Michael Chabon comes to Los Angeles tonight with his new nonfiction collection "Manhood for Amateurs: the Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son." Chabon may be known for his fiction such as "The Yiddish Policeman's Union" and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," but he's turned his attention to concerns of daily life.
He and his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, are the busy parents of four children. He spoke to Jacket Copy's Carolyn Kellogg via phone from a Pittsburgh hotel before his first reading. "You cook the foods you'd love to eat," he said. "You write the books you'd love to read."
All tickets for tonight's appearance at the L.A. Public Library's ALOUD discussion with David L. Ulin have been reserved, but standby hopefuls at ALOUD events often find a seat.
Jacket Copy: In the first essay in "Manhood for Amateurs," you say that if you've ever had a bad review,
that sticks with you for a long time. Do you still read your reviews?
Michael Chabon: Definitely. Not all of them -- I don't necessarily go out of
my way to read the reviews, but I also don't try to avoid it.
JC: In our review of your book, Steve Almond wrote that you're incapable of writing a boring sentence.
MC:
How about that? That was very nice of him.
JC: But I wonder if maybe you're incapable of publishing a boring
sentence? I'd like to ask you about your writing process. Because I'm
guessing that these pieces did not spring fully formed onto the
page.
MC:
Oh, no, they definitely did. I actually just wrote them on napkins. While I was cooking dinner and watching a baseball game.
JC: (laughs)
MC:
I work really hard on my sentences, and on my paragraphs, too.
JC: It's kind of stunning to anyone who's ever tried to write that you
and Ayelet have four kids and you both actually finish books. What's
your routine? How do you make space to craft your work?
MC: Thank God school was invented. I don't know what we would do if it
hadn't been. We send them away every day. They leave the house -- we
drive them to school, and then we've got all this time. Ayelet works
primarily, almost entirely during that period, and she's very
efficient. When she's really working on a novel or whatever she gets
her word count in every day, and that works well for her. I have a
harder time -- my natural rhythm is to work at night, stay up late and
to sleep late. I can get more writing done between midnight and 1
o'clock in the morning than at any other hour of the day.
Unfortunately, that schedule does not work at all well in a family with
small children. If I sleep late, then I miss out on what I think is the
nicest, most pleasurable time of the day, of an ordinary, everyday
routine. In the morning -- my kids are generally in a pretty good mood
when they wake up, you know, we make breakfast. I hate missing out on
that, so I get up. So that means I can't really stay up as late as I
might like. Or else I don't get enough sleep. I struggle with the
schedule. And I've been struggling with it for years. Lately, sleep has
been losing out. I've been staying up late, and getting up early. It
doesn't work as well for me as it does for Ayelet, and I envy her that
she's more of a morning/day person than I am.
Often, I have to go away [to write]. I'll go to a place like the MacDowell Colony,
or borrow somebody's cabin, or go to a hotel even. Stay up until all
hours, and sleep late, and just crank. I can get a lot done. Even in
three or four days, I can do about as much as I could do in a month at
home.
JC: Many of these pieces were written for Details -- were they written over a long period of time?
MC:
My column just ended at Details -- my last one I think is on the
newsstand right now. That was four years' worth of columns. They're not
all in the book by any means. I only selected the ones that I could fit
into an overall thematic kind of scheme, or at least the best ones of
those.
JC: When you were putting together this idea of
collecting stories about manhood in its various generational forms, was
there an author you were looking up to, or was this filling a hole in
our culture?
MC: Well, there's a lot of good personal writing
out there right now, both stuff that's being written to be performed in
a spoken-word setting and stuff that is written for the page. I don't
think I had any illusions that I was necessarily breaking new ground,
and that isn't really what motivated me to do it. It's more the impulse
to turn your eye on the life around you. The experience of having
children, of being a father, impelled me, not just in my writing but
just on a daily basis in my thoughts and in my everyday reflections to
look backward at my own life, my own childhood, my relationship with my
father, with my brother, and to sort of look around me, not only what
was going on in the world of my children and their family but other
families, other kids around. Somehow it felt worthy of writing about --
it felt like I had a few things to say.
JC:
You describe your father and your first father-in-law acting
differently than you do. Do you see a period of continuing change with
the role of fatherhood from their generation to yours, and then to your
sons'?
MC: I imagine there will be, although I don't have the
faintest idea how. Everything keeps changing, that's the one thing we
can count on. The world has changed so much in not only in what a
father is expected to do, but is allowed to do. It's not just that a
father might face greater demands to be with his children, to be more
involved with their daily care, but also that he's granted the
privilege of doing that, it's something I wouldn't have wanted to miss
out on. Even though it's often really boring and tedious, too. I don't
know what it's going to mean for my sons to have grown up with the
father that I've tried to be. I don't know if that's going to make
things easier or harder or what. I feel very very close to both my
sons, and I encourage them, as much as I can, to feel like it's OK for
them to be whatever kind of man they want to be. If they see me walking
around carrying a purse, taking my wallet and keys out of it, I don't
know if that makes any kind of impression on them at all.