Actor Ed Burns to tell KC about debut novel, ‘love letter’ to his mother’s childhood

During the COVID shutdown, actor/filmmaker Ed Burns, like a lot of us, became separated for weeks from family and friends. His parents were stuck in Florida, unable to get home to Long Island where he grew up in a tight-knit Irish Catholic family.

Burns was home in New York City writing a novel, his first. Ever the good son, he called his mom every day. And unexpectedly, those chitchat sessions with Molly morphed into material for the coming-of-age tale he was writing.

“It was a way for me to start the day with her and kill an hour or two,” Burns told The Star. “With this idea that I would just ask her a very specific question about her childhood, her first memories of working in Manhattan, her experiences of going to high school in Manhattan. Only with the idea that I would be passing time with her.

“But I had already started to write the novel and all of these stories that she started to tell me ended up, versions of them, in the book. So it ended up becoming ... a little bit of a love letter to my mom’s — mostly my mom’s — childhood and her family’s experience.”

“A Kid from Marlboro Road” is the story of an Irish Catholic family on Long Island during the summer of 1980 told by the family’s 12-year-old son, a mama’s boy claiming his independence as his mother’s own dreams slip away.

Burns will talk about the book and sign copies at 7 p.m. Thursday at Unity Temple on the Plaza, 707 W. 47th St., an event sponsored by Rainy Day Books. ( Tickets are $32, which includes the book.)

“The book is fiction, and I would say most of the things that happen with the mother during that summer of 1980 are fiction,” Burns said. “But most of the things that are referenced, her experiences as a young kid with her father, her experiences in high school, her experiences of that first job, all of that is a slightly altered version of stories that she told me.”

British newspaper The Guardian has dubbed the book “the most Irish-American novel of the year .”

Burns, born in Queens and raised on Long Island, has made multiple films as a writer-director-producer-actor, including “Saving Private Ryan,” “She’s the One” and “Alex Cross.”

His novel has the same Irish lilt he brought to the screen with his popular debut flick, the 1995 comedy-romance “The Brothers McMullen.” (He just finished writing its sequel.)

The novel opens at a crowded Irish wake in 1970s New York. The deceased is Pop McSweeney, the 12-year-old’s grandfather. From there the boy takes the reader into his world of O’Neils and Murphys, Catholic nuns, trips to Belmont race track and the Rockaway beaches.

Of all his Hollywood work, Burns is most proud of this book because it is exactly what he envisioned. Even though it’s a story about a young boy, he didn’t want it to read like a story for young boys.

“Any time I’ve written a screenplay, you have an idea in your head of what you think the film is going to look like, what you hope it to look like, more importantly,” said Burns, who called from Cleveland on his way to Atlanta for another book tour stop.

“But film making is such a collaborative medium. You’re relying on your full creative team, from your director of photography and your editor and production designers to collaborating with your actors. And then you edit and it turns into another thing.

“And a lot of times, given the budgets that I have, it’s usually a lot of compromise. So the film’s just, I don’t want to say I’m disappointed in them, ‘cause I love them, but they turn out different from the vision you had in your head.”

With the book, “I think I kind of captured the time and the place and the voice of the people more accurately than I have in anything else I’ve done,” he said.

“And quite honestly, the idea of writing a novel was an idea that was born when I was in high school and I kind of put it aside, never thought that I could pull it off because it seemed like such a daunting task.

“And now that I’ve kinda pulled it off, I just have to admit, it really feels good.

“Going on this book tour has been more exciting, talking to people about their experience with the book and their reaction to the book has been as great as getting to go out with my very first film. It’s very special.”

‘Edward, you are going to be a writer’

At the end of the book there’s a sequence where the young protagonist and his mother are driving to the Bronx to see his grandmother, who is leaving the United States to return to Ireland.

Burns, who is 56, used the music of that summer — his boyhood summer — to set the mood.

“A number of sad things have happened in the family’s life leading up to that. And as they’re driving in the car, one sad song after another keeps coming on the radio and they both indulge in the sadness, mother and son,” he said.

“The songs referenced there are songs from that summer. I think Christopher Cross’ ‘Sailing’ was actually number one in August of 1980.”

He didn’t realize until halfway through the book that he hadn’t named the 12-year-old. “And then I was like, well, this kid is untethered this summer,” he said.

“He doesn’t recognize what’s happening to his mother. Doesn’t recognize what’s happening to his parents. His brother has become a different person. So I just thought this was a kid who doesn’t recognize his world anymore.

“I just kind of liked the idea that maybe he doesn’t know who he is, and therefore maybe we shouldn’t know who he is.”

The book is not a memoir. Burns enjoyed the freedom of fiction.

“I didn’t want to have to be beholden to the truth because I just don’t have that memory. And we’re just not as interesting as the characters I created. Certainly not as insightful,” he said.

But there are a few scenes that are ripped right from the pages of his own biography, yet unwritten. Like the boy in the book, Burns also wrote poetry at an early age.

“The story when the kid wins the Catholic Daughters of America poetry contest? That not only is that what happened to me, and all of the reactions that he has to winning it, but also, most importantly, the father character says to him, ‘You are not going to do anything but be a writer,’” he said.

“And that was my father. And when I won that poetry contest he was like, ‘Edward, you are going to be a writer.’ And at every step along my journey, from the sixth grade on, my dad has constantly encouraged me to write.

“Even when I said, ‘I’m thinking about trying my hand at a novel.’ He said, ‘You talked about it when you were 18, why wouldn’t you do it now?’”

Burns thought of making the book into a movie “but now I’m already into the second book. I see this now as a trilogy. So I’m excited about the idea of doing three books,” he said.

His mother never got to read the book.

She died of COVID during the pandemic.