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. Rose and lived with his mother. And lived with his mother. Rose we continue with don cheadle whose new film is called miles ahead. She was always on the vanguard of what was happening. He didnt want to do what he had done before. When you hear the music, its great because we can hear these outtakes and theyre not trying to cut things out and make them pristine, they let you hear the outtakes and the beginnings and the engineering in the booth and you hear miles play the beautiful ballads and as the last note is ringing and you hear the brushes on the drum set, hes, like, play that back. Rose david payne and don cheadle, when we continue. Rose funding for charlie rose has been provided by the following and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and Information Services worldwide. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Rose david payne is here, hes the author of five novels including breakout debut confession of a tauest on wall street. He has written a memoir about his family, barefoot to avalon, a brothers story, a searing account of complications with his brother and father. The New York Times called it a beautiful book. The San Francisco chronicle says the book is as much of anything of the power of inexhaustible candor. His sentences may demand patients but illuminate Family History and ask complex questions about social prestige, Mental Health and the ties that bind. It is called one to have the most powerful and penetrating memoirs, honest, engaging and heartbreaking. James kaplan calls it an analogy to a brother that pledges beyond depths, a fever dream of a memoir, a map of love and loss, head long, heartbreaking and gorgeously written. The Salem Winston journal says never has there been a more eloquent depresident ial election of a father dragging down a southern family even has it tries to rise. And payne has the makings of a charles dickens. A consummate story teller of language and people in improbable situations. The atlanta monthly calls it paynes earnest and unflinching account of a brotherhood that lasted long into their adulthood. And pain burns as brightly as any writer of his generation. For all of that, its a Remarkable Book and an interesting time to think about family and, so, im pleased to women david payne to this table for the first time, welcome. Charlie, thank you. Its an honor to be here. Rose its a powerful story of your brother, father, mother and grandfather, all of whom i knew. Why did you write it . Well, my brother, it was such a poignant and difficult story. He had bipolar one disorder and lived at home with our mother for nine years. He and i 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 and, after all these years of estrangement, i was speaking to my mother and she said, why dont you ask your brother to come help you . And i called and not an hour later, the phone rang and it was george a. , as we called him rose thats what his grandfather was called. To call to offer his help. He came to vermont and during the move he died on the highway in an accident help meg move back. Rose and you saw it in the Rearview Mirror . I saw it in the Rearview Mirror. Rose the book begins a couple of days before that. Right. Rose what is it youre telling us . Are you telling us because its not just his story. Its your story. Its the story of a southern family. Its the story of memories. Its the story of coming to grips with flaws and dreams. Its about how we lost each other as a family. Its about how a long history of Mental Illness and alcoholism and all sorts of difficulties played through multiple generations of our family and finally at this last moment we were able to reconcile and have the eight days that my brother and i had together before i lost him. Rose but he said remind me of the conversation between when you said, as i remember it, he said, its okay, 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 lived, 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 his thigh, i almost Say Something about my pristine ashtray. Thanks, george a. , i choose, instead. Its no big deal. No, seriously, man, i couldnt have done this without you. Youre a good brother. These are words he hasnt heard from me in quite some time. He contemplates them for a beat and raises the winston to his lips. Its okay, david, he says. The truth is, i dont make that much of it at the time. Its hours later than with we meant to start. Im dirty, stressed and tired and on the verge of leaving. Everything ive taken is my life. I simply squeeze his shoulder, turn away and whistle up leon, my brindled hound who gains the high seat of the truck with one sprain and we set off riding the groaning breaks of our unfamiliar, overloaded rigs downhill. Only later does it nag me that george a. Didnt say, youre a good brother, too, or you helped me in the past so i help you, or any of the other countless things he could have said. He says, okay, david, not resentfully, but someone at the long end of a contest whos been on the receiving end of it and ready to forget it. Rose you are unscathing in your clear and precise and penetrating analysis of yourself and what you think of as your failure. The only way that i felt that i could fairly and honestly tell this story was to be harder on myself than on at least as hard on myselfni as anyone else and i think that, with my brother, his generosity, and the fact thatni i needed something from him and thatnr i that he offered it with such simplicityo and sweetness at the end,xd that it was just important for me to acknowledgeni the ways that i hd been ungenerous toward him regarding his Mental Illness and the fact that he had stopped working and that cede estrangement within the family and i resented that and he lived with our mother. Rose who did not want you to do this book. Is thathats right. My mother and i very early in theni writing, she said i think for you to writeco in book is exploitive. She and i didnt speak about the book for almost two years. Then when i showed her the final draft, she wrote me a very, very beautiful note that said, ive finally come to understand that youve written with your most authentic self and that its not exploitive of your brother, and she gave me her blessing before she died on the book. Rose Pay Attention to the title in the book story. This is a picture of your brother. The title is barefoot to avalon, a brothers story. Barefoot to avalon describes a daily race. Avalon peer on the otter banks in Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina, when he was 16 years old, he wanted to play football at woodbury forest, aborting school, and i was a runner in those days. Every morning, we would do a four mile run, two miles down to avalon peer two, miles back, and in the third mile i would always leave him behind and 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 it beside me and suddenly we were in this grueling sort of hell for leather race and he pulled away and beat me on that particular day, and 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 disorderrer. Rose what was his psychotic breakdown . 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 pick him up. My brother, 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. So that was his first break. Rose i think on page 76 you talk about the cover photo, and whats powerful about this book is your language. In the photo, you can tell the boys an athlete of some kind. 67 and 210 or 215, lean wasted, acros broad across the. I thought my brother was the best looking boy i ever knew, among the best looking i ever saw. As i studied this old photo, though, i think perhaps it isnt clark gable after all im searching for but those cleancut, allamerican boys on lawns and beaches posing for the camera with their girls in paste waxed cars before they went to world war ii. George a. s smile extends friendly confidence like theirse something prepared for disappointment and strikes me george a. , in 175 is going off on an inward war and it will last 25 years and george a. Wont return from it. This picture is the last glimpse ill ever have which is why i kept it and put it out every place i lived in. Heres looking at you, d. P. , hes saying with that little grin and squint, this ones for you. My reply in kind, enjoy it while it lasts, oh, do. Rose what did you mean . I mean enjoy your life while you have it because its not going to be that long. Rose and help us understand the relationship. It was obviously influenced by our parents, influenced by the lives that youd had and the dreams that you had had, but because its so powerful, how would you characterize it . Well, i think there was a sibling competition that went on between us from the early days, and he and i the football was part of the thing that we had a competition over, but im afraid that i didnt always understand the when he first developed bipolar disorder, we didnt really understand what it was. We thought it was we didnt understand that it was a form of Mental Illness, we thought it was perhaps some kind of malingering. This was in 1975 and, so, it was a long journey for us to try to understand exactly what it was that was wrong with my brother, and i think that, during part of that, i judged him for things that were not true of his condition. So thats what i hold myself accountable for. Rose what informed you when you set off on this journey to write this book . I mean, you had written five novels. You clearly were a student of literature. You wanted to be a poet in the beginning and turned to novels. I think 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 realized that what i was trying to get at was who am i . Who is my family . Who are my people . Who did i come from . How did we come to be who we are . How did i come to be the person i am . Rose did you answer all those questions . I asked them. I cant say that i answered all of them. But i answered them as many of them as i could, and i think that, in order to answer them, i had to be honest in a different way than i had been in fiction. Rose youre taking us on a journey, too. I mean, is it simply to say to those who know you and those who knew your family and those who live within a family, you know, that this is one mans account of life inside a family, but it is a story written so many times in the life and experiences of family that deal with conflict, dreams, memories, tragedies, alcohol, infidelity, all of those things that make up the fabric of so many families. And i think so many of those things we tell ourselves we weave stories of happiness and perfection and ease, and i think oftentimes we leave out the dark truth at the base of our family stories. So i think i wanted to try and, at least in my case, to tell the truth a little bit more aggressively than i had done it. Rose to tell the truth because of what . Because thats a writers responsibility . Because 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 and to whitewash it, but to write about the darkness and the difficulty and the conflict and the competition as well. So that had never been spoken in our family, and i thought that it needed to be. Rose but there had been these explosive and powerful conflicts, exchanges, which brings me to your father who i knew as well. Your father was a tall and handsome who married the most beautiful young woman in town. And to know that, and you thought, my god, they have everything. They are going to be fantastic. Thats what a young boy growing up in a small town me said. So it appeared. Rose so it appeared. So it appeared. Rose but behind the walls and the doors of the house but 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 a boy who did not want to marry her. So that did put him in a position that, somewhere at the heart of our family, from the very beginning, there was a sense of resentment, there was a sense that something had been extracted from my father that i think he never forgave, and people looked at them and they saw the perfect exterior and they saw the beautiful girl, but something had been extracted from my father rose and he had to become an adult earlier than he might have wanted to. He had to get married and all the responsibilities of that. Right. Rose he wasnt ready for it. Its not a reflexion on her, its a reflexion on him, that he wasnt i think thats an older way or looking at it, but we have a different opinion with that. Rose you tell me. Im asking. I dont think that my father necessarily that, at 20 years old, for him to be trapped into a life that he did not 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. Rose and what did it do to his life . He is a central character in the two of you. I think my father became a kind of a wanderer because he did not he did not accept he didnt 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. You know, he moved from land to land, he had Strange Powers of speech, the moment his face i see but, yo anyway, my father was a dark and tragic story, but he was also a he was a very talented, he was a create raqontour, thats what you remember about him as well. Rose right. But something i said about my family which is that rather than people choosing 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 what went wrong in your family. Rose a passage on page 66 id love for you to read where he is reading to you. My father says, do you know why i read you this . No, sir. I stand there with the pressure in my lungs and chest, the cinch, knowing to a dead certainty 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 its as if a draft wafts through blowing all the doors and windows open. Bill sees me get it and his eyes burn. Im proof rot. Dont you be, david. Measure out your life in gallons, bushels, hogs heads, dont be dissuaded by the woman or women on the sofas, even if shes your pregnant girlfriend or wife and you love her, ask the overwhelming question and dont let anybody stop you. God speed, god damn you, go and maybe youll have the victory i thought i would have but stepped aside to give you. This is your fate written in the manifest, not in the ink but in the blood of our parental sacrifice. Rose and when you heard him say that . I think my father was tell me some part of my life got taken away from me, dont let yours be taken. Go live the biggest life you can possibly live and dont measure it off in coffee spoons, measure it out in something bigger, and thats why i wanted to write this book to speak as much of it as i possibly could. Rose there was huge rage in him. There was. Rose and it was expressed both to you and your brother. It was. Rose and there is a moment in the book in which youre thinking about your own relationship with your own son and youre taking to him about the fact that he doesnt want to eat something. Right. And i see myself repeating the same abusive action 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 was, here i sign my name in blood upon this contract with my children in the future. Rose what is it about your life that we should know thats reflected here . I dont my suspicion, though i dont know, my suspicion is that my life is not very much different from most other peoples lives, and i think that other families have these same issues of Mental Illness and strife and difficulty and love and gratitude. Its just that we dont rose there is not somebody within the family that can write a book like this that gives expression because, i mean, the talent that gives expression so that everybody can feel feel. Well, i hope that thats true. I hope that ive done that. Rose well, if i just listen to 15 critics, its clear that you have done that. But the question also is what do you hope it accomplishes other than giving a huge magnifying glass to you and your brother and your family and the point, the brilliant point about you have to to your own self be true. Its your life and you have to define and you cant let anybody else define your life. What i want it to do is to say, while i was here and while i contemplated my life as a man, this is what i experienced. This is what i lived, and i believe that thats my fundamental testimony as a writer, just as your fundamenta6 you sit here every night and give your you know, your give back to the world what you give to the world. And this is my experience is whats in this book. Rose nlhas writing this book changed you . nrni i think i changed in the course of writing the book. I wouldnt say 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 me. Rose you have been through a divorce. I have been. Rose but are