a sort of homecoming

LIFESTYLE & ARTS A SORT OF HOMECOMING NEW TRIER TOWNSHIP HIGH SCHOOL ALUMNUS SHANNON BURKE REIMAGINES HIS WILMETTE HOMETOWN IN HIS LATEST BOOK.

BY GREGG SHAPIRO THE NORTH SHORE WEEKEND

Wilmette native and New Trier Township High School Class of 1984 alumnus is a busy guy. In addition to writing and producing the Netflix series Outer Banks (a series he co-cre ated), he is also a prolific author with four books to his credit. His fourth and latest, due out this month, is The Brother Years (Pantheon)—set in the North Shore suburb of Seneca (a thinly veiled Wilmette), during the late 1970s. Narrator Willie guides us through his challenging teen years which involved a tough father, a tougher older brother, and all the calamities you can imagine, and then some. There’s even a Chekhovian moment where a gun introduced in the first act definitely goes off later. Burke was kind enough to answer a few questions for The North Shore Weekend in advance of the book’s publication.

I apologize for beginning with such an obvious question, but seeing as how The Brother Years is a novel, I have to ask if you come from a large family or are an only child fictionalizing a large family?

I know some novels are entirely fictional. I tend to write books that feel almost like memoirs. All the family details are totally true. I grew up in Wilmette. Almost all the stories, that we were working and…

What about the sinking of the boat?

The sinking of the boat is not true. There is a corollary to that. My father bought a Porsche. Making it a boat (in the novel) was just more picturesque, but it's basically the same idea. Just completely out of the blue, so impractical. When I look back on it, I say, “What was he thinking?” It just seemed so insane. I did spend a lot of time on the water. Later, we did have a Hobie Cat and I sunk it. I was rescued by the Coast Guard four times, so I have had lots of experi ence sinking or being rescued from desperate situations.

Where do you stand in terms of the family birth order?

I'm the second child (of four). There are three boys; the last one’s a girl. It's a roman a clef. My siblings would say there are lots of things in there that are not true. That's true; but emotionally, there’s probably almost nothing in there that doesn't have its corollary in reality is what I would say.

Have any of your family members read The Brother Years?

Oh, yeah, they all read it.

What do they think of it?

It’s complicated. They had different reactions. There's a lot of specific things where they said, “Well, that wasn't true.” Or they would just say, “It wasn't really that bad,” or they would laugh about some things. I would say to them, “I’m a fiction writer and the message from this is true, but it was just more fun to write about it in a more dramatic way. As a writer you just start bending things around to make them fit.

Are they all still talking to you?

Yeah, they're all still talking to me. I've been writing now for 35 years. There are all kinds of things that they’ve read, and they just go along with it sometimes. This (book) was different because it was about them. They were a little guarded. My younger sister … I was really close to her … but she's

Shannon Burke PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF PAOLO BOVILACQUE not in the book that much. She was so much younger. When you're that young you don't make anything happen. You have things happen to you. If you’re not affecting the action, your input ends up getting washed out. When I was writing it, there were lots of things left on the floor. You cut it out because you want to keep the pages turning. There was stuff with her where it seems like she wasn't that important, and that actually wasn't true. In reality, my older brother Mike and my younger brother Ian were sort of a team. I touch on this where my dad's frustrated and he's disciplining all of us, but particularly my older brother, and it flowed down through the rest of the kids. Ian teamed up with Mike to get out of his way, and then Erin and I would team up, and that’s not in there; it's not relevant to the story. Instead, I