Author Allen Levi, 69, Shares the Inspiration Behind His Beloved Bestseller ‘Theo of Golden’

You never intended to publish it. What changed?

Friends who knew that I was writing it asked me, “What’s the status?” I said, “It’s finished.” Patted myself on the back, it’s in a drawer. And they said, “We’d like to read it.” And so I said, “Okay, there are some rough edges, but yeah, you can read it.” They read it and strongly encouraged me to do something with it. So my niece and I decided to collaborate. I said, “I’m almost 70. We’re really late in the game, so it would take too long to do that process. Let’s see if we can self-publish. And if we can sell a thousand copies, I would be over the moon.”

And then?

We started with this really slow trajectory. It just kept going up slowly, and then, out of the blue, we started getting calls from agents and traditional publishers. And we finally connected with a wonderful woman, Suzanne Gluck, a literary agent at William Morris Endeavor. And it’s really been a tremendous match. We are so shocked and beyond grateful, because this exceeds our wildest dreams.

You were a lawyer, then a musician, then a judge. How does someone with that résumé write a novel?

I graduated from law school in 1980. I worked full-time for 10 years. After 10 years of law practice, I left and moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, and got a master’s in Scottish fiction at the University of Edinburgh. I was there for two years. And then I came back home, did part-time law practice, and developed music as a kind of side hustle.

And after doing both of those for about three years, I left law practice to be a full-time singer-songwriter. I had a microscopic but very loyal following. But I did that for about 20 years until my brother got sick. And when he got sick, I left music and stayed home with him for the year that he slowly trickled away from us.

What was your writing process like?

I get up early in the morning. I say my prayers. I drink my coffee, and I walk 400 yards down into the woods to a writing cabin. I don’t take a phone with me, and I don’t have internet down there. And so I will stay there usually from 6, 7, 8 in the morning till maybe 2 o’clock in the afternoon. I do it all longhand. And then I type it up while I can still read my writing.

One of the book club members noticed the dignity you gave Ellen, the character experiencing homelessness. What informed that portrayal?

I go to the coffee shop a lot, and many of the characters in the story might not be recognizable as individuals. But everyone in the book shows up in some way or another on a typical day down at the coffee shop, including people like Ellen. And I think they’re lovely, delightful people. They’ve got interesting, hard, heartbreaking stories at times. But I did want the encounters that Theo had to represent a really broad cross section of the community. I wanted Theo to be someone who could reach across pretty much every imaginable line — age, race, economic circumstance, all of that.

What do you hope readers take from it?

Courtesy Simon & Schuster

We seem to be living in a pretty vitriolic time. A lot of people I talk to are really frustrated, wondering how we can react to the present moment in a way that’s redemptive and life-giving and gracious. There is an essay by Wendell Berry called “Think Little.” His premise is that typically when we have a big problem in our culture, we try to come up with a big solution. And he says if we could think little and just bring the cumulative effect of everyone doing their little part well, then we will solve the big problem.

So I think that in some sense, Theo is a prescriptive character. He gives us a way to use our days well, and that is to fill them with little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love, and just to keep doing the same small things well over a long period of time. I wrote the book not because I have arrived. I mean, it’s very aspirational to me as well. I want to be like Theo.

Are you working on something new?

For the last two years, I’ve been writing about Ellen. It will be called Ellen of Golden and is a continuation of that story with some new angles. She’s got a really interesting story that’s been hard to wrestle to the mat. I’m probably into my third or fourth draft of the book. I feel like I’ve got the bones in place, but now I’ve got to go back and put some clothes on the bones and tighten everything up. Hopefully, maybe by the end of the year, I’ll have it done.

Is there a book by another author you’d recommend?

My favorite writer of all time, probably, is Wendell Berry. He's a Kentucky part-time farmer, a brilliant man and a beautiful writer. President Obama gave him the National Humanities Medal in 2011. He writes fiction, poetry and essays, and I usually have something by him in the rotation. I also finished East of Eden last week. I love John Steinbeck. I read my first Stephen King novel, 11/22/63, which I thought was brilliant. James by Percival Everett, what a great book.

People will want to know if there’s a Theo of Golden movie coming.

I can’t really answer because I don’t know. I think there has been some interest shown. I will say this: When I was writing the book, I listened to soundtrack music nonstop. I have a playlist of about 300 or so songs, and it’s all very lush, very melodic, a lot of strings. And there were lots of times that I was writing, and music would play, and there would be this beautiful convergence of the scene and the sound of the music.

The book did seem to unfold cinematically in my mind. I could envision the scenes. But whether it will ever come to fruition, who knows?