← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Two New Books from Peter Mendelsund Explore Human Emotion
00:26:19
Peter Mendelsund is an author, graphic designer, artist, and the creative director of The Atlantic.
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A
This is all of it. I'm Alison Stewart. If you are one of the many, many listeners who are participating in our all of It Summer reading Challenge, you have one week left to complete it. Here's the recap. We've asked listeners to read five books in different categories by Labor Day weekend. We here at Team all of it are mostly done. Senior producer Kate Hines. I'm looking at you, Kate, right there. You swear you will completely east of Eden before Monday. Hands in the air. Okay. When you finish, tell us what books you have read. Go to wnyc.org summerreading that's wnyc.org summerreading and then click on the link to fill out the form. If you complete the challenge by Labor Day, we will send you a prize. You have six more days and you can win.
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B
Do it.
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A
That's near future. Now, let's get this hour started with author and artist Peter Mendelsohn. You have likely seen the work of my guest Peter Mendelsohn, even if you don't know him. He's a prolific book jacket designer and the creative director for the Atlantic magazine. He's also a novelist. His new book, Weepers, is set in a world that has gone numb. Most humans have lost their ability to feel. A small group of people who are still able to experience emotions have become professional mourners hired to cry at funerals. One day, a new young man joins the professional criers and proves he has sort of a special power to truly unlock emotions in others. But people in town might not be so happy to start feeling things again. Feeling big emotions or not feeling much at all is a familiar experience for Peter. He's also written candidly about his struggles with a deep depression in the midst of COVID During that period, Peter kept a diary, and he also began to paint for the very first time. Peter has collected those works into a book titled Exhibitionist. One journal, one depression, 100 paintings. Both books are out now. So joining me to discuss both is Peter Mendelsohn. Hi, Peter.
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B
Hi. Thanks for having me here.
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A
Let's start with the exhibitionist first.
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B
Great.
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A
In this diary you kept during the pandemic, you write the world and I infected. How did you think about isolation at this time? And how did you think about it affecting you at this time?
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B
Well, I mean, it's a great question. The depression had started maybe three or four months before the pandemic hit. And anybody that's experienced depression knows that one of its most painful symptoms is alienation and loneliness. I mean, you feel very Cut off and unable to really explain or translate the condition to the outside world. So when the pandemic first hit, it felt, you know, the pathetic fallacy. It felt like the world was kind of mirroring me, and I felt a little bit of solace. I was like, well, now everybody feels alienated, and maybe people will get it more. And I say in the book, in the diary, and this is true, there was a moment where people started to cope and make bread and, you know, communities started to form. And then I felt very left behind.
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A
Were you showing signs of depression before COVID Yes.
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B
I mean, I had had depressions since my early 30s, probably my 20s, that I didn't really know what they were at the time. But, you know, I'd had them pretty much my entire life. But the cadence was increasing sort of every decade. I was having more and more, and they were getting deeper and deeper. And both by that time, those three or four months before the pandemic hit, it was the worst it had ever been. And I also say this in the journal, and it's true. It was the first time that I recognized that this depression, as I called it, would be a dangerous depression.
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A
How so?
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B
That I was feeling that there was no way out of it, and the only ways out of it would be extremely damaging ways out of it, or.
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A
It would be just permanent.
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B
Yes, permanent. There was also some substance abuse which started during that time. I mean, you. You basically, if you're that bad off, will do pretty much anything to be in some other space than the one you're occupying, sort of psycho emotionally. So I found the various ways, legal, illegal, terrifying that one could do to turn oneself off.
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A
What was really interesting was that you. You couldn't. You couldn't really read. You couldn't read during the depression. That was one of the things that you had, like, people could do to escape and you couldn't read.
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B
Yeah. Speaking of your book club, I. Yeah. And as you mentioned, you know, I've read professionally for my entire adult life as a book cover designer, as someone who is deeply embedded in book publishing, as someone who's written seven books in capacity. And also just, you know, my discretionary reading is always. I just love reading. It's always been a place that I've felt at home. And one of the things that I noticed during this depression is that anything that would invoke a strong emotion and, you know, whether it was an interpersonal relationship or music, was the worst, actually, that was the thing that would open me up the most. But books, too, it's sort of anything that would sort of burrow in emotionally would just cause me to kind of collapse. I had no bandwidth to take anything else in, so that's how I diagnose it. Now, I'm still not entirely back to reading, but little bits at a time.
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A
But painting was all right. But painting came to you during this time?
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B
Yeah, it did.
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A
Why do you think you were open to painting?
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B
You know, it's a great question that I don't have a good answer for. I mean, you know, in the journal, when I look. Yeah, sorry about that. When I look back at the journal, I see that. That at the time, I mean, basically what happened is I was sort of sequestered away with my family in a remote farmhouse in New Hampshire at the time. And I was driving into the nearest town, which was 45 minutes away. We were in the middle of the woods and to go to Home Depot, and there was sort of a strip mall. And as I was pulling out of Home Depot, I saw that there was a Michaels. For those of you who don't know, it's a crafting store. And I sort of peeled the car around and went in, and I bought these canvases and these brushes and these paints, all of it just very cheap, and threw them in the trunk of the car and then went back to the farmhouse we were staying in. And they just sort of sat in the trunk forever. And I still to this day have no idea why I had that impulse. It wasn't the impulse of, oh, I want to paint now. Something. Something happened deep within me that was unavailable to my conscious mind. And then, you know, within a week or two, I just started to work on these canvases, and I kept it up until there were a hundred paintings.
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A
Well, you said 122.
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B
Oh, that's right. Well, I mean, you know, and I'm still painting, which is. Which is, I guess, a good thing. I'm enjoying it way more now than I was when I was depressed.
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A
What did the people who love you think about you at this point?
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B
Well, I think I did a very good job, as some people who suffer from substance abuse or, you know, various kind of mood disorders do, of keeping this a secret as much as I could. So, you know, I don't think they really knew what to make of me. I mean, I'm an artist in various ways, as you enumerated. And so I guess the cliche is that I'm. I'm moody and introspective and difficult. So I think some of that is. Was to be expected. And the painting, in a way, just seemed emblematic, I think, to the people who knew me of the fact that I am a little bit of an artistic table hopper, that I'm, you know, I was a classical pianist my entire life until I was 32, and after conservatory, switched to design and then switched from design to writing. And now I'm in news media. And I just, I. If it's. I get bored or I'm just curious, I'm not sure what it is. But I think it wasn't unexpected that all of a sudden I choose a new medium. For me, it was surprising.
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A
My guest is author, artist, book jacket designer, pianist, we can say as well, and Atlantic creative director Peter Mendelsohn. We're talking about his. One of his two books, this one, we're talking about his ex exhibitionist, one journal, one depression, 100 paintings. He's also written a new novel called Weepers. Let's stay with exhibition. I'm really into this part of it. With the painting that you did, part of the art you created was writing words on canvas and then destroying them with paint.
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B
Yes.
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A
How did you arrive at this as part of your practice?
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B
Almost like the painting itself, it was completely mysterious and arose out of nowhere. But in retrospect, like a lot of this stuff, it makes perfect sense to me. I spoke earlier about how difficult it is to communicate when you're depressed. Just that feeling of the rest of the world being unavailable to you and you being unavailable to the rest of the world, and that words don't really suffice. And the deep sort of also secret shame of having to live day in, day out, confront this just unhealthy aspect of mine. And so, you know, I'd just write down things that I was feeling often things that were so secret and so difficult to enunciate that I just wanted some erasure. And I think it parallels on some obvious level the fact that I wanted self erasure also. So I just wanted it all to just disappear.
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A
Let me backtrack for a minute. How long did it take you to get that Michael's hall out of your car and into a place where you could do something with it?
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B
Yeah, it took a while. It took a bunch of weeks. I mean, it was almost like I'd forgotten I'd done it. Like I'd bought the stuff in a dream state. And then I almost forgot that I had done it. And, you know, I'd be driving around sort of aimlessly and, you know, every now and then I'd stop At a stop sign, I'd hear something rattle in the trunk, and then it would just remind me. And then one random day, you know, two or three weeks after I bought this stuff, I just walked out to the trunk, popped it, pulled it all out, threw it on the floor of the barn, and was off and running.
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A
The paintings were often bright colors, actually, which was surprising as I flipped through the book.
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B
Yeah.
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A
What was behind the color choice?
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B
I think at first it was the. You know, at first, I think it was driven by the fact that I had just grabbed from the painting aisle at a crafting store, whatever was there. And they were all bright colors. There wasn't a lot of subtlety to the inventory there. And because I'd never painted before, I never really thought about how to paint or what it was that one does when one paints. I didn't mix any of the colors. I mean, they were right out of the tube, so bright red and bright blue. And, you know, interestingly, I think when you're depressed, the world becomes very monochromatic. It's very hard to see color or taste flavor or not even sure I was aware that I was painting with bright colors. And when I was putting together the book and I was putting the text of the journals, which are so dark, side by side with these bright works, that tension became so notable and interesting to me. And I hope that all of my answers to your questions are not. Well, it's inexplicable, but some of it is.
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A
Well, if you can take off your hat as the artist and the person who wrote the journal and put on your hat as a creative director, what does that say to you, to have the words mean one thing and the art signal something else?
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B
Well, you know, when you're making book jackets, of course, there are a few sort of modular components that you're working with, Right. You're making an image, whether it's a photograph or an illustration or painting. And of course, you have the title of the book, you have the subtitle, you have the author's name. So word and image always is married. There, I think, was something so liberating for me to be able to. And maybe that's something to do with, you know, over painting the words or smearing them. This idea that I could just work in this purely visual medium without, you know, it piggybacking on this, you know, an author's work.
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A
Why did you want to put this. This is a beautiful book.
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B
Oh, thank you.
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A
Why did you want to put this out in the world? This is a Lot of it is very personal.
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B
Yeah. And, you know, let me say that the title describes pretty well my feelings about putting it out into the world, that it is exhibitionist, that I still feel a huge amount of shame about it. And actually, the way it came about is I'd finished the novel, and people knew that I had done all of these paintings through social media and other channels, and I was starting to sell them, and I'd been approached to make an art monograph, a book of the paintings. And I thought, well, that's interesting. And I started to caption them, set up the book, and it all of a sudden just seemed very boring to me, like, I'm just gonna put another pile of art into the world. And so I was like, well, what if the journals could work with this? And I couldn't get them to work. And I was at my mother's apartment, and she was sick at the time. Passed away this year. And she was a huge reader, huge reader. Kept up with everything up until the last possible moment. And she had just finished a celebrity autobiography. And I said, mom, you know, what did you think? And she said, I don't like these memoirs. They're so exhibitionist. And the second she said it, I was like, well, exhibit is in there. Shame is in there. I was like, that's the book. Like, I can do it. I can marry these two things. This darkness and this lightness. So it was really, you know, thanks, Mom.
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A
She's like a woman after my heart.
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B
Yeah. Yep. That's right.
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A
What do you hope that someone will get out of reading this or experiencing it? Because you can do both. You can read it or you can, like, look at the pictures. You can just, like, you can touch it.
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B
It's.
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A
Kind of a cool book.
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B
I don't know if it's a feature or a bug that it's such an odd format that, you know, a memoir, a depression memoir, and sort of this catalog of bright paintings. It's so odd. And you really have so many ways to enter in, I hope. I mean, one is you can just have it as a coffee table book and open it where you might. I mean, what I really hope that people do get out of it is that fact of being recognized that I was talking about, which is so difficult, if not impossible, when you're suffering from these things that the journals, you know, looking back and reading them, I think, you know, I'm just really trying so hard to articulate only to myself what it is that I'm going through. So what's been buoying for me, you know, putting aside the painting and the novel and the literary aspirations and all that sort of stuff, is to have people at the end of a reading or a talk or whatever it is, say, you know, thanks for that. What medications are you taking? And all of a sudden it gets very personal and you make these connections.
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A
Or, thanks for expressing what I wanted to express.
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B
Yeah, well, that's the deepest and most wonderful response to get, you know, because I think there is. There is a kind of fellowship there. You know, there's a great line that Melville has in Moby Dick describing the Pequod as a group of isolatos federated along one keel. This idea of everybody on the ship is isolated within themselves, and yet here they are as a community.
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A
We're talking to Peter Mendelsohn about his book exhibitionist, one journal, one depression and 100 paintings. After the break, we'll talk to him about his new novel, Weepers. You're listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Peter Mendelsohn. He is the creative director for the Atlantic magazine. He's also a novelist. His new book, Weepers, is set in a world that has gone numb. A small group of people who still have the experience of having emotion, they become professional mourners. They're hired to cry at funerals. A new young man joins their ranks, and we take it from there. But first of all, what was the first seed for Weepers?
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B
Really, the germ of it all was the depression that I was experiencing at the time, and that feeling of that incredible sensitivity that just like your body turned inside out, your raw skin on the outside, just that feeling of intense sensitivity that I was experiencing. And it got me wondering about this sort of loose cohort of people that I would describe as sensitive. Like we all are these people or know these people, and some people aren't. And I think increasingly it's harder in this particular day and age, what with the decline of democracy and the death of the planet and all this stuff I was listening to on the news in your green room, to actually maintain some sort of emotional openness. And so in the sort of the depths of my own oversensitivity, I just started to think, think about this sort of loose group of sensitives, whether they're just chemically or nature nurture or they belong to some cast of poets or artists or, you know, there are professions that tend to draw these kinds of people. You know, I started to think, well, you know, what are we? Who are we and like, what are we for? And looking around at all the anger and anesthesia, just general nastiness out in the world, I started to think, well, you know, there is in a kind of. Maybe not in an actual way, but a sort of magic, realist way, maybe there is something that sensitive people could do that they could actually remind people and teach people even what it's like to feel what I think of as the productive emotions. Joy, sorrow, which is a very important and healthy emotion to feel. And all of these are, you know, these are emotions and affects that I feel like we've lost of late. So that was the idea.
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A
There are certain cultures that have these professional mourners.
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B
Yes, yes.
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A
Did you do any research into that?
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B
You know, I didn't. I never research any of my books, which I like to come to things as stupidly as possible, but I've been told a lot since I wrote it. And, I mean, one of the things I do know is that in the biblical literature, in the Roman literature, certainly I know in Asia, and, you know, I am aware that this is a more normalized things in other cultures. I also. The one, I guess, piece of research I did was to go on social media and just type in what was my search term, professional mourner. And one guy turned up who had a price list for how intense the crying would be, which is like. It was like sniffles to. The last one was Bahamanian wailing, which I didn't even know what that was. And I mean, first of all, I looked at his price list. I was like, dude, you are not charging enough. But also, I didn't realize that there was, like, gradations, but. Which I did find informative, actually. But that's sort of the extent of it.
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A
Wow. I know what we're doing. When the show is over, we're gonna go look that up. Your protagonist is Ed. He's in a union. It's funny because he kind of says that, you know, like, we know each other. We mourners know each other. How do they know each other? We weepers know each other. How do we know each other? How do they.
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B
Yeah, it's a funny thing. I don't know how we know anything about one another without opening our mouths, but we somehow seem to, right? I mean, you can look at someone in the ey and you can say, oh, here's somebody that's taking in what it is that I'm putting out. You know, their mirror neurons are firing in the same way that I'm. You know, I like to think when I'm around other people, I mean, you could call this, maybe this is self aggrandizing, but you call this compassion. And it's something I think we all used to perhaps have more of. Maybe that's not true. But just looking around the world today, it's very easy to feel that way. But there is also. With a weeper, I think there is this particularly downcast, hang dog kind of aspect to this particular union. This group of weirdos.
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A
I consider these four walls. I think we're a compassionate group in here.
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B
Yeah, I would say, yeah, that's my feeling.
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A
How does Ed feel about being a professional mourner?
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B
You know, it's a mixed feeling for him. He is exhausted of it. He's exhausted doing all of this heavy lifting for everybody. He's sad to see that he has to do it more and more and to see the general decline around him. Also, he. Throughout the book, there's a series of flashbacks. Is working through a kind of trauma that he experienced as a boy at the hands of his father. And all of these memories start becoming unlocked as soon as this stranger you mentioned comes to town. It is very much a stranger comes to town narrative or a messianic narrative. And so the weeping for him becomes a kind of exorcism, in a way, of these feelings that he has been sort of putting off confronting.
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A
This kid comes to town. They call him the kid, but he's a young man.
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B
Yeah, right, He's a young man.
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A
Why did you want to make him a young man?
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B
I thought somehow that it would be stranger and more miraculous if these feelings came not from somebody who had seen it all and somehow had weathered life's difficulties, you know, And I said, it's a messianic story. It really is. There are miracles in the book. I mean, the book raises the question at certain points about whether they are miracles or not. You'll have to draw your own conclusions. But the. This preternatural ability to draw emotion out of other people, it seemed wilder and more somehow inexplicable to have a young person do it.
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A
You did not do the COVID for your book covers?
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B
No, no, I did not.
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A
Why not?
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B
I haven't done the COVID for my last two novels. And, you know, I haven't actually designed specifically book covers in many. It's a strange thing. Like I said, I spent the majority of my life at the piano. And then, you know, I sort of stumbled into this career as a graphic designer and did that for, I don't know, 15 years. Or so. And. And it seemed very natural to me at that point when I started writing prose that, well, why not? I was this, and then I'm that, and now I'm this. It's very hard to shrug off those labels. Once people know that you designed X, Y or Z, it becomes the case that say a review of. I remember this from my first novel, which was many years ago. You know, I don't remember if it was the Times, but one of the first reviews was graphic designer Peter Mendelsohn's new novel. And there was something about that formulation that kind of chafed, if you know what I mean. Like, people don't want you to leave your lane.
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A
Have you left that lane?
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B
I really have. I mean, you know, my job at the Atlantic, I do a lot of things there and one of them is supervising a fair amount of visual content. But I myself don't design anymore. When it comes to the visual field, it really is painting. I like the idea now of really just having my own world that has no other audience than myself. And then if it's something that seems at the end of the day, like maybe someone in the general audience might respond to, then I put it out into the world. But design doesn't work that way. Design is, in its own way, an art form. But of course, it is a sales medium.
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A
What is the crossover between the Weepers and Exhibitionists?
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B
The crossover is really just.
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A
It's just you.
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B
It's just me. Yeah, well, it's just me. As you know, I joke to people before I put out these books. I was like, well, it's good to have a brand. And I think my brand brand is gonna be sad, boy. And actually doing events and readings for this book, I think it really is. So whatever I write next, it's gonna have to be really super jolly. But no, I really do think that is. In fact, you nailed it.
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A
Yeah. The name of the book is Weepers. That's the novel. The name of his journal, memoir, source, slash art book is Exhibitionist. One journal, one depression. Thank you for being with us. We really appreciate it.
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B
Such a pleasure to be here. Thank you. NYC now delivers the most up to date local news from WNYC and Gothamist every morning, midday and evening with three updates a day. Listeners get breaking news, top headlines and in depth coverage from across New York City by sponsoring programming like NYC now. You'll reach our community of dedicated listeners with premium messaging and an uncluttered audio experience. Visit sponsorship.wnyc.org to get in touch and find out more.