Kim Powers--Are There Bookstores in Heaven?

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Sometimes it's a funny old small world, isn't it? Take my guest today, Kim Powers, award-winning television news writer (Senior Writer for ABC's 20/20,) playwright, novelist, graduate of Yale School of Drama, all of which sounds so glamorous and cosmopolitan. (Which it is!)

But Kim grew up right here in the town where I live in north Texas, which is also where my husband grew up. My husband rode his bike to the same Saturday matinees as Kim, at the Ritz Theater on the town square, and I'm sure they both got ice cream at the local Dairy Queen, and swam in the same pool. Kim and I also went to the same small north Texas college--in fact, we are both Distinguished Alumni, and have taught a writing workshop together there. (Yay, Austin College! Go Roos!)  So it is an extra special thrill for me to introduce Kim and his marvelous new book, RULES FOR BEING DEAD, which is getting such terrific buzz.

Kristopher Zygorski of Bolo Books opens his review with this: "Every season or so, there’s a book that seemingly comes out of the blue that manages to knock our socks off. Rules for Being Dead is that book for the Summer of 2020." And he adds, "If you threw The Lovely Bones, Cinema Paradiso, and Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story into a blender the result would look something like Rules for Being Dead, but even that doesn’t fully express the bounty of treasures within. " 

Kim will tell you more!

 

                    ARE THERE BOOKSTORES IN HEAVEN?

          Because if there are, I’m screwed. My father (and I don’t mean my Heavenly Father) is possibly not going to like what I’ve written about him in my new novel RULES FOR BEING DEAD. My whole family–and sadly, most of them are up there by now–won’t necessarily be too happy about it, because I’ve opened up the closet and finally let out all the long-held family secrets. In fact, I use this George Bernard Shaw epigraph at the front of the book: “If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.” I also use this, from Ricky Ricardo: “Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do!” Taken together, they give you a sense of what you’re in for--I Love Lucy Solves a Mystery.
         The book’s original title might give you a further clue: The Movies We Watched (The Year My Father Killed My Mother.) Pretty much cuts to the chase, doesn’t it? I work at ABC News and have always been taught “don’t bury the lede.” (That’s news spell for “lead.”) I changed the title for a few reasons, in large part because it gave away the whole story—or what I thought was the whole story--before you even got to the copyright page. The second reason is that Chris Cuomo told me to. 

Years ago, he was co-anchor of ABC’s 20/20, where I’m senior writer. He loved my first book, a memoir called The History of Swimming –“Why don’t you write like that every week for ME?”—but winced when I told him the name of my then work-in-progress. “Not a lot of grace in that, my man.” He’s big on grace (and saying “my man.”) Was it his Catholicism talking, or just general humanity? Whatever, he had a point. I changed the title. I needed some grace as I dove into this autobiographical family novel about the very sad and mysterious death of my mother, and all the other sad and mysterious things that came after it. But the initial facts of the story remained: I did watch a lot of movies that year (every Saturday afternoon at The Ritz in McKinney, where our beloved Deborah Crombie now lives!!) and I did come to think my father killed my mother. Several other people in my family did too. 
         The first draft of the book, with that HE KILLED HER, Y’ALL! title (not my finest moment, I admit) was told entirely from the point of nine-year-old Clarke Perkins, a stand in for little me, trying to play boy detective and figure out what really happened. Some people thought suicide; my older brother and aunt thought murder–by my very own father. At one point, I even asked my stepmother if he had done it, and she said, “Why bother asking? It won’t bring your mother back. Let sleeping dogs lie.” She didn’t say it meanly, she said it sadly, which made it sound like even more of an answer.
         But Clarke got boring, all by himself–do you want to read 297 pages of precocious?--so I started adding new voices to the narrative: my father; Rita (the new girlfriend-turned-stepmother); and last of all, my dead mother herself, floating around in the ether, playing a middle-aged Nancy Drew and trying to remember what happened. (Whenever I begin thinking of the book as a memoir, it hits me that you can’t have a dead woman flying around with little angel wings IN A MEMOIR.) Draft by draft, I added the “grace” that Chris Cuomo was talking about. Rita wasn’t just “the other woman” or the “cruel stepmother,” but a disappointed woman who’s already buried one alcoholic husband, is trying to run the shoe repair store he left her saddled with, and slaps on too much eye shadow and hair spray to try to make things better. L.E, the father, wasn’t just a drunk and a womanizer, but a victim of aching poverty and neglect, growing up in a shack in the frozen Vermont backwoods. A kid who almost died after being run over by a semi-track while trying to sell Christmas trees to make extra money for his family. That’s not fiction. That’s real. That’s grace. (His, not mine.) Creola, the mother, wasn’t just crazy, but someone with undiagnosed bi-polar disease, looking for salvation in religion. That’s why she attacked my father with a giant cast iron skillet, while screaming that the Great Apostle Paul told her to do it.  
        Rita. L.E. Creola. Those are their real names. When my editor first saw my dedication, “In memory of my two mothers, Creola Perkins Powers and Rita Cobb Powers,” I think she was a little bit taken aback. Did I really want to go there, invite all those inevitable questions of “did this really happen?” Even though I’d made no bones about the autobiographical nature of the book, that dedication said there was no turning back. This was my story. This was their story. I’ve given them names (literally) and voices that wouldn’t have been heard otherwise, these people we all know, these people we all are, just trying to do our best and make it from one day to the next. Now that I’m an adult, I understand that struggle all too well.
         And I finally know what killed my mother.           
        Will it make them famous in heaven, having their names in a book? (Talk about an overcrowded field up there!) I hope so. That would make me feel better, because it’s hard enough worrying about the living people in the book, let alone the dead people. (Is it just me, or does everyone who writes memoir or autobiographical fiction worry about this, along with the “little” things like “will anyone actually buy the book?” It’s one thing to go back home for a book tour, where everyone knows your business, but factor in what they’re thinking in the afterlife….I guess you can take the boy out of Texas, but you can’t take the Southern Baptist out of the boy.) They deserve it, some “me” time, some loving attention, after everything I’ve put them through. After everything RULES FOR BEING DEAD might put them through. I hope to find out one day, when I see my family again and nervously ask, “So…read any good books lately?” 

DEBS: Mystery, memoir, literary novel, ghost story, RULES FOR BEING DEAD has it all, and Kim will give away a copy to a commenter on today's blog! 

Readers, if you had an obsession when you were ten, what was it?

And Kim, here's a bit of nostalgia for you! McKinney's Ritz Theater!

 

Kim Powers is a two-time Emmy winner and author of the novels Capote in Kansas: A Ghost Story and the thriller Dig Two Graves, as well as the critically acclaimed memoir The History of Swimming, a Barnes & Noble “Discover” Book and Lambda Literary Award finalist for Best Memoir of the Year. Powers is also the Senior Writer for ABC’s 20/20, part of the team that has received an unprecedented three consecutive Edward R. Murrow Awards. A native Texan, he received an MFA from the Yale School of Drama and lives in New York City and Asbury Park, NJ.   

It’s the late 1960s in small-town McKinney, Texas. At the local downtown theater, movies—everything from James Bond to Beach Blanket Bingo, Alfie to Dr. Zhivago--feed the obsessions of ten-year-old Clarke Perkins. But when his beloved mother mysteriously dies, no one will tell him what happened. No one will tell HER either. She’s left to float above trees and drive-in movie screens, trapped between life and death, searching for the truth. Neither mother nor son can rest until they know the final answer about a time and place long gone. 

Darkly humorous and incredibly moving, Rules for Being Dead is reminiscent of The Lovely Bones and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, with a touch of Larry McMurtry and Mark Childress.)