Ask Peter Levine discussion

Not sure if this group is active. I just recently discovered it. Here goes....

I am curious why there wasn't a story from the mother's point of view. It seemed as though every angle was covered, friends, coworkers and his father. There wasn't one independent story of just his mother's point of view.

The second is why to kill him off in the end? While it does add closure to the book and cohesiveness to the collection, why such a drastic end?

Thanks for these great questions!

As for Tom’s mother, my plan wasn’t so much not to give her a story of her own, as it was that I ended up writing two stories, at very different times, that focus on Tom’s relationship with his father.

While you often hear about overprotective or overbearing mothers who are aren’t happy with their son’s love interests, I wanted to examine a father’s point of view.

In those stories, I tried to convey a sense of infatuation, even obsession, that Stuart has with his elusive son, who always seems at a distance from him.

Therefore, everything else, including his wife (who, as you point out, never even gets named), gets drowned out in his effort to get a read on Tom.

Tom’s demise came about by accident, so to speak. I’d written the final story earlier than many of the others, when I was still playing with the idea of a popular but fated hero. So, killing him off didn’t seem like such a big deal at the time, though later on it did!

But again, the idea was that for as popular as Tom was, he wasn’t long for the world, and obviously, the final story describes that.

Thanks so much!