On Tuesday, author Will McGrath is hosting a book launch event for his superb new collection of essays Farewell Transmission: Notes from Hidden Spaces at Sisyphus Brewing.
The event is billed as “Will McGrath & Friends,” and the Q&A portion will be conducted by the bestselling novelist Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep, Rodham), who McGrath genuinely considers a friend—the two of them are both writers married to college professors with children of similar ages, and their family friendship was solidified during COVID, at a time when so many friendships suffered a daunting entropy.
So on a recent weekday morning, I met these two buddies at The Baker’s Wife, McGrath’s favorite donut shop—he’s an old-fashioned, limited yeast donut purist—to discuss how to make a book event even more exciting than they usually are, if writers can actually be friends, and the differences between journalism and anthropology.
So how long have you known each other? Are you legit friends?
Will: I mean the title of the event now says Will McGrath and Friends. So Curtis is legally obligated now. It’s a binding pact.
Curtis: So my family moved here in like August 2018, and I think we met at a writer event organized by Frank Bures. And I think that Will’s family are some of the few people that I became a bit closer to during the pandemic.
Will: Mainly because we were the only people crazy enough to sit outside in the winter.
Curtis: We’d be like “do you want to come over and like eat pizza in our driveway when it’s 15 degrees?” And you guys would be like, “coming over.”
Will: We try to always remain game.
So do you guys like other writers usually?
Curtis: No.
I find that hanging with other writers can sometimes contain an awkward jealousy component.
Will: Yeah.
Curtis, Have you read Will’s book yet?
Curtis: Oh my god, of course. When I met him, I hadn’t read his first book. Actually, the night we met was at Lake Monster Brewery in St. Paul at this event organized by Frank. And I remember actually you said to me something like, “my wife is a big fan of your books.” In all honesty, that’s sort of known to be a thing that female writers hear from men. But I think we took a picture.
Will: [laughing, sheepishly] Yeah.
Curtis: And the other thing I should say is that Will and Ellen are one of those couples where you meet one and then you meet the other one, who is just as awesome. But I read Will’s first book and sincerely loved it.
Will, have you read all of Curtis’ work by now?
Will: I’ve read three of her books. She’s only read two of my books.
Curtis: That’s true.
Will: So I’m one up on you.
Curtis: I’m sorry, but there’s a pivotal piece of our friendship journey that I feel gave it sort of extra meaning. So I think that we knew each other and crossed paths for a year, like we ran into each other at the first Wordplay or something. Then Will’s family had my family and another family over, basically the night before everyone stopped doing everything for COVID. And so they were the last people’s house that we had been inside, and it was a really fun night. I think that almost everyone can probably remember the last social thing that they did and that was ours. And then we were like, should we celebrate our six month pandemic anniversary? I remember Will and Ellen and my husband and I met outside and ate donuts together. I think it was literally snowing.
Will: We spent a lot of time outside in the cold during COVID. It’s a bonding thing. I think the main barrier that was overcome was we had gotten to know each other and at some point after that you read my book, and you were like, “I was so glad that it didn’t suck.”
Curtis: [big laugh] Yeah.
That’s the thing when you read a friend’s book: there’s relief when it’s good because reading a book is a bigger investment than listening to a song, or watching a movie. So have you had writer friends before this?
Will: Not really before the Twin Cities. We moved here in 2015 from Chicago and my first book came out in 2018. This is a slight tangent, but I think it’s a really good city to be a writer in because it’s a big enough place to have a vibrant art scene and there’s a lot of creative people in the area. And it’s small enough where you can actually get to know people. Like if I was in New York or something, I feel like I wouldn’t know anyone.
Um, I think in New York writers actually hang out.
Will: But they all hate each other too. I feel like around here at least, I have not experienced that level of competitiveness. There’s a lot of fun writers that you can get to know and it’s like not an edgy scene in my limited experience, I guess. So for me, the Twin Cities feels like it actually fosters that kind of community in a meaningful way.
Curtis, you’re best seller-level successful. Does that make it harder to make writer friends?
Curtis: Well, Will and I both did MFA programs. I think I literally did mine 20 years before Will. So I have probably always had writer friends for most of my adulthood. Before this, my family lived in St. Louis, Missouri. But I was among more writers at this random happy hour six months into living in Minneapolis than I was cumulatively in 11 years in St. Louis. And if we find ourselves at a writer’s happy hour and there are like eight people there, it might be kind of like two are in radio, three are in print journalism, one’s in fiction, one’s in long-form nonfiction. There are lots of people doing their own thing here in an interesting way and I think there’s enough of an overlap of being a writer, no matter what category, that you have plenty to talk about, but I don’t perceive it to be like super competitive. I think people are kind of on their own path here. I also agree with Will that in some ways there’s not so many writers that you take it for granted, but you are like oh yeah, maybe we should be friends. In New York you might be like this is unremarkable to meet another writer.
So you decided to do this event together as friends.
Will: Friends…and rivals.
But this is a kind of one-off special hometown-only event.
Will: It’s weirdly delayed—the book came out in August, but I was out of the country when it came out. So I knew I wasn’t going to do a launch event right when it came out.
Where were you?
Will: I was in Ireland.
Oh, that’s right. You were doing the Ultimate Frisbee Championships in Limerick.
Will: We lost in the finals. We made it to the finals of the World’s Masters Ultimate Frisbee which is a fancy way of saying old people ultimate frisbee.
You played for one of Surly’s teams, right—they sent a bunch of teams there.
Will: Three Surly teams from three different divisions and all three of them made it to their respective finals, but we were the only ones who lost.
Ouch! So the two of you must have been involved with so many book events over the course of your careers, right? How will this one be different?
Will: The half-baked idea in my head was it could kind of be like a variety show. I didn’t want it to just be me with great gravitas reading a passage and then stepping away—I was like what’s a way to make this kind of fun and have different little segments have it in a brewery as opposed to a quiet bookstore. So it’s got a little energy to it. So there’s a great poet who’s from the Twin Cities, Ed Bockley. And one of the essays in the book is this piece I did for the Atlantic a few years back about an iPhone that ends up in Yemen.
That essay is amazing.
Curtis: Isn’t it?
Will: So you know, there’s like a cameo from this guy Ali Sultan who’s a stand up.
So is Ali going to do a tight five?
Will: I think he’s going to do 10. Ten-ish, yeah. So there’s going to be poetry. There’s going to be standup comedy. There’s going to be some reading, and then I was like to close out I need someone to bullshit with. So Curtis is the best person to do that.
It’s interesting that your book is out on the heels of a two-year pandemic lock down. Because the book is such a peripatetic book, where you’re encountering these weirdos all over the world.
Will: Aren’t weirdos the best?
Truly.
Will: I mean I think the book is born out of the pandemic in a way because there’s a wanderlust. Like missing being out in the world and being able to scramble around in the hidden little corners of things.
But you are clearly aware that you’re the white guy on the beach in Namibia. In that essay, and in others, you interrogate these concepts of “parachute journalism” and the dread word “tourist.” You’re not a formal anthropologist or historian. You’re drawn to writing about stuff that you’re not an expert in, but are deeply interested in.
Will: I think you’ve got to be careful. So my wife is an anthropologist by trade.
Oh shit, so she’s the real deal.
Will: She’s the real deal. And a lot of her thinking influences my own about just how to approach the world. When done right, so much of anthropology is about coming to a place that you don’t know, and the understanding is you’re going to take away your preconceptions of how things should operate. Just come to a place openly and say I’m going to do my very best to engage with this place on its own terms and engage with these people on their own terms, and as much as I can, be a useful part of life. I think it guides a lot of my writing, of being like if I’m going to be writing about a community that I’m not intimately involved with, I want to make sure that I’m not trampling in there and giving my dumb, white guy opinion on how things should go. That I should be learning about a place and how people see themselves on its own terms.
But anthropologists are so different than like New Journalism journalists. They’re so careful that the “I” is never introduced. But that’s not you either.
Will: I mean I think I’m both a fake journalist and a fake anthropologist. I’m just a fake in general, but where I think anthropology is a very valuable framework to offer, there’s also something phony about it, and I think this can be true in journalism too. There’s something phony about pretending towards some sort of objectivity.
I agree.
Will: We’re all fundamentally enmeshed and it takes a lot of work to try to take away those preconceived ideas about how things should work. So it’s a good framework and model to be like I’m going to do the best I can like this, and then also admit that I’m a human being. It’s impossible for me not to have my own opinions and viewpoints and experiences that are going to color how I interact in a situation.
And Curtis, I admit I haven’t read enough of your work. But you started out with Prep, a book about a boarding school of which you’ve had personal experience, and then you wrote about Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton, respectively, these elite women who you might be able to relate to, but who’ve lived lives so much different than yours, who you’ve had to deeply research.
Curtis: I’ll just remark on something that Will said that I think is super interesting. So when we were talking about the relief of reading your friend’s book, and when I think about reading Will’s first book, I think I felt like a double relief: I felt like we’re friends and I genuinely love his book, and I also felt like you know, a white man wrote about his years in the tiny African country of Lesotho and there are so many ways to go wrong, but Will’s approach is very open and very humble and always has such a quirky sense of humor. I think that Will does things as a writer that he almost objectively shouldn’t be able to get away with, but does, which is kind of my favorite thing in writing. I respect a writer who can kind of bend language or like almost perform acts of daring. Like there’s so much sadness or tragedy in both books and it’s mingled with so much joy and hilarity, I do think it’s an amazing feat.
So how do you handle writing from personal experience versus writing about a subject that you have to learn so much about?
Curtis: I will say this comes back to bite me as a person, but as a fiction writer, I want a reader to read my book and almost think it feels so true that it must be true. It’s actually overwhelmingly not true. Like my own life is not worthy of plots and fiction in books, but I do work really hard to make it all seem true. So of course you’re very far from the first person to maybe imagine my work to be more autobiographical than it is. it is ludicrous to say, but I think it’s like 30 percent autobiographical. I had a story collection come out in 2018. A lot of it is about like affluent, educated, cranky liberal white women.
Will: I think that short story collection is maybe my favorite book of yours.
Curtis: Mine too.
Will: And I think you’re a fake anthropologist in your own way.
Curtis: Oh my god, that’s like such a high compliment.
Will: Because I think that book especially, it’s like you approach these lives on their own terms and all their flaws and messiness. I think that’s what the best fiction does as well—it approaches the world empathetically, and really tries to understand lives that are different from our own, lives that are messy and weird and maybe seem objectionable in many ways but, like with all your stories, even if sometimes people are awful in certain ways, you love those people. They’re empathetic and understanding of people’s messy, weird, sometimes awfulness. But they’re not mean stories. They’re loving of the weirdos.
Curtis: Until this moment, I’ve never thought about if our writing is similar—I do think that both of us are probably pretty compassionate people, but I also think we both have the ability to go for the jugular. You can’t be so softhearted that you’re not willing to call out something. Which is something that goes through Will’s essays. I think he often withholds something and then, kind of like in the Namibia essay, at the end, he kind of does this thing where he articulates what the reader has been waiting for, or kind of expresses what I, as the reader, sensed the stakes were all along.
So Curtis, without spoiling it, what’s your line of questioning going to be for Will during your Q&A?
Curtis: I’m going to be the Steve Marsh of the event! I have a lot of feelings about this. I’ve been on both sides: I’ve asked the Qs, I’ve given the As. I know people are there to hear Will talk about his book and his experiences. I don’t think I’m a particularly hilarious interviewer, but I want him to talk about the experiences of putting together these pieces. One of the questions I have is: Do you seek out the experiences to write about them, or do you write about them because life is so interesting? I feel like you tell some stories like, “I was in New Orleans at 3 in the morning.” That feels like so much more of a Will interaction than a Curtis interaction. I could never start a story like, I was in New Orleans at 3 in the morning! I think Will’s an open, game person. So which came first, your life or the writing?
Will: I think the writing piece came later, the more I think about it. Growing up, my youth was boring in the best possible way. I had a very peaceful and easy upbringing, so once you get into college and beyond, the world is so interesting, there’s an instinct to be like I want to learn about this, and see this, and that. And the writing can grow out of that.