Tommy Hays, author of "The Pleasure Was Mine"

On the evolution of my most recent novel, The Pleasure Was Mine, which was recently read on Dick Estell's Radio Reader and was a finalist for the SIBA (Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance) Award in Fiction 2006.

My father died of Alzheimer's seven years ago this past June. A couple of years before he died, I began keeping notes. At first we weren't sure he had Alzheimer's. He hadn't been to the doctor in 35 years, so we had no real frame of reference. My father was wonderful, smart, articulate, warm, very well read, obsessed with Eastern mysticism, a fine writer, and eccentric in a very charming way, and so it was hard to tell where any sort of illness like Alzheimer's started and where his personality left off. Looking back, we realized he had been a master at hiding what he didn't know or what he was forgetting.

These pages that I was writing about my father were more than notes. They were my attempt to render through creative nonfiction some of the interactions, the conversations, the arguments, the dramatic scenes that happened with my father. And the fact that I made them more than notes, and worked on them being scenes as I would work on any scene in any story, using action, dialogue, description, etc, indicates to me that I wasn't just writing them for my benefit. I hoped to one day make this into a book. I'm not sure how many pages I wrote altogether. Somewhere between 150 and 200 pages.

At first it was very helpful and felt right because the worries about my father were so present that to be able to transfer that to the page gave me a little distance, perhaps a sense of some small control. It also gave me a feeling of being extra present and paying extra attention to what I felt certain would be the last years with my father. It might have also given me a little distance from the pain of it all.

Anyway about a year into this memoir and deeper into my father's illness, I stopped the memoir. I had given some of the pages to friends and to my agent. The friends said they liked them, but that's what friends are for. My agent at the time was less enthusiastic, because she said so many people were writing memoirs about Alzheimer's. She suggested I write a novel about Alzheimer's in which the main character wasn't me.

I was at a little bit of a loss as anyone is who gets halfway into a project and finds himself questioning it. I think the interesting thing is that usually I never show a manuscript of a novel to anyone until I've gotten at least an entire rough draft. But with the memoir I was showing early pages. It was almost as if I wanted someone to tell me to try another way.

The whole other thing was that I was tired of the memoir. I was tired of going down to Greenville, struggling to help my mother with my father, then coming back to Asheville and writing down what I had just experienced. It was like reliving the pain. It became monotonous, a kind of duty. The memoir was dragging me down. The other thing that was going on was that my father was just being moved into National Healthcare. A nursing home in Greenville. I wrote a little about his stay there, but then I stopped. And I think that was especially depressing and deadening to write about. The powerlessness of the situation just weighed on every word I wrote. A kind of inertia and resistance set in. It felt like I was trying to write underwater.

So I began thinking about trying a novel. I had had an old man's voice in the back of my mind for a long time. One that I felt I really knew. It was a lot like my great great Uncle Cleve Marshbanks' voice. He would be a hundred and twenty by now if he was still alive. He wasn't educated (unlike just about everybody else in my family), had quit school in the sixth grade and gone to work. He lived with his sister, my aunt Eddie, who was one of the first women in Greenville to go to college. Anyway, it was sort of my uncle's voice that I began with. The more I wrote in his voice, the more it felt right to me. Comfortable, relaxing and I felt something open up. One thing that helped a lot was using humor. With the fiction, I felt freer to find the humor in situations and to perhaps see that even when a family is in crisis, good things can happen, opportunities are created, family can get to know each other in new ways. The result I believe is a book that is in part about Alzheimer's but isn't depressing. As one gerontologist who read the book and found it accurate said, "The truth is that Alzheimer's isn't all bad." And I've heard from so many caregivers who said they found the book acknowledged what they were going through and yet kept them company and gave them hope at the same time.

To read more about The Pleasure Was Mineand other books by Tommy Hays visit his website here.