A Great Escape: A Guest Post by Edward Burns
From starring in Saving Private Ryan to directing The Brothers McMullen, you’re probably familiar with the work of Ed Burns. Actor and filmmaker Burns has penned an exclusive essay for B&N readers on the inspiration for A Kid from Marlboro Road, and how he found the time to accomplish his lifelong dream of writing a book.
Hardcover $27.95
A Kid from Marlboro Road
A Kid from Marlboro Road
By Edward Burns
In Stock Online
Hardcover $27.95
An Irish-American family comes to life through the eyes of a 12-year-old boy in this debut novel by actor-filmmaker Ed Burns.
An Irish-American family comes to life through the eyes of a 12-year-old boy in this debut novel by actor-filmmaker Ed Burns.
During the early days of the Covid lockdown, those of us in the movie business had no idea when we’d be able to get back on set to make a film. So, after 30 years of writing screenplays exclusively, I decided it was the perfect time to pursue a goal I had to write a novel.
I thought the book, A Kid from Marlboro Road, was going to be about the adventures of a 12-year-old boy and his group of friends growing up on Long Island in the summer of 1980. With his 13th birthday falling on the last day of summer, his innocence would end as his hormones kicked in and he and his buddies became teenagers and, likely, turned into assholes who hated their parents in the way that all teenagers are assholes who hate their parents.
While writing these early drafts, I was painfully aware of the toll the pandemic was taking on my parents, who were unable to travel home to Long Island, trapped in their condo in Florida. I started calling my mother every day to keep her company. After a few weeks of daily discussions about what they watched on Netflix and what they ate for dinner, I started asking about her life. Every day I’d start the call with a new question. What do you remember about your high school graduation, your first job in the city, your first date with my father, your life at home in the Bronx with your father, and seeing Frank Sinatra in Times Square? We’d sometimes be on the phone for hours as she told me these stories and it was a great escape for both of us during those difficult days.
What I didn’t anticipate is that those trips down memory lane would shape and transform the novel I was writing. Her reflections about being a young mother, inspired the central tension (and heart) of the story. The book was now a relationship between a sensitive kid, both eager and afraid to grow up, and his mother, battling depression and the prospect of divorce, and mourning the loss of her son’s childhood. The 12-year-old hero, of course, has a difficult time making sense of his mother’s sadness and depression. And he is equally troubled that his parents seem to be headed toward divorce. But they’re Catholic and it’s 1980. So, instead, they suffer quietly because in their house and in their neighborhood, nobody talks about those things, but children, of course, feel the tension.
For this boy and his mother, the marker of his 13th birthday carries a certain melancholy, about the passage of time and innocence, but also perhaps the prospect for a new connection, between an adolescent boy soon to be a young adult and his devoted mother.