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Episode 315: Tad Friend
251 Plays3 years ago
Tad Friend is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of the memoir In the Early Times: A Life Reframed (Crown).
Social: @CNFPod
Sponsor: Athletic Greens
Support: patreon.com/cnfpod
Show Notes/newsletter: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Why does Federer hire a coach?
00:00:01
Speaker
Hey, what's going on CNFers? Okay, so there was this time when Roger Federer was one of the greatest tennis players in the world and didn't use a coach. He was like, bro, I'm good. But at some point during his play to stay on top, the greatest player of all time, arguably,
00:00:21
Speaker
hired a coach. He needed someone to see what he couldn't see.
How can Brendan help memoir writers?
00:00:25
Speaker
Likewise, if you're a writer working on a memoir, maybe sports or maybe a book proposal, those are my areas of expertise and you're ready to level up, someone to hold you accountable, shoot me an email, brendan at brendanamare.com. And we all started dialogue. I'd be honored and thrilled really to help you get where you want to go.
Call for submissions: Audio Magazine on 'Codes'
00:00:46
Speaker
And those calls for submissions are out for the next issue of the audio magazine. Codes is the theme. Codes to live by. Mantras, personal beliefs, rules, oppressive, maybe liberating. I love people who are so principled, they live by a code. Whether that be Captain Fast, uh, Fast-tastic, jeez, B.O. Captain Fantastic, or even the Mandalorian, this is the way.
00:01:11
Speaker
Give me your best 2,000-word essays about codes. Email creativenonfictionpuckass at gmail.com with code in the subject line. Simultaneous submissions are fine, but if you have your piece accepted by another publication or are holding out for a more prestigious publication, let me know as soon as you can. So I don't read and edit your piece because I even give notes to the rejected essays. I mean, what a guy.
00:01:35
Speaker
So just do that. The submissions should be original. Okay? Original submissions. Deadlines October 31st. This is the way. Well, that took a turn, Brendan. We're going so well this interview. And you call me a failure. I'm taking off my microphone.
Introduction to Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Ted Friend
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Speaker
This is the creative nonfiction podcast a show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara. How's it going? Ready for some for some chatter? Well, not that much chatter, but you know five to six minutes. I'm sorry. It's just how long it takes It's how long it takes that's why you have a skip button, but I need to introduce the guests So don't skip ahead Susan tad friend is here
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Speaker
Ted is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and he's written some of my favorite pieces over the years. A lot of great profiles and features. Back in 2014, he wrote this great profile on Bryan Cranston at the end of the Breaking Bad run. And I pinged him on Twitter because I wanted to pick his brain about how he went about the piece. And he answered my questions, and I've hung on to that email ever since.
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Speaker
Have I written a single profile on that level yet? No, but I think about it a lot.
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Ted also is the author of the new memoir, In the Early Times, A Life Reframed. It's about his father, it's about fatherhood, shame, regret, middle age. I read this book side by side with Brad Listy's Be Brief and Tell Them Everything. And for some reason, they seem to really compliment each other. I'm not exactly sure why, but they really did. It's like peanut butter and chocolate. It was a wonderful experience. I want to remind you to keep the conversation going on Twitter at cnfpot or at Creative Nonfiction Podcast on Instagram.
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Speaker
You can also support the podcast by becoming a paid member at patreon.com slash cnf pod as I say the show is free But it sure
Ted Friend's writing process and memoir reflections
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Speaker
as hell ain't cheap members get transcript chances to ask questions of future guests special podcasts I give away cool stuff like if my book proposal for this thing I'm working on if it sells yeah, you better believe I'm gonna share it with the patreon audience So you have a little bit of a template to see what a winning proposal looks like but if it doesn't sell pie to the face also
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Speaker
this episode. And for the next few or so, maybe the next eight, there'll be a mid-roll ad. If you don't want to hear an ad in the middle of the show, I'm dropping the file while the show ad-free on the Patreon page. So yet another wickedly exciting perk.
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Speaker
Free ways to support the show, you can always leave a kind review or rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Written reviews for our little podcast that could go a long, long way towards validating it for the wayward CNF-er. I mean, who the hell am I? But if you see all those reviews, you might be like, oh wow, okay, I'll give it a shot. Got a couple new ones, so I'm gonna read one right here. Save another one for next week. This one from Karen Workshops, Five Stars. Inspired me to get writing again now.
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Speaker
See here I am writing seriously though. I listened to Brendan's short episode today. It was about the talk Jeff chatting and reading his craft essay on cooking and writing parallels while I took the dog for an early walk and I got interested then I listened to his interview with Jane Friedman with great pleasure even though I'm not really interested in the business side of writing still they made it interesting and
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Speaker
And now I see the endless list of past podcast episodes, interviews of all the authors I know and don't know. Enough for the years to come.
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Speaker
Then I looked him up and read The Day That Never Comes. And so far, that's a feature I wrote that I won an award for. So, so far, I have not even touched the breakfast dishes. I'm assuming that those are the very early episodes. Brendan's interview style is casual enough to be easy and fun to listen to, serious enough to be inspiring. And on top of that, while it shouldn't matter, it helps that he's got the perfect podcast bass voice.
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Speaker
Amazing. Thank you, Karen. Let's keep this train rolling, CNFers. Be sure you're heading over to BrendanOmero.com for show notes and to sign up for my monthly up to 11 rage against the algorithm. CNF and monthly newsletter. Say that.
00:05:55
Speaker
However many times fast first of the month and no spam so far as I can tell you can't beat it Alright, so Tad is at Tad friend on Twitter and we talk a lot about structure and magazine writing Reporting and organizing failure success What the subjects he reports on say about him and a lot more really rich stuff? So let's get to it CNFers. Here's the great Tad friend
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yourself. Where is tension on the forefront of your generation of these stories? It's in there and I think if it's sort of foremost in your mind then you're just writing
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propulsively to get people to the next thing, then you might be getting close to Thriller territory or Jack Reacher territory, which I totally love those books and you gobble them down. But they don't necessarily make you three days later think about them while you're standing in line at the grocery store. And I think tension
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Speaker
There's a balance that I find myself always struggling with. I'm always struggling with like nine things that I always often feel like a cartoon bubble of all these sort of things in the air over my head that I'm struggling with to try to do simultaneously. And in music, you can do that because you can say, well, let's bring in the flute here and then we'll have the bassoon. And they can be both, but they can both be at the same time. And in writing,
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Speaker
When you're writing one sentence, you can't have a second sentence underneath it doing something. So you have to write sort of sequentially and try to somehow in some way that never works, evoke the flute and the bassoon at the same time. So this is a very long-winded and totally rambling and unhelpful answer to your question. But I think a good way of maintaining tension, I think there are two ways that come immediately to mind.
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One is by ending like a scene or a moment and going really far away from it. And I often feel like the second section of a magazine piece, I try to go as far away as I in good conscience can from whatever we've done in the first section.
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to indicate the overall, here's the map of the story. It may have started in New York, but it's also going to take us to Portugal and South Africa. Often they aren't so much geographical, but it's going to be about
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plant-based meats, but it's also going to be about the destruction of the Earth. And so you sort of try to set the larger context. And in the meantime, the reader is sort of, if you've done your job well with the first scene or two scenes or whatever, thinking, what about those guys who are drowning on the island? Let's go back to them. So that is the sort of going away in a way that feels purposeful rather than just like you're stumbling around like a drunkard.
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can be helpful because then the person is learning something, but that feels that keen sense of like, the writer is going to take me back there, but they, you know, he feels like this is important that I also know this. So that's exciting. That's one thing you have to be careful about because then if your third scene suddenly is like set on Pluto, then people are going to like, wait, where are you going? What's happening? I don't get it. So you have to somehow be cognizant of what you've done earlier. And the other thing I feel like, which is maybe not a tension thing, but I think
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Speaker
maintains tension rather than creates it, which is, I feel like a really good way to almost smuggle useful information in. I mentioned a piece I wrote about impossible foods and plant-based meats a couple of years ago.
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Speaker
There's a lot of science and global warming and deforestation stuff that I sort of had to get in there because that's the reason that Impossible Foods got started. And to explain what the founder, why he, a lifelong scientist, decided to start this company, you sort of have to talk about methane gas and how many times worse it is than carbon dioxide in terms of global warming. And you have to get into all that stuff.
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If you just deliver paragraph after paragraph of stodgy facts, you are risking having the magazine being hurled across the room and fair enough. If you're having two or three or seven people talk about something, you're showing that scene and the reader feels like,
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it's really helpful to understand they're talking about methane. And then you occasionally are saying methane is actually 25 times more powerful global warming gas than carbon dioxide. In the middle of that, they're feeling like, oh, that's really helpful information because now I understand why this person is so incensed about methane. So if you can kind of syringe in
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facts as you're having a scene. It's a great way of maintaining the tension without diluting it and then just like falling off a cliff by having a whole section of here's some really boring shit you ought to know. Right. And getting to that notion of all the cartoon bubbles going on like above your head or even the cartoon bubbles that are kind of popping out out of the story you're making,
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How do you go about maybe just putting a pin in those things and organizing those thoughts so you can write as you're saying that you're writing sequentially but you know eventually you got to sort of check a lot of these boxes that that organizational I guess ethos it can be very hard to maintain over the course of a very hefty piece of writing so I wonder how you approach that.
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Speaker
I wish I knew. I've occasionally talked to other writers or read other writers' accounts of what they try to do organizationally, and I'm always incredibly fascinated. It's like reading about someone else's sex life, but then I also think, well, I don't want to do that. I would never wear that.
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It's idiosyncratic and it works for me, but not all that well. I feel like it's laborious and not efficient.
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The prosaic, dull thing is I sit down and write little one sentence or half sentence, little reminders about each important thing that I want to get in there. There might be in a long piece, I think I want to get in 1500 little facts or scenes or quotes or things that are just nuggets of some kind. Then I usually end up with about half of that. But I think at the beginning, I'm really convinced that they all should be in there and that probably pretty much the whole magazine should be turned over to my
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magnum opus So then and then I have them and I then I kind of like loosely organized them by like topic like methane and cows and You know vegetarian burgers earlier failures or whatever it is or Flavor science all these things that might you know like that I need and then the scene with so-and-so and the teams in the laboratory and they put them all so there ends up being like 90 or 100
00:13:24
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different little kind of organizational things. And then I try to like, they're like all boxcars. I sort of think of them as boxcars. And then I try to get the boxcars organized and make a train, which is the outline. And very often it means shifting, you know, the chickens and the grain from one boxcar to another. You're like, oh, it doesn't really work there. And then I kind of have an outline and it's a very rough, but I sort of feel like, oh, this is kind of be the story. Yeah. And then I start writing.
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And then by the end of the second paragraph, I have thrown my outline at the side, which is why it's such a terrible process, except for me. But I can't start writing without it. I need the psychic reassurance of this totally factitious and somewhat useless outline that I instantly depart from because I'm like, I can't wait to tell that later. I've got to tell that now.
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which may actually turn out not to be true, because I write a first draft that's sort of the vomit draft. And at a certain point, I get so frustrated with the fact that I have no outline and no idea where I'm going that I'm just inputting random chunks that I'm like, all right, I'll just do this little scene here, even though it doesn't belong there. And I'll just hear, oh, I forgot to talk about, you know,
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Speaker
I forgot to talk about all the people in Washington who were fighting this law. I'll just throw a sentence to write more about this later. It would be nowhere near public, not even though the best side of the world could take that version and turn it into something. Then I take all that and almost every paragraph when sentence gets moved around to some other place. It's a very long process. It's like the writing usually takes like
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Speaker
four to six weeks, I hate to say. I wish it were faster. I feel like there are people who write, there's sort of two basic kinds of writers. There's the people who can only write the second sentence when the first sentence is perfect. They're sort of the lapidary chiselers who are like, and then they, okay. And they know, they kind of know where they're going or they figure it out as they go.
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And then there's the other kind who can only write the first sentence after they've written the thousandth bad sentence and have a really shady draft and then they can go back and fix it. And I guess that's me.
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To me what comes to mind too is an NFL head coach is their call sheet. They've got all the things that they would like to do. And then the game presents its own kind of challenges. And you're like, all right, well, we've got to scrap this and kind of just react to what's going on on the field based on all the study you've done and everything. And it's not like everything is for waste. But it's like, OK, now we can be nimble based on new information. So it's kind of like the draft in progress. It's kind of like the game in progress. It's like, OK, now we have to.
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Speaker
How do we react to this thing that just happened that I had no idea was going to come up? Yeah, and often like it's sort of funny because, you know, like in the same sports analogy where a great opponent brings out the best in you, like the best, you know, like playing someone, a great tennis player, you're like, I mean, if they're not insanely good, you're likely to play better tennis than if you're playing a terrible tennis player.
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Speaker
And I sort of think that the funny thing about that, of course, is that the other tennis player is you yourself. You're playing against yourself. There's no other team running onto the field with strange uniforms. You're sitting there at your computer looking out the window. But the best ideas, the things that you didn't know, in that sense, either the opponent or your collaborator, if you will,
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Speaker
are the things that come to you when you're sitting down and you think, oh, this is the way to connect those two things in one sentence instead of two big, huge paragraphs. Or, oh, here's an idea. I realize, as I'm using about it, that I really, that I really, because I don't really know what I'm heading towards or even what I feel or think about the topic until I start writing. That's the, that's the big problem is all the other stuff is kind of like, is like calisthenics getting you ready, but so you can run on the field. And then
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to continue your field analogy. Yeah, it's like, then you're on there and it's like, all right, well, you know, let's call an audible.
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Speaker
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00:18:46
Speaker
And I read that you had said, I guess I have a strength or weakness where I feel like I can't start writing until I know what I'm talking about.
Ted Friend's journey to The New Yorker
00:18:54
Speaker
Not just 80%, but feel like I'm totally confident in being able to assert something. So how did you arrive at the fact that you got to get all that material and not start writing to kind of paint yourself into that sort of corner? You got to have it all before you can proceed.
00:19:10
Speaker
Well, it's definitely a luxury and it is probably a byproduct of the New Yorkers giving us, you know, not a whole lot of adult supervision and a lot of time to do things. And I do feel like after like two or three weeks of reporting, I could probably do a piece that's, you know, 60 to 70 percent as good, maybe, or interesting. You get a lot like I feel when I look through my notes, I often get a lot at the beginning. A lot of the stuff that I end up using is at the beginning and at the end.
00:19:40
Speaker
which maybe just cut out the middle. But I don't know. The middle is often people talking to you and telling you to talk to someone else who you talk to at the end. So I would love to be more efficient about it. And it definitely is a sort of tick or crutch or something to feel like I have to kind of feel, even falsely, that I know what I'm talking about before I start writing.
00:20:10
Speaker
There is a point where I feel like, OK, I can start writing. And it's when I feel like I have thoughts now. I feel fairly sure that if I talk to 10 more people, they'd be telling me some version of what I already have heard. And I could keep reporting, and it could be a book. But here's the right amount of information for the story I need to tell, and the possible curse of writing
00:20:39
Speaker
You kind of think you can tell every story in like 6 or 8 or 10 or 12 at most 14,000 words. And maybe you can. Maybe you don't need books anymore. I don't know. But there aren't that many magazines that publish really long stories. So there are lots of books too. Yeah, exactly. Or even just turning over the entire issue to Lawrence Wright for coronavirus. Here you go, Lawrence. That doesn't happen very often. No.
00:21:08
Speaker
There was another time you said that there used to be this unspoken snideness or distance in my writing, in your writing. So I wonder how you overcame this to write from a greater sense of empathy and understanding over time. That, you know, I think that a lot of that has been unconscious. It wasn't because I wasn't aware of it as much as I should have been. It was a byproduct of me writing because I wanted people to pay attention to me rather than to what I was writing about.
00:21:38
Speaker
I wanted people to think I was great and like a really good writer and knew a lot of words and could use them and more or less correctly. And all of which I think comes through pretty clearly on the page when I look back at some of my earlier stuff.
00:21:53
Speaker
kind of want to lie down for a while when I read it, because it's painful and it's callow. It's youthful and immature and unguarded, I guess, is the best you could say for it is that I was unaware of how much I was revealing about myself. So I think it's a life thing where, you know, over time, I've become, I've come more to feel two things. When I feel like the focus should be on what I'm writing about, whatever it is, sometimes I'm writing about myself, like if it's a personal history or
00:22:22
Speaker
in the book that I just wrote, but the focus isn't on me, the writer, but on me, the person who's writing, which is an important distinction, even though it sounds like it might not be, I think.
00:22:31
Speaker
Well, I think the second part of it is that I don't feel the impulse to show off anymore as much. And it's not like about that. It's more trying to tell the story in the best way, whatever it may be, and tell the story as it presents itself to me. And obviously, another writer would tell it a different way. But if you focus on the story and focus, I guess the other part of it really is also
00:22:55
Speaker
Telling the story means paying attention to what I'm feeling about something, not just kind of taking shots at it or seeing it as an opportunity to like make remarks, you know, or show off my wit or my, you know,
00:23:11
Speaker
quip or my attitude, but simply like, if I'm feeling, here's something that's important and here's why, or this may be uncomfortable and here's why, or this may be laugh and here's why, and if you can come out, evoke that in the reader, I think it's a better story. So I'm not sure I've succeeded at all those things every time or even anytime because who knows, but that is at least I feel like I've clear on what I'm trying to do and trying, and also I'm not trying to do.
00:23:39
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's the trap of a lot of up-and-coming writers who are very inspired by stylists, be they David Foster Wallace or Joan Didion or Susan Arlene, whoever. And eventually you come to the point where you kind of surrender to story and you're like, all right, I have to kind of check some of my cleverness and what I think is funny in service of the story itself.
00:24:04
Speaker
I think by doing that, when you can drop in that little grace note, a very nice turn of phrase, it actually stands out and serves the story. Whereas sometimes if you do that too much, you just come across as a showman or a comedian bombing on the stage, which doesn't serve anybody.
00:24:25
Speaker
Yeah, I was looking for something I'd written, and I thought I was in this book. I had a collection of pieces that came out about 20, quite literally 20 years ago, exactly. And I was looking for a story that I thought was in there, which it turned out to be. And I kind of came upon my forward to the book, and I was reading it. And I was thinking, oh, this is kind of funny.
00:24:46
Speaker
And it would be funnier if it was less funny. I was trying so hard to be funny that I felt like there was a lot of, as you said, the comedian, where it had a little bit of a performative, here's another one if you didn't like that one kind of quality, where it seemed insecure to me and needy. And so I was like, oh, that's interesting. I didn't feel terrible about it. I was like, that's who I was then. So OK.
00:25:15
Speaker
Luckily the book didn't show all that well. So not that many people know about it except all people gonna hear about it right now On your podcast legions of people. Let's flock. Yes. No, I mean, I feel like probably there's gonna be a really like seismic tremor from this That's gonna Were it possible for there to be a seismic tremor? The book is lost in Magnolia travels in Hollywood in other foreign lands Add to cart
00:25:44
Speaker
all the people who are thinking about maybe buying my 20-year-old collection are not gonna rethink themselves.
Challenges in story structure
00:25:51
Speaker
So yeah, you can sort of see it. And who's to say that in 20 years from now, I won't look back at stuff I'm writing now, I have the same feeling. So we'll see.
00:26:00
Speaker
You know what's amazing, Tad, is that way back when, this would have been 2014, I saved the email that you and I had a very short exchange about your Bryan Cranston profile, which I love, the man who knocks or the one who knocks.
00:26:16
Speaker
And it was – I peppered you with a few questions just about how you went about reporting a piece of that nature, the structure and such, because I really loved it. I remember I undersold the word count just from my own instinctual thing. I thought it was like 5,000 words, and you were like, actually it was like 8,500.
00:26:37
Speaker
And you didn't say that to correct me. It was just like it was a way that made I couldn't believe it was almost 50 percent longer than what I had ballparked because you know you were able to just tease it out and it read shorter than it was, which is really a testament to a well-reported and even better written piece.
00:26:53
Speaker
And I've saved this email for so long, and there's an element of it that I think is just a wonderful element that you brought to it when talking about structure. And you said, you know, structure, I think, is the hardest, most crucial aspect of storytelling. It is storytelling. Unfortunately, no one's structure works for every story or even most stories. You have to reinvent the wheel every time. So do you find that that's still true with the stories that you're reporting to this day?
00:27:22
Speaker
Yeah, I deeply wish there was a template that I could just apply, like a waffle iron. You just pour it in the goo, you bring the waffle iron down, and then you got a waffle. That'd be so great. Might get boring then, too, right?
00:27:39
Speaker
It might, and the reader might notice, we've had waffles all every day this week. Could we have some french toast? But it is frustrating to me. I don't think it's frustrating anymore. For a long time it was frustrating to me because I sort of felt obscurely that there should be a, in some sort of Joseph Campbell-y, hero's journey kind of way, this one narrative where you bring back the elixir after you've done these seven other things.
00:28:08
Speaker
And it just doesn't feel like that's right. So I was just abused of that, I guess, just by trial and error. And maybe it is right. Maybe there's some great
00:28:20
Speaker
I just, I'm too close to it to know that there's some template that I am following in slightly different ways that feel very different. But I feel like each story has a different, has to have its own structure. And I feel like with good editing, like most, there's a lot of writers who can write sentences and paragraphs, you know? But I feel the reader, the writers who really hold my attention are ones who
00:28:46
Speaker
getting back to your point earlier about tension and pacing, sense of surprise, setting things up in a subtle way that you don't necessarily see that then pays off later. You don't realize, oh, that's going to mean this later. Maintaining surprise without feeling like it's manipulative. The writer hasn't kept some key thing from you to spring it on you, but maybe has figured out an artful way to
00:29:14
Speaker
disclose information at a time when it feels like it makes sense and feels resonant and natural. And so all those things, like a writer who can do that, like really with structure, that's all structure, I think, or at least a lot of it is structure. And I think structure is the hardest part. Like I feel like, I feel that I learned how to write sentences in paragraphs
00:29:40
Speaker
relatively young, youngish, and structures is I'm still learning and still feel baffled by a lot of the time.
00:29:49
Speaker
And, you know, Mark Maron of the WTF Podcast, when he has SNL cast members on his show, he's always obsessed with how comics of that nature get on SNL. And he's got this unique obsession with it, because I think he, at one point or another, had auditioned, but really wanted to be on it and never could. And I have a similar obsession with New Yorker writers and with a similar ethos behind it.
00:30:14
Speaker
Um, so I just, you know, for my own elucidation, you know, what's your New Yorker story and how you arrived, uh, to become a staff writer there for the, you know, better part of, geez, I don't know, 25, 30 years now? Close to it? Uh, 20, 24 years. 24. Um, but it feels like 30. Um, I, I wrote some talk of the towns for the New Yorker in the, in the eighties when I was in my
00:30:40
Speaker
mid 20s. And then I wrote some more in the early 90s when I was in my early 30s. So I had a little bit of an acquaintance with the magazine. And then I wrote a piece for them. It was assigned to 2000 words in 1998 about Gary Shanling, the comic and his manager, Brett Gray, who were suing each other. And it was sort of ugly in the way that those things can be and lots of like people, you know, sort of like the allies of the two men had to choose sides. It was like, you know,
00:31:09
Speaker
It wasn't like that everyone in Hollywood had gone to one camp or the other, but it felt like that in this sort of slightly overheated world of Hollywood. And I had written a piece
00:31:20
Speaker
seven or eight years before that about the Larry Sanders show. And I'd spent a little time with Gary Shandling and met Brad and spent some time with him a little bit when they were still friendly and very professionally close. So anyway, an editor at the New Yorker who I knew from having worked with her very closely at Spy years before when we were both editors there said, Oh, do you want to write about a little postcard from LA? I was going to assign it like 2000 words about
00:31:49
Speaker
And they knew that the New York Times was also looking into it. So there was a bit of a, you have to do this fast. So I got on a plane and went out.
00:32:00
Speaker
Because The Times had already gotten the cooperation of Gary Shandling, I, perforce, was getting the cooperation of Brad Gray. Because each side was trying to tell its side of the story first and loudest in a big publication. So I went out on a Wednesday.
00:32:20
Speaker
reported really like all days kind of crazily, like thinking this could be my chance to, you know, break into the New Yorker. Turned in a draft the following Friday, which is pretty fast for, and I turned in like 8,000 totally unstructured, disorganized words, but it had, there was good stuff in it. I had gotten good material, I think. And so they ran it, you know, relatively longer, like maybe 6,000 words and then it had been assigned and
00:32:49
Speaker
they liked it and they ran it like right away, they sort of shoved it in there to get it in front of the times. It was all about competition and Tina Brown was still the editor then, so she was very keen on that kind of like, we beat the competition and we had this big splashy thing. And she had this mistaken idea that I knew about Hollywood based on the fact that I just knew like one and a half things about
00:33:13
Speaker
two people in Hollywood. I didn't necessarily go out of my way to disabuse her of that idea. She offered me a contract and I took it. It was that simple. It was nice. It also helped, I think, that Vanity Fair was interested also probably based on that story, having gotten a certain amount of attention. When you have more than one person interested, it's always better. That helped the New Yorker make up its mind.
00:33:44
Speaker
and Tina Brown left six weeks later. David Brown and I were kind of like staring at each other like, who's this guy?
00:33:50
Speaker
We both had that kind of who's this guy feeling. And I'm sure he would have rather that there had been an empty space that he could have filled with his own person. But somehow it worked out. Nice. Again, just it's like it's like the GM coming in and like this clearing house. Like I want my coach and my quarterback. It's like, hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And who's this like draft pick who just showed up, you know, on the bus? And it was like it was a little bit like that because, yeah.
00:34:20
Speaker
Because we didn't meet until I was writing my second piece for the magazine on contract after that. And it was a little bit of a, hm, OK. Hope it goes well. What would you say the subjects you're most drawn to, and maybe based on that, what they might say about you, about the people you're drawn
Interest in success and failure stories
00:34:49
Speaker
to?
00:34:49
Speaker
Yeah, I think I wrote about this actually a little in the book that you mentioned. I realized that without in any way intending this, I think I'm drawn to people who feel like even no matter how successful they are, they feel like failures. And that's interesting to me. In a kind of Sisyphean pushing the boulder up the hill, great artists are never satisfied, people who are pushing themselves
00:35:18
Speaker
driven, don't feel like, I think hacks in life, not just in art, but hacks in general are satisfied. They're like, yeah, that's pretty good. I think, yeah, I killed it. And like I wrote a piece a couple of years ago about Donald Glover, who was inexhaustibly creative and interesting and driven by a sense that he hasn't quite done it right. I think every time, even though he's done some, you know,
00:35:43
Speaker
Just mind-blowingly terrific stuff in so many different arenas. I think he never feels like, okay, that was good. I'm good. I'm just going to go defeat you for a while and chill. He probably wouldn't call himself a failure. I don't think he would, but I think he would feel like he hasn't been a success and it's come at a large cost.
00:36:05
Speaker
and feels restless. So I think that that restlessness and sense of wanting to be better and feeling like other people have done it better and you're not quite doing it right. That interests me. That's something I've been drawn to. I think unless I did a certain number of Hollywood or entertainment based stories in my earlier years of the magazine,
00:36:30
Speaker
somewhat deriving that of Tina Brown's misinformation. And then I think I've done some Silicon Valley-based things that are interesting to me. And I'm working on a story now about door-to-door salesman that I find really fascinating. I like the sort of people, the machinery of persuasion is interesting, how you convince people who really want you, did not invite you, want you to go away as soon as possible, how you convince them to buy something pretty quickly, often.
00:37:00
Speaker
So I don't have, again, it's sort of like the structure thing. I don't have a, oh, this is a good story. It has these four ingredients. It really is a gut feeling of like, that's going to be interesting. And it's like door to door salesman. I was interested in salesman for a while and I was sort of thinking like door to door seems like the hardest version because if you go to a car dealer, you want to buy a car.
00:37:24
Speaker
But if you answer the doorbell, you don't want to buy a vacuum. That's not why you answer the doorbell. And I didn't have at that point a person in mind to kind of send it around, but I just thought, this is an interesting arena. And often I do find it's an arena, and then I try to figure out the way into that arena. I knew for years I wanted to write about a Hollywood agent. And I sort of talked to a lot of agents and then found someone I thought would be good because he was sort of an anti-agent and he didn't like
00:37:50
Speaker
being a traditional agent. And then if you find the person who's at the periphery of the thing, of the world you're interested in, but really good at it, but is different than all the other people, then you can write about both that person and the sort of more standard person. And by exploring the space between them, you can show what it is that makes the agent, I think.
00:38:13
Speaker
Yeah, and in your recent, your most recent book, you know, you'd written most of my best pieces were about people who, even at the summit of their success, felt they'd failed. And it gets you, it gets your point. Even in reading this book too, you know, I don't,
00:38:30
Speaker
I didn't get a sense that you didn't necessarily celebrate yourself as an accomplished writer and I wonder like for you what your relationship might be to your own success or maybe do you even view what I externally see as your successes as maybe you haven't achieved what you're capable of or you feel like you've failed.
00:38:52
Speaker
Well, that took a turn, Brendan. We're going so well this interview. And you call me a failure. I'm taking off my microphone. It's a great challenge that I try not to think about too much, honestly. I'm not trying to duck your question because it's totally fair. I feel like one of the interesting things about The New Yorker is no matter how happy
00:39:21
Speaker
you are with a story that you turn in and it comes out, is the editors are instantly like, what's next? And there's no victory lap. It's like, all right. Classic CNF pod aside right here. Isn't that the demoralizing part? You put in all this work and then it's like,
00:39:42
Speaker
Okay, what's next? It's so demoralizing, dispiriting, and maybe for 24 hours or so you kind of win the day and people are celebrating it, and then all of a sudden it's like, okay, well, gotta move on to the next thing. It's like a starting pitcher. I mean, shoot. You could throw a no-hitter, but five days later, yep, get back up there. Can't dwell on that previous success or failure. In either case, it's just a part of the grind.
00:40:14
Speaker
I can look back and think, oh, I'm happy with that story and that story, not so much with those two. But I don't spend a huge amount of time thinking about where it's all going, if anywhere.
00:40:31
Speaker
I feel like I hope my best stories are ahead of me. Let's put it that way. I don't feel like a failure. I don't feel like a failure. I don't feel like success. I feel like I'm learning on the job still and I hope getting better at it and I hope telling better stories more economically and ones that do more of the things that I hope they will do. I hope they will move people and surprise them and
00:41:00
Speaker
make them laugh and make them think. And I hope I can do that better still in the future. I don't feel like there was some golden age of me ever, but I don't feel like there was one story that I wrote years ago that was great and everything else is an aftermath. I feel like I'm, hopefully I feel like I'm, it's an asymptote, but I hope I'm heading towards some kind of self-satisfaction.
00:41:25
Speaker
Well I think that's the the beauty of this this craft is unlike being an athlete where you would look like yeah my peak years were 27 to 32 and you Michael Jordan looks back on that and he's just like even though in his head he's still thinks he's better than everybody else because he's still 30 year old me out
00:41:44
Speaker
Yeah, 30 years removed from his athletic prime and it is something that ends. But with this, it is something that you continually get better at and refine yourself and be more economical in language. Do ask better questions that get to a deeper sense of what your subjects are talking about or thinking about. So it's exciting in that sense that your best days, as long as you keep working at it, continually to be ahead of you until you're in the ground.
00:42:10
Speaker
Yeah, that's an optimistic view and a pessimistic one is that I'm lying to myself. But if I believe they're still ahead of me, then it gives me impetus to keep doing it and trying to get better at least. On the rare occasions when I have some reason to go back and look at something I wrote many years ago that I don't even remember writing, so I'm reading it kind of fresh the way you would read A Stranger's Work. I feel like I'm often surprised by
00:42:40
Speaker
certain insights or pieces of information. I'm like, oh, that's really interesting that this reporter, AKA me, got that fact or that's an interesting thought. But I feel like I'm a little surprised by it because it feels fresh because it's not in me anymore. But I don't necessarily feel like, oh, there's some lost wax theory of structure or something that I have forgotten how to do. I do feel like it is additive in terms of the
00:43:07
Speaker
my craft, at least it feels like I'm getting better at that part of it. Yeah. Well, in terms of like, you know, the a bit of a bit of humor, that's just a funny dollop to something that you wrote, like, you know, here you wrote that in 1990, your father, your father would write like, one son likes money. The other words, my daughter likes massage. I like money, words, massage and sacred music. And you're like, OK, Zeus. I was like that.
00:43:35
Speaker
My wife pointed out to me at one point that I had developed a tick, like at the end of the third paragraph of my pieces for the New Yorker, there was always like a joke, kind of like slightly tongue in cheek, dry joke. And as she pointed out, I had to stop doing it because I felt like, you know, that felt like the equivalent of a crutch word where you're using the same word over and over and you're like, oh, maybe I shouldn't, you know,
00:44:03
Speaker
I mean, she's probably read things more carefully than the average reader. When I was a spy years and years ago, I
00:44:09
Speaker
tried and succeeded for a long time in slipping a Flintstones reference into every story that I wrote. And I have no idea why I did this, but I think it came up naturally the first two times for whatever reason. And then I was like, let's see how I can go on this. And finally, actually, the same editor who assigned me the piece about Gary Chandler and Brad Gray, a lovely woman named Susan Morrison, said, hey, you've written a Flintstones reference. And as I came up,
00:44:36
Speaker
And then I had to stop. But I'm going to start again now. Actually, I'm just letting everyone know. So brace yourselves for some more Wilma and Betty and bam, bam coming up. Nice. Yeah, really pulling the tail of a bird that just squawks into the abyss. Yeah, or running really fast in my car. You know, who knows? I think with humor, if you think about
00:45:03
Speaker
It's like the old line about if you dissect a bird, it doesn't fly anymore. If you think too much about your own brand of humor, I remember years ago in a meeting at Esquire when I was going in to talk about writing for them, and I ended up writing for them for a few years as a distribution editor, but two of the editors were discussing me as if I were not there, talking about my style and my approach and why I'd be perfect for the story.
00:45:27
Speaker
Not quite literally sticking my fingers in my ears, but I was sort of trying to go, la, la, la, la. I can't hear you because I felt instinctively, I don't want to know what kind of writer you think I am because then I will just be trying to service your notion of that somehow or there's a danger of that. You'd be like a cover band of yourself.
00:45:47
Speaker
That's well said, yeah. I think if you start to jukeboxify yourself and just feel like you're Shawn Mendes, you're the same chord progressions over and over and it's like, all right, yeah. Sounds like that break off was pretty tough for you, Shawn. I don't know. I don't mean to pick on Shawn Mendes.
00:46:08
Speaker
It's funny because like a couple times people have said to me, I started reading a story about something and then I realized after like at this point that it was like, you must have written it because of X. And it's sort of nice in the sense that people like have recognized your voice. And at the same time, I want them to stop there and not tell me
00:46:28
Speaker
Because it's these three things you always do, or I don't want to hear it. I like the event that anyone out there is planning to give me a compliment that specifically exposes all of my tricks. I would rather not, though.
00:46:45
Speaker
Early on in the book, you draw a scene where your father is up in his room and you're listening to him talking to his caretaker through a baby monitor.
00:47:00
Speaker
And it was such an evocative thing because it really gets at the heart of how, you know, as we age, we essentially kind of regress to being almost like children and infants. And just hearing, you know, your father and his advanced age and, you know, through a baby monitor was just really evocative in that sense. So it's just that it just it just got me thinking of just that painful notion about how like, you know, the young become old or the old become young again. Yeah, I think
00:47:30
Speaker
Well, there's, yeah, I definitely felt like, and my father felt and hated the fact that he felt like he was being infantilized by all the people around him, which was true in a sense, because, you know, and we're all, we all know like how people talk to the elderly, like in sort of like loud voices, like, how are we feeling today? You know, and my dad hated that because, you know, he always had a great and perhaps even excessive sense of dignity and like want to be treated, you know,
00:47:59
Speaker
as an adult, probably when he was three. In fairness to him, it's because he didn't get a whole lot of being treated as a kid because he grew up in this very waspy household being raised by servants. And he said he was being raised by a minibar or something. Yeah. Well, it was a waspy alcoholic household, so yes. So there was that going on. And then also, for my own part,
00:48:25
Speaker
In writing this book that's really my effort to kind of understand him and get closer to him before he died, I became aware in a lot of ways of ways in which I resembled him. So I felt that I was becoming more and more like him or becoming more and more aware of the ways in which we were alike, even though I'd set out both consciously and unconsciously to kind of
00:48:48
Speaker
not be like him and not repeat the things he did and be different. But there's a kind of Greek tragedy element to that of where you get the oracle of Delphi tells you you're going to do X or Y, so you leave the country and determine not to do that. And that's the only way, of course, in which you become that thing that you were told.
00:49:11
Speaker
going to happen. And so I think even as he was becoming younger in certain ways, because he was helpless, as he was getting sick and couldn't move around as much and was losing some of his memory and his grip on things, I was becoming more aware of ways in which I was like him. So it felt like the seismic plates that we were both on were shifting in ways that
00:49:34
Speaker
You know, if you read the book, you can see how that all played out. But it was tumultuous. It's always this push and pull of you're trying to run away. And the farther you run away, eventually you kind of end up kind of coming right to the start to you end up being very similar. Yeah. Yeah. And I think I feel like.
00:49:58
Speaker
My dad died a year and a half ago now.
Writing a memoir: Honesty and family issues
00:50:01
Speaker
I feel like I understand him better than when he died. One reason being that he made me his literary executor and I got to go through all his journals and papers and letters. There was a society that kept hidden from us, the reason that my sister and I particularly, but also my brother to some extent,
00:50:20
Speaker
We always felt like he was kind of, if we said the right thing to him at the right time while crossing our fingers behind our back, he would suddenly say, I loved you much more than you thought. And here's the secret reason why I couldn't tell you. We were always kind of trying to get it out of him somehow. And I feel like it actually, I understood that he was just incredibly sensitive to feeling vulnerable or feeling, he just wasn't good with feeling. He had a lot of feelings.
00:50:48
Speaker
but they were, he kept them to himself, but anybody wrote them down because he was a writer. And I feel like I, that's also probably true of me that I, you know, people always think I'm calm and collected and I feel internally that's totally not the case, but I have, my daughter says I have resting bitch face. So like, it just looks like I'm just sitting there kind of like whatevs, but it's actually my listening face as I pointed out to her a few times.
00:51:18
Speaker
Yeah, there is a lot going on in there and I feel like recognizing that commonality has also been helpful generally in realizing and sort of, I guess, the word of the moment about
00:51:31
Speaker
a lot of people at the center of the culture is de-centering the narrative and I feel like actually it's kind of helpful to me in a slightly different meaning of the phrase to de-center myself and realize that anyone you're talking to has a lot going on. There's the person who's mean to you on the subway or cuts in front of you in the line at the supermarket, their mother might have just died or they just found out that their best friend is a fatal illness or who knows? A lot of those things are happening all around at all times and if you just sort of think about it that way,
00:52:02
Speaker
I feel like it's helpful. And not to make this sound like a public service announcement for empathy, but I do feel recognizing in my dad who I always thought of as this Donish in the English Oxford sense rather than the Mario Puzo sense, Donish figure who respected and communicated only through logic and rationality, how emotional and trembling he was at all times.
00:52:29
Speaker
made me think like if he had that going on that people who seem much more emotional obviously have that going on. Yeah, you're right too that the writers who came to grip me were wizards with structure who didn't flinch from their characters' dooms. And that made me think too, this must have been especially difficult in this book because you're at the center of some doom that you really run towards and embrace for the story and very unflinchingly.
00:52:56
Speaker
So for you, it's a very raw book for you to write. So how challenging was it for you to kind of run towards the doom and actually keep you in it and not run from it? Well, so what you're talking about, I think, is I discovered that my dad had been unfaithful to my mom after he died.
00:53:20
Speaker
And then I had also been unfaithful to my wife and I wrote about that and she discovered that and I wrote about that. And I only wrote about it because we agreed after we started working on our marriage, after I'd behaved so terribly to her and hurt her in ways that I never wanted to because I never wanted her to find out, but that I really did hurt her terribly and that the shame and
00:53:45
Speaker
regret and misery that that caused me was such that I wanted to entirely redirect my life. It was a huge bolt of lightning and opportunity, even though it was also the worst moment of my life. And if she had not, I had already written two versions of the book, one before my dad died, one rewritten after he died, and I'd read his papers. If she had at that point when that discovery felt like it
00:54:15
Speaker
couldn't not be in the book. If she didn't want me to write about it, I would have pulped the book gladly because it was way more important to me to work on my family and marriage with her. She's the hero, sort of hero of the book. Yeah, I agree. She agreed with me that we
00:54:39
Speaker
that we together wanted to go forward and tell the truth and make it a true book, knowing that that wouldn't be easy for me and it wouldn't be easy for her and people would receive it in all sorts of ways that we couldn't control.
00:54:56
Speaker
But it was a decision we collectively made and if we hadn't made it, there would be no book. I feel like that was the hard part and then writing it was hard in a different way just because it was very hard to get any kind of emotional distance on it because it was still kind of happening when I was writing it because it was very fresh and we just started seeing a therapist.
00:55:21
Speaker
We're working on our marriage and talking about very painful, difficult stuff. Whereas when I'm looking back at things that happened with my dad when I was seven, there's a fair amount of water under the bridge and the feelings might still be strong, but they've definitely had time to
00:55:38
Speaker
settle and you've got a vantage point. And the vantage point here felt like me in a car spinning off a bridge into a gorge. And so I had no idea what was going on. And so trying to work that into the book, some of which was staying the same, a lot of which was changing, it felt like I was trying to do a lot of things at once. And I guess other people will have to judge whether it feels like it works as all is one story or it feels like
00:56:08
Speaker
It doesn't. I don't know. In the recent Master Class piece you wrote in the New Yorker, you cite a quote from St. Vincent who said, you know, an artist's job is to metabolize shame.
Processing shame through writing
00:56:22
Speaker
And I had just revisited the Master Class piece. I just read the first few pages after having read the book. And I was like, that really, I really put a pin in that because that really stuck out to me. Was the, you know, was this book in a way for you to, like, as St. Vincent says, metabolize shame?
00:56:39
Speaker
It was, and I remember when I was interviewing her, and she was talking about that, which she may also have talked about in her class. I can't remember at this point, but that came up with her. And I remember thinking because at that point I was in the middle of still kind of working through some of this stuff that stayed with me as both an admirable goal of how to do it and also a way to make the shame
00:57:04
Speaker
that I definitely felt about my behavior have a purpose. Like maybe I can make something that will reach other people and be, I don't want to, it's not a social tract, it's a memoir, but it might be, might help people
00:57:21
Speaker
think or feel differently about their own circumstances. And there might be something in it that, or even it might just help me kind of work through it. I don't know. Like I think it, I think definitely the second part of it is true that writing about it kind of and putting it down and kind of getting it, you know, getting it onto the page kind of is purgative and that was helpful. Uh, and then the rest of it, you know, like I, I feel like you, you kind of,
00:57:48
Speaker
toss the book into a brook and then it disappears and people find it either passes by their house and they pick it up or it doesn't pass by their house and they don't pick it up and who knows from there. But I do feel like that quote meant a lot to me.
00:58:02
Speaker
You know, given that, you know, for, you know, for years, I think this is kind of kind of true for me, too, just kind of like at odds with, you know, with the father or your father,
Complexities of father-son relationships
00:58:13
Speaker
my father. It's just, you know, you spend a good chunk of your time very much running away from it, trying to be divorced from it, very opposite. But eventually, you know, in that time, they're getting older.
00:58:27
Speaker
and you're getting older, but they're getting closer to passing. And then before you know it, you've wasted, I don't know, 10, 15, maybe 20 years, and then suddenly you're like, oh shit, they're not gonna be around here that much longer. And it's something I'm grappling with. And I wonder for you, if there's an element of, in that running away period maybe, if there is some regret and there are things you wish you could have done differently.
00:58:55
Speaker
I mean, I think if the book is anything, it's an ode to regret of a lot of kinds. Some about my dad and wishing that he had just been able, which he wasn't. But we can still have wishes that we know can't be granted with our parents often. But I do wish he'd been able to communicate more about himself and who he really was.
00:59:23
Speaker
Well, he was alive instead of leaving it for me to find after he's dead since when I think one's relationship with one's parents continues after they're dead. My mom died 19 years ago and I feel differently about her now than I did when she died.
00:59:39
Speaker
I have a different sense of her and since then I've had kids myself and I am more appreciative of the great things she did that I was less appreciative of before I had kids. So that's all true. So there's regrets about his inability to kind of open up. There's regret about the fact that I, at a certain point,
01:00:00
Speaker
without like ever saying the words aloud or whispering them even to myself. But I at some point kind of gave up on him and decided I'm just going to be kind of friendly, civil, loving, polite in a certain way that hasn't a limit because I'm not going to get if I want more from him, if I want a totally open, candid, emotional exchange that feels like
01:00:28
Speaker
everything's on the table and tell me everything you're going on. I want to help." And that feels open and all frequencies on the spectrum work can be addressed. That wasn't going to happen, I felt like, because I tried. I felt like I tried and he just wasn't comfortable with that. So I kind of stopped.
01:00:55
Speaker
And I think as a result, and I write about this in the book, I became blind to the ways in which he was trying. And I went back and read his letters to me again. I stopped reading his letters because a lot of his letters were really super long and full of kind of academic detail about places he'd been to and people he'd talked with in his jobs as the head of a foundation and people unknown to me, cultures unknown to me,
01:01:25
Speaker
somewhat arcane and digressive letters I felt and so I could have stopped reading them and then I, so I missed the ones that were personal and direct and aimed at me instead of what it felt like posterity because I kind of tuned them out. So I regret that. I regret having, you know, there's a quote in the movie, the Philadelphia story of Catherine Hepburn's character says, the time to make up your mind about people is never.
01:01:50
Speaker
which I always liked, and I think that's right. I know with me, my first book that came out a while ago, I remember giving it to my dad to read in that similar vein, like, all right, he'll get some, yeah, I'll see what he thinks. And at first, his first thing was on Christmas Day 2010 or something. He just said how it was boring.
01:02:15
Speaker
And then I let him, and then a couple years later there was just a regional award ceremony and I was winning like a second place ribbon for a feature I wrote. And he was able to come and then I was like, I was very happy with myself. And he went to later say, he's like, man, they give awards out to everybody here. And I was like, okay.
01:02:33
Speaker
All right, I'm sort of done with this. But there was a moment in the book, and that's why I'm bringing this up, because it really resonated with me that, you know, eventually, you know, your dad told you that you were his favorite living writer and that you later learned that he had kept files of all your articles. But it's like you later learned. It's this thing like he couldn't tell you that, but you later found like, oh, I was important to him. And this did mean something to him, even if he couldn't say it to my face. Yeah.
01:03:05
Speaker
First of all, I'm really sorry about your dad's responses. That sounds like not what you were hoping to hear. I don't know your dad, but I know my dad somewhat. I know that he himself was a writer and you wrote in his journals about
01:03:28
Speaker
trying not to stifle my writing, but with his own competitive instincts. He was a very competitive guy. So I think, to his credit, he was aware of the difficulties of two writers, same family. He wrote an autobiographical novel about growing up in Pittsburgh. I wrote a memoir about growing up the next generation. We didn't really talk about it directly, the idea of who was
01:03:58
Speaker
doing what as a writer, but he would show me all the stuff that he'd written and ask for my edits and thoughts and I sort of stopped showing my stuff to him, maybe for reasons of insecurity or maybe because I just felt like
01:04:12
Speaker
he wasn't responding, maybe like with your dad, I felt like he wasn't responding the way I wanted him to. Often, writers in general, you're hoping, you got it in the back of my head anyway, I'm not gonna speak for all, but my sense is, from other writers I've talked to, you're hoping for the person to say that this thing in this way, with the commas here and the semicolons, you want this very specific response, which is, in my case, really warm, emotional,
01:04:42
Speaker
and very specific. I really liked when you did this here because it set up that, and it was so great that this thing happened where people were not just like, oh, that's great, generic, or as I said earlier, even worse.
01:04:56
Speaker
Yeah, I started your story. It looks good. But my dad, I felt like if he did have specific responses, it was often to raise a question about something or say, why did you bother to do that story in the first place? And I read about that a little bit in the book. What was the point in publishing that story? Which is a little bit like they give out prizes for anything. You're sort of like, blah, blah.
01:05:19
Speaker
Because the only kind of responses that comes to mind is like, well, fuck you, which isn't very helpful, it turns out. So that's sort of why I avoided.
01:05:31
Speaker
a lot of topics with my dad, because I didn't want to get to the point of having to say, fuck you. Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly right.
Ted's pen recommendation for left-handers
01:05:41
Speaker
Well, Ted, the last thing I want to ask you, and it's something I ask a guest of the show, is that when we bring this airliner down for a landing, is asking for a recommendation for the listeners of some kind. And like I said, that can be anything from a brand of coffee to a pair of socks to a fanny pack, whatever. So what might you recommend to listeners out there?
01:06:00
Speaker
Well, for years I was a big fan of paper made pens and then I've gone off them because I've decided that they just aren't reliable anymore. Like they stopped, I don't know whether they changed their manufacturing process. I know I'm getting in very deep here, but I will, I would like to give a tip of the hat cap to Bic. The crystal medium blue pen, I think is very reliable, good solid line. I'm a left hander, so I tend to smear.
01:06:25
Speaker
my notes if it's like the ink doesn't dry fast enough and it dries at the perfect moment where by the time my hand gets across the next level it's already dry and it's legible and it's clear and it kind of has a nice dark blue solid authoritative look to it.
01:06:46
Speaker
Nice. Well, fantastic. Well, Ted, this is so wonderful to get to speak to
Podcast wrap-up: Admiration for Ted Friend
01:06:50
Speaker
you. I've been a longtime admirer of your work. And I love this book. And I just constantly, whenever I see your byline, I just know I'm in for a good ride. And that's all I can ask for from a writer like you. So just thanks for the work. Thanks for coming on the show. And best of luck with the new book. Thanks, Brendan. I really appreciate your time and great questions. And it's been a real pleasure for me. Thanks for having me.
01:07:21
Speaker
Wasn't that great? A lot of fun.
01:07:41
Speaker
He wanted me to make sure I wasn't using that email for publication or anything. It was just a correspondence between two of us, and I assured him it wasn't. I'm not sure if talking about it here constitutes a breaking of that treaty, but nevertheless, here we go. It's Profile Writing 101, right? He talks to the people closest to the central figure, and he asks that person who else he should talk to, and so then he talks to all of them until eventually you get to a point where things start to get repetitive.
01:08:09
Speaker
then you take your material and maybe organize it into childhood or Hollywood or whatever but also you start looking at what structure would be best for the piece and it's unique to every story and he was like so key on like structure is it like structure is storytelling
01:08:27
Speaker
It was very nice of him to entertain that desperate 34-year-old Brendan who, eight years later, is equally desperate, but giving fewer shits. Maybe? I still give probably a few too many shits. In any case, like anything in this crazy field, all you can control is your effort. So I'll keep trying. I hope you will too. So stay wild, see ya in efforts, and if you can't do, interview. See ya.
01:09:02
Speaker
you