Timothy J. Hillegonds is the author of the new memoir And You Will Call It Fate. He also has written the memoir The Distance Between. He lives in Chicago.
Q: What inspired you to write And You Will Call It Fate?
A: There have been two questions I’ve been trying to answer for most of my adult life.
The first, which I explored in my debut memoir, The Distance Between, was essentially this: How did I become the exact person I vowed I would never become?
The second question, which I’m still considering, is the one I wrestle with and attempt to answer in my newest book, And You Will Call It Fate: How do we reconcile the debts owed to those who simultaneously save and harm us?
And You Will Call It Fate tells the story of a chance encounter I had with a former NFL player turned entrepreneur named Sean Dempsey when I was in my early 20s.
I was a high-school dropout working in a Baker Square restaurant in the suburbs of Chicago, living a life that was going nowhere fast, and he was a charismatic enigma of a person with a gravity about him that pulled nearly everyone in.
For reasons that I still don't quite understand, he offered me a job, and then gave me a chance to get sober, and changed my life in ways that are hard to comprehend, even all these years later.
However, he was also a volatile and angry and aggressive man—and, as I later found out, there was a price to be paid for the gift that he had given me. The book is my attempt to make sense of it all, to unpack what happened and see it from the perspective of time.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: Titles are famously hard, and coming up with this book's title was no exception.
However, I've always found that Carl Jung quote— “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”— to be interesting, and I’ve thought about it a lot over the years.
Making the unconscious conscious is what we do when we write—especially when we write memoir— and so it seemed a fitting title for this work.
Q: The writer Kristi Coulter said of the book, “In an era where cultural conversations about masculinity can be dismayingly binary, And You Will Call It Fate is exactly the book the world needs.” What do you think of that description?
A: Well, to be sure, it's incredibly generous, and I'm forever grateful to Kristi for saying that.
She's also getting at something that I care a good deal about, which is contributing to the evolving conversation around masculinity.
Though I don’t come at it from an academic perspective, examining masculinity, or as I’ve come to see it, masculinities, has become central to what I write about.
I'm deeply interested in how we come to understand ourselves as men—and what it means to “be a man,” as it’s so often put—and what happens when we take the invisible scripts we've been handed by other men, and by society, and by women, and put them under a microscope.
I think what Kristi is getting at in that quote is that many people assume that there's one way to be a man, and that you either are or are not. But, of course, that’s a false choice. And probably the wrong question to be asking in the first place.
Because I’m much more interested in what it means to be a flawed human trying to navigate this life, in all its complexities, while being accountable and ever open to change.
Q: What impact did it have on you to write this book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: For so many reasons, this was a difficult book to write. I've been wrestling with how to tell this story for the better part of 10 years.
I've written two memoirs now, and I've found that with each of them, after I’ve finished, I’ve been left with a feeling that I betrayed someone. I’m sure I’ll be unpacking that in therapy for the rest of my life!
But, jokes aside, it’s hard to tell hard stories, especially when they intersect with the stories of people you know and love. But that’s the work of a memoirist and it’s work I don’t take lightly.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m working on a book about running and what it means to live a good life—to have a “good run” as we might put it.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Just that I'm thankful for anyone who takes the time to read the book. It feels like now, in the age of AI, and when we’re all just so darn busy, that having someone spend their time reading an actual book by an actual human is an incredible gift.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment