What was the writing process like for Richard Yates? How long did it take to write?

I wrote a short story in an early version of the final “prose style” of Richard Yates around February/March 2006. I began writing things that are in Richard Yates, in different form, though, some time around June 2006. I worked on it “idly” (1-4 hours a day 70-80% of days) until around March 2008 when I worked on it “pretty hard” (2-6 hours a day for 90% of days) until around August 2008 (at this point I had a “working” final draft, in that I felt the structure/length would be very similar to the published structure/length) when I sold shares in its royalties, gaining $12,000, and stopped working at my restaurant job, and worked on Richard Yates “very hard” (6-10 hours a day for 98% of days) until around October 2008, finishing what I felt at the time was a final draft (though knowing, to some degree, that I would work on it much more still). The next 15 months I worked on it 4-6 more times, each time 6-10 hours a day for 15-25 consecutive days. In mid-June I edited the advanced copy (“galley”) ~50 hours for 4 consecutive days. The final draft was completed some time in early July 2010. Thank you for being in The Rumpus Book Club, I’m excited about this.

Did you study any other books for guidance or inspiration while writing Richard Yates?

The End of The Story by Lydia Davis and The Easter Parade by Richard Yates. To a lesser degree, maybe, Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys.

How would you summarize Richard Yates to potential readers if you didn’t write it but were a publicist paid to promote it?

In Richard Yates—Tao Lin’s second novel—22-year-old Haley Joel Osment, a writer living temporarily on Wall Street in Manhattan working part-time at a membership library on the Upper East Side meets, on the internet, 16-year-old Dakota Fanning, a high school student with a history of involvement with older men. After talking for hundreds of hours on Gmail chat, through email, and by phone Haley Joel Osment travels two hours by train to visit Dakota Fanning in rural New Jersey where they sit by the Delaware River and walk around and eat Chinese food. Haley Joel Osment says he doesn’t want to go back to New York City and that he feels happy in Dakota Fanning’s town, which he describes as “great weather, fucked people,” in part due to the number of people that “don’t have to go to school anymore” due to severe depression, according to Dakota Fanning, who says, with amounts of humor and self-awareness, that she herself is severely depressed but still has to go to school.

The next few months, in secret from Dakota Fanning’s mother, whom Dakota Fanning repeatedly lies to and whom they both “fear,” to some degree, Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning visit each other dozens of times, with many “close calls” of being discovered. Finally, as the relationship begins to become quarrelsome, Dakota Fanning’s mother finds out about Haley Joel Osment and aggressively confronts him by phone before gradually welcoming his presence in her and Dakota Fanning’s lives, eventually inviting him to live with her and Dakota Fanning in their house, as his and Dakota Fanning’s relationship becomes increasingly fraught and out-of-control—the result, to some degree, of having naturally isolated themselves from their few friends and being already alienated from the adults in their lives—and begins to operate, to degrees neither of them have experienced before with another person, within a metaphysical context uninfluenced by most societal and cultural norms, resulting in a chronically lying and bulimic Dakota Fanning, an increasingly distrustful and confused Haley Joel Osment, and an overworked and screaming single-mother of two with a full-time job who, at one point, responds to a question from Dakota Fanning by saying that she doesn’t know the answer and that “[her] body is about to shut down.”

How do you view Richard Yates in terms of its seemingly autobiographical elements?

I view Richard Yates as something created to have a certain effect, and I wrote and edited it in service of that, using anything, ideally, as a means, regardless of whether it “really happened,” if certain people would think certain things about me, if it was “original” or not, if certain [anyone] would think [anything] about it, or [anything else]. Another way of saying that, I think, is that I try to focus on writing what I want to read. I try to focus on having the only influence on what and how I write be “what book/story/poem/essay with exactly what characteristics do I feel most strongly like I want to read right now?” ideally. I say “ideally” because I don’t view it as possible to be 100% uninfluenced by [a lot of things]. Also I think “what I want to read” changes, to some degree, every moment.

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PEANUTS

TAO: what did you eat last night
SHANNON: mushrooms and nutritional yeast and peanuts on this couch
TAO: peanuts…wha… / weird combination
SHANNON: i felt like i still had peanuts in my stomach when i woke up / so i ‘went jogging’
TAO: when my dogs ate peanuts they shit peanuts i think
SHANNON: haha
TAO: might be thinking of corn
SHANNON: peanuts is funny / once i found a thong in my dogs shit

SLEEP

TAO: are you normally up ‘at this hour’
SHANNON: lately i have woken up every morning at 6 but i havent slept yat / u?
TAO: lately you’ve woken up every morning at 6 AM…but today you are still up at 6 AM, is that what you mean / i’m usually up until 7 AM
SHANNON: yeah / i think i mean / i am often awake at 6am
TAO: so have you been up for 24 hours then
SHANNON: not yet, at noon / something / is fucked up
TAO: i’m confused…bro
SHANNON: i dont have a regular… thing…
TAO: oh ok

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

TAO: why are you reading 2killa mockinbird
SHANNON: i am reading it because i want to see it screened this week / and i dont know the story and i think the movie is supposed to be good
TAO: have you ever seen the movie for ‘where the wild fern grows’
SHANNON: no
TAO: what happened in chapter 1 of 2killa
SHANNON: googled ‘where the wild ferns are’ / in chapter 1 they met their neighborhood bro ‘dill’
TAO: i’m confused…i think it’s actually ‘where the red fern is’ or something
SHANNON: yeah…
TAO: i’m confused
SHANNON: where they are

HTMLGIANT

TAO: do you ever read htmlgiant
SHANNON: only when i am linked to it, i never remember to navigate to it myself
TAO: is that how you view yourself on the internet, ‘navigating’ your way through it / like a sailor
SHANNON: yes….
TAO: cool
SHANNON: said no and then said yes / i make the rounds / is what i think
TAO: sounds good / hm making the rounds / sounds sexual / or…just like a gang bang / to me
SHANNON: i think it sounds like going shoplifting and hitting all the good spots
TAO: gang banged by websites
SHANNON: makin the rounds
TAO: interesting
SHANNON: gang bang

WATERMELON

TAO: would you rather have an unlimited supply of raisins the size of watermelons or watermelons the size of raisins
SHANNON: watermelons the size of raisins
TAO: but the watermelon shells would be, like, bigger than the watermelon itself…whereas with the giant raisins you can eat the shells
SHANNON: probably could bite through them
TAO: there would be so little edible watermelon
SHANNON: one raisin would last for weeks
TAO: yeah, but you chose the raisin-sized watermelons
SHANNON: what can you do with a raisin that big
TAO: pies…or just as a jam
SHANNON: shitty… / thinking about touching it / no / i dont think so / lil watermelons, i think they would have a burst when you gottem / like filled candy shit / only melons…

ANN BEATTIE

TAO: what is the first memory of ‘distortions’ by ann beattie you have, the first thing you think after reading this question, be honest
SHANNON: midgets
TAO: what is the first memory of ‘foo fighters’ you have
SHANNON: my dad playing looking to the sky on repeat / wait / learn 2 fly / laughing…
TAO: i just googled ‘looking to the sky,’ it’s a song by ‘c-block’ / what do you think about nirvana
SHANNON: i like nirvana
TAO: do you know anyone that doesn’t like nirvana
SHANNON: no… my mom… might not / when i was trying to get in2 nirvana in middle school my dad told me 2 check out ‘heart shaped box’
TAO: haha

***

Read “The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #1: Deborah Hampton in Conversation with Kellesimone Waits”

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Honored Guest seems versatile, powerful, reliable, and accommodating to me. If I am severely depressed I can read it and feel calmer, more accepting, and better able to utilize such depression-reducing skills as detachment, irony/sarcasm, and relativism. If I am happy I can read it and feel “delight,” an increase in the non-delusional aspects of my happiness, and that I am glad I exist and can interact with certain other humans. If I am bored I can open the book randomly and study whatever sentence or scene to see how they have been constructed, find “little jokes” or “other things” I didn’t notice before, or read it slowly in a self-conscious manner for purposes of perceiving how exactly my emotions are being affected by certain line breaks or adverbs.

In the past I have felt that Joy Williams’ stories were too [something] for me to enjoy at a comprehensive, “direct” level but today I do not feel that way. Today when I read Joy Williams I feel that I am not blocking out or suppressing any aspects (or only very small and vague aspects) of my personality, sense of humor, or worldview. I feel that I am “enjoying” the writing in a manner similar to how the author herself would enjoy it, as opposed to writing where I feel “ever conscious” that I am probably “enjoying” it in a different manner than the author would, for example writing that I feel is unintentionally funny or only “accidentally” detached (not completely sure what I mean re “accidentally” detached).

To me Joy Williams (b. 1944) and Lorrie Moore (b. 1957) overlap in their writing to some degree. I like them both a lot. Their output quantity (and, to me, quality) is similar, to some degree, a notable degree. They’re both sort of on the “edge” of whatever groups of writers journalists have successfully grouped together. They both have three story-collections of which the first ones, I feel, were in a somewhat different style than the next two, which have styles that are “crystallized” versions of the first books’ styles, in my view. I sometimes think about what they think about each other’s work. I feel interested in interviewing Joy Williams about Lorrie Moore or Lorrie Moore about Joy Williams. I have Googled their names together without success. They seem to have not ever mentioned each other’s names in print. I think almost everyone I know that likes Joy Williams’ writing a lot also likes Lorrie Moore’s writing a lot.

I will write about some of the stories in Honored Guest.

Honored Guest. In this story a girl is living with her mother who is dying. At one point the mother wakes up screaming her own name. I feel like if I were dying I would wake up screaming my own name sometimes.

Congress. In this story a woman’s boyfriend’s job is to examine body parts of dead people or animals to identity them as specific people or animals. Halfway through the story the man falls out of a tree while hunting with a cross bow and gets brain damage. This story feels to me like a full-length “indie” movie in terms of narrative movement, number of scenes and locations, and quirkiness level re characters.

The Visiting Privilege. In this story a woman visits her friend in a “mental hospital.” Her friend gets annoyed because the woman visits every day and sometimes more than once a day. The woman makes friends with an old woman and thinks the old woman is “cute,” in how she acts, and I agree. This story to me exhibits clean, beautiful, high-quality expressions of depression and meaninglessness.

Charity. In this story there is a small girl that is very “cute” in how she acts. I think I always feel that Joy Williams thinks her characters are cute, interesting, or funny and not ever “evil,” uninterestingly boring, immoral, or “wrong.” This and The Visiting Privilege are maybe my favorite stories in this book.

Fortune. In this story a lot of young people go to South America, for a vacation, I think, and “sit around” a lot. I think their parents are also in South America on vacation. It is maybe the longest story in the book. I remember only parts of it. I remember the ending. I seem to almost always have an urge to reread this story in order to know it enough to “feel aware” of its entire structure inside of my head, at one time, as I have been able to do with the other stories after rereading them whatever number of times. I feel I will in the future reread this story for the 5th or 10th time or something and “gain” the entire structure, and then experience it at a different level, causing me to have different urges to further reread it.

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