A few questions with Michael Kimball
Michael Kimball and Marc Fitten read at Beep Beep Gallery, part of the Solar Anus Reading Series, on Sunday
- TYRANT BOOKS
Baltimore-based writer Michael Kimball arrives in Atlanta on Sunday to read from his latest book, Us. Kimball is probably best known for Dear Everybody, praised by everyone from The Believer to the Los Angeles Times for the book’s distinct, singular powers. Kimball has turned his attention to exploring grief and love in Us, a book that follows the aftermath of man’s wife suddenly going into a coma in the middle of the night.
We caught up with Kimball to ask him a few quick questions before his reading at Beep Beep Gallery on Sunday.
How long have you been working on Us? When did the story come to you? Were you drawing on personal experience?
It depends on how you count the time. It probably took me about five years to write Us if you count all the false starts. But if you count it from when I wrote the first chapter of Us to when I wrote the last chapter, then that was about a year and a half. For years, I had a certain voice in my head, an older man narrating, but it took me a while to figure that voice out, to find the right syntax and diction for it. And I was, in a loose way, drawing on personal experience, the two main characters being based on my grandparents, who were around a lot when I was growing up — that and the various kinds of dying that I was around during my teenage years.