The Uses of Enchantment | Heidi Julavits | Talks at Google

Hi, everyone, and welcome to today's Authors at Google event with Heidi Julovitz. Heidi is the author of the Mineral palace, the Uses of Enchantment, and the Effect of Living Backwards. And she is also a founding editor of the Believer magazine, where, coincidentally, I used to work. I will not say anything further because, you know, one more word for me is one less word for Heidi. So I'll turn it over now. Please join me in welcoming Heidi to Google.

Thank you. Can you guys hear me okay? Yeah. All right, good. So since we are under sort of a time constraint, I'm probably not going to read from the book because although I was told that someone here can't read and therefore I should read from my book to assist poor fellow, I'm assuming the rest of you actually can read and therefore you don't need my assistance. I thought maybe I would just talk a little bit about. Talk about the book a little bit, but also talk about. I mean, the book, in a way, is a sort of cobbled together narrative. And I feel like cobbled together narratives are the only thing that I can write right now. Because in order to be a writer these days, especially probably in every country, I don't want to really sort of say only probably in America is one of some of the highest paying writers around. You know, I don't know, I just feel like Iraq probably doesn't have a lot of writers who are sort of surviving on their writing these days. But basically to be a writer of any sort actually is to have a cobbled together life where you're essentially trying to dovetail a bunch of different things and make a living for yourself in a way. And I also feel that for me personally, so I'm not. I'm a fiction writer. I guess I like to primarily define myself as a fiction writer, though I sometimes feel like I get defined first as an editor and then second a fiction. If I haven't had a book come out in a while, suddenly the editor starts to kind of edge out the writer and I've learned to care about that anymore. But so in addition to writing novels, I, along with some friends of mine, founded a magazine called the Believer. Does anyone here read the Believer or know what it is? Small show of hands. Just curious. Okay, so for those of you who don't, shame on you. And second of all, it is a magazine that's published through McSweeney's, which is in the Mission in San Francisco, founded by Dave Eggers and the Believer we founded. We actually just published our 50th issue and it's a monthly magazine. And we just recently started taking ads. We before were sort of completely funded via, I guess, some really faulty accounting is what it came down to. And finally someone actually did the math and was like, yeah, you guys need to take out some ads or something. But essentially, the Believer was a great way, especially in, I think, this world where people are cobbling together lives for themselves as artists and writers. But also in a world where you actually don't necessarily. You guys have the luxury, I suppose, of going to an office, or you definitely have the luxury of going to probably the best office there is available. But many writers in particular don't necessarily have an office to go to and don't have a community to be a part of. So the believer was a really sort of crucial way, first of all, to sort of give us a community that we didn't have, even though it is essentially just over the web. But I've emailed all these writers who I still haven't met them yet, but they are someone with whom I'm in conversation. But to get back to why we started it about four or five years ago, I guess I just started to get really sick of the mean tone that was sort of seemed to be this almost default mode in book reviewing. And that tone, to me sort of said, you know, books are actually so irrelevant. Like, we're actually starting from that assumption that books are actually completely irrelevant. And now we're just going to kick them around a little bit more and we're going to bring in the private life of the author and et cetera, et cetera. And I do need to clarify that I am very pro criticism, but I saw as these did not. The movement that I saw or the sort of prevailing attitude in book reviewing did not seem to me to be critical in nature, but really just kind of change cheap shots and mean, which I saw as being different from critical. I mean, a critical piece of writing, a critical review would in fact be something ideally that as a writer you would read and maybe they were not loving your stuff, but you might actually learn something from it. You know, that might be a way that someone might show you, like, ah, you know, okay, I know what to do next time. So I was very pro that, but very anti this other sort of prevalent sentiment, it seemed. So that's how we started the Believer. And it became this. It soon sort of morphed into something where it was book reviews and also just really lengthy treatments of kind of whatever. So, you know, a taxidermy. There's A great writer named Michelle T. Who's in San Francisco. I don't know if you guys are familiar with her. And she basically wrote about being a gay woman who goes to a taxidermy conference in Montana and dressing very much like a gay woman in this very, as you can imagine, kind of masculine kind of scene, the taxidermy scene in Montana. So, yeah, so basically we've extended to. There's interviews and all sorts of other stuff. But anyways, that was the kind of core idea behind the Believer. And it has been sort of mislabeled as, oh, we're just nice, or, oh, we just want everyone to get along, or, oh, peace and love and no criticism. And, you know, I actually feel like we run quite a few critical essays. They're just not trying not to use the word snarky, but they're not snarky. And so anyways, in the midst of all this, I also write nonfiction. I also teach writing. And so then I had to write another. Had to write another book. And so basically, has anyone here ever read in the Lake of the woods by Tim o'? Brien? No. Put that very instantly at the top of your reading list. So essentially, I was looking, you know, as a writer, and I'm sure, you know, writers are thieves. You know, I think every artist is a thief. And so essentially, I just sort of have my. I have my robber gloves on all the time, my burglar gloves, and when I'm reading or when I'm watching a movie. And so I stole essentially from Tim o' Brien this. He has. It's a three part structure, so it's a three part narrative, which is what I have. And the whole narrative, forward motion is that you. You kind of sign on to this book thinking that you're going to get one kind of an answer. But as in the Antonioni's Blow Up. Any of you who have taken a film class ever in your life, I'm sure you were forced to watch that, or even if you got an education, you were forced to watch that. A liberal arts education. But anyways, that's where the photograph. Someone thinks that they see a murder in a park, right? But you can't really tell if there's a corpse back there in this photograph or not. So it gets blown up and blown up and blown up. And there's this kind of moment where the information in the photograph, suddenly, as you get closer to the object, it starts to sort of dissipate. And I love that. I love that narrative move where you think you're Going towards something to get one kind of an answer. And then suddenly it all kind of like pixelates. It's almost like too much information. And it kind of makes you. It brings you face to face with the notion of what are you trying to answer? Not only what are you as a reader wanting to answer, but what other questions. What's the purpose of this particular narrative? Like, is it trying to bring you or what's the most satisfying journey that you can go on through a narrative? And I find with books, when there's an answer where you feel like you're reading, you're reading, you're reading, you're reading, ah, that's the answer and you put it down. I feel like that book ends for me there. And I don't tend to go back and re experience the experience of reading that book because the experience was all about finding out an answer. And for me, books that stick with me and that I feel I revisit them in my head as emotional experiences. It's a book where you're both sort of tricked into wanting to turn the pages really quickly. And I use tricked in the least pejorative sense of the word, if there is such a thing. But then you're also sort of left with this sort of bigger contemplation of what it was you were after in the place. First. First place. If suddenly there is no notion of this is the answer, right? Because you know, in life there rarely is an answer. And especially when you start introducing different characters and different threads and people. So essentially this book, it's three different sections. Two are told from the perspective of one person. Here when she's very young and here when she's a little bit older. And the middle section is told from the perspective of her therapist. She has essentially faked her abduction, or you're not sure if she has or not. And she goes to this therapist and essentially just feeds him this whole story that she's created and he buys it and then he ends up writing a story about her. And I was interested in this idea of kind of competing narratives, especially after, well, you know, there seemed to be this kind of spate of disappearing girls. I know that they disappear all the time, but it seems like sometimes the media really cares about it and other times they don't. So around the Elizabeth Smart time, it's sort of like upper middle class white girls disappearing seems to sort of be like, I don't know, a theme that they were hitting for a while. And what was always interesting to me about those girls is that you get sucked into that narrative, right? Of, like, what happened to them? Where did they go? They're missing. And then when they get found, that's it. Like, there's no more. And then suddenly you start getting, like, the book that the parents wrote that's about how, you know, they all found God and everything's great, and you're still like, yeah, but what happened to her? You know, you want to know. She disappeared. And there's never. And it's almost like the newspapers have their version of the story, the family has their version of the story. The girl, because she's frequently a minor, never gets to tell her story. And so there's this sort of. There's this narrative I use now. It's like it's a narrative trick in a bad way where you've been tricked into caring about this. But then they don't actually pursue it, or they don't show you sort of these competing needs around this incident, these story needs, right? Everybody has a different kind of story need attached to this event. The parents have a story need, a narrative need. They need to sort of fit. They need to have a narrative to tell. And I think in. So, you know, and I'm obviously poking quite a bit of, I think, hopefully respectful fun at the therapy industry in this book, but I also feel like that's a. When therapy gets lazy, when therapists get lazy, there is this way that they. They can help you understand, understand or process, I guess, your life by making it into a story, right? And suddenly you have this story that is your life. But the minute you sort of commit to that story, you realize there's like 99.9999% of your life that's kind of been erased from this very clean narrative arc. And you realize you could probably tell like 17 different stories about your life, all would be equally true. But I have sort of found, with various research that I've done in the therapy industry, that there is this kind of, to me, sort of dangerous desire to help people create a story that in the end isn't particularly true or isn't particularly truer than many other stories you could tell about yourself. And this sort of multiplicity, I guess, of stories feels. Feels like it's being kind of squeezed in a way. And it's like you kind of have to, like, this is your line, you know, this is your line. This is your party line. This is who you are. And so I'm playing around with that, obviously, a little bit and looking at the way that to commit yourself to a story. Whoa. That's what I would be saying if I actually was telling, saying what I really felt right now. And so anyways, and I was actually speaking, speaking with this reporter the other day about the whole notion of narrative ambiguity. And he and I were talking about how there does seem to be this cultural resistance to narrative ambiguity now that I didn't sense so much maybe 10 years ago. There's a movie called Safe by Todd Haynes. I don't know if anyone has seen that movie. Also put that on your list of great things to experience. Anyways, it was Julianne's sort of first role. It was as a disaffected, alienated housewife. Right. First of many. And essentially at the end you can't tell. And depending on when you see this movie in your life and depending on who you see it with the ending, she has an environmental allergy and you can't tell if she really does or if she just has. Has psychological problems and she's kind of creating this illness for herself so she can escape her life and escape this hellishly upper middle class, luxurious LA suburb. And at the end of the movie, and I've had different reactions depending on when I've seen it, she has either escaped this life and she's taken charge of her life or she has just let a different person imprison her. She's just in a different kind of a prison. And so it's that. And the last shot is just her looking in this mirror and she looks like shit. And it's supposed to be this kind of victorious moment. And at the same time it's so full of failure. And I just love that. I love that. But there's no answer to that movie. It's not telling you what to think. And that movie, when it came out, was really, really sort of loved. And now it's interesting. I was at a bunch of. When I first was traveling for this book over a year ago, when it was in hardback, I was at a lot of creative writing programs and I would talk about Safe Night and so many of them were just like, I hate that movie. It had gone from being this movie that had seemed to me as this sort of timeless, just some sort of one interesting way to tell a story. And now it had become sort of. Yeah, there was just no tolerance, I guess, for that lack of an ending, of a firm ending. And I guess you could argue that there's a way that ambiguity can be also kind of a trick or kind of a tease. And obviously there are fine lines between just failing to commit to something and then also trying to create an experience where the ambiguity is really suggestive and has a sort of multivalent effect on you. But anyways, that has been sort of one of these. Anyways, when I was talking to this back to the reporter, we were just saying how there is this and George Saunders. Do you guys know George Saunders? All right. Another person. You must read George Saunders. He just. He's an incredible fiction writer. But second of all, he wrote a book recently called the Brain Dead Megaphone, which is a collection of nonfiction essays. His first essay, the title essay, the Brain Dead Megaphone, is essentially. He sort of locates our cultural stupidity in the OJ Riding in the Bronco moment. He sort of has decided that culture and Americans ability to actually think for themselves and not just sort of like passively receive what they're being told started with the OJ in the Bronco moment. Because this was when suddenly the idea of what was important to know shifted from, oh, there are weapons of mass destruction somewhere, dah, dah, dah. And so it was just sort of like, here is the dumb story, and now everything has the same weight. He makes a joke about how now the news is in his hometown, Syracuse, New York. Half of the news or like a fraction of the news is about the war, and the rest of it is about, like, hey, it's really hard to park at the mall around the holidays, you know, and that's like a news story that's given the same weight. And so it ends up just sort of like blanking out your whole brain where you're just sort of like. You're just sort of in this receiving mode. And, you know, I would argue there's a kind of narrative danger, I guess, to being against ambiguity, to feeling like there is an answer. And, you know, hopefully as everyone's trying to figure out who the hell to vote for coming up, that function will be turned back on again since there's suddenly we're being made aware by. I mean, that's actually the one good thing about campaigns, is that they make you very aware of the computer stories there are out there. So, yeah, I could blather on endlessly about this, but I don't really have that much time. And probably I was told you guys are a really inquisitive bunch. This is how you were billed to me, just so, you know, so you could let me down right now and not ask any questions. But, yeah, so if you guys want to ask any questions or if you have any comments about anything, or even anything. I actually think, I think it's really valuable if there's other stuff that you've read or seen or whatever that you think kind of relates to what I'm talking about at all that we should put on our to do list. Which is also partially why I founded the Believer, because I felt like you always are in this position where you think, oh, what do I want to read, see do next? Right. And. And there's so many options out there and it's nice to kind of decide, okay, this is one area I trust. And people are going to tell me like, this is the next book you should read or this is the next movie you should see, et cetera.

So.

And I only would ever have that experience if I'd go to writers colonies or something and I'd meet other people who would suddenly like send you off on this totally other direction that you would never have gone on had you not encountered them.

Yes, I'm interested in the process of writing. Interested in the process of writing. How do you go about, I mean, when you start a novel or something, how much planning, how much do you just start writing? You know?

Yeah, well, I think this is so interesting. Someone should actually compile all the writer's answers to this because there's as many ways to do it as there are writers in the world. You know, my process is extremely inefficient. Basically, for every novel I have published, I have written a novel that was supposedly that novel and then threw it away. So. And each time it happens, I think, this time it's not going to happen. This time I'm going to start writing the novel that I'm writing and that will be the novel that I'm writing. So right now I'm writing that novel. I'm hopefully writing the novel that I'm writing, all the while knowing in the back of my head that it's very likely that this will not be the novel that I'm writing, that it's the pre novel to what I'm writing. But you obviously can't admit that to yourself while you're doing that, or else you would just be too depressed to get out of bed in the morning, you know, if you knew you were writing the novel that you had to throw away in order to write your novel, you know. But I also think it's difference between. I'm married to a writer as well, and his writing process is so incredibly different from mine. And he is just, he's an Eker outer, I say, you know, like he just Sort of like ekes out like a blood drop, you know, after like a week or something, like, you know, you know, sweating, sweating, sweating. And then one word goes on. I mean, it's not that extreme, but that's his process. Whereas I just sort of like wake up, you know, and suddenly I have this huge, huge mess that then I have to contend with. And I think in the end we each write about the same amount of publishable work in a year. It's just. I have this just, you know, forests and forests of worth of thrown out printouts of work that I have and thousands and thousands of words written that never get published. Whereas he sort of waits until he knows exactly what he wants to write and then it goes down and then it's pretty. It's pretty much as is when he writes it. So. And it's interesting because I, as I said, I teach also. And it's so, you know, you get into this kind of like diagnostic mode as a teacher where you try to figure out what someone's personality is and what their writing is like and try, you know, because they're. It's hard. It's hard to start out writing a book. I think it's extremely hard. And I actually made one of my students cry last fall because she had written basically four chapters and there were a lot of problems with it and we were talking about it and it was just so. She just was like, well, I feel like I've worked so hard on this and da, da, da, da, da. And I just said, listen, you know, I wish I could be sympathetic, but I mean, I write whole books and throw them away. And quite frankly, if you don't cry when you're writing a book, then I don't know what to tell you. I probably can't really relate to you. This just seems like it's a bit of an arduous process in a way that completely invigorates me because it's different every time depending on what your subject matter is. And I try to. I'm very structure oriented, so I try to have different structures each time that somehow fit what I'm trying to explore thematically. So, yeah, you know, some people do outlines. I don't do outlines, although I did with this book because I got about two thirds of the way through and then I was just like, whoa. I had to do a chart to figure out where I was. So, yeah, I'm more of a just sort of wake up and write through the confusion. That's how I approach it. And my husband, Ekes out.

Does any of that lost material be going backstage?

That's interesting. I mean, you know what? That's exactly what it is. It's backstory. It's me doing the backstory work for my own novel. And I feel like that's the only way that I can figure out what it's about, I guess, is to write almost the context for it, you know. So, yeah, it's useful for that. And that's obviously not a small usefulness to have. It enables what comes, but it is a little. It's the moment when you realize you have to throw it away. I can't even tell you that's a bleak moment, you know, but then when it's gone, then you're just like, woo. You know, it's like, new file. No mistakes have been made yet on this file. You know, it's all. It's all good stuff from here on out, you know, so. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the ability to know when to cut your losses is a hard one. But also, you can't keep giving up on things either or, you know, it's always the same sort of. It's like criticism, you know, it's like you have to have this. This permeable, impermeable barrier up, you know, because you have to be able to hear what's not working, but you also have to be able to be secure enough in what you're doing that you can say, you know, what. What that person wants for me is not what I want. So that I reject, you know, this. That's hard to hear, but yes, bring it on. So, same thing with being your own critic and throwing your stuff away. So. Yes. You have the microphone.

Yeah. I was wondering if you thought that avoidance of the ability to hurt the.

Yes. Avoidance of answers.

Ambiguity. Avoidance of ambiguity was sort of peculiarly American. And if it's something you see in literature elsewhere.

Yeah. Well, that's interesting. I do feel like it is more American. And it's interesting too, just to sort of. It's not just American, it's very. I feel like it's very related to where we are in time. You know, there was recently an article in the New York Times about last year at Marienbad, you know, that famous 60s new wave movie. And of course, you know, I also didn't see that until I was in college, so I didn't know the history behind it. Well, it turns out this completely opaque 60s new wave movie that no one can make sense of, for the most part. It has no actual sense. You Know, I mean, it's a. Whatever. It's plotless and et cetera. It's just being re. Shown in New York right now, which is where I live. And so the writer wrote about the history of this novel's coming to America and he writes about. I mean, I feel like it's the same. It's happening in film too. It's like a story crisis that, that we're having or a story intolerance we're developing. But anyways, he talks about how in film, this was something that people were like dying for this film in New York, dying for it. Dying for this French new wave film that has no plot. And it came to New York and it was this crazy success and it was all anybody talks about in movies. I mean, at cocktail parties. And it was just this huge deal and it did really well across the entire country. You know, I mean, what. And to think that that would be an artistic experience that would actually be culturally popular, right. Or even culturally required or even culturally known about right now seems so unthinkable or hard to imagine. So. So obviously, I hate to get on that whole it's such a tiresome and ultimately futile oh, we're just getting dumber over time argument, you know, and so. But I do feel like as a writer that, yeah, I resist it. I resist it and I resist it as a reader. And I get really frustrated when people start giving me really easy answers. I'm just like, aw, dang, you have to, you know, you know, an editor went in and was just like, you know, you gotta kinda, you know, it has this sort of. It has this. Yeah, it has this sort of like, the marketers would really like it if kind of meddling feel about it. So anyways, yeah, I don't know if that answers your question, but I do feel like it's more of a. Of a where we are now. I don't think that America has always been this way, but like, what we consider. Well, you know, same thing with the Oscars. You know, you look at what was nominated in the 70s for Best Picture and then you look at what's, you know, it's all. And same thing like these awards ceremonies and it just seems to be this kind of. It's just a signal of the decline of the industry in a way that it can't take chances anymore. It doesn't dare to take chances anymore anymore. And, you know, it just means there's just. We're not going to be able to do it the way we used to be able to. So.

Questions? Thank you so much for coming to Google, Heidi.

Thank you very much.