Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
When I was reading "How We Are Hungry" I was struck by something: It seemed less angry than your stuff in the past. I don't mean to say that both "Heartbreaking Work" and "Velocity" were similar books, but they both felt fueled in large part by anger.
"Heartbreaking Work" is a really angry book in a lot of places. It was meant to be and I'm fine with it being that way, but I can't really tap into that as much anymore.
What changed?
Well, there was a lot of solipsism to "Heartbreaking Work." The book itself talked about that, about the self-centeredness of people that age. It was supposed to be an indictment of that, too -- about how you're 25 and you truly think your thoughts and your goals are the main engine that keeps the world turning. And that's true and completely ludicrous at the same time. Anyway, I think that's why so many first novels are either semi-autobiographical or baldly autobiographical, because at that age, you're really trying to figure out your own sense of self and what you are and what you mean to the world. I think "Velocity" might have been a transitional book, and this book, I think, is inching to go further. I mean, outside of journalism, I didn't even write in the third person until this collection.
Did you find that tough? Freeing?
I think in general it's an effort -- not an effort, but an inevitability that I've been moving further and further away from self-analysis and self-concern and just more into ... I'm trying to put it in a way that's not really corny. 826 Valencia [the tutoring center in San Francisco] was really born out of a feeling that I'd spent a good year and a half pretty much alone writing the unpublished book, and then "Velocity," thinking what I was writing was so crucial to the world that I had to spend all this time just doing that and thinking about it, to the exclusion of all else.
We lived in Costa Rica for a while, then Iceland, and all the while we weren't speaking English much, and we were just these people living in little shacks, writing books, without any contact with anyone, without any ties to the community. And living that way, you spend far too much time inside your own head. You're really not re-energized with your connection to people and just how, I don't know, soul-strengthening that can be.
I lost a bunch of people in my life in those years, between 2000 and 2003, a couple of suicides among them, and not that I wasn't in touch with mortality before, but I became more so in terms of people my age. I had always advised my friends that were really depressed and directionless to try to direct some of that energy outward and get involved in other people's lives and help people -- to address the concerns and needs of people who are even needier than they. So many people I knew were just tearing themselves up and devouring themselves, full of regret and torment, and I had this theory, based on nothing, really, that they might be saved if they leave the house and use their educations and healthy arms and brains to help people who might need their expertise or energy. But it was weird, because I would always advise this but I wasn't really taking the advice so much myself.
Tell me a little about how 826 Valencia started.
When we moved back to San Francisco -- that was in summer of 2001 -- right away we rented this building in the Mission District. We didn't have 501(c)(3) status; we had nothing. We just sort of rented the building and started tearing it up. It was a mess when we moved in. I convinced a high school friend of mine, Barb Bersche, to move out, and she and Vendela and I just started getting this building together and buying computers and that kind of thing, without really any definite clue of what we were doing.
I had friends who were teachers in San Francisco, and we'd been talking about how we could get the writing community involved in the public schools on a pretty massive scale, and we had an inkling it would work. And personally, it was just an effort to get out of my head a little bit and be able to come home at night and talk about something other than my own writing.
I already know you're going to hate this next question, but I feel it has to be asked. Let me put it like this: When I wrote that piece a while back in the Believer [dealing with the literary world's fetishization of youth], I ended up on a panel talking about it. Anyway, there was this notion that I was the "McSweeney's guy," as if I'd sat around a fire with you and [co-editor] Heidi Julavits concocting something, when the reality was I'd just pitched Heidi cold, and then wrote a piece. I guess what I'm getting at is the animosity that is, within the little world you were just describing, directed at McSweeney's, and what your thoughts are about that.
Just a warning, it's definitely not a subject I want to get too far into. It gets into crazy people, and it always puts me in a bad mood to talk about crazy people. I personally don't ever hear much about people like your panelist friend, because here in San Francisco it's a sort of ridiculously supportive atmosphere. What always cracked me up about some of the initial reaction by a few to the Believer was that here was this magazine that was designed to talk calmly, enthusiastically and intelligently about books, and some people were, I guess, threatened by that.
At the beginning, it was very much like the Believer was saying, "Hey everyone, let's be a bit more mature and calm when we talk about books, and here's some good stuff you might not have heard about." And of course that got certain people even angrier.
It's pretty funny, when you think about it, right? It's like an anti-violence movement being crushed by military force. You can't win, right? I think almost every writer in the world would hope that books would be always talked about with respect and civility and depth and seriousness. It's not such a controversial position, when you really think about it.
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