Paul Theroux on His Ideal Reader
In Conversation with Mitzi Rapkin on the First Draft Podcast
First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.
In this episode, Mitzi talks to Paul Theroux about his new short story collection, The Vanishing Point.
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From the episode:
Paul Theroux: My ideal reader is someone who knows my work, who knows it from the beginning. So, that I haven’t written just one travel book, I’ve written a dozen travel books, and they’re related. The first ones are different, but I think that they’ve improved. They’ve grown, and they’ve developed. They’ve enlarged. Same thing with the novels and so forth. My early novels are tentative, but they’ve developed. My advice to a reader, a reader of mine or reader of anyone, is to read everything if you like that writer, whether it’s Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald Hemingway, Faulkner, me, Patrick White, whoever, read all that writer’s work, and you will learn something. You will live that person’s life and then read a biography. To compensate for my lack of a PhD, I read intensively, and my reading program is always I find a writer I like, Joseph Conrad, Rebecca West, whoever, and I read everything, everything, everything. If they wrote 15 books, I read 15. If it’s 20, I read 20. And my advice is, don’t read one book. Don’t read one book and say, Oh, I read a book of his. I read Death in Venice. So that’s Thomas Mann. No, no, no. Thomas Mann is a prolific, brilliant writer. Read everything. Reading is almost the equivalent of writing in terms of finding joy, finding pleasure, and it’s a private experience. Reading made me a writer. Reading made me a traveler. Look what it did for me, kids.
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Paul Theroux is the author of many highly acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Great Railway Bazaar, The Mosquito Coast, Riding the Iron Rooster, and Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories. In 2015, Paul Theroux was awarded a Royal Medal from the Royal Geographical Society for “the encouragement of geographical discovery through travel writing.” His new short story collection is The Vanishing Point.
