October 12, 2022 • 37 mins
Minnie questions Pulitzer Prize winning author Anthony Doerr. Anthony shares the unexpected gift that came from early challenges he and his wife had while trying to grow their family, his advice for writers on creating something that sticks, and why efficiency is overrated.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
We have a sun named Henry as well, also enjoys
the hot pocket now and then I tried to make them.
I tried to make them because I was like, Okay,
if you're gonna like a hot pocket, it's not that
far off like a CalCon so that's been feeding Italians
from time immemorial, So perhaps we should just have a
girl making a hot bookt And Henry was like, what
is the Italian word for kelson and men again? And
I was like sock And he was like, yeah, mom,
(00:23):
you made a sock to taste like a sock. Nice. Hello,
I'm Mini driver. Welcome to Many Questions Season two. I've
always loved Cruce's question. It was originally a nineteenth century
Harlag game where players would ask each other thirty five
questions aimed at revealing the other player's true nature. It's
(00:47):
just the scientific method really. In asking different people the
same set of questions, you can make observations about which
truths appeared to be universal. I love this discipline, and
it made me wonder, what if these questions were just
the jumping off point, what greater depths would be revealed
if I ask these questions as conversation starters with thought
(01:08):
leaders and trailblazers across all these different disciplines. So I
adapted prus questionnaire and I wrote my own seven questions
that I personally think a pertinent to a person's story.
They are when and where were you happiest? What is
the quality you like least about yourself? What relationship, real
or fictionalized, defines love for you? What question would you
(01:28):
most like answered, What person, place, or experience has shaped
you the most? What would be your last meal? And
can you tell me something in your life that's grown
out of a personal disaster. And I've gathered a group
of really remarkable people, ones that I am honored and
humbled to have had the chance to engage with. You
(01:49):
may not hear their answers to all seven of these questions.
We've whittled it down to which questions felt closest to
their experience, or the most surprising, or created the most
fertile ground to connect. My guest today is the author
Anthony Door, whose book All the Light We Cannot See
One the Pulitzer Prize. This, it turns out, is not
(02:11):
surprising at all if you have ever read a single
word he has written. His more recent novel claud Cuckoo
Land is genuinely one of my favorite books ever, and
the level of lyricism present in his writing is there
when he speaks to I wrote down so many things
he said all the way through the interview, you know,
as though the whole thing wasn't being recorded and I
(02:34):
had to take notes. I hope you enjoyed this conversation
as much as I did. I'm very interested. Do you
mean to start up with since my mother died? But
since my mother died, I think about the things that
I didn't realize until after she'd gone, that went into
the basic architecture, the stuff that was impassing, rather than
the big moments. And it was weird. It was like
(02:56):
it was like having the foundation of something revealed when
I'd really just been looking at the building the whole time,
this beautiful building, because she was this amazing person. It's
been like this weird posthumous gift to feel all these
other things. So now when I do something and my
son rolls his eyes and like things that I'm super
embarrassing and that we've spent five hours making a sock,
(03:17):
I do go. Now you know what he's going to
remember this because we listened to New Order while we
made this cow zone and we chatted about some something
that's so interesting, because that's kind of the lesson for
like beginning writers want to write about the big architecture,
you know, they want to write about love for what
it feels to be confused. But the only way to
deliver that to another person is through detail, through like
(03:39):
these moment by moment details of life. That's how memories
get built, you know, is New Order and making a
cow zone exactly. And you know what, I had this
teacher who I dedicated my book to my English teachers.
My three teachers were so huge in my life as
a whole, but Alistair one of them. On a Monday morning,
a piece of a four paper would be posted on
(03:59):
the notice board in my school from the age of
ten onwards, and there would be a list in his
really beautiful, strange italic handwriting, and it would be like
drinking a cup of tea, tying my shoelaces, getting out
of bed, and you had to write two sides of
a four describing this extraordinarily mundane thing. And he was like,
(04:23):
this is just like exercise. He was like, this is
the same as you're running around playing fields, playing hockey, basketball,
whatever it is. So many years later, when I was
still working my way through the anthology of what he
told me to read in my Life, he said it
was about getting you to pay attention to not just
having to do this thing. The thing was not the thing,
but to your life, to all those things that it
(04:43):
would trigger that whenever you noticed something, it would trigger
the memory of your interest in the fact that you've
had that muscle built in from an early age to
appreciate it and to be able to kind of develop
ideas from it. Yeah, detail is how you communicate with people.
If you had said I had this teacher our stair
he was meaningful to me, that would kind of bounce
off me. But if you describe his handwriting and you
(05:05):
describe this list on his door and the details of
what he was asking you to do, described telling your shoelaces,
it means something to me. That's how you communicate a motion.
It's ironically it's like you're reaching for the stars. But
the way to do it is like the tiny little
pieces of broken glass on the ground, and that we
keep retrieving memory, Like I've just moved back to the
town that I'm from. I don't like how it feels
(05:27):
because I don't feel like I can make new memories here.
I'm so in the trough of what went before and
I'm fascinated by At the same time, it's feeling incredibly sad.
It feels palpable. I keep asking everybody, how do you
create new memories in a totally familiar environment. That's super interesting.
It makes me think about Germans and like the seventies
(05:48):
trying to deal with like the weight of the memory
of all the stuff that had happened, and you're just
trying to listen to music and be eighteen years old,
and there's always this impulse to renew. I mean, I
think that's what's so beautifu. Those grass always ends up
growing over the battlefields and it's so important to remember
that blood was spilled there, but at the same time
allow space for young people to move around. So our
(06:10):
twin boys just went off to college. Oh wow, Yeah,
I worry so much about you know, this world, Like
I keep saying, like a little world's warming up, oh,
and like it's gonna get worse. You know, he doesn't
need that, he needs to be able to go make
new memories and discover the world anew and go to
a party as if it was like the first time
anybody ever went to a party? Did you go to
(06:31):
any good parties? And what you're busy going? Can you
believe the ice caps? Not? What about that Kappa Kappa
gamma that's totally it? Yeah, And then his mom's like,
ask him about COVID. She's like the cherry on top,
that's really funny. Well, God, I'd better get on because
I could really just ask you about a thousand questions
(06:54):
that have nothing to do with these seven questions, but
I will glean all the answers that I would like
to ask you. If these having questions allow a ski,
will you tell me where and when you were happiest?
Of course I thought about it. I'm gonna choose a
general when, but a specific where I love to ski.
(07:17):
I live in Idaho, in the mountains in the United States,
one of the last places middle class families can still ski,
and you know afford it. We raised our boy skiing
on this mountain called Brundage Mountain, about two hours north
of here, where you know, they just put a keg
of beer in the snow and like grill Hamburgers and
you could still get a seasons pass for about two bucks.
Oh my god. There's something about joy for me that's
(07:39):
always connected to the ephemeral, and for me, it's fresh
snow is like this great reminder of it, when the
whole world's like made new again by a big dump
of fresh white snow. To be there with my boys,
like moving downhill, there's some joy and speed are linked
in my head too for some reason. But skiing through
fresh snow like your joints filled twenty years younger, because
(08:02):
you can just land without pain and moving and hearing
them like whooping. You can hear like the joy of
other people. And you know what's gonna go away. It's
going to get tracked up, but I'll get too warm.
The moment of freshnow is unpredictable. You just have to
be lucky enough to be there when it comes, and
then to feel yourself dancing. It's really a kind of
dance moving down through that all of your troubles kind
(08:25):
of vanished and evaporate, and you're just present in the
now and you're creating like you're dancing. Is especially if
there are trees you're dancing down through them, so you're
kind of improvising and making music in your head. It's
really sharing that with somebody is so special. Oh my god,
for how you describe that. It is so akin to
the ocean. I mean, I know that snow is visited
(08:48):
upon us and the oceans are always there, But that's feeling.
That is what surfing is like. For me. Everything feels young.
It's only the next day when you feel your knees
and my shoulders in my back and the thing in
that moment, that's it. And the waves aren't always predictive,
but me you're waiting to see what way will common.
Sometimes they aren't there and sometimes they're too big, and
(09:09):
so it's very very similar. Yeah, and you're using gravity
the forces of nature to move you through an environment
something so deeply human. It connects us to our ancestors. Yeah,
it really does. It really does that. Moving through nature,
particularly like the mountains, feel particularly sort of atavistic because
there's it's so much to do with survival, Like I
(09:29):
don't know, the part of my brain is always on
a mountain or high up or on a glacier like
super super super, more turned on than it is anywhere else,
even in the ocean where I know that there are
great white sharks. They swim right by me to go
up to the seal colony and eat their breakfast. It's
not switched on in the same way as it is
in the mountains. It's funny, but there is always a
thread of injury. There's always there's something that makes you
(09:51):
feel a little more alive. I'm not chasing like down
crazy cool wars or something, but a little bit of
threat of danger does help keep you kind of present
and in a mind like mine that's always like what
do I have to do next Friday? Or why can't
I solve this problem in the book I'm working on
right now, to just be present is something I'm chasing,
and it's always so leading, you know. I just want
(10:13):
to grab on that and remember, like, my boys are
going to get bigger, you know, they won't always ski
with me. I'm going to get older, sort of have
those moments when you get to be with them and
to try to appreciate them for what they are before
they're gone. Yes, my son barely looked over I mean
he did, but he did barely look over his shoulder
when he went off on this camping trip. His first
week back at school, and I was like, I carry
(10:36):
him around in my pocket if I could, Like I
would be in the back of his class, being like
this an agent ron great, Like I'd be you want
to sit together at what should we have the lunch?
Like I would be his worst night matter if I
possibly could. But I called his name out, and I
must have There must have been something. You know how
when you hear someone shout and you can tell that
(10:57):
they're in vain, you know it's not a shriek of
Joe way, You really know that they've trodden on the
thumb tack or stuff. That time, I must have said
his name with something in it, because he turned around
so quickly, and I sort of like cheshire cat grinned
at him, and he was like, mom, it's gonna be okay. Yeah,
And then I asked him if I was damaging him. Well, yeah,
(11:20):
we just we have twin boys. Will just drop them
off at college, so it's like the same thing. God,
that must have been really hard. Your whole job is
to get them to live on their own, and yet
you're trying to make your deepest emotional connection of your
life really over and over with them and then you're
expected to kind of say okay and let them go. Yeah,
(11:40):
let them go. I know it's way more evolved than
humans actually are, which makes me feel like we used
to be so evolved, because clearly we used to do it,
We've been doing it for this long, but like it
doesn't hasn't gotten any easier, Like how come everything else
is supposed to evolve and there are these things that
just do not. It never becomes easier, or you can't
intellectual qualify. Maybe we didn't evolve to send our kids
(12:03):
three thousand miles away at the university. There's a lot
of things that are kind of artificial demands that modern
life puts on us that maybe our ancestors didn't have
to deal with. I think, you know, we would be
around our elders a lot more, we would be around
our grown kids. And the way we segment kids in schools,
for example, like all the twelve year old shipped together now,
but the village is like kids of all different ages
(12:23):
would be helping each other. The three year olds would
be attended by the nine year olds, and the fifteen
year olds are helping the nine year olds. Sometimes I wonder,
you know, all this segmentation in the distance. You know,
our kids got into so called good universities, but they're
far from home, and maybe that's a little artificial, I
know for people listening. Clokkleland is honestly one of my
favorite books I ever read, and the part that I
(12:45):
cried in the most was one of may is leaving home,
being forced to leave with his cattle, yeah, and knowing
that he will never see them again. This idea that
even if one returns. There was something particularly unbearable about
how going to I don't know how far Constantinople was
from where his woods were, probably only three hundred and
fifty miles, but you know, in those days, that's forever.
(13:08):
The whole book really is about returning and how you
can never step in the same river twice, and yet
that's part of life. Like letting your son go off camping.
You know he'll come back slightly changed and he'll still
need you for a few more years, but you have
to celebrate his growing independence even as he's pushing against
those boundaries that you're building around him. Our boys need
to go build new families, new tribes, and they're not
(13:31):
rejecting us. We're not losing them as much as kind
of sharing them with other people. As what I keep
trying to tell myself. Anyway, you're a little bit ahead
in terms of like the college thing, but Henry goes
to boarding schools. There is something of them like going
off and taking what you've given them out into the
world and saying, this is what we did. This was
the point was to build good, strong, kind, intellectually curious,
(13:52):
independent people who can go out and be a nice
addition to whatever environment they find themselves in. Yeah, that's
so BEAUTIFU fleet put, that's a kindness. I mean, I
think we're successful if we build kind people for the
next generation. Yeah, I mean I will saw later obviously,
but I will remember these what relationship real or fictionalized?
(14:25):
De find love fear? This was your hardest of your questions.
I've been reading a lot about Rachel Carson. Her most
famous book was called Silent Spring. It came out in
the sixties, and as she was dying of cancer, she
made a very persuasive and emotional and beautifully written to
argument that d d T this pesticide that humans were
spring everywhere, was going to lead to a silent spring.
(14:48):
It thins that the shells of bird eggs, and so
it really makes bird reproduction complicated. You know, it's an insecticide.
In World War Two, it arrived as like this magic
silver bullet that could eradicate, especially during war when everybody's
all close together, these diseases that you know, these awful
pandemics that were occurring, especially saying Naples, and they shower
(15:09):
a million people with D d T and all the
life sty and then there's no typhus anymore, so saving
tons of lives and also malaria. It's amazing mosquito eradicating pesticide,
but if the collateral damage is immense. So anyway, Rachel
Carson was living at a time when I definitely wasn't
okay to be a lesbian or even just be interested
in sexuality in a different way. And she had a
(15:31):
relationship with a woman named Dorothy Freeman. And there's about
nine d letters that survived between them, and they had
this amazing romantic relationship that was always kind of fearful
of being found out Dorothy was married to a man.
And so I've just been reading through some of those
letters and trying to understand they're very different, and I
think what's so interesting about loves. We often think, what
(15:51):
do we have a comment, you know, like, hey, let's
go out on the scorpio. You're you like skateboarding. But
a differences, I think are what ultimately make relationship. It's
interesting the way you try to embrace what's different about
each other, and that's how you learned and evolved together.
It's like, oh, man, he likes to go to bed
at ten and I like to go to bed at
eight thirty or whatever. I think those kinds of things
(16:12):
that really help push you to grow as a person
if you can embrace the differences of your beloved. So
called beloved, were they very different Dorothy and Rachel Carson. Yes,
Rachel kind of had a little ego, which is interesting
to learn. And you know, she became a famous writer
about ten years before Silent Springs, so she had to
deal with fame. Of course, she didn't have another person
(16:33):
in her life, so there's always that kind of strange
jealousy too, where Dorothy has this husband stand. But they
shared so much love for beauty and for the natural
world that they could, you know, be out just like
in their dresses in their nineteen fifties dresses tiebooling together,
and they took such joy and sharing that, so sharing
the beauty of the world with each other, I think
(16:54):
was this thing they had in common. But then Dorothy
would go back to her so called heterosexual life and
all these worms that are pressed down upon these women
so that the time they could spend together is so intense.
There's something really beautiful. That's amazing. I love that. I
love that that's in a book, But it's not fiction.
That's really cool. What quality do you like least about
(17:18):
yourself in patience? I take a long time to write
these books, like how long. My book before Cloud cook
Land was called All the Light We Can't See. It
took me ten years to write. I started it when
I was thirty and I finished it as forty. Took
me forever. You did win the fullest surprise for its
or maybe it was worth it. I guess that was
an epically beautiful book. The Shell Collector was my gateway book,
(17:41):
and then All the Light we Can't See and then
Cloud Cookie Learned, and then your memoir Thank you so much.
He's so sweet. But anyway, you know, at least Americans
were kind of taught to worship efficiency, like don't waste
a chapter. Don't like, oh if you would take a
research trip to France for this book. Every minute better
be productive or you're failing, like you know, especially leaving
(18:02):
my wife back at home with two kids, taking a
financial risk to go there. You just put so much
pressure on your stuff, Like I can't just go entering
cider and look out at the sea. I've got to
be working to the point where I think, you know,
through my thirties, I was teaching myself if I'm stuck
in a line at the grocery store, you should be
back at your desk, like this is a waste of time,
Like you should at least be reading something, like you
(18:22):
should be researching while you're waiting three people deep to
buy this lettuce. And I'm trying, as I can get older,
to accept that sometimes you can't control life, like you
just get stuck in traffic or your flight is delayed,
and there are real pleasures in trying to find moments
of the day to just breathe. For example, I was
just on the flight and it was right on time.
(18:43):
Everything was going great, but it was like the third
flight is long flight back home from Europe has probably
happened to you, and the gate people aren't ready to
like dock the plane with the jetway and you know
your bladders full, and I'm like, I've timed my patients
just for this last thirty seconds so i could get
off the plane. I'm just telling myself, like, here's an
opportunity for you to just breathe, sit in the chair.
(19:04):
I'm totally failing at this, by the way, but I'm
trying to say, like, now you can exercise patients and
say you're alive. You have so many things to be
grateful for. You have a book in your bag, Just
pull the book back out. It's gonna be okay. But
I'm not that great at that. So in patience, I
wish I was more patient. What do you think would
happen if you were more patient? Maybe you would lose
like some kind of engine. I think that's okay, Like
(19:26):
the engine of like that makes you write books, or
that makes you go say yes to the film project
that's probably landing in your email box right now. Sometimes
saying yes to those things is so valuable because you
go to Fiji or whatever, You'll meet people and you'll
give you participant in this great team making this film.
But sometimes if you tone down the engine, maybe stillness
(19:47):
is something that we need to embrace a little more.
At least for me as I'm getting older, the pandemic
really helped teach me that I used to think, like
I've got to have a list of things I've got
to see before I die. Like you've never been to
the multi coast, Tony, like you ever read all of
Edith Wharton Tony to take Washington Square to goddamn a
most exactly, and then while you're there, make sure you
(20:09):
also go for a run and to push ups. And
you know, I think I've got to say it's okay.
Like there were these moments, especially early in the pandemic,
and there's no airplanes in the sky. You know, we
have these beautiful blue spring skies, and the snow kis
were migrating like a mile above our yard. You'd see
this little thread, this little like bracelet of white birds
(20:29):
and you could hear them because there was no other sound.
You hear them honking at each other, and you realize, like,
just here in our backyard versus many miracles as I've
been chasing. When I'm trying to like go all the
way to Kenya or something. So I'm trying to learn
that right around us there's all these gifts and that
I don't have to always be running the engine as
high as I think I should in your life, Can
(20:55):
you tell me about something that has grown out of
a personal disaster. So we've been talking about our kids
just heading off to school. They're eighteen years older. Twins.
Are they identical? Twins? Are they fraternal? Their fraternal? They're
quite different looking at inside too. But we got married
two years ago and dated for a few years before that,
and we both wanted to be parents and it wasn't
(21:16):
working out. I forgot married, were like, let's see if
we can make babies, and it wasn't happening. And in
the beginning we were kind of like in this arms
race with some friends who were getting pregnant, or like
semi unconsciously bragging about it, and you just sort of like, oh,
I guess it is hard for us. We're struggling. And
it felt very much like a personal disaster, even though
(21:36):
I know there are many worst problems in the world.
And thanks to science and UH in detro we were
able with quite a bit of expense that wasn't covered
by our healthcare plan able to get pregnant, got pregnant
with twins. When I look back now, I am so
grateful that we went through those thickets because I want
I knew I wanted these kids, and every minute that
(21:59):
I was with them, I was pumped. I was so
grateful that I got to see those kids run around
and jump in puddles and play basketball and skin their
knees and yell at me. And I just really had
to go through that journey to understand, like, this is
an immense privilege to get to have an offspring that
I get to hang out with. I've just been thinking
(22:19):
about that lately, how that so called personal disaster at
least the troubles we were going through really helped us
appreciate what we had. That's really what their childhood was.
M you noticed it happening, and now noticing that it's
so there in all. I mean, I know that that
is It's sort of what you're famous for in your books,
is the detail with which you tell these stories. But
(22:41):
it is very interesting that that is like how you
live your life as well. I'm trying my favorite art,
whatever does film or a painting or a symphony or
like a quilt. It shows you the world with new eyes.
It wakes you up to the miracle of being alive,
because I think the worst crime you can commit is
to sleep walk through your life, you know, And of
(23:02):
course there's days when you're tired and it's fine too,
you know whatever. Taken a junkie film where you know
every single thing that's going to happen, But to challenge
yourself occasionally to wake up and see the familiar with
unfamiliar eyes. That's what I try to do in my sentences,
to try to disrupt little patterns so that you're disrupting
cliche at the sentence level. And then stories that kind
(23:25):
of disrupt expectations in surprise the reader. They bring me
so much pleasure. So that's the kind of stuff I'm
trying to make anyway, So, now, what question would you
(23:46):
most like answer to? I was thinking about this and
I was like, oh, it's obviously gonna be aliens, Like
are there aliens? And I thought, that's okay. Here's my
midlife journey is just like tying in with my previous answer,
trying to get more comfortable with not knowing, like not
knowing when the dudes are going to use their little
joystick and put the jetway onto the plane. Get more
comfortable with that, and so I think I would just
(24:08):
say it's okay, I'm happy with not knowing what I
don't know. Like you know, the classic exercise if they
handed any driver and envelope and said inside is the
date and the cause of your death, you know, would
you open it? No, right, because knowing would suck. Knowing
would suck, totally suck. Like again, why are we not
(24:28):
better at it? All we do is humans? Is not
nice stuff? How we know better at this? Like I'm
I want to know that. I want to know about
why these parts of ourselves don't evolve when we have
so much information, Like you just saying, I just want
to get more comfortable with the unknown, Like it feels
so freeing, it feels like like a breath, Like God.
(24:48):
That's the way to do it. It's not to seek
to you know. It's like God isn't in the God,
It's in the faith. If you can get into the
notion of faith and you can really get into the
idea of God. I mean, this is how my Christian
friends have fixed my and got to me. And I
understand that because they're wanting me to just cozy up
with the void. And I feel differently about that on
any different day. But it's interestingly we haven't developed a
(25:10):
better relationship with not knowing. Yes, for me, that's all
time with the future. Like my anxiety is often about
like what is coming, what will come next? What will
happen next Tuesday when I have to talk to a
French journalist, how badly will I flame out? And if
I can just be more president like the Buddhists, maybe
like Christians. You know, Buddhist idea of living now and
(25:31):
accepting now means you have to be comfortable with not
knowing what's coming and whatever comes, being comfortable with your
ability to cope with it. And I'm just saying words.
I'm not good at following any of this, but well, okay, well,
which leads me to what I'm going to have to
ask you this. How does one get from the self
awareness and the knowledge that the words create of what
(25:52):
it is we need to know, and then the not
doing of that, and the continuing not doing of the
thing that we know would make us feel better? How
do bridge that schism? Tony, come on quick. The novelist
friends who meditate. For me, it's yoga in the morning.
The moments that you can just take in the day
to practice being comfortable in the now, even if it's
(26:15):
twenty minutes, I think can help prepare you to make
you a little more resilient for the rest of the day.
When you're uber is late and you're like, when will
he get here? I have to be blank. And then
also I think for me, like accepting the invitation of
like the night sky of the universe often helps me.
Right before we dropped our boys off a college, I
took them backpack and we're really lucky to have smoke
(26:36):
free skies. And remembering how tiny you are can sometimes
be so helpful because our problems start to seem like
we're the center of the universe. And if you remember,
like the Earth's four and a half billion years old,
like percent of species have gone extinct, you know humans
will be the same eventually. You know your life is
(26:56):
small and huge, and that's kind of like that's the
paradox in fiction, right think, Really, you know you're dealing
with the details of some person's life, and yet this
person's life in the pages of a novel becomes enormous
but it's also tiny because you're connecting with readers across
time and space, and so you can remember somehow your
smallness by exercising that imagination, that imaginative empathy. To say, oh,
(27:18):
Minny driver has felt the same way as I have
felt about saying goodbye to her son before he goes
off to camp. Means I'm not alone, and it means
my problems aren't so unique in the history of the world.
And I think reading is one way to really help
me exercise that and just looking up at the stars
and contemplating, you know, our tiny little whirling kunk of
(27:39):
carbon that's like whirling around out here. We're just tiny.
Even the Milky Way is just a tiny little galaxy
in a sea of galaxies. God, it's nuts when you
say that the Milky Way is a tiny little galaxy
in a sea of galaxies. As my mother was dying,
which is the kind of the agonizing everyday pot of
grief subsides and like, you start watching it grow into
(28:02):
something else if you've developed a relationship with it, which
I think it's incredibly important to do. And the days
where you can approach your loss in this more robust
way and remember and think about that person, and I
think about my mother. And she did say a version
of We were lying in her bed pretty close to
the end, and she said, I just I can't believe
(28:24):
how fast this is all happening. And I said, do
you mean dying? And she said, I do. I mean dying,
but I also mean living. She's like it happened so quickly.
And then she and she didn't not and she wasn't
in a self pitching when she said, and you know
the other thing that was crazy. She was like, the
lack of significance and the significance of my life is
(28:46):
happening in real time and in real awareness, and it
is the trippiest feeling and thought to hold that it
meant everything and it meant nothing. And those two things
are existing in time and space and here in my
physical body, which is soon going to be gone. And
it was so interesting because you want I wanted to
(29:06):
have a really evolved spiritual reaction to that, but invariably,
because again one is comforted and also confounded by your humanness,
all I could do is just squeeze her hand just
so tightly. And I suppose in recognition or in comfort
or in whatever it was she needed to get out
that squeeze. But it's wild remembering that. Yeah, that's beautiful.
(29:28):
And don't be impatient with yourself if that spiritual moment
doesn't last, because you are alive, Like eventually you have
to go eat and have breakfast and change your shoes.
And these revelate, these like epiphanies that we have don't last.
That's just part of being human and we kind of
have to keep relearning those lessons of our vast significance
and our massive insignificance all at once exactly. So, will
(29:56):
you tell me what person, place, or experience most a
to your life. Yeah, I think my wife Shanna gets
a shout out here. She's taught me patients. Shauna grew
up in a family. She had three sisters and her
oldest has an intellectual disability, and as a consequence, her
house was filled with patients in a way mine wasn't
because Kelly just takes much longer to do everything. And
(30:20):
also they just kept conflict to a minimum. I had
three brothers, was kind of this other yin yang household,
and there's just always movement in mud and creatures and
action in our house. And I think Shanna has taught
me so much about patients, and she'll just drop me.
She teaches me about love every minute. She'll just drop
whatever she's doing to talk to all of her friends,
our kids, me about our problems, you know, versus me.
(30:42):
I'm like, I'm tying being a very important email. You know.
Can I hear about your heartbreak later? You know, kindness patients.
When we first got married, Like if we're in the
grocery store and I'd be like, oh, I decided we
don't want this pancake mix or something, and I'm just
gonna put it back here in the soft drink style.
She'd be like, no, We're gonna walk all the way
back to Aisle three and put it back where you
(31:03):
found it. Oh my gosh, are we okay? Oh we are?
Oh wow, we're doing this all right. Okay. Education of
being a better person all the time. That's a great
that you love that though. That's clearly obviously why she
loves you, because you don't mind things that are kind
of making you a more thoughtful and considerate humans. Yeah,
(31:23):
the love is especially you know, over decades, it helps
you grow as a person. You know, if you can
keep challenging each other and help each other evolve and
appreciate that changes, like the only music and the world
that you know, change is going to keep coming, and
how do you help each other through that? You know,
I remember the first days in the pandemic when we
thought like we're going to be dragging each other's corpses
(31:44):
to the curb or who knows. I remember both of
us saying like, we are so grateful we have had
this time together, and those little resets are so important.
I think, Yeah, how is she doing with your son's
being off for college. Yeah, thanks for asking. Since we're
only eight days in, we just neither of us really know.
Sevent of the traffic and our house came from our
(32:06):
boys and their pals, and so it's super quiet. Thankfully.
My career is kind of busy, so that kind of
helps me maybe ignore feelings that like the dumb men
aren't good at this way and she's probably a little
farther along and processing this is part of the journey.
But you know, phones are interesting. You know, when I
(32:26):
went to college, I called my parents every other Sunday
and that was it. And they're texting her a lot,
and so I think she's getting connected to them. Because
of technology in a way that's mostly healthy. I don't
think they're ignoring their experienced to touch base with home,
but it does make you feel connected to them, like, oh,
they've figured out what dining hall to eat at, or
they figured out how to do their laundry, or they
(32:46):
figured out how to get a package. You know that
stuff is kind of nice. Yeah, No, I love the mundane.
I checked the weather where he is right now, he's
on this camping track. I'm obsessively refreshing the met office
here in England, which is notorious and they useless and
predict weather. But I'm looking at it in real time,
not ahead, So I feel like I'm staying very present
with the weather where he is. So that's good, isn't it.
(33:08):
I'm in the now and he's in the rain. It
is just raining and it's quite cold, and are you
comfortable with that? Can you sit with that? Be like
he's called? Yeah, because I know how many socks he's
got because I packed them and I realized, really what
you need is you need fifteen pairs of socks, because
really what you want is your feet to feel dry,
even if your boots are wet, putting on dry socks
(33:30):
makes you feel better. I know that from having done
a lot of trekking. And if you've gotten wet, you
have to have warm clothes to change into. So I'm
not worried. Boys are so funny that I guarantee doesn't
even know everything that's in his back. I swear to
you he will have won the same two pass socks
and the one sweater you know I packed five. Yeah.
I like being connected by mundane things that makes me
(33:52):
feel safe in the world rather than being connected by
the loftier stuff. I just want him to text me
and go, can you get some salt and vinegar crisps
for when I get back? And I'll be like, yeah, totally,
and like that's it, And that's what love is, though,
that's love. That's what love is. It's like it doesn't
need to be she experience on it, you know, it's Yeah,
you have those moments or they volunteered them. That's what's great,
(34:14):
those moments. The poetry of your children comes in the rarest,
most amazing moments, you know, not when you necessarily need
it or are asking for it, but when they deliver it.
And there's something I mean, I tend to write down
a lot of the stuff that he says. But I
sometimes I do write down the Crisps conversations too, because
they are incredibly comforting, like verbatim. I'll do it and
(34:35):
they make me chuckle. That's great, and you'll love them
in twenty years. And I've been doing it since he
was about three. I've been writing down the weird ship
that he says, and it's really good going back and
reading and knowing that he's wound up where he is
currently and we'll continue, Yeah, making that unscheduled time for that.
You know, corporations are always trying to sell us on
(34:55):
like come to this resort and have meaningful family tough.
But you know you can just do that by being
president dinner, you know, just burned some pork chops. By
the way, I went to hear Rumdus speak when I
was quite young. He came to London and I went
and sat on the floor and listened to this. You know,
he was amazing and amazing being in person, and his
(35:17):
whole thing was you know, not only not only can you,
but you will and you should think about it. If
you won't think about anything, having your big spiritual experiences
in the butcher's shop, in picking your tomatoes, waiting in
line at the dentist in the waiting room as you will,
like sitting under the Banyan tree. It goes back to
(35:38):
what you were saying about detail, like there is such
life in detail, and that is mundane and that is
also poetic. The mundane and the sublime are linked there,
like braided around each other all the time. Boy, they
really are. I love sort of videgar crisps. They are
the food of the gods. Thank you so much for
(35:59):
coming and chatting and where all these ideas. It is
absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much. Mini. I've really enjoyed
diving into the podcast, and I think it's so cool
that you're exercising your curiosity and you get to bring
all these different people together. So wonderful. Thank you, Tony,
and please say hello to your wife and your boys. Okay, same,
(36:19):
say hi to Henry. We'll do well when he gets
back with his clean socks socks. Anthony's newest book, Cloud
cookoo Land, is out now in hardcover and paperback, and
be sure to read his other incredible works, including All
the Light We Cannot See About Grace and This wonderful
(36:41):
collection of short stories called The Shell Collector. Mini Questions
is hosted and written by Me Mini Driver, supervising producer
Aaron Kaufman, Producer more Than Levoy, Research assistant Marissa Brown.
Original music Sorry Baby by Mini Driver, Additional music by
(37:04):
Aaron Kauffman, Executive produced by Me Mini Driver. Special thanks
to Jim Nikolay, Will Pearson, Addison No Day, Lisa Castella
and a Unique Oppenheim at w kPr, de La Pescador,
Kate Driver and Jason Weinberg. And for constantly solicited tech support,
(37:26):
Henry Driver.
We have a sun named Henry as well, also enjoys
the hot pocket now and then I tried to make them.
I tried to make them because I was like, Okay,
if you're gonna like a hot pocket, it's not that
far off like a CalCon so that's been feeding Italians
from time immemorial, So perhaps we should just have a
girl making a hot bookt And Henry was like, what
is the Italian word for kelson and men again? And
I was like sock And he was like, yeah, mom,
(00:23):
you made a sock to taste like a sock. Nice. Hello,
I'm Mini driver. Welcome to Many Questions Season two. I've
always loved Cruce's question. It was originally a nineteenth century
Harlag game where players would ask each other thirty five
questions aimed at revealing the other player's true nature. It's
(00:47):
just the scientific method really. In asking different people the
same set of questions, you can make observations about which
truths appeared to be universal. I love this discipline, and
it made me wonder, what if these questions were just
the jumping off point, what greater depths would be revealed
if I ask these questions as conversation starters with thought
(01:08):
leaders and trailblazers across all these different disciplines. So I
adapted prus questionnaire and I wrote my own seven questions
that I personally think a pertinent to a person's story.
They are when and where were you happiest? What is
the quality you like least about yourself? What relationship, real
or fictionalized, defines love for you? What question would you
(01:28):
most like answered, What person, place, or experience has shaped
you the most? What would be your last meal? And
can you tell me something in your life that's grown
out of a personal disaster. And I've gathered a group
of really remarkable people, ones that I am honored and
humbled to have had the chance to engage with. You
(01:49):
may not hear their answers to all seven of these questions.
We've whittled it down to which questions felt closest to
their experience, or the most surprising, or created the most
fertile ground to connect. My guest today is the author
Anthony Door, whose book All the Light We Cannot See
One the Pulitzer Prize. This, it turns out, is not
(02:11):
surprising at all if you have ever read a single
word he has written. His more recent novel claud Cuckoo
Land is genuinely one of my favorite books ever, and
the level of lyricism present in his writing is there
when he speaks to I wrote down so many things
he said all the way through the interview, you know,
as though the whole thing wasn't being recorded and I
(02:34):
had to take notes. I hope you enjoyed this conversation
as much as I did. I'm very interested. Do you
mean to start up with since my mother died? But
since my mother died, I think about the things that
I didn't realize until after she'd gone, that went into
the basic architecture, the stuff that was impassing, rather than
the big moments. And it was weird. It was like
(02:56):
it was like having the foundation of something revealed when
I'd really just been looking at the building the whole time,
this beautiful building, because she was this amazing person. It's
been like this weird posthumous gift to feel all these
other things. So now when I do something and my
son rolls his eyes and like things that I'm super
embarrassing and that we've spent five hours making a sock,
(03:17):
I do go. Now you know what he's going to
remember this because we listened to New Order while we
made this cow zone and we chatted about some something
that's so interesting, because that's kind of the lesson for
like beginning writers want to write about the big architecture,
you know, they want to write about love for what
it feels to be confused. But the only way to
deliver that to another person is through detail, through like
(03:39):
these moment by moment details of life. That's how memories
get built, you know, is New Order and making a
cow zone exactly. And you know what, I had this
teacher who I dedicated my book to my English teachers.
My three teachers were so huge in my life as
a whole, but Alistair one of them. On a Monday morning,
a piece of a four paper would be posted on
(03:59):
the notice board in my school from the age of
ten onwards, and there would be a list in his
really beautiful, strange italic handwriting, and it would be like
drinking a cup of tea, tying my shoelaces, getting out
of bed, and you had to write two sides of
a four describing this extraordinarily mundane thing. And he was like,
(04:23):
this is just like exercise. He was like, this is
the same as you're running around playing fields, playing hockey, basketball,
whatever it is. So many years later, when I was
still working my way through the anthology of what he
told me to read in my Life, he said it
was about getting you to pay attention to not just
having to do this thing. The thing was not the thing,
but to your life, to all those things that it
(04:43):
would trigger that whenever you noticed something, it would trigger
the memory of your interest in the fact that you've
had that muscle built in from an early age to
appreciate it and to be able to kind of develop
ideas from it. Yeah, detail is how you communicate with people.
If you had said I had this teacher our stair
he was meaningful to me, that would kind of bounce
off me. But if you describe his handwriting and you
(05:05):
describe this list on his door and the details of
what he was asking you to do, described telling your shoelaces,
it means something to me. That's how you communicate a motion.
It's ironically it's like you're reaching for the stars. But
the way to do it is like the tiny little
pieces of broken glass on the ground, and that we
keep retrieving memory, Like I've just moved back to the
town that I'm from. I don't like how it feels
(05:27):
because I don't feel like I can make new memories here.
I'm so in the trough of what went before and
I'm fascinated by At the same time, it's feeling incredibly sad.
It feels palpable. I keep asking everybody, how do you
create new memories in a totally familiar environment. That's super interesting.
It makes me think about Germans and like the seventies
(05:48):
trying to deal with like the weight of the memory
of all the stuff that had happened, and you're just
trying to listen to music and be eighteen years old,
and there's always this impulse to renew. I mean, I
think that's what's so beautifu. Those grass always ends up
growing over the battlefields and it's so important to remember
that blood was spilled there, but at the same time
allow space for young people to move around. So our
(06:10):
twin boys just went off to college. Oh wow, Yeah,
I worry so much about you know, this world, Like
I keep saying, like a little world's warming up, oh,
and like it's gonna get worse. You know, he doesn't
need that, he needs to be able to go make
new memories and discover the world anew and go to
a party as if it was like the first time
anybody ever went to a party? Did you go to
(06:31):
any good parties? And what you're busy going? Can you
believe the ice caps? Not? What about that Kappa Kappa
gamma that's totally it? Yeah, And then his mom's like,
ask him about COVID. She's like the cherry on top,
that's really funny. Well, God, I'd better get on because
I could really just ask you about a thousand questions
(06:54):
that have nothing to do with these seven questions, but
I will glean all the answers that I would like
to ask you. If these having questions allow a ski,
will you tell me where and when you were happiest?
Of course I thought about it. I'm gonna choose a
general when, but a specific where I love to ski.
(07:17):
I live in Idaho, in the mountains in the United States,
one of the last places middle class families can still ski,
and you know afford it. We raised our boy skiing
on this mountain called Brundage Mountain, about two hours north
of here, where you know, they just put a keg
of beer in the snow and like grill Hamburgers and
you could still get a seasons pass for about two bucks.
Oh my god. There's something about joy for me that's
(07:39):
always connected to the ephemeral, and for me, it's fresh
snow is like this great reminder of it, when the
whole world's like made new again by a big dump
of fresh white snow. To be there with my boys,
like moving downhill, there's some joy and speed are linked
in my head too for some reason. But skiing through
fresh snow like your joints filled twenty years younger, because
(08:02):
you can just land without pain and moving and hearing
them like whooping. You can hear like the joy of
other people. And you know what's gonna go away. It's
going to get tracked up, but I'll get too warm.
The moment of freshnow is unpredictable. You just have to
be lucky enough to be there when it comes, and
then to feel yourself dancing. It's really a kind of
dance moving down through that all of your troubles kind
(08:25):
of vanished and evaporate, and you're just present in the
now and you're creating like you're dancing. Is especially if
there are trees you're dancing down through them, so you're
kind of improvising and making music in your head. It's
really sharing that with somebody is so special. Oh my god,
for how you describe that. It is so akin to
the ocean. I mean, I know that snow is visited
(08:48):
upon us and the oceans are always there, But that's feeling.
That is what surfing is like. For me. Everything feels young.
It's only the next day when you feel your knees
and my shoulders in my back and the thing in
that moment, that's it. And the waves aren't always predictive,
but me you're waiting to see what way will common.
Sometimes they aren't there and sometimes they're too big, and
(09:09):
so it's very very similar. Yeah, and you're using gravity
the forces of nature to move you through an environment
something so deeply human. It connects us to our ancestors. Yeah,
it really does. It really does that. Moving through nature,
particularly like the mountains, feel particularly sort of atavistic because
there's it's so much to do with survival, Like I
(09:29):
don't know, the part of my brain is always on
a mountain or high up or on a glacier like
super super super, more turned on than it is anywhere else,
even in the ocean where I know that there are
great white sharks. They swim right by me to go
up to the seal colony and eat their breakfast. It's
not switched on in the same way as it is
in the mountains. It's funny, but there is always a
thread of injury. There's always there's something that makes you
(09:51):
feel a little more alive. I'm not chasing like down
crazy cool wars or something, but a little bit of
threat of danger does help keep you kind of present
and in a mind like mine that's always like what
do I have to do next Friday? Or why can't
I solve this problem in the book I'm working on
right now, to just be present is something I'm chasing,
and it's always so leading, you know. I just want
(10:13):
to grab on that and remember, like, my boys are
going to get bigger, you know, they won't always ski
with me. I'm going to get older, sort of have
those moments when you get to be with them and
to try to appreciate them for what they are before
they're gone. Yes, my son barely looked over I mean
he did, but he did barely look over his shoulder
when he went off on this camping trip. His first
week back at school, and I was like, I carry
(10:36):
him around in my pocket if I could, Like I
would be in the back of his class, being like
this an agent ron great, Like I'd be you want
to sit together at what should we have the lunch?
Like I would be his worst night matter if I
possibly could. But I called his name out, and I
must have There must have been something. You know how
when you hear someone shout and you can tell that
(10:57):
they're in vain, you know it's not a shriek of
Joe way, You really know that they've trodden on the
thumb tack or stuff. That time, I must have said
his name with something in it, because he turned around
so quickly, and I sort of like cheshire cat grinned
at him, and he was like, mom, it's gonna be okay. Yeah,
And then I asked him if I was damaging him. Well, yeah,
(11:20):
we just we have twin boys. Will just drop them
off at college, so it's like the same thing. God,
that must have been really hard. Your whole job is
to get them to live on their own, and yet
you're trying to make your deepest emotional connection of your
life really over and over with them and then you're
expected to kind of say okay and let them go. Yeah,
(11:40):
let them go. I know it's way more evolved than
humans actually are, which makes me feel like we used
to be so evolved, because clearly we used to do it,
We've been doing it for this long, but like it
doesn't hasn't gotten any easier, Like how come everything else
is supposed to evolve and there are these things that
just do not. It never becomes easier, or you can't
intellectual qualify. Maybe we didn't evolve to send our kids
(12:03):
three thousand miles away at the university. There's a lot
of things that are kind of artificial demands that modern
life puts on us that maybe our ancestors didn't have
to deal with. I think, you know, we would be
around our elders a lot more, we would be around
our grown kids. And the way we segment kids in schools,
for example, like all the twelve year old shipped together now,
but the village is like kids of all different ages
(12:23):
would be helping each other. The three year olds would
be attended by the nine year olds, and the fifteen
year olds are helping the nine year olds. Sometimes I wonder,
you know, all this segmentation in the distance. You know,
our kids got into so called good universities, but they're
far from home, and maybe that's a little artificial, I
know for people listening. Clokkleland is honestly one of my
favorite books I ever read, and the part that I
(12:45):
cried in the most was one of may is leaving home,
being forced to leave with his cattle, yeah, and knowing
that he will never see them again. This idea that
even if one returns. There was something particularly unbearable about
how going to I don't know how far Constantinople was
from where his woods were, probably only three hundred and
fifty miles, but you know, in those days, that's forever.
(13:08):
The whole book really is about returning and how you
can never step in the same river twice, and yet
that's part of life. Like letting your son go off camping.
You know he'll come back slightly changed and he'll still
need you for a few more years, but you have
to celebrate his growing independence even as he's pushing against
those boundaries that you're building around him. Our boys need
to go build new families, new tribes, and they're not
(13:31):
rejecting us. We're not losing them as much as kind
of sharing them with other people. As what I keep
trying to tell myself. Anyway, you're a little bit ahead
in terms of like the college thing, but Henry goes
to boarding schools. There is something of them like going
off and taking what you've given them out into the
world and saying, this is what we did. This was
the point was to build good, strong, kind, intellectually curious,
(13:52):
independent people who can go out and be a nice
addition to whatever environment they find themselves in. Yeah, that's
so BEAUTIFU fleet put, that's a kindness. I mean, I
think we're successful if we build kind people for the
next generation. Yeah, I mean I will saw later obviously,
but I will remember these what relationship real or fictionalized?
(14:25):
De find love fear? This was your hardest of your questions.
I've been reading a lot about Rachel Carson. Her most
famous book was called Silent Spring. It came out in
the sixties, and as she was dying of cancer, she
made a very persuasive and emotional and beautifully written to
argument that d d T this pesticide that humans were
spring everywhere, was going to lead to a silent spring.
(14:48):
It thins that the shells of bird eggs, and so
it really makes bird reproduction complicated. You know, it's an insecticide.
In World War Two, it arrived as like this magic
silver bullet that could eradicate, especially during war when everybody's
all close together, these diseases that you know, these awful
pandemics that were occurring, especially saying Naples, and they shower
(15:09):
a million people with D d T and all the
life sty and then there's no typhus anymore, so saving
tons of lives and also malaria. It's amazing mosquito eradicating pesticide,
but if the collateral damage is immense. So anyway, Rachel
Carson was living at a time when I definitely wasn't
okay to be a lesbian or even just be interested
in sexuality in a different way. And she had a
(15:31):
relationship with a woman named Dorothy Freeman. And there's about
nine d letters that survived between them, and they had
this amazing romantic relationship that was always kind of fearful
of being found out Dorothy was married to a man.
And so I've just been reading through some of those
letters and trying to understand they're very different, and I
think what's so interesting about loves. We often think, what
(15:51):
do we have a comment, you know, like, hey, let's
go out on the scorpio. You're you like skateboarding. But
a differences, I think are what ultimately make relationship. It's
interesting the way you try to embrace what's different about
each other, and that's how you learned and evolved together.
It's like, oh, man, he likes to go to bed
at ten and I like to go to bed at
eight thirty or whatever. I think those kinds of things
(16:12):
that really help push you to grow as a person
if you can embrace the differences of your beloved. So
called beloved, were they very different Dorothy and Rachel Carson. Yes,
Rachel kind of had a little ego, which is interesting
to learn. And you know, she became a famous writer
about ten years before Silent Springs, so she had to
deal with fame. Of course, she didn't have another person
(16:33):
in her life, so there's always that kind of strange
jealousy too, where Dorothy has this husband stand. But they
shared so much love for beauty and for the natural
world that they could, you know, be out just like
in their dresses in their nineteen fifties dresses tiebooling together,
and they took such joy and sharing that, so sharing
the beauty of the world with each other, I think
(16:54):
was this thing they had in common. But then Dorothy
would go back to her so called heterosexual life and
all these worms that are pressed down upon these women
so that the time they could spend together is so intense.
There's something really beautiful. That's amazing. I love that. I
love that that's in a book, But it's not fiction.
That's really cool. What quality do you like least about
(17:18):
yourself in patience? I take a long time to write
these books, like how long. My book before Cloud cook
Land was called All the Light We Can't See. It
took me ten years to write. I started it when
I was thirty and I finished it as forty. Took
me forever. You did win the fullest surprise for its
or maybe it was worth it. I guess that was
an epically beautiful book. The Shell Collector was my gateway book,
(17:41):
and then All the Light we Can't See and then
Cloud Cookie Learned, and then your memoir Thank you so much.
He's so sweet. But anyway, you know, at least Americans
were kind of taught to worship efficiency, like don't waste
a chapter. Don't like, oh if you would take a
research trip to France for this book. Every minute better
be productive or you're failing, like you know, especially leaving
(18:02):
my wife back at home with two kids, taking a
financial risk to go there. You just put so much
pressure on your stuff, Like I can't just go entering
cider and look out at the sea. I've got to
be working to the point where I think, you know,
through my thirties, I was teaching myself if I'm stuck
in a line at the grocery store, you should be
back at your desk, like this is a waste of time,
Like you should at least be reading something, like you
(18:22):
should be researching while you're waiting three people deep to
buy this lettuce. And I'm trying, as I can get older,
to accept that sometimes you can't control life, like you
just get stuck in traffic or your flight is delayed,
and there are real pleasures in trying to find moments
of the day to just breathe. For example, I was
just on the flight and it was right on time.
(18:43):
Everything was going great, but it was like the third
flight is long flight back home from Europe has probably
happened to you, and the gate people aren't ready to
like dock the plane with the jetway and you know
your bladders full, and I'm like, I've timed my patients
just for this last thirty seconds so i could get
off the plane. I'm just telling myself, like, here's an
opportunity for you to just breathe, sit in the chair.
(19:04):
I'm totally failing at this, by the way, but I'm
trying to say, like, now you can exercise patients and
say you're alive. You have so many things to be
grateful for. You have a book in your bag, Just
pull the book back out. It's gonna be okay. But
I'm not that great at that. So in patience, I
wish I was more patient. What do you think would
happen if you were more patient? Maybe you would lose
like some kind of engine. I think that's okay, Like
(19:26):
the engine of like that makes you write books, or
that makes you go say yes to the film project
that's probably landing in your email box right now. Sometimes
saying yes to those things is so valuable because you
go to Fiji or whatever, You'll meet people and you'll
give you participant in this great team making this film.
But sometimes if you tone down the engine, maybe stillness
(19:47):
is something that we need to embrace a little more.
At least for me as I'm getting older, the pandemic
really helped teach me that I used to think, like
I've got to have a list of things I've got
to see before I die. Like you've never been to
the multi coast, Tony, like you ever read all of
Edith Wharton Tony to take Washington Square to goddamn a
most exactly, and then while you're there, make sure you
(20:09):
also go for a run and to push ups. And
you know, I think I've got to say it's okay.
Like there were these moments, especially early in the pandemic,
and there's no airplanes in the sky. You know, we
have these beautiful blue spring skies, and the snow kis
were migrating like a mile above our yard. You'd see
this little thread, this little like bracelet of white birds
(20:29):
and you could hear them because there was no other sound.
You hear them honking at each other, and you realize, like,
just here in our backyard versus many miracles as I've
been chasing. When I'm trying to like go all the
way to Kenya or something. So I'm trying to learn
that right around us there's all these gifts and that
I don't have to always be running the engine as
high as I think I should in your life, Can
(20:55):
you tell me about something that has grown out of
a personal disaster. So we've been talking about our kids
just heading off to school. They're eighteen years older. Twins.
Are they identical? Twins? Are they fraternal? Their fraternal? They're
quite different looking at inside too. But we got married
two years ago and dated for a few years before that,
and we both wanted to be parents and it wasn't
(21:16):
working out. I forgot married, were like, let's see if
we can make babies, and it wasn't happening. And in
the beginning we were kind of like in this arms
race with some friends who were getting pregnant, or like
semi unconsciously bragging about it, and you just sort of like, oh,
I guess it is hard for us. We're struggling. And
it felt very much like a personal disaster, even though
(21:36):
I know there are many worst problems in the world.
And thanks to science and UH in detro we were
able with quite a bit of expense that wasn't covered
by our healthcare plan able to get pregnant, got pregnant
with twins. When I look back now, I am so
grateful that we went through those thickets because I want
I knew I wanted these kids, and every minute that
(21:59):
I was with them, I was pumped. I was so
grateful that I got to see those kids run around
and jump in puddles and play basketball and skin their
knees and yell at me. And I just really had
to go through that journey to understand, like, this is
an immense privilege to get to have an offspring that
I get to hang out with. I've just been thinking
(22:19):
about that lately, how that so called personal disaster at
least the troubles we were going through really helped us
appreciate what we had. That's really what their childhood was.
M you noticed it happening, and now noticing that it's
so there in all. I mean, I know that that
is It's sort of what you're famous for in your books,
is the detail with which you tell these stories. But
(22:41):
it is very interesting that that is like how you
live your life as well. I'm trying my favorite art,
whatever does film or a painting or a symphony or
like a quilt. It shows you the world with new eyes.
It wakes you up to the miracle of being alive,
because I think the worst crime you can commit is
to sleep walk through your life, you know, And of
(23:02):
course there's days when you're tired and it's fine too,
you know whatever. Taken a junkie film where you know
every single thing that's going to happen, But to challenge
yourself occasionally to wake up and see the familiar with
unfamiliar eyes. That's what I try to do in my sentences,
to try to disrupt little patterns so that you're disrupting
cliche at the sentence level. And then stories that kind
(23:25):
of disrupt expectations in surprise the reader. They bring me
so much pleasure. So that's the kind of stuff I'm
trying to make anyway, So, now, what question would you
(23:46):
most like answer to? I was thinking about this and
I was like, oh, it's obviously gonna be aliens, Like
are there aliens? And I thought, that's okay. Here's my
midlife journey is just like tying in with my previous answer,
trying to get more comfortable with not knowing, like not
knowing when the dudes are going to use their little
joystick and put the jetway onto the plane. Get more
comfortable with that, and so I think I would just
(24:08):
say it's okay, I'm happy with not knowing what I
don't know. Like you know, the classic exercise if they
handed any driver and envelope and said inside is the
date and the cause of your death, you know, would
you open it? No, right, because knowing would suck. Knowing
would suck, totally suck. Like again, why are we not
(24:28):
better at it? All we do is humans? Is not
nice stuff? How we know better at this? Like I'm
I want to know that. I want to know about
why these parts of ourselves don't evolve when we have
so much information, Like you just saying, I just want
to get more comfortable with the unknown, Like it feels
so freeing, it feels like like a breath, Like God.
(24:48):
That's the way to do it. It's not to seek
to you know. It's like God isn't in the God,
It's in the faith. If you can get into the
notion of faith and you can really get into the
idea of God. I mean, this is how my Christian
friends have fixed my and got to me. And I
understand that because they're wanting me to just cozy up
with the void. And I feel differently about that on
any different day. But it's interestingly we haven't developed a
(25:10):
better relationship with not knowing. Yes, for me, that's all
time with the future. Like my anxiety is often about
like what is coming, what will come next? What will
happen next Tuesday when I have to talk to a
French journalist, how badly will I flame out? And if
I can just be more president like the Buddhists, maybe
like Christians. You know, Buddhist idea of living now and
(25:31):
accepting now means you have to be comfortable with not
knowing what's coming and whatever comes, being comfortable with your
ability to cope with it. And I'm just saying words.
I'm not good at following any of this, but well, okay, well,
which leads me to what I'm going to have to
ask you this. How does one get from the self
awareness and the knowledge that the words create of what
(25:52):
it is we need to know, and then the not
doing of that, and the continuing not doing of the
thing that we know would make us feel better? How
do bridge that schism? Tony, come on quick. The novelist
friends who meditate. For me, it's yoga in the morning.
The moments that you can just take in the day
to practice being comfortable in the now, even if it's
(26:15):
twenty minutes, I think can help prepare you to make
you a little more resilient for the rest of the day.
When you're uber is late and you're like, when will
he get here? I have to be blank. And then
also I think for me, like accepting the invitation of
like the night sky of the universe often helps me.
Right before we dropped our boys off a college, I
took them backpack and we're really lucky to have smoke
(26:36):
free skies. And remembering how tiny you are can sometimes
be so helpful because our problems start to seem like
we're the center of the universe. And if you remember,
like the Earth's four and a half billion years old,
like percent of species have gone extinct, you know humans
will be the same eventually. You know your life is
(26:56):
small and huge, and that's kind of like that's the
paradox in fiction, right think, Really, you know you're dealing
with the details of some person's life, and yet this
person's life in the pages of a novel becomes enormous
but it's also tiny because you're connecting with readers across
time and space, and so you can remember somehow your
smallness by exercising that imagination, that imaginative empathy. To say, oh,
(27:18):
Minny driver has felt the same way as I have
felt about saying goodbye to her son before he goes
off to camp. Means I'm not alone, and it means
my problems aren't so unique in the history of the world.
And I think reading is one way to really help
me exercise that and just looking up at the stars
and contemplating, you know, our tiny little whirling kunk of
(27:39):
carbon that's like whirling around out here. We're just tiny.
Even the Milky Way is just a tiny little galaxy
in a sea of galaxies. God, it's nuts when you
say that the Milky Way is a tiny little galaxy
in a sea of galaxies. As my mother was dying,
which is the kind of the agonizing everyday pot of
grief subsides and like, you start watching it grow into
(28:02):
something else if you've developed a relationship with it, which
I think it's incredibly important to do. And the days
where you can approach your loss in this more robust
way and remember and think about that person, and I
think about my mother. And she did say a version
of We were lying in her bed pretty close to
the end, and she said, I just I can't believe
(28:24):
how fast this is all happening. And I said, do
you mean dying? And she said, I do. I mean dying,
but I also mean living. She's like it happened so quickly.
And then she and she didn't not and she wasn't
in a self pitching when she said, and you know
the other thing that was crazy. She was like, the
lack of significance and the significance of my life is
(28:46):
happening in real time and in real awareness, and it
is the trippiest feeling and thought to hold that it
meant everything and it meant nothing. And those two things
are existing in time and space and here in my
physical body, which is soon going to be gone. And
it was so interesting because you want I wanted to
(29:06):
have a really evolved spiritual reaction to that, but invariably,
because again one is comforted and also confounded by your humanness,
all I could do is just squeeze her hand just
so tightly. And I suppose in recognition or in comfort
or in whatever it was she needed to get out
that squeeze. But it's wild remembering that. Yeah, that's beautiful.
(29:28):
And don't be impatient with yourself if that spiritual moment
doesn't last, because you are alive, Like eventually you have
to go eat and have breakfast and change your shoes.
And these revelate, these like epiphanies that we have don't last.
That's just part of being human and we kind of
have to keep relearning those lessons of our vast significance
and our massive insignificance all at once exactly. So, will
(29:56):
you tell me what person, place, or experience most a
to your life. Yeah, I think my wife Shanna gets
a shout out here. She's taught me patients. Shauna grew
up in a family. She had three sisters and her
oldest has an intellectual disability, and as a consequence, her
house was filled with patients in a way mine wasn't
because Kelly just takes much longer to do everything. And
(30:20):
also they just kept conflict to a minimum. I had
three brothers, was kind of this other yin yang household,
and there's just always movement in mud and creatures and
action in our house. And I think Shanna has taught
me so much about patients, and she'll just drop me.
She teaches me about love every minute. She'll just drop
whatever she's doing to talk to all of her friends,
our kids, me about our problems, you know, versus me.
(30:42):
I'm like, I'm tying being a very important email. You know.
Can I hear about your heartbreak later? You know, kindness patients.
When we first got married, Like if we're in the
grocery store and I'd be like, oh, I decided we
don't want this pancake mix or something, and I'm just
gonna put it back here in the soft drink style.
She'd be like, no, We're gonna walk all the way
back to Aisle three and put it back where you
(31:03):
found it. Oh my gosh, are we okay? Oh we are?
Oh wow, we're doing this all right. Okay. Education of
being a better person all the time. That's a great
that you love that though. That's clearly obviously why she
loves you, because you don't mind things that are kind
of making you a more thoughtful and considerate humans. Yeah,
(31:23):
the love is especially you know, over decades, it helps
you grow as a person. You know, if you can
keep challenging each other and help each other evolve and
appreciate that changes, like the only music and the world
that you know, change is going to keep coming, and
how do you help each other through that? You know,
I remember the first days in the pandemic when we
thought like we're going to be dragging each other's corpses
(31:44):
to the curb or who knows. I remember both of
us saying like, we are so grateful we have had
this time together, and those little resets are so important.
I think, Yeah, how is she doing with your son's
being off for college. Yeah, thanks for asking. Since we're
only eight days in, we just neither of us really know.
Sevent of the traffic and our house came from our
(32:06):
boys and their pals, and so it's super quiet. Thankfully.
My career is kind of busy, so that kind of
helps me maybe ignore feelings that like the dumb men
aren't good at this way and she's probably a little
farther along and processing this is part of the journey.
But you know, phones are interesting. You know, when I
(32:26):
went to college, I called my parents every other Sunday
and that was it. And they're texting her a lot,
and so I think she's getting connected to them. Because
of technology in a way that's mostly healthy. I don't
think they're ignoring their experienced to touch base with home,
but it does make you feel connected to them, like, oh,
they've figured out what dining hall to eat at, or
they figured out how to do their laundry, or they
(32:46):
figured out how to get a package. You know that
stuff is kind of nice. Yeah, No, I love the mundane.
I checked the weather where he is right now, he's
on this camping track. I'm obsessively refreshing the met office
here in England, which is notorious and they useless and
predict weather. But I'm looking at it in real time,
not ahead, So I feel like I'm staying very present
with the weather where he is. So that's good, isn't it.
(33:08):
I'm in the now and he's in the rain. It
is just raining and it's quite cold, and are you
comfortable with that? Can you sit with that? Be like
he's called? Yeah, because I know how many socks he's
got because I packed them and I realized, really what
you need is you need fifteen pairs of socks, because
really what you want is your feet to feel dry,
even if your boots are wet, putting on dry socks
(33:30):
makes you feel better. I know that from having done
a lot of trekking. And if you've gotten wet, you
have to have warm clothes to change into. So I'm
not worried. Boys are so funny that I guarantee doesn't
even know everything that's in his back. I swear to
you he will have won the same two pass socks
and the one sweater you know I packed five. Yeah.
I like being connected by mundane things that makes me
(33:52):
feel safe in the world rather than being connected by
the loftier stuff. I just want him to text me
and go, can you get some salt and vinegar crisps
for when I get back? And I'll be like, yeah, totally,
and like that's it, And that's what love is, though,
that's love. That's what love is. It's like it doesn't
need to be she experience on it, you know, it's Yeah,
you have those moments or they volunteered them. That's what's great,
(34:14):
those moments. The poetry of your children comes in the rarest,
most amazing moments, you know, not when you necessarily need
it or are asking for it, but when they deliver it.
And there's something I mean, I tend to write down
a lot of the stuff that he says. But I
sometimes I do write down the Crisps conversations too, because
they are incredibly comforting, like verbatim. I'll do it and
(34:35):
they make me chuckle. That's great, and you'll love them
in twenty years. And I've been doing it since he
was about three. I've been writing down the weird ship
that he says, and it's really good going back and
reading and knowing that he's wound up where he is
currently and we'll continue, Yeah, making that unscheduled time for that.
You know, corporations are always trying to sell us on
(34:55):
like come to this resort and have meaningful family tough.
But you know you can just do that by being
president dinner, you know, just burned some pork chops. By
the way, I went to hear Rumdus speak when I
was quite young. He came to London and I went
and sat on the floor and listened to this. You know,
he was amazing and amazing being in person, and his
(35:17):
whole thing was you know, not only not only can you,
but you will and you should think about it. If
you won't think about anything, having your big spiritual experiences
in the butcher's shop, in picking your tomatoes, waiting in
line at the dentist in the waiting room as you will,
like sitting under the Banyan tree. It goes back to
(35:38):
what you were saying about detail, like there is such
life in detail, and that is mundane and that is
also poetic. The mundane and the sublime are linked there,
like braided around each other all the time. Boy, they
really are. I love sort of videgar crisps. They are
the food of the gods. Thank you so much for
(35:59):
coming and chatting and where all these ideas. It is
absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much. Mini. I've really enjoyed
diving into the podcast, and I think it's so cool
that you're exercising your curiosity and you get to bring
all these different people together. So wonderful. Thank you, Tony,
and please say hello to your wife and your boys. Okay, same,
(36:19):
say hi to Henry. We'll do well when he gets
back with his clean socks socks. Anthony's newest book, Cloud
cookoo Land, is out now in hardcover and paperback, and
be sure to read his other incredible works, including All
the Light We Cannot See About Grace and This wonderful
(36:41):
collection of short stories called The Shell Collector. Mini Questions
is hosted and written by Me Mini Driver, supervising producer
Aaron Kaufman, Producer more Than Levoy, Research assistant Marissa Brown.
Original music Sorry Baby by Mini Driver, Additional music by
(37:04):
Aaron Kauffman, Executive produced by Me Mini Driver. Special thanks
to Jim Nikolay, Will Pearson, Addison No Day, Lisa Castella
and a Unique Oppenheim at w kPr, de La Pescador,
Kate Driver and Jason Weinberg. And for constantly solicited tech support,
(37:26):
Henry Driver.
Host
Minnie Driver
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