Richard Price to Terry Gross

On the car radio as I did my shopping rounds in Montrose, Richard Price was talking about his life as a novelist to Terry Gross on "Fresh Air." The conversation was already under way but what I heard made me think, "Why haven't I read any of his books? The announcer said at the end that the program had been recorded years ago and was included in a celebration marking the 20th anniversary of Terry's gift to radio, her always fresh and astute interviews on "Fresh Air." Price said in growing up in the Bronx, he knew only Catholics, Jews and Italians and until he went to college he had never met anybody from the Midwest, never met a WASP person. In the Bronx he was a rare specimen--a kid who grew up and went to college. It changed his life, transformed him, and made him desperate to become a writer. Noting that a writer's best subject is what he knows best, he knew he had to put down his early life on the Bronx's mean streets. "But what could I say, after Philip Roth?" he said. He had a point. What more could he say about growing up that Roth hasn't said already about life in New Jersey in 1942 in The Plot Against America? What he did also say though was that he always knew he would be an artist and that he knew that he could not go through life undistinguished.