“Special needs. Addiction. Divorce. Righteous grandmas. Overwhelmed parents. One kid in the closet and another on the road as a showgirl. How can it all be happening in the same family?”
That is how author, and former Watermark columnist, Greg Triggs describes his latest novel, “That What Makes Us Stronger.”
The book is told through the point of view of Warn Barnes, a young, closeted gay kid in the Midwest growing up during the ‘70s and ‘80s with his very extreme family.
“I like to think that the book explores the upside of that,” Triggs says, “and the strength and bonding that can bring a family together when there are challenges instead of ripping them apart.”
Triggs spoke about writing “That What Makes Us Stronger” and its connection to his own upbringing with Watermark shortly after the book’s release in March.
How did the story for “That What Makes Us Stronger” come about?
It’s largely based on my own family; I have two challenged siblings and a lot of addiction issues in my family. Similar things but I really wanted to, within the spirit of the book, bring humor and kindness to things that are usually explored by virtue of their limitations. So “That What Makes Us Stronger” talks about the challenges the family endures together and ultimately, for the most part, finds themselves stronger for having gone through it.
“That What Makes Us Stronger” is a work of fiction but how much of it is autobiographical?
I would say it is 100% inspired by real-life circumstances but where it deviates, I would call the ratio about 70/30. Number one, I’m not sure my life has been worthy of a memoir [laughs]. Number two, I really wanted to provide my family with a little wiggle room when talking about the things we have gone through together. I wanted them to bring their emotions to the story but not forensic detail.
What was it like for you to revisit growing up gay during the ‘70s and ‘80s in the Midwest?
It was very interesting looking back on that time because one of the things I’ve come to realize is while I was coming to grips about who and what I really was I don’t think I was fooling people as much as I thought. In a way that I’m very forgiving about I see that I put myself through a lot of unnecessary things that were born of my circumstance and the era in which I grew up.
It was really gratifying to write a layered story where many characters were going through something because I think it gave me a chance to look back and while I was wrapped up in what was happening to me, I didn’t really consider what was going on with the people I love. That was really rewarding and there were times when I tried to balance what the character was going through in terms of all those things with joy about the things he was freer to discover than I was.
Why did you want to write this novel now and tell this story at this point in your life?
I’ve been thinking about this novel for a long time. One of my siblings passed away so I’ve really been trying to think of ways to spend time with him and a way to thank him. My brother was much older than I am and he brought a lot of wonderful things into my life and I kind of approached the book as a chance to acknowledge that. I also wanted to give his kids a better understanding of who he was.
I’m a pretty goal orientated person and I wrote this during the pandemic. It had been in the back of my mind and I thought when I get the chance, when life opens up enough for me to do this, I’m going to do it. Then the circumstances of the world helped me have that opportunity and I thought if not now, when? I guess in a way that kind of mirrors the book, under rather challenging or frustrating circumstances it’s always good to feel like something bigger came out of going through it. Not that this book is bigger than the pandemic but having something positive to show for all the negative.
There are some heavy topics covered in this book. Did you find it easy to write it looking for the humor in those experiences or was it a struggle taking situations that you lived through and making them into comedy?
I think enough time had passed but truth be told there were some nights where I finished writing and I’d think “that was a lot to relive.” Especially around the themes of addiction and losing my brother and finding a way for humor to be respectful. I feel while the book is not a perfect reflection of that goal, I feel good about where it is.
My first book [“The Next Happiest Place on Earth”] was in part about divorce and when I was writing that book I became very aware that most often in fiction there is a hero in the divorce story and there is a villain, and it has not been my experience that those of polar extremes, it is more layered that that, so I really wanted to write about two people who just failed to rise to a common challenge and couldn’t find their way back to each other. But neither one of them are horrible people, they weren’t fools for having been together in the first place. I tried to bring that ethic to the theme of addiction in this book because very often I think people who suffer with addiction issues are not presented as whole people. They represent everything about the disease of addiction but what else are they?
The character who suffers from addiction the most in my book is the father and having grown up with a father who was an alcoholic, it was healing to look at that with a more three-dimensional point of view. I was pretty young when I lost my father, so it was very healing to think about his alcoholism in a broader context than just how it affected my childhood.
At any point in writing this book did things get too intense for you which led you to pull back with some of the details in your lived experiences?
When I was writing the book, I really stopped to consider whether or not those aspects for the story ultimately were mine to tell. If I didn’t feel like they were mine to tell I tried to temper those with kindness. The other thing about it is this is a book with a lot of characters so you can’t tell every aspect of every character in the story. You have to focus on what they contribute to the narrative. Other things that might be interesting and are worthy to write about might need to wait until another time.
Obviously you write a book in the hope that it will be successful and people will find themselves engaged in the world of that story. I use to think that my third book was going to be going back to the world of my first book and now I hope that the response is such that I can stay with this world because I see more stories within this world.
I’m in my 50’s, grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and as I was speaking about divorce I think very often in my era of coming up and becoming a reader and learning more about writing and embracing that talent more, gat books were that. They were books about being gay and what I’ve said about other areas of life, I don’t want to compare being gay to divorce or addiction because I think that’s a negative connotation, but it was really wonderful to write about a gay character whose circumstances make him being gay part of the story but not the story.
The book deals with processing through trauma. Did you find, in writing this book, it helped you to let go of past trauma, either known or that you were holding onto subconsciously?
It did. I feel really good about that aspect of the book. Within that dynamic I also realized that things I’ve been holding onto or that I didn’t understand about how people treated me when I was growing up was homophobia. It was about their limitations and their small minds, and I was not going to be able to fix that. So things I was holding onto I was able to release in ways I was not anticipating.
“That What Makes Us Stronger” by Greg Triggs is available now at Amazon.com and RedHawkPublications.com.
