T.C. Boyle: Is There Still Hope?

Thomas Coraghessan Boyle has written widely read books such as World’s End, The Tortilla Curtain, Dr. Sex, Water Music, The Road to Wellville and—so far published only in Germany—No Way Home. His works have been translated into two dozen languages, and some have been adapted for film. This is the the freely accessible original English version of the podcast. An AI-translated version is available exclusively to ZEIT podcast subscribers. A free trial subscription is available at https://www.zeit.de/podcastabo. T.C. Boyle was born in New York and grew up in precarious circumstances: both of his parents, immigrants from Ireland, were alcoholics; as a young man he struggled with drug problems himself and barely managed to finish school. During his studies, he discovered his love of writing. Boyle initially worked as a teacher at his former problem school in order to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War. His first published short story, about his experiences with heroin use, secured him a place in the prestigious Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. Among his teachers there were John Irving and John Cheever. Boyle earned a doctorate in nineteenth-century English literature, a…