NY Times best-selling author Wally Lamb discusses new book

When writing on dysfunctional families, New York Times best-selling author Wally Lamb said he thinks of a Leo Tolstoy quote: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
His newest novel, "We Are Water," focuses on the Oh family, he said. Orion Oh is half-Italian and half-Chinese, and he is married to Anna. The two are married for 27 years at the start of the book, which begins in 2009. Anna falls in love with a woman and leaves her husband. Lamb said while he studies the repercussions of the decision for her husband, he also looks at how it affects their children, who are all in their mid-20s.
"I do think happy functioning families [are] more of an ideal than a reality. I don't know of any families, including my own, where there are not challenges along the way," he said.
Lamb will be at the Carroll Arts Center Friday to discuss his new book, "We Are Water," in a sold-out appearance.
Lamb said the work is also a study of race in America and the country's history of racism. The novel transitions back and forth from Annie's childhood in the 1950s in Connecticut to 2009.
"I began this novel in about 2009," Lamb said. "It was a time when America was beginning to change in so many ways. The social mores surrounding gay marriage, and the beginning of legalization of that, but also we had just elected our first half-black president."
At the time, Lamb was skeptical that America had truly entered a post-racial society, he said. As incidents such as the shooting of Trayvon Martin exploded in the news, he continued to take it in.
"When I'm working, in my work day - I'm living - my head is in the story, but then the work day ends and I'm very much in the real world. I read the newspaper and watch cable shows and all that kind of stuff," he said. "That was some of the stuff that I was examining both in the book and in life."
Many of his novels do draw from different experiences, he said. His first Oprah's Book Club novel, "I Know This Much Is True," examines two twins, one of whom develops paranoid schizophrenia. The inspiration for the main character in the novel was drawn from an experience when Lamb was still teaching high school English.
While working on an oral history project about how teens during the Great Depression grew up, he had several volunteers from the era discuss how their childhood was during the time.
One of the volunteers had been locked up in a state hospital for the mentally ill for about 45 years, Lamb said. During World War II, the man became a religious zealot and cut off his hand as a way of making a sacrifice to give a message of peace, Lamb said.
"All of my students were a little afraid of this guy, as was I. They were all a little afraid to work with him, so he became my interview subject. Then a couple of years later, I started that novel and this man ... became my inspiration for my character," he said.
He said the genesis of "We Are Water" is drawn from two experiences from his hometown of Norwich, Conn. Lamb lived through a devastating flood when he was 12 years old, which is a central piece to a subplot involving another inspiration from Norwich.
The other inspiration was from an artist named Ellis Ruley, who was unable to sell his work when he was alive, he said.
"Now he is rather posthumously famous and he is highly valued by collectors," he said.
He died under mysterious circumstances, though the black community by and large felt Ruley was murdered. He became the model for a main character in the book, Josephus Jones, Lamb said.
"We Are Water" has eight different narrators throughout the novel, using both men and women. He said in many ways, he notices the differences are often through the way men and women are socialized.
"They're different but in some ways they're not different. The way I write, I sort of become the characters. I climb into their skin and shed my own when I write," he said.
Overall, he said he notices that women tend to implode and men tend to explode. Lamb teaches a writing program for incarcerated women at York Correctional Institute, a women's prison in Niantic, Conn. He said he notices while men will get upset and explode by getting into a bar fight, for instance, the women he works with often snap and commit one terrible act in their lives.
"I think women tend not to be that explosive, but then sometimes you know they can't take it anymore and suddenly they're in prison for having killed an abusive spouse," he said.
He said overall, he enjoys writing novels that explore dysfunction, typically in the familiar town of Three Rivers, which is based on his hometown. He often does this because the typical stereotype of Connecticut is that the families send their children to prep school and belong to a country club.
He said the Connecticut he knows is more "feisty than fashionable," and is more "liverwurst than pate."
"I am interested in dysfunction, I'm very interested in mental illness and I write the novels I do and create the kind of characters that I do so I can learn more," he said.