Dear Readers,
First, I’d like each of you to know how humbled and delighted I am to be sharing this experience with you. Because writers most often meet their readers only in passing, and because those encounters rarely offer the chance for prolonged conversations about the stories at hand, this feels to me like an uncommon—and uncommonly wonderful—opportunity. I thank you for that. I thank you deeply.
To tell you the whole story behind the writing of this novel would be to tell you the story of eight years of my life. Much of that story would be horrendously boring, and I would never inflict it upon you. But it would also depict my son’s birth, a difficult divorce, a move from New England back to my home state of Texas. It would dramatize a frantic search for employment, a tale of a sometimes-floundering father and his young son, and a flourishing love story. Along the way, while I was living the kind of real-life story that each one of us lives, the novel endured many stops and starts, many setbacks. I can remember (though I’d like to forget) one unsettling afternoon when I highlighted nearly sixty pages of polished prose on my computer screen and then took a deep breath before pressing the delete key. And so, while it is true that I wrote the first words of The Wake of Forgiveness eight years ago, I can’t honestly say that it took eight years to write the book. Instead, what I believe to be more accurate is that it took me eight years to learn how to write the book.
As so often happens in my writing life, the work on this novel became a kind of divining rod, one that bent toward my own capacity for empathy. I grew up in the city, the second son of blue-collar parents. My father was raised on a cash-crop farm in south Texas, not far from the landscape of the novel. Many years ago, he told me the story of a man who farmed a parcel of land not far from the one my grandfather had worked—a man who, out of meanness or desperation or both, harnessed his own sons to his plow instead of using a mule or a horse. As a result, the boys were permanently disfigured, their necks kinked in one direction or the other because of all the time spent straining against the shoulder harnesses as the plowshare cut through the hard, sun-baked earth. Years after hearing this tale, I wondered if I could make such an outrageous truth both believable and compelling in fiction, if I could make it as indelible for the reader, for you, as it was in my father’s memory, and that was the driving question behind which The Wake of Forgiveness widened.
This past winter, after I had finished the novel, I asked my father about those boys with their bent necks. At the time, he didn’t know that I’d written them into my book, and he gave me a curious look, one which suggested that he’d forgotten he’d ever shared this story with me. “That was Benny,” he said. “Your Aunt Dorothy’s first husband. Him and his brothers.” I hadn’t known that part of the story, and I was surprised, but in hindsight it seems a perfect distillation of what writing means to me: It’s a way of arriving at the truth of something even if I don’t recognize that truth as such immediately when I get there. It’s a way of satisfying a longing for something that I hadn’t even realized I desired.
And so now it comes down to this: I give the book to you, hoping, as I do, that it satisfies some similar, if unforeseen, need in you. In the meantime, I thank you all again for such a rare and wonderful opportunity. I wish you happy reading, and I look forward to our discussion over the coming weeks.
Warmest regards,
Bruce
www.brucemachart.com
