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Age 3: Freud sees his mother naked (1859).
Age 98: Rin Tin Tin dies in his Los Angeles home - age in human years: 14 (1932).
Age 30: Hitler grows a mustache (1919).
Age 53: Local writer and illustrator Eric Hanson publishes a compendium of mini-narratives detailing the origins, endings, and turning points in the lives of several historical figures, ages zero-100 (2008).

Hanson - whose stories and drawings have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, McSweeney's, and the ever-estimable The Rake - professes a fascination with chronology. Certainly A Book of Ages is a manifestation of this interest. Throughout the book we sneak into the lives of various writers, actors, politicians, and athletes, catching them at their highs (age 41: Columbus sails the ocean blue) and lows (age 42: Elvis dies on his bathroom floor) and strangely serendipitous moments (age 17: Kurt Cobain is fired from his job as a hotel cleaner for sleeping in the establishment's rooms). The real joy of this collection is seeing the fact-lets interact, as lives lived separately begin somehow to intertwine, and even inform each other, when recounted collectively.

Recently, Secrets of the City (age: two months) had the chance to speak with Hanson a bit about his book.

SOTC: Did your fascination with chronology amplify while you were putting this together? Or was this a purging? Or, more likely, will the obsession never end?

Hanson: I don't think of it as an obsession, really. But the mind gets into the habit of looking at things in a certain way; having an unconventional perspective makes thinking less humdrum, I guess. When I'm working as an illustrator I need to be able to turn a topic or a political idea into a visual metaphor, so I'm accustomed to thinking differently. Turning things around to look at them from different angles.

To write the book I began to look at lives differently. Every time I read an interesting anecdote or an episode from history, I asked myself: How old were they when this happened? Charles Schulz - at age thirty-six, the age Jesus is when he's crucified outside Jerusalem, Charles Schulz draws a comic strip in which Linus awaits the coming of the Great Pumpkin. Writing the book in the present tense helps put everyone in the same moment with the reader.

SOTC: There are a lot of writers that seem obsessed solely with death, but your interest seems to be more about the lifelong sequences that come before the obituary...

Hanson: Dying young was what first gave me the idea for A Book of Ages. A writer friend was turning thirty, so we gave him three books by famous writers who'd died before they were thirty (Keats, Shelley, and Stephen Crane). That's what set me thinking about what people were doing at certain ages.  And there is a sprinkling of deaths throughout the book. I suppose it reminds us that we're all survivors in a way. Not a bad thought.

SOTC: Are you surprised that readers - Amy Goetzman at MinnPost, Elizabeth Bachner at Bookslut - seem to find A Book of Ages soothing?

Hanson: Reassuring, I guess. F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American life, but American life is full of second acts. A reviewer in BookList was expecting A Book of Ages to be a catalog of great achievements, and was pleased that it wasn't only that.  It's interesting to know how old people were when masterpieces were written or painted, but it's reassuring to know that Churchill was considered a failure until he was made prime minister at age 65. The most amusing things are the failures and mishaps.  Even famous lives are full of ups and downs. I think schadenfreude is a worthwhile emotion--in moderation.

SOTC: Do you think there's an underlying message to the book (i.e. 'Slow down! You've got time!')? Or is it just a sort of objective collection of "Career stats. Great moments. Crossed paths. Generational chasms and rivalries"?

Hanson: Any commentary I've put into the book is pretty subtle.  I like the ironies that emerge. I am less kind to some people than I am to others, but they are damned by their own stories really. Nixon being barred from a co-op apartment in New York, for example. And there are the sad ironies - the man who invented television died a bankrupt. I like it that he didn't allow his children to watch TV, because the content was worthless. I guess this was before PBS.

SOTC: How much of an entrant's biography would you read before boiling his/her life down to a paragraph or two? And was there a method for how you chose the biographical information that made it into the book?

Hanson: I had more material than I could fit in. I chose things that were surprising or little known.  I also preferred things that told about life.  Important choices, missed chances, lucky meetings, stories about dogged persistence and foolish mistakes. Some of them make you wonder what would have happened if things had taken a different course, if Hemingway hadn't lost all of his stories on that train between Paris and Montreux, if Carson McCullers hadn't lost her wallet on a New York bus, if Dylan Thomas hadn't broken the record for drinks consumed in one evening at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village. Some of the wonderful stories I couldn't fit into A Book of Ages might find their way into a sequel.

The characters in the drama were the people I read about in the New Yorker or the New York Times or Vanity Fair or heard stories about on the BBC or saw on TV, and I'm more likely to read or listen to or watch things that interest me. There are more literary and film people than there are business people or sports figures.  I did make a point of hunting up figures from different walks of life and other continents. But the baseline was celebrity.

SOTC: Did you find that these 'characters' got their starts in their careers earlier in life than you would have assumed? Later?

Hanson: Child prodigies are annoying, but we can relate to people who followed up on early inspirations. I think A Book of Ages is perfect for everyone who wishes they'd played in a rock band or written a novel and wonders if it's too late. Because there are plenty of late achievers.