This interview has been edited for length and clarity. How growing up poor, Black and gay fueled Brian Broome’s memoir ‘Punch Me Up to the Gods’.It took Chris Stuck 20 years to get published.At 91, writer Hilma Wolitzer lost her husband to COVID-19 and began writing again ‘to see what happens next’.‘The Other Black Girl’ author talks race, diversity and influence of ‘Goosebumps’ and ‘Get Out’.Lauren Tarshis’s ‘I Survived’ series for kids tackles hard topics like 9/11, war and disasters.Now, 15 years after that day on the roof, Antrim has revisited it for his new book, “One Friday in April” that, like William Styron’s classic “Darkness Visible,” recounts his experience with a brutal frankness that he hopes can engender empathy and even hope for others in the same situation. Antrim, the award-winning author of three novels, writes that “I felt as if I had been dying all my life” but as “the world seemed to scream” on this day, he came closer then ever before to suicide.Īntrim, who had long struggled with his mental health, was in the throes of a crisis sparked by his mother’s death and his attempt to come to terms with their tumultuous relationship in his memoir, “The Afterlife.” It took months of hospitalization, therapy and electroconvulsive therapy for him to even begin to regain his footing, and then more time to find the right medication that would stabilize his life. Donald Antrim was on the roof of his Brooklyn building, desperate and close to the edge, both metaphorically and literally.

One Friday in April by Donald Antrim