Best-selling author Wally Lamb spent nine years working on his newest book, "The River Is Waiting."
In this time, he wrestled with self-doubt, navigated his own sobriety journey and worked for years as a writing teacher at York Correctional Institution, Connecticut’s only women’s prison.
His new novel explores addiction, reckoning and forgiveness, and the injustice that exists in prison today. It follows the experience of Corby Ledbetter, a stay-at-home dad with a secret substance abuse problem who accidentally kills his son and is sent to prison.
Lamb spoke about his latest novel with Connecticut Public’s “Where We Live.”
Interview highlights
‘Here’s karma challenging me’
I had just come off two Oprah's Book Club hits [“She’s Come Undone,” published in 1992 and “I Know This Much Is True,” published in 1998]. Those were wonderful experiences. Obviously, it helped with the book sales and so forth. And then I came home and I was scratching my head and going, ‘OK, why did this happen to me?’
So finally I decided, well, I don't really need to know, or I can't really know why this happened to me, but what's incumbent on me is to give back to thank the universe for this great luck.
I got a call from Margery Cohen, who I had played dodgeball with in the streets when we were kids. She was the librarian at the York prison. She said: We're struggling here. We've had a couple of suicides and and there are several more attempts. So could you please come and just talk about your work?
And so I said, reluctantly, OK, here's karma challenging me. I want to do something. And so I went, thinking I was going to go one time. So I did a class and talked about my writing.
At the end of that class, when I was packing up, one of the women raised her hand, and she had been scowling at me throughout the program, and she said, ‘Thanks for coming.’ And I said, ‘Oh, you're welcome.’ And she said, ‘Are you coming back?’
‘They were in a safe place’
Prison is a place where it's probably a good idea not to trust people too much. But [in my prison writing classes], they were able to be candid in their writing, to let go of secrets that they had kept, for many, many years – in some cases, all their lives.
If they were [victims of incest] by a grandfather – or a brother, or an uncle – they were instructed that you never, ever tell anybody about this. And threatened that they were not going to tell anybody about this.
And so when they unleash some of these secrets, that's when their energy came. Then, they couldn't stop writing.
[But] it's a different thing to write it and to read it in front of others. And so as they began to see from other women, ‘Oh, yeah, that happened to me.’ They were in a safe place.
Testing this ‘white middle aged guy’
Here I am, this white, middle aged guy – what’s his deal? You know, why does he keep coming back?
I'd been a teacher all my adult life, and I had never worked with such an exciting group of students. That's what kept me coming back.
I would drive down Interstate 395 complaining to myself, ‘Oh, I don't have time for this. I can't believe I'm still doing this.’ And then every time I left, [after the] three hours, I would have a smile on my face, and I would be just incredibly grateful that they were willing to trust me.
On Corby seeking forgiveness in ‘The River Is Waiting’
It has to be something that's deep within you – that when you seek forgiveness and when you make amends – you better be sincere about it, or else, it's just, you know, empty verbiage.
Before [Corby] is incarcerated, he is advised by his lawyer to get into some 12-step programs [to] impress the judge. He does this reluctantly. But he's also going to see a therapist, Dr. Patel, who appears in some of my other novels. She's sort of my surrogate. She speaks the truth and is not afraid to challenge him.
He begins to take it to heart. And when he gets to prison, he’s beginning to have his eyes open.
It's credited to the singer and poet Leonard Cohen, but I love that quote, ‘We're all cracked. That's how the light comes in.’ And that's kind of what I see is happening with Corby. It's a slow process.
But writing is a slow process, too – for me, anyway. I was sort of rediscovering with him that whole philosophy of making amends and going deep and finding what the root is of some of these addictions.
On navigating his own substance misuse
I wrestled with my own drinking, which had become alcoholic, when I was in my 50s. Some of [Corby’s patterns], I’m sorry to say, some of those were my own patterns.
I drank, usually at night, quietly. I didn't go to bars or anything. And so, as my problem increased, some of that sneakiness, that was part of my behavior, too. I drank out alcoholically for about 10 years during my 50s and and then I was able to go into a 12-step program and climb out of that dark hole.
On the internet’s reaction to Corby
Now that the book is out, I'm getting letters and reactions on social media.
There are a lot of people who say, ‘I didn't like that character. And I didn't like him at the end as well as the beginning.’ And, you know, I feel that OK, when I'm writing the book, it's mine, and then when it's published, and it goes out into the world, it's not mine anymore.
It becomes the readers’ book. And they're entitled to feel about the book, or about the meaning or about the ending, whatever they choose to.
Listen to the full conversation
This conversation has been edited for clarity and condensed. Connecticut Public’s Catherine Shen, Tess Terrible and Patrick Skahill contributed to this post.