National Endowment for the Arts

The National Endowment for the Arts was the grant-making institution whose fellowship helped make I Know This Much Is True possible. For the writer, its contribution was more than the $20,000 award: it supplied time to work and the assurance that his writing might matter, arriving just as he had decided to stop writing. He later described the novel’s existence as dependent on that support and urged recognition for other writers still struggling to establish themselves.

Role in the Writer’s Career

The Endowment enters the account through a particular fellowship, not through a detailed description of its structure or general programs. Its significance is shown by what its award changed in one writer’s life. Financial assistance made an extended period away from teaching possible; institutional confidence helped restore a commitment to writing. The narrative presents these two forms of support together: practical time and the validation that made using that time feel worthwhile.

The fellowship also became part of the writer’s understanding of public support for the arts. He regarded it as a life-altering gift from his government and connected that experience to a personal obligation to give back. The Endowment’s role in the account is therefore both material and relational: it financed a period of creative work while making the writer feel noticed and trusted.

Application and Award

Nine or ten months before receiving the fellowship, the writer applied to the Endowment at his wife’s dare. The application was made while he was still pursuing his work, but its eventual significance became clear at a moment of near-renunciation. After a sleepless night, he made what he describes as the painful decision to give up writing, believing that he could not continue because it had become too difficult. The very next day, the telephone rang with news that he had received the award.

The timing turned the fellowship into a reversal. The application had been submitted months earlier, but the award arrived immediately after the decision to quit. Alongside the $20,000, the Endowment’s faith in him as a writer offered a message that his stories could matter. Rather than treating money and encouragement as separate benefits, the account makes their combination decisive: the funding enabled a leave from teaching, while the recognition helped set his work in motion again.

The Fellowship as Working Time

The fellowship commenced in January 1993. The writer took a leave of absence from teaching, and his family lived frugally so that the award could last for the next twenty months. This arrangement gave the fellowship a defined practical shape: it was not simply an award received, but a limited period organized around sustained work and family life.

His days followed a deliberate routine. He wrote fiction in the morning, conducted research in the afternoon, and was a father in the evening. The schedule makes clear that the time supported by the Endowment was divided among creative work, preparation, and family responsibilities. It also shows why the award’s value cannot be reduced to its monetary amount: the money bought time, and that time made a sustained working practice possible.

Research during the fellowship ranged across libraries, hospitals, Native American museums, and, most significantly to the writer, New York’s Ellis Island. He also read about identical twins and spoke with them. These activities supplied material and knowledge for the novel, while conversations with families who had lived through domestic turmoil and mental illness introduced experiences of survival and coping. The people who shared their stories offered accounts that were heartbreaking as well as sometimes hilarious; the writer describes assembling, little by little, the knowledge he needed to write the book.

Relationship to the Novel

The writer links the fellowship directly to the making of I Know This Much Is True. He describes the project as a six-year creative odyssey and says the novel would not exist without the Endowment’s time and validation. This claim gives the organization a specific place in the book’s history: it did not create the novel’s subject matter, but it enabled the author to resume writing and devote an extended period to fiction and research.

The account also places that work against the risk of representing mental illness through stereotype. Early in the project, a mother whose son had paranoid schizophrenia warned the writer that popular culture already relied on sensational portrayals that encouraged misunderstanding and added to the burdens borne by mentally ill people and their families. He remained grateful for that warning and framed the aim as writing truthfully rather than exploitatively. In this context, the Endowment’s support enabled a novel whose stated aspiration was to challenge misunderstanding, rather than repeat it.

Gratitude and Legacy

The writer compares the Endowment’s recognition to an earlier moment when Sister Mercy had noticed him. That comparison presents institutional encouragement as an experience of being seen at a vulnerable point in a career. From that experience, he makes an appeal for other writers who are still finding their way and struggling to continue: the recognition that helped him, he argues, should also be extended to them.

He connects the government’s support to a commitment to give back. He and his wife designated ten percent of his book earnings for organizations helping people with mental illness, victims of domestic violence, and the arts. He distinguishes these donations from what he considers more personally meaningful: time spent at York Correctional Institution, where his involvement began in 1999 after what he calls a serendipitous accident. That later work is not described as an Endowment program; rather, it belongs to the writer’s account of how receiving public support shaped his own sense of responsibility.

The novel’s acknowledgments reinforce the Endowment’s importance by stating that the book would not have come into existence without its generous support and validation. The statement makes the fellowship more than background biography: within the account, it is the material and emotional hinge between an abandoned writing career and the completed novel.