Transcripts For BLOOMBERG Charlie Rose 20160328 : vimarsana.

BLOOMBERG Charlie Rose March 28, 2016

Itt i that he offered and such simplicity that, it at the end, was just important for me to acknowledge the ways that i had been ungenerous toward him regarding his Mental Illness and the fact that he had stopped working and that that had created a strange mens and a family and estrangement in the family. Charlie he is the author of five novels including his breakout debut. After three decades of writing novels, he has written a memoir about his family. It is called barefoot to avalon. It is a searing account of his complicated relationship with his brother and father. The newer times causing a brave book with beautiful sentences on every page. The San Francisco chronicle says that barefoot to avalon is a book that is as much of anything you study and the power of exhaustible candor. The dense, say that sprawling sentences may demand patients, but they illuminate a riveting Family History and as complex questions about social prestige, Mental Health and the ties that bind. It has been called one of the most powerful and penetrating , fiercelyer read honest, deeply engaging, natalie heartbreaking. James kaplan calls an analogy to a brother. A dream of a memoir, a blazing map of familiar love and loss. Gorgeously written. Not since a previous debut novel, has there been a more eloquence, courageous depiction of the tentacles of madness and ambivalent love for a father dragging down a southern family, even as it tries to rise. And they say that he has the makings of a Young Charles dickens, a consummate storyteller in love with language and all of the variations of lights, people, and a probable situations. Atlantic monthly calls it earnest and unflinching. Defining the relationship and their lives. They say a prince as brightly as any writer of his generation. For all of that, it is a remarkable book. An interesting time to think about family place to welcome david payne to this table. For the first time. David thank you. An honor to be here. Charlie a powerful story. Of your brother and your father and your mother. And your granddaughter. All of them, i knew. Why did you write a . Brother, it was such a poignant and difficult story, hadend of his life, he bipolar one disorder. And he had lived at home with our mother for nine years. ,e and i had become estranged there was difficulty in the family. Pressure inunder terms of my career. And i needed help moving home from vermont to North Carolina. After all of these years of i was speaking to my mother and she said, why are you ask your brother to come and help you . And i called, not an hour later, the phone rang and it was my brother calling to offer his hell. His help. He can to vermont and during the move he died on the highway. In an accident. Helping me move. Charlie you sought in the rearview mere . David i sought in the rearview mere. Charlie the book begins a couple of days before that. What is it that you are telling us . It is not just his story, it is your story. The story of a southern family. The story of memories. The story of coming to grips with flaws, dreams, david it is about how we lost each other as a family. It is about how the long history of Mental Illness and alcoholism and all sorts of difficulties played through multiple generations of our family and finally, in this last moment, we were able to reconcile and have time before i lost my brother. Charlie remind me of the conversation between you said, as our member, he said it is ok, david. Towardthere is a passage the end where my brother, i was saying good night, we were getting ready to leave the house. In vermont where i lived. Window ofn the side the Ford Explorer that he was driving and i said, ready . And he said, whenever you are. Glowingat the winston on his thigh, and will Say Something about my pristine ashtray, thanks george, i choose instead. It is no big deal. No seriously, i say, i cannot of done this without you, you are a good brother. These are words he is not heard from me in quite some time. Contemplates them for a beach and then he raises the winston to his lips, it is ok, david, he says. Thatruth is i do not make much of it at the time, it is hours later that we are meant to start and im dirty, stressed and tired and on the verge of leaving everything ive taken as my life. I simply squeeze his shoulder, turn away and whistle. Off, downhill, only later did that nag me that he did not say, you are a good brother, too, or you have helped me in the past and so i hope you or any of the other countless things that he might have said. Is ok, says is, it david, not resentfully but like somebody at the end of a long contest who has been on the receiving end of something and is ready to forgive it. You have clear and precise and pinchrun penetrating analysis of yourself. And what you think of as your failure. David the only way that i felt that i could fairly and honestly tell the story was to be harder on myself than on at least a myself as anyone else. Brother,hat with my his generosity and the fact that i had, that i needed something from him, and that he offered andwith such simplicity that its at the end, was just important for me to a knowledge of the ways that i had been ungenerous toward him. Regarding his Mental Illness and the fact that he had stopped working, and that that had created estrangement in the family and that i had resented that. And he lived with his mother. Our mother. Charlie the denial you to do this. This book. David did not want me to do this book, thats right. Thatther and i, she said very early in the writing she said, i think for you to write this book is exploitative. And i did not speak about the book for almost two years, and then when i showed her the final draft, she wrote me a very, very beautiful notes that said, i finally have come to writtennd that you have with your most authentic self and it is not exploitive of your brother and she gave me her blessing. Before she died. Charlie Pay Attention to the title and the book story. This is a picture of your brother. Barefoot tos avalon, a brother story. That describes a daily race. David avalon or on the outer banks in North Carolina, when he was 16 years old, he wanted to play football and woodbury forest, a boarding school and i was a runner in those days. So every morning we would get up and we would do a four mile run, two miles down to avalon. , two miles back. And in the third mile, i would always leave him behind and leave him to make his own way in the final mile. The very last week of summer, when i made my cake at the end, he kicked up beside me and we were in this grueling sort of hell of a race and he pulled away and beat me on that particular day. He went back to boarding school, he got a starting job on the team, and toward the end of that season, we got the call from the doctor telling us about his first psychotic breakdown with bipolar one disorder. Charlie what was the breakdown . David he was out on the football field, he basically became catatonic. They called the coach, the coach called my mother. She came, to virginia to pick him up. My brother kept in the hotel room, kept going to the window and thinking that he saw our father, our dad, in the parking lot where he actually was not. And so, that was the first break. Charlie i think on page 76, you talk about the cover photo. What is powerful about this book is your language. David and the photo you can tell that the boy is an athlete of some kind, 67 inches, 215 pounds, he is lean wasted, brought across the shoulders and the chest. More man than boy. But there is still a spindly, cold dish something in his legs that mark them at the triple point. I sat my brother was the best looking boy i ever knew. Among the best looking i ever saw. As i studied this old photo, i think perhaps it is in part when im searching for, with the cleancut, allamerican boys on lawns and beaches. Posing for the camera with their girls and cars. Before they went away to world war ii. Extensively confidence like theirs, but a little further back, i see something that has prepared for disappointment and it strikes me that george, this day in 1975, is going off to war, and inward were that is no less real, it will last 25 long years and the rest of his short life. And george will not return from it. This picture is the last glance i will ever have of him, which i guess is why i kept it and put it out in every place i ever lived in. Here is to looking at you, he is saying with that grin and little squints. This one is for you. My reply in kind, enjoy it while it lasts. Audeui. Charlie what you mean . David enjoy life for you have it, it will not be that long. Charlie help us understand the relationship. It was obviously influenced by her parents. Influenced by the lives that you have had and the dreams that you have had. Because it is so powerful, how would you characterize the . There was a sibling competition that went on between us from the early, early days football was art of the thing that we had competition over. Notim afraid that i did heays understand when first developed bipolar disorder we do not really understand what it was, we thought it was we can understand that it was a form of Mental Illness, we thought it was perhaps some kind of malingering. We had different ways of this longn 1975, so it was a journey for us to try to understand exactly what it was that was wrong with my brother. I think that during part of that, i judged him for things that were not true of his condition. And so, that is why i hold myself accountable for. Informed you when you set out on this journey to write this book echoed book . You had written five novels. You are a student of literature. You wanted to be a poet in the beginning. You turn to novels. David i think that each one of my books had felt as if it moved fictionnd closer from toward the Boundary Line of nonfiction. And each one got closer and closer to the truth of my life and my family. And i realize that what i was trying to get at, was, who am i . Who is my family . For my people . Who do i come from . How did we come to be the we are . How did i come to be the person that i am . Charlie did you answer all those questions . Them, i cant say that i answered all of them. But i answered them, as many of them, as i could. I think that in order to answer them, i had to be honest in a different way than i had been in fiction. Say, to is it simply to those who know you, and those in your family, and those who lived within a family, that this is one mans account of life inside a family . A story that so many times in the Life Experience is that families that deal with conflict, dreams, memories. Tragedies. Alcohol. Infidelity. All of those things that make up the fabric of 70 families. David i think so many of those ourselves, we weave stories of happiness and and ease, and often times i think we leave out the dark truth at the base of our family stories. And so, i think i wanted to try at least in my case, to tell the truth, a little bit more aggressively than i had done. Charlie because of what . Because that is a writers responsibility . David because i think what a writer is supposed to do is to ask, what is the human condition, and what is the deepest account that we can give of our presence here . It, and toabout whitewash it. Darkness and the difficulty and the conflict and the competition as well. That had never been spoken in our family. And i thought that it needed to be. Explosive and powerful conflicts and exchanges with spring be to your father. Who i knew, as well. Your father was tall and handsome. He married the most beautiful young woman in town. And to know that, and think, my god, they have everything. They are going to be fantastic. That is what a young boy growing up in a small town, me, said. David so it appeared. Charlie behind the walls and the doors of the house, david behind the walls and the doors of the house, my mother, an 18yearold, young girl who wanted to escape her family got 18,nant and married, at narrator boy who did not want to marry her. So that put him in a position so that somewhere at the heart of our family, from the very beginning, there was a sense of resentment, a sense of something being extracted from my father that i think you never forget it, and people looked at them and saw the perfect exterior and the beautiful girl. But something had been extracted from my father. Charlie he had to become in a dont earlier than he mightve wanted to. He had to get married and all of the response abilities of that. He was not ready for it. It is not a reflection on her, it is a reflection on him. David i think that is an older way of looking at it. But we have different opinions. Charlie you tell me, im asking. That my dont think father necessarily at 20 years old, for him to be trapped into a life that he did not come consent to live, to be trapped into that life, and to be forced by social pressures to have to take on that life, and to burden himself to the end of his days was a reasonable, ethical obligation to demand of my father. Even though, had he said no, i would not be here. Charlie what did it do to his life . He is a central character in this. David i think my father became a kind of wanderer. Because he did not, he did not ethical obligation to take on this family. And so, he left the family, he abandoned the family, and he became like a wanderer. He was like the ancient mariner. Night to lance, Strange Powers of speech. My father was a dark and tragic a verybut he was also talented, a great raconteur, probably part of what your member about him. Something that i said about my family, which is that, rather than people choosing to affirm their relationships to each other in love, they chose to extract something from the other person that the other person was unwilling to give and that was at the center of our family and that was at the center of what went wrong in our family. Charlie theres a passage on page 66 that i would love for you to read. This is where he is reading to you. David my father says, do you know what i read you this . No, sir. I stand there with the pressure they lungs and chest, scent, knowing to a dead certainty that im going to fail the test. What do you think it means, david, to measure out your life with coffee spoons . A moment passes, now a second, and suddenly it is as if a draft walkthrough, blowing all of the , he sees windows open me get in his eyes, they burn. Measure out your life in gallons , bushels, hogsheads, do not be dissuaded by the woman or the women on the sofas, even as she is your pregnant girlfriend or your wife or mother and you love her. Ask your overwhelming question and do not let anybody stop you, god speed, god dam you, go and may you have the victory i thought i would have that stepped aside to give you. This is your fate, written in the manifest, not in ink, but in the blood of our parental sacrifice. Charlie and when you heard him say that . David i think my father was telling me some part of my life got taken away from me, dont let yours be taken, go live the biggest life that you can possibly live, and dont measure it out in coffees and. Measure it out in something bigger. And that is why i wanted to write this book. To speak as much of it as i possibly could. Charlie there was huge rage in him . David there was. Charlie and it was impressed to you and your brother. David it was. Charlie theres a moment where you are thinking about your own relationship with euros on and you are talking to him. That he does want to eat something. David i see myself repeating the same abusive actions toward my young son that my father repeated toward me, and i say to myself, this cant continue any longer. The same thing that i swore that i would not repeat, i have repeated and that really is the beginning of the book, here, i sign my name and blood, upon this contract with my children in the future. Charlie what is it about your life that we should know . That is reflected here . My suspicion, though i dont know, my suspicion is that my life is not very much different from most other peoples lives. I think that other families have these same issues of Mental Illness and strife, and difficulty. And love. And gratitude. It is just that we do not charlie theres not some but within the families can write a book like this that gives expression. To give expressions of that everybody can feel. Feel. David i hope that that is true. I hope that i have done that. By the critics, it is clear that you have done that. The question is also, what you hope it accomplishes other than glass a huge magnifying to you and your brother and your and the brilliant point to your raised about own self be true. It is your life and you have to define your side your life. Nobody else can define your life. David what i wanted to do was here, andile i was while i contemplated my life as a man, this is what i experienced, this is where i lived. And i believe that is my fundamental testimony as a writer, just as your fundamental testimony is what you do when you sit here every night and give back to the world what you give to the world. This is my experiences, what is in this book. Charlie has writing this book changed you . David i think i changed in the course of writing the book. I would not say that writing the book itself changed me. I think probably the close to eight years of therapy that i spent during the course of writing the book, probably changed. Charlie your been through divorce. David i have been. Charlie are you in a good place in your life now . Havingput this down, dealt with it, having given expression to it, david it is like having dropped a weight. I was saying to someone earlier tonight, i was describing the scene with my yell at my i had to son is a way my father had yelled at me, and i remembered leaving a cub scout banquet with my son when he was 10 years old and one of the boys at the banquet was cutting up and knocking people caps off, and my sense of me, what is the matter with that kid, dad . What is his problem . And i said, i dont know, i suspect theres some going on at home, dont you . And he looked to me and said, i used to be mad like that, deny . And i realize that in the course of writing this, the whole thing had changed. The conflict and resentments and the forces forced me to deal with to write the book, they had passed away. Charlie your father committed suicide. David he did. Charlie how hard was that . Coming. Never saw it it was deeply sad. I never saw my father committing suicide that way. I dont know what to say about it even to this day. Had beene estranged for two and a half years, i had not really talk to him, so i dont know the specifics. Charlie estranged of . Of hisestranged because abandonment of me and my childhood. Because of the it had been many years since my father and i had been close. So we do not really talk that much. So, i did not know what particular circumstances were at

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