We are coming to May, which always feels like a melancholy time of year. Spring has started, but it’s a time of graduation, of the school year ending. 

The book I am currently reading, the poet James Merrill’s memoir, A Different Person, perfectly captures this feeling. Merrill was the son of Charles Merrill, a founder of Merrill Lynch. In 1950, at the age of 24, he headed for a tour of Europe, which was an expected undertaking for someone of his age and class. Merrill was gay, and during this trip he was treated by a psychiatrist who was sympathetic to queer identities, which was a revelation to him. For Merrill, who desperately wanted to be a poet, the trip became one of self-invention. “According to Rilke, a young poet can’t have enough solitude.… Being alone was not my strong suit,” he wrote of his younger self. “Like those children who, undetected until it is too late, lose the use of one eye by favoring the other, I functioned blankly, imperfectly, without a confirming viewpoint.” 

Throughout the memoir, Merrill displays the extraordinary gift of double sight: the ability to inhabit the callow motivations of his youth while revealing the insights of his adult mind. Each chapter ends with an italicized interlude where he reinterprets what has just occurred through his present-day understanding. He is able to extend empathy to his ex-lovers and to his father, who he realizes also could not stand to be alone and so did not know himself. Most rare, Merrill extends empathy to his younger, lost self. He understands himself as a product of his class and his unique family configuration, and the memoir becomes a cartography of how a person’s mind breaks free from both but, crucially, does not forget either. The writing here is stellar. Merrill is one of those poets who can write clear, precise, piercing prose. Because I read a lot of first drafts, I have gotten into the bad habit of skipping over sentences—a byproduct of reading prose that has not yet been pushed. This memoir reminds me of the pleasure of paying attention, line by line. Remember those chains that used to hang from the ceiling in the chemistry lab at school, connected to an emergency shower to douse yourself if you ever got splashed with something toxic? This book is like pulling that chain and standing under all that water. 

This past November, I headed to the National Book Award gala, after another day of bad news. I cannot even recall what calamity had just occurred; there are so many of them now. It was hard to spend an evening listening to writers insist on the power of books while the world was on fire. But the speaker that night was George Saunders. Saunders is a writer who has always written about the untenable surreality of modern life. His story collections, like CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Tenth of December, and his novels, like Lincoln in the Bardo and this year’s Vigil, play with the realms of life and death, of meaning and sacrifice. In his speech, he talked about the science and mysticism of changing one’s mind, the miracle of free thought. It was a challenge to the sickly comfort of imagining apocalypses every day. So I knew I wanted to interview him for this newsletter.

Kaitlyn Greenidge: What is something that you feel absolutely has to happen in a novel to make it work? In a short story?

George Saunders: Part of me wants to say that there is nothing that has to happen, since these forms are always reinventing themselves in order to evade rules and regulations. But functionally, I suppose, a story or novel has to somehow compel: compel the reader to keep going. It doesn’t have to do this in a facile or submissive way. But something in it has to engage the reader enough for the reader to be engaged in it. Other than that, the sky’s the limit.

KG: What is something that you feel cannot happen in a novel because it will fall apart? Or a short story?

GS: I don’t think there’s anything like that, other than a long patch where the writer forgets that the reader is over there on the other side, craving relationships—and truth, and wit, all of that. In other words, it’s not great when the writer goes on autopilot in any way. It’s kind of like if you were on a date and the other person was suddenly on their phone and stayed there. That would cause the date to “fall apart.” Other sorts of issues can be tolerated, and in fact many great works function that way. The reader resists, pulls away … and is somehow drawn back in. The writer has taken into account that resistance and built it into the story.

KG: Where does the question of faith and belief enter into how you write a character or how you understand a character?

GS: The only article of faith I try to abide by when writing is that looking deeper yields more complexity and, therefore, more interest from the reader. If I keep asking the character, “Anything else I should know?” I find that they always have something to say. It’s in the spirit of that line “The time to give up on a person is never.”

KG: There is a real panic happening at the moment around novels and fiction writing: that readers are disappearing, that the novel is obsolete. This is a really old argument, though. People have panicked about novels for decades. Do you think this time the panic is justified? Or is this something that you think of as not your concern as a writer?

GS: Well, I think there’s a cause for concern, as detailed in a new book by James Marriott, The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society.

But as a writer, my goal is to keep my level of literacy high and get that into my work, trusting that there are still plenty of us out there who value complexity and difficulty in prose. And that’s because we recognize that prose is a wonderful—I’d argue the best—repository for wit and profitable ambiguity and complex thinking.

KG: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about humor in fiction, mostly because most novels I see being described as funny are rarely actually funny; they more sort of gesture toward humor. Your work is not like that at all. It’s actually genuinely funny. I am wondering how you think of humor in what you do, what rhythms you pay attention to, what makes something sing.

GS: Thank you so much. That means a lot to me. That is maybe the most coveted compliment, in my view, because if a person is being funny, they are doing everything: speaking truth, being respectful of the reader, looking at the world with a sense of wonder. 

While writing, I try not to think, you know, “Be funny” or “Be funny now.” It feels more like I am trying to get myself into a happy mood, to see things in a certain wry, loving flavor. And the way in for me is revision. That is, if I’m not feeling that way, I just work on making the sentences better. And then suddenly a sentence will get revised into being slightly more efficient and compressed, which means that the reality of the story has just shifted. The story has blurted out, in the form of that new sentence, something more truthful, which is often … funny. And then that sentence raises the bar for the other sentences around it. Like, if someone suddenly said something truly witty at a party, the other guests might get called to attention. Something like that.

To me, humor is a subcategory of wit, and wit means being fully in that fictive moment right there with the reader. Feeling where the reader is, we’re able to anticipate—or intuit, really—what next thing she might find charming.

KG: Has there ever been a time in your writing when you have written a character who you could not, at first, feel empathy for? Who you felt contempt for? And how did you write around it or change it? Is this something you consider as you are working?

GS: I think this is almost always the case, yes. The first draft tends to be me making a cartoon and heaping scorn on that person. And then I read it the next day and go, “Ugh, that’s cheap.” Then, as mentioned before, I try to look a little deeper, which is done by rewriting the sentences that caused me to say, “Ugh, that’s cheap.” Which, in turn, is done by seeking more detail, more specificity, by way of questions like “How so?” or “Tell me more, please.” So, “Jim was an asshole” might become “Jim was behaving badly. He’d just snapped at his mother. He couldn’t believe Rebecca had called him an insensitive boyfriend. That really bothered him. He adored Rebecca.” Well, not the best example, but that’s the idea: taking a broad statement and making it more complex by revising it—and then, you know … that’s character.

KG: I wanted to talk a bit about endings. What do you think the ending of a piece of fiction is for? What do you think makes a good ending? And what are the elements of an ending that just doesn’t work?

GS: This might sound a little facile, but it’s true: Ending is stopping without sucking. Which is another way of saying we want the ending to somehow answer, or be in relation with, the questions we’ve asked along the way. We’re trying to see if we’ve got every last drop of the energy out of the thing. Practically speaking, I just spend a lot of time writing past the current ending and/or trying to end it sooner than I currently am. One of my—casual, loosely held!—mantras is “Always be escalating.” So that needs to hold true even into the last lines.

In other words: I don’t know; endings are hard. And what makes any given writer distinctive is how she’s figured out this question of “What do my endings look like?”

KG: I’m so fascinated by how quickly social media invents and discards language—the dizzying speed to come up with new terms that are just as quickly co-opted by commerce and then abandoned by their originators. “Looksmaxxing” is probably the most recent example. Do you think about the language of the internet when you are writing fiction? How do you avoid or disrupt the cadence of that? Is it something you attempt to work against or work with?

GS: I basically just try to avoid any urge to be current, honestly. If something sticks around awhile, I might consider using it. But to use a new word just because it’s new—not so much. Or, at least, I try to be aware that a character, by using a hip new word, is putting a time stamp on himself. (He is “autochronostamping.” Take that, Internet.) 

KG: What does writing and communicating with people via Substack do for your own writing practice? Or do you think of the two as completely separate?

GS: It helps me understand who my audience is—how generous, how curious, how bright—and that gives me a little lift when I go to try and write for them. It also informs me about certain preferences and aversions they might have, which I can choose to embrace, ignore, or flout when I write. 

In each edition of this newsletter, we ask writers to share a space where they wrote something beautiful. It can be their regular writing spot or an unexpected place of inspiration. This week’s writer is Saba Sams. Sams is the author of the short story collection Send Nudes. Her debut novel, Gunk, is about a found family of bar workers in Brighton, England. 

Saba Sams: “I grew up in the small seaside city of Brighton, in the south of England. It’s a place that changes personality in line with the seasons. In the summer, the beach becomes a swarm of tourists blasting their Bluetooth speakers, while in the winter the wind whistles down empty alleyways. Brighton is a character in itself, made of two extremes, and it was so fun to set my novel there.”