prairie point

reading about life

Today I was reading a magazine essay when the author of the piece began to relate an incident with his brother that had taken place when he was a boy. All of a sudden I put two and two together. His brother had been a friend of mine in college. All the details fit - the name, the city. I had even spent a night in their house once - perhaps in the very bedroom described in the article.

It made me feel a bit like a voyeur. I haven't heard from my friend in years but when I think of him from now on I will have another perspective.

I have been acquainted with a few other authors but I was never really able to fully identify any characters in their books with people that I knew. Of course I am talking about fiction now whereas the magazine article was an essay.

A couple teachers in college were well-known writers. Larry McMurtry wrote a lot about places that I knew even if I did not recognize the characters. I can remember drinking beer with some friends once on the patio of a Mexican restaurant that had been in a scene from one of his early novels, while we debated how well he had captured the atmosphere of the place.