CHAPEL HILL -- Rosecrans Baldwin's "You Lost Me There" addresses issues not typically found in the debut novels of 20-something New York writers: The nature of memory. The bitterness of regret. The ravages of Alzheimer's disease.
Then again, Baldwin is no longer 20-something and no longer a New Yorker.
Set on a small island off the coast of Maine, "You Lost Me There" details a pivotal summer in the life of Dr. Victor Aaron, a leading Alzheimer's researcher. Victor's wife, a successful screenwriter, recently died in a car accident and left behind writings that throw their 30-year marriage into an entirely different light.
Baldwin began the book in 2005, at the age of 28, while juggling various jobs in New York - advertising copywriter, web designer, magazine writer. After a long gestation process, the book hits shelves this week.
In the meantime, Baldwin had founded the popular online literary magazine The Morning News, and spent a year and a half living in Paris with his wife. He moved to Chapel Hill this year to be closer to family and escape the hectic rhythms of the big city.
The advance buzz for "You Lost Me There" has been remarkable, even in an industry where buzz is in constant circulation. The book has already been previewed in Time and Entertainment Weekly.
But it's making Baldwin's life hectic again, as book promotion duties call.
Ducking the heat and nursing a beer at Jack Sprat Cafe in downtown Chapel Hill, Baldwin discussed the new book, the Parisian language barrier, and the curious sideline of "luxury humor."
Q: The book deals a lot with memories. Was that a deliberate theme you wanted to explore when you started the book?
It wasn't deliberate, but it came up pretty quickly once I began to figure out who Victor was and what drove him, and it's also a personal preoccupation. I have a very good memory for conversations and visual details, but I'm awful with dates and names, and I find it embarrassing. I possess the world history knowledge of a fourth-grader.
Q: Do you have any personal experience with Alzheimer's, family or friends?
My grandmother died of it over a number of years. It's awful, to see someone quite literally degrade in front of you. And it's torture for the person to lose her humanity - her memories, her cognitive abilities, her physical functions - and have it frequently occur so slowly, but it's also very difficult for the family.
Q: Your dialogue reminds me of Salinger in his Glass family books - something about the rhythm of the language. Are you a Salinger fan?
Sure, though not a huge one. His way with dialogue, though, absolutely. My main inspirations are Philip Roth and William Faulkner in that way, how alive their characters become through voice.
Q: You lived in Paris for a while before coming here, but didn't speak much French, right? That always seems harder on writers, or people in the communication business. Did you find that stressful, not speaking the language?
Absolutely. I felt like I had been doing the crossword all day, every day. It's that desire to be understood, and when it's so important to get your point across and you can't do that. But one thing is, when you're forced into speaking French all the time, the bald naked truth comes out of you.
I was asked about being in New York during 9/11, what was that like? I was like, "I was sad. Very sad. Many people die. Very bad day." Without getting into Islamic terrorism and the Bush White House, the simple truth of it was it was a really bad day. And a lot of people died.
As a native speaker, when you hear someone talking like that, it's easy to assume they're misinformed or have a very rigid opinion, when it may just be that they don't have the vocabulary. So anyway, we did Paris for 18 months, then were like - [forget it]. We need some quiet. We need to live in the woods.
Q: Had you written or published any fiction before "You Lost Me There"?
Well, I had written two other novels - really novels in name only. The first was 300 pages of junk, and that's consigned to the dumpster of history. The second one was a big 375-page, heavy concept, David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo thing. Everyone's 23, living in Brooklyn, very conceptual.
The second one got me my literary agent, though. It went out to X amount of publications, came back with X amount of super-nice, generous rejection letters. So that was depressing.
Q: But you went back at it?
Yeah, I would block out in the morning three hours of novel-writing. Then I had these random gigs: I wrote for a golf magazine and I did a column on luxury watches. Well, I don't have a watch, and I've played golf exactly once.
I also wrote a humor column for a magazine that shall remain nameless. It's not a magazine that's on newsstands - it's only for very, very wealthy people. I did a back page humor column, and they wanted "luxury humor." I'm like, "What is luxury humor?" They said, you know, jokes about chateaus and wineries and Greek islands.
But it paid really well. I just thought: If I have to make knock-knock jokes about Merlot, I can do that.
Q: And meanwhile you were writing the book on the side?
Right. And I wanted to do something that was more personally significant than what I was writing before. The concerns and issues of the characters are more my concerns and issues. None of it is taken from real life - none of the characters are real people - but all of it is me. It's a very personal expression while being entirely non-biographical.
Q: What is your writing schedule like now?
I'm still a morning person. I get up at 5 a.m. I do my Morning News work until breakfast, then from breakfast to lunch is my fiction writing time. I don't have an office, I just turn off the Internet and sit at the kitchen table.
