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- [00:00]
Narrator/Commercial Voice
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- [01:02]
Ryan Reynolds / Guest Author Jason
Now I don't know if you've heard.
- [01:03]
Narrator/Commercial Voice
But Mint's Premium Wireless is $15 a month. But I'd like to offer one other perk. We have no stores.
- [01:13]
Ryan Reynolds / Guest Author Jason
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- [01:17]
Narrator/Commercial Voice
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- [01:24]
Stephen Colbert
Of $45 for three month plan. $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile.
- [01:32]
Ryan Reynolds / Guest Author Jason
It's the Late Show Poncho with Stephen Colbert.
- [01:40]
Stephen Colbert
Jason, thanks for being here. You are a best selling author of two poetry collections and four novels, the last of which won the National Book Award. But you're here today for your newest novel, People Like Us. How would you describe it in one sentence?
- [01:55]
Ryan Reynolds / Guest Author Jason
Ooh, one sentence. It is the story of two authors, one traveling across the us, One traveling across Europe, discovering what America and belonging mean to them.
- [02:05]
Stephen Colbert
A lot of people are calling it metafiction and much of that is because you started it intending it to be a memoir.
- [02:11]
Ryan Reynolds / Guest Author Jason
Right?
- [02:12]
Stephen Colbert
What happened?
- [02:13]
Ryan Reynolds / Guest Author Jason
I'm just bad at writing memoir apparently. I think that's what happened. So it began as I won the National Book Award. After a hell of a book. I started trying to write about what I was seeing as I was touring around. Like touring is a very frenetic, very crazy. Which is a strange thing to do. I'll just say it that way. And I tried to capture some of that feeling of strangeness and not belonging and the oddity of the action of traveling and touring. I was trying to capture that in a memoir. And the more I got deeper into the memoir, the more complex things became, the more I realized that I just didn't have the tools personally to tackle this. And I figured these two characters who I'd worked with before, they suddenly kind of showed up one day and they felt very much at home. I felt like I realized that I could use those two characters to have a different conversation than I did in the previous book. And that's the only reason I stuck with it. Like, I knew that I didn't want to rehash the same topics. I had to have something new to discuss, and I did. And these two characters were a great foil for that.
- [03:09]
Stephen Colbert
Do you think of People Like Us more as a sequel to Helluva Book or as a standalone novel that shares characters?
- [03:15]
Ryan Reynolds / Guest Author Jason
So in the same way the book defies genre and things like that, or tries to. I try to. I call it the standalone sequel, which makes no sense at all. But that's. That's kind of what I refer to it as, where it does all those things. Like, it is the same two characters from Helluva Book. It is ten years later, roughly. But a lot has happened. And you don't have to read Helluva Book. You're totally encouraged to, but you don't have to read Helluva Book to understand the story that is happening in people like us.
- [03:41]
Stephen Colbert
Which is to say this follows. This is the novel that followed Helluvabook, which is your National Book Award winning novel.
- [03:47]
Ryan Reynolds / Guest Author Jason
Yes.
- [03:48]
Stephen Colbert
What is. Is the pressure? Like writing the next thing when you've just won one of the biggest prizes you could hope to win as an author. And how do you cope with that pressure?
- [03:59]
Ryan Reynolds / Guest Author Jason
Yeah, so that's always the million dollar question is like, what do you do with the pressure of that? And actually I felt zero pressure writing on this because for me, the National Book Award is such a prestigious thing. It's something I never in my wildest dreams thought that I could actually achieve. So after I won it, it's kind of like you climb Everest. Like there is no Everest Part two. It's just you've done it. And I realized that at a certain point in life, you not become complacent, but you need to accept and revel in the achievements that you have and actually like savor them. So I am still to this day, savoring the fact that I did something that won the National Book Award. And so for me, writing this next book was just my chance to have fun with the least amount of pressure I've ever had. Because I think before that the pressure is I want to write a book that gets noticed, a book that wins awards, a book that actually, like, grips people enough to make them notice. And I did that. So now I get to write books that I just enjoy writing and work on that way. So it just. So for me, it was actually less pressure than it was before.
- [04:55]
Stephen Colbert
That's awesome, because the fun you had writing it, I think really comes across. I mean, I've seen this book called Surreal Mind Bending A Fever Dream. As the author, do you enjoy leaving a lot of meaning and interpretation up to the reader?
- [05:10]
Ryan Reynolds / Guest Author Jason
Yes, wholeheartedly. I think Fever Dream is the best description for, like, that's what I was going for when I was writing it. I wanted to feel like that 2:00am you just woke up. You don't know where reality ends and the dream starts. And that is the most exciting part to me. And so, yeah, I love seeing readers trying to figure out puzzles, trying to understand what characters are, because I'm a strong believer that you don't have to have specific narrative closure as long as you have emotional and psychological closure. I think the book achieves that. But I love playing with the narrative parts and just having readers guess, what does this character mean? Are these characters the same person? That, for me, is just a blast.
- [05:45]
Stephen Colbert
One of the core themes of this book is grief, but it's also very funny. So reading the book is quite an experience because one page you're about to cry, and the very next one you're laughing out loud. What do you think is the relationship between pain and humor?
- [06:02]
Ryan Reynolds / Guest Author Jason
I think humor typically exists on the unexpected. Like the funny things are the things that someone said or does that you don't expect. Grief is kind of the inevitability of a loss that we kind of see coming and we kind of see way down the road. So for me, when I worked on this book and hell and hell of a book, the thing I try to do is I try to lead with the grief a little bit to make you think that, get you the expectations built, and then use the humor to kind of subvert that. I think that balancing those two two things makes it where both become much more powerful. They hit harder, they just are more effective. And I also think that the book reflects kind of how I live my life. Like I lost my mom at 22, my dad around 27. Like, I've lost a fair amount of people in my life, so I have the grief component. But I also realized that life is short and you should smile and laugh at things that you can smile and laugh at. So I try very hard to have the humor in my life as well. So for me, the book was trying to reflect kind of how I exist, which is just a constant balance between laughing and sometimes crying that really comes across good.
- [07:03]
Stephen Colbert
This book is both hypercritical of America and also a love letter to America. Did processing your own feelings about this country through the writing process change your opinion of it?
- [07:18]
Ryan Reynolds / Guest Author Jason
I don't know that it changed it. It definitely allowed me to more deeply explore my opinion of it. I think my. Some of my opinions have become more honed to myself. Like, I understand how I feel about certain topics in America a bit more clearly now than I did before. I don't know for a fact if things have actually changed. I feel like I've always had a complicated relationship with America, as so many people do. And writing on this book, working on it, delving into what does America actually mean to me. Like, there's one theme in the book where these readers ask the author, like, do you love America? And that becomes, like, the echoing question throughout the entire novel, which is something that I personally am still grappling with. Like, there are days and times and moments when I very deeply love this country, and there are days and times and moments when I just want to flee it as quickly as possible. And so, yeah, so it has helped me understand my opinion. I don't know for certain how ironclad some of those opinions are, though. It's just. It's complicated. America's complicated.
- [08:14]
Stephen Colbert
Gun culture and gun violence loom large in this story. Why did you want to emphasize that aspect of life in America and as an American, even abroad?
- [08:24]
Ryan Reynolds / Guest Author Jason
So this is going to be a bit of a sad statement, but I think it's difficult to have an American story that doesn't involve guns in some way. Like, guns have become synonymous with America, with freedom, whatever freedom means. I always find that freedom is one of the most nebulous, useless words that we have in our language. We always are changing what freedom means to suit our personal goals. But for whatever reason, guns are rooted in this country's history, and they continue to be a part of our contemporary daily lives. And so I wanted to lean into that. I wanted to understand what that meant for me. I'm from the South. I grew up in a Hunting culture. My father gave me my first shot shotgun when I was 10, my first rifle when I was 12 or 13. I hunted with uncles and cousins throughout my entire youth. I still own guns, and so I am very much a gun owner. But I am also someone who believes that guns should be much more regulated than they actually are. I don't think it is an either or equation as people try to make it out to be. And I wanted to explore all that. I want to understand what that meant, because much like the author in the novel, I did go speak at a college once, not long after a shooting occurred. And that was a powerful, terrifying, awkward moment for me. And at the same time, I did travel through Europe, and I got to see what that meant. There was a moment in Europe where I heard a car backfire, and my brain recognized that it wasn't a gun, it was a car backfiring. And I didn't realize how. There's always a part of my brain that is perpetually listening for the gunshot. And being in Europe for a while made me realize that you can live a life without that. And that was a very stark and shocking moment that I didn't realize you could have a life that isn't listening for gunfire, because in America, you always are.
- [10:02]
Stephen Colbert
Wow. If you knew you were going to move abroad and let's just say for some reason you had no access to books while you were there.
- [10:10]
Ryan Reynolds / Guest Author Jason
Oh, this is a terrible place we're going. I don't like it.
- [10:13]
Stephen Colbert
But you can bring one book. Okay, what book are you bringing?
- [10:19]
Ryan Reynolds / Guest Author Jason
I can't bring two. Like, I can't bring two. Okay. If it's one book, it will be Lord of the Flies by William Golding. That's the one book that I would take. And it would be a very dark, beautiful place wherever I lived at, but it would be a meaningful place if I had that book with me.
- [10:35]
Stephen Colbert
Okay, they just found room for your second book.
- [10:37]
Ryan Reynolds / Guest Author Jason
What's the second book? Thank you. Thank you. Found it in the luggage. I like that.
- [10:41]
Stephen Colbert
Exactly.
- [10:42]
Ryan Reynolds / Guest Author Jason
The second book would be John Gardner's Grindel. These are the two books that literally made me the writer that I am today. Like, John Gardiner's Grindel was the book. There's a book that I read that made me want to become a writer. And then not long thereafter, I came across Lord of the Flies, and that made me want to continue and really pursue to be a writer. Like, I think Lord of the Flies is, like, the perfect book on a technical level, on a reading level, on every possible interpretation of that word. So I reread it every few years, and I am perpetually trying to achieve what Lord of the Flies has achieved.
- [11:12]
Stephen Colbert
How old were you when you encountered those books?
- [11:15]
Ryan Reynolds / Guest Author Jason
I was around 14 or 15. I hit them both around the same age. I hit Grendel first, and that just completely made me want to write things. It was one of those books where when I finished reading it, I felt like I was vibrating. And I remember thinking to myself, very vividly, I want to do this to someone else one day. I want to be a writer and pass this on. And then about a year later, I was in high school, we read Lord of the Flies, and it just shook me to my core. And then, like, the older I get, the more that I reread it, the more terrifying and beautiful it is each time I read it.
- [11:44]
Stephen Colbert
You teach writing. Do you have a piece of advice you give to aspiring writers?
- [11:49]
Ryan Reynolds / Guest Author Jason
Yeah, I've got several. I think the most. The biggest piece of advice that I give is learn to be consistent. Writing is a lifelong endeavor. It is a marathon, not a sprint. You will be terrible at it for far longer than you want to be terrible at it. And there's no getting around that. And at some point, you have to give yourself permission to write badly. I think that's my biggest thing, is give yourself permission to write badly. Just keep writing. You can't say the thing if you don't say it badly first. So just accept that you're going to say it badly first. You can fix it later and say it beautifully later.
- [12:21]
Stephen Colbert
That's good advice. Was there ever any advice given to you that changed your craft?
- [12:29]
Ryan Reynolds / Guest Author Jason
I think the biggest advice that I got was stop trying to be other people, which I know sounds very core and very basic, but especially as a writer, like, you know, I read John Gardner, I read William Golding. I want it to be them. I read a lot of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker. I tried to write like them for years of my career. And just before my career got, you know, before books were published, like, I spent years trying to write like them. And I had a mentor a long time ago who said, like, you're not them. And that's not an insult, but you're just. You're not them. You're you. You should try to find the way that you want to write and you want to tell your story. And I was like, yeah, but their way is successful. He says, well, yours can be, too, if you actually lean into it and practice your craft. So the biggest advice I got was learn to be myself and stop trying to mirror and copy other people and People Like Us makes fun of that. There's some moments where I make a little bit of fun of that with other author authors I don't know.
- [13:18]
Stephen Colbert
So thanks for being here, Jason. People Like Us is available everywhere. Books are sold. For Late Show Book Club updates, follow our Instagram colbertlateshow.
- [13:30]
Narrator/Commercial Voice
Thank you for listening to the Late Show Pod show with Stephen Colbert. Just one more thing. If you want to see more of me, come to The Late Show YouTube channel for more clips and exclusives.
- [13:43]
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- [14:48]
Ryan Reynolds / Guest Author Jason
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- [14:59]
Narrator/Commercial Voice
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- [15:01]
Ryan Reynolds / Guest Author Jason
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