Forget Me Not

He adds that he's preparing for "the possibility that I will have to watch her die as we once watched my grandmother die, not slowly exactly but in a hundred tiny pieces every day; the possibility that there will come a time when I look at her living body and debate whether she is still she; the possibility that I will one day witness my mom returned to the same oblivion to which I too will likely one day return, the same oblivion in which all the members of each generation of our family, with few exceptions, begin and end our lives."

Block has lived something of a charmed life. Besides boasting a supportive family, he was an international science fair champion in high school and received his lucrative book contract when he was only 24. But his current success is wrapped up in tragedy. Like Seth, Block's bird's-eye view of his family's descent into earthly oblivion is a constant reminder of what one day will likely befall him as well.

And yet in his book Block's attitude toward the disease is upbeat. This was noted in Janet Maslin's otherwise positive review in The New York Times. "Nothing about Mr. Block's narrative is predictable or even suitably bleak, given the nature of the illness he addresses," she writes.

Even more surprising, he handles his real-life genetic misfortune with equal aplomb.

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Block's father says he was tipped off to his son's intelligence when he and wife Debbie brought him in for a preschool IQ test.

"The thing kept going on and on," remembers Andy, a clinical psychologist, "and so finally Debbie went downstairs and asked the tester why it was taking so long. He said, 'The kid hasn't gotten anything wrong yet, so I can't stop the test.'"

Yet Block looks back on his school years with embarrassment. Take the still-standing bedroom mural he painted with a girlfriend just after high school graduation, which features an amateurish portrait of Walt Whitman surrounded by pearls of wisdom from folks like Keats, Robert Frost and Paul McCartney. "It was going to be great literary figures in the tradition of Starbucks cafés," he deadpans. "Basically it's a collection of the most overly quoted poems of all time."

Block boasts pretty, multicolored eyes and a confidence-inspiring smile. His gravity-defying, unkempt brown hair adds a couple inches to his tall, solid frame. Nonetheless, he prefers to dwell on his own physical awkwardness, noting that he was once told he had "the map of Israel in my face."

Favorite topics are his failures with girls and longtime struggle with acne.

"This girl I had a crush on told me, 'I've been learning Photoshop,'" he remembers of a particularly scarring high school English class encounter. "'It's amazing what you can do with that airbrush tool.' And then she looked at all of my acne, and she was like, 'I wish I could just use that airbrush tool on your face.'"

Such experiences helped him identify with both the aging, humpbacked character of Abel and the high school nerd, Seth. But though Block still considers himself an outsider, nowadays he dresses fashionably and talks to women with wit and self-confidence.

And he's financially established as well, having won a six-figure contract with Random House, the result of a bidding war for Forgetting. Though he prefers not to disclose the exact amount, he imparts that the figure was bolstered by the sale of publishing rights in a wide swath of countries, including the U.K., France, Finland, Israel, Australia and New Zealand. (The book's Los Angeles-based film agent may add to the total as well.) Reviews have been favorable, with Publishers Weekly offering a starred rating, calling it "a story that's compulsive and transporting" and an "astounding debut." Maslin called it a "fresh, beguiling novel." Glowing reviews from Entertainment Weekly and NPR followed soon after.

Block was an unknown author before he sent agent Bill Clegg a rough draft of his novel in the summer of 2006, out of the blue. Block was shooting bar mitzvah and wedding videos to pay the bills at the time, having moved to New York two years earlier after graduating with a film major from Washington University (where he wrote early bits of the novel). After quitting his own agency the previous year, Clegg had joined the prestigious William Morris agency and just happened to be looking for new clients. He loved the book immediately.

"I think his instincts for storytelling are so natural, and the way he sets up that book is so effective and gripping," says Clegg. "Stefan comes out of nowhere. He doesn't come from a writing program; he doesn't have some famous mentor; he doesn't come off of publication in The New Yorker; he doesn't come off of winning a prize. Stefan had nothing but a great book, period."

Clegg was convinced it could be a hit, and so after reading the manuscript over the weekend he called Block into his office the following Monday.