McCann Day

Richard McCann, whose Mother of Sorrows has just come out, is interviewed over at The Happy Booker. Here’s a snippet:

I have read that [McCann’s current project, The Resurrectionist] touches on some autobiographical facts of your life, yet you decided to write this as fiction, not memoir. Where do you draw the line? And is it necessary for the reader to draw the line? Have you deliberately blurred this line and should there even be a line?

I never really “decided” between fiction and memoir. I started, as I always do, with facts; eventually, I saw I had deviated far enough from the starting points as to have made a work of fiction. There was a cartoon in The New Yorker a couple of years ago that I loved: a man is standing in a bookstore in which the sections are marked with titles like “Memoirish” and “Fictionish,” as opposed to “Memoir” and “Fiction.” That’s a bookstore, I suspect, in which my work belongs.