Usually somewhere between two and three hours, the show runs live on Tuesday nights, as Scharpling and his producers take calls around a loosely-defined topic (like the controversial 50 Best Snacks). Whatever it is, the topic is just an excuse for Scharpling to offer his funny, curmudgeonly-but-kind riffs on the indignities and annoyances of daily life. Along the way, he displays his deep knowledge of rock music (he once published a music fanzine called EIGHTEEN WHEELER) as he waits for each show’s centerpiece: the call from Scharpling’s comedy partner Jon Wurster — drummer for The Mountain Goats and Superchunk, among others — who will be performing as one of the many annoying citizens of the fictional Newbridge, New Jersey or as the much-loved Philly Boy Roy:

I’d enjoyed dipping in and out of various Best Show debates (“Improve a movie by adding a dirtbike!” “50 Biggest Crabapples”), but I didn’t quite get Scharpling and his whole thing until listening to a 30-minute monologue he put out in lieu of a show back in February. He spent a good bit of time reflecting on creative struggles and his desire not to find himself at the finish line “with a pile of half-done ideas.” To acutally do something with ideas, he reminded himself of something a boss told him once: “ideas are cheap.”

This had everything to do with the things I’ve been thinking and asking people about here in the “How Do You Finish a Book?” section of A Saturday Letter. And so, when Scharpling said on a recent episode that, to promote his new book, he’d talk to any “nursing home newsletter with nine subscribers,” it was a perfect fit (It helps that A Saturday Letter has a tremendous open rate down at Our Lady of Perpetual Dentures).

The book, It Never Ends: A Memoir with Nice Memories, came out last week. In it, Scharpling tells the story of, yes, how he started The Best Show, and it has some great set pieces of the “why me?” variety — his awkward fan encounter with Patti Smith — as well as his strongly-held music takes — Nevermind is “Foghat being mopey;” My Bloody Valentine is overrated because they’re British. But Scharpling also discloses his mental-health struggles as a young adult — including his hospitalization and treatment with electroshock therapy — for the first time.

It’s a funny book with some hilarious set pieces as well as thoughtful reflection on the mental illness, creativity, and finding your way, and I was delighted to talk to Tom Scharpling about it.

And, not to toot my own horn, but I must say this is a master class in interviewing. Because what’s the thing that all the best interviewers know to do? That’s right: dominate the conversation right out of the gate to show the interviewee who’s boss. Watch and learn.

Go here to check out previous installments of “How Do You Finish a Book?”

Go to the About Page to learn more about A Saturday Letter.

How Do You Finish a Book?

No. 4: Tom Scharpling

The interview has been edited and condensed, both for clarity and to make me sound smarter.

Sebastian Stockman: You know, I heard you say on The Best Show you'll talk to anybody with a newsletter, so here I am.

Tom Scharpling: OK! Challenge accepted.

SS: I just finished the book today; I zipped right through it. And it’s really so much fun. You can certainly hear your voice in it. I know, uh, this is my interview of you, but I was hoping I could start by telling you a story.

TS: Of course.

SS: I'm sure you're going to get a lot of this sort of thing, but the Patti Smith story in your book — it sent me right back to this conference in Portland, Oregon. It’s like a literary/writing conference, and Colson Whitehead was the keynote speaker. Do you know Whitehead?

TS: I do. Not personally.

SS: Right, so each of his last two novels has won the Pulitzer for fiction and like, you know, he's a big deal, right? So it’s the morning after his address, and I'm waiting, in a Peet’s Coffee right across from our hotel. And who should be sitting there, but Colson Whitehead just by himself, just staring into the distance…

TS: Yep. Oh, I know where this is going.

SS: Right?

TS: It can’t go wrong. How could this go wrong?

SS: So I texted my friend. “Yo I'm over here,” you know? “And so is Colson Whitehead, and I’m trying to figure out, should I go talk to him or what?” And my friend's like, “Go talk to him.”

And so here's what I’m thinking: I had reviewed Whitehead’s nonfiction book, like seven years before for The Kansas City Star1. And he followed me on Twitter for a little bit, but then stopped. And then also I’d been hanging out with this guy, this sort of indie publishing figure who had been his college roommate. And so I’m thinking we have, like, a lot in common <laughs>.

TS: Sure, sure.

SS: And so I go over to him and I say, “Mr. Whitehead?” And, you know, I said some nice stuff and he stands up, talks to me, you know, lest I get the urge to sit down with him. And I said, “I actually reviewed your poker book couple of years ago, and then I was having beers with Richard Nash the other day… .” And he goes, “Ah, yes, my beloved Richard.” And so Whitehead is being absolutely polite but not, like, trying to keep the talk going, you know?

TS: Mmmhm.

SS: And so, it kind of peters out and then something grips me: I realize that I have been in this coffee shop, sort of glancing over at him and texting on my phone for like, you know, 20 minutes before going up to him, and now I'm going to go back over to the stool because I’m still waiting for my friend. And so I actually point over to the stool that I'd been sitting on, and I say, “I'm just waiting for a friend; I'm not stalking you or anything.” Like, a line from the worst sitcom, you know…?

TS: Yeah, it’s definitely not great to introduce the theme of stalking to a thing, because usually, a stalker would be the first one to say, “Oh no, I’m not…”

SS: And so he just says “I didn’t think you were,” implying that he might think so now.

TS: “...But now I’m reevaluating that claim.”

SS: That story is my way of saying that I had a number of moments like that — and I won't force you to listen to all of them — these moments of strong identification while I was reading. I also have been a sports writer and I've been in one or two life endangering car accidents, so anyway…

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TS: Well, this is exciting. I found my target audience.

SS: Right! So, I do want to put on my English professor hat for a minute and note something that you observe and nicely summarize towards the end of the book, and that has to do with the problem of life writing, and you put very succinctly what a lot of academics spend articles and books discussing which is, basically, “what a weird thing.” It’s that a memoir or autobiography is not someone’s life, or not even the story of someone’s life. It’s a story of your life.

TS: Yes.

SS: One of the things that really launched The Best Show, you say, is when you opened up to the audience, and talked about how you were really feeling — but that was only up to a point, right? OK, so here's the question: did you “break” the story of your life? The way you do in TV writers' rooms?

TS: Oh yeah, well, look: everything is going to be performative to some degree, but this is much more open than I had been. When I decided to open up on the show, I opened up and started to own how I feel and [share] emotions and things in my life. But then there’s other things I've been pretty private about, and that’s where that’s at.

Then you strip another layer away and you get deeper — but you're never going to get all the way to the bottom. Because it turns, and suddenly you’re living in too-much-information land, and you're just an oversharer. It all needs to be curated or thought through to some degree, or it’s just going to be word vomit where I consider every part of my life equally interesting, which is not true.

SS: You say at the end of the book that you gave some of the more confessional chapters to your agent to say, like, “is this anything?” And if he had said, “yeah, this isn't anything,” do you think you would have done a different book or stopped the project?

TS: I definitely wouldn't have done this book. I might not have done any book. I needed to know that this worked and it didn't feel like a weird overshare or navel-gazing or any thing like that.

I trusted in what it was, but I still needed someone that wasn’t in my immediate personal life to tell me that it was something. So that’s what that process felt like: is this a thing?

And I probably would not have … I’ve always wanted to write a book, and I had entertained the idea of doing a book — a fiction thing, a novel-type thing or whatever you want to call it. And that’s kind of what I was aiming toward for a bit. And then it was like, “No, I think I’ve got to talk about this stuff and own this stuff and tell these stories.” I felt like I was finally ready to tell those stories, and so it was time.

“It’s going to be funny, and then it’s going to be sad and then it’ll get funny again, but the sadness will still kind of inform the rest of the book, unavoidably.”

A lot of people's memoirs are like a collection of stories, and there's nothing kind of linking one to the next. [But] I kind of felt like I could see a through line with it because of the heavier stuff in the book. And I realized I’m going to have to build the structure of this thing around these heavy things that ultimately have to be the anchors throughout, and then I can build the other stuff around it.

I say it in the book — it’s one of the earliest things I knew I was going to do: It’s going to be funny, and then it’s going to be sad and then it’ll get funny again, but the sadness will still kind of inform the rest of the book, unavoidably. But I kind of knew that was the general shape of it. As soon as I was entertaining [the idea], I kinda knew that shape.

So then it was about trying it and seeing oh wow, this works. This seems to be playing, structurally.

SS: Yeah. Well, that’s interesting. And I’m thinking about where — I am naturally drawn to the places in the book where you talk about writing — you call yourself a sucker for structure. But you also say, in a dig at Lorne Michaels, that “formula is for babies,” right2? Do you see those statements as contradictory? Or are “formula” and “structure” not necessarily synonyms for you?

TS: I don’t think they’re the same thing. I'm not being a slave to structure and following just some sort of dumb pattern that just makes a story reductive or pat, I'm not doing that3. Structure at its worst is when structure’s driving the bus of a thing over any other factor: quality, entertaining, interesting, funny, all that stuff [should be] secondary to structure.

SS: Structure is the thing you can play off of, I guess.

TS: I also didn’t want it to be some exercise in formless whatever, I wanted it to work and I wanted it to be tight. So it was trying to strike a balance between those two poles.

SS: So the ostensible subject of this interview series is, “how do you finish a book?” And I guess the question there is: after you showed those early chapters to your agent, did you go off and just try to write the whole thing yourself? Or are you showing things to people along the way?

TS: Well, part of the process is you write those chapters and so he’s like, yeah, this is a book…

SS: Let's sell it.

TS: Let's look to sell it. You showcase those chapters, and then you kind of pitch the general structure and say the kind of other things that will be in the book to inform and entice the potential publisher. I knew I had stories and events in my life that would work, and then started structuring them in the pitch document. And so I kind of knew like, all right, this'll be in it, this’ll be in it, this’ll be in it, and then a flow kind of starts to reveal itself.

I didn't want it to be super linear, I wanted to be able to move around a little bit and have it be more thematically linear, than just, like, chronologically linear.

And the arc that kind of revealed itself was the whole thing with the psychiatrist not remembering me.

“The end of the book just showed up, and I’m crying — for a week. That's just for better or worse, how it goes, if you're going to write about yourself and be kind of forthright and honest. That’s the kind of stuff you’ve gotta use.”

SS: Oh, man, yeah. [At the end of It Never Ends, Scharpling looks up the psychiatrist who’d treated him with electroshock therapy during his institutionalization. This indignity — that the psychiatrist who’d irrevocably altered the course of Scharpling’s life didn’t remember him, is a fitting — and traumatic — thematic coda.]

TS: When that happened, I knew. It was one of those moments where I was just like, this is the worst thing that ever happened to me — and that’s the end of the book.

SS: Totally.

TS: The end of the book just showed up, and I’m crying — for a week. That's just for better or worse, how it goes, if you're going to write about yourself and be kind of forthright and honest. That’s the kind of stuff you’ve gotta use.

SS: Yeah, it works! I mean, I know it was painful…

TS: One of the worst things that ever happened to me.

SS: But it does work structurally.

TS: But it was still fine. It’s the end of the book, and it’s one of the worst things that’s ever happened to me, and it’s terrible, and it’s a good ending for the book.

SS: Yeah, I mean, the idea that the guy who caused a bunch of your memory to get wiped out, had no memory of you, it’s just…

TS: If it was fiction, somebody would say it’s on the nose, and it’s a little too pat and convenient. But it’s like, no, it happened. What are you gonna do? Those are the facts.

SS: You are offering all kinds of stories you haven’t told before, but you do still hold things back. Your marriage, your private relationships, are still held pretty closely. Was that just how it worked or was that a thing you were being mindful of?

TS: That's a conscious thing. I'm telling certain stories from certain eras. And, you know, it's hard to tell a story you’re in the middle of. And there are other things that wouldn’t have fit in the book, and just also are not appropriate for what I was trying to accomplish in this.

SS: I mean, it goes back to that idea that it’s a story of your life, it’s not the whole thing, right?

TS: It’s not everything. Yeah. It's like, look, maybe the next thing, if I do another thing, that stuff, maybe I’ll cover it, maybe I'll never talk about it. It's just … such a strange thing, but you gotta pick and choose.

Because also, I wanted it to be funny! That was the goal going in the whole time: This book needs to be funny. Even with the sad stuff, I’ve gotta find a funny center to it, or the funny parts of the sad things.

The tightrope I was kind of walking with this thing was that I didn’t want to minimize anything that happened to me. I didn’t want to turn my life into a series of jokes where my pain is your entertainment. There’s some of that, but it’s not where it lives, I hope.

I wanted to respect the things that happened to me, and own what they felt like and how hard some of them were. I didn’t want to just be like “Ah, it’s all cool. Everything’s fine. What are you gonna do? That’s life.” No, some of these things really hurt and were scarring. So I wanted to acknowledge that, but I didn’t want it to feel like a “woe is me” kind of thing, I wanted it to be funny. So I tried to find ways to strike that balance as much as possible.

SS: And I think you do, and in the Patti Smith story or other things like that — where you are somewhat the butt of the joke, or the sad sack part of the joke — I feel like those are going to be the places where readers identify. Or some of us do, anyway. We’re not just laughing at Tom.

TS: Yeah, exactly. You’re supposed to be with me on it, even if you’re laughing at the circumstances. You’re not laughing at this buffoon. You know, you can laugh, but don’t laugh too hard. The worst version would be if somebody’s like, “Oh, look at this idiot, what’s this idiot gonna do next? He’s such an idiot.4” That’s not the goal. So, yeah, it’s a whole lot of striking of balances.

SS: Another balance —obviously you have a sort of built-in audience that you're hoping buys the book, and you're asking them to buy the book and stuff, but you also I'm sure want it to go out beyond the loyal Best Show audience. Were you thinking at times about how to explain The Best Show to people who haven't heard of The Best Show?

TS: I wanted it to be satisfying for somebody who knows the show. That they got things and stories behind the scenes or whatever that maybe they didn’t know, but I also didn't want it to just be inside baseball.

I tried to write it in a way that it’s open for people to get on board. If they don't know the show, then it's the story of a guy dealing with some problems, figuring his life out and having funny dopey stories happen to him in the course of him trying to figure things out and find his path.

SS: Yeah.

TS: And I feel like it works as that. I feel like they could fill in the blanks later, there's enough there that you could read it without being familiar with the show and get it.

SS: So just to go back, we talked about what you had to do to sell the book. But after you'd sold it and were writing it, did you lock yourself away and try to bang it all out that way? Or were you showing chunks to people along the way?

TS: I had a couple of people like my agent, and my friend Sammi Skolmoski was working with me the whole time and would read chapters. And then I would show them to the agent after taking her notes. I’d take the agent's notes and then just start putting it together that way.

“[T]his is the same shit over and over. And it’s shocking. The same thing can happen when you’re 14 and then it can happen again when you’re an adult.”

SS: Another intriguing thing in your book I noticed — and partly because I struggle with it — is that, in some areas you have a lot of confidence. Like when The Best Show is not taking off, but you know it’s good. But you also have a deep insecurity and a desperate need for approval, which I also have.

So, I found this theme that emerged that you didn’t talk about, but I wonder how much you think about that in your life, that — again, balance — between confidence and insecurity or desire for approval or…

TS: The conflict between confidence and lack of confidence?

SS: Yeah, that’s a better way to put it.

TS: It’s everything. It runs through everything. Just, I could be the most confident in one way and just a disaster in another way. And it’s shocking which ones flare up when they flare up. It’s shocking when I get a burst of confidence and I’m strutting around like the king of the world, and it’s just as puzzling when I’m plagued with terror. It’s unbelievable, and it just kind of is. It’s kinda the unfortunate part of all of this.

SS: Right. And… there’s no takeaway then, I guess. It just comes or it doesn’t.

TS: Yes, exactly, that’s exactly it. It’s just like, God bless ya, you don’t know which one’s going to show up.

[Excised interlude where I ask to ask him one more question just after I’d said there was a last question. He says “no, go ahead,” and then I spend more time apologizing than it would have just taken to ask the question. This is another pro tip for all the aspiring interviewers out there: Use at least 40 percent of your interview time apologizing for taking up the interviewee’s time.]

SS: When I have my students do personal writing, I ask them to notice what they are surprised by and what they've discovered. What was something that surprised you? You know, was there something that you hadn’t thought of that you remembered or rediscovered during the process of writing?

TS: One thing that really did tie into the theme of the book is where it's just like, this is the same shit over and over. And it’s shocking. The same thing can happen when you’re 14 and then it can happen again when you’re an adult.

And that was not just a convenient hook for the book; that was an absolute truth that showed up. Unbelievable. It’s stunning how these things change appearance, but at their core, they're the same thing.

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Her debut novel, Rabbit Cake, received all the starred reviews, was longlisted, shortlisted, best-book-of-the-year-listed all over the place. It was a People Magazine(!) Book of the Week, and it’s being developed as a film at Amazon Studios. Everyone who reads it loves the book’s precocious main character, pre-teen Elvis Babbitt, a whip-smart sponge for facts who has trouble making sense of her mother’s untimely death and its aftermath.

The question, for Hartnett, was how to finish a different kind of book, in which the focus was on In this great talk, Annie tells us about writing her first book, abandoning a second, and figuring out how to finish Unlikely Animals, a novel she’ll publish next year with Ballantine/Random House.

The eagle-eyed reader may recall that I’d planned to run this last week, but technical difficulties prevented it. This prompted Annie to break some news in a tweet:

That’s right, folks, it’s the first exclusive we’ve scored here at A Saturday Letter.

This interview is long, but worth it! Come for the wild inspiration for her new book, stay for the advice from Tom Perrotta and other tips I’m going to implement immediately. We didn’t talk about the film adaptation because I’m too high-minded for Hollywood.

I ran a portion of the interview last week, so we pick up right in the thick of it.

How Do You Finish a Book?

No. 3: Annie Hartnett

SS: Do you have a title?

AH: I do.. Although it goes to the marketing people next and so it might not. With Rabbit Cake, I always knew. I was like, “if anyone doesn't like this title, like you're a moron.”

SS: Oh yeah, totally.

AH: It was always the title. It was the title from the moment I started writing that book. This title, I was very tortured about. It’s “Unlikely Animals.”

THE ROBBER BARON AND THE NATURALIST

SS: That’s a good title!

AH: It’s a good title. It’s not, a Rabbit Cake title, but it’s also the right title for this book. Mostly it’s about a small town in New Hampshire, and father and a daughter, and the father is dying from an undiagnosed brain disease.

And so he hallucinates. He’s hallucinating two things: small animals (which is common actually, in Lewy Body Dementia) and a ghost, a naturalist who died in the town in 1925.

SS: Is that based on someone real?

AH: The naturalist is a real guy who I became obsessed with. He was the original seed of the book. I was in New Hampshire at our friend’s cabin and we were driving through Newport, which is just an ordinary, small town outside of Sunapee. They had just moved there and — by ordinary New Hampshire town, I mean just like a rural town: a small town center, a library. It is near Sunapee, but it’s not a tourist destination.

So we’re driving along, I don’t even know what we were looking for, but we passed this huge yellow mansion that was on this hill. It looked like a hotel, fancy, and there were “No Trespassing"“ signs everywhere.

And I was like, what is this place? It’s not a hotel. It’s not public, it’s private property. It’s a just enormous mansion.

Our friends and my husband Drew were kind of like, “I don't know. I don't care.”

I was like, “What!? <laughs> How can you not care?”

And then we went back to the house. Oh! We were going to buy at Christmas tree, that’s what we were doing. So they’re setting up the Christmas tree and I just started Googling, like, “huge yellow mansion Newport New Hampshire” and fell down this amazing rabbit hole.

There was this guy in the Gilded Age who sort of founded Coney Island. Well, he was the first person to build on Coney Island. He built two hotels on Coney Island that are gone.

He was a terrible guy. He was a banker, and a hotelier, he was president of the the Long Island Railroad for a while. Just sort of like a robber baron.

When he retired, he came up to New Hampshire where he was born, and he knocked down the house he was born in. There are different versions, but I'll tell you the best version of that story: He knocked down the house he was born in except for the room he was born in. The other story is that he didn't knock down the house, that the house is still in the mansion, and he built this mansion around it this huge twelve-bedroom, enormous mansion, and that was like his retirement home.

SS: Wow.

AH: And then his retirement project was to buy up — different places say different things, whether it’s 30 farms or 60 farms — 26,000 acres, fence it all in, and fill it with animals from around the world. And you know me, I’m obsessed with animals, and —

SS: Did you say from around the world?

AH: Yeah, and at the time white-tailed deer and beaver had been hunted out of New England, but he — his name was Austin Corbin — shipped those animals, as well as bison and antelope and elk and boar. And deer love New England, but they had just tanked. So they boomed, and this park is the reason we have [in New England] white-tailed deer and beaver, too. Beavers were also brought back because of this park.

He didn’t want any predators in the park. I don’t explicitly say that for the book because ... who knows what’s in there?

SS: And it’s still there? This park and everything?

AH: Yes. The [Corbin] family went bankrupt, and the property and park were sold separately. But the mansion was owned by this man that I knew a little bit. He died two years ago.

SS: Oh, wow. You met him after you found out about this place?

AH: Yeah. I became very into the town after all this. The park is still around, too. It belongs to an anonymous club, and they have this 26,000 acres, which is just enormous. It takes up parts of five towns. So then I discovered this other guy, who was, so Corbin is like this bad guy…

SS: Corbin was the banker?

AH: Yes, and he was an anti-Semite and just a bastard. I was interested in him because obviously he was crazy. Then I discovered that there was a naturalist who was actually there after [Corbin's] death, who was the Park’s official naturalist. There’s never anything about whether he’s actually on the payroll or whether he was just given a house to live in. But he and his wife were allowed to live at the edge of the park and were allowed full access to the park, for their naturalist study.

And he was a Dr. Doolittle. He lived with animals in his house. He had a pet fox, a pet bear, pet wolves, chickadees, skunks. All his books — I have them all on my shelf — are about living with animals and the need to protect animals. And so that guy became, in the book — that’s the ghost.

SS: And what was his name?

AH: His name is Ernest Harold Baynes. He goes by Harold Baynes, and—

SS: <excited> “Harold Baynes” is what he goes by?

AH: Yeah, he went by his middle name. I think because, well, I forget...

SS: Not because it’s the name of the Chicago White Sox DH, right? Harold Baines, the famous baseball player?

AH: <decidedly unimpressed> Yes… Drew has mentioned.

SS: Okay. Sorry. Sorry. Never mind.

AH: So, I went to the historical society and found out anything interesting I could about the town. I was just obsessed in the beginning. Was I always going to use it in a book? I guess I was … I mean, you know, I wanted to write another book, and I felt like I’d used all my good ideas on my first one.

SS: So, you'd already published Rabbit Cake and you were looking for another one?

AH: Yeah. I was writing another book, but ....

SS: One you abandoned?

AH: Actually at Bread Loaf, I met with an agent, and I had just finished the first draft of Rabbit Cake and I was really not ready for agents at that point. But I thought I was.

I met with Katherine Fausset. And she was sort of interested in hearing me talk about Rabbit Cake, and then she asked me what my second book was about. I told her, and she was like, <long intake of breath> “wow, you really don’t make it easy on yourself, do you?” There are aspects of that book in this one. I learned something from writing as much of that book as I did.

SS: What was that about?

AH: I don't even really want to be on the record talking about it. It was based on a real story. [Offers a brief account of a story that is indeed harrowing].

The difference was that once I published Rabbit Cake and had the experience of going on tour and having a conversation like this, I realized I don't want to be on the radio e [talking about the horrific basis for the abandoned second novel].

Just realizing, “Oh, you have to stand next to what you wrote.” I have some of that with this book too, because I haven’t quite figured out how to talk about it because I can go into that whole long history but it’s actually set now and it’s about the opioid crisis and this town now, and about the people who are living in this town and this guy who’s dying from a horrible brain disease and it’s a comedy.

SS: But that’s, like, your thing. I mean, Rabbit Cake has horrible stuff in it, but it’s a comedy. Wouldn't you call it a comedy? It’s funny and lighthearted — well, maybe not lighthearted.

AH: Yeah, I think both books are similarly funny. And it’s like I shouldn't be comfortable with this, I shouldn't laugh at this stuff. And somehow I am, and I do.

FINISHING

AH: I started writing that second book that died on the vine in my MFA program because of some advice my professor had: "Stop working on your thesis, which is Rabbit Cake. Because you are going to finish this book and probably publish it. But right now you'll never be in as cushy an environment as the MFA program. So before you leave, stop working on your thesis, just it’s done, like, you can defend it. Don't work on it anymore. Start a second book because what I see is so many people obsessing forever about their first book and then not moving on to anything else.

So that's why I started that second book, and there are seeds of the second book in my real second book because there are kids. So the first second book was told from the perspective of kids and the [to-be-published second] book is told from the perspective of a whole town. And there are kids who are a big part of that sort of chorus. It’s the ghosts of the town who are telling the story, but they have access to everyone's thoughts. So it’s an omniscient narrator.

SS: And so using that sort of choral narrator was the practice you got in that second, abandoned manuscript. That’s interesting.

I’m also interested in what your professor said, because that goes right to the ostensible topic of finishing a book, right? He told you to work on something else because he said Rabbit Cake was finished?

AH: He knew I was going to finish it.

SS: Just because of where it was? Because the story was nailed down or… why was he so confident?

AH: Well, I don't know. That would be interesting question to ask him. It was then at 40,000 words and when we sold the finished book it was like 90,000 words. And then it’s published at, I think, 71,000 words.

I mean, I did graduate into a very cushy fellowship at BPL. So I had that year to finish it. I really had like an extra MFA year.

So with this book I've been in prison in comparison, adjuncting like five jobs, taking care of a toddler, just, yeah… So it's totally different.

SS: So how did you finish this one? What strikes you about finishing it?

AH: Sheer terror and willpower. Whereas Rabbit Cake was this fun thing I was working on. I had a very charmed life in that I was in an MFA program that was fully paid for, and then got \a fellowship that was like, what was it? $20,000. But I lived with my parents for part of it. And then we did have an apartment, and Drew was in graduate school. So between the two of us, plus the bookstore, we were able to pay rent.

SS: And writing the book was like your job.

AH: And that was my job... I didn't have any anxieties of what people would say about it because I didn't know. It was just this book that I was writing and I loved. I did want it to be published very badly, but I didn't have any reviewers in my head. Which is good, because I remember everything that I’ve ever read about my own writing …

SS: I mean, there are those people who say they don't read reviews and it's like, seriously, you don't?

AH: A lot of people say they don’t, do you think they’re telling the truth?

SS: I don't, but what do I know? You read everything?

AH: There’s nothing I have missed. No, that's not true. I intentionally do not read bad Goodreads reviews. I only read the five-star reviews, because I had the experience of reading them [all] and then remembering the exact wordings, and that doesn't seem productive.

SS: So with Rabbit Cake you had this cushy… I mean, not cushy, but relatively ideal —

AH: Super-cushy! Between the MFA program and the fellowship and being able to live in my parents’ house for part of it.

SS: But then for this second published book, you’re fitting it in around jobs and child-rearing and did you carve out specific days? Specific times of day?

AH: Until COVID, I was teaching the Novel Generator class at Grub Street, which is a nine-month course. And basically all I’m teaching in that course — because every novel really needs to be written in a different way — but what everyone kind of needs to learn is if you don’t have a routine, it’s never going to get written.

And it’s helpful if you’re in a class with a boss. So it’s like, I'll be your boss, as scary as I am. I was like, you guys are scared of me now, and as you get to know me you won't be scared of me, but hang on to it as much as you can, as long as it's useful to you.

I can't keep being scary, but like you can keep being afraid of me, if it's useful to you.

It was harder the second time, because the stakes were higher. The first time it was just like “I’m in an MFA program. I’m here to learn. I’m not trying to publish anything.” The second time it’s like “Why aren’t I better at this?”

SS: Maintain your fear. So who was your boss? Are you able to be your own boss? Because I'm someone who is good at disregarding any deadlines I set for myself.

AH: What happened with me with this book is I was just sort of floundering and a couple of lucky things happened. I had someone walk up to me at a Rabbit Cake reading and ask me if I wanted to be in a writing group. And I had just moved to Providence and I was like, “Great, nice to meet you, where do I show up?”

So I joined a writing group but what really really helped me is when my friend Tessa Fontaine, who went to Alabama with me (where we were friendly but not close), her book was coming out, and she asked me for a blurb.

And her book is really, really good. The Electric Woman, it’s a memoir and it’s amazing. It’s about her mother having a stroke and then her mother’s illness after the stroke. And her mother goes to travel, even though she was really not well enough to travel, but like on this death tour of Europe with her stepfather. So there was nothing really Tessa could do for her mother anymore. She was in the MFA during this, and after the MFA, she joined the circus and she spent six months in a traveling circus —

SS: As one does….

AH: — swallowing fire and being a snake charmer and just kind of dealing with the impending grief of her mother’s dying, but not immediately.

And the memoir is amazing and when Tessa asked me to blurb it she also asked me “how do you write a second book?”

And I was like, “Fuck if I know.” I didn't really know how to write another book. I felt I had used my ideas.

So Tessa and I started a contract. There’s this article on Oprah.com by Aimee Bender about the writer’s contract, and there’s a template that comes with the article too. I have all my students do it. All you do is you set a goal for whatever, and everyone, at least in my class, is allowed a different goal. In the article, it’s something like, I have to write for two hours a day, no internet. And if I do it, then I send you an email “done” and then Aimee Bender writes back “check.”

SS: Aimee Bender, or who ever you're in the contract with — not always Aimee Bender, right?

AH: <laughs> Yeah, Aimee Bender is kind of amazing! I don’t know how she ever gets any writing done when she’s just writing “check” all the time. So Tessa and I did that, and her book probably will come out in, I think, 2023 with FSG.

So we both got second books out of it and I think you need to seek out a boss because we write — well, we all write for different reasons — but I think you need to keep tricking yourself .

SS: The “done” and the “check.”

AH: The “done” and the “check.” I needed someone else. I needed to be shamed into it. Without that I don't know what would have happened. That sort of got me through my first draft.

SS: Was it word count? Was it hours? What was it for you?

AH: I’m usually a word count person. I think probably I was doing a thousand words a day.

SS: And “done” and “check” — that was it? You guys weren’t talking about the work or the drafts at all while you did it?

AH: No, we didn’t talk at all about what we were writing until we both read each other’s drafts when it was over. I would share pages [with people], but I don't even really like feedback that much.

Actually, this is a good story, it’s kind of a name-droppy story —

SS: Oh, that's the best kind. I love those.

AH: I was at Winter Institute, which is this booksellers’ conference. I was there because Tin House had sent me. But there were a lot of big-time, really famous writers, because publishers can only pick either one or just a few people to go. So I ended up sitting on this couch in the hotel lobby, just trying to, I dunno, have my 11 a.m. wine —

SS: Perfect, glamorous writer’s life.

AH: So I'm sitting on this couch, in the hotel lobby, and I'm like, is that Tom Perrotta? Yep, that's Tom Perrotta. And oh, is he talking to Ann Patchett? Yep, they’re just chatting.

And I’m just sitting there. I know who both of them are; I’ve read both of all of their books. And then Ann Patchett walked away and I was like, well, now it's only Tom Perrotta. He’s so much less threatening than the two of them together.

So I was like “Hey, Tom...” And he was very nice, and just a lovely person. He started talking to me about the Alabama MFA program, and we talked about my process writing a novel there.

When I first started, I did have a professor who was like, “I think you might be a much better short story writer.”

I was turning in absolute shit every week; the pages were horrible. And I didn't really know why I was telling the story.

And [Perrotta] was like, “Oh, well, it’s because that’s what you do at the beginning of the novel. The floundering is part of the process.”

People talk about shitty first drafts all the time, but that’s one of my mottos: The floundering is part of the process.

And that really helped me in novel-teaching later: do not be hard on yourself if you’re turning in [less-than-great work]. You’re getting out some of those ideas, figuring out what you’re interested about with these characters. You need to write those bad scenes to find your way.

That was harder the second time, because the stakes were higher. The first time it was just like “I’m in an MFA program. I’m here to learn. I’m not trying to publish anything.” The second time it’s like “Why aren’t I better at this?”

SS: I love that “floundering” thing. That's amazing. I think about that with students. I want them to embrace this shittiness or the, you know, the attempt, It’s an attempt. You’re trying it and it’s not going to be great the first time.

But, I don't know if it’s my background having worked in newspapers for a while, or what but I have trouble embracing it the way I encourage my students to. I’m like: I want to be done. I want to just be told that I’m good, that it’s good. It's taken me a long time to get around to realizing that some of it is just — you banged away at something for awhile and now you’re going to get rid of that and that’s part of it, right?

AH: Yeah, yeah: none of it is really wasted.

SS: I feel like some fiction writers have a better, or maybe not, probably it’s a stupid generalization. But I have this thing where I won’t put it down unless I’m sure it’s pretty good, which is not a good way to get a lot of stuff generated.

AH: Maybe it’s because you know what happened? And so if I just have to make up what happened, you know, like I can't…

SS: <mock-bitter> Yeah. Sure, that’s a great point, Annie: non-fiction writers have it much easier Sure. That's an excellent point.

AH: [laughs] No, I mean….

PARENTS

SS: Rabbit Cake and then Unlikely Animals… I'm sure you’ve considered it at some point, but you’re, like, hard on parents? It feels like there are parents in your books who, you know, come to unfortunate ends, or…

AH: This is something that she didn’t say to me, but I think I can quote her because it sounds like something she would say, Jill McCorkle told a friend of mine that “you write your first book about your mother and your second book about your father — if you can stand it.”

SS: Oof, all right….

AH: And, the person who told me that, he said that he fainted when she said that to him. But, neither the [late] mother of Rabbit Cake nor the [ill] father of Unlikely Animals are my exact parents. I make these composite characters of people I know and people from pop culture.

The mother in Rabbit Cake is some of my mother, and she’s a lot of my friend Jessica’s mother who died when I was writing it.

Part of writing Rabbit Cake was sort of my response to my worry about my friend, who lost her mom when we were young, like 25. Jessica would come back from, from Spring Break and be like, “Well, my mom took me to a belly dancing retreat.”

Her mom was just like a hippie and a very forceful, very striking, beautiful person. I didn't know her that well, but she was very memorable. And I know Jessica very well, and I was just kind of worried about Jess, because I was so struck by like, what happens when someone who is that big a personality is just suddenly gone.

So she's a lot of Jessica’s mom, and then she’s also Cher from Mermaids, who is also a very big personality and sleeps around.

The dad in [Unlikely Animals] is somewhat my dad, somewhat my best friend growing up’s dad. And then he’s like Ozzy Osborne-slash-Willie Nelson.

SS: Oh, I like that.

AH: My dad is larger than life and very gregarious and fills the room with his presence. And my friend growing up’s dad was like a very eccentric professor. And then you know who Ozzy Osbourne and Willie Nelson are.

SS: I do.

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DEATH

SS: It’s been a few years since I read Rabbit Cake straight through, but I want to talk about your main character, Elvis Babbitt. She’s such a great, precocious character and there is something great about the way she's this little, you know, little fact magnet. She’s a little fact monster who has this kid’s view of the way things are supposed to go. You learn the facts, and then the world proceeds rationally from there, right? And so she has to deal with people behaving in unpredictable ways, and with the prescribed time for mourning her mom not matching up with what she experiences.

And, I don’t know what my question is. Maybe just, where did she come from?

AH: Oh, Elvis? That book was always her voice… Maybe that’s why my professor always knew that I was going to finish the book. As soon as I had her voice… having her voice was the greatest gift. It doesn't matter what happens in that book. Like that book could have a thousand different plots —

SS: That's a really good point.

AH: — and it did have a thousand plots, because I wrote them all. But it doesn't matter. The point is that you get to know that character, and that character is the reason the book matters, whereas the second book is about the town. The books do have a lot in common. Parents are dying in both of the’ both books are about the question of what is an acceptable death? And what’s an unacceptable death?

Because that’s the question that Elvis can’t quite answer: I lost my mom and, I don’t really know what happened to her and I don’t understand death or the way that it should fit into my fact-based [view of the world]. She wants all the facts, that's who she is, and she doesn’t have all the facts with her mom because her just walks out of the house and … They know she drowned, but they don't know what happened that night.

She just doesn't feel like she has enough information, and that's how I feel about everyone who I have lost. I’ve been like, “What really happened? Was there something that we could have done to prevent it?”

Even something like my grandmother’s death — she had a stroke, she was 86, she had 900 other health problems. There’s nothing you can do; everyone has to die sometime. But I didn't feel like I had finished answering that question in Rabbit Cake, because it’s mostly about that family coming together afterwards.

But it’s a bigger question for me and maybe I’m not even done with it now. This book [is] told from the perspective of the ghost, and one of the main characters of the family is dying, but it’s also a town that is in the middle of the opioid crisis.

SS: That’s good. I mean, the opioid crisis is bad, but the subject matter is good.

AH: We get the question of what’s a good life? And what’s an acceptable and unacceptable death, and does it make it easier if someone dies an acceptable death? Clive, one of the main characters, the dad who is dying, is 60. He’s young enough that he hasn’t really come to terms with his own death. There's another character in the book, who is 91, who jokes about death a lot, because he’s just not afraid of his own death. He’s spent probably at least 10 years at that point, waiting, thinking it’s around every corner. And Clive, forced into retirement, is not ready to die, is too young to die in some ways.

SS: The idea of the “acceptable death” is interesting. And then of course it’s like, “acceptable to whom,” right? Your 91-year-old, it sounds like any death will be acceptable for him.

AH: This year with people who were, I don't want to really bring COVID into it, but there was somebody who was really looking forward to their 100th birthday and died of COVID. And we think like “oh, they were robbed of that ‘and is that acceptable? Nooo? But also, you know, you lived to 99. …

SS: Is that, is 100 a goal for you, Annie?

AH: Oh no, take me to...Um, I feel like, you know, mid-eighties. My other grandmother actually died an amazing death. She decided to turn her defibrillator off. And so she knew she was going to die at some point. She just didn’t feel good anymore. So she turned her defibrillator off, and the day she died, she did a crossword puzzle and took a nap.

SS: Would you say you’re death-obsessed?

AH: Am I death-obsessed? Yes. Definitely. I'm death-obsessed. Oh yeah, in Alabama I lived in a graveyard. We put in our MFA acceptance on April 15th and the tornado was like April 26th, I think, or 27th. When I was looking for a place to live, a lot of the graduate student housing had been destroyed in the tornado. And two of my friends ended up moving into a house that was the groundskeeper’s house in the cemetery.

And I still like to walk in cemeteries. We moved across town, but we used to also live right across the street from a cemetery, here in Providence. But there are no cemeteries near me right now, which is kind of too bad. I really like them.

SS: What do you like about them?

AH: I like that everybody’s names are on the stone is just like a little story. I just like walking around thinking about who these people were.

TELLING STORIES

AH: My friend James told me that when your book comes out and people can read it, it’s like people can walk up to you and ask you about that weird dream you had and be like, “Oh, it’s so funny that you were purple and covered in scales.”

This is my mantra for myself and my students: all I’m doing is telling myself a story.

And I thought that was a good way to put it. And still sometimes I’ll have that experience where someone will make a joke from the book at me. And I either don’t remember, or I don’t know what they’re talking about. Someone made a joke about my feet being different sizes. And I was like, what a weird thing to say, Elvis’s feet in the book are different sizes, but I didn’t remember that.

And I’m not Elvis, and in that context I was just like, “they’re both seven and a half.” …

Rabbit Cake was in some ways an easy first book, because everybody loves Elvis, because you have to love Elvis, or you stop reading the book, or you don’t make it very far. This book is a lot more complicated. I think publishing it is going to be a different experience because I don’t have that character.

SS: Yeah. That's more fraught, right? Cause you love Elvis, and people love Elvis. And so it is a sort of take it or leave it thing. And now you have more moving parts?

AH: Yeah it’s all moving parts and it’s a domino thing. It’s a very traditional novel where everybody is kind of connected in some way.

SS: So, again, in terms of finishing this one you know, yes, you were writing under different circumstances, but you were writing obviously a different book, you didn't have this single character that you could just trust.

AH: This comes off as sort of critical of Rabbit Cake, it’s not really, but it is going to sound that way. I could look at Rabbit Cake and say, “I wrote that. Can I write a better book than that?”

They’re different, I don't really think that one is better than the other, but you can see the added challenges that I took on in the second book that are more ambitious and harder to pull off and more complicated, and I’m just trying to do more with the novel form than Rabbit Cake needed to, because it was so voice-driven.

So it does sound critical, but that was the only way that I could get out of that fear of never writing a second book. That was how I wrote the draft, just trying to take all the other noise out of it and saying all I’m doing is telling myself a story.

This is my mantra for myself and my students: all I’m doing is telling myself a story.

Others on this list who know my antipathy to deadlines aren’t surprised to sometimes find “A Saturday Letter” in their Sunday-morning inboxes.

BUT! I have an excuse this time. I’ve got a really good, long interview with the novelist Annie Hartnett all ready to go, but the Substack interface is fighting with me, and I’ve been unable to insert images and make it look nice and pretty. Rather than do Annie a disservice by presenting the interview as an unbroken block of text, I’ve decided to punt it to next week. In the meantime, I offer a couple of recommendations and a teaser excerpt from next week’s talk. To prepare, why not order Annie Hartnett’s Rabbit Cake from Bookshop or your favorite local indie bookstore? It will get you ready for both next week’s full interview and the eventual streaming adaptation.

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Podcast reminder

When I mentioned it last week, my appearance on Better Read than Dead had only been up for an hour or so, and I hadn’t got a chance to listen to myself on it yet. I have since listened and I’m pleased to say that I was not mortified. So, go here to hear me talking about Janet Macolm’s 1990 book The Journalist and the Murderer. It’s the middle episode in the gang’s three-episode New Journalism arc.

I encourage you to subscribe to the podcast if deeply-informed yet also sometimes ribald book talk is your jam. If you don’t want to hear me talk (and who could blame you), there’s last April’s series at Herman Melville, beginning with Benito Cereno. The episode convinced me to read this strange and unsettling novella.

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A thing I read

I just recently subscribed to Jeet Heer’s new newsletter (I am now subscribed to way too many), and I thought a post from this week provided some food for thought — food, anyway, in the sense that it might make you gnash your teeth:

The history of Jacksonian democracy certainly suggests that epiphanies of enlightenment are rare. A major party committed to demagogic authoritarian racism can persist for decades. The small dissident forces inside the GOP adopted the slogan “Never Trump.” We need to prepare for the opposite possibility: Forever Trump.

Heer’s Never Trump or Forever Trump? extends the parallels between 45 and his supposed “favorite” president1, Andrew Jackson, to the legacies their presidencies left or could leave on their respective parties. He acknowledges the limits of this kind of pattern-seeking, but then makes a compelling and, to me, worrisome case.

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Special super sneak preview

My friend Annie Hartnett and I spoke at length recently about her first book, her new book, and her work habits — the need to sometimes trick yourself to get your writing down.

In advance of the full thing next week, I offer this excerpt in which Hartnett tricks me, a “professional” interviewer, to talk about my own work. She gives good advice!

Sebastian Stockman: The book!

Annie Hartnett:. I did hand in the book. I am waiting to hear any final things from my editor…

SS: That’s great. How are you feeling, in this waiting period. This is almost the final back and forth, right?

AH: Yeah. It was the line edits, and then it will go to copy edits. But I've been working — I mean, I think everyone probably feels this way — you’ve been working on the book for so long, but you could also work on it forever. I'm both like “don't take it from me” and “I may need to get to the place where someone needs to take it from me.” So once it goes to copy editing, I’m gonna try to but I haven’t emotionally let it go yet.

I have not read it this week for the first time in however long. And I'm still like, “uh, there’s one chapter at the end where I should end the chapter right there and then start a new chapter” … and it’s just like, does it really matter? “Who cares, Annie?”

SS:Does this match up with the experience you had of the first one?

AH: I try to remember. They were kind of far apart. My life is so different than with Rabbit Cake. [Then] I did not have a kid; there wasn't a pandemic. … What's going on with your book right now? The last time we spoke, you were writing, you were trying to finish the memoir.

SS: Still! Basically … in summers, I return to it. I've had over the years, sort of serious questions. Like: do I even want to, should I do this? I mean, there are a lot of sunk costs, but … should I finish it? Can I see it out in the world?

And I've finally gotten to the place, or back to the place, where, yes: I actually think that I do and want to and can.

I didn't have enough perspective on the story. As people told me 10 years ago, when I was first working on this in an MFA program “maybe you might need some more time,” And I was like “f— off” And it turns out, yeah, probably I did need that perspective. I think there was a story that I could have published then, but it's definitely better now.

AH: I wonder if that's like what Ellen was talking about last week with the reader who said you just want to know that the writer's okay at the end of a memoir?

SS: Yeah, I think that was an interesting point. Because I was thinking, is that a thing I always want? And I guess you want some sort of resolution, right? Some sort of stasis point.

AH: Because the sort of point of the memoir is —well, I don't know anything about memoirs — but I think it’s that we learn something together: you and me; writer and reader.

SS: I’m writing that down. That's good.

AH: So if I feel like you, the writer, haven't learned anything, then I'm like, well ...what were we doing?

SS: For me, it’s double-pronged. Early on, it was like, Oh, this crazy story, You'll never believe what happened. That was the idea at one point. And it was like, well, that’s fine, but that's not much more than a cocktail story.

AH: Right.

SS: And then it’s like “well maybe it’s about what happens when you spend three or four years lying to various people in your life and pretending to be something else, and then it also can be about the cauterization of some of those relationships.” …

AH: I had forgotten about this, but I asked you, maybe at Bread Loaf or maybe afterwards, but I asked you if you'd ever said you were sorry.

SS: YES, You did ask me that!

AH: Yeah, I forgot about that. And you were like “Uh, I’m not sure, I have.”

SS: <grimaces> I'm not sure that I did after we talked, either. I think I felt bad about it, but it’s hard for us to talk about it. …But man. I really appreciate being given the opportunity to talk about this in my interview of you.

AH: Well, no, I mean, I haven't seen you in so long, and I have interest in your book.

SS: You don't have interest in your book anymore?

AH: [laughs] I do, I just haven't talked to you.

—

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They are my wisdom teeth, and they are disgusting: the surfaces striated with black rivers of decay, the roots flecked with clinging bits of blood and bone.

The seven-year-old placed the baggie under his pillow last night, and the tooth fairy left him both the teeth and a note that read “grown-up teeth are disgusting!” The tooth fairy did this mostly out of concern for parental welfare. If Ike thought there was money in adult teeth, Katie or I would doubtless wake up to find him wielding a pliers in one of our mouths.

Instead of a photo of this gross and useless trio, I offer another disturbing marker of my age. Thanks to the hybrid in-person/remote classroom setup we used on campus this year, I was able, for the first time, to see the not-quite-bald spot on the crown of my head, and to capture it for posterity:

This preamble is just to say that I’m writing you today from atop a cloud of ibuprofen and amoxicillin. And, as I am newly without wisdom (har har), I’m pleased to be able to offer this chat with Ellen O’Connell Whittet, whose memoir, What You Become in Flight debuted a year ago, just after the pandemic and just before her first child. Truly, she’s had a year.

Ellen and I met, as I recall it, over breakfast at a writers conference nine years ago. She was working on the manuscript that would become this book, and I was working on the manuscript that is still on this computer.

Here’s the third sentence of What You Become in Flight: “That was the winter I decided to stop eating, and began to be noticed.” Whittet is 19 and on the verge of a promising career in classical ballet when, in a rehearsal mishap, she suffers a career-ending injury. Suddenly bereft of what had been her means of creative expression, Whittet is forced to ask herself what she’ll do now, and to reckon with the ways she’d had to give up control over her body in order to “succeed” in ballet. (“As an object, I knew my angles, and I knew how to hid the parts of myself that weren’t as pleasing to the audience.”) For me, it was a fascinating look into a world that had been completely foreign.

Ellen O’Connell Whittet is an essayist and lecturer who teaches in the writing program at UC Santa Barbara. Ellen has written for The Paris Review, Buzzfeed, Vulture, The Atlantic, and dozens of others, which you can check out at her website. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Thanks again, Ellen!

(This is Number 2 in my How Do You Finish a Book? series. See the first conversation, with novelist Marc Fitten, here.)

How Do You Finish a Book?

No. 2: Ellen O’Connell Whittet

Sebastian Stockman: So, just before this, I was doing yoga, which is a thing I do now.

Ellen O’Connell Whittet: Oh. [Ed. note: this is an “Oh” of bewilderment.]

SS: I’m just saying that for applause. But, no, I have a point here. You write early in the book: “Ballet and language are always linked for me.” And that couldn’t be more opposite from my thinking. Like writing, writing happens up here for me <points to head>, not in the body.

And with yoga, and therapy, and stuff like that there are all these things that are supposed to get me in touch with my body, and I don’t want to think about my body. I live in my head. [babbles some more about his body — gross]

ANYWAY, the premise of this, section in my new newsletter is to ask how do you finish a book?

And you confront it in your book, explicitly, that question of where to end it, how to end it.

Ellen O’Connell Whittet: That's the hard thing with memoirs, where do you end it? You know, you keep living, but you're not writing your life. You're writing some small, slice of the pie of your whole life. And you know … My agent, bless her, read it so many times and I think probably lost a little bit of the freshness that you want a reader to come to your book with. Like, she just saw every single change, and [so] she gave it to somebody else to read.

And the other person said something where I was like, “okay, this, this is the secret to where you end a memoir.” <interviewer leans in attentively> She said, “I finished this. And I don't know that the author is OK. I'm worried about her. I don't think that this has concluded.”

I just thought, Oh, OK. That's what she's looking for. She wants to know that I'm OK at the end. And then I have to figure out what narrative point will show this.

That's particular to memoir. It’s different from doing reported nonfiction or a totally different genre. But in a memoir, they want to come away knowing that you're okay, you want to know the protagonist is okay and what okay means.

I just this morning finished … Adrian Brodeur’s memoir called Wild Game. It was riveting. Her mother enlisted her to keep her affair a secret when she — when the daughter — was 14.

SS: Oh, Ok, yeah I’ve heard of this! You enjoyed it?

EOW: Yeah, but it seems like it ends now, you know, but it’s so much about her adolescence. It's interesting that we get all these scenes in her adolescence, and then it just speeds up, and it's like, “I met my husband and we had two children.” That was so rushed over, but not everything can take the same pace.

And I was thinking, we need to know that she’s going to be OK. And she’s not going to be OK until she doesn’t need her mother … to mend their relationship in specific ways. The realizations that she comes to that would heal the teenage wounds come so much later in her life — so we don't need to know that much about her marriage or where she went to college or whatever.

And I think that's what I was looking for [with my book]. How do I know that this particular wound, this particular ballet wound, has healed? And … well, I have to feel like I’m safe in my body. That’s the answer for my memoir, I have to feel like I have some kind of agency and like I’m not moving or living or thinking about my body in relation to how other people see it. I’m just a body in the world experiencing things, rather than like trying to stay safe or trying to look good or trying to be thin or all the things that I thought about so much as a ballet dancer.

We're always trying to say something that's impossible to say. I mean, there are so many times that I've written "I can't say this in words" or "I feel more than words can express" or something, and then you're like, I gotta delete that. That's not what you want to say.

SS: And your realization of agency also then ropes into the [snake] phobia, right?

EOW: Exactly.

SS: Overcoming the phobia and then taking control of that.

EOW: Yeah, which is something I added in so much later. It doesn't necessarily fit except the reason the phobia developed was because of a sexual assault. That was the ultimate loss of agency. [And] I didn't recognize [it as] a sexual assault because of the lessons I thought about myself in ballet.

Those things, ballet, sexual assault, my phobia, all live together. At least the way I experienced them. So it's weird because assault is so different from ballet and yet the lessons are the same.

SS: Yeah, and the other thing occurring to me now is that you’re trying to recoup, you’re trying to recover this loss of agency. But with ballet… it’s just interesting because in ballet you have to have this immense control, but that’s not necessarily agency.

EOW: Exactly. You have control over the individual muscles in your body, but not over your career. So it’s easy to focus on those tiny moments that you do have control over and feel as though you're the one making the decisions. And yet you’re not the one casting yourself. You're not the one choreographing, choosing literally what it is you dance. You’re not the one deciding what steps come next for you.

And there are so few careers, I think, that actually have so little input from the person who is, you know, the agent. That is a strange thing, but it doesn't feel very good to always … have to see myself through someone else's eyes.

I was the paintbrush. I was never the artist.

SS: Yeah. Yeah! You can't, like, freelance ballet on the side or anything.

EOW: Right. Freelancing in general is like, you feel you have a little more control, but then also you don’t because you don’t have any stability or benefits. In ballet, the model is that you’re in a company and you progress from corps de ballet to soloist, to principal, hopefully, and then you retire and I guess become a teacher or, you know, whatever.

SS: Just to go back to the agency thing — you write “At no point in any ballet class I ever took was there a chance to revoke or rethink my implicit consent to teachers, choreographers, and partners who must, for the aesthetics of ballet, touch women’s bodies to perfect positions or movement…” So it's that paintbrush thing, right?

EOW: Or just you're being sculpted or manipulated by everybody in the room. And do you know that that's what you're signing up for?

It’s like when you nail the sentence or you nailed the paragraph or you figure out the structure for your memoir or the end point for the book that you're writing. You feel that kind of excitement of an 11-month-old who’s like “Oh,‘dog’!”

SS: I just keep coming back to that idea of writing and dance or writing and ballet are linked for you. I know that ballet has formal steps and a language. But I think that where I’ve gotten hung up so often is that that language isn’t, or isn’t often, used to make a narrative. Or at least not one that I can understand. So then can you talk about how ballet and writing, or ballet and language are linked? Or I guess that’s me being up here <points to head>. Like you understand something about… Or maybe that's the problem of like translating it into words? Because it’s, it’s a language, but it’s some sort of physical language rather than …

EOW: Yeah, but we're always trying to say something that’s impossible to say. I mean, there are so many times that I've written the words “I can't say this in words” or “I feel more than words can express” or something, and then you're like, I gotta delete that. That’s not what you want to say.

And so I think that we try to write beyond language constantly. Dancing certainly feels like movement beyond language and is probably how we feel when we confront any art form, when we see a beautiful painting or hear a piece of music. It's something beyond language. And yet we're always looking for the language to express it, to communicate that experience.

SS: And I guess language is what we have.

EOW: It’s the first thing we have. You know, I’m watching my baby accumulate language now. And she’s feeling something she can’t express, and yet it’s my job to teach her to express that. And when she recognizes a word and attaches it to something, I see how excited she gets. It’s like when you nail the sentence or you nailed the paragraph or you figure out the structure for your memoir or the end point for the book that you're writing. You feel that kind of excitement of an 11-month-old who’s like “Oh, ‘dog’!”

SS: Oh yeah, that's really good. That's a really good way to think about it. So: the ending. The ending as it appears in the book happened way after you started writing the book, right? What was the arc of the story when you first started?

EOW: Well, I first submitted it to my agent confident that it was pretty close to done. It was in 2016, before I got married, — which is [now] sort of an end point in the book, though there's a lot that happens afterwards.

But at first I didn't see my own love story as something that needed to be included in this story about ballet. After that, my mom got cancer, and I found out that I had a high chance of getting cancer. So all of a sudden there were all these things where I'm really confronted with a lot of the same questions about agency and decision-making. It doesn't really feel like a true decision that I can make — you know, do I really have choices around these kinds of questions?

I felt like I was confronting something that I had already confronted and that I had a chance to maybe face it or respond to it differently than I would have as a dancer. And then I was like, well, that’s kind of a narrative conclusion.

I say this explicitly in the book: I should go to therapy so I can end this book. Like I should figure out this terrible fear that I have about something that's illogical [the snake phobia], but also resides in my body.

I felt like I could not acknowledge that I'm doing this for my book in the book, but then I was thinking, well, that’s what’s interesting.

SS: You really are bringing us up to “and now it’s the book you’re holding in your hands.”

EOW: Right.

SS: Which is good. I think it works. … On the therapy front — and I know this is your interview, but I’ll just say — I've gotten this new therapist, and he’s been great and has helped me go back to my bloated manuscript and sort of approach it with warmth and compassion for what I was doing instead of raking myself over the coals …

EOW: That's the thing about therapy that is, I think, really helpful for writing. I can't imagine writing without having gone to therapy. I was just thinking the other day, “I want to work on the second book; I should probably go back to therapy.”

It helps you, first of all, be honest — which is a good quality for a person, but a writer as well —and especially it helps you see the whole story. … You're trying on different perspectives. You're trying on different endings. All these things that I think are really useful exercises for writers turn out to be things that just naturally happen in a therapist's office. …

I think it can be really easy to just be a broken record when you tell your story [as a pitch], because you’re like, this is the way that I'll make it palatable to other people, and they'll understand my very quick premise, and you know the responses you're going to get, you know the follow-up questions, you know all of it.

And then eventually you're like, okay, this is how I would say it to an editor, but that's actually not good for writing a book — it’s lazy. It’s like a little groove that you just kind of nestled into without ever trying to claw your way out. I think you have to claw your way out of that groove in order to finish the book. Because… we want to honor the pain that we were in in order to make a series of bad choices.

It’s surprising to me who did read my book, and it’s surprising who didn’t read my book. People in my family would say they started it and they liked this one thing, and then I never heard from them again. I had an ex-boyfriend tell me he was going right then to buy his copy that just came in at the bookstore. And then I never heard from him.

SS: Yeah. Wow. That's really good advice. I appreciate that. And, uh, you know, I’m not trying to do the Marc Maron interview where he talks about himself mostly…

EOW: No, I'm so interested in yours.

SS: I feel like sometimes I can't even go to it, the manuscript. I’ve got, like 100,000 words or something, which is way too long. It’s this bloated thing. And I can't approach it. Katie, my wife, helped me see — like, I've had this thought that it has to, it has to go win prizes in order to justify its existence to my mother. But then that’s also just a way to stop yourself from writing.

EOW: Parents are tricky for the thing you're saying. Actually you should read this book Wild Game, because her relationship with her mother is super-complex and her mom comes across looking really bad.

SS: I mean, the premise is bad.

EOW: Her mom just seems so selfish and totally unaware of her child as an independent person — which like may or may not be relevant [to you] — but she struggles a little bit with when to write this and she ends up writing it when her mom has dementia. That’s when she was going to be okay with kind of throwing her mom under the bus.

SS: Whoa.

EOW: I remember some early readers [of my book] saying “you were 92 pounds or something, how did your parents not do anything?” And I had to ask them and they were a little bit defensive about it, and I just put it in the book. And, you know … whatever, they've read it. 

But people are uncomfortable being written about. It’s surprising to me who did read my book, and it’s surprising who didn’t read my book. People in my family would say they started it and they liked this one thing, and then I never heard from them again. I had an ex-boyfriend tell me he was going right then to buy his copy that just came in at the bookstore. And then I never heard from him.

I think there are a couple of chapters at the end that my husband has not read, because he’s in them so much. But he’s read the first three-quarters of that book, like, 20 times. 

But you know, I didn't really have that problem because I changed people's names and they were not people who were close to me. … But if it's somebody that you're close to — I don't know. I mean, you can just say this is how I experienced it.

SS: Yeah, that’s good.

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EOW: There’s so much that can freeze you from writing. I feel like that about something else I want to write right now. I feel frozen about it and I can give myself a lot of excuses or I can just write something that’s bad. And then, you know, the good stuff comes in revision anyway.

SS: Can you talk about the new project you’re wanting to work on?

EOW: I want to write about women saints, whom I find weird and fascinating. I was raised Catholic and saints loomed large in my childhood, but the women in particular.

And a lot of them had this faith that manifested physically, like in starvation, which affected women more than male saints. I think politically and religiously that’s interesting: the sort of self-erasure that they did.

SS: Oh yeah, OK. I see the through-line!

EOW: I want to compare that to motherhood and the whole culture around conceiving, being pregnant, giving birth, immediate postpartum — that sort of self-erasure that happens when you’re putting somebody else first, and what we're allowed to feel about our babies’ births or encouraged to express about them.

And there’s the self-erasure and sort of self-editing with these early models of womanhood — this sort of holiness that I think moms are also held to, to some extent.

SS: And then there’s the “success” or the “honor” deriving from what you do to or allow to be done to your body, right?

EOW: Yeah, exactly. Especially in the medical world, the choices you have to make around pregnancy and birth feel very passive or like someone else is making a decision for you.

SS: OK, so who are your favorite saints? Which of the women are you looking at?

EOW: Oh, what a great question. I really love the Virgin Mary, but not in the way you're thinking. I think that she is quite revolutionary. I think the Magnificat is revolutionary in the same way that someone like Emma Gonzalez is revolutionary, just like a really bad-ass teenager who was not meek and mild. She was subversive.

And then she's also written out of the story of Jesus for big chunks of it, which is interesting.

SS: What is the, uh, Magnificat? Is it the conception, or? I grew up Lutheran, so I don’t know all the…

EOW: OH, that’s unfortunate. No, the Magnificat is like the song of Mary, it starts “my soul doth magnify the Lord.” But then she does this bit about destroying hierarchies. 

And I really like Catherine of Siena, who was one of the saints who starved herself and got the stigmata, which is what I knew about her as a child. But then she's also the earliest woman doctor of the church. And she was really instrumental to healing the great papal schism and all these really incredible things that I was like, why is that not more known? These women operated in a patriarchal system through sneaky shows of power. 

SS: I’m happy to talk more about saints, but I wanted to talk about teaching, and working with student writers, which is a thing we both do. You talk in the book about working with writers who are dealing with themes that you’re dealing with. And, well, I’ll just speak for myself here: I teach a class called Publishing in the 21st Century, and I have sometimes felt fraudulent. Like “Well, I'm still working on actually doing that here in the 21st century.” And, I don’t know — do you respond to that feeling?

EOW: Yeah, I mean, in university settings in general because of the sort of hierarchy of MFAs and Ph.Ds, I feel like a fraud most of the time at meetings, especially with other departments. They just know the ins and outs of the university world, so well, and the language to talk about that.

I also feel like that when I teach magazine writing, when I teach feature writing. I mean, I have written features, but they feel really forced. Those get the most editing out of all of the things that I've written. And also I haven't written that many. I worry I write features just so I don't feel like a fraud when I teach them.

SS: But the editing, that’s just standard stuff, right?

EOW: That's the thing — I always feel I have this moment where I'm like, should I apologize that they had to move entire paragraphs around? And then I'm like, well, that’s what they’re paid to do.

I wish people shared pictures of their drafts that had been chewed up by editors because this is a question that I always have: how much red is normal?

SS: What’s also funny is that I’m really good at preaching “This takes a long time. It’s iteration. We do the work in revision.”

EOW: It's also collaborative, which is really hard to actually feel.

SS: Yeah, it’s like, I’m preaching that and then I get an edit back and it’s like, Oh, I thought … I thought you were just going to tell me I did a good job.

EOW: I feel like that with rejection, too. I got one a couple of weeks ago where I was like, “Oh, I really thought that that would be a sure thing.” And it just makes you feel not good enough. But you know, if a student ever came to you with that, you would be like, “listen, there are so many factors that go into these decisions.”

SS: One more thing on the student front, and this is just my curiosity so we can either have this in or not, but you had Chanel Miller as one of your students, right?

EOW: Yeah, she was one of my writing students.

SS: I thought I saw that on your social media when she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Know My Name. I was mostly curious, because there are weird dynamics here, right?

EOW: The fact that she was in a position to blurb my book was so meaningful. She is somebody who, I was not surprised that she became famous.

I wish that she had a different story to tell. I mean, I think that this made her who she is now, but I wish that she didn't have to suffer as much as she did in order to tell a story and have the platform that she has. But she was always so talented that… you know, you have those rare students where you don't feel like you actually teach them anything and you just kind of encourage them and say “you’re beyond anything that I can give you right now, other than just time and space and support and encouragement.”

And that was certainly Chanel, even at 18, 20.

SS: That’s so cool. It must feel great, but also it feels like cheating as a teacher sometimes.

EOW: Right. I actually just found some note from her in my room, at my parents’ house, thanking me for another great quarter or something. And I don't know why I kept it — it’s several years old at this point. And I was like, oh, that's interesting that I kept that.

But I probably kept it because Chanel’s an incredible person and it meant a lot coming from her. And this was years before, you know.

SS: Maybe you were saving it for when she sells her papers to some library.

EOW: Oh yeah. When you can go visit her house, on a tour.

SS: And so that’s a case where you are really just actively rooting for someone. So that’s not the writer envy sort of thing. It’s different because you literally had her as a student. How do you deal with that other thing?

EOW: Well, yeah, I mean, I'm jealous that she probably had like a huge book advance, but you know, I also think of anyone she worked really hard for that. And “deserves” is such a strange word, but you know, she deserves her success because she has really made a piece of art from what she went through.

And she's also such an amazing activist. I follow her on Instagram now and she’s just so good at what she does. And she’s so good at the public-facing part of writing, which can be really difficult.

But envy, yeah. Envy is a hard thing as a writer, but now, my belief about it in my better moments is that, when I feel jealous of somebody, whatever they have, it just makes what I want more clear.

So if I'm jealous that somebody was published in a certain place or with a certain kind of piece, or has fans that are certain kinds of people, I think, okay, that's the thing I want. And it doesn’t mean tha

t I can never have that. It just means that that’s the thing I want. And it’s sometimes really hard to actually identify what you want.

SS: Wow. That’s … really healthy.

EOW: But I get it. I mean, I woke up at two a.m. the other night, really jealous of a writer who just published a book, feeling like, you know, we started off in the same place, but she worked harder and it's because of X, Y, Z, you know….

[Off-the-record gossip about people we envy. If you want to know, like and share this post with twenty-five people!1]

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Let’s blame the newsletter delay on Daylight Savings Time, but let’s also not think about that excuse too hard. Your refunds are in the mail.

As I’ve noted previously, I’ve been working — and all too often not working — on a book for quite some time. I’m also working on a future post where I say more about that, at length, entertainingly, without whining. I say “without whining,” because I want to acknowledge that there’s a fine line between the very interesting genre of “Writers at Work” texts a la The Paris Review interviews, and the less interesting genre of two writers telling each other how hard it is to write, which examples I won’t link here because you can find them on your own.

I know that the answer to the animating question in this, my own little “writers at work” series, is “It depends!” But I know that I find sustenance seeing other writers talk about their work (there’s always a little whining, of course), and I hope some of you do, too.

Without further adieu, here’s the first installment in our ongoing series:

How Do You Finish a Book?

No. 1: Marc Fitten

Marc Fitten is a lovable hustler.

He’s also a former literary magazine editor, a novelist, a tech strategist, and a good friend of mine.

In the mid-90s, Marc eschewed college in favor of an earlier model of literary apprenticeship. Just out of high school, he went to Europe, looking to acquire experience. He ended up in Hungary where he stayed for five years. He returned to the U.S. with his wife, Zita, and their newborn son.

As a very young father, he pieced together work and college. Eventually, he latched on at The Chattahoochee Review, the literary magazine hosted by his school’s English Department.

And here’s what I mean about hustling: as an assistant editor at the Review, he looked at its publishing operation and figured out how to save a bunch of money. Instead of sending off a huge Microsoft Word document to the white-glove publishing firm paid to lay the whole thing out and send back a finished journal, Marc taught himself InDesign and other publishing programs and began laying it out himself. It was the dawn of the digital era, and Marc embraced those changes in the publishing operation.

Having freed up something like half the budget, Marc then used that money to cold call big-name writers to ask if they had anything laying around that he could pay them to publish. While he never did close on Harry Crews, he closed on many others and this raised the Review’s profile along with Marc’s. When the editor retired, he was the obvious successor.

During this time he wrote two novels, Valeria’s Last Stand and Elza’s Kitchen. Each book is set in Hungary in the uncertain times of post-Soviet collapse. Each book features a proud, prickly, not-always-lovable woman as its main character.

I met him at the inaugural Yale Writers Conference. He was on the faculty, and had just published Elza’s Kitchen. I was a student, and we were both regulars at New Haven’s Anchor bar. His confidence and charisma were intoxicating. So was the beer.

Marc soon discovered that a lot of the disruptive trends he had put into place at the literary magazine were also occurring at technology companies. Needing money to support a family, and accepting that lit mag editorships aren't as lucrative as brand strategy for Silicon Valley, he changed careers and began working at tech startups. One of those startups was eventually acquired by a huge tech firm. No, not the one you’re thinking of. Not that one, either. It’s probably not one of the first four or five that come to mind, but you’ve definitely heard of it.

Marc is now thinking about his next project.

Marc Fitten: I don’t pay tuition anymore. It’s like I got a raise. I bought this guitar [holds up a modest acoustic]. And then I bought this guitar [holds up less-modest Telecaster]. And then I bought a motorcycle.

Sebastian Stockman: You bought the motorcycle after the guitar?

MF: Yeah, and then I bought motorcycle gear [goes on to list a bunch of gear; Interviewer loses interest].

“[T]he translator liked it and gave it to a German agent, who began the process of pitching it to German publishers, and she had to drop me for some reason, but the bell had been rung and it all sort of took off from there.”

SS: You bought all that stuff and you haven’t even spent a year of tuition, right?

MF: Yeah, in the beginning it was like I was working on it: what else should I buy? What I do now is, I’ll look at something online that I might want, and then I’m like, oh that’s so cool! I think I’ll just put the amount into my… IRA.

Sebastian Stockman: So, anyway, my project is this newsletter, right? I’ve got this feature: How do you finish a book?” And you’ve done that a couple of times. So… that’s the question.

MF: I wrote the book without any… It was just a book that I wanted to write, and so I wrote it...and then I tried to shop it.

SS: But was there no — I mean, you don’t have anxiety, so maybe that’s it. But you were here in the States working this shitty job, right? You didn’t write it in Hungary.

MF: No, I didn’t write it in Hungary. I was editing a literary magazine. I wrote the book while I was doing that. I reject anxiety. I just reject it. I don't partake.

SS: And how did you do it?

MF: How did I do it?

SS: Yeah.

MF: Uhhhhhh. Like how did I write?

SS: Yeah, when? How? How did you finish?

MF: I don’t know. I just wrote. I kept working on it. It was basically the project of my — from 25 to 31, 32 — there was no pressure, it was just a little bit here, and a little bit there.

A little bit at a time. I thought it would be fun to do, and I did it. And then one day I thought “this might be finished.” And then I thought, “I wonder what to do now?”

And I sent it around to a couple of people who were like “Yeah, it’s not very interesting.” And I thought, “That’s fair.”

SS: <laughs>

MF: And I sent it around to a couple of more people who were also not — they were like, “That’s random, and whatever.” And I would always go back to polish it and do what I thought was polishing…

SS: Right.

MF: And then one day, I had the idea to send it off to a translator in Europe who was very positive about it and thought, “Oh my gosh, this is really great, and I know a German agent who might want to see it.”

SS: And why did you send it there, to the translator? You were hoping for that sort of response?

MF: Well, by the time I’d gone through readers in the States, it was like nobody was interested. And so I thought, well, they don’t just publish books in America. Germany is a market, too, so maybe I should consider publishing it in the European markets.

And I thought, wouldn’t that be funny? I could be like Hasselhoff, get published once in Germany and that would be the end of it, and then it would be a funny story at a cocktail party, like “Oh, I published a book in Germany once.”

That’s kind of what I set out to do, and the translator liked it and gave it to a German agent, who began the process of pitching it to German publishers, and she had to drop me for some reason, but the bell had been rung and it all sort of took off from there.

SS: Right. And then that got you your current agent, right?

MF: Yeah. It was during the London Book Fair. I don't really know what happened behind the scenes, but I imagine hilarity ensued, and then it sold and was published internationally.

Ed. note: The problem with interviewing a friend is that a bunch of stuff the interviewer already knows can get elided. In this case, the “hilarity” mentioned above is that the buzz about Valeria’s Last Stand in the German market caused American publishing to take a closer look. Marc signed with superagent ( now also a novelist) Bill Clegg, who snagged Marc a three-book, low-six-figure deal with Bloomsbury (then flush with cash because of its success in publishing the Harry Potter series outside of the United States). Oh, also, Marc was big in Germany: he once gave a “reading” at the Hamburg Opera House, where he sat on stage while German television actors read from the German translation of his book.

SS: So you got this big deal, and then you were on the hook for … two more books.

MF: They bought the book. Then I asked why they didn't want the other two. And then there were some discussions and they really believed in it and so did I and so we kind of threw in a couple more. I’m still on the hook for one, but everybody has turned over and by now I'm pretty sure they've mostly forgotten my name.

But I gotta tell ya, I don’t know how I finished my second book. I really don’t remember writing that book. I feel it is a horrible book. I feel very …

SS: Really? You feel like it’s horrible?

MF: Yes, I feel like it’s a terrible sophomore effort. It’s like everything you read about. But I was on the hook for it and the experience of writing it was the exact opposite experience of the first book, because this one was written under pressure and having to get it finished. And I did it to myself.  I shot myself in the foot.

And… yeah, well, I don’t necessarily do anxiety, but I certainly did then, and it was just like … to this day I can’t even tell you what that book is about.

SS: It’s about a restaurant!

MF: I wish I could say it was because of the drugs and the alcohol and my retreat to Betty Ford or whatever, but there is no story [like that]. I couldn’t tell you how I finished it, how I wrote it. The book just hit the same note again and again. You can hear the machinery grinding.

I honestly couldn't look at it very much after it was published, because…. I guess I was just so disappointed in myself.

SS: Didn’t you read from it at Yale?

MF: Maybe that was the last time, like a chapter or something. And I”m sure it was like, oh, yeah, I wrote this. I’m sure the parts are better than the whole and I’m sure it’s got some interesting lines maybe, but overall it was not an experience that I talk about. It really shook me to the core in terms of what it means to produce art. I don't know anything about how to write a book. I suspect the completion of a work is something that needs to be rediscovered every time for whatever that work is.

And, for this third novel -- well, I’ve been writing it for the last 10 years. And now that book has  completely aged out.

Did I mention I bought a motorcycle instead? I ride motorcycles now.

SS: Ha!

MF: That’s how I’ve dealt with the third book.

SS: What do you mean it’s “aged out”?

MF: If I look at what I was doing, and what I was trying to do — so, I mean, this is going to sound crazy: I expected Trump much earlier than we got him.

SS: Ahhh.

MF: And I started the book during Baby Bush’s second term, expecting that Trump would come right after—

SS: You mean Trump literally or Trump figuratively?

MF: A Trump figure. A right-wing demagogue. I thought Baby Bush had primed the pump and this figure would come right after and throw us into chaos. I’d been waiting for that figure for 15 years.

And, that’s the book I was kind of trying to write. American Entropy. And then Obama got elected and I was like “well, I’m clearly wrong, and I don’t have my finger on any kind of pulse of any kind of zeitgeist at all. Clearly, I don’t know a damn thing.” But then Trump won, and I was like, “nope, I was right all along.”

SS: And then you went back to it, kind of?

MF: And then I kind of went back to it, but by that point, shit, everything was happening so fast and — where I had been ahead of it, I was suddenly too late and the wave totally crashed and now I just feel like… And then the pandemic and then it was — I didn’t have a pandemic in my book!

But I didn't have a pandemic because I’m always betting on volcanoes, and I feel like this is the year. Etna is rumbling in Italy. Yellowstone was rumbling in January. 

SS: So you’ve shelved it now?

MF: I guess? And it’s just like, I can’t bring myself to finish this thing. I don’t know what it is. So, yeah, I bought a motorcycle. And I’ve written some essays, here and there. And the essays have been fun. And I feel like they’ve gotten more attention than I expected. And I’ve been pleased with that because they were an opportunity for me to be thoughtful.

And I think now that maybe my next book should be nonfiction. One of my goals is to ride my motorcycle along the Trail of Tears. Have I told you this?

SS: No, I don’t think so.

MF: So, yeah, I spent all of last summer in state parks. And I found them super-interesting. The Mississippian Culture has been effectively erased and most of us just don't get that before the United States there was a culture here that lasted thousands and thousands of years. In America. These people were so decimated, that even  memory is gone. And then we get to Native America and the Trail of Tears. And then you fast forward 200 years and everybody in Oklahoma is voting for Trump anyway.

How does that happen? That's the book I'd like to write now. That's a question I'd like to ponder. And I'd like to do it on a motorcycle.

I’ve been reading a book by ’s this professor out of Canada -- Ted Bishop. He's got this book called Riding with Rilke.

SS: <reading from book description> “Reflections on motorcycles and books” I see.

MF: It seems really promising, but I’ve kind of been like “oh man, I wish this guy would get in a bar fight.”

SS: “Archive-diver and Ducati enthusiast.”

MF: Yeah, right now it’s “I rode my Ducati from Alberta to Austin, and then I went to the library.” And that’s basically what happens in this book. And he’s like “They’ve got funny accents in Texas.”

SS: But your idea is the same.

MF: Ha. Maybe. I ride my Yamaha from Atlanta to Oklahoma. They've got funny accents in Oklahoma. Honestly, I’ve got to get over my fear of riding 850 miles by myself into Oklahoma and into Trump country.

SS: You’ve only wrecked it a couple of times, right?

MF: Only crashed once.

SS: Right.

MF: I survived, though I sprained my ankle. And I feel like I pulled my — oh, I did crash twice, actually. And just yesterday I was like, why is my hamstring hurting? Ohhhh, because of that time I flipped over the handlebars riding in the Arabian desert.

SS: I tore my MCL playing freaking football with [the 7-year-old] in the yard …

[Interlude of two 40-somethings comparing various aches and pains.]

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SS: I remember, at Yale, you were like “you gotta finish the book, you gotta finish the book.” It seemed very easy to you. It seemed like a very easy thing for you to say.

MF: Gotta finish that book. My advice for every writer.

SS: I mean, because you’ve done it twice, right? And this third one isn’t done. And it’s not gonna be done, you feel like?

MF: I don’t know. The novel? I feel like, I was raised as such a Catholic, like, I have to finish everything on my plate. I have to eat every bite, drink every drop, take things to the sad bitter end. Because dammit, that's just what you're supposed to do. There’s no getting up from the table until it’s done. So part of me does feel that way about it.

But another part of me knows that this is silly.  I’m obviously not dying to write this book.  So maybe my answer to your initial question is...write the book you're dying to write.  Maybe the best thing I could do for myself is put this book down and plunder what I can, and then write the book I'm dying to write.  Without contracts. Without readers. Without the promise of publication. Just write the book I absolutely feel like I have to write.

Some Reading

Gabrielle Bates is a poet I admire and am friendly with. I wanted to share her beautifully-unsettling poem “Time Lapse,” published in Catapult this week: “And what did I say to him,/ did I say, Thank you?”

And finally, I’m not much of a Royal-watcher, but I thought this column from Patrick Freyne in the Irish Times was great. Just check out the lede (that’s newspaperese for “beginning.”):

“Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.”

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