Green Grass Grace
A Novel
by Shawn McBride
List Price: $13.00
Pages: 304
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 074322311X
Publisher: Touchstone
Shawn McBride lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Green Grass Grace is his first novel.
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Q: Like Henry, you were born and raised in Philadelphia. In what ways has your portrait of Henry's neighborhood drawn on your personal experiences?
SM: In every possible way. I grew up in Henry's Holmesburg neighborhood, on a row home block like St. Patrick Street, packed with people, most of whom were extremely crazy and funny and full of fighting-mad conviction about the Catholic Church and Philadelphia pro-sports teams, but not necessarily in that order. You can't live that close to that many people and not learn to survive through beer cans, belly laughs, and fistfights over porch railings. Growing up in my neighborhood, you found in every house you went somebody larger than life, beating some kind of drum, asking you to say hello to your mother and tell your father to go to hell, or vice versa, but either way God Bless and Go Phils.
Q: Likewise, where did the inspiration for Henry, his friends, and their escapades come from? Are there any similarities between Henry and the thirteen-year-old Shawn McBride?
SM: I wish. At thirteen I had some of Henry's superficial qualities, minus the ones that make him special. So I combed my hair a lot but was shy and nervous, especially around girls, and lacked his bravery, conviction, and compassion.
As for the inspiration for Henry and his friends, it came from a variety of sources, both good and bad. My daughter Chloe and her friends were a good source. They are much younger than Henry and his crew, but they're such a blast to watch. In any given conversation or game they undertake, all the basics of human drama are covered: love, jealousy, generosity, betrayal, loyalty, competition, name it. They're just plain contagious fun too, full of love and life and energy, open to everything, ready for anything, having no time or taste for bullshit. I wanted Henry and his friends to be all that, and to contrast them against what we become in adulthood, which is assholes really.
Life was fun then. The days stretched out forever, and everything that happened was epic -- Dumpster kisses, bike rides, Mob delis, dark dirty bars with open doors, insane neighbors, stickball, basketball, and broken windows. A single day was thrilling.
Q: How did you create Henry's voice? Was it difficult to shape, or did it just flow naturally?
SM: It was a little of both. The first couple of drafts, he didn't really have a voice. He told twenty pages of internal jokes in between sitcom-type dialogue exchanges with cardboard neighbor characters. It was one-sided satire, with no love or sympathy for the characters. The pivotal change in his voice came right away though, on whatever draft got me in the right direction. In earlier drafts, I honestly think the opening line was "Hello, my name is Henry Toohey." Finally I thought, What is this crap? and in my great disgust came up with what's there now: "Hellfire, hallelujah, and halitosis. Mike Schmidt sits to pee. How you doing fuckface?" Once I had that, I had his voice and things just rolled from there. But I was still a long way off.
Q: This was your first experience as a novelist. How did the story take shape? What was your creative process?
SM: The word "process" implies much more sophistication and expertise than I possess. I initially set out with the mission of playing to my main strength, which is being funny, and staying away from my greatest weakness, which was everything else. I felt no confidence about being able to pull off a plot that built to a climax in structured fashion. So I figured I'd write about a funny city kid in the summertime, because I could lean on jokes and experience and write a narrative that pinballed back and forth -- like a city kid's summer day would -- for reasons I could later justify. All of which led to an overjokey mess that placed Henry's proposal in no context. The kids just zipped around, he was just proposing to Grace because he was a dreamer, and the story lacked any development of the adult backdrop bullshit hanging over these relatively happy kids. That came later as the story and I got better through nothing more than osmosis and repetitive effort. I was almost disappointed at how much writing came down to the same principles as riding a bike: you can't do it at first, you just keep trying and crashing. Then all of a sudden, you're popping wheelies and have no clue or memory of anything you did that got you from A to B. You just ended up there. Because of this, I attribute nothing to muses, magic, or lightning bolts and smell a fraud anytime I hear somebody talking in such fashion. To me it's all light bulbs, long days, and late nights.
I had no schedule for writing. I work a full-time job and am a weekend father, so I stole time anytime, anywhere. I wrote the story on several different computers, in different houses, at different jobs, on napkins in bars, wherever, whenever.
Q: Henry's story is ultimately deeply optimistic -- a tale of love and hope for the future. What message did you hope readers would take away from the novel?
SM: I would love for readers to finish this book and run out of their houses to kiss strangers. But maybe most people are too subdued for that, so hopefully they'll take away hope and love, like this question mentions. I can't imagine life without either and feel all my books will include both.
Q: What's next for you as a writer? Will we be seeing more of Henry and the Toohey family?
SM: Yeah, sure, if somebody backs the Brinks truck up to my house. I'm kidding. Sort of. We'll see what happens with Henry and the Tooheys. I'm not against writing another Henry Toohey tale, but I need a break from him for now. I don't want to be an author who writes about the same character over and over throughout a career. More power to J. K. Rowling, whose writing is great, but I'd be ready to decapitate Harry Potter by now, then have the bad guys play fricking quiddich with his head, then have them explode it with dynamite after the match. I'd go nuts.
I'm writing a Christmas book -- set in Philly (and the North Pole) -- right now. It's about unhappily married homicide detectives, their failing marriage, their explosives-loving delinquent egghead twin son and daughter, record amounts of holiday season snowfall and homicides, bad art, soft rock, AWOL Christmas toys, the Clauses on the rocks, and a toy-tracking bounty hunter elf and his steed, a self-conscious bare-assed reindeer.
Excerpted from Green Grass Grace © Copyright 2012 by Shawn McBride. Reprinted with permission by Touchstone. All rights reserved.
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