The Rumpus.net » journalism

Weekend Rumpus Roundup

Lauren ONeal — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:00:59 +0000

Check out these tasty Rumpus morsels, posted over the weekend!

Wendy Ortiz interviews poet Louise Mathias about beauty, ecstasy, and eroticism…and “snakes and horses and sky and birds and hallucinogenic flowers, and stars, and the smell of creosote after rain, and…”

When journalist Maggie Downs lost a friend in a skydiving accident, many of her writer acquaintances filled her “voicemail…with interview requests instead of well wishes.” In her Sunday Rumpus essay “Spill,” Downs tries to figure out what role journalism has in times of tragedy:

Are these articles designed to tell us that humans suffer? Don’t we know that already? Are we expected to somehow share in this suffering? How can we possibly do that?

The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Spill

Maggie Downs — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 13:00:43 +0000

It was the sky that made me rush through the farmers market. My canvas bag was stuffed tight with ripe tomatoes, cheese, meat, jam and bread, and I hurried to the car, tilting my head up every few seconds. The sky was such a gentle blue, dramatic in its softness. The air was sun-ripened, but not hot. There wasn’t even a cloud.

It was the kind of day that made skydivers, like me, drive 80 miles an hour directly to the dropzone.

My plan was to make sandwiches in between jumps. My friends, the other jumpers, always ate like crap. Bags of Funyons chased down with cans of Red Bull. Cold French fries. Slim Jims. But that day I was going to nourish my friends, take care of them.

It didn’t make sense when someone said my husband, then my boyfriend, a professional skydiver, had landed off the dropzone and was headed to the hospital. They had to be mistaken. I had just started unpacking the food. I had bread to slice. Jam to spread.

“Maybe you should go there,” a friend urged.

But if I went to the hospital, I thought, that would mean there is a problem. And there’s no problem. The sun was so big and bright, the sky so pearly blue.

Someone else sat down with me and explained what had just happened only a moment before. My husband had been shooting video for our friend, S., a longtime skydiving instructor. When S. deployed his parachute, somewhere around 6,000 feet, the canopy dove in a way it shouldn’t have. The two jumpers collided, both falling at dramatically different speeds.

I heard an ambulance scream down the gravel road, sirens and all. I sat and waited, stunned. I had a cell phone, but no idea who to call. Several minutes later, the ambulance drove past again. This time it had no siren. That’s how I knew this was something big. At least one person didn’t have to be rushed to the hospital.

“Which one died?” I said to the friend sitting next to me. He somehow knew everything I didn’t.

It was S. My husband was the one who lived.

For about a year after the accident, I tried to avoid TV shows or movies in which somebody died. I could no longer read sad books or look at the newspaper. It was difficult enough to have a friend swiftly ripped from my life. I didn’t need it to be my entertainment too.

That’s easier said than done, though. Death infused everything. Every drama. Every detective show. Every video game. Every page of the paper and grizzly segment of the TV news. It didn’t even matter that these things didn’t involve skydiving. Any mention of death, and I instantly associated it with that terrible, brutal, sunny day. Even a blue sky made me wince.

The month my husband spent in the hospital was also an exercise is distraction. I did yoga in the hospital hallway and inexplicably bought a stack of books about Lance Armstrong. I thought a lot about the world. I considered what I wanted to create and contribute during this brief, wild, precarious life.

I was a journalist, the only career I had ever known or wanted.

I knew a lot of other reporters for various media outlets, and they badgered me for interviews about the skydiving accident — even while I was in the intensive care unit, waiting to find out if my husband would walk again. TV reporters came to the hospital dressed like friends. My voicemail filled up with interview requests instead of well wishes. A personal conversation with a colleague ended up in the newspaper I worked for. In trying to make some sense of it all, I added to the noise with a couple of columns — messy personal essays about grief and desolation and how quickly a life can end.

In the thick of my sorrow, I realized I didn’t want to be that person anymore. That person who doesn’t keep a respectful distance. That reporter.

This is something that has been on my mind ever since the Boston Marathon explosions. I am grateful I am no longer a journalist.

I still have the utmost respect for the profession. I know remarkable journalists who do important work every day. They mark history. They are the watchdogs of society. They capture and freeze this world at a moment in time. But I also know what it’s like to stand on someone’s porch after their loved one has died and ask, “How do you feel?”

How do you think they feel?

I am happy I didn’t have to stand in a newsroom after the attacks in Boston and scramble to get a local perspective on the bombing. I’m thankful I didn’t have to compete for the same quote that says the same thing all the other quotes have said: It was loud. It was bloody. It was horrific.

I remember when one of my colleagues was lauded for clinching the interview with a shooting victim that nobody else could get. How did she do it? She brought flowers to the hospital, where she pretended to be a family member of the patient.

I am relieved I no longer work in that world.

Maybe, after the accident, I no longer had what it takes. Maybe I never did.

Last week my Facebook feed was filled with people passing around Boston’s tragedy like trading cards. One of the headlines was, “A mother’s tragedy: Two sons, two lost limbs.” The accompanying photo was of the mother, waiting at the hospital for news about her sons, weeping on the shoulder of a relative. My friend’s comment was, “OMG. So sad.” Another person shared it with the message, “Uggggh. Really sad.”

What is the purpose of this?

The reporter did nothing wrong. The article was well-written and sympathetic. The mother appeared to be a willing participant. But I wonder why editors continue to assign these stories, what motivates media to keep turning these pieces out, why we still read them and share them.

Sure, there is a fundamental desire to know what happened. But beyond the articles that tell us the facts, beyond the positive pieces that are a reminder of our humanity, beyond the analysis of what it all means, there are these knee-jerk stories that bulldoze into grief-stricken homes, stale hospital rooms and somber funeral services. And for what purpose?

Are these articles designed to tell us that humans suffer? Don’t we know that already? Are we expected to somehow share in this suffering? How can we possibly do that?

When 9/11 happened, I was a very young but earnest reporter in Ohio. Not long after the towers fell, I packed up my car and drove to Manhattan. A part of me wanted to chase the story, because that’s what a journalist is supposed to do. But a bigger part simply wanted to bear witness to a moment in history. I thought there was some kind of inherent dignity in the unflinching gaze, in not looking away.

Now I fear that kind of gaze, so common in the news, proves we are smug people even in our sympathy. It alienates us from what actually took place. We are looking at the rubble and saying, “That could’ve been my loved ones. That could’ve been me. … But it wasn’t.”

It is a validation of our own lives.

One day a young teen beat his brother to death with a baseball bat, then washed his hands in the fountain at the center of town. That same afternoon I stood vigil on the sidewalk in front of his family’s house. My editor gave me strict instructions, “Don’t even think about coming back to work until you get a family quote.” I didn’t go back to work for two days. When I finally did, a sour, solid knot had formed in my throat and wouldn’t go away.

There is a point at which mourners become weak. When they crack and spill. That is what I was waiting for. That was considered an achievement.

Later I begged my editor for advice. I said the job was making it hard for me to get out of bed in the morning. It was becoming tougher to distinguish the beautiful parts of the world from the evil and ugliness. She told me I was too sensitive, and sensitive people never make it in the business. Then she slid a business card across the desk, the number of a free hotline I could call and speak to a psychologist.

Right now a reporter — many reporters, in fact — are standing at the home of the young boy who died in Monday’s bombings. I don’t have to see proof of this to know it is true. They probably don’t believe they are being invasive. They are saying things like, “Your son’s story deserves to be shared.”

They are waiting for the spill.

Only a few months before my husband’s accident, I was assigned to cover a plane crash. It was a small, personal aircraft with two passengers inside. They were an older married couple. Both died instantly.

In a Cincinnati suburb, I rang the doorbell of the couple’s home. Their adult children, dazed by the shock of losing both parents at once, answered the door and invited me inside. I explained why I was there and what I needed from them.

“I want to give you this opportunity to talk about your parents,” I said. “This is your chance to make sure they are more than just names on the obituary page.”

Those kids had no idea what to do with me, and they were too polite to tell me to go away. So they made me a sandwich and allowed me to sit with them in their sorrow. They gathered around the kitchen table, opened family photo albums and told me disjointed stories that I didn’t understand. Stories about relatives I would never meet. Stories of lives that could never squeeze into a 10-inch story in the newspaper. Stories that would not give the deceased the dignity they deserved.

I had no idea I would soon be on the other side of that table — that very sincere reporters would look me in the eye and tell me how important it is to share a tragic skydiving story with the world. How this was my opportunity.

Soon after my husband’s accident, I took to the air again. I made about 40 more jumps before I decided to hang up my rig for good.

I also made a job transition. I transferred to another paper owned by the same company and took on a new beat, one that didn’t involve cops, crashes and killings. That lasted five years, and then I left the business entirely.

In both cases, I realized once the joy of something slips away, it’s nearly impossible to grab hold of it again.

Today I watch the news and wonder how long it will be until the Boston Marathon spectators, the runners and their families can look at the TV again. I wonder if they will ever see an action movie without cringing when the bombs go off. I wonder when they will be able to sleep through the night.

I also wonder about the reporters out there. The people standing on the porches of the dead, secretly wondering if there’s a better way to tell stories that matter. Wondering if maybe, just maybe, it’s better to explore the ways in which we are fundamentally connected instead of gawking at someone else’s exquisite pain.

A Day in the Journalistic Life

Caroline Kangas — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 21:45:23 +0000

The life of a writer is rarely depicted as glamorous.

We do it because we must. But sometimes we also must do other things like eat, and pay for shelter over our heads, or support those dependent on us. In the age of of information inundation, with high reader demands and little money to go around, the situation is bound to get tense.

A few days ago, Nate Thayer spelled out “the state of journalism in 2013” on his blog after being asked by The Atlantic to rework a piece for free.

In a debate among writers, words will be met with more words and, after a heated day on Twitter, an editor/writer for the Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal responded with a day in the life of a digital editor. The clincher, delivered with a sigh: “Anyway, the biz ain’t what it used to be, but then again, for most people, it never really was.”

Joining the conversation, Stephanie Lucianovic, one of those freelancers for whom the title sometimes just means free from contract but other times also involves writing for free, explains that at times she can’t help it — the words tumble out before the money comes in.

The Rumpus Interview with Tom Reiss

Shea Dean — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 21:12:03 +0000

Tom Reiss had been on my radar, vaguely, for years. I’d had a copy of The Orientalist on my shelf since it was published in 2005, and had occasionally pulled it out, taken a look at the enigmatic man wearing a fez on the cover, and put it back again, despite its being a national bestseller and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. I didn’t know who the subject of the book was, and so, naïvely, thought that I didn’t need to know.

An advance copy of Reiss’s new book, The Black Count, landed on my desk last summer, and it eluded my interest in the same way The Orientalist did. Its cover featured a picture of another man I knew nothing about—in a tricorn hat and brandishing a sword, no less—whose main claim to fame referenced a novel I’d never read. Then I heard Tom talk about the book and made it clear that, however obscure his subjects might be, he was a writer first and foremost, obsessed with getting the details right while crafting a story that could propel even a reluctant reader across unfamiliar terrain.

I went home and tore through the book. The story centers on General Alexandre Dumas, the father of the author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. General Dumas was born to a black slave mother and a feckless French nobleman in the colony of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, in 1762. Summoned to Paris at the age of twelve, he was raised as an aristocrat in a culture that was remarkably free of racism and distinguished himself as an extraordinary soldier. He rose through the ranks of the army to command tens of thousands of troops during the French Revolution, only to have his career cut short by Napoleon.

But as dramatic as Dumas’s life and times were, what I found most compelling about The Black Count was Tom’s ability to keep me reading it, and with such pleasure, all the way through. Unlike most biographers and historians, he is supremely attuned to the reader’s interests, peppering the text with off-the-wall footnotes and personal anecdotes without ever straying too far from his narrative line. As a narrator, he overflows with enthusiasm for his subject but never resorts to the corny contrivances and breathless prose other writers use to pump life into inexpertly-told stories. In The Black Count, history clips along at a brisk pace and in full color. As transporting as a novel, it’s an honest-to-god page-turner. I was curious to learn more about how Tom accomplished such an impressive feat.

We met earlier this winter for lunch at the swanky Gotham Bar and Grill in Manhattan, after our plans to meet in Koreatown went awry. Just back from a book tour in the U.K., Tom was wearing a rumpled tweed blazer he’d dredged out from his closet while his suit was at the cleaners. He explained that he’d bought it at a thrift store in Texas twenty-five years earlier, when he went to study with Donald Barthelme at the University of Houston and wanted to look professorial. It was apt for our two-hour interview. A natural raconteur, he discussed not just the nitty-gritty of his writing process but his personal motivations for writing about the past. Below is an edited excerpt of our talk.

***

The Rumpus: Do you consider yourself a journalist or a historian? Is there a difference?

Tom Reiss: I consider myself both and neither. I’m a writer who has a lifelong fascination with history—with all aspects of the past and its impact on the present. I cut my teeth as a journalist and continue to use journalistic techniques to gather my stories. Since I’m often searching for people whose lives have been forgotten, or suppressed, it takes journalistic legwork to even find historical archives or records about them. But history needs to be written and taught in a way that is more compelling than journalism, because it doesn’t have the natural element of suspense. We “know” what happened already. But, of course, we really don’t know what happened in the past, and it’s my job to reintroduce that real sense of uncertainty into the mix, the sense of wonder, because that’s where the suspense comes from. I’m not sure you can have a compelling book without some sort of suspense. I want my readers to be on the edge of their seats about history, always somehow surprised by what’s “going on” in the past.

Rumpus: That was definitely the case for me. To be honest, there was nothing about either subject that grabbed me. But when I started reading them, I was totally drawn in.

Reiss: Well, they’re not regular history books. Some of the most gratifying things I hear about The Black Count are reader responses or blogs from just a huge number of people who start by saying they never read history or don’t like history or think history is boring. It’s exactly the response I wanted, which is that it’s not specialists, and it’s not people who particularly like history—it is a really eclectic group of people basically looking for an interesting story, an interesting book. On the other hand, I am incredibly grateful when we send it to Skip [Henry Louis] Gates and he says all these incredibly nice things about it. And so actually I find that real historians, people who spend their whole lives working in the primary sources on my period, are also great readers for my books. Because they respect and like the fact that I approach history with the kind of obsessive care that they do.

Rumpus: Your obsession with detail really does come through—in a good way. I kept thinking while I was reading that you would have made a great detective. In both books you traveled all over the world gathering bits of evidence to support your story.

Reiss: Well, I grew up reading Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain—I’m a huge film lover, and I’m obsessed with the 1930s—so I guess I absorbed, on a superficial level, a lot of the characteristics of a hard-boiled detective. Now, that’s kind of ridiculous to say because I think if I had lived two hundred years ago I would have had the same personality, a detective’s personality—it has nothing to do with wearing a trenchcoat or being Humphrey Bogart. I think it has to do with having a personality that is very dogged and noticing huge numbers of details. I have always been kind of a snoop. What’s funny is that I’m not a novelist, so I don’t put much of this to use.

Rumpus: I thought about this while I was reading. Your descriptions of the characters you meet in the course of your research are so sharp and vivid. Yet you choose to write about history, which prevents you from making many of these types of direct observations. Why?

Reiss: That’s a very good question. I’m not exactly sure why I run away from the present moment, but I do. I run away into history. Maybe it’s cowardice on a certain level. I’m afraid of the present moment a little bit. Or maybe the problem has been that I’ve never liked the present moment well enough. Whenever I’m in a place, not only do I observe a lot of things about all of the people who are there now, but I try to imagine or try to perceive things about their back story, and the back story of the place. It’s almost like seeing ghosts. I sometimes wish that I could write something that could be purely in the present, but I’m so quickly drawn into the past. That’s why I have always liked to interview really old people—they’re connected both to our moment and also to a totally different moment in time. At the very least they’ll have a really different take on history than we have, but very often they’ll be sitting on secrets that they haven’t thought about.

Rumpus: You’ve mentioned that your great-uncle was a big influence on you growing up.

Reiss: My great-uncle Lolek didn’t write, but he just loved to tell stories about people, and he had this insane memory for all the people he’d met during the last eighty years. He could tell you about something my mother had done fifty-five years ago when they went out for coffee. He had this elephant’s memory for human stories. I spent a couple of years interviewing him before he died, but for various reasons I didn’t want to write about him directly.

Lev Nussimbaum [the subject of The Orientalist] was a perfect proxy that fell in my lap. When I first saw a picture of him, when I still knew him under the Arabic and Turkish names, I was powerfully drawn to him because he looked so much like my great-uncle. Then I found out Nussimbaum was Jewish—a Jewish guy who had changed his identity, who had reinvented himself in different countries and different locations. That was also really similar to my great-uncle.

His story had enough things that kept it at arm’s length for me. And that’s what I like about it—and I like it about The Black Count, too: these are stories where I see my themes, but they’re at enough of a remove from my own family and my own life that they’re very far from navel-gazing, which I can’t stand. For me as a nonfiction writer, themes are everything, and subjects come next. If you really know what you’re passionate about and what you’re scared of and what you’re attracted to in life, then—to mess up a weird Nietzsche quote—the books that you need will fall off the shelf and hit you on the head.

Rumpus: That definitely sounds as if it was the case for The Orientalist.

Reiss: Well, yes and no. Condé Nast Traveler paid me to write about Baku, which I’d pitched them. But at the time nobody traveled to Baku. And Baku was definitely not ready for Condé Nast travelers when I went in 1998. The only people there at the time were people trying to make it in the oil business and trying to get a piece of that or some even shadier sort of post-Soviet business. There was a lot of sleazy business going on there. And there were NGOs there because of the huge ongoing but unspoken humanitarian crisis. Azerbaijan had fought this war with Armenia that was so crazy, it left this insane number of refugees for insane reasons—I mean, it’s completely nuts—

Rumpus: So did Condé Nast Traveler ever publish the piece?

Reiss: No. I wrote the piece, and it was a damn good piece, and they should have published it because it was a very colorful piece of travel writing, but it was not a service piece. You could have used it to take a trip there, but it wasn’t a contemporary destination. I used it to write about the kaleidoscopic way that the past and history of that part of the world revealed itself in Baku at that time. You could just see layer upon layer of this tumultuous twentieth-century past. First it was this oil boom city, then it was this Soviet city, and then it was this post-Soviet city. There were so many layers of things going on.

It wasn’t an accident that I was there. I went there to write about the [late 1990s] oil boom—that was the way I shorthanded it. But really it was an excuse to write about the oil boom that went on there before World War I and led into World War II. Everything from the Russian Revolution to the Nazis really played out in that area in an exciting way. So I was going there for that. But while I was there I discovered this amazing character who just brought all that past to life in one person, and then in all the people who were connected to that guy.

In a way that’s maybe why I do history. Because history gets me to the interesting people in the present. Otherwise, how would you know who to meet? Who to go up to and meet in this restaurant? That’s my organizing principle: I have these historical themes that fascinate me and somehow cause me to bump into these really interesting people alive right now.

Rumpus: I was struck by how similar the themes of The Orientalist and The Black Count are: Lev Nussimbaum and General Dumas are both outsiders trying to define themselves in the face of dramatic social and cultural changes. What is it about that story that’s appealing to you?

Reiss: It’s personal on the one hand, because I was a misunderstood angry outsider my whole childhood and a rebel-without-a-cause sort of kid, and it’s also because of my way of understanding history—that it’s a gigantic risk factory. Any historically interesting period is just fraught with risk, especially for minorities and people who are at the margins of society for one reason or another. And obviously that goes back to my family’s background. My family was destroyed by the same forces I describe in The Orientalist—basically the Nazi period, but also the period before that, everything that happened starting with the First World War, when European society began to fall apart.

Rumpus: The Black Count has nothing to do with this period, but I understand it is also what led you to the story.

Reiss: Again, that’s my crazy, personal view of history. When I was growing up, The Count of Monte Cristo is sitting in my house in this old battered copy that my mom got in an orphanage in France. My grandparents were killed by the Nazis during the war, and she survived the war with these different families in hiding, and after the war she was still very, very young, maybe eight years old. And she had this very strong memory of having gotten the novel after the war and starting to read it and being fascinated by it, and then ticked off and upset when they took it away from her. Then she remembered getting it again and bringing it with her in her suitcase to the United States. So it was my mom’s copy of that book, and the other Dumas stories from my mom’s wartime period and right afterward, that gave Dumas this extra significance for me.

Rumpus: How did you get from The Count of Monte Cristo to the story of General Dumas?

Reiss: I discovered [the novelist] Dumas’s memoirs when I was probably twelve. To me it was clear that The Count of Monte Cristo was the basis for Batman and a whole lot of other action heroes that I grew up loving. And I just really liked Dumas as a storyteller. So that led me to The Three Musketeers and the memoirs. And the memoirs—it isn’t hard to find General Dumas there because the whole first book of that multi-volume memoir is devoted to him. I didn’t get very much farther into them because they tend to get boring. I was less interested in the development of a writer, than I was of this man who was more like the characters.

But I’m not a literary historian and I would never have devoted years of my life to doing a book just because it would allow me to trace the history of somebody else’s heroes. There has to be almost an existential reason why I’m going to do it. I’m satisfying some very deep thing inside me. And the deep thing inside me was tapped by the sense of love that Alexandre Dumas expresses for his father in his memoirs.

Rumpus: It’s funny you should say that, because whenever you quoted from the memoirs in The Black Count, I felt a little skeptical. Dumas worshiped his father and seemed to have no perspective whatsoever about his flaws. As a nonfiction writer, what was your approach to dealing with this material? How much of it did you trust?

Reiss: That’s really simple: I didn’t trust a word that he wrote about his dad. But also the fact that it was inaccurate wasn’t a problem at all for me as a writer. The great thing is that if you assume none of it’s true, you have no confusion. I just set off saying, Okay, what’s the story? And luckily in the case of The Black Count, there was this crazy amount of documents that I found. And the whole book is written out of documents that are not the memoir. So the memoir is a piece of emotional evidence, not a piece of history.

Rumpus: And yet, in the end you seem to share Alexandre Dumas’s view of his father as a truly great man, a hero of almost epic proportions.

Reiss: As an eighteenth-century heroic calvary swordfighting person, he was in some ways a perfect man. He was never anything less than completely brave and courageous. I only found evidence of him sticking up for the underdog in every situation. He was uninterested in advancement to a degree that was shocking in that period, because all the other Napoleonic generals became sycophants with the idea that they were being led by this new Alexander the Great, Neo-Roman emperor. General Dumas and a handful of his pals steadfastly upheld moral objections and political objections to that. They were closer to American revolutionaries—they believed in democracy and republicanism. These guys were living to be heroes. They were risking their lives all the time, and to die beautifully and to die heroically was a very important thing. When you compare him to a more modern character, like Lev Nussimbaum in The Orientalist, who’s just as thoroughly bad as he is good, [General Dumas] seems to betray a lack of complexity.

Rumpus: Especially at the end. Napoleon had not only spurned General Dumas personally, but he had outlawed intermarriage, put limits on where black and mixed race people could live, barred black officers from holding positions of command, and cut funding for color-blind education. But Dumas was still groveling for a job.

Reiss: If you want to come up with a flaw for Dumas, that’s the flaw. He can’t stop believing—and he can’t stop itching for the fight. At that point the cause of republicanism—the red, white, and blue of the Revolution—was over because Napoleon has made himself dictator. But General Dumas still wanted to get up and fight for France.

Rumpus: I kept hoping for the Hollywood ending, where he rode back to Paris, sword flashing, to take revenge on Napoleon for betraying the ideals of the Revolution.

Reiss: I felt that, too. In some sense he was too much of a true blue soldier. But to me what’s satisfying about this story is the fact that he then gets transformed into his son’s character, the Count of Monte Cristo. And the fact that his son lives on to avenge him is what makes the story work narratively and makes it work for me as a project. If there hadn’t been the afterlife, I’m not sure I could have just written the story of a soldier who just sort of falls on his own sword. It’s not a character I’m that familiar with.

Yet one reason it was fascinating to write this book was because I never thought from the point of view of a soldier before for an extended period of time. I’ve gotten some interesting reactions from people who are soldiers who have read The Black Count, particularly from this guy who is a Marine veteran who was wounded in a firefight in Fallujah, this incredibly tough guy who is in love with the book. But he is in love with General Dumas on a level that neither of us could understand. When I met him, he could recite lines from throughout the book in a way that I couldn’t. And he especially remembered details from General Dumas’s letters. He kept saying in different ways, You don’t understand, when we were in a firefight in Iraq, this guy was what we all wanted to be, but better. And I’m like, Wow, you really believe in heroes? But combat soldiers do. It’s not that they’re simple-minded—it’s that they focus their worldview into certain guiding principles that are more powerful to them than probably any that I happen to have myself.

Rumpus: I’ve always imagined that research-heavy books like yours would require you to be chained to a desk for years on end, surrounded by dusty file boxes. But that doesn’t seem to be the case for you.

Reiss: Since the archival revolution of digital photography and online archives swept in a few years ago, I no longer feel the need for a large desk. I store a vast archive of thousands of photographs of documents on Dropbox, so I can access them anywhere on my laptop. I can work in a café or at a bar just as well as I can at a desk. The main advantage of the desk to me is that it’s fun to put my feet up on it. But nowadays I write standing up most of the time, so I’m just as partial to a bar or a high countertop. When I do find a desk, I usually put a small box on it, podium-style, and work on top of that.

The archival dust is definitely still true, though, because the best sources for many stories will simply not be on the Internet or in a book. I’ve gotten most of my most crucial material in dusty archives—oftentimes private ones, which were far dustier than anything maintained by a university library. I actually find it oddly antiseptic working in some library archives. I’ve had my best luck in castle towers, back offices, forgotten valises—and, of course, locked safes.

Rumpus: You mentioned that the first draft of The Black Count was three times as long as it ended up being. How do you go about cutting it down to size?

Reiss: This was a long and difficult process, but it was just as important as writing the book, in my view. I always edit the heck out of whatever I write, even if it’s just a paragraph. I love editing, and I’m a pretty active editor of my own work. But I also rely heavily on the opinions of very close friends, who have very different interests and tastes than I do, to tell me when I’m being boring. And my wife, who was a professional editor for many years, has an exquisite sense of prose and knows when I’m overwriting.

I think the most important thing is to have other people tell you when they’re bored or confused, and to try to learn to read your own work with their voice in your head. That’s another thing that’s hugely important for me: I read everything I write aloud on the final two drafts. Much of the polishing happens then, because I’m fundamentally aural. I need to know how things sound.

Rumpus: I understand you steep yourself in the music of the period you’re writing about, too.

Reiss: It’s an odd rule I have for myself: I don’t allow myself to listen to any music written after the death of my subject, and I’ll try to listen to things written and played during the time period he or she lived in. It worked out great with my first two books: with Fuhrer-Ex I got to know the German rock scene from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. With The Orientalist, I lived in a world of ragtime and international jazz. But with the life of General Dumas, I had to stop listening to anything post-Beethoven for seven years. Of course, I found ways to cheat my own rule, but still I mostly stuck with it—and it was torture!

Rumpus: Have you chosen a new book topic?

Reiss: I am still pondering.

Rumpus: Well, if you had to choose on the basis of the music you’d have to listen to for seven years, where and when would it be set?

Reiss: San Francisco 1969 or Memphis 1975. I’d also be damned happy with New York, circa 1933.

***

Author photo by Aventurina King.

Painting attributed tо Louis Gauffier, “Portrait d’un chasseur dans un paysage, dit portrait du General Alexandre Dumas” in Musée Bonnat-Helleu, Bayonne, France / photo by A. Vaquero.

The Dish Ran Away With the Andrew Sullivan Readers

Lauren ONeal — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 14:00:27 +0000

Andrew Sullivan is lighting out on his own, hoping his blog The Dish will make enough money to stay afloat without the assistance of the Daily Beast or any other publication.

His plan has a number of details that set it apart from other attempts to monetize online media: no ads (for now), no paywall (sort of), and an option for dedicated fans to pay over and above the annual subscription price, to name a few.

But if Sullivan succeeds, it won’t be because of any financial innovation—rather, it’ll have to do with the discussion around journalism and memoir we joined yesterday. Ann Friedman explains:

The really modern thing about Sullivan is that he is a brand unto himself, a journalist who transcends the outlets that have employed him. There is a particular Andrew Sullivan tone, a particular Andrew Sullivan perspective on the world. This is something his readers enjoy and value, something that keeps them coming back, and maybe (hopefully) something that prompts them to shell out $19.99 per year.

The Big Idea #2: Andrew Solomon

Suzanne Koven — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 08:01:06 +0000

The biggest surprise of parenthood is how surprising it is.

Ovulation predictor kits, amniocentesis, and endless childrearing manuals offer a brief illusion of control—even prophesy—but anyone who’s ever had kids knows that the whole project turns out to be more or less a crapshoot. The athletic give birth to the sedentary, Republicans beget Democrats, and offspring of the devout often become atheists. Sometimes, children differ so much from their parents that they have more in common with strangers than with their own families.

Andrew Solomon, winner of the 2001 National Book Award for The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, has written a new book, Far From The Tree: Parents, Children, and The Search For Identity, profiling such families. Including chapters on the Deaf, dwarfs, children with Down syndrome, autism, and severe disabilities, as well as transgendered people, schizophrenics, prodigies, criminals, and children conceived through rape, this nearly 1,000-page book covers so many parent-child differences faced in so many different ways, that the reader begins to wonder if anyone’s family is “typical.”

That’s a reaction with which Solomon would likely be pleased. Certainly he counts himself among those whose “vertical identities” and “horizontal identities”—terms he coined to distinguish traits shared with one’s parents from those shared with unrelated peers—have not always aligned comfortably. As a child with dyslexia and as a young man suffering from depression and coming to terms with his sexual orientation, Solomon’s relationship with his parents was not smooth. His current unique family includes “two men, three women, four kids, and three states,” as he’s described it.

I recently spent a gray Saturday afternoon with Solomon at his father’s country house north of New York City. Solomon, his husband, John Habich Solomon, and their three year-old son retreat there on weekends from their home in Greenwich Village, when they’re not at their other home in London. We spoke about Solomon’s own family, and about several of the 300 families he interviewed for the book. We also talked about the process of writing such an ambitious work, which took Solomon eleven years and brought him to places as diverse as a Little People of America convention, a village in Rwanda, and the Colorado home of Tom and Sue Klebold, parents of Columbine killer, Dylan Klebold.

***

The Rumpus: This is a big, wide-ranging book, but its origins were very personal: you’ve said that you wrote it to forgive your parents. What did you need to forgive them for?

Andrew Solomon: You know, I think that when…before I started on the book, I hadn’t drawn the distinction—which has become important to me since—which is between love and acceptance. You know, I feel as though when I was in the process of coming out of the closet it was upsetting for my parents, especially for my mother, and they weren’t very accepting of it. And I experienced that as their not being very loving. And actually, what I recognized writing the book, is that parents of children who have some kind of difference almost always have to struggle with it, and often manage to come through, and it’s their love that motivates them to come to terms with the strangeness or difference or whatever it is that’s extraordinary in their children. And having looked at all these other families I was able to say: Okay, my family didn’t throw me out, they didn’t want nothing to do with me, they weren’t actively rejecting. It just took them a while to get used to it.

And it took me a while to get used to it, too. We were all going through a process of accepting who I was. And there had never really been a deficit in their love. The deficit was in their acceptance. These were two separate things. And the deficit in acceptance was no worse than anybody else’s deficit in acceptance. So I just felt that by trying to understand, How does a family deal with a child who has an identity they at least initially experience as aberrant?—I could fit my parents’ behavior into a larger framework, instead of feeling that I was dealing with it just as itself, and adding layers of meaning to it that it didn’t have.

Rumpus: So the forgiveness you ended up with wasn’t perhaps the one you thought you would find when you started out?

Solomon: Well, what did I think I was going to find when I started out? I’m always amused when people sell nonfiction based on a proposal, because if you know what you’re setting out to find out at the beginning and that’s what you find out at the end, then it probably wasn’t worth working on. So I have to cast my mind back to 2001 when I first proposed the idea. I think I’d had that experience of writing the piece for the [New York] Times Magazine about the Deaf [Solomon explains that “deaf” as a condition is spelled with a small "d," and the “Deaf” as a group, with a capital "D"], and I was very startled to see how much Deaf culture and the Deaf experience had in common with gay culture and the gay experience. Most deaf children are born to hearing parents, similar to the experience of gay people who are mostly born to straight parents. That was a real revelation to me when I worked on it, whenever that was—almost twenty years ago.

And I think I then began to feel as though there was a larger community from which to obtain wisdom about these processes. That, interesting as the literature about gay people coming out was, it was only the tip of the iceberg. I really wanted to understand this phenomenon of how you negotiate your way from an illness into an identity, how you figure out who you are, how parents figure out how to relate to children, how children figure out how to relate to their parents. It was really startling to me. I mean, even then, twenty years ago, it was somehow reassuring to me to find out that the Deaf experience was like the gay experience. It made me feel less alone.

Rumpus: So in a sense you ended up expanding your own “horizontal” community through this process?

Solomon: Oh, absolutely. That’s kind of the centerpoint of the whole thing. It’s that any of the individual differences listed in the book can be very isolating. There are only so many families dealing with schizophrenia, or transgenderism, or even with crime. If you say that all of them have something in common, then sudddenly all those people are members of a larger community and that was the real revelation of the book, to say, “Look, we all have a lot in common, we’re all dealing with a lot of the same issues. What if we all held hands as we’re doing it?”

Rumpus: So in the broadest sense, this book is about the power and limitation of analogy. Did you fear that the Deaf might feel offended by being put next to a chapter about children who become criminals—or transgender, or children of rape, or prodigies, even? That these are, in some ways, very analogous and in some ways, very different? Were you fearful of overextending the analogy?

Solomon: One is always fearful of overextending. But some people have said to me, “Did you really have to go into so much detail about each of these conditions in each of these chapters?” And my response was that I wanted to describe what they all have in common, which I think is really substantial, and the ways in which they’re very different. If they were all the same, then reading ten of these chapters would be incredibly tedious. The point was to say, “Look, here are all the things that this group of people are confronting, that no one else in the group has to deal with. This is why, and this is who they are, and this is what they need.” Yet, nonetheless, all of these people, all throughout the entire book have something in common and there are parallels among their experiences. I know nuance is not popular, that some think your book should be arguing one thing. But I was really arguing that we have to recognize the specific dynamics in these specific situations, and also try to look at what they have in common.

Rumpus: I have to say that what makes me turn the book over and over in my mind is that it’s as hard to narrowly characterize as any of the individuals portrayed in it. The book, itself, recapitulates the stories, in this sense.

Now, back to your mom: you say that your parents, particularly your mom, were very supportive about your dyslexia, that your mom was just dogged in helping you move through that. And your parents were very supportive about your depression. Your mom sounds like she was a pretty loving, enlightened, and engaged lady. Why was accepting your sexuality so hard for her?

Solomon: Well, I think there are a couple of pieces to it. As I describe in the book, when I was a kid, homosexuality was generally accepted to be an illness. And a crime. And a sin. I don’t think she was particularly hung up on the “sin” piece, but it seemed like an illness, it seemed like a crime. I came of age in the age of AIDS. I think there was just a sense from her point of view, especially as someone who had grown up in the ’40s and ’50s, that I was consigning myself to the margins of society and that most of the people she knew, who had ended up so marginalized, hadn’t been very happy. I wrote in the book about how we had these gay surrogate “uncles.” So she wasn’t hideously homophobic. She was happy to have them with us for all of our holidays and so forth. But I think she thought that it just didn’t look like as happy a way forward. I also think that she was very…I’m lingering over the word “obsessed”…very deeply engaged with the idea that having children and a family was the meaning of life. And she thought that as a gay person, I wouldn’t have a family, and that that was tragic. So it contained both a critique and a compliment.

It was lovely that she thought that having children was the most important thing in life. That meant a lot to me. And I think she thought that I undervalued the conventional in some ways. She was very original in her thinking, but she had a relatively conservative way of interracting with the world. I think she felt as though I didn’t really understand the consequences of what I was signing myself up for. And I also think that she’d grown up in a time when mothers were blamed for their children being gay. So I think she somehow felt accused by it and that she felt ashamed of it.

Rumpus: Does the challenge of having a child who is different have more to do with your protectiveness of that child and your fear of the peril they may be facing, or—not that they’re mutually exclusive—the change it makes in your own identity? For example, in your mother’s case, that your being gay made her “the mother of a gay son.”

Solomon: They’re yin and yang. I think both are incredibly difficult. Some people struggle more with their child’s pain and some struggle more with their own pain. Some people are in pain even when their child isn’t, and some people are not in much pain even though their child is. It’s very hard to generalize. But I think you’re absolutely right to say that both things are there.

Back to my mother for a second: she found it difficult being the mother of a gay person and she was worried that I would be old and lonely. Those were two concerns. You can’t say there was seventy-two percent “this” and twenty-eight percent “that.” I always think of the anecdote in the “Crime” chapter, when I was talking with Sue Klebold and she was talking with someone on a train, and she said: “We had this lovely conversation and I could feel the questions were going to start, you know: ‘Are you married? Do you have kids?’” And she said, “I thought it would best to tell them who I am, and who I am forever is Dylan’s mother.”

I saw this with a lot of these parents, in terms of that whole acceptance thing. We’re in my dad’s house now. My dad actually had a fairly conservative take on things at one point, but he enthusiastically supported and voted for Obama, in part because he’s the parent of a gay child. My step-mother told me they were at some fancy dinner at which people were going on and on about how he should support Mitt Romney, and he said, “There’s no point discussing this any further. I have a gay son, and I’m supporting Obama.” And I think, therefore, he’s been changed. His attitude has been changed. Maybe he would have anyway. I think he always would have believed in these liberties. Maybe he would have made the shift anyway. But, in fact, he’s been changed. I mean, we are changed by our children. It’s inevitable that we will be. And I think he does have some ownership of that identity, to announce it at an event like that, at which perhaps he wouldn’t have been expected to some years ago.

Most of these parents end up accepting these new identities. But new identities are hard, they take a lot of adjusting. In a completely separate project—I have been working on a Ph.D.—and it deals with motherhood. And I think the women in the study I did for it, that I’ve been interviewing longitudinally…I mean, you aren’t a mother and then you are a mother. That’s a huge shift in identity. And you can love your child, and not actually love the identity of being a mother. Or you can really get off on the identity of being a mother, and not really connect very much with your child. They’re really sort of separate. So I feel like all these parents were cast into this new identity and some of them ended up finding community there, and a new focus in their life, and wonderful things out of it, and some of them ended up finding only pain and horror in the experience. But either way, they’re profoundly changed. But they want both: they want their child to be okay and they want to be okay.

Rumpus: I want to return to Sue Klebold for a moment. One thing I noticed—not one-hundred percent, but definitely a trend—is that the mothers seem to have a little easier time both facing the reality of the difference and crossing over to acceptance. You mention that Sue Klebold was more like [post-war] Germany, and her husband, Tom, was more like Japan—one more reflective and guilt-ridden, one more “let’s move on, it didn’t really happen.” Did you notice that trend at all? Am I imagining that?

Solomon: You know, again, there are variable experiences. I’ve seen families that split the difficulties in all kinds of ways. What I’d say, overall, is that I found that the women were more involved in—maybe a gross generalization—the first task of acceptance that takes place within the home. They were the ones who were more likely to say, “We’re not going to change or fix this child, and we’re going to celebrate this child for who he is here and now. We’ll make sure he feels loved and happy.” The men were better at expressing to the world—or letting the children express to the world—that point of view, and taking it outside and beyond the home. So you have a child in the book who is very severely disabled. You have the mother, Sarah, who said, “I want to baptize Jamie right away,” witnessing that he really is a person despite all these severe disabilities. And it was his father who sued the state of Connecticut and got them to build a different kind of group home, and who got Jamie’s picture on Hartford Courant Magazine and got the idea out there into the world—that the world should accept the child. That might be a good shorthand—I wish I’d thought of it before I wrote the book—that the mother helps the father to accept the child, and the father helps the world to accept the child.

Rumpus: I wonder to what extent that’s an accentuation or an exaggeration of stereotypical parental roles, even when the difference isn’t as dramatic. “The men solve the problems and the women supply the empathy.” That reminds me to ask: are there ways in which these parent-child relationships are not so different than more typical parent-child relationships? I was explaining your book to a woman in her seventies, who has two severely autistic sons in their forties. I told her the book is about children who are very different from their parents and she said, “Oh, but ‘Joe’ is exactly like my husband, and ‘Jim’ is just like me!” So I wondered, amidst all this difference, were you struck by how “normal” these families were?

Solomon: Yes, in a word. I think dealing with this kind of difficulty tends to exaggerate what would be there anyway. It makes loving parents more loving and probably makes abusive parents more abusive—though that’s not really my topic. It kind of intensifies things more than it changes them. I mean, it changes them, too, but I think that the intensification is very strong and I feel as though the basic questions of the book are applicable to children who have much less dramatic differences. You can have a child who doesn’t have any disease or anything that seems exceptional, and you can still sometimes look at your child and think, Where did you come from? They’re incomprehensible in some way. And the origin of character is endlessly bewildering. I think it’s just…

Rumpus: “Production” rather than “reproduction,” as you say in the book?

Solomon: Yes.

Rumpus: I was speaking to friends last week who are very liberal, whose eighteen-year-old son considered casting his first vote for Mitt Romney. It’s these lesser heartbreaks, so to speak—the musician whose kid can’t carry a tune—that aren’t quite the same, but I think have some of the same quality. The other analogy that occurred to me was children of immigrants. I routinely see patients who bring their children in to translate for them at medical visits. And it always strikes me that there is tremendous pride at the assimilation of their kids, but there must be some sense of loss, too. Did you think about immigrant families in terms of parent-child differences?

Solomon: Yes. I definitely have some feeling of loss. Not that I wish that I were living in poverty in the South Bronx where my father grew up. But I’m sad about that having vanished, and the disconnect I feel from it. I’m very aware, having lived in England for a long time…I have friends in England who are living in houses that their families have lived in for over a thousand years. I feel so disconnected from my past. Very connected to my father, and was to my mother, and my brother…but I feel very disconnected. If I think back one hundred years, I can’t even imagine it. What would it have been like if I had been born as me on a farm in Romania? What would I have done? How would it have worked? I can’t wrap my mind around it. So I feel a sense of dissociation, and I’m the one who’s had all the advantages. What was it like for people who are not the ones with all the advantages, to see their children leading other lives? No, I feel it’s very much like the experience of immigration, that feeling of entering into something somewhat incomprehensible.

Rumpus: It also brings up the tension that comes up so much in the book, the tension around assimilation versus identity. I want to get into some of this stuff, boy, I had a hard time wrapping my mind around…the idea that cochlear implants for the Deaf can be interpreted as a kind of genocide; that prenatal testing for Down syndrome is a form of genocide; that the Deaf, or dwarves, might deliberately conceive children who share their disabilities—so-called “deformer” [as opposed to “designer”] babies. Did you listen to that and think, “Yeah, I totally get that” or did you think, “that’s disingenuous”?

Solomon: On the “genocide” front: I think that I understand why someone would choose to give their child cochlear implants, and I suspect that I would choose to give my child cochlear implants if I had a deaf child, because I think the most important thing one can achieve with one’s child is good communication, and I’m not particularly good at languages and I would never gain real fluency in ASL [American Sign Language]. But having said that, which is about the individual decision and the individual good, I think that the Deaf culture enriches the world and if it were completely to vanish, we would lose a lot with it. The idea of that happening makes me sad. I feel that the social goal and the individual goal are not necessarily the same. I don’t think cochlear implants were invented because people hate deaf people. I don’t think it comes out of rage and hatred. I think the word “genocide” frequently gets used in a melodramatic fashion. It suggests that the wish is to get rid of something because of hatred for it. I think, here, the wish is to help people but the side effect is that we may see the Deaf culture vanishing. I think we should be awake to the fact that we are eliminating these things and not lose sight of that fact that, as you were saying earlier, in relation to immigration, whenever there is a positive change there is also a correlated loss. The correlated loss may be lesser than the gain, though we should recognize that both things are always taking place.

Rumpus: But there may be a slippery border between help and hate, as in therapy to “cure” people from being gay. I have no doubt that some people who are doing that are convinced that they’re doing something extraordinarily helpful, as misplaced as that is, and as rooted in prejudice and hate as it is.

Solomon: Right. And if the therapies worked, and they allowed the people who didn’t want to be gay to be not gay, I think they’d be quite popular. I think they would not have just been made illegal in California, I think they would not constitute cruelty and torture. You would then have an activist group saying, “You have all these parents sending their kids to therapy to make their kids not gay, and gay culture is really great and we should cherish gay culture, so that’s a bad thing to do”—which is an argument that can definitely be made and be supported. But the problem with the anti-gay therapies is that they’re traumatic, they create a lot of self-hatred in people, and those people remain gay. They may change some of their behavior, but they don’t change their underlying structure of desire. A lot of the question, I think, is the question of what can be cured, and what should be cured. It’s not always so easy to see the difference.

Rumpus: One statement you make at the end of the book was that when you were thinking about conceiving your son, you were more apprehensive about being a gay father than you were about your child inheriting dyslexia, or depression, or your relatives’ cancers. I’m not sure what you meant by that. Did you mean more apprehensive about being gay and being a father? Or about your child inheriting your sexual orientation?

Solomon: I’ll answer that a little bit obliquely: the Ph.D. I’ve just done, which will be the basis for the next book I’ll do, is a study of motherhood. I think I had some concerns about having been attached to my own mother. What is it that mothers do and will we [Solomon and his husband] be able to do it all, as men? That was part of it. I’m not worried about it any more, but I was worried about it then. I think I went into the doctoral research to understand motherhood, in part so I could see what are the constituents of motherhood and what are the things that might be missing from our son’s life. But more profoundly than that, I think I worried that it might be a stigma for him to carry around with him, that kids might point and laugh—they certainly would have when I was in school if someone had two dads. They would have thought it was weird—they would have made jokes about it, and people would have been not very nice about it. They certainly weren’t very nice to me, and I just don’t think it was a very nice place… But in any event…I just had that sense that I didn’t want to have as my opening gambit something that would be traumatic and sad for our child. I had to be sure that it was not a selfish impulse, that we were having a child because we had love to lavish on our child and could give him a happy life, and not just out of some ego need of my own. That I wasn’t having a child in a situation that would be too uncomfortable for that child.

You know, and over time, I came to think—and much more strongly since having children—that children all come into families that have got their up sides and their down sides, that we’re not mean and we’re not stupid and we have lots of other areas in which we’re doing all right by him. But I think my anxiety was, Is he going to turn around at some point in adolescence and say, “I never wanted to be born into a family like this”? I don’t think so anymore. I think he’ll say obnoxious things like all adolescents say…

Rumpus: I think you can count on that.

Solomon: But I don’t think that will be it. I mean, it’s all turned out to be great. But I thought: Are we qualified to do this? Or are we consigning this putative child to…you know.

Rumpus: Of course the world will change that much more between now and then. In fact, you worked on this book for eleven years and the world changed a lot in that time in terms of attitudes towards disability and marriage equality. So the world was changing and you were actually watching some of your subjects grow up. You got married. You had children. Did you ever feel like you were trying to write this book on a moving sidewalk?

Solomon: That’s very well said, writing it “on a moving sidewalk.” Yes, I had that feeling all the time. I feel that way even now. There was just some data published on a drug that’s being tested to be given to young children with achondroplasia [a type of dwarfism] that will turn off the mechanism that’s overactive—a gene that sends the signal to stop growth prematurely. There’s now a pharmaceutical agent they think may reverse that. It’s still in a very early stage of testing, and it’s still vague. But I look at it and I think, I have to have that in! My chapter on dwarves is totally out of date without that! And I feel it as I hear the Supreme Court decided yesterday to hear the gay marriage cases, how that might have been part of what I was writing about. But when I read about Deaf culture back in the ’90s, it was such a far-fetched idea that that really was a culture at al,l and I guess that means, of the zeitgeist of these communities and of this changing reality…that on the one hand, if I were writing about John Adams, he’d presumably…

Rumpus: …stay dead?

Solomon: Yes, he’d stay where he is. There’d be some papers that might turn up, but it wouldn’t be an absolutely moving system. But the fact that it’s a moving system also means that it has leeway to be shifted in a more positive or a less positive direction. So the book has a kind of vitality insofar as it contains ideas on how to keep the change positive.

Rumpus: In fact, more of your stories are positive and upbeat than depressing. More of the stories are about overcoming obstacles and finding love and acceptance. Yet, you also mention that it’s harder to write a happy story than a sad story, comparing this book to your book on depression, for example. Did you find yourself, as you were writing it, thinking, Nah, too happy, too sappy…these parents can’t love this kid this much…?

Solomon: I tried to honor what I found, and to be true to what I found. I have had people who have said, “There are so many depressing stories here!” And I’ve had people who’ve said, “A lot of parents would have had these children and hated them, and you found only loving parents and that’s not the whole story.” I found myself at the end of those accusations—which is a healthy position to be in; essentially we all know that there are some parents who can’t deal with their children who don’t have problems. The news piece of it for me as I went deeper into it was how many parents, confronted with children who weren’t what they wanted, ended up saying, “But I love my child for who he is,” and have made some kind of peace with it—found some means of celebrating it, even. That seemed to me more interesting than a book that was full of: “And these parents were miserable having this child and stayed miserable.”

Rumpus: The one I keep coming back to, the ones who crossed the biggest Rubicon, were the Klebolds. There’s one thing you mention, just in passing, that shocked me: that you slept in the guest room that used to be Dylan Klebold’s bedroom. I wondered, was that weird? Was that creepy? Or, at that point, had he been “normalized” for you, no longer a monster, but simply the dead child of these lovely people? Were you seeing him through their eyes at that point?

Solomon: I’m sorry to keep answering in this equivocal way, but I think both. On one level, I could see him through their eyes by spending time with them. And then, when The Today Show did their interview with me, and they showed a little bit of the footage of Dylan, screaming hysterically into the camera in preparation for this terrible thing…

Rumpus: With the guns and the black trench coats.

Solomon: Yes. I thought: that is not an okay person. That’s a monstrous vision. But I ended up thinking—and I think Sue said it the best—I ended up thinking, can we really sort people by saying: these people are terrific, these people are okay but made some mistakes, and these people are monstrous? It’s just not a very good system. Everyone does wonderful things and terrible things. What Dylan did was much more terrible than what most people do, but I don’t think that it therefore is the only fact about him. So my feeling in terms of seeing him through Tom’s and Sue’s eyes is that I think he did something shocking and awful, and if any of us could go back in time and reverse it, we would…

Rumpus: Most of all, them.

Solomon: Yes. But I don’t feel that in the end I can say he’s a monster and nothing but a monster. He’s a monster who also brought Sue an umbrella when he picked her up in the rain, and worked the extra shift in the pizza parlor for Eric; who grew up in this essentially loving household, who was broken in some profound way. I’m sorry, deeply sorry that he was broken. I see how much pain he caused his own family, and I know how unbelieveably much pain he caused all these other families, and to some degree, the whole nation that was shocked and horrified by that whole thing. But even though I know all that, I can’t think of it as being the only fact about him. I just don’t think there’s an “only fact” about anyone.

Rumpus: It struck me as such a sad irony that Sue Klebold said that Columbine gave her termendous compassion for the world, at the very same time that it made her a pariah. That, I thought, could be said of a lot of people whose different children make them isolated, but also in some ways make them more expansive and more compassionate. I know a woman who advertised for a tutor for her autistic son and was delighted when a dwarf applied for the job. It seemed natural that one person with a challenge would be empathic with someone with a different challenge. Did you see in children with differences, or parents of these children, more compassion, or more hunkering down—like, “I can’t worry about you, buddy, my plate’s already too full”?

Solomon: With individuals, I found a certain amount of hunkering down. But the central argument of the book is that if everyone dealing with difference would recognize the commonalities, the next wave of civil rights would be accomplished. The next wave of civil rights has to do with people with all of these diffuse conditions, all of whom are essentially arguing the same thing. Which is not to say that having lower urinals for adult dwarf males is the same as better education practices for Down syndrome or a better rehabilitative prison system. I’m not suggesting at all that it’s the exact same acts, but it’s the exact same ethos. If we could get this ethos into broader circulation we’d be doing a terrific thing. I had the book party, and about a week afterwards I got a message from a couple of people who’d been at the book party who were a dwarf, the father of someone with autism, and a woman with schizophrenia, who mentioned that they’d all gone out to dinner together, having met each other at the party. And I loved that. I loved that they were stepping out into the world.

Rumpus: There’s an incredible moment in the chapter, “Rape,” when a woman you met in Rwanda asks you if you can tell her how to love her daughter—conceived through rape—”better.” What did you tell her? And did you find yourself, in the course of writing the book, offering advice to your subjects, who were often in such difficult situations?

Solomon: I don’t really believe in the idea that disengagement constitutes neutrality, that cherished idea in journalism. In the same way, I think there can be a lot of hostility in the silence of a psychoanalyst hearing someone describe great pain. In the same way, I think there can be brutality in showing art on white walls with bright light and nothing else around it. So I think that if you go in as a journalist and you ask people to let you in very deeply into their lives, and you then refuse to be kind or engaged or helpful to them, I think what you’re doing is… It works very well for some people in some circumstances, but I don’t think it should be the universal rule. I often found myself being asked for advice, and if there were situations in which I felt I had good advice to give, I shared the advice. And if it helped a family in terrible pain, when they had opened up and told me their whole story, and there was a way I could perhaps take their pain and make it less, I was completely open to doing it. I didn’t try to shape what they were doing to make a better narrative for my book, which is a kind of cheating. I tried to validate some of the experiences they were having. The thing people most often asked me was, “I’m having experience X. Have you heard anyone else describe an experience like that?” And I was always open to saying, “It’s interesting you say that. Yes, here are three other people”—not necessarily with their names—”three other people that are a little bit similar, and here’s what they had to say.” So that was the general position.

The woman who asked me how to love her daughter more was in Rwanda, in the middle of no-place, and when she asked me, I was so shocked I didn’t know what to say. Afterwards, as I wrote in the book, I saw that there was a lot of love in that question, and if she had been someone I could contact again, instead of in a hut in some unspecified area of Rwanda, I would have wanted to write her and say, “I’ve thought about what you said and here’s what I wanted to say back.”

Rumpus: The transgender chapter seemed a particularly acute example of the tension between medical condition and identity. The controversy over including transgenderism in DSM V, for example. As you may know, in Massachusetts now there’s a case in which a transgendered prisoner, who murdered his wife, is petitioning the state to pay for gender reassignment surgery, on the grounds that transgenderism is a medical condition warranting treatment. So what happens when you’re straddling those two concerns? If you have a medical problem, then your distress is appreciated in a certain way, and it has practical implications for insurance, and treatment in prison, etc. If it’s not medical, then it’s at least partially de-stigmatized…

Solomon: So how do you remove the stigma but maintain the services?

Rumpus: Yes.

Solomon: That’s one of the issues throughout this book: that people want to be accepted, but they also want to be accommodated. If you say that dwarfism is as good a way of being as any other way of being, why do we have to go through the expense of having cash machines that are lower? If you say that deafness is a culture, then why are we paying for sign language interpreters in hospitals? There’s a constant question about that. I think it’s a very tricky one. And I think transgender is an area in which it’s been particularly so. Is it a physical illness or is it a mental illness? If you classify it as a mental illness, you can get treatment for the psychological component of it, but no payment for surgery. If you classify it as a medical illness, then you can maybe get payment for surgery, but have you given up on the psychological aspect of it? The way in which these things are administrated makes it very difficult to figure out the right answers. It would be nice if we had a society which could be accepting of people and help them with whatever their medical needs are.

Rumpus: So that they wouldn’t be mutually exclusive?

Solomon: Right.

Rumpus: Because it gets to the issue of labeling. So how about the even bigger picture, of individuality and assimilation as the parallel and sometimes conflicting American themes? One statement made in the chapter “Prodigy,” by the mother of piano prodigy Marc Yu, who said that there’s this American thing, where all kids have to do nine activities, and not stand out in any one of them. She said all Americans seem to need to be the same. Yet that runs counter to the American ideal of rugged individualism. Do you think that people who are born with differences and challenges are trying to be more individual, or trying to be more assimilated? And does our embrace of these seemingly contrary ideals in the American culture contribute to our inability to move forward on these issues? Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the Republicans’ rejection of the U.N. Treaty on Disabilities isn’t pure spite—is there an attitude of “You need to be an individual and succeed on your own—but you need to be not too different”? Do you think our confusion about these two, sometimes-conflicting strands in American culture contribute to our confusion about how to accept people with difference? And when you look at different cultures, is it different? How much does American culture inform our view of difference?

Solomon: One thing I’ve observed and that interestingly came up a couple of times in the course of my book tour is that a number of people who’ve shown up who have disabled children, have come from Europe to live in the United States, and therefore were commenting on this split. And I think I’d sum it up by saying that in Europe the legislation is way ahead of what there is here, but here, the social acceptance is way ahead of what there is there. Not always social acceptance, not everywhere, not every condition—again, not to make generalities. But I think that there is a belief that the law should protect these various forms of difference.

But I think there is a European model in which difference is more stigmatized. I think they’re more purebred societies in which they’ve had less immigration, and therefore in which difference is more noticeable than it is societies in which you see more difference. But I really noticed, looking at the last election, on election night when I was sitting there, anxiously staring at the TV, as they were cutting between those two rooms…the room full of Romney supporters looked like a room full of people who looked like they were doing their best all to look the same. You almost felt that if they all could have got their plaid kilts and things at the same place, they would have, because it was an army of sameness. And the Obama room seemed to have obese people and skinny people and old people and young people and black people and white people and people with ethnicities you couldn’t even figure out. There were people with their hair done and with their hair not done. There was just this fiesta of difference. The country seems to have very narrowly sided with the fiesta of difference. But I think that the split that you’re identifying, that I encountered in looking at these families and their experiences is, in fact, the split that the whole society is confronting: do we want to be a conformist society? How much do we want to just let everyone be whoever they are, themselves, and celebrate it? I think we’re headed more in that direction. But there’s always a strong undertow.

Rumpus: Our very diversity may, in fact, inform our fear of diversity.

Solomon: Right.

Rumpus: Garrison Keillor was married to a Danish woman, and he once said something like, “In Denmark, they can have so many different political parties because they only have one way to eat lunch.” When you say that in Europe there is better support and less acceptance, maybe it’s because they only have one way to “eat lunch.”

Solomon: I think that’s true. And I think that there is a real sense, intellectually and everywhere else, that the capacity for a shift in the social order here seems so huge because of that incredible diversity. But the fact that the diversity is so huge is part of what makes people defensive. And part of why I think, for example, that Evangelical Christianity makes it so readily into the realm of politics. It’s because there is the sense of how all of this difference is very threatening. In societies where there isn’t so much difference, it isn’t so threatening. But here, someone has to come out on top. And there are people who generalize from the specific… You’ve heard all of that hateful rhetoric about how we’ve voted in this black president and now we’re going to have a black country, and whites are going to be in this little minority, and all this demographic hysteria. Difference is frightening to everyone. Whether you’re German or Russian or American. It’s daunting.

I think my motive in writing the book was partly counter-phobic. These were all things that made me uncomfortable, so I decided I should really look at them and try to stop being uncomfortable with them, which has largely succeeded. I feel like I am more comfortable with dealing with all these kinds of differences. I’m sure I’ve still got a very, very long way to go to be fully comfortable with all the difference there is in the world.

Rumpus: When you finish a book like this, a changed person—you’ve been on a very extensive tour and talked about this a lot—will it be hard for you to move on? Will it feel like moving on, or will it be like having had another child, like something that remains a part of you? You’re now writing a book about motherhood; will Far From The Tree be, by necessity, an organic part of your approach to writing the new book?

Solomon: This book changed who I am, and I’m not going to change back to who I was before it. My evolution as a person is an ongoing process—I like to think mostly moving forward. I feel that eleven years was long enough to work on this exact book. I’ve already had people say, “Oh, do you think you might do a second volume?” But I really feel like I’ve done this. When I finished my book about Soviet artists, people kept saying to me, “But, wow! Look at what else is happening in contemporary Russian art!”—which it was, by the time the book was published. I was interested and those artists are still good friends of mine, but I said what I had to say about Soviet artists, and I was ready to move on to the next thing. I’m constantly getting letters from people saying, “Why don’t you write another book about depression?” The issue of depression materialized in this book and it surely will materialize in the next book about motherhood, where post-partum is so central. It’s in everything that I write and think. I’d be a different person if I hadn’t gone through depression. A completely different person. But I don’t want to write another book about it. And I feel as though I’ve done what I set out to do as well as I’m able to do it. It will always be in my mind. These people have become friends. I have a sense of connectedness to this material. I’ll lecture about it and talk about it. But I’m ready for my next book. That being said, there’s always a kind of post-partum with something like this. I feel like it was the project that occupied my forties. I’m forty-nine now. I’m getting close to fifty…

Rumpus: It doesn’t hurt a bit.

Solomon: Oh good!

***

The Rumpus Interview with Jon Ronson

Stephen Markley — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 08:55:00 +0000

Jon Ronson’s bestselling nonfiction works include The Psychopath Test, Them: Adventures with Extremists, and The Men Who Stare at Goats, which is the only one of his books to become a film starring George Clooney (so far).

The Welsh-born writer began with a column in Time Out, before getting the opportunity to film a series for the BBC2 called The Ronson Mission—of which he is not particularly proud. The series did lead him into filmmaking, however, culminating in a documentary called Tottenham Ayatollah, about the Islamic militant, Omar Bakri Mohammed. The experience formed the basis of his first bestseller, Them. Ronson went on to become a kind of a latter-day gonzo journalist and filmmaker, writing and producing for the likes of The Guardian, This American Life, and even giving his own TED talk that’s basically a primer on how to spot a psychopath.

His latest is Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries. An anthology of a decade’s worth of experience and adventure documenting the “dark, uncanny sides of humanity,” Lost at Sea offers profile after profile of the strange, unnerving, and occasionally preposterous things we are willing—and sometimes are all too eager—to believe. Through twenty-two often hilarious, occasionally chilling, and always surprising pieces, Ronson investigates some of the strangest corners of our hopes, fears, prejudices, and most fervent desires.

Upon getting ahold of Ronson by phone, I was well aware that my list of questions ran far longer and wider than the actual boundaries of space-time an author can reasonably be expected to stretch in order to answer them. We came away with one of those non-stop, fascinatingly meandering, frequently interrupting, talking-over-each-other, freewheeling kind of conversations. I have whittled, hacked, and streamlined it down to the version you may read below.

***

The Rumpus: I watched your interview on The Daily Show and Jon Stewart called your book “investigative satire.” Does that description work for you?

Jon Ronson: Yeah, I like it. Or maybe “investigative humorism.” I think it works. I want to immerse myself in an unfolding adventure in the way an investigative journalist does: drown yourself in the details and sort of lose yourself in the maze of the story, but come out on the other side not with a polemical treatise or a finger-wagging expose, but a with really nice piece of narrative nonfiction; to look at the nuances of the human condition in a funny way. So I go about it sort of in the way investigative journalists do, but I think my outcome is probably slightly different.

Rumpus: Your book purports to document “how deep our collective craziness” lies.

Ronson: Yeah, I kind of like that. In the old days, I would definitely put myself on the kind of level of rationality above the people that I was interviewing, and the older I got the less comfortable I felt with that position, because I felt it was kind of imperialistic and hierarchical and kind of not fair. Because, sure, I may not believe in the kind of crazy things they believe in, but the older I get the more I realize we’re all driven by irrationalities and compulsions. It’s unfair to make yourself look better than the people you’re interviewing. Which is why the “collective craziness” is nice. I think the world is changing a bit: we’re less inclined to sort of gang together to humiliate people and we’re more inclined to be a little bit more egalitarian about each other’s weaknesses. Do you think I’m right in that? I mean, have you sort of noticed that at all?

Rumpus: There was a book I wanted to bring up. It’s called The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking, by Matt Huston.

Ronson: No, I don’t know it.

Rumpus: It’s pretty fascinating. It basically talks about how even the most secular, atheistic among us—which I would certainly count myself as—we all cling to different forms of magical thinking as a way to order our lives, give them purpose, and escape our own mortality, more or less.

Ronson: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more with that. But I think it should be something we’re not ashamed of. It should be sort of like, “Well, okay, fuck it. It’s fine.”

Rumpus: Yeah, his point is that this is in many ways a good thing. This is a way of ordering ourselves. I wanted to get your take on this: do you think the subjects you document have similar subconscious motives? Or is that just too reductionist?

Ronson: No, I think they do. I completely agree with everything you just said. I come from the skeptical, secular world, and I give talks at skeptic conferences, and I like them. And I do think it’s important to draw a line in the sand between what’s true and what’s not true, and especially after 9/11 when you had those Truthers terrorizing people online, which I write about in The Psychopath Test… With a situation like that, it’s important to note a difference between rationality and irrationality… What I did notice going to these skeptic conferences was a certain sense of superiority. You know, we, the rational scientists, are sort of great and impeccable, and you, the believers in irrationality, are kind of lesser people.

Rumpus: Do you find it hard at all—you know, I can only speak from personal experience, which is that I’m from small-town, rural Ohio, where at a young age I encountered or dealt with people who thought Darwin is this conspiracy liberals cooked up to make your kids not believe in Jesus. So where do you come down on something like that?

Ronson: Wow. Well, obviously I come down on the side of rationality and liberal secularism completely. In fact, I was at Westminster Cathedral in London not so long ago, and I was talking to a tour guide, and he said he had led a group of American tourists, and when they walked past Darwin’s grave, one of them spat on it.

Rumpus: Right, as if algorithmic evolutionary processes are all just a silly cult this one British guy dreamt up.

Ronson: Oh, it’s enough to put a chill through you. So the question is, you have to be sure of what’s right and what’s wrong, but how do you do that in a way that’s utterly humane and humanistic? I don’t want to attack the people who believe in stuff, I don’t want to consider myself better than them. I want to consider myself on sort of a level as them.

Rumpus: You want to not be Richard Dawkins.

Ronson: Yes, in fact my friend Rebecca Watson was attacked by Richard Dawkins. She was in an elevator…

Rumpus: Yep.

Ronson: You know this story?

Rumpus: I do know this story.[1]

Ronson: Well there you go, exactly. I’ve no doubt there is some seventeen-year-old girl in some small town like the town you grew up in who was feeling suffocated, who read The God Delusion, and it kind of massively improved her life. But I feel very uncomfortable with the way Richard Dawkins and his crowd deal with believers in that sort of brutal way.

Rumpus: Well, not to get off on a whole tangent, but one of Dawkins’s contemporaries, Daniel Dennett, wrote the book—Darwin’s Dangerous Idea—that was kind of the synthesis for what I’d long held true, which is that religious ideas and their services and their structures do serve a purpose for people, and you have to be very careful in the way that you approach your rationality.

Ronson: Exactly, well maybe it’s the whole John Stuart Mill thing. And I don’t really know very much about John Stuart Mill—this actually comes from a friend paraphrasing him—but Mill said, “Anything goes, as long as people don’t get hurt.” So maybe that’s the idea. But I’m saying that as a complete John Stuart Mill ignoramus.

Rumpus: Let me use this to segue into the Insane Clown Posse. It’s the first and, by far and away, the funniest profile in the book, because it turned out their extremely violent and misogynist shtick was supposedly a front to reveal the truth about God; they revealed themselves essentially as a Christian rock band.

Ronson: I know it’s kind of hard to get your head around that. You know, if you’re going to write that deeply about God, you should probably at least do it in a way that someone will notice within twenty years.

Rumpus: And I hate to say it, but in this piece they sound so pitiable; they’re talking about how scientists can go fuck themselves for trying to explain where giraffes come from. People ridicule their music, but they clearly both suffer from some kind of depression and anxiety. It just struck me that they’re only attempting to articulate issues and ideas in much the same way as any mainstream religion. Their question of, “How big is your ringmaster?”, in its way, is as profound or not profound as a lot of things in mainstream Catholicism.

Ronson: And how your voice just happens to be a voice that is ridiculous to millions of people. I mean, what a tragedy that is. I always felt very lucky: I remember the first time I ever got onstage, it was my first talk when Them came out… As I approached the stage, I thought there was nothing in my temperament that suggested I was going to do this well. I’m introverted, I’m quiet, I’m quite socially awkward. And by a stroke of luck it just happened that I was okay at it, and people liked it. I remember thinking, Oh good, this is going to make my life much easier.

And the poor Insane Clown Posse are like the opposite. You’ve only got the voice that you’ve got, and if everybody thinks it’s kind of ridiculous and absurd, no wonder they’re trapped in depression and anxiety. Every time they open their mouth, I suppose everybody laughs at them. Violent J said to me, “You know what? If Alanis Morissette had written this fucking song, everyone would think it was fucking genius.” Which I’m not sure is entirely true.

Rumpus: You visited with some tech geeks and billionaires attempting to create intelligent, self-aware robots. Do you think at some point we will have to redefine consciousness to include beings with circuit boards instead of neurons? Or is this the story of very wealthy people attempting to chase immortality in their own secular, scientific way?

Ronson: Well, they believe it, no question. And a lot of people believe…that these people are really onto something. I don’t know much about neuroscience, but I have to say I came out thinking that what they’re trying to do is not going to work because firstly, you’ve got the tipping point theory of robot consciousness, which is that if you just pile enough information into a robot, it will, at some point, just burst into spontaneous life. So then why has Wikipedia not burst into spontaneous life? Then you have this thought that if you can completely model the human brain, then you can model consciousness, and that doesn’t seem to me to be a very practical notion. And they keep saying that it’s going to happen in ten years, and they just keep saying it, and that feels slightly snake-oil salesman to me. However, I thought Martine[2] was one of the most incredible people I’ve ever met.

Rumpus: Her story was almost crazier than the robot story.

Ronson: I mean, imagine inventing the concept of satellite radio for cars… And then going to the library and inventing a treatment for pulmonary hypertension. I mean, fucking hell. That’s just unbelievable. Rarely do I come away from an interview thinking I just met someone incredibly inspiring. Especially because I come from Britain and we shy away from words like “inspiring.” But with Martine I came away just shaking my head in awe. However, I do think this idea of robot consciousness is possibly where her brilliance runs out.

Rumpus: Often these are stories of people wishing for things beyond the material world or at least our earthly world. You have parents believing their slightly hyperactive kids are “Indigos”—psychic children who are the next step on the evolutionary ladder. You and the pop star Robbie Williams hang out at a UFO convention.

Ronson: Yes, there’s a real connection between those two stories: that the irrational beliefs come from a very rational place on both of those occasions. I should say a very “real-world” place. The parents of the Indigo kids—their beliefs are a direct consequence of the pharmaceutical industry being out of control, and I write a lot about that in The Psychopath Test, how the pharmaceutical industry behaves in a psychopathic manner. The rationality of the Indigo mothers is a direct consequence of the irrationality of the pharmaceutical industry. And I think the same thing is true for Robbie, because Robbie had become a thing that a generation of kids dreamed of being, and he actually found it incredibly stressful and wanting because of all the terrible pressures on him. So his belief in aliens and some kind of higher power comes from the fact that he is sort of an alien and a sort of higher power, and as a consequence he’s looking for something greater.

Rumpus: It’s people using scientific fantasies to construct similar types of wishful thinking about our place in the universe.

Ronson: I think with Robbie, there are millions of people dreaming of being Robbie Williams—or One Direction or Simon Cowell, this top-strata celebrity—and when you become that thing and kind of hate it, it’s a strange and interesting part of human nature that you would go looking for something even greater.

Rumpus: So moving on to someone like Paul Davies of SETI, who’s tasked with being the first person to speak to aliens should we ever hear from them.[3] This could go from being the least important job to the most important job in the history of Earth in literally ten seconds. Do you think the world should be considering our first contact playbook a little more carefully?

Ronson: Well, I like his defense: if we were [democratically] given the chance to decide, then we’d probably send up Call of Duty, or Lady Gaga or, you know, if we were really on top of it, some Mozart or 2001: A Space Odyssey… I rather like when Paul Davies points out that these humanoids would have no idea what any of this was. I think the reason he’s so looking forward to aliens coming is because he’s so much more intelligent than any other human, so this is his last chance to meet someone who’s somewhat on the same intellectual level as him.

Rumpus: I grew up a massive Stanley Kubrick fan, so I resent you enormously for getting the opportunity to sort through his personal boxes after his death, which I liken to looking through Shakespeare’s notes.

Ronson: I know, unbelievable. What a break that was. I do have to tell you, though, it was wonderful and amazing, but like all mysteries, the closer you get to the mystery, the more sort of real-life it becomes, and after a while going through the Kubrick house, it wasn’t like Alice in Wonderland. After a while it became a little bit of a tough day with thousands of boxes to look through… However, what an amazing way to spend a few months of your life.

Rumpus: As you got closer to his thinking through his notes, did he take on the trappings of a normal, obsessive person?

Ronson: I don’t want to demystify him. But have you seen Room 237? It’s this documentary that’s just come out about Stanley Kubrick conspiracy theorists all reading hidden messages into continuity errors in The Shining.[4] It’s really interesting, but what they’re doing is taking continuity errors they can’t imagine Kubrick would ever make. They’re reading this huge amount of stuff into continuity errors, but I think the fact is Kubrick was fallible. Actually, the vast majority of stuff in the boxes, what it really shows is not a super-human man but a very human man who just cared a lot about making a film that was really good… The closer you get by looking through the boxes…[he’s] not a sort of crazy hermit obsessive, but someone who is perfectionist in a way that’s completely appropriate.

Rumpus: I think all writers and artists hope that someone ends up poring over their notes, trying to figure out what every little jotting meant, but Kubrick rose to this stature of just total myth.

Ronson: But there were very practical reasons for this. One was that he would see directors going on TV to promote their films and would think, “God this guy is so geeky and his story is so terrible it’s actually making me not want to see the film.” One of his assistants told me that. One of the reasons Kubrick never gave interviews was not because he was incredibly mysterious and enigmatic but because he actually didn’t want to be disappointing… Now what is true, though—and I have no explanation for—was that there was no published photograph of him for like seventeen years.

Rumpus: You also spent a lot of time talking to people who are more or less cult leaders. At least they walk the line between pastor, guru, spiritual leader, and outright fraudster. In some instances it’s very obvious, like the psychic Sylvia Browne, who comes off as a total fraud and buffoon. In other cases, such as Nicky Gumbel and Richard Bandler, they hew closely enough to our religious traditions or tangible psychological reasoning that it’s harder to dismiss them. What is the line between these two roles? Or is it totally fallacious to think there ever could be one?

Ronson: Well, I would draw a line between Nicky Gumbel and Richard Bandler. Nicky Gumbel—his whole thing is about the Bible. He’s an Evangelical Christian who has a strange homophobic thing going on. He would say, “There’s nothing homophobic about me, I have many gay friends,” but then he went on to say—and he admitted this is the thing he most regrets saying in public in his entire life: “You know, if a pedophile said ever since he was a young kid, he was into… You know, I’m not equating homosexuality to pedophilia, but the Bible says that homosexuality should be healed—only I strongly recommend you don’t use the word ‘healed’ to them. They hate that word.”

Nicky told me a couple of months later that that quote caused him some trouble. Besides those two things, I really liked Nicky Gumbel a lot, and I didn’t feel the slightest bit coerced… It was actually a very pleasant experience, whereas doing NLP [Neuro-Linguistic Programming],[5] I felt very coerced. I couldn’t walk to the toilet without ten Richard Bandler acolytes wanting to know what I was doing, so I felt suffocated and coerced. Then later on, Richard Bandler, I sent him a request to be in my book about psychopaths…

Rumpus: Yeah, he sounds almost like a caricature of a psychopath.

Ronson: Well, I don’t think he is a psychopath actually. He said to me later, “When I found out you wanted to put me in your book about psychopaths my first thought was, ‘I’m going to break his fucking legs.’” I don’t think Richard Bandler is a psychopath because Richard Bandler is full of compulsions and anxieties, and psychopaths tend to not be particularly anxious or have weird compulsions. But what he was was a very intense, difficult person.

Rumpus: I was very impressed with your evenhandedness, because I would be off on a polemic after half the stuff you’re writing about. I wouldn’t be able to help myself. It did strike me that you gave people the benefit of the doubt. You gave them every chance to explain themselves.

Ronson: It’s because I don’t feel my job is to make myself look good. I’m always a little bit suspicious of the kind of…crusading journalist. It feels like a little bit of posturing: “Look at me, the journalistic superhero.” I think it’s fine to write about your own frailties and weaknesses, and it’s fine to try to see the world through the eyes of the person you’re interviewing even if the person you’re interviewing is abhorrent.

Rumpus: Hold on, though, because your pursuit of the collective craziness leads you to sketch a really brilliant piece about how credit card companies and other lenders pursue sub-prime individuals, who then become enormously indebted. Obviously, you had the same kind of private debt crisis in Britain as we had here. You had these heavily deregulated banking sectors, this free market orthodoxy—what economists call the “efficient market hypothesis”—that says institutions like banks and mortgage-lenders don’t need any rules. Is this one of the most dangerous collective crazinesses in your whole book? You clearly did have an editorial position on that.

Ronson: Yeah, I did, very much—but, I started with the question: okay, Richard Cullen committed suicide. Who’s fault was it? Was it Richard Cullen’s own fault for behaving in an irresponsible way? Or was Richard Cullen essentially an innocent victim of a very manipulative, devious system? And I came to the latter conclusion. I found it fascinating that there’s a whole strata of society up there who are deliberately and consciously and invisibly trying to exploit our weaknesses for their own gain… My father is a conservative and would never see business in that way. It took me quite a long time to reframe my mind to see business in that way… I wanted to find out what happened [to Cullen], and it was a completely all-consuming six months.

Rumpus: Yeah, I could see where the story was going, but nevertheless it’s always shocking. You know, you kind of assume that for the most part, people all have good intentions, and in this case you say to yourself, “Okay, your business model is to go after people who are going to get themselves in trouble?”

Ronson: Yeah, and remember this is happening before the crash. It wasn’t known…that this was happening. I mean it was thought amongst people who were really watching the industry, but nobody was really watching the industry because everyone had their flatscreen TVs and everybody was loving the easy credit. So nobody wanted to be told this party was fragile.

Rumpus: Did you see in it the Ayn Randian myth that, well, “My rational self-interest is producing a socially desirable outcome. These people need credit, and I’m providing it to them”? Did you see any of that rationale?

Ronson: Oh, absolutely, people were thinking that. I wonder how many of them knew—you know, these clever economists—how many of them knew that it was a house of cards destined for disaster? And I don’t know the answer to that. It’s possible none of them knew. But I’ve got a very clever friend named Adam Curtis, who’s a British documentary-maker, and he was saying to me around that time that this wasn’t going to last… He knew that it was all going to collapse, so there were people out there who knew it.

Rumpus: This goes to the second piece that covers the same terrain, “Amber Waves of Green.” You profile people on different scales of the economic distribution, including a Haitian dishwasher in Miami, a struggling family in Des Moines, and a billionaire. You note that the only one of them who seems politically enraged is the billionaire, who believes the rest of society is out to leech off him.

Ronson: Absolutely. Now to Wayne Hughes’s credit, I don’t think he felt that way because he was a bad person. I think he felt that way for entirely ideological reasons. He said it was an emotional thing for him. For him, America is built on unregulated, free market capitalism and anything else is abhorrent, so I absolutely believe he means it in a very genuine way. However, as Nick Hanauer[6] put it to me, if it’s true that the rich are the ones who create the jobs, then America should be drowning in jobs given how rich the rich have gotten. But I liked Wayne Hughes. I really felt he was genuine. He’s not an exploiter; he believes his view, and that it’s best for America. You know, he was chief fundraiser for all those American Crossroads ads, the pro-Romney ads. He must have been furious at what he got from them… He gave more than anyone else, to my knowledge.

Rumpus: I don’t know if you heard but Mitt Romney just got caught telling his donors that Obama won because he was giving “gifts” to everyone—like health care and relief from student debt.

Ronson: Unbelievable, right? The idea that, oh, how terrible is it for people to feel “entitled” to health care and food and education. You know, the right in America is a lot further right than the right in Britain, and I think the right’s going to collapse unless they move further to the left. That’s what British conservatism realized, and if American conservatives don’t realize that, they’re screwed. They’re destined for exile.

Rumpus: On the flipside of the equation, the family in Des Moines and the Haitian dishwasher—the fact that they’re not angry, is that a part of America’s collective craziness now? That we are so entrenched in our class positions that we cannot see the way the system distributes opportunity disproportionately to the top echelons of society?

Ronson: Well it’s a very interesting question. I wouldn’t necessarily say that it’s an American thing. You know, Frantz’s [the Haitian dishwasher] view that everything that happens to him is okay as long as people talk to him respectfully is a view held by very poor people all over the world… And then I’m thinking about the Des Moines couple, Rebecca and Dennis, their view that, “We would do it too. We would find a way to pay 18% tax, too, if we could.” Is that peculiarly American? A part of me wants to say yes, because respect for the higher class is more of an American notion than a British one. There’s a saying if you see a Rolls-Royce or limousine go past in America, you think, “Maybe someday I’ll be the person in that limousine,” and in Britain you say, “Maybe if that limousine gets close enough, I’ll get out my key and scratch it.”

Rumpus: Why did you use “Lost at Sea” as the title of the book? It’s a shorter piece that describes the people who go missing from luxury cruise liners. When a young woman goes over the deck in the middle of the ocean and no conspiracy theory, no magical thinking will ever bring her back, does this somehow act as a commentary on the ultimate hopelessness of some mysteries? That they just are, and that’s all you can say about it?

Ronson: No…the reason I called the book “Lost at Sea” is because we are all lost at sea. We’re all trying to get ahold, out adrift with irrational thought and magical thinking, and we’re all the same. It’s an egalitarian title. So everybody in the book is lost at sea, from Richard Cullen, to the people in Sylvia Browne’s audience, through to me and my readers. It’s kind of an empathetic title. I really like your interpretation of the title, though. That’s quite good, too.

***

[1] It’s important that I explain here that this story does not involve Richard Dawkins “attacking” Rebecca Watson, but only rhetorically attacking her in a blog comments section. What happened is, following a conference, Watson was in an elevator alone when one of the male attendees followed her in and proceeded to make her incredibly uncomfortable in his forthright attempts to invite her back to his hotel room (not to mention, Watson had just finished speaking about how ill-advised such advances are). After Watson wrote about the experience, Dawkins made a surprise visit to the comments section of a blog where he wrote a sarcastic letter to an oppressed Muslim woman. Sample sentence: “Stop whining will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and…yawn…don’t tell me again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.” Suffice it to say, this was not the most well-received thing Dawkins has ever written, and spurred a great deal of discussion about misogyny within the atheist/skeptic community. Think of it like an atheist-writers old school hip-hop beef.

[2] This is Martine Rothblatt, inventor of Sirius Radio. Ronson is also about to leave out that Martine was born a man named Martin. I want to convey this information in a completely non-judgmental way, but I think it adds a 32nd curveball to the already-incredible story of a billionaire, self-taught inventor who wants to re-create her lover in robot form.

[3] This question set-up actually led to an enormously interesting ten-minute side discussion about how SETI recently massively reduced the statistical probability that there is life on other planets. Ronson had just heard this theory of “hot Jupiters,” which he then had to look up again because, like most of us, he’s incredibly informed, but can never remember “where he got informed by” (as I put it), or how this fascinating information came to be in his brain—only that it’s there and it’s pertinent. He sent me a link to a recent article from Space.com, describing how hot Jupiters tend to scatter other planets within their solar systems as their orbits move closer to the sun, and their gravitational pulls cause chaos for smaller bodies. This makes it unlikely that stars orbited by giant, hot Jupiter-esque gasballs could be home to planets that could sustain life. Ronson finished with, “And I thank you for listening to my TED talk on hot Jupiters.”

[4] Upon realizing that I had heard of Room 237 and, in fact, had been anticipating this film the way fourteen-year-old girls anticipate Justin Bieber performances at the American Music Awards, I let out an extremely unprofessionally, nerdy, “Ooooh, I have heard of that!” Directed by Rodney Ascher, Room 237 is currently at 98% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the trailer looks, in a word, sick.

[5] Neuro-Linguistic Programming is kind of hard to describe unless you read about it, but basically it’s kind of a way of psychologically manipulating people to do what you want them to do. I guess you’re supposed to use it in business meetings and on dates and whatnot.

[6] An early investor in Amazon, also profiled in the chapter as a millionaire with pretty much the opposite take on economic theory as Wayne Hughes, the billionaire.

Mexican Journalist Death Toll Rising

Julie Morse — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 23:45:28 +0000

If you’ve forgotten, over at The New York Review of Books, novelist Alma Guillermoprieto is here to remind you that drug-related violence is still alive and strong in Mexico.

She examines the long and growing list of journalist killings in Mexico. The almighty drug-trafficking group the Zetas is the enemy behind many of these deaths. They dole out bribes so that journalists will write government press releases as if they are news stories:

It is hard to determine how immoral the chayote might seem to Mexictan reporters, given that the practice was institutionalized by their own government. Not to accept a bribe or emolument from an official can be seen as a hostile act—a threat, almost. Few editors or publishers can be counted on to stand behind a reporter who refuses to play by the rules. Even fewer pay a living wage. (In the state of Tabasco, where the Zetas are powerful, the enterprising Salvadoran journalist Oscar Martínez found out that reporters are paid 60 pesos—about $5—per story.)

The Rumpus Interview with Elizabeth Gilbert

Rachel Khong — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 07:02:41 +0000

I was in college when I first encountered the work of Elizabeth Gilbert. I was trying to be a writer (full disclosure: I still am), and I’d given myself the assignment of reading one short story collection a week. I was very strict about it. Sometimes the books were chores to get through, but Pilgrims—Gilbert’s first book, published in 1998—wasn’t. I’d seen the capacity that short stories had— despite their shortness—to be really freaking boring. These were not those. The stories in Pilgrims struck me as sparkly and surprising and weird and very funny. They seemed to belong together, even though they were set all over the place: a ranch in Wyoming, a bar in New York City, a school bus in the afterlife (that story’s called “The Finest Wife,” and we’ve reprinted it here). Gilbert’s characters were tough and wisecracking, but full of heart and life.

My fondness for Pilgrims drove me to seek out Gilbert’s other stuff: Stern Men, a novel about lobster fishermen; The Last American Man, about a real-life Daniel Boone named Eustace Conway; the articles she’d written for SPIN and GQ (“The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon” and “The Ghost,” among them). I read it all.

A little later, I began seeing a book called Eat, Pray, Love on bookstore shelves. Then I couldn’t stop seeing it. Surely that couldn’t be my Elizabeth Gilbert, I thought. (It was.) And even though Eat, Pray, Love was the book that millions of women were reading and adoring, and even though I had read every other thing Elizabeth Gilbert had ever written, I avoided it.

For a few years, I didn’t read any Elizabeth Gilbert at all. Then in 2009, she gave a TED Talk. I was living in Florida, at the time—trying to be a writer and feeling the regular amount of despair about it. She spoke about creativity. And I remembered just how much I liked her, and just how much she had to say.

I met Liz in person this past April, when she was visiting San Francisco. McSweeney’s was reprinting her great-grandmother’s cookbook, and some of us staff took her to dinner. Liz and I sat next to each other, and talked about writing. We made plans to talk some more, but only—we agreed—after we had squared away our respective projects. She was working on a new book; I had a magazine to help put out. She finished the book in mid-September (it’s called The Signature of All Things); we sent the latest issue of the magazine to press a couple weeks ago. “Book is done! Lucky Peach is done! We are ready to roll!” she e-mailed. Our conversation took place over Skype.

***

The Rumpus: The first thing I ever read of yours was “The Famous Torn and Restored Lit Cigarette Trick” in The Paris Review, and I loved it so much—it felt so generous and comprehensive in a way that most stories aren’t—and right away I went out and got Pilgrims. It’s hard for me to love story collections fully. There are always one or two stories that I don’t like as much, or one or two where it’s like, Why is this in there? They never feel as cohesive as I want them to. But Pilgrims is up there with my favorites: Airships by Barry Hannah, and The Coast of Chicago by Stuart Dybek, and Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson. Why did you decide I’m going to write a story collection? What were your models, and who were you emulating?

Elizabeth Gilbert: I didn’t decide to write a short story collection. I just wanted to write things and wanted something to be published, and that was the entire extent of my aspiration. I wasn’t consciously putting together a short story collection, I was just writing stories really slowly. That’s probably the book that took me the longest to write. It took me six years to write those stories—that’s the rate of maybe two a year. I was learning, and I was studying, and my influences changed because my tastes changed over the six years, so when I read it I can see who I was imitating at various moments. Probably my biggest influence at that moment was Annie Proulx, who was nice enough to give me a blurb for that book, but she could honestly just as easily have sued me because I was really emulating her and really imitating her. I was also imitating Cormac McCarthy. A couple of those stories I wrote as an undergraduate; a couple I wrote in the years after college. “Pilgrims,” the title story, was purchased by Esquire, and published there, and after that, I got an agent, and the agent said, “If you can write a novel, we can get you a book deal for your short story collection.” And I was like, “My what collection?” I didn’t even realize what I had inadvertently created. That was really good news to find that out.

Rumpus: How do you feel about those stories now?

Gilbert: I haven’t read them in a long time. A couple of them I’m a little embarrassed by. I’m embarrassed by “Come and Fetch These Stupid Kids.” I wrote that in college and I feel like it shows. I’m embarrassed by “Landing,” a story about a girl in a bar in San Francisco. That was me trying to be Raymond Carver.

Rumpus: Was that based on anything biographical?

Gilbert: It was based on everything. That was the one that my mom read and was like, I wish that girl wouldn’t just jump into bed with that guy that she just met. And there was this long silence between us. And it was like, Yeah…I kind of wish she wouldn’t, either. But she keeps doing that. But I’m really proud of “The Torn and Restored Lit Cigarette Trick.” That’s the last short story I ever wrote. And I feel like it was a bridge to becoming a novelist, because I feel like it’s a miniature novel. The other ones are really short stories, but that story kind of stretched out, and I began to realize I could sustain a bigger story. It’s more generational, it takes place over a longer period of time, and it reminds me of the book I just wrote, in a way, where there are big things that happen in condensed time and then twenty years pass. I still think that that one holds up, but some of them, I could barely look at.

Rumpus: Where did “The Famous Torn and Restored Lit Cigarette Trick” come from?

Gilbert: My first husband was somebody who had been an enthusiastic amateur magician when he was a kid. Which I always thought was adorable. And he did it for way too long, like, past when it would have been cute and well into officially geeky. But I was charmed by it, and I was charmed that he was this kid from a working-class family in Ohio, and that he was trying to make transformation and misdirection and sleight of hand and all these things that you would need if you wanted to change your class and change your life. He had a book of magic tricks, and there was a trick called “The Famous Torn and Restored Lit Cigarette Trick,” and I just loved the weird arcane language of that. I started going to magic acts in New York, and really kitschy, non-ironic old nightclub magic acts. And her father killing the guy in the parking lot over the money stolen was based on an incident that happened at a diner in Philadelphia where I worked. Well, nobody was killed, but there was a beating and there were shoes stolen and a lot of the things happened.

Rumpus: A lot of the stories seem kind of autobiographical or based on real things. I can pick out little facts from your life. In “Pilgrims,” there’s a character who grew up on a Christmas tree farm; “Tall Folks” is set in a bar and you were a bartender in New York. But I’ve always wondered about “The Finest Wife”: where did that come from? You were in your twenties but it seems like it was written by someone much older.

Gilbert: That is the only objective, magical, creative experience of my life, is that story. I was taking a commuter train, from my old house in Hudson Valley to New York City, and I fell asleep and I dreamt that story. And that has never happened before or since. I dreamt that ending of the train cars with all the writing on them and this woman with all her lovers. I woke up and I must have written that story in like two or three hours. That one was a freebie. That wasn’t work. It was just transcription. I often wonder if I were a purer person, maybe I could access that more often. Or more than once. But it was just a random nap in the afternoon. I don’t know what channel got opened, but it’s never been opened again since, unfortunately.

Rumpus: Maybe you could recreate it—recreate your life back then.

Gilbert: It’s not worth it. It wouldn’t be worth it to go back to be in a failing marriage and fall into a depression. I don’t know why I got given that one, but that was a freebie. I dreamt it, but as I was writing it I knew what the mandate was, which was to write a story about a woman who isn’t punished for being promiscuous. Which is really hard to find in literature. Or in the world. And I just wanted her to be unapologetically promiscuous, and to have all the men in her life just think it’s terrific. Maybe that’s the reason that literally was a dream, because I can’t imagine a real world in which that could occur. It’s a completely unrealistic depiction of sexuality and intimacy in marriage. She gets to have a happy marriage, too. Maybe it’s a dream for lots of women.

Rumpus: When did you start writing?

Gilbert: My dad was a huge reader, even though he was a chemical engineer and a farmer. Both my parents were big readers. My mom—it just meant a lot to her. She grew up without a lot of education and it meant a lot to her that her daughters be educated. We spent a lot of time at the library, and I think it’s a natural progression to go from being an obsessive reader to being someone who wants to play, and wants to do it themselves. My older sister Katherine is also an author; she writes young adult novels. We didn’t have a TV and didn’t have neighbors, so we had to make worlds up. Well, she made worlds up and I followed her into them. She made up pretty baroquely detailed worlds. We were time traveling sisters who had a dinosaur, but one of us had polio. There was always some really weird twist, because we read too much and the children’s books weren’t as good then as they are now, so we read a lot of grown-up stuff too, and it all got mixed up. It was really kind of a Petri dish for creating writers.

I wrote a play in fifth grade, and directed it and starred in it. It was a musical, and it was ten minutes long, about a girl who went back in time—which was a big theme in our plays. No one believed her, and she had sort of a lament in the middle of the play, about how no one believed that she went back in time. I wrote the lyrics and put it to “Fifteen Miles on the Erie Canal.” It’s a deeply heartfelt plea. She brought back a newspaper from the 1800s, which was the evidence that people finally accepted, and she was vindicated. So I was just always writing, and that’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do or be. It has made life simple.

Rumpus: You wrote while working a variety of jobs, in your twenties. But when did you find the time to write? How did you find the time to write while bartending in New York?

Gilbert: I was really stubborn about it, and I was really fascistic about it. A bartending job is perfect because you only work three or four nights and you have the rest of the time. Waitressing, too—you can make fast cash without putting any intellectual energy into what you’re doing. You get to hear a lot of people speak. That was what was great about bartending. It was a lot of note-taking for me. Because if you work in an office, you’re encountering maybe the same six or seven people a day. But if you’re working in a bar, there’s this constant influx of all sorts of different voices and backgrounds and dramas, and it just was a really great pool from which to draw.

I was a bartender; I was a waitress at this diner in Philadelphia. That was a really great job because my friend Mike would give me every shift—he was always short-staffed—and I would just spend four or five months working seven days a week and saving all my money. Then I could leave and travel and have experiences and run out of money and then come back and pick up that job again. It was perfect for what I was trying to do. Then I worked on a ranch in Wyoming; I was the trail cook at the ranch for a season. And then it was more waitressing, more bartending. Childcare, also, is a good job for the person who wants to be in charge of her own hours. Honestly, I thought that I would probably be doing work like that my whole life, and I didn’t mind. I suspect that would have gotten old by the time I turned thirty. I had this limited idea that I could do that, but looking at it now, that would have gotten frustrating, and I would have had to have gotten a proper career. But it worked really well for me during those years.

Rumpus: Weren’t you just exhausted, though? I come home thinking, I should write, but I’m so tired.

Gilbert: I was, and I didn’t write every day. But I wrote every week. I mean, it took me a long time. It would take me almost a year to write one short story. It took me a long time because I didn’t have the confidence, and because I didn’t have the time and the energy. But honestly, what drained my energy those years, more than my work, was the fucked-up emotional psychosexual dramas that I got involved with. If I could help myself at all in retrospect as a 43-year-old woman I would be like, “Get out of that guy’s car! Don’t move in with him! Don’t cheat on that guy! Don’t run away with this one! Don’t break up this marriage!” The stuff that I was doing was so hugely mentally invasive, and so physically and emotionally draining for me and whoever I dragged into that story. When I look back on those years, what feels miraculous to me is not that I was able to do any writing working as a bartender and a waitress—it’s that I was able to do any writing while I was making the stupidest, fucking personal decisions anybody has ever made. I feel like that, more than anything, is a tribute to how stubborn I was about wanting to be a writer, because so much of my life was really quite a mess. But I really wanted it. I wanted it so much that, despite myself, I managed to get work done.

If I’m being forgiving of myself, I could say I’m somebody who was really hungry for experiences. The same thing that would make me go try to be a trail cook on a ranch was the same thing that would make me want to have sex with a couple cowboys while I was there. So, all of that kind of dovetailed. I just… I wanted to know everything. There’s a lot of disorder that comes along with wanting to know everything and wanting to try everything and wanting to experience everything, but there’s a lot of knowledge that comes out of it too. And there’s nothing like intimacy for revelation. If I went through—word by word—those short stories, I can tell you who that guy was. I wish that it didn’t have to be that way. That’s not how I work anymore. And I think it’s more efficient not to be that way.

Rumpus: Okay, Coyote Ugly. It was a GQ article…

Gilbert: It was a GQ article I wrote after I wrote “Tall Folks.” And “Tall Folks” I wrote while I was still working at Coyote Ugly, and that’s the fictionalized version. “Tall Folks” is a good example of what I got out of the work that I did. That year-and-a-half that I worked there produced that short story. And then when I started working as a journalist, I was mentioning to an editor that I had worked at this bar and he said, “Well you should write a story about it,” and I remember that being the first moment where there was a bifurcation, where I just thought, Oh wait, am I allowed to use this material for nonfiction purposes as well? And if I do so, is there stuff I need to hold back—like the good stuff, should that be saved for fiction because that’s the higher calling? Up until then, I had never even thought to be a nonfiction writer, so yeah, that came out of those years. And that beautiful movie.

Rumpus: Were you part of that writing at all?

Gilbert: No, no I wasn’t. And I never imagined when Disney approached and said they wanted to make a movie about that bar. That made no sense. It still doesn’t make sense to me. It’s a piece of quite miraculous alchemy that they formed that skanky story and that skanky bar into a preteen love story that captured the hearts of a lot of thirteen-year-old girls. I don’t really know how that was done, but it was done, and it was an astonishing transformation.

Rumpus: I Netflixed it in preparation for this interview. I tried to watch it, but I could only watch about seventy percent and then I couldn’t go any further. The sex scene! Do you remember the sex scene? She was wearing lavender panties…

Gilbert: Oh, my god. Oh no. What I remember about that was going to the premiere, at the Ziegfield theater, in New York, and being allowed to bring a dozen guests. So I brought all the regulars from Coyote Ugly and a couple of the bartenders. The real Coyote Ugly bar was a pit. And a very proud one. It was a hole, and it was disgusting, and it was awesome. Then the movie became its thing, and then the bar began to imitate the movie, and now it’s a chain. It’s an odd sort of ping-ponging, how that happened. But when the movie premiered, I remember all of us had one row of the Ziegfield, and everyone got up and left and all the Coyote regulars and bartenders were just still in there seats, staring at the blank screen, like, What the hell just happened? All these guys in their biker vests and their beards, and these really tough chicks who were bartenders there—everybody’s like, What the fuck was that?

Rumpus: Your early stories and the stories in GQ strike me as really confident. I’m just wondering, how did you get to be so confident in your writing when you were just starting out? Were you faking it at all? Or did you just feel like, I can do this?

Gilbert: A combination of both. I really honestly always felt like I could do this. If you’re good at something from when you’re really little, there’s a lot of people who keep telling you that you’re good at it. When I was in 5th grade, I was in this special drama program, and we were all given the assignment to see if we could come up with a play idea. I went home and wrote my play—the one that I told you about—and I typed it. It was fifteen pages long and it was a complete thing, it had characters—beginning, end—and I just remember, by comparison, all the other ten-year-olds, their work was really amateurish. I remember feeling like, I’m really ahead of these guys on this. Once you start off ahead you just get that kind of momentum.

Also, I wasn’t good at anything else. And I’m not being falsely modest. I really wasn’t. I can make a long list of things I’m not good at academically, and so I felt like I’d put all my chips on that thing. And that’s what I did, and that momentum kind of pushed me. I remember, in college, taking a writing class, and the professor, Helen Schulman—who’s a wonderful fiction writer—took me aside and said, “You could do this if you want to do this—if you feel like you want to try to be a writer.” And I was like, “Yeah, yeah! I know! That’s what I want to do!” And she said, “But I really encourage you to just spend these years focusing your craft and not worrying about getting published.” And I was like, Fuuuck that. I was already sending short stories out to The New Yorker. Because I was in a hurry. I was in a big hurry to try to get this thing going. She said to me, “The inevitable rejections will crush your spirits and break your heart.” It was such compassionate advice, and it was such good advice for almost any other kid, but something in me knew: No it won’t! It’s okay! I’ll just go ’til I fucking get it.

I was just so committed, and I did have six years of rejection letters. And it really didn’t break my heart. Some of them made me really excited because some of them had little handwritten notes at the bottom. Pretty good, but not our thing. And I was like, I got a really great handwritten note from Harper’s! And I would hang it on my wall, like, That’s such a great rejection letter! I don’t know why I felt like I had the right to do it. I don’t know. I’ve always been really surprised—and I really remain very surprised—at people who don’t think they have the right to do their work, or feel like they need a permission slip from the principal to do it, or who doubt their voice. I’m always like, What? What? Fucking do it! Just fucking do it! What’s the worst that could happen?! You fucking fail! Then you do it again and you wear them down and they get sick of rejecting you. And they get tired of seeing your letters and they just give up. They don’t have any choice. So part of it was real confidence, and part of it was fake confidence, and part of it was insecurity. It was a combination of all them.

I remember talking my way into SPIN Magazine to try to get a job there, and being so scared. It was one of the few times in my life I understood the expression “when your bowels turn to ice.” Going up in that elevator was so terrifying. But I had just seen that Quentin Tarantino movie, Reservoir Dogs, and there was a character, the undercover guy, who just keeps saying to himself, “You’re a beretta, you’re a shark, you’re a beretta, you can do this.” And I just remember going up in that elevator and being like, You’re a beretta, you’re a shark! and just pushing in. Maybe it’s just because the stakes for me were so huge. I didn’t have an alternative plan. I didn’t know what I would possibly do if I wasn’t going to be a writer. It had to work. It just had to, or else what the hell else was I going to do? I would just be a bartender forever. And wind up really skanky, full of cigarette wrinkles.

Rumpus: Was it always easy for you? Did writing come easily for you?

Gilbert: It came pleasurably. Not necessarily easily. And every time I transferred into doing something I’d never done before, like the first time I wrote a journalistic story for SPIN—“Buckle Bunnies,” about the groupies of the rodeo circuit—there were tears. I remember sitting in a bathtub in Texas, in a Motel 6, just crying because I was so intimidated. I didn’t know how to do it. I hadn’t gone to journalism school. I had talked my way into them sending me on the assignment; I had convinced them that I could do it, and I didn’t know if I could. I didn’t know how to interview people, I didn’t know how to take notes, I didn’t know how to use a microphone—I still don’t really know how to use a microphone—so I’d just take notes and I thought I would get in trouble. I just didn’t know how to do it. And I just learned, I guess. I remember going to the first rodeo bar in Houston and sitting out in the Avis rental car and just being fucking terrified to go in there, and just daring myself. Okay you have to do this. What’s your alternative, to go back to SPIN and say, I’m really sorry, I was too shy to talk to anyone? They bought you a plane ticket. You have to do it. I would not let myself leave. It’s so hard to approach people. I wouldn’t let myself leave a situation until I’d spoken to five people. I was making these sales goals, almost.

But even when writing is hard, I still find it so interesting. It keeps my attention in a way that nothing else ever has. It’s not easy, but it’s so fun when it works. And it’s so fun trying to solve the puzzle of how to make it work. And it’s so interesting when it doesn’t work, because then you look at your failure and you’re like, Well, I wonder why that didn’t work. You do an autopsy on it and try to figure out what it choked on. Nothing has ever kept my interest as much.

Rumpus: I love your TED Talk about creativity. You talk about all the pressure creative people put on ourselves to be “geniuses,” and how that’s messed things up and given us an unrealistic amount of pressure, when in fact we should think of “genius” as a thing out of our control. Has that perspective made writing easier?

Gilbert: I’ve come to think of it as the plow mule and the angel. This is how I think of it: there’s a contract between you and the mystery. And the mystery is the thing that brings life to the work. But your part of the contract is that you have to be the plow mule, or the mystery won’t show up. It might not even show up if you do your work. There’s no guarantee. It doesn’t promise you anything, but I can promise you that if you don’t do your work, it won’t show up. That’s the only guarantee. It’s not going to wake you up in the middle of the night to be like, Hey I’ve got this golden gift for you! It doesn’t do it that way. It needs to see that you’re giving the full commitment.

It’s the idea that I will do my side of this bargain. As long as I am able, as long as I have agency over my body, I will do my part of this, even when I don’t want to, even when I don’t believe in it. It’s gonna be a long life, hopefully. And so it’s all right to embark on a project that doesn’t work, and it’s okay to abandon one. It’s okay to recognize that you took a wrong turn, and to begin anew. It’s okay to write a book that gets bad reviews. It’s okay to write a book that no one reads. The idea is just to focus on how you want to spend your life. My intention is to spend my entire life doing this, so any one piece of it isn’t that important when you think of it in the long scale. Then when you open up that scale even further and you think of the entire history of human collaboration with the arts—my little piece of it is really insignificant, and that takes the pressure off a lot, too. I’m just joining a history of people who do this work. I’ll do it for as long as I’m permitted. I’ll do it to the best of my ability. It may not be successful, it may not be lucrative, it may not be well-received, but I’m gonna give it everything that I have, and then I’m gonna die, and then other people will do this. And so it will go. And what a wonderful way to live your life! What a great company of saints to join. And a wonderful team to play on: the makers. It’s worth a lot of trouble to get to do that.

Rumpus: Does this generosity with yourself extend to relationships? This idea that it’s okay to take wrong turns. Because sometimes I don’t feel so okay about it. I think, Ugh, why did you go and do that? Why did you waste your time?

Gilbert: I have a lot of trouble forgiving myself for being so dumb. I really do. And then I’m like, But you were twenty-one… And then I’ll be like, But you were thirty-one… But yes, of course, the big generous compassionate view that you should take of yourself and of all events is: what a glorious circus train this has been, and what a wonderful messy parade, and all of those steps took me here, where I precisely need to be now, so God bless it. When I’m feeling benevolent, that’s how I feel about it. And when I’m not, I’m like, You could have been writing novels so many years earlier! How could you have wasted a minute of your beautiful youth on that stuff! But all of it went into the work in various ways, so I suppose it all had to happen. My husband always tells me this great Brazilian adage. They say that there are three kinds of people in the world. There are people who never learn one way or another anything; there are people who learn from their own mistakes, eventually and with great pain; and then there are the really wise people who learn from other people’s mistakes and spare themselves the suffering. And I’m in that middle category. I’m an empiricist. A lot of stuff I had to fail at spectacularly, in person, in order to understand it.

Rumpus: So I have to admit I avoided reading Eat, Pray, Love for a long time. It felt almost like you were an indie rock band that I had loved before anyone else knew about them, and then I felt betrayed, like you had done a Target commercial or had a hit single, and I didn’t want to share you. Also I got really mad when Eat, Pray, Love readers would leave bad reviews on the Pilgrims Amazon page. That made me so angry! But then I thought I should probably read it so we could talk about it. So I read it, and realized: it’s still you. It’s a lot of the same themes you were preoccupied with in your novel and story collection, and it’s about people’s specialness and shittiness, all observed in your unique way. But it is different. And the people who read Eat, Pray, Love were different from the people who had read your stuff before. Your work always seemed to me really tough and macho and maybe written for men. And now you’re…

Gilbert: The definition of a chick-lit author.

Rumpus: How did that happen? What’s the difference? Did something change in you? What happened?

Gilbert: I don’t know! I think what happened to me was that I had spent a lot of my life trying not to be a girl. It just seemed like the boys got to do such better stuff. And I’m not a tomboy at all; I’m actually kind of a pussy. I’m not physically brave, but I’m socially brave. And I wanted to be around men. I was also just really interested in guys and I wanted to be around them. And I felt like the happiest times of my young life were when I was the only girl in a group of men. I just felt like I had pulled off the ultimate trick, and that they were showing me who they were really were, and they were talking the way they talk when women aren’t around, and I was getting all that. I felt like a superhot spy, to get to be in that world. I wanted to be like those guys. And probably the ultimate incarnation of that was The Last American Man, like I kinda wanted to be Eustace Conway. But spending a lot of time around maleness stunted me, in a way. It was beneficial to me in some ways, but in other ways it stunted me. And primarily it stunted my ability to know what I was feeling. Because it just seemed like I shouldn’t have feelings, or I should cope with them in a butch way, so I just put a lot of that stuff aside.

It must have bottled up. And it was really humbling to have my heart broken, not once but twice in quick succession, to fail so spectacularly at marriage, to fall into really painful emotional depression that was so intense that there was a period where I thought I might never be able to get out of it. After two years of crying every single day, I remember just thinking, Fuck, what if this is what it’s going to be? What if I look back on my life and I’m like, Well, I had a really great childhood and I had a lot of fun in my twenties and then something happened, and for the rest of time I was the person who woke up at four o’clock every single morning, sobbing. I couldn’t crawl out of this hole and it was so terrifying. And the only way I could get through it was to admit that I was a woman despite how hard I had tried to live, and write, and act like a man, that I wasn’t one. I was a woman that I had vulnerabilities, I had sensitivities, I had unfinished emotional business, I hadn’t grown up in certain ways, that there was a lot of stuff I was afraid of feeling and knowing and wanting. Eat, Pray, Love was obviously the big expression of that. I went really femme! But I felt like, there’s no way to do it but be really honest. And that’s precisely where I was at that time. It just so happened that every single one of my questions and desires and fears intersected with like ten million other women who have all of those same questions and fears and desires.

I, too, marvel at how suddenly I went from being the only girl in the room to everybody’s big sister, or whatever it is that I’m perceived as: soul sister to all these women. It’s a really peculiar honor. And I’ve tried to treat it with a great deal of respect, because those women who read that book deserve that respect, and their own emotional experiences deserve my respect, and my regard. It doesn’t really matter to me that they don’t read Pilgrims. Because why should they? It’s not their thing. I cannot tell you how many times a week people say to me, whether it’s on Facebook or in person, “I really loved your first book. It changed my life.” And I know that they don’t mean “I really loved your tiny little carefully constructed fabregé egg of literary short stories that sold 2,000 copies,” and I just nod and smile because I know, for all extents and purposes, Eat, Pray, Love is year zero. Everything that came before it is something that I will just have to know exists and a few people who I am really delighted exist know exist. It’s something really special and almost private. It can remain that. I don’t go around trying to shove it down the throats of women, like, “You should really read my lobster fishing novel!” Because I don’t know that they really should. I’ve had several women come up to me at book signings, who’ve said, “This is the first book I’ve ever read.” That’s how far it is from the rarified world of literary fiction. There are people who’ve read Eat, Pray, Love who’ve never read a book. That’s an honor.

Rumpus: Does it get to you, when readers of “serious literary fiction” dismiss your work as chick-lit?

Gilbert: It does get to me sometimes. Of course it does. Because writing is everything to me. Publishing wasn’t everything. Writing was everything. And I accidentally made this bestseller. It wasn’t my intention. And to be honest, it felt like a big risk for what I had of a career. Because prior to that point, if I was known at all, I was known as the tough-writing woman who was the only girl in the room. I quit my really good job at GQ to go traveling that year, and they couldn’t promise me that I could have that job back. I’d earned a certain amount of credibility that I knew I was endangering by speaking with such emotional candor. All the guys that I hung out with at GQ I was thinking about as I was writing Eat, Pray, Love. I was like, Oh my god. What is Adam Rapoport going to think of this? Those were my peers. But what can I do? It was a really emotionally honest attempt, and it was a really literarily honest attempt, too, as a book, and for every person who’s snarky about it, there are several thousand whose lives were altered by it, in ways that were very real, and when I meet those women and they tell me their stories and they tell me what that book did for them, or did to them, those stories are profoundly real, and they’re far more real than a gripe-y blogger. Of course the gripe-y blogger has a real life, as well. But I’ve met those women and I’ve spoken to them and I’ve seen this great opening this book gave them to start to consider questions in their own lives about what they deserve, and what they want, and what they want to seek. That’s a solace.

I also take the long view, too. Eat, Pray, Love wasn’t my first book. It’s not going to be my last book. It’s too soon for people to make a judgment of what my career represents. There are gonna be a lot more books coming and, you know, when it’s all done we can assess. But it’s probably pretty clear that that will define how people think of me for a long time. But that’s okay. They gotta think of you as something.

Rumpus: Does it ever feel sort of sexist? Like, when you were writing for men and being one of the guys, you were nominated for National Magazine Awards, and now that you’re appealing to women, it’s different. And that’s not blaming men. For a long time I only read men. I wanted to be taken seriously, and women write about emotions and things that don’t matter.

Gilbert: And if you’re going to read women writers, you’re going to read Annie Proulx. Or Margaret Atwood. Or people who have earned their credibility because they’ve been knighted by the men who have grudgingly accepted them. I am embarrassed for myself that I had the same feelings for much of my twenties. I wouldn’t be caught reading a women’s magazine, but I wrote for men’s magazines. I gave a lot of speeches in bars about how much better the men’s magazines were than the women’s magazines were, and it’s so lame, because they’re not. You open up the men’s magazines and there’s talking about shoes too. They’re talking about moisturizer. They really are! It’s all in there. I felt that thing too and that’s a pity, and I don’t know what it will take to undo that, and I don’t know what we can do as writers about it. I think: do I want to take this battle on, in some way? Do I want to have an argument about this, defending the legitimacy of my work? Do I want to reply to any of these people? No. I have a task. I have to write the next book. You have to write the thing you feel is missing from the world, that’s not on the bookshelves, the book that you would want to read if you’d heard about it, the book that you long for. And you have to be really honest about what that is. You can’t necessarily write the book that will earn you the respect of other people who are the guardians of the culture. Because you appointed them to be. That can’t be the motive. You have to write the book your heart wishes existed. At the moment that I wrote Eat, Pray, Love, I wished that someone had written that book and given it to me as I was crying on the bathroom floor. That’s what I needed and so it’s the book that I wrote, and it’s not the book that I need to write right now so I’m not going to do it again. I hope I don’t have to do it again. Then you just kind of have to wrap yourself in a cloak of philosophy that what people decide to think of you and your work is none of your business.

You also have to be very careful not go trawling for what people think of you and your work. It became really clear to me, from within a few months of Eat, Pray, Love being published, that I could never again enter the Internet. And I have really avoided it! I don’t look! I don’t Google myself, I don’t look at my Amazon pages. It is a recipe for heartache, and I wear blinders to not see it, because I know it will fuck with my head. I don’t want to do that to myself. There was a couple years ago when I was on a book tour, and I had an event and I couldn’t remember what time the event was, and so somebody had a computer, so I said, “Can I just borrow this and find out if I have to be there at 7 or 7:30?” and so I Googled my name. I swear to God it was right after Committed was published and up comes this line: “Is Committed Elizabeth Gilbert’s most annoying book yet?” I was like, “Fuck, I just wanted to know what time I had to be at the library!” I wasn’t even looking! And now that’s gonna be in my head forever. It’s so unfair. I really didn’t seek that out. But you just have to let everybody bark and get stuff out of their system and then you just have to keep working.

Rumpus: This new novel that you just finished writing: tell me about it.

Gilbert: I haven’t talked about it yet. It’s a big, sprawling, epic historical novel that takes place from 1760 to 1880, following the fortunes of a family called the Whittakers, who make their name in the early botanical exploration/proto-pharmaceutical business trade. And Alma Whittaker, who’s our heroine, is the daughter of a global botanical explorer, who grows up in this rarefied world of books and plants and knowledge, but also has a very confined life until she’s about fifty years old, when circumstances in her life change dramatically and she is thrust out into the world on her own exploration and adventure. It’s about science, it’s about botany, it’s about searching for the mechanism behind patterns of nature, it’s about all those great 19th Century, mid-century Victorian scientists with their incredible discipline and focus. It’s about the beginnings of the evolutionary debate, and the struggles between understanding nature and understanding divinity. It’s a love story.

It was so damn fun to write and to research. I researched it for three years and started writing it back in April. I was intimidated. I hadn’t written fiction in thirteen years, since Stern Men. I didn’t know if I could do it anymore. Also, it was a period novel, and I didn’t want it to be candlestick-y and bodice-y and costume-y and funny voices-y. I was very influenced and helped and given confidence by Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall because of what she managed to do—this terrific hat trick that she played. She wrote a book that’s set in [the] 16th Century, but it’s a contemporary novel. And that’s sort of what this is too, because of that realization that you don’t have to try to write a book that feels as though it was written in 1840—you can write about 1840 from this perspective. So it’s sort of a contemporary novel about that time. It’s not like people are like LOL’ing or anything, but I didn’t want it to be too precious because it’s really about the story. It’s a big, hopefully galloping story and that is the first time I’ve fully explained it to anybody because it’s newly finished. It was really fun.

Rumpus: How did it feel to write fiction again? Did you feel that you had learned stuff, in the thirteen years, that you were using?

Gilbert: I feel like a better writer. I feel like I know how to do my job now. When I used to write fiction I was still searching, but I’ve been doing this work for twenty-five years now—2013 will be the 20th anniversary of the first time I ever got published, but it’s also five years prior to that I was writing—so it’s a lot of labor. I’ve kind of learned how to do it. But it was also new because I haven’t done fiction in so long, and it was so fucking fun to write about something that had nothing to do with me, nothing to do with my family, nothing to do with anybody that I knew, because even The Last American Man—the third-to-last book I wrote—I was a character in that book, as a storyteller. It was so liberating. I’d forgotten what you can do in fiction. Just because you say something happened, it happened. If you can make it plausible, anything can happen. So Alma, my character, her father makes his fortune in the quinine trade because I said he did. And as long as I know a lot about the quinine trade and I can create a plausible reason as to why he could become, essentially, the beginnings of a multi-national corporation billionaire for the time, in this trade, sure. If someone needs to die, you kill them! Whatever needs to happen you can just make it so.

Rumpus: Was this book more imaginative for you? Or did you go to bars and eavesdrop on people talking about botany?

Gilbert: The people who I needed to eavesdrop on are dead! But I eavesdropped on them from across time by reading a lot of letters, which is how you do historical eavesdropping. Because even better than journals, I read a lot of journals, but letters, man. I just read so many 19thCentury letters. And they didn’t have to be botanist 19thCentury letters—I just read anybody’s 19thCentury letters. That is the closest approximation, I think, to human speech. Especially if you can get a volume of every letter that somebody ever wrote, letters that they weren’t writing for posterity, letters that they wrote when they were pissed off at somebody, letters that they were writing in heartbreak, letters that they were writing when a product had disappointed them. You can hear a voice in there, especially the really fast, jotted-down letters. It’s like reading someone’s e-mails. That’s where I got tons of detail of dialogue and character and speech.

Rumpus: Eat, Pray, Love obviously helped a lot of people, and helped them out in hard times. But before that, when you were writing fiction, did you ever think: is this okay, what I’m doing? Just making up stories? Does it ever feel selfish?

Gilbert: Totally. I still feel like that. And I think it is. And I think another way that you can really harm yourself as an artist is by buying into the mythology that it’s really important. Because I kind of actually don’t think it’s really important. I think that once you let go of that, you’re even more free. Because in the triage of human suffering and existence, I think the arts are really kind of low, on the necessity level. I feel like they are a luxury, and I know that there are people who would adamantly disagree with that, but I’m a freer artist by believing that it’s a luxury rather than believing it’s a necessity, or believing that I have a mandate to humanity.

My work is incredibly important to me personally. It brings me joy and it brings me life and it brings me meaning. It doesn’t necessarily have to be important to the people who read it. It would be nice if it did bring them life and meaning, but it doesn’t have to. It’s not their fault that I wanted to be a writer. I just want to do it because I like doing it and it’s a pleasure. I always quote Tom Waits, because I had this amazing experience of getting to interview him and every single thing that he said was so Socratic—he’s just biblically wise about the arts—and he said something like, “You know, it’s not that important what I do. I’m just a guy that makes jewelry for the inside of people’s heads.”

And it’s lovely to have jewelry. It’s not food. It’s not difficult for me to come up with twenty careers right off the top of my head that are really much more important for the good of society than what I do. From kindergarten teacher to anyone who fixes a road or makes bridges or whatever. Anybody’s work is more important. I’m really lucky that I get to do this, and it’s a privilege to get to make jewelry for the inside of people’s heads. And it’s not a big deal. It’s just jewelry. That also helps you get through bad reviews or sort of critical artistic mental blocks because it’s like, we’re just playing. We’re just writing songs, we’re just writing poetry, it’s not that urgent. Just enjoy it.

Rumpus: It seems like writing for you is pleasurable, it’s helpful. How did this newest book help you? What did you take away?

Gilbert: I think this book is my reward to myself. Because writing Committed was not pleasurable. It was helpful to me because I needed to process all my thoughts about marriage, and it was useful to do that in print. But it was a very heavy assignment, to write the book that came after Eat, Pray, Love, and I had never had a heavy assignment before. I knew that there was something at stake that was hugely important, not to anybody else, but to me. Which was, if I let this big success get inside my head and cause damage, that I would lose the real love of my life, which is this work. And that must not be allowed to happen, because that would be a huge tragedy on a very small scale. It would be a tremendous tragedy for one human life only, and that would be mine. And I just felt like, as the guardian of my own life, I can’t permit that to occur. So I had to push really hard. That was like the biggest plow mule work that I’ve ever done, because I just had to push against everything that Eat, Pray, Love had become, and everything that people wanted me to be, and everything that people mistakenly thought I was—or maybe honestly was or accurately thought I was—I don’t know. There was no possible way to write the book that came after Eat Pray, Love that would not disappoint that woman in the bookstore in Tulsa, Oklahoma who had only read one book in her life and it was her favorite. Like, well, I can’t give her anything after that that’s going to make her happy. There are a lot like her.

It’s almost like Committed was the sacrificial book. I’m very fond of it and it’s very dear to me for that reason, because it went out into that aftermath and allowed itself to absorb all the disappointment and all the attacks from people who’d had years of frustration about how much they hated Eat, Pray, Love build up, and they needed to get it out on their blogs—it just took all of those slings and arrows. But then it was distracting everybody, and I got to go off and write a novel about 19th century botanical exploration! And so Committed permitted me to write this book. I feel like that’s why you have to keep working, because you never know what your one project will open up for you, for your next one. You owe it to the project that wants to be born next to get this one finished, so that you can do the next one. You just have to keep the assembly line going. I know I make it sound like it’s always been a ball, but it hasn’t always been a pleasure. Sometimes it’s been painful. But it’s mostly been a pleasure.

Rumpus: In The Last American Man, you write, “Now I have a habit of speculating about the sex life of every single person I meet.” Do you still do that?

Gilbert: Do you know what the worst part of that is? When I wrote that sentence, I originally wrote, “Like all of us, I spend a lot of time speculating about the sex lives about everyone I meet.” A lot of people have pointed out to me that they actually don’t do that. I really thought I was just making a point, like, you know how we all sometimes think about how cool it would be to be invisible or fly, and wonder about our neighbor’s sex lives? I’m trying to think of the least pervy way to present myself. I can’t deny it. I’m a novelist. I’m really, really curious. I want to know all the secrets. And that’s the most secret thing about people, usually.

Actually, in this new book, it was really important to me that my character Alma was really carnal. It was really important to me that she be very sexualized because that’s the thing that’s missing from all the George Eliot novels, because they couldn’t. She’s not a beauty and she’s got romantic bad luck against her, and that’s her secret hidden self.

When it came time for me to write her masturbation scenes—she’s a big masturbator—I started choking at it. I had always planned for that to be the case. But when it came time to write them I thought, Can I do this to you, Alma? I don’t know if I can do this to you. I ended up going out to lunch with this romance novelist to just get her advice, because I haven’t actually written that many sex scenes, for someone for whom sex has been a really important part of my life and my work. There’s not that much in here. And she said, “I can tell you as a romance novelist who is contractually obliged to write two and a half sex scenes per book—two sex scenes and either one oral sex or masturbation scene, and they have to be separated by thirty pages—here’s the one piece of advice for writing a sex scene: you just have to ask yourself what that person would actually do. Then let them do it.” I felt one of those moments of embarrassment, where I felt like, I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years and that would have been really good advice for someone to have given me about fiction writing. Seems really simple, but I’d never put it in those terms before. It kind of opened up the whole book for me, from that point forth, because every turn I would just ask the characters: what would you really do? And then let them. Sometimes they surprised me. But I think it’s authentic to who they are.

Rumpus: Can we play a game where I say a famous person’s name and then you imagine their sex life?

Gilbert: Yeah!

Rumpus: Nina Simone.

Gilbert: Tragic. Devastating. Humiliating, and sorrowful, and with deep rich tones. Maybe I’m just thinking of her voice. I’m just thinking of those songs. They were all about horrible things. But I bet she couldn’t help herself, and just kept going back for more.

Rumpus: Woody Harrelson.

Gilbert: Cartoonish. Maybe a little show-off-y. It would be performance-y and actorly. My very limited experience with actors has been disappointing. They’re always performing.

Rumpus: Kermit The Frog and Miss Piggy.

Gilbert: I think it’s really hot, and I think, unexpectedly, she’s the bottom in that relationship. I think their whole thing—her browbeating him and his sort of meekness—is just play-acting, and what’s really going on is he’s just giving it to her. And that is what keeps them together, is hot, hot sex. Frog on pig, never pig on frog. It’s those little guys, those little meek guys! You never know. I think he’s kinda got that Woody Allen thing, where he plays the insecure schmuck but he’s actually really like, a real lothario. Gentleman on the streets, demon in the sheets.

Rumpus: Well, thank you so much for talking to me.

Gilbert: Thank you. How is your book going?

Rumpus: Um, it’s not really. That’s why I was asking about how to get writing done when you’re working a whole other job. I just realized something about my own psychology or personality, which is, if I have a job, even if it’s making coffee, I will give it everything I have: I will make the shit out of that coffee and go home feeling tired and defeated. I love my job, but after work I can’t think or write my own stuff. I’m still trying to figure out how to do it. The writing feels devious.

Gilbert: Like you’re cheating on your job.

Rumpus: Yeah.

Gilbert: But your job is making you cheat on your writing! Or just cheat on your job, and go have an affair with your book. Your job is like your husband. Don’t let him know—just get some sexy lavender underwear from the girl in Coyote Ugly and go have a fling with your book, and then lie to your husband, and say, “I was thinking about you all night,” when you really weren’t. Just go cheat on your job. Go have an affair. Be more like a Frenchwoman. And now I’m just perpetuating stereotypes like I already have about Woody Harrelson.

Well, I wish you luck, and stubbornness, and the absence of the need for a permission slip from anybody. Just go fucking do it. Or as my favorite character on RuPaul’s Drag Race, Latrice Royale, says… She has three rules for how to get through life, and she’s like a six-foot-ten black former felon who’s a really amazing drag queen. She says, “Get up, look sickening”—which in drag queen parlance I guess means “awesome”—”and make them eat it.” That’s what you gotta do.

***

Read our exclusive reprint of Elizabeth Gilbert’s short story, “The Finest Wife,” from her short story collection, Pilgrims, here.

The Rumpus Interview with Alexandra Kimball

Stephen Markley — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 19:45:12 +0000

You probably have not heard of Alexandra Kimball. She’s a young Canadian writer who has spent the last decade trying to break into a career in journalism. Working from Toronto, Kimball found herself floundering in her efforts to publish, went back to the refuge of grad school to get an “accidental” Ph.D., and only truly felt like she had the time and financial cushion to make it when she inherited a small sum of money unexpectedly from a relative.

Her observation may sound familiar to hordes of young writers, graduated and struggling into a new Internet-based world in a troubled economy: that what it takes to make it as a journalist is not pluck, moxy, verve, or any of those other underutilized descriptors, but rather a financial base, either from savings or one’s parents. The economic ability to take one or more unpaid internships early in a career may be far more important than talent, insight, or work ethic.

This led her to write the piece “How to Succeed in Journalism when You Can’t Afford an Internship” for the journal Hazlitt. It subsequently got picked up by The Guardian and went viral among journos, fresh grads, and the ever-prickly libertarian crowd.

It’s as provocative a piece as has been written about the state of professional journalism in recent memory, and its implications should trouble us: a profession that truly needs full representation, and that is much-ballyhooed as a supposed meritocracy, may actually restrict itself to a certain class who can afford to work for free after college.

***

The Rumpus: First things first: I really loved your piece because I recognized in it so many of the hard decisions I had to make to pursue writing. How did you come to write it? What was its inception?

Kimball: Well, [after inheriting the money] I made the transition to freelance, and I got all these assignments off the bat, and I realized, Okay, I might be able to do this. But I felt pretty strange about the fact that what it took, after all that time, was just having no debt and some savings. Now, it’s common for starting-out journalists to work three jobs and write for free. When my piece was singled out as particularly candid or brave, it was strange because I thought it was saying something pretty obvious.

So I wanted to explore that shift in privilege without using academic language like “economics of opportunity” or whatever. Also, I’m not a labor expert, and I have no idea how the internal politics of media hiring and firing go, so it pretty much had to be a personal essay. Which was scary, on the one hand, because I’m a really private person, and I never saw myself as doing memoir or personal journalism, but on the other hand, the fact that it scared me was a good sign, that it might be worth hearing. Then again, I didn’t know if I wanted my first piece to be me coming out opening fire against the industry I wanted to work in.

Rumpus: About that: what attracted me to the piece was the feeling of, “Yes! Kindred spirit.” Because I showed you the op-ed I wrote in 2010, and I definitely got out of school with that feeling that the only way into some of these places is to basically work for free. And you say a lot of people—young journalists—had a similar reaction to the piece?

Kimball: I loved your piece about internships.[1] I loved how you pointed out that even the free internships are difficult to get. Like, you didn’t intern at Goldman Sachs because you didn’t know anyone at Goldman Sachs. But yeah, I’ve had dozens of emails, actually, from young people who are either on the job market, or about to graduate, and they’re saying, “Okay, this is exactly what’s happening to me now. I’m feeling like everything’s stacked against me, but I’m not allowed to mention it, and I’m sort of scared and mixed-up and angry at the same time.” I mean, I’ve also had messages from people who really disagreed with my piece, but I’d say the majority of stuff I’m getting is along the lines of “me too!” and it’s mostly from young people.

Rumpus: There’s something about the idea of being willing to work, willing to bust your ass to achieve your dream, and then essentially being told you’re going to spend the first part of your career doing that for free that’s anathema to the spirit of trying to become a writer/journalist.

Kimball: I’d hope so. I mean, I’d hope that this industry would mitigate, or at least explore, economic barriers to entry. Because it’s not like this is just happening at Fuck the Poor Monthly. It’s happening at the progressive papers and magazines—media that take up topics of inequity. Of course, it’s complicated. It’s determined by factors outside the industry, too. Student debt is a huge, huge problem. Cost of living in major media centers is absurd. Papers and magazines themselves are facing huge internal losses and cutbacks.

Rumpus: When I interned at Fuck the Poor Monthly, all they wanted to talk about was how Bernanke was printing too much money… So how do you think those barriers affect the range of people who end up becoming journalists now? Do you think it will lead to a less representative class of professional journalists?

Kimball: I don’t see how these barriers won’t lead to a homogenous class of journalists who are very privileged. There are growing economic barriers to a profession that needs to have people from different backgrounds on staff. So that they can cover issues that affect every group in accurate and nuanced ways, so that they can accurately cover what’s affecting poor communities, minority communities—issues that are so often misrepresented or overlooked.

Rumpus: Putting the economic straights of newspapers and magazines aside, it’s pretty evident that the unpaid internship amounts to nothing more than a systemic labor violation no matter what the industry.[2]

Kimball: Yeah, I agree. It also sets up this awful race to the bottom. When the standard is “working for free,” how do you go “above and beyond”? Are we going to start paying to work?

Rumpus: Let’s start a hedge fund and see if we can find out. Maybe you just invented the next great business model.

Kimball: I’m sort of sorry I even said that. I’ve had people tell me they’re going to school to be a nurse so that they can be a journalist on the side. If you root around people’s bios, you’ll find a lot of them are full-time employees of something else because doing journalism full-time doesn’t pay a living wage.

Rumpus: You went back to school and got your Ph.D., which I think you termed “hiding out.”

Kimball: Yeah, I sometimes say I have an “accidental Ph.D.”

Rumpus: I bring this up because I, at one point, had the itch to go take shelter in grad school. I still do.

Kimball: People with humanities Ph.D.’s have a pretty grim situation right now. If you decide to stay in academia, you’re up against the “adjunct problem,” which is that tenure track jobs are being replaced by multiple “adjunct” positions that pay fractions of the tenure salary, no benefits, and you have to reapply every four months. I’m not kidding or exaggerating when I say that a common salary for a new Ph.D. at a Canadian university is $20,000.

Outside the academy you’re in trouble, too. I mean, a doctorate might make you a better worker/person or whatever, but in my experience, non-academic employers are not looking around for English Ph.D.’s.

Rumpus: Tell me about the negative reaction to your piece.

Kimball: Yeah, it was really interesting, because on the one hand, I was getting many heartfelt letters from young writers, and on the other hand, I was getting the Standard Conservative Internet Comment About Personal Responsibility, and I had seen that comment so many times on so much stuff, and I never thought it would happen for me! There were two subgroups: one was trying to poke holes in my story, like “your parents had jobs, clearly you are not working class,” stuff like that. And the other was just this blank outrage [at the idea that] privilege factored into getting a journalism job.

Rumpus: You know you’ve made it when people call you a “Marxist (insert misogynist/homophobic slur, depending on gender)!”

Kimball: Or when people use a lot of scare quotes around your writing and then say something like, “Oh, please!” Or my very favorite: “No sympathies here!” Is being proud of having no sympathy an Internet thing? I’m actually really interested in that.

Rumpus: You said that being a woman is certainly not something you felt held you back, yet you noticed an evident misogyny in those responses. How do you ferret that out? Or is my critique correct, that the “up by your bootstraps” philosophy inherently has some masculine angst involved?

Kimball: I knew it was probably a big issue inside the industry, like when it comes down to who gets what assignments, and promotion to management levels. But because I was on the outside, trying to just get a job, and I saw lots of young women getting hired, I figured gender wasn’t my biggest problem at that point—it was cash.

Then I saw a write-up on my piece on a political blog, where the comments section devolved sooo casually into brutal misogyny, that I had to rethink everything immediately. I think it had to do with a sort of a priori attitude about women’s voices—that women’s voices are worth less. Now I’m wondering how gender factored in all along.

Rumpus: I know it’s different for men, but I’m always thankful that I’m hard-wired or somehow attuned to not being concerned about getting called a “faggot” in comment sections and on Twitter. Probably because I’m just such a virile and strapping heterosexual and all.

Kimball: Actually you’re right, and you clarified that for me—the rhetoric of personal responsibility has to do with not acknowledging one’s privilege, and of course that extends to gender. It assumes that the playing field is equal. And that the field is equal for men and women, too. This ethic of personal responsibility has always been around, but it seems that now it is taken to an extreme and ignorant point. I just thought it was so telling how the negative responses were all very, very similar to each other, right down to the rhetoric, word choice, and sequence of points.

Rumpus: Speaking of which, the last line of your piece was, I thought, just about the best damn sentence. It struck home for me in a number of ways because I think one of the worst traits can be an inability to at least, on some level, understand how privileged your place in the world is. Which I think a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to actively not confront.

Kimball: And that’s so dangerous. Just that refusal to look at what’s working in your favor, or not. [The piece] got this response because I mentioned the word “privilege,” the psychological aspect of it. There’s a very real discomfort in taking unpaid work, but if you link that to the political, people go nuts. So there’s a lot of complex stuff about privilege, and I was trying to unpack why I felt guilty. Getting to do what I do is a luxury, and I don’t want to forget that, because I think that if I do it will negatively affect my writing. It will distance me from my reader.

Rumpus: However, having acknowledged that, I also sometimes feel like—going back to being writers and all—the Internet has simply eviscerated the market. Everyone now has a blog, everyone now has a self-published book, and simply too much of it can be given away for free. When it comes to journalism, no one’s come up with a very good model for how to structure the world so that writers don’t all work for free until they can get one of the few, few salaried jobs. Thoughts?

Kimball: I know! I think about the blog and free writing problem a lot. There are young writers trying to organize and refuse to write for free. Carrotworkers, that’s one in the UK. It’s for culture workers in general. Bethany Horne is a Canadian journalist who has come out about refusing to work for free.

Rumpus: Yeah, I’m dubious that anyone not already established can make that work. There will always be eager beavers, many of whom have grown up now basically writing free blogs on Facebook.

Kimball: I know. Is anyone teaching basic worker’s rights in high school? I actually always wondered why no one taught that in high school.

Rumpus: Once we get class sizes down to fifty-five kids in Chicago and get them to stop teaching creationism with public money in Louisiana, we’ll work on that next.

Kimball: It’s funny, I remember my ex was an organizer for post-doc students when we were in grad school, and there was a lot of resistance to his suggestions that maybe they should ask for standard job security and so forth. There was so much resistance to that idea. People were scared.

Rumpus: I think anybody who doesn’t understand that there will always be someone scheming to turn him—no matter his profession—into a low-paid or no-paid economic cog is not living in reality… Whoa, that sounded way too Marxist—maybe I’ll edit that out.

Kimball: We can edit for Marxism after the fact.

Rumpus: Exactly.

Kimball: You should write in the intro that it was edited for Marxism, and then sell the “uncut” version.

Rumpus: You think people will pay for mostly unknown writers to have bitter, Marxist thoughts? Hold on, there’s our get-rich-quick scheme!

Kimball: I think Bitter Marxist Thoughts would be a great blog! Or a Twitter feed.

Rumpus: I’ll literally be checking the domain rights as I finish this interview… Okay, but for real, my answer to my own question has always been this: you just have to keep adding value. Like, there are so many voices crowding out the Internet, you just have to train yourself to look at the world in different ways and be dissatisfied with your own writing, thinking, and analysis. It’s basically the stupid bullshit about “the cream always rises,” but I use fancier words.

Kimball: I like that. I mean, there are always going to be external factors we can do nothing about. I could not, until recently, do anything about my debt. I couldn’t change the cost of rent, and so forth. But you can figure out how you’re going to work that, and the way to work that is not to just adapt your voice and perspective to every assignment that comes in. You have to be doing whatever it is that you, uniquely, have to offer. The best way to respond to those external setbacks is by preserving—not compromising—your integrity as a person and a writer.

Rumpus: So if we could conclude our Advice to Young Writers From Two Still-Struggling Writers, it would be: a) add value; b) keep your integrity; c) be motherfucking relentless.

Kimball: Yes! And also! I wrote in my piece that months would go by where I didn’t write at all because I had a full-time job and I also wrote corporate copy on the side, but that’s not completely true. I wrote in my journal, I wrote involved emails to my friends, I had Gchats. I wasn’t writing for publication sometimes, but I was actually always writing and all of that writing counts. So another thing I would say to a young writer is that lots of different kinds of writing and reading counts, it’s all practice, it all helps you build ideas and a voice.

***

[1] This is too awesomely ironic to not point out, but the piece we’re talking about ran in RedEye under the title “Unpaid? Allow me to unwork,” and subsequently got picked up by the periodical The Week. Not only did I not get compensated for that, but no one at The Week even bothered to tell me that they’d reprinted it nearly in its entirety, and I found out weeks later from a friend.

[2] TIME Magazine recently heralded “The Beginning of the End of the Unpaid Internship,” describing the class action lawsuits being leveled at the likes of the Hearst Corporation. In it Diana Wang, 28, describes taking her seventh unpaid internship of her career for Harper’s Bazaar where she worked as much as fifty-five hours in a week, totally uncompensated. By 2008, 50% of college grads had held an internship, and in many industries—but certainly professional journalism—it has simply come to be regarded as the first rung of the ladder.

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