Chris Adrian Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

Chris Adrian explains the inspiration behind his first novel, Gob's Grief, how he manages to juggle writing with his medical studies, and why so many doctors seem to end up writing books.

What was the inspiration for Gob's Grief? Was it the period, the plot, a character?

My brother died in an automobile accident in 1993, and shortly after that I started a novel about an actor who plays a physician on a soap-opera. It bears no resemblance to Gob's Grief but shares with it a title and a concern with characters, living and dead, who try variously to understand, deny, accept, or defeat their mortality. The novel underwent many transmogrifications of plot, character, and setting, some of them truly strange and even a little gruesome, before a friend introduced me to Mrs. Woodhull, and Mrs. Woodhull introduced me to a New York in the years after the Civil War. I credit Mrs. Woodhull with saving what was otherwise doomed to be a failed effort and probably a lifelong source of misery for the author. I think I can safely call her and her time the inspiration for the book, while the events in my life that required me to write this novel are perhaps best called something else that connotes less airy joy and more unhappy obsession. I suppose I could call it the desperation, rather than the inspiration, for the novel. In any case, I wanted to write a story where somebody gets his ...