Now I’ve read the book, now I’ve had time to think about it. What is my understanding of her personal truth? I can only understand a small slice of it—269 pages is a fraction of reality—but it seems to have something to do with joy and spirituality and devastation and redemption and wisdom and poetry. Also: the hunger for knowledge, the quest for community, and the capacity for love. Great loves and small loves alike. It is good to be able to love. I felt it flowing through the pages of this book. Don’t be mistaken that this book is about booze. It is about much, much more.

Over e-mail, Rosie answered a few questions about her love of poetry, her intriguing family members, and what she would do with her life if she weren’t a writer.

***

The Rumpus: Does having a poetry background impact your prose writing? Is there any sort of crossover inspiration?

Rosie Schaap: Poetry influences me in countless ways: in how I write, how I make decisions, how I reckon with my misgivings and mistakes, how I treat people. I read at least a poem a day; without that to anchor me, I’m pretty sure I’d completely unravel. Although I seldom write poems anymore, poetry does affect my prose writing—whether as a source of inspiration or a point of reference (Frost and Brecht have turned up in my “Drink” columns for The New York Times Magazine; Yeats and Blake, among others, are big presences in Drinking With Men), or as a kind of reminder to be careful with metaphors, to think them through, to make sure that they do what I need them to do.

Rumpus: Now I’ll do that awful thing where I ask if you have a top-five poet list. Or do you have any go-to poets? What poets are you greatest triggers?

Schaap: A top-five list. So hard! I share your devotion to Grace Paley—as a fiction writer, as a poet, and as a human. Blake, Dickinson, and Wordsworth are always with me. See? That’s already four. So I’ll pick one among the living: the great Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson (who is also a brilliant prose writer); it makes me a little crazy that, although he has many fans, he’s not massively famous, especially on this side of the Atlantic. I often turned to a nonfiction book of Ciaran Carson’s, Last Night’s Fun, when I was really struggling with writing Drinking With Men. To me, it’s everything great nonfiction should be: smart, funny, surprising, insightful—just a joy to read from beginning to end. Its primary subject is traditional Irish music, but so much else comes into it: family, food, sports, history.

Rumpus: You are a woman with no shortage of opinions. I know that you have very specific likes and dislikes in writing. What turns you on in writing? What infuriates you?

Schaap: I think what I always want most of all is the sense that the reader matters to the writer. That a story, true or not, is being told not only for the sake of the telling, but because it might matter to anyone generous enough to take the time to read it. And I don’t mean it has to matter in some big, life-changing way (though sometimes literature has had that effect on me). I guess I’m annoyed by writers who seem only to look inward, and never out at the world around them. There’s a kind of willful obfuscation or opacity I sometimes detect in contemporary poetry that turns me off. All writers need to be introspective. I think that’s obvious. But I think we also need to signal to our readers that they’re part of this, too.

Rumpus: While some may get the impression from the title that this book is about drinking, I think more than anything else this book is about the importance of the sense of community. (I thought so often of the concept of a third place while I was reading this book.) You are a native New Yorker, and New York City gets a tough rap sometimes for being a mean, tough place. But I saw a lot of love.

Schaap: Community is absolutely at the heart of Drinking With Men, much more than drinking (although there’s plenty of that). You’re right about the “third place” idea. Bars have always been crucial to me as places that aren’t home, and aren’t work. Bars are pressure valves. And most of all, bars are people. And the people I’ve met—my community—at bars here in New York have been as warm and open as people I’ve met in bars anywhere else. This image of New York as a mean, tough place drives me a little nuts. But as much as I love my hometown, and cheerlead for it whenever given the chance, I frequently remind myself that, as a native, the perspective I’ll never have on this town is that of someone coming here for the first time, and making a life here. I will never know what that feels like, even thought most of closest friends have had that experience.

But listen, I am from here, and I’m not so tough and mean. I love giving people directions (I get stopped in the street for them all the time) and restaurant and bar recommendations, and other NYC-related advice, whether they ask for it or not. You know me. I talk to everybody. All the time.

Rumpus: You come from a family of many magnificent Schaaps. Your father, Dick, was a famous sportswriter and wrote many books; your brother Jeremy is an ESPN anchor and also a sportswriter and author; and, of course, there is your cousin Phil Schaap, the jazz historian and DJ, who inspires so much obsession from music fans. Was there always a sense of this is what you are going to become, that you would be a writer someday? And although those other Schaaps are, for the most part, very different in terms of what they write about, did they still inspire you? Do you see any commonalities between your work?

Schaap: Ha! You are too kind, Jami. “Magnificent” is a very charitable way of putting it. My parents split up when I was very young, and I was raised by my mother (who was pretty magnificent in her own way). But I vividly remember watching my father write. What he modeled, inadvertently, just out of necessity, was that writing is a job. He was very, very good at his job. But what I saw was someone putting in marathon stretches at an IBM Selectric II. He didn’t seem to give himself much time to plot, reflect, outline, fret, ponder, pace, despair (though I suspect he must have done all of these things when I wasn’t looking). What I saw was: he wrote. Like a man possessed. (He was married three times and had six children, and in a brilliant, and comically cynical moment, he once told me that “alimony is the greatest muse.”) But I know how much he valued good writing, so I don’t want to say he stripped all of the romance or excitement from the work of writing; he just made it clear that without putting in the work, there could be no romance attached to it. In the sports world, my brother has followed in his footsteps, and has done so beautifully, and very much in his own fashion. I could not admire my brother, or his work, more.

And then there’s Phil. Amazing Phil. I hadn’t seen Phil very much in my youth. What really brought us together was a ride we shared back to New York after another cousin’s wedding in Maryland in the mid-1990s. He took up much of the five-and-a-half hours telling us the heartbreaking story of the genius cornetist Bix Beiderbecke. By the time we arrived in front of Puffy’s Tavern, well before last call, I had tears in my eyes. I was deeply moved by Phil’s telling of the sad tale. I was also so happy to be reunited with my wonderful cousin in this way, and we’ve stayed close ever since. He’s a gift to all people who love jazz—and to me.

I guess we all share an obsessive strain. For my dad, it wasn’t just sports—it was people. He found people endlessly fascinating, and so often brought out the best in them. I hope I share some of this. My brother knows as much about history and culture as he does about sports. I’d just as soon talk about poetry or music or social justice as I would about drinks. The things we’re into, we are really into. And we are all talkers. Epic, unstoppable, kind of superhuman talkers. Just try to shut us up. But I’ve also known that I’m inherently lazier, less focused, and less driven than these other Schaaps. (And since our name is Dutch for “sheep,” it was kind of irresistible to consider myself the black sheep). I always wrote, but in terms of really thinking of writing as a career, I was a late bloomer; it didn’t click until my late thirties. I wasn’t terribly ambitious. And I didn’t have the ideas or the resolve or the will to commit myself fully to writing until adulthood, after I’d given many other, varied professional paths a chance.

Rumpus: We have discussed before our different feelings about writing. I enjoy the act of writing and am very happy in the moment, whereas my impression is that you enjoy more having written. What is important to you about writing (or being a writer) if it is not the act of writing itself? And what do you enjoy more than having written? You have had so many careers in your life—if you could swap writing as a career for anything, what would it be? I like to picture you just officiating weddings for the rest of your life.

Schaap: I wouldn’t say I enjoy the idea of having written any more than I enjoy the act of writing, but I always do enjoy reaching the finish line (whether it’s with a book, a column, an essay, or a poem). I love the act of writing during those rare stretches when I know it’s going well, when my brain and my heart both feel fully, richly engaged. I wish it felt like that all the time, but for me anyway, it doesn’t. There’s so often a slow-burning, burdensome sense of wanting what I write to be so much better. And that’s frustrating, but it’s also productive. I want to keep going mostly for those moments, when I know I’m really communicating something in a way that I think might move or entertain a reader (if I can do both, I’m especially happy). I can’t help wanting more of those moments. At the same time, I’m grateful beyond measure to have arrived at a point when I really can have a life as a writer, to get to do what I get to do. Writing the “Drink” column is a total pleasure; I think the scale of it—just 600 words or so—and the steady deadlines make it hard to indulge in the fretfulness and occasional agony I felt while writing a book.

So I think that regardless of the difficulty I have with writing, it’s exactly the career I want. But I do daydream about running a little pub someday, while still working as a writer. A cozy little bar, where I could read and write in the back office when things are slow. Talk to the regulars who drink during the day. And officiate at weddings in the garden out back. It will have to have a little garden out back.

***

Photograph of Rosie Schaap © 2013 by M. Sharkey.

Related Posts:

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• The Rumpus Interview with Molly Ringwald
• The Rumpus Book Club Interviews Jami Attenberg
• Jami Attenberg Roundup
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Also, I go to see other authors read, to support them, and to watch them interact with their audience. I want to know what they know. I never want to stop learning. Last summer, in New York City, I went to see Molly Ringwald give a reading for her first book of fiction, When It Happens to You, a funny, emotionally true story about the failure of a marriage and its repercussions, a book which I very much enjoyed and promptly bought for my mother. I thought: Well, let’s see what she knows.

Of course Molly was a great reader—she’s been performing since she was a child. (I was fortunate enough to have her narrate the audiobook version of my latest novel.) She was poised. She held the room. But sometimes, because of her past, she gets asked questions that don’t have anything to do with her writing. I only wanted to know about her writing. So I decided to ask her some more questions. We exchanged e-mails. Here we go.

***

The Rumpus: One of the things I appreciated about your book was how structurally sound it was. I think structure is one of the biggest challenges writers face. For fiction writers, it’s sometimes easy to get caught up in a character’s voice and lose track of the bigger picture of the book. Can you talk about how conscious you were of the structure when you were writing it, if you found any challenges in that area, and if you used any other books in any sort of instructional way?

Molly Ringwald: The structure of the book actually came fairly organically. The only idea that I really had in mind when I set out to write the book was the thought of writing on betrayal—the ways in which we betray each other and ourselves. I intended for the stories to be shorter and the connections to be more random.

But as soon as I wrote the first story—which came in longer that I had expected—I realized that I wanted the connections to be less random and more profound. I wrote the stories more or less in the order that they appear, with the exception of the second story that I wrote, which was even longer than the first. I labored over it like crazy and then scrapped it, which was heartbreaking but know now that it really helped me to further focus the book that I ended up writing. It takes place in the span of a year, so there was some shuffling that I had to do a little bit after the fact to make sure that all of the events line up in the right months, but it was actually surprising to me how little of that was actually necessary.

What I did find challenging—and I don’t know if all writers face this, or of it is just me—but I do find myself switching verb tenses while I’m writing. I mean, this is pretty much first draft stuff, but it’s interesting to notice the places where it happens and why.

The Rumpus: I love a good nitpick. The thing that I obsess over in my own work—and I find myself doing it in the work of others as well—is when I repeat certain phrases or words. Even though it feels really cushy and lovely to use them sometimes, because they are your favorite words, it’s just a sign of lazy writing. What other kinds of things do you zone in on in your writing or the writing of others? And on the flipside, what do you delight in? Like, I love a long sentence—I’m talking a page-long, even longer. I love one that takes you on a real journey.

Ringwald: Repetition is absolutely something that I nitpick over in my own work and in the work of others. It is also something that can be really noticeable if you happen to read work out loud. I really tried to be aware of it in my own work, but even with that in mind, I found a repetition in the finished book that drove me out of my mind!

I tend to zone in when writers pamper their main characters—when the self-deprecation seems a little disingenuous. Also, when the writer has the characters speak in the same way with the same character ticks.

Long sentences I love, if you can pull it off, and, of course, Franzen is genius at that. I think it’s incredibly important to know how to use them and how to vary it so that it has an inner structure to it. Another device that I admire, that you use, and Egan as well, is the ability to flash forward into the future and then back again. I find it thrilling—especially when the writer manages to not undercut the suspense in any way. It seems magical to me.

Something else that drives me crazy: writing clichéd similes. I think certain writers just have a natural facility to find similes that are utterly original, and other writers don’t use them at all. It is something that I think about all the time when I write. If it ever sounds like something that I have heard or read before, I’ll cut it.

The Rumpus: So I am very lucky because I got to have you read my audiobook, but I have only listened to a little bit of it because I’m afraid I’ll start to read it like you. I have a problem with mimicry, especially with accents, but also with timing. I also end up wanting to write like other people who are highly stylized. I remember the first time I read On The Road, when I was traveling in Europe by myself, and when I look back at the journals I kept at the time they just sound like Kerouac and nothing else. Do you have any issues with mimicry at all?

Ringwald: I am a natural mimic, and it is something that I kept in mind while writing my book. I basically just stopped reading all fiction—the only exception that I made was for writers that I had already been influenced by in my life, like Carver and Didion. But I swore off new fiction entirely and now I feel like I’ve been making up for lost time and reading as much as I can. (Of course now I have that feeling of: “Flash forwards! Why didn’t I try that?”) I found reading biographies of other writers incredibly helpful, and also poetry. I don’t really write poetry, so I didn’t feel like it would sway me.

Rumpus: Carver’s actually one of my go-tos when I have trouble writing. Carver and Paley and Flannery O’Connor. Whenever I feel like I’ve forgotten how to write I can pick up one of their books and open it to any story, and I’ll suddenly feel renewed.

Ringwald: Carver, he’s a good one. I have always responded to the immediacy of his writing. Whenever I get caught up in this idea that I’m not “innovating,” or the pressure of thinking I have to express something that no one has ever expressed in the same way ever, I go back to Carver and am always struck by the way he just…said it. It puts me back in the frame of mind of just tell the story—as honestly and as authentically as I possibly can.

Rumpus: I was thinking about how I know more about you from the Internet than anywhere else. Can you talk at all about what impact the Internet has had on your writing? Has it helped you to develop an audience? Do you feel like it has opened up the conversation about your work? Does it impact your writing at all?

Ringwald: I don’t really think that the Internet has impacted the actual writing at all. I use it while I write as a sort of virtual library. All of these random questions that would have taken days to figure out are now ridiculously easy to answer, and I really do use it for that. I also write very often to Pandora, which I weirdly prefer to my own music collection, because it is music that I don’t know and therefore do not have any former association with it.

As far as the promotional side of the Internet…I have mixed feelings about it. I am ambivalent about self-promotion, but at the same time I can’t deny that it had a positive effect on my book sales. Particularly e-book sales. At the beginning, my e-book sales were literally quadruple my print sales, which I’m sure had a lot to do with my online presence. But at the end of the day, I think I am ill-equipped to stay in the social media atmosphere on a regular basis. It feels a bit like staying at a party for too long, and I need to get home, back to my real life to recharge. Not to mention that when I spend too much time on social media, it keeps me from actually writing.

Rumpus: And finally, you and I were chatting the other day about the best books of the year and I mentioned a few you hadn’t read yet, and I was thinking about how all I do is sit around and read and write all day and maybe I’ll, like, go for a bike ride or something, but that’s pretty much it. And you have three kids and a day job and a husband, and I am just curious how you fit it all together—the life of the mind, and the emotional life, and also, if being a parent has impacted your writing at all beyond subject matter.

Ringwald: Children do force you to prioritize your time in a way that I don’t think I ever did as a young single person kicking around Paris and New York. Time is a beast that my husband Panio and I struggle with every single day. We negotiate every night who gets to write, and who has to pick up the kids, go grocery shopping, etc. He likes to say that it’s just a matter of desperation—whoever is the most desperate and looks like they will sink into a pit of despair if they don’t get some writing time in is usually the one who gets the hours in the next day. 

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This was never my intention, this peripatetic life, but looking back now at the age of 40, I can finally see I have been doing it for decades. I wanted so much more for myself at some point, though I cannot even remember what exactly it was that I wanted anymore. Now it is only just to write.

On the one hand, I’ve written three books. On the other hand, I have what is politely called a “challenging track record” in the publishing industry, which means I’ve sold just a few thousand copies of each of my books. Getting three books published means I am technically a success, but if you ask some people, my empty bank account unequivocally means I am a failure.

But it is the thing that makes me happiest, and I believe that if you can find the thing that makes you happy, you should do it. Most of my artist friends struggle financially in varying degrees, and we all seem to be trading off turns loaning money to each other. We are members of the creative class, and none of us ask for any sympathy, because we chose this unstable life, although, in our most pretentious and self-indulgent moments, we will whisper to each other that it chose us.

And now, this risky life that I had chosen, had practically broken me. On December 30, I left New York City, and my apartment (now sublet), and headed down south to New Orleans. I was barely surviving off the advance for a book deal, and an unreliable freelance project. I’d had car troubles, too. I could no longer afford my New York rent. Soon I would have nothing left. So I headed south, toward cheaper rent, and a perspective shift. Whatever I had been doing for the last ten years of my life was no longer working. I did not know I would end up sleeping in 26 locations over a seven-month period, though I suspected the journey would be long. But I was all in on whatever happened next.

First, I stayed for two nights in a small town outside of Chapel Hill, NC, with some friends from New York who had swapped their Lower East Side apartment for a sprawling house. Their two children were with them, and the little girl was just like the mother, and the little boy was just like the father, and I could not stop thinking that the entire time I was there.

Next, I stayed for a night in a small, gated community on Tybee Island with my aunt and uncle, in their tremendous house they built from scratch. They talked casually about buying new patio furniture, each individual piece of which cost more than half my rent, and when I heard the figure it stung me with an unusual sensation; it was not envy, but it was something like it.

Did I mention that before I left town my agent took me out to a nice dinner, and told me I should probably try and find a rich man to marry? I never bothered to ask him if he was kidding or not.

In Gainesville, FL, I stayed with my friend Lauren, her husband, and their two young sons. Her husband made lasagna for dinner, and I drank wine, and after dinner Lauren and I talked about books, and then I fell asleep in their guest room, hard and fast, feeling as if I was at last far enough away from New York.

My first apartment in New Orleans, a two-month sublet, was one half of a shotgun in Mid-City I shared with my landlords, two doctors, and their two children and dogs. It was a bi-level apartment, the bedroom and bathroom upstairs, a living room and dining room and kitchen downstairs, fully furnished, big windows, ceiling fans to keep the room cool. There was a giant dining room table on which to spread out and write, which I did religiously, daily, with a firm discipline. My rent was one-third of my rent in New York.

It was in this house I found out about all the money I owed in taxes. I realized I had to sublet my apartment in New York for a few more months in advance so that I could have money from the deposit to live on. I would figure out where I would live later, but I knew I was going to have to do some serious couch-surfing for a while. It was like ripping a parachute cord.

So first I stayed another month in New Orleans, this time subletting another inexpensive apartment a block away. The bathroom smelled funny, and there was nowhere comfortable to sit, and so I spent most of my time there hunched over my laptop in bed.

One night I stayed with a man who lived about two miles away from me, in a tiny studio behind a larger apartment building, and in the morning he made me iced coffee and played Neil Young songs on his stereo.

In April I headed West, stopping for four nights at a friend’s house in St. Martinville, LA, a small town outside of Lafayette. It was a loft converted from a church and at night during thunderstorms the stained glass windows lit up magnificently. The night before I left, at sunset, a friend of a friend who had spent most of his life in that little town and still lived in his family’s farmhouse, took me on a swamp tour in his rickety old motorboat.

In Austin I stayed at a friend’s house just outside of the downtown. Years ago we’d had a fling. Now he was married. At night they drink beer and teach themselves how to play pop songs, she on keyboards, he on drums. They let me play the tambourine while they learned “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” and I thought maybe I would be jealous of their relationship, but instead I was just jealous of their musical abilities.

Outside of Austin I stayed with a friend who had received a nine-month residency on a 250-acre piece of land, part of which was a Cherokee burial ground. I stayed there for ten days. I wrote, I took long walks; the turkey vultures circled us at sunset every night.

On my way back east I stayed at a bed and breakfast in Little Rock, AR. There was a rose garden out front, and I ate crawfish at a nearby restaurant for dinner.

The next night, I stopped at the home of an old friend of mine from New York who had moved down to Memphis, TN because she had fallen in love with a musician who lived there. A friend of theirs was sick – he would pass away soon after I left – and things were tense. My friend and I went to yoga together before we left and we were both grateful for it.

I was making my way back to my hometown: I stopped for a night in Charleston, IL where I stayed with my internet friend, Roxane, who is a professor at the university there. It was the first time we had met in person. Her home was immaculate, and she bought me dinner, and I admired all her books, and the next morning I bought her lunch at a nearby diner and I suddenly realized how gorgeous her smile was.

In Chicago, I stayed for a few nights with one of my best friends, Wendy, and her husband, Chris, and on the first night I got there she made us all individual pizzas from scratch and then we watched most of the second season of Portlandia and I drank a bunch of wine and was extremely happy. They know how to live their life right, I thought.

I spent an evening with my parents in my childhood home, in my childhood bed, where I will always sleep like a rock, because it is quiet there, and the room is small and compact and womblike, and I feel safe. When I said goodbye to my father he seemed sad, though I didn’t think it had anything to do with me, but I realize now maybe I was wrong.

I stayed with my old college roommate and her husband and two children in their beautiful home in Evanston, where we ate pot roast and drank wine and her daughter showed me how twirly her skirt was in the morning. I slept in their basement on an air mattress. I found myself experiencing something like envy when I looked inside her well-stocked refrigerator.

Rilke was notorious for always being someone’s houseguest. I read somewhere once that he had 50 addresses in four years. I suspect he wasn’t sleeping on air mattresses in basements though.

I cannot remember the name of the town where I stayed in Pennsylvania, but it was small and eerie: a town of chain motels and restaurants, planted in the middle of nowhere. I slept in a Holiday Inn Express, and dined at a TGIFriday’s.

I arrived in New York City at the beginning of May, and a migraine kicked in as I was passing Bryant Park on my way to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where I would stay for two nights with my friend Gabrielle. I immediately blamed New York for my migraine. I was flattened for two days. Gabrielle sketched me while I lay on her couch and we talked about money and art.

I moved to South Brooklyn for a few nights and stayed with my friend Rosie for a few nights in her beautifully decorated but tiny 3-room apartment. I slept on her couch. I got up at 7 AM and sat in a café so she could have her space to do her work, and it was somewhere in those days, those early hours in the café, that I realized I had fully rescinded control of my life.

In Queens I stayed with my brother, his wife, and my seven-year-old niece. I slept in their basement on an air mattress. I babysat my niece for a few hours and when I told her that soon I would be back in New York for good she slid down to the floor and made a small noise of joy. “Did you think I was never coming back?” I said, and she said, shyly, “Yes,” and I didn’t cry, but I didn’t not cry either.

My friends Kate and Brendan, engaged, bought a house in Portland, ME, last year, and had finally installed themselves in it fully this winter, and invited me to live in their guest bedroom for the month of May. The house, an Italianate gem, was constructed in the 1800s, and is all high ceilings and hardwood floors, built-in bookshelves and crown moldings. There was a fresh paint job. They built a window bed in their guestroom and I was the first person to sleep on it. Forever I will feel like that was my room. For three weeks they fed me delicious food and wine, and the Maine air acted like a narcotic.

A freelance project arrived, and I completed it. I was getting some scratch together.

One night I slept at my friend Ron’s house in Waterville, ME. I drove up there for the night. It was his birthday. I slept in his guest room and he told me that he had let so many of his broke friends stay there over the years, and I know he wasn’t talking about me, but I realized that’s who I was, that’s who I am. I am someone’s broke friend.

My subletter moved out early, and I moved back into my own apartment for a week. I collapsed in bliss. I watched the sunset every night from the roof. I almost remembered who I was for a second. Then the next subletters arrived, a couple from Texas with a small dog named Peanut, and I gave way to that floating feeling again, perching myself in a friend’s girlfriend’s studio apartment near Prospect Park, cat-sitting while she went on vacation. I walked every day in the park, in one big circle. It helped.

I was back to Gabrielle’s for three weeks, renting her spare room so that she could afford a plane ticket to Chicago. The heat wave started. There was no air-conditioning.

I questioned everything in my life. A freelance project that was supposed to start never did. Every day I hid in cafes. All I wanted was to return home. But the deal I had made with myself in Texas in the spring was still in effect: my apartment was sublet until close to the end of July.

Three more weeks, this time with my friend Cinde and her husband, David, both unemployed and needing help with their rent themselves. I slept in their back bedroom. Again, there was no air conditioning.  I stretched sheets across a couch, and woke up every morning in a huddle of cotton and sweat, covered in mosquito bites.

I was still broke but now there was just enough in my pocket to pay my rent. Another freelance project arrived. Enough money to get me through until the fall. Enough money to give me a moment to breathe. My subletters moved out, and then, suddenly I was home, and I wanted to wrap my hands around my apartment and never let it go.

Sometimes people with more stable lives than mine, people who are married and own their apartments and have good jobs and families, like to say to me, “Keep living the dream.” And I always want to say to them, “What dream is that?”

I will never own a home, I will never have money in the bank to last me more than a month or two in advance. There is no chance with this economy. I will work until I die, but I will be happy to do it because I love my work. I’d better love it. And I’d almost say it’s all I got, but I know I’ve got just a bit more than that: a whole lot of people who love me and have my back. Forever I will have a place to rest my head.

***

Illustrations by Hadley Hooper.

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“Good luck, son,” I said.  “Let me know when you’re done.”  I’ll admit it, I doubted him. It was his first book.  He’s young. Writing a book is hard.  Who knew what the kid had in him?

Turns out about 300 pages. In just two months Cole produced a sharp, witty, and well-researched book: Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan’s Army Conquered the Web. I mean, I don’t even have a tumblr and I liked it. But still, it plagued me.  How did he get it done so fast? Cole agreed to talk to me via email about how to write a book in two months. (Hint: it’s not Adderall.)

The Rumpus: Why did you have only two months to write your book?

Cole Stryker: My publisher initially told me that I would have eight months to write Epic Win. But throughout the spring, Anonymous exploded into the press with a series of heavily publicized attacks and hacks. It became clear that riding the wave of that publicity would be essential for selling the book, which would otherwise have been a quiet release about an obscure topic. Lucky for me, the public awareness of 4chan and Anonymous has expanded this summer, far beyond my expectations and journalists are scrambling to talk to experts on the subject.

Anyway, Overlook wanted to be sure to get the book out by the end of summer so that Epic Win would serve as a definitive statement about this still very mysterious subculture. So, I signed the book deal in the end of April, started writing in May, and finished my first draft by the end of June. I then had less than a week to clean it up (along with the help of a wonderful editor and copyeditor, of course). I thought it was insane at the time, but in hindsight I think Overlook made the right call. The timing could not be more perfect.

Rumpus: I asked some of the fastest writers I know, and we all agreed writing a book in two months is fast.  Can you talk about the breakdown of writing versus researching versus interviewing? What was the most time-consuming part of it?

Stryker: A few months before the book project began I moved from an expensive, tiny, windowless room in the Lower East Side to a massive place up in Harlem. When I tell people what I’m paying in rent they usually respond with a steely glare. The point is that I pay so little in rent that didn’t have to actually work at all during the two months of writing. I have two big windows that let in lots of sun, a comfy leather chair and a hi-fi setup. I’ve never been interested in that urban writerly cliche — going to coffee shops and sitting in the park with a laptop — because my writing environment at home is so ideal.

Still, it was crunch time from Day 1. I started the process by making a basic outline, then a list of about 75 people I wanted to interview, and sent out emails. While I waited for responses I started copy-pasting every interesting bit of information on 4chan and Anonymous that I could find into a huge Word document, that I then used as a checklist of all the stuff I wanted to cover. Then I put together another doc made up of questions that I didn’t think anyone had answered yet. These became the basis of my eventual interview questions.

From there I just started writing every chapter at once, because each new discovery in my research affected the content needs in three or four other chapters. There were moments when I felt crushed by the weight of this disorganized jumble of material that had almost no structure. Putting everything together into a cohesive narrative was the toughest part. My book is so broad, it felt like I was juggling three different books and trying to squeeze them into one story.

Rumpus: How many words a day did you write?

Stryker: I wrote about 1,500 words a day. I barely left the apartment.

Rumpus: I can’t imagine you transcribed 75 interviews.  That would have taken forever.

Stryker: I’d say about half the interviews were through email, half by phone and half over Gchat or IRC. Transcribing audio was the most tedious aspect of writing the book, but when it came to interviewing some of the heavy hitters, they understandably preferred to chat rather than type out long responses to my questions. I liked the way that gchat interviews captured the spontaneity and light tone of a personal conversation while allowing the subjects to think about what they were writing. A happy medium between email and phone interviewing.

Rumpus: Did you take Adderall or anything like that?  Did you sleep less?

Stryker: I didn’t sleep less. I’m useless when I’m tired, so I generally get at least nine hours every night. I’ve never tried Adderall; I don’t even really drink caffeine. If I ever indulge in a cappuccino I end up spending the entire night playing violent video games because it’s the only level my brain can operate on when I’m being kept awake artificially. Then of course I’m dead the next day, so I just try to avoid anything of the kind. I know, I’m a 90-year-old lady.

Rumpus: Have you always been a fast writer? You used to work in advertising, as have I, and I think it really trains you to be a fast writer because you have to turn pitches around so quickly.

Stryker: I suppose. I spent four years as a copywriter before I moved to New York and transitioned into journalism. And I’ve been blogging daily since 2002. So I guess that has given me an ability to crank out copy quickly. In addition to training for tight deadlines, advertising has also helped me learn how to communicate big ideas to an audience that might not be engaged at the outset. In copywriting, every word counts. Once you build that skill of writing a tight sentence, long form is cake.

Rumpus: Is there anything you wish you’d had more time to work on?

Stryker: Oh absolutely. I can’t even think about it. I would have liked to spend more time in the trenches with Anonymous. I interviewed a handful of them, but it would have taken months to ingratiate myself with the group to the point where I could have gotten some amazing behind the scenes stories. I’m hoping to do some follow-up work that may manifest in some magazine articles or potentially another book.

Rumpus: Did anyone from 4chan have any negative impact on the writing of this? I know you got banned from it when you posed some interview questions.

Stryker: Not substantively. I received nothing but vague, empty threats, which was expected.

Rumpus: I wonder if the time you took to write it somehow reflected or complemented the subject matter, which is to say if 4chan is constantly in motion, in order to cover it, you had to be as well.

Stryker: This is accurate. My story shifted rapidly as Anonymous became ever more politically minded. Lulzsec and other Anonymous splinter groups, which grabbed headlines throughout this summer, did not exist yet, so I was able to incorporate those into the narrative in the form of an epilogue that I wrote several months after I turned in the final draft of the book.

Rumpus: Do you think you’d ever try and write a book this fast again?

Stryker: Not if I can help it, but it’s quite possible that there will be an Epic Win 2: Electric Boogaloo. So, in the interest of timeliness…we’ll see.

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I’ll just come right out and say it: I enjoy books so much more when there’s lots of sex in them. And there is so much sex in Hannah Pittard’s smart, affecting, and beautifully crafted debut novel, The Fates Will Find Their Way.

Inappropriate touching. Masturbation, both public and private. Some grateful fucking. The fetishized hemlines of private-school girls’ skirts. All the boys keep staring at the hot Russian neighborhood mom’s ass. It’s the male gaze times a million—everyone seems to be quietly violating everybody else, in one way or another.

The intertwined tale of a vanished teenage girl named Nora and the hometown boys who loved her—as told through their omniscient perspective—The Fates is The Virgin Suicides for a new generation. Pittard’s depictions of sexual activity are spare and straightforward, but they feel extremely (and credibly) dangerous. Take this scene between two teenagers:

“Just let me see it,” he said. “Just let me see it.”

She looked away and he pulled down the fabric hard, just enough so that her pubic hair was exposed.

He made sounds. She closed her eyes. One hand held down her pants, the other hand was around himself, working.

“Look at it,” he said.

She looked at his face instead, but she was crying a little, hoping it would be over, wanting him to have whatever he needed to finish.

It’s tricky territory, all this underage sex going on in the book. Some of it is innocent, and some of it is sexy, and some of it is disturbing. (There are also references to pedophilia and rape, although they are not rendered explicitly.) That’s sex in America, I guess. We’re a bunch of demanding hypocrites, greedy for stimulation, while we judge everyone around us for wanting the same exact thing—even (or especially) if it’s in a different form. I have done it, and so have you. Can we please have one day where we don’t lie about it?

Hannah Pittard

Pittard seems hell-bent on making her Greek chorus of narrators tell the truth about their own lives, even as they’re mired in fantasies about Nora’s. She tells the story in tight chapters that bounce back and forth between the boys’ youthful existence, their present-day lives, and the imagined possibilities of Nora’s life. Did she hop on a flight, never to be seen again? Did she hitch a ride out West and start life anew? Were there darker forces at work? “It’s the stuff of fantasies, not of real life,” the collective voice says of one possible scenario.

In fantasies, you can get into strangers’ cars. You can have sex with men you don’t know. They’ll love you and pet you and whisper things that high school boys don’t know how to whisper. They’ll fall hard for you and do anything you tell them to, including take you home whenever you want.

Each possibility is teased out deliciously, and the reader uncovers another side of Nora with each of her appearances—“real” or in the boys’ imaginings—in the book. And what of these boys, trapped in their hometown? They grow into men, still trapped: “It seemed, some days, that life was nothing more than a tally of the people who’d left us behind,” they say wistfully.

Meanwhile, we find out the deep, dark secrets of the boys themselves, from childhood to adulthood, together and individually. For the book to work, their collective voice must ring true, and Pittard nails that honest, smart-ass youthful energy. “We never understood why Minka Dinnerman’s dad kept a copy of Hustler tucked in the recess behind the base of the toilet in the first-floor bathroom of the Dinnerman house,” she writes.

Mrs. Dinnerman was the hottest of all the moms. In some ways, it was a shame that she had to be called a mom at all… we all thought it was kind of weird—Mr. Dinnerman’s greedy and unappreciative need to have more than one hot naked lady in his life.

If The Fates has any flaw, it is that Pittard poses perhaps too many questions, and these questions sometimes get in the story’s way. But these questions, distracting as they can be, are at the heart of this novel. And they are worthy of reflection, not least because they are surrounded by so many wise, lovely, and yes—sexy—passages.

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David Goodwillie

American Subversive, which the Associated Press calls, “a triumphant work of fiction,” tracks dueling perspectives.  One is a Gawker-esque blogger who receives information about the identity of a terrorist whom he investigates, and the other the terrorist herself. It’s a taut literary thriller, difficult to put down, buoyed by wickedly incisive commentary on the state of our union.

Kapitoil’s narrator, Qatari citizen Karim (whose voice the Houston Chronicle describes as a “carefully articulated…thing of beauty”), works in the World Trade Center just months before 9/11, and invents a software program that predicts oil futures based on the media’s coverage of terrorism. Wayne has written a surprisingly – given the subject matter – heartwarming coming-of-age tale, rife with clever wordplay and smart cultural analysis.  Kapitoil is a fully addictive read.

Goodwillie and Wayne – don’t they sound like they should be a super cop duo? – recently discussed via email the still-looming threat of terrorism, the agendas of Fox and MSNBC, and promoting yourself via Twitter, which, shockingly, neither one of them seems to particularly enjoy.  (And catch them both across the country soon at numerous events: Goodwillie reads in New York City today, April 22, at Barnes and Noble Tribeca at 7 PM, while Wayne tackles California next week, starting in Los Angeles on April 26, at 826 LA East at 8 PM.)

Teddy Wayne

The Rumpus: Both of your books take place in New York City, where you both live. I know you were both here for the World Trade Center attacks.   How do you think New Yorkers feel about terrorism nine years after the fact? It seems to me like people don’t talk about it that much, that there has been some sort of shift that perhaps has something to do at least in small part with a collective New York bravado.

David Goodwillie: There’s a certain fatalistic attitude towards terrorism in New York – especially in Manhattan, where I live.  We’re aware of our esteemed position as target number one, of course.  For years now, we’ve seen SWAT teams on the subways, police boats in the harbor, bomb-sniffing dogs at Penn Station.  And most of us experienced 9/11 in some first- or second-hand way.  But the truth, of course, is that no one thinks or talks about it much.  It’s a bit like Fight Club: for a New Yorker, the first rule of 9//11 is that you don’t discuss it.  We leave that for outsiders.

Really though, when it comes to terrorism, we’re all just too busy to deal with it.  Terror today is something of an idle man’s game; it’s participants–from Bin Laden to McVeigh to the Unabomber–are usually rural types with time enough to develop dangerous ideas–and deadly weapons.

And that goes for regular citizens who obsess about it, too.  After 9/11, it was the people farthest away from New York and Washington that were screaming the loudest about patriotism and revenge.  There’s so much going on in the reality of every-day New York that potential threats–even doomsday kind of stuff–naturally take a backseat.  Even when something does happen here–the anthrax attacks, say–people push it out of mind quickly.

Teddy Wayne: I don’t think New Yorkers are any braver or even much busier than people in the rest of the country. We have short memories, for one, and we grew weary of the constantly shifting rainbow-colored threat warnings of the Bush years. Most important, people are more concerned now about getting laid off than they are about getting bombed.

But it seems almost inevitable that another attack of some stripe will occur in New York.  We live in a relatively open society.  It takes just one person with access to even mildly advanced weaponry to cause mass destruction, and New York is a symbolically potent target. And it’s increasingly likely that such an attack will come from an American citizen, as in the recent kamikaze mission on the IRS building in Texas, and that is essentially impossible to defend against.

Rumpus: Both of your books explore the relationship between media and terrorism. How much do you feel like the media stokes the fires of terrorism, and how much do you think terrorism needs media in order to survive?

Wayne: Here’s a new Zen koan: If terrorists blow something up in a city, but no one reports on it, does it make a sound? Well, yes and no. The terrorists still certainly cause terror among the populace, but their larger political goals, which require media attention, may go unheeded.

I think the media, especially TV, love reporting on terrorism, just as they love reporting on elections, scandals, and any other spectacles of fear, distraction, and sin. But what’s more dangerous than a source like Fox News–which preaches to the choir and which, if you can’t decode its blatant agenda, you’re probably not a very astute observer of the political scene to begin with (not to say that MSNBC doesn’t have its own equally blatant agenda)–are when seemingly moderate, supposedly “objective” news sources spin events in far subtler ways.

Goodwillie: I almost can’t watch television news anymore.  Even places like MSNBC–which I’m aligned with politically–have become as bad as FOX.  Keith Olbermann makes me want to shoot myself.  (Although I do have a soft spot for Rachel Maddow.)  To say nothing of the half-hour “health and weather updates” that constitute the network nightly news shows.

I remember tuning in to one of the cable news stations–I think it was CNN–to see what would happen when the Tsunami waves hit Hawaii after the earthquake in Chile.  The anchors and reporters built up the tension for an hour as a countdown clock – the weather people had the Tsunami’s arrival figured out to the minute – approached zero.  And then…nothing happened.  The sea stayed calm.  You could sense the media’s disappointment through the screen.

Finally, the anchor cut in and addressed the situation, saying something like, “It’s not that we were rooting for a catastrophe.  I don’t want anyone to get that impression.”  But of course they fucking were!  They were begging for those waves to roll in.  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I hope the farce that TV news has become (I don’t think CNN will last another two years in its current form) gets people to start reading newspapers again.  Not that things are much better in print.

Rumpus: This is not related to terrorism necessarily, but it is connected to being in assault mode. You are both debut novelists in a time when people seem to care less about books, or are at least buying less of them, there are less review outlets, and, in general, there’s a real struggle to be discovered or heard.  In a sense you have to have a “take no prisoners” attitude about promoting yourself and your work. Can you talk about what your experience has been like?

Wayne: Indeed, one has to “terrorize” friends and acquaintances with news of your book. Or to “bomb” social-networking sites to get the word out. You might even say that I’m currently “holding the editors of the New York Times Book Review hostage, and I’m completely serious, this is no longer a joke playing off various terrorism-related words, and if my demands are not met within 24 hours…”

There’s a fine line between promoting yourself and distastefully chasing after notice. After a point, it becomes less about your work and more about you, and I think that difference is evident to astute observers. Then again, the people who are most brazenly exhibitionistic do get more exposure, for better or worse. I’m of the Conan O’Brien mind that if you do good work and are good to others, people will respond. (I did, however, recently and reluctantly acquiesce to Twitter.)

As for the future of publishing, I’m mostly pessimistic. There will always be serious readers, but they’ll be further ghettoized. On the other hand, e-books will eventually democratize the process, as Web sites like the Rumpus are already doing. If you’ve ever wanted to get published in some form, there’s never been a better time. If you’ve ever wanted to get paid for something you’ve published, there’s never been a worse time. (These are Dickensian times, in more ways than one.)

Goodwillie: Teddy’s pretty much right on with his assessment.  Most literary authors would love to pull back a heavy curtain every three or four years, place their book on a pedestal, then retreat, pulling the curtain closed behind them.  A few – DeLillo, Pynchon, McCarthy – still can, and do, but the rest of us mortals have to run around on stage holding the damn thing up while spotlight dips and dives every which way. (I realize this metaphor expired a few lines ago and I apologize.)

I have also agreed, reluctantly, to use Facebook and Twitter and anything else that holds out the possibility of spreading the word slightly farther than it might otherwise go, and of course it’s all hideously contrived and, I fear, pretty much useless.  Books catch on or they don’t.  Good reviews help a little bit.  So do bookstore placement and print runs and advertising and a dozen other things that are pretty much out of an author’s control.  The process still works, barely, and good books somehow still get noticed, though discerning readers and reviewers are more responsible for this than publishers, who, with a few exceptions – like mine of course – will pretty much publish anything if they think it might sell.

I will say it’s nice to have a novel out there this time around.  My first book was a memoir, and I never felt completely comfortable waving it around up there on that stage–pimping out the story of my life and everyone in it in the name of literature.  Of course, compared to the rest of the reality-based entertainment world—”The Jersey Shore,” “The Housewives of New York,”—my dalliance with self-analysis was probably just fine.  I don’t know.  The world’s a weird to place to be living in these days for anyone who thinks about it very much

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And then I was thinking about how hard it is to write a book with an unhappy ending these days, or rather, how hard it is to write a book with an unhappy ending and hope to get it published. Maybe it’s because the people who are making the decisions believe that people don’t want to think anymore.  Maybe they’re right, but I hope they’re not.

Because then I was thinking about how it is really important that we have books and movies and art and music that are sad or tragic or full of doom so that we have some perspective, and can then appreciate when things are good because we have a deeper understanding of when things are bad, and also perhaps feel more connected to the universe at large because now we know we are not alone when we feel bad, that there are other people out there who suffer too.

Something like that. Was what I was going to write.

But then I read Ron Currie, Jr.’s  Everything Matters! which sort of says all that in a really exquisite way, without, of course, saying it at all.   And somehow he made an unhappy ending feel sort of happy which is sort of magical and enviable.  He said what I wanted to say, and did what I wanted to do.  I’d shake his hand if I met him.

Holy cow, did I love this book.  I loved the concept: on the day super genius/prophet Junior is born he learns exactly when the world will end (approximately 36 years later), and the book follows his life leading up to that point.  And I loved the execution: poignant writing, very, very funny writing, buoyed by a mixture of voices – from the voices in Junior’s head, to the voices of his family and loved ones – all of which were deftly captured.  Also I love all things apocalyptic in general, because as a child  I, just like Junior does in the book, watched a movie about nuclear war on TV – in my case the 1983 classic “The Day After” – and it changed my brain forever.  I am not always thinking about when the world is going to end on a daily basis or anything, but those kinds of stories trigger a bizarre pleasure center in my brain.

So I might be biased, but I think I can recognize a good book when I see it.    Everything Matters! is sharp and funny and, dare I say, an important book to read, if at the very least because it reminds you that we have a purpose on this planet, which maybe we don’t hear a lot of these days.  Pilots land planes gracefully in the Hudson, ex-presidents retrieve captured journalists in foreign countries.  Doctors save lives, aid workers feed the hungry. For some people, it’s so obvious.  For the rest of the planet, we might need to read a book to remind us.

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At what point in a writer’s career does their writing become able to be characterized? I mean specifically the point where you get to add “ian” or “esque” at the end of someone’s name, or “so” at the beginning of it. As in, “it’s the most Updike-esque of his works” or “those stories are soooo O’Connor.”

Kate Christensen is about to release her fifth novel, Trouble, after last year’s triumphant, PEN Faulkner-winning, The Great Man, and this new book is feeling pretty Christensen-ish to me. The writing is lush, witty, and extremely clever without being the slightest bit pretentious, while vividly etched characters consume life willfully and voraciously, as two female friends in their 40s escape their lives and take on Mexico City. Trouble is simultaneously bittersweet and exhilarating, and will fit nicely in one’s beach bag, this summer. Try not to get it wet, though, because you’ll probably want to share it with a friend.

Kate kindly answered three questions via email over the course of a stunning summer weekend in Brooklyn, NY.

Rumpus: I think my favorite thing about this book is that the narrator is unapologetic about wanting to fulfill her desires. I know that sometimes women – more than men, for sure – both in real life and the fictional world definitely feel a little guilty about making themselves feel good, whether it’s with sex or food or following their dreams. It’s so refreshing to see a character having a good time. Did you set out to write something inspirational? I recognize that some people might not find a narrator who leaves her husband to pursue, amongst other things, her sexual desires, as a role model, and the narrator is indeed flawed, but still, the whole time I was thinking: Hallelujah.

Christensen: I set out to write about two very different types of women — Josie is tough and selfish, although she generally tries to do the right thing; she’s empathetic but naive. She has limited awareness of herself and other people, even though she’ a therapist; and this myopia protects her in some deep way. Raquel is also tough in her own way, but she’s far more vulnerable and self-aware than her friend, and this is what destroys her in the end. I wanted the difference in their fates to feel poignant and complex, not attributable to only one thing — as Josie comes back to life, she becomes increasingly self-involved. As Raquel falls apart and spirals down, she becomes increasingly clear-eyed.

If I’m saying anything, to answer your question more directly, maybe it’s that in order to allow yourself to get exactly what you want, you have to be a little clueless, a little naive — willfully so, maybe. I’m not judging either character, it’s not my place to judge my characters because they’re all parts of myself, but I do think objectively that Josie can be maddeningly obtuse, which enables her to see what she wants and needs to see. Raquel has no such luxury of selective understanding: she sees her own situation with blistering, unmediated clarity. Josie suppressed her own desires and needs for years: she couldn’t face the fact that she was stifled and frustrated because she lacked that degree of self-knowledge. Her sudden realization that her marriage is over is uncharacteristic, which is why it startles her.

The rest of the novel unfolds from this one unexpected moment of insight, which gives her the impetus to go off in search of pleasure, sex, adventure, decadence, independence. Raquel is paying the price for her own past; she’s lost her internal sense of entitlement to joy or pleasure. She’s washed-up, heartbroken, and shamed, and she knows exactly what she did to get herself into this state. It’s the irony at the heart of the novel for me: self-knowledge doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness.

Rumpus: I also enjoyed your investigation into female friendships, which can sometimes shift at a moment’s notice, even if you’ve known a person for years. I often talk about taking “friend breaks” with people, which is some rough stuff, but usually works out in the end. I just think they’re really tricky things, female friendships. Again, you’ve expressed different layers and possibilities than aren’t usually acknowledged in literature. Can you talk a bit about what drove your decisions with this topic, and, if possible, a little bit about what you have learned about female friendships in your life.

Christensen: Female friendship can and often does go as deep as marriage or family, but it lacks the codified structures of those more “official” relationships. Therefore it can be either a glorious, carefree bond or a nebulous and swampy world of painful misunderstanding and thwarted expectations — there are no rules about what we owe our friends, and often it feels as if each friendship is sort of made up as it goes along, improvised from scratch.

I’ve taken “friendship breaks,” I’ve flat-out dumped friends and been dumped myself, I’ve struggled through painful situations with friends, and I’ve learned, over the years, that friendship must be seen by both people as entirely voluntary, entirely based on mutual choice — although friends often feel guilty or resentful about letting each other down and say or do things they’d rather not say or do in order to avoid hurt feelings, there really are no obligations, no real responsibilities, that attend friendship.

So in a way it’s the purest of bonds — both people are there because, ultimately, they choose to be together, with every lunch, every walk together, every conversation, it’s a reinforcement of that choice. Over the years, a friendship becomes ingrained, but a friend isn’t someone I feel I can ever take for granted.

I wanted to write about this somehow — raise some questions about female friends who’ve known each other through the decades and have stayed close despite divergences in their lives. I find these friendships deeply moving and inspiring — at the end, after her poignant rapprochement with Indrani, Josie thinks about Raquel and wonders whether she failed her; she realizes, both from what happened with Indrani and what happened with Raquel, that the way to be a true friend is not to judge or proscribe, but to empathize and be as fully present as possible – this is what true friendship is made of, no mater what the outcome.

Rumpus: You told me that you were reading Blake and Cervantes right now in preparation for writing your next book. What books did you read in preparation for writing this book? Is this something you’ve done consistently throughout your career as part of your process? And how deliberate are these choices? I have, on occasion, gone to bookstores where I know the employees well and highly value their opinion, and given them a very general idea of what my book is about and then asked them to recommend a slew of books of to me. But it’s always in the very nascent stages of my book, just a hint of an idea, and I think partially I just like hanging out with people who work in bookstores. I suspect you are more purposeful than that.

Christensen: Really? No, I don’t think I am; your approach sounds quite purposeful and open-minded and smart. I do research for books in a haphazard, intuitive, quasi-grumbling way. I KNOW Blake and Cervantes are crucial for this next book, and I don’t know enough about them, so I will spend my weeklong summer island getaway as a working vacation, immersed in Don Quixote and as much of Blake as I can gulp down. I know I’ll be a pig in shit, though. In fact, I can’t wait.

For Trouble, I didn’t really do any ancillary reading — it was a visceral experience to write that book. I did a lot of research on Mexico City itself, a place I’ve been to many times; I have friends who live there or have lived there, and I made them read the manuscript and picked their brains. I derived inspiration entirely from my own imagination and experience this time around.

I wrote the novel in three months and didn’t stop for breath the entire time. It felt deeply necessary in a personal, not a public, way, so with this book the critical reception doesn’t matter to me as much as it did with, say The Epicure’s Lament, which was a labor of tremendous literary love — I was inspired by Montaigne and MFK Fisher most of all, but also many other novelists. It’s mysterious, where novels come from.

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