Matt Stanley
AUTHOR

Matt Stanley

Literature & Fiction
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About A COLLAR FOR CERBERUS The origins of this novel lie in the late 1990s when I lived and travelled in Greece. I kept detailed journals of my experiences at the time, but these books spent many years in storage as my life progressed in different directions and in different countries. Much later, when I become a writer, I looked again at the journals and thought about creating a novel from the material. However, I was never able to manage the task. Biography has no structure and no story – it's just a series of events that makes sense only in retrospect and through the distorting lens of memory. In 2016, in my mid-40s, I was undergoing a sort of mid-life crisis. What had I achieved in life? Where was I going? Where had I been? I had a young friend going through some of the same experiences I'd had, and I returned again to the journals. The person revealed in those pages of 20 years previously was almost unknown to me. He was a romantic, an adventurer, an idealist. He wrote about simple pleasures like drinking a coffee or watching a sunset. The world was a fascinating and new place to him – a place of wonders and possibilities. What had happened to him? That's when I had the idea. I'd write about my experiences in a highly fictional form and as three different people: the self I was in my twenties, the writer I am now, and the person I once thought I might become. Somewhere in that mix, I could explore what experience meant to me and think again about what we live for. I could finally attempt to capture what it had felt like to be fully alive. All of the places described in the book are places I visited. All of the food is food I have eaten. As for the structure of the novel, it's a classic storytelling form: a journey of discovery that has been told and enjoyed since Homer wrote 'The Odyssey'. The journey itself is the destination.
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