Interview with Tom Casey, Amazon Bestselling Author of Unsettled States
Tom Casey was born in New York City in 1950 and grew up near the beach in Rye. He graduated from Rye High School in 1968, after which he was both a military and commercial airline captain. He turned to fiction novel writing, and has published three novels – the last of which came out July 1, 2024, called Unsettled States. The title reached the top spot on both Amazon’s ‘New Releases’ and ‘Best Sellers’ in the United States the following week. MyRye.com interviewed Casey recently to ask him about his unique path to literary success and his reaction to early reviews of Unsettled States.
MyRye.com: “Please provide a brief introduction to our readers – who are you, what is your connection to Rye, etc.”
Casey: “My name is Tom Casey and I was born in 1950, the eldest of eight children. My parents moved to Westchester in the early fifties. I grew up near the beach in Rye. The beach became a big part of our life in summer, and that gave me a sense of the sea and adventure. When I was older I learned to sail; and in high school, flying continued the theme of expanding horizons. Flying airliners has given my life an otherworldly dimension, a storybook quality. And coming from a large family can’t help but deepen understanding of personalities and how transactions take place among human beings — subterfuge and conniving are endless among children. Though I was also aware of a code that developed spontaneously among us based on fair play.”
What inspired you to turn to authorship after spending so many years as a pilot, both with the US Air Force and commercially?
“For some reason, I was always moved to write. For high school students about to graduate, job applicants, aspiring attorneys and diplomats, or anyone who has written a love letter: the struggle for accurate expression can be a bittersweet challenge, but it must be taken up. All of society depends on it. Written expression is the oil in social machinery. Failure to make a coherent point can be devastating to purpose. To sum it up succinctly: language matters. Proper language is important, it is powerful. But, like flying, writing well is also exhilarating. The pursuit of great pleasure with an acceptance of failure and pain. The problem is it takes a fiendishly long time to write a novel properly. If you can. All of my instincts seem drawn to that kind of challenge.”
What separates this novel from your first two? How do you feel your experience as a novelist has grown from your first publication to your uber-successful third?
“Unsettled States is my third published novel, published earlier this month on July 1. It has received widely favorable notice, but I would not call it ‘uber-successful,’ though I wish for that, of course. It is too soon. With respect to previous work, writing is a journey that never ends. Paul Auster called it an illness. I would say that serious writing is more of an affliction. Writing seriously is a habit that you don’t move away from. My novels that have been written stand as signposts for unwritten work ahead. Other novels will come but there is no how or when. The difficulties are great, and, to be worth it, the satisfactions must also be great. Also, there is a lot of mysterious unconscious input from the mind dealing with challenges from the page. Hemingway wasn’t kidding when he said, ‘Sometimes I write as well as I can. Sometimes I write better than I’m able.’ It is always kind of a surprise when you get it right.”
Your first two books were based on pilots – although fictional, were those characters based on either you or someone you know, even if loosely?
“In my view a novel is always autobiographical. A novelist by definition is in love with life, and writing is always part genius and part craft. To make a novel is a writer’s way of articulating his experience in life by means of analogy and metaphor. Was I ever a cross-dressing Peeping Tom with a mother issue? Emphatically not. Do such people exist? Yes. Can their stories be useful in the fabric of a novel that seeks to explore behavior and contradiction? Absolutely. Growth as a writer of fiction comes as a symptom that feels freer in mental constructions that are useful for story. A writer grows comfortable with the veracity of imagination, and less reliant on personal experience.”
Did you know that Unsettled States would be such a hit? When you were writing it, did the words flow in a special way, or are you completely taken aback by its early success?
We’ll talk in a year about success, if you mean money. That the book was written at all, is success. To be published at all is success. The book will last, of that I am sure, and that’s success. Zillions of dollars would not change my life at all, but would anyone say no to it?
‘When I was writing, did the words flow in a special way?’ That is a very good question. It took 14 years to write Unsettled States. One chapter took me six years to resolve. I will acknowledge that writing about Bradley and his mother and other aspects of his life and psychoanalysis were sometimes very pleasurable for the certainty I had about them as characters. Sometimes the writing did flow effortlessly. The muse is chronically fickle, however. You accept that it happens but you never rely on it.
In order to rid myself of certain unknown influences hurting my life, I entered orthodox Freudian psychotherapy just before I was furloughed from the airline during the breakup of my second marriage. In the span of two months I suddenly had no job, no money, no marriage, no home, and my writing was hopeless. Yet I made a conscious decision to write the novel I wanted to write; I didn’t want to work for a newspaper or write for magazines, or any of that. The problem was that I had no idea of how to write a novel, and even if I had talent, which was not at all clear, I knew it would take a long time to make it happen. Yet, I had a crazy kind of faith in myself. I entered analysis to find out if I was delusional. It turns out that I’m okay and you are probably not!
Thank you Tom!
Tom Casey is scheduled to speak at the Rye Free Reading Room on Thursday, July 25. More info about Rye’s latest bestselling author is available at tomcaseynyc.com and at heresy-press.com. He also co-produced Flying Boat, a documentary, which is currently out on Amazon Prime.
