The Lit Hub Author Questionnaire is a monthly interview featuring seven questions for five authors with new books. This month we talk to:
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Kurt Baumeister (Twilight of the Gods)
Callie Collins (Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine)
Daniel D’Addario (The Talent)
Susan Morrison (Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live)
Mariam Rahmani (Liquid: A Love Story)
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Without summarizing it in any way, what would you say your book is about?
Callie Collins: Austin. Texas. The burn of cheap tequila. The delicate and sometimes cruel machinations of a young social scene. God. Telecasters.
Daniel D’Addario: Maria Callas. Zoom therapy. Lady Bird Johnson. Compulsive behavior. Tennessee Williams. Losing yourself, finding someone else. “Titus Andronicus.” Rivalries, friendships, a funny third thing that’s kind of both.
Mariam Rahmani: Finding love in a messy world. Histories of U.S. imperialism and global networks of Orientalism. Contemporary Islamophobia. Genre constraints.
Susan Morrison: It’s the life story of an impresario—Lorne Michaels— and the challenges of corralling and managing a swirling band of needy creative egos.
Kurt Baumeister:Humanity’s suicidal obsession with absolutism. But light-hearted and comical.
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Without explaining why and without naming other authors or books, can you discuss the various influences on your book?
Susan Morrison: I thought of my book as an old-fashioned bildungsroman, in that it shows my subject learning key little bits of information every step of the way, as he moves through life. But I also wanted it to have the immediacy of a magazine profile, with plenty of in-the-room up-close action. So I devised the book as a braided narrative, with historical sections alternating with contemporary scenes in the offices of “Saturday Night Live.”
Mariam Rahmani: Third Worldism; U.S.-Iranian relations (or lack thereof) post-1979; Persian literature both classical and modern; the 19th-century Anglophone novel and marriage plot; diversity of the American Muslim community including across sects, and in particular, the mosques I went to growing up in the Midwest. Vintage hunting.
Daniel D’Addario: Beyond the obvious (my years of work as a magazine writer and the various personalities and awards campaigns to which I’ve been exposed), some threads: The film Her Smell and the TV show “The Rachel Zoe Project”; going to SoulCycle in Los Angeles; becoming a parent (ugh, I know, but…); the public-relations strategy around Anyone But You; the experience of being competitive by nature; the Dior perfume ad where Natalie Portman screams “Prove it!” and then runs on the beach. I also listened to live performances from Lady Gaga’s tour supporting the album “Artpop” for hours at a time while finishing the editing process, and I think that entered in.
Callie Collins: Duct tape on an old rip in the booth seat. Justin Townes Earle’s picking style—the way he plucks, rips out, and deadens the bass note. Tallboys, gravel parking lots. My dad’s collection of gig posters from the Armadillo World Headquarters. A movie called Blaze. 105-degree afternoons. The sound of the word snarl. The sound of the word acreage. Scott Newton’s old photographs. A good murder ballad. Live oak trees.
Kurt Baumeister:Conspiracy theories, likable unlikable characters, polyhedral dice, video games that go blip-blop-blorp in the dark, mythology, post-punk, John Singer Sargent, Pollock, Basquiat, politics, history, and theology. You might as well laugh at Darkness and its big, bad daddy, Death. They’re coming for you whether you’re deferential or not.
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Without using complete sentences, can you describe what was going on in your life as you wrote this book?
Daniel D’Addario: Emerged from my “Ray of Light” era (vaguely spiritual new-parent contentment). Entered my “Music” era (when a slightly-less-new parent decides it’s time to be really random!). Moved house. Had a second baby. Walked around Brooklyn a lot. Co-working space!
Susan Morrison: Getting used to being an empty nester. Settling into a new long-term relationship after a decade of being mostly single. Taking on the challenge of running a big cultural organization, while still doing my day job as an editor at The New Yorker.
Mariam Rahmani: Piddling career frustrations. Rescued love. Trash rom-coms.
Kurt Baumeister:No more mom. Abby and Annie. Virginia-Baltimore-Philly. Trump. Covid. Fear. Hope.
Callie Collins: I play baseball, a lot of baseball, and I play with some very strong dudes, one of whom, Tucker, hits these astronomical pop flies when we take infield—celestial, truly, those things stay up there forever—and there’s this very particular feeling you have to contend with when you’re trying to position yourself directly underneath something pure and catchable, a gob of leather and yarn and cork that was shot up into the sky like a balloon out of a cannon and which is now falling like an anvil—or shot up into the sky like an anvil out of a cannon and which is now falling like a balloon—and there are eight guys around you who’d do anything for you and are instead totally helpless, and you’re 100% alone and somehow also more attuned to the world than you thought it possible to be, and time stops completely kinda, but whole days pass too, and you can feel them roll over, and all you can do is stay on the balls of your feet, and keep your eyes open and your hands soft, and hold your hope gently enough you don’t crush it completely, and anyway, seven years of … that?
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What are some words you despise that have been used to describe your writing by readers and/or reviewers?
Kurt Baumeister: When someone tells me my writing is “cinematic,” I tend to think it’s a dig. This probably stems from the time my ex-wife’s aunt told me I should write for TV.
Daniel D’Addario: I’m invariably so curious about how I’m being read — even when I feel misread — that no particular word really bothers me. I guess I don’t like when “subtle” is used as a critique, when to me, it’s like… the point, or a point, of writing is to convey ideas without just coming out and stating them.
Mariam Rahmani: One should be so lucky as to be despised (this is a debut!).
Susan Morrison: “Overly long.”
Callie Collins: If you read my work and want to say something about it, I’m truly grateful. Call it anything you want. (If you don’t read it and want to say something about it, cause ew, Texas, also fine! I’ll just tuck you right into the chip on my shoulder.)
*If you could choose a career besides writing (irrespective of schooling requirements and/or talent) what would it be?
Daniel D’Addario: I think I would be a really good senator!
Callie Collins: Session musician, pedal steel.
Mariam Rahmani: High-end personal shopper. Or business school professor (i.e., another high-end scam).
Susan Morrison: Being a producer.
Kurt Baumeister: Fictional supervillain.
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What craft elements do you think are your strong suit, and what would you like to be better at?
Mariam Rahmani: Okay at poetics of prose, as in rhythm and sound. Always always working on structure.
Callie Collins: I think I’m pretty OK at inhabiting a voice. I’d like to be better at everything else.
Daniel D’Addario: I think the process of writing The Talent made me much more adept at differentiating between voices as we switch between characters’ perspectives, and I’m also pretty good at bringing paragraphs to a close. I could stand to improve at moving the plot along — the nuts and bolts of getting people into and out of rooms, that kind of thing.
Kurt Baumeister: My strong suits are voice, dialogue, and prose. I wish I cared more about exhaustively describing scenery and staging: the high-end fashions and au courant haircuts, the extravagant home furnishings and delicious meals. Some readers really seem to go for that stuff.
Susan Morrison: With my magazine journalism background, I think I’m good at crafting scenes with dialogue. I’d like to get better at writing paragraphs of critical appraisal.
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How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything?
Susan Morrison: I had no idea that anyone would be interested in what I had to say! I never wrote anything before I was 60.
Mariam Rahmani: Thinking about how much space everyone else is taking up publishing their books! More so, actually, enjoying one such book and being grateful that someone went through the trouble of not only writing and editing it but going through the humiliating process verging on ego death that is packaging it for the public.
Callie Collins: I try to remind myself that plants don’t worry about hubris when they grow out of the ground. Also, I have a very patient therapist.
Daniel D’Addario: I write stuff that — if I hadn’t been the one to write it — I’d like to read. So I know I have at least one interested reader, if nothing else!
Kurt Baumeister: Denial? Sublimation? Gosh, I’ve been writing for so many years and so few people really seem interested in my work, perhaps I’ve just forgotten how hubristic this whole enterprise is. Yeah, I think that’s it.
