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David Gilmour's Open Book, Part Two

© Paula E. Kirman

Kirman: Lost Between Houses is being called your most autobiographical novel yet. Why is this one more autobiographical than the others?

Gilmour: I don't know why that is. Autobiography is not my word for it. It's certainly the most personal. We all have stories that happen to us and of different profundity. The other three novels that I wrote were stories that were not literal. None of these things ever literally happened but they're a source. But there are certain events in our lives that affect us really personally and really profoundly and I think that this is the most personal. I have a 14 year old child; if I give my fourteen year old son this book and I want to say, "if you want a photograph of my insides when I was your age; of my interior life, this is the absolute truth of how I was." It was quite remarkable in writing this book how easy it was to completely return to that room when I was fifteen years old and I remember everything in it.

Kirman: At the same do you have your own boundaries when it comes to writing; are there certain things that you just will not write about?

Gilmour: No, I don't have that feeling at all. I don't have it about sex, I don't have it about friends, I don't have it about death. I have a few rituals, which is to say, as you know I've been married a number of times, that when I'm finished a book, if it involves either of my ex-wives I show it to them first and I say "look, is there anything in here that is really going to make your life an embarrassment or really clumsy," and there hasn't been so far. So that's a courtesy, but I think if you're interested in hiding yourself, interested in protecting yourself, writing is definitely the wrong business to be in. Other people create characters and they create stories that never happened to them and I sometimes think that's a degree that they can sort of hide behind other characters. My feeling always was what we're doing here is writing about our own life and our own experience so let's not fool around, let's not call ourselves Mrs. Prutherow and set this in a Welsh castle, but let's set it in our own house with our own people and change enough names so that the dead aren't offended and the living can't sue.