Jonathan Tropper is the internationally bestselling author of five previous novels: Plan B, The Book of Joe, Everything Changes, How to Talk to a Widower and This Is Where I Leave You. He is also a screenwriter, and a co-creator and executive producer of the action drama series Banshee, which will air on Cinemax in 2013.
Silver is a complex character--by turns lovable, frustrating, pathetic and heroic--and yet feels very much like an Everyman. Can you tell us a little about your inspiration for this character?
I started out with the intention of writing a character that differed from my past protagonists in a very specific way. I've always created characters for whom redemption was a distinct possibility. With Silver I wanted to try something else. I wanted to write about someone who is already past the point where he can correct his mistakes, someone who must live every day with the consequences of those mistakes. What is the nature of redemption when it's too late to actually correct the mistakes you most regret? How do you move forward from there? I wanted to raise the stakes by writing about someone who is starting from that place. I wanted to see what redemption looks like when it doesn't physically fix anything.
Woven throughout One Last Thing Before I Go are themes of loss, regret and faith in God. How did these themes develop for you as you were writing the novel?
This novel is about a man who is brutally honest with himself. He sees himself for who he is, understands the mistakes he's made even if he doesn't have the self awareness to understand how or why he allowed it to happen. He cannot escape the regrets he has over his failure as a husband and a father. So I guess regret was a thematic component from page one. As for God--Silver has an aortic dissection that could kill him at any moment. He is also the son of a rabbi. So with that kind of upbringing, and the very real possibility of death hanging over him, there was no way God wasn't going to enter the picture in some fashion.
Despite the many ways in which Silver's family is a slow-motion train wreck, there is a great deal of genuine, tender love between them. Are they, in your opinion, a dysfunctional family? Or is dysfunctional the new functional?
"Dysfunctional family" is a term that gets thrown around a lot when it comes to novels, as a kind of catch-all for any family that has issues. All of the families I've written about in my novels have been referred to in reviews as "dysfunctional." I've generally disagreed. My feeling is, any family in which the family members will be there for each other at those key moments of need is not a dysfunctional family, no matter how much they may not get along. In this case, though, I do think we're dealing with a pretty significant level of dysfunction. Silver has been a marginal presence in the life of his daughter and ex-wife for almost a decade. His daughter, now 18, is pregnant, and he and his ex-wife can't seem to figure out how to help her. So, yes, you would find this family somewhere on the spectrum of dysfunction.
Although the novel is told primarily through Silver's point of view, you allow us generous glimpses into the minds and hearts of his teenage daughter, Casey, and his ex-wife, Denise. As a writer, what were the challenges you faced in switching among these very different points of view?
Although it's written in third person, I wanted to keep the narration pretty close. I wanted each character to have their own voice. So as I bounced back and forth in the different points of view, I had to write in the voice of a world-weary, possibly dying 44-year-old man, a precocious and pregnant 18-year-old girl and a divorced 40-year-old woman. The trick was to make each voice sound authentic, and to be able to show the same characters in two ways--the way they saw themselves, and the way the other characters saw them, altering your perception of each of them depending on whose point of view you were in.
Silver's illness, an aortic tear, leads to his physical decline but also to a number of emotional and personality changes that multiply as the novel progresses. How much research did you have to do about this condition? On a related note, did you begin writing Silver's character with the idea that he would have this particular medical condition or did you need to find a medical condition that would match Silver's emotional and physical progression?
From the beginning, I wanted there to be a significant change in Silver's behavior. This is a guy who has stood by silently, almost helplessly, like an innocent bystander to his own mistakes. So I wanted him to go through something life-threatening that actually caused him to find his voice. I thought it would be life-altering for him to actually start sharing his feelings with anyone and everyone. So I did a little research into various medical conditions that could have that effect on someone. I interviewed some doctor friends, took some liberties so as to not bog down the book with medical jargon, and came up with a plausible situation in which Silver's medical and spiritual conditions combine to generate the quirk of suddenly being absolutely truthful with everyone. It's both terrifying and ultimately liberating for him, and often pretty damn funny.
What would you most like readers to take away from One Last Thing Before I Go?
I don't really write "message" books. I want to people to be moved, to be entertained, and to reflect on their own lives and relationships--to see the truths I'm attempting to convey about life and humanity and to relate to them in whatever ways they can. One Last Thing Before I Go is about people living with regret and moving past it, it's about fatherhood and marriage and reinvention, the mistakes we all make, and how they shape us. And, hopefully, with all of that, it's a rewarding and pleasurable read. --Debra Ginsberg
Photo by Greg Yaitanes