So a number of years ago I read a book by Mark Salzman called The Laughing Sutra. And I think it’s a really wonderful book, I think, and I had actually read it with my book group and my son at the time was I think twelve or thirteen and I thought he would really like this book so I had him read it and then I had my friend’s son read it and they all thought it was a really good book and I was reading a review of it somewhere and it described it as a picaresque.
And I’m not even I’m sure I can pull of the exact definition at this point in time but it has something to do with having a rogue as a hero, a series of adventures with a rogue as a hero. And so I thought oh, I’d like to write a picaresque. So I started by reading Don Quixote which apparently was the first picaresque. But I was also thinking at the time, we had a very good friend who was the kind of guy that a 13-year-old boy would really like to get to know.
I mean he was sort of an adventurer, he was kind of a rogue and he really liked doing nice things for people but in his own kind of ornery way. We were building a house at the time and whenever there was a part that we couldn’t figure out how to do, my husband would call this friend of ours on the phone and he’d say I just don’t’ think it can be done and the next morning his truck would be in our driveway and he lived three and a half hours away and he would have an idea about how to solve this problem.
The only, the problem was that he had died, he had died in an accident and it made me sad that our son Frank would never get to know this friend of ours so I decided I will introduce them in this book. And that’s essentially how that book came to be. One of the hard parts was coming up with a scenario, I mean we’ve got cell phones and so many ways of connecting and averting disaster that for somebody to have an adventure you have to sort of do something drastic.
So I had to come up with a scenario where the parents were unreachable and these two characters meet and have an adventure together, so.
So when I was thinking about doing this book, I had this, I wish I had it with me, I had this plot diagram and it started out so there are, there’s the boy, Ry, and Dell and there’s his grandfather who stays home to watch the dogs. There are his parents who are on an island in the Caribbean and so I had this plot diagram where it’s just all a big tangle until they come together at the end.
There is a lot of luck in that book. And I think there’s a lot of luck in life if you, you know, choose to see it that way. I’m not really sure how to talk about it. The friend who I mentioned who was one of the inspiring forces in this book, we actually started out, I don’t talk about this that often, my husband and I started out in a little cabin on the side of a hill with no utilities.
And we lived that way for about a year, and we weren’t trying to prove anything we just were cheap and we wouldn’t, wanted to only get things when we could afford them so by and by we, you know did make a normal kind of relatively house. But our friend was visiting us once when, before any of that happened and I think he was washing his hair on our kitchen floor in a basin.
And he was saying lucky, lucky, lucky, I’m just so lucky. You know he was saying you know a lot of people in the world don’t even have this. He’s trying to convince himself that he was lucky to be washing his hair on our kitchen floor in a basin. So, you know it just depends on how you look at it.
