Park Slope writer Tom Rayfiel isn’t planning on leaving Brooklyn anytime soon. No way. In fact, he’s got a book coming out next week that should be a popular choice for Park Slope book groups and should cause quite the buzz on Park Slope Parents.
Tom is reading from his new book PARALLEL PLAY on January 16th at Barnes and Noble at 7:30 p.m.
The book, which is gathering fantastic reviews, is the third novel he’s written about his very compelling female protagonist, Eve. Here’s Tom (from the Random House website) in an interview with novelist Don Caron.
INTERVIEWER: Do you believe women think and react in radically different ways than men do?
TOM RAYFIEL: I’ll let Marron,one of the characters in the book, answer: “I don’t believe there’s any difference between male and female. I mean, they’re useful distinctions, for bathrooms in restaurants and stuff like that. But they’re artificial. They’re imposed on us by society. Really we’re this complex mixture of both."
That, it seems to me, with all the problems it presents, is still a more fruitful approach than to regard the opposite sex as some fundamentally unknowable “other” only capable of being depicted from without…My understanding is basically this: Inside every straight middle-aged man is a sixteen-year-old girl struggling to get out. (My female side just happened to emerge in a book and not on Vesey Street at four A.M.) By concentrating on the aspects of my personality that society deems “feminine,” I was able to discern a pattern, and finally a character, a voice, that was myself and yet not myself.
As for special difficulties or sensitivities, yes, I do show my work to my wife and other women and ask, “Is my slip is showing?” I don’t always take their advice, though. There are as many different women as there
are people…Eve was a great
way to escape the hackneyed concerns of what a man setting out to write is often faced with, that barren, overgrazed field. For me, she was like a scraper, peeling the paint off flaking surfaces, getting down to something more structural and load-bearing. The wood. The wall.