A Bridge Across the Abyss of Human Loneliness

photo from title screen of the adapted film

Before we get started, isn’t it strange for us to do an interview about this new work of yours that’s essentially an anti-interview book?

So why are we doing it?

Capitalism being capitalism, doesn't one need to sell a book or promote a new literary magazine, regardless of integrity or consistency?

Are you praising selling out or protesting it?

Is there a way to live as an artist in America that isn't dissonant? More specifically, when working on The Very Last Interview, made up solely of curated and arranged questions you've been asked in interviews over your writing career, did you worry if you would be able to find a publisher for it? Was it your hardest sell?

Maybe the hardest sell was selling myself that the idea was sellable?

Does it matter to you that when reading the new book, at times, I was dying to know your answer to some questions, even though I understand they are irrelevant in the context of the book’s momentum, implied thesis, and overall art?

I think what you say is praise for the book; will you allow me to take it as such?

Should we proceed with a traditional interview?

Let me ask you a few questions instead; okay? What did you think of the book—as a book and as (oblique) self-revelation?

My kids were napping and I was going to pass out next to Amy but started reading and woke the fuck up. Finished it just after their naps and then I stress-ate four bowls of chocolate Chex mix at the kitchen counter. 

Is there a greater compliment?

The book shouldn't work, but it does.

Or greater than that?

The questions do many things at once—bare you, the institution of "the interview," maybe the impulse of criticism, even the institution of "memoir," and certainly (as always) human loneliness. Maybe your most vulnerable book? Rather than undressing yourself as you do in most work, you are, in effect, disrobed by others. And you just sit there and take it. Are you consciously channeling Marshawn Lynch as a stance in this book (after releasing that doc on him)? Or Salinger (after that biography you did)? You don't have to answer that.

What you say is very generous, but it’s also somewhat harrowing. As is, for me, the film version of the book. I find it even more discomfiting. Not sure why. Did you feel that?

The movie, too, works when it shouldn’t. In the book I get the sense that the questions are from many (though similar) voices and the chapter breaks work as a kind of cataloguing of the voices on different but related themes. At the same time, the onslaught of questions and the reader's awareness of a silent interviewee creates the feel of a single-session live interview; it implies a kind of setting and, dare I say, plot.

Suicide as undergirding narrative?

Right. But the movie instead takes the form of that single-session live interview. The emotional arc is, as you said, harrowing. Watching it, I tried to imagine you watching it, especially at the places where even I was feeling existential terror. Am I trying too hard if I make a parallel between you watching and enjoying the movie and the subtle masochism portrayed in your recent work, The Trouble with Men? Was it pleasurable?

Pleasurable? I'm not seeing that. I just admire it as art. I guess there is pleasure in having Rachel-and-Nick, screenwriter-and-director-who-are-married, get the book so well. So deeply. Art is a bridge across the abyss of human loneliness. You haven't heard me say that before, have you?

Wallace, right? Maybe a hundred times?

I think the book is painful; the movie even more so because as you say it's more crystallized. And the acting is extraordinary, I find. Do you agree—Chris's and Ashley’s performances?

I love that there are only two performances in the film—one entirely vocal, the other entirely facial, or bodily. Part of the thrill is how dynamic and controlled both performances are. I will try not to get carried away with this answer. I love to be interviewed. This is likely because I have not reached any degree of success for my writing. You must be very tired of it (see: the book). Would you ask me another question? Two?

I really appreciate your engagement with my work, and I’m sort of stunned by all the connections you make—eg, my silence in The Very Last Interview: Lynch’s silence: Salinger’s silence, etc. How did you come across my work? Only in last year or two has it occupied a more central place in your thinking?

I remember hearing you on Brad Listi's podcast at some point mid-decade and enjoying the interview, but I have a thing where I typically enjoy listening to writers talk on podcasts more than I enjoy reading their books, so I still hadn't bought one of yours. More than a year ago, I heard the episode you did on Maron's pod. It caught me at the right time. I had been changing genre in my recent work, bored with traditional storytelling (I had come out of an MFA fiction program seven years earlier). I dug into your newer stuff, then went back to Remote (I, too, am occupied by and write about mediated reality), and have since read most of your catalog. Reading your work has helped me a lot in my writing life; my regular one too. I think I fell into it because much of it isn't all that different from listening to someone talk about themself and their work on a podcast.

Elif Batuman once said that she prefers her writer-friends' emails to the books they write. Do you love that idea as much as I do?

But your work is much more purposeful, artful, and powerful than an e-mail. It galvanizes me. I had a dream once that I had published the book I was working on at the time and there was a blurb on the cover: "The Millenial David Shields." The blurb was written by Marc Maron, but then his name was crossed out and the quote was instead attributed to you, David Shields. Isn't that embarrassing in so many ways, and maybe even a very Shieldsian confession? Does it bother you to hear people talk about your work, or body of work, like this? Do most people, like me maybe, get it totally wrong in your view? 

I love it when people engage with my work in such a personal way. I would say most people get it wrong, but so far you seem to be getting my project weirdly right. You just seem to get what I’m doing. I don’t even get how you get it so easily. You just do. I think I’m about twenty-five years older than you, and we have different backgrounds. But it just resonates with you, which I find very moving. What’s my question here? I guess—what is our secret connection? Maybe it’s just the miracle of art—building the bridge across etc.

We are thirty years apart, if your birthday on Wikipedia is accurate. That means you’re five years younger than my father. I don't talk to my father anymore. On Jan. 1 (2020) we exchanged a series of e-mails in which we agreed via flashes of textual rage to stop communicating for the rest of our lives, which is a bit extreme on both sides if you know the situation. We'd gone through a couple periods of extended silence before this one, though this seems mutually final; not one word between us the entire pandemic. . . if not now, when?

Indeed. If not now, never? One reviewer once called my aesthetic sex-on-the-1st-date. So good.

Perfect. I still have a few books of yours on my to-read list. One is The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead. I know there's a lot in it regarding your father, too. I heard you say in some interview that when you finished that book you could hardly get out of bed for a month (or something to this effect). Is this true?

Of course not. You know how much rhetorical excess there is in all these interviews. I do think writing that book changed me though. So, too, hugely, did The Trouble With Men. Also, The Very Last Interview. Dead Languages, for sure. They wrote me as much I wrote them, as Montaigne said. Reality Hunger, too, in a different way. I Think You’re Totally Wrong and How Literature Saved My Life as well in smaller ways. Also, That Thing You Do with Your Mouth.

By the way, I didn’t bring up my father to suggest some weird I-want-David-to-be-my-dad scenario here (though maybe I should clear this up with my therapist!) but to suggest I understand well the subterranean meanings of silence. 

What did your father do that made such a rupture necessary?

I can't say “necessary” is the right word. In short, we are unalike in all the wrong ways and alike in all the wrong ways. But essentially I know very little real about him, and he only feeds the mystery. When my brothers and I all ended up getting married and having kids, he seemed to grow very uncomfortable being around us. But then he would try to act like that wasn’t the case for years. Very clear strange secrets lurking, we all felt. Or mental illness, I think—but what kind? and do I have it, too? Surely, I would, and must. He, and the fracture of our relationship, is a mystery I am always trying to figure out. And one he has no interest in discussing. There’s probably a book in here; I couldn’t even help but sneak it into an interview I’m supposed to do about you. Which reminds me: how did The Very Last Interview change you in writing it?

I think of Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello being his best book; he takes all his books and reads against all their affirmations. I tried to do the same, but I wrote it mainly in the last year, when I was in freefall from a divorce and then the breakup of a 1-year relationship after marriage. I wrote from a "place" of pure vulnerability and devastation. It completely demolished me to write that book. Does that come through? It was/is quite scary for me to think about it, maybe even more so than The Trouble with Men? 

To what extent did Trouble with Men play a role in the divorce? Or break-up? Did The Very Last Interview have anything to do with that, too?

I’m not going to address reactions by anyone to Trouble with Men or The Very Last Interview (which of course isn’t out yet til March 2022). Surely you understand?

Sorry. Bad question. I should say, however, regarding that "place" you wrote this new book from, my heart goes out to you. It sounds like a real shit-pile to head into COVID isolation with. How's it going now?

I’m in very intensive psychoanalysis, and I’m focused very heavily on new work.

I do psychotherapy. Is that different?

Psychoanalysis means you lie down on a couch, talk to a therapist several times a week, and focus heavily on ancient roots and sources of things. I really like it, I must say. Do you, too?

I sit up on a couch for my sessions, usually once a week, depending, and talk about whatever and go wherever; my therapist is mostly silent during it, depending, and tries to get me to figure out what emotions I'm experiencing. I often don't know. And then over time I kind of piece all the threads together and figure out what's going on in there, why, and if I'm going to do anything about it. Now all my therapy sessions since March have taken place via video chat. I've done them in my car, in the garage, and finally just started using my bedroom and not worrying if Amy or the kids overhear me. Do you do your sessions by video chat too now, or do you go in for socially distanced full couch experience?

Yes, it's been remote since March. All by phone. So many of my books, jesus all of them, are awash in psychology, and yet it took me til I was age 63 and separated from my wife to start therapy. It's a genuine question for me: Why didn't I enter analysis when I was 27 and in grad school? And the more interesting question is whether I'd have written all these books if I had been in therapy all these years or had started therapy decades ago, when I should have? I suspect I wouldn't have. That is, I wouldn't have needed to write the books as bridges across etc.

But that might not be true. Therapy, for me, has been one of the best things I've ever done for my writing. It helps me figure out what I keep coming back to emotionally or intellectually and need to focus on more, or explore further via writing. The insights I gain in therapy help me be more direct on the page, gives me a more interesting starting point to dig deeper into and get somewhere interesting faster. Here is a question: Let's say you could backtrack and put yourself into psychoanalysis at 27 and maybe you'd have been "better" the last 30+ years but would have far fewer books, would you redo it? At the same time, I don't believe therapy, then, was nearly the cultural norm it seems to be now, so it didn't fully occur to you then.

That’s a great point. Now it’s pretty much de rigeur. Also, I wasn’t in psychic freefall. It’s a great question: would I trade X for Y? My first impulse (surprisingly, perhaps) is to say no (what’s so great about equilibrium?). I love the books too much.

I keep thinking about that question I asked before. The bad one. Why did I ask it? What was I trying to accomplish? Psychoanalyze me.

It was a fair question. I spend the week analyzing that stuff in therapy. I just didn’t feel like delving into it right then. There are also ethical and legal questions, too, I think?

Maybe I was testing your boundaries with me? Wanted to see how deep the pseudo-intimacy of an interview could really go, or at least know where the line is drawn?

That’s sort of the donnée of the book and film as well, isn’t it? To what degree is this a gimmick? To what degree am I or are we fucking around? It’s rather like therapy in that sense. Is this a real conversation or a theatrical space? It’s both. Pseudo-intimacy is right. I’m bored by the poses on both sides. As someone once said to me, I have no boundaries. Which is apparently bad, but to me it’s good; it’s what makes a writer, ain’t it? Naipaul: If you want to write seriously, you have to be willing to break the forms.

In your book, some questions come off as banal or obvious (likely the point of showing them), and often questions that have some originality or life to them come off as aggressive or offensive. I have asked both types of questions here with you. Is it too moralistic to call these "bad" questions? Or is it just the genre of the interview—to some degree it requires both banality and aggressiveness if the interviewer is meant to get anywhere of value with the subject?

The bad questions are just the questions I’ve heard a million times. The good questions take me into an unusual place. I think what makes the book and film awkward for people is that uh oh it’s real; don’t you think?

Real in the sense this interview is real? If I think about it, I have spent this interview trying to impress more than trying to get the kind of information an audience might want from an interview with you about this book. Is it that most interviewers, underneath it, in the end just want you to perceive them as either your genuine friend or worthy adversary? Can one succeed at either in this kind of space? Have I?

Does it ever become real? Rather like therapy, in that sense too? I try to be real, but then I worry that I’ve fallen into the trap.

Do most interesting questions have no answer?

Or seventeen answers, all contradictory?

When does a question cease to be a question?

When it’s the last line of a conversation?