STEWART O'NAN

The Novel of the Holocaust

About the story:
- The Novel of the Holocaust is my riff on our position as authors, how we tend to use or exploit our personal experience in our fiction, but also the experiences of the people closest to us, and how this sharing of our and others' lives--mixed with the imaginary--can lead to terrible guilt as well as joyous rewards. The trade-off, when we write about our own and others' private suffering and broadcast it into a massive public arena, can be alienating.

The idea for the story:
- The idea came from seeing authors celebrated as representatives or ambassadors of much larger historical or national movements, rather than as fallible, often unreliable, if not completely fucked-up and haunted individuals. The carnival-barker-like opening owes a debt to both Ray Bradbury and John Updike.

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