Buckeye
Buckeye
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Patrick Ryan on Buckeye
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A grandmother’s secret and the damage it leftThe novel began not with a plot idea but with a posthumous family revelation. Ryan learned, long after most of the people involved had died, that his paternal grandmother had led a hidden life entirely at odds with how he had understood her.
The secret was that she had maintained an affair for decades with somebody in this town. And it was completely out of line with the way I — my entire grasp of her as a person. And it got me thinking about what it would take to maintain a major secret for a long time and what such a secret would do to the two families that it affected.
A decades-long affair as subject matter felt too familiar to him. He stripped the situation down to its smallest, most careless form, because the briefer the transgression, the longer and more unforgiving its shadow would be.
I was interested in the mistake. I was interested in making it a fling, and making it something just short-lived and selfish that then had echoes and repercussions and factored into the rest of these people’s lives. [paraphrased from audio]
Once Ryan saw the two families the fling had affected and began following those families across time, the novel’s true subject declared itself. He grew up watching how grudges outlasted the people who first earned them, and the difficulty of releasing them never left him.
I find forgiveness to be so important to any relationships that grownups have, and so difficult, such an uphill road.
That uphill road became the novel’s spine. The fling lasts a single night; the forgiveness, or its failure, takes four decades.
How he wrote it
Eight years, a hand-drawn map, and a narrator who surprised himRyan started taking notes in 2016. The book published when he was sixty, which means it occupied nearly a decade of his working life, including three full drafts over six years and three more with his Random House editor. He described his pace without apology.
I write slowly and revise constantly. It’s not a great way to work, because the forward progress can be almost undetectable for long periods of time. I also print often, take a red pen to the pages, and mark up ruthlessly.
Working as editor-in-chief of the literary magazine One Story meant the novel competed for attention every day. To prevent long gaps from breaking his grip on the material, he imposed a single discipline on himself.
Spending time with it every day keeps it in your head as you do other things.
About a year into the writing, he drew a map of Bonhomie, the fictional Ohio town at the novel’s center, purely for his own use. He placed the bank, the grocery stores, the cemetery, and where the father-in-law character lived on the outskirts.
If I didn’t have it written down, drawn out, it just felt willy-nilly to me and then I worried that that would translate to the reader. [paraphrased from audio]
The novel’s structure, which opens on a charged encounter between two strangers, then loops back to show each character’s history separately before converging them at that same moment, was not a strategic gamble. Ryan could not find any other way through the material.
The book takes some risks in terms of structure, I think, because it shows the reader an important moment in these characters’ lives, then backs up and works its way toward that moment twice, from two different angles. Then it proceeds to span four decades.
Ryan had always written in close third person, moving between viewpoints only at section breaks. For this book he needed a narrator who could slip between characters mid-scene. Testing that narrator in the second paragraph, he followed a minor character from Ohio all the way to Germany where the man is shot, then snapped back to Ohio without stopping. The experiment clarified something unexpected about where he stood in relation to the voice he was using.
The narrator had done that... I was the narrator’s manager, maybe. I was the narrator’s life coach. But I wasn’t the narrator.
The personal thread
A morning decision and the character who changed everythingBecky, the young woman in the novel who can communicate with the dead, was the element Ryan agonized over longest. His instinct was to stay non-committal about whether her ability was real. Then one morning he reversed course entirely, and the decision reshaped her role in the book.
I thought, ‘Nope, she can do it.’ I just decided that one morning, ‘She can do this, and I don’t even know how, and I don’t think she’s going to know how, and I don’t think she’s going to know why, and that’s going to be part of her journey.’
After committing to her ability as real, Ryan came to see Becky as the novel’s moral center, calling her “the good heart of the book.”
His editor’s single most useful note arrived mid-revision, scrawled across the bottom of one page. It reoriented how Ryan thought about what he had been withholding from readers and why withholding it was the right call.
Midway through the editing process, my editor wrote across the bottom of one page, ‘The secrets are more powerful than the confessions and confidences.’ Which was a way of reminding me that tension is important when it comes to fiction.
On what the book is wrestling with
Midwestern racism and the myth of Southern exceptionSetting a story about race in small-town Ohio, rather than in the American South, put Ryan in direct confrontation with a comfortable national story. He had grown up in Florida with Ohio grandparents, and two years of graduate school at Bowling Green had given him enough texture of the Midwest to know the story the setting demanded.
I had to confront the common misconception that racism in the United States is contained within the South. It was — and is — worse in the south, but it’s also bad everywhere in the US and always has been.
The literary model he held in mind for the book’s sweep was not a contemporary one. He was after a novel that felt less like a constructed artifact and more like a piece of lived experience, and one predecessor kept returning to him as the benchmark.
I am forever inspired by what I think is one of the best books about the United States ever written, The Grapes of Wrath. Hugely moving books that don’t feel like books so much as like lives. Like life.
What he wants us to sit with
What you do after the mistake is also who you areRyan resists letting the novel’s central transgression define the people who commit or absorb it. He made this point in several interviews as a kind of moral premise for the whole project.
I really believe that people are also very much defined by what they do with our mistakes.
Forgiveness in the novel is not handed out in a single scene and then settled. Ryan’s view of it is more grinding than that, and the novel’s four-decade span exists precisely to show that grinding.
I think forgiveness is not just a single act, but it’s a whole lot of decisions. And it can be a million decisions a day that have to be remade over and over.
The novel’s generational reach, following families from the 1940s through the 1980s, keeps returning to the people who never told each other what they felt before they ran out of time. That loss accumulated in the drafts until it became the most direct thing he wanted to leave with readers.
I hope readers take from the book the importance of conveying to the people in our lives the love we feel for them, while we’re all still here to convey and receive it.