Loading summary
Transcript106 lines
- [00:01]
Announcer
This message comes from Charles Schwab. When it comes to managing your wealth, Schwab gives you more choices like full service, wealth management and advice when you need it. You can also invest on your own and trade on think or swim.
- [00:12]
Dave Davies
Visit schwab.com to learn more from why in Philadelphia. This is FRESH AIR weekend. I'm Dave Davies. Today, best selling author Liz Moore. Her book Long Bright river was set in a troubled Philadelphia neighborhood where she'd worked on a photo essay.
- [00:31]
Liz Moore
My own family has a long history of addiction. I was kind of emotionally drawn back to the neighborhood over and over again because of that.
- [00:39]
Dave Davies
The resulting thriller about a policewoman searching for her missing sister was made into a TV series on Peacock. Moore's latest book, the God of the woods, where a child goes missing from a remote children's camp, will be adapted to a Netflix series. Also, we hear from one of England's most acclaimed writers, Julian Barnes. He has a new book which he says will be his last. It's called Departures. And Maureen Corrigan reviews George Saunders new novel that's coming up on FRESH AIR weekend.
- [01:11]
Sponsor/Commercial Voice
This message comes from Mint Mobile. This holiday season, stop overpaying for wireless and Switch to Mint Shop 50% off unlimited plans@mintmobile.com Switch limited time offer upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months or doll for 12 months. Taxes and fees extra initial planned term only above 35gb network may slow when busy capable device required availability, speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com this message comes from Amazon One Medical. Your body tells you all kinds of stuff. Headaches and hair loss are its way of saying something is up over here. Amazon One Medical has 24. 7 virtual care, so there's always someone available to listen and help with whatever your body is trying to tell you. Thanks to Amazon One Medical. Healthcare just got less painful. This message comes from Amazon One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy. Having a health issue that requires medication can be stressful. Are the meds going to get refilled on time? Do I need to renew my prescription? Do I need an appointment to get them renewed? Amazon One Medical has 24. 7 virtual care and Amazon Pharmacy delivers meds to you fast, anxiety free with Amazon Health Care just got less painful.
- [02:31]
Dave Davies
This is FRESH AIR weekend. I'm Dave Davies. Our first guest writer, Liz Moore, is on something of a roll. Her last two novels were national bestsellers. One Long Bright River, a thriller about a policewoman patrolling a troubled Philadelphia neighborhood where her drug using sister is a sex worker, was made into an eight part TV series on Peacock. Moore was an executive producer, co creator and co writer of the series, and its star, Amanda Seyfried, has earned a Golden Globe nomination for her performance. Moore's latest bestseller, the God of the woods, is set in a remote children's camp in the Adirondacks where a young camper goes mysteriously missing. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan said when she read it, I was so thoroughly submerged in a rich fictional world that for hours I barely came up for air. Netflix has announced it will produce a limited TV series based on the God of the Woods. Moore's novels show quite a range of subjects. The central character in an earlier novel titled heft is a 450 pound shut in in Brooklyn who longs for human connection. Lismore won the 2014 Rome Prize in literature, and her two most recent books were on Barack Obama's lists of recommended reading. Lismore lives with her family in Philadelphia, where Fresh AIR is produced, and she directs Temple University's Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing. Liz Moore, welcome to FRESH air.
- [03:58]
Liz Moore
Thank you, Dave. I'm so happy to be here.
- [04:01]
Dave Davies
Let's talk about Long Bright River. This is set in this Philadelphia neighborhood, Kensington, which has gotten some national attention. It's become a regional center for drug users just because it was a place where people learned they could score drugs, they could use drugs or deal drugs. And in some cases over the years, people have been living on sidewalks and in abandoned houses. And so it's been a big issue in a lot of ways. The other thing I'll just note about the neighborhood is that there's an elevated subway train that runs over Kensington Avenue, which is sort of the spine of the neighborhood. So that even in the daylight, it's that whole area, which is a business area, is kind of cast into shadow, gives it a sort of Dickensian feel. So what made you want to make this the setting for a book?
- [04:48]
Liz Moore
I am not from Philadelphia. I grew up in Massachusetts. I lived in New York for a time. My husband is from this area. When we arrived here together in 2009, I was looking for community and I was looking for writing projects and a photographer who was at the time making portraits of abandoned homes in the city of Philadelphia. His name is Jeffrey Stockbridge, invited me to go with him to interview some of the residents of Kensington that he was making portraits of. This was a long time ago, and so Kensington itself was not receiving the national attention that it now receives. So when I went there, I was kind of naive and I was a little bit Unprepared for what I would see. But what I was immediately struck by was how much the neighborhood had been failed in various ways in terms of resources that the city or the state could offer it. And also just the incredibly moving and interesting and complex conversations I had with the people I was interviewing at the time. That became a photo essay. And I rarely do nonfiction writing, but it was actually nonfiction writing that caused me to take an interest in the neighborhood in a fictional way. My own family has a long history of addiction. I was kind of emotionally drawn back to the neighborhood over and over again. Because of that, I began doing community work with St. Francis Inn, running free writing workshops at a women's day shelter there. And although it was not active research, it functioned as the backdrop of, like, life experience that I had in Kensington that ultimately formed the setting.
- [06:32]
Dave Davies
Yeah, there are two sisters who are at the heart of this story. Tell us about them.
- [06:36]
Liz Moore
So Mickey is a patrol officer with the Philadelphia Police Department. And from the opening of the novel, she talks about how she's really not cut out for police work. She describes herself as, you know, not the first officer to, like, put her life on the line. She I wanted to make her a very kind of a fish out of water character, which I love to do. Her sister Casey, has always been troubled. The two sisters came out of the same family, raised by a grandmother because they lost their own mother to overdose.
- [07:09]
Dave Davies
Casey's just a little bit younger then.
- [07:11]
Liz Moore
Casey's a little younger than Mickey, and they grow up incredibly close. But at the start of the novel, they are estranged by virtue of the very different paths that their lives have taken. Mickey self identifies as kind of the good sister who's always made all the right choices. And she has cast Casey into this role of being the, quote, unquote, bad sister. But those ideas become very complicated over the course of the novel. Without giving too much away.
- [07:36]
Dave Davies
Right. We can say that Casey is a regular drug user and a sex worker on Kensington Avenue, Right?
- [07:43]
Liz Moore
Yep. Casey suffers from substance use disorder. She does survival sex work. She goes missing at the same time that a string of homicides is occurring in the neighborhood of Kensington. And although Mickey is used to seeing her sister absent from the streets for long periods of time while, for example, she's trying to get into recovery, the timing of this particular disappearance alarms Mickey, and she decides to kind of investigate off the job as well.
- [08:16]
Dave Davies
The book was made into a series on Peacock, which you were co creator, co writer, executive producer for. It was shot in Brooklyn. Oddly, although it looks a lot like Kensington. I mean, it really does. I imagine it is hard for a writer who has put such time and effort into crafting this thing to see it adapted because, you know, it's a different medium. Things are going to change. Some characters change, the ending change. How did you feel about the experience?
- [08:44]
Liz Moore
The experience was fascinating. Team sports were something that I always felt kind of apprehensive about. And I had the same apprehension going into the making of the series Long Bright river because I knew that although I was the author, I wasn't the showrunner. I wouldn't have ultimate say over creative decisions, but at the same time I would have a lot of, you know, a lot of input. And I do feel confident saying that my input was respected. And one thing that all of us agreed on, everybody who made the show, was the importance of bringing in members of the community of Kensington to set, both as consultants, on set consultants and off set consultants, and also in small roles. Father Michael Duffy from St. Francis Anne actually played a priest, which was not a stretch for him in the series. The musician ot the real who has kind of made a career in Kensington, played a pretty large role, a character called Doc. And we had other musicians from Kensington. James Poyser from the Roots was our composer, one of our two composers on the series. We even brought in graffiti artists from the neighborhood to kind of tag the set and make that feel authentic. So I think if I'm what I'm proud of in the series is making sure that members of the community had a voice within the series transparently. I absolutely wish it had been shot in Philadelphia. A lot of that was a budget decision that was kind of above my pay grade. And I think it would have been complex for various reasons to shoot in Kensington, but the city of Philadelphia is still a place that I hope to shoot someday.
- [10:42]
Dave Davies
Liz Moore is a writer based in Philadelphia, where she directs Temple University's Master of Fine Arts program in Creative writing. We'll hear more of our conversation after a break. This is FRESH AIR Weekend.
- [10:54]
Announcer
This message comes from MIDI Health co founders Joanna Strober and Dr. Kathleen Jordan discuss why they started a virtual care platform to empower and educate women in perimenopause and menopause. Historically, perimenopause and menopause have been very stigmatizing, so people haven't wanted to admit.
- [11:12]
Liz Moore
That they are in perimenopause and menopause as though it was like embarrassing, which is insane. It's just something happening to your body. So one of the things that we're trying to do is destigmatize these topics.
- [11:24]
Announcer
Perimenopause and menopause are just women's health.
- [11:27]
Liz Moore
So we try to educate women all the time.
- [11:30]
Announcer
Maybe it's your hormones and we would.
- [11:32]
Liz Moore
Like to help you. Yeah, and I find women actually want.
- [11:35]
Julian Barnes
To talk about it. It's one of the things they always comment at MIDI is that they finally feel heard.
- [11:41]
Liz Moore
One of the ways that women find MIDI is actually from other women and I think it's meaningful.
- [11:47]
Announcer
MITI Health committed to helping women in midlife with perimenopause and menopause care accessible via telehealth visits@joinmidi.com.
- [11:59]
Dave Davies
So let's talk about the God of the Woods. That's your most recent novel, which is a big best seller and is going to be a TV series. It's also a mystery, but it couldn't be a more different setting than Long Bright river, which is in this struggling urban neighborhood. This is set in the Adirondacks, these mountains in upstate New York. I've been there a couple of times. Kind of wilder, less developed. Tell us about it and what inspired you about them as a setting for a novel?
- [12:24]
Liz Moore
Yeah, the Adirondacks are a mountain range in upstate New York and it's really a huge swath of protected land. The Adirondack park was formed in the 1890s and my family, actually my mother's ancestors, come from the Adirondacks. It became a kind of summer playground for the wealthy. And a lot of wealthy dynastic American families discovered it in the 1800s and built these enormous compounds that they called great camps. And so the God of the woods centers on one of these great camps. It's fictional and the family in question is fictional. And just down the hill from the great camp is a summer camp that the family also founded from which their own 13 year old daughter goes missing. So that's sort of the setup of the book.
- [13:15]
Dave Davies
Right. And the interesting thing about this camp is that it's for kids, but it's not just, you know, swimming and campfires and I mean, they get survival training. They learn how to make spears for catching fish and trap small animals and skin them and cook them. And I guess the idea is that the owners of the camp, which are this wealthy family that kind of run this land preserve, see themselves as real outdoors people and they want to preserve that culture, those skills.
- [13:46]
Liz Moore
Yeah, they do. They have this notion that they are very skillful outdoors people, but they are quite wealthy and they've been, I think, protected from criticism for too long a time. So they've become pretty myopic and they have overestimated, let's say, their ability to survive in the wilderness. Meanwhile, a nearby town called Shattuck, also a fictional town in the book, is full of working class people who are actually required to use the skills of hunting and fishing and trapping for their survival. The wealthy family in the book, they have named their own great camp Self Reliance, after the Ralph Waldo Emerson essay of the same name. And the locals nearby think it's very funny because they like to point out that it was not actually the family that built the house. It was the people of Shattuck who rolled all the lumber on log roads and built the house and now serve the family in this kind of weird fiefdom that the family has created.
- [14:46]
Dave Davies
And so there are a lot of class issues here. And the title, the God of the woods, tell us where it comes from, what it means.
- [14:54]
Liz Moore
The original title of the novel was not the God of the Woods. I called it Self Reliance for the entire time that I was writing it, up to about a year before its publication, when everybody at Riverhead Books simultaneously broke the news to me that they hated the title Self Reliance, which I don't blame them for. I think the concern was that it would sound like a self help book. So I was sent back to my room basically to try to come up with a different title. And often when I do that, I go through a variety of other texts published about some of the themes that crop up in my novels. So that's actually how I found the title of Long Bright river as well, which comes from a Tennyson poem called the Lotus Eaters with the God of the woods. I was really interested in primary sources about the Adirondacks. That's the first place I started. I entertained the title the Bark Eaters, which is what the word Adirondack actually means. Ultimately, I became really, really interested in the phrase wood panic, which is the real sensation of feeling completely disoriented in the woods, which often causes people, especially children, to walk in a particular direction without knowing where they're going, which is really dangerous. And one of the phrases that comes up a lot in the God of the woods is when lost, sit down and yell. It's emblazoned on different buildings at the camp. It's told to the campers when they arrive. And a version of that phrase was also told to me when I was growing up in the Adirondacks. Another way to say it is hug a tree, stay in One place and yeah, stay in one place and you'll be safe. Wood Panic itself contains within it the word panic, which comes from the Greek God Pan, said to be a kind of playful trickster God who liked to make people feel lost in the woods. And it occurred to me that the phrase the God of the woods referring to Pan, could also refer to a number of other characters in the novel, including the Van Lars, who I think mistakenly or in a self aggrandizing way, see themselves as the gods of their domain. I thought that's the title of the book. That's the right one.
- [17:05]
Dave Davies
You're really good at writing. Do you enjoy it?
- [17:09]
Liz Moore
Writing is something that I always enjoy having done so because I have little kids, I write my fiction almost exclusively between the hours of 5:30 and 7:30am I feel very unsettled when I don't do it. In fact, Dave, when I arrived here, you said, have you been up since 5:30? And I said actually no, because my son decided to wake me up twice overnight. So I'm feeling a little off. If I'm being honest. It's a bit compulsive for me if I don't do it. Sometimes I feel like I have a bad day.
- [17:43]
Dave Davies
Seven days a week.
- [17:44]
Liz Moore
No, I'm sorry, five days a week. I do it on weekdays.
- [17:46]
Dave Davies
So Saturday and Sunday, you're okay if.
- [17:48]
Liz Moore
You don't do it. I'm okay if I don't do it. But the weekdays that I don't write my fiction, I feel like I've failed myself in some way. 98% of the time, writing is labor for me. 2% of the time, usually at the very beginning of a book and the very end of a book, it feels like flying. It feels like it's almost a supernatural experience of being in a kind of flow state where words are arriving so quickly that they bypass my brain and go straight from something to my hands that are typing. And if I didn't ever have that 2%, I might not be a writer. But it's sort of like the 2% of the time that's what you live for as a writer is that feeling of true breakthrough, of solving a problem that has felt unsolvable. And it's a gift. It's the great gift of my creative life is that kind of moment.
- [18:45]
Dave Davies
It takes you about four years to finish a book, typically. And I know from reading about you that you don't work from an outline. You don't know when you start a mystery how it's going to end. You what you create characters and see what they do.
- [19:00]
Liz Moore
Yeah, I never pre plan people, place. And problem is the shorthand that I use with my students. The one compromise I make is, as I write the book, I keep a kind of simultaneous chronology running so that if I name a date, I will open up that other word document called Long Bright River Timeline, and I'll say, you know, whatever. December 20, 2006, Mickey and Casey go to the Nutcracker as children. And what that helps me to do is to very quickly have a reference for ages if I'm jumping around in time. And also eventually to just kind of get a sense of the arc of the book.
- [19:41]
Dave Davies
There's a moment in the God of the woods, your most recent book, where one of the characters that we meet early and who I felt most sympathetic with, she is physically harmed by someone that the character trusts. Aware of the moment I'm referring to. I don't want to give it away, but it was painful for me to read because I liked this character so much. Is it painful for you to write?
- [20:06]
Liz Moore
It is. I know the scene that you're talking about. This sounds diabolical as a writer, when I come up with a moment that I know is correct for the book, but that does endanger a character I love in some way. My mind splits in two, and half of my mind goes, oh, no, I have to put this character through this. And the other half is like, oh, yes, this is exactly right for this book. And it's a dynamic scene, and it moves the story forward. And actually, I remember when I understood that I would have to write that scene, all of a sudden I understood something about the future of the novel as well, and it solved a problem for me later. So it was a gift of a scene, even while it was hard to write.
- [20:52]
Dave Davies
Yeah. You know, you're starting with these characters, and you put a lot of time and effort into this book. Years. Do you ever worry you're gonna write yourself into a corner and can't get out of it? When I used to be in the newspaper business, I would. Whenever I worked on a story of more than a few weeks, there would come a point where I would just hate it. I would want it out of my life. I mean, do you have this?
- [21:11]
Liz Moore
I have never written a novel without writing myself into, like, all four corners of a room. The only thing that I take with me from novel to no is the knowledge that I will, at at least one point, probably more than one point, feel that the novel is fundamentally broken and that I have to throw it out. So now, when that moment arrives, which it inevitably does, I'm not scared of it. I'm just sort of like, oh, there you are. I know you. I've seen you before. I am going to just have to hit my head into the wall over and over again until I bust through it in one way or another. And sometimes that means going back to the trunk of the tree and saying what's thing I knew was working and trying a different formal experiment, a different experiment of story, losing a character, creating a new character, jumping to a different point in time. But, you know, if I'm. If I'm. I can't put a fine, you know, I can't put an exact number on it. But let's say if I'm 150 pages into a book or 200 pages into a book, I'm going to keep going. I've not gotten that far in a book without finishing it. Even though it sometimes does take me four years. It usually takes me four or five years to write a book.
- [22:27]
Dave Davies
When you're in one of those jams, are you a harder person to live with?
- [22:31]
Liz Moore
1,000%. I am sorry to my whole family. 10% of my brain is usually working out that problem.
- [22:42]
Dave Davies
And you're a Master of Fine Arts students at Temple, can they tell Liz is a different person than when you're going through this?
- [22:47]
Liz Moore
I don't think so. I think I'm able to compartmentalize. Teaching is very, very important to me, and it actually provides a respite to me. It's a chance for me to think about somebody else's problems with their writing so that I don't have to think of my own. And I am pretty transparent with my students about the ups and downs of my own writing. For example, technology has become such an untenable thing in my life that I've had to require myself to be fully offline when writing.
- [23:16]
Dave Davies
And.
- [23:16]
Liz Moore
And so I'll bring in. You know, right now I'm writing on an ancient iPad with a detachable keyboard because I can't trust myself to even be on my laptop when I write in those morning hours. So I brought in my weird contraption that I devised in order to show my MFA students, Look, this is what I'm writing on these days. Because I need to babysit myself. I cannot be connected to the Internet in any way, or I will whatever, check Instagram.
- [23:41]
Dave Davies
You know, I did some reading in both of your last two novels over the last couple of weeks when I knew I was going to be talking to you. And I found going back all this stuff that was more enriching and complex, I mean, which is just a sign of, I think of all those endless hours and word documents that you put. I mean, this really is a really fulfilling read. Do you think about wanting to make sure that you're writing, particularly when you're writing mysteries, literary mysteries, as opposed to, you know, I don't know what we call it denigrating to call it beach reading. I don't know. Do you think about that?
- [24:17]
Liz Moore
The line between those two terms.
- [24:19]
Dave Davies
Yeah.
- [24:19]
Liz Moore
Or how I'd like to be perceived. Yeah.
- [24:22]
Dave Davies
And the kind of work you want to produce.
- [24:23]
Liz Moore
Yeah, I produce the only kind of work I know how to produce, which is work that's very attentive to its line level writing but also wants to tell a good story. And, you know, Long Bright river and the God of the woods are my quote unquote, breakthrough novels in the sense that they've reached a larger audience than I ever had before. But the only thing that differentiates them in my mind from my first novels are that one has they both. Each one contains a missing person at the start and therefore they are perceived as or categorized as thrillers or literary mysteries. My first three novels also contained really, you know, story was something I was always interested in. A book of mine called the Unseen World deals with a mystery of identity. There's a character who has effectively lied about everything in his entire life, has invented an identity for himself and his daughter only discovers this after he begins to lose his memory. So she has to figure out who he really is and why he lied.
- [25:28]
Announcer
Heft.
- [25:28]
Liz Moore
There's a mystery of family is all I'll say. I think in the US we're much more preoccupied by questions of genre than other countries are. So when I publish my books in other countries, I even notice that there's less of a divide between fiction and nonfiction or fiction and memoir. I don't really care what genre my books are called. I write the way that I've always written. I read very, very broadly. I love reading mysteries. I love reading literary fiction, whatever that means. I love reading now. I love reading the books that like my daughter is reading. I think there's some really, really excellent young adult books, some excellent graphic novels. I think reading in general is a morally good thing for human beings to engage in and probably a good exercise for our brains that lets us decompress from the very rapid onslaught of information that we get from other. From forms of technology that aren't literature.
- [26:36]
Dave Davies
Liz Moore. Thank you so much for speaking with us.
- [26:39]
Liz Moore
Thanks for having me.
- [26:40]
Dave Davies
Liz Moore is a writer based in Philadelphia, where she directs Temple University's Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing. Her last two novels, Long Bright river and the God of the woods, both best sellers, are available in paperback. Writer George Saunders is a Buddhist whose practice informs his work, Most notably his 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize. Saunders new novel Vigil also explores the Buddhist concept of the Bardo. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review.
- [27:24]
Maureen Corrigan
If Heaven, according to the Talking Heads, is the place where nothing ever happens, the Bardo, according to George Saunders is as jam packed and frantic as Costco on Black Friday. We Saunders fans have been to the Bardo before, that suspended state between life and death where, according to Tibetan Buddhism, a person's self awareness helps determine what kind of existence they'll enter next. Saunders set much of his magnificent 2017 debut novel Lincoln in the Bordeaux in the actual mausoleum and surrounding cemetery where In February of 1862, Abraham Lincoln sat cradling the body of his 11 year old son Willie, who died of typhoid fever. In Saunders, rendering the Lincoln Pieta sits at the center of a crowd of Bardo dwellers, cracking crude jokes, demanding attention, exuding empathy, nastiness, indifference. In short, dead people behaving like exaggerated versions of their living selves. The enlightenment that some of these dead achievements is what the novel also delivered for many of US readers, a deepened sense, however momentary, of the mystery of existence. Vigil is a briefer and bumpier return visit back to the Bordeaux. Instead of the mythic grief of Abraham Lincoln, here we have the passing of one somewhat mundane, if contemptible human being. K.J. boone was, and for a few more hours still is, an oil company CEO. To Boone, corporate greed and fossil fuels power the engine of American capitalism, and he sees nothing wrong with the way things are. In fact, to keep profits soaring, he went so far as to falsify facts about scientific research. Think Mr. Potter from It's a Wonderful Life for the Climate Change Era. Plummeting down into Boone's palatial bedroom from a more elevated spiritual realm is a woman named Jill Dahl Blaine Doll was Jill's nickname before her sudden death in an explosion at 22. In her role as spiritual facilitator, Jill has attended some 343 passings. Her mission is to console those terrified by the transition from life to death. She also urges the dying to undertake a final review of their lives. But Boone isn't buying it. He sees nothing wrong with himself. As one of the many Bardo dwellers who visits Boone's death deathbed says his long service to his colossal ego begins to undo him. Vigil is a good but not great short novel. Boone is just too much a stereotypical captain of industry to be the abiding center of interest here. That's why the novel comes alive halfway through when its focus turns to Jill, our flawed spiritual messenger. A wedding taking place next door to Boone's house prompts Jill to recall her former life with such longing that she risks becoming stuck in the earthly realm. Here's a moment where Jill's grandmother, known as Grandma Gust because she frequently breaks wind, whisks her off to a cemetery to see some graves that may shock her out of her nostalgia. Also buried in the cemetery are Jill's parents. Jill says seeing their graves was the hardest blow of all. I used to come in from playing and there they'd be. They'd used to come in from being out somewhere and there I'd be on the couch maybe, and I'd jump up so happy to see them. Once there'd been no me and then they'd come along and made me, and now I was gone and they were, too. What was the point of it all? Grandma said, what keeps you here, doll? What keeps you here? I said. She leaned forward to answer as about to tell me some long kept secret, then did a little fart like in the old days so we might part on good terms. That wild swirl of the bodily profane and the spiritual, the elegiac and the comical, is what makes Saunders writing so spectacular. And thankfully, the sections where Jill takes center stage call it forth. Of course, I feel a little regretful about saying anything negative about Saunders work, given that he's been elevated to secular sainthood ever since he gave that viral commencement address at Syracuse University in 2013 on the topic of kindness. Surely the Bardo must be packed with critics struggling to let go of ego atoning for negative and even mixed reviews like this one.
- [33:04]
Dave Davies
Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed Vigil by George Saunders. Coming up, Booker Prize winning writer Julian Barnes talks about his latest novel, which he says is his last. Hi, I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR Weekend.
- [33:21]
Announcer
This message comes from Intuit TurboTax with TurboTax Expert full service match with a dedicated expert who will do your taxes for you from start to finish, getting you every dollar you deserve. It's that easy. Visit turbotax.com to match with an expert today. This message comes from BetterHelp. The new year isn't about doing more, it's about carrying less. Therapy can help you unpack what's been heavy and bring more clarity, calm and perspective into 2026. It's a small act that can lead to big relief and real perspective for the year ahead. You can't step into a lighter version of yourself without leaving behind what's been weighing you down. Visit betterhelp.com NPR for 10% off. This message comes from Ollie offering their daily probiotic gummies. Probiotics are the good bacteria that support your digestive and immune system. Go to o l l y.com to do something for your gut. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
- [34:27]
Dave Davies
Our next guest, the critically acclaimed best selling author Julian Barnes was diagnosed six years ago with a rare blood cancer. But it's not a death sentence. It's treatable, which means he'll be on a chemo drug for the rest of his life. He's 80 years old and recently published a new book which he says will be his last. It's called Departures. It's part memoir, part fiction. The memoir sections are about his diagnosis and his reflections on death, why he's agnostic, the power and unreliability of memory and how his memory has been diminishing with age. In a way, his new book is a companion to his book Levels of Life, which is in part about the death of his wife, Pat Kavanaugh, who was also his literary agent. She died in 2008, just 37 days after being diagnosed with a rare hyper aggressive brain tumor. They'd been married about 30 years. The new York Times review described the book as shattering. Barnes won Britain's highest literary award, the Man Booker Prize, in 2011 for his novel the Sense of an Ending. Julian Barnes spoke with Terry Grose.
- [35:38]
Terry Gross
Julian Barnes, welcome back to FRESH air. I really like your new book a lot. I found it very meaningful.
- [35:44]
Julian Barnes
Good, good. That's a good start.
- [35:48]
Terry Gross
The main character is named Julian Barnes and he's narrating the book and talks about his own grief through the book. You lost your wife, your first wife, in 2008.
- [36:00]
Julian Barnes
Yes.
- [36:00]
Terry Gross
Yes. And she was also your literary agent.
- [36:03]
Julian Barnes
She was indeed.
- [36:05]
Terry Gross
And it was, you know, understandably, a horrible experience for you. She died 37 days after she was diagnosed with a very aggressive brain cancer.
- [36:16]
Julian Barnes
Yes.
- [36:17]
Terry Gross
So part of the book is about that, but it's a character named Julian Barnes, but it's not necessarily all memoir, that part. And then there's a story, another story within it about how Julian Barnes and helps two people get together during their college years. They become a couple, but they break apart. And then about 30 years later, Julian Barnes, at the request of the guy in this couple, helps reunite them. So what's that story doing in what otherwise would have been a memoir?
- [36:54]
Julian Barnes
Well, I often write hybrid books. This is a hybrid. It's not a term that publishers like. They like to have something that says fiction or non fiction and nowhere to.
- [37:07]
Terry Gross
File it in bookstores.
- [37:08]
Julian Barnes
No, it's a problem for booksellers as well. Once a publisher asked me how I would describe my book, and I just said, well, it's Julian Barnes new book in a rather irritated way, put it.
- [37:24]
Terry Gross
In the Julian Barnes section. You've written 27 books, or 26.
- [37:30]
Julian Barnes
Yes, and quite a few of them are actually hybrid, which mix autobiography, fiction, non fiction, art criticism, whatever's relevant to my thinking about the book. So I've always been quite relaxed about this. But I know that it does annoy some people. And indeed, the character Julian Barnes is attacked at one point by one of the participants in this love affair who he hasn't met for 40 years or so. And she says, I don't like this hybrid stuff. You do, you know, I think you should stick to one thing or another. And it was rather enjoyable to have a character rebuking me for the book that I was writing. I sort of enjoyed that. And I get cross with her and I say, well, you may like or not like one of my books, but I want you to know that I know exactly what I'm doing when I'm writing, which was actually, I heard another writer use more or less those words, so I sort of pinched them. A reader has, you know, absolute liberty to like or not like your book and to say, you shouldn't have written it this way, you should have written it that. But usually the complaints and the corrections to it fall on rather deaf ears. With most writers, what you're putting in there is something that you've thought about, you've written a number of times, and you've corrected it and corrected and corrected. So it is what you mean to say.
- [39:12]
Terry Gross
The third sentence of your new book, Departures, says that your interest tends toward the ghoulish and the extreme. So give us a couple of the examples. And why do you think that you're interested in the ghoulish and the extreme of the body?
- [39:33]
Julian Barnes
Oh, just because I'm a sort of sick Brit.
- [39:36]
Terry Gross
I Suppose sick in what way? Physically sick or like mentally?
- [39:43]
Julian Barnes
No, I mean, quite a lot of people are interested in awful things that happen or unexpected things that happen. And I think it's a way of confirming that, you know, as I think the Russians have it, life is not a short walk across an open field. There's always something waiting for you coming out of the hedgerow at you. So I have a friend who's a consultant radiologist and who sends me clippings from the British Medical Journal. And as you say, she knows that my interest tends towards the ghoulish and the extreme. And so, you know, for example, it's always men somehow who are doing this stuff. Men who decide to grow their toenails to a length of several feet so that they're unable to walk. And these examples like this, they usually have photographs with them so that they're sort of proven. And then there's one case I particularly remember was a man who'd been fitted with a tracheostomy tube. And when he went for a checkup, the doctors were baffled by sort of yellowish stains around the hole into which the tube was fitted. And it turned out that he was a desperate smoker who couldn't smoke through his mouth anymore. But he discovered if he took out the tube, then a cigarette fitted perfectly into the hole and all he had to do was to light up and inflate his lungs. You've got to be pretty clever and curious to come up with that way of smoking, it seems to me, when.
- [41:24]
Terry Gross
Something extreme is happening to your own body or something tending toward the ghoulish. Do you find that fascinating too, or just horrifying?
- [41:35]
Julian Barnes
I find it fascinating.
- [41:36]
Sponsor/Commercial Voice
Really?
- [41:38]
Julian Barnes
Yes. I mean, I find it fascinating until I know exactly what it is and then I might find it horrifying. I was talking to a friend of mine who said, oh, I don't think about death. I'm only 60. I'll think about death when it's nearer the time. And you think, well, death doesn't quite necessarily operate in that fashion. You know, death could be an out of control motorbike coming round a corner and taking you out. You won't have had much time to think in those three seconds before it hits you. One of my French gurus is the 17th century philosopher Montaigne, and he said we should think about death on a daily basis. We should make it our familiar. That's the best way of treating it. Not as some awful sort of, you know, ghastly skeleton with a scythe in its hand coming to chop us off. That we should think, he says we should think of death. When our horse shies or when a tile falls off the roof of a house, we should make it sort of. We should almost domesticate it, tame it in this way. And then we should hope to die while planting out our cabbages. That's a wonderfully sort of wise approach to it all. I haven't got a vegetable garden anymore. I used to have one, and when I planted cabbages, they didn't do very well. That's the only fault I can find with Montander's view of death.
- [43:14]
Terry Gross
But if you take him too much to heart and obsess about death every day, instead of thinking about it and thinking about it as a kind of natural part of life, that's not great. Where on the scale, where are you? Because it sounds like you've been pretty somewhere between thoughtful and obsessed with death for a good deal of your life.
- [43:34]
Julian Barnes
I've certainly been thoughtful about it. I've certainly been afraid of it. And it's a kind of moot point if you're very familiar with the idea of death and the way it happens. Whether you therefore enjoy life more knowing that it's so passing. I don't know the answer to that.
- [44:00]
Terry Gross
Do you feel like you enjoyed life more because of your.
- [44:03]
Julian Barnes
Well, I actually think that people who don't think about death at all enjoy life probably just as much as people who do. So that's a bit of a downside. There must be some advantage, I think, in realizing and reflecting on the fact that you're not going to be here forever. And in my case, I won't be here in 10 or 15 years. Definitely not.
- [44:32]
Terry Gross
My guest is Julian Barnes. His new book is called Departures. Just a heads up here in the next part of our conversation, we briefly discuss suicide. If you're having thoughts of harming yourself or are having a mental health crisis, help is available by calling or texting. 988. That's the National Suicide and crisis lifeline. Again, the number to call or text is 988. You finished writing a book in 2012 about your wife's death. She died 37 days after being diagnosed with a very aggressive brain tumor. You describe her as stoic, even in how she handled illness and the approach of death. Your illness has brought the thought of your own mortality to the forefront. Are there ways that watching her die affected how you're handling your own sense of mortality?
- [45:27]
Julian Barnes
Probably, but I don't think of what I've got as in any way Comparable to what she had. I've got something which will be with me for the rest of my life and I may well live a sort of normal span. She had a catastrophic diagnosis and was dead in 37 days. It was like being taken downhill in an avalanche. And every day something got worse. And it was the most. Well, it's by a long way, the most appalling thing that has happened to me in my life. And the most. The blackest. The thing that most deprived you of sort of hope and balance, really. It took me years to get over it, but I don't think I shall mourn my own departure in quite the same way.
- [46:20]
Terry Gross
Did your wife give you any directions or even clues about what you could do to help her, about what she needed from you?
- [46:29]
Julian Barnes
No, she didn't give any specific guidance. She was herself as much as possible, right to the very end. I mean, her last complete sentence was, she was brought home from the hospital on a stretcher and she was put in a bed in the sitting room, and the guys who brought her in sort of rather dumped her on the bed. And I said, was that a bugger? And she said, a bit of a bugger, which was wonderfully precise. You know, don't complain, just say exactly what the situation is. And that was her last sentence. And she died about 48 hours later. I suppose you could say that she showed me how to die with grace and also with a consideration for other people who are coming to see her. She never got cross, she never became tragic or upset. So in some ways she was. We were well suited because I have that sort of temperament as well.
- [47:49]
Terry Gross
You describe yourself as agnostic. You don't believe in God. Do you ever wish you could believe in a loving, comforting God who was your friend and a heaven where you'd be reunited with your wife of 30 years and, you know, things would be calm and beautiful?
- [48:09]
Julian Barnes
No, I never thought that. I've never had any religious belief. I think that life is all we have and there's nothing after it. It's very hard to believe in a calm and loving God when you look at the state of the world. I remember Stephen Fry, the actor, was on a chat show in Ireland. Religion was in better healthier shape than it was in England at the time. And the interviewer said, so give me one reason why you don't believe in God. And Srivillurai answered, child cancer, which is sort of kind of unanswerable. I think if he's a loving God, then why did the just do badly? Why do the Unjust succeed. Why do innocent people get suddenly killed? It makes no sense. Except that the defense from the religious angle is God moves in mysterious ways. We simply don't know. We'll find out later. That's sort of not good enough for me.
- [49:37]
Terry Gross
After your wife died, you said that if the grief didn't stop, you would consider taking your life, ending your life. Did you give yourself like a border, like if you reach that border, that you would try to end your life?
- [49:56]
Julian Barnes
I remember very clearly when I thought that I might kill myself. It was a few weeks after my wife had died and I was walking home and I looked across at the curb on the other side of the road. And at that moment I still see that curb stone on a daily basis. And I thought, of course you can kill yourself. That's permissible. It's not unforgivable in my morality. I'm extremely unhappy. I'm bereft. I'm lost. Though I have many friends. And I think I said, or friends said to me, I can't remember which way around it was, give it two years. I said, okay, I'll give it two years. But before that two year period had elapsed, I discovered the reason why I couldn't kill myself. I wasn't allowed to kill myself. And that's because I was the best rememberer of my wife. I knew her and I had celebrated her in all her forms and in all her nature. And I had loved her deeply. And I realized that if I killed myself, then I. I would in a way be killing her too. I'd be killing the best memories of her. They would disappear from the world and I just wasn't. Wouldn't allow myself to do that. And at that point it just turned on its head. And I knew I'd have to live with grief for quite a long time. But I didn't think an answer to the grief was killing myself.
- [51:40]
Terry Gross
Julian Barnes, it's been a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much. And I wish you stable health and long life.
- [51:49]
Julian Barnes
Thank you.
- [51:50]
Dave Davies
Julian Barnes. New book is called Departures. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producers are Danny Miller and Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorok, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly CV Nesper. For Terry Gross and Tonya Moseley.
- [52:29]
Sponsor/Commercial Voice
I'm Dave Davies this Message comes from Amazon One Medical. Your body talks to you. Symptoms are the body's way of asking for help. Amazon One Medical has 24. 7 virtual care with providers fluent in body talk. Thanks to Amazon One Medical. Healthcare just got less painful.
- [52:51]
Announcer
This message comes from Intuit TurboTax with TurboTax Expert. Full service match with a dedicated expert who will do your taxes for you from start to finish, getting you every dollar you deserve. It's that easy. Visit turbotax.com to match with an expert today.
- [53:09]
Sponsor/Commercial Voice
This message comes from Amazon Pharmacy. Waiting in line at the pharmacy takes time away from anything else you would rather be doing. Amazon Pharmacy delivers meds to you. Fast Health hack unlocked. Thanks to Amazon Pharmacy Healthcare just got less painful.