We’re taking a summer-long hiatus to stock up on interviews for ya’ll. The sun is shining and we’ll be typing and talking, what about you?

xoxo

Team DoY

On May 2, 2013, he won a National Magazine Award for his article entitled “Fear of a Black President.”

When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Tony Dorsett, the running back for the Dallas Cowboys. That’s what I wanted to be.

Did you play a lot of football on your own or was that just sort of a….?

I did, but I didn’t play too much on account of not being very good. You know, it was just something we did in the neighborhood, threw the football and ran around a lot, yeah, a lot of fun.

And were you a kid who told a lot of stories?

No, but, you know, I did ask a lot of questions. I asked a lot of questions. I really annoyed my brothers and sisters, I remember that.

You were the kid who was always saying, “Why? Why?”

Yes, that was me.

What was it you wanted to know?

Everything! I mean that was how I ultimately got into writing. Professionally I started off in journalism and the thing about journalism is, it’s a license to ask anybody anything. For a kid like me that was exciting, you know?

My dad read a lot, I do know that. My mom read a lot, there were books all over the house.

Your father actually ran a publishing company, right?

He did, he ran a small publishing company so there were books everywhere.

I was voracious, man. My natural inclination was to read.

Was there an early reading experience that was important to you?

Yeah, Choose Your Own Adventure. I was just like, “Wow, you get to sit in the driver’s seat.”

A lot of writers talk about that moment when they’re reading and they realize that someone actually wrote the story, that there’s someone behind the story.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think what you’re describing similar, right? That feeling that you wanted to control the narrative.

Yeah it was totally similar. It’s the idea that, “Hey you can’t do it.” You know what I mean? Choose Your Own Adventure says, “Yes, you can control the story.” It’s not even wondering, “Can I?” The answer is, “Yes, you can.” It’s actually not that much of a leap from saying, “I can control the story” to “I can actually write the story.”

And did you? Did you begin to write around that point?

Yeah, but I mean there were other things in my life, like hip-hop was really big and to some extent hip-hop isn’t big on storytelling. Some of it is, but the big thing about hip-hop is the beauty of language. Rappers really, really love language and the best rappers have been really good at language and the notion that through precision of language, through the unlikely coordination of language, you can paint imagery in people’s heads. And that in and of itself could be delightful.

On top of loving storytelling, on top of having all these questions, I really, really liked language; I really liked the way words sounded. They were like instruments, as far as I was concerned.

Did you write hip-hops songs and play with language?

I did, I did. I was really bad at it. I did a lot of things I was really bad at – which I think is very important, by the way. I didn’t really care that I wasn’t good at it. I really enjoyed it.

And you listened to a ton of hip-hop.

It was constant, it was the soundtrack of my childhood. It was just everywhere.

And I went through a long period, once I got to writing, of not being very successful but I kept doing it because I liked it.

You grew up with many siblings.

Yeah, there were seven of us – four women and kids rotating. I lived with my mother and my father, a parade of brothers and sisters that were there at any particular point in time, so I saw all of them at varying degrees. I loved them very much. I had people who loved me very much who looked out for me.

My dad had been somebody who had read a lot as a kid so reading was very, very important to him. He had opened up this small independent press that was top-notch so all the things that I wanted in terms of reading were just right at hand. But in the geographic community I lived in, that value was not too widely shared. And to be fair to that community, I don’t know that if had we been somewhere else those values would’ve been widely shared. Reading, just for the hell of it and not for school, is not exactly a prized value anywhere right now. So I don’t put that so much on them. At the same time, there were people around me who recognized that I did read and that that was a good thing and that was always encouraged.

And I guess since your dad had this independent press, you were sort of privy to the whole process of how a book comes into the world. So for you writing and the world of books must not have felt very distant. It must’ve felt pretty natural, close to home.

It did. I didn’t quite realize that people could make a living at it, but I did know that people wrote books, I was very aware of that.

Did your father and mother encourage you in that direction?

Reading was more encouraged than writing. But having said that, once I started writing as I got older it thrilled my parents to no end.

You went to Howard University.

I did.

That’s a pretty unique experience on the American college scene. What was college like for you? Were you writing?

There is this sort of narrative around black people who are into intellectual things – particularly with this generation, I don’t know about previous generations but particularly with this generation – about the distance between us and, you know, other black folks. I didn’t have that at all. I didn’t feel that at all. I went to Howard and there were 10,000 black folks there and there were black folks of all stripes, of all kinds. I didn’t really find it too hard to find other black people like me. So I never had any sort of notion of blackness as being tied to not valuing intelligent things. That didn’t really exist for me.

In that way it gave me a sort of safety, because I think when I went out into the world as a writer, um…. I don’t know how to say this. It’s like it’s one thing if something racist happens to you when you’re a child, right? Like a lot of my peers who are writers, my wife is the same way – they were “only-ies” in their school, like they were the only black kid in their AP program or their gifted program or their talented program. They were distinguished because they were black and intelligent, okay? I was never distinguished because I was black and intelligent. I don’t have that as an experience at all. You definitely can’t have that as an experience at Howard; everybody is black and intelligent there. It doesn’t really mean anything to be black and intelligent, there’s nothing singular about that, you’re not original, you don’t have anything particular. So I never had that as a burden, right? I didn’t come into contact with that until much, much later in my life and I think by then I was really, really steeled to that and I think part of the steeling was going to a place where that just wasn’t the case.

I was speaking with Sanford Biggers, the artist, and he said how his sister went to Harvard and that she always felt that people were like, “Oh you went to Harvard and you’re black,” like people were questioning her, like she only got in because she was black.

Yeah nobody reacts to you like that when you go to Howard.

Yeah, so Sanford didn’t want the experience that his sister had, which is why he chose to go to Morehouse. Was your decision to go to Howard motivated similarly?

No, cause I didn’t know anybody – like I didn’t know black people who went to Harvard or Yale or anything, like I didn’t even know anyone who did anything like that. I didn’t know people who did things like that, I didn’t know what their lives where like. It was so abstract to me whereas Howard was something I knew. My dad worked over there and everyone in my family who was middle-class went to historically black colleges. I only had an abstract conception of what the “white world” was. There was no direct tie in my life to that.

Did you begin to write seriously in college?

Yeah that was about the time I started writing poetry. I started late in high school and continued into college. Most of that stuff reflected my really simplistic quasi-black nationalist politics. You know, a lot of sister Nubian queen stuff… I recall a “Kill Whitey” poem. “Kill Whitey” poetry is like, “Uh, well I don’t know anything but I know I’m angry at white people so…” A lot of dumb stuff like that.

One of the cool things was that there was a literary tradition at Howard. There were writers that went there; Toni Morrison went to Howard, Zora Neale Hurston went to Howard. So again, it wasn’t this situation where you can just walk in and say, “Hey, I’m black and I write.” Nah, that ain’t special, that’s already been done, plenty of people did that. So there were people there who critiqued that sort of thing, they said, “Man you ain’t really saying nothing.”

That was probably a really good thing.

Oh yeah, it was excellent. You couldn’t write these people off and say, “You only saying that ‘cause you white.” You couldn’t really disqualify them, you really didn’t have a crutch to lean on. They were saying ‘cause they knew, they knew more about black literature than you did. So they were more than equipped to tell you why you weren’t really talking about nothing and why what you were writing wasn’t very good.

It was a great place to get disabused of things and of notions that you would’ve had going in. It just takes the racial element right out of it. You could never say these people are saying something to you because they don’t understand where you’re coming from. They know exactly where you’re coming from. They know more about where you’re coming from than you do.

You were writing poetry but you also started to become interested in journalism, right? You dropped out of Howard to work as a journalist?

I started writing journalism while I was at Howard. I started writing for the school newspaper and then I started writing for the alternative paper in the city. After doing that for about a year or two… See, I kind of knew even when I got to Howard that I didn’t really belong in college. I wasn’t very good at school and I probably wasn’t going to be good at school. I knew that but I didn’t really want to accept what that meant, so I kept going.

Once I started working for the city paper it became clear that I actually could do something, that all this reading and all this curiosity that I had had all these years actually had some application somewhere. Wow, who knew? That was like a revelation. At that point I said, “This is clearly where I belong.” And it took about two more years before I said, “It’s really, really time to go.” In between that I was off-and-on, I would leave for a little while and the come back, I went back and forth.

How did your parents feel about that? Were they stressed out that you were going to leave school?

Yeah, they hated it, everybody hated it. Nobody liked it, nobody said, “This is a great idea Ta-Nehisi.”

But you were convinced that it was?

Yeah, I just didn’t – at that point what I remember is that I knew that I wanted to be a writer and it was not at all clear to me that by staying in school I was gonna become a better writer. I couldn’t see the point. I was bad at it (school) and not only was I bad at it, but it wasn’t going to help me get to where I wanted to go.

Didn’t it scare you in some way – the way society is set up now, a college degree is a basic prerequisite to do anything?

You’re right, but again, going back to what I was saying earlier, I had never really been good at anything. I had a great degree of failure in my life and so what? I was going to risk more failure so, you know, “Alright, fine.”

That’s a pretty gutsy move, especially when your whole community and family is telling you “Don’t do that. Stay in school.”

I wanted to be good at writing, that was all I had and that was all I could really think about.

What was your first move when you left college? What did you do?

I kept writing for the city paper and I started freelancing.

And where were you living? Did you move back home?

No I had a place by then. I was living in D.C. in a small efficiency. I kept living there and I tried to freelance a little bit. I just kept writing, I just kept writing.

Shortly after I left, maybe a year or two after I left college, the young lady who I was seeing at the time – my current wife – became pregnant. I would’ve been 23 or 24 when that happened. So that was a big shift, but it actually didn’t make me say, “Oh now you should go back to college and get a regular job,” you know? What it made me say was, “Well, you really better be good at this writing thing.”

Because now it’s not just you taking the risk anymore.

That’s right, that’s right. So talking about other things that I think really helped me in terms of my writing, it was really my son because I didn’t spend a lot of time in my twenties doing the sort of things that twenty-year-olds usually do. I did go out and have a good time and all that but when somebody else is at stake, when you have a family at that age, it ages you. I think especially for young men, you’re willing to do dumb things that endanger you but once you’ve got a family it becomes a lot harder to do dumb things that will endanger them. Because if something happens to you, that somehow has an effect on them. You have to decide who you’re going to be in that situation. So all of this kind of set into me really taking my writing more seriously.

When you said you were trying to freelance, did you just sort of cold pitch places?

Yes I did, I cold-pitched, you’re exactly right. I cold-pitched everywhere and got nowhere. Sometimes I would have a name but that didn’t make any difference, none of that did anything.

No?

No.

It’s a tough thing because what I realized later was that this (industry) is totally about who you know. There are actually too many good ideas in the world. There are a lot of bad ideas, don’t get me wrong, but even then there are not enough front pages for all the good ideas. What makes the different is having a relationship with people. I had no relationship with anyone at that point, so it was tough, it was really, really tough. I got a couple of breaks. I did a horrible job at this alternative paper in Philly, just a really awful job.

Why was it so awful?

I don’t think they knew what they wanted to do and I don’t think they knew why I was there or that I was quite clear on why I was there. I didn’t really have guidance, you know what I mean?

What were you hired to do?

I was hired to write a lot of assignments I wasn’t stimulated by. I can remember the last assignment before I got fired that I got chewed out about. You had to write about your cubicle and I was like, “I couldn’t care less.” I think I had that job for about 5 or 6 months and I basically got fired. My son was two months old when it happened.

Had you moved down to Philly with the whole family?

Well she (his wife) was working at a newspaper in Delaware which was a 30 minute commute so I moved up to Delaware. At the time she was at home on leave and it had been a really, really difficult pregnancy, she had almost died, she had congestive heart failure, it was really bad.

Oh my gosh! That’s awful.

Yeah it was pretty bad. It’s interesting hearing you react to that because in the moment this was not my reaction.

No?

No, I think I…. So I talked about growing up in Baltimore, right? There was a great degree of violence in the city that I was exposed to and involved with, was a victim of, etc. And one thing about violence is that it doesn’t do you well to think too much about it. You just try to move on and get through it. I was really trying to get through it and I don’t think I thought too much about how horrible it was. I know I didn’t because the day I got fired I came home and I was like, “Alright we should move to New York,” because we had been thinking about it. So Kenyatta, who was not my wife at the time – we only got married like two years ago though we were deeply committed to each other – she started at a copyediting job in New York. She got the job first so for two or three months she actually commuted to New York. Sometimes she would stay the week up there with friends and come back on the weekend.

That must’ve been so difficult with a two-month old.

Yeah, I was taking care of the kid at that point.

You were home with your son, were you also looking for writing gigs?

I was. I was writing for The Washington Monthly mostly and almost basically writing for free. They paid 10 cents a word; you weren’t there to get paid. I will say this: that aside, it was a great place to be. I think what writers need more than anything is a field to practice on and I had a field to practice on there.

Did you have other jobs at the same time?

When Kenyatta first got pregnant, and I was in D.C., I delivered food, like a delivery guy. When we finally moved up to New York, after a year of just being in utter depression, I started doing that again, I was a food delivery guy for a while. That was actually a decent job. I would do my bagel and coffee in the morning, I would just sit in the car and put on sports talk radio and, you know, just sort of drive around the city delivering food. It was pretty good.

At least you didn’t have to be on a bike. The bike delivery guys in the New York, that seems like…

No, no that’s rough, I didn’t do that. I had a car, it was like a corporate thing, mostly hospitals, that sort of thing. And that was really how I learned the geography of New York. You drove everywhere; you drove into Manhattan, Queens, deep out into Brooklyn, and it was fascinating.

Then the security guard, he must’ve felt some pity for me, he said “Yeah I’m sorry man.” So I went home and emailed the woman again and said this is what happened and she said, “Oh I’m so sorry, I got caught up in this meeting da-da-da-dah, will you come back tomorrow?” I remember being angry about that, right? I thought it was really disrespectful and I called two of my friends, one of whom was my first editor, David Carr – he’s at the New York Times now – and I was really angry and I said, “This happened; why the hell do I have to go back?” and he said, “ ‘Cause you do. You just do. Eat shit. Move on. Do what you have to do. At this point you’re a kid; keep going.” So I went back and she stood me up again.

Stop it!

I sat there, yeah, and she said again, “I’m sorry,” and I called them again and I said, “Can you believe this shit happened?” and he (David Carr) said, “Yeah, that’s what happens here. Sorry, it does not sound that unusual to me. Go back again. This could be your key to something.” And I went back again and she did show up this time. So I started working there (The Village Voice) as a minority fellow.

At the end of that gig they came up with this idea; the idea was they wanted a column about black males and they wanted it to run weekly and they wanted me to write that column and I went home and I told my wife, “If I take that gig that will be the end of my career as a writer, you can just forget it because it’s a horrible idea and my writing – I won’t make that good, it will make me bad, that’s what’ll happen.”

It’s the opposite of what you were describing from your experience at Howard, where it’s not about being a black writer, it’s about being a writer.

Yeah, and it felt like the opposite of what I do right now. Even though I write about race a lot people don’t understand the difference of you being interested in writing about race and someone saying that’s what you do. So anyway, I came in a couple of days later and… I should back up a little bit. Preceding that – I didn’t want to tell this story but I think I probably should.

The story was: the Voice had this column “Press Clips” and “Press Clips” was really important to them and I didn’t quite understand why. Nevertheless, they fired the person who wrote it – as they often did without a plan – and, you know, they didn’t have anybody else to write it so they asked me to write it. So I did this and I would not by any measure say that I was particularly good at it. In fact, I hoped to only do it for a little while and then go on to something else. Whatever. I was worried about my kid, that’s what I was thinking about. So I did that. And here I was out to eat lunch with somebody one day, somebody close to me, and they said, “Hey this Press Clips thing, this is your beat, right?” And I said “Yeah,” and they said, “Well you know I hear that they’re interviewing people for that job,” and I thought, “Jesus, they actually assigned this to me but then they’re trying to shop it around at the same time.”

Nice move.

They admitted they were doing that and that it was absolutely horrible and that they shouldn’t have done it and – how do I say this? That gave me a sense of where I was working, like now I knew where I was working and what I was working with. So when this whole thing about black males happened – I just thought, you know, part of writing is that you have to able to trust people and you have to believe that not only are they looking out for the product’s interest but they’re looking out for your interests. And it became pretty clear to me that that would not happen. So, I left. And I left without any sort of anything, without any gig lined up, without any sense of where I might go, what might happen. I didn’t have any of that.

Wow.

My wife was not like, “Man you gotta have have something.” She said, “Okay, you said you gotta leave, you gotta leave then.” She totally, totally supported it. So I left.

But the good thing is that by then I had begun to write for some other people so by then, you know, I was a writer. I had a few contacts, not a lot, but I had a few. I went to TIME magazine. And a few months after I got to TIME they had layoffs.

Oh no.

And they have been having layoffs every year since. I didn’t get laid off then but the next round that they had was about a year and a half later and I did get laid off. And at that point I was like, “somebody must be sending me a message.” I knew I was gonna write, I just thought maybe I’d have to make my career doing something else. So I wanted to be a cab driver, that’s what I really wanted to do.

Oh yeah?

Yeah. My wife was like, “You can’t do that.”

The good news was that when I left TIME, I had been working on this little story about Bill Cosby and the most upsetting thing about getting laid off was the notion that that story was gonna die. I was so sad about that. And the good news was that my old editor, David Carr, had this contact at The Atlantic and I had this story and I really, really wanted this story to come out and lo and behold they said yes. That would’ve been 2007 and I have not looked back since.

That’s a pretty great place to sort of stumble into, right? The Atlantic, that’s a good home for a writer.

Yeah, it’s a great home. No matter what happens from here on in, I just feel like I will always owe them. There’s no question about that at all.

They didn’t just take the story; they took the story and they took it at great length, like 6,000 words or even 8,000 words, which is looooong. Really, really long. But it was the sort of long writing I had come into the business doing when I was at the city paper. They didn’t just take it, they said, “You gotta do what you do. Go do what you think you should do.” It had been, like, 10 years since somebody had said something like that to me.

That must’ve been incredible.

It was but it was also deeply scary while I was working on it. Because at the same time I was writing my first book and I just remember thinking, “If this don’t amount to nothing then I really got to find some other way because this is it right here.” You know? Somebody says, “You go do you, you do what you think you can do,” and if nothing comes of it then that’s who you are, you know? This was the moment when I knew, “Okay, this article and the book are really going to be unvarnished me and if it don’t move nobody then, okay, that’s what it is.” I would’ve kept writing but, again, it would’ve gone on that list of things I was not very good at.

So terrifying, so much at stake.

Yeah, yeah, but it worked out.

While you were freelancing, what was life like?

We lived in Brooklyn for a year and then we moved to Harlem and we lived in Harlem basically for about six years, from 2004 to 2010. At 131st and Lenox Ave., which I loved. I really, really loved Harlem. It was everything I loved about, you know, African-American communities but it was multiplied by ten.

It was wild, it was wild.

And looking back at that time, is there something that you think that you would tell your twenty-something self that you think it would’ve benefited you to know?

No, no, nobody can tell you about getting punched in the face, you gotta get punched in the face.

You just have to let it happen?

Yeah I think so. I think all of it really needed to happen.

And would you give any advice to young writers who are struggling to sort of get their bearings?

Yes: keep going, keep going, don’t quit. Failure has a lot more to do with who quits than it does with who has talent.

Interview by Astri von Arbin Ahlander
Photo by Liz Lynch

Hoytema is affable, self-deprecating, and quick to chuckle. He can be seen rambling the streets of Stockholm dressed in layers of black, always with a camera around his neck and seasonably impractical sneakers on his feet.

You were born in Switzerland to Dutch parents. What’s the story?

My dad was studying there and my mom followed. They were living together in Zurich. That is why I was born there, it was pure practicality. And one year later we moved back to Holland.

Your dad was studying architecture, right? He’s an architect.

Yes.

I find that interesting, that you dad is an architect and you’re a cinematographer. There is something there, a parallel I am trying to get at. Both architects and cinematographers are artists working within very technical media who need to adapt to wills and budgets dictated by others.

Accommodating arts, you could say. You don’t carry the full responsibility of the functionality of your art or your contribution. Maybe that’s a parallel. But the parallel that I see more between my dad’s job and mine is that I just absolutely didn’t want to become an architect!

[Laughs.]

Because he was one?

Yeah. I think it’s a beautiful profession to be an architect. And to a certain extent it is very similar to what I do, because there is always so much politics involved before you actually get to do the nice things. There’s money, and financing, and whatever you do has also to be utilized by a lot of people.

But I thought many aspects of my father’s work were just so boring. A lot of the people he had to deal with were so dreadfully boring! And I think that is maybe more interesting in my profession, it’s not that accommodating, the whole filmmaking business is not that accommodating. You can get financing for much more free, much more loose, much more sort of theoretical things, and that is very difficult in architecture. Once you’re getting to the stage where you actually have to build, all the elements that are obstructing you from being really free are just too many, I think.

How did your family feel about you going into the arts?

My dad always supported me in what I wanted to do. My older brother became an architect.

So he got one down!

He did. But it was absolutely not his intention to get any of us down; he absolutely had a very relaxed mentality toward his profession. He didn’t see it as honorable, something that people should do – absolutely not. I think my father would have been happier if I had been a musician.

Happier if you were a musician?

Well, he’s a sensitive, melancholic man who believes in the arts! [Laughs.] And in people expressing their feelings. And I think, deep inside, he would have wanted to be that himself, if he only could. But he couldn’t. He just wasn’t in any way musical.

No, my parents were pretty easy. And when I would fuck up in school, which I consistently did, they complained but they were always trying to find out what I wanted so they could support that. If I threw a turd against the wall when I was a very small child, they would buy me paints.

Ha! He wants to express himself! You knew you wanted to go into film pretty early, because you applied to film school already when you were seventeen. That must have been right out of high school.

I applied, twice. I got turned down. When I applied from high school, I was just so immature, I just had some sort of idea that I wanted to do that. I think that at some point these ideas start to formulate themselves into drives. It is very hard to define where that comes from, but I really wanted it badly. I didn’t have an 8 mmm camera in my father’s closet, I just had some idea about how this was and how it could be and what it meant.

Did you have some early film experiences that made you think you wanted to go into film?

I do remember that I realized that – at some point – films could be made in good ways and bad ways. I remember on television we had some sort of a “good” television channel that would transmit retrospective films of directors and I remember seeing, like, three films in three weeks by Nicolas Roeg – in a way I was still too young for it. Even though I know that today these films are very dated – I think I’ve seen some recently – but the way that he constructed the story, the way he used the visuals to tell the story, I mean, that made an impression and it kind of told me that, “There are very different angles and views on how you can make films.” I think that planted some sort of seed.

That was even before I knew of the existence of Buñuel or Godard or whatever. So, I think that’s maybe a little starting point.

Did you always know cinematography was what you wanted to do? Or did you think, you know, directing or…?

Not really. Yeah, I mean, in the first instance you think directing because you don’t really know, you have no idea what everything is.

But you know there’s a director.

You know there’s a director, you know there’s a medium, you know that the medium can be molded in different ways but you don’t really know who takes which kind of decision and what’s closer to you and what’s not. The thing is, I chose to be or I became a cinematographer when I went to the Polish film school. Because in the Dutch film school, you apply generally. But in the Polish film school they have two directions: one was writing and directing and the other one was director of photography. At that point you have to apply to either one of these directions. I thought about it and I… When I was going to study in Poland I really wanted to study, I think, to be very practical. I was not so much interested in the theoretical side of things, you know? I wanted, you know, to touch the cameras and I wanted to touch the lights…

But I’m still happy that I went in that direction.

Can you tell me a little bit about the role that you have defined for yourself and how you’ve seen that change from your early career to where you are now?

I think it starts with your film school. It’s an environment where everybody wants to really build definitions about cinematography and what it is and how you work and why you work. I think it’s a very threatened part because cinematographers always feel like artists but they always feel that they don’t have input and that they don’t get enough respect for their work, so they build a little church around what they do and it’s sort of a front. But I may be loosened up a little bit over that during the years and I found, opposed to a lot of other cinematographers, it most fun to work with directors. Most guys they thought it was a pain in the ass to work with directors.

They wanted to hold on to their…?

Yeah, they’re always defining… I was never so much interested in the pure aesthetical aspect but very much into the sort of psychological and philosophical aspect of the job. And one of the most inspiring things for me has always been to sort of work together with somebody, like work together with the director. I like very much this idea that my profession is sort of an accommodating art, you know? That I get presented with other people’s thoughts before I can develop those into something else. And in that way I think I’ve become much more humble and much more relaxed towards what your role as a cinematographer is. I mean, from being some sort of a free artist it changed and I’m much more a psychologist or a shrink you could say, you know?

So I have become much less snobby about cinematography through the years, I think.

You’ve also developed close relationships with directors. You work over and over again with directors that you work well with – I’m thinking specifically of Mikael Marcimain and Tomas Alfredson. It seems clear that once you learn each other’s language it’s much easier to communicate, you don’t have to go through that whole start-up process. Now you go into a project and you know how to talk about it.

There’s something inevitable with the way that I like to work, or that a lot of directors also like to work – it becomes so personal that you also inevitably develop friendships. I mean, if you have in the back of your head that it’s very important for you that people, whoever you cooperate with, feel extremely comfortable and feel extremely free to communicate with you and feel that their ideas get bounced in a very sort of sincere way – I can only imagine, but it must be pleasant for directors, you know? I mean, you know it with yourself: you have ideas and the moment you communicate an idea to another person or in other words, you bring it into the world and a lot of things can happen. It can die or it can come alive, and so much is dependent on those people that are close to you, you’re very dependent on how they accept or receive those ideas.

That has been very important in my cinematography, this kind of very sensitive and careful processing of other people’s brain farts. Of course you start working more with the same people because they feel secure, they feel safe, you feel in a comfort zone. And by being comfortable you can give some sort of a breeding ground to those ideas that otherwise don’t have the chance to see the light of day.

I read somewhere that you’re not a big fan of working strictly with storyboards on shoots and want to be more open to what the actual place and the weather and the actors that day bring to the table. I guess you need to be very comfortable with the director and the director with you in order to take that kind of risk.

I don’t have anything against storyboards and I understand totally the need for them and also [they] can be another process of communicating. The only thing is that the storyboard is just not a guarantee for coming up with good solutions. A guarantee to coming up with good solutions is to share the same frame of reference and to be on the same level feeling-wise and to know each other very well. In a very stressful situation on the set where you have a bunch of people waiting, you understand where somebody is and that person knows where you are. I mean, at those moments you can actually say, “Okay, let’s fucking clear the set. Everybody go to the craft table and let’s rethink this.” Then you rethink it together from a totally different ground than some sort of absolute truth that you have put on a piece of paper. This very often is very satisfying and a much more reliable source to build things from than, for instance, a storyboard.

I mean, the storyboard is a tool and what I am talking about is much more a philosophy or an idea or a mentality towards filmmaking.

Like you said, you also have to share a frame of reference in order to be able to do that kind of fast thinking. For each project that reference, the sort of codex or whatever, varies. I suppose it depends on how each director you work with is interested in building a visual language and doing that research, but what do you prefer? Do you use a lot of film references? Other photo references? Do you read a lot?

It depends for every project; every project is very different. Some directors, they want to watch ten movies and build a library and some directors they refuse to watch movies because they want to do something completely new or they don’t want to get spoiled by other people’s ideas about how to solve scenes and so on. I think it’s good to have a lot of references; you take many references and in that process you also eliminate, you know? You throw away what is good, you keep what is bad.

[Hoyte grins and points to a naïve caricature pencil drawing hanging on the wall; the drawing is rough, but the resemblance is unmistakable. It is Hoyte himself.]

Yeah, I think I recognize who that is.

It cost me two peanuts in Kinshasa, in Congo.

I love it, a piece of art. You said the word “mood” before. Looking at the work that you’ve done with different directors – again, I’m thinking mostly of Tomas Alfredson and Mikael Marcimain– mood seems to be very central.

Well I don’t know, I mean, that’s another thing that I got a little tired of, that whole sort of old-fashioned cinematography thinking. My professors, they always said, “It doesn’t matter what you do, but you have to be very consistent.” Through the years I stopped caring about that a lot. I just thought the whole concept – or to have so strong a concept – about something that is so dependent on little moments, chasing those little moments in the narrative but also on the set. I just felt like being some sort of a defender of that kind of concept; being [like that] on the set just makes you a machine. So more and more I started to disregard that and I started to also treat things in a moment with that whole bank of references, you know? So rather than having a concept or having some sort of pre-chewed idea about how film should be, I started more thinking: You don’t know yet really before you start and you have to sort of grow in it and you have to respond.

So, I think mood is important for every cinematographer, of course; but I think very often you see that concept wins a little over that and that is something I sort of… Yeah, I’m not so worried about that anymore.

Let’s go back to Poland and film school. You were there and you were talking about how you chose the cinematography focus also because of the language barrier. Did you speak Polish when you moved there?

No, you first enter year zero when you learn Polish. Then, after spending one year in Poland, hanging around some other people’s film sets and so on, you speak Polish after three months, you know?

It’s very sort of snobbish of them to run a school in Poland and call it an international film school and refuse to speak English whatsoever.

That’s very surprising, but it was a different time. What year were you there?

1992 or something, 1991.

What was it like to live in Poland during that time?

It was a fantastic time of course because we were sort of coming from all over the world – we had Koreans, we had people from Iceland, people from America, and it was all sort of dropouts like myself. You know, people that didn’t get accepted at their own film schools or people that sort of were a lot older and so on. There were lots of possibilities for weirdos from all over the place to come there because you had to be crazy enough to even be interested in it.

To go learn Polish.

Yeah, but then you live in a country that is going through a huge transition. It was still quite rough when we started living in Lodz, especially Lodz was a very rough city, you know? But you’re all together and you’re all sort of in the same boat so it’s very exciting, you really live in a weird bubble and it’s not luxurious but on the other hand you live in one of the most extreme patinated cities and Europe is in great transition and people are just focusing on politics and arts. So, it’s a very intense period. Then, but also in retrospect, I enjoyed it very, very much. I thought it was just a perfect environment.

You must have created a very strong community with your fellow classmates.

Yes, there are so many people that I studied with that I still today have contact with. When I go to Seoul in Korea or when I go to Berlin in Germany or to Iceland I can call somebody and say, “Hey listen, I’m in town.”

We veterans like to talk about it as if we have been to war, and of course it’s not but at the same time it’s something very strong that connects us somehow. We experienced something very specific at a very specific time and year and it was a very intense experience.

What was life like? Were you living in dorms or in apartments or…?

When I started there I was living in a student dorm – the school had sort of made a dorm for the foreign students. They didn’t support that super integration so much, which of course we all thought was ridiculous. They were just afraid that if they put us up at the same dorm in the suburbs as the Polish students in the poor dorms, the foreigners wouldn’t want to be there.

In retrospect it was quite romantic. You just also felt so good about living in a poor, poor country somehow; it’s a little bit weird, something strange with that also because you kind of think that you’re doing something good because of it, but you aren’t of course.

That you’re contributing something by being there?

Yeah, or you are at least tough enough to do that and that’s of course ridiculous.

Do you have any good stories? Survival tales?

Many, many, many. A lot of things happened, I wouldn’t know where to start. Nobody got killed. I mean, there were some suicide attempts, yes.

But do you mean stories like, I don’t know, finding people frozen to death on the street or…?

Well did that happen?

Or you know a school grip being taken to hospital with a clinical death while he was working on our set? Those kinds of things. I mean, there are a lot of weird stories that I have, you know.

The climate was quite harsh in the winter in Poland as well. It was very grey and the city had also… it was such a melancholic city because this was a city that was mainly existing from Jews before the war – it must’ve been seventy percent or eighty percent maybe. They had a ghetto but the city turned into some sort of ghost city [after the war]. It was a city that was extremely rich by the turn of the century, so you see wealth and riches everywhere in the buildings. But from the Second World War the city has stood still and sort of turned into a ghost city, so all of the beautiful turn-of-the-century buildings would get thicker and thicker layers of smog and it turned into some sort of a gothic city. Of course visually it looked fantastic.

Yeah, for you guys to film, I bet.

Yeah. But of course it became also a very melancholic place. Visually it was very, very inspiring and intense.

I read somewhere that the school used had all kinds of weird cameras, like old German cameras from right around the war?

Yeah, the film school had 35mm cameras – a lot of them they were taken by German soldiers to Poland. Like the old Arriflex cameras, the 2C cameras, which is like the oldest workhorse. We would film everything on these cameras. We didn’t have video cameras in the school.

I know that you prefer to work with film as opposed to digital; you’re a bit of a purist. Do you trace it back to film school?

You can say purist but it’s also comfort, I think. You get very much used to certain media but I just did a feature on digital as well and I can definitely see the advantage of it. Today, my mentality is that every film deserves its own approach and its own language and its own media. It’s the same again with not being too conceptual about things, you know? If I like grain it’s not necessarily set that every film should have a grain because everything is different.

One thing that you get from that [Polish] school is that you become very snobbish and very purist about things; that’s in a way the doctrine of that particular school. It’s also very long study. I stopped after the third year.

You dropped out. Why did you leave?

During my second year or maybe my third year, I started to film a lot with directors; I was working more with directors than a lot of the other students. For instance, a 3rd year director wanted to do a film and he wanted to find a cinematographer so instead of, like, you know, you do a lot of your own films, you could also put your film stock into a bigger project with a director. I started doing that and I remember there was one director that really wanted to work with me, a Norwegian girl. She was going to do her exam [thesis] film, you know? We worked a whole summer and we were storyboarding and being very frenetic about things and so on. And then when I came back after the summer to school it was my professor or the dean that called us in and said, “Well, you’re going to do this exam film but we don’t really want you to do this exam film, we want some…”

Third year? Someone who would also do it as their final film?

Yeah. Which I of course thought was totally unfair; we’d been working. They gave me a choice. They said, “Either you do this film but then when you do that film you cannot move on to your next year.” Which I thought was much more unfair.

That’s crazy, actually.

Yeah. Anyway, so I did that film and then I stopped, I never really waited to find out how serious that threat was or not, you know, and how extreme. I just remember I had had enough. I kind of thought I had learned enough, which of course you haven’t. I mean, the school still probably had so much to give. But I was restless and then I moved to Holland and thought, “Now I’m going to tell everybody I went to Polish film school and everybody’s going to give me the greatest jobs and I can do the arts exactly the way I’ve been doing them in this bubble,” which is of course not true at all.

What was that sort of wake-up experience like?

Well it was a wake-up experience, a wake-up experience that it has taken years for me to recover from.

I mean when you come out of film school, nobody wants to give you jobs, nobody trusts you, and nobody wants to work with you for the reasons that you think people would want to work with you. So, I started doing a lot of assisting jobs but I was so bad at it so I started feeling bad about myself.

Why were you bad at it?

Because I’m not that technical. I was clumsy and at the same time I still had that whole Polish film school arrogance in me, which made me a very annoying person probably to have on the set. I was not so hands-on and ambitious. I just always felt bad about what I was doing.

Tell me about that trajectory from when you were starting to do assisting in Holland to ending up a successful cinematographer in Sweden. Like, how did it all work?

Well, after being in Holland for something like two and a half years doing crap jobs I moved back to Poland. My brother and I had a company. It was not related to anything whatsoever. We just wanted to take advantage of me knowing Poland so very well and he was an architect. So we thought, “Now we are going to be entrepreneurs.”

In Poland?

In Poland.

Actually, we built two big supermarkets for a giant Dutch supermarket chain and it was so wild.

That is totally wild!

It was very wild and we pulled it off somehow. We were like – how do you call it? We were like contracting and designing. Like I said, Poland was wild and there’s a lot of people that would just start things up there, you know? And they wanted to start up some sort of a pilot store there.

So they hired these two young brothers to do it.

Yeah, but these two young brothers were smart enough to hire an older, good Polish architect that knew the whole system. So we had this company with him. We were completely green and new to it but somehow we did it. Of course it wasn’t my thing either, so it didn’t last very long. We had it for like two years or something, but it was for a very short time quite ambitious and quite fun and quite crazy.

Then I moved to Warsaw with my girlfriend because she was working a lot.

Was she in the film industry?

Yeah, she was a production manager but she was also translating a lot, she was doing subtitles for movies. We met in the film school and even though she wanted to be a production manager she started to translate a lot for the money so that became her constant job and I was sort of walking around in my underwear through the apartment being depressed that I didn’t really work.

Then, before I knew it, we were two years ahead and I’d been working in a straight line and then at some point I started renting an apartment. It’s a little bit like that. Like, before that I was kind of as free as a bird and then you start to know people, you start to… You know, why don’t you just…

…stay?

Stay or take it easy a little bit and try to develop here a little bit.

Yeah. It’s interesting how you ended up in Sweden. In a way it’s pretty random, right?

Yes but I always had super much sympathy towards Sweden. Maybe because my biggest friends at school, they were all Swedes.

Oh really?

I just – we shared very much the same sense of humor and…. yeah, I always liked it.

Now it’s funny because Sweden tries to claim you a lot: “the Swedish cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema.! Swedish press likes to say stuff like that.

Shoot, I mean if they want to I’m very grateful that they do. I feel like a Swedish cinematographer. I mean, this is where I got to make my career, this is where I got to develop myself, this is where I live. My daughter is half-Swedish. Sweden can 100% claim me. I always get irritated when they try to claim me in Holland because I haven’t lived in Holland for 18 years and they never wanted me as a cinematographer; they rejected me out of the film school twice, they never gave me a nice job. Holland has done nothing for me in terms of everything that’s in that way important to me.

I’m very happy that Sweden has been generous enough to adopt me. So they should claim me 100%.

You have had most of your career so far in Sweden but now you’ve started working in Hollywood. You shot The Fighter and the new Spike Jonze movie. Is there a big difference in how people work?

Yes, it’s different but in the soul it is of course the same. It’s a lot of technical stuff, technical shit, people doing the same thing. Of course you have to adapt to unions, you have to adapt to their regulations, to the way that they structure the crew, but somehow it’s not so difficult to adapt to it. It makes sense as well. Of course unions is a thing that we don’t really have [in Sweden], not to that kind of extent.

Which is funny when you think about the general perception of Sweden compared with the United States.

Yeah, you have something here, some kind of union, but it’s not as oppressive and powerful as the different unions there. You realize when you see all these unions that it is an industry, it’s not just a state-financed art form that is there to keep up culture and the country’s art legacy or whatever. It’s an industry, it’s a money machine and within a money machine of course a lot of hard-working people they become unprotected and they form unions to get that kind of protection.

Was Hollywood a dream for you?

No, not at all. And it’s still not a dream. I don’t want to live there for instance. It’s never been like, “Oh, now I got to Hollywood.” My dream is to do the most interesting projects wherever they might be and I think that Hollywood has a lot to offer in terms of interesting projects. I think that most interesting films, they of course originate from that [Hollywood], but I love good European films the same.

But the whole idea or concept of Hollywood, like probably the way you mean Hollywood, it has never been a dream for me.

When you were younger and you started film school, what was your idea of success?

How do you mean? How I saw myself being successful or just sort of philosophically?

Both, I guess.

I don’t really know, I just really was very anxious to do what I wanted to do and to do it on a regular basis and to make a living with that. I think I was already very successful the moment that I realized that I could support myself doing what I liked. And, in a way, that has taken quite a long time because in the beginning when I was doing what I was doing I could pay but I didn’t always like it because they weren’t the right projects. In a way success has become for me very much to have the freedom to choose the stuff you want to do and to feel very responsible for those choices and to a certain extent progress in these choices and to get acknowledged for the stuff that you do for those choices. I think, as a cinematographer, acknowledgement is of course very important because you work so much in relation to so many other people. So if people do or do not appreciate your work becomes very important.

I always felt that if you can work within the line of work you’ve chosen and you can choose, I mean, that is for me successful enough.

Is there anything that you would tell your younger self that you think it would’ve been good for the young Hoyte to know?

What I would tell my younger self is to relax a little bit more, you know?

But, on the other hand, I value extremely much the years that I was really walking around in my underwear eating from my nose and watching crap television in an apartment and being frustrated. I really needed those years to just be completely tired of it after a while and to start having energy for other stuff.

Now you have a natural momentum because there are so many exciting projects that you are offered. I’ve spoken to a lot of artists who say that when they have children they also find a whole new level of efficiency because they can’t believe how much time they wasted before. With kids you have so much less time and I wonder now that you have a daughter who is pretty young – two right?

Three almost.

Has the way you work or how you view your work changed?

No not really actually because what I do, I don’t do at home, I don’t do nine to five. During filming I usually do it away from home so then I’m away for a couple of weeks and then I come back and I just spend time at home, you know? Also I do things on a project basis. Like on Sunday, I flew to go do a commercial in Atlanta but then I land there and I’ve been driven to a hotel and then it’s just a rush from there on and then the only time I really actively am with my family is on Skype in the evening in the hotel, you know?

I’m also scared that I will get bored, which would completely kill my input somehow, my quality. I’ve become much more cautious about what I do and what I don’t do.

Interview by Astri von Arbin Ahlander

Photo courtesy of the artist

Despite all that Anastas has been through, his humor – and generosity – remain intact, as witnessed in this lively interview.

How much do you know about The Days of Yore and how much do you want me to tell you before we sort of get going?

I think I get the idea, which is sort of talking about a certain time in your life, before you were a grand personage.

I like that: a grand personage.

While you were still struggling.

Yes.

The struggle never ends but there’s struggling and then there’s struggling.

Exactly. So, can you recall an early reading experience that was somehow important to you?

Well, my father kind of made it his project to turn his children into literate people. All he had in his house were books; he never had any money but what money he did have to spend he always just spent on books. His house is just absolutely filled with them.

In a lot of ways it was the first grown-up literature I ever read. I used to read a lot of – I guess you would call them fantasy books – about swordfights and monsters and dragons and heroes with great manes of hair. But James Joyce’s “The Dead” was really the first profound reading experience I had when it comes to adult literature.

And what was it about it that was so appealing to you?

There was a lot that went over my head, but it was literally just the cadence of the language. When I got to that last page, about the snow falling over Michael Furey’s grave, I remember sitting there and reading it over and over again. And of course it didn’t hurt that my father – you know, I had been coached, I had definitely been coached. He said, “You’re not going to believe the last page of this story.” I think he’d even read it aloud to me. So, I had been primed to really appreciate this kind of pure outpouring of language almost for its own sake and it really did work.

Of course the idea of having regrets in marital life and having carried unrealized love around with you for years: these were things that were completely alien to me as an eleven-year-old. It was just the force of the language itself that I found really mesmerizing and I remember very vividly staying up late with the bedside light on in the bedroom that I slept in at my dad’s house and just reading and reading and reading.

After that reading experience, did it change what you looked for in a book? There are different ways of reading. Reading for language is one way of doing it, more than reading, say, for the story – which is probably what you were doing when reading those fantasy series.

I think it did. I think it did help awaken me to the music of language. I’d like to think I would have become a writer on my own without my father’s influence, but he was almost like a tennis dad when it came to writing. The idea of giving your eleven-year-old child “The Dead” and saying, “You’re really going to love this.” It’s almost like I wanted to love it to make my father happy.

So, I learned to take comfort in fairly arduous fiction at an early age, which I think was great. I think he, in his way, was training us all to be writers.

Did your siblings end up being writers too?

My brother and my sister turned out to be writers in different ways: my brother does a lot of writing for marketing and advertising, which is the field he works in; and my sister is an art historian so she writes a lot of criticism about 20th Century and contemporary art. I’m the only fiction writer.

Was your dad coaching you with writing as well as reading?

I did make a few abortive stabs at writing stories when I was young, but it was really my senior year in high school when I started writing fiction in a sustained way for the first time. I remember it was the summer before my senior year in high school; I was up in Maine and I decided I was going to write a short story. So I wrote the story and I was inspired by – I forget the name of the band now, this is embarrassing…. Oh! It was This Mortal Coil and they had a song I loved called “Song to the Siren,” with Elizabeth Fraser from the Cocteau Twins on vocals. I used to just love the song; it was so ethereal and so sad and filled me with all these emotions that I felt like I needed to have in order to be a writer. So I wrote a short story that summer and I named it “Song to the Siren.”

Those are emotions you need to have not just to be a writer, but to be seventeen.

Exactly! Everything is unrequited. I mean, everything is unrequited.

It was really then that I started and got very serious about writing fiction and I stayed serious about it from that point on. Really, to the detriment of all else. I mean, I stopped doing my work in other classes.

Really?

I just felt the need to be a writer with my whole being and everything I read, everything I did, everything I thought about was all kind of geared towards that. When I was that age my father was a frustrated fiction writer; he’s since written and published quite a bit – but, you know, Jung has a very famous quote about the strongest influence on children being their parents’ unlived lives, and I definitely think that’s true of my father and me. One of my touchstone memories is a manuscript that he used to have on his desk in his house – this is at a time in his life when he really wasn’t writing very much; he stopped writing fiction for 19 years. So, he had this manuscript of stories that he would take out and he would send to try and get grants every year and he would never get one. This sense of frustration he had I think I really inherited.

This was before I had a computer; I had a Brother typewriter, an electric typewriter, which had this weird lag: you’d press a key and there was this momentary and very awkward lag before the letter would strike. I was a terrible typist, I was a kind of hunt-and-peck two-fingered typist (I still am) – but the words were flowing out of me so fast that my typing couldn’t keep up, and also because the typewriter had this weird lag. So I would keep a notebook right next to the computer because so often the words would just come out of me so fast and so furiously that I was too slow of a typist to catch them; I’d have to stop typing and just write things down by hand so I wouldn’t forget them.

This is all very Kerouacian.

I know! And sometimes if there wasn’t any paper around I would just – I have very tiny little handwriting, it’s almost like code – and I would take the pen and just write, literally, on the top of the typewriter in ink. It was November of the semester that I took off that I finished the book, and as soon as I finished the book I was like, “Okay, I’m out of here.” And I drove back east.

So much discipline! It’s incredible and also somewhat manic. And daring, too. To take time off from college and pursue a project like that is a pretty daring thing.

I never had plans to leave school permanently. But working in the restaurant was great – like I said, it was great money, it was hugely fun, that community that builds among people who work in a restaurant is just… there’s really nothing else like it. You’re under all this incredible pressure every night; friendships form really fast; there’s lots of flirtation and romance; and you’re also eating and drinking a lot, which is nice. There’s something primal about it. At the end of the shift they always brought out all this really nice food for the staff and we’d all eat together and the bartender would always be sneaking everybody drinks. Bourbons that keep getting magically refilled, goblets full of wine.

It was terrifying! I really did get sort of scared straight; the idea that I did know on some level that I could blink my eyes and it would be 10 years later or 15 years later and I would be in the same place clearing off half-eaten plates of pheasant spring rolls …

When you finished the novel and went back to school; the novel that you wrote, did you publish it eventually?

No, I never published it. But, you know, quite insanely, I did try to publish it. I sent it to agents and I actually got one. Quite a good agent, too. She really liked the book and sent it around. Luckily nobody took it, but still sometimes I think, like, “Why did I even think of sending it to an agent?” But then I go back to my dad’s manuscript sitting on his desk and I must have been trying on some level to undo the injustice of my dad’s frustration with publishing. I wanted to publish; I wanted to be a published writer.

That’s a big reason why I went to grad school right after college. I was in grad school when I was 22, which is kind of insane. And then after graduation I came to New York. I felt like I didn’t want to be a writer who sat somewhere in isolation and sent out envelopes and hoped for the best.

But first you faced the rejection of that first novel. How was that?

It was pretty devastating. I think one of the reasons why I worried about publishing too early is that, you know, I wrote a lot during those years, starting when I was a junior in college and then all through grad school. I mean, I really wrote a lot, it was kind of… I wouldn’t say it was compulsive, but it was really all I wanted to do. At that point I was producing, like, a manuscript every year, more or less. Every year, every year and a half, I had this manuscript that I tried to do something with.

I used to push my work on everyone. When my agent was done sending work out to editors I would find out who other editors were and I would send them my manuscript. I even sent a book to Norman Mailer once.

Did you get a response?

Yes! Like eight months later I got what looked to be a hand-typed letter from Mailer saying: “Thank you for sending the book. You know, I’m a writer, not a publisher. My eyes are so bad that I can’t even read my friends’ work, so I can’t read your book but I appreciate how brazen you are, and how desperate.”

Good of him to even write back.

People used to write back. Things have really changed. I remember when I was in college – again, quite prematurely – I would send short stories to The New Yorker, the ones that I felt were my best work. And I used to get notes from Daniel Menaker, who was a fiction editor then. Which is just unheard of. I mean, I think that courtesy among writers and editors has just disappeared.

I mean, can you imagine being as a sophomore in college and getting a note from Daniel Menaker at The New Yorker? You can imagine how important that was to a young writer.

You were getting a lot of encouragement through thoughtful rejections.

Yeah, it wasn’t all bad that I was getting rejected. For a long time I got very nice rejection letters.

You suffered from a brain tumor when you were in college, right?

Yes, that’s true.

Was that after you came back from having written the novel in Santa Fe?

Yeah. I took one semester from school off so I finished in December of my fifth year. I had applied to graduate schools – like 5 or 6 of them – and I didn’t know where I was going yet. I left school and went to my mother’s house in western Massachusetts. I had been having really very, very bad headaches for a year, maybe even longer, but I never even thought very much about them. I just figured, “Oh I’ve got headaches, it must be a migraine.” In that 21-year-old way I was like, “Oh I don’t need to see a doctor about this.” But the headaches got really, really bad to the point where sometimes I almost passed out and had to sit down. I just assumed it was my tragic flaw. One morning I woke up and there was this spot in my vision and when I looked in the mirror I couldn’t see any scratch on my eye or anything in it. So it turned out it was something happening internally.

My cousin, who lives in Connecticut, is an ophthalmologist so I called him up and he said, “Well it’s probably nothing serious but you should come and see me anyway. Come down tomorrow.” So I drove down to where he lives and he looked in my eyes and it was clear from the moment he first looked that something was seriously wrong. The spot I was seeing in my eye was actually blood inside my eye, my optic nerve was bleeding from all the inner-cranial pressure I had. It’s a condition called papilledema and pretty much the only thing that causes it in a twenty-one-year-old is a brain tumor. He said that I could have a condition called Pseudo-Tumor, which is when you have all the symptoms of a tumor but you don’t actually have one. But the chances of that were slim. It turned out that I did have a tumor, a very small one, and it turned out to be benign. But it was right up against my brain stem. It was nine hours of surgery, it was very touch-and-go. But I had otherworldly surgeons and they told me they were aiming for nothing less than a “cure.” They put this tube in my brain called a shunt, which I’ve had in ever since. I actually just had to have my shunt replaced last year – without health insurance. I got a bill in the mail for $93,000.

Really? Wow.

This all happened for the first time in February of 1991. It was the semester off I had between finishing college and going to grad school. I wasn’t quite sure where I was going to go. I ended up finding out that I got into Iowa and then I showed up there in September after having gone through this really life-changing experience.

I’m thinking about you describing yourself as someone writing all those manuscripts and not really having something to say yet because most of us when we’re that young don’t have that many experiences. But now you had a very intense unusual life-and-death experience…

Well, here’s the part that still seems kind of remarkable to me: I left school and then came back home and I had been studying pretty hard the last semester – another great thing about taking a semester off from school is that it made me realize that I actually wanted to be a good student, so when I came back to school I went to all my classes and I studied hard and I did well in school for the first time ever. That last semester I didn’t have a whole lot of time to write, but I’d been forming an idea for a novel. So I said, “You know what? I’m going to go back home and write a novel really fast.” I sort of planned the whole thing out. I knew how long I wanted the book to be, it was a short novel – 170, 180 pages or something – and I sort of planned it out, like, “Okay, if I write 7 pages a day then I can have the book done in this amount of time.” But I was having all these headaches and they were getting worse and worse I was sort of speed-writing this novel and I wrote it in 5 weeks. It was called Transition from Cool to Warm, after a book by the German artist Anselm Kiefer. I was very pretentious as a youngster.

As soon as I finished it, that’s when my headaches got really awful and that’s when I went in and had the surgery. So between leaving school and having brain surgery, I cranked out a novel in 5 weeks.

That’s crazy. You realize that, right?

I know! And when I got to the hospital and it turned out that I had a brain tumor I remember saying to myself, “Well, you know what? If I die, I guess it’s not the end of the world because I just wrote the best thing I’ve ever written in my life and I’m ready for whatever happens.” I was ready to rest my reputation on an unpublished novel that I’d just written in 5 weeks. So I went into the operating room with a very serene attitude.

And then you get out and you’re fine and you’re like, “Well, now what?”

That’s part of what made graduate school so hard. I showed up in September and, literally, I felt like I had been born again. I mean, I felt like I was kind of this newborn with this tender little sensibility, you know? And grad school was just hand-to-hand combat. I mean, it was brutal. I wasn’t ready for it.

What about it was so brutal? Was it the competitive atmosphere?

It started with the competitive atmosphere. I don’t know if Iowa still does this, but they used to literally rank everyone in your discipline from 1 to 50. At least that was the story.

Yikes.

Your financial aid job was based on where you fell in the rankings. So you knew where everybody was roughly ranked based on whether they didn’t have to work at all – there were a few fellowships at the top like that – or if they were teaching-writing fellows, the next level, or just plain teaching or some other kind of job … So, you kind of knew where you were and everybody wanted to move a notch or two up. Part of moving a notch up was making sure you were writing a lot and writing well, but the other part of it was trying to tear everybody else down so you could take their job.

That’s pretty terrible.

It was a blood sport. My friend Peter Craig and I, we were both 22 and I think we were the two youngest people in the program. Grad students in MFA programs tend to be younger now. When I was there, the average age was somewhere in the early 30s. People had been out in the world, they’d had jobs, they’d traveled, they’d seen things, they’d done things, and I think there was this idea that, “Okay, I’ve got two years to make it or break it.” That just made for a level of … I’ll call it desperation.

But I wasn’t equipped! I was 22 years old, I’d just been through this near-death experience. I felt like I was an infant with wisps of hair and baby-soft skin, you know? I just was not ready. I was not ready for it. And I made every mistake imaginable.

Had you been in workshops before, like in college, or was it your first experience with the form?

I had been in workshops before but they were all very tightly controlled. If there was even a hint of going off on somebody my workshop leader would always sort of step in and stop it. Whatever you said had to be “constructive.” But that was not the case in Frank Conroy’s workshop; there were some weeks when it was just this competition to be as cutting and brutal as you could possibly be and everybody was trying to one up each other. And Frank would just sit there with a glint in his eye and a little smirk on his face.

Then he just seemed like this kind of high priest of literature, but of course the more you got to know him the more flawed of a person you saw that he was. And when it came to the kind of work that he loved and the work that he didn’t, he was very flawed.

Did you find camaraderie with your peers?

Oh sure, I made close friends that I still have. That’s the best thing about a program like that.

And did you develop from there relationships where you continue to read each other’s work?

Less that now, more just friends that I’ve had at this point for twenty years. But, certainly, at the time I had friends who were my first important readers and I got used to the idea of I have this other person out here who I can show my work to before I enter the more dangerous realm of sending it to an agent or an editor. Choose a comrade in arms.

Exactly. You said you moved right to New York post Iowa. Did you move there with the intention of writing only? Where did you live and what did you do?

Quite stupidly for a long time I had this idea that I just wanted to write. I didn’t want to do anything else. I just did not attend to the practicalities of life and financial well-being and all that.

My sister had come to New York first and she was working in galleries and so I lived with her, I kind of slept in her hallway. She had a railroad apartment on Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint. I guess for the first six months that I was in New York and living on my sister’s floor I didn’t work at all, which is kind of crazy because I didn’t have any money either. I guess I just ate my sister’s food.

Your poor sister! Working a probably-incredibly-poorly paid gallery job!

I know, I know. She was in grad school at that point too, getting her master’s in art history at Columbia, and she saw a poster on campus saying that there was a job opening at the graduate writing program at the School of the Arts. So I went uptown and I interviewed for this job working in the office and I worked there for the spring of that year.

And what did you do? What was your role there?

I would Xerox people’s stories and get them ready for workshops. I remember Xeroxing Jonathan Ames’ work and he got very upset once because the Xerox wasn’t of high enough quality. He brought this stack of Xeroxes back and asked me to do them again.

It was great.

Well if you’re going to pay, you know, incredible figures for an MFA and they’re not even going to give you your thesis notes…

At that point, as poorly run as the program was, there were some seriously talented people there. I mean Ed Park was there, Heidi Julavits, Vendela Vida, Mark Wunderlich, I mean there were people who have gone on to be real writers. I’m proud to have done their Xeroxing.

So how long did you work that job?

I just worked there through the spring semester. As soon as the school year was over in May or whatever, I stopped.

Was that the only job you had at the time?

Yeah, that’s when two things happened: One is that I found out that I won a fiction contest from GQ Magazine. They published the story and they were throwing this big party and they paid me like $5,000 for it or something insane.

And then I also found out that I got a fellowship for the next year from Iowa, which was $1,000 a month – it was $12,000 total – and I thought, “Great, twelve grand! I don’t need to work at all!”

And live in New York? I mean this isn’t even the 70s. It can’t have been that cheap.

No, this was 1994.

Right, I mean, come on.

Well you know when you’re sleeping for free in your sister’s hallway you don’t need that much.

Through my sister I ended up moving to a room in an apartment on the south side of Williamsburg, an artist named Miguel Ventura who kind of went back and forth between Mexico City and Brooklyn. He was just so incredibly generous; I only paid for rent of my room but I had the whole apartment when he was in Mexico City so for about half the year I had this whole huge apartment for the price of my room.

That’s one of those great New York stories. Amazing.

Yeah, I lived in the south side of Williamsburg back when people would throw bricks at you and you could get mugged at 10 in the morning. Now you can buy a Case Study playhouse for your toddler.

What was life like? Did you have friends in New York besides your sister?

Oh yeah, I had really good friends. One of my very best friends from school, Scott Anderson, had moved to New York too so I spent most of my time with Scott and with other writers and sort of getting to know literary New York more.

And how did you get access to literary New York?

A lot of it was through Scott. He had started publishing at Harper’s back when publishing at Harper’s was a huge deal. I remember finding some way to crash the Harper’s holiday party, which was the height then. I mean, everyone wanted to be at the Harper’s holiday party. Do they even have one now?

Also, through Scott and his brother, John Lee Anderson, I got to know a group of writers who had all started out together: Francisco Goldman, Charles Siebert, Bex Brian … If you’re a young writer you just want to be around the real deal, basically. They’re the first real writers who I was around a fair amount, albeit as a confused young puppy dog.

And were you publishing at this point?

I was publishing here and there. I had published one short story when I was in grad school and then published the GQ story. But, no, I wasn’t really publishing. Again, I was getting all these crazily nice rejection letters, so I felt like I had reason to keep going.

And did the agents start circling you like hawks when the GQ story came out?

No, not really. I guess I had been around the block by then. They were just like, “Oh, Anastas, that guy. I read that guy’s last novel and it didn’t work for us.”

He was constantly giving remarks at board meetings and so I did two things. One of them was to type and research his remarks. He would write out his remarks for meetings in longhand over the weekend. He would write things like, “Our applications are up blank percent this year, and our international program continues to grow by blank percent,” and the first part of my job was to call the right offices to get the numbers that he’d left blank. I would research and polish up these remarks of his on the computer and then I would make sure that the draft remarks went into the right briefcase for whatever meeting he was rushing off to next. That’s basically what my job was.

So bizarre that he had three briefcases, it’s so confusing. Like, what’s the point?

I know, it was really strange. After being there for a while – or at least long enough to get really pissed off – if I knew he was going to a really fancy event with Trustees, I would send him with the really battered briefcase.

Ah, the small revenges!

Exactly, it was all I had.

I had a new agent at that point and she was sending An Underachiever’s Diary around and that’s when I got my first book contract.

After all these years of high productivity and kind rejections, to suddenly have your agent call you and tell you that there’s interest here and someone’s going to buy it…. What was that like?

It was great! It was a tremendous relief. Let me think about this… It was 1996 probably, so I was the grand old age of 26 or 27, something like that, but I felt like, “You know what? Maybe this just isn’t going to work,” because I had dealt with so much rejection at that point.

So it was mostly good, although I never really got along with that editor or that agent. Things went sour pretty quickly.

Really?

They were real industry types and I was just so convinced I was writing for the purity of the thing itself. I was still that 11-year-old staying up late to finish James Joyce’s “The Dead,” you know? If you’re around people who are steeped in the publishing industry, it can be hard to talk to them about books—I felt like there was nothing we had in common, we just thought about books in completely different ways. I remember one lunch at the Royalton that was so grim I wrote to a couple of divinity schools to get their catalogs.

Were they trying to push you to change your writing to somehow be more, I don’t know, marketable?

Sure, I think both that agent and that editor wanted me to do well in the industry, so they kind of knew what didn’t work, and what I did, what I felt like I should be doing, obviously didn’t work. I didn’t really calculate my career in the same way that commercial writers do. I certainly never have.

So, I fired my agent and found a new one and the book went out again and I found a great publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. As I say in the memoir, for me … It was like the promised land. So, to be honest, more than my first book, that’s really when I felt like I could breathe easy, which, again, was completely wrong.

You reach this point, your second book, you feel like you’ve in some ways arrived, right? You’re publishing with FSG – to many writers THE ultimate place. And then there were many years that turned out totally differently than you had expected. I guess what I’m wondering is if you can tell me a little bit about what was going on during that time when things went in a downward spiral. I mean, you had the second book and then what happened?

Well, flush with the confidence that came from publishing with my dream publisher and making enough money to quit another job and then move to Europe, which is what I did – and granted, I didn’t get paid a lot of money for that book at all but, you know, it kind of gave me the impetus to make some rather extreme choices. Which were, “Okay, that’s it, I’m quitting my job, I’m going to move to Italy and write this other book, which is the difficult third novel I’ve been dreaming about for an eternity and I don’t just want to write but I need to write.”

It was the book that was going to dispel all of the great mysteries of my childhood. The main character is based on my maternal grandfather, an Austrian Jew from Prague who killed himself a couple of years before I was born. So I set about resurrecting my grandfather and telling the story of the early part of his life in Prague and Austria – which was a big mistake!

How so?

It was a big mistake in part because I think one of the things I learned is that I’m just not equipped to write historical fiction. And the other thing was I had to spend every single day for three or four years with this person who, even though I’d never met him, filled me with this sort of guilt and shame because I felt like, “I’m going to write this book and I’m going to finally understand my grandfather and it’s going to make me feel better about it, it’s going make my whole family feel better about it, and it’s going to finally put to rest this restless spirit who had always roamed the hallways of my life.”

In this study where I worked in Italy I just had all these pictures of him and pictures of Austria where parts of the book were set and I just felt like I had this ghost who was looking over my shoulder all the time and disapproving, which are not great conditions under which to work.

No. Sounds like a whole lot of pressure to sort of make your whole family feel closure about something. I mean, what a crazy thing to put on your own shoulders with a book project.

Yeah, yeah, it was too much. And one of the things I lost sight of is that you really have to enjoy what you are writing in order for it to turn out well.

I worked on this book for four years and FSG saw it and they were like, “This book isn’t what we were expecting and we’re not ready to give you a contract for it. We’re not really sure that this is what you should be writing anyway.” So it went out to publishers after that and there were editors who wanted to publish it but because my second book had kind of disappeared really quickly and sold very few copies, it was a tough sell. And the book itself was a tough sell too. It’s seriously flawed. So it didn’t get published in the US; it did get published in Europe. It got published in German translation. It got great reviews in Germany too.

You must’ve of course felt frustration that this book wasn’t finding a home in English and you were back in New York at this time, right? And what were you doing for work?

I was working for Art Omi, which is a non-profit that has a writer’s colony called Ledig House. I was the director of Ledig House, which meant that I did fundraising and admissions for an international writer’s colony and then I ran a board meeting twice a year. So that’s what I did.

What year did you come back from Italy?

I was in Italy from 2001 until 2003. I came back to New York and started working at Ledig House in 2004 and then I think it was 2005 that I spent a year on the eastern shore of Maryland as director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College on the eastern shore of Maryland. I taught literature and writing there as well.

And that’s also when everything else in your life sort of began to unravel, as I’ve read in your memoir.

Yes. The novel’s rejection sort of set off this whole shockwave, which just reverberated everywhere in my life. But it started with the novel’s rejection. Or rather, I let it.

And when did you begin to write Too Good to be True?

I started writing the memoir in the fall of 2010. I wrote it quickly and it was published very fast, just two years after I wrote the first words out in longhand.

You had been writing fiction and now you turned to memoir. Was it difficult for you to come into this new form on a pure writerly level? And then also, of course, was it difficult for you because you were implicating so many people – real people – in your life?

It was difficult to be writing a different kind of work, but I’d reached the point where the circumstances of my life got so difficult that I literally just couldn’t write fiction anymore. It felt like my life was pressing in around me from all sides so the only thing that I could do was write about it.

I guess in an ideal world I would’ve told her about it and she would’ve known about it and would’ve seen it before it went out to publishers. I was planning on showing it to her as soon as I figured out what was happening with it, but she got a copy early on even before it had a publisher.

How does that even happen?

Somebody in publishing gave it to her. You know, when a book goes out, it goes out, and all of a sudden there are copies everywhere. So someone just made sure she had it.

But yeah, that’s one of the big reasons why I hope I never to write another memoir: the responsibility of writing about other people. I’m selfish enough to do it, but not callous enough to ignore reactions.

Going back to the very beginning, when you described your father as sort of, you know, the tennis dad but with writing. In a way I guess he can’t say too much if you show up at his doorstep with a manuscript…

Like, “Hey Dad, guess what? I’m writing about how you used to moon people out of the window of your VW Bug.”

He’s like, “That’s not what I meant when I gave you ‘The Dead’”!

It’s really no fun to have a writer in the family. We’re awful.

But how do your family members feel about you being a writer – your father, your mother, I mean. How did they feel about the fact that you pursued life as a writer?

I think mostly they’re proud. My father in particular has always really encouraged me. Not that my mother hasn’t, she has too – in very real ways – but she’s also someone who’s just more practical and is much more interested in like, you know, why does my forty-year-old son need to borrow money from me? Can’t you get a better job?

Yeah, right.

So as proud as they are, it’s definitely a mixed blessing.

When you were starting out and in your 20s say, what was your idea of success?

I read a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald and if you read his essay “Early Success” it’s kind of all about how, you know, he was working on This Side of Paradise and he’d worked in advertising for a little while and gave it up and so he was back in St. Paul and working for a car-roof repair company and he’d sent the manuscript off to Maxwell Perkins for I think the third time and Maxwell Perkins accepted it and Scribner was going to publish his book and he writes about when the letter comes just kind of taking off down the street and just telling everybody who he knows, everybody who he sees, just sort of shaking their hands and saying, “I’m being published by Scribner!” And he talks about paying off all of his terrible small debts and starting his life as a writer.

I’ll never do that again.

And what is your idea of success today?

Well, really just being able to write well and publish with people who value that. It was a little bit of a gamble publishing my latest book with Amazon because the book hasn’t been in a lot of bookstores. But I got to work with people who love the book and published it as well as anything that I’ve ever seen. So to me, success is being able to work with people who love your work as much as you do and are unfailingly supportive of it. I mean, that’s success.

Of course you never know what’s going to happen when you publish a book, particularly now. It might find 50,000 readers or 5,000 or 500. I compare being a literary writer now to making scented soaps in the bathtub and selling them on Etsy. You better like the smell of lavender …

Why did you choose to publish with Amazon, beside the fact that Ed Park is your editor and is awesome, obviously. Maybe that is the whole reason?

Well, it was really just Ed. The funny thing is, I’d never really known him before, even though we had overlapped at Columbia years ago and were probably in the same room 100 times. I just felt like I’d met this kindred spirit. So Ed is the biggest part of it, for sure.

You’ve had so many different ups and downs on this path and I’m wondering: if you were to look back at yourself in your 20s and look back at yourself in your 30s, is there something that you think that it would’ve benefited you to know? That you would tell your younger self at those different points in your life?

Well, when it comes to life, of course I have all kinds of regrets, all kinds of things I wish I’d never done or said. But when it comes to publishing, I just – the only thing that I wish I could go back and change is that I have had a lot of sleepless nights thanks to worrying about publishing and rejection and feeling slighted and just feeling like I would never make my way in this industry and, you know, all the typical things that writers feel. I just wish I’d cared a little less, you know? Just cared more about the writing itself and had more faith that people would find it eventually, in their own time and in their own way. I feel like I have wasted too much time worrying about how to navigate an industry that is fundamentally un-navigable.

In the same vein: you also teach a great deal. Do you have advice that you would offer young writers?

I think the only real advice that I have to give, and another thing that I kind of wish that I had understood, is that you just have to make sure that you’re the only person in the world who could’ve written what you’re writing. Doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be about your own experiences or your own life. It just means it has to be so particular and so geared towards your own individual enthusiasms that it can never be mistaken for somebody else’s and it could never be too influenced by any other writer, you know? It just has to be from some part of you that is really inviolate. I think that’s the biggest thing.

You can’t be writing something because you feel like you should be writing it; you can’t be writing something because you feel like it’s what you should be doing next and you can’t be writing something because somebody told you, “Hey I’d like you to write about that.” It has to be something that comes from a very pure and deep-seated part of you.

Interview by Astri von Arbin Ahlander

Photo by Lorena Ros

This furiously paced conversation took place over breakfast at Englander’s Brooklyn home while his spirited pup stole croissants and yelped for us to quit jabbering and start playing with her, already.

You grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home. Tell me about your childhood.

If we lined up all your author interviews, I always feel like you’ve asked authors, “How did you end up being a writer?” “I was a miserable unhappy child and someone gave me a book.” I feel like that sums up almost everyone’s bio: “Literature saved my life at some point.” I immediately get metaphysical; I can’t control myself. What is memory versus what happened? My point is, every once in a while I’ll see a picture of myself smiling and I’ll be like, “I must’ve been happy at that moment.” But I feel like I have a brain that erases everything positive and just holds on to…

Marina Abramovic said that a happy childhood makes a crappy artist.

Maybe so! I remember being happy at my grandparents’ house when we’d visit them once a month. But yes, I was pretty much an anxious, unhappy child, I guess.

Why, do you think?

I don’t know. If you ask my mother, her memory will be me always telling jokes. She said there’d be people over and I’d be telling the adults stories. She remembers this distinctly, that she’d be in the kitchen and hear laughter and I’d be out there telling a room full of adults stories. She remembers me climbing the walls and happy and storytelling and all that.

But I think it was more…. the sense of being an outsider. What we’re talking about – maybe that’s the central thing – is this distinct sense of feeling outside of things, of questioning the reality that I was in but not knowing that there were alternate realities. I think I sort of compare it to what it must’ve been like for people to come out of the closet. It was this real feeling that: this is the world, this is my reality, and if I’m miserable then I’m going to be a miserable person in this world. That’s why I compare it to this idea that if you’re told, “this is how your orientation is supposed to be, this is how the world is,” and you just know at a young age that you don’t feel this way and if this is the only way to be then its going be a long unhappy life.

So you felt “other”?

I could see the Catholic girl getting on her bus to the school down the street and neither of us…

Growing up there was a real structure of rabbis and students and to me this very clear, very gendered power structure, and I think it was just recognizing – just questioning that this doesn’t make sense to me. That’s the terror of, “I’m just gonna be unhappy here.” You don’t know your alternatives.

The interesting thing is how early you knew that you were unhappy about it.

Unbelievably early. I was just theologically-minded, I always loved books and stories and I’ve always had a real need to understand a moral order to things. If I had different kinds of rabbis who would’ve engaged with that, I think I would have a beard down to the floor.

You said you loved books and you loved to read. In this Orthodox community, did you have access to books?

We were modern Orthodox, which is what I call “gap Orthodox”, you know yarmulkes and tzitzits and fully religious Hasidim get extra credit, they follow a Rabbi and they wear coats. But, like, you’re religious or you’re not. We were fully Halachic Jews but it wasn’t that there was an anti-book thing, my parents read. My mom was not raised in a kosher home, my mom was – they were reform religious. They went to synagogue every week and they were active in the community and she went to Hebrew school but they’re reform so my point is my grandfather made meat and bacon every morning and my mom did art growing up. My mom got married at seventeen or eighteen and dropped out of art school to marry my dad. So I think with my mom there has always been respect for religion and in a way there was always respect for the arts. I blame her for this subversive thread in me. I remember she had this book, it was a folio, like something from one of her art classes. You’d slide them out and they were nicely printed images of famous pieces of art. I must’ve been something like two, three, or four and going through this thing obsessively.

I remember reading in 5th grade, finding my sister’s copy of 1984 and not knowing what it was but knowing that I was changed. I remember being, again, on the basement floor.

That’s an early reading memory. Any other early books that you read?

Philip Roth has already banned me from telling this story, but I can tell you that my mom and dad had, like, that clamshell bed and headboard and the two sort of Chippendale side things, very seventies, and I remember just looking for books and there was my mom’s row of books and I pulled it and found Portnoy’s Complaint as a teenager when I was already truly unhappy, already truly on the outside. And that to me… seeing someone write about that… I think the book maybe would’ve been less scary if I had my roach clip and a Camaro; if I was a naughty 1980s kid it would be one thing, but I got to read it with all the shock. It was like I was a 1950s kid, I literally got to be raised in the 1950s. I got to read it with the sensibility with which he wrote it. We were different generations but timed in our experience of morality and what is appropriate behavior. That to me was just was mind-boggling.

Then, in this super religious school with all these rabbis and stuff, there was one teacher who was Catholic and the way I had been relating to the rabbis, she had related to her nuns. She was a leftie and she would talk about how they forced her to write with her right hand. She got the ruler pretty good and I think she just knew; in that generous way she could tell who needed a book. She’s the one who liked Camus, Conrad, Kafka. I read that stuff in high school and I was changed.

You read it, not necessarily for class?

No. She would give these lists, like separate read-a-book-from-this-list – she was big on lists and knew some of us were hungry. I just think it was a gift.

One thing [that teacher] did were these culture tests, god bless her, and I still use them to this day. I remember her saying it, it’s so naughty and wonderful, “Some of you are gonna go out into the world. Someone in here may, and you basically have no education.” It was basically to help us get through cocktail parties and it was just lists, honestly. I memorized those lists and I use them still today in my head. It would say “Darwin” – I never read any Darwin, they didn’t teach us evolution, we got six days of Creation – so it would say “Darwin – The Beagle” and you would just know the name of his boat, stuff like that. Literally today people say, “Ah, Arnold Schoenberg” and I say, “Ah, the twelve-tone scale.”

So you have something to say if it comes up in conversation!

Yeah, it was just lists like that I used. I remember the one AP test that we had, I got my credit but I was writing about – I’ve never said this out loud or in anything public – but I was writing about Dante and I knew “Dante – Inferno.” I wrote about the Inferno, I knew there were levels or something but past that? I wrote this whole essay about it as a painting. I thought it was a painting. But god bless, again, they gave me credit, I don’t know why.

You said reading changed you somehow.

Yes.

At that point, did you also feel that you wanted to write?

I only ever wanted to write, yes.

You always knew that?

I cannot tell you why, there were no writers, I’d never met a writer, that wasn’t a job we did. I thought it was this thing from another world that I couldn’t be. There was very clear pressure of: these are the jobs.

What were the jobs that you felt that you were supposed to be going towards?

Well I am of the priestly class, which is a whole specific thing we won’t get into. I was a religious kid and so I never in my life considered being a doctor because I knew from an unbelievably young age that I wouldn’t be allowed to be around the cadaver to study. So I never once considered being a doctor.

I had my most successful run working the stock market at age sixteen, trading this account in my sister’s name.

That’s totally ridiculous.

Yeah, redonculous. I was literally watching and studying the market and then it became clear to me at that age – this is actually turning mortifying in its vulnerability and honesty – that I’d rather starve to death and be around books.

Security was a thing we did not have. I’m not trying to make us seem poor in that way because we did have a house and food but we did not vacation, that kind of thing. Financial security was a concern and my mother really wanted me not to have those worries. It was the American Dream: you should find this security. And yes, I remember that first semester I took a filmmaking and a creative writing class but I took microeconomics. The idea still: I’ll take one…

How did your parents react?

You know what? I feel like we should bring my mom in for this. My sister makes this joke because we were both perfectly well-behaved and then I stopped being well-behaved. My sister would say, “Can I go away for school?” And our mother would say, “No,” and she didn’t. I mean, young women in our town pretty much didn’t. But that was the answer, and then I would ask these things and the answer would be, “No,” and I would do them. I said, “Can I go away to school?” She said, “You may not, absolutely not.” And then I was gone.

In the end they said, “Okay”?

Yeah, with help and support from my grandparents. It was a big deal to get that together. You know, junior year wanting to spend that year abroad and nobody had ever traveled, nobody had ever been abroad – my people came to America and stayed.

You went to Israel.

Well this is the point: I said to them, “Can I go to Israel?” and my mother said, “Absolutely not, you can’t go,” and I said, “I’ll see you in a year.” That’s how all these things happened. We laugh about it now and that’s exactly how we do the narrative of it as a family, like, “Can I…?” “Over my dead body! Absolutely not!” and then I just go. That’s how all these decisions happened, I was forbidden and I did them.

So you went to school and left the bubble.

I was still in the bubble. I was a super-religious kid. I was in school, but religious. It was in Israel that I gave up religion as soon as I got there.

Why did you decide to go to Israel?

Well it’s also because of creative writing. This guy G.W. Hawkes – I’ve never said him name in an interview before – I just wanted to study writing and the idea of me taking a creative writing course in college was like a dream.

And how was it? Was it a dream?

Yeah, I was really scared of him. I remember seeing him once sophomore year and I didn’t even approach him, it was so holy to me.

To do it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m a secular person but this could make you religious, just like the idea of good fortune. You know I did a Judaic Studies degree because I had a religious knowledge but I wanted to relearn this stuff.

Since you still had those questions.

Yeah, like: Let’s look at the Bible as literature. That was a really useful for me.

That’s what you had been wanting to do.

Yeah. So professors like Norman Stillman ended up being this really wonderful world-class professor who happened to have chosen Binghamton as the place he wanted to be. I ended up in two small departments with really fine professors. This guy Barry Targon, who is a wonderful writer, he was a moral, moral man and I deeply believe in a moral fiction, like the fiction writing itself is a moral act.

The dream was of being a writer and I didn’t want to miss a class. I wasn’t going to go to Israel for my junior year. I went to John Vernon’s office because I was afraid to miss Creative Writing: “I won’t be a writer if I don’t finish the series; I need 322A.” And he said, “I will see you in a year.”

“Go.”

Yeah, and to me that was a great bit of advice. That year changed my life. I think that did more for my writing than anything ever.

Tell me. You said you got to Israel and you sort of turned away from being a religious person. What was your…?

To meet someone who says, “I’m Jewish” but has none of the reference points that I have, none of the rhythms that I have, none of the world views that I have – that’s going to let me see that I can be this person or I want to be this person, you know what I’m saying? I got to Israel and I saw secular people – Jewish atheists. I mean to look at a soldier and say, “This person’s fighting for this country and so, like, wait, if they die they’re not going to heaven because they’ve eaten a cheeseburger?” To me it was this instant thing, like, this doesn’t add up in terms of dedication to place or people or culture.

And I also wrote that year.

So you were writing?

Yeah, I wrote a whole novel in the spring. I still tell my students what Barry Targon would say. I remember at the end of the semester – I took him twice – he would say, “Your next story’s due August 8th” and we’d all be like, “Whaaat?! School’s over!” And he’d be like, “If you’re a writer, you don’t need it for me.”

You need it for you. When you came back and graduated, were there some years between graduating from college and going to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop?

I did not know anything. Where to search for jobs or how I should be working, anything. I just can’t even tell you how woefully unprepared I was for this world. The year after college I wanted to be an artist so desperately and I was afraid to write; I was so terrified to make this choice. So, through my sister, I met this photographer and I worked for free. Back to compulsions: I got a camera and then I was obsessively taking pictures.

Why did you turn suddenly to photography?

Writing is the easiest thing in the world; it is absolutely; there is nothing easier than writing when you are writing. The unbelievably hard, soul-crushing, terrifying, overwhelming thing is the emotional engagement. Right? When you are in the zone and you’re writing like a motherfucker, is that hard or is it the best part of your day for the whole day? When you are having a transcendent moment, you know, an out-of-body dis-associative, truly just a not-in-existence, like, just, at one with the story, the story is and you are not – that is what I live for. So you can’t tell me that’s hard; that’s joy.

What’s hard is: I know my next novel, now it’s time to really dig in. The emotional engagement involved, you know what I’m saying: that’s 99.99%. It’s the idea of people sitting down; it’s the engagement. And I think, for me, to have fallen hopelessly in love with something, with a life that was not possible for me to have, was pretty scary. I only understood that I could not have this. I had not been trained for this.

But why photography? Did that seem more accessible?

Because it did not scare me. It did not have my whole heart and soul.

So you’re thinking, “I can learn this thing.”

Yeah, and I still feel that about almost everything, in a weird way. I liked the photography and I would just – like the stock market: “I’m gonna learn this.” I would just shoot endlessly and print endlessly and go to photo shows and read books.

You were working for free for this guy?

For a couple of weeks, and then I was in Argentina and just shot. You know, I went for a wedding, which ten years later turned into a novel, but that was my only trip to Argentina. People are always like, “When you lived in Argentina…” I did not; I went for a wedding and took some pictures.

My friend Daniel’s mother Deborah Brody, who’s a friend from Jerusalem, was an editor and said to Daniel, “I know your friend is writing in his room; tell him to bring me a story.” An editor looking for an extra story. It was The Twenty-seventh Man, which goes into rehearsal today, and it was called The Cosmopolitans then. I brought her this crazy story that I had been working on in secret and she’s the one who said what I’ve only ever wanted: “The story has potential, so do you. There’s a story in this story and it’s a big fucking mess.” I would just meet her and she’d cook me dinner and you know, “I want to see you in however many weeks,” and I would redraft and redraft.

What a great person to make you dinner and give you editing advice, pushing you along.

Yeah for six months basically, “We’re gonna get you out of your bedroom.” I didn’t want to spend the $45 to apply to Iowa because I didn’t want the rejection, I didn’t have the money, like I need the $45. She’s the one who made me, literally, “You are applying to this school.”

That’s the idea when we’re talking about this good fortune, I wouldn’t have known, you know what I’m saying? How is one supposed to know the story inside the story? She’d just work with me for months and when she was done she sent me to a line editor friend who met me out of the goodness of her heart to say, “This is how we work on the level of a line.”

Wow.

She changed my life, literally: “We are gonna get you out of your room…” And by her good graces…

You went to Iowa.

Yes, which honestly changed my life. Jim McPherson and Frank Conroy and Marilyn Robinson. It just changed my life. Again, what it is to be around literally some of the great living minds. And Frank’s thing on dedication: you can post 3 hours a day, 6 days a week. Just the idea of simple discipline. When people say, “Give me some writing advice. What do I do?” Shut off your phone. Don’t tweet. Don’t interrupt your writing time. That is my most concrete advice. If you can’t shut off for a few hours you’re not gonna work, and I promise you I’ve been on that road, my soul is poisoned with technology right now. It’s only out of my deepest respect and self-control sitting here with you that I haven’t refreshed my email while we chat.

I want you to tell me more about Iowa but first I want to hear a little more about your time in Jerusalem. What were you doing to support yourself after that short stint as a summer camp counselor?

That year I did photography.

Where did you live?

I had a share – we’ve always lived around the corner from each other, me and my best friend since nursery school.

You moved to Israel together?

Yeah, yeah. You know Melissa, we went to school together from nursery to college then we went to college together, then we were roommates in New York and lived in an Upper West Side Seinfeld set-up until two years ago. My friend Daniel, Deborah’s son, I always say is Kramer. Literally people always hanging out at my house so I got to be the Seinfeld in this setup, the camera’s at my house. Kramer is a wildly successful pulmonologist and critical care specialist. So, literally I had him down the hall and then one floor down and around the corner was Melissa and she gets to be Elaine, just single 30-somethings in New York having those conversations.

Amazing.

We always would get the smallest apartments and put up those fake walls, like it wasn’t even a one-bedroom, looking at brick walls. I think the first room was $400 and then it was $450, you know, whatever it was, which was a lot for me then.

It was photography, that year I had this nice studio gig. And then when I came back from Israel I wanted to write, so I sold expensive shoes on the East Side – in a suit.

Really?

Yes, it was on commission, people were really fierce, you know, selling alligator-skin shoes. But you had to wear a suit and so I had to straighten my hair and put it in a ponytail. I had to be clean in a suit, but, you know, the hippie-ish-looking 22-year-old guy in a suit? Ridiculous.

That lasted one week and then I called this Art Director that I knew and said, “I just want to write books, let me be your secretary, I won’t cause any trouble.” I needed a job where I got to clock in, clock out, and then go write. She hired me that day and then called me late that night and was like, “My friend, I’m going to have to yell at you. I can’t do this. You’re gonna be my front office person? You’re gonna be in trouble if you mess up. I don’t want that relationship with you.” And she called her friend at a children’s book publisher and got me a job. I was the package boy, I would go in and wrap artwork and that was it. It was a half-day job by the hour and I would wrap artwork and run it to different whatever and I would ride my first mountain bike home, ride around Central Park a couple of times, and then I would write.

And then you created your own discipline, your own schedule?

Yes: I’m gonna write every day. It was perfect; a four-hour job, I’ll be whatever and then… I’m sure there was some distraught couch-sitting months in between there somewhere, but I found that system.

Did you find the satisfaction you’d been looking for?

Well this is when Deborah surfaced but this was the idea of me writing stories in my room and I just remember this obsession with that story. I mean there were other stories, but that was my first real story which has been such a central part of my life. It was how I got into Iowa; it was one of my first publications; it was part of my first book; and now my first play. It’s very strange, its many manifestations.

We’re catching up in time to Iowa and the incredible experience you had there. Then your first story collection gets published, and you get a great agent, Nicole Aragi. Did you approach her or did she approach you?

I feel like I just got married, an agent is a really big person in your life. But I always say it’s like this reverse dating thing where she approaches me but I know who she is. I was like, she was the…

The Thing.

At that point she was just super starting out, super young and I just knew she was fierce. I think she had Brady Udall, probably Junot [Diaz] and Edwidge [Danticat]. You know what I’m saying? She was my dream choice and then it was this strange thing where she approaches you and then you’re nervous and send your work… I laugh every time that it just goes back and forth where it’s like she has to want you, then you have to want her, and then she has to read your work and hopefully want you… It’s a very strange back-and-forth.

I just knew – you know, a lot of people who talk to me about my work just talk about the Jewish part. I sat down with her for dinner and we talked for four hours and she understood my work in its core way, you know what I’m saying? She just got it in this way that made me feel safer than anything and has yet to even abate in the slightest fifteen years later.

That’s wonderful. When you had your first story collection published, looking back at yourself as this desperately wanting to write, to create stories, to write books that someone would read and thinking: it’s not for me, I can’t do it, it’s off-limits. There is your first story collection, you’re holding it, you have the story collection: what’s the feeling?

I do not dwell on that; you’re the first person in all these years to ask me about that moment.

Really? I feel like that would be so huge.

I imagine it was an unbelievably huge joy. I remember the time as just an exciting time. I also see that I did not know what was going on; that was another thing about Jerusalem: I didn’t understand what was happening. I think it was a very strange, it was beyond my wildest dreams, beyond my wildest expectations.

The way it was received in the States while you were living in Israel?

Yes, all that. Truly, deeply, thankful but I did not understand what happened, I did not understand what that meant for me, and I just went back to my life in Jerusalem. But I just knew enough not understanding that I didn’t want to change anything there. I was American and an immigrant kind of person; I didn’t need to be a writer guy. I was in the middle of a big interview with the biggest paper in Israel and then I called him and was like, “Can we kill this?” He had tape, he had – and he killed it. It was really sweet of him.

You just didn’t feel like you wanted to…?

Yeah not talking to anybody, yeah.

My point is, yes, learning to live the writing life is a whole separate matter.

So if you look back at your teen self, feeling displaced, and looking at where you are today – is there something you would tell your younger self that you think would’ve been good for you to know?

I honestly, this is my biggest advice that has really been so helpful to me because it simplifies everything and it’s so nice, my whole aesthetic, I’d say your obligation is to story. That’s it, that’s the only rule that’s not gonna break or change. You know, like, you wanna go out Friday night? Does the story need you to go out or do you need to work on it? And the same thing, when I want a character to do something, what does the story need? In a really Zen clear way it’s become so clear to me and it helps me live my life.

Your obligation is to story and just put everything else out of your head. Can you feed yourself? Is there a roof over your head? Be thankful and do the work.

Interview by Astri von Arbin Ahlander

Photo by Juliana Sohn

Nick Harkaway is a pseudonym, as is the nom de plume of his father, John le Carré.

Let me start from the very beginning. When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

When I was a very young kid I wanted to be a milkman because we had an incredibly happy milkman. He came every morning and he was always pleased to see everyone. That just seemed to me to be an excellent life. I don’t think I ever wanted to be an astronaut or a rocket scientist or a pop singer, anything like that.

So, instead of doing that I got a job, I decided I wanted to go into movies. That was my next big dream.

It was, like, the big silver screen movie dream…?

Yeah, I wanted to write Jurassic Park or… I actually wanted to write the screenplay for Neal Stevenson’s Slowcrash. Literally, I called movie studios and begged them. They were like, “You’re some dude from England, why on Earth would we let this happen?”

But you had the guts to call them. I mean, come on, that’s pretty cool.

Yeah, and the weird thing about that is that in Hollywood people were kind of like, “Well obviously we’re not gonna let you do that, but wow, you know…”

“…You’re calling!”

People did offer me things. They were like, “Come and do this instead.” And I was like, “Well, no, I don’t want to do that.” But now I look back and I’m like, “Jeez, did you turn down those offers just because you were so monomaniacal?” But if you’re not that monomaniacal then they’re not interested in you in the first place.

Since you wanted to write for film, writing was something that you wanted to do. And writing wasn’t a foreign thing for you growing up, obviously. For a lot of writers I speak to, it’s a really big hurdle for their families or for themselves to understand that you can write, that such a thing exists called “writer.” But your mom is a book editor and your father is a very successful writer.

The biggest burden that I had, in a way, was that I was surrounded with storytelling as a way of living, as a way of being in the world and whatever. My family tells stories to one another as a kind of… Instead of “hello,” it’s, “this incredible thing happened to me today!”

You know, a lot of people think basically if you want to be a writer and you’re not high 90% of the time and if everyone you love doesn’t hate you and you didn’t have a terrible childhood, you’re screwed, you’ve got nothing. And it’s not true! I would go so far as to say five or six percent of writers are not insane. I don’t necessarily number myself in that group but, you know, it’s possible and I knew it was possible. So, I knew that writing as a life was not about being Hunter S. Thompson. That’s not to say you can’t do it, obviously Hunter S. Thompson wrote amazing stuff. But the thing is, you write day after day and by the end of the year, amazingly, you have a book.

Because you had writing all around you and your parents working with writing, did you ever have that sort of rebellious feeling like, “Well, heck, I can’t do that because that’s what they do.” I mean it’s almost too close to home too.

So, that was the movie thing. Because movie writing is a very different skill.

But the environment I grew up in wasn’t pre-scripted. It wasn’t like, “You will be a novelist.” There is a Monty Python sketch which inverts the usual thing and it’s a northern family and the dad’s a writer and he’s saying, “It’s no good you going down the coal mine and thinking you’re clever. No, you’ve got to learn to work at the creative calling.” It’s a gag.

Yeah, I’ve seen it.

But it’s true, there are families that I know where big pressure is put to work in an intellectual job and actually all the guy wants to do is go and be a ski bum for a few years. But no, that didn’t really happen to me. I wanted to be in a creative space, but initially I wanted to be in a different creative space so that’s why the movies.

What was your first step to break into the movie business? It’s a difficult industry.

I got a job working as a production runner – it’s a UK term which basically means that you do an insane quantity of stuff. It’s the first step on the ladder to being a producer because you touch every aspect of the job. So you’re over in the editing room saying, “Can we have this for the director to see this evening?” And the editor is like, “Yeah sure, sit down. This is what we’re cutting together and this is how it’s done.” Then you ping-pong back into the office and it’s like, “Oh my God, the assistant director is sick today so we moved everyone up a slot. Can you go over there and be a runner on the stage?” And you’re wrangling actors and that whole sort of thing – it’s basically panic stations the entire time. And you work…I was working, let’s see… I was getting into the office at about six in the morning, I was getting home at about midnight-thirty, to go to sleep and do it all again.

Once you’ve done the production runner job, just in terms of hours spent in the week, nothing will ever scare you again in terms of physical endurance. I mean you might say, “I’m not gonna do that because it’s insane,” but you’ll never go, “Well I don’t know if I’d cope with that,” because you’ll know whether you could or not. It’s great preparation, certainly, for being a dad.

Always chasing someone around.

Always in crisis, plans change immediately, you have to arrange for the ability to feed an extraordinarily large number of people at very short notice, and the star of the show is usually in tears. It’s exactly like being in the movies. In fact I have a friend who was a production coordinator. She was trained as a nanny and then she was like, “To hell with this, I’m doing movies.” And she was perfect. I mean, the best coordinator in the world. People would call her up and go, “I’m on the M-25 road and I’m lost and I don’t know where I should be and da-da-da-da,” and she would just go, “It’s okay…” and then after a while go, “That’s enough!”

Ha! That’s amazing. Then what happened? Did you know you wanted to move towards writing? Is that where you were setting your sights or were you testing everything out?

No, I was testing everything out. I was working on these movies and it would be extraordinary: you’d get 300 people working those kinds of hours, massive effort, and insane stuff would happen. A guy would take 30,000 volts, fall backwards seven feet off a ladder, land on his back, hitting the ground, would restart his heart, and be at work the next day. That’s the movies. All this would happen and if the script was bad none of it mattered. There’s nothing you can do with a bad script. I worked on a bunch of movies and some of them had, at best, mediocre scripts and I just thought, “Well, I can do this,” and I started writing film scripts.

My first film script was sort of a cross between Delicatessen and V for Vendetta, and it got me an agent. Then I spent nine years trying to manage the trick again and get someone to pay attention and doing occasional bits of writing and getting paid some, but I am not a big fan of the movie industry.

You said you weren’t a big fan of the industry. Tell me about that discontentment.

I loved working as a runner; that was one of my favorite things that I ever did. What I didn’t love later was working in the UK film industry as a writer. There is a myth that the difference between London and Hollywood in this regard is that in Hollywood it’s a straightforward Faustian bargain: they give you a shit-load of money. And in London it’s a much more equitable exchange: they give you much less money, but your soul remains intact. No: In Hollywood they pay you; in London they don’t but you’re soul gets taken both times. I have impatience with the London model; it’s terrible what’s gonna happen to my soul, but I do expect incoming cash.

But weirdly, as a novelist, you’re in a completely different dynamic with the studios and with producers and so on than you are as a screenwriter. If you’re a screenwriter, you are basically some guy who wants to bore them and use up their time for no good reason because you’re just some schmuck with a project. But a novelist, you’ve already been published, that means there’s a group of people out there who are already fond of your stuff, it’s proven material. That means you have a project which they might want to buy. It’s completely different.

Tell me a little about what life was like when you were working as a runner. I mean, you were mostly just working, but where were you living and who were you spending time with? The whole shebang.

So the studios in London, at the time there were basically only two: Pinewood and Shepperton. I was working at Shepperton studios, which is southwest of the main city. I would drive out there in the morning and it’s a totally surreal experience. One time, actually, when I was working at Pinewood, I got in and I was driving around finding a parking space and I got out of my car and was immediately surrounded by a troupe of mounted horseman in medieval armor, passing two-by-two and led by Richard Gere. And I was just like, “Okay, I don’t know if I’m hallucinating now or if that was real.” Of course they were filming that Lancelot movie that he did.

It was weird because all the other guys were carrying a sword and he had like a broomstick or something because he wouldn’t carry an edged-weapon because he’s a Buddhist. So that was weird. The whole thing is so surreal. I just went from crisis to catastrophe the entire time… I leaned on a tiger cage; they were filming a commercial with tigers and I was just getting my breakfast and I leaned back on the cage….

Oh no!

Just like that, just having my eggs and everyone’s looking at me and I’m having my eggs and everyone’s looking at me and suddenly I hear, “Grrrrrrrrr,” and I look around at a tiger. The tiger’s looking at my eggs or possibly my head and kind of going, “Where’s my breakfast?” I had no idea. I teleported ten feet away.

Five weeks into one production a guy crashed a forklift truck into my car.

Oh God! When you were in it?

I wasn’t in it. He drove the forks of the thing through the passenger door. He was worried he was going to get in trouble because it was in the studio parking space, so he gets the forklift truck, he takes my car up on the forklift and he puts it back in the space neatly so I’ll never know. Like, there are holes in my car! The wheels are pointing in different directions! What a joke.

I got home one night and I was living in Surbiton, it’s a very notoriously middle-class kind of area, which is surrounded by a couple of fairly rough bits of London. I was living in this flat and I went in, I had this old portable TV – this was back when TV’s had cathode ray tubes – which I’d been given by my brother when he moved out. It was plugged in by my bed and I was watching TV and I was just falling asleep when the TV exploded, just like Bang! Black smoke pours out of the back and all of the lights go out in my apartment and I’m suddenly in this acrid choking box. So then I’m out the door and I get out to the corridor and I choke for a while. Then I figure I should go back in and see if the house is on fire and warn the other people but there’s black smoke coming out so I bang on the door of the apartment next to me and this guy comes out in a pair of swimming trunks. I’m just like, “What the hell? Am I back at the movie studio asleep with my head stuck to my desk?” And he’s looking a little bit angry and I say, “Look I’m really sorry but I think I may have set the house on fire, could I possibly borrow a torch?” And he says, “You know, seriously I’m packing for my honeymoon right now…” They were entirely having sex. I interrupted my neighbor having sex the night before his honeymoon. I was the worst human being in Surbiton. On the other hand, accidentally letting your neighbor’s house burn down…

…is worse.

Somehow in between all this I found the time to write. And this is the great thing about dedicated screenwriting software and it’s the greatest thing about Scrivener which I use to write novels – you can write little chunks of stuff and knit it together later. If you don’t have time it’s really, really useful, because you can’t [type a lot] in the seven minutes that you have, so you write 150 words, you’re done, you go. But if you do that three or four times in a day, you’ve maybe written 1000 words and suddenly you’ve got something.

So you were writing in these little snippets of sort of captured time that you had between exploding televisions.

Between exploding televisions and interrupting my neighbor mid-coitus. Yeah, I would stick faux-diagrams on my wall with blue tack. I have this vision in my head of the perfect writing wall or room where you’re typing away and you have an idea and you get up and you have a kind of spider’s web of clotheslines and strings over your head and you just peg the idea in place on a particular string because it’s part of that thread of the story and then, if you need to move it around, you just move the thing and you can weave the threads together.

I’ve tried this a couple of times; it is physically not doable. It’s one of these things that psychopaths and detectives do.

It sounds like A Beautiful Mind.

It can’t be done! You can’t organize yourself in 3-D with clothes pegs and string.

But you’ve actually tried the clothesline thing yourself?

I have!

Amazing.

It does not work.

It sounds very complicated and messy.

Like the scary guy in the movie. They walk into the room and they go, “Hooooly Shit. You’ve clearly lost your mind entirely…”

When you were making these crazy clothesline timelines and all that, were you living alone or did you have a roommate?

I have not lived with a roommate for a long time, if ever, really. I’d be living alone or I would be with somebody and they would be spending a lot of time at my place or we’d be living together, whatever. I don’t think I ever did [the clotheslines thing] while somebody was cohabiting with me, I think that would go badly. It’s definitely a very good way of encouraging someone to leave: show them the scary clothesline room.

When I was living in Surbiton I just had lots and lots of charts stuck up on the wall with blue tack, which then I had to pay for because it pulled all the paint off when I finally took it down.

When did you decide to switch and leave the film industry and make this sort of crazy shift to writing novels? Also, it must’ve been daunting considering who your father is.

It was always in my mind that one day I might write a book. Not that I particularly wanted to, but it was a possibility. And again, that’s something that comes out of the confidence of having seen it done.

Finally I went in and I pitched the single-best European movie, possible break-out idea that I’ve ever had, again with a female lead, this time (God help me) in her 40s or even older, 50s. The point about it is that it was a re-telling and an inversion of that old thing about a young woman who runs away to be a soldier and she dresses up as a boy. So they were like, “This is a transvestite movie about a middle-aged woman.” “I wouldn’t classify it as that, it’s kind of a swashbuckler, an adventure, whatever.” “Um, well, no, this is a transvestite movie about a middle-aged woman.” So suddenly it’s this disaster zone and they just threw it out; it was this horrific thing.

And you thought, “No more.”

And bear in mind that this is in the UK where you’re supposed to be allowed to keep your soul. You’re doing kind of country house-horror story or country house-detective story and you go and make the pitch for someone and they say, “I think what would be really good if they were all lesbians.” I’m like, “Well, okay, are we talking about realistic gay women here? That would be fine.” And they go, “Oh no, that’s not what we’re talking about.” And it’s like, “Yeah, so what you’re talking about really is you want to make a 90-minute wet t-shirt contest movie. That’s fine, but I’m not doing it for you.”

So, I started writing a book.

You quit your day job to do this? Wow.

Which was fine. I didn’t take very long to get into the book. I started writing in January and by April I had 300 pages and I knew I was gonna finish and it was gonna be okay. Then I got to the end and it was extraordinary.

Tell me about that first day when you were, like, “Alright, I’m going to start a novel.”

It came pouring out. I was so compressed because movies, particularly UK movies, have a budget ceiling and they’re 120 pages long, there’s a maximum amount of story you can tell. There’s a limit to the amount of elephants you can write in. I want more elephants. I want, in fact, all the elephants! I want to write a book in which every single elephant in the world appears at the same time and they stand on one another’s backs and they dance the cha-cha. So I was just kind of like, “Right! Okay! Let’s go! Come on! This is it!” And I really took the brakes off and away we went.

Were you ever scared? You quit this thing that you had started building a career in and you’re diving into the unknown and you’re getting married too…

I just couldn’t be a scriptwriter again. I just absolutely didn’t want to do it. If the book hadn’t worked out I was gonna go back to university and retrain. I had no doubt about my ability to do that and I was comfortable with that possibility.

How did it go from having this novel pour out of you to getting it published? And you submitted your manuscript under a pseudonym.

UK publishing is a relatively small world and a lot of people in it had known me from when I was a kid and I basically just didn’t want to embarrass anybody. I wanted to make it possible so that if somebody read my book and just hated it, they could say, “I hate this!” and that would be it and they wouldn’t have to call and say, “Gosh, Nick it’s been a really long time, it’s great to hear from you, da-da-da, by the way, we’re not really confident in your grip on narrative structure.” I really didn’t need to have that conversation. So what I did was I called around to a couple of people and I said, “I’ve done this insane thing: I’ve written a book. What agent should I submit to?” Somebody suggested Conville & Walsh – Patrick Walsh in particular – and so I sent it to Patrick, whom I hadn’t met, with a kind of cover note saying, “I’m Nick Harkaway,” or whatever. Patrick read and came back to me and said, “Come in and we’ll talk and see what we can do.” And we were away. From there, in a weird way, it was relatively straightforward.

We had to have the conversation about my father and say, “Are we concealing this in a very serious way or are we just not bringing it to the forefront?” And I said we’re doing the second because, apart from everything else, you’ve got to have a relationship with your editor, which is to some extent based on trust, and with the other people that you’re going to work with. If they do this whole thing, they bid for you and whatever and then you turn around and say, “Oh by the way, there’s something you should know: my father is a best-selling novelist,” they might quite rightly be quite pissed. It affects things; it changes things. I didn’t want to put anybody in that position, so I did a kind of discreet but not obsessively secretive thing about it. It went out and Patrick very skillfully massaged the whole situation and heaven help me, an auction, which is great.

A lot of people might think that the natural thing to do was say, “Yeah, sure this is my father,” because people might be more interested and you might get more money and that whole circus. You wanted to be judged on your own merit.

Very occasionally people have kind of taken a bite out of me because of my father’s career and who he is and somehow I must be inside the door of the industry. But most people go, “God, that’s brave.”

You didn’t play that card, which you could have played.

First of all, it would be disingenuous to suggest that that card doesn’t play itself.

Well, fine.

That’s also been the thing that I have to carry a little bit in my life, that that is always in the background and people figure it out relatively quickly for various reasons. It’s relatively obvious to many people. Sometimes you just have to deal with it.

We had a lot of stuff about The Gone-Away World that was all kind of: “Wow, here is this guy, le Carré’s kid and he’s writing about ninjas and the end of the world and it’s so completely over the top and he hasn’t written a spy story.” Then with Angelmaker there was almost nothing. Done with that, human-interest story finished. Good.

What was your idea of success when you were in your 20s and what is it now?

Success has always meant happiness to me because otherwise, why are you there? My wife is a lawyer and I’ve met a couple of lawyers who’ve taken the kind of hardcore big law firm route and they work all the hours that God gave and so on in order to produce a vast amount of money which they can then spend on their families and themselves. The loss of facetime with one another is so damaging to them and so painful to them all. For many people maybe it works but for me it was always about being able to be there. There’s no point working so hard that you miss it. It’s like when you take a camera somewhere and you take too many pictures and you miss the event you are photographing. Same thing. You’ve just got to be there.

I think being an intolerable human being does not make you a success and being a success shouldn’t make you an intolerable human being.

That’s well put. Do you have any other advice for young writers?

That’s almost the most important thing. Be a person, it’ll come through when you write. I hesitate to point to myself since I’ve only written two novels and a non-fiction book, but one of the things that everybody says to me over and over again is: “You write human; there’s empathy in what you write. I feel that your characters are real because they care about stuff.” I care about them reciprocally. I believe it’s because it’s about being a person, it’s not about everything else.

The second thing is, for me: the framework is always the detective story. There’s a crime, an investigation, and a solution. It can be an emotional crime, an emotional investigation, and a human solution – it doesn’t have to be a literal legal crime. But if you keep that structure in your head and keep interrogating your story – Where am I in the investigation? Where am I in the solution? – you won’t get lost, and if you don’t get lost then you can go anywhere.

Interview by Astri von Arbin Ahlander

Photo by Rory Lindsay

Novey speaks quickly, laughs often, and is always doing at least three things at once.

Were you always very apt at languages when you were younger?

I used to make up plays and make the neighborhood kids act in them in the backyard. In my family there were four of us. Especially my younger stepbrother Daniel, I would dress him up in tutus and make him participate in all of my literary shenanigans. I was always doing things like that. At the bus stop I would make up songs and games and make people do them. People were game; it was a small town.

Where was this, where you grew up?

I grew up in a town in western Pennsylvania, near the border with West Virginia and Ohio. It’s, like, the rust belt. No one moved away and no one came so there was a fixed group of children who just knew each other forever – I think I was just known as the person who did those kinds of things.

Most of the people that I went to high school with…some of them now, I go home and they work at, like, the Blockbusters, or they work at the mall, things like that. So I did not to go to a high school where a lot people were going to college. I wrote a play in high school. It was performed and no one knew it happened, it was, like, a total non-event because it was the only play that anyone had ever written in that high school. You know, there was a football game that Friday… It was that kind of high school.

But you knew you wanted to be doing it because you were doing it on your own.

I never knew I wanted to be doing it, I just did it because that was what made me happy, you know? My dad was really helpful. The University of Virginia had this creative writing program in the summer, so he sent me to do that when I was in high school. I wrote stories and then he found someone who was a professor at something and this professor read my stories and gave me feedback and sent them back.

That’s pretty big. So your dad was really trying to help you.

Yeah. He is a doctor but when I was little he acted in lots of plays, I remember going to see him as Dracula. And we always went and saw theater. The six of us went as a family to the Edinburgh Theatre Festival.

I remember being, like, fourteen and there was this Japanese dance thing that was all naked men. I look back on it, like: “That was a really interesting choice!” [Laughs.] To take four children to see all these naked men dancing. But I was fascinated by it. And we talked about it for years. You can imagine four teenagers being, like: “Our parents took us to see…”

…naked men dancing?

[Laughs.] Yeah!

I had a similar experience. I was seven years old and my parents took me and my sister to a dance show, there were naked men and nuns…And I’m not sure if the point was that the men were supposed to be raping the nuns, but the men stripped them –

Oh!

At that point we left.

That’s a good point to go.

So, when you were describing your hometown, would you say your family was a bit of an anomaly?

In every sense.

You seem to have had your own little world of theater and writing programs…

Yeah, my dad always had season tickets to theater in Pittsburgh and would take us occasionally and they still do. It was two hours from where I lived but I think he just needed culture and would go and seek it out. But no one else around us did. They didn’t look for it and we didn’t talk about it.

I’ve always been doing my own thing. And I got so used to everyone around me being like, “Well Idra just does that thing. We don’t know what it is. Whatever.”

Did you decide early on that you wanted to pursue writing in college?

Well, I thought I would do journalism. It seems like a profession, it has, like, an income, it’s read by lots of people. Poetry, not. So I did journalism as an undergrad when I was at Barnard and I worked for this magazine called City Limits which covered the non-profit sector of New York. Every time I handed in the articles, the editor would be like, “Idra, there’s this wonderful three-paragraph description of the dust on the floor…I’m just gonna cut that out.” And he would always cut the things that I had worked the hardest on and cared the most about. And so then I started turning them into poems that I just wrote for myself. It was basically like, “The Dust on the Floor at the Housing Court,” you know? I just turned it into a poem.

After college you moved to Chile, tell me about that.

Yes, and I was there for three years. When I was in college, I was a comparative literature major. Because in addition to the various weird things that my family did, my dad had friends in Puerto Rico so we went there for Christmas for many years. We also went to the Dominican Republic, we went to Spain. My dad loves speaking Spanish. And we had exchange students in my house – just to add to the carnival. We always had Latin Americans living in the extra room in the basement.

I was like: “That’s unusual. She just met me.”

Its karma. You had exchange students forever at your house. Tell me about the brother, the man you would later marry.

He came to visit his sister and we met in the city [New York] and I told my grandmother that same day that I was going to marry him.

Really?

I did.

Okay, you have to tell about that meeting.

Leo is fourteen years younger than his sister, who has twins. He called me and said, “I’m Ana’s brother, I’m here from Chile. She said maybe you can take me out on the town?” Cause she had, you know, twin three-year-olds. And I said I was busy but maybe we could go out on Monday, let’s talk then, and I, like, hung up…

“Uh, annoying! I have to take care of this guy who’s visiting.”

Exactly. So then the next day I’m on the subway and I look over and I see this man who I thought was just – he had dreadlocks and looked sort of like, a little sleepy, it was in the morning – but just had this energy and I was like, “Wow, you know, I wanna date somebody like that.” And he got off the subway and was with Ana’s twins.

And it was him?

Yeah, and I was like, “I’m fantasizing about someone on the subway and I have a date with him for Monday night. What is the chance?”

That is fate.

Well, you can imagine, as a person who is drawn to literature, why I would tell my grandmother that I was going to marry this man. I think I fell in love with the story first, but then by Monday I was, like, done.

And then we did get married. We were twenty-two, which is very young.

Wait wait wait! Back track: you married him at twenty-two?

We did, yeah.

So first you went to Chile? You have to tell me the whole story.

Yes, I went to Chile.

I taught creative writing at this shelter there for women who had experienced domestic violence, I was just volunteering. I wasn’t paid to do it or anything, but I loved doing it and I felt like it gave me a window into Chilean society that I never would’ve had otherwise. That was the first time I think I actually started translating. I would translate, you know, poems by Louise Glück and bring them translated into Spanish to the class. If there weren’t any poems – or at least I didn’t know where they were – written in Spanish that I was familiar with, I could translate these poems that I thought would be meaningful to the women and share them. They would bring them up weeks later, about how they were still thinking about it and I was like, Wow! It was amazing to be part of making that connection happen for them.

Did you think at that point that translation might be something you would do more of?

Well like many young translators, I also got a job – money-making – translating articles for the Santiago Times, which is the main English-language newspaper for Chile. I was translating articles into English that came out in the Spanish-language newspaper El Mercurio.

They also did some original content, so the guy from the newspaper asked me to interview, like, the Canadian Trade Minister to Chile. I did the article and he was talking about trees somehow and so I went on and on about the trees, nothing about the trade, and the editor called me –

Back to the dust on the floor.

Exactly! And he’s like, “So these descriptions of all the different kinds of trees are great, Idra, but he’s the Trade Minister.” He never asked me to do another one. [Laughs.] That was it.

So there you are, you’re traveling with Leo, you’re translating in Chile, then you got married.

No, we got married because I wanted to come back [to the United States] and go to graduate school and I knew that it would be easier for him if he had a spouse visa to work here. So the whole idea of getting married at that point in time was because of work reasons. I wanted him to be able to get a job here and live here.

When we moved to New York we had two pieces of luggage and no money.

And how did Leo feel about the move?

I think he was okay with moving here. We originally had this idea that we would eventually live in a third country that was neither his country nor my country, but what happened was by the time we got here and I went to graduate school and then got a teaching job, you start to set up a life in a community and you don’t want to start over again.

Leo started his own business, they’re all entrepreneurs in his family. But it was hard because I was in grad school and I was teaching and working at a literary agency part-time. We had nothing in our apartment. A friend drove us to our apartment and the only thing that we had was the mattress we bought from Sleepy’s and our luggage. We had nothing. So this wonderful friend went back to his apartment for two cups, a set of crappy sheets, and two chairs… He was like, “Here’s one of everything you need to just get through the next, like, two or three days.”

What was your graduate school experience like at Columbia? Was it what you expected?

I was so excited to be around people who wrote and read and spoke English. But I think in some ways I had come from being in, like, a really international way of thinking and reading and the graduate school wasn’t quite like that. And it was exciting to read predominantly American writers because I hadn’t been doing that, but I think my sense of reference was always just a little broader than that. I would always be bringing up things that other people hadn’t read, which was fine, but then it was like, well why bring it up, you know?

Richard Howard read my translations and gave me great feedback and Michael Scammell became a mentor and continues to be a mentor on both writing and translation. So I think I found good mentors for that and I started publishing things right away. It worked out and it seemed like that’s something I should do. But then, slowly, I did have this feeling that it was, like, hijacking my own writing life.

Did you start publishing more translations as opposed to your own writing first?

No, I was always publishing poems in the U.S. when I was living in Chile and then when I was in graduate school I published a chapbook with the Poetry Society America. Carolyn Forché, who I’d never met – but I loved her work – she chose it and I think there was a definite connection there because she is a poet who had also lived in Latin America and who has a very international mindset about how she thinks about looking at the world and she is interested in, like, the intersection of poetry and imagination and also ethics and kind of seeing how they play into each other, which is of interest to me.

So she picked it and then in her intro to that chapbook she sort of explained to me what I was doing, which was great. She was like, “All these poems do this,” and I was like, “Oh, maybe they do. Super!” Once I published that chapbook with PSA and read her intro, it helped me figure out what to do for the rest of the book. I finished the rest of the book of poems after I graduated.

What did you do for work after you graduated from Columbia?

I was teaching composition at Columbia for a couple of years. It was ideal looking back because it gave me health insurance and a job for, like, three years. I finished the book and it got picked by Alice James for the Kinereth Gensler Award. So my first book came out and I really feel indebted to Carolyn Forché because I think she told me what I was doing and I couldn’t see it, I was just cranking out poems, but she saw what they were doing… together. I think it still even affected the way I wrote my second book. She taught me how to see connections between poems.

That’s huge!

Huge. I don’t know what would’ve happened if that hadn’t happened.

Have you told her that?

Oh yeah! She knows.

When I taught at a women’s prison for three years, I taught her book. It was the Bard Prison Initiative. I made up a class for the students in the prison that was looking at the history of poetry about war. Carolyn fortunately has this amazing anthology, “Against Forgetting.” So I used that as kind of the basis for the class. She calls it the poetry of witness.

You said you were publishing poems in American publications when you were living in Chile, so did you have a habit of submitting work early on?

Well, when I was an undergrad I had translated this Rosario Castellanos poem for a class and the professor of that class, Peter Connors, said that he thought that I should send it out somewhere. And then Alfred Macadam – who was my thesis advisor – said to me, “Do you want to write reviews?” for the magazine that he edited with the America Society. So, it always seemed like something that people were encouraging me to do.

You felt like it was possible.

Yeah! People who I respected told me that I should do it, so I did. I mean, I wasn’t publishing in super fly places because I didn’t even know what the super fly places were when I was living in Chile, I just would randomly come across things. I would go to Barnes and Noble when I came back from Chile and just sit there in the literary journal section and read. I was so hungry for it. I would find journals I liked and just submit when I went back to Chile. It would’ve been so much easier now because you can submit things online.

How did your family feel about you living in Chile?

I think they were very nervous that I wasn’t going to move back. But then I did because I really, really wanted to be around people who wrote in English.

How do your parents feel about your choice to pursue life as a writer?

You know its funny, when I was in Chile and thought about going to grad school, I wondered if I should do something more practical and go get a PhD in Latin American literature or comparative literature, something like that. And my dad said to me, “All you do is write poems.” I was like, “Yes, but I don’t know if I can make a living at that.” And he said that he had just met somebody who I guess wrote operas or something, which is also a really financially promising path! Like, who writes operas?

Nobody. Who watches them anymore, unfortunately?

That’s what I’m saying. And this guy made it, he says, because he loves it and he’s like, “You love to write poems, go do the MFA, I’ll help you.” So I did.

Awww. Good dad!

I know. I don’t know if I would’ve done it otherwise.

Yeah, and especially as a poet. I mean, as a fiction writer you can pretend that you’re going to write a bestseller, you know?

Yeah there’s some lofty book deal out there.

Do you ever feel like, “What am I doing?”

Sometimes I meet people and I tell them that I’m a poet and they look at me in kind of like a pitying way. I’ll be like, “Oh I’m a poet,” and they sort of look at you like that’s kind of charming, sort of like if you told someone you make children’s toys or something like that.

But now I live in Brooklyn where everybody’s a writer. I think the writer per capita ratio here is extremely high. I think if you just went up to a Brooklyn building and shouted, “Is there a poet who can help me?” three windows would open.

You should try it. “Poets! Open your windows and doors!”

I think they would all be like, “What do you need? Is there any money connected to this?”

So you never experience feelings of doubt…?

Oh, I doubt it, like, every day. I think part of the reason why I did translation for a while is because I was like, I can’t possibly just… do poetry. That doesn’t seem like a very steady thing to do, I better do something else.

You just have to understand, I feel like I’ve done so many different jobs in so many different places that I also know that whatever I’m doing, by the next year I may be doing something else, you know? I mean for a couple of years I was moving back and forth between teaching at Columbia and at a prison. Moving between the Ivy League and a women’s prison was…

Very different.

Well, it showed you the range of places one can teach.

You were teaching basically from day one after graduate school, even before graduate school…

Yeah, I love teaching. I love writing and being alone, but writing is such a lonely thing to do, and with teaching you get to hang out with other people and you get to talk about books with other people.

I like teaching. I like that it gets me out of the house. You have to, you know, put on some nice shoes. Brush your hair.

To people who don’t do the writing life or work at home this sounds basic, but…

Its pretty big.

Otherwise, you’ll just wear your pajamas all day.

Yeah. And I still wear clothes I’ve had since, like, high school so once in a while its like, “Well I’m teaching, I better get some new pants.”

Have the jobs you’ve done always been writing-related or have you done some weird gigs?

I guess I haven’t done any jobs that are totally completely unconnected to writing. I did work at a literary agency, but that’s still literary. I think it just kind of worked out because I was living in a really inexpensive place after college. So I didn’t have to work that much. And my husband’s family was there and we went to his parents’ house for lunch every day.

Every day?!

Yeah. There was a cook and so we went and we just ate and then left every day.

Well, that’s a perfect scenario.

It was great! So we only had to put together some toast at night. Then we got this cheap apartment, we rented somebody’s summer home during the school year and then they would use it in the summer and we would go and backpack. It wasn’t a very expensive way to live after college.

And what about in New York? I mean, here it does get very expensive. So you had that crap apartment where you just brought your Sleepy’s mattress.

Yeah, I was teaching and got a couple of grants for writing and translation which, you know, helped things. And Leo had launched his company, so little by little he was making more. You know, there was always two of us making it work, and neither of us are people who needed any more than just enough to make it happen.

Now you have one son who is two years old. And you have a little someone coming.

A little number two son.

Do you find that parenthood has changed things?

The amount of time you have changes. Now I want to be able to prioritize writing and to have teaching jobs that make that possible. I’m just learning that I need to be able to make choices that enable me to write when I want to. I feel like that’s a work in progress, because that’s not always possible. Sometimes you just have to put the other things first because you have to pay rent.

Because I’ve always operated in different languages and had different jobs going on and was always, like, the sort of a weirdo, I don’t need to be like everyone else and I don’t need to organize my life like other people. I just need to make it work for me. Leo works for himself and I work for myself and neither of us has any financial stability and we’ve never had it. Every year we have no idea what our income is gonna be and we’ve gotten used to just sort of making that…

Dealing with that?

Yeah. So maybe in that way I sort of am like, “You just have to make it work every semester, every year,” because we just don’t know, you know?

You’re not a five-year-plan person.

No, there is no five-year-plan here.

And that hasn’t changed with having a baby?

I think maybe if you had a lot of job stability or were married to someone who was always doing the exact same thing all the time and could sort of forecast their life, then the shake-up [of a baby] would be sort of, you know, like earth-shattering. But for us it’s just more chaos!

But this past month has really been something else. I have this new book out. So I’ve been doing tons of readings for it and I am so round [Idra is 9 months pregnant at the time of this interview.]

And you do know what happens with readings and roundness. Last time you were pregnant and gave a reading you read, left…

And then I went into labor.

When’s your next reading?

It’s Friday!

And when are you due?

Um, three weeks, so..

So Friday!

I’ll keep you posted. Can you imagine if it happened twice?

As a man, if you’re expecting a kid or you have a small kid, you go to readings and you sort of have control of whether people know what’s going on with your… life. And as a woman, if you’re pregnant, you don’t have any control about putting your personal life aside in order for the audience to concentrate on you and what you’re reading. You don’t have that option. I just feel like every time I read and I’m sitting there pregnant I’m like, “Well, everyone knows I’m not a virgin.”

And is that somehow important to you?

No, it’s just a fact. It’s just there, you know?

Every time I’ve had a reading I’m thinking about that.

Instead of imagining the audience naked you’re going, like, “They all know I’ve had sex.”

Well, one of the readings last week was Pen World Voices Festival and the theme was metamorphosis.

You’re like –

Exhibit A.

Do I have to read or do I just stand here? Performance art.

I did a reading on Saturday night and was reading a couple of poems that are about prisons. I taught at this women’s prison and a lot of my students were mothers and had children who they didn’t see because they were imprisoned. So I was reading these poems and there were mothers in it. When I first wrote that book I was thinking of mothers as like my mother and other mothers, but once you’re either pregnant or have a kid, anytime you read a poem about a mother it’s also you! You aren’t necessarily assumed to be the daughter; you could also be the mother. And so even though I wrote those poems when I wasn’t, reading them now I am.

And I feel like I have this false sense of control, of being like what people perceive of you or not, which you have no control over. I have no control over whether people see me as a translator who writes poems or a poet who translates or, you know, a mother who writes or a writer who happens to be a mother. You have no control over that and you just have to accept that. And I think trying to control it is a profound waste of time.

Looking back, can you think of any major challenges that you faced?

Living in another country for a long time was really lonely. I figured out how important it was to me to feel that there was a particular kind of women who were doing a lot of thinking and who were resisting the ways that things happen. And when I didn’t have any women friends like that, it was devastating.

You didn’t have any friends like that in Chile?

No. I think it was because we were living in a small town. I had a friend or two in Santiago and I would take the bus for two hours to go and see them for, like, a little while and come back. And I think after that I just never underestimated the importance of friendship. I think it’s so sustaining. Because I was just lonely, I just couldn’t find anyone that I connected with. I had gone to Barnard and I just assumed that everyone thought that Adrienne Rich is a form of religion, you know?

They’re like, “What’s Idra doing?” I mean, I was taking pictures of, like, dead fish on our bed.

What about Leo? How does he feel about being here, in America?

I think he’s glad I’m no longer putting fish on the bed.

He’s not nearly as particular a person as I am. Leo could strike up a friendship with a tree. I’m kind of like a weird, intense person. You know? He, he gets along with everybody.

If you were to talk to younger Idra, of her mid-20s, what would you tell her?

Calm down. Yeah, I would tell her to calm down.

Now I know, if I’m working on something and all it is is just frustration, I’m just like, “Let’s just find that big delete button and get rid of this.” I’ve learned that I do not force things. I used to force things. I used to think if I just picked at it long enough it would come together. It doesn’t.

What about advice for young writers, what would you say?

I would say that it’s okay not to always be writing. It’s okay, you know?

And why does that seem like such a radical idea? It’s okay not to do anything.

Well, all that about how it’s not the inspiration, it’s the blood and sweat you put in that matters…

I think you can have blood and sweat but you don’t have to have it 365 days a year.

There’s this fear – and I had that when I was younger – that the thing that you’re working on is like a fire and if you don’t tend it every day, it will go out. When I think if you just let it go out and come back with some new kindling, you are actually going to build a bigger fire.

Interview by Astri von Arbin Ahlander

Photo courtesy of the artist

When the Guardian described Manguso’s latest book as “clear and sharp as a shard of glass,” the critic may as well have been speaking of Manguso herself. This interviewer would like to add a few more modifiers to complete the picture: humble, thoughtful, kind.

Were you the kind of child who ran around telling stories?

Never. I can’t tell a story. I can look at a small part of actual reality and try to figure out what’s going on, and maybe write about it, but I cannot make up a story.

I was an only child, and I grew up on a street with a lot of retirees, so there weren’t many kids in the neighborhood. I spent most of my early childhood by myself. I looked at the toad family that lived in the storm drain, the little stones in the garden.

Was there an inner dialogue going on that was about looking at and examining things?

I remember feeling somewhat alienated from my peers when they talked about TV. I didn’t watch TV. My parents didn’t watch much TV. So I didn’t understand why, with these half-hour programs, everyone would then talk about them for hours at school the next day. It’s not that my parents were intellectuals; they just didn’t keep the TV on.

But I remember very tall trees and interesting stones I would pick up. Maybe all the kids were doing this, too, along with watching TV.

You just didn’t have the contemporary culture part.

I was easily overstimulated — not in a way that made me combative or noticeably upset, but I sensed I needed less stimulation than I thought my peers did to feel full, to feel maximally involved in the universe, and I still feel that way.

Did you read a lot when you were little?

Yes. One quirk of my early reading life was that our town had an unusually well organized dump — okay, “waste management facility” — and it included a fantastic book swap. I found all sorts of weird, antique, out-of-print books. Periodically someone would dump a big box of correspondence. Old, old handwritten letters. Old magazines. I went there on Saturdays, with my father, and I was allowed to take home whatever I wanted.

One Saturday I found an arithmetic book in Arabic, and even then I was a little self-conscious – I was about ten – and I thought, “Oh my god, this is going to make me so much more interesting.”

[Laughs. ] Just having it.

Just having it. I had big dreams about being able to read it. I couldn’t, of course.

Did you create a library in your room?

I didn’t know that a personal book collection could even be called a library, but yeah, I had stacks of cool books. I still have a lot of them.

When you are younger and you’re reading a book, at first it’s just about the story and the way it’s written, and then at some point you realize that someone wrote it. Did you have that experience? Did you think at some point, “Maybe I could write something like that?”

I wish I had a kind of origin myth involving that realization. I remember not being excited or impressed by the idea that people wrote books. I didn’t, as a child, want to be a writer.

What did you want to be?

The first thing I wanted to be was a magician. Then, for a while after that, I remember thinking that I probably wouldn’t want to do the things as an adult that I wanted to do as a child. Nevertheless, I was highly susceptible to the middle-class idea that if you are smart, you will grow up and become a doctor.

I was a doctor for Halloween one year, and people kept saying, “Oh, M.A.S.H. !” and I of course didn’t get the reference.

What did your parents do?

My father was an accountant and is now a retired accountant. And my mother was and is a housewife. I believe there’s a tax occupation code for housewife. I remember watching my mom filling out forms of some kind and writing down “housewife” as her official occupation. As a tiny proto-feminist, I thought, “Well, I’m definitely not doing that.”

I sent out one application and was accepted. I’ve had some strokes of luck in my so-called career narrative. That one is embarrassing, almost unbelievable.

Luck is important, but luck doesn’t matter if you aren’t ready to take on whatever opportunities it brings you. You have to set the stage for it.

This wasn’t a case of preparation meeting opportunity; I just didn’t know any better. I’d heard of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and I thought, “I guess that’s where you go,” in the same way I’d thought that good spellers became doctors. I had no idea there were probably fifty other writing programs.

It’s a big leap to go from the idea of doctor to classicist, and certainly to poet. I’m interested in what you were thinking about when you made those switches.

That’s a good observation. [Laughs. ] I’d say the change from doctor to classicist represented a willful transformation.

My mother kept the house extremely tidy. It was impressed upon me that there should be no clutter, so that might have been an early trigger for my liking uncluttered spaces and uncluttered texts. Of course, I then married the person who produces the most clutter of anyone I’ve ever met. [Laughs. ]

[Laughs. ] Oh, great.

We make a good team.

That transition to doing Latin was an emblem of leaving the middle class and doing something impractical. I wanted to catch up to the students who had been studying Latin all along, but there was no way I could have entered a PhD program after my two and a half years of college Latin.

But that was what you thought you might do?

I had a vague plan of attending a post-baccalaureate Classics cram school, but I was still pretty lost.

I lived in New York between college and graduate school, and interned at the New Yorker. Then, at Iowa, there were so many people who’d already decided they’d be writers. I thought I should just go back to New York. I didn’t feel like a writer yet.

We were talking about “the ladder” – going to Harvard and then eventually going to Iowa. So then you were at the New Yorker, which is like The Holy Grail, right?

So you’ve picked up on this middle-class fetishization of the brand name! I didn’t recognize it at the time – I thought, “I’ll affix these super-classy brand names to my personal narrative and thus launch myself upward.” But really what I was doing was so exceptionally middle-class. It was striving.

Getting that internship at the New Yorker was an exercise in indulging my dumb vanity. It felt terribly important that I find a way to work there. The irony is, I didn’t even like the magazine as much as I liked the idea of it.

So, how did you get the job?

Basically, I broke into the mailroom. This was pre-email. I called the editors on the phone. I called them at night. If I ever find myself on the receiving end of this sort of thing, I’d block the number.

[Laughs. ]

Seriously.

After talking with and interviewing with some editors and with the fact-checking department, I got a temp job at what was then called the Word Processing department, which doesn’t exist anymore. I learned the workflow, learned the antiquated computer system. A month later, when they needed a new intern, it was easier to hire me than to train someone else.

How long were you an intern there? How long were you in New York?

Five months.

When you went to New York, did you know you were going to Iowa?

I did. I was going to Iowa in August, and I had graduated college in March. I think forty-eight hours after I got my diploma, I got on a Greyhound bus and moved in with a bunch of friends. One of their mothers was a real estate agent who had found a big rental apartment in Lower Manhattan.

It was four guys and me. I lived in a corner, in a tiny space separated by a curtain I’d sewed.

Was the internship paid?

Yes.

Good! That’s unusual in these times. So what was life like these five months?

It was beautiful. I was twenty-three. I lived in a little corner of a room. I worked the second shift, so I would get to work at around four. Since I was working past seven o’clock, the magazine paid for dinner. We ordered food from one of several nearby restaurants. I would eat a well-balanced meal. All of my money was going toward fancy drinks. This will date the story: A chocolate martini was quite the thing.

Ew.

This was years before anyone said the word “Apple-tini.” I would go to Pravda, a bar in Soho, and order ten-dollar chocolate martinis. And I would go to Pakistani Tea House for giant bowls of curried lentils.

At the magazine, I would eat dinner, and then if you worked past eight o’clock, you would get a car service home. It was about twenty hours a week. It wasn’t a job anybody over the age of twenty-three should have had.

But perfect! If you are poor in New York, and you work the late shift, and you get dinner and a car service, then you are getting all the perks that you need…

I still remember riding down Fifth Avenue at night in a black car, down to Tribeca. I was living in Tribeca! I was living on the corner of West Broadway on Chambers Street. I passed these landmarks I had read about, and I thought, “I can’t believe I get to do this. This is amazing.” And it was. There was nothing bad about it.

When I moved back to New York after graduate school, that’s another story.

At this point, you know you are going to Iowa, you had fought to get into the New Yorker, you must have thought – “Okay, writer.”

Even then, I wasn’t sophisticated enough to perceive the difference between working for a magazine and writing for a magazine.

I moved back to New York and got a bad job but an excellent education in the difference between industry jobs and non-industry jobs. I was working as the secretary at the Wylie Agency. It was a literary agency, and I’d thought, “Literary? Perfect!” It wasn’t.

Why?

I don’t know how it is now, but at that time there was an institutional pride in being insanely overworked. Twelve- and thirteen-hour days were not uncommon. And I was earning so little, I didn’t even have the heart to calculate whether I was making minimum wage. But I am a pathologically dutiful worker, and they smelled it on me. The place was very good at attracting obedient workers and Stockholm-syndroming them into staying. But I wasn’t good at any of the things the agents needed me to do. The best agents will take a bullet for their clients. I have such an agent now, and it’s one of the great blessings of my life, but I was too scared to negotiate things. I remember having to negotiate permission fees for reprint requests, and I didn’t like talking to people, making demands of them.

Wylie is a boutique agency run by a legendary agent nicknamed The Jackal. I was taking care of a lot of other writers, and as dense as I was at that point, still I realized, “This isn’t what I have been called to do.”

How long were you at the Wylie Agency?

Well, I tried to quit three times.

They wouldn’t let you, or you wouldn’t let yourself?

I think they went through a lot of secretaries, and I am a good secretary. They finally let me go when I said I wouldn’t stay even if they increased my pay.

What did you do after that?

After that I became a copy editor, which was a great job for me.

Where were you working as a copy editor?

All over town. I started at the Village Voice, and I did that off and on for years. Very briefly I was at the New York Post, which was a good job. The Post taught me another kind of distillation and compression. I would be given these articles that were seventeen column inches long and be told, “Write two photo captions and a headline and take it from seventeen to three.” That was a great exercise. I worked at the Natural Resources Defense Council’s quarterly magazine. And I worked at Winstar Communications for a while.

I did that for a long time and then drifted into adjunct teaching.

When you had these copyediting jobs while working in the city, were you creating space and time for yourself to write? What habits did you have?

I lived in a lot of different neighborhoods. I had no geographic stability, no job stability. I somehow always had enough time that I was able to produce writing. It felt natural. I would eat a few times a day; I would write a little bit; I would do some copyediting.

Having grown up comfortably enough that I wasn’t clawing my way out of poverty, but not so comfortable that roughing it felt like roughing it, I was ideally prepared to feel quite satisfied with a couch.

Thinking about your parents and your family – did you feel any pressure from them, while you were on this couch, working on a book? Was there any concern from them?

Much to their credit, they never pushed me, because they correctly understood that I pushed myself hard enough that things would be okay. I did well enough in school so that they didn’t have to sit me down and say, “Sarah, you have to go to a really fancy college.” Maybe they so skillfully influenced me that I just had no idea it was happening. I went on the Harvard tour with a couple of friends – I didn’t go with my parents.

This is also a privilege of not growing up in the upper class – my parents never said, “Oh, you’re going to have to take over the financial services company that your great-grandfather started.” My parents made no such demands of me.

I’d love to hear what your experience was at Iowa. You applied to this one program, and you got there, and you hadn’t done that much writing, and you’re in this intense workshop situation where people are semi-professional, or treat themselves that way. What was that like?

There were two qualities of my experience of Iowa that were important. The first is that I had gone there from Harvard, so I didn’t experience it as cutthroat or particularly competitive; it seemed normal to me. Lest that sound superior, I want to add that when I got to college, I was just devastatingly underprepared, and it took me forever to get used to the degree of competition that infected everything. And while I was in college I was surrounded by people who had gone to boarding schools and prep schools who very freely said, “Oh, this is so much easier than high school.” I just thought, “Holy shit.” But then in graduate school, I didn’t feel threatened anymore by that competition and nastiness. I didn’t even experience it as nastiness. So that’s the first thing.

I was willfully blind to the fighting among the instructors and all of the gossip and the adultery and the attendant adventures that are happening in a program like Iowa, in a town like Iowa City. I was blind both to the gallivanting of the adults and to the competition among my peers, and so for me it was a lovely experience and a very instructive one.

As a writer, did you feel you were branching out in new ways?

Developing a critical vocabulary for talking about writing was the first thing I had to learn. A lot of people came there having already had a lot of experience writing and talking about writing, but I was starting at square zero, and it was great. I wanted to learn how to use this tool, the wonderful, capacious English language, which I love more and more each year.

It was a good couple of years for me.

You were surrounded by all of these writers, in this very literary place. And that was new for you. Did you feel you had found your tribe with these people?

I’ve never been tribal, but I was excited to be included among them. I loved reading and being around these people who were just – they were so good, they were so far ahead of their time. Some of them just now are starting to publish. The people who were immediately successful were not by any measure the best writers in the program. This guy from Tennessee doesn’t have a book, as far as I know, but he wrote this double sestina about Elvis that is still one of the best things I’ve ever read. [Laughs. ]

[Laughs. ] There’s this idea that you are only a writer when you are published, but what gets published is not necessarily dictated by quality.

Yes.

There’s something else about the program, when I was there, that seemed important. There was a longstanding softball rivalry between the poets and the fiction writers, and the poets always won. There’s the stereotypical consumptive poet, skinny, wasting away in the garret, versus the athletic Hemingwayesque fiction writer getting up early and shooting elephants. But – maybe it was a temporary condition in the late Nineties – many of the poets, the men and the women, were big, gruff people. I loved that.

I’ve also been a student of a writing program, and you want to party with the poets, because they are beyond the abyss somehow. And the fiction writers are between, and you go to the nonfiction writers for a reality check, to be with people who have their feet on the ground.

Yeah, the poets were always getting their licenses revoked. DUI’s. All of that.

Do you remember what it was like the first time you had something published?

I had been publishing book reviews during and after college in a now defunct publication called the Boston Book Review. It is in their archives that you will find a record of my learning how to string three sentences together.

My first poetry publication was in the American Poetry Review. There were no simultaneous submissions allowed in those days, and everything was done on paper. I remember discovering that four pieces of paper and a business envelope and an envelope inside that could bear one stamp, but if you went over four pieces of paper, you had to put a second stamp on. It was so unimaginably slow compared to now, when you can just send an email to three hundred places at the same time.

And get immediate responses sometimes.

Exactly. It was slower, but it wasn’t overwhelming to send work out – you put stuff in the mail, and you forgot about it. Then you didn’t have to make any submissions for six months, because all of your work would be out.

But then all of a sudden you got a yes.

I was just starting out – in fact I was pre-just starting out. And the editor, Arthur Vogelsang, wrote to me with great respect, as if I were already a writer. It meant the world to me and still does.

Was it a different sense when you had your first book published and you had this physical object in your hand?

Yes. My thesis advisor from Iowa, the famous Jorie Graham, was so good at presenting memorable advice. Almost everything she ever told us sounded legendary.

One of the things that she told the poets was “Always remember the feeling of publishing your first book and holding it in your hands, because you will never have that feeling again.” I lived in a fourth floor walk-up in Bed-Stuy when the publisher sent me a box of books. I was with my boyfriend, and there was this brown box in front of my door and I tore it open. I was still such a student. I opened the box and thought about what Jorie had said, and I held the book, and I handed it to my boyfriend, and we looked at it together. Then, once I felt that I had sufficiently moved through that experience, I went on to the next thing.

In recent years you’ve done a good deal of teaching. How do you teach?

One of the things I like to do is to invite students to ask me absolutely anything. I find it’s the undergraduates that are the most fearless about asking questions. They don’t yet have to pretend that they know all the answers. I want to answer questions about etymology and how to write a cover letter and what to do when you have nothing to write. My ideal teaching milieu would be a bunch of students raising their hands for three hours and just asking questions. It’s slightly sinister, but I try to make all of my courses by the end of the semester consist of just that.

If you could look back at yourself, when you were in your mid-twenties, and you could tell yourself something that you think you would have benefited to know, what might you say?

Let’s see. [Pauses. ] At twenty-five, I was having a slow nervous breakdown that culminated in a psychiatric hospitalization.

Was that in the middle of Iowa or after?

It was after. I had a lot of health problems in my twenties. Pretty much from twenty-one to twenty-five I was in and out of the hospital. It was an autoimmune disease. One of the treatments involved a lot of cleansing of the blood.

Or I’d say, “Get better drugs.” [Laughs. ] I did, ultimately. In my thirties, I got better drugs. I got a better psychopharmacologist, and now my neurotransmitters’ relative concentrations are such that they promote continued life. In my twenties I did not enjoy that condition.

The condition of the twenties is somehow by default a state of frenzy.

Because all things are possible – you don’t know what to rule out yet. One of the great solaces of getting older is understanding what to rule out.

It’s a wonderful solace not to have every goal anymore, every possible goal.

Interview by Astri von Arbin Ahlander Agency

Photo by Andy Ryan

During this interview – surrounded by Columbia students, staff, and faculty clamoring for caffeine at Joe Coffee – Chung broke up the chaotic energy with calm focus as she relayed how she came to find balance as a professional writer. Within the hour, it became more difficult to think in terms of slow and steady winning the race, and easier to consider the peaceful possibility of there being no race at all.

When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

To be honest, when I was a kid I didn’t really think about that. I wasn’t someone who dreamed about being a ballerina or fireman, or anything like that.

No astronaut ambitions?

No astronaut ambitions.

Did you grow up in an artsy household?

I grew up not at all in an artsy household. I came from a family of doctors and ministers. I never imagined being either of those things, which is probably partly why I didn’t have any idea what I was going to be. The models around me didn’t click, and I didn’t really know what else was out there.

Was there a point when you knew you wanted to be a writer?

When I was a teenager, not unlike most teenagers, I journalled a lot. And I was kind of depressive [laughs] – also not unlike many teenagers.

And writers.

And writers. I was a very internalized person, and I spent a lot of time putting that into writing. But again, I never really knew that you could be a writer. I didn’t really know what that was. Even when I was in college, I was still in that same place, where I knew what I didn’t want to do. Nothing that was presented to me seemed to fit, and I still didn’t quite know what the possibilities were.

I did have something like a conversion moment – thinking about it now, it wasn’t a very coherent thought; it was more like an instinct – that there was something in the creative world I should try to explore. I was reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and it was like nothing I had ever read before. It affected me so much that I just really felt like I had to do what she was doing. It was my senior year in college.

What was your major?

I was a history major.

So were you like, “Oh god, I need to change my major.”

Well, it was too late, and I actually don’t regret at all having been a history major. In fact, it was Annie Dillard who said to Spencer Reece, a poet who studied with her at Wesleyan, ”If you want to be a writer, the best thing you can do is study something else.” So I have no regrets at all about studying history, because I feel like everything we study, everything we learn, everything we explore, feeds our writing.

I really had to turn and put on these writers’ shoes and figure out what they felt like. A lot of people debate whether it is necessary to go to school to be a writer. For me it was useful for that transition. I hadn’t ever been around writers, or even creative people at all. So it was just two devoted years to suddenly be around other people for whom being a writer was a much more natural course.

Was there a time gap between your undergrad and the MFA?

There was two years.

How did you spend those two years? Were you writing a lot?

No, I wasn’t. Again, I applied to school sort of as an inkling. I didn’t have pages and pages in a drawer. It was just that I knew I wanted to do something with words. I knew I could be good at it. And I was feeling very inspired by what I was reading. I had a full-time job at the time. What I’d wanted to do while I was in college – I had some sense that I wanted to make the world a better place. In History, I studied 20th century social movements.

Lots of people making the world a better place.

[Laughs. ] Right. All of my internships when I was in college were for nonprofit organizations. I worked for an organization that provided legal services for homeless people. I had an internship at Harvard Law School in their public interest department – for lawyers who wanted to be public defenders, or public interest lawyers.

My first job out of college was as a grant writer for a women’s organization. And so I did that for those two years before the MFA.

You had a job as a writer right out of college!

Yeah, that’s exactly how I put it together, because one thing I realized as I was doing these internships was that I had no talent for direct service work. Actually counseling the clients. I’d tried that, and I found it totally draining and uncomfortable. I thought, ”How can I be part of this good work using my strengths?”

Was there ever a point when you thought, Now I’m a writer?

Frankly, when I found an agent, that felt very concrete to me. Being in school – not so much. I didn’t feel like a writer in my MFA program at all.

Even though you were writing?

Part of it was that my particular program was very studio-based. I was writing, but I don’t know if I was really learning that much about writing. Looking back, I learned how to read in graduate school. There’s not much that I wrote in those years that I’m terrifically proud of.

That was quite a while after my MFA. It was probably eight years after I graduated. I had a long hiatus between graduate school and starting a novel. I went back to grant writing; I was married and was a little lost, to tell you the truth, for kind of a long time.

So you didn’t identify as a writer during that time?

No, I didn’t feel like I was a writer at all. There were fits and spurts, where I was trying to write. I was trying to find writing rhythms, to find places – literal, physical spaces to write in. I was actually very deliberate about my reading at that time. I felt like I had a lot of catching up to do as a reader before I could really be a writer. So probably the most productive thing I did during those years was that I read a lot. I kind of did my own English major, because I hadn’t done that.

And just the conversation I had on the phone with my agent the first time we talked – the idea that someone who did this for a living had taken the time to really read my book and was talking about it like it was a real thing [laughs] and that it was going to exist in the world. There’s something pretty startling about it.

So that was when you were like, ”Okay, I’m a writer.”

I was probably too pessimistic to say, ”I’m a writer.” But I probably said, ”I’m on a path of some kind.”

How did you maintain the motivation it takes to write a novel when you didn’t know you were on the path?

Yeah! I mean – that’s the whole ballgame. You’re completely in a vacuum, or I was. Nobody cares if you write it or not. Nobody cares if you finish. It’s completely inwardly driven.

And there was something about that eight-year gap between finishing graduate school and having lived a bunch of life and having failed at a bunch of stuff in that interim. It was really the failure of a few things in my life – including my marriage – that made starting a novel a very clear process. I was ready.

You had a full-time job while writing Long for This World – when did you find the time to actually write?

During the time when I had that fulltime job, I was writing a little bit in the morning and mostly on the weekends. I had about two-thirds of a draft – this was the end of 2006 – and I had been working on it about two years, and I felt like I had hit a wall in terms of what I could do while working on the novel on the side. It was due to both the time that I had and my mental energy, and it was also this question of who am I? There was something in me that said if I was going to finish this thing, I had to decide I was a writer. I was not a nonprofit administrator. I was not this other person.

So I quit my job. I just said, ”I’m going to be a writer. I’m going to work on my novel!”

How did you pay the bills?

When I had a fulltime job, it was a good job. I had benefits. I had a salary. I was living comfortably. I was living in Brooklyn Heights.

Where the Cosbys lived.

Exactly. Near the promenade. I had a nice little life. And [after I quit], it was really hard. I started to drum up a little freelance grant writing. I was paying for my own health insurance.

I think for those first two years after I quit my job, I made like $14,000 gross, and then maybe $21,000 gross.

And you were still living in New York?

I was still living in New York. I used my credit cards. I deferred my taxes. I did a lot of the stuff that is really scary to do. It was really hard. And I wasn’t in my twenties anymore, I was 33.

I did that for about four years – really not knowing how I was going to survive.

Where exactly did you live during that time?

I lived in the South Bronx for three and a half years. I actually wrote most of Long for This World while living in the South Bronx. Or finished most of it while living in that apartment. It was a tough place to live, but it was an interesting place to live.

What were your neighbors like?

We lived on this very industrial block. Almost all Puerto Rican. I was very conspicuous; there were almost no Asian American people there at all, except for the Chinese takeout owners and delivery people. And the super in our building was a guy who had never been to Manhattan, who had never left the South Bronx. The City for him was this other place. I felt I was really out in the Wild West, in every way. [Laughs. ]

Even the basic stuff of – ”Can we meet for dinner?” It was really stressful. It was like – ”Well, can we go get a falafel?” [Laughs. ]

Did they say yes – to the falafel? Did they understand?

It depended. There were certain friendships that really survived that. And certain friendships that kind of fell away.

So writing as a means to weed out the less true friends?

Yeah, exactly. Maybe it was all for the better. [Laughs. ]

Was your family supportive of your decision to write fulltime?

My parents did not understand what I was doing at all. Especially post-divorce. What was familiar to them was to have a stable life – which was either to have a family or a stable job. Theirs was a very, kind of, immigrant mentality. It was a little confusing to them, what I was doing.

They reacted as though you were going backwards?

Or maybe going crazy. [Laughs. ] There was a lot of this, “Who are you? I don’t know you,” attitude. And then when my book came out, you’d think that would be the moment when it was like, ”Oh, we get it!” They were still a little uncomfortable. They were supportive; they came to some readings. I don’t know – it puts you in a strange category, to be doing this for a living.

I think, actually, the thing that made them feel like they could exhale, or they were comfortable, was when I got a job at Columbia. They could understand that; they could say, ”Okay, I get what that is.”

Maybe you helped pave the way for future generations of family members.

I sat on a panel at Hunter College once, for the Asian American Studies program, about Asian Americans in the arts, and a lot of what we talked about was this thing about how weird it is in the Asian American community to do something that’s not professionally stable. But the other half of that conversation was how that’s really changing now. Ten years ago [becoming a writer] was really weird. Now, it’s not so weird. You see actors and writers and playwrights. The generation is further along now.

Did you have any muses for your craft? What did you do to combat the doubt?

I went to books.

I remember having a moment once during the agent search. I felt like, “When is this ever going to get published or see the world?” When I was uncomfortable around my friends because they had money. When I would just go to books. And I thought, “Oh my god, I’m becoming one of those weird people for whom truly my best friends are my books.” [Laughs. ]

It’s like you were being hard on yourself for having a coping mechanism for doing something difficult.

You have this kind of out-of-body moment when you are like, “God, you’re a weirdo.”

But you weren’t a weird cat lady.

Oh, my dog! Pax! I’ve had a dog for thirteen years, my longest standing relationship. [Laughs].

It was actually a big deal during those long, lonely writing hours and months. Just to have a dog sitting there at my feet, sighing and sleeping.

It’s cooler, too, to be a dog lady than a cat lady.

Although, a lot of writers have cat muses.

But the other thing this reminds me of – one of the most difficult things about having to move, about living in a cheaper apartment in a low-income neighborhood, in the South Bronx – you really take for granted living in a neighborhood where you can go for a nice walk. When you don’t have any money, and you are trying to nurture your mental health, being able to go for a nice long walk with your dog is kind of all you have. And we lived in a neighborhood that was industrial and garbage-y, and it didn’t feel good to be out at night. So that was a real cost.

But you had to go for walks with the dog anyway – what were they like?

They were shorter. I had my crappy car keyed, and then stolen. We were attacked by pit bulls who were off-leash.

Was there a point when you considered giving up writing?

When I was searching for agents, when I was receiving polite rejection letters, I remember feeling pretty hopeless. But I remember having a kind of lucidity about it. I knew that how I responded to this rejection was important – I knew that. I just didn’t know if I could do it. I knew that I needed to have what it took to persist through that rejection.

One of them was another writer that I had gotten to know, who was also older and started later. She was someone who I knew not just as a reader, but as someone who I trusted to be a kind, compassionate person, and I knew I needed that. The other person I asked was someone who had experience in the editorial world. It was a little scarier to trust that person to read it. But it was really that person’s response that helped me go forward again. She said to me, “You’re much closer than you think you are.” Which were the magic words, because you start to feel like, “Oh my god, is this whole thing just a mess? Do I have to trash this?”

Even just the use of the word “close” probably felt great!

[Laughs. ] That actually gave me the energy to go in and do another revision, which was needed, and then go forward from there.

That was after you quit your job. So you were knee-deep in it.

Yeah, and really alone. You know, when you’re not going to work everyday, and you have a solitary personality, it’s really easy to sink into solitariness. You go long periods of time when you don’t hear the sound of your own voice, or get out of your pajamas.

What do you recommend for those writers who require a long time to write, but who in the process tend to fall into that sense of isolation?

My ideal schedule is to start first thing in the morning, work until two in the afternoon; go for a long walk, or go to the gym, do something physical; and then come back to it for a couple of hours in the afternoon. I find it’s good to block your time: these hours are for writing. These are for resting the brain. I feel much happier and freer then to email or go out with friends or whatever.

Schedules are really helpful. I think the mistake could be to try to make a schedule that is supposed to be a good schedule. The key is to find your schedule. And then commit to it. It’s that magic balance of discipline and going with your natural rhythms.

Maybe that means prioritizing your natural rhythms over financial certainty?

Yeah, and that’s the hardest one. It will always be tempting when money is being offered for something, and it’s hard to know when to say yes – because you need the money – and when to say, ”No, I could do this another way.”

I want to talk about Bloom, the new site that you launched, and how it challenges the notion that new writers need to publish early, in order to call themselves successful. What inspired you to create Bloom?

It grew out of this series I was writing at The Millions called Post-40 Bloomers. I was very deliberate not to say late, because who’s to say what’s late?

The writers who have been early-Bloomers and successful when they were young – I would never say they should slow down. I think that’s great. My point is that I am pro-diversity of paths. Bloom is meant to open up the conversation.

What would you say to new writers, who are chomping at the bit to publish early, and for whom it’s just not working out?

My answer is persistence; hang in there. It takes awhile.

To be clear, I wouldn’t say to lower your expectations, but I would say you would be cheating yourself of possibly a better and great publishing path if you think, “If I don’t publish this way, at this house, I am a failure.”

Do you have any final words for new writers?

Two things, which may seem contradictory, but somehow, in my mind, and in my life, they aren’t: First, take the opportunities to get involved, in small ways, with online literary sites in this amazingly vibrant digital publishing world. You will probably not get paid, but there is tremendous value, I find, in writing short-form, semi-regularly or once in a while; or even reading slush or doing bits of editorial work. It’s a more substantive way of “connecting” with other reading and writing people than Facebook, for one. It also can energize you to keep going on the longer, deeper project that is going to take the time it takes; we need both community and some concrete evidence that we can finish things in order to keep going with The Novel or The Memoir or whatever.

The second thing is, keep focused on the work itself, what you’re writing, and everything else will follow. That sounds naïve and Pollyannaish, but even with all the things we’ve talked about – all the difficult things of having a literary life – I still, hands down, feel that the writing of the book itself was the hardest part. The rest of it is challenging, and you have to figure it out, and it requires patience and persistence, but actually writing well, writing something of value, writing something that is in fact literature, that’s the hardest part. Invest as much energy as you can there.

Interview by Marni Berger

Photo by Robin Holland

The first time I saw Robinson perform, I was a child. Nearly two decades later, she continued to entrance me as she moved across the stage with infectious energy and otherworldy grace. As the New York Times wrote in tribute to the retiring star, “The way she turns that head and those eyes to different points in the theater — aiming never at the rehearsal mirror but always at you, you, you and me — has long been a thrill. So has been the sheer power and sensuality of her dancing.”

What was your first exposure to dance?

Right beside my school they had a recreation center. And a part of the many activities that were offered were dance classes. I don’t remember the type of dance that I was involved in, I just remember movement. I don’t know if it was the same year, but I was still pretty young, when my family went to a football/dance/all kinds of sports activities camp, just for one day. You could try a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and of course I wanted to try the dance camp. The lady who conducted it, she told my mother that she thought I had talent. She gave my mother the name of a dance school in Washington D.C. that would accept students of color, because at the time there were not ballet schools in D.C. that would accept students of color. It was the Jones-Haywood School of Ballet – a very, very strict school. Their goal was to produce professional ballet dancers. When I went to audition, they liked my body. My parents didn’t have extra money for dance classes, so it was arranged that I would have scholarship support. I was ten years old. And that is basically where a big part of the story begins.

Were the arts a big part of your family culture?

I don’t remember dance or the arts being specifically spotlighted in my upbringing at home, no.

So, dance just sort of fell under her belief that if children are not exposed to different things when they are growing up, how will they know what they want to do? And exposing your kids to things also gives them a chance to interact with different people in different ways, to learn other things beside what their school is teaching them or what they are learning at home. And how to interact with the public on other levels. To interact with people who are not doing what you are doing at home. Just building a broader, young person who hopefully will go on as an adult and have a broader view of her neighbor or her neighborhood.

Sounds like you have a very wise mother.

[Laughs. ] Yeah, and it was a strict rule. You know, you go through certain times in certain periods when you’re just like, “I don’t want to do anything!!” “Uh-uh, you’re gonna do something. Either you choose or I will find something.”

She may have gotten more than she gambled for, right? Because there you were, going to dance classes as an extracurricular activity, and then you ended up dedicating a whole life to dance!

[Laughs. ]

Tell me about the Jones-Haywood School.

Well, when I started I would only go on Saturdays because I was quite young. But I stayed on up through graduating high school and then I started to take classes more frequently after school. They had a small, teeny-tiny, regional company called the Capital Ballet Company and I became a member of that, giving a few performances throughout the year – nothing big.

I would have to take the bus after school [to ballet class] and it was a long way from where I lived. I remember the bus ride being at least forty-five minutes to an hour in each direction. My mother would pick me up after class. I remember that when I got my license, I was happy but I am pretty sure my mother was happier – because she didn’t have to take me or pick me up from dance school anymore!

You said it was a very strict school, can you tell me more about that?

The school was named after the two teachers, Claire Heywood and Doris W. Jones. The school only had one studio, and the studio was attached to their house. When I was there it was a very big deal that one of their students, who was older than myself, had been invited to Russia to compete. She was the first black female…something along those lines. So it was a really big deal. I remember I would arrive at the school early and they were rehearsing her. I remember watching her and how intense it was. Hearing them speak to her about not only the seriousness of the invitation and the magnitude of it, but how she had to work hard; every day it had to be better, every day it had to be consistent. And what she would be representing. It was a whole big deal, planning for the trip… I just remember overhearing it.

So, it was not the type of school where you could go and have fun experience in dance class. It was not that kind of environment. When you came to dance class, it was serious. I learned a lot about performing and being responsible for your presentation at an early age. A lot of discipline.

Did you, at that early age, begin to think about becoming a professional dancer? After all, the environment you were in was very professionally oriented.

I don’t think it was a burning desire. I remember enjoying taking dance classes but many, many times I wanted to quit. On the days my feet wouldn’t point they way they were supposed to point, or when the teacher was getting on me about my arms, or just when I had a hard day in dance class, I remember coming out to the car and being sad or crying and saying that I wanted to quit, that I was done. Well, rule number two for both my brother and myself: we couldn’t quit anything because it was tough. If I had come out of a great class and done well and felt good but said I thought I was done with dance, then it would have been okay. That was very much a part of my discipline.

I just found that on the days when things were going well, I enjoyed dancing, I enjoyed being a part of the small company, but I definitely remember that it was not something where I thought, “As soon as I graduate from high school the first thing I will do is move to New York and audition for some of the larger companies so that I can become a professional dancer.” Maybe it was something I heard my parents say or it was from growing up in Washington D.C. where it is all politics or law, but law was kind of in my head, the idea of becoming an attorney. There were days when I thought it would be fun to dance in a company and there were days when I thought that dance wouldn’t be too serious after high school. It went in and out.

So what did happen after high school? Because you did continue to dance.

I did. I applied to a few universities and chose New York University as a dance major and an economics minor. I received scholarship support from NYU for my talent. So I went for one year. When the summer came and my friends and I were deciding what to do for the summer, my goal was not to dance. I had made a good, good friend and we were going to go to Paris for the summer and learn to speak French and wait on tables and then come back in the fall and finish school. But I had some friends who said, “You are really talented, you should audition for some scholarships here in the city. You never know.” Alvin Ailey was at the top of the list. And I got a scholarship to the Ailey school. And then I fell in love with dance. [Laughs. ]

Maybe because Ailey is a whole different kind of dance from the classical ballet you had been dancing?

Yeah, but it was more than the classes. My school was very small in Washington – only one studio, all the students were Washingtonian. And here, coming to a school where there were students from all over the world and the excitement of New York City and all the kinds of classes that were going on… It opened up another world for me. More than just opening different spaces of dance disciplines, it was another world. I loved the teachers, I loved everything about it.

And as I learned more about the company, the extensive amount of traveling they did, learning about Alvin’s philosophy, and falling love with all the first company members, looking up to them, that is when I fell in love with dance and left school – with the intention of going back…

Wait, wait! This is some major stuff! From going from a place where you thought you would eventually stop with dance to leaving college to dance…!

In my mind it was just a leave of absence. And that is what I told people. My mother threatened to kill me [Laughs]. She stopped talking to me for quite a while. Because school was the important thing. And I totally agree.

But when the scholarship was finished, I was asked to be a part of the workshop company [at Ailey], which was run by Kelvin Rotardier who had also been a former member of the first company. We did performances around the city. After that, I was asked to join Ailey II. It took two times of auditioning before I got into the main company, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. And the rest is history.

How long would you say that it was between when you quit school at NYU and when you actually joined the main company at Alvin Ailey?

At least four or five years.

During that time, did you have other jobs to support yourself?

Oh yeah, oh yeah. I worked at a cafe with a friend. I worked at a little gallery in Brooklyn. I just answered the phone, I was the receptionist. It was great, just great. Because I love art and it wasn’t hard, like waiting tables. Those two jobs I remember the most, but I am sure I had others. Because my mother said, “You’re leaving school, you’re on your own.”

A tough mama.

Yes, and rightfully so. Like I said, I had great intentions of returning to school. And I had that opportunity, I received my Master’s Degree in dance just this past August.

Congratulations!

From Hollins University. The rift has been repaired between myself and my mom. [Laughs. ]

I hope earlier than that!

It did. Once I started traveling with the company and she saw that this thing that I had left school for, I was actually able to make a living on. I was being a responsible adult, and I was seeing the world. I was having exposure, and you know that had her vote. [Laughs. ]

But you did have a period when there was tension between the two of you. That must have been hard on you.

It was. It really, really was. I remember that she did talk to me, but they were always short conversations and it was always, “Okay, how long are you going to be in the workshop company?” “Well how long are you going to be in Ailey II?” “Well, you know you have to go back to school. Have you contacted the school…?” It was mostly conversations like that. In between I would tell her about the exciting things that were happening.

And most of the time I was in the studio, because that is a dancer’s life. When I wasn’t in the studio I was working to support myself.

Did your mother come to see any of your shows when you were in Ailey II, for instance?

I don’t remember her seeing any of the Ailey II performances.

Maybe she was taking a stand.

Yeah, she’s feisty!

My brother is five years younger than I am, so he was still at home and she was really on lockdown with him. He was heavy, heavy into the football, but I am sure in her mind she was thinking, “Okay, I won’t lose another child to a ‘passion.’ This one is going to finish high school, he is going to finish college, I don’t care what I have to do!!”

What was life like for you during your early New York years? Who were you hanging out with?

Mostly other dancers. I think, like with any profession – whether you are a doctor or a lawyer – if you’re very, very into it, the company that you keep are usually heavily into it as well. So, yeah, I was around dancers all the time. Maybe I shouldn’t say that was a bad thing, but coming from a family where exposure to a broader experiences than just what you are experiencing was what I heard my whole life… Then, getting into the company, Alvin Ailey insisted that the dancers continue to learn about life.

He was channeling your mother!

Yeah! I thought, “I guess this is my life, this man is saying the same thing.” He said the only way you can give the audience a rich experience is if they are seeing dancers who have something more to say besides just showing and sharing their great technique and beauty. That is the kind of dancer he wanted, a person who continued to learn about life so that you would be an interesting person on the stage.

What did you do beyond dance?

We took what Mr. Ailey said to heart and whenever we could – even if it meant getting up early – when you were in a city or in a country for the first time or in a city where a wonderful exhibition was going on, you would get up early and you would go see it, even if you had to run through it really fast. Picking up books about anything, going to museums, picking up magazines, just trying to get stuff in there in any way I could. And sharing it with my fellow dancer.

Life on the road can be thrilling but also quite tiring, right?

I love to travel – that is probably part of the exposure thing that I heard as a mantra in my ear when I was younger. I love learning about other people and other cultures, so I like travelling now even with the fatigue that comes with it.

I’m wondering more about those early years in New York and what life was like. Where were you living, for instance?

I was very lucky that I didn’t have to do very much moving around. Early on I got my own place and had a steady roommate for many, many, many years. Who was not a dancer. We both were very practical kinds of individuals, came from very strict upbringings. You made things happen, and you took care of yourself in a quality way. I still live in the same building where I lived with the roommate.

Really?!

I love the building. It’s on the Upper West Side. Early on, I was in this location, so it gave me stability. I was never someone who wanted to jump around. I recognized my blessing and it worked for me. When I came back from traveling, I needed to have that feeling that something was stable and constant.

When you had money, what did you spend it on? What were your indulgences?

Taking care of my dance clothes, buying more dance supplies. I sketch, I draw, so I probably I bought a sketch pad and some tools now and then… But, you know, it was very little money. It probably all went to my rent and eating and transportation. I do remember going to the movies a lot. Seeing dance performances on a regular basis was out of my budget. So it was probably the cinema, I liked going to the movies in New York.

Do you have any good stories from those years?

You know, I was pretty regular. I didn’t go out to the clubs…I wasn’t one of those party animals, I didn’t have a big group of friends I went out with. I had a small group of friends. I liked being at home, watching TV.

That makes sense because as a dancer, your body is your instrument. Drinking and partying is not the way to build a long career for your instrument, so to speak.

I wasn’t a drinker, I wasn’t a smoker, I didn’t do recreational drugs. I was just pretty regular. The close friends that I had, I enjoyed their company. And whatever money I could save, I saved. That is one thing I do tell young dancers to do, especially now when the world is very different and everything is so expensive.

Those first years, before getting into the company, that is what I continued to do, because there was no computer monitor to keep me engaged. I got up in the morning and got out of the house and continued to explore New York City. New York is so rich. Discovering new neighborhoods or discovering Central Park again, and again, and again.

When you were younger, what was your idea of success?

When I was in high school it was about graduating university, becoming an attorney. I think that is probably where it stopped in my head. After that everything seemed to fall into place. The people who were attorney’s who I looked up to had a home, and a car, they traveled or had exciting cases that they were working on.

Of course now, as we sit here and have this conversation, it is tragic that students go to college and leave with a ton of debt and possibly won’t be able to go into the field that they were studying. And they may have graduated at their top of their class! They may have to take a job that they have to take, because they need to get rid of the student debt. I am sure there was some of that when I was younger, but it wasn’t as astronomical as it is now. During that time it was probably more accessible that what you studied in school would be what you were going to do for a living and you were able to be calm about raising a family. That would have been, as a young person, the vision of success.

What about today?

Oh goodness. This answer is going to sound odd. But, first things first: having good health. The thing I feel that is most important, because without it you can’t get to any of the other things, is good health. Healthy lifestyle. For me, that incorporates having access to healthy choices of food, being able to feed your body well. Being around positive people. This sounds so hokey, but being around people who see the glass half-full instead of half-empty and who enjoy what they do – that helps to keep you healthy. If you have your health, then you have the possibility of going after whatever it is. But if you don’t even have that to start with…

I can sit here and name a few other things that I think represent success, but to me, there has to be a base to start from.

This is something you have really lived by. You have been performing with Ailey for over thirty years. That is completely astounding, especially in a company that is so physically demanding. There is no way you can do that without the focus you’ve had on tuning your instrument, if you will. Do you have any advice for young artists and performers?

Make food your medicine, not your poison. Of course meaning food that you eat, but also the company that you keep, things that you expose yourself to. It can be your medicine or your poison. Be around people who are full of life and want to talk about things, so that your energy is not drained in talking about negative things. That would be it.

That is very good.

Because from there – I do believe and I see it – anything is possible, all kinds of flowers can bloom, all kinds of ideas can come to life, because you’re excited, you’re excited about the moment, about the choreographer who has come in, about making it into the ballet – maybe you didn’t make it into first cast, but you’re in the room! As long as you are in the room, the choreographer can see you, you can listen to the things that can move you up to first cast. But even if you’re not in first cast now, in a company like Ailey, they perform so much that you’ll make it onto the stage at some point. And the audience doesn’t know if they’re seeing first cast or not, they just know they came to see a beautiful performance. And that is your work.

That is your work.

Interview by Astri von Arbin Ahlander

Photos courtesy of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater