When I was writing the book, there were some things I went back and researched, but there were other things I didn’t care about. I just believed he had been shot while he had been robbing a store, or something like that. There was so much detail about this surgeon coming down from West Point, that it sounded like he had in fact been shot, but the whole thing about the revolver accidentally going off…once I was an adult, I didn’t believe that anymore. So towards the end of his life, when I tried to get details about things, it was really hard to pin him down. One of the things I’ve always found interesting about my family, and I think this was true of a lot of poor families, is that parents tell their kids anything, because they’re just trying to get through the day, and they figure, well we’ll sort that out later. I’m glad we have a few questions about poverty! But is it just poverty? You also speak about how he had-potentially-brain damage, from a bullet he took to the head. The main theme of the book is that he was not born evil. And even now with the book, just about everybody who’s reviewed it obsesses about my father beating us, but doesn’t really pay that much attention to the poverty. And I would say, “Well I grew up in Philly and went to a small Catholic school and my parents were poor.” And the subject always gets changed. People just assumed I went to Harvard like everybody else. And that was a subject never discussed in my whole career. I think of the book primarily about being about poverty. I think of my father as the main character in the story, but I don’t think of the book being primarily about my father. Because everything I’ve written before was just straight-out funny. You get into your 50s and you start thinking about writing something more substantial than you’ve written before.

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Closing time by joe queenan