Listen to the full interview on Wauktown Radio and hear Chris Bohjalian tell how the idea began for his newest book.
Chris Bohjalian’s most recent book, The Double Bind, is the result of extensive research and combining reality with fantasy.
The book began with a newspaper article Chris wrote in a Sunday column for the Burlington Free Press. The newspaper article was about Bob Campbell, a real life photographer who was once homeless. The man died after moving from the streets into an apartment that the Burlington, Vermont Committee on Temporary Shelter found for him. Campbell left behind black and white photographs of some of famous people from over 40 years ago.
“We were all mystified as to how Campbell had gone from photographing luminaries from the 1950s and 1960s to winding up at a homeless shelter in northern Vermont,” Chris explains in the opening Author’s Note in The Double Bind. Chris described the story that resulted as “the longest article I’ve ever written,” consisting of three newspaper pages from top to bottom.
“Those photographs he left behind at the shelter were certainly an inspiration for the book,” Chris said during our recent interview at the Printer’s Row Book Fair in Chicago.
“But the fictional character I created is not real,” he stressed. Because Chris had already done so much work writing the actual article, he said he had plenty of background to begin creating the fictional character of Bobby Crocker. The actual photos that the real Bob Campbell took are used in the book and can be viewed on line at http://chrisbohjalian.com/campbell.htm
Chris’s publishing career began with a short story in Cosmopolitan magazine. A novel followed and “sold right away, much to my astonishment,” Chris joked. He says his first three books were “hideous,” yet admits one of them, Pass the Bleachers, did become “a lovely Hallmark movie.”
The Double Bind is Chris’ 11th book. His talent as a writer is making fictional characters seem so real we know we’ve met them, talked with them as neighbors, and have come to know and care for.
In Double Bind Chris weaves reality and fiction to create the compelling story with life-like fictional characters. We meet social worker Laura Estabrook and the homeless clients she works with. We are by Laura’s side as she tries to piece together the story of the real photographs and the fictional Bobby Crocker’s life, played out against the modern day residue of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s broken Buchanan family from The Great Gatsby.
It all flows together to a startling conclusion.
