Richard Price at Politics and Prose

I saw Richard Price at Politics & Prose last night. He read from his recent book, Lush Life, which I got for my birthday, but haven't read yet. I loved his last novel, Samaritan, which Entertainment Weekly named their favorite fiction book of 2003.

The author was quite engaging, with a very New York sense of humor. Price grew up in the Bronx, and talked about how when he went upstate for college at Cornell, he intentionally emphasized his Bronx accent as an identity thing. Later, at a book signing in New York City for his first novel, a construction worker-type approached him about his accent, saying that his daughter attended a local college and spoke "better fuckin' English" than he did.

He also talked about writing, specifically the fallacy that a lot of writers fall into where they feel like they can only write about things they've personally experienced. "It's fiction! You can make it up!" he said, and following a period of screenwriting, felt more free to more exploratory in his writing.