Mark Farrington is the author of the new novel Loss of Life. He spent many years teaching writing, including at Johns Hopkins University, and he lives in Maine.
Q: What inspired you to write Loss of Life, and how did you create your character Matthew Winton?
A: I have long been fascinated by the power and importance of memory. My wife and I have no children, and I’ve never put much stock in material things, so to me, my memories provide the most proof that I’ve been alive. They are in a sense, my life.
What if a character who depended on his memories as much as I did were to lose those memories? That’s the question I wanted to explore.
I gave Matthew some characteristics similar to myself—a college writing professor, unmarried at 41 (I was 44 when I married for the first time); mostly this helped me with the details (I knew what was involved in his job, for instance, because I’d done it so long myself) but it also made it easier for me to imagine what he might be going through.
I also wanted to explore the power and importance of writing, so him being a writer gave me that opportunity.
Q: The author David Giannini called the book a “novel of pain and loss, of forgiveness, but also of love found and love remembered...” What do you think of that description?
A: I like that description. I think all of those things are in the book. I also like Jessica Stilling saying the book is “at times funny, at other times devastating,” because there are some heavy moments in the book but moments of humor were important to me, too.
But once you write a book and it gets published, the author gives up a certain control, and readers will see in it, and make of it, what they will. If a book speaks to you, it will speak in its own way and what you see in it or take from it might be different than what others might see in it—or what I might see in it myself. I’m okay with that.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: Some things I knew, or suspected, in a general way. I was pretty sure that in time, Matthew would regain much of his memory, though I didn’t know how that might occur.
The book opens with him in the hospital following a car accident that may not have been an accident, so I knew he would have to revisit that accident in some way, though I didn’t know what he would discover.
Early in the book, he begins a relationship with a woman who has been helping him, and I had no idea how that relationship would turn out.
It wasn’t until I was writing the end that I realized that Matthew, in examining his past life, is really seeking forgiveness. The whole process was kind of like visiting a foreign country for the first time; you might go in with ideas of what you want to see and do, but some things will change, and others will become clearer, only after you get there.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: For me, the title goes back to the notion that your memories help you define who you are and to know you have lived a full life.
I had fun watching Matthew navigate a world that is totally unfamiliar to him, a world where he finds hundreds of books in his home and can’t remember reading even one of them; a world where a teasing “friend” tells him, “I could say anything about you and you wouldn’t know if it was true.”
More than that, I wanted Matthew to have to turn and face his past, to force him to examine his life, and one way to do that was to take his life away from him.
There’s a quote in the epigraph from Paul Tillich, that “Forgiving presupposes remembering.” I hoped Matthew would find forgiveness, but before he could do that, he had to want to remember.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’ve got a collection of short stories I’m putting together. I just finished a new story in which the main character is 72 years old, and I had fun writing that.
I’ve been wading into what might eventually become a new novel, just writing down images and partial scenes that are lurking in my head, not really worrying what they might add up to, or if they’ll add up to anything at all. I’m not ready yet to fully dive in.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: One of my former students, while reading the book, asked me if it was autobiography. This was one of the themes I wanted to explore, the relationship between memory and imagination, and I had fun writing about Matthew reading his own fiction trying to determine what if anything in it came from his real life.
The student had been a little wary about asking the question, but I told him that asking a question like that was a great compliment for a fiction writer, because it means that I’d rendered the material in such an accurate and convincing way that it felt as if I must have experienced it all myself.
That’s really what most fiction writers are seeking to accomplish, to render the fictional world so realistically that it feels as if it could have happened, or even as if they must have happened, in real life.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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