Caryn Oxford asked David Joy:

David, this book was so dark, so violent but beautifully and maybe painfully written. What was your inspiration for writing this book? Is this based on your family experience? I hung on to every single word until the last page. I had a few people in the airport ask me what I was reading that would make me gasp out loud. Now that I know the ending, I want to reread it for deeper meaning and for the beautiful words.

David Joy The novel started with an image. I was at a friend’s hog lot and I had this image of a young boy standing over a pig he’d killed. I knew two things: one, that his father was there and had told him to kill it, and, two, that the boy suddenly realized how much power he had over life and death. I wrote that scene, a scene that winds up happening later in the book, and I knew that the boy had a story to tell. I kept trying to write his story and I kept getting it wrong, at one point burning about half a novel and starting over. After about a year or so of living with that image I woke up one night in the middle of the night and I could hear Jacob speaking clear as day. At that point it was just a matter of trying to keep up, and I wound up writing the first draft of Where All Light Tends To Go over the course of a few months. I think I tend to live with images and characters for a long time before I ever actually get anything on the page.

As far as the darkness and the violence, I think there are also elements of hope, and I think it’s that balance between hope and fate that, with any luck, keeps the reader invested. As for writing within that space, I can remember after finishing the novel I was talking to my sister and I told her, “It’s going to take a long time to find my way out of the darkness I’ve created.” I’d spent months inside of that space, immersing myself to the point that I was walking into walls, to the point that when I had to go somewhere like the grocery store it felt as if I was moving within a dream. The world I’d created was more real to me at that moment than anything else around me. I think for an artist to create anything meaningful it takes that type of immersion. There’s a sort of sacrifice that has to be made, and, for me, the end justifies the means. I tend to tell stories of heartbreak and circumstance and desperation as I think those types of elements allow you to immediately get to the heart of a character. When things fall apart a person can’t be anything aside from exactly what they are. That’s what interests me most.

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