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DETROIT
— For 16 years, columnist
Leonard Pitts Jr.
has come into America's homes, sharing what he thinks
about just about everything. Politics. Parenting.
People. Race. His work is recognized across the world,
and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for his nationally
syndicated
Miami Herald
column, which is distributed by
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
and runs in 250 newspapers.
But
column-writing wasn't his aim when he graduated from the
University of Southern California
in 1977. Writing novels was what he wanted to do. Pitts,
52, accomplished that goal last year with the release of
"Before I Forget" (Bolden,
$16
).
The Detroit Public Library
has chosen Pitts' first novel to kick off its
"Detroit Reads! One Book, One Community
Program," an initiative to get the entire city
reading and talking about books. And people will have a
lot to talk about after reading this multi-generational
story of relationships lost and found between fathers
and sons in urban America.
Pitts
writes from his home in
Bowie, Md.
The Detroit Free Press
talked with him last week.
Q: What
led you to write a novel?
A: I've
been writing novels for as long as I can remember. The
question should be, how did you finally manage to
publish a novel? I sort of got sidetracked into being a
music critic. And then when I got tired of being a music
critic, I went from there to being a columnist. I'm sort
of just now getting to do what I set out to do 33 or 34
years ago.
Q: How
did you feel when you saw the book for the first time?
A: There
was nobody home but me and my grandson, Eric (then 13).
And I told him to take a picture of me opening the book.
It was a great moment. I feel like I've crossed some
finish line with myself in terms of finally getting to
where I wanted to be.
Q: Why
did you choose to make the father-son relationship a
central part of your novel?
A: I
think fatherhood is sort of a great un-discussed issue
in the African-American community, frankly, and in the
nation at large. I don't think we do men the honor of
believing that their contributions to the family are
important beyond perhaps the monetary contribution. I
wanted to take a look at three generations of this and
how the failure to be successful as a father transcends
down through the lives of these three men and threatens
the outcome for the youngest. If his father can't get
his act together, what will happen to DeVante? To me
that's the question of the book and the question of our
communities.
Q: One of
the other subjects the novel deals with is early-onset
Alzheimer's. How'd you come to write about that?
A: That
was purely a plot point. I was looking for an illness
that sort of sets the clock running. It gives a
deadline. If there's unfinished business we don't worry
about it until suddenly you get a death sentence and
those things take on more urgency and importance.
The other
thing about early-onset, specifically, is that it scares
the heck out of me. As a writer, you're always trying to
find something that pushes your own emotional buttons
and for me that's it. Of all the ways to die, that's got
to be one of the scariest. It takes your quality of life
before it kills you.
Q: Music
is a constant backdrop in the story, both R&B and
hip-hop.
A: That
was very conscious. There were two things I was trying
to do. One, the book deals with a generational rift.
There're a lot of things Trey's generation doesn't know
because his dad's generation, which is my generation,
didn't teach them. We weren't there physically and
emotionally to do that job.
Q: What
do you want readers to come away with?
A: The
first thing you want is for readers to be entertained.
But I also hope it encourages people to think about the
role of father in their lives and the lives of people
they know. And the idea of handling the business of our
relationships while it's still possible to handle it,
rather than waiting until a crisis point.
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