Fictionaut Blog

T.C. Boyle (The Human Fly, Talk Talk, The Women) kicks off Line Breaks, a new regular feature in which accomplished authors introduce and share their first published stories with the Fictionaut community. You can read “The OD & Hepatitis RR or Bust,” originally published in North American Review in 1972, on Fictionaut.

My first published story, which was accepted the year before I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and which came out during my first semester there, dealt, in an imagistic and fragmented way, with a scene I knew from experience.  Some of this material–or, that is, material suggested by that scene–seeped into Drop City (2003) and then, when I wrote the stories that would comprise Tooth and Claw (2004), into the last story of that book, “Up Against the Wall.”