The Silver Screen follows an elderly widower trapped in a strange world of abandoned theaters, where he meets a woman who helps him uncover the truth he has kept hidden. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

One cold winter day, I was driving to work and saw that the old, abandoned downtown movie theater was being renovated. I started thinking about how many small towns in the world probably have an old theater like that and how many of them are probably crumbling into disrepair. Then my mind started to wander into uncharted territory. I asked myself, “What if all those theaters were somehow connected?” After work that evening, I sat down and wrote the opening scene. The next day I wrote the scene where Wyatt touches the screen and steps into the hallway of doors. Then I was off and running. 

I think the pain of having recently lost my grandfather, who suffered from dementia, bled through quite a bit when I was drafting this novel. Combine the speculative nature of the theater and the doors with loss and regret, and that’s where the idea started.

The novel spans war, family, marriage, trauma, aging, dementia, and death. How did you decide which parts of Wyatt’s life were essential to understanding him?

Wyatt’s story really started as a “life review”. I wondered, “What does a man at the end of their life wish he’d done differently? What memories do they treasure, and what memories do they wish they could forget? I knew early on that Wyatt would be spending a lot of time looking back. I knew that’s what those doors were almost immediately. 

I started thinking about the older folks I knew; I thought of the things my grandfathers had been through, and I started to understand that Wyatt was a man who’d been through more than most people could imagine. He was an amalgam of all the trauma and loss I could throw at him, but also moments of peace and joy. I didn’t want him to come off as a “hero” character but rather a man who did the best he could, like most of us. June really is the “hero” of this story.

The essential parts of Wyatt seemed to revolve around his relationships. Emma, June, Russell, Hersch, and Wyatt Jr. were characters that drove Wyatt’s stories. Without them, he’d have been a sad, lonely old man. He spent long portions of his life running from trauma, so I had to include some of that as well. Like real life, there’s good and bad, and without the bad, the good wouldn’t seem as sweet. Wyatt had to have both good and bad experiences, because we all have good and bad experiences. But as he was stuck in a kind of purgatory, it seemed he was destined to focus more on the bad than the good; enter Emma, who reminds him of so much good he’d forgotten. 

Memory is central to both the mystery and the emotional story. What interested you about exploring the relationship between memory and identity?

Our experiences, our memories, shape our identity. Wyatt is a clear example of this. The combination of war, love, anger, and torture turned him into the man he became. If he hadn’t gone to World War II, he may never have been a photojournalist. His entire life could have been different. Then, at the end of his life, he’d have had a different set of memories, regrets, and he’d have had a different hallway of doors to comb through. I guess, in the end, Wyatt was trying to come to terms with things he wished he’d done differently. Things it was too late to change. And that interests me. In my own life, there are already things I wish I’d done differently; what will that feel like when I’m 88? How will the choices I make today alter my future identity?

Did writing about Wyatt’s long life change the way you thought about aging, memory, or relationships?

Relationships and experiences create richness in our lives that no material possessions could ever mimic. They’re more valuable than any amount of money, and when we get old and see our own deaths coming, they’re all we really have. I used to think memory was the only thing we had that no one could take away. Then I watched my grandparents suffer through dementia. I think that’s what scares me most. At some point, people with dementia have their experiences and relationships taken. I saw my grandparents go from knowing me, to calling me my cousin’s name, to not knowing me at all. It’s like when the repo man comes to take a car, but so much worse; it’s your whole life. You don’t remember your family; you don’t remember the things you’ve done. Hell, maybe you don’t even remember that you’ve died, and you’re just stuck living with bits and pieces of the life you’d once lived. 

If writing this story changed me at all, it made me more willing to risk a little bit, in order to live the life I want to live, to experience the things I want to experience before I get too old to enjoy them.

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