Interview with Benjamin Anastas
Although Benjamin Anastas is primarily a novelist, this October he released his memoir, Too Good to Be True. The book weaves back and forth between a present-day setting of seemingly genteel poverty and a childhood of liberal misery. The author’s character is writing a memoir to keep his son in yogurt cups, to keep his girlfriend from leaving him, and to keep everything together.
Q: Your first novel was in many ways concerned with failure, with competition and with ambition; these are themes you returned to in your memoir. Were you always consciously aware that these were preoccupations for you?
I do think that failure is the great shadow subject in American life—the one that dogs our persistent preoccupation with success.
Q: Did handling the same topics in a nonfiction setting feel different for you? Did it affect your process?
I wrote Too Good to Be True more or less in “real time”—that is, when I was writing about using the Coinstar machine to go food shopping with my son it was just a few days or a few weeks at most since I”d actually done it; I literally didn’t know if my girlfriend on the other side of the door was plotting to leave me; I didn’t know, before I started working at the office tower I describe, if I would find a job. So the failure in my life felt very immediate, and the job was to go back and plumb the past to find out (1) how I had gotten myself there, and (2) whether there were any lessons to be found in the primordial muck that would help me find my way out. The book is more than nonfiction, in a way; I thought of it as a “reality experiment.” But that said, there was an awful lot of selection that went into the process, scene shaping and dialogue making, that made me feel, at times, as if I were actually writing another novel.
The book is more than nonfiction, in a way; I thought of it as a “reality experiment.”
Q: You make it sound like very artificial live blogging. Looking back at the Benjamin Anastas that the memoir presents, does he still feel like you?
Artificial in what sense?
Q: Perhaps “artificial” was the wrong word, maybe “constructed” would have been better. I was simply referring to the process of shaping and editing that made the process feel novel-like to you.
Artificial has some very bad connotations when it comes to memoir! But yes, in the sense that I was creating artifice it absolutely applies. Writing takes time, at least it does for me (just one of the reasons why I suck so royally at Twitter!), so the lag between living the events and writing down the ones I chose to include felt useful and right. I’d had time to think about, say, what makes the Brooklyn Flea so alienating, or ride the subway without my son and realize that my arms were aching for him. To go back to your original question: no, I don't feel like the Benjamin Anastas in the book anymore, and that’s been one of the real freedoms that writing the book has provided. I am no longer that protagonist with his very specific and time-bound set of problems. Maybe it’s just an illusion—and if it is, that’s all right by me—but I have managed to find my way out of the wood I was lost in and reorient my life.
Q: Well, that sounds like one of the best things anyone could say of memoir. In the book, you describe trying to encourage students to be writers, even though your own life and your writing were falling apart. If you were to encounter yourself as a student would you encourage that young man to try to be a writer? Would you say the same thing to your son?
I benefited from a lot of encouragement along the way, beginning with my father and extending to my favorite workshop teachers (Margot Livesey, Deborah Eisenberg), so it’s been very easy for me to try and offer the same encouragement to young writers who’ve got the bug. I was just like you, or any other student who really burns for it—there’s no rattling their belief that writing is what they’ve been out here to do, so it would be malpractice of the highest order to try and discourage such a deep-seated impulse. When it comes to my son, that’s another story; I’m trying my best to social-engineer him into the sciences. There’s too much uncertainty to the writing life—too much loneliness and bone-pulverizing doubt. But if it turns out that he wants to carry on the family business, I’ll do what I can to help him out.
Writing takes time, at least it does for me … so the lag between living the events and writing down the ones I chose to include felt useful and right.
Q: You talk a lot about the distance between yourself and your father, who was also a writer. Are there things you wish he had told you about the “family business”?
One of my earliest memories is a manuscript of short stories that my father kept on his desk and would send out for grants and other recognition that he never got. So without saying a word to me about it, I knew from his brooding and his tripwire temper when it came to hugely successful writers like John Updike that dissatisfaction often comes with the job. Later, just before I started writing the memoir, actually, I finally learned that for most of my childhood, my father was suffering through a nineteen-year drought when he just couldn’t bring himself to write fiction. (This isn’t true anymore—my father has written and published more books in the last ten years than I have!) “The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived lives of his parents,” Carl Jung said, and I think I must have started writing fiction, at least at the beginning, to help assuage the feelings of a father who wasn’t writing.
Q: A fascinating part of this book is the descriptions of the writing social circle. Do you feel that it is a very small circle? Do you feel like it is possible to be a successful writer and exist outside of it?
It’s an awful little village, the world of publishing and writers in New York City. People don’t last long in it—especially now, with ebooks and all of the corporate consolidation—and it always amazes me that there are so many fresh young faces every year, eager to fill a cubicle and join the ranks. I’m not sure, to be way too honest, how much good writing is being produced in the shadow of Big Publishing right now; whenever graduating MFA students ask me what to do with their lives, whether to stay in New York and get a starter job in publishing, or move to somewhere smaller like Madison, or Charlottesville, or one of the two Portlands, and find a job that pays the rent and gets them health insurance, I always tell them to light out. Aside from the expense of life here, which is truly ridiculous, most of the intellectual energy here is devoted to getting and/or protecting status. It has nothing to do with writing books that make your extremities tingle and send chills of fearful recognition up your spine.
I think I’ve learned from writing a memoir that I really do love writing fiction. Whether I’m meant to do it is another question, and time will bear that out.
Q: Do you feel like you learned anything writing memoir that you will take with you when you return to fiction?
Phew, that last answer was a real unburdening! Anyway: I think I’ve learned from writing a memoir that I really do love writing fiction. Whether I’m meant to do it is another question, and time will bear that out. The things I truly loved about writing the memoir—having the same project to come back to day after day, the sentences that started out clumsy and gradually found their form, the scenes that took on a life of their own and the voices that came to whisper in my ear—all happen when you’re writing fiction. You just don’t very often have the actual, the real, to be your guide. So I’m relishing a return to invented lives, and all the shades of reality they depend on.
BENJAMIN ANASTAS is the author of the memoir Too Good to Be
True (New Harvest/HMH) and two novels: An Underachiever’s Diary (Dial) and
The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor’s Disappearance (FSG). Other writing has
appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, New York Times Magazine,
and The Best American Essays 2012.