On this special episode of Design Matters, we take a look back at the collective brilliance of fiction writers interviewed in 2022. Best of Design Matters 2022 with Brad Listi, Jason Reynolds, A.M. Homes, Candice Carty-Williams, and Min Jin Lee is live!
A.M. Homes:
Politics is the push and pull of who we are and who we hope to be, I think, and I really felt like something weird was happening in this country.
Jason Reynolds:
All I ever want to do in my books is just show, for me specifically, black children as human beings.
Speaker 4:
From the Ted Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. For 18 years, Debbie Millman has been talking with designers and other creative people about what they do, how they got to be who they are and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode to mark the end of 2022, we’re going to hear excerpts from some of the best interviews with fiction writers that Debbie did in the past year.
Brad Listi:
Isn’t this what we’re all hungry for, is for somebody to drop the mask and really say what’s on their heart and on their mind?
Debbie Millman:
Over the 18 years I’ve been doing Design Matters, I’ve slowly expanded the range of people I interview. First designers, then people in the visual arts and now pretty much anyone who is living creative life. And that of course includes writers, especially writers of fiction. This year I interviewed a number of remarkable writers. That means I read a lot of fiction and boned up on the biographies of the writers themselves. And I always want to know, how did they become the person who does what they do? To mark the end of 2022. I want to play excerpts from some of those interviews. First up, Brad Listi. Brad Listi is a novelist. He also hosts a podcast with other writers called The Other People Podcast. His latest novel is Be Brief and Tell Me Everything. One of my many questions for Brad was about a line in that book that is this, “The first half of my existence has been spent with only moderate success trying to become someone and the back half would be spent learning to become no one.” Talk a little bit more about what that means.
Brad Listi:
Well, I think it’s just having a really acute sense of death, which I want to believe most of us have. I know a lot, I’m not alone in this, I think a lot of people are really death obsessed and not in a bad way. I think it’s healthy to comprehend your life through that lens. Like it’s coming, we are going to die. It could happen today, it could happen tomorrow. It will be the end of this incarnation or the end period, depending on your worldview or your spiritual framework. I am often at odds with cultural values for this reason. It can seem crazy to me. I think it seemed crazy to me in the phase of my life when I was trying to “become someone,” which I’m not entirely divorced from.
We all have to do what we have to do to get by in life, but I think maybe the grief experiences that I’ve lived through, these untimely losses, made me who I am in a lot of ways and gave me that acute sensitivity and brought to mind all these big existential questions, like what’s it all for? What are we doing here? I want to try to deeply reckon with my own mortality, and I don’t want to use the phrase, “I want to die well.” A lot of people say that like it’s like an accomplishment. It’s like, “No.” I’m sure it’ll be messy and a little terrifying, but I do want to have courage and I do want to look at it because I’m fascinated by it. It’s the ultimate reality to me, and I don’t think it has to be this heavy morbid albatross that you carry around.
I think it can actually be a positive, even daily ritual that adds a sense of urgency to your existence and helps to put things in perspective and helps you to relate to the people in your life whom you care about the most at a level of depth that would otherwise not be there. When you have a sense of like, “Wow, the clock is ticking,” what matters most? Who matters most? It’s these kinds of things. It’s priority inducing. And so that’s the way that I try to relate to it and maybe I just have a deeper sense of it or a bigger fascination with it than most, but I know I’m not alone in it.
Debbie Millman:
No, not at all. In thinking about the structure of the book, you stated that it required a lot of failure and for example, there’s a chapter in the book where you talk about a miscarriage, a single miscarriage that you and your wife experienced even though you experienced multiple miscarriages, I believe five miscarriages, which is just horrific. And you decided that that was too much. I think there was even a moment where you felt like the book could have been called The Five Miscarriages, but you’ve stated that when you go through all that failure you start to get a more developed sense of the reader. How does that happen?
Brad Listi:
Well, some of it’s feedback, some of it’s people in publishing telling you that the book is just too depressing or suffocating or they’re not sparking to it. I think there’s a temptation and a natural reflexive inclination for people who are writing a, I guess what you would call a trauma or a grief narrative, to want to just render the experiences accurately and truthfully in full. And I tried that mode. The problem, even though the writing was probably pretty good on a line by line basis, is that that’s not enough for a book to work. I knock myself on this front as maybe a blind spot for me or an area that I could stand to improve, is having a more well-developed sense of the reader at the end of the line. If you’re writing a book, you’re writing for a reader and sometimes I think you can be like, “Well, I’m writing this ’cause I need to express myself.”
Debbie Millman:
Not a good reason.
Brad Listi:
No, you have something to say. That’s a different task. If you want to express yourself, get a diary. You can express yourself all day long. But if you’re trying to write a book, you’re trying to communicate with somebody and you have to have a sense of them and it should be primary and it took me a while to get there. There are little things about a book that make it more pleasant for a reader. Things move along. There’s not a lot of wasted motion. There’s a couple laughs here and there. Even in a dark story, there’s a sense of real intimacy and risk on the page, which causes people, myself included, to lean in. I always appreciate that you go, “Oh, okay, so here we go.” It’s like that sense of somebody really dropping their guard and bringing you in and being willing to say what often goes unsaid. And I hope in subsequent books that the learning curve will not be so steep and will not take me as long.
Debbie Millman:
That was Brad Listi. Jason Reynolds is the author of some of the most Celebrated YA fiction of our time, including All American Boys and the bestselling Track Series. He also writes comic books and poetry. Here’s an exchange I had with Jason about his early days as a writer.
When you were 16 years old, you self-published your first book and you began selling it out of the trunk of your mother’s car. Was that the book, Let Me Speak?
Jason Reynolds:
That was, and it’s so weird that this I am, I’ve been like [inaudible 00:09:18]
Debbie Millman:
Well, it wasn’t that hard to find. Tell us what the book was about and how did you make copies of it and how did you go about selling it?
Jason Reynolds:
Back then it was different. I was 15 when I started it, 16 when I was selling it. It goes back to my mother, “I can do anything.” There was nothing in me that ever felt like I couldn’t just make what I wanted to make or do what I wanted to do or go where I wanted to go or say what I wanted to say. I just never had any of those sort of hangups. So I remember telling my mom like, “Yo, I want to make a book. I’m going to publish a book.” And so at that point I was all over the East Coast as a 16-year-old. This is when spoken word was becoming. It was still an underground thing. It hadn’t really exploded yet. We’re talking about ’98, ’99, around that time. And so it’s about to explode.
It’s still a thing that everybody’s doing, but it hasn’t hit the mainstream. It’s a bunch of just young artsy Bohemian kids getting together at grimy open mics and just doing their thing. Everyone has on brown and green and smells like Patchouli and that was the vibe. And I was one of the young people in that scene. And so I would be in Philly and I would be in DC and I would be in New York and I would be in Richmond and I’d write as a 16-year-old, driving my mom’s car, just getting busy. This is back where you can get a license at 16, obviously. And I’m just getting busy doing my thing because I knew who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do. And I realized that everywhere I went they were all selling books. They’re all in their twenties and thirties, they’re all selling books.
And so I’m like, “I got to make a book too. I meet this woman in Baltimore, a good friend of mine still, Myisha Cherry, who at the time was 21 and she’s like, “Yo, I started a publishing company and I’m going to publish just our friends.” And Myisha was the one who was like, “I want to make this book with you. Let’s do it.” And really it was a vanity press. Really, what that meant was, Myisha was going format it and put it in the files and then I was going to take care of [inaudible 00:11:21]
Debbie Millman:
That’s pretty ambitious for a 15-year-old, a publishing company.
Jason Reynolds:
Absolutely.
Debbie Millman:
Your own imprint.
Jason Reynolds:
Yeah, that’s what it was. And I was like, “Let’s do it.” And so we did that. I had a summer job. I remember, I think it cost me $500 to print a thousand books or 500 books or something like that.
Debbie Millman:
Were they Xeroxed and stapled? Did you have them bound?
Jason Reynolds:
No, this was a real deal. We found a printer out of Florida called White Hall Publishing or something like that. They’re out of business now and they were just a family business that did actual bound books. I paid them 500 bucks. They sent me a thousand books and I sold them out of the trunk of my mom’s car. And that’s how I started to make money. And I did that a few times over. That was the beginning of my life as a book maker.
Debbie Millman:
It’s incredible that you did that. Do you still have copies of this?
Jason Reynolds:
I do. My mom has three or four. I have one around the house somewhere. My mom has one of the poems on the wall in the house because she’s my mom. I try not to look at it. It’s juvenile. It’s hard to read some of that stuff,
Debbie Millman:
But it’s evidence. It’s evidence of your being 15 and the ambition to publish and create this. It’s extraordinary.
Jason Reynolds:
I think it’s the first brick in whatever castle I’m building and I look at it as, this is the sign of a kid hungry for life. Somebody with a lot of grit, a lot of persistence. Nobody was going to tell that kid that he couldn’t do anything.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I believe you self-published two books.
Jason Reynolds:
Three books.
Debbie Millman:
Three books. Okay. You went to the University of Maryland and yet you almost failed out of college in your freshman year.
Jason Reynolds:
I did. It’s tricky. I come out of high school, even with those great teachers, Ms. Blaufuss and Mr. Williams, but I wasn’t prepared for college. I’m 16 years old.
Debbie Millman:
That’s young.
Jason Reynolds:
Yeah, I’m not quite firm in my education. I don’t really know too much ’cause I wasn’t that great of a high school student. It’s not like I was a straight A kid or anything like that. I wasn’t in the honors society or any of that stuff.
Debbie Millman:
You were a publisher.
Jason Reynolds:
I was doing that part, but I was a get-by kind of kid when it came to school and I get to college and the first class is English 101 and I bomb it. I fail it terribly. I fail it a few times. Not only am I failing English, but I’m failing math and I’m in remedial. I’m in pre-remedial. This isn’t like math 101, this is like the math you have to take before you get to math 101 and I’m failing that too, and so it was clear at my first semester that college was going to be a struggle for me that I was in over my head, that I wasn’t prepared for this, for whatever that world was, that academic world. I just wasn’t ready for it. But what I was ready for was the social element.
I was ready to attack the world and attack this sort of bubbled space, this bubbled environment where I could literally build an ecosystem. That made more sense to me than classwork. That made more sense to me than tests and examinations or transcripts. I understood that all of the currency was outside of the classroom in a contained ecosystem that I could scrap my way to the top of whatever the hierarchy was, using this grit that caused me to make these books or run up and down the East Coast as a child reciting poems in rooms full of 30-year-olds. Whatever that was, it was going to be exacerbated and pushed to the extreme on that college campus. And that’s what I really used college for.
Debbie Millman:
That was Jason Reynolds. A.M. Holmes is a prolific writer who often explores extremely uncomfortable situations and characters in her fiction, her bestselling memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter is about meeting her birth mother when she was in her thirties. Her latest novel is titled The Unfolding, and it’s about a white man who sees the election of America’s first black president as a crisis for his kind. I asked her why she wanted to write a political novel. Why politics?
A.M. Homes:
Why politics? Because politics is history, politics is culture, politics is the push and pull of who we are and who we hope to be, I think, and I really felt like something weird was happening in this country. I started this book well before Trump was elected and I felt like not only had the American political establishment lost touch with the average American, but that this new thing, which isn’t really that new, but dark money was starting to flow in, in increasingly large amounts. So I think part of it too, is the exponential increase in that dark money and in think tanks and institutes and ways in which one buys airtime for narrative that may not even be true, and it’s very complicated. But that was progressively more and more disturbing to me. And so I felt like I needed to figure out how to talk about it.
And also I felt like it’s two different threads. So one thread is that I feel like when there was a previous election where I went to bed thinking Al Gore had won and I woke up and George Bush was president, I was like, “I missed something while I was sleeping,” which for a person who’s a worrier, it’s a good way to get insomnia like, “Don’t turn the news off, stay awake.” But that, in a way, happened because of, and I’ve made it a person, not in the book, but in my imagination, Hanging Chad, who is not a person but a thing in Florida and because the Republicans had control over Florida, they were able to actually claim that the presidential election. And somehow there wasn’t enough of a fight for that, which is a whole other problem.
But so when Obama wins and they don’t have another trick that they can pull out, this group of men becomes really disturbed. And what you begin to see is, what I would describe, of the fear of older white men, that they are losing power, they are losing all of the things that they took to be theirs and theirs alone. And they’re going to now have to share all that. And I think that Obama’s election unleashed a racism and sexism that’s always been there. I mean we know that, but it, almost in some bizarre way, gave it permission to surface all the more. And I think we’re still progressively seeing that. So that’s why I chose that moment. And also because that moment was so powerful on the other side, for many of us.
I bought a new TV. It was my first TV since college and I got a bigger TV to have people over to watch. And that difference between people taking to the streets, celebrating the idea that we could live in a different a country, where many points of view, many voices could be heard and so on, and then the sheer terror that invoked in white people. And that’s the only way I can describe. It was interesting to me.
Debbie Millman:
One of the most fascinating aspects of the book is how you weave these fictive characters with real characters. John McCain, George Bush, Condoleezza Rice makes an appearance, and you refer to figures such as Malcolm Moos, who wrote President Eisenhower’s military industrial complex speech in 1961, I think. And I actually quite inadvertently learned a lot about history reading your book, while I was mesmerized by the plot. How much research into American political history did you have to do, or did you already know everything that you were writing about?
A.M. Homes:
I definitely did not already know all of it. I have to say, I have progressively fallen more and more in love with history and I would call it histories because that’s one of the big things that also is, as I say, in my craw, that we tend to think there is an American history. And then five seconds later if you just even look at it, you realize there are so many histories that are not included. And that’s really important to me as well. So I did do a ton of research and I’ve always been obsessed with the period that really begins with Eisenhower’s speech about the rise of the military industrial complex because that’s part of how we economically got from there to here. So that’s really important. And this book is… I’m glad you got all that because it is truly rolling in history and detail and crazy, crazy facts that you just think, “That couldn’t be real.” But it is.
And I wanted to play that history out and unpack it in line with these fictional characters, who obviously are not historical figures, but in some ways represent elements of history in the sense that one of them will come for the world of banking, one of them comes from the world of medicine and business, which was an echo of the Eisenhower Ten, which were the men that Eisenhower just sent lovely letters to us saying, “In case of nuclear disaster, you’ll be in charge of agriculture. So please show this letter to your nearest farmer and he’ll know to give you his crops.” I don’t know how that was really going to work, but I found all of it really interesting and wanted to work with it.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that your biological father was a bit big guyish and in that sense of a large scale, sense of ownership or privilege of place. Some other familiar themes in your autobiographical writing return in The Unfolding. Megan’s parents lose their infant son to an illness before she’s born. And then there’s another big plot surprise that I don’t want to give away. What made you decide to bring these themes into this book?
A.M. Homes:
Again, so many things. On the one hand I would say I wanted to explore some of those themes a little bit more. And I still haven’t really done it in terms of, what does it mean to me to be a replacement child, or what is that experience like. At some point maybe we’ll write some more autobiographic material about that. But I wanted to explore that a bit more. Also in my adoptive family, my father was quite politically radical. So in some ways I have these two very, very different fathers. He was a lover of Ramparts magazine and Marching on Washington, and there’s a wonder wonderful little FBI file on him for his early political work and so on. And so he also had all kinds of political books around the house, but it would be like Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, which I have his copy of here, and the report of the Warren Commission and all kinds of early nutball books about conspiracy theories and so on. So there’s that juxtaposition. And my biological father was definitely sort of a big guy in Washington.
I didn’t know of course, that the family had owned Washington, but he grew up there. He lived there. And there is a Washington within Washington, which is the local people, who can be a little bit like fixers. They own the parking lots, they own the land, they own the real estate and so on. And he was definitely a part of that group of men.
Debbie Millman:
That was A.M. Holmes. Candice Carty-Williams burst on the literary scene several years ago with her novel, Queenie, which is about a young Jamaican British woman in London trying to recover from a bad breakup. Her new novel is called People Person. For this episode, my partner Roxane Gay guest, hosted and conducted the conversation with Candice.
Roxane Gay:
You’ve spoken very openly and eloquently about childhood trauma and dealing with anxiety and also getting healthcare through therapy. What prompts you to be open about the kinds of things that we tend to try and keep to ourselves instinctively?
Candice Carty-Williams:
I suffered so much when I was young with being this sort of strong black woman, and I just wanted someone to be like, “I’m not.” That’s all I wanted. I just wanted one person to be like, “I’m not that strong.” And I never had that. And I was seeking it for years and years, not in my family, not around my friends, not on social media. And so I made a decision, when I had any sort of public profile to be someone who was like, “I’m not a strong black woman at all.” And that’s fine because I’m sure there is someone out there who’s going to be like, “Oh, great, neither am I.” And also it’s like… This is a very strange… You’ve seen Eight Mile, I imagine.
Roxane Gay:
Yes, I have.
Candice Carty-Williams:
And I think you just, like Eminem does at the end, Rabbit, you just got to say the stuff people might say about you upfront because there’s nothing I’m ashamed of. In my bio, it says that I’m the product of an affair. That’s true. And I had this idea of a journalist being like, “Oh, so your parents, were they together?” And me having to be like, “Oh well,” and maybe someone finding out that. And I was like, “No, I’m never going to have anything that anyone can use against me.” And so I think it’s two things. I think also just I’m a person in the world. I’m not perfect. I have many flaws. I’m trying to work them out, as we say, I’m trying to be kind as I do it, but there’s nothing about myself that I’m ashamed of or embarrassed of. And I don’t think anyone should be, because I honestly think so many of us are just trying to get through the day.
And so I think this idea that, I’m strong or that I’m impermeable or that I’m the best or that I can do everything that other people can’t do, it’s just not real. And so I think just say it because we’re all just figuring it out. And that might sound naive or quite silly, but we just are. Everyone is just trying every day to deal with something.
Roxane Gay:
It doesn’t sound naive. To my mind, it sounds realistic because it’s the truth and sometimes the truth is just plain and simple. You were raised in South London and you’ve said that you’re going to always live there. What makes South London home to you and what holds you to that place?
Candice Carty-Williams:
That is a really beautiful question for my heart. South London feels very safe to me. I think because I’ve been there a lot, but also because I’m quite a sad person, which is fine and in a way that I’m cool with that. It’s cool. I can have a laugh and I’m funny. But naturally the emotion is sad. And I’ve spent a lot of years walking around South London, being sad, listening to music, walking around parks all times of night, all times of day. And I’ve always felt very held, still, always, by this space that’s always looked after me. It feels very consistent and it is the most consistent thing in my life. I’ve moved around a lot. I worked out that maybe I’ve lived in 25 houses when I was growing up and they were all in South London. And I always felt okay because I knew that I was going to be in this place that I understood. And so for me it’s that, and it’s the nostalgia of always walking around this place and always feeling okay and always knowing I was going to be safe and I always was.
And I hope that I continue to be, but I’ve always been safe and held by that particular area, which is very interesting. I don’t know if many people have that, but I know it and I long for it.
Roxane Gay:
Safety, I think kindness can be underrated. I think it can be overrated in certain contexts, but I also think especially for black women, it can be incredibly underrated. And when we do find places and spaces that are safe, they are invaluable because there are so few of them, quite frankly. Before you were a writer, you worked in publishing quite a lot and in fact when I met you, I think you were still at Fourth Estate. I know that being black in publishing in the United States is challenging because there are very few people in publishing, editorially as agents, as marketing executives, which is where you were. How did you navigate publishing as a black Britain?
Candice Carty-Williams:
How do I answer this question diplomatically? In my first job I had, and legally, in my first job, I had a really fun time. Fourth Estate was really amazing to me. I was able to start the short story prize with the Guardian for Underrepresented Writers. That was incredible. And that was me being like, “I have an idea, I have a plan.” And then being like, “Okay, do it. Enjoy yourself. If you need us, we’re here. You can chat to us.” That was incredible. And so I had a really good time there, but I think, because I was 25 and I was just running around, just drunk all the time, just doing stuff I shouldn’t have been doing, that was okay. And publishing understood me as a young person. And so most of the seniors would say to me and my friend who I worked with at time, my best friends, they were like, “Hey kids,” and that was cool.
And then I went into my next job and it wasn’t good at all. I felt the weight of being the only black woman. There were many, many incidents that I found very, very tough. And I would’ve loved to have stayed on and carried on work in publishing because I know that when you have someone black or someone of color working somewhere, it makes a massive difference to what is published, even if it’s one person. Because it just takes one person to stand up and be like, “I can see how this book would sell. I can see why it’s important.” But I had to go. I had to go. And for many reasons that… Basically, they paid me off in it. But one day I reckon I’ll talk about it and give them their money back.
But I had to go. I had to leave because I was like, “It’s killing me. It’s killing me. It’s killing me being here.” The weight of that is hard and I’m a very resilient person, I always have been. I can do a lot, I can feel a lot and I can cope with it. But that place, I was like, “I don’t think I’m going to make it out alive.” And so I had to go. And I think writing a novel, I was asked by Human Resources, “Did you get permission to do that from your boss?” And I was like, “Oh, okay. It begins.” So yeah, it was a time.
Roxane Gay:
I have to say, every time I talk to a black person in publishing, I hear a story and I think I’m never going to hear anything more fucked up than this. And then I talk to someone else and I hear something worse and I think, “Okay, this is it. This is the apex. I’m not going to hear anything worse.” When you were asked, “Did you ask for permission to write?,” That hearkens back to so many white supremacist activities like enslavement. Are you kidding me?
Candice Carty-Williams:
I laughed. I laughed because I thought it was a joke. And I was met with just a very straight face and I was like, “Oh, that’s not a joke. You are serious.” And I was like, “No, of course not.” And at that point I was so like, “Oh, should I have?” But even then, I was like, “This isn’t right. That’s not right.”
Roxane Gay:
No, it’s not. It’s curious to see the ways in which employers tend to think that because we work for them for eight hours a day or so, that they have ownership over all 24 of our daily hours and such is not the case.
Candice Carty-Williams:
Absolutely not.
Debbie Millman:
That was Candice Carty-Williams with Roxane Gay doing the interviewing. Min Jin Lee is an author and journalist who was born in Korea, grew up in Queens and now lives in Harlem. Her latest novel is Pachinko, which is about several generations of a poor Korean family living in 20th century Japan. I asked her about that book as well as her earlier novels.
Your first published book was Free Food for Millionaires. But the first book you wrote was called Revival of the Senses, which you didn’t publish. And you’ve said this about that book. “It was so boring, really competent prose, but so boring.” And you go on to state that even your husband said, “It’s really boring,” and he’s one of the nicest people on the planet. Did you ever try to have it published? Did you ever solicit any other opinions besides yours and your husband’s?
Min Jin Lee:
Oh yeah. I finally got an agent who I don’t have anymore. This very nice young person who decided, “I’ll take a shot at you,” And she sent it out and it was rejected everywhere, absolutely everywhere. I have the letters. And no one said it was for them, not a single publisher. And she must have sent it out to at least 20 places. And I’m so glad it wasn’t published. Now I see what happens if you have a terrible first publication. I really understand what that means. So now I think, “Oh, I’m really glad that didn’t happen and it’s okay that I was not an early success.” Although of course I have to tell you that between the years of 1995 and 2006, every year, I really felt more and more like I’ve made a very big mistake.
Debbie Millman:
After Revival of The Senses, you wrote the book Motherland, which was a precursor to Pachinko, but you stated that that was garbage. That was the word you used. It was garbage. Really?
Min Jin Lee:
Yeah, it was garbage because it was really boring. Again, it was really boring. And I think that this is, if I really think about the evolution of my writing, it’s really about my inability to understand what it means to be an artist.
Debbie Millman:
What do you mean?
Min Jin Lee:
And I take that quite seriously when I say that. I don’t think I understood about vulnerability. I didn’t understand the risk that you need to take in order to really make a mark in the world of what you want to say and to stand in your position of what you believe. I thought I could lean on my competence, lean on my ability to do things in a very acceptable, admirable way. And I think being admirable and being competent is very different than being an artist. It’s almost like the difference between being pretty and being beautiful. It’s really different level of vulnerability and exposure. And I think by the time I published Free Food for Millionaires, I really decided that, “You know what? It doesn’t matter. I’m going to write things that could get me judged.”
Debbie Millman:
Your opening line of the book is, “Competence can be a curse.” That makes sense now. Now I see the little threads all coming together. What was the most irrational thing about writing Free Food for Millionaires?
Min Jin Lee:
That it took 12 years and I wrote it in omniscient point of view, which almost no one does anymore. It’s considered passe or it was something that it’s actually really difficult to do. And at certain points, what the modernists said in terms of the literary artists, that you didn’t need to do it anymore ’cause you need more psychological penetration of just one character and third person limited. It was also a rejection of the idea that since God is dead, you don’t have this all-knowing narrator anymore. And I said, “You know what? I still really love Anna Karenina. I still love House of Worth, I still love Middlemarch and I want to write like that.
And I think that my decision to learn how to do that craft, took such a long time, but I didn’t know that that’s what I was doing. I knew that I wanted to learn how to do this thing, but I didn’t realize that I would take this long and I didn’t know that I would be so alone and I don’t have a training in the classic way. I don’t have an English major. I didn’t major in English that is. I don’t have an MFA, I don’t have a PhD in literature. All of it I had to figure it out by myself and I’m glad I did now, but back then I think I had a very DIY art career.
Debbie Millman:
The interesting thing about this omniscient voice is I think when you write this way, you have to ask yourself about this sort of fictional universe that you’re creating. I think a lot of your work is, in its core, very much about morals and choice. I think you are crafting a glacier through the choices that we face, whether we’re adhering to immoral just God or an immoral God.
Min Jin Lee:
Yeah. I am creating this world in which there’s meaning that I am arguing deeply against a post-modern world. I am arguing against the sense there is no meaning that things can just take place in terms of a Darwinian cycle. I’m fighting deeply against that, and in order to share that philosophy, I create these worlds in which there’s a purpose and there’s a good purpose.
Debbie Millman:
Does your art have to reflect the moral justice that you believe in?
Min Jin Lee:
I think so, without it being propaganda. I don’t ever want it to be irrational. I don’t really believe in these sort of Hollywood endings. I think that in a way, when we get these Hollywood endings very often… Now we have two kinds of Hollywood endings. One is super happy and everything is saccharin, and the other one is, the evil guy actually has to have sympathy. Lately, we don’t seem to have anything sort of in the middle, and I guess I’m critical of both.
Debbie Millman:
That was Min Jin Lee. These excerpts are from some of the fiction writers I interviewed in 2022. Next week we’ll have excerpts from interviews I conducted in 2022 with musicians and performers. Then we’ll be back with brand new episodes with guests, including the legendary athlete, Megan Rapinoe, musician, King Princess, Restaurateur, Will Guidara, scientist and writer, Alexandra Horowitz, tech innovator, Guy Kawasaki, artist, Dario Calmese and many more. This is the 18th year I’ve been doing Design Matters and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, if we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Speaker 4:
Design Matters is produced for the Ted Audio Collective by Curtis Fox production. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Wayland.