Matrimony | Joshua Henkin | Talks at Google

I think what I'm going to do is I'll read for about 20 minutes or so and then I'll talk a little bit about the book beyond that, and then I'll open it up to questions and we can sort of have a conversation in that context. I'm going to read a couple of scenes, but the first scene I'll read is from the beginning of the book, so it doesn't really need any context. This is from the beginning of magic. Out. Out. Out. The words Julian Wainwright ever spoke, according to his father, Richard Wainwright iii, graduate of Yale and grand lubricator of the economic machinery, and Julian's mother, Constance Wainwright, Wellesley graduate and descendant of a long family of Pennsylvania Republicans, Julian the first Wainwright in four generations to be given his own Christian name. Julian's father would have liked another Richard Wainwright, but. But Julian's mother was a persistent woman, and she believed the child of hers was entitled to his own identity and therefore his own name. And so at 15 months in a car ride back from Martha's Vineyard, Julian, who until then had not said a word and had given his parents every reason to think language would come slowly to him, uttered these words in rapid succession. Out, out, out. Not once, not twice, but repeatedly until the words became chant. And it was obvious that for reasons all his own, he didn't want to return to New York City, to his parents apartment on Sutton Place. Now, 17 years later, he had gotten his wish. It was 1986 and he was starting his freshman year at Greymont College, a small liberal arts school in Northington, Massachusetts, two hours west of Boston, an alternative school, according to the Greymont brochure, on whose cover there appeared a picture of Rousseau sitting next to a cow. Henri Rousseau. Jean Jacques Rousseau. The students didn't know and they didn't seem to care. The only thing that mattered was they were at Gremont, in the middle of whose campus stood a shanty protesting college investments in South Africa, a shanty so large it could fit practically the whole student body inside it. According to one upper class math major, more nights per capita had been spent sleeping inside the shanty at Greymont than in any other college shanty in the United States. At Greymont, if you wanted, you could receive comments from your professors instead of grades. And on the application for admission, there was a creative expression section that, according to rumor, one successful applicant had completed by baking a chocolate cake. Ash Brownie, as a student, said Guy, got the dean of admission stoned. Julian's own creative expression section took the form of a short story he'd written. At 13, he'd met his hero, John Cheever, standing on the steps of the 92nd Street Y, and ever since then, ever since he'd gotten John Cheever's autograph, Julian had known he was going to be a writer. But that would come later, once classes had begun. Right now, Julian waited in his dorm room to greet his new roommate, a young man from New Jersey who had assured him over the telephone that he was bringing the largest stereo system Julian had ever seen. It was going to take the two of them to carry it up the stairs. Julian's roommate was right. The promised stereo system, when it was delivered, looked like an intercontinental ballistic missile. It was a stereo system paid for by Ronald Reagan and built by the United States Pentagon and directed at Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet Politburo, a stereo system that could blow the Russians out of the sky and turn them into a mushroom cloud. Wandering about the room, trailing wire behind him, Julian's roommate was contemplating where to put his electric guitar, his boombox, his microwave, his toaster oven. He was, Julian thought, a tangle of electricity. This school is wild, his roommate said. Some of the guys on campus wear skirts. They do. They're hoping to transcend the boundaries of gender. Mostly they're just trying to get laid. There are naked parties here. People come to them without any clothes on. Completely new, julian said. In the winter, I guess they wear shoes and socks. It gets pretty cold here. Julian's roommate was dark haired and thick set, and he had brought with him piles of press shirts and trousers, each of them separated from the others by a white piece of tissue paper, as if they had come directly from the dry cleaner. He was hanging them up now, smoothing them out with his hand. You think those guys pee in the shower? Which guys? Said Julian. Jared, and Hartley. Bill Steffen, Julian's roommate, gestured to the room down the hall. Hartley's the kind of guy who pees in the shower in the bathroom. Now Julian glanced warily at the showers. There were two stalls for six guys, each with a white piece of plastic hanging down from the rod but not quite reaching the floor. It's bad enough to pee in your own shower, his roommate said, but in a communal shower. He looked up at Julian. You don't pee in the shower, do you? No, julian said. From time to time he had. Didn't everyone? I had this roommate in prep school who peed in the sink. You didn't, julian said. Swear to God. When I was using the bathroom and he needed to go, he'd just Climb up on the sink and pee in it. That's disgusting, said Julian. All the same, I think I'll be wearing flip flops in here again. His roommate gestured to the room down the hall as if to reassure Julian it wasn't him he mistrusted. Here come the PCCRs, he said. Through the window, Julian could see a group of students walking across the quad. They wore blue badges and name tags and held red and black satchels. They were upperclassmen, Julian Drumaid said, recent graduates of a week long training course in reproductive health, purveyors of information about pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. And in their satchels they carried the tools of their trade leaflets. Condoms, dental dams, and Spermicide in all flavors, julian said. The pccrs. Peer Contraceptive Counseling, his roommate said. First night at school, they come talk to you. It's all part of in loco parentis. There are dozens of them, said Julian. Like flies, his roommate said. That night, as his roommate had predicted, everyone in Julian's entryway met with four members of Peer Contraceptive Counseling, each wearing a PCC badge and name tag and holding a red and black PCC satchel. In freshman entryways across campus, upperclassmen had descended wearing these very same badges and name tags and carrying these very same satchels. Julian listened to a beautiful young woman named Nicole demonstrate how to use a dental dam. What exactly was a dental dam, and why was Nicole wearing one? She appeared to be covered in Saran Wrap. Now Nicole's colleagues Brian, Ted, and Simone were trying on dental dams as well. Several of the boys began to laugh, but the girls nodded knowingly, as if they'd spent their whole lives in the company of dental dams. Soon it was time to taste the spermicide. There's nothing to be afraid of, nicole said, uncapping a tube of spermicide and squeezing a little onto her finger. She stuck her finger into her mouth, then passed the spermicide to Ted, who stuck his finger into his mouth. Everyone was eating spermicide. It's fruit flavor, nicole told the freshmen. It's supposed to be eaten. She asked for volunteers from the freshmen, and when no one raised a hand, she chose Julian. Julian stood up. Was he supposed to stand up? Did you eat spermicide sitting down or standing up? Nicole was only a junior, but she seemed so much older than he was, so wise to the ways of the body and to the various flavors of spermicide. And to the reason there should be various flavors of spermicide. Would you like passion fruit? Nicole asked. Or strawberry? Strawberry is good, julian said. Nicole handed him the spermicide. Don't worry, nicole said. It goes down smooth. It tastes like strawberry bubblegum. Julian squeezed some spermicide onto his finger and stuck it into his mouth. How does it taste? It tasted terrible. Like strawberry bubble gum, but with extra chemicals. It had a sloppy, grainy texture. Julian nodded in approval. The session lasted an hour and a half, and at the end of it all, 18 freshmen from Julian's entryway were sent off with a contraceptive loot bag that included spermicide, dental dams and condoms. Miniature red and black satchels of their own, taken from the larger satchels the PC seers carried with them. Carefully, seriously, respectfully. The girls took their satchels upstairs to their rooms while the boys tossed the contents at one another and dissected them. And Hartley, from across the hall, filled his condoms with water and jested them out the window into the courtyard, seeing if he could get them to explode. Julian's roommate said, I'm telling you, fat guy pees in the shower. Could be, julian said. He went into his bedroom to unpack. Okay, I'm going to Skip probably about 20 or so pages and give you a little context. Julian has come to this college, Gremont College, in order to become a writer, in order to study creative writing. And he takes a class with this kind of famous overbearing and difficult and curmudgeonly professor named Professor Chesterfield. And he meets this guy, Carter Hines, in Professor Chesterfield's class. And Professor Chesterfield decides that they're the only two kids in the class who have any talent. But the way he tells them they have talent is he says their work is sophomoric and pusillanimous. So he sort of. I mean, their attitude is basically like that. Well, he likes us because he pays enough attention to us to criticize us. That's just a little bit of a background about Julian and Carter's relationship. Because the next scene that I'm going to read from, it's about Julian and Carter's developing friendship, and it's after they spend time in creative writing class together and they're slowly getting to know each other. The other thing that might be helpful to know is that Julian is a very wealthy kid from New York City, and Carter comes from the Bay Area and is a scholarship kid and kind of is working class and has a bit of a chip on his shoulder about that. Okay, so I'm going to read this next sort of scene and a half, and then I'll tell you a little bit more about the book and then we can. We can talk. So Julian and Carter were becoming friends. But Julian couldn't tell whether Carter liked him. This is page 19, if you're following along at home. It came down to this. Julian was a rich kid from New York City and Carter wasn't. According to Carter, Greymount was filled with rich kids from New York City and Carter was from California, just outside San Francisco. And he had no interest in New York City. He equated Greymont with New England and New England with wealth, and wealth with New York City and New York City with bullshit. And Carter hated bullshit. He'd grown up in a place utterly devoid of bullshit, in a completely bullshitless town. No bullshit in San Francisco. Julian had been to San Francisco and there was plenty of bullshit there, even if it was different from the bullshit in New York. Carter was from the suburbs. Besides, the suburbs were all bullshit, in Carter's opinion. Everything was more impressive on the West Coast. There was a great cultural divide that flowed with the waters of the Mississippi and cast its shadow across the Rocky Mountains and the Mojave Desert and accounted for the fact that in creative writing class Carter was the only one who didn't take notes. And in general, all the other students cared and he didn't. His first day at Greymont, Carter showed up in torn blue jeans and scuffed boots made of alligator leather and with several days growth of beard on his face. That first semester he would walk across campus with his sneakers untied, his blue jeans frayed, his shirt not fully buttoned, running his hand through his hair as if he were in a permanent state of having just woken up. But if Carter didn't care, why right now was he asking Julian to read his short stories? And why was he standing in Julian's room watching him like a voyeur? Carter's stories were good. They were really good, Julian thought. When Julian told Carter this, Carter just shrugged. According to Carter, there was a sexual abandon where he had grown up that helped account for the fact that he'd lost his virginity at 13, whereas Julian hadn't lost his until much later. And 13 was late, Carter said. Often Julian felt Carter didn't have time for him. But then Carter would show up at his dorm and they'd go play pick up basketball. And late at night they'd walk to the store 24 or stop for cheeseburgers and onion rings at the Bison Bar and Grill and then go play poker with the guys down the hall. After Professor Chesterfield's class they would return to the dorms and Carter would ask to see Julian's stories. Carter liked Julian's stories and he liked Julian himself. And one night, drunk on Veers and having smoked some potatoes, Carter admitted that the reason he talked so much about the west coast was that he missed home. He missed his mother and father, and he found the east coast daunting. The history of it, the wealth, New England especially, where he'd gone to prep school on scholarship for a couple of years before returning home and graduating from his local public school. That was why he had come to Greymont, to show himself he wasn't intimidated by New England and by people like Julian, who came from New York City and had lots of money and had been to places he'd never been to, such as Europe. And although it was true he'd lost his virginity, it hadn't been at 13, and when Carter told Julian this he looked as if he were going to cry. Now the empty beer cans were collecting on the floor and Carter was saying, I love you, Wainwright. I love you, man, and he hugged Julian so hard he almost knocked the wind out of him. Really, Carter said they were going to be writers someday. You're a fucking sophomore. Pusillanimous writer. Both of us are the only two talents in the class. Carter was laughing, and then it seemed he was going to cry, and now, embarrassed, he said, hey, you dork, and he kneed Julian, hardened the leg. Then they went camping together. They were in the car and Carter was talking about virginity again. According to him, a girl could get her virginity back. Retrieve it? Said Julian in a manner of speaking. How? Surgery, Carter said. It's for born agains mostly. Doctors are reinserting the girl's hymen. You know how in a movie set a guy gets shot and there's blood all over the place, but he's really just bleeding ketchup? Well, it's the same idea. A girl gets a new hymen, but it's not really a new hymen. It's a fake new hymen made of ketchup, julian said. Made of who knows what, said Carter. It's mostly for born agains. Like I said, some kind of Pentecostal medical ritual. Not that you'd have to be a born again, but why else would you do it? Why would anyone do it? Said Julian. I have no idea. At the campground where they pitched tent, Julian was learning new things about Carter, such as the fact that Carter could imitate a loon. Carter was so eerily adept at imitating a loon that when Julian closed his eyes he thought Carter was a loon. So did the loons themselves. Carter was leading them in a chorus of calling. That's fucking fantastic, julian said. Carter shrugged. I've got perfect pitch. I was born with it. I guess I can do this with my tongue, julian said. He curled up his tongue into three segments so it resembled a cauliflower. That's excellent, carter said. It's retarded, said Julian. Sure, it's retarded, but it's also excellent. For dinner, Julian and Carter grilled hot dogs, and they wrapped corn and potatoes in tin foil and tossed them into the fire and ate those, too. By the time he was done eating, Julian felt so full he could barely move, and he beached himself on the hood of the car. He lay on his back, his arms spread to the sides, looking at the sky through a knot of branches. The thing about hot dogs, he said, is once they're inside you, the pieces come back together again. It's like they're guided by some magnetic force. Hot dogs, Carter said, are made entirely of cow testicles, except for the parts made of pig testicles. I don't doubt it, julian said. Carter handed him a stick with five roasted marshmallows on it. You know what marshmallows are made of? Said Carter. Some other kind of testicles? I suspect so, carter said. In the tent that night they talked about the fact that they were two guys who weren't half bad looking. So why were they camping alone? In Carter's opinion, it all came down to evolutionary biology. How else could you explain Henry Kissinger, who, if the rumors were to be believed, was a Lothario. Anyone who had seen Henry Kissinger recognized in him a familiar figure from their past, the kid from their high school class who was smarter than everyone else but who didn't have any friends. Henry Kissinger had orchestrated the Vietnam War. He'd bombed the Indochinese and lived to tell about it to the tune of $25,000 a speech. Never mind the starving children in Ethiopia and Cambodia. If any evidence was needed that the world was an unjust place, all one had to do was consider Henry Kissinger's sex life. Henry Kissinger was ugly and corrupt. He was a war criminal. But he was a war criminal with sex appeal, Julian said. Maybe girls like it when you bomb people, you know? Maybe they find it erotic. That's part of it, carter said. Henry Kissinger's older than we are, right? Julian nodded. He's older than we are, carter said. He's wealthier than we are, and he's more powerful than we are. So Girls like that, they're looking for someone to protect their offspring. They think that they're looking for something else, but they don't have a clue. It's the same with us. We like girls who are hot, certainly, Julian said. Well, we think we like girls who are hot, but subconsciously, evolutionarily, we like girls who are fertile. A hot girl is a fertile girl, Julian said. The problem is, said Carter, the fertile girls don't like us back. Evolution's got us by the balls. Carter looked up at the inside of the tent as if hoping it would provide an answer to their predicament. The one consolation, he said, is Henry Kissinger is having empty sex. You think? Said Julian. Definitely. Guys like Henry Kissinger who were what they were in high school, spend the rest of their lives compensating. Nothing makes Henry Kissinger satisfied, not even the sex. I'm telling you, carter said, the man's unhappy. He's very depressed. Okay, so that will be the end of my reading part. But I'll tell you a little bit more about the novel. Lest you think that it all focuses on 18 and 19 year olds, the book actually takes place over the course, really, of 20 years. It starts when basically, even though you haven't yet met her, it's about Julian and this woman, Mia, whom he meets in the laundry room freshman year, and they fall in love and they go out for the rest of college. And I don't want to ruin too much for you, but basically a family tragedy strikes for Mia senior year, and that compels her and Julian to get married earlier than they otherwise would have. I mean, they're the kinds of people who they very well might have gotten married at some point in the future. I mean, they certainly love each other, but I think at 22, 21, 22, marriage was the last thing on their mind. But this family tragedy strikes and they get married. And that's sort of the key moment in the book that sort of sends everything in a different direction from, you know, where it was going. And then the book sort of chronicles their marriage over the Next pretty much 15 years. They move to Ann Arbor, where Mia goes to graduate school in psychology, and Julian is trying to write a novel. Things happen between them. I don't want to ruin too much for you, but there are problems in the marriage. Julian ends up going to Iowa City to the Iowa Writers Workshop to work further on his novel. More stuff happens. Julian spends some time out in Berkeley with Carter. Carter moves to Berkeley with his girlfriend, then wife Pilar, whom he also Meets freshman year. So it's sort of about these two marriages. And then by the end of the book, Julian and Mia are back in New York, where Julian grew up, Neil grew up in Montreal. And the book comes full circle and ends up back in Northington, which is based on Northampton, where the college scene starts. So it's sort of a novel that takes place over many years, and it sort of chronicles a marriage, but it also chronicles what it's like to be in your 20s and 30s, in certain cases even in your early 40s. You know, that feeling, I think, especially when you're living in a college town. A lot of this book takes place in college towns where there's this kind of feeling that, you know, you never really get old because there's always a new bunch of students every year. And there's certain sort of rituals and signposts. You know, there's homecoming and there's the football game and Thanksgiving break and spring break, et cetera. And you have this idea that, you know, someday you'll get older and someday your life will begin. And I think what happens to a lot of people, some people in their 20s, certainly people in their 30s, is they all of a sudden realize that they've been waiting for their life to begin, but their life has been happening all along. And that's really, in some ways, what this book is about. What it's like to be at that time in your life and find that life takes you by surprise. And you make decisions that you didn't realize would have consequences down the road. And you think you're going one place and you're ending up someplace else. I don't want to tell you too much more because I want you to read the book while it's still, you know, without my having, you know, told you everything. But that's sort of, in general a sense, both of what the book sounds like from my reading and what the book is about. And I'd be happy to answer questions about the book or about the writing life, because I am a writer and I teach writing. And the book is, in part, about the writing life, really. Or anything. You can ask anything. And if I decide I don't want to answer it, I'll tell you. But I'm pretty good about answering most things. I have a question. You mentioned that a lot of the places that you have in here or, like, the actual locations of certain buildings or places that are visited by the characters in your book are actual, real places. Why did you decide to choose real existing places as opposed to Places that you could have made up? That's a good question. I sort of balanced it. I mean, in the first part, the section that I read, that takes place in a town called Northington at a college called Greymont. And that's basically based on Hampshire College and it's based on Northampton. There's no place called Northington, there's no place called Greymont. And I think I did that because I wanted an alternative school that was in New England. And Hampshire seemed like the obvious choice. But because I don't really know Hampshire, I've never been to Hampshire. And I kind of felt like I wanted to sort of be able to play fast and loose with the facts. So I want to be. I want to be able to evoke that place and that kind of place without dealing with specific details. I mean, without dealing with actual. Like this building is here, that building is there. Then for the other places I know I lived in Ann Arbor for a long time. I lived in Berkeley for a while. They felt like the kind of college towns that I didn't really want to make up. And I felt like I'm not that good at writing about places that I've never been. But when I've lived for a place, I think you can. Geography is really important to a story. And so I wanted Berkeley to feel like Berkeley and San Francisco to feel like San Francisco. Certainly New York. I mean, it's very essential that Julian grows up in New York. He's a certain kind of New Yorker who. I mean, the book is about wanting to get out. Those are his first three words I read. Out, out, out. But in other ways, you know, not only he can't get out, I mean, he ends up back there. You know, he's a. He's a die hard New Yorker in some sort of ways. And to sort of call it someplace else to make up a town that's not to call it Tokyo or Jersey City wouldn't have made sense. So I think fiction writers, they always try to do what helps them. So sometimes having an imaginary place is more helpful and sometimes having an actual place is more helpful. And I think in this case I did a little bit of both to sort of have the advantages of. Of each case, you know, in each instance. So you've taken real life places as reference points. Have you also taken real life people who you've come across in your story? Right. You're asking whether the people are. Yeah. And the story are people, you know? Yeah. No, I mean, I think it's another version of asking. It's a very, very good and reasonable question. You know, to what extent is fiction autobiographical is really what people are asking. And I think about this a lot because I teach creative writing, and I'm always talking with my students. Should you write what you know or should you write what you don't know? And often my undergraduates in particular, they tend to err to one extreme or the other. They write simply what they know, which is like a transcript of Friday night's tea party, or simply what they don't know, which is Martians. And I encourage them to write what they know about what they don't know, what they don't know about what they know, which sounds like, you know, a bad GRE problem. But basically, I think the idea is try to take a situation that you're unfamiliar with and try to put yourself in that situation, or take a situation that you are unfamiliar, that you're familiar with, and imagine someone else in that situation. I think what you want is a kind of balance between closeness and distance. If you're too close to something, if you're really writing about exactly what happened to you, sometimes you're too interested in telling it exactly like it is. And that's not what a fiction writer does. A fiction writer is trying to get at a deeper kind of truth. A fiction writer believes that you lie in order to get a truth. So you want there to be enough distance that you don't feel like, well, I have to tell the truth because that's how it happened. On the other hand, you want it to be close enough to you that it's from the heart. So to answer your specific question about this book, I think anyone who knows me well would not be. Or even certain people who don't know me well, but even someone who knows me well wouldn't be able to find any particular character and say, oh, this reminds me of you, or of someone you know. That said, it took me 10 years to write this book. I spent a lot of time on it. And when I started it, I was single, living in Ann Arbor. And by the time I was done with it, I was married and had two children and was living in New York with my wife. So I don't think it's a coincidence that I was writing about being in your 20s and 30s at a time when I was basically my. Mostly my 30s and writing about marriage, when I was getting married and was thinking about these things. So certainly that's true. But in terms of Julian's a writer and I'm a writer, so obviously the stuff about writing comes in part, if not exactly, from my life. You know, things I think about, concerns I have. The stuff that takes place in writing workshops in the book is not exactly lifted from my life, but I've seen some crazy things happen in writing workshops. But actually, I think in some ways, Mia, whom you haven't yet met in the book, is in some ways more similar to me than Julian is. I mean, Julian's a wasp. Mia's Jewish, I'm Jewish. Culturally, she's the daughter of a professor. I'm the son of a professor. So a lot of times there'll be a particular detail where someone will say something to me, and I'll use that line in a story or in a novel, but you change who says it, and you change the context of how it's said, and then it sort of becomes something totally different. So I think a writer is always borrowing, but, you know, usually the way you borrow is so you change things so much that it's almost unrecognizable to the, you know, the people who are reading it. Are you working on anything new right now? I'm supposed to be. And I probably shouldn't say this in front of the camera because that is, my editor watches Google. I mean, my next novel is due at the publisher next spring, but I'm about 150 pages into it. But I've been basically been very busy getting ready for publication of the book and doing publicity stuff. And now I'm on the road for the next. On and off for the next six weeks. So it's one of the. I mean, I both love doing it and sort of regret doing. When I say doing it, I love being out on the road and talking to readers. And I think, you know, any writer who says they don't care about readers or they're not writing for someone is lying. I mean, I'm not writing for a particular person. But of course you're writing for someone. I mean, otherwise you'd just be writing in your diary, which is also a fine thing to do. But I think when a fiction writer is writing, he or she always is thinking, how can I achieve the emotional effect I want to achieve on my readers? And so actually going out and meeting my readers in person or just. Or online or, you know, whatever ways we meet them is really valuable. And I'm a pretty social person, and writing is hard in that sense because it's very solitary. And so I spend a lot. That's why I have to make my characters interesting, because they're the people I hang out with. So in that sense, this part of the process is really great, but it also takes away from my writing. And so I'm supposed to be working on this book, and I haven't had a chance to work on it in a while. I can tell you a little bit about it. I only tell you a little bit because, well, I don't want to tell too much else. I don't know exactly where it's going. I never know where a book's going. You often think it's going one direction, but it's not. In some ways, it's a quite different book from Matrimony, in the sense that Matrimony is a book that takes place over 20 years. And the next novel, which is tentatively titled the World without yout, takes place over a single July 4th weekend. And it's basically a family reunion at the family's summer house in the Berkshires. And the reunion takes place on the occasion of the anniversary, the fourth anniversary of the brother's death, and he was a journalist killed in Iraq. And so the three adult sisters with spouses and boyfriends and the parents come back to the summer house for the reunion on the occasion of death. And they're various surprise guests, and various things happen along the way. But it's all structured over a single weekend. And it's told from. In third person, but from different points of view. So that's what I think it's about. You know, in a couple years, you asked me, and I tell you I've done something totally different. What else can I. When you're working with a publisher, do you come up with the idea solely by yourself, or do you work with someone to kind of create that story and go from there? Yeah, that's a good question you're asking. To what extent is fiction, you know, a collaborative enterprise? You know, I think it differs in different cases. A lot of people, you know, a lot of editors these days, simply acquire books and don't really edit. I'm very fortunate to have a great editor, and she. She did an incredible job and really, really helped make the book a lot better. But in terms of actually. And we certainly did have ideas together, we had a lunch and talked about ideas. Once she had bought the book and had seen, you know, the draft that she brought and wanted me to make some changes, and I had some ideas about changes. But it's not like. It's not like nonfiction. A lot of times, nonfiction is sold based on a proposal, and sometimes an agent or editor will suggest something and that's. It's much more collaborative in that way. Why don't you write about this? But, you know, I'm always telling my students this, and I think it's very important that fiction is not about ideas. I mean, you know, I'm not saying there aren't ideas in fiction. And certainly if you have intelligent characters and they say intelligent things, you know, ideas come through. But with fiction, it's really about the characters and the story and the execution. And so there's a real way in which, you know, Nader can't help you. It's until you have something on the page. I mean, I could sit with the editor and she could say, let's say I said to her, well, I'm going to write a novel about a marriage that takes place in college. I mean, she could say, well, you know, why don't you do this? But it would almost be foolish for her to say that because she doesn't know the characters. I don't know the characters yet. So there's a way in which, with fiction much more than nonfiction, you're really swimming on your own. Which is why there are a lot of reasons why fiction isn't generally sold until you have the complete manuscript together. It's very typical in nonfiction. I mean, there are some people who make a lot of money based on a five page proposal. I mean, it doesn't happen that much, but it's at least possible in fiction. But let's say nonfiction, unless you're famous, no one's going to do that for fiction because it's not about the proposal, it's about the execution. And so in that sense, you just really have to go tell your story, write your characters, and then once you have a draft, then the editor can be really helpful. And my editor was great. I also had a couple of friends. I did graduate work at Michigan. I got my MFA in Ann Arbor. And I had a couple friends from graduate school who I'm still in touch with who are really good readers for me. And so I show it to them. But I don't believe in showing my work too early. I really feel like I have to get to the. I have to get to the end of the book and feel like I've gotten this far as I can before I ask for help. I think that a writer really has to make his or her own mistakes. This book took me 10 years and I threw out literally over 3,000 pages. And some of those pages, I think were pretty good pages. They just didn't belong in this book. But if you look at the actual final book, I would say about 75% of the pages got written in the last year. And so, you know, the obvious question is, well, wouldn't it have been great to skip over those nine years? I mean, if only someone could have told you you were barking up a wrong tree and gotten you to the ninth year in year one, you'd have saved yourself a lot of time and heartache and wasted paper. But I think the answer is no, it's not possible that you have to make your own mistakes. And those nine years that I put in were, I guess, the bad days are investments in the good days. And those nine years that I put in were necessary in order to be able to have the payoff in the 10th year. So I think writing is solitary and hard for that reason, and that's why it's very insecure. Even if you've done a good job one time. This book, I mean, a little bit of a plug, but it just got a great review today in the New York Times from Janet Madison, and I'm, of course, thrilled. But it's not going to make my next book any easier. I mean, it could make it harder, you know, because, you know, there's pressure. But, I mean, I'm probably at a stage in my writing where I know I'm not going to write something that's so abysmal that it's incoherent and just embarrassing. But whether it really jumps off the page one time and doesn't another time, that's really. That's magic and mystery and luck. I mean, we all know that. We all know the phenomenon of reading an author and loving his or her book. And then you read the next person book, and we didn't like it as much. What happened? Did they get worse? I mean, it's possible. I suppose there are people who have only one book in them. But what more often happens is the next book isn't as good, but then the book afterwards is better. And the other ones, I mean, there's not a simple trajectory. I mean, it's really like a bad idea of an electrocardiogram. So I think that there's so much that's mysterious about writing that the idea of sort of sitting down and hashing it out with someone before you've actually done the. Done the work, it'd be nice to do. But, you know, I think it's not possible. What books are you currently reading? That's always, you know, the question why I read is always the question that Stumps me because always, you know, an hour later I say, oh, God, you know, I should have. Should have said that. And I'm reading a lot. I teach, I read a lot of my students stuff right now. I recently read a novel by Helen Schulman called Day of the beach, which is a great novel that takes place on September 11, 2001, but it's not about what takes place with that is it's about a marriage and the marriage crumbling with September 11th as a backdrop. There's a book called Grief by Andrew Holloran, about a gay man whose mother has died and he moves to D.C. and it's about grief. That's a beautiful book. Those are two books I've read recently that I've liked a lot. Some of the books that I've read in the last few years, they were very influential to me. Jonathan Francis, the Corrections, I really liked a lot. Richard Rusev's Empire Falls, Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep is a book that's very much so about the world that I'm writing. About your matrimony, that's more about high school than about college. Claire Messoud's the Emperor's Children. I love Ian McEwan. I just finished On Chesapel Beach. I think that's a great book. And Atonement is a great book too. John Cheever, Richard Yates, Lori Moore. I tend to like, you know, if the world could be divided between, I guess, sort of fiction that's more in the mold of John Cheever and more in the mold of. Of Don DeLillo and more in the Cheever mode, by which I mean I tend to be interested in realist fiction and fiction that's principally about character. Less that I'm interested in sort of more surrealist, fantastical stuff. I mean, for me, it's about character. I mean, the reason I read is I want to be transported. I want to be taken out of my own experience. I want to. I don't have to like the characters. I mean, I've read books that I loved where I hated the cat characters, but I at least felt that I could understand who they were, that I got to know them. I want to feel at the end of a book like I know the characters as well as, or better than the people who are in my own life. My friends, my wife, my kids, my parents, etc. And if I feel that with my own work, if at the end of a book, at the end of my book, the reader feels like they know my characters, they miss my characters, then I Feel like that I've done a good job. So that's what I'm looking for in the reading experience. That's what I'm looking for in the writing experience. So the kinds of writers I like tend to be writers for whom character is paramount, where they're using narrative, they're using story and language in service of character. I mean, there are some people who are more interested in language for language's sake than I am. Certainly poets are, but they're fiction writers who are like that too, who, for them, a beautiful set is worth everything. And I love a beautiful sentence as much as the next guy. But for me, a beautiful sentence has to be in service of something. And for me, if the sentence is beautiful, it doesn't make me feel something, but I don't care about it. So that's the kind of fiction that I tend to be interested in. Anyone else? Any of you writers here are like aspiring writers or taking writing classes or totally uninterested in writing. So if you had to write a review about. Pardon me, if you had to write a review of my book, I would say it's brilliant. On your favorite author and some favorite book, who would it be? A single favorite book? Yeah. That's so hard. Because, you know, I think that, I mean, it's a little bit like asking, you know, what's your favorite child? Or even. I mean, we don't mean to make it so as momentous as that, but what's your favorite food? Well, I mean, you know, sometimes you want pizza and sometimes you want banana cream pie. But, I mean, not to be facetious, I think also that a lot of times the book that's most important to you may be less about the book than is about who you were the time you're reading the book. So there are certain writers who are very influential to me at particular periods of time. I wouldn't necessarily look back and say, oh, they're my favorite writer. I certainly feel that John Cheever is a great writer and that reading his stories and reading his journal, I think his journals are brilliant, were very important to me growing up. Also writing. I mean, he writes about the world that I'm writing about in matrimony. He writes about a certain kind of wealthy WASPy sector of the population where there's some dark things going on behind the white picket fence. And that was something that was interesting. I think that what's dark in fiction and what's dark in life is what's interesting. I always tell my students, because I teach writing and I always tell them, take your characters that you like and try to find their dark side. Take the characters that you don't like and try to find their vulnerabilities. You always want to make your characters complex. And I feel that, you know, I mean, people always sort of. People sort of say about a lot of fiction, and not about my fiction per se, but I've seen a lot of people say about fiction, well, you know, why does it have to be depressing? You know, why does bad stuff have to happen? I mean, on a certain level, there's a certain practical fact that, you know, need conflict in fiction in order to get to know character, that you know the way and you think about your own lives when you're in the heat of the moment, when things are bad, when there are problems, when there are divorces, deaths, when you have to make moral choices. That's when you really get to know what people are like. And so that's true in real life, and it's true in fiction also. But the other thing I'd say is that I think that. I don't think it's depressing when bad things happen. I mean, it can be sad and, you know, you want. It's okay for readers to be upset, but I think it's actually. I always find it. I don't know, I find it gratifying to see. To feel, oh, you're not alone. That you see, there are other people who are going through that too. And so I find there's a way in which. When bad things happen in fiction, that can be oddly encouraging. You kind of feel like, well, there's a world out there where people who are struggling and they manage to do okay. I mean, I won't ruin the book for you, but these characters do okay in the end. I mean, there are just some bad things that happen along the way. But, I mean, in the end, they do all right. They come through it in some sort of. In some sort of fashion. So, I mean, I didn't go about writing it with that in mind. I think it's very important for a writer not to have a goal. I mean, a writer should never have an idea about what he or she wants to do. You should never have a message. If you have a message, then you're not writing fiction. You're writing theology or political theory or economics, all of which are good fields. It's just not my field and that a writer's job is to tell a story and to convey character. So I didn't know it was going to happen. And it's possible that these characters, that things weren't going to be all right in the end, and that would have been okay, too. Just. Just happened. That as it worked out, what was truest to who they were is that it wasn't right. Any other questions? So, thanks for coming. I really, really enjoyed it. Thank. You.