Queen of Peaches

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I’ll Follow You: Chatting with Michael O’Donnell About His Debut Novel “Above the Fire”

This week I am absolutely thrilled to share my conversation with writer Michael O’Donnell.

(You can stream our chat via the embed here or pretty much anywhere else you source your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, and Google Podcasts.)

Michael is the author of the novel Above the Fire. Published by Blackstone Publishing in December 2023, Above the Fire crystallizes the relationship between a father and son as they survive a winter of isolation. The book has received starred reviews from Booklist and Shelf Awareness, and the audiobook edition recently won the AudioFile Earphones Award. Michael’s nonfiction writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and other publications. He has been a member of the National Book Critics Circle since 2005. An attorney by profession, he clerked for Judge Ann Claire Williams of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and now practices law in Chicago. He earned his bachelor’s degree with distinction from Indiana University in 2001 and his law degree magna cum laude from Boston College in 2004.

In our absolutely fascinating chat today, we talk about why and how he chose to express the intensity of the summer of 2020 through fiction rather than memoir or journalistic reportage; how to create tension in a narrative without resorting to depictions of violence; how the notion that “you can’t win if you don’t play” helped get him through moments of frustration during the writing process; how he completed the manuscript in seven months by keeping himself on a schedule of daily writing sprints during his lunch break; becoming experienced and confident enough as a writer to be able to put together a twelve-word sentence with no internal punctuation; and how Greta Gerwig’s version of Little Women reminded him that in order for a book to become real, it has to first be entrusted to others.

SHOW NOTES

Michael O’Donnell’s website.

More information about Michael’s book, Above the Fire.

Buy a print copy of Above the Fire.

The Above the Fire team:

The audiobook edition of Above the Fire is the Winner of the 2024 AudioFile Earphones Award.

The Always Take Notes podcast

The film Leave No Trace

The book The Eight Mountains by Paolo Cognetti

The book The North Water by Ian McGuire

The film Phantom Thread, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, was cut by editor Dylan Tichenor.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s soundtrack to The Social Network

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s soundtrack to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

The composer John Luther Adams and his 2006 piece In the White Silence

Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons

Aaron Copeland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man“

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony

Erik Satie’s Trois Gymnopedies

The film The Martian, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon

The 2019 film Little Women, directed by Greta Gerwig. Here’s the printing press scene.