My debut thriller Extreme Vetting will be published in February 2023 by Ooligan Press (Portland State University).
“I consider myself lucky. Not like people who made it through an entire war, where any minute a bullet could’ve ended their life—but lucky. I’ve gone through terrible things in my life, seen terrible things, heard of terrible things, but I haven’t changed much. I’ve become wiser, a tiny bit wiser, not a lot. But I didn’t become a monster, and I still have compassion for those around me.”
– Radu Codrescu, 2006 (translated from Romanian).
When I first met Radu Codrescu (name changed for privacy reasons) in 2001 in Redmond, Washington, he was an accomplished software developer at Microsoft and a competitive rower with the US Rowing team. A friend of mine told me that Radu had been in jail, back in Romania, for trying to flee the country during Nicolae Ceauşescu’s dictatorship. That he had risked his life, again and again, trying to break through the closed borders of our native country.
I didn’t start interviewing Radu because I wanted to document the crimes of the communist regime in Romania. No. I wanted to hear Radu’s story because it’s a real thriller of a story, packed with all the great storytelling elements—thresholds, allies, enemies, ordeals, failure, and success—a story that had really happened to the man sitting opposite me in his living room in Redmond, a microphone clipped to his shirt, a glass of red wine on the table in front of him.
After I began writing Radu’s story for this blog last year, I realized that his struggles wouldn’t mean much to a global reader without a picture of what he was struggling against. I didn’t want to rehash decades of documented injustice in Romania and Eastern Europe. So I tried to remember my childhood during those years, but my memories are out-of-focus pictures of good times, when I didn’t comprehend how hard life was for the grownups around me, who had no real choice about their life. I was a child and children make the best out of everything. Using my own past as background for Radu’s harrowing adventures changed the way I now think about memory and perspective. Working on this series changed the way I now think about history and storytelling.
“Most of my dreams at night are not about being in jail or about trying to flee. They are about rowing. They are neither good nor bad dreams—more like images. I dream a lot about a certain corner on the Herăstrău Lake [in Bucharest, Romania]. It’s not a more beautiful corner of the park or of the lake, or more interesting than others, but I dream about that part of the lake again and again. I don’t know why.”
– Radu Codrescu, 2006 (translated from Romanian).
