Author Bill Clegg speaks of his youth in Sharon

SHARON — Bill Clegg’s novel, “Did You Ever Have a Family,” centers on the kind of event most would only experience in a fevered nightmare. 

On the eve of her daughter’s wedding, June watches her home catch fire, and every member of her family perishes in the flames. 

Reeling, June leaves the fictional Wells, Conn., and in her absence, friends, acquaintances and strangers are left to sift through the ashes. Connected by various threads of loss and grief, whispers and petty cruelty, it all seems to spiderweb across the small town. 

“Did You Ever Have a Family” is Clegg’s first foray into fiction, and in an interview over e-mail last week, he said the novel’s origins could be traced back to when he was compiling notes for his memoir, “Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man,” about his experience falling down the dark rabbit hole of crack cocaine addiction. 

“I thought — incorrectly, it turned out — that I’d need to remember and include episodes from my growing up years in Sharon,” said Clegg, who is the son of painter Kathy Clegg. “So while I was writing the memoir I opened a separate file about Sharon, and I would — separate from working on the memoir — write down everything I could remember about the town, even beyond my own experience. So I had family trees and names of roads and restaurants and all sorts of rural gossip. None of that stuff ended up in the memoir, but later when I went back to it, it led me to thinking about the town and its particular mix of rich and working class, locals and weekenders and from that a three-word sentence — ‘She will go’ — happened one day.  

“It’s the first piece of fiction I ever wrote, and I had no idea what it meant. The next thing I wrote was in the voice of a local florist, and she was the first character who began to answer the riddle of who ‘she’ was and where and why she was ‘go’-ing. I wrote those voices like someone listening to an unfolding news report on the radio.”

Those interwoven voices are central to a traveling narrative, creating a layered chorus from those who may live near each other, but exist isolated in secrets and regret. 

“It wasn’t until three or four years into the writing of ‘Did You Ever Have a Family’ that I could begin to see what connected all these lives and the ideas that the arrangement of their stories and voices could convey.”

Clegg said that while writing the novel, which was awarded a spot on the Man Booker Prize longlist in 2015, he traveled back to Sharon. 

“But by the time the novel began, the physicality and make-up of the town of Wells had become its own world. No one in “Did You Ever Have a Family” is modeled on any one person or event. There is a mix of names from my growing up. Many of the roads and buildings and the town Green for example come from Sharon. But anyone holding up the town of Wells to the silhouette of Sharon would go mad trying to trace the parallels.”

Clegg is head of The Clegg Agency in New York City. His 27-year-old client Emma Cline  has made a literary summer splash with her debut novel, “The Girls,” currently sitting on the New York Times Bestseller List (Cline was also profiled in the May issue of Vogue magazine). 

The purely Californian fable is that of a 14-year-old girl who flees the youthful pains of suburban ennui for the distinctly grown-up complications of a 1960s Manson-like cult. 

“I was stunned from the first sentences,” Clegg said of first reading “The Girls.” “The immediacy of the experience described and how powerfully she explores the idea of how vulnerable we can be at certain hours of our young lives, how a few seemingly simple choices made can have such catastrophic and long-lasting impact not just on our own lives but on those of others.”

Clegg is one of more than 30 authors signing copies of their latest books at the 20th Annual Sharon Summer Book Signing on Friday, Aug. 5, from 6 to 8 p.m. Tickets are $35. For more information go to www.hotchkisslibrary.org or call 860-364-5041.

The annual used book sale at the library is the following day from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and ends on Sunday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. (all books on Sunday are half price). Admission at 9:30 a.m. on Saturday is $10; entry is free after 10 a.m. and on Sunday.