Give It Up For Cormac McCarthy

On 2008, The Oprah Show led an interview to the author of The Road, Cormac McCarthy, making it his first appearance on a television interview. It lasted about 13 minutes, in which Oprah asked McCarthy questions about him as a writer and about his book. Some of his answers were surprising and new to me, while others were expected. 

The first surprise, that answered some question about The Road, was when he told Oprah that he had a 4-year-old son when he started writing his book, and not only did McCarthy dedicate the book to his son, but he considered him his “co-writer.” McCarthy’s initial inspiration for writing The Road happened when he was standing in front of a window, and his son was staring at the city outside. Without warning, McCarthy started thinking of how that city would look like in various years, and he imagined some fires burning in the mountains. He wrote a couple of pages describing that, but only four years later did he realize that it could become a whole book.

It is important to acknowledge that the author decided to leave the names of the characters unknown, so that it could refer to any father and son in the world. It helps prove that the apocalypse could happen to anyone, no matter how perfect their lives were prior to the event. Even though the author probably wrote originally thinking about the man and the boy to be him and his son, all readers think of it as themselves and their fathers or children. 

Something else that I found unexpected from the interview was when Oprah asked Cormac McCarthy what people  should see in the book, because even though it is just about a man and a boy on a road, there are many things that can be inferred from it. Surprisingly, McCarthy answered that the reader was invited to read onto it anything they wanted, but that for him, it was only about the man and the boy. We as readers are always analyzing and over-analyzing everything we read, and even if most times it means something, there are some authors who write pretty straightforward things, meaning nothing more than what is literally said. He seemed like a simple author, writing a simple book.

McCarthy also talked about his personal life, and how he had absolutely no money until one day someone knocked at his door with a check. He said he hadn’t cared about his poverty. When asked if he believed in luck, McCarthy said that he thought there were luckier people than others in the world, but that luck wasn’t permanent, and it could leave you at any moment. 

The most important discoveries I made about the author and the book while watching the interview were that The Road meant exactly what it said, and that McCarthy had written it as a “love story” to his son. He had talked about how having a son at an old age made you appreciate him more, and I could see that he really did love his son a lot. It is always useful to see the author in real life, because it adds to the general feeling and image left after reading a book.