Q: Agent Wolgast becomes a surrogate father to Amy. Is he modeled after you at all?
JC: He is probably the character who is closest to me. He’s more brokenhearted than I am, of course, because he has to replace a daughter who died. But I’d like to think I’d do the things he did under the same circumstances. I think I’d be very happy spending a year alone with my daughter on a mountaintop, playing board games and reading old books. One of my favorite moments in Shakespeare occurs in King Lear, when Lear is arrested with Cordelia and expresses his happiness that, after everything terrible thing that’s happened, the two of them are going to jail together; at that moment, she is all he needs.
Q: In The Passage, you write, “So, really, when it came down to it: how much of Project NOAH was really just one grieving man sitting in a basement, trying to undo his wife’s death?” Does Dr. Jonas Lear deserve forgiveness after what he unleashed on the world?
JC: Don’t we all deserve forgiveness? I hope we do; I believe we do. Forgiveness says as much about the character of the person bestowing it as the person receiving it. Learning to forgive may be the most difficult of human acts, and the closest thing to divinity, whatever you decide that is.
For my children.
No bad dreams.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For advocacy, encouragement, counsel, inspiration, expertise, friendship, camaraderie, patience, shelter, sustenance, and the general tossing of meat through the bars, thanks and ponies to: Ellen Levine and Claire Roberts at Trident Media Group; Mark Tavani and Libby McGuire at Ballantine Books; Gina Centrello, president of the Random House Publishing Group; Bill Massey at Orion; the spectacular publicity, marketing, and sales teams at Ballantine and Orion; Rich Green at Creative Artists Agency; Michael Ellenberg and Ridley Scott at Scott Free Productions; Rodney Ferrell and Elizabeth Gabler at Fox 2000; my brilliant and intrepid readers, Jenny Smith, Tom Barbash, Jennifer Vanderbes, and Ivan Strausz; my many wonderful colleagues and students at Rice University; Bonnie Thompson; John Logan; Alex Parsons; Andrea White and The House of Fiction; ACC, best boy ever; IAC, the girl who saves the world; Leslie, Leslie, Leslie.
ALSO BY JUSTIN CRONIN
The Summer Guest
Mary and O’Neil
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in New England, JUSTIN CRONIN is the award-winning author of The Summer Guest and Mary and O’Neil. Having earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Cronin is now a professor of English at Rice University and lives with his family in Houston, Texas.
THE TWELVE by Justin Cronin
The sequel to the New York Times bestselling novel The Passage.
Coming October 16, 2012, but available for pre-order now.
www.EnterthePassage.com
www.Facebook.com/EnterthePassage
A Ballantine Hardcover and eBook
The Passage Page 100