This Writing Life

This Writing Life

By James KiddArtsBooksFiction
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This Writing Life episodes

  • Episode 28 - Hanya Yanagihara: A Little Life - Part 2

    In the second part of our lunch-time chat with Hanya Yanagihara for the amazing A Little Life, we began by discussing how her second book was a reaction to her debut, the also amazing The People in the Trees.----more----

    • ‘I just wanted to do something that felt a little dangerous, in a sense. I wanted to do something that felt inescapable.’
  • ‘I wanted to try to create that quality of not being able to deny Jude’s life, because so much of Jude’s life is people denying him in one way or the other.’
  • the exaggerated, overly intense feeling of the novel
  • ‘I wanted the reader to feel drugged’
  • her frustration with emotionally stingy novels that hold you at arm’s length
  • the models, from visual art, that inspired A Little Life
  • on technology the commodification of friendship
  • jealousy, envy and the thrill of messy friendship
  • Jude and the problems of being a friend
  • talking, story-telling and the problem of personal pain
  • was writing A Little Life therapeutic for Yanagihara herself?
  • ‘It is a personal book, not so much based on content as based on ways of coming to terms with how you think about your own history’
  • turning 40: what next?
  • responses to A Little Life
  • A Little Life as a New York novel
  • Yanagihara and the laziness of brand names
  • models for Jude
  • ‘This book is a lot about absences’: family and surviving tragedy
  • is A Little Life an angry book?
  • on the institutions that failed Jude
  • Yanagihara and the allure of male relationships
  • ‘I find men very interesting because there are a lot of things as men you are never allowed to discuss, never allowed to feel and never allowed to put voice to.’

    • Part three will follow next week.

    31 min
  • Episode 27 - Hanya Yanagihara: A Little Life - Part 1

    For the second Writing Life Podcast conversation with Hanya Yanagihara, we moved from tea at a posh London hotel to lunch at a posh(ish) London restaurant. This was not the only difference. Yanagihara had herself moved: jobs, from Conde Nast to the New York Times; and novels from her debut The People in the Trees to A Little Life, which has recently been long-listed for the Man Booker prize.

    ----more----
    The conversation took place about a month before publication in the UK, but shortly after it was released in America to ecstatic reviews. I had recently been in New York and seen the novel everywhere. Well, mainly in bookstores, but on prominent display.

    We begin - Hanya in mid-breadmunch - with her hero, Jude: 'I just wanted to write a character who never got better,' she tells me. From there, we shift focus to examine:

    • how A Little Life challenges current American beliefs in character development
  • on suffering and trauma
  • 'I do think there is a point where some people are too damaged to be alive'
  • Yanagihara's scepticism about therapy
  • Jude as lovable and frustrating
  • Jude vs The American Dream
  • on the rituals of self-harm and cutting
  • emotional overdrive: the challenge of reading A Little Life
  • 'It’s an exaggerated book. There is nothing subtle about the book. I really push the conventions of a literary novel, and the restraint of the contemporary literary novel.'
  • damage and the challenge of personhood
  • 'I'm sorry' and challenges of friendship
  • was writing a second novel easier than her debut
  • writing process and research
  • talking to people about careers
  • how personal is A Little Life?
  • (as I begin to serve carrots), how does friendship change over the decades?
  • love, marriage, relationships and friends
  • 'I am personally not interested in getting married'

    • Part 2 will follow in the nextfew days.

    21 min
  • Episode 26 - Anna Smaill: Part 2
    In part two of This Writing Life's podcast with Anna Smaill, we negotiate photographers, noises in RIBA and publicists to discuss her soon-to-be Man Booker longlisted debut novel, The Chimes.

    ----more----

    We began by talking about the taunting idea of the 'genius' and the tragedy of falling short. After mocking This Writing Life's mobile phone, Smaill then moved on to:

    • the glories and downsides of genius

  • 'I should probably say, I never actually thought I was a genius'
  • did The Chimes address Smaill's own musical background?
  • from Young Adult to something else: the writing process of The Chimes
  • hearing the voice of her hero, Simon
  • what Simon and Smaill have in common
  • what was the challenge of writing fiction
  • 'That sense of mystery animated it throughout'
  • the (quasi-pseudo ) inspiration for 'Onestory', music as a form of social control
  • Vladimir Gavreau, Infrasound and sonic weaponary
  • music and control in Tokyo
  • chaos, order and the problems of being an individual

  • leaving home and Smaill's return to New Zealand
  • New Zealand and the Man Booker: Hulme and Catton
  • Eleanor Catton and controversy
  • the state of the arts in New Zealand
  • can a novel set in New Zealand break out internationally
  • living with a novelist - Smaill on her husband, the writer Carl Shuker
  • the future

    • Read Anna Smaill on her Man Booker nomination: here.

    31 min
  • Episode 25 - Anna Smaill Part 1
    Anna Smaill is a New Zealand poet, academic and now Man Booker longlisted novelist. ----more----Her striking debut The Chimes has something of all parts of her career so far. There is music (Smaill trained as a violinist), lyricism (in evoking a world in which words have been replaced by melody), intelligence (in exploring grand narratives about connection, language, fundamentalism, technology, religion) and narrative drive: The Chimes is a love story and a dystopian mystery.

    We met just before publication at RIBA. After some chatter about jet lag, we moved on to:
    • memories of London, where Smaill began The Chimes, before returning home to New Zealand
  • writing about London as an imaginative place
  • the soundtracks of London and Tokyo
  • German techno and Tokyo dancing vs Suede
  • Smaill pitches The Chimes to Stephen Spielberg (kind of)
  • the problems and danger of language in The Chimes
  • memory, communication and extremism
  • does The Chimes critique contemporary society?
  • the pros and cons of technology
  • the joy of reading
  • linear narrative vs fractured memory
  • Smaill's career anxieties
  • The Chimes returning Smail to the joys of childhood reading
  • from Phd thesis to novel writing
  • Smaill's musical past - playing the violin
  • crisis and giving up music
  • music and identity
  • music, emotion and the physical

    • I talk to Anna Smaill about her Man Booker longlist in The Independent: here.

    33 min
  • Episode 24 - Hanya Yanagihara: The People in Trees - Part 3
    In the final part of my Yanagihara trilogy from 2014, we continue to discuss her astonishing, unnerving debut The People in the Trees. ----more----Yanagihara begins by answering my question about whether her fiction sets out to astonish or unnerve. She continues by addressing at least some of the following:

    • asking questions in art that she can't answer in life
  • her (former) day job at Conde Nast Traveler
  • about the advantages of a work-writing balance
  • about the research needed to write The People in the Trees
  • science and animal research
  • Yanagihara's father and the evolution of science
  • immigration and American science
  • reactions from family and colleagues to The People in Trees
  • 'I dont love the book either...'
  • a preview of her next book, A Little Life
    • The interview ends with me gushing and the sounds of a hotel preparing for lunch. A new four part podcast about A Little Life will be released later this month.

    15 min
  • Episode 23 - Hanya Yanagihara: The People in Trees - Part 2
    In the second part of my nicely noisy conversation with Hanya Yanagihara about her debut novel The People in the Trees, we began by discussing ----more----the fictional tribe of Ivu'ivu who may have discovered the secret to extending the natural  human life span. 
    This leads to the following topics: 
    • Western treatment of the elderly
  • 'I would rather be lead off into the jungle than sit in some horrible home for decades'
  • sexual rituals and moral relativism
  • judging Norton Perina 
  • 'People do use being in a naive land, where they're the powerful one, as an excuse for all sorts of bad behaviour that they wouldn't do in their own society
  • the morality of sexual tourism
  • travel writing and the ethics of travel
  • 'I can't think of anything that are moral absolutes in every society'
  • children, sexuality and the problems of power
  • sex and imperialism
  • masculinity, editing and narrative in The People in the Trees
  • the neatness of theories

    • 21 min
  • Episode 22- Hanya Yanagihara: The People in Trees - Part 1
    Hawaiian-born Hanya Yanagihara has been feted across the world, and longlisted for 2015's Man Booker Prize, for her amazing A Little Life. A Writing Life podcast is on the way.----more----
    Last year Writing Life met Hanya for equally unsettling and unputdownable debut, The People in the Trees, the story of an anthropologist who travels to a tiny Micronesian island in the search for extended life and ends up accused of child abuse. 
    In the first part of this three part interview, we met at a noisy Berners Street hotel. Hanya began by wondering whether she feels like a novelist. Then:
    • the importance of her work for Conde Nast in freeing her creatively
  • 'My only concern with the books is the world I create be as logical and complete as possible'
  • the conservative nature of modern publishing
  • laziness and taking 20 years to write a novel
  • the strain of writing as an old man
  • where did the idea for the novel come from?
  • the real-life story of the novel's inspiration, Daniel Carleton Gajdusek
  • researching Gajdusek, science and controversy
  • Hawaii, Barack Obama and Yanagihara's cultural background
  • 'I am the first generation of my family not to work in the fields'
  • colonisation in Hawaii and Yanagihara's fiction 
  • The Tempest as inspiration for The People in the Trees
  • travel, Empire, science and transformation
  • love, loneliness, science and Yanagihara's central character, Norton Perina
  • genius and the 'Great Man'
  • Yanagihara's scientist father
  • moral questions: does the end always justify the means in scientific research
  • the vexed question of extended life 
  • 'Nobody wants you to be old anymore'
    • Read my review in the Independent of The People in the Trees here.
    32 min
  • Episode 21 - Hanya Yanagihara 2014 on Book Groups
    A short taster for my first interview with Hanya Yanagihara from 2014 about her extraordinary debut novel, The People in Trees. 
    A Writing Life podcast with Hanya about her differently extraordinary Man Booker longlisted A Little Life will be out last this month. 
    For now, enjoy Yanagihara on encountering an Upper East Side book group.
    2 min
  • Episode 20 - Tom Drury Part 3
    In the third part of my conversation with Tom Drury, we rewind to his days studying creative writing with Robert Coover, 'a great teacher'.
    ----more---- After a discussion about realism and seriousness, Drury moves on to: 
    • his early short stories
  • his attempt to write different novels
  • 'The kind of sentences you want to make, it is not a static thing'
  • David Hockney and Drury's interest in art 
  • the visual nature of Drury's prose
  • time and breaking the fourth wall
  • why Drury continues to write about Grouse County
  • 'They are my repertory company'
  • why he chooses not to write about Grouse County
  • Drury's work in progress
  • inspiration from folk tales, magic and Faust
  • 'I have never written about Mephistopholes'
  • the role of religion in Drury's life and work
  • on death, 'the unknowable thing'
  • Drury's 'mid-western paranormal noir'
  • his own return to Iowa and the possible affect on his work
  • on interviews and readings
    • For my interview with Tom in the Sunday Independent, click: here.
    17 min

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