Ford, 51, is a native of Mississippi. He has a soft drawl. Goes bird hunting. Lives with Kristina, New Orleans’s head of city planning and his wife of 28 years. (They have no children.) Ford had no intention of writing a sequel to “The Sportswriter”–no Updike-like plan to pull a Rabbit out of his hat –but found himself filling notebooks in Bascombe’s voice. “I said. ‘God. I wonder if this isn’t somebody knocking on my door’.”
So he let Bascombe in. Ford knew real estate: he and his wife also own places in Mississippi and Montana. But he invented everything about divorce and fatherhood out of thin air and free-floating sympathy. “Independence Day” took four years to write. Near the end, Ford–who won 1994’s $25,000 Rea Prize for his stories–was so preoccupied that his wife told him to go to New York to work. “I was just a complete a–hole.” Ford admits. “All I wanted to do was work night and day. So in the middle of the winter Kristina told me I needed to leave. I promised myself I would never act like that again.” Ford has no plans for a third Bascombe book, but there’s no crime in hoping. J. G.
