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Roadside Resting Places Provide Life Lessons for Local Author

In Resting Places, author Michael C. White takes his readers on a journey along with his protagonist, Elizabeth, across the country and into her soul to try to come to terms with the loss of her son in a mysterious automobile accident. 

When the novel begins, Elizabeth is angry about her son Luke’s death and guilt-ridden about an affair she’s just ending. She’s become estranged from her husband Zach, who takes comfort in a church support group while she takes comfort in Scotch. A serendipitous meeting with a man named George at a roadside memorial is the impetus for her trip, which ultimately leads to her finding a way to make peace with her past and feel hope for the future. 

The author is a resident of North Madison where he lives with his wife Reni and their two Labs, Henry and Falstaff, and writes in a converted chicken coop in the woods behind his house. 

Local scenes in the novel take place in Garth Point, loosely based on a shoreline town, and Mystic, where Elizabeth, a lawyer, does pro bono work at a woman’s shelter. 

This is White’s seventh novel. He won the 2011 Connecticut Book Award for fiction for Beautiful Assassin. He also has published more than 50 short stories in national magazines and journals and is the founder and director of Fairfield University’s low-residency MFA creative writing program. 

The following is an interview with the author about his new novel. 

Q. This book is about trying to come to terms with the death of a child — every parent’s nightmare. Why did you choose this heartbreaking experience as the central theme of the novel? 

A. I have two kids. The prologue of the novel actually happened when we thought we lost our son while on vacation [in the British Isles]. My older brother lost two of his children in a terrible car accident. And a number of friends have [had children die]. It’s a very profound experience that’s in my background. 

Q. You tell the story through the eyes of a woman. You’ve had female protagonists in your previous novels — Beautiful Assassin and Soul Catcher. Why are you comfortable putting yourself in a woman’s shoes? 

A. It’s difficult to put yourself in anybody else’s shoes. But that’s what the writer has to do. A couple of my characters are priestsdI’m not a priest or Catholic—and several are historical. The idea is to be able to crawl into another person’s soul and experience what they’re feeling. I call it empathetic imagination. The father has adjusted to the death more easily. He has stronger faith. Elizabeth does not have faith, and I felt it would be a lot more interesting to [make the main character] someone who’s on a spiritual journey versus someone who’s already been there.

Q. Tell me about the roadside memorials, the crosses that Elizabeth discovers, and how that was an inspiration for the novel? 

A. I passed one on a rural road in New Hampshire and stopped, got out of the car, started to read the inscription [about] a middle-aged man who’d left behind children, a wife, parents. I started thinking, each of these crosses tells a story. In a cemetery, the death is set aside, very organized, people bury their loved ones there and occasionally visit. But roadside memorials are right in your face—a reminder of our own mortality. As I started to do research for the novel, I started to visit these all over the place. At Exit 82 off I-95 going north near Groton I got off (the highway), parked my car, jumped over a fence like my character does, and looked at these two crosses. They had been there a long time. They were weathered. And some of the mementos left there suggested the death of a young person. It started me on this quest of stopping at roadside memorials. 

Q. Did you actually drive to places across the country that Elizabeth went to, in order to research the story or did you imagine those scenes? 

A. At some point, I told a writer friend that my character died in New Mexico in a desert. I’d never been there. I just picked it. I had seen pictures online. So, me and my friend went on a trip [for about eight days in 2009] stopping at hundreds of descansos (the Spanish term for roadside memorials), which really means resting places for the people carrying the burden of their loved ones to the cemetery. 

Q. Can you talk about how important it was for Elizabeth to make sense of a senseless tragedy—particularly the death of a child—to get answers? 

A. I think Elizabeth had a hard time accepting death like a lot of us—we try to come up with concrete answers. And her son had become sort of an enigma to her in his late teens, early 20s. They had grown apart. She blamed it on friends, was grasping at straws. The more she dug, the more she realized these were broader questions about faith, God, what Luke believed in, and she started to learn more about him after his death. We don’t know and can’t know everything about our loved ones—she had to learn some things and unlearn some things about her son. 

Q. George and Gabe—the man Elizabeth meets along the way—are two people she would have been unlikely to befriend under different circumstances. Was that important to you to show how we stereotype people, how complex we all really are, and how universal the experience of loss is? 

A. Yes. George is the first messenger to her—he’s not the vessel she’d normally listen to. He’s someone who collects other people’s junk. He tells her she should go out there. Gabe, someone who’s had a blue-collar life, teaches her other lessons about suffering, about grief, and ultimately about loving your children. 

Q. Gabe and Elizabeth both use alcohol as a means for numbing their pain. Religion is a comfort for Elizabeth’s husband, while she sees it as a way of avoiding grief. Can you comment on that? 

A. Elizabeth drinks to numb herself through her own pain and sees her husband’s faith as another kind of addiction that takes him away from really looking at the hard [truth] of loss. At one point, people are telling her the importance of faith in getting over one’s suffering. She thinks it’s too easy. At the end, she realizes true faith can be a way of living, a world view, and not just in moments of terrible loss or pain. Elizabeth comes to accept faith and sees faith in a more profound way. 

Resting Places (Open Books Press) by Michael C. White is $16.95, softcover.