"Electricity was rationed, so the great monuments weren't lit. Still, he could see sparks of moonlight on the Seine, and the towers and spires of Notre-Dame etched in black against the stars, and the comforting flicker of candles in the apartment houses on one side of the Rue Guynemer with the locked gates of the Luxembourg Gardens on the other, and down a deserted stretch of the Boulevard Montparnasse, the light in the windows of Le Select, an all-night cafe and a haven for les vagabondes nocturnes."
Both Julian and Kendall are haunted by wartime experiences, which Golden leaks out slowly. "Writers are always asking questions that readers want answered. It's the treasure hunt mentality: I want to find the prize," he explains. Was he anxious about writing characters of different races and genders? His answer is swift and unambiguous. "Not for a moment. That's the moral aspect of being a novelist. The more different people you can become, the more compassionate you can become."
Nevertheless, he puts these words into Garland's mouth: "White people don't have a clue what it is to be a colored. Not one damn clue." Here as elsewhere, he uses period-accurate language, including such mouth-friendly slang as "The band was cookin'. And Eddie and me got boiled as owls." Golden also writes juicy sex scenes and unapologetically romantic plot twists. His turf is the intersection of love story and history.
Does he approach novels and nonfiction differently? "Narrative is narrative. The only difference is you've got to look things up when you're doing nonfiction," says Golden. "When you pick up a history book, for every sentence you read, the person who wrote it has probably read five or six books. What informs nonfiction is a lifetime of work."
An early illness may have nudged him toward literature. Home sick for a week, Golden binge-read the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books. His sister wrote a Nancy Drew-inspired book at age 12, and read him selections aloud.
At college, he devoured Hemingway and Fitzgerald while majoring in philosophy. "I was interested in the history of ideas and how they change," Golden says. In 1973, during Christmas break, he saw James Earl Jones in “The Iceman Cometh” and came out determined to write. "I went back to Albany and read everything in the library that had Eugene O'Neill's name on it." But he decided playwriting was "not pragmatic—I wanted to make a living as a writer." After a brief stint as an aide on a psych ward, he started writing for magazines, worked as an advertising copywriter, and created five interactive novels for a joint project by IBM and Bantam Books. He spent two years in Silicon Valley, moving back east when his mother was diagnosed with cancer.
Back in Albany, he wrote for Capital Region magazine, eventually becoming its Managing Editor. When a former professor recommended him to write a biography of Max Fisher, "I thought, 'Who the hell is Max Fisher?'" Golden reports. He soon found out. One of the world's richest men, the octogenarian practiced private diplomacy on an international scale. "Max was the reason I got to interview all those people," Golden says of the heads of state on his resume. Between all these travels, Golden wrote an early version of Comeback Love. At 850 pages, the manuscript didn't sell. He set aside the '60s-themed love story for a decade, then revised extensively. When it still didn't land a publisher, he brought it to Susan Novotny, owner of Albany's The Book House and Troy's Market Block Books, who was launching an imprint called Staff Picks Books. That small-press edition caught the attention of sales rep John Muse, who recommended it to his employers at Simon & Schuster; agent Susan Golomb sold it at auction.
Both Comeback Love and Wherever There Is Light have attracted Hollywood interest, and Golden is hard at work on another historical novel, about a deejay who broadcasts rock 'n' roll into the Soviet Union and winds up in a Cold War intrigue.
