Striking Back owes a debt to the inappropriateness of my mother. She was quite a story teller, alternately funny and sentimental, even maudlin. The saga of her childhood, which she delivered episodically over casseroles at the dinner table, invariably veered to the brutality of her father.

Along with my ever-increasing number of siblings, I would sit with some manner of pasta hanging off my fork, drenched in some manner of sauce, as mother regaled us with detailed accounts of the beatings her father had perpetrated on her mother. These were often presented in novelistic detail: “Then he took his arm and swept everything off the table. It crashed to the floor, and he grabbed grandma by the hair and dragged her through the food and plates and forks and spoons into the bedroom of that cold water flat…”

Mother gripped us with suspense, even as she repeated the same stories. There was nothing like being invested emotionally in characters whom you knew so well.

These tales were utterly appalling, hardly the material that young children should have heard, and yet I have to say – in the spirit of let’s try to find something redemptive – that they helped form me both as a writer and as a person. I developed a deep distaste for bullies, whether at the personal or national level, as well as a strong sense of what constituted compelling storytelling, although little that was gray ever intruded on my mother’s accounts. Years later, I would sort out the gray in psychotherapy when I began to understand the perverse mingling of my mother’s unquestioned love for her children with the violence she directed toward one of my sisters and me.

It followed, of course, that I became intensely interested in the work that my wife undertook as a spousal abuse counselor back in the ‘90s. She and a colleague ran a weekly group for men who had battered their wives or girlfriends. To my knowledge, they did not have same sex batterers in their group; although I knew in general the nature of my wife’s work, she maintained the strict confidentiality of her clients.

That didn’t stop my imagination, sparked by memories of my mother’s stories of my grandmother’s plight. And in the way stories sometimes present themselves, the protagonist of Striking Back, Gwyn Sanders, arrived on roller blades in the heart of the UCLA campus. Why L.A.? I don’t know. I didn’t choose the location, but L.A. and Hollywood turned out to be perfect settings for Striking Back. At least that’s my judgment, now that the tale’s been told.

I did live in Hollywood for long stretches while writing and directing at Paramount Studios on a very successful TV series, Hard Copy. It came as no comfort to me to realize, after having a distinguished career in broadcast journalism – four Emmys for investigative reporting for my on-camera work for NBC News – that I had an uncanny ability to write tabloid TV. It was as if I’d been born to do it. 

But the story that became Striking Back didn’t appear right after I left Hollywood for the mountain home I had in Oregon at the time; characters and plots often don’t arise in such linear fashion. It took a good ten years before Gwyn started blading down the wide pathways of the UCLA campus, and more than a year to write the mystery and romance that formed the heart of the novel.

But the origins of Striking Back were easy for me to divine. They began decades ago at a dinner table with my mother’s own stories.

 

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Read an excerpt of Striking Back at : STRIKING BACK

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