Tom Barbash of Mill Valley is the author of the award-winning novel “The Last Good Chance” and the nonfiction book “On Top of the World: Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick & 9/11: A Story of Loss & Renewal,” which was a New York Times bestseller. His collection of short stories, “Stay Up With Me,” was published in 2013. He is teaching writing at California College of the Arts and working on a new novel due out next year. He is married and has a 7-year-old son.
Q: What was it like growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan?
A: I loved it. We were a block from Central Park; we could get into my father’s version of nature pretty quickly. I grew up across the street from the Museum of Natural History, which for a kid is a great place to be near.
Q: How did your parents earn their living?
A: My father was a corporate lawyer and my mother was a writer and editor who really wasn’t working for much of our childhood. She passed away when I was in college.
Q: You worked for three years as a reporter for the Syracuse Post Standard. What was your beat?
A: I did a number of things from cops to county government, obits. Eventually I was stationed in the Oswego County bureau, which was the ailing post-industrial town I based my first novel on. It was a really good experience for me to get out of New York City and live in a small town and get that perspective.
Q: You were on the tennis team at Haverford College with Howard Lutnick, the chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald; what was it like writing “On Top of the World?”
A: It was like landing on page 175 of a really sad novel that is in full steam. There were so many threads. I don’t think I could have written the book the way I did unless I’d written a complicated novel going into it.
Q: Reviewers have compared your writing style to Raymond Carver and John Cheever; how did you develop it?
A: I’m a believer that style grows out of character. The voice in “Letters to the Academy” is very different than the voice in “January,” and the consciousness is different. The way the characters think are different from story to story, and for me that’s one of the great pleasures of writing.
Q: Writers these days have to spend more time than ever before marketing themselves; do you mind?
A: The way I try to tell it to my students and friends who are publishing is try to separate yourself into two selves and don’t think it is the writer who is doing it. You have two selves, one who wrote the book and the other one who is being kind to that book by going out in the world and doing nice things for it. Be gracious while you’re doing it.
Q: What can you tell us about the novel you’re working on?
A: It’s set in New York City in the year 1980. It’s about a family that is living in The Dakota the year that John Lennon was assassinated. The patriach of the family is a talk show host. Johnny Carson has a small walk-on part.
