Kathryn Scanlan on Joseph Mitchell’s Joe Gould’s Secret

Kathryn Scanlan (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction) talks with Prize Director Michael Kelleher about legendary New Yorker journalist Joseph Mitchell’s famous double-profile of New York fixture Joe Gould, the perils of running out of ideas, and the blurry line between fiction and reality.

For a full episode transcript, click here.

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Reading list: 

Joe Gould’s Secret by Joseph Mitchell • “Joe Gould’s Teeth” by Jill Lepore • Bright Lights Big City by Jay McInerney • Old Mr. Flood by Joseph Mitchell

From the episode:

Michael Kelleher: So it’s interesting to me, and I know that in your work, you also are having to manage a lot of these ethical quandaries about using documentary materials about somebody’s life. And it’s interesting to me how we apply different rules to what you’re doing if you call it nonfiction, as opposed to whether or not you call it fiction. Do you have to just put the noise outta your head and just write when you’re working on this stuff, or do you have to kind of keep those questions really present in the front of your head as you’re mining the material of another person’s life for what’s ultimately gonna be a piece of fiction.

Kathryn Scanlan: Yeah, I mean, I guess I think about, genre as sort of a made up thing in a way, or it’s like something to play with and not take too seriously. basically I feel like writing is either interesting or it’s not, you know, and however you get there, is how you get there.

And I think that genre is fun and useful as a tool to play with people’s expectations or to allow greater or lesser degrees of freedom. I have doubts about nonfiction in general, like, Mitchell’s, you know, publishing these pieces and publishing them as supposedly nonfiction.

But I, everything is coming through him, you know, it’s, everything is, filtered through Mitchell and so it’s, it’s obviously going to be slanted, you know, there’s going to be a perspective. And I think that he could have called Joe Gould’s Secret fiction as well, you know, and sort of acknowledged his hand in it, um, in the shaping of it.

I think there’s probably plenty of people who would disagree with me and say like, oh, you know, nonfiction is this and fiction is this, and, and that’s fine too. I think that it’s up to each writer to sort of decide how to use or, or not use those ideas, I guess.

MK: Yeah, it’s just fascinating to me how, I think nowadays especially there’s this real thirst for nonfiction, right? Quote unquote where people want to know not only that the story happened, that it was true. They also want the author to have some kind of like specific personal connection to the content.

And then there’s this dismissal of fiction as like well, that’s not real. Therefore it’s not relevant to whatever, that’s happening in the present day. and I think that really does fail to acknowledge the nature of art and the nature of storytelling. There’s this real sort of… what’s the word I’m looking for? willingness to believe that somebody can deliver the facts to you, unfiltered as long as you say that it’s nonfiction, which as anybody who’s ever written anything knows, is impossible, right?

And so because of that, these other separate standards are applied to the nonfiction writer. Because if you find out that like somebody made up one little thing, you know, everybody has a heart attack, right? And they pull the book from publication and so forth.

But if, if you say it’s fiction, you know, then they’re willing to just let you do whatever you want, right?

KS: Yeah. It’s a strange… State, I would say, and it in some ways it feels just, I don’t know, kind of naive to me or something. It also doesn’t acknowledge fiction and like the history of fiction and how a lot of fiction is really close to, quote unquote real life or some, you know, somebody’s life or actual events or actual people that they know.

The history of fiction is full of very thinly veiled portraits of, real people who lived, you know, whether it’s characters in the book or the author themselves but fiction allows a license to let your, imagination or your unconscious, you know, your subconscious to come in and play around with, this material.

I also think that the obsession with, with the real or with, you know, the true story, I just feel like every show, like on tv, every movie now, like every single one, it’s like, this is based on a true story. And it, there, there really is this obsession with it that I, I don’t quite understand.