Editor's Note: Here, Andromeda Romano-Lax of 49 Writers interviews David Vann, the author of the critically acclaimed collection of fiction set in Alaska, "Legend of a Suicide." Her questions are in bold text; his responses follow.

"Legend of a Suicide," by David Vann

You say in the interview at the back of the new paperback edition: "This book is as true an account as I could write of my father's suicide and my own bereavement, and that was possible only through fiction." Wonderfully said. What I want to know is, how difficult was it to write, given the nature of the material? You've written two nonfiction books, and I've read that this book took a long time to get published. Was there a point in your writing life when you felt ready to write this; did you have to wait until you had a certain amount of narrative control under your belt; did you have any concerns about wading into such heart-wrenching material?

Although "Legend of a Suicide" wasn't my first book to get published, it was the first book I wrote. I worked on it for ten years, from when I was 19 until I was 29. So I was learning to write, and I had no idea how to tell the story. I threw away everything from the first 3 or 4 years, because it was all too direct, with too much emotion on page 1. I'd start with the day we found out my father was dead, for instance, which didn't work at all. But then I read Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping" and heard a lovelier, more emotionally distanced voice, and I was also reading poems by Elizabeth Bishop, and I ended up writing "Ichthyology," which was the first story I was able to keep. It focused on tropical fish and fishing in Alaska, and my father's story came indirectly, beginning first as subtext and rising to the surface at the end. That indirection was the key to writing the rest of the book, and is part of why I didn't write the book as nonfiction. There was no one true story to tell anyway (because we all had different versions of who my father was and what had happened and what it meant) and the true story, even if I could have found it, would have been too direct and essentially unreadable.

Once I finished the book, it sat for 12 years and no agent would send it out, so I sent it to a contest (AWP's Grace Paley Prize), and that's how it was finally published.

The structure is unusual to say the least: three short stories told in the first person, followed by a long novella told third person and without quotation marks, followed by two short stories told in first person again. All feature the same characters -- or so this reader would argue anyway: Roy Fenn (adolescent except at the end of the book) and his tragic father. There are repeating themes and constellations of images and connecting storylines throughout, but what I loved most was how the early stories "teach" the reader how to interpret the main novella. We know enough of the "true" (within the framework of the fictional world) events of the early stories to be able to understand, or try to understand, the novella in several possible ways -- at least that's how I read it. Without spoiling the book for others, I'll say that there is a shocking development in Part II that makes use of a startling and effective shift in point of view. First: did you plan the structure this way from the beginning, and in what order did you write the stories? Have readers had widely different interpretations of the novella, in particular?