Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Books Novelist and Brooklyn Native Ben Schrank Talks About How the Borough Has Changed—Or Not!
Posted by Henry Stewart on Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 11:35 AM
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Whose ghostwritten celebrity tell-all would you sprint to the store to buy (along with a copy of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius so that the checkout clerk doesn’t look at you screwy)?
My wife and I are really into Bethenny Frankel. We love Bethenny and believe in her and her mission. Of course we have Skinnydipping, her underappreciated semi-autobiographical novel, at home, but we would like the most unvarnished truth from Bethenny about Jason.
Have you ever been a Starving Artist, and did it make you brilliant, or just hungry?
I have been a writer who ran out of money and gotten a job because I couldn’t take a girlfriend to dinner. I didn’t enjoy that. I didn’t feel brilliant.
What would you characterize as an ideal interaction with a reader?
A friend gave my book to a reader who shared this in an email to me: “I am having such a great time reading your book. I was so engrossed yesterday that I forgot to change to the F and ended up whisking down to Chinatown on the D—and had to double back.” For me, that was it—that’s ideal, that’s the dream.
Have you ever written anything that you'd like to take back?
Yes, there are great steaming heaps of prose in my first two novels that I’d like to take back. But I don’t want to take back a single word of this new one!
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