Gary Shteyngart: Middle-Aged People Need Weird Hobbies to Exercise Their Dying Brains

Gary Shteyngart’s Lake Success is now available.

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Who do you most wish would read your book?
My shrink, for sure. He always tells me if I’ve been honest with myself after I he reads my books and if I have been he rubs my belly. I also show them to my accountant, but he just tells me to write for TV like a normal person.

What do you always want to talk about in interviews but never get to?
Interviewers rarely ask me about my kick-ass collection of wristwatches, but I hope that changes. Middle-aged people need weird hobbies with plenty of granular detail. This helps us exercise our dying brains. Did I tell you about my collection of wristwatches? It’s kick-ass.

What time of day do you write (and why)?
I write from 11am to 3pm, with a lunch break in between. There is such a thing as over-writing, I feel, and after four hours you get diminishing returns. Also, I’m lazy AF.

How do you tackle writers block?
I never get writer’s block. I have content coming out of my pores. You want 600 words on maize production in the Andes? I’ll have it to you by Friday. How much do you pay a word?

Which book(s) do you return to again and again?
Same crap over and over. Nabokov’s Pnin, Chekhov’s collected stories, the entire oeuvre of Mary Gaitskill. God, can you believe I just used “oeuvre” in a sentence? Oberlin does shit like that to you.

Which non-literary piece of culture—film, tv show, painting, song—could you not imagine your life without?
TV for sure. Better Call Saul basically makes life worth living these days and I pretty much came of age during the Sopranos, even though I was like 30.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
When I first met Philip Roth he told me not to eat butter. I’m not sure that counts as “writing” advice, but it’s kept me squarely in the 128-132 pound zone, which has made me super-hungry as a writer. That last sentence made no sense. I apologize. I’m in an airport lounge and the person next to me is talking about some kind of green Hawaiian turtle. I hate everything.

What was the first book you fell in love with?
I was growing up in Leningrad and I loved this book called The Wonderful Adventures of Nils which was about a Swedish boy who gets shrunk down to a tiny size and has to travel with these geese to Lapland. Russians are always trying to shrink Scandinavian people down to size, so it struck a chord. I also liked a Stalin-era translation of Tom Sawyer. Becky Thatcher was my first crush. If I had a fence, I would paint it.

Name a classic you feel guilty about never having read?
Everyone tells me I should read Jude the Obscure, but I have serious issues with obscurity.

Is there a book you wish you had written?
Not really. I mean there are many books I like better than my own, but each writer has been put on this green earth by Beelzebub to write a very specific set of works. I’m about halfway done with mine. Can’t wait to retire already. Writing is super hard.