Richard Ford: 'America beats on you so hard the whole time'

Richard Ford talks about writing his most recent novel Canada. I'm about 3/4 of the way through it and am enjoying it very much.

Well, I started writing the book 20 years ago. I wrote 20 pages and then I set it aside. I am sort of a comer-backer, anyway. But I took this bag of notes and put it in the freezer compartment of my refrigerator. The story was already called Canada and I knew it was about a 16-year-old boy going across the Canadian border to Saskatchewan. I didn't know why he was going there. I didn't know why two parents would have abandoned him, but over those 20 years I would get a little idea about how a person would get in that situation, and write it down and add it to the envelope of notes in the freezer.

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