The things that alert you to another book you’re about to write are not necessarily the things that end up in that book. Why 1964? That’s when I heard Miles Davis for the first time—on someone else’s stereo. Playing Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Lift to the Gallows) opened a sneaky door at the back of my mind, one that I had always kept carefully closed. Behind that door was an old file folder filled with letters from people who could well be dead, and I read them. Yes, I was going to write a book—though I was afraid of it.

1964 was the year when the ‘60s had not yet crystalized into The Sixties but was about to—a feeling like the terrible atmosphere before a storm when you don’t even know yet that what’s coming is a storm. Freedom Summer flooded Mississippi with idealistic white kids. I had never engaged in any political activity in my life, but when I read that they had found the bodies of the three murdered civil rights workers, I knew that I was on a team. I thought: they have just killed three of us.

What else? Goldwater, of course, refusing to disavow extremists—and paving the way for Trump to take over the GOP years later. LBJ and the notorious Daisy Ad that was only run once, but that was plenty. It was “controversial,” so news programs reran it, and I saw it, and it scared the bejesus out of me just as it was supposed to. That was the first presidential election in which I was old enough to vote, and of course I voted for Lyndon Johnson, the peace candidate. (Insert bitter smiley face here.)

Lenore Rowntree, in her perceptive review of In the Defense of Liberty (in The British Columbia Review), tells us that she read my memoir, The Bridge, before she read the novel, and they go well together. “I am not suggesting Mason is an alter-ego for the author, but one knows with certainty from reading the memoir that Maillard has lived the life about which he writes in Defense. Reading the two books is greater than the sum of their parts.”

She’s right on both counts: I do know the life I’ve written into the novel, and it’s emphatically not a roman à clef. Both “fact” and “fiction” have Latin roots. A fact, originally, was something that was done, a fiction something that was formed—that is created. Fiction has its own truth, and anyone who writes it knows that.

Reviewing my novel in The Ubyssey, Thomas McLeod writes: “Suicide haunts every corner of this book, as Mason feels unable to go on living as a boy.” Three of my characters are what we would now call nonbinary, but we’re so far back in time that the language to talk about this stuff hadn’t been invented yet. If what you are isn’t even acknowledged to exist, then it’s difficult for you to feel fully human. That’s when suicide whispers in your ear.

McLeod continues: “Keith Maillard, being both queer and a senior citizen, is constantly reappraising and unraveling the standards that repressed his gender identity in his youth. The book is well worth a read, and is a refreshing reminder of the existence of open-minded counter-culturalists who are still standing by their principles.”

Thanks, Thomas.

In the Defense of Liberty is published by Freehand Books.