Category Archives: Interviews

Jennifer Haigh in Conversation with Stewart O’Nan

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From Riverstone Books:

Best-selling author Jennifer Haigh will join Pittsburgh’s own Stewart O’Nan in a conversation on writing, story-telling, and fiction that moves us.

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Jennifer Haigh is the author of the short story collection News from Heaven and six bestselling and critically acclaimed novels, including Heat and Light, Faith, and Mrs. Kimble. Her books have won both the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction and the PEN/L.L. Winship Award for work by a New England writer. Her short fiction has been published widely, in The Atlantic, Granta, The Best American Short Stories, and many other places. She lives in New England.

Stewart O’Nan is a native Pittsburgher and an Allderdice grad (Go Dragons!). His novels include Snow Angels, set in Butler, Everyday People, in East Liberty, and Emily, Alone and Henry, Himself, in Highland Park.

A Family Patriarch Finally Gets His Due

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From Boston University’s alumni magazine:

When author Stewart O’Nan introduced readers to his fictional Maxwell clan in 2002’s Wish You Were Here, the family patriarch, Henry Maxwell, had recently died. In that novel and again in 2011’s Emily, Alone, readers caught only glimpses of Henry in the memories of his surviving family members. In O’Nan’s new novel, Henry, Himself (Viking, 2019), Henry finally gets his due.

“The book is about revealing who he actually is,” says O’Nan (ENG’83). “Not what other people say he is, but the way he feels and thinks.”

O’Nan hadn’t expected to return to the Maxwells. The author of 18 novels, he has tackled vastly different subjects and settings in each of his books: fast food shift workers in Last Night at the Lobster and the last days of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald in West of Sunset. When he started Wish You Were Here, O’Nan says, he intended it to be about Henry’s recently widowed wife, Emily. But he found the other characters—Henry’s sister, Arlene, his children, Kenny and Margaret, and his grandchildren—vying for his attention. Nine years later, in Emily, Alone, he chronicled Emily’s life as a widow. But there was something about Henry that kept nagging at him. He decided it was time to go back and see what he could discover about him.

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Interview: Thirty Odd Minutes With Stewart O’Nan

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From Knock and Know All:

At fifty-eight years young, Stewart O’Nan has seen seventeen of his works of fiction published along with two non-fiction books, one of which is Faithful [with Stephen King] a best-selling bleachers-eye-view of the first championship season for the Boston Red Sox since Babe Ruth was traded. All of this since he, with the full support of his saintly wife, Trudy, abandoned his career as an Aerospace engineer to earn his MFA, ultimately publishing his first collection of short stories In The Walled City [Drew Heinz Literary Prize] in 1993.

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