We write for a target audience. Readers differ in their demographics as well as their literary tastes. When my novel, Never, was published, I began meeting with book groups, and they were all baby boomers like me. I realized I’d written a book for my own generation. Never is a coming-of-age story that takes place in the segregated south. Folks my age (I’m turning seventy) can remember Martin Luther King and the turbulent sixties. Southern readers have shared with me their memories of growing up with a Black maid, often articulating a version of the bewildered affection my narrator expresses for the stranger who came to his house every day. Northern readers, even if they never saw a “colored entrance” sign, remind me that mid-century prejudice wasn’t confined to the southern states.

In one book group, a reader told me that she recommended Never to her son, but he wasn’t interested. “I don’t want to read some old man talking about race,” he said. It was my “OK boomer” moment. When I told one of my sons about my book, he said, “Great! An old white guy mansplains the civil rights movement.”

My narrator, named Little, looks back on his parents’ lives across a gulf of sixty years. They lived in Georgia at a time when a Black girl was not allowed to sit on a white Santa’s lap, when the Black maid was expected to ride in the back of the car. What kind of brutes would choose to live in such a society? His parents. His parents’ friends. His cousins and neighbors, teachers and city councilmen, practically everyone he knew. Little doesn’t believe that some fluke of genetics or time has made him a better person than his mother. He says, “I like to think that, had I been an adult in 1960s LaSalle, I would have joined the marchers and refused to attend a segregated church, but my closest proxy is my mother, and she did not do that.”

A relative in her eighties once told me that, with each passing year, she thinks more about her parents. For Little, the effort to untangle his memories of his mother becomes an exploration of his own identity. He says, “Incredible that I, a man in his seventies, could remain blinded by a boy’s simple love for his mother.”

I can imagine how alien, even despicable, we may seem to a future generation. We knew the causes of global warming but continued to pump, mine, and burn, leaving them with a wounded planet. We won’t be there to make excuses for ourselves. Let the historians pass judgment. As novelists, we look back on the crimes and accomplishments of previous generations, and we find ourselves there.

Joel F. Johnson joined the ranks of debut novelists at age sixty-eight. His novel, Never, is a coming-of-age story that takes place in the segregated South. Published in 2023, the novel received an Independent Press Award and was a finalist for an Indie Book Award. Johnson’s book of poetry, Where Inches Seem Miles was compared to the work of James Dickey by Kirkus Review.

Johnson graduated from Harvard College with a BA in English & American Literature. He has an MBA and has been self-employed for twenty-five years. The father of three, Johnson and his wife live in Concord, MA..