Interview with Myself
On Life 1.5 Months After Publication
What’s going on here?
I’m interviewing myself.
That’s weird. Why?
Because I’m bored. Because it seems easy and fun. Because I have things I want to say about the book and about life and probably about some other random bullshit and I’m looking for a structure in which to say it.
Why not just say it?
I am a big believer that artificial forms can help you find something more real. And lately I’ve been a bit blocked. So I’m hoping this interview can open up a few ideas.
How long have you been blocked?
It’s been on and off for the past few months, since I finished writing my newest novel.
You mean The Unmapping?
No, no, no. I have written two novels since then. I finished editing a new novel at the end of April. Right after sending it to my agent, I got very busy traveling and preparing for the launch of The Unmapping, and since then, my brain has felt like cotton fuzz.
How do you feel, now that your debut novel publication date has come and gone?
Pretty much the same as before, only now there is a book out there with my name on it. Somewhere. I’ve been popping into the local bookstores to see if they have my books for sale, and the only ones I’ve tried, they’ve all been sold out.
That seems like good news!
Or maybe they just didn’t order enough. (They probably didn’t order enough).
But really, haven’t you always thought publishing a book would change your life?
I don’t know that I ever thought it would change my life. I thought it might solidify my life, like, confirm to the world: yes, I am a writer. So it’s strange that it has resulted in a writer’s block. But I probably should have expected it; I read probably a dozen essays warning that this would happen, yet I didn’t think it would happen to me. I’ve never had writer’s block. I’ve always had several different writing projects going at a time. But I couldn’t write when I was on the road; there was simply no time. I was having a lot of fun, but also missing my desk, my computer, my long happy writing hours in the morning. I thought I’d get home and be turbocharged to work on my next book idea. But it hasn’t felt that way at all. It’s like the whole idea of writing a new book has taken on a new valence. The urge to write feels both bigger and smaller than it used to. Bigger in that I know now how much I love the experience of throwing myself into a whole new world for a very long time, and that I have the confidence that I can do this, and that I still have big ideas I want to explore. Smaller in that I feel less pressure to actually write. This is the first time in maybe thirteen years that I haven’t felt this intense pressure to write. Maybe it’s because the published book is out there, and two new books are looking for their homes, so I can finally relax a little. Maybe I could have relaxed the whole time. Probably I should have.
But it’s weird, this easing of pressure. It slides away dangerously. I tell myself it’s okay to not write, I can instead research and worldbuild and explore my ideas sideways. Then I tell myself it’s okay to not do that either, I can just read books and articles that are relevant. Then I say actually, I’ll read whatever I want, who knows what will be relevant. Then, when I’m not careful, the reading stops too, and I’ve accidentally spent an hour scrolling through gardening subreddits.
Gardening, eh?
Yes. That is taking up a lot of my mental space right now. It’s kind of similar to writing a book in that I have this grand vision, but it will take a lot of time and work to get there. In the backyard, I want a pollinator-friendly lawn—like an actual lawn you can run around on—filled with primarily violets and clovers. In the front yard, I want to create a labyrinth that winds between native wildflowers. We’ve mapped out the labyrinth, so now we need to build sections of wildflower strips while also figuring out how to create a low groundcover underneath the labyrinth stepping stones. There are also awkward side patches we need to figure out what to do with. Maybe some herbs and vegetables.
Sounds like a lot of work!
Yes, well, recently I was sick for a week and unable to do even that. Thus the gardening subreddits. Also, watched much of Nathan Fielder’s show The Rehearsal. I have a longstanding promise to myself to only ever watch television or movies at home when I’m not feeling well.1 When I got covid, I watched The Sopranos. When I had surgery, I watched a baking show. And lately, there’s The Rehearsal, which is fascinating (and hilarious). In this show Nathan creates elaborate scenarios to help participants “rehearse” for real life situations. In season one, most of this is centered around helping a woman decide whether or not to become a mother. They hire dozens of child actors to play out the role of her fake son “Adam,” as an infant, three-year-old, six-year-old, nine-year-old, and fifteen-year-old. Season two is absolutely insane and wonderful—it’s about helping pilots communicate better in the cockpit to prevent airline crashes, and involves a fake singing competition, first dates, and actually learning how to fly. And the show is also very much about Nathan Fielder and his desire to control everything, and what happens when that script gets broken. In season one, Angela, deeply Christian, prays to affirm her belief that G-d is in control of the situation, not Nathan. At one point, she reprimands him: “Not everything is make-believe. Some things are real.”
He is constantly playing with reality and unreality in a way that gets at something even more true. Like the decision to have a child. Like flying a plane and keeping everyone on it alive. It resonates with my recent musings on fake versus real. Sometimes it seems like the only “real” things are things you can touch, like soil in a garden and a compost pile that refuses to decompose. But that’s not true at all. So much is happening beneath the surface. Medicine that makes my body react a certain way, then different medicine to fix that reaction, then different medicine to fix that… there are all these invisible battles going on inside me that I don’t understand. At the doctor’s office last week I had a procedure that required anesthesia—
Wait, I thought we were talking about gardening.
—which always makes me feel like I’m swimming in unreality. When I’m waiting to go under, everything feels a little too real, I’m paying extremely close attention to each moment, wondering if this is the last moment I will remember before it’s over, no, this one. They asked me if I wanted to listen to music and I said Andrew Bird. The nurses asked what I do and I said I wrote a book, and then they started talking about how they don’t have time to read. That’s all I remember before waking up and saying, “Has it happened yet?” I asked the nurse what was the last thing I said, and it matched up to reality. I had this idea that there would be whole conscious minutes that somehow disappeared, or slipped away slowly, but it was actually more binary than that. I remembered my final words and then it was over. Falling asleep is much more gradual. I listen to a podcast and the podcast smoothes and curves and becomes a dream. But, really, anesthesia doesn’t feel unreal at all. It feels like you experience one moment, and then another one, and each of those moments really exist.
Have you read Small Rain by Garth Greenwall? A lot of people say it’s quite good, some sort of gorgeous lyrical book about an intense experience with a two-week illness, which, honestly, sounds way worse than yours. Apparently it’s based on his life and he found enough meaning in the experience to get a whole novel out of it. Did you find meaning in your illness?
Wow, how did you guess? I started listening to it on audiobook because I was curious. I sometimes get disappointed with myself when I’m ill, because not only am I not productive, I’m also not really getting any meaning out of it. Suffering is art, and all that. When I’m sick, all I can think about is: I want this to be over. I don’t want to explore my feelings or pick them apart. I want them to go away. I just want time to pass and so I watch television because it makes time pass faster. I hate the idea that I want whole hours and days to disappear, but that’s what happens. In my better moods, I maintain the idea that every day can and should be meaningful. Even throughout this, every morning, Seth and I ask each other, What will make today meaningful? and every evening we ask, What are we grateful for? There’s never nothing. There’s always something. So anyway, I tried listening to Small Rain because I thought maybe it would provide me the meaning I’ve been unable to find. But I couldn’t get past the first five minutes. Maybe it’s extremely insightful, but I wasn’t in the mood for it. Also, I’m a bit wary of books that are supposed to be very deep and meaningful but don’t seem to have a real plot.2 At least when my brain feels like fuzz.
On the flip side, some books are all plot and no character. Because I’m exploring the idea of writing a hard science fiction novel that takes place on other planets, I’ve been reading more hard science fiction and feeling a little disappointed in my selections. I know there is better science fiction out there—Kim Stanley Robinson and Ted Chiang come to mind, and I will shout from every rooftop I can climb on that Three Body Problem is the best sci-fi series of all time—but I think it’s hard to find. In general, I think, it’s hard to find a really good book. I’ve found myself getting more picky, tastewise.
Anything you have enjoyed reading lately?
I started Cubafruit by
and was taken away immediately by the energy and wit. There is a scene in the beginning where someone is on the phone and gets distracted by the ugliness of his neighbor’s new couch. I was delighted by what seemed like an irrelevant interruption and how the narrator keeps staring at its purple frills as they talk about the drug trade in the Caribbean mafia, and then someone emerges from the couch and shoots him. Pow! And it totally works. (Sorry for spoiler but it’s near the beginning, and was the event that made my head turn around in its socket to be like, This is different, this is new, I’m in).I also recently read Recursion by Blake Crouch, which is a thriller about time travel and memory. I’m deeply impressed with the way he takes a simple idea and blows it up until it’s insane, all while telling a fun thriller. Sometimes it’s a bit much and feels shallower than it should but I think there’s a lot going for his work. I also loved Dark Matter, a fun take on the multiverse, again in thriller mode. I have more thoughts on that but I’ll save that for a bigger essay. Maybe.
But now you’re planning to write a novel in space?
Maybe. I’ve had a couple false starts on a couple different things. And now I’m finding myself wanting to write something less serious and more funny. Something that energizes me, not overwhelms me, like the research it would take to create a world in space. I’m not sure if this is the right time for all that. I just want to write. I want to write about an ugly purple couch. I want to write about the fake wolf in the park that I mistook for a real one. Getting kicked off a bench at a beach full of seaweed by a group of teenage girls who were very polite as they pointed out that there were more of them than me, and also, it was Britney’s birthday. Or maybe I’ll take a longer break to work on the garden. I’ll be honest, the Substack I posted last week was not my favorite. It was written in this strange fuzzy headspace and I felt like the point was floating away from me. It made me feel like I had a snapshot into being very old. I wonder if my writing will be less clear and more poetic, in a way. More image-focused, with the meaning somewhere underneath. Like how Shakespeare’s plays became more inaccessible as time went on. As G. Wilson Knight said of Shakespeare’s later work, “In such poetry we are less aware of any surface than of a turbulent power, a heave and swell, from deeps beyond verbal definition; and, as the thing progresses, a gathering of power, a ninth wave of passion, and increase in tempo and intensity.”3 Obviously I am not Shakespeare, but I wonder often how my writing will continue to transform as I grow older. I used to say it is the goal of any writer to look at their older work and think it’s terrible; that this is a sign of progress. But maybe progress from now on is less of an upward lift and more of a sideways slant. Maybe instead I’ll look back and think, How strange, how different I was back then, way over there near the beach, testing her strength while staying close to shore.
I had more questions for you, but this feels like a good place to end on!
Really? You had questions? How much did you prepare for this?
In some ways, I’ve prepared my whole life, haha. But mostly, not much. Usually when I interview authors, I spend a lot of time coming up with questions, but the goal is to get to a place where I can ignore those questions and let the conversation happen naturally, digging in further based on where it goes. It feels more dynamic and alive.
On the interviewee side of things, I hate that. I always like to overprepare; I’m far more coherent when I write than when I speak. Sometimes, I finish an interview and realize I don’t agree with what I just said. Someone pointed out that I apparently once said that reading my book is “a way to get to know me.” I don’t even remember saying that. And I don’t agree with it at all. Reading the book is a way to live in the dream I’ve created, which is related to me, but is also outside of me. In live interviews, I’m just not able to provide the nuance that I can in writing. In some ways it’s more honest I guess, this spontaneity, but it’s also less true, because I’m not comparing my thoughts in this moment with a lifetime of thoughts.
So you hated this?
No, not at all. I went into it not knowing where to go, so it felt dynamic, yet I still got the time to think through each question without feeling pressure. So, best of both worlds. What did you think of it?
It was fine, I guess.
You guess?
I mean, I sort of feel like I didn’t matter. Like you just had some things you wanted to say and didn’t care what I asked. Like you didn’t need me at all.
No! I definitely needed you.
Really?
Yes. Like I said earlier, I’ve been struggling with writing. Last week I put out a post that was not my best, honestly.
I thought it was nice in theory. Living life as an experiment and whatnot.
Sure, in theory. But I wasn’t actually feeling that way while writing it. It was an idea I put together slowly over the past couple weeks, but when I sat down to write it I had no energy or focus and I think that came through. I mean, it’s titled “A Robin Named Fred.” That is a stupid title.
No comment.
But this fake interview has energized me! I actually woke up last night in the middle of the night with lots of ideas that I typed into my Notes app at three in the morning.
So weird, I did the same thing at the same time!
Either this structure is giving me energy, or I just happen to have more energy while writing it. Probably both. Like I said earlier, I think structure can open up ideas to something greater. For me, the goal is always to find energy in my writing. When something feels like it comes alive. When it wakes me up in the middle of the night and the ideas appear in thin air. It’s almost a spiritual practice. No, it is a spiritual practice. I read a recent essay called “Don't Ask If I Believe in Talking Donkeys,” where the Jewish author
explains that he considers the Hebrew Bible to be a poem written by G-d. So perhaps all of the events in the Bible aren’t 100 percent true, but they are truly written by the Creator, and they are a poem that brings even bigger truths to life, and it is our duty to act as if they were true. I’m still figuring out my own relationship to faith but this essay really resonated with me. So, yes, I like the idea of following energy for an interview, even if that means you come with no set questions, which just means, as an interviewee—in the usual context—that I have to work harder to prepare.Actually I did have one question I didn’t get to ask.
What is it?
Well, it’s more of a comment than a question. I mean, it’s more of an idea of a comment, that would end in a real question. I was going to ask something that was more of a comment, really deep and interesting, some sort of meditation on our lives, and then finish by saying, “So what did you eat for breakfast?” But I never really got there.
What did I eat for breakfast? That’s the question?
Well, what did you eat for breakfast?
Why do you care what I ate for breakfast?
Because it’s good practice to end an interview either by talking about what’s next, or by bringing in something silly and lighthearted, and we’ve already covered the former.
I refuse to answer. That’s a stupid question, and you already know the answer. This interview is already too long.
You’re only making it longer by refusing to answer.
So I’ll end it now. Bye!
With the exception of House of the Dragon, which has become a hatewatch, but I have to watch, if nothing else for the soundtrack, but it only comes out every two years, so I think it’s okay
It is very easy to write a plotless book very badly, and so this is the sort of book that needs to stand the test of time before I will read it. Like, Proust is on the list for someday. Ulysses too. Small Rain? Maybe in five years.
