What is based on real life and what is fiction

Ed Burns is one of those actors whose name may not immediately spring to mind, but when you see his face, clips from unforgettable films and television shows immediately spring to mind, from Saving Private Ryan to Entourage.

The 56-year-old actor has built a career as a screenwriter, producer and director of mostly independent projects over the past three decades and can now add novelist work to his resume.

“A Kid From Marlboro Road” (out Sept. 10 from Seven Stories Press, 224 pages, $27.95) is a gripping coming-of-age ode to Burns' own Irish-American childhood. There's enough overlap (dad a cop, Long Island setting) to feel real, while also allowing the author to delve into fantasy through the voice of the 12-year-old, nameless narrator.

“My dad was a cop, my mom actually worked for the FAA (at JFK airport), and my dad's dad was really a piece of shit who beat him and my grandmother,” Burns tells USA TODAY while standing in line at a Los Angeles burger joint after dropping his son (he and former model Christy Turlington have two children) off at college. “But honestly, the best parts of the book are the stuff I got to make up.”

Blending the raw pathos of family friend Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir My Mother's Ashes with the caustic humor of JD Salinger's timeless The Catcher in the Rye, Burns conjures a 1970s middle-class world that makes its prepubescent protagonist groan at almost every opportunity.

“That first Monday at school, some kids, mostly eighth graders, decided I must be a sucker for winning a poetry contest and deserved a smack on the head and a punch on the shoulder, and to top it off, I got a purple nipple – and then they grabbed your nipples and twisted them,” Burns writes. “(But) I was lucky. I didn't get a stupid nickname after I wrote my poem. Instead, I got a pair of dead legs, a purple nipple, and a grandmother who was considering me a priesthood.”

We spoke to Burns about his inspiration and creative process (edited for length and clarity).

Question: Why did you write this novel?

Answer: In film school, I fell in love with coming-of-age stories like They Kissed and They Beat Him (1959) by François Truffaut and thought I could turn that into a screenplay.

I had free time during COVID and decided to tackle this as a novel after realizing it wouldn't work as a screenplay (given the work shutdown during the pandemic). I started by writing it in diary form from the point of view of a 12-year-old. It helped that I spent hours driving our then-14-year-old and his friends to basketball practice, so I felt like I knew how these kids spoke.

Would you like to see this made into a film now?

That would be my dream scenario. I'm glad it was a book first because as an independent filmmaker I'm always thinking about budget when I'm writing and I'm conscious of what (it would cost to shoot) each scene. If the book does well and gets attention, I could see it justifying a bigger budget than I normally have available.

Did you have any memoirs in mind that served as inspiration?

The inspiration was definitely My Mother's Ashes (1996). My father was friends with Frank and I knew his (older) brother Malachy, we had worked together. I read the book and re-read passages and thought, “OK, yes, here's Frank, maybe around my age, writing about his life as a child and this is how he dealt with it,” and that served as a kind of safety net for me.

Was The Catcher in the Rye an influence?

I didn't consciously think about it, but when I was a young boy and reluctant to read fiction, this was a book my parents gave me to give me a kick in the butt to make me fall in love with reading. It was The book for our generation. But I also thought of books like (John Knowles' 1959 novel) Another World and (SE Hinton's 1967 book) The Outsiders. They reminded me that it's OK to tell a story like this from a child's perspective.

Was writing these lines a cathartic experience, especially since some of it is of a personal nature?

Well, at first I thought the book was just going to be about a kid becoming a teenager at the end of the summer, and that confusing time in every kid's life when they're changing and their friends are changing – emotionally, physically, chemically.

But because I wrote it during COVID, I was calling my parents a lot because they were stuck in Florida (and couldn't get back to New York), so after a bit of asking about what Netflix shows they liked to watch, I ended up asking my mom at least one question about her life. And then, wow, we were suddenly on the phone for an hour, maybe reminiscing about the day she graduated high school and how her dad then took her out to dinner at a place in Manhattan.

I knew about her terrible childhood as an orphan in foster care and that her father was an alcoholic, but there were also new memories of her, like riding the 3rd Avenue L elevated train (the subway elevated train) and looking in the beautiful apartment windows and hoping for a better life. And all of that transformed the book into a boy who sees his mother struggling with depression, his parents seemingly headed for divorce, and his brother's life falling apart.

There is a beautiful scene in your novel where the protagonist goes to the big city with his mother, where men pay attention to her and he realizes that she is pretty.

Right, even though I never made this journey with my own mother, I was able to look at my life as a whole as a starting point. It was such a liberating experience.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Ed Burns talks about his debut novel and reveals what is based on his life