Acclaimed novelist David Payne needed many years to prepare him to write Barefoot to Avalon (Grove/Atlantic, Aug.), a memoir about the death of his beloved younger brother, George A., in an accident that Payne witnessed, was helpless to prevent, and occurred at the end of a weeklong visit between the two men that seemed to bring about the healing of a long and painful estrangement.
Payne had given up on his brother, who suffered from a bipolar disorder so crippling he had to live with and be taken care of by their mother in the years before he died.. Yet when Payne needed help moving from Vermont to North Carolina in 2000, George A. was the surprising volunteer who came forward to lend a hand during a stressful time. "We spent eight days together prior to our road trip and the accident, just the two of us," says Payne, "and I felt the rift between us had begun to close." The house finally packed up, the brothers set off on the road in two rental trucks. With George A. following behind him, Payne constantly monitoring his kid brother in the rearview mirror, he watched with horror as the truck skidded off the road and crashed. George A. died almost immediately.
"If we'd arrived safely in North Carolina, I suspect we'd have continued in that spirit of reconciliation and opened a new chapter," says Payne, "not happy ever after, perhaps, but one where we were involved in each other's lives again and might have helped each other."
Payne is the author of five novels that include Confessions of a Taoist on Wall Street (Houghton Mifflin, 1984), his first, and Back to Wando Passo, his most recent (Morrow, 2007). But Payne, whose memoir also details the story of his parents' dysfunctional marriage and its effect on the two brothers, likely would have written Barefoot to Avalon even had George A. not died in the accident. "The boundary between fiction and nonfiction is one I've edged closer and closer to for years in my autobiographical fiction. I think it was inevitable that I step over," he says. "In fiction, I can project my consciousness into the psyche of the characters. In memoir, I can speculate how others feel, while keeping the drive and momentum of storytelling."
The North Carolina native has taught at Bennington, Duke, Hollins, and in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Queens University of Charlotte, in North Carolina, where he's a member of the founding faculty. Payne is a recovering alcoholic, but when he began writing Barefoot to Avalon in 2006 he was still drinking. "I wasn't in a good space then," he says. "But this story felt like an assigned mission from my brother. My mother didn't want it written, but after reading a draft of it three years later she told me, ‘My fear passed away.'" Given his mother's blessing helped Payne enrich the memoir with deeper insight. "When you hear really honest and intimate storytelling, when the small talk stops, it resonates with the people you tell. This is what I hope to achieve with Barefoot to Avalon."
Today, Payne signs at the Grove/Atlantic booth (939A) at 3 p.m.
This article appeared in the May 28, 2015 edition of PW BEA Show Daily.
