John Thorndike

I grew up in Connecticut, read a thousand novels as a child and always wanted to write one. My mother was a reader, my father an editor and writer, and our house was filled with books. After four desperate years at a New England prep school I went to Harvard, wrote some fiction, studied night and day. Then a master's degree from Columbia, two years in the Peace Corps and a year of doctoral studies at NYU, brought to an end by marriage, parenthood and the delirious Sixties. In 1970 my wife and I moved to an isolated farm in Chile, where we lived for two years, raising chickens, growing potatoes and pursuing the complete back-to-the-land experience. When we divorced in 1974, I wound up with custody of our son and settled with him in Athens, Ohio, where I farmed for ten years, built houses for ten, and wrote.

My first two books were novels. Anna Delaney’s Child and The Potato Baron. My third book, Another Way Home, is a memoir about my wife’s schizophrenia and the years I spent raising my son. A second memoir, The Last of His Mind, recounts my father’s last year, in which dementia stripped him of memory, language and self-awareness.

My third novel was A Hundred Fires in Cuba, set in Havana during the early years of the Cuban Revolution.

My most recent book is The World Against Her Skin, a fictional memoir (or as some would say, a work of reality fiction) that follows my mother's life closely, even as I have to imagine many of the details. Beck & Branch will publish this in May, 2022.

You’ll find more about my books, and me, at johnthorndike.com