Hindsight is 2020 follows a man and his family across five generations who reflect on how the past has brought him to where he is and what the future can hold. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

In 2020, my parents died. It was already a pretty tough time for me and my family and the pandemic just made things so much worse. It became really difficult for me to sleep. All I had left of my parents was in boxes. There were pictures and letters and even stories they wrote. I actually learned a lot about them. But I was also accepting the permanence of their death. And I found that writing a journal about my thoughts, things that were going on, really helped me. Then I decided to start writing fiction and that helped me even more. A lot of my ideas came from the grieving process. Those feelings that I couldn’t resolve like being angry. Angry at the world, at my situation. It gave me a way to let those feelings out and really understand them and think about what they meant to me. Eventually it occurred to me that I might put it all into a book. And I started thinking about how I could make all of those pieces fit together. And that’s what the book represents, all of those ideas and feelings.

What are some things that you find interesting about the human condition that you think make for great fiction?

Curiosity. Curiosity, for me, is the driving force behind all of my writing. A lot of the characters in the book deal with the secrets that people keep and whether or not to pursue the truth. Being curious but ultimately left without answers because they realize that you never really know the whole story of someone’s life. You only get a few pieces. Those are the kind of feelings that I wanted to explore in the book. Curiosity about myself, too. Wondering about what would happen if an event in my life were different. What would happen if somebody was out to get me? For some reason I fixate on those things. The “what if” questions about my life. What would happen in this situation? How would this person feel? How would this affect their life? When I’m writing, I’m imagining what I would do under those circumstances. I try to really go deep into that character, to be them and get their thoughts onto the page.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

Loss is definitely a major theme in Hindsight is 2020. The grief that comes with it and what it does to change a person whether they like it or not. How do you, how do I, recover from loss and become the husband, the father I was? How do I get back to feeling the way I used to? Which was something I really wondered about myself. Would I be able to recover, or would I always be stuck in this mode of grief and anger. Writing the book really helped me to come back. And I hope it can help others. I hope maybe someone can read it and feel like they’re not alone and they can find the strength they need to recover.

What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?

I actually had the idea for this book back in the mid-nineties, so it took me a really long time to work up the nerve to actually start writing and then to share it with somebody. That part was really hard. It was really hard for me to have the confidence to let anybody read it. Even my wife, she was the first person to read some of it and she said that I needed to keep going. She was critical too, she was very critical, but she said, “This is good. This is something. You can do this.” So then I started sharing it with some very trusted friends. Eventually I got the confidence to actually get the thing published. I hope to do it again because it was a really life-changing experience for me. But I don’t think that it’s going to happen again any time in the near future. Don’t hold your breath.

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Original source: https://literarytitan.com/2024/03/20/curiosity/