Outer Banks

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IT’S DIFFICULT FOR me to speak as the author of Family Life, Hamilton Stark, and The Relation of My Imprisonment, even though I did indeed write them and eventually published them under my own name. But it was so long ago, and I was such a different person then, that they seem to have been written by someone else. It’s as if the books were written, not merely by a younger version of my present self, but by a different writer altogether. He’s a man in his mid-thirties, which makes him thirty to thirty-five years younger than I am now. He’s not I, but he’s someone I happen to know rather well, almost intimately, the way one knows a much younger first cousin or a favorite godson. It’s nice that we share the same name, since I’m not ashamed of the young man, and he seems to have launched a promising career as a novelist on his own. We don’t look much alike (although there is a noticeable family resemblance around the eyes, nose, and mouth), in spite of the fact that I am bearded and have thinning white hair, and that other, much younger Russell Banks has a drooping moustache and long brown hair and wears those silly seventies-style sideburns. We’re approximately the same height, but I’m about twenty pounds heavier than he. No one today would confuse either one of us with the other.

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