Listen "Larry Bograd: on Family, Grief, and Writing with Compassion /Ep 4145"
Episode Synopsis
Larry Bograd is an award-winning, widely translated author whose works have been published by Farrar/Straus, Harper and Macmillan. In addition to a UK edition, his books were translated into Japanese, French, Swedish, Danish and German. His first book, Felix in the Attic, won the Bank Street College Irma Simonton Black "Best Book for Children" award, and his novel Los Alamos Light was selected as a UNESCO Book for Peace. He has an extensive backlist and several anthologized short stories. His success as a children's book and young adult author was cut short by censorship and book banning because he wrote honestly about childhood poverty and adolescent sexuality. When it became clear that no publisher would promote his work, he turned to playwriting, screenwriting and documentary filmmaking. He lives in Denver, Colorado. Blood Flow is a dual memoir that travels back and forth in time, recounting the suicide of author Larry Bograd's physician father just two weeks after Larry's bar mitzvah, as well as Larry's unexpected triple bypass surgery in his early fifties. Over decades, Larry interviewed relatives and friends of his father, Nathan, to explore Nathan's life and the trauma of his death on those he left to grieve. During his investigation, Larry traveled to his father's Eastern European birthplace and Trieste, Italy, where Nathan served in the Occupation Medical Corps after World War II and came home a troubled man. Larry also obtained medical records from Nathan's three hospitalizations for depression, piecing together the story of his father, who died young. His search was interrupted by his heart surgery, creating an uneasy connection between how his father died and Larry's cardiac disease. Blood Flow encompasses a wide array of narratives — growing up in suburban Denver in the 1960s, family secrets, suicide, shock and grief, the quest to understand one's parent, international travel, unearthing previously unknown medical records, and interviews with relatives — while consistently focusing on its central theme: the necessity and challenge of grasping a troubled immigrant's life and the American child he left to mourn. Website
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