Please join us for a Q&A with William Boyle, author of Saint of the Narrows Street.
William Boyle is from Brooklyn, New York. His novels include: Gravesend , which was nominated for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France; The Lonely Witness, which was nominated for the Hammett Prize and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière; A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself, an Amazon Best Book of the Year; and City of Margins, a Washington Post Best Thriller and Mystery Book of 2020. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi.
William’s latest novel, Saint of the Narrows Street, was featured in our February 26 ezine.
Please use this space to ask William questions about his work. As a reminder, to reply to an existing comment click the grey Reply on the right side under the comment. To ask a new question, click the blue Reply button a little lower down.
William, thanks for being here! Please tell our group a little about yourself.
Hi Kim- Thanks so much for having me! Saint of the Narrows Street is my eighth book. I write crime novels set in and around the neighborhoods in Brooklyn where I was born and raised, Gravesend and Bensonhurst. I went to college–and lived for the better part of a decade–in NY’s Hudson Valley. I also lived in Austin, Texas for a bit and have been in Oxford, Mississippi for 15+ years–I came down here initially for grad school (drawn down by the work of one of my favorite writers, Larry Brown, and the chance to study with Barry Hannah and Tom Franklin). I’m a big reader–I’m currently reading Charles Neider’s The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones (just reissued by McNally Editions), which I’ve been wanting to read for a long time (the basis for Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks and Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid). I’m also reading–for the first time–Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker–it’s blowing me away! Ann Petry’s The Street and William Kennedy’s Ironweed are my favorite novels of all-time. Other favorite books include: Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts; Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood; Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?; and Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women. Willy Vlautin is my favorite contemporary writer. I love movies and music. I won’t start listing favorite movies and albums (yet–ha).
You mention Saint of the Narrows Street is your 8th book. After so many novels, how do you continue to find inspiration, or to keep what you write about fresh? Do subsequent novels get harder or easier to write?
You channel Brooklyn beautifully and really do your hometown justice! How about your characters? Were the characters for this book (or those in any of your novels, for that matter) based on people you know?
Saint of the Narrows Street is quite tragic. Did it start out that way, or did it evolve into a tragedy as you were writing? I can see a lot of potential endings; why did you choose to conclude the story as you did?
Feel free to use the spoiler tag if you want to get specific:
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I like artists who spend their whole careers exploring the same obsessions. There are ways to avoid stuff getting stale, for sure (usually that comes via characters, place, time period, specific details), but I think I’m always driven by the same concerns. I love exploring the same things from different angles. So many of my books are essentially set in the same house on the same block–it’s my grandparents’ house in my mind–even if I present it differently each time. It sounds boring to say it, but inspiration is everywhere. When I go home to Brooklyn, just walking up the block, my mind fills with memories and stories. I have a notebook full of quotes from my mom–each line feels like its own story. What I’m reading and listening to and watching all filters into the work. Today, I rewatched Jonathan Kaplan’s (RIP) Over the Edge for the first time in a long while, and I realized what a massive impact it had on the sorts of stories I like to tell. I’m always on fire with ideas–characters, images, details, whatever. Each new book presents its own challenges. Things get easier in the sense that I know what the work takes. I’ve been doing it for a while, and I know how to build what I build. That said, it can sometimes take a while of working on something before you realize you’ve gone down a bad road or the wrong road with it. I’ve had a couple of novels in the last few years that I just couldn’t figure out. That’s hard.
Thank you so much! None of my characters are based on anyone specifically. I take pieces from people I’ve known here and there. My mother is an inspiration for a lot of characters I write in some ways, though I’ve never explicitly based a character on her. In Saint of the Narrows Street, she definitely inspired elements of Risa. There’s a lot of me in many of the characters I write. In this book, with Chooch, I think I was writing a version of myself if I’d never left home, if I’d gotten trapped by the neighborhood in some of the ways I always feared. I’m not Chooch–and he’s not me, not at all–but there are elements of his personality (his yearning especially) that reflect a way I felt when I was growing up.
I envisioned it as a tragedy from the start. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say it’s a tragedy. I love Greek tragedies, Shakespeare, noir (Dennis Lehane has described noir as “working-class tragedy”), melodramas, and more art in that vein. I’m very fascinated by doomed characters. A reader recently wrote this about my book: “The tragedy of life is we punish ourselves with the weight of regret because we want to believe life is about choice but we’re forced to see it’s about chance.” That feels like a pretty good summation of what I was after. I tried really hard to write an epilogue that ended things on a bit more of a hopeful note–there is a future for Risa, Chooch, and Giulia, despite their profound loss–but it just didn’t work. It ended where it needed to end.
I’m delighted to hear that there’s a future for those three. I did think the ending was exactly what it should be but soooo wanted better things for Risa & Chooch. They’re good people & deserve happiness.
It sounds like you had the story pretty well outlined before you put pen to paper, is that fair to say? Other than the omitted epilogue, were there any other surprises or challenges you ran into as the book progressed?
Beyond the fact that I knew a certain character was doomed, I didn’t really outline or plan anything. The original draft of the book was actually written over a few weeks in 2020. It was set all on the block on one summer night in 1986. Obviously, in that draft, though the same characters were present, things were very different. Fab was just a baby for the entire book and not someone we saw age across eighteen years. When I figured out the time element in subsequent drafts—dropping into these four different moments across this eighteen year stretch (1986-2004)—things started to change pretty drastically. When I wrote part two of the book, I fully intended Roberto to be a character who we’d follow for much longer—that shifted in a major way as I was writing. I was very surprised by what unfolded in that section–I hadn’t figured on it happening the way it happened. In part three, I didn’t expect Father Tim to be such a major character–he was fun to dig deep on. Part four starts with Fab on the hunt for his father, and I really had no idea where that would lead–the scenes at the Rosendale Cafe and 87 Motel were pleasant detours. I don’t love to outline or plan too much—I often feel like it kills my enthusiasm—but I do know certain beats I want to hit and a lot gets worked out during the revision/drafting process. Still, it’s always important to leave room for discovery and for unexpected turns—that’s one of the great joys of writing for me.
How did you get started as a writer? You sound like a very creative individual - were you a lifelong storyteller? What spurred you to write your first novel, Gravesend, and what was your experience like getting it published?
One of your books, Tout est brisé (Everything is Broken, 2017) was first published in French and then later in the Southwest Review in installments. What’s the story behind that novel, and how it ended up being marketed to that audience in particular?
Which of your books was your favorite to write? Which one are you most proud of? Which was the most challenging?
I’ve always loved writing. I started telling stories when I was little–I remember writing a story in second grade featuring my friends that got copied and passed around. I used to spend a lot of time tape-recording my grandparents and transcribing their conversations–I learned a lot about dialogue that way. When I was in high school, I really focused on trying to write screenplays and poems. By the time I was in college, I’d figured out that fiction was what I was better at and what I really wanted to pursue. I wrote three failed novels in my twenties–all of that was training for Gravesend. I wrote Gravesend as my MFA thesis. Getting it published was difficult. A lot of close calls with agents but no one bit. Eventually, it was published by a small press called Broken River Books. That was a great move. It wound up being translated into French and published as the thousandth release in the esteemed Rivages noir collection edited by François Guerif, which changed the course of my life as a writer.
Because Gravesend had some success in France, I had a career there before I did here. That led to my third book, Everything Is Broken, being published there first (I’d had a short story collection, Death Don’t Have No Mercy, published here by Broken River Books in 2015–that was my second book). Everything Is Broken (the title comes from the Bob Dylan song) is a small, quiet story of a son returning home to live with his widowed mother. It’s not a crime novel. It’s pretty short–might be more accurate to call it a novella. It’s had a nice little life in France. I love that book–it was subsequently published serially in the US by Southwest Review, and I also wrote a short story called “Getting Mercied” that’s a coda to it that was later published in Southwest Review.
The answer to all three of those questions is Saint of the Narrows Street. My other books are largely set over very short spans of time–a few days or a couple of weeks, with maybe a prologue and/or epilogue set at a different time. Narrows Street was the first book where I covered such a long time period–eighteen years. I cheat a little because I use this Boyhood method of dropping into moments across this long stretch of time, but covering that much ground was new and challenging–I had to resist constantly playing catch-up for the reader. The whole process of it was just so rewarding–it’s my longest book, the fullest expression of my vision of things, the one that felt the most purposeful and that I felt the most in control of. I loved the editing and revision process–getting notes from my agents and especially from my editor (his input especially helped so much) was really rewarding. It was also my favorite to write–I lived with and worried about those characters in a way that was so immediate and haunting.
Do you run your rough drafts by anyone besides your agents & editor? Also wondering what your mother thinks of your books, since she’s so present in them.