Death in Summer
by William Trevor
List Price: $12.95
Pages: 240
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0140287825
Publisher: Penguin
William Trevor is the author of twenty-eight books, which include novels, short story collections, a play, a volume of memoir, and a children's tale. Among his many prizes are a 1996 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. Two of his books were chosen by The New York Times as Best Books of the Year. His short stories appear regularly in The New Yorker.
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Q: In many of your novels, you show a real affinity for desperate, victimized women. Where does your capacity for understanding these women come from?
WT: The capacity you're thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.
Q: The image of motherhood is pervasive throughout your work, especially mothers who are inattentive or abusive. Why?
WT: I value mothers and motherhood enormously. For every inattentive or abusive mother in my fiction I think you'll find a dozen or so who are neither.
Q: In Death in Summer, there are several allusions to the Lindbergh kidnapping. Was this the inspiration for the story?
WT: No. It's natural for anyone of a certain age who remembers hearing about the Lindbergh kidnapping to recall it when a baby disappears.
Q: How do you believe your own childhood has influenced your writing?
WT: There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes. Descriptions of, for instance, physical pain have to be the author's own experience. He cannot know, exactly, how someone else has suffered in this way. Otherwise, I don't think my childhood—or later life—has had much influence on my writing.
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Excerpted from Death in Summer © Copyright 2012 by William Trevor. Reprinted with permission by Penguin. All rights reserved.
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