The Fall of Man

A novel by Tim Hanson

Overview

The Fall of Man is a novel told from the perspective of Thomas Erikson, a man in his late-thirties going back to his hometown to attend the funeral of Mr. Richardson, an instrumental teacher during Thomas’s formative years. However, as the service begins, he cannot bring himself to enter the church, and as he flashes back to a childhood spent not only attending this church but also the school next door, we discover why. This flashback provides the bulk of the story, chronicling Thomas’s maturation from second grade through seventh, as he struggles to apply the lessons learned in and out of the classroom to his ever-changing world view, where myths and fables he believed literal are worn away bit by bit and replaced with a much more complex and difficult philosophy.

The Journey So Far

The idea of The Fall of Man (then called The Fog of Memory) came to me in the spring of 2013. All I knew then was I wanted to write a novel loosely based on my own childhood spent in catholic school, a coming-of-age story detailing the humor, drama, and growing pains of those formative years much as my favorite stories did, ranging from the works of Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary to the more adults works of Stephen King and Alison Bechdel.

After spending three years researching and planning, I finally began the first draft in May 2016. Over the next year and a half of writing, the story would change dramatically, but it always had the same goal: to capture what it was like growing up in catholic school and to show how those years forever influenced the course of things to come. On October 28th, 2017, I wrote the final sentence of the first draft, put the work aside, and prepared to become a father. During the exhausting early days of fatherhood, I picked it back up and began editing, a process that lasted two years, longer than it took me to write the initial draft.

Current Status
I am currently looking for representation in the hopes of getting The Fall of Man published sometime in the next couple of years. I have made a few of edits and additions here and there this year, but the work is finished and ready to find its audience. I look forward to hearing what others think of this project that I've spent years bringing to fruition, and I hope that it can impact some as much as those coming-of-age stories I so love impacted me.

(Me, my mother, and my sister, taken before my first communion, May 1993)