David L. Ulin: Hello, everyone. I am David L. Ulin. I'm the books editor of Alta Journal, and I want to welcome you to Alta's California Book Club. We're thrilled tonight to welcome Tobias Wolff as our guest. But before we get to the conversation, I want to briefly introduce you to Alta if you're unfamiliar and the California Book Club.
Alta is a quarterly print publication with a very active website. We do a lot of cultural coverage, a lot of books coverage, books and literature of California and the West. And part of that initiative during the pandemic, in the fall of 2020, we began the California Book Club as an online monthly discussion of what we are calling the new California canon. We've been doing this now for four years, and we will continue to do it. It's been very exciting.
I want to first, before I do anything, thank our partners without whom we couldn't possibly make this happen. So thank you to Book Passage, Books Inc., Book Soup, Bookshop, the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, the Los Angeles Public Library, the San Francisco Public Public Library, Narrative Magazine, Vroman's Bookstore, Green Apple Books, Bookshop West Portal, and ZYZZYVA.
So, at the California Book Club, before each of the Zoom interviews like the one you're going to see tonight, we put on our website the author website, interviews with this month's author, in this case, Tobias Wolff, multiple pieces examining the work in question, which is Wolff's phenomenal memoir, This Boy's Life, deep dives into themes, a sense of place, excerpts, et cetera. We want you to feel like we're all in this book club together and that there's tons of information.
Your support is what allows Alta, the quarterly magazine, to present free events like this, so I encourage you all to consider subscribing to Alta Journal. For just $50 a year, you can receive four issues of Alta Journal and the Altatude book. I do have swag, but, unfortunately, I'm in my office tonight at USC, so I don't have the swag with me. But, trust me, the Altatude book is a great collection of comics from the magazine, we have hats, we have all kinds of things, and next month I will show them to you.
A couple of pitches before we get started, I do want to let you know that you can buy our current issue of Alta which includes Q&A, essays by upcoming California Book Club writers, including Tobias Wolff, for free shipping and no tax, so please look into that on the website, and also to let you know that, tomorrow night, we are hosting CBC Live in San Francisco. This event is part of the city's Litquake Festival and will be held at the Verdi Club with special guests Andrew Sean Greer, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Jaime Cortez. There are still a few tickets available, so, if you're in the Bay Area, please come hang out with Alta and the California Book Club tonight.
I also want to say a special welcome to my old friend, my old high school friend, Carol Edgarian, who is our special guest tonight and will be joining the conversation to talk with Tobias Wolff and John Freeman. At this point, it's time for me to get out of the way and turn things over to John, so please welcome John Freeman, and enjoy the conversation. Thank you all for being here.
John Freeman: Hello, David. Nice to see your face. Nice to see everyone here. I come for the first time in a while. Actually from California, I'm in San Francisco, and I grew up here in California. And, for most of my adult life, if you wanted clean, dependable, easy action in the short story, there was really one place to go and to begin, and that was the stories of Tobias Wolff. If you could combine the easy, loose comedic range of Chevy Chase and the wonderful, terse sentence-by-sentence beauty of Raymond Carver, you could get somewhat close to what Wolff does in the short story. And they never really failed to entertain or surprise, whether it's a hunter coming home with an animal on his hood or a critic walking into a bank, getting his brains blown out and having his life flash before him.
Tobias Wolff has become a master of storytelling in our lifetimes and I think has changed the way that American stories are told. He was born in 1945 in Alabama and grew up around the United States and, at around the age of 10, moved from Florida to Utah with his mother, a trip which begins a journey to the West that they undertake together. They followed on to Portland and onto Seattle and into Washington, a journey that she was taking under force of duress to some degree. As we would later find out in the extraordinary book that we're here to talk about, This Boy's Life, it's a memoir about growing up in the 1950s as a boy and all the things that a boy in that time did, whether it's dropping water balloons on Ford T-Birds or trying to play basketball and dress shoes or become a Boy Scout, but it's also a groundbreaking memoir.
And the way that it shows how a boy tries to figure out how to be a boy and the lessons that he learns from all the people around him, this book wasn't just groundbreaking in the ways that it conceived of boyhood, it was the way that it told the story, putting you in young Tobias Wolff's life. He goes by Jack at the time. We live moments with him, and I think you come to understand that our lives are stories assembled. This kicked off, I think, a boom in the memoir around the same time that the short story was also going through a boom. Both of these had to do with the presence of Tobias Wolff. We all know he's the author of four collections of stories and two memoirs, including this one, and two novels, the winner of the PEN/Faulkner, The Story Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. We have him here, so let's just get him on.
It's a real pleasure to have you here, Mr. Tobias Wolff. Thank you for joining us.
Tobias Wolff: It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to this.
Freeman: I am, too. Let's just jump right in. Rereading this book, I was clobbered by happiness, but also moments of deep sadness and a remembering of what it felt like to be a boy. And I wonder if you can talk to us a little bit about creating the voice of a 10-year-old, because this feels very authentic, and yet also it is a device, so are there some things that you wanted to do in telling your story from that point of view that you could tell us now?
Wolff: Well, the one thing that I found myself focused on in writing came to me because I was doing it wrong at the beginning. I had to give up the things I had learned from being a 10-year-old and become that unlearned 10-year-old again. I had to, in a sense, put on the blindness, the naivete of the boy I once was. I could not gift him with the kind of wisdom or insight that I really did not have at the time.
That was not as hard as it might have been because there's, frankly, a part of me which has never quite grown up as anyone close to me would quickly confirm. And, also, I've had the luck of raising a couple of boys myself as well as a daughter and being close to that perspective. And, indeed, I was in the process of raising my children when I wrote the book, and I can't but think that that gave me some help in finding that perspective and being true to it in the telling of the story.
Freeman: Violence is very prevalent in this book. Your mother leaves Florida because she's afraid of a man and then leaves Utah because he catches up with them and then falls in with another man who is I would say very sneakily violent at first, the story of which takes up the latter half of this book. And it feels like one of the stories the book tells is the story of how a boy develops pattern recognition, how to look for signs of what the adult world could possibly mean in terms of threats and the need for protection. And, in that sense, young Jack, the name that you described yourself adopting after you turned 10 and moved West, he's also looking out for his mother. And that must've been quite painful to re-remember those occurrences where, as a young child, you're having to intuit something that's beyond you, but you also know means danger for your mother, not just for you.
Wolff: Right. The other aspect of the violence that was the circumstances we were in were kind of pregnant with violence because both my mother's boyfriend and, after we left him, after she left him, the husband she married, both of them were bristling with firearms. They were both gun nuts, and so there were guns around the house. I had one myself. I had a Winchester rifle that I prized, so the possibility of something going really wrong was always there. And I was aware of it.
We had a long hallway in the house we lived in. The house was actually half of a converted barracks, that German prisoners of war had been kept in during the war. This was in the mountains of Washington State. And, at night, my stepfather who fancied himself an expert rifleman, used to dry fire, practice shooting. He'd lie on one end of the hallway with a 22, a Match 22, one developed especially for shooting competitions. And he'd be down there in the prone position. And just to get from the living room into my bedroom, I'd have to cross that hallway, and he'd be down there with the rifle pointing, snapping it on an empty chamber, practicing not pulling the trigger, but squeezing it, all those sorts of things. So, even at night, I mean, somebody's pointing a rifle in my house. And I can't imagine that didn't have an effect on me.
Freeman: You describe books that you read. Bret Hart's stories, there is also this kind of... It's not benign, but it's a lot more benign than someone-in-the-hallway-shooting-a-rifle sense of adventure. And you recount these hilarious 20-page letters you wrote to your pen pal from Utah where you lived on a ranch. And it seemed like-
Wolff: Oh, I said I lived on a ranch, yes.
Freeman: It seems like, from the very beginning, invention was part of your DNA. And your brother has written a story, a memoir about your father called The Duke of Deception, and that's a whole other family past we could get into. Do you have any sense of when this sense of invention really took off, when it became something that you didn't just do for survival technique, but for enjoyment?
Wolff: Yeah. It was actually when I was living in this little village in the mountains of Washington State, in the Cascades, and we were very isolated and, in fact, the high school I went to was 32 miles down the river. And so I traveled 65 miles a day or so to go to school and back. It was very isolated and, for a while, we didn't even have television, so I read a lot. I always had, but I really read a lot then because there was not a lot else to do at night and, for some reason or another, I developed an ambition to write some stories myself. So, God knows, I had time, and so I started writing when I was probably about... that is in a conscious way, when I was probably about 14, 15.
I loved Jack London's stories. I even ditched my own name and took the name Jack in honor of Jack London. It was a manlier name to have and also had all those resonances of the great north and the adventure that the name of Jack London conjures. And so they were imitative stories, of course. I fell in love with O. Henry, the trick endings, and so I did. I won't say I was a disciplined writer, but I wrote. Yeah.
Freeman: I love how this all sort of happens offscreen or offstage, if you will, in This Boy's Life. I mean, most of what we read about and see in the book is Jack bearing down, trying to get through his teenage years under the thumb of Dwight, who is both a maniac and very eccentric. He decides to paint the house entirely white, this Christmas tree white. He goes through these-
Wolff: The piano. He painted the piano white.
Freeman: Except for the black keys, right?
Wolff: Except for the black keys, he did. Yes, he left those alone.
Freeman: I mean, obviously, part of his character was his drinking. But why do you think he did these strange things? I mean, did you speculate about it growing up or do you feel like, now as an adult, you came to understand a little bit more about why he was the way he was?
Wolff: Honestly, I mean, he was I have to say a figure of some note even to friends of mine who had eccentric fathers and stepfathers of their own. He was conspicuous. He was. At this rate he was... I would say, from the most generous part of my heart at this point, that he was someone who had not been loved when he was young and didn't know how to look for it, so demanded it from people around him, his wives, his children, with a kind of desperation that was always going to be disappointed and which then curdled to anger and violence. I mean, that's the kindest construction I can put on it in retrospect.
However, when you live with somebody like that, you don't have the luxury of trying to understand them. You're just looking out to see if you can get through this day. And so, honestly, I never felt a moment's compassion or fellow feeling for my stepfather when living with him. I would be lying if I said I had. Whatever compassion there was in what I just said was not in me at the time.
Freeman: And that's one of the glories of the book is how faithful it is to your point of view as a young boy and then a teenager and then someone trying to survive this period, someone who's developing friends, is also goofing off, developing interests and then desperately wants to escape. At some point, luckily, among his many deceptions is to go through his... your mother's mail and find the address of an uncle which starts, I think, a process of reaching out. You eventually write to your brother at Princeton and send him stories, which is how we learn in the book that you're writing stories, and he comes up with the idea of you writing away to boarding school and getting out of there, and this lifeline comes. And one of the funniest scenes is when you decide that you're going to have to write your way out of Washington State with your own references. And I wonder if you could just read from that part of the book.
Wolff: Sure. At the time, things were coming to pretty much of a head with my stepfather and me. Things were getting pretty dark, and I had luckily been able to get in touch after years of not being in touch with my older brother, Geoffrey. He's seven and a half years older than I. He had grown up with my father back East and was a brilliant young man and had gone to Princeton and graduated summa laude in English. And I finally managed through Princeton to get in touch with him, and then he got in touch with me. And I explained my situation to him, and he said, "Well, you should try to get some sort of a scholarship to a boarding school. Get out of there." And it sounded like a great idea to me, but I knew that my record in school would not entitle me to a scholarship anywhere. It was a laughable prospect. I often skipped school altogether.
And so, what I did, the school... I was given by my brother a list of schools I ought to apply to, including the one he'd gone to, and so I set about to apply. But when it came to actually having letters of recommendation, there was no way that the teachers that I'd been blowing off for two years, I was a sophomore at Concrete High School, which is where I went to high school in Concrete Washington, would have had no reason to give me letters of recommendation, so I thought I'd better write my own.
A friend of mine worked in the school office and gave me some school stationery, and I went to work.
Over the next couple of nights, I filled out the transcripts and the application forms. I have to say that I also fudged my grade records. Now, the application forms came easy. I could afford to be terse and modest in my self-descriptions, knowing how detailed my recommenders were going to be. I began writing the letters in longhand, then typed up the final versions on official stationery using different machines in the typing lab at school.
Now the words came as easily as if someone were breathing them into my ear. I felt full of things that had to be said, full of stifled truth. That was what I felt. I was writing the truth. It was truth known only to me, but I believed in it more than I believed in the facts arrayed against it. I believed that, in some sense not factually verifiable, I was a straight-A student in the same way I believed that I was an Eagle Scout and a powerful swimmer and a boy of integrity. These were ideas about myself that I had held on to. Now I gave them voice.
I made no claims that seemed false to me. I did not say that I was a star quarterback or even a varsity football player. The same was true of basketball. I couldn't feature myself sinking a last-second clincher from the key as Elgin Baylor did for Seattle that year in the NCAA playoffs against San Francisco. Ditto school politics. The unending compulsion to test one's own popularity was baffling to me.
These were not ideas I had of myself, and I did not propose to urge them on anyone else. I declined to say I was a football star, but I did invent a swimming team for Concrete High School. The coach wrote a fine letter for me, and so did my teachers and the principal. They didn't gush. They wrote plainly about a gifted, upright boy who had already in his own quiet way exhausted the resources of his school and community. They had done what they could for him. Now they hoped that others would carry on the good work.
I wrote without heat or hyperbole, in the words my teachers would have used if they had known me as I knew myself. These were their letters. And on the boy who lived in their letters, the splendid phantom who carried all my hopes, it seemed to me I saw at last my own face.
Freeman: Thank you. I love that section of the book especially also because what's leading up to that is you've had all these various models that you're falling under thrall to of people, one of your close friends, who you become close friends with, but you're embarrassed by because he's sometimes effeminate, Skipper, Dwight's son who's working on a car. He's sort of literally building his escape hatch in front of you. And you turn to your own brother, and he comes through for you in a way, and then-
Wolff: He sure did.
Freeman: I sometimes wonder if, when you wrote this book after your brother wrote his book, were there lessons that you took from his book when you wrote this one, or did you try to keep them separate, because it's very tempting to read them together, but, obviously, they're two completely separate lives joined?
Wolff: Yeah. Well, I loved his book, The Duke of Deception. If I learned anything from it that was most useful to me in terms of the actual writing, it was his unsparing view of himself in the book. He didn't try to... It wasn't a story about an angel in a fallen world. And I certainly took that to heart. I liked that about his book, how honest he was about his own weaknesses. That was probably a principal inspiration for me in reading his book. We grew up very differently. He grew up with my father on the other side of the country from me and, as has been made clear, I grew up with my mother in the West, so we had such different upbringings from the time I was very young. My parents split up when I was about four. And he was 11. And my father married a very wealthy woman. They lived in Connecticut. We had our life out in the West, in Florida and then the West, so we had such different stories to tell.
I didn't feel cramped by the presence of his memoir in that way. If we'd grown up in the same house and he had written a memoir, I would probably never have written one because, really, what would've been the point? But, no, I had a very different story to tell than Geoffrey had, and it gave me a great deal of freedom. I didn't feel constrained by the presence of my brother's book. In fact, I felt inspired by it.
Freeman: Speaking of inspiring, we have a friend of yours who for over 20 years has brought us Narrative Magazine, Carol Edgarian, who's a writer, a novelist, the author of Vera, as well as Rise The Euphrates. She's a wonderful door opener for so many writers as you have been as a teacher.
Carol, I want to bring you on to ask Tobias Wolff some questions because I bet you probably have some that I have not thought of.
Carol Edgarian: Hi, John.
Wolff: Hi, Carol.
Edgarian: Hi, Toby. How are you? It's wonderful to see you.
Wolff: And you.
Edgarian: I want to start by thanking you because I have spent the last few days rereading This Boy's Life, and it's been some years since the last time I read it, and it is such a great ride. I was thinking, when you were reading that piece of, if we had the Zoom on everyone's faces, they would all be laughing along with you. It's the full organ. It's incredibly entertaining. It's sad. It's got, as John said, the threat of violence moment to moment to moment. It's that naivete. It strikes me, this reading, that it's moment to moment the making of a boy's moral compass that we're watching moment to moment and also the making of a storyteller. When you're being raised by wolves, as you and I share that in common, where do you go? Do you fall into the abyss or do you make life a little better than it actually is?
But also, your artistry, in lesser hands, this could be a trauma drama, a lot of what happened to you. I'm awe of what you put in and also what you left out, and your generous heart that is so present here moment to moment. But something you said just now in writing the recommendations which, I mean, we could talk about that forever, but that phrase "without heat or hyperbole", which is I think a great phrase for the book overall, how you wrote it, and one very short scene that really struck me was talking about your mother as a child with daddy and the spanking, the brutality of daddy, and how, before dinner, he would tell her she was going to get a spanking and made her go through dinner and then, after dessert, he would spank her, and then she'd have to kiss him.
And the way you wrote that, that phrase "without heat or hyperbole", made it so incredibly powerful and unvarnished in both its brutality. And, I wondered, do you remember that section in particular or, just maybe overall with the book, in drafting, did you have to pull a lot back in the revision? I mean, I loved what you said about maintaining the naivete of young Toby Jack, but also that aspect is just remarkable.
Wolff: I found a lot of my experience in writing this book was of leaving things out. In fact, the first draft was so much longer than the final book. I needed to prune those things that did not... there is for me a pattern in the book of... I mean, I can't describe it in so many words, but there is a psychological and moral pattern to the book. And those things which repeated, just repeated, evident, more evidence for the formation of that pattern could go. I could make the point. I didn't have to keep making it. And so I did, as you say, leave a lot out. I don't think I cut any muscle or bone out. I hope I didn't. But you always risk that when you're cutting, when you're editing your own work, though I have to say probably most writers err on the other side and leave-
Edgarian: Alas. Alas.
Wolff: Right. But it's too many notes, right?
Edgarian: Yes.
Wolff: Too many notes. But, no, that's right, Carol. As a writer, I know you must have that experience of having to put things out which you really liked writing at the time.
Edgarian: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's so much to talk about in this book, the beaver, I mean the goddam beaver-
Wolff: Oh, my Lord, yeah.
Edgarian: ... and how the beaver ends up in the attic and has its own afterlife of-
Wolff: It sure did.
Edgarian: I mean, just that idea that it's up there, but overhead at all times is like a-
Wolff: I can see it to this day with this filament almost like floating above it, a mold that had formed on it. Anyway, it was incredible.
Edgarian: It's incredible. You and I were talking about this not too long ago about the lives of books, our books, and how, something you've written a long time ago, it gets hazy a little back there. But, this book, it strikes me. There's the life of young Toby, your young life. There is the moment, those, what was it, six years when you were working on the book from 38 to 44. Is that right? Is that right roughly, when you were early middle age, kids in the house, you're looking back on your young life, then these 30-plus years of the book being out of your hands and in the hands of so many readers and having its life, and now your life. There's the time of the book and then there's the time of the book in the writer's life. I wonder how has your relationship to This Boy's Life changed over time, or has it?
Wolff: I don't honestly reread it. I've read it so many times when I was writing it and then in time since when I was invited to read from it in different places. But it was something I needed to write. And having moved on to other projects, I didn't want to get stuck in one way of writing, one way of thinking about how my talent such as it is should take form in the world, so I went to stories and a couple of novels, yeah.
Edgarian: You sure did you. You sure did. Something that is always surprising to me, and I don't think we've ever talked about this, but I'm always surprised when your family members read something you've written, in my case fiction, but, in this case, actual memoir. I would imagine, as you were writing this, there were potential little bombs that you were worried about people reacting to. But they never seemed to react to the thing you think they're going to react to. What was something that really surprised you in a reaction?
Wolff: Well, I was most concerned about how my mother would respond to the book. I did not consult her while I was writing it. I didn't even tell her I was writing it. When I finished it, she was, aside from my wife, Catherine, the first person I showed it to. And I have to say I was trembling in my boots. I thought that she might feel, though it's written with love, I thought that certain things in there might cause her pain or embarrassment.
And my mom was really great about it. I mean, what she said was, I'll never forget this, she said that's who I was. I said, "I hope it doesn't seem too unadorned in my portrayal of you," and she said, "No." She said, "I know you love me." She said, "And I would have felt strange if you thought that you had to make me seem different than I was in the book, that you couldn't present me for some reason as I was that." I mean, I hope I would feel that way if my kids write a memoir in which I figure.
Edgarian: Yeah. Oh, I love that. I love that. And that's so her character. And that's the character you gave us, but also there's so much love for her here. I mean, there's so much love for her.
Wolff: Yeah. And, looking over the book again before this conversation today, I started reading about it and I... Yeah.
Edgarian: And speaking to naivete, she had that incredible exuberance and blindness.
Wolff: Oh, yeah, exactly. She had such courage and such blindness with men. I've had women friends who were like that. I wonder, "Don't you see what this guy is like you're with and how badly this is going to go for you?" And, of course, it happens to men, too. We're blind. We're blind, yeah.
Edgarian: Well, and there's all that moment with Dwight where she keeps saying, "It's not too late. It's not too late," and she's hoping you're going to say, and of course you don't want that power to say, "The guy's a bad dude. We got to get out of here."
Wolff: Right.
Edgarian: But the reader is saying that. And that's what's so brilliant about what you do because we're leaning way in saying, "No. No. The guy is." I mean, oh, it's just so fantastic. I'm mindful of my time here. I know John wants to come back on, so I will talk to you.
Wolff: You sure will.
Freeman: Thank you, Carol. Oh, yeah, there are so many scenes that really resonate with your mother. And the scene where she's getting herself ready to go out on a date after meeting those two men in the park, and you're watching as a character, and the build up to that date is very tense, and it's very clear something is not going to go well, and you don't as a young boy say anything. You are waiting to see what happens. And the unbearable does happen when she comes home in tears.
Later in the book, after you do something willfully cruel to a farmer, you say, "It takes a childish or corrupt imagination to make symbols of other people." You're talking about the Welches. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about telling stories about real people and not turning them into symbols and what that did for you, if anything, as a short-story writer and how you treated imaginary people.
Wolff: Well, to begin with, the imaginary people in my stories, once I've started writing, they don't feel imaginary to me and they start in some strange way revealing themselves to me in more and more complexity. It's probably some psychological trick of my own that I'm unaware of to continue to make them interesting to me. But, yeah, certainly in writing the memoir, I wasn't bending over backwards to be compassionate and loving with everybody. I knew I didn't feel that way. And I didn't, I hope, represent them in that maudlin way, but I do even with my stepfather. They were human and they had the full complement of human foibles and even virtues in some cases, and I recognize that.
Also, the book is organized not like in short stories, but in episodes that are story-like, I think some of them. And that's because that's how I remembered my life. That's how my memory of things is organized. No doubt, I would think that part of the reason for that is because that's how, in talking about my life with friends and my wife, my kids, I would tell about the past in terms of these stories, these incidents, these crucial passages. And so it was natural to me to organize the book in that way because that's how I remembered it in these signal episodes building the... that built... that those were the blocks out of which I built a sense of my life. And, recognizing the part that other people played in those incidents, I wanted to recognize how fully they were involved in all of this.
Freeman: A question from the audience, Humane Blanco is asking about the act of reinventing oneself especially in youth. Do you think reinvention is ever really possible, or are we always tethered in some way to where we're from?
Wolff: There's a wonderful line in... Oh, what's his name? He wrote that wonderful book Memoirs of an Anti-Semite.
Freeman: Gregor von Rezzori.
Wolff: Gregor Van Rezzori. At the front page of the book is a dedication. He has the line, "I make myself up, therefore I am." I've always loved that. And, to an extent, we do that. I mean, our identity is created by, of course, the people around us, the things that happened to us, but also the story we tell about ourselves to ourselves. And it might not at certain points align exactly with external reality, but that is still part of the work you do to build a sense of who you are. So, yeah, I think that that kind of self storytelling is crucial to the development of a person's character.
Freeman: In the edition of the book I read this time, you have this lovely introduction where you talk about someone in a dinner presuming that you've always had a Volvo and had lovely sweaters and came from a comfortable life the whole time, and it was the presumption of that comfort that made you think, "Hey, wait a second. It was not always thus." And I bring this up because another audience member, Ellen Birkett Morris, asked a question that I think might make sense addressing here, which is, "Do you believe that writers have to have a heightened sense of their own destiny to succeed?" Did you ever have that at some point when you began to write or did it always feel precarious to you?
Wolff: It's always felt precarious to me. What is it? There's a wonderful line in, T. S. Eliot and the Ideology of Four Quartets where he talks about trying to write. And he says, "With shabby equipment always deteriorating." And you almost have that feeling when you're writing that what you're doing is not adequate to what you have to say, but you keep coming at it and, eventually, you say something and maybe it's okay. It is that ideal you have in your mind from all the reading you've done. You are probably always going to pale a little in comparison to the things that are your totems. But there's, again, from Eliot, a line that I love. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. I love that. You have to try, and don't be measuring the result all the time because it's not going to satisfy you. Just keep trying.
Freeman: I want to bring us back to the '80s when you were writing this book. You'd published two collections of short stories. You'd won the PEN/Faulkner for The Barracks Thief, this wonderful novella about three paratroopers and training in North Carolina, and something's stolen. The book moves around beautifully in point of view. It was published by Ecco Press, which was a small press at the time. This book must have seemed a gamble. Dana Kujala, who was listening, asks, "Was it difficult to find a publisher for this manuscript at the time, because you must've been a little bit out of your comfort zone to some degree?"
Wolff: Well, I had a publisher who... My first two books were published by Ecco Press, which was connected to Halpern. Daniel Halpern of Antaeus was the editor, and he did a beautiful job with those two books, and I love them. But my next book was a collection of stories, and Houghton Mifflin, Nan Talese at Houghton Mifflin, had liked my stories, and she published that book. I knew that she would probably be interested in what I was writing, and I knew that Gary Fisketjon at Knopf was interested in what I was doing, and so I didn't have that terror that I had when I was just starting to write, that, "God, nobody's going to want to read this. It's never going to see the light of day."
I did have at least a reasonable amount of confidence that I was not wasting my time in writing the book. And, also, I had to write it anyway. In fact, when I started writing, I had no confidence at all that people were going to publish anything that I wrote. I got really lucky, and magazines published my stories. I have been so lucky in this writing life. It's so easy not to be lucky in this writing life, and so at least I had that kind of confidence in writing it, that there would be someone who would take an interest in the book and even enough of an interest to bring it to publication.
Freeman: There's a lot of questions about the movie of the book which, obviously, came out a few years after. There's a question about Robert De Niro being cast. Just what did you feel about seeing your life on the big screen after doing all this difficult work of trying in the dark by yourself even though you had lots of experience and success as a short story writer to suddenly see parts of your childhood acted out on the silver screen?
Wolff: Yeah. I mean, there was a sense of, in some ways, unreality about it for me. I flew out to Seattle and drove up into the mountains to watch them do some of the filming. I was there when poor Leonardo DiCaprio had borrowed a mountain bike and was going up into the hills and, on the way back, hit a root and went over and landed right on his nose and so his nose all puffed up. They were paying him a lot of money to be there not to have an unexplained puffy nose in it. It was fun to watch that. But I remember watching the rushes. And it was a step from my memories, right? And so, sometimes, I'd be watching the screen, watching a scene on a screen, and I'd be watching like it's just a movie, and I'd have this thought really, "God, that reminds me of something that happened to me," and then I think, "Oh, yeah, that's right, it's my life they're portraying."
They had to be somewhat inventive in translating a book to a screen, and so, for the writer, that's always going to create a sense of disjunction, even of unreality sometimes. And, De Niro, boy, he really took that role and ran with it. He was fresh off making Cape Fear at the time. And you remember there's this monstrous villain named Jack Cady in Cape Fear, and I sometimes wondered if he hadn't carried some of that over into This Boy's Life, in making This Boy's Life. But DiCaprio was fantastic. I thought it was his first movie. And I liked Ellen Barkin and everything, and De Niro. I mean, I love De Niro. No. It was an unexpected bonus of writing the book that it should become a film and not one that I'm embarrassed by.
Freeman: So many exceptional performances in it. Carol, why don't you come back on because there's one question that connects to something that you were talking to Toby about with regards to seeing your life in scenes. And the question is from Macy Hurwitz. And, Carol, I think this is something you maybe could address, too, as a writer and as editors. When you start to narrate life in scenes, does it affect the way that you remember?
I mean, Toby, you already mentioned you saw your life as stories. But, when you start to pattern your life, does it create a kind of accelerating effect of...
Wolff: That's a kind of loop where-
Freeman: Yeah, a loop where you see more of what you already wrote because that's what you think has happened.
Edgarian: I think, for some of us, and this is certainly true for me, I'm writing toward what I want to know, so I learn a lot in the crafting of a scene of what comes forward, what moves. Toby, I loved what you said how, when you fall into the story, the story is real. It reminds me of the Ken Kesey line, "It's the truth, even if it didn't really happen."
Wolff: Right? Yeah.
Edgarian: Yeah. I mean, we're writing to know more, to experience more, right? I was thinking, listening to, John, you and Toby talk how, Toby, your work is like a masterclass in rule number one, which is about generosity to the reader, the reader's experience, of giving life with both hands, entertaining, eliciting our fear, our hopes. This book, it's just marvelous. And it's true in your stories, too. They feel lifelike.
Wolff: Thank you. Thank you.
Freeman: One of the questions a reader asks is about the liar. This is from Peter. And, Peter, I hope I'm pronouncing your last name... Riel or Reil. And he wonders how much it functions as an alternate story to This Boy's Life with the way that you talked about embellishing stories.
Wolff: Well, I certainly drew on my experience as a kid and a fabulist. I have to say I was not a truthful kid, but it's a completely different context. In fact, I pretty much borrowed my wife's family to tell that story through. And, in fact, my wife's mother, my dear mother-in-law happened to... The story was in the Atlantic. And they took the Atlantic, and she was reading the story and happened to mention to my wife that she'd read it, and Catherine said, "Well, what did you think?" She was thoughtful for a moment. She said, "Well, he certainly knows his family very well," which I thought was pretty nice because they were my family then, too.
But, yeah, I'm sorry. I've lost the question. I start thinking back on the process of writing certain things and then I forget sometimes what question prompted those ruminations.
Freeman: No. You've described the difference between the story and the memoir to some degree. And, Carol, you've curated and written about writers' diaries. And I always think of the difference between, say, Christopher Isherwood's diaries and Goodbye to Berlin and how different a writer talking to themselves is versus a writer telling a story about their life versus a writer telling a short story. And I wonder if, in rereading This Boy's Life, if you had any more thoughts about that, because I think, if anyone has read short stories on this side of the Mississippi, it's definitely you. Do you feel like there's a moment where you feel a difference, where the memoir and the story differ and the flavor?
Edgarian: Well, I think storytellers are storytellers. I mean, the Toby I know from sitting around many dinner tables is the same Toby you see in this book. I mean, the crafting of the story, how we know the world, we tell stories, I mean, how we make sense of our lives, I think, even in diaries, you always are aware of the writer writing the tale, crafting, leaving things out, shaping things. I mean, the best diaries have that incredible organic shape. Virginia Woolf's diaries, I mean, she's working it, working it all the time even though she's just dashing something off. It's her voice. It's unmistakably her voice. Isherwood. Unmistakably his voice, right?
Maybe this is just the way my brain works. I think there are obviously rules about memoir that it has to be, quote, true. But memory is never true, is it? On the other hand, it's the essential truth. I don't fuck so much with that line.
Wolff: Right.
Edgarian: I think whatever serves the story.
Wolff: Well, whatever serves the story is fine with fiction.
Edgarian: Yeah. I mean, with fiction, yeah. No.
Wolff: Yes. That's the beauty of fiction. Your freedom is absolute. And that's the terror of writing fiction. Your freedom is absolute. I mean, when you have so much to choose from, so many ways to go, that is, you have to invent the constraints on yourself. You have to invent the rules of the game you're going to be playing. But, obviously, there are the, I mean, the challenge of writing a memoir. Very different. I mean, you are at least confined to the events of the life that you have lived. But once you open that Pandora's box, really, there's a kind of almost infinite number of things that have happened to anybody.
Edgarian: Of course. I mean, just imagine Dwight telling the tale.
Wolff: Yes. Exactly.
Edgarian: Right? Imagine your mother telling the tale. Imagine any of the characters claiming the talking stick. Right?
Wolff: That's right. Exactly. That's a great way to put it. And so I'm very aware of the subjective nature of my story, my memory. Everyone's memory is subjective. You are at the center of things for yourself and all these events when nobody else sees you there. They see themselves there, so the perspective shifts from person to person. What you can hold yourself to is not saying that things happened that didn't happen. If you are writing a memoir, you have at least that charge that you have to respect, I think. Otherwise, why not just call it fiction?
Edgarian: Why not call it fiction? Right. Right. My experience when I've written from life, the people involved often say, "Well, I don't think it happened that way," and then they'll quickly say, "But did it happen that way?"
Wolff: Right.
Edgarian: Right?
Wolff: Yeah.
Edgarian: But, again, it returns to the importance you place on your moral compass in this book. It's that compass that in its development guides Toby, but it's your compass, the adult you that guides all of your work absolutely.
Freeman: There's so many questions coming in from the audience. We're sort of really over time now, so I'm going to have to pick one. But Tobias Wolff is appearing in Menlo Park tomorrow night during Litquake. You can look it up on Litquake's website. Carol will be around, I hope.
It's been wonderful having you here, Carol. There's questions about the influence of science fiction, maybe, on your work, there's questions about how to set up a scene, but one question I think I'd like to come back to is from someone named Julia Laxer who said, "Can you give us any advice for writing the hard truth, the difficult truth as a memoirist?"
Wolff: Well, you have to know what it is. What is the hard thing for you to face? You may have to just write your way toward that. Sometimes, a writer will be given the book before they begin to write. They see where it has to go, the outline of it. I've not generally been a writer that blessed. I have to mind the thing that I'm working on and work my way toward it. But when I find that question or that thing that is going to really animate the work, it's usually from the process of writing and until it comes to me. And, for that reason, I think you need to resign yourself not to writing the perfect draft right away, but to revision and look at yourself at these first drafts as a process of discovering. And what you are discovering is really, perhaps, the thing that is most important for you to say. And that's really the best advice I can offer.
Freeman: Oh, what a beautiful place to end.
Edgarian: That's beautiful.
Freeman: Thank you, Tobias Wolff. Thank you, Carol.
Wolff: Thank you, John. And, Carol, thank you.
Edgarian: Thank you, John. Thank you, Toby.
Wolff: This has been really a pleasure. Thank you.
Freeman: I think David or Blaise is going to come back on and tell us. There you are, David. Thank you for hosting us again. This has been fun.
Ulin: This was a great conversation. Thank you all three of you. Thank you, John. Thank you, Tobias Wolff. And thank you, Carol. This was much to think about. I will just simply add Kafka to the list of diarists whose voice is always on the page. And I want to let you all know this interview was recorded and will be available at californiabookclub.com. Next month's book is Gary Phillips' Violence Spring, which is a classic piece of Los Angeles crime fiction.
Another reminder, please join Alta Journal for just $50 a year. You can do that at altaonline.com/store. That's the same address for the Alta store on our website where you can buy the current issue which features an interview with Tobias Wolff, essays by upcoming California Book Club authors, free shipping and no tax. And so, everybody, stay safe. Please stay, stick around for a two-minute survey that will pop up as soon as this event ends. And we will see you all next month. Thank you very much.•
