![]() The book ends with Brent on the threshold of a new beginning as he prepares to re-enter society after prolonged hospital stays. They should have asked the question: "How are we going to get this kid back together so he can continue his life?" Setting myself on fire made no more sense to me than it did to them. The psychologists were asking for reasons why I set myself on fire. What would have been the right questions? ![]() In the book, you mention that psychologists kept asking the "wrong questions" while you were in the hospital. Actually, right after I got out of the hospital, I did start writing a novel, but the book was so transparently about me that I stopped. ![]() I was a very outgoing kid, but being in the hospital-being outside of social action for so long-turned me into an observer. How do you think your life would be different if you had not set yourself on fire? Do you think that you still would have become a writer? Later, when I was writing this book, it was like I was thawing out all of those old frozen memories. I didn't feel a lot of things during my hospital stay. Trauma-especially physical trauma-freezes memory. Did those details stay with you, from your adolescence, or did you find they came back to you as you prepared the manuscript for the book? Sometimes, while writing the book, all I had to do was look at one of those Polaroids and entire scenes would come rushing back.ĭetails of your suicide attempt and hospital stay are written with remarkable clarity. There were also a lot of photographs taken of me in the hospital. I didn't have my own journals, but my mother kept a journal while I was in the hospital, and my father wrote newsletters to keep friends and family updated on my progress. ![]() It was all I could do to write 500 words, then I would be emotionally ruined for the rest of the day.ĭid you keep a journal as an adolescent? How did you go about recalling and piecing together the events of your book? When you were writing the book, was it difficult to recreate the traumatic events? Nancy Siscoe heard the show and gave me a call. I read the first chapter of on air during another segment of This American Life. How did you go about finding a publisher? I showed the story to a radio producer, Christina Egloff, and she said, "You've got to write the whole story down and call it The Burn Journals." Brent Runyon: I'd written a version of one of the stories from the book for a radio show called This American Life. ![]()
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