Author Nathan Hill talks 'Wellness', polyamory and parenting

Hello, thanks for joining us. Today. He's being called the best new writer of fiction in America. That's after only two novels. His first, The Knicks in 2016, was named one of the books of the year, an option for ATV series with Meryl Streep. He's here as his second Wellness is being translated into French by the publishing house Gallimar. It's a look at modern love and marriage, society's pursuit of health and happiness, and the stories we tell ourselves. Welcome to Nathan Hill, Thank you for having me. Hello. Thank you for being here. Well, I love this book. I am not the only one. Oprah Winfrey picked the book for her book club. And you found out by surprise while you're on a Zoom call with her, with your publisher. And I just wanted to share that moment before we talk about it. Hey, I have an idea. Oh, my God. What? Hi, I have an idea. Why not choose it for Oprah's Book Club? You're kidding. No, I'm not. This is not happening. Hi there. Hi there. Nathan. What a book. What a book that was. That was deeply unfair. I I did not expect to be mugged by Oprah Winfrey on a Zoom call. Yeah. My publisher just kept telling me we're going to have a meeting over Zoom on Friday. They refused to tell me what the meeting was about. I thought it was going to be bad news, you know, And Yeah. And then suddenly there's there's Oprah. It was. Yeah. Deeply surprising, shocking, wonderful. The whole experience was a little surreal, but. But yeah, I think you can see it in that video. I'm. I'm genuinely shocked, gobsmacked. Oprah described the book as a love story gone wrong. I wondered, how would you describe it? It's I would describe it as a love story through time. It's a it's a love story that begins in in a very kind of Romeo and Juliet Thunderbolt love at first sight kind of moment. And then we Fast forward 20 years and life has sort of happened. The main couple is, is not, not those, you know, those same dreamers that they were when they were 20. They're now in their 40s. They have a child who is a bit difficult to handle. They're planning a move to the suburbs. The neighborhood around them in Chicago has gentrified. So everything has changed. And and so has their relationship. So the book is sort of an excavation of how love changes over time. And the main characters are called Jack and Elizabeth. And I love the way that this beginning part is so romantic. Then all of a sudden there's this massive switch of gear. But tell us about this first bit 'cause it's, it's based on a short story that you wrote 20 years ago. That's right, That's right. So 2020 years ago, I was, I first moved to New York City after I finished my education. And I was living in this tiny studio apartment in Queens. And the only window I had in that apartment looked across an alley to a brick wall full of other windows. And I, it just inspired the story. I just imagined two people catching glimpses of each other through that window and slowly becoming interested in each other and slowly falling in love. And I wrote that as a short story. And I was, you know, maybe 25 when I published it and forgot about it for a very long time until I started working on this new book. And I remember that story and I, I remember in my 20s, I thought it was fabulously romantic. And then in my 40s, you know, I'd been married for a, you know, a long time and, and I just had a different perspective on life. And I thought, no, those people aren't romantic. They're idiots. You know, they're like inventing these fantasies about the other person that have nothing to do with reality. And so I was like, well, what would happen? What would happen to this couple if so? I wrote I wrote chapter 215 years after writing chapter one. This love at first sight situation when I was reading it seems very 1990s with all the dating apps. Do you think like it's something that could happen today. I don't know if it could happen today. It's it's I, I think it if you meet somebody not on a dating app, it's a little creepy, right? So that isn't it. Yeah, it is. So I think it would be, it would be really hard for this love story to happen anytime. But that moment right before the Internet really exploded the vibe certainly 20 years on for Elizabeth and Jackers shifted. Elizabeth has designed separate master bedrooms for their new apartment. And the book really raises this question of what love is. I wonder, do you have an answer to that for us? Well, what's your answer? Oh, that's, that's, I don't know if my wife is going to be watching. I, I, I find the most useful definition that I've come across is thinking of love not as a noun, but as a verb. You know, I think the, the, the problem of Jack and Elizabeth at the beginning in their 20s, they think like love is something that happens inside themselves that somebody else creates. And if you expect that feeling when you're 20 to extend all the way through life, you might be, you know, deluding yourself. And I've got this. What is it you say in the book new relationship energy, New relationship energy, right? But eventually that energy transforms into something that's that's maybe more warm, more stable, but quieter. And, and if you still think that love is that big feeling that that person generates inside you, it, it, it could be quite challenging. I prefer to think of love as as an action. Like what? When you love someone, what you're doing is helping them become the best person they can be and they're helping you do that reciprocally. And, and, and if you think of love as something that's a practice shared between two people, I think that's much more lasting reading with the book identified with so many parts of it, but especially the part on parenthood. And then I discovered that you don't have children, right? How do you write so impressively about the subject? Thank you. All of my friends, all of my closest friends, all had children at about the same time, as did my two sisters. So I had this front row seat to all of these people that I I love dearly becoming parents and going through the madness. And the thing that I noticed that most struck me was I was watching them from the outside thinking they're incredible parents. They're, they're bringing their whole soul into this practice. And and then I would ask them, how's it going? And they would be like, I'm failing, I'm terrible, I'm a terrible parent. I can't do this. They would, yeah, they would think that they were failing every day, whereas I thought they were, they were incredible. And so there was a tension there that I wanted to explore the the internal reality versus maybe a more external objective reality of, of parenthood. Something else you write very authentically about is polyamory. I wanted to ask you about your research for this part. You're trying to get me in trouble. I the book is about the stories that we live by. It's a it's a book about how the story, how the stories that we believe shape our reality. And so Jack and Elizabeth have a very traditional story about marriage that it's, that it's monogamous and it's for life. And, and so I thought, what better way to complicate their lives than introduce these characters who have a completely different story about about marriage. And so I introduce this couple who are polyamorous and they take them to to to a club where where where married people switch partners. And and I thought, well, it's a great, it's a great moment for drama and also for comedy to take somebody from a maybe the more traditional culture and stick them into a radically different subculture and kind of see what happens. I thought it would be, I thought it would be very fun. Yeah. It certainly was central to the books. Many themes as well as this notion of Wellness, which is obviously the title of the book, which is a distinctly American concept of self improvement and this pursuit of happiness. But it's not just American. It is everywhere. Telus. Is there something in particular that inspired that subject? I have a friend who was spending what I thought was way too much money on Wellness products that I thought it were a little dubious. And so I did a little research on these products and it turns out they they perform no better than placebo. And I told him this and I was like, you should not be spending $20 on these, you know, silly energy shots. And, and he said something that haunted me. He said, what does it matter if they're fake, if they make me feel better? And that question, you know, should we believe things that aren't true if they make us feel better, seems to be a very central question to life in the 21st century. And so that question sort of prompted the whole thing. I want to ask you as well. You live in this deeply conservative part of Florida. And for the most part, everyone you said gets along, apart from occasionally online about certain things. And how are you seeing the autumn elections? Oh, I, I wish I had something interesting or new to tell you about that. I'm going to say what probably everybody else already knows is that I think it's going to be incredibly close. I don't know what's going to happen other than, you know, it's going to come down to maybe 20,000 voters in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. And I have no idea what's going to happen. OK, let's go back to the writing. You've had lots of praise for your writing, especially for your debut, which came out in 2016. You did a promo tour. I think it lasted for more than two years for that. It was translated into more than 20 languages. John Irvin said you're the best new writer of fiction in America. It's also been there was talk of Meryl Streep starring in an adaptation. What's happened to that? That adaptation is on hold for now. It's it's, it's, it's, it's an artifact of Hollywood that, that things, things, things get shuffled around a little bit. I'm not sure what happened to that. The the pandemic really sort of interfered with that project. And coming out of the pandemic, things change. So my agent remains ever hopeful, but I myself have sort of moved on from it. OK. And I wanted to ask you as we're running out of time about you have a passion for photography. I do. And it's something that we see throughout the book. And correct me if I'm pronouncing it wrong, but the Jack, the protagonist, is an artist who created cameraless photography, which is called Shemigrams. Yeah. Yeah. Chemigram. Chemigram. Chemigram. And each chapter displays the you actually created yourself. Yeah. I it's a, it's a kind of avant-garde photography that does not use a camera nor light. It uses only the chemicals of the development process. And I thought in order to describe it properly in the book, I would need to do it myself. And so I built a little dark room in my garage in Florida. And, and some of the some of the chemograms that I made were so I found them quite beautiful. And so I thought, well, why not just put them into the book? And so all the all the photographs that you see in the book are are are mostly made in my garage. OK, yeah. Fantastic. You don't you don't come across so well on the Kindle, which is what I was reading in the book. They look, they look fantastic. And we've had some some of them on the screen. Well, we always end our program with our guests. Cultural pick of the moment. What have you chosen for us? I have chosen a new album from one of my favorite string quartets. If if folks are fans of classical music, the Mirror quartet. Their new album is called home. I think it came out last month and the Mirror Quartet, they've they've been together for almost 30 years now. And I've, I've had the privilege of seeing them live once, I believe. And, and they, they are so they play together so well. They're so used to each other that they're, they function as almost one Organism. And this album is, is beautiful. It's full of American composers, some new work, a new piece from Carolyn Shaw is quite beautiful. I'd recommend it. And so it's it's there's a lot of fireworks, but it's also like deeply, you know, American Music. And, and I've been listening to it on repeat for the last month. OK Nathan Hill, thank you so much. We're going to leave you now with Over the Rainbow from Miro Quartet. This new album, home Nathan Hills Wellness, is out in French in August, published by Gallimar. You'll also be in Paris at the Festival America in September. We'll look forward to that. Thank you so much for joining us. See you next time the After 40 years of dictatorship, a handful of soldiers orchestrated a peaceful coup. They were nicknamed the April Captains. Retraced the fall of Portugal's dictatorship in the Carnation Revolution. Revisited on France 24.