The Great Summer Read Is Here

You mention in the novel that Benji avoids a corner where a truck with a Confederate flag was parked. Were there areas in Sag Harbor where you did not feel comfortable growing up? How about now?

Well, when we were kids, we knew we’d biked too far from our territories when we saw a lawn jockey on someone’s front lawn! Nowadays, we know we’re in the wrong place if the menu says it’s $20 for a burger.

So, how does it feel to come back to Sag Harbor now that you're older?

In 2002, I started coming out again, for a few weeks here and there. We moved around Manhattan a lot when I was a kid, but Sag Harbor was there every summer, and I’ve come to appreciate it as crucible and crib. Certainly it has become the one constant in my life.

Are you a barbecuer now, like Benji’s dad was?

I have become a griller. There—I said it! Last summer I purchased a Big Green Egg, which is a brand of smoker, and all I do when I get out there is try to figure out what kind of big chunk of meat to slow-cook for hours…and hours…and hours. It passes the time.

So your daughter is a third-generation Sag Harbor baby?

Fourth generation, if you count my grandparents. It’s quite a marvelous thing to see her play on the beach that I used to play on, that my mother used play on. To see her become friends with the children of my friends, the children of my siblings’ friends. With a little luck, the last chapter of Sag Harbor captures how I feel about the dance of the generations.

How did the shift toward a more autobiographical, realistic novel come about? Was there something in the writing process that changed? Perhaps impending and then palpable fatherhood?

I try to keep each book different from the ones that went before. The protagonists of my first three novels are “writers” in different ways—so I was drawing from my life in that way, but I’d avoided borrowing from my own experiences so directly. It seemed a bit tacky or something. Why dilly-dally with teenage angst when you can bring on the Giant Robots, that was my motto. But one weekend I had some friends out to Sag Harbor for the weekend and as I tried to explain the community to them, I realized that I had a lot of good material to use. Material that was too good not to use. I find the thing that you are avoiding writing about, what you are shying away from, is probably a good avenue to explore in the end.

As for the father thing, I have noticed that if someone has to get shot in one of my books nowadays, they’re probably more likely now to get “just a flesh wound,” as opposed to “their cranium exploded.” So maybe something has changed!