Growing up in a three bed/one bath house with nine siblings in Buffalo, New York it was a just the facts, assembly-line type of childhood. However, one day in the late seventies, well into my clamorous teen years, that all changed when my exhausted mom uncharacteristically asked several probing questions about how I was doing, what I wanted of life and how I was going to get there . . . totally confounding me. She was supposed to dish out commands and make declarative statements: Take out the trash . . . Don’t come home unless you’re bleeding. . . Every time you masterbate it’s a hundred-years in purgatory. She wasn't supposed to ask to articulate inward, looking, questions about myself. Self-examination and contemplation, was light years beyond my transactional existence.
Eventually, though, due to a certain amount of aimlessness and failure I did come to consider my mom’s questions and many more of people, time, place and heritage, which have become the basis of the novel Written In The Stars: The Book Of Molly. Seen through the eyes of young Molly Shea it is an exploration of the ways and means of 1979 Irish-Catholic, South Buffalo and an evolving girl’s place in that world. It also has informed my second novel— the gritty, yet tender Leaving Jackson Wolf, a coming of age story which examines the lives of Jackson Wolf and James McDougal—two fringe fifteen year old boys searching for their power in a complicated unforgiving world.
Presently I live in West Seneca, New York with my wife and three college age children. I have a State University of New York background in English and I love trade paperbacks, quiet black mornings and The Ramones.
P.A.Kane
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