That i that he offered it with such simplicity and sweetness at the end, that, it 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 estrangement in the family. I had resented that. 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 his father. The New York Times calling it 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 a study in the power of exhaustible candor. The reviews say that the dense, sprawling sentences may demand patience, but they illuminate a riveting Family History and as k complex questions about social prestige, Mental Health and the ties that bind. It has been called one of the most powerful and penetrating memoirs ever read, fiercely honest, deeply engaging, natalie heartbreaking. James kaplan calls an analogy to to a brother beyond death. A dream of a memoir, a blazing map of familiar love and loss. Gorgeously written. Not since a previous debut novel, lie down in darkness 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. Says hes week magazine 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. The Atlantic Monthly calls it earnest and unflinching. Defining the relationship and their lives. Pat conroy says he burns as brightly as any other writer of his generation. For all of that, it is a remarkable book. An interesting time to think about family, im pleased to welcome david payne to this table for the first time. Welcome. David thank you. An honor to be here. Storye it is a powerful of your brother and your father and your mother. And your granddaughter. All of them, i knew. Why did you write it . David my brother, it was such a poignant and difficult story, the end of his life, he had bipolar one disorder. And he had lived at home with our mother for nine years. He and i had become estranged, there was difficulty in the family. My life was under pressure in terms of my career. And i needed help moving home from vermont to North Carolina. After all of these years of estrangement, 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 help. He can to vermont and during the came to vermont and during the move he died on the highway. Helping me move. Charlie you sought in the Rearview Mirror . Rearviewsaw it in the mirror. 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. It is the story of coming to grips with the 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 it these eight days that me and my brother had together before i lost him. Charlie remind me of the conversation between you said, as i remember, he said, it is ok, david. David there is a passage toward the end where my brother, i was saying good night, we were getting ready to leave the house in vermont where i left, and i tapped on the side window of the Ford Explorer he was driving and i said, ready . And he said, whenever you are. Looking at the winston glowing on historic, i almost Say Something about my pristine ashtray, thanks george, i choose instead. It is a 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 has not heard from me in quite some time. He contemplates them for a beach and then he raises the winston to his lips. It is ok, david, he says. The truth is i do not make that 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. Unfamiliaroff, the rigs 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 elp you or any of the other countless things that he might have said. What he says is, it is ok, 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. Charlie you are on scathing in your clear and precise and 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. I think that with my brother, his generosity and the fact that i had, that i needed something from him, and that he offered andith such simplicity , it wass at the end just important for me to acknowledge the ways 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. He had lived with his mother. That is our mother. Charlie the denial you to do she did not what you to do this book. David did not want me to do this book, thats right. My mother and i, she said that very early in the writing she said, i think for you to write this book is exploitative. She 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 understand that you have written with your most authentic self and it is not exploitive of your brother and she gave me her blessing before she died on the book. Charlie Pay Attention to the title and the book story. This is a picture of your brother. The title is barefoot to avalon, a brothers story. This describes a daily race. David avalon shore on the outer banks in North Carolina, when he was 16 years old, he wanted to woodberryall at 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 pier. And 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 kick 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 up to virginia to come and 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 in 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 broad across the shoulders and the chest. More man than boy. But there is still a spindly, coldish 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 not clark gable i have been searching for but those cleancut, allamerican boys on lawns and beaches posing for the camera with their girls and cars, before they went away to world war ii. George is smiling extensively confident like theirs, but a little further back, i see something that is prepared for disappointment and it strikes me that george on this day in 1975 is going off to war, and inward award that is no less real that will last 25 long years for the rest of his short life in georgia 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 squint. 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 because it will not be that long. Charlie help us understand the relationship. It was obviously influenced by your parents, influenced by the lives you have had in the dreams you have had, but because it is so powerful, how would you characterize it . David there was a sibling competition that went on between us from the early, early days and he and i football was part of the thing that we had a competition over. But im afraid that i did not always understand the, when he first developed bipolar disorder, we did not really understand what it was. We thought it was, we did not understand it was a form of Mental Illness. We thought it was some kind of malingering. We had different ways, and this was in 1975, so it was a long 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 to. Charlie what informed you when you set out on this journey to write this book . You had written five novels. You clearly where a student of literature. You wanted to be a poet in the beginning. You turned to novels. David i think that each one of my books had felt as if it moved closer and closer from fiction 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 . Who are my people . Who do i come from . How did we come to be the we who we are . How did i come to be the person that i am . Charlie did you answer all those questions . David i asked 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. Charlie is it simply to say to those who know you and those who knew your family, and those who live within a family, that this is one mans account of life inside a family . That has been read so many times in the Life Experiences of family that deal with conflict, dreams, memories,. Ragedies, alcohol, infidelity all of those things that make up the fabric of so many families. David i think so many of those things we tell ourselves, we weave stories of happiness and perfection 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 . What . David i think what a writer is supposed to do is to ask, what is the human condition and what is the deepest account we can give of our presence here . Not to lie about it into whitewash it, but to write about the darkness and the difficulty and the conflict and the competition as well. And so, that had never been spoken of in our family and i thought it needed to be. Charlie there had been these explosives and powerful conflicts, exchanges which brings me to your father, who i knew as well. Your father was tall and handsome and he married the most beautiful young woman in town, and to note that and you thought, my god, they had everything. They are going to be fantastic. That is what a young boy growing up in a small town believes. David so it appeared. Charlie so it appeared. 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 pregnant and married, at 18, and married a boy who did not want to marry her. Thatput him in a position so somewhere at the heart of our family from the very beginning, there was a sense of, there was a sense of resentment, a sense that something had been extracted from my father that i think you never for gays 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 an adult earlier that he might have wanted to, had to get married and all of the responsibilities 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, i am asking. I am just asking. That, i do not think dont think that my father necessarily at 20 years old, for him to be trapped into a life that he did not consent to live, to be trappeinto that life and to be forced by social pressures to take on that life and burden himself to the end of his days was a reasonable, demand ofligation to 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. David i think my father became a kind of wanderer. He did not accept, he did not accept the 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. He moved like night to land and had Strange Powers of speech. Was a dark ander ,ragic story, but he was also he was a very talented, great raconteur, probably part of what your member about him. I think that something that i said about my family, which is choosinger than people to affirm their relationship 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 in my lungs and chest, the cinch 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 waft blows through the doors and windows and they open. 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, goddamn you, go and may you have the victory i thought i would have that but 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, do not let yours be taken, go live the biggest life you can possibly live and do not measure it out in coffee spoons, 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 your own son and you are talking to him. The fact that he is not want to eat something does not 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 herening of the book, was, i signed my name in 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 . David 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. 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. Listen to 15 just critics, it is clear that you have done that. Is also, what do you hope it accomplishes other than giving a huge magnifying glass to you and your brother the point hely and read, the brilliant point that you have to be true to your own self. It is your life and you have to define your own life and you cannot let anyone else define your life. David what i wanted to do was to say, while i was here, and while i contemplated my life as a man, this is what i experienced, this is where i what i live. 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. My experiences are 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 i spent during the course of writing the book probably change. Charlie you have been through divorce. David i have been. Charlie are you in a good place in your life now . Having put this down, having dealt with it, having given expression to it. David it is like having dropped a weight. My relationship i was saying to someone earlier tonight, i was describing the scene with my son and how i had to yell at my 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 peoples hats off, and my so