The disclaimer on the copyright page indicates that Painting The Invisible Man is based on a known event.

An Interview With The Author

The disclaimer on the copyright page indicates that Painting The Invisible Man is based on a known event.

Yes, that's true . The story is influenced by the 1976 murder of my father. Like the character Anna, I was researching the archives of my hometown newspaper for a client, and I made a keying error. I accidentally charged ten articles instead of one to my credit card. After retrieving my client's news article, I began typing in names of people I knew that still lived in Syracuse. Why I typed my father's name, I'll never know.

What did you find?

I found thirty-seven articles from the 1990s that referenced my father. It wouldn't have been all that strange had my father not died in 1976.

Was there a particular headline that caught your attention?

There was one that mentioned FBI surveillance tapes of the man who was acquitted of my father's murder, bragging about getting away with murder twenty years before. At that moment I knew I had to explore this story.

Why did you choose to write this as a contemporary historical fiction rather than as a memoir?

After the James Frey debacle, memoir is a fearsome word. For much of the story I had to rely on my memory and the recollections of people involved with the trials. Fiction gave me the freedom to create a compelling story.

Anna, in her youth, was rather an odd kid. Were you?

Oh yeah. I was very peculiar. Anna's accoutrements were most definitely fashioned after mine. I never understood my strange childhood ways until I began writing this book. Now it all makes sense.

The character Sophia, Anna's cousin, is married to the defense attorney, Greg Haynes. It was an interesting twist. Fiction of fact?

(Laughing) Certainly you've heard the phrase, "Truth is stranger than fiction." That is so very true . My cousin Terri, who was just a kid when my father died, did marry the defense attorney several years later.

So Anna's quandaries mirrored your own?

Yes. Like Anna, I had to confront a lot of intensely challenging and personal issues. Truths about my father, truths about myself, truths about people I once thought were trustworthy. Like Anna, I struggled with writing this story. It took me five years. Of course, most of that time was spent avoiding it. But once I made up my mind, it spewed forth like a volcanic eruption. As painful as the process was at times, in the end it was tremendously cathartic and healing.

I think the fact that this story is steeped in truth is compelling. Do you think people who don't know you will find it to be so?

Absolutely. I think fans of The Soprano's and this genre will find Painting The Invisible Man intriguing. It offers an inside look at what it's like to grow up in this kind of family. Most of us aren't privileged like Meadow Soprano or grow up like the Gotti's.