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Questions for John Grogan

Q:When did you decide to write about your childhood and your relationship with your parents as the subject of your next book?

A: For many years I knew I wanted to write about my childhood. I was born in 1957, so I was growing up in the middle of all the turmoil and social unrest of the 1960s and early 1970s. It was a pretty eventful time. But that’s just the first section of The Longest Trip Home. It was only in the last few years that I began seeing the book as more than a growing-up memoir. My childhood was part of the story, but of equal importance was the often funny and sometimes painful struggle I made as a young adult to break free from my parents’ influence and find my own place in the world. I realized pretty quickly my courtship of my future wife, Jenny, was central to this part of the story. And then, as I entered middle age and my parents their sunset years, I saw that time was running out to reconcile and reconnect with them. I ended up writing the book in three parts: Growing Up, Breaking Away, and Coming Home.

Q: How do you think readers will relate to your story?

A: Well, we all belong to families. We all have to deal with those messy, complicated, often infuriating dynamics that it seems no family is without. All of us, too, must find our way free of our parents’ orbit and to our own place in the world. And we all must come to terms at some point with our parents’ mortality--and our own. After I wrote Marley & Me and was going around the country talking about it, countless readers came up to me and said nearly the identical thing: “It was as if you were writing about my life.” I hope readers will find the same relevance and touch points in The Longest Trip Home.

Q: Do you ever visit your old neighborhood?

A: I go back at least once or twice a year. My mother resides in a nursing home not far away, and my family still owns our childhood house in Harbor Hills. The neighborhood has changed dramatically in the thirty years since I left home. Nearly every waterfront home --lovely in their day but considered modest by today’s standards--has been torn down and replaced with opulent mansions. The houses away from the water, such as the ones in which my friends Tommy, Rock, and Sack grew up, are largely unchanged, but the cars parked in the driveways, mostly European, are a far cry from the made-in-America Chevrolets and Fords that were the order of the day when I was a kid. My childhood home has changed not at all; it’s almost like a museum relic. Same kitchen cupboards, same linoleum floor, same bathroom tile. I cannot visit the old homestead or walk those neighborhood streets without being flooded with memories, a lot of good ones and some bittersweet. Thomas Wolfe was right: you can never go home again. Not easily, at least.

Q: Your parents were tremendously devoted to each other, and yet they sound like they were definitely a case of opposites attracting. How were they different?

A: My father was shy, quiet, and bashful. He was serious and meticulous and a horrible dancer. My mother was just the opposite, gregarious, funny, spunky, the life of any party, and light on her feet. Mom loved to pull pranks and tell stories; Dad was incapable of teasing someone and loved to listen to her stories. She was in bed before ten o’clock most nights; he seldom hit the sack before one a.m. Dad would hang a picture on the wall by measuring to the thirty-second of an inch and using a level. Mom would squint through one eye and drive a nail in wherever the spirit led her. But they both had generous and kind hearts, and they shared a deep, life-long devotion to their faith and to God. As the expression goes, the family that prays together stays together. For my parents, that certainly was the case. Their faith was the pillar that supported their marriage for nearly six decades.

Q: How did your parents influence you as a parent? What life lessons did you learn from them?

A: Growing up, I never once doubted my parents’ love for me. Even though the words “I love you” were seldom spoken in our house, especially by the men, there also was no question about that love. Their actions, their concern, their worry, their amusement at their children’s antics--even some of the more egregious ones--all spoke to their strong love for each other and their children. And it was an unconditional love. Even at times when I knew I had disappointed them deeply, I never wondered about their love for me. They taught me that every child deserves the security of knowing he or she is loved unconditionally. As a parent, I’m trying to follow in their footsteps that way.

Q: Your father wasn’t able to witness your success. What do you think he would have thought?

A: My father died in December 2004, while Marley & Me was still in the manuscript stage. Dad was always the biggest fan of my work, even my first college internship at a community weekly paper called, of all things, The Spinal Column. He religiously clipped and saved my newspaper columns and magazine articles. I know how proud he would be of me as an author. At the same time, I am certain I could not have written The Longest Trip Home while he was still alive. As I’ve said, I believe you shouldn’t tell a story unless you can tell it honestly and openly. If I knew my father would be reading it, I don’t think I could have done that.