WE WERE IN THE MIDDLE OF A REMARKABLE CONVERSATION that veered from motorcycles to square dancing, from Carl Jung to Marcel Proust, when his wife politely interrupted and set before us a plate of madeleines she had just that afternoon procured from a French. It was June 2008, and I was at the writer’s home in Wonewoc, in the “Driftless” region of Wisconsin, to talk about his fourth novel, , set to be released that autumn by Milkweed Editions, thirty-three years after the publication of his previous novel, . I had arrived that morning to discuss not only his triumphant new book, but also the events of those intervening years during which, as I wrote in the resulting profile for this magazine, “a horrifying motorcycle accident broke his back, paralyzed him from the sternum down, threw his marriage into a tailspin from which it would not recover, and all but erased his name from contemporary literature for the next three decades, his books quietly falling out of print, forgotten.”
EDITOR’S Note
Feb 15, 2023
2 minutes
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