In His Own Words

This interview was conducted in early 2004 by publicist, MaryGlenn McCombs, in conjunction with her representation of Mr. Beard prior to the anticipated launch of the self-published version of the novel. Viking Penguin called to offer Mr. Beard a book deal days before Dear Zoe was to go to press. See BACKSTORY

MM : You know I have to ask you this question because the answer is just too bizarre not to be shared. You scaled back a successful law practice to pursue your writing. I think a lot of professionals fantasize about doing something like that, but what made you finally decide to take the risk?

PB : Ah, the fortune cookie story. I wrote a lot in college, even more in law school. But once I started practicing, there was no time. In the spring of 1998, I was sitting with my wife at a small table in our favorite Chinese restaurant, lamenting what I considered the tedium of my legal practice and threatening to scrap it all in favor of doing what I’d always imagined myself doing — writing and teaching high school English. This had become a frequent topic of conversation for us, but this time it was more heated, talking about what we could afford to give up, the status of my retirement savings, that kind of thing. When I opened my fortune cookie that night, it read (I swear this is true): "You are a lover of words. Someday, you will write a book." Traci and I started scratching out budgets on napkins right there, as if that little piece of paper could really tell us what to do. The next fall, with Traci pregnant with our third daughter, I went back to school for an English teaching degree and began work on a novel. That fortune remains taped to our refrigerator to this day.

MM : How did the idea for DEAR ZOE come about?

PB : Subliminally, I think the book was written to explore my greatest fear – the fear of losing a child – but through a narrator who is nothing like me. Talking through Tess helped me to express what might have been impossible for me to write about through my own perspective. It took me a while to get there, though.The book really began with Tess’s voice and her talking about having two very different fathers. Somewhere along the way I decided that she had lost a sister, and her voice, for some reason, started speaking directly to that sister. After September 11th, I was walking my dog and thinking about how this family tragedy I was trying to write about seemed so insignificant in comparison. Gradually, that began to seem like a story in and of itself. From there, the novel began to take shape.

MM : At that point, did you know where the book was headed?

PB : No. I write about people, not events, so I never outline or know very much about what’s going to happen to my characters. If I know, I have to assume my readers will know as well. I knew from the beginning that Tess was going to live with her biological father for a while, but that was about it.

MM : I’ve had other fiction writers tell me that, and it always surprises me. How do you know from the beginning that what you are writing is a novel?

PB : Knowing whether or not it’s a novel is purely a matter of feel for me. I wrote plenty of short stories in college and law school, and none of them were very good, mostly because I never felt as if I had enough room, if that makes any sense. Different writers have different talents. I have always felt that mine was creating characters people will care about, or at least feel some sort of kinship with. Short stories never really allowed me to exploit that talent. I knew when I came back to writing that it was to write novels. So I just started writing and convinced myself that if I kept writing about these people for long enough, eventually I’d have a novel.

MM : But how do you keep going? Is it discipline or blind faith?

PB : It's a little of both. Just before I decided to scale back on my law practice and devote myself to writing full-time, I went to see a high school classmate of mine, Dan Jones, who was appearing at my local Barnes & Noble to promote his first novel, AFTER LUCY.Someone in the audience asked him that very question, and Dan gave a great answer. He credited another writer, but I’ll always attribute these words to Dan. He said that writing a novel is like taking a long road trip at night: you can only see as far as the headlights illuminate, but you know you’re getting somewhere. A week later, I started writing my first novel with that analogy written on a post-it note stuck to my computer screen, and I can tell you it kept me going more times than I can count. So to answer your question, I guess it's faith that your discipline will eventually take you where you are going.

MM : What was most difficult about writing DEAR ZOE ?

PB : Writing and revising the pivotal scene in which Tess sees Zoe getting hit by the car was awful. I wanted the scene to be perfect, and yet I hated reading it, hated even knowing I had written it. My youngest daughter was two at the time, and I kept picturing her, no matter how hard I tried not to.

MM : This seems like a silly question, but was there anything that was easy?

PB : Writing is seldom "easy" for me, but Tess’s voice came very naturally. From the beginning, I could hear her voice in my sleep.

MM : You have a stepdaughter who, like Tess, is much older than your biological daughters. Did you learn anything about yourself as a father and stepfather by writing this book?

PB : Yes, and most of it I wish I hadn’t learned, frankly. Tess is very different from my stepdaughter, but I spent a lot of time trying to see myself from her point of view in order to understand how Tess would see David. What I realized was just how distant a personality I must be to my stepdaughter. Cali and I have a great relationship, but we've both had to work very hard at it, and it’s more different from my relationship with my other daughters than I ever realized or wanted to admit. There is something that comes from bonding with a child from birth that can’t be duplicated. It’s more than biology. It comes from the physical contact more than anything else, I think. It’s the closeness and the holding and the constant interaction; it’s the fact that what you say to them and do with them becomes part of the way they’re wired forever. When you meet a child at age four and don’t live with her until age six, there’s just no way to go back and make that kind of introduction.

MM : What do you hope readers take away from DEAR ZOE ?

PB : I think it’s presumptuous to write with the idea that you can dictate what your work is going to mean to your readers. So much depends on when you read a book, how you come to it. In that way, reading is no different than writing. If I had written this book five years ago, the 9/11 element would have been non-existent, and Tess’s story would have been much different as a result.

MM : You mention 9/11. Do you think the reading public, especially those in New York and Washington, are ready for a character who sees September 11th the way Tess sees it – as a horrible tragedy, yes, but one which, ultimately, had no effect on her?

PB : Oh, I don’t think Tess would say that 9/11 had no effect on her. It affected her deeply, if only in the way it threatened to diminish the import of her own tragedy. What she comes to terms with, for me anyway, is the fact that 9/11 wasn’t so much one tragedy as it was 2,752 little ones. To me, 9/11 becomes even more unthinkable like that — in small pieces, in discrete lives. Tess’s tragedy was one more, no less important than any of the others, no less life-defining.