Category Archives: Interviews

The TNB Book Club Interview

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On April 30, Stewart participated in an online chat for The Nervous Breakdown’s book club:

Brad Listi (BL): Three minutes, ladies and gentlemen.

Stewart O’Nan (SO): Gotta warm up my Magic 8-ball.

BL: (He’s not referring to cocaine, ladies and gentlemen.)

SO: I was gonna say — not a Belushi reference.

[THREE MINUTES ELAPSE.]

BL: Okay…I believe we’ve reached the top of the hour. Let’s get started. I want to begin by thanking Stewart O’Nan for taking the time to be here this evening. It’s a thrill to have you, Stewart, and congrats on Emily, Alone.

SO: Thanks for having me and Emily (and Rufus).

BL: In this book, you’re writing an older female protagonist. The level of detail you’re able to deliver about that experience is pretty striking. I’m curious if you did any research here, or if you’re simply working from life experience and imagination.

SO: I did a fair amount of research. Handed out questionnaires to older folks at my library readings. And kept several notebooks to get closer to Emily and her world in Pittsburgh.

BL: Can you describe these questionnaires?

SO: I’d ask people how their neighborhoods had changed, and if there were neighbors who were no longer there whom they missed. I asked for three places they went to every week, who they wished they saw more in their lives, what’s become harder the older they’ve gotten.

BL: You tend to write about people “unlike” yourself,  to work “from the outside, in,” as opposed to the other way around. Do you feel this is a fair assessment?

SO: Maybe. I mean, I think I share the emotional worlds of my characters even if I’m not like them in age, gender, race, class, or even region sometimes. I like to find out how it feels to be someone else, what they go through, what’s important to them — and I think that that is usually the same. We want to be understood by the people closest to us.

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Four Guys, One Book

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1. A review of Emily, Alone by Three Guys One Book:

JE: It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Stewart O’Nan. His winning combination of pathos, intelligence, curiosity and heroic range, make the dude a national treasure. Like Steinbeck (and Dickens and Twain), O’Nan writes about “the little people.” He’s a bard for the blue collar, reporting on the quiet and sometimes desperate lives of decent folks who may not be making headlines with their heroism, but in whom we recognize ourselves with a clarity that is all too rare in modern literature.

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2. An in-depth conversation with Edward Champion (Bat Segundo Show):

I had interviewed Stewart O’Nan before in 2007 for The Bat Segundo Show. And after reading Emily, Alone, I had hoped to set up a second interview. Unfortunately, O’Nan’s hectic schedule of teaching and long driving to author events made things a bit difficult. And when I received an unexpected jury duty summons in the mail, I prepared for the distinct possibility that a few weeks of my life would be sacrificed to the courtroom.

We started volleying by email. And the two of us learned that we both had quite a lot to say about American fiction. Our conversation touched upon the influence of Richard Yates, what a writer can learn from John Gardner, avoiding parody and creating dimensional characters, and how one can protest marketplace realities while appealing to the reader. My many thanks to Stewart for taking time out of his busy schedule to answer my somewhat verbose concatenations.

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Emily, Alone: Reading Group Guide and Author Q&A

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A CONVERSATION WITH STEWART O’NAN

Q. At first glance, you wouldn’t seem to have all that much in common with Emily Maxwell, the widow in her late seventies who is the main character of Emily, Alone. How does a novelist go about thinking his way into the experiences and consciousness of someone so different from himself?

I share a great deal with Emily, in that, having previously written a six hundred-page novel about her and her family, I know the people closest to her extremely well. I also know her neighbors intimately, and her social circle, the little town she comes from, her parents, her sorority sisters, her old roommate Jocelyn. Much of it comes from my own family life, and much from just keeping my eyes open and taking notes, but some also comes from active research, location scouting, extensive interviews with people Emily’s age and in Emily’s situation. It all goes in, but finally it has to be strained through Emily’s sensibility, Emily’s feel for life, and that can only be felt or sensed. What, naturally, would Emily see, and what language would she use to describe it?

Q. Did you have a particular model or models for Emily?

When I did research for The Circus Fire, I did hundreds of interviews with survivors, most of whom were in their seventies and eighties. And when they invited me into their homes, they told me their stories not just about the fire but about their whole lives. That experience of looking back on life and appreciating where you are and how you got there comes from those survivors. In terms of personality, Emily shares much with my mother, my mother-in-law, my grandmothers, and my wife’s grandmother.

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Writer Stewart O’Nan took roundabout route to successful writing career

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From the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

Writer Stewart O’Nan is sitting at D’s SixPax and Dogz in Regent Square, talking about his life, his work and returning to Pittsburgh last year after a 30-year absence.

He talks about his family — his father, an engineer; his mother, a schoolteacher — and how they set examples for him, and of his wife, Trudy, a Butler native and social worker, who convinced him to quit his career as an aerospace engineer to study writing. He speaks of the proverbial Pittsburgh work ethic and how that has stood him well in all of his endeavors.

Then the conversation turns to former jobs.

“I was a dishwasher,” he says. “Every time I do a dish, a record falls. … I never got to be waitstaff, I never got to be a busboy. I was always a dishwasher, and that’s where you get to hear the best stories.”

Small wonder then that O’Nan, 49, is one of the best storytellers in contemporary fiction. His novels and stories often spotlight characters who are ignored by the mainstream, though they often are in plain sight.

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