WEBVTT 00:00:06.018 --> 00:00:12.500 I think that if the reader can know the true story and the background, that it changes the reading 00:00:12.500 --> 00:00:18.310 and I think it changes the reading for the better because I think that there's something that happens 00:00:18.310 --> 00:00:24.989 in writing there's an actual actor transformation that occurs on the page, in the writing. 00:00:24.989 --> 00:00:31.226 When I was writing about my father's suicide I worked on the book for 10 years and I didn't know 00:00:31.226 --> 00:00:36.143 how to write about it, and I wrote too literally at first. I wrote about the day we found out he died 00:00:36.143 --> 00:00:38.821 and so we were all crying and it's impossible to read. 00:00:38.821 --> 00:00:44.685 But then I was writing the short novel that's in the middle of the book 00:00:44.685 --> 00:00:50.016 and half-way through there is an enormous surprise where everything changes and I didn't see that 00:00:50.016 --> 00:00:55.066 moment coming until I was half-way through writing the sentence and so the next day I went back and I 00:00:55.066 --> 00:01:00.830 planned to cut that and continue with my plan, but I reread all the pages leading up to that moment 00:01:00.830 --> 00:01:07.268 and it was like seeing them for the first time, even though I wrote them, I saw all this pattern in them 00:01:07.268 --> 00:01:10.928 for the first time, that was leading to that moment that I hadn't seen 00:01:10.928 --> 00:01:17.385 and that changed everything for what I thought about writing, and, and the best pages in the book 00:01:17.385 --> 00:01:22.304 are right after that where it's crazy and I have no plan. And so my feeling about telling an 00:01:22.304 --> 00:01:28.064 audience about the background of the story is that there is nothing to hide, it's, it's, I want an 00:01:28.064 --> 00:01:34.451 audience to know that my father did commit suicide when I was 13, I want them to know that he asked 00:01:34.451 --> 00:01:41.067 me to come and spend a year back in Alaska with him and I said no, and soon after is when he killed himself. 00:01:41.067 --> 00:01:46.764 Because when I was writing this tale of a boy and his father going homesteading for a year, that was a 00:01:46.764 --> 00:01:51.664 second chance to say yes to my father, to spend that year with him, and I didn't understand that when I 00:01:51.664 --> 00:01:57.933 was writing, it never occurred to me when I was writing, that I was getting a second chance to go spend that year with him. 00:01:57.933 --> 00:02:01.429 And so there's something powerful I think that happens in fiction, at an 00:02:01.429 --> 00:02:06.066 unconscious level, where's there's all this pattern, and I think that you can only really see that if you 00:02:06.066 --> 00:02:12.177 know what the true story is in the background, and so I'm always happy to say exactly what's true 00:02:12.177 --> 00:02:18.344 and not true in the books, because I'm very interested in what the fiction has made out of those past events. 00:02:18.344 --> 00:02:23.265 I think there is something in our unconscious that wants to take the very ugly events and wants to turn 00:02:23.265 --> 00:02:27.760 them into something beautiful, wants to reshape them, wants to have a kind of redemption. 00:02:27.760 --> 00:02:33.382 I thought that I would, that this book would be how I'd get closer to his despair and I would finally 00:02:33.382 --> 00:02:37.428 understand him, and I would understand the final moments, and that was what I was trying to do, 00:02:37.428 --> 00:02:40.929 because I felt I had been cowardly in all of my other short stories about him, 00:02:40.929 --> 00:02:44.683 that they were pretty but that they were cowardly, they didn't get close to that despair, 00:02:44.683 --> 00:02:49.334 so I thought this would be a novel that by the end would follow right into his final moments, into the 00:02:49.334 --> 00:02:53.296 point where he kills himself, and then I would understand it better when I got there. 00:02:53.296 --> 00:02:57.417 But halfway through the boy kills himself, he, the father hands him the gun because the father is 00:02:57.432 --> 00:03:02.623 suicidal, the boy looks down at it, and I realised right then he's just going to put it up to his head and fire, 00:03:02.623 --> 00:03:07.175 and there's no thought whatsoever, and it was only years afterward that I could try to understand 00:03:07.175 --> 00:03:13.431 that moment and what, what happened, you know, and, and I could see partly it was revenge, 00:03:13.431 --> 00:03:17.846 that partly it was a psychological revenge, that all these years I've had to carry around my father's 00:03:17.846 --> 00:03:24.710 suicide, so in the book the boy kills himself and the father has to literally carry the boy's body all 00:03:24.710 --> 00:03:30.499 around, from one island to the next island, so I made him carry my body around for a while, and 00:03:30.499 --> 00:03:37.264 I of course was completely unaware of that but it took a few years later to understand that, that partly that was revenge. 00:03:37.264 --> 00:03:43.592 In the 2 books, in 'Legend of a suicide' the primary relationship was a father and son and the boy is the main character really. 00:03:43.592 --> 00:03:47.881 In the next one 'Caribou island' it's a marriage and Irene is the main character. 00:03:47.881 --> 00:03:54.224 But the antagonists, the boy's father and Gary, Irene's husband, you're right are very similar 00:03:54.224 --> 00:04:00.597 in the kind of pressure that they put on Irene and the boy, and that acts out in different ways in the books. 00:04:00.597 --> 00:04:06.623 But they both have a sense that if they go back into wilderness and they go back into nature 00:04:06.623 --> 00:04:11.826 that they'll find some better self, and that they'll find a way, for the boy's father he believes he'll be able 00:04:11.826 --> 00:04:16.678 to run away from his problems, that his despair will vanish, he'll find a way out of that despair and 00:04:16.678 --> 00:04:21.703 his despair with women in particular, that his second marriage that he's broken up through infidelity 00:04:21.703 --> 00:04:23.762 like the first and that he wants back. 00:04:23.762 --> 00:04:30.923 And Gary has a little bit different dream which is that he's never actually, he's always felt alone and so 00:04:30.923 --> 00:04:38.749 he married and had kids but he actually wanted to be alone also, and he believes that this cabin is, will be 00:04:38.749 --> 00:04:44.180 the better shape of himself, it will be the outward shape of a man, and that he'll connect outwards, 00:04:44.180 --> 00:04:48.674 sort of aniously into nature. This is a dream that comes from the British romantic poets, through the 00:04:48.674 --> 00:04:55.220 American transcendentalists, a dream that our imagination with a capital i connects to nature with a capital n. 00:04:55.220 --> 00:05:00.348 That they are actually the same faculty and that we'll find our innocence, our child self, when we go back. 00:05:00.348 --> 00:05:05.018 I don't actually believe this, I think that when we go into nature we just find a mirror, 00:05:05.018 --> 00:05:09.763 and it's a mirror that amplifies, so if what's happening inside of us is terrifying what we find in 00:05:09.763 --> 00:05:12.820 nature is even more terrifying, it's amplified back. 00:05:12.820 --> 00:05:18.073 So I don't have the dream anymore, I can't believe it, but the funny thing is my life is still arranged 00:05:18.073 --> 00:05:22.929 so that I'm constantly going for the dream. I live in New Zealand on a ridge overlooking the ocean and 00:05:22.929 --> 00:05:29.013 hills, and I go hiking and go windsurfing, and I spend part of the rest of the year on a boat in Turkey, 00:05:29.013 --> 00:05:34.675 along the coast, in beautiful little coves, and so I'm constantly seeking out a kind of solace and comfort 00:05:34.675 --> 00:05:40.932 in nature, and a lot of it, a lot of time spent by myself there, and yet I don't believe the dream at all. 00:05:40.932 --> 00:05:46.679 I had a dream for a long time that I'd be some sort of mountain man, that I would head off into the hills, 00:05:46.679 --> 00:05:52.680 and I would live out in a cavern and all that, and I loved backpacking as such, but what I realised 00:05:52.680 --> 00:05:58.456 after a while was that I can't really be alone for more than 2 or 3 days, and then I just start to feel 00:05:58.456 --> 00:06:07.841 so lonely, and I need other people, and I'm just not cut out for it, I can't really be the kind of loner out in nature. 00:06:07.841 --> 00:06:12.600 I did actually build a boat to sail non-stop solo around the world, which is going to be 5 months 00:06:12.600 --> 00:06:17.760 alone, and I was committed to it, and I had all the food on board and everything, but the crossbeams 00:06:17.760 --> 00:06:21.538 weren't strong enough between the halls, and so I had to turn back. 00:06:21.538 --> 00:06:25.702 So I had planned to set out but I have to admit that although I felt some excitement about it, 00:06:25.702 --> 00:06:29.464 and I love sailing, what I felt mostly was despair and dread. 00:06:29.464 --> 00:06:35.222 The idea of being alone for that long actually was something that felt terribly wrong. 00:06:35.222 --> 00:06:41.089 My writing is very unconscious and my life has been led very unconsciously too, and I've had 00:06:41.089 --> 00:06:46.842 repetitive disasters, I have an ability to repeat the same mistake 2 or 3 times, and partly it's 00:06:46.842 --> 00:06:50.256 because of not having any idea why I'm really doing what I'm doing. 00:06:50.256 --> 00:06:56.223 I went to sea for years as a captain when I couldn't get 'Legend of a suicide' published, I couldn't get published for 12 years, 00:06:56.223 --> 00:07:00.991 and so I went to sea and became a captain on sail boats, and I was repeating my fathers life, 00:07:00.991 --> 00:07:06.421 he was a dentist who didn't like being a dentist, so he went to sea, he became a commercial fisherman in Alsaka, 00:07:06.421 --> 00:07:10.460 and he loved it, but it was also disastrous for him, it didn't work out in the end. 00:07:10.460 --> 00:07:14.924 And so when I went to sea I was repeating his life, but I wasn't really aware of that when I 00:07:14.924 --> 00:07:20.343 was doing it, so I've sort of lived the method you know, I've gone out there unconsciously and 00:07:20.343 --> 00:07:25.864 experienced the disasters and train wrecks, just like my characters do in the novels. 00:07:25.864 --> 00:07:30.006 What I like about writing is it feels like a religious practice to me, where it's every morning, 00:07:30.006 --> 00:07:35.845 just a couple of hours, and it's a time of meditation in a way, of reading through the 20 or 30 pages 00:07:35.845 --> 00:07:38.703 up to the point where I'm going to add a new page. 00:07:38.703 --> 00:07:46.573 Then for the next hour it just comes in kind of brief, like quick flashes that are my page or two for that day, 00:07:46.573 --> 00:07:52.842 and there's a kind of immersion in that, and a kind of unconsciousness, and although I'm an atheist and 00:07:52.842 --> 00:07:59.626 I don't have any religious beliefs, I feel like writing satisfies that desire that we have, 00:07:59.626 --> 00:08:03.848 I think we probably all have, some need or desire for something like religion. 00:08:03.848 --> 00:08:08.470 So it's been tremendously satisfying in that way. 00:08:08.470 --> 00:08:12.303 I'm not thinking about what the shape of the sentences will be when I'm actually writing them, 00:08:12.303 --> 00:08:17.005 they just come very quickly, and I type as fast as I can think, so it's very fast, and the books 00:08:17.005 --> 00:08:21.675 are published the way that they came out in the first draft, so I don't think about it then, 00:08:21.675 --> 00:08:27.302 but I actually study language every day, I've been translating Beowolf every day from old English, 00:08:27.302 --> 00:08:34.843 seeing that part of our language, the old part from a thousand years ago before it was combined with French, 00:08:34.843 --> 00:08:45.822 and, so I'm thinking about meter and syntax in my teaching also, I teach from lingusitics in the history 00:08:45.822 --> 00:08:51.258 of the English language, when I'm teaching style in fiction, so I think about it a lot 00:08:51.258 --> 00:08:56.567 but when I'm actually writing I don't think about it, but to me it's very rythmic, I mean the whole, the text 00:08:56.567 --> 00:09:04.010 is put together through vision of landscape and through a rythym in the prose, 00:09:04.010 --> 00:09:08.702 and that's what I'm looking for, and that's why I read through the previous 20 pages before I start to write 00:09:08.702 --> 00:09:10.861 is so that I'll feel that rhythm to it. 00:09:10.861 --> 00:09:16.750 Writing is really therapeutic, it has to be more than therapy, writing and therapy are both about truth, 00:09:16.750 --> 00:09:22.176 but writing is also about the beautiful, it also has an aesthetic goal that therapy doesn't have. 00:09:22.176 --> 00:09:26.709 And writing that doesn't have that aesthetic goal is just crap, it's just therapy, and, 00:09:26.709 --> 00:09:32.703 not to say therapy isn't valuable, but it doesn't have that artistic or aesthetic aim. 00:09:32.703 --> 00:09:38.786 So one thing I was surprised by in spending all these years thinking about my father and writing about him 00:09:38.786 --> 00:09:44.257 is to realise that I don't really understand the final moments of his suicide any better than I ever did 00:09:44.257 --> 00:09:48.583 right from the beginning. I understand all the patterns in his life and what led to suicide 00:09:48.583 --> 00:09:55.340 becoming possible, what could have put him to that final moment, but then I can never make it inevitable, 00:09:55.340 --> 00:09:59.003 I can never say "Oh, this is why he had to do it". 00:09:59.003 --> 00:10:02.684 He always could have at the last moment, he always could have decided not to, 00:10:02.684 --> 00:10:05.382 and I can never erase that, I can never get rid of that. 00:10:05.382 --> 00:10:09.587 I also wrote a book about a school shooting, a mass murderer, I profiled him, 00:10:09.587 --> 00:10:14.753 and I had access to all of his mental health history, all of his emails, everything, 1500 pages of files, 00:10:14.753 --> 00:10:21.980 and even with all that information I could not get to the point where I could make his shooting and suicide inevitable either. 00:10:21.980 --> 00:10:26.003 I could see where it was possible, there are half a dozen narratives leading to that moment, 00:10:26.003 --> 00:10:31.007 but I could not get it to where he had to do it. He could have not done it at the end. 00:10:31.007 --> 00:10:35.377 And that's interesting to me, that in fiction there's a kind of open endedness, 00:10:35.377 --> 00:10:41.344 we can't ever actually make it to where our character had to do the final act that they do. 00:10:41.344 --> 00:10:46.642 We can only get close to where it becomes plausible, where we can see that it makes sense, 00:10:46.642 --> 00:10:47.754 that it could have gone that way.