KWL – 342 – Academics and Authorship with Patrick E. Horrigan

#342 – Academics and Authorship with Patrick E. Horrigan

In this episode, we spoke with Patrick E. Horrigan, academic and author of American Scholar, published by Lethe Press. Since recording this episode, American Scholar was shortlisted for the 2024 Lambda Literary Awards in the Gay Fiction category. Congratulations, Patrick! Patrick is also the author of two other novels, plays, essays, and more.

In this episode, we spoke with Patrick E. Horrigan, academic and author of American Scholar, published by Lethe Press. Since recording this episode, American Scholar was shortlisted for the 2024 Lambda Literary Awards in the Gay Fiction category. Congratulations, Patrick! Patrick is also the author of two other novels, plays, essays, and more. He and taught literature for twenty-five years at LIU Brooklyn, and was a previous winner of Long Island University’s David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching, among many other accolades.

We had a great time talking to Patrick about his career as an author, his history in academia, his past experiences at Columbia and LIU Brooklyn that helped shape him, his latest novel, the inspiration behind it, and much, much more. This episode was informative, illuminating, and an all-around great interview! Don’t miss out on listening in.

In this episode:

• We ask Patrick about his career as an author, and how he got started writing, going from academia to creative writing
• Patrick explains how he learned academic writing was not for him, and how moved from academic writing to personal essays to fiction
• We hear how Patrick was inspired by Virginia Woolf in college, and learn more about his transition from academic writing to creative writing
• Patrick emphasizes the importance of research, and discusses how his academic background aided in his writing of fiction novels
• We hear about Patrick’s experience joining a gay men’s reading group at Columbia University, and how this became very important to him and contributed to the narrative of his own life
• Patrick tells us more about American Scholar, and we hear more about what inspired him to write this novel
• We learn that American Scholar actually started out as a work of non-fiction, of memoir, and how it evolved into a work of fiction
• We also learn about F. O. Matthiessen, an important literary figure in Patrick’s life as well as in American Scholar
• Patrick talks about the editing process, and how he edited down American Scholar from a draft that was originally three times the length of the published version
• Patrick discusses the themes of love, history, and art in both American Scholar and in life, elucidating on how these aspects affect both his characters and people in general
• We talk about American Scholar as a love story, specifically as a queer love story, and Patrick elaborates on constructing such a love story
• Patrick talks about representing LGBTQ+ stories, and the challenges and triumphs involved in writing these stories
• And much more!

Useful Links

Patrick’s website

Patrick on Facebook and Instagram

American Scholar

Mentioned in this episode:

Pennsylvania Station by Patrick E. Horrigan

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

F. O. Matthiessen

Emily Dickinson

Patti Smith

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Maurice by E. M. Forrester

The Celluloid Closet by Vito Russo

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

The Price of Salt (Carol) by Patricia Highsmith

Lie With Me by Philipe Besson

Episode Transcript

Transcription by www.speechpad.com

Laura: Hey, writers. You’re listening to the “Kobo Writing Life Podcast” where we bring you insights and inspiration for growing your self-publishing business. We’re your hosts. I’m Laura, author engagement manager.

Rachel: And I’m Rachel, promotion specialist for Kobo Writing Life.

Laura: On today’s episode, Rachel and Tara talk to Patrick E. Horrigan. Patrick is an award-winning novelist, professor, essayist, and playwright. He’s the author of the novels “Pennsylvania Station,” “Portraits at an Exhibition,” and upcoming novel, “American Scholar.”

Rachel: Tara and I had such a delightful conversation with Patrick. I feel like we could have spoken to him for at least another hour. We talked to him a lot about his writing career, and how he shifted from working in the field of academia into becoming a fiction writer, and what lessons he learned from academia that he now brings into fiction. We spoke to him about writing LGBTQ+ novels and flawed queer characters. And we spoke to him a lot about his upcoming novel, “American Scholar,” and his writing process, and the research behind it, and how he wove multiple timelines together to create this story. Like I said, we had such a lovely conversation, and I really hope you enjoy.

Tara: Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining the “Kobo Writing Life Podcast” this week. We’re delighted to have Patrick E. Horrigan here with us. Welcome, Patrick.

Patrick: Thank you, Tara. Thank you, Rachel.

Tara: And to get started. We’re going to talk a little bit about your career as a writer and especially going to delve into “American Scholar.” But for anyone who may not have known you or not familiar, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and the types of books that you write?

Patrick: Sure. I write fiction that revolves around LGBTQ lives. I got my start in academia. I got a PhD in English many years ago and started work that was, sort of, a cross between cultural criticism and memoir. But then I moved over to fiction because that seemed more freeing and allowed me to tell the stories I wanted to tell and say the things I wanted to say.

Tara: Now you got your start in academia, but was being a writer a part of your journey through the English literature world or did you have more different aspirations when you started?

Patrick: I always loved writing, and I discovered in graduate school that writing was really my calling. And I also discovered pretty quickly that academic writing was not suited for me and what I wanted to do as a writer. So, I started veering off on a different path. I was interested in film and decided to write a series of personal essays about movies that had an impact on me as a child. And I wrote those for my own pleasure even while I was in academia writing papers for my seminars. And when it came time to put a dissertation together, I decided that I would use those essays and cobble them together with some other more academic-type things. So, that’s how I got through the PhD program. And then I started teaching in academia, but my writing really became creative writing at that point.

Tara: I’m very jealous of the idea of somebody having part of their dissertation already done just for kicks. That’s awesome. Is there a particular… You’re saying you’re inspired by film there, and that was, kind of, like one of your first books is like I guess that form as a memoir. Is there any particular author or book that inspired you in the creative sense of writing or has served as an inspiration for your work?

Patrick: Yeah. One book that comes to mind is the novel “Mrs. Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf. I was assigned that novel in a course in college, and it spoke to me in a way that no book had ever spoken to me. And I didn’t know a book could speak to me to that extent, and I think that… It didn’t immediately occur to me when I was reading Woolf in college that I could be a creative writer.

But one of the things that really appealed to me and that has played out in the fiction that I write is Woolf really emphasizes the minds and emotions of her characters, the mental experiences that they have rather than the physical things that they do. It’s very psychological. And she throws us so many

things in order to delve into the minds of her characters. She rejects so much having to do with plot and, sort of, creating a real world around her characters. It’s really from the inside out. And when I started writing fiction, I really took my cue from Woolf in that sense.

Rachel: Now, I’m curious about this transition to fiction. Did you have a hard time, kind of, ditching the academic voice? Because academic writing does have a very different tone than fiction. I’m curious what that transition was like for you.

Patrick: That’s a great question. It’s been a long process of weaning myself away from my academic training in a way, although my academic training also really feeds into the kind of work that I do. On one level, I think my background in academia has taught me how to do research and how to find information that I need to build the worlds that I want to build in my fiction.

One of the problems with academic research however is that you’re trained to, kind of, become the sole proprietor of a certain body of knowledge, and the more you know about that thing, the better. And I’ve had to learn, in writing fiction, when enough is enough and to not, sort of, allow myself to be engulfed by my research but to use it judiciously.

There’s another way in which, however, that my work I feel continues to show its roots in academia for me, and that is that all of my novels revolve around some artistic medium. My first novel revolved around portrait painting. It’s about a guy in an art museum looking at paintings, and I did a lot of research on portraiture in order to write that novel. My next novel is about an architect who’s trying to save an old building. I did research on that building. It was the old Penn Station in New York. And in my current novel, “American Scholar” is about a professor and writer who focuses on American literature and a particular critic of American literature who lived in the early 20th Century, F. O. Matthiessen. And so I write about people who are interested in art, and ideas, and culture, and that really gets expressed in all kinds of ways in the fiction.

Rachel: I know. We’re going to delve into “American Scholar.” But as a film buff, I do have to take us on a little bit of a tangent and ask what those films were that inspired you and were there any that, kind of, drew you to a more creative career.

Patrick: So, I want to just give you a tiny bit of background to that book on film that I wrote, which came out of my work in academia. When I was in graduate school in the late ’80s, I joined a gay men’s reading group at Columbia University. And it was my first time really socializing with other gay men. I had recently come out and reading about gay history and all kinds of things related to this aspect of my identity. And I had also just started therapy around the same time.

So, the idea of learning about myself, about my history, about my people, whoever those people are—it’s not just my family of origin, it’s also my community—became very important to me. And in therapy, one of the things you do is you start to construct a narrative about your own life that helps you move forward. And I started thinking about one of my obsessions as a child, which was movies. And I used to, kind of, live out these fantasies about not only being in the movies that I loved but also making my own movies. And so I wrote these essays about certain key films from my childhood, one of which is “The Sound of Music.” And that’s one of the first movies I remember loving as a child. And then when I became a teenager, I saw the film “Dog Day Afternoon,” which is about a bisexual bank robber played by Al Pacino. And as a 16-year-old, that movie just blew my mind in so many ways.

So, I tried to write about these movies and reconstruct what I think I was experiencing as a young person seeing them in light of who I had become, which is an openly gay man. Not to draw a straight line between those two things but to try to tease out what drew me to a movie like “The Sound of Music,” to a character like Maria who’s this surrogate mother who frees these children who can’t sing, who can’t speak, who can’t express themselves. If I put it that way, I think you can begin to see the queer resonance of that. So, those are two of the movies that show up in that book.

Rachel: I think that’s such a cool project too because I do think it… Not to say everything is a universal experience, but speaking from my own experience and my friends, to be a queer person and then look back and kind of figure out, “Okay, why was I obsessed with this?” So, for me, it was “Bring It On.” Why did that speak to me personally at that time in my adolescence? I think that’s such a cool project to, kind of, look at your obsessions, for lack of a better word, in your past and, kind of, draw the line. That’s really cool.

Patrick: Yeah, I agree. Thank you.

Tara: I don’t know about you, but I definitely sang “Edelweiss” as a little kid just walking around fields in Ireland. I only now think about it, my neighbors would have heard me and I was just like this little child, “Edelweiss…” But anyways I digress.

So, let’s talk about “American Scholar,” which I very much enjoyed. And I hope maybe this is a true, kind of, summary. I thought of it as a book about love history and the stories we tell ourselves. So, I was just wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the story, which you’ve kind of already done but the listeners might not have realized that. And could you talk a little bit about the inspiration behind writing this particular story?

Patrick: Sure. And I think that is a good description that you just gave, Tara. So, in graduate school, I was reading this critic named F. O. Matthiessen who I learned was a gay man. He was writing in the early 20th century. He was a gay man. He was considered one of the founding fathers of the field of American studies. And he also suffered from severe depression, ultimately killing himself in 1950. And I became fascinated by this figure partly because I was entering the field of American studies and I had just come out. So, he was a kind of role model figure, but his life ended tragically. So, I really wanted to understand what he was all about.

And at the same time, I was starting to date somebody who resembled him in many ways. This person also suffered from severe depression, ultimately killing himself. And their politics were also similar. They were both socialists. Matthiessen was a socialist in the ’30s and ’40s, and my boyfriend Gary worked for Democratic Socialists of America. So, there was this uncanny similarity between this historical figure and this person that I was involved with. And I thought that I needed to understand that coincidence. And so Matthiessen became a figure in my dissertation.

And then several years later, I decided to try to write a memoir about this experience. And it didn’t really work as a memoir. And I think it didn’t work as a memoir because I hadn’t really figured out what I wanted to say about myself in this mix. And so many years later, I decided to dust off the memoir, and rewrite it as a novel, and making all kinds of changes in order to really tell the story that I wanted to tell.

So, it’s a story about a professor and a writer who had a very significant relationship 30 years ago in the late ’80s with someone who died under mysterious circumstances. We don’t find out how this beloved person died until the end of the novel. But this person was the inspiration for research that the protagonist did on F. O. Matthiessen back in the day. And the protagonist has recently written a novel inspired by the life of F. O. Matthiessen. It’s now 2016. So, the novel sets up all kinds of parallels between the late ’80s and the early 2000s. And we get to see how the protagonist has changed from being a young man in his 20s to a middle-aged man in his 50s. And we see how the legacy of this important relationship from his past has really affected every aspect of his life.

Tara: There’s a couple of things you said there that I definitely want to dive into. I like a lot the heavy historical narrative as a… The team will make fun of me. I’m primarily a non-fiction reader and, to their opinion, the duller, the better. But fiction for me that has a sort of historical narrative is very much stuff that I enjoy. And I wanted to, kind of…because you were talking about… There’s the two main timelines that you, kind of, go between 1987 and 2016, but there’s also the third timeline of the book within the book, which is the research that’s happening in the early 20th century that you’ve mentioned. And then each timeline itself kind of offers a reflection of what life was like as a gay man in that particular time period. So, I’m kind of curious about… You talked a little bit already about getting lost in kind of the academic research of things. But what was the research like of those three different timelines? And how did you find writing and kind of melding them together? Because it reads very easily as you’re floating back and forth.

Patrick: Well, one thing that occurs to me when you ask that question is the theme of love and what it was like to be a gay man in love in the 1920s for Matthiessen and his partner, Russell Cheney. They found each other on an ocean liner bound for Europe and created a life together, but they felt very isolated. They felt that there were no role models for the kind of relationship they had.

In the 1980s, when I was coming into my maturity as a gay man and first experiencing love as a gay person, it was the worst years of the AIDS epidemic. So, you fall in love with someone and there’s this kind of sword hanging over your head. And then in the 2000s, so the protagonist has a young boyfriend in his early 20s, and they’re discussing Matthiessen and Cheney, and the boyfriend has this, sort of, emotional breakdown where he realizes that, when Matthiessen and Russell first met and fell in love, they didn’t take their clothes off. They didn’t have sex. And the young man thinks, “Wow, we’ve really fallen, in a way, from that era because now we find each other in dating apps and it’s so easy to just jump into bed with somebody.”

So, there are these different notions of love, different contexts in which queer relationships are formed. It even goes back further than the early 20th century, because in one passage within the novel, Russell Cheney reads a poem to Matthiessen by Walt Whitman written in the mid-19th century. And it’s a love poem about looking at a beautiful man in a bar in the 1860s. So, yeah, there is a kind of accordion of relationships going on here across time.

Rachel: And just to, kind of, follow up on Tara’s question, I’m curious about the research project. And as somebody who is guilty of doing this, did you fall into any deeply specific research holes where you were kind of brought maybe off-topic or it inspired a new part of either this novel or future work?

Patrick: Wow, that’s an interesting question. Well, the first draft of this novel was about three times the length of what it ultimately became. So, the experience of revising it was very much about cutting. In the first draft, I just sort of threw everything in that I could think of. And a lot of that had to do with Matthiessen because I had done all this research on Matthiessen in graduate school, and I brought it all with me when I started working on this novel. But I realized that I had to really whittle it down to the core of what drew me to Matthiessen and his work.

And I think what really drew me was, as I said, this idea of this young man in his early 20s in the early 1920s, discovering love with another man for the first time but having no context for it and really no language for it. And in his letters to Russell Cheney, you see him groping for words to describe what their relationship is all about and what to call it. Do we call it a marriage? Should we be monogamous? Should we tell other people about our relationship? These really basic questions. And then the rest of it, a lot of it I just had to jettison. Whether or not that gets used in a future project, I’m not sure.

Rachel: And what were your research sources like? Because like you mentioned, being part of the LGBTQ+ community historically has been kept very secret by a lot of the members. I’m really curious what your sources were like while researching this project.

Patrick: So, when it comes to Matthiessen in the early 20th century, we’re fortunate because his life and work are well-documented relatively speaking. And as I mentioned, he wrote many letters to his partner, Russell Cheney, because they spent a lot of time in different countries because of their work and also people wrote letters in those days. And a collection of those letters was published in the late 1970s, and that was invaluable for understanding who they were.

As far as the 1980s goes, I lived through those years, and I’m a bit of a pack rat. So, I have a lot of stuff from the ’80s both, you know, everything from graduate school but also all the political activity that I was involved in. I was a member of ACT UP, the AIDS activist organization in the ’80s, and I saved a lot of material that I got from those actions and those meetings. And the boyfriend that I mentioned who is the inspiration for one of the main characters in “American Scholar,” when he died, he left behind 12 storage boxes of material, and I inherited those boxes. So, I had that archive to delve into. So, there was a lot of paper that I had to work with.

And actually in the novel, the character based on me has been hanging onto storage boxes left behind by his old love, and his husband is always grousing about this and wishes he would just get them out of the house. So, a lot of what’s in the novel is a thinly veiled autobiography, even though it’s fiction.

Tara: You mentioned about how you had made the decision to have this be a fiction book. Can you talk a little bit more about that especially having written, kind of, something about yourself in the past? How did the writing change and what kind of drove you towards…? I guess maybe it’s easier to tell a fictional story in some ways. Maybe easier is the wrong word, but can you talk us through the process?

Patrick: Sure. Well, so when it was a memoir, I shared it with a lot of people. And the response I got from almost everyone was this, sort of, head scratching and people didn’t seem to know what it was about. They would say, “is this book about you? Is it about F. O. Matthiessen? Is it about your boyfriend Gary? What’s the center of this book?” And also, one or two people said, “I really didn’t like the figure of you in the memoir. You come off as someohow either an unfinished character or even slightly unlikable.”

And I took all this feedback and I thought about it and time went by. And so when I started rewriting it as a novel, I realized that it had to t be told from the point of view of the character based on me and that, in a way, it is his story, that is my story. And then the question becomes, “Well, what is my story with regard to these two important figures—this important love interest and this important historical figure?” And that dictated a lot of the changes that I made in the story. For example, and this won’t give anything away, but the way my friend actually died in the early 1930s ends up not being the way that the character based on my friend dies in “American Scholar.” And that was something that it took me a long time to let go of because that seemed like such an important part of the story. But it turned out it wasn’t such an important part of the story.

New York City plays an important part in the novel. It’s the setting for the novel but it’s more than that because the protagonist is interested in the issue of place almost in a kind of superstitious sense, and he’s thinking of writing a book about place. And in the memoir, of course, it’s set in New York City and it refers to all these places that my friend actually lived and things that we did together in the city. But one of the changes that I made when I started rewriting this memoir as a novel was I was able to kind of, really mix things up in terms of the geography of the city, and who lives where, and who’s moving where at what point. And, again, all of that was to serve the story.

The story of “American Scholar” in a way is like the story of the “Odyssey.” It’s about the protagonist who’s now in his mid-50s who’s on his way home to Brooklyn to his husband. But while he’s on his way home, he’s reflecting on this important relationship from 30 years ago. And so there are all these flashbacks to the 1980s. But that basic structure of slowly winding your way from the Upper East Side of Manhattan to Brooklyn over the course of four or five hours, that sort of governs “the plot” of the novel. And that’s all an invention.

Rachel: And you mentioned the original manuscript was three times the length, the original fiction manuscript. What was that editorial process like? And do you have any advice for authors who are kind of facing a similar issue of their manuscripts just needing to be pared down but not wanting to “kill their darlings”?

Patrick: Yes. Well, I love cutting things, I have to say. As much as I love writing and I can fall in love with things I’ve written, I do enjoy cutting because I’ve learned from experience that that’s when you’re weeding what you’ve written and you find what’s really important. And in my experience, you don’t necessarily know exactly what’s important from the outset.

I do work from an outline, and I stick to it. I have an idea of the overall structure. But within that, there’s a lot of stuff that gets written that ultimately isn’t necessary. And so I guess the pleasure of discovering the substance of what I want to say, the story outweighs the pain of having to sacrifice things that I liked that I wrote. So, I’m all for cutting and paring things down.

Tara: And was this manuscript, were you always calling this “American Scholar”?

Patrick: No, it wasn’t. It had a different title to start out with. And, yeah, it was originally called “15 Minutes With You.” And one of my readers told me that it sounded like a YA novel. And actually, though, the memoir that I’d written was called “American Scholar.” So, when I decided to jettison “15 Minutes With You,” I was like, “Oh, I can go back to the title of the memoir.” And that title, I like the title because it resonates in all kinds of ways. It refers to my protagonist who is an American scholar. It refers to Matthiessen, the founding father of American studies. It refers to Gregory, the boyfriend from the ’80s, who was a kind of scholar in the making. It even refers to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous essay from the 1830s called the “American Scholar.” And some of the ideas in that essay resonate throughout the novel. So, again, it had a lot of layers, that title.

Tara: That was my question. You literally just named out my question word for word about all the different scholars. So, I know it’s open to interpretation, but who is the American scholar or is it a mix of all of them? It could also be you, you the writer of this book could be the scholar, too.

Patrick: Well, I don’t know if I could say which one is really the American scholar or who is foremost. But what occurs to me when you ask that question is one of the interesting things in Emerson’s essay is he’s writing in the 1830s at a time when American culture is rather thin. We’ve gained our independence from Britain but we haven’t really gained our cultural independence. And so he gives this addressed to a group of Harvard undergraduates where he basically says… And by the way, scholar for Emerson just means student. It doesn’t mean anything more professional than that. And it also doesn’t even just mean student. It really means anybody who’s doing anything creative. It could involve words, but it could also involve other artistic media.

So, he’s calling for a kind of new American art that really reflects the realities of life on these shores. And it’s meant to be liberating and empowering. And he says like, “Don’t go looking out…” It’s very much like the end of the “Wizard of Oz.” Don’t go looking outside your own backyard for inspiration. Look within. Look at home. Look at yourself. Write about that. And there’s this wonderful passage where he says, “You need to be not only a creative writer but a creative reader.” And I take that idea of creating creative reading, and I, kind of, run with it throughout the novel because the protagonist in my novel is constantly misreading, constantly misreading people, situations, himself, texts. When I say he misreads texts, sometimes he just reads them too closely. He’s too good of a reader in some ways. He’s not always seeing the big picture. And I think there’s something kind of wildly and dangerously American about that.

Rachel: You kind of touched on the importance of the location of the book being in New York City and kind of the journey. But one thing that kind of comes up throughout the book is the importance of place and the idea of buildings kind of keeping memories. And I was wondering if you could talk about that a little bit.

Patrick: Yes. And in a way, this goes back to Virginia Woolf because she wrote novels that were not so much about action and the things people do. Also because her novels often take place in very concentrated periods of time. Place becomes very important like the house in “To the Lighthouse” takes on this outsized importance in the novel. So, here, in the contemporary chapters, the protagonist is walking through Manhattan over the course of a couple of hours. So, on one level, he’s not really doing anything. He’s just walking through the city. And so in that sense, the city becomes very important as a trigger for his memories.

I’ve had the experience numerous times in my life of going someplace and being confused about what I’m supposed to be thinking and feeling when I’m there. For example, I remember visiting Emily Dickinson’s house in Amhurst, Massachusetts. And the bedroom where she did most of her writing, she wrote most of her 1,776 poems in that bedroom. So, to stand in that bedroom, you’re in a very important place and I remember thinking the first time I visited that bedroom, “What should I be looking at? Should I look under the bed?” Because the dosen is pointing out the wallpaper, and talking about the mantelpiece, and the drapery, and the writing desk. And all of that is important, but I also feel like there’s something important in addition to that, that is more mysterious, more spiritual. And I’m not sure how to get at that, but I feel that there is something to be discovered beyond what you can apprehend with your five senses. And I think art comes into play here because art involves the real world but it also lives off from the real world and it touches on things that are ultimately spiritual and go beyond the five senses, I believe.

So, in the novel, the protagonist James at one point visits the house where his old love Gregory used to live and where they had many experiences. And as so many people experience in their lifetimes, when you go back to an old place, it’s shocking. Sometimes it’s much smaller than you remembered it or it doesn’t look at all like you remembered it, and you start to question your memories. And all of that interests me. And so James is sort of struggling with those issues as he’s remembering his past with Gregory in the places where they did things together.

Tara: What you were saying there about the Emily Dickinson and I think you go to…well, in the book, the characters go to where Matthiessen had stayed and places like that. It very much reminded me of Patti Smith’s photography where she’ll do a lot of polaroids that will be… I mean, I can’t for the life of me think of one author, but a lot of her work will be like this is some famous author’s spoon or their chair or their shoe. And it’s the same sort of idea of like an object having this more emotional source of something surrounding it. But I’m not quite sure what but I have felt the same when I was reading the book.

Patrick: Yeah, yeah.

Rachel: Have you made the walk that James makes from the Upper East Side down through Brooklyn? Did you make that walk during the writing process or have you made it before? Because that is a journey.

Patrick: I have made that walk, and actually I made the walk at a point in the writing process where I realized, “Wait a minute. I need to actually do this to see if what I’m writing is at all viable.” And so a lot of the details that come up on that walk are details that I recorded in a notebook as I was walking from the Upper East Side downtown. So, yeah. And that was a really fun experience to do that.

Also, in the novel, James and Gregory go on the walk that Matthiessen took on the last night of his life from his townhouse in Beacon Hill to the hotel in Boston’s North End where he ultimately killed himself. And that’s something I did as a graduate student. I wanted to go on that walk and just, again, kind of see what came to me, what occurred to me, see what I could see along the way, to have a kind of experiential connection to the past rather than just reading about it to actually try to live it somehow.

Rachel: Did that walk evoke some of the same kind of emotional feelings as being in Dickinson’s room where you’re like, “Okay, this has bigger meaning than just a stroll”? Did it kind of have that same emotional weight to it or is it a very different experience?

Patrick: It did have that emotional weight. And this is where I feel like I don’t know how much of this is me projecting onto my environment or if the environment is really giving me something. And I use this in the book. As James and Gregory are walking down the hill toward the North End where the hotel had been, they’re passing street signs that say things like danger. One way. Russell Street, Russell was the name of Matthiessen’s partner. And it’s like when you’re… I was just re-reading the chapters in Anna Karenina leading up to her suicide, and she’s gone mad. And everything she sees, she’s interpreting according to her mental state. And I feel like that’s what I did when I went on that Matthiessen walk and God knows what was in Matthiessen’s mind as he was going on that walk. And, again, this fascinates me, the interface between the mind of a person moving through space, and the environment around him, and how those two things interact. And does the environment ever penetrate? And if so, how?

Tara: I’ve talked a little bit about or we have talked about how this is kind of like a book about love and how love changes over time. Would you consider this a love story itself? I mean, it’s kind of like a historical fiction narrative. And if you do, I just was wondering, kind of, comparing that to it being a love story versus a queer love story and how important is it for you to have like kind of queer romances represented.

Patrick: I didn’t set out to write a love story. I have done that in the past. I didn’t in this case but as you say, love emerges as such an important theme in the book. It is important to me as a writer who focuses on LGBTQ lives to think about how to represent love among LGBTQ people. And I think a lot about the conventions that we have for telling love stories: straight love stories, gay love stories, in popular culture, in high culture. There’s a book and a movie that come up in the novel. It’s E. M. Forster’s “Maurice.” And “Maurice” is notorious or famous, I don’t know what the word is, because it ends happily. And he wrote this in 1913. It’s a love story between two men. And a lot of the original readers of the book criticized it because they said, “Well, this could never end happily. These two men would never make it as a couple in 1913.” And anyway, the First World War is on the horizon, so they go off and get shot.

And this whole question of how should a queer love story end is really fraught, I think, in queer culture. I tend to tell stories that don’t resolve cleanly, and this novel doesn’t end in a simple way. I think that’s truer to life. The danger of that for a gay writer is that historically queer stories have been told that so often end unhappily with murder, suicide. Vito Russo, the film critic, wrote a book called “The Celluloid Closet,” and there’s an appendix at the end of the book where he lists as many movies as he can think of in film that have queer characters and how they die. And it’s almost comical. This one jumps out a window. This one gets hit by a falling tree. This one kills herself, etc., etc., etc.

So, that’s become a trope in queer narrative, and I don’t want to fall into that. On the other end, a pat ending, a fake false ending, that’s not satisfactory either. So, how to tread that line is an interesting challenge for me, and how to represent love between people of the same gender in a way that’s realistic and honest, that’s an interesting challenge to me. Some people have questioned what it means that my protagonist is happily married but also has a boyfriend. So, I like to complicate things in that way.

Rachel: And you literally just asked and answered almost my next question, which was… It is such a trope in LGBTQ+ media like bury your gays is a trope.

Patrick: I haven’t heard that expression but, wow, absolutely there with kill your darlings.

Rachel: I think there’s or there used to be… I don’t know when the internet was like GeoCities, but there used to be a list of the bury your gays trope and all of the media where the queer character meets an untimely end. And you have kind of answered this, but looking at it from a historical perspective, how do you tackle that challenge of telling honest stories about the history of the community without it falling into tragedy when the community has experienced so much tragedy like discrimination, the AIDS crisis, and so on and so forth?

Patrick: That’s such a great question. I taught a course on queer fiction many years ago to a group of undergraduates. And these people were hungry for stories about their community and stories from the past. And they were shocked when they were reading books like “Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin. Even “Carol” by Patricia Highsmith. These books present queer lives as very damaged, in some ways, very tragic, very sad. And these kids were like, “No, this is not what we signed on for. We don’t want this history.” But it is part of our history.

So, I guess one of the things you want to be clear about is that, yes, tragedy exists in our history. And how do you explain that? Too often the explanation is, well, there’s something inherently wrong with queerness and therefore it leads to these tragic ends. So, I think there’s a way to tell honest stories that don’t always end happily but that also give you a sense of satisfaction because now you understand something about the past and how it relates to the present.

Rachel: And since you have taught a class on queer literature, I feel like you’re the perfect person to ask this question. Do you have any recommendations of just any…? Do you have any favorite books in the LGBTQ+ canon of literature?

Patrick: Well, I mentioned “Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin. Tragic as it is, it’s a beautiful book, and it really does such a beautiful job of showing how love feels when you first discover it. So, I recommend “Giovanni’s Room.” That’s from the late 1950s. What else?

Rachel: Sorry, just putting you on the spot here.

Patrick: Oh, it’s okay. It’s okay. I just recently read “Lie With Me” by Philippe Besson, which came out a couple of years ago. He’s a French writer, and it’s about two French boys in a kind of provincial town who discovered each other in the ’80s and then we follow one of them into the present who’s become a well-known writer. It has some interesting parallels with “American Scholar.” I enjoyed that book a lot. I think it’s being made into a movie. Yeah, I mean there’s so many. Yeah, I could sit here in silence trying to decide which ones I want to mention but…

Tara: We’ll get you to send us a list and we can put it on the post afterward. Well, Patrick, I feel like we could stay here chatting to you all day. But we’ll start to wrap up and just curious what’s… I mean, I always feel terrible asking authors this when they’re promoting their latest book. But what’s next? What is your next work? What’s piquing your interest at the moment?

Patrick: Well, I’m working on a new novel. I’m really enjoying it. I’m about midway through the first very rough draft and it has a…

Tara: Is it about a different art form? You have the painting, the movies, the writing.

Patrick: It is. It revolves around classical music. And the protagonist is a piano teacher and it’s a woman. So, I have a woman protagonist. So, I’m enjoying that challenge.

Rachel: My mother was a music teacher, so she would be very upset if I didn’t ask. Are there any specific composers that you were focusing on?

Patrick: Yes. Chopin comes up a lot. Brahms. Rachmaninoff.

Rachel: All of the classics.

Patrick: Yeah, yeah.

Rachel: And where can our listeners find you online?

Patrick: So, I’m on Facebook /pehorrigan. Also on Instagram, same handle @pehorrigan. And I have a website which is patrickehorrigan.com.

Rachel: Perfect. We will include links to all of those in our show notes so listeners can find you. Patrick, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today. This has been fantastic.

Patrick: Tara and Rachel, thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.

Laura: Thank you for listening to the “Kobo Writing Life Podcast.” If you’re interested in picking up Patrick’s books, we will include links in our show notes. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please be sure to rate, review, and subscribe. And if you’re looking for more tips on growing your self-publishing business, you can find us at kobowritinglife.com. Be sure to follow us on social media. We’re @KoboWritingLife on Facebook and Twitter, and @kobo.writing.life on Instagram.

Rachel: This episode was hosted by Tara Cremin and Rachel Wharton with production assistance by Terrence Abrahams. Editing is provided by Kelly Robotham. Our theme music is composed by Tear Jerker. And a huge thanks to Patrick for being a guest today. If you’re ready to start your publishing journey, sign up today at kobo.com/writinglife. And until next time, happy writing.