John Wilson

Abraham Lincoln, but his son, Willie, the 11-year-old son who has died and is visited in the tomb by his grieving father.

And the Bardo is a Buddhist concept of a limbo state between life and death.

Interesting you say it could have been a play, because actually there is a play-like aspect to it in the way it's experimental.

Lincoln's visits to the tomb are witnessed by this vast cast of ghostly spectral characters, and then interspersed also with quotes from supposed historical records.

Were any of those records real?

And that sort of very staccato form, which is almost like a play script, that answers the question, why that form then?

Yes, it kind of grew out of the play.

He was not sobbing.

And what about the environment, the bardo itself?

And Willie Lincoln is the one.

Plot spoiler is the one who opens their eyes to that appalling fact that they are all dead.

And it's interesting you called them ghosts earlier because I thought of them as sort of dead souls, restless spirits, those sort of things.

On This Cultural Life, George Saunders, my guests choose the influences and experiences that have had the biggest impact on their own creativity.

And your first choices for this programme are your parents.

You were born in Texas but grew up in Oak Forest, Illinois.

What was home life, earliest memories of home life?

And you say your mother was from Texas.

I think I'd read that you went back to Texas a lot during the holidays.

So how important was that sort of Texan influence on your sense of identity?

making the best of a situation when sometimes it's not going well.