“Film is very different from fiction—I’m always reminding my graduate students of this—but every so often a movie comes along that captures with full force what you’re trying to do as a novelist. Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me is just such a movie.
Quiet and character-driven, it made me want to sit down and write when I first saw it twelve years ago, and it still does that to me. My friend Joel Lovell wrote about it recently in the New York Times Magazine, which made me go back and watch it again. The scene Lovell quotes, when the character ‘Terry’ is talking to his young nephew, reminds me of what good fiction does, and how so much good fiction captures adults behaving like children and children, therefore, forced to behave like adults. In any case, it’s a movie that reminds me of why I’m a writer, that makes me want to get back to work, and get back to work, and get back to work some more.”
—Joshua Henkin, author of The World Without You: A Novel (Pantheon, 2012)