Courtesy Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Q&A With Scott Turow By Diane Brown, November 2005, May & June 2007 The author of Ordinary Heroes on uncovering family secrets

• Click Here to Buy Ordinary Heroes
• Message Board: Reveal Your Thoughts About Family Secrets
• Jump-start Your Next Reading Group With Our Discussion-Guide Questions
• If You Liked Ordinary Heroes, Take a Look at These Related Titles
• Don’t Miss Our Latest Web-Exclusive Book Reviews
• Check Out More Great Content on AARP The Magazine Online’s Books Section

Bestselling master of legal thrillers Scott Turow forgoes his fictional Kindle County courtroom for the frontlines of European battlefields in his new novel, Ordinary Heroes, a World War II suspense tale inspired by his father's past. We spoke to him about the book.

You've said this is a story you wanted to write since you were 17. What was so compelling—and why now?

My experience is probably emblematic of boomers whose fathers fought in the war and who seem to have been deeply affected by it but didn't talk about it. For me, the war experience seemed critical to understanding my father. Part of that was because I was a boy and war is supposed to be the ultimate test of masculinity. Writing the book was my attempt to figure out both those issues. Add the final layer of being Jewish. Till I approached adolescence, there wasn't really a term for the Holocaust, for what went on in Europe to exterminate Jewish people. That, too, was grinding unconsciously throughout my childhood. My dad has been gone for five years now, and I felt it was time to come to terms with his legacy in me.

You write about a World War II veteran who was in extraordinary combat situations and had to make difficult moral choices yet never talked about this with his son. Was it difficult to get your father to share his experiences?

AARP: Lifestyle Information for People 50 and Over
The entertaining and informative content on AARPmagazine.org is just one of the many benefits of AARP membership—only $12.50 a year. Join or renew online today!

I think I was listening carefully on occasions when he did talk—usually at family gatherings of six or seven men around the dining table. The pain of the war experience was pretty plain on my father—he'd be still when he'd see scenes on TV, become animated when he met vets. It was really striking to me—and confusing. My mother insisted Dad was a big hero, yet his reactions were anything but chest-thumping, so it was hard to figure out. I've talked with others in my age group, and it's almost always the same story: he came back; he never talked. The exception seems to be that as these men reach their final years, many now will talk. I had a touching experience with an older law partner, a tough guy, who read my manuscript and provided helpful comments. As we talked about it, he started to cry over things he said he hadn't thought about in 60 years.

The son in the novel is drawn into a search for the truth behind his father's court-martial partly because of the lurking question: would he have been up to the same challenges? Do you think boomers who haven't experienced war wonder about their capacity for courage?

Yeah, certainly the men in my social group—the upper-middle-class kids who managed to skip Vietnam. It seemed at the time a moral commitment to do that, but it leaves the question: did I try to avoid going not simply because it was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time but because I'm afraid to fight? The attempt to come to terms with my father and the question of how to become a man never left me.

Have boomers had an opportunity to show their own "right stuff"?

As we're aging, it's a subject of hot debate. When I was 21, I'd have told you we were the most glorious generation that ever walked the earth. We were changing the world: civil rights, the rise of feminism, the whole alteration of authority that happened in the '60s. I think there's something to it. And we changed the terms of being a parent. Frankly, the men became fathers in ways their fathers weren't. On the other hand, because we were a generation raised with the bounty of America that developed after World War II, it's not clear if we lived up to our promise or not. The final returns are not in yet.

In your previous novels, too, you often write about secrets within families. Why the focus on family secrets?

It's a recurrent motif because it's in the nature of families to keep secrets. I'm often startled by how little parents share with their children about the nature of their own relationship. Ordinary Heroes is about children always wanting to know more. And the reality is you will never know everything about your parents. I have to admit that writing this exposed me to more of my own family's secrets. Seeing how my parents recreated their past was eye-opening and at times upsetting.

You've written a lot about judges and juries who make the wrong choices. Is our system fundamentally flawed?

I'm meaning to express human fallibility. I don't think judges and juries get things wrong any more than the rest of us do. It's just that we create an idealized legal system, so their failures seem shocking. The theme of my work is the inevitable failures of the legal system to meet the idealized vision.

Many Americans thought the jury decisions in the Michael Jackson and Martha Stewart cases were pretty shocking.

What happens in a highly publicized trial is that jurors park their common sense and think they've become movie stars. They're now the focus of attention, and they get into wanting to send larger messages. Even judges aren't immune. Sometimes the system works well anyway.

What would you do to make the system work better?

I'd be more protective of juries on celebrity cases than I was willing to be 25 years ago. I used to think that cameras in the courtroom were not just a good idea but a constitutional right. Now I doff my hat to the judges who told me there were enormous downsides.

You must carry a heavy workload as a practicing lawyer. When do you have time to write? Where do you write?

I've been a part-time practicing lawyer since 1989. I do have billable time every day, but it's not the majority of my day any longer. I write in the morning at home. I have a great office, with a beautiful view out my window. By afternoon I'm usually burned out, and it's time to be a lawyer.

So you have time to read for pleasure?

I always have time to read. At the moment it's Maureen Dowd's Are Men Necessary? And Palace Walk, by Naguib Mahfouz, a really interesting novel—more so because of 9/11—that looks into the life of a 1950s Egyptian family.

Do you have enduring favorites?

Saul Bellow. Tillie Olson is a great writer of short fiction. And Graham Greene because he provided the idea that suspense and high literary purpose can coexist.

Contribute your feedback regarding this article without leaving this page! Your comments will appear in this article's message board.