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| Illustration by Grafilu |
20 Under 40: Q. & A.
Chris Adrian
By Jennifer L. Knox
June 77, 2010
Chris Adrian was featured in The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 Fiction Issue. His story will appear later in the summer.
When were you born?
November 7, 1970.
Where?
Washington, D.C.
Where do you live now?
In Boston and San Francisco.
What was the first piece of fiction you read that had an impact on you?
Probably Richard Scarry’s “Busy, Busy World.” It was the first time I can remember being so taken by a fictional representation of the world that I wanted to live there instead of in the real world. And I identified very closely with Lowly Worm. I had this idea that Lowly and I and Huckle Cat could all live together in one of those timber-framed houses that Scarry drew so exactingly. I didn’t think of it that way back then, but now I think I wanted us all to be boyfriends.
How long did it take you to write your first book?
About ten years, through almost as many drafts.
Did you ever consider not becoming a writer?
Yes. I still consider it every few months or so.
What, in your opinion, makes a piece of fiction work?
I think that there needs to be something at stake that the writer, the characters, and the reader can all agree is interesting and important.
What was the inspiration for the piece included in the “20 Under 40” series?
When I was five, my aunt gave me a Christian record album for Christmas that was a sort of singing narrative of the battle between the Warm Fuzzies and the Cold Pricklies. She was (and still is) a wonderful person, and her family was considerably more ethically advanced than mine, and I loved her, but I was bitterly disappointed in the present. Though I was too polite (or too afraid of what my mother would do to me if she caught me being rude) to say it directly, I tried to indicate what a lame gift I thought she had given me by dragging her to the new television my parents had given me and extolling its virtues to her, trying to make plain that this was the sort of thing that one got for Christmas, and that Jesus-themed gifts were really not appropriate at this time of year. My brother and I listened to the album once, pronounced it irredeemably gay, and I lost it shortly thereafter, but it’s always stuck in my memory, and I remember the melodies of the songs, if not the words. When one of the characters in my novel suddenly appeared to have grown up in a very musical Christian household, the gift of the album combined with some not very well remembered episodes of “The Partridge Family” to shape this part of the story.
What are you working on now?
I’m finishing up a novel that’s a retelling of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” set in Buena Vista Park, in San Francisco, and a novel for young adults about a girl who makes a deal with the Devil to try to get her mother out of a supernatural jail.
Who are your favorite writers over forty?
Ursula K. Le Guin and Marilynne Robinson, John Crowley and Padgett Powell.
Published in the print edition of the June 14 & 21, 2010, issue.
THE NEW YORKER
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