Stuart Brody, 2024 Winner of the Grateful American Book Prize, on the Hero Arc in Fiction

Stuart Brody: In any powerful relationship, you move from inspiration to disappointment and then to reconciliation. It’s the arc, it’s the hero’s arc. It’s the arc that every hero plays in any action movie or any psychological drama. It’s always the same. You’re inspired, you get moving, you run into obstacles. In this case, it was my disillusionment with Humphrey because he was supporting a war that I saw no point in, and either did he; and it broke us apart. But the young boy comes to understand that there were factors involved, and he learns to have empathy for this man who was in an excruciating position. Maybe he breached his integrity, but you don’t cast away … discard someone who’s important to you for a mistake, no matter how big. And so the two actually reconcile and they both learn from each other. So that’s the meaning of the book, that’s the power of it. The journey from being inspired to moving through your disappointment, pitfalls through obstacles, mistakes you think you’re never going to get out of it, to picking yourself up, going at it again and learning that some of the people that disappointed you the most are the ones you can learn from. And that’s the power of staying connected.

Narrator: This author interview was produced through a partnership of the Grateful American Foundation and WETA. For more author interviews, please visit AdLit.org.