When many members of the Class of 2014 read Ron Currie Jr.’s book “Everything Matters!” this summer, they may not have realized that the “very very strange life” of the novel’s protagonist is based in part on the author’s own experiences.
Currie, whose book “Everything Matters!” was required summer reading for incoming freshmen, spoke at Baldwin Auditorium Saturday about his past experiences and how they related to his book. A strange series of events in his life inspired the apocalyptic novel that was ultimately selected out of the more than 70 nominations submitted to the University.
Currie grew up as a “blue collar lunch pail kid” in central Maine and became interested in writing at a young age. Reading and writing served as an escape from difficult financial circumstances, Currie told a crowd of a few hundred students.
But despite heading to Clemson University, Currie dropped out in 1993 and worked as a short-order cook, writing whenever he had spare time. Several years later, Currie said he worried that he might have made the wrong choice.
“I realized pretty early on that I didn’t need to go to college to accomplish what I wanted to do, but after [a few years] I realized that I made the wrong decision,” Currie said. “I had a... life crisis at 25 and decided that if I didn’t sell my first story by 26, I would stop writing. Two weeks before [then], I sold my first story.”
Currie said he began working on “Everything Matters!” even before he started his first published book, a collection of short stories titled “God is Dead.”
Currie said much of his inspiration for the fictional “Everything Matters!” came from the real world.
“There’s certainly a good deal of my life in this book,” Currie said. “Every character is analogous to somebody in my life.”
Currie added that while his father had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, he was getting home and transcribing his days into the book. Even now, he sometimes has a difficult time reading those passages, he said.
One character in particular was drawn from a man Currie met while working as a cook in a children’s circus. While with his cousin at a Hampton Inn, Currie said a man revealed his plan to strap a bomb to his wheelchair and roll into a Social Security building. Currie said he used that experience verbatim in his novel.
Although Currie said “Everything Matters!” was the most autobiographical work he’s ever written, he added that “fiction is fiction.” He drew on his experiences, but much of the novel is centered around hypothetical apocalypse. For example, John “Junior” Thibodeau, the novel’s protagonist, is a hyper intelligent boy who is born knowing that the world will end in 36 years.
“Part of the reason why Junior is as smart as he is is because he has the advantage of this foreknowledge and voices in his head,” Currie said.
To some students, hearing Currie’s stories made “Everything Matters!” more enjoyable.
“It was interesting to hear his story behind the book because it was so eccentric,” freshman Samantha Sebastian said.
But some students liked their understanding of the book without knowledge of its conception. Freshman Nick Prey said he disagreed with the way that Currie encouraged students to think about the book, but added that it was interesting how relevant all the people in his life were to its plot.
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