“Life Story” by Kevin Egan appeared in Issue 41 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about “Life Story.”
The inspiration for “Life Story” came during the weeks-long task of cleaning out the duplex house where I grew up. My immediate family lived in one half of the house, while my grandparents, two bachelor uncles, and an unmarried aunt had lived in the other. During the clean-out, I asked myself the type of question that can generate a story: What if I found something that totally changed a long-held conception of someone who lived in the house? I didn’t find that something, so I needed to invent one.
I wrote the story over several years, abandoning it for months at a time, then returning to it with fresh ideas. This is common practice for me, which I variously describe as “growing into a story” or “letting the story come to me.”
The early elements of the story, in fact, the first six pages, hardly changed from the first draft in 2011. My favorite element is the initial interplay between the p.o.v. character, a successful novelist, and the nursing home social worker who “rejects” the novelist’s perfunctory “life story” of her aunt, a nursing home resident, an example of high dudgeon versus bland institutional language.
What was the most difficult part in completing this piece?
The most difficult part of the story was deciding what exactly the novelist/niece would discover while cleaning out her aunt’s house and how that discovery would play out both dramatically and thematically. This aspect of the story bedeviled me for years. At first, I chose to portray the aunt’s stillborn hobby — crocheting. The aunt never finished anything, not a shawl, not a sweater, not an afghan, and her niece finds hundreds of crocheted squares stuffed in trash bags. The idea didn’t work. Years later, in 2017, I decided the niece would discover a set of notebooks. The notebooks not only totally change the niece’s conception of her aunt — for one thing her aunt was an excellent writer — but also helps forge a bond between the niece and the social worker.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
Any of the Slow Horses series of novels by Mick Herron.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Mick Herron. If he is anything like any of his ensemble cast of characters, it would be a blast.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
Since the publication of my eighth (and likely last) novel in 2017, I have been concentrating on short stories. Most of my short fiction is mystery-related, and my stories have appeared numerous times in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Mystery Magazine, and Mystery Tribune. I would like to write more stories like “Life Story,” which blends a more mainstream/literary voice with an element of mystery. If only more such ideas would strike me.
Our thanks to Kevin for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this story. Read “Life Story” here.
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Kevin Egan is the author of eight novels, including Midnight, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2013. Egan’s 40+ short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Mystery Tribune, Mystery Magazine, Rosebud, and The Westchester Review.