Russo on Life

Even though most families are hurting in Russo’s fiction, the family, broken or whole, remains central to his work. In a commencement address at Colby College, Russo proffered the kind of life advice that college graduates rarely hear these days and that might have seemed unlikely coming from someone with his tough childhood. “Have kids,” he told the graduates. “Don’t worry that you can’t afford them, though it’s true, you can’t. Don’t worry too much about the world they’ll be born into, which will suck, because that’s what the world mostly does. You won’t be a fully vested citizen until you have someone you love more than life to hand this imperfect world over to. And don’t worry that you may have poor parenting skills, which you will.”

Read the rest of Steven Malanga's 2019 City Journal article on novelist Richard Russo.