Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
These essays are interested in all varieties of
disappearance: Voluntary, involuntary, coerced, professional, intellectual,
transcendent, mortal. Ghosts of dead friends, driving Uber after Hollywood work
dried up, narcissism in writers, social class and upward mobility, the Polish
diplomat Jan Karski who failed to stop the Holocaust, folk art and synesthesia
and transcendence, Bernard Moitessier and c. diff. and the sickness that might
find its way into our song.
Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why?
The real pleasure was writing “Junk Temples,” a
novella-length essay-in-digressions toward the end of the book that is
intensely interested in the notion of transcendence in art and the idea of how
we make temples out of all kinds of things, including junk, and ascribe
elevated meaning to them. I got to visit the folk artist Howard Finster’s
Paradise Gardens, a couple of acres of his life’s work in junk collage and
painting on everything, which is located right across the street from a state
prison, and in a neighborhood full of Rottweilers chained to rickety stakes in
every other front yard. And I got to spend time in the work of Henry Darger,
who left behind one of the largest books ever assembled, which has at its
center a phalanx of Charmin-girl angels with penises fighting a Civil War in
some kind of troubled heaven. And I got to think about the nature of love and
forgetting and music and books alongside Susan Sontag and William Goyen and a
lot of poets, all through an overlay of synesthetic color and light.
And which essay gave
you the most trouble, and why?
The most difficult essay was the one at the end, “The
Sickness and the Song,” which is an attempt at a personal reckoning with what
art and writing are for, and how narcissism distorts, and what matters in life,
even if you are chasing art. I was thinking about an around-the-world boat race
in which the Frenchman Bernard Moitessier was in the lead, but he quit because
the sailing—the water, the wind, the sky, the fish—had come to matter more than
the race.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s
road to publication.
I injured my brain a little playing hockey, and for a little
while I had some trouble reading. Then I got sad. Then there were some
complications with clearing permissions. The book was a little late to press.
By then, the world had changed again, and it started to mean new things it
hadn’t meant when I wrote it. Maybe it was for the best.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
Quit this shit and go to medical school, so you can make
enough money to eat.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something
surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
I think I might have found a path out of despair and into
hope.
Who is your ideal reader?
You.
*****
READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK: http://sarabandebooks.org/
ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://shop.skylarkbookshop.com/search?q=how%20to%20disappear%20and%20why
READ AN ESSAY FROM THIS BOOK, “The Uber Diaries”: https://newohioreview.org/2019/10/02/the-uber-diaries/
