The title, McGinness said, is meant to be ironic. That was my goal, to make an engaging story. “To be read five times, you’ve got to be read once.

Literary fiction is a genre and sometimes that genre is boring and uninteresting and they forget that the reader is there.” “That was a very deliberate decision on my part. “Once you come to understand this character, then you can understand what happened in the accident and what happened to that woman,” McGinnis said. She wasn’t my girlfriend, but I didn’t correct them.” The book opens with the lines: “When I woke up in the hospital, they told me my girlfriend had been killed. More: Two years of seasoning add poignancy, polish and power to Asolo Rep’s ‘Knoxville’ In case you missed it: Enlarging ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ at Venice Theatre 'I used a structure of a murder mystery.' 'That’s pretty hard and I thought, how do you pull it along?'' “It’s actually a very dense, emotional work about the relationships of men,' McGinnis said. McGinnis did that in part to give his fictional counterpart more maturity – something that works well, since after his treatment stopped because of lack of insurance, the fictional Jarred McGinnis was forced to move in with his estranged father Jack McGinnis, a man he hadn’t seen for a decade. McGinnis was 20 and a senior at the University of Texas-Austin when his vehicle accident occurred. There are a few differences between McGinnis’ own story and that of his protagonist. It’s the last stop of a short tour that coincided with a trip to visit family that included appearances in Texas and a Zoom talk Tuesday night at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, New York. McGinnis will talk about his book from 5 to 6 p.m. Delayed in part because of the COVID-19 pandemic, “The Coward” wasn't released in the United States until April 12.

The Lovers by L.A. McGinnis