Q & A with Ron Currie Jr.

Ron Currie Jr. is the author of God is Dead, winner of the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and Everything Matters!, an Indie Next Pick in 2009. His new book Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles comes out next week. I had a chance to ask the author some questions about his writing, and I am pleased to present his answers:

Everything Matters! has an alternate ending, one of any number of possible variations. How did you determine which versions of the story to tell?

Well as you point out, the way I set the story up it could have had literally an infinite number of conclusions. Seeing as how I don’t have the stamina to write a never-ending book, though, I had to settle on one–or two, as it were. What made sense, given that I was going to write two endings, was for them to be pretty much the exact opposite of each other. So that’s what I did. Then, of course, in the second ending is the real payoff for the reader, I think, in which Junior finally understands all the very difficult lessons life has been hitting him over the head with, and makes use of that understanding. It had to be that way. Anything else would have been a deus ex machina. 

Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles tells the Truth about the inspiration for the characters in Everything Matters!; what made you decide to revisit the characters’ backgrounds?

It wasn’t a decision so much as a compulsion. I wrote another, very different novel first, and it wasn’t working no matter how hard I tried to make it work, and I couldn’t figure out why. Once I hit on the idea of writing FLPM, and wrote the first few pages, I noticed a subtle but definitive shift in the feel of the writing, and I knew that I’d finally stumbled into the place where I needed to be.

Should the two books be considered variations on the same theme?

Once I was critiquing a short story by a very good, very wise writer friend of mine, and I chided her gently for returning over and over again to the same topics. True to both her intelligence and her gentle nature, she responded with a gentle admonition of her own, one that absolutely echoed with the truth: As writers, we all have our obsessive themes, is what she told me.

If you would like a chance to win a copy of Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles please leave a comment on this post. The winner will be selected one week from today.