"Your work comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable."
Last night, I had the incredible pleasure to hear Wally Lamb speak at a local library. With the release of his new book We Are Water, he was approximately 36 cities into a 40 city tour when he finally made it back to his home state. But even with that kind of crazy schedule, he was still amazing. I was able to ask Wally (we're likethis... I can totally call him "Wally") a question about his experience in reading the character of Orion Oh in the audiobook version of We Are Water during the Q&A portion of the evening. In addition, I was able to tell him about how one of his characters (Dante Davis) impacts my driving as I'm currently re"reading" (listening) She's Come Undone. He joked that if I get a speeding ticket, I should send it to him... "as it really would be my fault". He also told me about his desire to bring a stage version of She's Come Undone to the Northeast (a production had previously been done in Seattle). Wally Lamb is a funny, sweet, interesting and passionate man. Sitting there and listening to him speak about the writing process, I felt an intense jealousy for those students in his Creative Writing class when he was a teacher at Norwich Free Academy (and, to a lesser extent, jealousy of the inmates of the York Correctional Institute where he's taught writing for the past fourteen years). If you're looking for a good read and haven't yet read any of Lamb's works, I recommend you start with I Know This Much Is True and just continue on through. Unfortunately, he has only published 5 books to date, but they were all worth the Lamb-less years in between. And here's some ocular proof of my awesome evening:
