2023-12-04 17:55:19
New York – Writer TC Boyle is no more unfamiliar with the big social issues than the big words and characters. He also has to slowly get used to the large numbers: the iconic author, who is particularly popular in Germany, is 75 years old today.
That doesn’t stop him from writing. His most recent work is about a world on the brink of climate catastrophe, the extinction of species and a tiger python as a shoulder decoration.
Work as a teacher
The author, who grew up in New York and is recognizable by his Frank Zappa beard and always somewhat wild hairstyle, was born Thomas John Boyle on December 2, 1948. His parents, a bus driver and a secretary, both alcoholics, shaped his childhood. At the age of 17, young Thomas adopted the name Coraghessan from an Irish ancestor and is now known to most of his readers as “TC”. Boyle studied English and history and worked as a teacher for a while.
After being accepted into the prestigious Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, Boyle received his doctorate and began teaching at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles in 1978. There he dedicated himself to teaching creative writing for 37 years. Today he lives with his family in Santa Barbara, about two hours north of Los Angeles, in a house with large windows designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
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First novel “Water Music”
In his first novel, “Water Music,” from the early 1980s, Boyle dedicated himself to the British African explorer Mungo Park. He once described the book as his favorite, saying it was wild and far-reaching, a stumble on the edge of – exactly – the abyss. This was followed by “Welcome to Wellville” (1993), which is about John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of peanut butter and cornflakes.
“Dr. Sex” (2005) focused on the self-absorbed American sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. In “The Women” (2009), Boyle told the story of the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright, in whose house Boyle now lives, from the perspective of four women in his life. In “The Light”, one of his new works, he dedicated himself to the guru of the hippie movement Timothy Leary, who fought for free access to drugs such as LSD – even though he himself had not used the hallucinogen since his twenties.
New book about the climate crisis
Since the early 1980s, the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction has written over a dozen novels and numerous short stories. His works have been translated into around 30 languages, from Hebrew to Korean, including many into German.
His book “Blue Skies,” published in the spring, about the climate crisis is a scenario for ironists to get used to the grim reality of climate change, Boyle told the Literary Hub site. “Blue Skies” closes a circle that began with Boyle’s novel “A Friend of the Earth” in 2000: it was also about global warming and extreme weather, and the action takes place 25 years in the future. “That future is now. And so, with Blue Skies, I evaluate the results of that earlier scenario and imagine what is to come.”
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