When the scent of autumn toasts the air, my husband and I yearn to travel to the Big Apple. Over the years, we’ve chalked up a few unforgettable trips to museums, plays, and some of most delectable meals we’ve tasted. NYC is arguably the capital of culture with a long literary history that makes me green with envy. But I could not live there. After all, I’m a San Franciscan through and through, and we’re the home of Jack London and the Beat Generation, thank you very much. Still, to assuage my NYC lust, I weekly devour “The New Yorker Magazine,” and last October, I crossed off a wish on my bucket list—The New Yorker Festival, a heady weekend celebration of books and art and all things literary. I loved everything about it and wondered what took me so long to book a ticket.
At Gramercy Theater I attended an illustrious panel that featured Louise Erdrich, author of Love Medicine among many other fine novels, Rachel Kushner, author of Flamethrowers, and to my delight, a last-minute stand-in, Jeffrey Eugenides, Pulitzer Prize author of Middlesex, an extraordinary epic novel on my top ten list of books.
There I sat in the darkened theater, 10AM in the morning, clutching a notepad, while all around me the audience blinked like owls, nursing coffee and starring at their cell phones. The authors walked on stage and climbed onto high canvas-backed stools, smiling at the crowd. Everyone cheered; I was thrilled. Ms. Kushner, fiction editor of The New Yorker, moderated the panel, and began by inquiring how each one approaches writing.
Ms. Erdrich jumped right in. “Everything I do is rooted in compulsion.” It was a startling statement given the body of work she produces. How could she be anything but highly disciplined and organized? She’s a cool looking blonde with a warm laugh, part Chippewas Indian, burning with a mission, exploring issues of justice, and her reply hit upon a question that has a hundred faces—why write?
Mr. Eugenides didn’t hesitate. “My writing explores intimate compulsions about psychological history.” I scribbled down his words. He looked and sounded like the Princeton professor that he is, slightly rumbled yet youthful, confident speech tinged with ready humor, and I could see him holding forth at a burnished oak table, eager eyes looking into his eyes, poised to follow whatever path he suggested. When he said, “Outlines are delusion,” I wanted to cheer; couldn’t have said it better myself.
Taking a slightly different angle, Ms. Kushner related that after doing research on Telex From Cuba, she put aside four years of research to find the shape of the novel. “The author’s job,” she said, “is to ask questions, and then more questions.” Like her, I was at the finish of a novel, and I knew exactly what she was talking about. At some point, I had to shelve historical fact, listen to the voice of my characters, and ask them the questions they were waiting to hear.
Their words buzzed into my ears, and I marveled that not fifteen feet away were three real people. Maybe it’s me, not every author, but I tend to rank authors in a hierarchical rank, and the higher they sit in my pantheon of greatness, the farther they seem from me. Yet, here they were like me, admitting to compulsion, the lure of research, facing a blank page every day, and not far away at all. Afterwards I shimmered with transcendent inspiration and an enormous hunger, and off we went, back to the West Side to Red Farm, a Kosher Chinese restaurant, for Katz’s Pastrami Egg Rolls, the best in the world.
