We have to answer some questions.
But also in the back, Riverhead has this unique approach
to marketing, which is the tattoos.
I don't know what the logic is, but these
are semi permanent tattoos, which means permanent.
My daughter has one from last fall, so be careful with them.
[LAUGHTER]
These are for the new book, In Persuasion Nation
so please take--
especially if you're attractive please wear them.
[LAUGHTER]
Any questions at all to be addressed?
Well, it must have been very definitive.
Yes?
When did you start writing?
Really, I started in college, but I
was in engineering school, so I was kind of doing on the side.
So I started then, and I kind of just
didn't do anything for a long time.
And I went overseas, went to Sumatra in the oil fields.
And when I was there, I kind of got
a lot more serious about it.
But my first book didn't come out
until I was 33 or something, so I was
kind of a late, late bloomer.
What [INAUDIBLE] did you do?
What made you want to publish [INAUDIBLE]??
Oh.
Well, I just sent them out, you know?
I just sent him out over the transom.
Yeah, I just literally just sent out
a little cover letter saying, would you publish this
and-- is that what you mean?
Were you writing books [? in light of ? ] publishing?
Yes, very much.
I mean, like a lot of young people, even 20,
I thought, my goal is to write a book that
is so good and popular that I get rich instantly.
And I can skip over all that banal middle American shit,
like--
[INAUDIBLE]
Say it again?
Yeah.
I mean, I really had the idea that it
would be great to pass over all this stuff.
And of course, it didn't happen for another 13 years,
and then it wasn't enough to even buy anything.
But--
[LAUGHTER]
Honestly, that's a great blessing
because I did have the idea that I--
we all grew up in our parents' houses,
and we feel like, oh, compromise, compromise.
So I had any idea that it would be
great to just leave out of that, but it didn't happen at all.
So that has been a great life to have
to do what everyone has to do and never
have quite enough money.
And then that, of course, becomes your material.
So I'm grateful that I got nice things,
but it was always later than I wanted them, which is good.
Yeah?
I was wondering where you got your inspiration for the story
Sea Oak because that was one of the craziest things I've ever
read.
I totally didn't see it coming.
And I guess they said that they were turning it into a movie.
What are your plans on that?
Yeah.
Ben Stiller owns-- I wrote two scripts, that one
and CivilWarLand, and Ben Stiller
has the rights to both of them.
So I'm hoping that something will happen.
And that story-- really, what I do honestly
is just start with the smallest thing I can think of.
In that case, I lived in Syracuse.
And I was walking in the mall, and there were these two kind
of white trashy Syracuse girls.
And their conversation was so funny.
It was like, [INAUDIBLE].
It was like they were from Moldavia or something.
I couldn't understand them.
And then very slowly, I just followed them around,
and they were talking.
But it was all this [INAUDIBLE].
So I thought, really, that's a form of poetry
when you get right down to it.
I mean, I grew up in Chicago.
All these people that I knew were very loving,
very passionate, sentimental people, but in many cases,
they didn't take the traditional approach to expressing emotion.
They would tell you sort of on the side of their mouth
or sarcastically.
So I kind of fall in love this idea
that any diction can be overflowed.
I have a story in this new book that's
written in a technical writing jargon or a corporate
or whatever.
So that story just started with those girls talking that way.
And after a while, I think it's kind like a sea crystal.
You come up with one little riff that you kind of like.
And then you say, OK, well, where are they standing?
And then you write off from there.
So really, it just started as that.
I don't want to give it away, but there's a surprising thing
that happens in the end.
And I got stuck for about four years on that part.
I wrote something like 300 pages of alternate endings,
but always were disappointing.
And then one day I had the idea that those of us
on the in-crowd know about.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah.
I mean, I'd love to see it made into a movie.
I'm kind of--
I wrote it, so I hope it gets made in time for the old folks
home payments.
[LAUGHTER]
Who are some of your biggest influences?
I said in the classroom I was a big Hemingway
fan, believe it or not.
I don't think there are too many traces of it any more,
but I really loved the economy and the sort
of simple objective sentences.
And then later, Kerouac, I really loved.
Thomas Wolfe, I loved, and then I went to the Syracuse program
and studied with Tobias Wolff, and Raymond Carver was still
living there at the time, so they were big influences.
And then I think really it was kind
of a process of just loving those people so
much in their work and then getting to a point
each time where you tried to imitate him,
and it just wasn't satisfying.
Your life, you know, didn't quite mesh with their vision.
And you could feel the falseness of that.
So finally, for me, the big break through
was permitting myself to be funny
and to be a little scatological, which we were
doing at home all those years.
But somehow the idea that it was in literature,
I hadn't made that leap.
And then later, I mean, Gogol--
I love the Russian writer, Gogol.
And the Russian writer Isaac Babel was a big influence.
He's not a funny writer particularly,
but his prose is so tight.
Even Hemingway said, he does what
I do only he does it better.
And Babel also was able to take that approach
and apply it to a really domestic themes, which I don't
think Hemingway ever quite did.
And Tobias Wolff was a huge influence in his writing
as a person because he was my teacher at Syracuse.
And he was such a nice, loving guy,
great father, a great husband.
And I always thought that to be a writer, you had to be off.
And I was wondering when my addiction would kick in
because I was kind of a straight arrow, and I thought,
oh, I'm doomed.
Meeting him was really inspiring because he didn't have any.
The only thing he did intensely was write.
And he'd come out of there, and he'd be a great father.
I remember once he called his teenage son, dear,
and I thought, shit, that's great.
That's something.
So he was a big personal influence for sure.
In terms of-- some of your stories
have a political edge to them.
[INAUDIBLE] writing stories like that, do you
think about the audience that are
going to be reading the stories, assuming that they're
going to share your politics or you may try
to change the minds of someone?
It's a really good question.
It's a good question.
Honestly, for me the politics is sort of more--
I think of it as more just landscape, the landscape
in which the story takes place.
In other words, if you were Turgenev,
you'd have a landscape of peasant villages in forests
and so on, and that would be the stuff out of which you would
make the psychological moment.
So for me, a lot of times the politics
is kind of just background noise,
but I'm aware that also sounds like I'm advocating something.
So I think like a lot of people, 9/11 kind of messed me
up a little bit, and I suddenly started
writing much more politically than I ever would have before.
And this book in a way, is kind of the story of that trajectory
because towards the end, the last story
is-- for me anyway, it was kind of a way out
of the trap of being political.
I think all stories are political if they're
about human beings.
Chekhov has this beautiful story called "Grief" where there's
this guy whose son has just died that day, but he's a poor guy
and he's a cab driver, like a horse cab driver.
And the whole story is just him trying to get somebody
to listen to him.
He just wants to talk about his son,
that he was a good boy, that he was--
they don't want to talk to a cab driver.
He gets whipped at one point, and he's spit on
and whatever, just ignored
And at the end of the day when no one would listen to him,
he takes the horses in the stable,
and he kind of takes the horse's head in his hand
and he whispers something in the horse about his son.
Is that a political story?
Yeah.
I mean, it is in the deepest sense
because that's the Russia that's going to erupt
in revolution in 15 years.
And there's a whole nation of people
like that who can never tell their secrets to anyone
who will listen.
So my highest vision is that a story
would be political because it's happening to a human being.
And you extrapolate that times a million, and it's political.
But in this book, a lot of them are much more overt than that.
I just felt frustrated that our country had gotten
so stupid all of a sudden and so passive,
and I couldn't help-- it just wouldn't stay out
of the stories.
I wrote some of anti-war things for the New Yorker,
but still that pressure was really there.
I think what I'm trying to do now is remember that fiction
basically is a tool to wake us up,
and it's also a tool to disassemble
your own projections and prejudices.
So when I think Republicans--
I don't know.
There may be some here.
Who knows?
But when I think that, I'm being full
of shit because there is really not such thing as a Republican.
I mean, there is, but deep down in a fictional way,
the Republican is Keith.
And Keith is self-conscious because he's
got a slight overbite, and he always
feels that people are making fun of him
because of that overbite, which has
happened to him his whole life, especially
those liberal elites.
So really, Keith is a guy with a vulnerability who's
exported it to somebody else.
So I think the fictional thing is to reside with the character
until you start to see him as a three dimensional human being,
and then the process of loving them can start.
And so for the next book, that's the plan anyway.
No more [INAUDIBLE].
[LAUGHTER]
[INAUDIBLE] a lot of your dialogue
the sentences that were spoken by characters ended in question
marks, and yet they didn't always seem necessarily
like interrogative statements.
I was wondering if sometimes you feel limited
by having only sort of question marks and periods and stuff
to end sentences.
Yeah, I think so.
I mean for me, the big fun is the tonal communication.
So where I live, a lot of the kids
are always talking like this.
There's a spike in my head.
And you think, there is?
But it's beautiful.
I mean, there's something beautiful about that.
And there is something different.
"There's a spike in my head" is different than "there's
a spike in my head?"
And so in a certain way, I don't quite
know that I could quantify what the difference is.
But sometimes you just hear it and you go,
that's a question mark there.
It's amazing, too, isn't it, how we
read they're so perceptive that a reader who's fully
in the moment of the story gets to that question mark,
and that's different than if it was a period.
So yeah, thanks for noticing.
I mean, thanks for noticing it?
[LAUGHTER]
Thank you.
Oh, yeah.
OK.
You're almost out of there.
If everybody else wants to leave, that's--
We'll just talk.
I was just going to ask a couple of words of advice
from you, right?
We talked a little bit in the class.
I think the biggest advice is don't stop.
As far as I can tell, when I look at my students in Syracuse
who've published, the main thing they've done
has just been like tanks.
And with their minds open, they just keep going
and gradually the work rises to meet them.
But then the other thing that we talk about in the class
was this idea that maybe when you really get down to it,
originality in art means settling into where you
actually are in a certain way.
Like me, I have this voice.
You may have noticed.
I talk a little fast, and it's a little nasal.
And when I was a teenager, that caused
me no end of embarrassment because I
was sort of an easy target.
And I talk with my hands, and I really hated it.
And there was even a time where I tried to slow down
and really tried to be an attractive alpha male.
And then that didn't work very well.
So I think in capsule, that's kind
of what my artistic trajectory was
like was to finally say, god, I don't know why I always
write about corpses.
I don't know why every time I get to a place in the story
where I'm getting a little bit deep,
I have to undercut it with the joke.
But I do.
So for me, the whole thing was to relax
into that and say, well, I'm going to be here another 30
years, so let's go ahead and throw everything
you've got at the thing.
So I think maybe one thing is whenever you find yourself
saying to yourself as a young writer,
I don't know how to do a story.
I don't really know the rules.
Relax into the idea that you, at whatever age you are, 18,
you have lived in the world 18 years.
And when Faulkner was 18, he did not know more than you know.
He may have been technically more adept or something.
But in terms of actual experience,
18 years is 18 years.
So what seems lovely to you is.
What seems sad to you is.
The greatest tragedy of your life, it was.
And your heart being broke is just as real
as Shakespeare's being broke, and I
think then you can start to get purchase on how to do it.
And of course, it's got to be a new way.
When I say there's that beautiful Turgenev story
First Love, when I say First Love,
the room lights up with thousands of ideas,
memories of first love.
And how wonderful it is that one, when I say first love,
I can see people kind of going, hmm, Sally, or whatever.
And so in a way, what that proves
is that we're all basically different variations
of the same model.
We've got the same brain.
First love means first love.
Now for me, it means 1973 in a back seat of a '69 Camaro that
smelled like Love's Baby Soft.
But that has nothing to do with anybody else.
But if I say first love, you get it.
So to me, that's the thing that gives you
confidence is that the person on the other end
is just you on a different day in a slightly different world.
So you can communicate.
And in fact, it's almost impossible not to communicate.
And this stuff that you have to say
is perfectly wonderful and valid.
OK.
Thank you so much for your attention.
[APPLAUSE]