Tiana chatted with Jesse Andrews author of the New York Times bestselling novels Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and The Haters. He also wrote the film adaptation of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, which won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.
Hi Jesse! Great to meet you! Okay to start off with, what advice would you give to your younger self about pursuing writing as a career?
Hahaha yep, well when you start to imagine the counterfactual of the career you might have had if you had known better, the problem with that is that, well I really love the career that I have now. I get to work with pretty fantastic people and so any advice that I could kinda time-travel back there with and [potentially] knock my life off course, I feel suspicious of that.
But here’s what I would say to a younger me. Just quit smoking. Just stop doing it. I quit now but it took a while and I should have never have started smoking, for like 7 years. It is a disgusting and terrible habit. It is a really really gross, awful and fatal a lot of the time. So yeah, quit smoking. (laughs).
So I read that you are a novelist, a musician, previously worked as a travel writer, tour guide and receptionist at a German youth hostel! Was writing what you always wanted to pursue or was it a side-thing at first?
Yeah, well it started with my mother who was a librarian, and she just brought home books and books and books. Our house was full of them so, you know, you grow up swimming in books and I think a lot of the time you are a writer even if you don’t think of yourself as one just because the form is so intimate to you and who you are. So I always wanted to write and then a lot of these jobs were just how I supported myself (laughs). [During this time it was about] trying to find a job that provides the most support, that you can live on but it allows you the creative and mental energy to actually make stuff. Yep, that was the challenge.
So you were writing since you were a teenager then?
Yep, and there were some off and on [moments]. I wasn’t writing very much during college.
Wait, so were you studying English Literature while you were at university?
(Laughs). No, I was studying applied maths and physics for two years and then I realized I was not very good at it, so I switched to art history which I liked and which had the fewest requirements. It was the only thing that would let me graduate on time and so my parents were thrilled. They were not thrilled but very graciously put up with it. I mean art history is useful because it does train you to write about very slippery stuff that is hard to get a purchase on. You can sound really stupid writing about art and so you have to have some facility with language and ideas not to sound like an idiot. (laughs).
What drew you to writing?
I mean my favourite thing about writing is still character. It has sort of always been character and trying to find a voice that through squiggles on a page, [comes out and] feels like a person. So to take that really simple clay of “just a word after word after word”, as Margaret Atwood put it, and turn it into something that can really feel real and human out, that to me is just a kind of magic that will never get old. There’s an infinite number of ways to do it and so yeah, voice and then also on top of that comedy. When a voice is very specific, at some point there is something very funny about that too. It’s just familiar and there is something funny about the familiarity of a voice off a page from someone you have never met and it sounds like someone you have.
In Me and Earl and the Dying Girl you depict a war-like sense of high school where your protagonist has got use his diplomacy skills? What was that based on? Do you gain most of your inspiration from your life experience or do you seek to purely invent characters?
The story was not based on something that happened to me but it was something that I was interested in. [It was about] taking an emotionally limited teenage boy and shoving him in a tragedy, basically something he wouldn’t be able to deal with because that does happen – teenagers and their emotional asks made to you that you are not up to answering. Besides, there is a lot of sadness and regret there but also a lot of comedy. That was certainly a lot of who I was as a teenager and I think I was not super in touch with my emotions but also pretty aware that it probably would be a good thing if I were haha.
So you mentioned Margaret Atwood previously, what authors/screenplay writers inspired you to do what you do?
I mean there are so many. I learned a lot about interiority and stream of consciousness by reading Virginia Woolf and some of the other modernist writers. More recently George Saunders, especially with his new book because he writes about power in a really direct and bracing way but it is also very funny and that is close to what I wanted to do, in a different way of course. Then Jennifer Egan. Roald Dahl, probably as a kid since I read a ton of him and I’ll admit to Dave Barry. When I was a teenager I just read the living crap out of Dave Barry and I thought it would be a manual for how to finally be funny, which I really wanted to do without being able to do it. I guess it sort of worked out, I dunno.
No, for sure it did! Even your blog is hilarious!
Why thank you. Well, that’s the thing, if it seems that way then I have to tell you it’s not. (laughs).
In terms of your experimentation with form within your novel, such as adding snippets of scripts within Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, was this something you learnt or just a load of experimentation?
Yeah, that stuff really interests me. Anything that you can do that is sort of unexpected and different, a lot of that is formal and technical. In another book [I used] a couple of Wikipedia entries and I wanted to put like eight of them but my editor was like “yeah, one is enough. If you really have to do two, then do two” and I was like, “We’re doing two.” Again, it’s like anything you can do to fight expectation and show something. The needle you have to thread has to be new but not unfamiliar so that it bumps the train of thought [of readers] or the flow because reading is about the flow. The words disappear and the world materializes out of them only if the reader is able to get in a state of flow. So if I can do that with devices that aren’t unfamiliar then I think that that’s the place I want to live as a writer.
Right, in terms of that, what is your goal as a writer? Where do you want to take your work?
The emotionally mixed [such as] comedy mixed with grief or sadness or confusion. It usually ends up being those two things. So like comedy and sadness and each is its own lens to look at the other and see something unusual.
One thing you want to write about in the future? Do you start works and just not complete them?
Yep, there are a ton.
Do you go back over them?
Yeah, sometimes. If I feel like there is something there then maybe I’ll go back. With “Munmun” it is such a strange world and different from the other two and I wanted to chase that a little bit and try to now write something with even a little more ambition to it and see how close I can get to my own weird specific version of a space opera basically without leaning too much on the stuff other people do. You know because already space opera is a really considered and kind of ruled out form and I don’t want to learn those rules to be honest, although you kind of have to in order to not repeat stuff that has already been done.
Do you reckon that there are trends in what people like to read depending on the political/social climate?
I think there are but I don’t think authors should really chase them unless it really comes naturally to them. There is a lot of pressure from the marketplace to chase the shiny thing. Right now the shiny thing is politics and for some writers it comes naturally and they are the ones that should be doing it but not for other writers who, not to put too fine a point on it, are like the white male writers saying “yeah, I really want to do a police shooting book”. Like dude, oh man, (laughs) I’m not sure that you’re gonna do a great job. That said, whatever is in you, write it, but just really interrogate it and really try to figure out where it is coming from and make sure it is not coming from a desire to be popular or to be thought of as a certain way. Just make sure that it is the story that you must tell.
Also writing a novel that features an adolescent with cancer and the idea of Rachel choosing to stop chemotherapy, what kind of scope of license did you feel you had when writing about such a topic? Did you ever feel nervous about reactions?
Yeah, well I researched it and I talked to cancer sufferers. You know I had to weigh that choice. My uncle is a paediatric oncologist and, well I mean, of course, you have to think about it. You know that specific kid who is weighing that choice and reading the book, so you just take the best shot at it as you can. We talk about the power that stories have and we usually frame that power is very positive but of course power is power and can be used for good and for ill and there are stories that do real harm. Any time we are telling a story, we have to ask ourselves what that harm might be. That was the question that I tried to get a satisfactory answer for before I put the book out in the world.
Everyone’s different. Some people found it really redemptive and other people, you know I have gotten a couple of emails from readers who were like “I have cancer and your book infuriated me”. Then I try to engage and I say like, first of all, I’m sorry that I did that and I own that and let’s talk about it. Usually, we talk about it and come to a place of mutual understanding. Yeah, it’s complicated.
In regards to that, have you ever regretted putting something in a book and it has been released and then you think two years down the track, like oh I wish I didn’t write that or that was a phrase I shouldn’t have put in the book?
In The Haters, each of the characters has a musician or band that they feel guilty about liking and for one of them I made it the “The Shins” and that’s kinda dumb because “The Shins” are actually pretty cool (laughs) so that kid gets to be kind of cool and I regret that and I should have made that “Coldplay” [instead]. They are much more of a guilty pleasure, which I also personally have. (laughs) Sometimes I just want to put on “Magic” by Coldplay and like wander around and feel like “yeah, everything’s ethereal and oh man, I’m like Chris Martin”. So yeah, it should have been “Coldplay” instead of the “The Shins”.
What is the thing that you feel most accomplished about in your career?
Oh geez, well that is hard to talk about because you start patting yourself on the back and you become someone like that is.
Haha, wow you’re so humble!
(laughs) Yeah, well I think of myself as a recovering ego-addict and so I kicked It [and got out of it] and at that point started writing stuff that was any good at all. Before that, it was just so soaked in vanity and narcissism, that it was just awful. It was all stuff where I wanted to appear really smart.
Well, you are probably very intelligent.
No, I’m not, I’m not and I had to confront that. (laughs)
So you got that feedback from other people or that was just your internal self-criticism?
Well, people failed to connect with it and there was just something unenjoyable about reading the stuff I was writing because it was just so bent on trying to impress people with intellect. There was a shallow aspect going on with it. So yeah, at some point I had to face the facts and think like “hey, I’m not a genius and maybe I don’t need to write stuff that makes me seem really smart” and that’s how I wrote Me, Earl and the Dying Girl. You know, [aside from] whatever good thing things there are about it, it doesn’t make me seem very smart and that’s great. That’s fine and that’s who I am.
So anyone saying like praise of any kind feels like someone is offering me a hit of the pipe, the old ego pipe, so I just gotta pass it down and say yeah man, I’m not going there anymore – well until two years from now when I’m just like “I’m amaaaazinnng”.
You mentioned previously the works that you have started on but never finished. At what point do you know that something is not worth continuing working on?
It’s when you start writing it and you reach a point where you are like, okay I have to outline it [the narrative] and if the outline won’t come and just won’t naturally snap into place of a story with a beginning, middle and end, then you know. Or if like everyone in the book just starts repeating themselves, that’s kind of a sign too. If you ask yourself on the most basic level “what is this book about?” and you don’t have an answer for it, then that’s also another sign that maybe you are not ready to write this yet and maybe this isn’t the thing.
What is the process like for your writing? Is it very regimented or spontaneous, you just write and the words come out or is it more like you have to write 400 words a day no matter how bad it is?
No, I don’t have a quota per day. It is just about time. You find some hours before lunch and some hours after lunch and you just have to be honest and try to enter the deepest attention span you can. You know this means getting the phone out of there [when you’re working] and shutting off the internet and everything and trying to really put your head around as much of the story as you possibly can and that takes a while to think through everything. Sometimes it means going for a walk before starting to write and just going over it all in your head. Yep, just you and your story and that is just how it begins.
Last question! Could you sum up your feelings towards writing in five words?
I LIKE TO DO IT.
Hahaha, love it!
Tiana (17) spoke with Jesse Andrews at the 2018 Sydney Writers’ Festival.
Thank you to Allen and Unwin and Sydney Writers’ Festival for organising.