Out on the road, somewhere between Columbus, Ohio, and Indianapolis, John Thorndike is taking time to talk about his son.
No surprise there. In between book readings, the 53-year-old novelist/autobiographer/father has been doing little else for more than three months now. And that follows a three-year period in which he wrote an entire book featuring his 25-year-old offspring.
In fact, that book - "Another Way Home: A Single Father's Story" (Crown Publishers, 245 pages, $24) - is the reason why Thorndike is now driving around the country. And why, Specifically, he is on the phone at this moment.
He is at once selling his book and being a proud papa.
"He is on the verge of going to South America," Thorndike says of his son Janir (Jah-neer). "He's going back to Chile, where he was born."
You can hear the concern in his voice, the same concern that bleeds from virtually every page of "Another Way Home." It's the voice of a man who, for better and for worse, chose to take seriously his responsibility for a child in the face of a disintegrating marriage to a woman with a disintegrating mind.
"It's been a long time," he continues, recalling Janir's 1970 birth in a remote Chilean village. Janir's decision to visit his birthplace, Thorndike says, "kind of surprised me a little bit, but I think that with his mother's death, and with him getting older, he's more curious about the Latin side of his history."
Thorndike is responding to the first questions posed him: What's up with Janir, and what's he now doing? These questions seem the most logical place to begin an interview as Thorndike's book follows his son's entire life.
But he isn't there in the beginning. In the beginning, there was only Clarisa.
Clarisa Rubio Betancourt was just 19 years old when Thorndike, then a 24-year-old Peace Corps volunteer, met her in El Salvador. The fell in love, married and - it being the late '60s and all - made plans to live off the land.
That's what took them to Chile. And it's what carried them through a couple of years living in a house with no phone, no electricity and no running water.
Gradually, though, Clarisa began to change. Her aloofness that began with Janir's birth became more pronounced when they returned to El Salvador. Her growing estrangement from Thorndike - and from Janir - evolved into virtual apathy.
At the same time, her behavior - which, Thorndike learned, was linked to a family disposition toward schizophrenia - became unpredictable and often bizarre. Eventually, Clarisa's own mother began to worry about Janir's welfare.
And that was when Thorndike made his first choice: He would return to the United States. With his son.
"I wanted Janir to have a mother, but not like this," he wrote.
"Protecting Janir was my excuse to bail out of a marriage that had overwhelmed me. Perhaps it was a reasonable excuse, but the truth was I could love and look after my son, but not his mother, because I needed someone to love me back."
Thorndike moved to Ohio, bought a plot of land and again took up farming. This time, however, he did it as a single parent.
"I didn't want to lose my wife, and I didn't want to become a single father," he says over the phone. "And yet, somehow, those things became the greatest gifts."
As he documents in the book, Janir became the focus of Thorndike's life. And as he drifted through one relationship after another, never successfully finding another Clarisa, he began to accept the fact that Janir would reamin his central focus.
Which is what he means by loss serving as a gift.
"Who knows how involved as a father I would have been otherwise?" Thorndike says. "Certainly I would have been involved. But I would not have been deep down in there the way a man can get when he is the one who does everything. It's a chore, it's a trial, it's not what I wanted and it's not what most men want. And I discovered that it was the most important thing I'd done in my life."
Around the time he arrived at the realization, Thorndike - the author of two novels - began to consider writing about his life, which seemed to have come full circle when Clarisa died in 1995.
"I never thought, 'Oh, I'm going to write this whole story,' " he says. "I didn't even think about it until my kid was completely grown."
Then the idea of a book seemed as natural as fatherhood itself.
"My publicist kind of pumps up the idea that this (book) is an antidote to deadbeat dads or something," Thorndike says with a laugh. "But the heart of it is that I didn't want to have a child. When I did, though, I got used to it. I got into it."
