I’m new to Goodreads and still finding my way around, but I think if you’re reading this, you have read one of my books, or have it on a list to read, or it was recommended by a friend. However we’ve met here, thank you for your interest.
The Vintage paperback of my religious memoir "Faith, Interrupted" will be published March 8. For those of you who know me through my various books on Woody Allen, this might seem an odd departure for me (although a favorite topic of Woods’s is God—or the absence of God). It is a book I had thought about for more than 15 years. I wrote the first two pages of the first chapter in 2001, after reading Dave Eggers’ "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius." The tone of his writing gave me an idea of how to get into my book, but after those two pages, I had no idea where to go next. (Storage in My Documents turned out to be the answer.) A year later, I wrote a few more pages, then hit another dead end. Finally, in 2007, I figured out the whole chapter, which is written in the third person, and then the whole book. Readers of my other books know the subjects going in and have the book because of it. Telling what could be a universal story allowed me to set up this book without having to say, “Hey, this is me I’m talking about, even if you don’t know me or have a clue as to who I am.”
In my next blog—I’ll be writing in this space regularly—I’ll tell you what I learned from writing a memoir. If you go to Amazon.com, there is a Q and A with my publisher about the book. I also have a website: http://www.ericlax.net.
Thanks for your time,
Eric