Lorenzo Carcaterra

I wrote A Safe Place for one reason -- I was a married man in my mid-30s with children of my own and thought it time to make peace with my father. I felt writing a book would do that. It didn't. What it did was make me realize that despite all his horrors and faults, my father was the person most responsible for shaping my life. He was a bad man who happened to be a good father to me. He was an abusive husband who made me strive to be a good one. He was functionally illiterate, but by forcing me to read to him every day -- newspapers, sports magazines, and the occasional book -- fed my love for and appreciation of writing. By the end of the writing of that book, I wished he were still alive. It was a very difficult book to write. It was a first book and with that you travel down roads you've never seen before, always unsure of the next step. It was a book about my parents and, at a certain point, it hits that you are exposing a closed life to an outside world. It was a book written out of pain and anger. I'd probably write it in a much different way if I wrote it today.
-Lorenzo Carcaterra
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