Free Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders by Jennifer Finney Boylan Page A

friendship has weathered many transitions—not only mine from male to female, but Rick and Barb’s, from parents to grandparents. In June of 2011, Rick and I sat on the sun porch of the Russos’ house in Camden, Maine, to talk about parenthood and fiction.

    J ENNIFER F INNEY B OYLAN : Rick, a lot of your readers probably think they know your father because your novels frequently have a kind of brilliant but feckless middle-aged man at its center. And whether it’s The Risk Pool or Nobody’s Fool or Empire Falls , I think there is a certain “Russo Man.”
    R ICHARD R USSO : Right. The rogue male.
    JFB: How close is that to your father?
    RR: My father was a man of just enormous charm. He had the ability to walk into a room and make everybody happy, just by his presence.Women in particular, he had a way of making … especially women who maybe once had been beautiful but weren’t anymore … he just had a way of making older women, sometimes elderly women … he would compliment them and charm them and just make them feel … you could just see their faces light up, you know, when Jimmy was around. He had that ability to just charm everybody. He was an incredibly generous man, too. Whenever he was around. But the problem with him was always not being around.
    JFB: Why was he not around? I mean, he married your mother. How long had they been married when you came into the picture?
    RR: Well, he married just before he shipped overseas. And he came home a different man. You don’t land on the beaches in Normandy and make it all the way through France and on all the way to Berlin and come back the person you were when you left. I think that my mother and father, before he left, were kind of on the same page about what they might have wanted the shape of their marriage [to] be. But by the time he came back, he had changed and she hadn’t. My mother, to another extent, would never change. She was, even deep into her eighties, a woman who looked at the world in essentially the same way. Whereas my father came home with very little tolerance for any manner of bullshit. He was celebrating the fact that he was alive.
    So the last thing in the world he wanted was any kind of responsibility. When other soldiers came back and took advantage of the GI Bill, or put a down payment on a house, or started having kids and settling down, he just wanted no part of any of that, and my mother’s point with him always was that it’s time. She said, “Can’t you see? Look around you. Everybody else is growing up. Everybody else is coming into parenthood, everybody else has at least some ambitions as to what the rest of their lives are going to be like. Time for us to just do what everybody else is doing.” And my father just wasn’t in it, and he never would be.
    He said, “I didn’t care about you at all. There was a poker game to go to. The track was there.”
    JFB: How old were you when he said that?
    RR: Well, I was probably in my late twenties, early thirties. I wasgoing back [to Gloversville, New York] summers to work construction and save money for the next year of college.
    JFB: It doesn’t sound like he was saying it particularly apologetically.
    RR: No! No. I mean, there was an element of apology in it, in the sense that he said, you know, if I had to do things all over again I wouldn’t have done it exactly that way, but he’d come to the conclusion that my mother was just batshit. “I wasn’t going to live with your mother!”
    He said, “I knew you were around and I knew I had responsibilities, but it was just easy on a day-to-day basis to forget, just easy to forget. There was always something going on.”
    JFB: What did you learn from your father when he was around? Your novels lead me to suspect that now and again he would show up and take you off on an adventure of some kind, whether you’re fishing, or …
    RR: Well, I mean, part of it was negative, and some of it was very, very positive indeed. On the