{"id":7877,"date":"2013-06-14T09:22:50","date_gmt":"2013-06-14T16:22:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/?p=7877"},"modified":"2013-06-17T07:34:45","modified_gmt":"2013-06-17T14:34:45","slug":"douglas-kennedy-in-transit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/douglas-kennedy-in-transit\/","title":{"rendered":"Douglas Kennedy In Transit"},"content":{"rendered":"

Summerguide 2013 | view this story as a .pdf<\/a><\/p>\n

This Wiscasset novelist really gets around.<\/h3>\n

Interview by Claire Z. Cramer<\/p>\n

\"Kennedy_Douglas\"<\/a>In his latest novel, Five Days<\/em><\/i> (Simon & Schuster, $26.99), Douglas Kennedy places Laura, a radiographic technologist at Miles Memorial Hospital in Damariscotta, and Richard, a Bath insurance man, at the same Boston hotel for concurrent weekend trade conventions in their respective fields. Their worlds intersect, and their lives are, as they say, forever changed. Kennedy is the best-selling author of 10 novels, including The Woman in the Fifth<\/em><\/i>; the film version (2011) starred Kristin Scott Thomas and Ethan Hawke. We caught up with him by phone with the sounds of a caf\u00e9 in the background.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re in Montreal?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My wife is Canadian; I\u2019m back and forth to Canada a lot. We have a pied-\u00e0-terre<\/em><\/i> here.<\/p>\n

How long have you lived in Wiscasset?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since 2007. I\u2019d been living in Europe for years, and I finally realized I didn\u2019t really want to be a permanent expatriate, so I came back. As a child, I was sent to summer camp in Maine\u2013an awful place in Otisfield. Years later I came back because I went to Bowdoin in the \u201870s, and that was so much better. I really like to move around a lot. But now Maine is my base.<\/p>\n

Where did you live?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I still have pieds-\u00e0-terre<\/em><\/i> in London, Paris, and Berlin. All of this came from the writing, incidentally. There\u2019s no family money there.<\/p>\n

On page 94 of Five Days<\/em><\/i>, Richard mentions that he\u2019s published a story in Portland Magazine<\/em><\/i>. How do you know the magazine, and do you know Portland?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I know Portland Magazine<\/em><\/i> because I\u2019ve read it. That\u2019s how! And I love Portland. I think it\u2019s a great city. And I am not going to say a \u2018great little city.\u2019 I think it is a great city. When I\u2018m in Maine, I probably go to Portland once a week. I like Longfellow Books. I like the coffee shops. I can write in them.<\/p>\n

Richard Russo has said he likes to write in coffee shops, too.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I ran into Rick Russo the last time I was in Arabica! [An interruption ensues during which Kennedy can be heard speaking French.] Sorry, the waiter came over.<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s ending is a complete surprise. It snatches away the reader\u2019s expectations for the characters.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Good. Everyone has the life they think they have to live. There are many ways people find to limit themselves. Let me first say there\u2019s no such thing as \u2018emotional truth,\u2019 but as a writer, it does have to be emotionally real.<\/p>\n

Are you working on your next novel?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m already well into it.<\/p>\n

So, let\u2019s see. You\u2019re sitting in a caf\u00e9 in Montreal, where you have a home. You write in Wiscasset, and you have homes in\u00a0 the capitals of Europe. Sounds like you\u2019ve got it figured out.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Listen. Nobody has it all figured out!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Summerguide 2013
\nThis Wiscasset novelist really gets around.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[25,20],"class_list":["post-7877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured","tag-interview","tag-summerguide-2013"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7877"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8194,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7877\/revisions\/8194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}