Andrew Sean Greer, "Less"

I'm Barbara Meade I'm one of the founders of politics of home I'm just so happy to be here this evening to introduce Andy I told Andy that when when he came to work here at politics and prose I was about the same age that he is now and that I'm here specifically to refer to show him that age is only relative he's not old he's young so I thought I hope that that would make him feel better food for that for that I tell you it's very very difficult to introduce Andy because that his in his writing career he has gotten so much in the way of good reviews good compliments that it just goes on for pages the basis for those of you who have a copy of the paperback book if you open it to the read page that is the second page in the book that that's the first of three that just goes on of quotes of things that are from people who about Andy's writing which is just wonderful Andy was before that he was a book writer he was a bookseller he was here at politics and prose he worked for us 30 years ago he he was a he and his identical twin might both worked here they were wonderful workers and I was reminding Andy that once I hurt his feelings by telling him I thought that Mike was a little bit better worker at work or that he would be what but I'm sure that now that Mike would prefer to be a better writer and it then then and then Andy so it's it's all relative when Andy left here he went on to Brown University he got his degree there and he was elected by his class to speak at the graduation that's the way the brown does it apparently from what I read that his speech set off a minor riot at Brown and he will have to tell us about that because I don't know what the minor riot was about about but anyway when he left after he left Brown then he went on to work a lot of minimum-wage jobs until that he went off to went west to the University of Montana to get his MFA and after his MFA he went to Seattle after Seattle he went to San Francisco and that's when things just started to work for him he told me that when he was working here that he would find books all the time and he could take home and read books that he had never enjoyed so much he'd just been in reading school books loving the Time of Cholera was something that he read when he was here that just blew him away away he didn't know anything about it until he took it home so he went on to from Seattle he went on to San Francisco in San Francisco he started submitting his writing he had been submitting his writing all along but when he got to San fist for the San Francisco it started being accepted and then he was able when enough were accepted that Picador which was a good mainstream publisher bought his collection of short stories to publish system so the first thing that and epub published in and it was when the money started how it was for me was a title of that and it was praised by the New York Times as saying that Greer's talents are immense a year later his first novel was published the path to minor planets which was selected by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the most important literary events of the year then four years later came his breakthrough novel the confessions of max Tivoli when Andy was only 34 I mean that was a this odd the confessions of activity was we reviewed twice and one year in The New Yorker by John McPhee I mean it was an extraordinary thing to happen for somebody who was third thirty four to four and John Updike said that if the confessions of activity was enchanting and he went on to say the novel quite brilliantly fulfilled the difficult task had set itself to show it the difficult task had set itself to show the life of a man born old who over decades grows backward into infant infancy and finally non-existence that book won two prestigious bicoastal awards the California book award on the west coast the New York Public Library Young Lions Award for an an author under 35 on the East Coast and from then on Andy was really rolling next came the story of a marriage was the worst imposed toes as the book of the year calling it thoughtful complex and exquisitely written and now we are have an T six work of fiction which has just landed him the 2018 Pulitzer Prize one of his characters in this novel less pronounced a Pulitzer he has to be corrected that is Pulitzer so please everybody remember never to mispronounce poop Pulitzer he it's an award chosen by Andy's meant that the Pulitzer is an award chosen by Andy's mentors and peers unlike the awards ceremony that our thermos goes to Italy where he is deeply humiliated by a committee of elderly people and who choose the finalists and then the award is from the final choice is made by a jury of 12 teenagers so the Fulbright could never be accused of anything like that news of his award came to as a surprise to Andy and he was in Italy when and he just he didn't believe it he had to call his friend Michael Schaben to find out of whether that it was really true and he found out Michael che would have won the award before and and he did found it found out that it was really true and he just could not believe it he just could not believe it so even though that Andy couldn't believe it when we read about it here we believed it and palliative politics and prose we were all cheering all cheering for Andy who that we had remembered from 30 years ago at least those of us there's still several people who are here who remembered him now Andy's going to be in conversation with Ron Charles the editor of book world who cost Andy's novel a comic masterpiece laughs until you can't breathe funny is how that he describes it and Arthur les would never have been dismissive of Ron as he is of the teenagers as somebody to gauge his writing Ron is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for book reviewing and he is neither elderly nor a teenager so so here are Andy and Charles in conversation it is so great to be here with you for a year and I've been telling people you've got to read less you've got to read so what was it like working here I was a bad worker I mean I was 18 but I would I think the way Barbara put it was that I brought an incredible energy to the store right off the bat the riot at brown can you tell us about that always it's boring it was political it was a I decided because it was the only time anyone would ever be in a crowd looking at me that um I would make a political statement it was about need-blind admissions at Brown which they later implemented so yeah but people in the audience were like don't talk about that at my graduation three things I was right looking back now you have written this classic comic masterpiece about the tragic comic business of being alive I think most people in the audience have read it but give us a jacket flap summary of the plot so we can talk about it oh yeah it's about a man named Arthur les who's a middle-aged midlist homosexual writer and he's fleeing the a wedding invitation that terrifies him of his ex-boyfriend he doesn't want to say yes because the other one go but he does want to say no because then everyone will be talking about how he couldn't get up the nerve to go to the wedding so instead he looks at his inbox and his envelopes and he and accepts ever sort of half-baked invitation that writers get that sounds like a fun free trip around the world but there was a price to pay which is humiliation would you read a bit for us sure yes I thought I picked up places here that uh that are in the book Arthur les is from Camden Delaware which is my I didn't want to say Rockville Maryland cuz I'm like it's not not a biography so I'll just put it in Delaware so I'm just gonna read a little bit here or he's in Italy I mean he's he's come a day early to the sort of literary event and so he's got the hotel to himself and he's trying to he's building a fire for himself in his hotel room and he has a memory here we go les has for years traveled with a set of rubber bands that he thinks of his portable gym the set is multicolored with interchangeable handles and he always imagined when he coils them into his luggage how toned and fit he will be when he returns the ambitious routine begins in earnest the first night with dozens of special techniques recommended in the manual lost long ago in Los Angeles but remembered in parts less wrapping the bands around the legs of beds columns rafters and performing what the manual calls Lumberjacks trophies and action heroes he ends his workout lacquered with sweat feeling he has beat back another day from times assault fifty is further than ever the second night he advises himself to let his muscles repair the third he remembers the set and begins the routine with half a heart the thin walls of the room might tremble with the neighbors television or the dead bathroom light might depress him or the thought of an unfinished article les promises himself a better workout in two days in return for this promise a dollhouse whiskey from the rooms dollhouse bar and then the set is forgotten abandoned on the hotel's side table a slain dragon less is no athlete his single moment of greatness came one spring afternoon when he was 12 in the suburbs of Delaware spring men not young love and damp flowers but an ugly divorce from winter and a second marriage to buxom summer August steam room setting came on automatically in May cherry and plum blossoms made the slightest wind into a ticker tape parade and the air filled with pollen school teachers heard the boys giggling at the sweat shine of their bosoms young roller skaters found themselves stuck and softening asphalt it was the years that the cicadas returned remember that yeah less had not been alive when they buried themselves in the earth but now they returned tens and thousands of them horrifying and harmless drunk driving through the air so they bumped into heads and ears encrusting telephone poles and park cards with their delicate amber hewed almost egyptian discarded shells girls wore them as earrings boys they did at GDS yeah boys Tom Sawyer that's my Spanish teacher yeah boys trapped the live ones in paper bags and release them at study hour all day the creatures hummed in huge chorus is the sound pulsing around the neighborhood and school would not end until June if ever then picture young les twelve years old his first year wearing the gold rimmed glasses that would return to him thirty years later when a shopkeeper recommended a pair in Paris and a thrill of sad recognition in shame would course through his body the short boy in glasses in right field his hair as gold white as old ivory covered now by a black yellow baseball cap wandering in the clover with a dreamy look in his eyes nothing has happened in right field all season which is why he was put there a kind of athletic Canada his father though les would not know this for over a decade has had to attend a meeting of the public athletics board to defend his sons right to participate in the league despite his clear lack of talent at baseball and obliviousness on the field his father actually had to remind his son's coach who had recommended les his removal that it was a public Athletic League and like a public library was open to all even the fumbling oaths among us and his mother a softball champion her day has had to pretend none of this matters to her at all and drives les to games with a speech about sportsmanship that is more a dismantling of her own beliefs than a relief to the boy make sure les with his leather glove weighing down his left hand sweating in the spring heat his mind lost to the reverie of his childhood lunacies before they gave way to adolescent lunacies when an object appears in the sky acting almost on a species memory he runs forward the glove before him the bright sun spangles his vision and thwack the cloud the crowd is screaming he looks into the glove and sees gloriously Glatt grass bruised and double stitched in red the single catch of his lifespan from the stands his mother's ecstatic cry from his back in pea amante the famous rubber bands uncoiled for the famous childhood hero from the cabins doorway the seahorse lady bursting in opening windows to let out the smoke from les his botched attempt at a fire it's a little nerve-wracking to participate in an author event about a novel about humiliating author events imagine if like your mother in your Spanish teacher here in addition and my father and all my neighbors from when I grew up what God has enough free time to arrange this very special humiliation that's what blesses little prayers have you endured some all of the humiliations in this book well it's a novel none of these things happen to these people this book I just told a journalist from WaMu today yes said I said I'm like a kleptomaniac houseguest that I steal things from your house and bring them back to mine but it's not things that you think are valuable it's what I think are valuable and that I the way I arrange them in my house would upset you because they're not together from you so I stole everything in this book but they're arranged the wrong way I don't think my mother can play softball at all [Laughter] who did oh my god she lettered in softball ladies and gentlemen that was a species memory - I didn't really didn't know that I guess see how you can be accurate while still making things up yeah you must have had some hesitancy writing a novel about a novelist must have seemed sort of worn out to you yeah I mean you know that writers are not supposed to exactly I really had reached the point where I thought no one is going to read this book it doesn't matter Oh what I write really and that's why I freely used autobiographical elements and wrote about of the you know white middle-aged novelist things that you're not supposed to any of that stuff because I just really didn't I really didn't I think that's when you write best is when you're at your the moment where you think well I'm a loser and a failure so no one will read it last year is 49 older than you much older let's just say older one way or another you've been writing about aging in almost every book or at least time right this is a preoccupation of yours an interest of yours I guess so you know long ago in my distant youth when I wrote the confessions of max Tivoli someone on a plane ask me what but you know it's like what do you do I'm a writer what kind of writer I'm a novelist what kind of novels fiction yes well your novels about and I said I write about love in the passage of time which shuts them up because they're afraid you're gonna say something about either of those things well I think that sure that'd be very true like I think I did keep doing that yes I do I don't know why I think it's obviously it's cuz they they cause me anxiety and so I work it out through the novels does it work does that work it out I mean apparently not you keep doing it well you'd have to take your drugs every day yeah I mean it works I'm gonna feel pretty good right now no one should feel sorry for me I've read all your novels since the year 2000 when you wrote the panel planets which I liked very much - and while you're often witty and charming and poignant I would not have thought oh I mean all the funniest novel as I can think of is Andrew Sean Grier now but then this novel comes along and it is it is hilarious did you think of you or did you sit down and say I'm gonna write a comic novel now I have to say the Washington Post was the first really the first review out of the gate when I was waiting and waiting for they told them not to send me any bad reviews and they're like we got one for you not a bad view but it was so stunning it was so without any it's such a strong generous review that it was so exciting because I also didn't know who was funny I thought it was funny well I didn't know if it was R I you know I could you can't tell it until you're it's in front of an audience right that's gonna work or not and honestly I think it always been confusing for for readers who came to like a reading of mine for a book like story of a marriage which does not crack a smile the whole time that I would be a little jokey at the event seemed weird and maybe too young to write a book like that or something you know then it started to fall apart the whole facade well I'll be honest I really you know those books are about serious subjects because I you know get down now and then and think about serious things and I was feeling way too down to write about it seriously anymore I wanted to write about the most serious thing I could think of so I started working on a book that was about after the generation of men who had most of whom died of AIDS or survive with AIDS facility the generation after my generation we didn't really get to see what it was like to be out and gay and get old because all those men died and we could see women getting old and being out and proud but we didn't know what that was supposed to be which is not a very funny topic and I read about it not very funny way but I just couldn't bear it so you'll find there's a pair about them but that's the heart of the book that is what the book is about that is what he's panicked about he's never seen anyone grow old he says but he says it in a funny way he says Arthur les is the first homosexual ever to grow walt which is a funny sentence structure you know because the word homosexual sky could funny word and from that I just was like actually I just would like to enjoy it you put aside the dark novel yeah I say the dark novel there's about three pages that remain and then I was like I couldn't feel sorry for him I had to make fun of him that was the only way to get empathy for the character and closer to the emotion I think that if I'd been like a written a start novel about that I was planning write a few stand-up comics I know try out their material over and over and over again on real audiences but as a novelist you can't do that do that no so how did you know what's funnier how did you know what was working and what wasn't working I just tested it on me really on me um even my editor she would she would you know her job is to pull me back mostly and so she would remove like a joke and I put it in somewhere else if there's one my stepmother Paula told me her favorite joke in the book and I was like that's one of them that like it's a terrible pun that I couldn't let go of I just kept putting it back so like nothing got cut it's all the girls still in there now we could come up with a thousand great tragic novels easily easily but we'd have trouble coming up with a dozen great comic novels right give me you key you start with lucky Jim and you've got cold comfort farm and then you start to like wonder what's the third one and you start to disagree this is one of them I think why are we getting so why do we have so few comic novels may I say tell the audience you wrote a great article about comic novels that I have leaned on as like as as like why I could they could possibly have chosen me thank you and which I sent to Italy to have them look at I was like you guys should cuz in Italy they don't believe a comic novel can be literature they don't have a tradition of it and they they resist it and also Germany it's just not something they have England they're all over that makes sense to them it does yeah but so I had to so I had to make this argument in interviews in Italy and I said I had to say Cervantes I know but it's like it starts with comedy so you know it's okay to continue in there try to argue that there is there are classic there's a long tradition Speer I'm like Shakespeare and Voltaire but maybe I'm more like I think a lot of writers that we forget their comic not a lot writers like I think Philip Roth certainly wrote comic not definitely hilarious and Jon objected to you know and saw Bella did and like there's um you know even writers like Muriel Spark is like a weird novelist and so once you open comic to mean like I can't tell if I'm laughing because it's funny or creepy or you know like those are all in the area of like upsetting which is what comedy is right yeah this one's not very upsetting 'he's not no no I didn't go there now I got ahold of your phone number through your publisher the day the prize is announced yeah and I asked you over the phone were you surprised we always ask were you surprised to win the Pulitzer and Andrew shot back oh come on everyone not Barbara yeah I was so hungover so you weren't at your computer the way all the journalists in the world are just waiting to hear no I didn't even know when it was you know I didn't know well because of course journalists are looking because they think right it make there's so many more awards in there citizen journalists well and if I'm totally honest I think at one point I did be I was like man do the Pulitzer sets up for the Pulitzer and I saw that George Saunders was and I was like what that is what I would give the Pulitzer to because it's a American novel about American language but they didn't ask my opinion so I wasn't on that committee Italians react to you winning the Italians nearby me or the book came out in Italy in September to and they would not review it geez there were there were journalists who wrote reviews and newspaper said we will not publish this ruse just to minor to American it was - and I thought it was because it was it there was a gay character but I don't it's because it was a comic novel that's what I finally discovered with bizarre right is cuz actually I sell well in Italy like I have other books that are serious books there's no reason not to review it if you've got a free review and you speak Italian fluently enough to do interviews and to understand the question yeah yeah yeah so I could I could go to interviews I could be on TV or radio a little bit but nothing nothing I got invited to festivals and then they cancelled them once the book came out is unbelievable and then I want to Pulitzer Prize yes and and it and then Michael Cunningham wrote an articles similar to yours to be translated into Italian explaining to the Italian public why a comic novel could be deserving of a Pulitzer Prize and I think that was the one that's what began a persuasion in Italy then then it's done really well and people reviewed it and liked it it was a weird that is very weird now at a party someone comes up to lasso front of me comes up to Les and said it's not that you're you're a bad writer it's that you're a bad gay there's this little discussion here about he says it's our duty to show something beautiful to our world the gay world but in your books you make the characters suffer without reward this is brief discussion about what the gay novel should do is this true are you all putting pressure on each other to do the NAM no I don't know this this character Finley Dwyer is is the is the person I'm always afraid I'm going to meet but I haven't good so I guess it's me right you have felt some burden in my mind and you know I actually was at a in New York I was at the lambda literary words last night and Rock saying Roxane gay was being honored and she stood up and she spoke and she said something really interesting she said we never talked about the pleasure of writing itself we always talk about the politics of what has been written and I think we all need to realize that the real work here is to write something that we are driven to write that may disappoint some of the people in this room and I was like Roxane gay that was really good because everyone else was not challenging the room but she was like some of us are gonna write things that you're not happy with and that's what our job is and I at least for me I was like thank you Roxane gay because I and I tell my students this because they're always like a diverse group of students and I say all of you are going to be writing about the community that you're from and you're the community that you're from are gonna want they have a sort of story about themselves they want you to tell and you have your job is actually to tell the truth and you're gonna let them down but you're also going to lift them up in a different way that they're uncomfortable with it first and I'm gonna try to help you to do that because I know they're all struggling with that but I know that got a little serious but it's time yeah that's what's been in my head on Monday Allen how I Hearst the great British novelist to give an interview to The Guardian and said the gay novel is dead without the challenges of homophobia and AIDS the novels that it just doesn't have reason anymore what sounded like a ridiculous thing to say I don't know what to say about well I mean the plot in my novel is not like getting back at the bullies in school or something it's trying to escape to the next country you know right so it's not a gay plot yes whatever that would but guards gren walls writing you know a great gay novel recently just two years ago there are lots of young gay brothers yeah of course yeah what do you think about those sort of categories though you know what I noticed the land of literary awards that was the Czar was that I'd never been invited to that before and like in the category of gay fiction most of the authors were women and in the category of like erotica it was like all women writing men's gay fiction and I thought I don't understand what these I'm glad these women are winning awards but I don't understand what the category is because it was the subject matter not because not the identity because I also think the identity now I mean if there are people like sub millennial young the idea of gay and straight isn't gonna make any sense to them so the idea of having like a gay fiction section is is gonna be feel like nonsense why can't they they're not gonna ever identify like that anymore so that's old-fashioned that's a good thing yes that's a good thing yeah yeah what kind of response you get into the novel as you go around fun stories interesting reactions I don't know if I have anything yet yeah let's take some questions would you do that absolutely yes a mic right here and I'm like wow it's a whole 180 of people just come up to the mic and hi first of all comic novel confederacy of dunces you went to brown Jeff you Genovese went to brown were you classmates or contemporaries and either way just brown have something in it at it that turns out great novelists Wow no I didn't know Jeff you'd entities because he's just enough older than me I will I have a Jeff unity story after he was the first person to email me I don't know him well and in fact a year ago in Italy I ran into him in the airport we were boarding the same flight and I said hi mister you Jenna DS and he's like Andy we know each other what are you doing you know you way you don't want to like presume anything so and he wrote me said remember at the airport where you thought that I didn't know who you were well now everyone will enjoy yourself which was very sweet hi hi Andy I know him win I love the book and I did laughs but I also think it has a strong undercurrent of sadness about that because obviously it's not a graphical but are you were also speaking to the lives of a lot of gaming and this may have been partially paradigmatic of gay lives men's lives of a certain generation so I wonder if you could speak to that yeah well I think you know as I was saying that it came out of like a sort of sad anxiety and having been in the weird generation of having watched men just older than us died including in our in our high school and then for all of us surviving and seeing what to happen next and not to know like do you get plastic surgery and say thin and and muscly or like do you do relationships go on that long like what's the longest gay relationship we're gonna be willing to stretch it out to like forever apparently but like what new we're supposed to be inventing this and then also loneliness and I think just the human anxiety about love because for me also every chapter I meant to be a kind of different version of love like a long-term relationship or a fling or two ships passing in the night and the excitement and sadness of of all of those and and Arthur trying to see which one he was willing to to and whatever underlying sadness was an inherent and me and the other thing I wanted to comment on was your upped and great optimism that straight and gay is no longer a meaningful category I wonder if you living in San Francisco doesn't have some through the cake episode yeah ok so just just to make to put that into the room in the world I'm saying there might be some young people here for whom that's happening thanks for writing the book Andrew I'm happy to be here and it's great to meet you and I'm also I have friends who've written fiction and all of them say that the characters at some point sort of take on lives of their own and you follow them and in some farm and fashion the way to write a book what happens when the story ends do they end or are they all rattling around in there somewhere oh gosh that's sad - well it's kind of like it's kind of like the party's over and there's you're still hanging out in their house and they're like we're just gonna clean up a few things here and you're like I'm gonna have another glass of wine this is a very party and it's over you know and so for for months and months afterwards I always think that I'm gonna write keep writing with those characters and then at a certain point I realize that's not what's gonna happen I have to just let it go yeah it's it just feels that yeah but then you have two or four years so you with them hello I really enjoyed the novel thank you I was wondering if I could ask you about your choice of narrator so why wasn't it from Arthur's purse you don't give anything away though right okay good point yeah so why don't you just have it from you know I guess why'd you make the choice that you did I can answer abstract lis okay it's written from a funny mixture of sort of first-person and omniscient and I usually write my books from from first-person which I like this is gonna be a technical answer to a technical question which I like because the the the reader feels warmly towards the towards the narrator immediately because it's I talking about it and omniscient kind of like Middlemarch ething is out of style and very hard to pull off and I I think I stole it from Nabokov from-from ponine specifically which is an underrated book of his and I loved having a there's I forget where I stole this there's always a narrator that it's that you could see like look at Arthur doing this that's sort of like you can tell it's kind of a person and so I felt that I could get away with both an omniscient the third person and a first person the same time because once you've been writing enough you realize there's no real rules and that these are categories that English teachers give you they start naming things but that we don't have to name them we can do whatever we want and then that led to other discoveries in the book thank you hi I really enjoyed the book thank you for writing it you've hinted at some of the autobiographical elements I wonder how you chose the places that Arthur les travels - oh that's good Paulo I was broke and trying to hustle to make money and I was hustling travel magazines and food magazines and so I ended up traveling to a few places and while I was supposedly writing this very much much sadder book that was in San Francisco so I took notes and at one point I thought well I'll just use my notes in the novel and I'll have him travel to these places it was a very different book at that point and once I realized I really was taking him on a trip around the world I had to like go to the other he had to go around the world and I hadn't ever been around the world before so then I had to find a way broke to get to India and Japan so I started pitching myself to these travel magazines I feel like I want to write about Bollywood you know when they turn it down but I eventually did find myself in all those places as it was important to me that I visit all the places and then I take notes and then I put down what I actually saw I not what I sort of fantasized about thank you thank you again it's been a really fun night already good I'm really excited to be here in part I'm here with my friend Scott who just asked a question we went to high school together grew up together and we're currently in a book club with our English class from high school and our English teacher Wow I know I know I know in their free time they're leading me but we're all graduated from college pretty recently and we're back in the area and I know I know I agree and so this is actually our upcoming book and it's really fun and exciting to hear you speak before we have our discussion Wow yeah he's finished the book you haven't I can tell no okay yeah this is this is a really fun read and I'm excited to discuss it with my peers and our teacher our previous book was actually also a Pulitzer winner it was tinkers by Paul Harding which is thematically very challenging it's about death and dying and the tone is really really different from this book and I'm really curious as I know you're not on the committee but you're a pulitzer winner you've written a character who's a pulitzer winner I'm curious and so we've talked a little as a book club about what makes for a Pulitzer Prize winner and I'm curious what themes you see in Pulitzer winners wow I have to speak with gravitas about it that's tough no no that's a good question luckily I mean the committee changes every year it's three people which means they're going to make I think like the mathematics turns out three people will pick up a weirder choice than like twenty people it's not a committee committee you know so they'll pick something unusual and then there's another level that is the board that will prevent them from making too crazy a choice which was like Thomas Pynchon didn't win for gravity's rainbow because the board refused the committee's decision so it's a they've got a weird process in there but so they picked people like Paul Harding was a surprise when he won for tinkers I'm avoiding the subject a little I wrote to the judges on Twitter and I said I don't know if I'm allowed to contact you or not so just don't answer but I have to say thank you for changing my life I don't know what was going through your head and two of them wrote back to me it was three women one is a librarian Nancy Pearl who's kind of a celebrity librarian she is an action figure today's honor the real-life shushing action [Laughter] I have it on my desk and Elizabeth the Kraken is a great novelist but I and I know them both vaguely and so they wrote back to me um and they were very vague I wish they had a more clear answer they kind of I'm afraid to say they kind of said that they they liked the idea of it going to like a nice person which is a nice thing to hear but they clearly must have liked the book too I secretly think if I may feel true yeah I mean they thought it was a very fine novel and I made fun of them for their dour citation one of them contacted me and said in their original citation they talked about how hilarious the book was but the judges cut that out of the citation that's wow so you may know more than I do that you've been in content like them with that the notes are released every 20 years or so so you'll find out oh my god I'll find out it's a grim evening I think that they were trying to make a statement about humor and a comic novel and that they they all agreed they loved the book and that they must have sat and been like well what do you what do you think what about any Greer and they're like yeah oh wow yeah yeah let's show them like I think it was an unusual choice and they wanted it to be yeah that's all Michael Cunningham also called me that night of the Pulitzer who he had won a Pulitzer and he Michael che Vaughn's advice to me was enjoy yourself there's no downside just have a great time you'll have a great time and Michael Cunningham said this is gonna be really hard on you I heard Micheal Chabon had a really good time I don't know how but he said don't doubt whether you deserve to have a Pulitzer don't waste any time on that because eventually you're and a half decide you do so you just go straight there I think you're totally deserving [Applause] so my book club just finished your book and we were actually gonna meet tonight to talk about it but then found out that you were in town so we decided to come see you instead of talking about you Wow like you manifested me we will do to be here we've been doing a lot of dystopian novels lately so having your tragic comedy was actually refreshing and so the thing that kept coming to mind as I was reading your book was the phrase that the clothes make the man and clothing and objects are kind of like this undertone to your book there's this the blue suit the luggage that gets lost and so I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about what objects and clothing mean to you although this is not a graphical right as we're kind of at like peak minimalist culture right now like how much of a role do objects and and clothes play in your daily life I have a clothing story yeah I was at the Pulitzer Prizes the other day no okay before that I was in Italy at working at my job and there was a great writer there Terry tempest Williams who's like a wonderful activist who chained herself to nuclear power plants and and is like a solemn priestly person she teaches at Harvard Divinity and she's wonderful to be around and and I course I asked her what should I wear and she said and I said should I wear I'm gonna wear something just like an elegant you know for the occasion and she said no sometimes in times like these when our happiness is we're being told our we don't deserve happiness and we're not human beings sometimes the strongest thing we can do is a defiant expression of we're a red suit and I did so like that was like I I had permission by this this sort of goddess to do what she felt was a strong political statement so yeah that was that was great a defiant expression of joy and I think that that the LGBT community has often used that as a tactic a political tactic to be joyous and funny during times that were like I remember the AIDS activism days that was not a funny time but the the activism was funny and that caught media attention and it meant that some people began to pay attention and that was a real it was a new tactic in politics and I know we were talking about clothes but I went there and objects okay and objects I don't object story which is that there's I made a rule that I said I could there's no object in the book that I did not write down in my notebook so I paid careful attention everywhere I went to the exact objects around me so there's like a fluorescent colored little chicken at one point and I saw that you know that was important to pay attention that's the thing I loved about like reading Proust is that that's a sad book but it's full of the ecstasy of life because he pays attention to objects that in a way that we would be painful for us to so we kind of passed by everyday objects but he resurrects them for us and we recognize the asparagus that he describes and it's that we feel like we're brought back to memory into life again and it feels optimistic even though it's the book is sad so there thank you Lou thank you so much for being here I really enjoyed the book so I know we've been talking a lot about how you said that the book is semi-auto graphical specifically talking about Arthur less but of course the deceased husband of Arthur less was a prize-winning novelist and I was wondering if you you have sort of he's not deceased he just he's sick yes yeah sorry but I was wondering if you sort of took any sort of more lessons from writing about him now that you yourself have also on a prize oh my gosh well that was the great irony of it was that of course that I had not only do I have that character win the Pulitzer Prize I have someone else like a female poet who wins a prize and comes up to and drunkenly at a party and is like don't ever win a prize you'll just to her and you'll never write again and like it's something else like that happens in the book too and I feel like I've written my own destinies I'm terrible way it's like a magic book in a terrible teenage horror movie like everything you write in it comes true so but more interestingly it was it's as autobiographical as the book is I don't know anyone like Robert his his ex-lover that's an invented person for me and a number of the people in there I just loved writing as them they were very real to me and and and I I tell people like all the things all the things in the book are things I found that all the people I made up and that was the fun of it cuz um yeah without ruining the ending did you energize you might have ended it at the Skype session okay there's a you haven't read it you don't know what they're talking about I will abstractly say something about the ending that my editor did want to change it and this was like a writing tip that I tell my students she said that there I did something tricky that wasn't necessary and stood out that I should get rid of it and I said to Here I am hearing a challenge to see what I'm gonna do with it because I recognize the kind of comment from an editor where they're saying there's a problem and they want to erase it but actually the the problem is probably the best thing you've done and everything around it is the problem so I fixed the whole rest of the book so to match the last three pages but I tell my students to do that because I always think I'm like if you sit in a workshop of 15 people and they're all like it's great until the aliens show up so just get rid of the aliens so you're gonna end up with like a story about a vaguely failing marriage that ends funny but what you really want to do I was an alien story so like make the rest of the marriage thing match the alien commit to the aliens and that's probably who you really are and what you really wanted to do otherwise you have a story no one's gonna want to read and there we don't read so many so I was proud that I and then I gave it to her she's like you were right you fixed it you fixed it before we go I feel like I should say something that the last time Karla Cohen who started this store with Barbara Mead introduced me the first four books that I had here and my last book David Cohen introduced me and it is heartbreaking to be here without either of them or without Myrna Cooper Steen who was at every one of my readings up until then and it is kind of pointed to have all my friends and family here and have all these people who would have just screamed here I want a Pulitzer Prize a magic Carla Cohen knowing that so I just wanted to talk about her priestesses [Applause] you

Channel: Politics and Prose

Views: 10,387

Rating: 4.9633026 out of 5

Keywords: Andrew Sean Greer, Less, Less book, Andrew Sean Greer Less, Ron Charles, Ron Charles Washington Post, Book World, Politics and Prose, Andrew Sean Greer writer, Andrew Sean Greer author, Pulitizer Prize, Pulitzer Prize 2018, Andrew Greer, The Washington Post, Andrew Sean Greer Pulitzer Prize, The Washington Post Book World, Bool World Ron Charles, gay writer, Lgbtq writer, lgbt writer, Lgbtq author, Less novel, novel, author, writer, Pulitzer, humor, humor novel

Id: PM0lOdRZ45c

Length: 52min 44sec (3164 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 06 2018