Stefan Merrill Block webchat, 8th April, 2009

We have a live webchat coming up on April 8th (between 3pm and 4pm) with Stefan Merrill Block, the author of our March Book Circle winner - you can either post your question now by clicking on the "take part in the discussion" link at the end of the introduction below, or wait until the day of the webchat and join in then. We look forward to hearing from you!

About the book:
Fifteen-year-old Seth Waller is devastated when his mother is diagnosed with a rare, early-onset form of Alzheimer's. When he was growing up, his mother always brushed aside questions about her past and family, and Seth realises that soon he will lose his chance to find out any more. He decides to uncover the truth about her life, their family history and the condition, and what he discovers is more surprising than he ever could have imagined. Inspired partly by Stefan Merrill Block's own family history, The Story of Forgetting is a moving and inspiring novel of love, loss, hope and genetic destiny.

Read more about Stefan with our exclusive Q&A

"This book enthralled me. So much so, that I read it in two sittings. The author writes with such in-depth knowledge, understanding and compassion about a subject most would not want to experience. The impact of early onset Alzheimers Disease on one family really gets into the core of your emotions and intellect. It is everything a book should be."
Joyce Hyde

Comments

[Stefan]

Okay, I guess it's time for me to get back to my grandfather, scribbling away in his mental asylum. Thank you all, again, for your close and thoughtful reading of my book, and for sharing your questions and ideas with me. If you have more questions, or want to get in touch, you can email me at stefan@stefanmerrillblock.com. I'll also check back on this page soon, for any more questions.

L'Chaim!

Stefan

[Stefan]

To Matt B: I'm sorry to hear about your grandmother, Matt. As far as Isidora: that's fascinating about Isis. I didn't know about her relation to the name Isidora. Isidora was a name I lifted from Calvino's Invisible Cities, as a kind of homage. Isidora is one of the first cities in that book, the first under the heading "Cites & Memory." If you are curious, you should take a look at Calvino's story. Maybe he was drawing upon the connection with Isis in ways that I missed.

[Stefan]

To Rodney Troubridge: Thanks so much for the kind words! Yeah, I grew up in a town called Plano, nearly identical to the town in which Abel lives. When I was younger, Plano was mostly prairie land, with a few crumbling farmhouses still standing. Just like in the novel, the McMansions metastasized and took over. But there were a few old Texan holdouts, whom the neighbors protested, just as they protest Abel in the book. I always admired those people, always wondered about them.

[Lisa G]

No, I've read a little Plath - she was genius - but I haven't read Lady Lazarus or any of Lowell's, I'll have to look them up. Thanks for the tip!

[Meg F]

Hi Stefan - The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry is another great book with a Mental Home theme - it won the Book of the Year at the 2008 Costa Awards.

[Stefan]

Thanks so much, Joyce. When I'm writing, it always feels so completely solitary. I can't tell you how heartening it is to know I'm connecting with at least a few readers out there. I'm hoping to come back to the UK soon. Hey, Waterstone's, how about footing the bill??

[Stefan]

To Eliz: I think that one of the great revelations to me of this first book was its debunking of my myth of personal catharsis. It's true, in many ways, I wrote this book to give myself hope, to take the things that haunted me privately and bring them into language, into the world. And maybe, for the moment in which I wrote, I felt a kind of catharsis. But then, life goes on and the chaos of things always comes back. I guess that's how I feel about reading and writing now: books cannot necessarily save you, but they can offer, temporarily, wonderful shelter.

[Stefan]

To Lisa G: I've written a little poetry, but I've always felt a bit absurd in my attempts. For this new book, however, I am trying to reconstruct my grandfather's prose-poems, and that has been a wonderfully challenging process. I've been reading Lowell, Plath, and Sexton almost daily. Without a doubt, they make me a better writer. Have you read Plath's Lady Lazarus? Or Lowell's Life Studies? Perfect.

[Stefan]

To Meg F: Great to know I'll have at least one reader! I also adore The Bell Jar, partially because of its messiness. I've never read Poppy Shakespeare, so thanks for the recommendation! Anyone else have madness- or grandfather- related books to suggest? I need all the suggestions I can get. Yeah, it's too bad that my grandmother destroyed those papers. If I could choose to have them back, I would. But it's also true that her destruction of them has allowed me to imagine them, has made this whole new project possible. If they existed, the actual poems would almost certainly never tell me as much as the imagined poems.

[Stefan]

Thanks so much, Jo R! I've always written, but I think I didn't really believed that a career as a novelist was realistic. Growing up in Texas, I never knew any writers. In fact, the first published author I ever met was my editor at Random House. But I've always felt compelled to write; other than things I've done for money, all work other than writing has felt like a waste of time. Even though I am an avid reader, I think that my compulsion to write comes not from my love of books, but my need to arrange and transform the chaos of my lived experience into something that makes sense of it and of me. That said, in the mornings before I write, I usually read from a few of my favorite authors, who get me as fired up to write as does my morning cup of coffee. Again and again, I return to: Italo Calvino, Michael Chabon, Michael Cunningham, Nabokov, Alice Munro, E.L. Doctorow, Jeffrey Eugenides.

[Stefan]

To Joyce H: You had a dream about my book! How thrilling! Perhaps sad to report, my dreams about writing are usually about language. Very often, I spend a good part of my time asleep struggling to come up with the perfect sentence to describe something. But, on this new book, that seems to be changing. I have, many, many times in the last few months, had dreams about my grandfather, whom I never met. In my dreams, I am usually him, locked inside a mental hospital (a feeling, I should add, not so far removed from my life as a writer, locked in my apartment, attending to my imaginary creations!)

[Matt B]

This is a very poignant novel for me, thank you for writing it. I watched my Grandmother effectively regress to her teens over 20 years with Alzheimer's, which was tragi-humourous as elements of the novel are. Makes me feel better about when we saw the funny side. My question is about Isidora. Isidora is a name related to the Egyptian goddess Isis, meaning "gift of Isis". She was known sometimes as the Goddess of Simplicity, which sort of tallys with the escapist nature of Isidora. Did she influence Isidora? Or am I reading too much into it?

[Rodney Troubridge]

Hello Stefan - I read the book in proof and one of the images that has stayed in my mind is the house where Abel lives and how it gradually decays and the efforts of everyone round him to evict him. Did you ever see a similar house or did this all come from your imagination? Greatly moved by the book by the way!

[Joyce Hyde]

Do you know if you will be doing any book signings in the M/cr area? If so, when?

[Joyce Hyde]

What a privilege for you to write about your Grandfather's poetry within your next book. I have Epilepsy and it would appear I resonate with your chosen subjects for your books. I would just like you to know Stephan, The Story of Forgetting had a huge impact on me and I feel you are a truly inspired author.

[Stefan]

To Gemma Barry: I think that, probably too often, I do make deliberate choices about the plot, but I almost never feel like I make choices about characters. They come as they come. The humor of Seth's story, I think, is a reflection of my own tendency to use humor in confronting tragedy. The tragic and the hilarious are often so intimately related. Great comedians so often have something horrible in their past. I think it's important, in exploring the full range of emotional responses to something as terrible as Alzheimer's, to include humor.

[Eliz]

Hey Stefan,

How cathartic did you find the experience of writing this book? Did it remove a weight off your shoulders?

[Lisa G]

Wow, that sounds like a really interesting new story. Were you ever tempted to write any poetry?

[Stefan]

to Gemma Barry: Yeah, I think I wrote somewhere that devising the structure was an endless combination of blind faith and neurotic scrutiny. Especially in the early stages, I did not know how the stories were related, or what shape the overall book would take. I just kept moving forward, with a faith that my brain would, eventually, find a way to make it all work together. After I had a first draft, I had a lot of work to do, integrating the narratives. I think this is why we see so many books written as collage now: to make these multi-layered stories function, it is infinitely easier if the text is easily manipulatable, on a computer.

[Stefan]

To Joyce: As I wrote the book, I would often go online or into the library to check my facts, but most of the research I did, I had done long before I had the idea of this book. That's usually my response to overwhelming and tragic situations, to try to learn all I can. So, confronted with my family's genetic legacy of Alzheimer's from a young age, I've always been reading and thinking about the disease.

[Meg F]

I'm going to look out for your next book, it sounds a little like Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar or Poppy Shakespeare by Clare Allen, both of which I loved. And how heart-breaking that your Grandad's writings were burnt!

[Stefan]

To Ella Young: Yeah, it's funny, I do sometimes still think of ideas for Isidora stories that I wish I could go back and put into the book. I doubt that I'll ever publish them separately, but who knows? After all, I wrote them at nineteen, certainly thinking they would never find their way to publication.

[Stefan]

To Lisa G: Yeah, and the next subject, in ways, is even closer. I'm writing about time my grandfather spent in the famous McLean Mental Hospital, just outside of Boston, in the 1960s. While he was there, McLean happened to be the center of a major literary movement: the so-called "confessional style" of poetry. Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell were all patients there then. My grandfather also wrote while he was there, but --in the early 1980s-- my grandmother burned many of his writings. My grandfather died somewhat mysteriously soon after he was released from McLean in the late 1960s, and his life and death are still shrouded in mystery. So, this book is my attempt, through both fiction and non-fiction, to try to understand my grandfather, and --in some way-- resurrect his burned poetry.

[Jo R]

I loved, loved, loved the 'Story of Forgetting' - Did you always want to be a novelist? and if so, which authors inspired you?

[Stefan]

To Jo C: You know, it's hard for me to have enough objectivity on the book to pick favorites. When I read the book, I still read it as its writer, and I always think about the challenges of each chapter, the things I could have done better. That said, the two moments from the book I still find myself thinking about, the two moments I can perhaps read as something other than a neurotic writer, are Abel's first chapter and Abel's description of the funeral. I think that with Seth, based so clearly on myself at fifteen, I get too self-conscious to be able to relax and enjoy his story.

[Stefan]

To Meg F: The stories of those EOA-23 sufferers, as well as their long genetic history, are based almost exactly as much on real people as are the other characters in the book. In all cases, I usually took a few ideas or feelings from lived experience, a few ideas from things I've read, and transformed them into something fictional. In the case of the genetic history of the EOA-23 variant, that was related, in part, to the effort my family has put into tracing how far back we can find evidence of our genetic legacy of Alzheimer's. But it also comes from something I read once about an extremely rare genetic disorder, the sufferers of which can all be traced back to a single person, who lived not so long ago. I thought there was something sort of tragically beautiful in that, the way the disease revealed lost and forgotten family relations. In the case of the sufferers Seth interviews, I could probably name at least one real life-inspiration for each. The sculptor was inspired by the true story he tells about De Kooning. The sisters are based, in part, on my fear of my mother and my aunts all developing the disease, each seeing her tragic future in her older sister's sad present. The final subject Seth interviews, Taylor, I half-ripped-off from a brilliant short story by Adam Haslett, called The Good Doctor.

[Stefan]

Hi Everyone,

I can't tell you how excited I am to have been a part of Waterstone's Book Circle program, and how heartening it is to get to connect with readers in this way. Let's get started!

[Joyce Hyde]

Last night I dreamt that I was on a boat travelling to Isadora. Have you had dreams where characters and places take shape for you to use in your writing?

[Gemma Barry]

Although the story is filled with tragic stories and bad life decisions I found Seth's story to be bordering on humourous. Am I alone in this or was this a character choice you made?

[Gemma Barry]

How did you begin to structure your novel? I imagine it to have been difficult with so many over layered stories.

[Joyce Hyde]

Did you find it a scary subject to research?

[Ella Young]

Are you thinking of writing more Isidora myths? Would you ever want to publish a book for them alone?

[Lisa G]

Alzheimer's was obviously close to your heart, what subject will you be writing about next?

[Jo C]

I really liked the section when Seth meets the three sisters. They were so tragic, particularly the youngest. What is your favourite story from the book?

[Meg F]

In the questions you answered last month you said that Alzheimer’s is something that has affected your own family. Are the back-stories for the North American EOA-23’s that Seth meets based on real people?