Photo: Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times. From nytimes.com:
His Novel Sold a Million Copies. James McBride Isn’t Sure How He Feels About That.
When people ask the author James McBride what he does for work, he tells them he’s a saxophone player.
In a sense, that is true enough. He runs a small music program at a church in Brooklyn and spends much of his time playing the tenor and soprano sax in the basement of his New Jersey home, which he’s soundproofed so the noise doesn’t bother his neighbors.
But McBride, 66, makes his living as an author — and right now, that living is very good. His latest novel, “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store,” which follows the Black and Jewish residents of a Pennsylvania town in the early 20th century, hit a milestone: Since its release last summer, it has sold more than a million copies. Most authors are lucky to sell 10,000 books.
“I’m not very interested in what other people have to say,” said McBride, who has greeted his most recent success with ambivalence. “I don’t pay attention. If I did, I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed and write in the first place.”
But sales as fast and robust as McBride is seeing now are vanishingly rare, especially in the world of literary fiction. And while he is certainly grateful for his success, McBride does not seem all that comfortable with it.
“You’ve been David all your life, and you become Goliath,” he said, sitting at a worn, wooden table in his kitchen. “Your life changes when you become Goliath.”
James McBride is an award-winning author, musician and screenwriter. His landmark memoir, The Color of Water, has sold millions of copies and spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list. Considered an American classic, it is read in schools and universities across the United States. His debut novel, Miracle at St. Anna, was turned into a film by Oscar-winning writer and director Spike Lee, with a script written by McBride. His 2013 novel, The Good Lord Bird, about American abolitionist John Brown, won the National Book Award for Fiction and was a Showtime limited series starring Ethan Hawke.
McBride has been a staff writer for The Boston Globe, People Magazine and The Washington Post, and his work has appeared in Essence, Rolling Stone and The New York Times. He appeared at the 2024 Festival.
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