Michael Hogan

I can't thank enough the people at Thomas Dunne Books. From John Parsley to Lorrie McCann, Hector DeJean and Emily Fry - they're the best. They published a beautiful book and now I hope a million people read it and enjoy it.

Michael Hogan

In 1973, when I was 23, having survived life in a New England mill town divided by a river and a mean streak, having been taught English by truly great professors, having been marinated in a not entirely comfortable counter-culture, with Vietnam winding down, with a lottery based draft, with a jobless economy wracked by the first oil embargo, I found myself on the cusp of the Seventies in the midst of Watergate in law school in New York City with other verbal students, some of whom had decided (like me) “to try” law as a means to some uncertain end.

I moved into a basement apartment on West 71st, bought the assigned books, tried to read the pre-class assignments and didn’t understand a word of it. This was an inauspicious beginning, and I knew that if I had a vocation in life, it was to something other than practicing law. Nonetheless I was in it, concerned about money, future income, status, worldly ambition. The point is I wouldn’t allow myself to think that one day I might write stories and novels. Writers write and except for a few college-boy poems, several legal memos and countless unarticulated, vague ideas scratched on countless beer-damp napkins, I’d written nothing.

So then I tried. Day after day. Bits and pieces. Building the sentences and then the paragraphs. And always reading. Trying to figure out how they did it.

In '85 I published my first short story, “After the Wars,” in The Amherst Review. Raymond Carver read that story and wrote a letter commending me on it-- a great compliment.

In 1991 I wrote my first novel, and in 1996 I wrote and sold the first of several screenplays. In 2003, Random House published my first novel, and this year, 2008, Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martins Press published Burial of the Dead.

I was a bachelor until I was 53. Then I married the most wonderful woman. We live a quiet life. I paint, write, read and watch too much TV. She offers me the love and support I’d once thought were unobtainable in this life.