BH: You approach issues of fatherhood in the book with humor by also managing to maintain an element of sadness, and you do this so well. Can you talk a little about this process of balancing the line between humor and sadness? Is fiction different from nonfiction?
BT: Those are kind words, and I’m thrilled you asked this. When I write fiction, I always try to balance humor and sadness, but some of those results are based on unconscious decisions. In attacking these essays, however, I consciously focused on looking to balance humor and sadness, whether sentence to sentence in a single essay, or from one essay to the next. Parenting is endlessly frustrating, and for me, filled at times with rage. Parents die. Children get sick. You get older and more scared of things. The world can feel so fucked and wrong. But you can’t just write about all of that. Who would want to read it? No one, so even as I am come off like a whiner nonpareil, I also sought to constantly remind myself that there is good in the world, children bring joy, with age comes wisdom, even with death you can laugh, and that you have to remember to embrace it, all of it, and write about it as well.
