Go Forth (Vol. 45)

Go Forth is a series that offers a look into the publishing industry and contemporary small-press literature. See more of the series.

An Interview with D. Foy

I read and loved D. Foy’s novel Made to Break a couple of years ago when Two Dollar Radio published it. His new novel is Patricide, just out from Stalking Horse Press. His work has appeared in Guernica, Literary Hub, Salon, Hazlitt, Post Road, Electric Literature, BOMB, The Literary Review, Midnight Breakfast, The Scofield, and The Georgia Review, among other places, and has been included in the books Laundromat, A Moment’s Notice, and Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial. I recently talked to D. Foy about Patricide.  

—Brandon Hobson

BRANDON HOBSON: In the opening chapter of Patricide, “Sleep,” the narrator tells us: “I was ten years old, and I was stoned.” I was drawn to the childhood scenes of Rice’s struggle with family, with peers and life itself. What inspired you to write such a damaged but likable young character?

D. FOY: I think it’s safe to say that not all, but a good portion of today’s fiction emphasizes the question of “what” as opposed to the questions of “how” and “why.” Just about everywhere I look, in course descriptions, workshops, essays, and interviews with authors and editors, writers are encouraged to focus, first, on character, and, second, through character, on conflict, as expressed in their actions, as opposed to their feelings and thoughts. Honestly, I find this as astonishing as I find it baffling. It doesn’t make sense to me that readers wouldn’t be interested in the workings of the human mind. And yet, obviously, since most readers aren’t, this must say more about me than it does about them. Most readers, actually—what’s left of them, anyway—aren’t concerned to enter into the consciousness of a character to see what motivates them, and, more, why and how. Instead they want to escape themselves by living vicariously through another person’s generally unexamined actions.

While I have to confess that the dirtiest of my little secrets is that I space out by watching sci-fi, fantasy, thriller, and action TV and films—I wait, for instance, for a season of Game of Thrones to close, then buy it on iTunes and binge watch the crap out of it for two days tops—in my work, and in life, too, I suppose, I’m interested in how the forces that play on people in their youth ramify through the rest of their lives. Probably this obsession explains my proclivity to trash when...