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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Writer and radio personality Sarah Vowell tells Death Cab for Cutie's Christopher Walla about the ghosts haunting her new book, "Assassination Vacation," and why life is brighter since her turn in "The Incredibles"
Apr 26, 2005 | Editor's note: At the height of Kerry fever last October, I interviewed Death Cab for Cutie guitarist and producer Christopher Walla about playing on the Vote for Change tour. In the course of our conversation about politics and rock music, he expressed intense admiration for "This American Life" contributor (and former Salon columnist) Sarah Vowell, whose collection of personal essays, "The Partly Cloudy Patriot," had moved him to read, of all things, the Declaration of Independence. "I can't think of a book I've bought for more people," he told me. "I just keep giving my copy away, and I keep asking for it back."
I called Walla recently to see if he would be interested in talking about Vowell's latest, "Assassination Vacation," and he agreed. Taking a quick break from his production responsibilities on Death Cab's new record, Walla connected with Vowell by phone -- he in Seattle, and she in Chicago -- on a stop on the publicity tour for her new book. Part travelogue, part memoir, part history lesson, "Assassination Vacation" is a fascinating retelling of the assassinations of presidents Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley -- of the lives those men lived, of the circumstances surrounding their deaths, of the monuments, statues and preserved residences we have to remember them by. As Vowell tours the country, inspecting even the tiniest commemorative plaques and scrutinizing even the flimsiest scraps of criminal evidence, she reminds readers of our rich American history and of the caretakers, docents and volunteers working tirelessly to keep that history alive today.
Vowell's journey is nothing less than a pilgrimage; as she notes in her introduction, her mission is to venerate relics of those presidential pasts. Below, Walla talks with her about that mission, her obsession with death, "The O.C." and why an essay is like a Manhattan apartment.
-- Hillary Frey
P.S. To hear a sample of Sarah Vowell reading from "Assassination Vacation," click here.
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Congratulations on your book. I have to ask, are you in Illinois having something to do with the anniversary of Lincoln's death?
No, just a coincidence. I'm here for the book tour.
You've written about Lincoln and talked about Lincoln a lot. But how did the whole infatuation start? Was it fifth-grade history class?
I've always liked him. He's sort of likable. But I honestly don't know. I'm not very good at talking about why I do things.
When I first started this project, there were a lot of things that I didn't know. So one day in a rush I just ordered a whole bunch of books like, click-buy, click-buy, click-buy, and they showed up and half of them, unbeknownst to me, were children's books. And I think it said something to me about the subject of American history that half the books on it seem to be for children, because all the subjects I was interested in -- like Seward brokering the purchase of Alaska -- this seemed to imply to me that if you're over the age of 9 you're not supposed to care about this stuff anymore.
I was wondering when I got the book if it was going to work, because this is the first thing you've done that's like a big, single concentrated piece. It's not a collection of essays. Was that different for you?
Yeah, I had wanted to do that for a long time, just as a technical exercise as much as anything. There's so much pressure on an essay to be so distilled and boiled down and perfect.
An essay is like a Manhattan apartment. Every piece of furniture needs to have at least two functions and everything has to fit in a certain amount of space and there's no messing around, there's no room for the snow-globe collection. It's just so compact and efficient. And I wanted to spread out a little more; I wanted more space. It's also how my brain works -- I'm a "one thing leads to another" sort of writer. And this project was very conducive to that, because I just kept stumbling onto stuff that would lead me down all these side roads and back roads.
This book actually started out as an essay. But I very quickly figured out that there was too much. I was finding so much that it wasn't going to fit into a little tiny box.
Were you planning to write about just one president?
When I first started, my idea was way shorter. It was going to be about all the political assassinations, including the '60s ones, but I realized that I had an aversion to writing about those. JFK -- so much has been written about that -- and then Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, it's just so sad ... Especially Martin Luther King, I have so much reverence for. I couldn't figure out a way to write about him without being a cliché.
And those wounds are still so fresh. They haven't been dead that long and their families are still alive and are actively mourning. So, sometimes I get into trouble with my innate tact ... I'm kind of nice. And I don't like to pry. It's one of the reasons I've cut down on being a regular reporter -- because I'm not a very good interviewer. I don't pry. I don't want to. And I just don't want to hurt anybody.
So then I decided just to focus on the presidents, and it seemed like there was just so much distance between the McKinley assassination, or the Garfield assassination or the Lincoln assassination [and the present] that there was more wiggle room to be honest or irreverent sometimes.
But the other deciding factor was Robert Todd Lincoln. Pretty early on I figured out that he had been there at his father's deathbed, that he had been there at the train station with Garfield, and he was in Buffalo getting off the train when McKinley was shot. And I wanted to write about the Lincoln memorial, and he attended the dedication of that in 1922. So once I knew he was there at the three assassinations and at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial, it was like I had this nice little frame to hang the book on.
