Lit Hub Asks: 5 Authors, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers

The Lit Hub Author Questionnaire is a monthly interview featuring seven questions for five authors with new books. This month we talk to:

*

Brian Allen Carr (Bad Foundations)

Aube Rey Lescure (River East, River West)

Hisham Matar (My Friends)

Lynne Sharon Schwartz (My Life at the Wheel: Toward a Memoir)

Nathaniel Stein (The Threat)

*

Without summarizing it in any way, what would you say your book is about?

Brian Allen Carr: Work, weed (kinda), quantum gravity (kinda), predictive data (kinda), getting arrested, fatherhood, marriage, and crawl spaces. And a kind of meditation on perception; a kind of meditation on consequences and causes.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz: Me. What made me who I am and how this happened? Did I resist or cooperate in the process of becoming myself? What shapes a person, e.g., a person like me, a born writer and observer and over sensitive?

Hisham Matar: Friendship, and that illusive distance between what is inside our hearts and the world.

Aube Rey Lescure: Late-aughts Shanghai, Communist Party propaganda, teenage angst, FamilyMart fishball skewers, messy parents, poorly behaved expats, white privilege, supermalls in Asia, transactional relationships, moral gray areas, the unknowability of other lives, Brecht’s alienation effect, performing roles, dreams and illusions about what’s beyond borders, cultural imperialism, emigration, expatriation, China’s economic rise, the meaning of family.

Nathaniel Stein: Office parties, inept hitmen, cat sitting, severed body parts, the US Postal Service, whether life is worth living, and self-deception.

*

Without explaining why and without naming other authors or books, can you discuss the various influences on your book?

Lynne Sharon Schwartz: Growing up in terminally dull Brooklyn just after the war, WWII of course.  Dying to escape to more exotic surroundings.  My boredom and being “different.”  Books, all day and night.  My family, middle middle class, part immigrant (father), conventional and intelligent, dying to grow up and leave.

Aube Rey Lescure: Bleak movies of extreme social realism about contemporary urban life in China, satires about status and class, CW shows of the early 2010s, Tang and Song dynasty poetry, navel-gazing expat novels or colonial literature that showed me what I did not want this book to be.

Nathaniel Stein: New York City, workplace politics, the Coen brothers, Seinfeld, the feeling of envy, David Lynch, and many books and authors that I won’t name.

Hisham Matar: The long and intimate companionship of several friends, as well as several painting, pieces of music and, of course, books.

Brian Allen Carr: Work program in high school. Reality in general. Bumping into the law. All the authors I’ve ever loved who worked some in journalism, and the way I thought about books in high school. 1990s literary vibes, I suppose. Like old mall bookstores and books about people doing drugs and being flawed humans.

*

Without using complete sentences, can you describe what was going on in your life as you wrote this book?

Aube Rey Lescure: Mid-to-late twenties, sharing a studio apartment that I couldn’t afford in Boston, working as a barback in a cinema, working as a phone survey cold-caller, working as an essay consultant, trying to keep my head high while my friends went to grad school or developed stable careers, breaking up a major relationship, drifting around Europe and the US and living out of a suitcase for two years, getting a job at a literary magazine I love. Moody, glorious pacing—walking over 9,000 miles in the past few years since starting the novel in earnest (according to my Fitbit).

Brian Allen Carr: Working. Getting lit. Raising kids. Doing the stuff and things. Recovery rooms. Swollen expectations. Doused hopes. Stacks of despair. Loads of good times. Highs and lows. Sky above the sky. Dirt beneath the dirt.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz: Pandemic, above all…  Teaching. Watching children grow up and leave home for college. New friendships with feminists. Publishing and being a success but only for a short while.  Spine surgery, neuropathy, loss of function walking. Misery over that. Horror at Trump’s policies. Loss of American ideals. Aging.

Nathaniel Stein: Relentlessly completing sentences!

Hisham Matar: Too much to list.

*

What are some words you despise that have been used to describe your writing by readers and/or reviewers?

Nathaniel Stein: “Life-changing.” I can’t go two seconds without someone telling me my book was “life-changing.” “Life-changing” this, “life-changing” that… It’s like, get a thesaurus!

Aube Rey Lescure: Well, despise is a strong word! But here: “cynical,” “hard to read.” I hope to write with heart, and will wring my hands when readers don’t perceive that and only the pessimism or grittiness.

Hisham Matar: Despise is too strong a word. 

Lynne Sharon Schwartz: Upper West Side (code for Jewish), leery. Mostly reviewers have been civil.

Brian Allen Carr: Publishers Weekly called my first novel, Sip, “jumbled and dissatisfying.” Lol. In writing, jumbled is a mean fucking word. No: jumbled, in general, is just a mean and badass word.

*

If you could choose a career besides writing (irrespective of schooling requirements and/or talent) what would it be?

Hisham Matar: A conductor. Claudia Abbado, for example.

Brian Allen Carr: I would own and operate a little gas station. I like gas stations more than anything. I think it might be because I am from Texas. Every now and then, I’ll see someone post about how much Bucee’s pays, and I’m like: I should move back to Texas.

Nathaniel Stein: Middling MLB career followed by decades as a beloved, even legendary, on-air analyst.

Aube Rey Lescure: Filmmaking! Or being a traveling photojournalist.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz: Acting.

*

What craft elements do you think are your strong suit, and what would you like to be better at?

Aube Rey Lescure: I think—hope!—I do well at portraying the texture and specificity of place, and the power dynamics and social differences between characters in each scene, so that every person, no matter how tangential, is imbued with their own consciousness if they appear on the page. I’m horrible at dialogue. It is still an uphill battle from typing “human speaks words” as placeholder.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz: I’m good at choosing words, and after all, isn’t that the most important aspect of writing? It is writing. I’d like to be good at making up plots. I can’t think in terms of plots, just one scene happening after another.

Brian Allen Carr: I feel like I write the exact way I would like to, but I’m not sure what elements I’m exactly best at. I think concepts and dialogue maybe. Could also be voice and/or pacing. I guess, if I could be better at anything related to writing/publishing, I’d be better at networking and self-promotion.

Nathaniel Stein: I think I’m decently good at creating a voice, particularly one that mines the irony arising from the hyperarticulate narration of blindness and irrationality. I would like to be better at certain “dramaturgic” aspects of novel-writing; I’d love to write a book that unfolds like a taut, captivating play! I also wish I had a better imagination.

Hisham Matar: If I could describe it I would have no need to write.

*

How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything?

Aube Rey Lescure: I get such enjoyment from unexpected details, delightful diction, and esoteric facts in my reading diet—if those small things can move the needle of interest for a reader in my own work, I’ll have done my job. I don’t have any Grand Theory of the World to pass along (thankfully)—just observations, small and large, that may or may not translate to something collectible or connective in a reader’s mind.

Hisham Matar: I try to see what’s behind it, because such feelings are almost always a distorted reflection of something else.

Brian Allen Carr: Equal parts arrogance for inspiration and impostor syndrome for motivation.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz: Why shouldn’t anyone be interested? I’m smart, I have something to say and I say it well, I am imaginative and entertaining and have an original way of seeing things.

Nathaniel Stein: I make sure it sits comfortably among a carefully balanced and maintained set of other mental disorders.