Samuel Ashworth is the author of the new novel The Death and Life of August Sweeney. He is a professor of creative writing at George Washington University, and he lives in Washington, D.C.
Q: What inspired you to write The Death and Life of August Sweeney?
A: I wanted to write a true book of the body. So many of us will go through our lives with a working knowledge of the machines we use—our computers, our cars, our homes—but little understanding of the machines we live in: our bodies.
I wanted to write a book that would give readers a profoundly changed sense of the value and power of their bodies by exploring the way they persist beyond death, both physically and in the minds of others. August is dead by chapter 2 of the book, but his body is just getting started.
I also—this is a sharp right turn—wanted to write the most accurate novel about the restaurant industry ever published. There are strangely few novels about hospitality, and it's a world I've lived in and loved all my life, so I wanted to do it justice.
Q: How did you create your characters August Sweeney and Dr. Maya Zhu?
A: A lot of research. To write August, I had to go work as a prep cook in a Michelin-starred kitchen. To write Maya, I had to go learn to perform autopsies in a lab in Pittsburgh.
They also created one another, in a sense: both of them are creatures of intense hunger and ambition, but they go about them in very different ways.
August cannot deny himself pleasure, and he is rewarded for it until it destroys him; Maya denies herself every pleasure to protect the focus and routine that she believes she needs, until the day she spends with August blows that routine to smithereens.
Q: As you researched the book, what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: I learned more than I could have ever put into the book, but the most life-changing thing was that autopsies are a vital but dying medical art, and nearly everything that TV and film have taught us about them is wrong.
Fewer than 5 percent of natural deaths in America receive an autopsy. (As recently as 1970, that figure was closer to 60 percent.) Their value for hospitals, patients, family members, and doctors themselves is extraordinary—especially relative to their low cost.
But most doctors will never see one, and have little ability to propose them to families nor explain their importance. But the main thing I want to tell people is that you should want an autopsy when you die; it won't hurt.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the story?
A: I hope that readers will come away with a newfound love for their bodies, no matter their age or appearance, and a reduced fear of death. If I can deliver either of those things, I'll feel like this book achieved everything I want.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Right now, I'm working on a number of screenplays, most importantly a true story about the evacuation of Afghan allies after the US withdrawal in 2021. I've lurched into screenwriting more in the last few years, because I love how fundamentally collaborative it is.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Sometimes people hear the description of this book and sort of freak out. And I get it—death freaks people out. But a lot of that discomfort comes from a lack of experience with it. So much of the way we die in America happens in sterile, clinical environments, which rarely give family members the space to get a foothold on grief.
To read this book is to truly spend time with the dead, and understand how much more life is left in them, if we only know how to look for it. And that act, I think, goes a long way toward blunting our fears.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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