On how to listen to the world around you

Your book, Information Age, includes a fair amount of found and overheard language, from Reddit, strangers on the subway, and headlines you’ve written. I definitely wouldn’t go so far as to call it a collage, but I’m curious whether there are collagists whose work you enjoy.

Lots of writers working in that associative, fragmentary mode were inspirations, for sure. Elizabeth Hardwick, Renata Adler, Vivian Gornick, Jenny Offill, Patricia Lockwood. Grace Paley, Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis. Those are the women writers who immediately come to mind, but John Dos Passos also did something similar in the U.S.A. trilogy. And then there are the journalists who also write fiction or write in that in-between area, like Svetlana Alexievich, who writes literary nonfiction and is really attentive to language but maybe doesn’t give it all the context you would expect.

What’s interesting to me about a few of these writers is that they naturally incorporate other people’s voices.

I think that’s really true. I feel like polyphony is a word that gets thrown around with Svetlana Alexievich especially, and I really like that as an effect.

So, what was the process of working on this book like? Did it ever consciously involve gathering overheard conversations that you then trimmed back? Or did you mostly draw from memory?

I was always taking notes in the Notes app of my phone, like so many people these days, on the subway or while I was reporting out a story. I would have two files going, or I would just recognize something that didn’t make sense for a piece, but that felt evocative. And I would try to file it away, while working at BuzzFeed News. And then I had a lot of material when I got to my MFA to work with and arrange. And then I had the habit after the MFA, too.

At what point did you feel like an arc was beginning to emerge from your notes?

I think that was probably the biggest challenge for me: forming a coherent narrative arc. Both in the MFA and since I’ve been lucky enough to have a lot of smart writers around me, helping me see where more character development would be good or what a reader might want from a work for it to feel more satisfying. So I would say that really only in the MFA and since then did it begin to feel like the shape of it was more of a clear narrative.

How would you label this book? Autofiction? Fiction?

Certainly parts of it are very autofictional and drawn from life. Sheila Heti had that “a novel from life” line, which feels helpful.

So, I’m going to refer to the narrator as opposed to you, then.

Perfect.

What do you think it says about the book’s narrator that she is so attuned to other people’s language, whether it’s found or overheard?

I think there’s a searching quality that I was going for, or that became a quality of the narrator, or was from the beginning. There’s an experience of constantly listening to try to figure something out or come up with some answers about how to move through the world. And I do think her training as a reporter leads to that kind of behavior, her pattern-making attempts.

It’s almost like a journalistic ethic, to not make assumptions.

I think that’s right. Whenever possible you want to quote people warmly and generously and fairly and accurately—and to let them speak for themselves. I think that’s a great way to put it. That’s the ethic. And if you do that enough, maybe you will come up with something accurate that is a depiction of how things are.

I’m glad you brought up Sheila Heti because I was going to bring her up, too. I’m reminded of some of her books, including Alphabetical Diaries and to some extent Motherhood, in which the narrator, who in her case is also a writer, appears in relief. Her desires come up not necessarily because of her will or her very concrete wants that she’s focused on, but more so as a slow reaction to the systems she participates in and the relationships she’s a part of. For a similar reason, Rachel Cusk’s Outline comes to mind, even though you’re really different writers. Do you think your narrator’s tendency to observe and listen is a function of her work as a journalist, her life as a woman, or simply her existence as a person alive today? Or none of the above?

I think all of the above. Definitely. And I think that’s right that the book is aligned with those books and that idea of a protagonist emerging from the negative space of what you see. You have to draw conclusions about their character and interiority from what they’re choosing to report back to you. And I know now it seems like there’s a whole canon of this type of narrator.

I appreciated the Alphabetical Diaries, too, for its use of a system to try to organize, or make a pattern, again, out of what might be more diaristic thoughts and experiences. Or, in her case, it’s this idea that, oh, if you just come up with a system or put things in order, then something will be made clear to you. And maybe in the end all that’s made clear is something about experience, but at least you’ve made this attempt to arrange it in a way that feels coherent, or more coherent.

It’s a non-narrative constraint. And using a new constraint, even if it’s arbitrary—especially if it’s arbitrary—is a way to raise questions about whether there are other ways to live.

Definitely. I think I texted someone when I was reading the Alphabetical Diaries that it’s Oulipo. To be annoying. [Laughs.] But also, it’s true.

[Laughs.] Totally. So, your writing is very spare both line-by-line and chapter-by-chapter. Is this a style that has always come naturally to you? And, who are some other minimalist writers you admire?

I do love minimalist writers and the style and people generally writing in vignettes and small scenes. Kathryn Scanlan and Eliza Barry Callahan and Helen Garner. I think compression and trying to be economical with language is partly a byproduct of journalism again, but also something that comes most easily to me, and maybe it’s a function of being hard on myself, where I will edit to the bone if allowed.

The book is set mostly in the late 2010s, but it also follows the early development of AI, which eventually affects the narrator’s work. I’m curious whether the development of Large Language Models affects your work as a writer and reporter, and whether it informed your thinking as you were working on this book.

It’s funny, there is this mention of Artificial Intelligence right at the beginning, which I wrote a long time ago, before Large Language Models were a thing. So that was interesting for me to notice when we were editing, because it does become a bigger part of the book towards the end, and they do fascinate me. I think it has something to do with this idea of a machine that can metabolize so many patterns of human language and writing, and what it produces when it does that and what that says about human literature and thought. And what is missing from that, or what the algorithm enhances or warps.

I find all of that interesting, and surely it influences my writing. It might have something to do with surprise in writing, and humor. The models will often write very predictable language, and that doesn’t result in the same pleasure of surprise.

Something I loved about the book right away is that a large part of it centers on the early days of online journalism, which the narrator is ambivalent about. On the one hand, she takes reporting seriously; on the other hand, she feels a disconnect between her office work and the lives of her subjects, who she doesn’t always talk with in person. Do you feel similarly about reporting from far away?

I’m glad that disconnect is on the page. Experiencing the heady days of online journalism was fascinating, and I’m lucky to have been in a newsroom, that newsroom in particular, for those years. And there were a lot of reasons, it turns out, for ambivalence or caution. But it was this mix of excitement and energy—and feeling like maybe this was the future or a future for journalism or a way forward—and you were in this place where people were figuring out new things about how the model could work, or how attention worked and how to manipulate that or respond to that, while also practicing journalism in a way that was ethical and old-school at the same time. And then Trump’s election made a lot of the media question itself immediately. Why didn’t the media capture the mood of the country as well as it could have? I think some of that is hopefully in the book.

The book feels in some ways like an antidote to these remote ways of relating, too. There are reporting trips to political rallies in other states, and there’s this journalistic—I don’t want to say efficiency, but—

I like efficiency, yeah.

—efficiency applied to descriptions of more intimate life, what you call, “people in rooms.” So yeah, it definitely feels like it’s engaging with all of those ideas, and, yeah, if subtly, how they related to that election.

In a lot of ways, I think everyone is and was doing their best. There was this earnestness or idealism of a lot of young people thrust into professional lives for the first time, also. And then the thing you mentioned, which is the alienation or estrangement that comes from reporting on a disaster remotely from a desk, and this was all before the pandemic even, but maybe some of the second half of the book is informed by that isolation, too, of being online, and being so connected, but also very separate.

The book also details an abortion, which isn’t handled as a political talking point in any way. It’s very much about the physical and psychological aftermath. This subject is often written about in a confessional mode, but now, for most readers of literature, it’s not taboo, at least as a literary subject. It interested me that your approach to writing about an abortion wasn’t confessional so much as reportorial, and you brought in voices from past generations, including the narrator’s mother’s voice and the narrator’s grandmother’s voice. I’m now seeing that I did not actually write a question about this.

[Laughs.]

[Laughs] “More of a comment than a question.”

What to say about the abortion in the book? I’m glad to hear you say that it feels more reportorial than confessional. I had read Annie Ernaux’s Happening and Play It as It Lays, and those were influences.

I think what I want to ask is how you went about writing on abortion, which has been written about directly, often confessionally, for several decades, and yet it makes sense why a writer would continue to treat it with extreme directness right now.

After Roe v. Wade was overturned, a lot of essays and articles came out in which women wrote about their experiences of abortion and times when people weren’t the perfect patient or the world’s most sympathetic case. And I was grateful for those. I’m always grateful when people write with candor about topics like this. Maggie Doherty’s essay, “The Abortion Stories We Tell,” for instance. And so I’m happy to be contributing to that store of description. And because this book took me so long to write, I think there are ways in which the political moment changed in that interval—and ways it will continue to change, but these types of descriptions will regrettably remain relevant, more or less, over time.

We’ve talked about this a little bit already, but are there other ways in which your reporting affects your fiction-writing, and vice versa?

It definitely does. I guess I’m happy to know that there are lots of prior examples of writers who work in that way, so that makes it feel less… I don’t want to use the word wrong, but that makes it feel like I’m in a tradition of people who are inspired by their reporting.

Do you feel like there’s a possibility that writing fiction could affect your role as someone who’s supposed to be impartial? Is that what you mean?

I guess the fear is that someone might think that or that it would be true. Both of those things are concerns, and so maybe that’s why I like to refer back to a rich history of reporters writing fiction, and it being acceptable, because of course, yeah, there are liberties you can take in fiction, and there are modes and styles of writing that are not available to you when you’re writing nonfiction, or if they are, it’s only a certain number of outlets that are allowing for those modes and styles of literary nonfiction.

And even then, you are expected to adhere to certain mores for good reason. And so in fiction, the ability to be more free and invent, at all, I think does let you get at other dimensions of reality and experience and the truth that I want to be depicting. And so I feel, again, lucky to be able to make a living as a reporter and then to be able to write fiction, where I’m not being held to the same expectations in writing.

What do you do when you’re feeling stuck with a piece you’ve been working on?

Oh, good question. I do think always having other people to send it to has helped me. Before the MFA, I had a writing group and I took night classes. And since the MFA, again, I’ve had a little writing group, and having someone else read and respond to a work is often helpful to me. And then also having experiences in the world to draw from, or putting it away and not looking at it, and then going back to it and seeing what’s salvageable.

In addition to everything else we’ve talked about, the book is very funny! Who are some of your favorite funny writers?

I think Grace Paley is often funny. I think Patricia Lockwood is hilarious. I don’t know if I mentioned Nancy Lemann, who wrote Lives of the Saints, which is often funny and wry and ironic. And Maggie Millner is both serious and funny. Yeah, I guess everyone I’ve mentioned: Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis, Jenny Offill. Oh gosh. Everyone I love has a sense of humor. Maybe not ha-ha funny. But a certain kind of humor.