A loss-filled decade in his 20s – including the “traumatic” death of his parents – improved best-selling crime author Harlan Coben’s writing.
“I had quite a bit of tragedy in my 20s,” Coben reflects in this week’s Big Issue, which goes on sale today (6 January). “Things moved along fairly smoothly until then, I led a fairly normal American suburban life, but I did something like seven eulogies that decade. My dad died, my mom died and a lot of people in my life died.
“So that probably also shaped me. Tragedy is a very cruel but effective teacher. I think that helped push me and made my writing better.”
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Coben’s father died of a heart attack at the age of 59 in 1988. “My father’s death is still the most traumatic,” he says. “Maybe because it was the first one. It came out of nowhere.” Coben previously wrote about his dad’s shock passing just three days before his college graduation in a moving piece for New York Times in 2003.
“I’ve come to the conclusion with grief that it’s like you lose a limb, right? You lost your arm. You can learn to go on without that arm, you’re going to learn to do things with the other arm and still have a happy, productive life. But that arm’s not growing back.”
Eight of Coben’s novels have now been developed into TV series. The latest adaptation, Missing You, premiered on Netflix on New Year’s Day.
