Bill Leggett: Your new novel, Forgetfulness, explores events and feelings after 9/11. Was this a topic you wanted to write about, or was it simply impossible not to write about it so soon after the event?

Ward Just: It was necessary to write about 9/11 and the war in Iraq but from a particular angle of vision. Hence a love story set in the south of France, where these events are felt as ripples: the drizzle of the day’s news. Then Thomas Railles’s life is affected most profoundly, posing the question: What is to be done? Always realizing, as Thomas does, that his own life has not been blameless.

BL: Forgetfulness references unexpected tragedies, including 9/11 and President Kennedy’s murder. How would you compare these two events in their effect on the American psyche?

WJ: After JFK, America was plunged into mourning. After 9/11, America was plunged into horror and a kind of necessary anger. I think Kennedy’s assassination was an awful psychic blow—not an end to American innocence (America has not been innocent since at least the Civil War) but a sudden appreciation of the awful randomness of events. Grief came to the table and stayed there. The effects of 9/11 will be with us for many decades. The ordinary processes of life have changed utterly, matters such as travel, surveillance of our personal lives, and an atmosphere of apprehension: Where will it happen next?

BL: What drew you to Paris as a part-time home?

WJ: The light, the air, the ambiance, the food, the drink, the laughter. And you can smoke in restaurants. People’s houses, even. The French are libertarian in spirit.

BL: Any change in the way the French view the Americans as a result of US foreign policy?

WJ: The French have not changed. American foreign policy has changed. But they tend to take the long view. Sooner or later the Bush administration will be gone. And, they hope, the brutishness with it. A restoration, in other words, of concern for “the decent opinion of mankind.” Not that the French ever cared overmuch.

BL: Forgetfulness gives vivid detail of an interrogation. Have you ever witnessed one? If not, did you research interrogations or imagine how they are conducted?

WJ: Never saw one. I did not research for the long scene in Forgetfulness. It’s an imagined encounter.

BL: The novel contains the line “…all novels are to some degree autobiographical.” To what degree is Forgetfulness autobiographical?

WJ: I think that line goes on to observe that the trouble is knowing which parts are autobiographical. This is harder than you might think. Imagine a passage worked and reworked a dozen times. What remains? Fiction remains.

BL: In the book, your character Thomas is told by his wife that he will always have his art, and maybe that thing is so large it crowds people out. Is this true of authors as well? Does the love of writing crowd out people and parts of your life?

WJ: Writing is not particularly hard work. Farming, commercial fishing out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, and soldiering—that’s hard work. But it does take a certain emotional toll and does tend to attract obsessive personalities. Trouble is, the process is so mysterious that it’s bootless to talk about. That tends to exclude people. Fortunately, most people—even the nearest and dearest—are utterly uninterested in this process. Lucky for them. Lucky for you.

BL: When writing your novels, do you do much outside reading?

WJ: I always have an open book in my office, the living room, and the bedroom.

BL: I have heard from many writers that they have an unpublished novel in their desk drawer, either because they couldn’t make it work to their satisfaction or it was too personal. Do you have one of these?

WJ: None, alas.

BL: What’s next?