I realized just being around my kids’ track teams, I just like this better. Our sports are so obedience-oriented and infrastructure-oriented. Lots and lots of rules, and they are run by the referees and umpires. Whereas in the mainstream sports of American life-football, baseball, basketball-there are huge amounts of equipment involved. The rules are starting line, finish line, don’t cut corners. It’s simple-alls you need is a pair of shorts, a pair of shoes, and a tank top and off you go. They were runners, cross country and track. What I really enjoyed was when my kids were in high school. When I was a kid I lived and breathed Carolina basketball, but as sports get more and more corporate, I am less and less interested. So in a few years maybe we’ll be moving on.īF: Not so much any more. But I have to say my wife and I have agreed we don’t want to die in Dallas.īF: Right. We raised our kids there and it was a decent place to raise kids. My wife has had a really good career practicing law there. But after a couple of years I realized that no, it’s very different. There is this veneer of Southern-ness about it, but with a big city, so I thought I’d get the best of both worlds. At the time I thought, well, Dallas feels similar to North Carolina. Why do you live there?īF: I followed my wife out to Texas. RB: (laughs) Somehow I had a feeling that growing up in North Carolina, you would enjoy living in Texas. So I don’t look at it as a chore, but I’ll be ready to get back to my desk and be able to go outside in the afternoons and evenings. But this is a temporary condition, this traveling, and book people tend to be good people. If I am not inside reading or working I want to be outside. RB: Because you go from airplane to car to hotel to bookstore-īF: Exactly. RB: Any contact with a reality outside the insulated word of the book tour?īF: You know what, what I really miss is being outside.īrief Encounters With Che Guevara (2006): Winner of the 2007 PEN/Hemingway Awardīilly Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2012): “The immediate impulse for the story came from a Dallas Cowboys halftime show.” But what is going on is just going from place to place. It came out on a Tuesday and I started traveling on a Wednesday. So, has anything interesting happened to you this week?īF: (long pause) A lot of traveling. But then you start second-guessing yourself. But someone confirmed to me that the Bears did indeed play the Cowboys on Thanksgiving in 2004-you looked worried for an instant.īen Fountain: Well, I had actually looked at that and I thought I satisfied myself that yes, they had played. I grew up in Chicago and the Bears always played the Lions on that day. Robert Birnbaum: The only problem I had with your book was that it has the Cowboys playing the Bears on Thanksgiving Day. He is busy at work on his next novel and expects to leave Dallas in the next few years. You get the purest strain of certain aspects of America-like capitalism, free market evangelicalism.” In the conversation that follows, which took place in Boston nine days after Billy Lynn was published, Ben and I talk about living in Dallas, growing up in the midcentury South, his fascination with Haiti and desire to visit Central America, John Sayles, Mark Twain, talking to Iraq war veterans, Catch-22, the Chicago Bears’ Thanksgiving Day games, Robert Stone, and other stuff. It’s in your face every day… I think it’s the most American city. And my parents were very proud of me-my dad was so proud of me…It was crazy.”īen Fountain has lived in Dallas since 1983, despite his antipathy to that city: “You are living in the belly of the beast. Nobody wants to waste their life, and I was doing well at the practice of law. “I felt like I’d stepped off a cliff and I didn’t know if the parachute was going to open. “I was tremendously apprehensive,” Fountain recalls. Malcom Gladwell found Fountain’s career arc interesting enough to write about in a New Yorker piece titled “ Late Bloomers.” He quotes Fountain: Raised in North Carolina, he graduated from Chapel Hill and Duke Law before quitting his job as a lawyer to devote himself to writing full-time. Ben Fountain is the author of Brief Encounters With Che Guevara, which won the 2007 PEN/Hemingway Award, and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, a National Book Award finalist that has shown up on numerous Best Novels of 2012 lists.
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