In the winter of 1976 author Joan Didion spoke at Berkeley California of her life underwriting about time. She had already written play it as it lays and run River. She was working on her most recent book the title of book of common prayer.In the first part of this options would like to share with you some of her remarks last year Susan stamberg interview Joan Didion and we'll hear that interview in the next half hour Joan Didion. I've been sitting there trying to get used to the idea that I'm here and you're there, but I may take me a little while. So if I look at my feet and don't talk very loudly. Hope you'll bear with me till I get used to this idea. I i m anyways riding is the actor saying I'm saying listen to me see it my way. See what I see change your mind. an aggressive act sometimes a hostile Act you can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clause and some tires and tentative subjunctive tenses and perhaps has an elliptical treatments of things and evasions and the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming of alluding rather than stating but there is no getting around the fact that writing is an aggression and imposition to invasion of someone else's nose private space. Like many riders. I have only one subject. I don't have any I have is only as one area one field, which is the act of writing in the making of objects. I think of it is making objects of book story a piece. It is making something that you can touch almost. And I cannot lie. I have no field and then I can bring you no news from any other discipline. I have no I'm not a public figure nor am I in any wireless caller? I don't think and abstracts. During the years that I was an undergraduate here at Berkeley. at Ron kind of hopeless late adolescent energy to get some kind of temporary Visa end of the world of ideas. I'm kind of green cards with an able me to think like other people seem to be sinking. By trying to find that part of my mind I could think and ideas could deal with abstracts. But my mind kept veering inexorably back. I'm some kind of boomerang I was stuck with to the specific to the tangible to what was generally considered by everyone. I knew. The peripheral I had trouble graduating not because of his inability to deal with ideas. I was majoring in English and I could deal with certain specifics. I mean, I was always the person who was picking out the house and garden imagery in portrait of a lady of yours. And I also knew where he went in the library to get the bag numbers of the pmla so I can find out what the house and Garden in the truth. Kevin graduating was that I neglected to take a course in Milton. And I was supposed to start a job in New York in September and was in June when it came to my attention that I wasn't going to graduate. And I needed to graduate in order to take this job. I mean it was one of the requirements. Amazon Iceman in English Department still he took pity on me and agreed if I would come down from Sacramento where I was spending the summer with my family every Friday during the summer and talk about the cosmology of Paradise Lost. He would certify me as proficient in Milton. I'll come down from Sacramento on the Greyhound bus every Friday morning at summer. And I would recite what other people had said or written about the cosmology of Paradise Lost. And some years later when I was riding my first novel. Would have been on my mind all those Fridays turned up and here it is original passage from Stanton, Iowa. As a bus rolled out of the Coast Range the end of the heat of the ballet Lily. Stop thinking altogether. Lullaby, the even Rhythm of the telephone poles against field after dry yellow field. Buy the regular rise and fall of a woman's voice by the grinding and shifting of Gears as the bus went off the highway and down the streets of towns in which you seem to spend her life Fairfield Suisun, Vacaville Dixon. Although she did not suppose she had driven to any one of the town's more than on the outside 20 times. They had about them an imprint which to perceive once especially if that once was on an August afternoon when the streets left abandoned in the frame buildings as fragile as Tinder, what do possessed forever? She could close her eyes and take it off the Bank of America building the WT Grant store the Lincoln Mercury agency the lone woman in a shapeless dress and flowers straw hats sitting on the porch of the hotel until her husband was throwing down off the main street. They would be a few blocks of houses three story houses in need of paint each fronted by a patch of dry grass. Maybe a tricycle overturned on the crack concrete walk. The blinds would be drawn and there would not be any people anywhere. The afternoon heat the bleach these town so clean that the house is in the building seemed always on the verge of D material dematerializing. There was the sense that the close one's eyes on a valley town was to risk opening them a moment later on dry feels the sun leaching out the last traces of habitation of flowers brought a neon advertisement, which is blank the moment before from a wall no longer visible. It was a great comfort washing the Town come and go to the tinted window Windows of the Greyhound bus the heat drain the distinctions from sings marriage and divorce and new curtains and overdrafts at the bank all the same. And then I could not at the moment with imagine any preoccupation strong enough to withstand the summer. Easy, my attention was never really on weather Milton put the Sun or the Earth at the center of his universe and I do not I wrote a paper on it ten thousand words and I do not as I stand here tonight. I could not tell you whether you put the side of the earth is the center of my attention was always on the periphery of things on the stuff. I could catch the Greyhound bus. That was a hard thing for me to admit at the time. And when I finally left for play traveling on what I knew to be a really shaky passport, I mean I had no credentials of false papers. I knew I couldn't sink. All I knew was what I couldn't do. All I knew was what I wasn't. It took me several years to find out what I was which was a writer. By which I mean not a good Rider a bad Rider. I don't mean it in any. I mean, obviously I have to put leaves at some stuff I write is good or I wouldn't keep on doing that. I would be able to get up in the morning, but I don't mean by a rider a bad ride or a good Rider. I just mean a person. His most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper entirely to find out what is on my mind. What I'm looking at what I'm seeing and what it means. What I want and what I'm afraid of. I'm talking really about something as simple as what Robert Penn Warren was talking about when he described riding as the attempt however modest and limited to make sense of experience to understand how things hang meaning play together. I'm talking about finding out what's going on. In a pictures in my mind. If you lie low enough and stay quiet enough. If you don't talk to very many people. You keep your central nervous system shorting out. These pictures come to you. When you try to find out what they mean. There's all around us this great chaotic Shimmer of experience energy worlds colliding and dark holes in space. meaningful things appearing trivial and trivial things appearing meaningful And it's hard to tell what matters. All riding as an attempt to find out what matters to find the pattern and disorder. Define the grammar in the Shimmer. Actually, I don't know whether you find the grammar in the Shimmer or you impose a grammar on the Shimmer, but I am quite specific about grammar. I mean it literally. Being that you seen your mind Finds Its Own structure. the structure dictates the arrangement of the words how many weather this is going to be a sentence with? Was Klaus Azar without closet or whether it is going to be a dying full sentence or whether it is what what kind of sentence it is is part of. the scene dictates that and so all is all the rider has to do wheelies find the words the arrangement of The Words, which is dictated by the structure tells me what is going on in the scene. I don't tell it I have to be alone to do this. This is for me one of the great advantages of being a writer. I like to be alone. two kinds of people sometimes tell me they want to be writers and their two kinds of people do sometimes tell me they wanted to know if I can write it down for all I need is some help getting it down and there are no great story. There are no terrific stories are really terrific ways of writing them down. So I know that kind of person is never going to be a writer and I also got another kind of person is the person who says. How do you stand being alone? Because you really have to like it most of us to write. So you sit down you do this and you don't think about making order of disorder. All you do is keep the picture in your mind and hope the words will come that will make you understand the picture. I'll tell you what pictures were in my mind at the beginning of some of the work I've done. At the time I began my first novel, which was called run River or all I had in my mind was a house a frame house on the Sacramento River. Hi, there was a living in this is a picture in my mind. There was a levy between the house and the river in the house was three stories during a certain period because it was so much flooding. It was no house in particular. I suppose as a child I had been in there. No, I was in Sunriver houses, but this was no house. I knew and I never really spent much time with Uber. This was just a house that I was so I imagine that and it was very hot in the picture. There was a woman upstairs in this house and there was a man downstairs and then we're not talking to each other. And not because she was upstairs and he was downstairs. And the woman had on a flip. I guess that's how I knew it was hot and the man had to work clothes and Kathy work clothes. Probably World War II issues suntan's is wearing his work clothes. And there was a sense a great weight of the past in this picture. Pass was weighing heavily on this man and this woman in this house. in fact, the house was it was one of those houses in which Have a terrific Faulkner line that I can never remember exactly what it was. Not dead. It was not even past. They are in the room. I have no idea who these people were beyond their presents in the image. I had I certainly have no idea what their story was. What's the story of the novel with beware the plot? I knew only that the simultaneity of past and present suggested by the picture indicated that the story whatever it was would be told and some rather on straight forward and complicated way. That's all I had the picture and the way the novel should be structured. The characters came as I went along the store. It came as I went along. I think when I first got that a story actually was suggested to me by out story. I saw on the New York Times woman in Grimes Accounting grimesville in North or South Carolina under their name was Grimes too, and he was on trial for murdering a foreman on the farm. And it occurred to me that the wife was probably involved with the former interesting thing about this. And that's how the story kind of evolved. Al's it's about halfway through the route over halfway through a book. It starts to move. This is over the people do start coming to you. They start some being your best friends your imaginary Playmate to start seeing how they are without any without any doubts And very exciting when that starts to happen when the story starts telling itself to the writer. I don't think that and I will work very successful late because I wasn't practiced enough to find a way. To keep the past and the present moving simultaneously I wasn't confident enough to insist on doing that. And so I took easier ways and turned out to be much more straightforward than I had wanted her that it and it should have been too bad. I still think the intention was right, but I just didn't know how to realize it. I don't even know how to get anybody. And play it as it lays. I got a little closer to what I had intended, but I can never get their entire late because of what I had intended was a novel so elliptical and so fast that it would be over before you notice didn't mean like that exist on the page at all. There were several pictures involved in play as a pictures in my mind involved in play it as it lays, but the first picture of always white space empty space. I conceived it. First of the New York novel a novel about a woman in New York was getting a divorce and experiencing and clinical grief. It was still going to be widened empty. And then I got some pictures that were white and empty themselves. So one of these pictures was the corner of Sunset and La Brea, which was an intersection with near where I live in Hollywood. Now that intersection there's a Carolina Pines Motel in one corner, and there's a tiny Naylor's drive-in on one corner. Supermarket on the 3rd Corner Corner, I've always been so blank out by this corner. But now that intersection is all white space. It just lies. There it is out of time. It is just there it lies there in this. Still life and nothing moved to see somebody Crossing that street almost knocks you out where there was nothing. the actual story of that novel the characters in The Action came as I know how long from some other pictures And one of the most Vivid of those pictures to me now, I mean one of them, but I still remember. whatever a young woman now with blonde hair and a white halter back dress. No, no back walking across the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at 1 in the morning, She was walking across the casinos Riviera because someone had paged her. well This was a picture. Not that I imagine with I actually saw. I watched her because I had her name at her being paid. She was in that I used to see around Los Angeles. It wouldn't know her name if I told you but time. I just wondered what that woman was doing being paged in the Riviera in Las Vegas at 1 in the morning. And this moment made the story start to tell itself to me. It doesn't that scene does not appear in the novel except in one reference. So there is a chapter which begins Moriamin list of things she would never do she would never walk through the Sands or Caesars alone after midnight. She would never fall out of party do SM unless she wanted to borrow first from a blipsy deal. She would never carry a Yorkshire and Beverly Hills. So that we have the only reference to and that is the beginning of that chapter and that is also the end of that chapter. So we see what I meant by white space if it was full of white space. another image that was very strong in my mind with another for that book was another thing I actually so I was cuz I didn't understand it was a I going to a party at someone's house and there wasn't just an argument to going on between that I didn't know very many people there. It was a fight that's detention about how loud the sound was going to be. Sing what's going on? I don't understand. And so that scene about someone arguing about the sound was. Very strong in my mind when I actually wrote a scene in play it as it lays about this. It went to come this way that the characters are allowed in the desert making a movie and Mariah's husband is up. Seems to be having an affair with a make the actress in the movie Susanna wood. This is attention in the room of some kind and Susannah what is sitting on her pits in the savanna Woods motel room and she is sitting on her bed rolling cigarettes and she says turn up the sound. Carter who was Mariah's husband And he's the director of the picture. Walked over to the bank of amplifiers and speakers that Susannah brought with her to the desert. Somebody's going to complain Mariah repeat it. So what Susanna would say it and then she laughed? Mariah thinks we're going to get arrested for possession Mariah thinks she's already done that number in, Nevada. Crazy locked up turn it down Carter. Susana would look first it be easy in that Mariah. Turn it up Carter. Mariah stood up it was midnight and she was wearing only an old bikini bathing suit in her hair. Come down play the back of her neck. I don't like any of you. You are all making me sick. Savannah wood laughed That's not funny Mariah. Helene said I mean sick physically sick. Helen picked up a jar from the Clutter on Susana Woods dressing table and begin smoothing cream into Mariah shoulders if it's not funny don't say it Mariah. That's the whole scene. It was not an important scene in the book anything with change. I mean it gives you no information but I wrote it kind of early on computers light in the book just because I have this picture of the room with his tension in the speakers. And until I wrote that scene and found out what the tensions were in the room. I didn't know what was going on between the characters and play it as it lays when I was quite shocked after I wrote that scene when I found out that Aqua I hadn't run not really intended that Carter be having this affair with Susanna. I had certainly not intended that there's a kind of them. Is an overtone about that one other thing I had known was it busy was going to be. Going to need some help defend Mariah to be as sensitive to where she was as he turned out to be in the book. I didn't find that out until I wrote the scene. Another thing. I didn't know what is overtone web Helene's why is she picking up that jar of cream and rubbing it into? Into Mariah shoulders, I mean that I just had not planned. I seen it all came out of this. A picture when I talk about these pictures I am talking about images that Shimmer around the edges. I used to be an illustration in every beginning psychology full text books. I should have drawn by a patient in varying stages of schizophrenia. Go ahead a shimmer around it went this way around the edges and the cat was became the background the background became a cat you could see that they were interacting exchanging ions. The whole molecular structure was breaking down around the edges of the cat people on hallucinogenics describe the same perception of objects. I'm not a schizophrenic and I don't take hallucinogenics, but if you look hard enough you cannot miss that Shimmer around the edges. What's that mean? It's there. and writing is the attempt to understand what's going on in the Shimmer find the cat in the Shimmer if the Shimmer if a cat is the important thing or to find Shimmer is A picture in my mind for the novel I'm writing now is the tarmac of the Panama airport 6 in the morning. I was only there once on my way to Columbia. On a plane at stop to refuel in Panama. for an hour But I see that picture very clearly. It was this was an obvious. We landed on Avianca plane. We got off the plane. I can feel the tarmac under my feet. I can see the Horizon I can see there's one other plane. That was a Pan American planes her floating down at the end of the tarmac heat already Rising off the tarmac at 6 in the morning with people inside playing slot machines. Very clear the whole thing. As a matter fact, it's been superimposed on everything. I've looked at for a couple of years. Now. I always see it cuz I'm working on a book from that picture. Then I thought you know that I imagined put a woman in the airport and a woman was. the coffee shop in the airport trying to well get a cup of tea, but she insisted they boil the water for 20 minutes. Now we do a few pages from it. I'm only about a third of the way through it or no more. The show you where the picture took me. So the narrator in these Pages I'm going to read you was a woman an American woman Norte Americana name Grace Strasser Madonna, the woman about 60 in North American woman who lives in this Central American country called Boca Grande for husband was a Central American is dead. She has a son named Gerardo and the Charlotte. She talks about In. This passage is another Norte Americana name Charlotte Douglas who turned up in this country Boca Grande at the age of 40 and died a few months later. At this point, I think the book is about Charlotte. So that's my plan. But Grace is telling it. This part I'm going to be is very near the beginning of the book and I read it only as an illustration of a picture in the process of emerging and I would appreciate you're just forgetting about it after you walk out of here. One or two for this is the narrator is talking about the country. What are two facts about the place where Charlotte died and I live? Boca Grande means big mouth or Big Bay and describes the country's principal physical feature precisely as it appears. Almost everything in Boca Grande describes itself precisely as it appears as if any ambiguity in the naming of things might cause the present to sing his praise mostly As the past. The real Blanca looks white. The real Colorado looks red. the Avenida Del Mar runs by the sea bienvenida de la punto Verde runs by the Greenpoint The Greenpoint is in fat green. On reflection. I know of only two place names in Boca Grande which evoke an idea or in a band or a person which suggests a past either Indian or Colonial. One of these two exceptions is millionaire real as in millonarios province. So named because our palms grow their and our copra is Mill there and my husband's father was the rich man the million REO St. Louis confidence man named Victor Strother who at age 23 Florissant, Missouri money to buy oil rights at age 24 fled Mexico after an abortive attempt to invade Sonora and at age 25 arrived in Boca Grande. Upon his recovery from Colorado. He married and Madonna and proceeded to divest her family of Interior. Boca Grande. Victor Strasser died at 95 and for the last 60 years of his life prefer to be addressed as Don Victor. I called him Mister Strasser. There is a million REO and there's also Progreso. In fact there to Progreso Del Progreso primero in El Progreso otro. The First Progress I was a grand design of my brother-in-law Louise the toy of his 15-month presidency. His new city is capital 20-match glass pyramids intersected by 48 Layne Boulevard all laid out on fill in the bay in connected to the main line until recently by Causeway. The match glass pyramids were never finished but the eight-lane boulevards were until a few years ago when the causeway come out by would take lunch out to the first Progresso and eat there alone sitting on the side of a projected Monument were all four empty boulevards converge on the field between the boulevards bamboo grow up through the big back. Crane's band in the day. My brother-in-law was shot Water Hyacinth clogged the culverts and after Reina Boulevard with Romaine all day and Shadow flood film of water shimmering with mosquito larvae and with a rainbow snake from rusting oil tanks until the collapse. I would go out there maybe once a week and stay most of the afternoon. It occurs to me that I was the only person Bubba Grande inconvenience by the collapse of the progressive cosway. At some point after the collapse Gerardo took Charlotte to Progreso by boat. I asked Charlotte at dinner if she found Progresso primero as peaceful as I did Charlotte began to cry. House Progressive Ultra which might have even more radically challenge Charlotte's brother teleological view of human settlement. I have not seen it in some years II progressed so was another new city in the interior build on leased Land hours spine American aluminum combine during the bauxite bubble hear there was box out. Yes, but not as much as a geologist had predicted not enough to justify Progresso Old Crow after the mines closed down a handful of Engineers State on trying to find some economic use for the illuminus laterite which made up the bulk of the deposit but one by one they got fever quit or move the combines operation Venezuela the last two left in 1965. The rodian would cost 34 million American dollars to build can still be discerned from the are quite clearly a straight line of paler vegetation. My husband wanted to maintain the road said always at the interior had things we might want to access to but after Edgar. I let it grow over what I wanted from the interior had nothing to do with access. I see that is all part of the picture that started with a Panama airport and I still don't know. I don't know why Charlotte cry dinner that night. I'm going to go have to be more to it than a rather illogical. I don't know. I don't know what she was doing out there Progressive with Gerardo. I mean, I still have time to get into that to find that out and I don't know what it is that Grace wants from the interior. I mean, I don't even really know. This as I said this appears to me to be a book about Charlotte it may turn out to be about Grace when I'm in the last 20 pages of it. I may have to go back through and pool. I may see it. I don't know. I have no idea. I still have not found a cat in this Shimmer and if I had found it if I knew what this book was about I wouldn't be riding it. I know that's why I write is anyone have any question Joan Didion speaking last year at Berkeley want to hear the type that we've just turned so naturally enough conversation picks up from that address. No, such thing is terrific stories. There's just terrific ways of putting things that it can't be true that have to be some terrific stories in this world with your rotten Lee written and you still keep you going there are but the most stories are but now stories maybe they went to Anna Karenina is it but now a story idea it could be called a soap opera Madame bovary's up and now story is the way they are written down the language the language structure and the way the novel moves mystery story. What's going on are really a lot more important than the Philly trans movies McDonald in which the the the character the detective Lew Archer goes out on a case and he finds always that the solution to the case lies in several Generations back. I mean the Harper was a movie based on a Ross McDonald mystery novel here and what he's been doing though is writing these closer and closer and closer until they are all plot. They are almost like geometric exercises. They're very exciting. Now if you wrote that story down any other way, I'm not sure it would be very exciting. It would read like a mystery novel as they are. They are very very peculiar and moving and frightening books because Detention he sets up with the language. I find your books very frightening and and your books having just that tension, especially play it as it lays and this is a new a book of common prayer. It is distasteful really it's not as ugly as play it as it lies. I don't think It's not a great deal more cheerful bedding is not it's not as ugly but this book did to me writing. It was it seems to me that age me a great deal. I don't mean physically, I mean the act of writing it but you know adopting Grace's point of view while I was writing it. I felt much sharper harsher I would to cut people off in the middle of conversations. I mean, I adopted a lot of the mannerisms then attitudes of an impatient dying woman be home for a while. I think I was when I was doing play it as it lays, I fell into Mariah's rather spaced life for a while. You were still the third person narrator telling me what's going on. Sing with novels. You don't know where they come from. I mean, they don't exactly come from you and your they seem to influence you are mood more than you are mood influences them while you're riding them. Do you begin by trying quite consciously to maintain the mood simply because you don't want to break the tone of the novel. I talked to John Gardner attorney Matt Reading how he reads and when he weighs and I wait to get into a dream. I open that book and I'm inside the dream of that book. Is that what happens to you in the course of a actual ride in Disney World becomes in the world of that book is more real more real and I don't and I really resent any intrusion. I didn't answer mail for a long time. I was writing this book and I didn't talk on the telephone very much and if I if I had a certain amount of business that had to be conducted during the morning I before I started work I resented it very much because Easiest to move from from being asleep and waking up without talking to anybody and then into this dream without waking up entirely but if you know what you're in the middle of a dream that that consistently and your works of fiction is a nightmare. I mean, it's on it's on the edge of horror all the time. I don't know who are not connecting who are have no real relationships and very little happiness or fulfillment in their lives. I always thought of my novels. I don't know about other people's novels, but I mean one thing that might know how old would me happened to me. I told him to myself they are cautionary tales. This is a story. I don't want to happen to me. this novel to some extent has to do with with my own daughter's growing up. Yeah. she is not anywhere near the age of Marin but she's no longer baby. I think the part of this book came out of that apprehension that we are going to both be adults pretty soon is the Patty Hearst. I'm not going to say another word about that of your book has been by her mother most of her life. Yes cautionary tale, which is a warning to yourself. You're really mean it that personally or do you mean to all of us on which their cautionary tales they just cautionary tales for me. Why do you jump to say that what I work out in a book isn't what the book said about. I mean this book isn't really about mothers and daughters. I think that's the part of what it was for me though. It's I don't think it's what it will be for a reader affrication at your work called you a professional moralist, and I thought maybe it was that that you were getting Cautionary to show look at these possibilities the way you did in the essays on head ass pretty cool up in such a strong Western ethic that I tend not to impose my own sense of what is wrong. And what is right on other people if I do them bows that I feel very guilty about it because it is entirely against the African which I was brought up. I mean, It in a very rigid way they act I don't necessarily perceive the same things as wrong that large numbers of people perceive is wrong. I think it's I think I want you to be telling me through all of these books that these women and their Lifestyles our room. I want to I want you to tell me that because I find them so distasteful. I find the people who I must read about, you know, because you're that good people that I would never want to know be near. It's okay for me to enter their nightmare for a while as a reader, but I want to be very sure that you know saying it with your pen for your typewriter that it's wrong that you see there. I can't make a judgment because there are other people they're not mad. I just want to Tell you the story. If it doesn't come I can't make a judgment on it. I'm thinking about those snapshots again spring of 67, which was just before the summer of Love A lot of people who were living there and give us quick. They are Snapchats quick Glimpse inside. Some of those lives appointment was there when nobody was there. Nobody was there to begin with nobody was up before noon or 1 so you lost the morning to get in with then if you made appointments. It was a very suspect thing to do. It wasn't you had to just hang around I might have benefit or you were too way out. Tony's is neutral as it is in in the pieces of fiction until you get to the end. I mean before then is huge ascription. It's chronology of what you see who said was until they give me the Marlins came at the right and wrong way because at the end you told about the three year old child. Can you tell it? Yeah, that was I spent a lot of time hanging around a place called The Warehouse which is a place where a lot of people lived in there. Will they have 2 was actually warehouses in abandoned hotel or the basement of an abandoned hotel and there were a great many people living there in a fluid bases and one of the long-term people living there had a child it was 3 and it was very dark in this place and we no windows or the windows were blanked off and this to they were colored spots all over his right theatrical place. The child was rocking always on a rocking horse in a blue spot. I mean it was worth rocking horse was and it keeps of pain and I like it. Like I always thought of that D H Lawrence Story the rocking horse winner. I brought a lot of literary Association comes into this place which no one else they're shared but one day I was over there on the child. Done something dangerous in the morning at 11. Fired started. Its or somehow start a fire and chewing on electrical cord and really terribly dangerous thing that we where was that my child was almost at age. And his mother was yelling at him and kind of a desultory way and everybody else. Was there been a floorboard damaged in the fire in the kitchen and do some hash drop down through it and everybody else was trying to fish around and get this cash back. It was very wanted to take the child out, but I had no business doing that. That's what I felt was he know? That's where it all broke down and that's what I feel and he may be right case when he says professional morale is because you could be a reporter just that far and then at that point, you know something broke through and you really had to make a judgment and in making the Judgment you give a context to the whole thing when I was writing that piece. I didn't want to publish. I've been up there for quite a long time and I've done all the research and I couldn't I thought I had to come home finally and I thought I still haven't come to terms with it. But I had no idea why this was happening where it was coming from. I was quite the strip, but finally I had to ride the peace because it would have been commissioned by the Saturday evening post and they had promised the piece on the cover of a forthcoming issue and I had to ride the fees and funny. I just took my notes and which I had already typed and started cutting down the notes and just rearranging the notes rather than writing a piece and what you made the connections I could not make the connections in that piece is one of the few things I ever wrote where eventually I didn't see some connect and and looking back on it. It seems that maybe it's because there were no Connections in so that what you did was the most factual I was shocked by a lot of what was going on there. Mostly having to do with the children of people who were living there the very small children and also older children 1617 who will run away is there I was terribly concerned that they could disappear be preyed upon by people and nobody would know that it seemed a place in which children could just disappear and they're there would be if they could be killed they could be and Charles Manson was there for a. Of time into those kind of people were around we learn to hear that is who we talked about was called slouching towards Bethlehem, and it is a part of a collection of your drive nonfiction essays and gathered under the title of this action towards Bethlehem in a paperback book, which is sometimes hard to get what people tell me a couple of bookstores around downtown you have it. I tried for some years and had to depend on the kindness of friends. I went to New York to thee more convention AJ liebling journalism counter convention and it's three separate seminars three separate sessions at that convention a read this quote from your book. I bet nobody ever told you this but my only Advantage is a reporter is that I am so physically small so temperamental be unobtrusive and so neurotic lie in our tick The people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interest and it always does that is one less thing to remember writers are always telling somebody out. Three separate sessions. They read that each time. It was read by a person who was in no way unemployed, and I'm I'm not a type it out and put it on my wall. Gave it to a reporter on the staff who doesn't fit that description anyway, either and she put it on her walk as we both thought it was so good and it speaks to the central kernel of any not only any Rider any person. I think I mean, I think that's why we all chose it right so that we could anticipate here in a way. I mean, I'm not sure that anybody writes who who has much sense of themselves as a as a sander of the room when their children that's an odd quote people when I go to college just to talk people are always asking me about writers are always telling somebody out and I all I meant by it was impossible to describe anybody a friend or somebody, you know, very well and please them. Because your image of them no matter how flattering never corresponds with their self-image. So you are. As right now sitting here wanting to talk to you about the things that most concern you in your life and feeling I could never do that because there's no reason I should rip off your emotions in your privacy to make my living. That's how I hear this line. Really? Yes. I meant something so specific. Give me my great story to tell me that you never give me my great radio or whatever because it's simply wood would invade a kind of privacy that that's nobody's damn business. I can never ask people even simple questions that you're all reporters know how to ask. Hotel rooms was trying to make the first telephone call to the reporter confident. Yes said that he hates to make that first phone and sits on the edge of the bed. That's why people care. This is so true, you know, it's true for all of us in a million different ways. And that's what happens with good writing introduction had never written a late one night and Has never thought much about it. To make you uncomfortable. No, no, I'll I'm and I'm glad it wasn't anything. I spend a great deal of time that you was uncharacteristic thing for me to write because I wrote it very fast and rather in my own voice almost fluently when I just typed it out and most things I spend a great deal of time finding a tone is not my own and then adopting the tone and getting it right. This is the thing if it is telling me it is the most choose to quote back to you or one of those things and it it's something that you didn't make well-wrought, you know as he doing the other things. What is that? What is that? It's conversational. I mean if you read this conversational, yes, I don't know. Well then in the in that case of the line for each piece of fiction. It was due and normally I have difficulty finding my own account. I mean, I have difficulty expressing myself as they say in any natural way. Really? I just written that I was a rough and John bread in the morning and this is your husband and said This is fine. Don't change it. So I didn't change it but it was just sort of rough down write notes. Normally. I can't I can't not that open. I can't write that way. It's the kind of tone that is very effective. If you are columnist, and I've never been able to develop it for I rent a lot of columns. I've never had a column of stone there always a little essays. They're not really comes and admire nor are friend has a wonderful columnist own absolutely enormous sense of self knowing who you are and not money than anybody else. Enjoy. Your own company is so fragile. She is so delicate. Somebody did an article that said you were curious combination of Agility and toughness is that a lot of garbage and I always think my physical size is deceptive. I mean at least he was a lot of people are very small not only small I am to seeing I am pale. I do not look like a California person. It generally makes people think that I must be free on I'm not actually a very frail. I mean, I'm very healthy. I eat a lot of I don't cry a lot to be small. Yeah. I wonder if they said about you cuz if your physical size or again getting back to people and things that you were lying about whether that that fragility of your characters and this kind of perceptions you have thought of you in reading the station towards Bethlehem as it is being somebody who was just trembling with the with the Penny all over the place that will constantly vibrating and kind of picking up on things that other people simply weren't picking up on that comes its early Cubs doing the riding whether it's true or not. I love you. I'm going to suspect it may be if there's that that that's what the fit you it is is in that kind of perception. Well, I think as a reporter I had to develop a stronger Instinct for what was going on because I wasn't a very good reporter and if I got into town where a story was and I found a life team there I go home. But so I had to somehow come out of every story having interpreted because I wasn't going to get it from anybody else. I'm going to need a lot of way people work comes out of their weaknesses out of their feelings. It's a way around if you can't talk to the mayor then maybe if you sit around the gas station and figure out what it's all about. I've always had a doubt to that in a lot of situations particularly dealing with people who are interviewed frequently, like politicians or anybody is in the middle of a breaking story dance to pretty much have a an answer to every question you're going to ask them. I almost using reviews when I do do them in that kind of situation as just a way of insinuating myself into the person's day. Actual answers aren't ever very significant Advantage you have is a writer that I wish I had but can't much better with wonderful. It's marvelous mean it. I was there I was sitting in there. That's true. It's sort of what you're saying to not real and you wouldn't put it that way. But the idea that you take home all those Impressions. I'm never happier than if I go on a story and I find myself with the person they're doing whatever they do and it turns out and maybe it's all set just say it's on a movie set at Turns out they're too busy to give me 20 minutes because I am there without having to go through the interview and taking me to induce early days as a reporter was trying to mix in trying to fit in and it came to realize that the thing to do is be the wallpaper, and then you'd see everything. He was so busy trying to fit in that. He forgot what the question is whether you should ask him if he wasn't that person's friend necessarily. Let's get back to business hours tomorrow. Force but from a little aside a different point of view, it's a bad that desolate landscape that you create and those those characters who move through it in their parched ways. It seems to me you're giving a kind of worldview in that and it also seems to me that you never get a Nobel Prize for literature not because of Any lack of skill magic because that prize is given for optimistic and positive you so fly I think it probably is true. I am more attracted to the underside of the tapestry. I tend to always look for the wrong side The Bleak side. I may not have since I was a child. I have no idea why I would have never run. Talk about exam alive. So yeah, but you're attracted to that side, aren't you telling us something about it? I'm asking the same question again, and I just can't watch it out. Anyways, Tammy. This is certainly didn't sassy toys. Buy them. Things are falling apart. The center cannot hold that was that became the basis for the essays that you and I think I wasn't play it as it lays to I was working there working out certain. I'm rather slow study and I came late to the apprehension that there was a void at the center of experience in conversation with NPR Susan stamberg.