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- [00:00]
Narrator
Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other. When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a 4 liter jug. When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.
- [00:11]
Caleb Zakrin
Oh, come on.
- [00:12]
Narrator
They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip. Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.
- [00:22]
Jeremy Gordon
Whatever.
- [00:23]
Narrator
You were made to outdo your holidays. We were made to to help organize the competition. Expedia Made to travel.
- [00:30]
Marshall Po
Hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience and podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:37]
Caleb Zakrin
I'm Caleb Zakrin, editor of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Jeremy Gordon about his novel, Sea Friendship. Jeremy is a journalist and senior editor currently at the Atlantic, covering music and culture. Sea Friendship is the story of Jacob Goldberg, a writer and cultural critic seeking a break from the written word in favor of a podcast series about the mysterious death of his high school friend and classmate, Seth. In search of the perfect narrative, Jacob goes on a journey through his past, interviewing old friends and enemies. Clever and engaging with the thrust of a murder mystery, Sea Friendship is a poignant novel for the new media age. Jeremy, thanks for joining me today on the New Books Network.
- [02:14]
Jeremy Gordon
Thanks for having me.
- [02:15]
Caleb Zakrin
Really glad to have you on. This is such an enjoyable book for me to read. I was really excited to read it because it's a book about a podcaster or someone who's trying to make a podcast. So I felt, in a way, in a very meta way, that I had to do an interview with someone who was writing a book about a podcast. And it definitely didn't disappoint. I think you captured a millennial milieu really well, and I found it really fun to read. But before I even jump into the book, I was wondering if you could just tell us a little about yourself and your background.
- [02:45]
Jeremy Gordon
Yeah. So I am a millennial journalist, much like the one in my book. I grew up in Chicago and I went to school for journalism, but came out to New York immediately after I graduated to cobble together a career mostly through freelance journalism and a couple of staff jobs. I've worked at places like Pitchfork and Spin, and I worked for a little boutique website called the Outline, kind of just more or less doing the same thing over the last 15 years. The rhythm of writing and editing, mostly about culture. I currently live in Brooklyn with my wife Jennifer, and our cat, Helen. She goes by Jen. I don't know why I said Jennifer, other than to make it sound a little more formal, but, you know, that's about the gist of it. And I'm currently at the Atlantic, sort of overseeing. Not overseeing, but helping to edit our cultural coverage, which we define as movies, music, tv, that type of stuff, but also kind of whatever we want, whatever we feel like. A lot of stuff can be called culture these days, I feel.
- [03:50]
Caleb Zakrin
Right. And the main character, Jacob Goldberg, initials J.G. yours are Jeremy Gordon. You know, you're satirizing, in a way, some of the articles that maybe you've written, in a sense. Jacob talks about doing album reviews of different artists and all sorts of other things. And the way that you describe the writing process is really quite funny. What was it like for you constructing this character? How much were you trying to model him after yourself? And how much were you trying to distance yourself from him?
- [04:22]
Jeremy Gordon
So obviously I was being a little coy by making the characters initials similar, as you point out, and the fact that his background is certainly rooted in a similar trajectory as mine. I think the guiding principle for me was sort of making him a crummier version of myself in some regards. Someone who's a little bit more self absorbed, a little less delicate at taking a more ethical path, someone who's dealing with a professional crisis in a way that I've never quite grappled with in the same regard. But there is, of course, an underside to this world of cultural criticism that by many Accounts can be a little, I don't want to say frivolous is the wrong word because I'm just throwing myself and my peers under the bus. But there is a repetition to it that can sometimes cause, you know, inspire a search for meaning. When you think about how much of your life is rooted in the analysis of other things, kind of weaving this tapestry and worldview in which, like, everything has its proper place. But at the same time, it doesn't take very much to dislodge that sense of security and knowing the idea of like, oh my God, I've only been paying attention. These things I've been paying attention to actually have possibly have no bearing whatsoever on reality or my own feelings. And I am, in a sense, kind of spinning it up as I go along. I mean, there's a moment earlier on in the book when Jacob is sort of tasked with writing about the surprise release of a major musical artist who's not named, but it's probably someone like Adele or Taylor Swift or whoever. And he sort of thinks to himself, like, my God, I've just been like, reviewing this woman's albums every two years for the last, like 13 years. And she's like, ascended up this ladder of global prestige and fame. And I'm kind of like where I've been for the last 12, 13 years, a moderately paid, Brooklyn dwelling millennial with no wife or apartment or mortgage. And when you sort of think about the sameness of a life just pouring over products, it can be a little daunting. So fortunately, that's never been the pure thrust of my life. But I think there's something in that quest that I certainly understand and wanted to make. The root of his experience in some.
- [06:53]
Caleb Zakrin
Regards, a big aspect of the book too, is this project of the podcast. So Jacob is, as you said, he's writing these reviews that he might be not super interested in. And there's this shift, you know, really it felt like, you know, about seven, eight, nine years ago, where suddenly podcasts start, you know, popping off their cereal. There's other podcasts that are really popular and Jacob wants to, you know, be a part of that trend, whether because he really wants to or because he thinks that this is how he can secure his, his career in some way. So how did you come up with this idea to write about a journalist trying to do a podcast? And what were you trying to investigate as far as what's going on with writing and new media in that aspect of the book?
- [07:44]
Jeremy Gordon
Well, initially, the podcast wasn't a huge part of the structure. I was more interested in this well intentioned but ultimately flailing attempt to kind of get at some of the truth of what happened to his friend. You know, how. How a journalist slash critic might use his tools of deduction and analysis to tap into something that's a little bit more serious and in real life than, you know, just this album or that movie. But as you know, I started writing the book in 2019, which is very much a one of these pivotal years that we mentioned in terms of feeling the industry beginning to shift a little bit. It happened in a moment when the website that I was working for was very much, I will say, in a dubious financial spot for multiple reasons and very much exploring new strategies. And at this moment in time, myself and so many of my peers are kind of grappling with this kind of ongoing process of modernizing the business, which can take so many shapes and forms. At one point it was video as the wave of the future. Then was podcasting was the way of the future. Now it's a video podcasting. And that sort of scramble to reinvent yourself is this pressure that I think a lot of people feel where it's like, if you're not doing the latest thing, you're falling behind. But that sort of relentless scramble to reinvent yourself and stay contemporary is a little exhausting. I mean, it can lend itself to a kind of identity crisis of like, well, I got into this business to do this one sort of work. Am I really just interested in maintaining my job, my position? Like, is that my greatest role in life, just to, like, make a living, you know? And I know obviously everyone needs to pay rent and have health insurance and have a roof over their head. But at the same time, it can be a little shallow when you think about the number of compromises that one has made, either small compromises or big compromises in order to just stay afloat. And yet at the same time, that is a trade off that I think just about every single person who works in this business of journalism or really any sort of modernizing industry, you know, whether or not it's. I can't think of examples off the top of my head, but it's certainly not. Media is not the only one. But these, these compromises that have to be made in order to just stay alive. I mean, nobody wants to be the. The guy who didn't see the Internet coming in the year 2000 and refused to get a computer. And then 20 years, 25 years later, here we are.
- [10:14]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah. And a big part of the the book feels like Jacob going and meeting with old friends or people that he wasn't necessarily really friends with, but, you know, for the purposes of the podcast, wants to speak with them, to interview them. And there's a big point of sort of comparing his career to them, you know, to their career. You know, he has, you know, an old semi girlfriend who, you know, works in art curation. He has a friend who's a lawyer who makes a lot of money, a friend who's a musician, you know, someone who works double shifts at a bar. How did you sort of come to these different careers of the other characters in the book and what were you trying to get at with these sorts of comparisons of career?
- [11:02]
Jeremy Gordon
As someone who graduated just a couple years after the so called Great Recession, I was very aware of how pretty much everyone my age was trying to find a job. And it's funny to think about not everyone was super career obsessed, not everyone was an ambitious striver. But there was just a simple awareness at this level of, you know, I went to a, I went to a Northwestern university, which has a lot of well educated kids and, you know, a good high school. A good high school and all, and all this stuff, you know, no matter who you were or what you're interested in or what your background was, there was a sense that you just needed to work. I mean, there was no the kind of being able to take for granted your ability to slack off for a few years and find yourself, which many of my older friends from the Gen Xers, as they call them, many of them sort of marveled at their ability to gallivant a little before figuring it out. Everyone I knew was having to do something, whether or not it was regardless of what career it was. But at the same time, I think there can be a sense of shared, maybe not misunderstanding per se, but the feeling of coming to, you know, you get 10 years into your career, 10, 15 years, and all of a sudden the rules are changing and you know, what was it for? What did you make all this money for? What did you define yourself in this emerging industry for? The friend who's a lawyer, he's fantastically wealthy, but what passions of his did he leave behind in his youth? The friend who's a musician, she pursued her, her passion, but like what, what stability has it left her in, in her 30s? Jacob, who's a journalist, has spent all this time trying to establish his name and his career and his opinion, but he's still left deeply mystified by some essential emotions from his past. And people that he can't quite figure out, or the friend who's lived in a bar, I mean, he's, who works in a bar, he, he's kind of coming to that position after a decade spent in the wilderness and is really just appreciating any sort of means of staying on his feet. So I think with all within all of this is a unified thread of, if not quite discontent, then certainly searching. I mean, these are not people who feel that they are set up for life in their current position. They don't envision themselves working the same job in 10, 20, 30 years. There is a very much peripatetic yearning that leads them from place to place and people to people, which not to be too broadly be too generalized. And I do think that is a common thing that many so called millennials and people of all generation really, but certainly mine can kind of empathize with the idea that there is very little that one can take for granted professionally and really in many regards, but certainly in a lot of the emerging industries that were coming out in that post recession era where it seemed like all the rules were up for reinvention. But now here we are 10, 15 years later and it kind of seems like everything is slowly inching backwards.
- [14:09]
Caleb Zakrin
So Jacob, he has this idea for a podcast. He notices that it happened to be the case that at his school, Sayers, a lot of the students from his year and year above below happened to die for all sorts of different causes. But the one that really sticks out in his mind is the death of his friend Seth, who was this sort of larger than life figure who was out and gay and was unabashedly himself. And it really is this kind of fascinating figure who we learn more about Seth as the story unfolds from different people's perspectives on him. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you came up with the character of Seth and what that process was like in terms of just thinking about him being this kind of mystery character at the center of it.
- [15:01]
Jeremy Gordon
Yeah. So I think one of the commonalities of Jacob's life and mine is that I certainly do have a lot of friends from that high school era and age who died at young ages unexpectedly. And Seth is certainly inspired by some of those people and maybe a couple people more in particular than others. But it's sort of a composite of a sense of lost potential in some regard of these people who loom so large at a younger age when you're meeting them and you know, a little less about yourself. And as time goes on and you kind of grow while they remain fixed in time, you know, are no less compelling or meaningful the older you get. I mean, some of these friends of mine who died when, you know, I was younger, the shock of their death and everything that they might have done or meant at that point in time is not really lessened. If anything, it kind of becomes more tragic as you get older. And there's a moment on when Jacob is kind of callously waned, which dead classmate he wants to get into, you know, but he's like, you know, I don't know if this story is tragic enough or whatever, but the reality is that he was closest with Seth, and that's what really gives him the most purchase over to tell his story. Even if arguably, like, Seth's death is no more or less tragic than anyone else's. It's just the one that Jacob feels the sort of entitlement to explore. And I think that's kind of a recognizable perspective that no two deaths are alike and no two people carry the same meaning to anyone. And it can be, in fact, a little callous to sort out your feelings and realize that this person just resonates a little bit more. And that choice to focus on one person, I think it has some kind of unintended repercussions for Jacob, as it does in real life, if you are able to focus so strongly on your own experience. I think it's a big concern for Jacob. He wants to do something that he thinks is going to reflect a general truth. But of course, he is just. He's thinking about his own feelings in his own life, not just this kind of universal appeal.
- [17:22]
Caleb Zakrin
There's a common thread throughout where as he is trying to track down the story of Seth, what happened to him, that he gets a lot of pushback from people. And obviously, as I was reading the book, I was thinking to myself, what if someone tried to do. Someone I knew tried to make a podcast about the people that I went to high school with, How. How much. How willing would I be to participate? And I feel like I would be one of the people that would probably brush off whoever was trying to do the podcast, saying, like, I don't want to, you know, dig up, you know, dig up the past. And, you know, this is not something I want to necessarily invest in to a certain extent. Like, obviously, you know, the format of the novel, you know, you're. The character is trying to do something that most people probably wouldn't actually want to engage, and they Wouldn't want to go and, and do this sort of thing. So when you were thinking about thinking through how various characters would react to someone going to them and trying to ask them about their classmate that had died, how are you thinking about what their reactions would be? What were you trying to get out of them?
- [18:28]
Jeremy Gordon
I always think there's going to be a range of reactions to something like that. There are some friends of Seth who respond very strongly in a negative sense once they get a gist that the. The project might be a little bit more self absorbed than intended. But then there are close friends who just as eagerly participate because the reality is like their connection to Seth is no longer as active. It's. It's something that's just passed, you know, I mean, these are things that happen and there's really nothing to be done about it. So why not indulge it a little bit? Why not spend an afternoon reminiscing about a friend and trying to piece together the truth of what happened? I think the difficult thing to except when you are grasping for your own sort of sense of resolution or conclusion to a tragic event, is that other people may have processed it years ago. Maybe they never even had to process anything in the first place. When you have an experience like such a variegated experience like high school, in which you have hundreds of people who went through the same thing technically, but all had different reactions, they may just all feel differently about something that can mean so much to you, but, you know, just is not the same to them. And there's moments when he talks to people his own age, classmates who seem to have like no real memory of Seth whatsoever. I mean, he's just a guy. Like they were aware that he maybe died, but it's just not someone you think about because, you know, on some sense it's just high school for a lot of people. It's just the past stuff that happened years ago. And that can be a bracing thing to realize that you are still concerned with things that other people have moved on from. So when considering the reactions, I really tried to think about that range of engagement of, you know, this is something I still really care a lot about. Sure. It's your story. Do it, do with it, do with it whatever you want. It's not something that really bothers me either way.
- [20:20]
Caleb Zakrin
A big turning point in the book is when Jacob discovers that Seth had been using heroin and that it's very likely the case that heroin was involved in his death. What was, you know, what, what were you thinking of here? In terms of making drugs at the center of it. Because, you know, throughout the book, obviously, there's. There's different levels of drug, of drugs in terms of danger. But throughout the book, Jacob is. You know, he's constantly at bars drinking with people. He's. He's smoking weed. He's doing, you know, he's. He's. He's doing, you know, maybe. Maybe lighter drugs. Obviously not. Not heroin. But. But why center drugs in this narrative?
- [21:02]
Jeremy Gordon
Yeah, I don't consider myself. I try not to be moralizing or judgmental about the coping strategies that other people use to get through the day. Obviously, opioid use can lead you down some pretty dark roads, but I have friends who've struggled with their own substance problems or the people in their lives have struggled. I think it's often a pretty clear reaction to something else that is going on, whether or not it's just their own genetic predisposition to addiction or the simple weight of being alive. Not to be too highfalutin, but a simple way of being alive in a country that is often intent on stamping you out at any turn. There's a lot of deferred dreams. There's a lot of difficulty when it comes to getting older and realizing that the intentions you have for yourself can. Might simply not happen, you know, or you get caught up in a party and it never ends. I mean, there's. There's often stories of alcoholics or addicts who stayed on board while the rest of their friends got off. You know, they were able to say, okay, I've had my fun. It's time to stop. But what happens if you just don't? And I think when it comes to. Past that Seth was using drugs and other people in Jacob's life were using that sort of drugs. You know, there's not some grand. Like, there's not some grand explanation. I mean, it's not that their lives were terrible or that they were abused by their parents or anything. It's just some. It's something that happened like anything else happens. And it goes on a little too long. And then one day, you're kind of left in the aftermath. Either you got out of it or you don't. And it's certainly. It's mirrored by the fact that Jacob has its own. His own coping strategies. As you note, he's constantly hitting his vape or he's having a little too few, too many drinks. But for him, it's that he can. He can. Either it's either he can stop or he can Let it not interfere too strongly with his life. Although one might. One might argue that him being addicted to weed more or less is what allows the project to get a little off road. Because he's so often sitting by himself, like, hitting his vape, thinking, like, yeah, like this is. This rule is like, I'm. Like I'm really getting to it. And, you know, who amongst us has not huffed a vape a little too much and gotten a little too high on their own supply? So, yeah, I mean, I think that was. And certainly I'm at an age right now where a lot of my friends who were using drugs like that or friends of friends have sort of come out on the other side. And if they've made it, you know, their feelings are, these are success, you know, successful participants of society who have fully, you know, gotten sober and. And picked up some of the pieces. And, you know, they. It's just life is what happened. It wasn't some, you know, it wasn't some totally derailing thing, which I think is a bracing thing to have to deal with as well, to kind of take stock of what you yourself went through.
- [24:07]
Caleb Zakrin
I think it's also interesting too, in a way that Jacob, even though Jacob's really close, there's this truth about Seth and about his drug usage is not something that he is aware of. Everyone else seems to know about it, or most other people seem to know it, but he doesn't. It's interesting that Jacob is the investigator of the story. He's the one who's putting the pieces together, but he has this blind spot. I think also with the book too, we don't really learn. There's a lot of things that we don't end up learning about in the book, these mysteries that persist throughout it. And I was wondering what you were hoping to do with that by not having these complete and total reveals. What was the message? I don't like that idea as much, but as if there has to be some sort of message. But what were you hoping to get out there?
- [25:06]
Jeremy Gordon
In my experience, sometimes you just don't know and you're never going to know. And there's no satisfying answer. And the purpose of an investigation to satisfy your own curiosity is really doing nothing more than satisfying your own curiosity. I feel that I am often aware of the fact that time has moved on, the years have passed. Things that once meant so much now matter very little at all, especially as your frame of reference gets bigger and bigger. Events that once seemed like the end of the world are now simply just it's in the past. And just as Jacob kind of has to get comfortable with that, especially for someone whose whole life is predicated on understanding and analysis, I wanted to leave a kind of a literary and emotional sense of open endedness for the reader to maybe sit with some of that lack of answer. Not in a way that is hopefully in a way that is truer to life rather than like a narrative cop out. Because as in the book, Jacob is talking to people who are being asked to remember things from 10, 15 years ago that maybe just don't matter that much anymore. And it's just long enough, it's just short enough to have not really taken on the weight of the unresolvable. I mean, sometimes you hear stories of people who 40 years after high school or whatever, some pivotal event, realized that it really meant quite a lot. But a lot of the people in this book are just still trying to make a career or life for themselves. They have not turned totally reflective and contemplative of the unanswered from a period of time that wasn't that long ago. If they don't know anything, it's just gonna have to be that way for a while. So I think that's a similar thing that Jacob has to sit with.
- [26:57]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah. The three cities that this book takes place in, New York, Chicago and la. You know, three of the biggest cities in America. You capture them in very interesting ways. And I was wondering what it was like for you writing about these cities and how you wanted them to come alive in the book.
- [27:13]
Jeremy Gordon
Yeah. So I think metaphorically speaking, New York is Jacob's present or he sort of sees where his whole career and life is based on and his identity for himself has been very much defined. LA kind of represents a potential future. Like it's easier, it's breezier. Like you can just go out there and do anything. It's not which has been shown before in movies. You know, he's out in a world where he doesn't have very much footing, but he's kind of getting along. You know, he's seen friends and people are interested to see him. He's able to kind of grapple with what a non New York world might be like for him. And then Chicago is very much like the literal past. It is the kind of root of his understanding of himself and kind of where all of these so called skeletons and ghosts first originated. And he's got to go back there to sort out the real truth of things in a very literal sense. Like he is going home and Those are also three cities where I've spent most of my life. I mean, I've lived in New York at this point for 13 years, and then was in Chicago for the preceding, like, 22 years, more or less. The little time in New York, I spent enough time in la, which I think is great. But I think aside from being representative of the emotions and Jacob's life, I think it's not a coincidence of those three cities often draw, I would say, what was seen as a kind of aspirational, multiracial, millennial class. That was, you go to these cities or you grew up in the cities with a sense of what life can be like in a more modern sense. I mean, I loved growing up in Chicago. I thought it was such a novel experience. I only realized later to have access to so much culture and life in a city that was not totally overrun with, not necessarily gentrification, but it hadn't been made inaccessible yet for young people. And I think New York and LA are also kind of wonderful, but filled with similar people, people who have. Who are maybe a little bit strivers in a. In a value neutral way, and kind of putting all of these, like, ambitions realized or not, in close contact with each other, regardless of where everyone is at their stage in life, like, felt at least like, you know, is a dynamic of my own life, but also other people's lives that I was interested in portraying.
- [29:45]
Caleb Zakrin
One thing that I thought was really interesting in the book is the main character is biracial, and Seth is also biracial. There's a few other characters that are either biracial or multiracial. And I was wondering for that aspect of the book. In many ways, when these characters talk about their identities, they oftentimes will joke about it or subvert it, or characters that are gay will make jokes about being gay. How are you trying to treat identity in the book? Because in many ways, you use it to sort of point things out, but it never really feels like it matters that much that someone is this identity. It doesn't necessarily reflect on who they are as a person. So how are you trying to explore identity in the book?
- [30:27]
Jeremy Gordon
Yeah, I can only speak for myself, but I went to a public grade school and a public high school that were both very racially and socioeconomically diverse. The stats, I have some old piece of paper that actually once marked it down, and people came from all sorts of backgrounds, and there was a real sense of. You were exposed to lots of different types of people growing up, and not in a way that made Everything perfect, per se, but certainly simply familiarity with each other, I think created kind of a. I mean, to me, just a better understanding of life and culture. Like, I'm sorry to be snobby, but I do think it's just. I still very much strongly believe in the multiracial democracy that, you know, was promised to the millennial generation simply because I lived through it and I saw, like, the sort of beautiful and authentic common ground that can be created when people of all sorts of different walks of life are put in contact with each other. And at the same time, you are aware of your own differences. It's not as though everyone was thinking themselves, like, well, I don't see color because, you know, yada, yada, yada. There was a very much sense of, like, whiteness and blackness and Asianness and other sorts of backgrounds. But, you know, I think there was a kind of comfortable. A comfortable third space within that where you could kind of see your. And again, I'm talking. I'm talking about my own experience, but you had freedom to kind of explore your own identity while also not taking it too seriously. There is not the whiplash that sometimes comes later in life when, you know, I have friends who didn't really. Weren't really made aware of their background or their identity. Their identity until they hit college or young adulthood and they realized, like, oh, my God, like, I've been in this sort of cloistered environment for all this, all these years, and now I want to engage with it a little bit more. You know, I don't know. I was at a high school or grade school at an early age where you had kids who were poor, where you had kids who were, you know, ethnic or gender minorities. And there was, again, it wasn't one big happy family, but you were the symbol. Awareness of it out in the open, I think bred a little bit of a different attitude. And so, you know, I often might have friends who are themselves very aware of their own identities, so to speak, but they're not, as, you know, it's not a. It's simply just like a fact of life rather than something that they felt really pressed to, like. How can you explore. How is one motivated to explore something that they've been aware of for their most of their life? And I think that kind of reflects where some of the characters in Sea Friendship are coming from, where they are simply just like, you know, I am just gay. I am just Asian, and not in some sort of sense of, you know, apolitical, you know, not making a big deal out of it, because they are. I would say everyone in my book is, you know, relatively liberal or leftist or whatever. I think there was a cut passage where everyone is just kind of joking about how they all voted for Bernie Sanders. But at the same time, like, there's a. You're. I suppose you're just, like, less beholden to having to make a big deal out of it, as opposed to, you know, I spent it. I spent my fair share of time in, like, Asian American clubs where I was like. I don't know if I'm, like, really vibing with this in the same way. And some of my friends also. It doesn't mean that we're not proud to be Asian, but, like, there's. There's less of a. You know, you don't have to demonstrate it with the same force. And again, that's just speaking for myself, I think there's something to the biraciality of it. Not to be too cliche, because, Corny, biraciality is something I was very much aware of avoiding, but the simple fact of occupying a couple worlds, it just makes you aware of what those worlds are. Not, in a sense that you have a deeper understanding, but you have an understanding that they are worlds. And it's just kind of like one foot and one. One foot and the other. And that sort of duality is something that a lot of the characters can certainly understand, whether or not they're both black and white or gay and also biracial. And you're just. I think the more you're exposed to, the more worlds you're exposed to, the deeper, you know, it's just quite as simple as. Just, like, having a bigger point of reference for reality.
- [34:49]
Caleb Zakrin
I think it definitely contributes to the realism of the book. You know, it feels very authentic, the way that the different characters engage with their own identities. And it does feel like a big aspect of the book, too, where as you learn more about the characters, you see how they exist as different people in different circumstances. You know, I think that the more we learn about Seth from different people's perspectives, the more we see different facets of him. Like, I still, you know, am struggling to fully, you know, picture Seth in my head, like, who he was as a person or who he is as a person in the book. He's such a complicated and interesting character that we only sort of discover through everyone else's telling. I want to talk also, too, about a little bit about the title and about this idea of how we remember the past and look and understand people through technology. Because see, friendship, it's mentioned in the book. It's the reference to looking at your relationship with someone on Facebook. And a big part of the book is Jacob kind of being a Facebook sleuth, going and trying to find who is commenting on what and going back to 2007 and seeing who was posting on Seth's wall, et cetera. So how are you thinking about how social media ends up being this record of the past? Incomplete, imperfect, you know, something that, that, that can help us dig into the past but also can. Can also confuse us as well.
- [36:23]
Jeremy Gordon
Yeah. So the title of the book is a little. It's. This is probably not great for my marketing, but it was true to where I was coming from, which I think the title of the book is a little clunky and I understand that it's because. But for anyone who isn't aware of it, it is, it's the name of a very literal feature on Facebook that allows you to see the totality of your relationship with someone, which to me is this, you know, it's meant to be sentimental and the type of things that sort of inspires an ad campaign that's like, look at what you were doing with Jacob and, or sorry, look what you're doing with your buddy Mark at Taco Bell in 2012. But it sort of strips, it totally strips it from context in a way that, you know, to me is very alienating to see this big wall of like contextless, like interactions getting back years with someone who maybe I no longer talk to or maybe is no longer alive. You know, it's an incomplete record of, of things. And I think when I was thinking about Facebook and the role that Facebook played in my life or the role that Twitter once played in my life or any real social media platform, whether or not it was livejournal or Xango or Instagram now or anything. You know, a lot of these are platforms that are dead. And I think in contrast to some models of a so called Internet novel which are very much about dissecting modern social more and like, you know, what does it mean when you like seeing someone's post and from every different direction? You know, this book's attitude towards social media and the past was very much about like taking it as something that had once mattered a lot to your, had once been the center of gravity to your social life and now matters nothing at all. I mean, I remember when Facebook was where everything was organized and you, you had total whole networks of communication and interaction and flirtations and friendships and Everything. It was all transplanted there was all there. And now no one my age uses it. None of my friends use it in that regard. It's totally dead and gone. And yet, like, the way that you used it, it counts for something because you did do it. You know exactly what some of these interactions meant. It's just different than it used to be. So I think that was very much the kind of animating idea behind some of this, was just, how would you feel about. You know, how do you feel about things that are dead and gone? What does that matter to you in the present?
- [38:37]
Caleb Zakrin
So I want to turn towards a character in the book. And I will say to listeners, if you find the book interesting right now and you don't want any spoilers, I'd recommend probably stopping listening around now and go read the book and then come back and hear the rest of this conversation. But there's a character very much at the center of the mystery of what happened to Seth Lee Finch, the guitarist for the buzz band Black Lodge. And I'm sure that the Black Lodge maybe was a reference to the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks. David lynch, the sort of the site where all the bad things seem to happen, where these kind of evil spirits lurk and haunt the town of Twin Peaks. But could you talk a little about Lee and how you went about constructing his character?
- [39:25]
Jeremy Gordon
It's funny you say that, because the name Black Lodge I honestly like. I mean, this is. This is just how an art is carried it out of thin air, right? But the fact of the Black Lodge obviously having this meaning in Twin Peaks is the sort of repository of dark experiences is correct. But I was mostly just thinking about, like, this era of, like, bands making incredibly uncreative references to Twin Peaks in their music. You know, like, I think there was.
- [39:50]
Caleb Zakrin
The Chicago band Twin Peaks, too.
- [39:52]
Jeremy Gordon
There literally was a band called Twin Peaks, which, like, listen, I have no opinions about their music either way, really, but I think it's just really funny to, like, call your band, like, what have I called my band? Like, Mad Men or, like, you know, the Sopranos. You know, just, like, it's. It's so, like. But, you know, it was a very easy thing to do. It was a. It's a great mood and a great feeling to evoke of, like, Twin Peaks. Like, we should call ourselves the Roadhouse. We should call ourselves Black Lives. Like, no, we should call ourselves Twin Peaks. But of course, I picked the one that has a dual meaning as kind of a shadowy underworld. But when I was thinking about the character of Lee Finch, I really didn't know a lot of. I mean, that's a character, a figure who is very present in my teenage life. A kind of cool, charismatic, handsome, guitar playing guy who's got great taste and is hit with the ladies and is a little too real to like, make a life, you know, as a maybe doesn't necessarily. Sometimes they were very smart, sometimes they were a little oafish, but they were, they were doing the damn thing. And I think it's sort of. It's people who were able to articulate something that they wanted certainly at an earlier age than I was able to articulate it. I mean, I could not have told you that, like, my ambition was to like stay out late, you know, partying and meeting girls or whatever at that age. At the age of like 14, 15, you know, these were learned, learned behaviors for me. But I think there's something to that, like youthful charisma that has been defect, you know, depicted in all sorts of popular media. I mean, a book, like a book or movie, like the Virgin Suicides, for example, like, you've got a Josh Hartnett's character whose name I forget. It's. It's incredible. It's an incredible name though. But like, these guys who are just like larger than life at a certain age and they have this kind of swagger to Youthful swagger to them that does not like. Doesn't necessarily translate to real life. Trip Fontaine, there he is in Trip Fontaine. When we meet him later in life, we sense that he's gone a little, you know, he's gone to seed a little bit. Maybe high school was the best days of his life. And that's not necessarily true for the people I know from, who are similar from that era. But I think they certainly mature and there's certainly an adulthood that they do not. Did not have when they were kind of young and carefree and cocksure and getting up to whatever. So that's very much where this character came from of just like a boy who's got the world, who's got the whole world in his hands from a young age until. Until he doesn't.
- [42:24]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah. I grew up in, in Los Angeles and when I was, you know, a teenager, the scene revolved around this, this, this sort of record company called Burger Records where there were these, all these, these, you know, sort of surf rock bands and. And I have to say, like, Lee just reminded me so much of a lot of the sort of people that hung around that scene where these kind of like these, these dark forces where you know, they, they, they had. There was something about them, but you kind of knew that. But once they, you know, cross the age of, you know, 23, 24, that it would kind of be downhill from there. And I think what's interesting about, about Lee as a character is that the whole book, he's kind of set up as this villain. Like, there's this scene where it's, you know, he's recalled during how he acted and behaved during Seth's funeral as like this absolute monster who doesn't seem to care at all that, you know, that his friend is dead and is, you know, selling heroin at his funeral and maybe getting chased out, you know, at knifepoint. And then we actually meet him. He's, you know, he's not really that at all. It's kind of. We kind of feel bad for him, you know, that he's this guy where, you know, he's, he's run down, things didn't turn out the way that he wanted. Wanted to be. And, you know, it's almost, you know, diff deflating in a way. But it feels very realistic and very truthful. And I was, I was wondering what you were, you were, you were, you were getting at there with that in terms of, you know, how, you know, these, these people that sometimes feel like villains are actually, in the end of the day, not necessarily as scary as we think they are.
- [43:58]
Jeremy Gordon
You know, I think Lee is someone who has had to grapple with the depths of his personality at a much younger age than Jacob did. And he was able to kind of come out through the other side, as people often do. Whether or not their answer is sobriety or Jesus or whatever, it is just hard work. He knows himself in a way that Jacob doesn't necessarily, because Jacob has not really had a come to Jesus moment for whatever. And without giving too much away about where everyone ends up, I think there's a kind of authenticity. I mean, really, Jacob is someone who is trying to search for meaning and understanding. Lee is someone who maybe has already attained that, but it's not necessarily something he needs to share with the world. He does not need to prostrate himself for understanding or share his journey in the exact same way. There's very much a private aspect to his. Even as he maybe agrees to participate a little bit in the project, there's very much a private aspect to his development that is really just for him to share when he wants to. And, you know, there's a. That's another kind of thread of the book is the sort of Maturation. The maturation process that happens off screen, off camera. You know, I think this is a. Certainly we're living in an era when there's no shortage of people who are happy to share their journeys in public at so many steps. You know, it's very much rooted in the self, and, you know, what I. My growth as a human being. But sometimes it's not for the public to understand. Sometimes it comes in the room of a, you know, a sobriety group, or it comes in the. The alley of a up house where you've been, like, shooting up all night. Not to put experiences in his mouth, but, you know, there's a reality that you are one someone like Lee grapples with a little differently than someone like Jacob, whose, you know, exploration, whose searching process is not insincere or inauthentic, but is certainly taking place in a different form than Lee's.
- [46:03]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah, I really found, you know, the way that his character develops to just be one of the most interesting aspects of the book, and I just appreciated the realism of this book. I really felt like it was capturing an aspect of modern life that just felt so accurate. The characters felt. All the characters felt very multidimensional and accurate to types of people that I know or versions of people that I know, and also just the type of character that Lee turns out to be. It felt in many ways, like, you know, kind of investigating this boogeyman in a way who, you know, turns out to just be this, you know, like a real but flawed person. And I think, you know, without giving too much away, you know, the podcast doesn't turn out the way that Jacob, you know, wants it to turn out. But there is this part where he kind of acknowledges as he's sitting down to do his little piece of the recording, that maybe by talking, he can express something that he couldn't express through writing. And I was really interested in this kind of. This dynamic between speaking versus writing, because I think it's a big aspect of podcasting versus writing. Are they two sides of the same coin, or are they different? And I was wondering how to sort of finish things off, how you think about writing as a form of expression versus speaking or podcasting, what your sort of conclusions are after having written this book.
- [47:34]
Jeremy Gordon
Yeah, you know, I mean, writing is the attempt to lock in a tone or evoke a tone or a feeling by the careful curation of words and syntax that you use. Speaking is the tone. It is the feeling, you know, when a woman. When someone is sobbing hysterically because they're going through the worst day of their life. You don't need to be convinced by that via the logical arrangement of words and whatnot. Whereas we know it can take quite a bit in order to find that feeling on the page, to be moved by a depiction of emotion or by someone's experience. So just as much as. And yet, at the same time, I think there's a little bit of snobbery, obviously, that writers have when it comes to talkers, because you are able to gesture at something that can be a little bit more tender, a little bit more delicate than, let's say, the pure demonstration of emotion. With the easy shorthand of being able to use your face or the tone of your voice, you can get at something that is just a little more. Yeah, a little bit more delicate, I think. I mean, I think of some of my favorite novels or books and they get it. Feelings and that I would rarely encounter in my real life, which is kind of why I go back to the. Well or ideas or sensations, depictions of time for, say, or just history. Whereas, you know, with podcasting, it's personality driven. It's very much like if you have the gift of gab, the gift of riffing and bullshitting, you know, you're gonna be. You're gonna be just okay, as opposed to the. And there's a reason why a lot of writers are often more awkward people in real life than they appear to be, because, you know, in the written form, they're able to carefully consider all of their thoughts and ideas rather than have to kind of casually generate them in real time, as the talkers must. But it's not a coincidence that a lot of the great talkers are also the great bullshitters. So it's a delicate balance.
- [49:38]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah. And certainly podcasting is rife with that. And what I find even funny, too, and interesting is that Jacob, he doesn't even seem to like podcasting that much. He says, tried doing it before, but, you know, when he walks around, he likes to listen to music. He has a playlist called walking around of 11,273 songs. And I guess to finish things off, I just wanted to ask for you. As you were writing this book, I imagine you were listening to a lot of music, probably. And for inspiration, there's a lot of music referenced throughout the book. And you're probably reading other books. So are there any albums or songs or artists or authors that you were engaging with a lot as you were constructing the book just to kind of give a companion piece for any readers?
- [50:22]
Jeremy Gordon
Yeah, it's funny. I was definitely listening to a lot of indie rock, which I love. I don't exclusively listen to it, but I do think there's a kind of a sort of wistful sentimentality or atmosphere that is often conjured by some of these songs that I like. I was listening to a band called Ammon Dunes. I think. Think I'm pronouncing that right. They have a great song called Mickey Doro, which is very much about someone's like a great surfer looking back at the kind of, like, detritus of his life. Or someone like, you know, Sufjan Stevens or Jens Lechman or Lou Reed. These kind of, like singer songwriters who often work in a mode of like, yeah, wistful reflection on, like, what has happened. Conjuring a mood like a band like the War on Drugs or, you know, the. Even, like the Beach Boys to some degree. The sense of, like, conjuring a sound and a feeling that is a little bit more predisposed towards, like, tenderness. That's kind of like what I was trying to, like, conjure. Not necessarily like, the tenderness, but the sense of, like, looking back. But, you know, not in a too. Not in a too nostalgic way. Not in a way that is rife with feeling, but more of a. A pale shade of blue, one might say, right?
- [51:38]
Caleb Zakrin
I mean, yeah, Obviously, Suvjan Stevens, Illinois came out, I think, in 2005 and obviously very Chicago oriented book. But yeah, I think there's musicians, music all throughout. And I think this is just a really enjoyable book that does a great job of exploring what it's like to be a writer today, but also just what it's like trying to dig through one's past and make sense of being a teenager, make sense of being a kid from the perspective of having some distance. Jeremy, it was really just absolutely wonderful to have you on the New Books Network and get the chance to talk to you about, see, friendship. So thank you so much.
- [52:20]
Jeremy Gordon
Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
- [52:29]
Caleb Zakrin
Sam.