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INTERVIEWER
But wait—are there elements of your autobiography worked into your novels?
CRACE
Well, once in a while. In The Gift Of Stones there’s a man who’s having his arm amputated. Afterwards there are weeping wounds and suchlike. I lived through exactly that. My father had osteomyelitis—his left arm was withered between his elbow and his shoulder. It was pitted with holes, and weeping with pus for most of my childhood. So what’s being described in the novel is something that I was very familiar with. Clearly writing about that arm—even though I described it as someone else’s experience—was emotionally weighted for me. It laid a ghost for me. But the amputation of a Stone Age man called Leaf, a stoneworker, does not relate to my father at all. |
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