After my Baby Boomer New Year's post featuring Eric Hanson’s A Book of Ages, Eric sent a gracious email hello and thanks. That gave me an opportunity to ask him a little more about the book, and future projects, all shared below.You can read more about Eric here and about A Book of Ages here.
Q: Why did you decide to write A Book of Ages?
I was around 30 when I began collecting the stories. At thirty you really begin to compare where you are with where your heroes were at your age. What have I done? What haven't I done? More interesting to me were the stories about lucky meetings, lucky breaks, the private generosities and rivalries and public cruelty. I hadn't known that J. D. Salinger came ashore on D-Day or fought in the Battle of the Bulge, or that he'd dated Oona O'Neil before she ditched him for Charlie Chaplin. After a while all of these lives begin to have a choreography. The famous wits start commenting on each other. Ironies emerge just by setting one anecdote next to another.
Q: How did you go about doing the research? Did you end up leaving a lot of examples on the "cutting room floor"?
I read a lot. Not just biographies but profiles in the New Yorker and other magazines. Obituaries, rock band liner notes, newspaper stories. I listen to the BBC and public radio and watch PBS. I am the person in the audience taking notes. I am always asking the question: how old were they when that happened? And one name makes me think of another: Virginia Woolf makes me think of Elizabeth Taylor who starred in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and Elizabeth Taylor makes me think of Cleopatra, so I keep thinking of new people to read about. When did Liz meet Richard Burton? Richard Burton the actor makes me think of Richard Burton the explorer and his translation of the Kama Sutra.
I cut quite a bit of material. Some was too sordid or too mean or too obvious or just less interesting; if there's too much about achievement the eyes glaze over. Some good material will have to wait for a sequel, if there's an opportunity to publish one. And I keep finding material I didn't know about before. And thinking of people I should have included. Why didn't I include Kit Carson? Or Prince, or Madonna, or Garrison Keillor? The best biographies are full of funny stories, but what I like best are the revealing moments when somebody changes his mind or discovers something by accident. Like Grandma Moses or Winston Churchill, discovering he or she likes to paint landscapes. People learning how to swim or ride a bicycle or cook or blog or play piano late in life. History is full of second acts, whatever F. Scott Fitzgerald said.
Q: What's next?
I continue to write fiction, which is published occasionally in McSweeney's and a few other literary magazines here and in Australia. I write magazine articles. I am a busy illustrator. I have a few children's books I'd love to publish before my children are grown. A sequel to A Book of Ages might be titled Another Book of Ages or it might focus on a category. Political, maybe, or literary or celebrity.
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