Natalie asked Mikel Jollett:

This question contains spoilers… (view spoiler)

Mikel Jollett The impetus was my dad’s death. When Dad died, I hardly left the house for nine months. I went through a major depression. I cried every day, I didn’t work on anything and I put on weight. Luckily, I had already met my wife, and she was extremely supportive. We just kind of locked ourselves up in the house and went through it. When I came to, I decided I wanted to write a book about it.

I think memoirs function on detail and voice, but mostly voice. But the voice doesn’t work without the right details. Toni Morrison, one of my idols, had this idea of rememory, the idea that memories live in the places where they occurred. If you ever have the experience of going to your childhood home or somewhere you haven’t been in 20 years, you stand there and suddenly you are just awash in so many memories. It’s not just the things that happened or how everything smelled or looked. You’ll remember entire attitudes, your entire way of thinking from years ago. And you’ll think “oh I totally thought that” for years! But you’ve forgotten because you moved on and became the person that you are now.

I went to all the different places in the book, and I stood there and took tons of notes. Then I’d come home and write for a few days. I had these big documents, anywhere from 20 to 50 pages long, about each place — everything I remembered, how it smelled, looked and sounded. Memory is strange. You pull and pull and eventually you start getting good memories. I also compared notes with other people who were contemporaneous with me to make sure I wasn’t the only one who remembered it that way. We’d talk things through and some people gave me some really good information.

Most of the early part of the book is written from the “we” point of view. That’s my brother and me. He helped me a lot with those pages because he was much older. We’d talk through the very early stuff. Later the voice switches from “we” to “I.” That’s how I constructed the world. Before I ever wrote a word of the book, just creating the world that the book is in was a whole, long process.

Choosing details is also very important, like the part where I first meet Jake and we go to his parents’ house. And my obsession with sugar. I’d always look around for the sugar. I knew there was Fruit Hoops (because it was in the bag). We never had money for Froot Loops, that’s for fancy people. When I wrote about donuts I originally put ‘Hostess’ donuts, but then I thought, No, it was the generic frosted chocolate little donuts in a sleeve. That’s a detail that argues for its existence. Readers hear a detail like that and they trust that they’re on a journey with someone who’s not bullshitting them. It felt really important to choose details that were evocative of the time. Of the different details in the scene I could’ve chosen, I chose the ones that really bring the scene to life.

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