“As you see, it’s decorated early Addams Family,” Kathryn Harrison says as she leads us through three floors of her Brooklyn brownstone. Standing beneath an ornate chandelier, she points out the Madonna statue that she carried home from Mexico. Over in the corner, a stuffed Bobcat stands atop a cabinet, his face frozen in a silent snarl. The bobcat recently lost his ears, which Kathryn says is “the final weird touch in this household.”
The stairs creak as we climb. Throughout the house, cats in various stages of repose lift their heads and stare. Kathryn ends the tour in her study. The room is bright and cozy. Her floor-to-ceiling bookshelves are decorated with prized curios.
“All that’s important is in this room,” she says. She picks up a paperweight from her mother’s desk, a plaster impression of her best friend’s teeth.
In her Stacked Up episode, Kathryn discusses her ideas about truth vs. the facts when writing non-fiction. In the past, she hasn’t shied away from weighty subjects such as murder (While They Slept) and incest (The Kiss). But in talking about truth as a direction rather than a destination, she suggests that telling a story doesn’t mean simply reciting facts. She’s more interested in the subjective truth of her characters. She says, “I think that everybody’s truth is different, and also that one’s own truth changes over time.”
Her point is best illustrated by the portrait that hangs above her desk. The drawing was sketched by her daughter and has a haunting, Dorian Gray quality. “I just thought she saw through the surface of me, into the me-me,” Kathryn says. “You know how you look at pictures and you don’t recognize yourself? I looked at that and I thought, ‘Yes, that’s me.’”
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is the first writer we’ve met who counts both Martha Stewart and Leon Trotsky as influences. We think this is unique. We don’t expect to meet another author who numbers among his (sparse) possessions a pink Kitchen Aid and a tattered copy of Marx’s Wage Labour and Capital.
We love the marriage of Martha Stewart style to a Socialist upbringing that Saïd writes about in his memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free. If you’ve read it, you know that these two ideologies aren’t mutually exclusive. Well, at least not in the continuum of a lifetime. Saïd and his wife, Karen, met while working for Martha Stewart’s empire at about the same time that Saïd was letting go of his socialist ideals. In place of the Party, he aligned himself with Martha’s principle of aesthetically pleasing randomness and gave himself permission to decorate.
Besides books about Communism, Saïd’s shelves boast a number of old-fashioned dictionaries–specialized dictionaries, everything you wanted to know about the U.S. military, or saints. He doesn’t keep them out of a sense of nostalgia. He needs them for reference because he disabled the Web from his computer. “So I can’t waste any time,” he said.
Stacked Up is noticing a trend among writers who disable the Web when they work. Both A. J. Jacobs and Ken Wheaton said that they keep a lid on the internet when they write. Saïd’s drastic measure means that he hits the public library to check his email. All this, he explained, so that he can avoid the tyranny of email that John Freeman describes. The topic of email leads Saïd to a story about a man at the library who regularly surfs porn under the watchful eye of the librarian. We learn that the porn-surfer is a large man, probably too large for the librarian to take down. As the story unfolds, we wonder if maybe the best thing about writers disabling the Web is that it brings them out into the world. Where they interact with potential characters in stories.
While blogging has yet to be included among Pulitzer Prize categories, Ken Wheaton has blogged enough to know the finer points of the form. For the writer of diverse blogs such as Adages, The Word O’ Wheaton and The Non-Dating Life, blogging falls somewhere between automatic writing and the chiseled prose of Flaubert. He told Stacked Up that he won’t bother opening WordPress unless he’s inspired by a specific act or event. But once he starts typing, he goes gangbusters.
“I think a blog can suffer if there’s too much editing,” Ken said. “There’s a flow you get from writing quickly.”
Conversely, Ken described his fiction-writing as a slow, thoughtful process that requires entering another world. And that means he doesn’t sit around waiting for thunderbolts to strike. He explained, “With fiction, if you’re the type of writer who who only writes when inspired, you’ll never be able to finish a novel, because it’s a slog.”
Given the inspiring subject, we asked Ken to post his thoughts about his Stacked Up shoot. So, without further ado, we give you Ken Wheaton:
So there it is, a Saturday morning and I’ve got a video crew coming into my massive 500-square foot apartment. Video sometimes makes me nervous. Add to that that I’m a first-time novelist and when I agreed to do the gig I had no idea the first few videos on Stacked Up would be with some heavy-hitters who are not only well-known, but live in proper homes with separate rooms and space for their stuff. Me? I’ve got books double-stacked on two shelves, some hidden in another room and monkey stuff hanging around all over the place.
And, of course, it’s Saturday morning. What was I thinking when I agreed to Saturday morning. I said I wasn’t going to drink Friday night. Swore up and down. But, well, there was a tinge of hangover there if I’m going to be completely honest. Still, the apartment was as clean as it tends to get. I showered, had some coffee, brushed my hair and teeth, put on clothes that wasn’t too casual but wasn’t too, I don’t know what I was thinking.
And that becomes readily apparent when you see the video. I’ve been told in the past not to wear stripes or busy shirts because such things dance. And I wear a checked shirt. And boy is it dancing. And while I thought I was being casual and cool, I’ve totally got a case of the mumbles. Hell, at times it looks like I’m doing a bad job of trying to pass a lie-detector test, what with the shifty eyes. After it’s all over my wife, who’d been in the bedroom listening the whole time and trying to type quietly, tells me I loosened up quite a bit toward the end, but that the first fifteen minutes were, to put it politely, stiff.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have worried so much about those drinks on Friday night. Maybe I should have had a couple that morning. Christ. Now I sound like a drunk, don’t I? –Ken
In all fairness, Ken, we agree that 10 a.m. was early. Especially on a Saturday. We belted back a couple of coffees before we got to your apartment. In retrospect, we should have asked you the monkey question earlier, because you lit up when you answered that one. But we love your episode! There are some great books in your stack. You’re a rock star! Now go autograph some books.
The night before the Stacked Up crew was scheduled to jump in a Zipcar and take the scenic route to Southern Connecticut to interview Rich Cohen, our executive producer left her purse at a bistro. The purse contained her driver’s license and Zipcard, two crucial elements to the shoot. She didn’t know it then, but when she made a frantic call to the restaurant at one a.m. and conversed in broken Spanish with the dishwasher, Stacked Up was officially running at the Deacon.
In fact, we kept running at the Deacon even before we met Rich and learned what the expression meant. We solved the Zipcard and driver’s license problem by putting a different producer in the driver’s seat. Northbound rush-hour traffic flowed quickly on the Saw Mill River Parkway, and we got to Rich’s town with half an hour to spare. We stopped for coffee five minutes down the road from Rich’s house. But once we got back on the road, the five-minute trip turned into 30 minutes of wending through a labyrinth of roads that led to cul-de-sacs. After a series of phone calls to Rich, he guided us to his house.
Rich Cohen tackled one of the most explosive subjects of the past century in his most recent book, “Israel is Real.” His philosophy of not being afraid to run straight at a complicated problem helped him condense 2,000 years of Jewish history into a narrative that speaks to the present. To do this, Rich read a lot of books and probably encountered his share of dead ends. But, as he told us, “Reading is the really important part” to writing. Without books, he wouldn’t have a book.
We wish our story ended seamlessly with Rich waving good-bye from his porch as we pulled out of his driveway. The day’s challenges did not end with the interview. Our driver had left the lights running in the Zipcar, and the battery went dead. Before sending us off, Rich gave us a jump.
Amanda Stern tossed us the key to her front door, wrapped in a sock, from the third floor window of her Brooklyn brownstone. One of our producers made the catch and wondered aloud if the key-throw was the first of a series of tests we had to complete before Amanda would grant us entry. Fortunately, the key worked and we didn’t have to scale the building to get in.
The week before our interview, we’d visited Amanda backstage at the Happy Ending Music and Reading Series at Joe’s Pub in New York. Amanda hosts and curates the monthly event. One of the elements that makes the reading so fun, besides the musical guests, is that Amanda requires each reader to take one public risk. That evening’s risks included Victor Lodato inhaling from a helium balloon and struggling not to pass out while he read from his novel in a chipmunk voice: Laurie Grodstein sharing a postcard she received in the 80′s from a fling she met in Amsterdam; and Paul Rudnick telling a story about his mother, who had passed away three weeks earlier.
Amanda said that writers who appear at Happy Ending often confuse the word “risk” with “embarrassment.” She explained that the risk was never meant to be an exercise in mortification. “I care a lot about people’s quirks and personalities–the unexpected parts of people,” she said. “Reading someone’ s book is a very private and personal experience, and I wanted to humanize that. I wanted to be able to give the audience the truth about an author.”
With her reading series, Amanda claimed she’d found the perfect way to balance two sides of her personality, the comedian who lives to make people laugh and the writer-hermit who locks herself in a room. As a self-confessed “recovering comedian,” she’s obviously comfortable on stage, delivering her monologue without the slightest hint of self-consciousness. She saves her risks, she said, for when she’s alone, writing.
Last month, at the height of leaf-peeping season, we packed up our gear and drove north from Brooklyn to Susan Orlean’s house near Rhinebeck, New York. We were excited both for our day trip and the shoot, which had been scheduled for more than a month. We’d taken advantage of the long lead time to do some research on Susan’s Architectural-Digest-worthy home, and we were fixated on her windows. From the photos we saw in the New York Times, the house looked like it had more windows than walls. Because shooting video against windows can be tricky, we were worried that her library would be too bright and that we’d have to shoot the interview in her chicken coop.
As soon as we arrived, Susan took us on a brief tour of her bookshelves, so that we could figure out the best place to shoot. We gasped, and not just at the beautiful views. Some of the cases spanned entire walls, beneath the aforementioned windows. Then she led us to the newly-finished, windowless library (it featured skylights instead). We restrained ourselves from high-fiving each other. No windows! Without a debate, we unpacked our lights and cameras.
When we say that the house that Susan built with her husband, John Gillespie, is worthy of Architectural Digest, we don’t want give the impression that the house is a museum. Yes, it’s a marvel of stone, wood and glass set atop a hill with no neighbors in sight. At the same time, it feels amazingly comfortable and lived-in. A lot of the art, whether painting, sculpture or knick-knack, follows a farm-animal theme. We saw likenesses of chickens, eggs, birds, cows, dogs, fish, ducks, horses, pigs, and at least one swan. Not to mention Susan’s real-life dog, cats and chickens. We couldn’t help but make the connection to E. B. White, another New Yorker writer who moved from the city to the country mid-career and wrote some great stories about farm animals. Who knows, maybe Susan’s story about raising chickens in the Sept. 28 issue of The New Yorker is her own, One Woman’s Meat?
Author, husband and father of twin boys, Darin Strauss doesn’t have time to monkey around when he needs to find a book. Which is why, during his Stacked Up interview, he pulled books off his shelves with the precision of a Dewey decimal devotee. Of course, Darin’s alphabetized library is much more than a system — it’s his gateway to his favorite authors. “I like to read authors a lot and I know their styles,” he said. He went on to explain that on any given day, he might pick up a book by Lorrie Moore to review her way of moving narrative along for “quick in-and-out of scenes.” Or, if he’s thinking about writing about Big Ideas, he re-reads favorite passages by Saul Bellow or David Foster Wallace.
In fact, right before his Stacked Up interview, Darin had been reading Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
When we rang A. J. Jacobs’ bell, we weren’t sure what we would find. After all, this was the guy who had, at different times, impersonated a beautiful woman in cyberspace, grown a beard of biblical dimensions to see how Moses lived and outsourced his life to an assistant in Bangalore. Like a method actor, A. J. fully immerses himself in his research. We hardly expected him to greet us as himself, wearing jeans and a button-down (what, no period costume?) and offer us food and drink.
A. J. explained that he had recently thinned out his shelves to make room for more books. We marveled at his pragmatic approach to his library. “I’ve learned to let go of books,” he said. “I think the ideas contained in books are irreplaceable, but I’m not obsessed with the actual books.” Some of his favorite titles, such as Tom Wolfe’s The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
While books come and go in A. J.’s life, facts remain his ultimate conquest. He admits that he’s probably the last person in the world to own a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. His love of trivia isn’t completely innocent, however, as his story about his nemesis brother-in-law reveals. Trivia is A. J.’s secret weapon, and he likes to be fast on the draw. “Like hunters have a bunch of heads on their den wall, I like having all these strange facts that I can reference.”
Before her interview with Stacked Up TV (and unbeknownst to us), Laurie Sandell blogged about whether she should hide some of her books.
“I have a number of books I’d rather not share with the World Wide Web: Self-help relationship books, self-help money books (with the exception of Suze Orman–she goes front and center), 12 step literature, books on palm reading and astrology and therapy…What do you think: Hide the contraband or own it?”
When we asked Laurie early into our interview, “Are there any books in your collection that you’re embarrassed to have on your shelves?” we had no idea the potential treasure trove we were opening up. Luckily, Laurie had resolved her dilemma by then and appeared to enjoy answering the question. She revealed a nifty feature in her shelves that allows her to hide books at each end. And while modesty prevented her from sharing all her contraband, we got a peek at several private titles her visitors don’t usually see. Titles such as, What Women Want Men to Know by Barbara DeAngelis, and Duane Brown’s Flying Without Fear. Laurie disclaimed, “I would like to say that, even though I’m embarrassed to have these books on my shelves, I do love them.” We expected nothing less from the memorist who dedicated her book, “To all the truth tellers.”
Landscape architect Diana Balmori’s shelves mix the radical with the practical.
