Episode 20 Transcript
Elise:
My guest today is Amy Alznauer. Amy is a polymath, a true Renaissance woman, a writer, arts collaborator, and an instructor of calculus and number theory at Northwestern University. Amy's most recent work is in children's picture-book biographies, work which has been awarded with the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators Illinois Chapter Laura Crawford Memorial Mentorship. Her creative nonfiction has won the Annie Dillard Award, and her book Love and Salt: A Spiritual Friendship in Letters, co-authored with Jessica Mesman, won the 2014 Christopher Award. Amy lives in Chicago, where she is an artist-in-residence at Saint Gregory the Great Catholic Church. Amy, welcome!
Amy:
Thank you so much. It's great to be here.
Elise:
So firstly, congratulations, because this has really been a banner year for your book, publishing. In the spring…
Amy:
For better or worse
Elise:
Right. Well, that's my question, really. You have had two books that have already been released, The Boy Who Dreamed of Infinity and Strange Birds of Flannery O'Connor, and you have two books upcoming in the fall.
So what has it been like to be ushering, shepherding these books into the world while we're in a pandemic?
Amy:
Well, so basically we were about to go on a tour in Georgia for the Flannery O'Connor book. We were doing that very early, because we were timing it with Flannery O'Connor's birthday celebrations that happen in Savannah and at Andalusia. So we probably had about 20 different events that were very suddenly canceled.
And to me that sort of tracked my dawning consciousness, as the American consciousness was dawning around COVID-19. So I remember still saying to my team from Enchanted Lion, Well, I’ll still go, I'll drive down to Georgia. I'll make it to Andalusia. And then, you know, within a few weeks, that seemed insane.
And so, I remember there being one single day where I sat down and just cried really hard because it was all over. But that was it. I mean, that was the sum total of the amount of grief I felt about all of it, because I think it's so overwhelming. So total, so encompassing of everybody's lives and everything that, again, your consciousness just shifts to this new reality. And, so yeah, I've just, I've been so busy just pivoting to this virtual world that I really haven't had time to make sense of how it could have been different.
Elise:
Right. And like you said, maybe that's for better and maybe that's for worse. If nothing else, it's kind of bringing you into what is surely going to be the new world of publishing from here on out.
Amy:
Right. Yeah, no, exactly. It is this new world. And I guess it's just forced me to not get too lost in the current projects, and to look to the future, to future projects as well. So that's good.
Elise:
Oh, that's great. And I hope we will talk more about those future projects. I want to talk to about the ones, though, that you have this year, and we'll delve into them specifically, but they all fall into this genre: Children's picture-book biography. And I want to start by asking you, what do you consider to be the hallmarks of that genre?
Amy:
I've been thinking a lot about that, because I certainly didn't set out in my life to write more than one picture-book biography. I knew I was going to write the one about Ramanujan, which we'll probably talk about later, just because I have a deep, personal connection to that story.
But the genre really grabbed me with its possibility. And I still have lots of ideas and, I told my agent, she needs to cut me off after three, so I start working on other things. Because it is really an enchanting genre. I think because I've always loved poetry, I've always loved poetic form, and it is such an intensely constricting form, you have, you know, under 2000 words, usually more like a thousand words. Some of mine are a little longer. the Ramanujan one is longer, but the other two are closer to a thousand words. And you have that thousand words to somehow capture a life. And so you have to find a way to go about that.
To me, that has been about metaphor. I think for a lot of people, writing is about story, and I would not at all denigrate that. I do think story is absolutely key. But the thing that you have to ask yourself as a writer is, where, what is your access point to story? And for me, it is metaphor more than anything else.
So I think when I get really energized around a particular story is when I locate that, not just metaphor, that's a little bit, it sounds like it's a single thing—but it is sort of this rich soil that I can feel metaphor within. And then it’s sort of mining that soil to find the clarity, the sort of single animating idea that can inform this very short piece.
Elise:
I love so much of what you just said. I love the idea of form, the compression of it, that suddenly kind of shoots out all of these possibilities. But also your entry point of metaphor, as you put it so well, that rich soil. I wonder if you can say more about it, because I think people, when they hear the word biography, they think fact, they think source text, all of those things. But there's more than one way to get at truth, and truth and fact have an interesting relationship. So how do you negotiate that?
Amy:
I've been thinking a lot about this, actually. I've been thinking about this ever since graduate school, when I got an MFA at the University of Pittsburgh. And that program for whatever reason was very journalism-centric. So Lee Goodkin was there. Jeanne Marie Laskas may or may not still be there.
But anyway, there was this heavy influence of journalism, which I really fought against the entire time I was there. I remember I once wrote a piece that was nonfiction, and I used the line, I've always remembered this, I used the line, “Her knees were flying up and down like a tinsmith’s hammers and lead.”
And Lee Goodkin said to me, “How do you know that?” And I thought, well, what do you mean “know that”? That’s not a knowable thing. I knew that she rode a bike. And so that was my imagination of the moment. So yes, I've been sort of chasing against this idea of nonfiction for a very long time. And of course, journalism, I think like, you're writing for the New York Times, there’s a different sort of standard of objective reportage that needs to happen.
But if you're writing a picture book biography, you're writing in a genre that's already mixed. It's already hybrid. It's going to be illustrated. The illustrations, of necessity, cannot map onto reality, and there's no expectation that they will. There's often huge flights of fancy that happen within the illustration. There's often an element of magical realism that tries to bring in the thoughts of the figure in illustrated form. So you might see, if it's about a mathematician, you might see the numbers flying out of their head like this gale or walking down the street, or whatever things that numbers wouldn't physically be doing, but you're trying to capture that imaginative life.
So with that, I feel like the text is going to do something similar. And it's going to sort of live within this, inspired by fact, imaginative universe. I've been recently really inspired by something Toni Morrison wrote about in Sources of Self-Regard, which was that huge pink volume that came out I think either the year she died or right before or after she died. But there's a beautiful essay in that where she talks about what she had to do as a fiction writer, but she mentions nonfiction as well. And she says you have to journey to the site of memory and see what remains. And I've thought so much about that, because she was obviously dealing with a lot of slave narratives, and she was trying to reconstruct. And the truth that lies behind that is that there's a lot that isn't said. And that there was a living person, there was a life, with all of its continuous reality that cannot be captured in any historical record. So to me, there's more truth that is left out without imagination. So the imagined part has to be there. So, yes, and I think I am probably a minority in the picture-book biography world right now.
Elise:
I'm staring at that Morrison book right now!
Amy:
Are you?
Elise:
Yeah. And it is wonderfully pale pink. And her comments and yours are really evocative of the way that the imagination creates an image around all that we have access to. And sometimes the stories that we most need to tell are really constructions around absence. We just don't know. And especially if you're doing what you're doing in your picture books, you're going back into famous people's childhoods. Not all of that is accessible. We can't always remember our childhoods clearly. Then there have to be other mediums, other ways of getting at something true, something real,
Amy:
Yeah. That's, I'm so glad that you brought up the childhood aspect of it, because I think, you know, Toni Morrison was writing, was drawing on slave narratives, et cetera, or just little snippets from news clippings, et cetera. But, as you say, I'm dealing with children, and children are very marginalized voices. They're very much not a part of historical record. So even for famous people, you have just little bits here and there, little bits of their speech, especially their speech is not recorded. So that presents a challenge and a possibility for the biographer. Again, there's different contexts. When you're talking about adult biography, you have a higher expectation for source to materials, but that's really inappropriate in a children's biography.
So the argument I always make to people is, there's an author's note. And the author's note is a different form of nonfiction. And I think children should be encouraged to read both. And then they get that critical awareness of what this story looks like versus what a more kind of clearly reasoned, you know, clearly sourced, clearly attributed piece of writing looks like, and they can begin to feel those differences, which, if you want a really literate person, that's what, that's what you want.
I had a long conversation recently with Betsy Bird, who runs a blog and is a big voice in the children's-book world. And her big thing is that she wants us to be able to hand fact to children and not lie to them. And so her idea is in the nonfiction part of the library, we need to say here is fact. And I think that's problematic from so many different angles. How much writing can we really say is not problematic?
So I think we need to raise readers. We need to raise people that have a subtle awareness of the huge, broad continuum that is the wild, bad world of nonfiction writing.
Elise:
And I think what you're also talking about is discernment in reading, because if you have an author's note and then you have the story, you get multiple points of view, multiple voices, to use a literary term, and you learn to negotiate those, and you learn to know the difference. So it also makes me wonder, do you really have a manifesto that more adults should really be going back to children's books? We maybe all have those books that we remember from our childhood that are deeply nostalgic for us. But is there real value that we should be reinvestigating the books of childhood, including young adult novels, which have really had a boom over the last 10 years? They're different.
Amy:
I wonder what you mean when you say we should be—do you have a particular “we” in mind?
Elise:
I think adult readers who are looking for fact-based narratives, who want to know who was this person really.
Amy:
Oh, I see. I see. That's really interesting. Well for me, childhood is just endlessly, endlessly fascinating. And yeah. I think that's true for a lot of writers. It's very, very true for Flannery O'Connor, a writer that I've becoming been becoming more and more aware of. In terms of people that are interested in life stories, that's a really, really good question. I don't think I can say that in general, because I don't necessarily think that a lot of picture book biographies are oriented around what I'm talking about. There's some really brilliant ones. There's many that I really love, but I think there's a lot of writers now who really are trying to report. And so to me, they're kind of just shorter versions of adult biography. And so maybe they aren't going to give you anything that adult biography wouldn't give you.
But I do think there's imaginative takes on childhood that are incredible. One that's very simple, simple and beautiful, is called Me…Jane. And it's about Jane Goodall and it is literally just the simple line, but you see how the imagination of this child opened into an entire life. And that's, that's what I like to see in children's-book biographies, is that what you're seeing in the child is not some stranger, some other being.
So much of the rhetoric we have around childhood, even around parenting children, is that there's this separate phase that's called childhood. And then at some point, I guess we graduated from high school and we are now adults. And then we do the serious work of our lives. But what you see when you look at almost any great figure is that they were already, in some form or another, becoming who they were going to someday be. And that becoming phase is so rich, it's so much where their genius is located, that it is absolutely worth diving into that. Whether or not a particular children's book does a good job of that remains to be seen. But I think revisiting children's books in general and sort of getting in touch with that childhood vision is really important if you want to think about the whole person, the sources of ourselves. Yes.
Elise:
And the richness of that imagination begs for word and image, which is precisely what the picture-book biography can give. Do you choose your illustrators? Because Ping Zhu did your illustrations for The Strange Birds of Flannery O'Connor, Daniel Miyares did The Boy Who Dreamed of Infinity, and you actually did work with the Zhou brothers for your book on them. How did you get to work with these incredible artists?
Amy:
I do not choose my illustrators, and actually the entire reason why I'm writing children's books today is because I discovered at some point—I was actually proctoring a calculus exam, and I was Googling children's books and trying to find out about that world because I had this interest in it. And I actually found out through reading about Candlewick Press that not only did they take unsolicited manuscripts at that time, they don't anymore, but they made the statement that they like to choose their illustrators.
So you come in with a text and they choose the illustrator. And I thought “Oh, I can write children's books!” Because I had always thought you needed to be an artist. So anyway, that was a wonderful revelation for me. And so I did not get to pick them. The only exception is the Zhou brothers. I did not pick them, but the story there, I don't know if you want to talk about it now, but the story there is…
Elise:
Sure!
Amy:
Okay. So we sold the story. I had the blessing from them. We sold the story to Candlewick. And then I went back to the brothers, and the younger brother has a son, Michael Zhou, who sort of is their manager. And he said, “Now, wait a minute, who's going to illustrate this?” And I said, “We really should have talked about this before I sold the book!”
But he said, “We can't just have anybody illustrate this. So I brought him 50 books and we sat there and went through them and he picked out. Just by rent randomly. He picked out the illustrator for my Ramanujan book, and he said, “I love his work.” And I said, well, we can't get him. He's booked solid.
And a week later, he sent me two illustrations that his uncle and father had done. And he said, “We want to illustrate the book.” And I was panicked, because I thought there's no way Candlewick is going to go for this, these modern artists. An illustrator and an artist are—I mean, I shouldn't, it's hard to say it—somebody whose life was made in modern art versus an illustrator are often very different beings. And that's not to denigrate the work of the illustrator, but this is a very different occupation. So I thought, there's no way they're going to believe that these artists can illustrate the book. And at the same time, there's no way they can tell them no, because it's their story.
So I just made this hard sell to Candlewick that these people are going to do this amazing job, and they brought them on. And so that's how it happened, but it was kind of a process for all of us. So I didn't choose them, but I definitely argued hard once I realized that they wanted to illustrate the book.
Elise:
I'm so glad you did, because now their art, as you said, is part of another genre of the art world.
Amy:
Exactly.
Elise:
Who knows what children and adults will be opened up, and then go look at their very modern, contemporary art.
Amy:
Exactly, and no one can tell their story the way they can. And that was my argument. I said, they are going to illustrate from the depth of their experience. And there's no other person that could use that personal experience and then open up into their art, which is what we're trying to do. And I think that's one of the shocks of their illustration work, which is honestly very representational in the children's book. You can see the figures very clearly. It's very relatable, and yet it opens into their heart as artists. So it's incredible.
Elise:
Yeah. And maybe we should say, too, for those listening, who maybe aren't familiar with their art, they share a canvas. They paint together on a single canvas, which is phenomenal, literally and materially, but it's also an amazing metaphor.
Amy:
Yes. It is an amazing metaphor. Yes.
Elise:
So hopefully we'll come back to this book a little bit, but I want to go ahead and dive into Flannery because that book is out right now and it is, it's a beautiful book,
Amy:
Thank you.
Elise:
It’s a really startling book, and I mean that in the best way. And I wonder, how did you come to decide that this big figure in the literary world—and especially for folks who are Catholic or Christian, Flannery O'Connor is kind of up on a pedestal for many of them—how did you know that you wanted to look at her in this way, in this way of telling her story of her childhood?
Amy:
Well, the simple, quick answer is her essay, “The King of the Birds,” which I'm sure you know. I'd read every single word that she had written in a very intense period of time, probably a three-week period of time, in preparation for a panel I did years and years ago, long before I ever thought I'd write children's books. But that essay stayed with me.
And then when I was introduced to this beautiful world of picture-book biographies, that story kind of re-emerged in my imagination and presented itself as a possibility. So I went back and read that story. And of course, in that story, she presents, she doesn't present the metaphor, really an association, but I think it's really clear.
She has this quest to find the strangest bird. She describes it as a quest, and it's rooted in her early childhood and takes her through her final years. So there's this quest that spans her lifetime to find the strangest, most stunning, most beautiful bird, which she says ends in the peacock. So it's sort of the natural end of this quest, was the peacock.
And of course the parallel quest in her life is to write strange, stunning, beautiful stories. So that was a, I think, just sort of a natural association, it suggested not only story but metaphor. But I think the thing that really clinched it for me was visiting the archives and seeing that the girl and the woman were also the bird, and were also the story. And then I could bring all three of those, intermingled, in this sort of beautiful Trinity at the end of the story. So to me, that metaphor, as I’m talking now, I can see that association with story. Because then the metaphor develops, right? So you have these little pieces, and to bring it into its fullness is a story. And so that story and that metaphor became the picture-book biography for me. And I think that's the clarity or the lens that allows me to condense it into such a small space but not minimize it. I'll still allow it to open up into the fullness that is Flannery.
Okay.
Elise:
Yeah, that's so fascinating to me. And I love the way you talk about the pieces coming together. That's the story. We tend to want to kind of find the story within it, but it's all of these collected pieces. And I have to say, personally, one thing that I loved about the book—so I'm actually someone that's terrified of birds.
Amy:
That's great.
Elise:
Yeah. And the smaller the bird, the more terrifying it is to me. But lately I can't stop looking at them and I just want to write about them and think about them. And I think there's something about their weirdness and my own terror and horror that keeps me at a productive distance. And reading your book, I thought, this is a new way for me to get into Flannery O'Connor, whose short stories I always kind of struggled with a little bit, but I loved her cartoons. And so I really, I really appreciated that weird perspective. It's giving me a chance to go back and read the stories in a new light.
And I was thinking that maybe for those who are listening, who haven't read Flannery O'Connor, or maybe they're hearing her name for the first time, could you just give us a brief overview of who she was?
Amy:
Sure. So she was born in 1925, grew up in Savannah, and from a very young age, it's sort of her early fascination, she was obsessed with birds. She had a lot of backyard foul. She had ducks and chickens. And if you're in the archives, you will see that she was constantly drawing images of birds.
There are so many photographs of her. One of my favorites is this little sequence where she's obviously in her Sunday best, and she has this little parasol and it's literally like one of her cartoons. You see the first image she's sitting there. Primly obviously posing for her mother, her proper Southern lady, mother. The next image, the parasol is falling down, the next image the parasol’s on the ground. And the final image, she's on the ground with her beautiful dress, like, in the dirt, with this little duck sitting in front of her. And the whole thing seems so perfectly Flannery to me. So that's how she started out.
And then when she was 13, her family moved to Milledgeville, and it was shortly after that, that her father died. So she was 15 when her father died. And that, I think, if we're saying that bird's were sort of the original fascination, I think her father dying was her original revelation.
And I really believe that that is the event that informed, almost all of the revelations in her fiction. Because it gave her the experience. She says it in her college journal, she says that grief had come upon them, but even more than grief, wonder. So in that moment, she experienced what. Pain, what a violent experience can do to you. And she describes her father's death like violence. She said it's like a bullet in the side. So she uses this violent language. So we have this child who is fascinated with birds, who has this experience of grief and revelation, who in the midst of all of this has begun to write stories, in addition to all of the images that she's drawing. And I think for a long time, she was really unclear in her own self where her life was headed. She wasn't sure if she was going to be an artist or a cartoonist or a writer. She was doing both. when she was fifteen, the same year her father died, she tried to self publish a book, to no avail. One of my favorite things from the archives is that letter sequence that she writes first to Viking and then to McMillan, I believe to trying to get these books published. And when she first gets rejected, she's so upset that she decides that these books, everybody's treating them as if they're children's literature, so she writes and says, “these books are not intended for children.” And then the P.S. is “I've seen worse published.”
Elise:
I love that! Of course she said that.
Amy:
Of course she said that. So that was her attitude at 15.
And these were stories about birds, and then (of course, I'm sure you know the story, but I'll say it for everybody who's listening), and when she was at Iowa, she goes to the school of journalism, hoping to be a cartoonist, hoping to do cartoons for the New Yorker, et cetera, even though she hated the New Yorker. She wanted to rise to that high level of being a well-paid cartoonist. But she gets there, and it's something, I don't know if we really understand exactly what happened in her psyche at this point, but she marches into the Iowa writer's workshop and the person she speaks to cannot understand her because of her heavy Southern drawl. And she writes a little note to him. She says, “I am not a journalist. Can I come to the workshop?” Or something like that with the second part; I'm not exactly sure what the words were. But at that point you realize she has understood that she is a writer.
And she continues painting for the rest of her life. And she very much thought her visual practice was an aid, but she saw that as supporting her writing rather than being the heart of her artistry. And I think a lot of artists are really confused about this, and people can spend their entire careers sort of bouncing between different art forms because they have a vision and they want to find the forum to express it in but they can't find what they're really given to. But she did; she found it. She knew that it was, it was writing. And then she wrote the series of incredible short stories that are collected in two volumes. She wrote two novels and a series of beautiful nonfiction that was mostly delivered as lectures. And then the collection of her letters, because she was an avid letter writing. And that's the sum total of her writing.
So you actually can read it in three weeks, though I wouldn't advise that as an experience to anyone. Her fiction is so intense and so violent that, yeah, you should probably space it out a little bit, but that's who Flannery O'Connor was. She won the National Book Award, and her fiction has had a long and beautiful, vibrant life that's still going.
Elise:
It is, and it's going in large part because of people like you who are doing this new work with her. And, you know, the title of your picture-book biography is The Strange Birds of Flannery O'Connor, and strangeness as a condition, as an orientation, as a perspective, is so on evidence in the book. I love the juxtaposition of text with image. I love the way the illustrations really bring to the foreground, when you're a child, you're small and that shifts the way you see everything. I love the spread where Flannery is lying on her bed, pigeon toed. The room is big. Her bed is big. And there's, there's a little bird looking through the window at her.
Why is strangeness so important, and maybe under-appreciated, for thinking through childhood or arts? Take that wherever you will.
Amy:
Okay, well, there's something I want to read to you. Let me see if I can find it here. I almost have this memorized, but not quite. So Flannery O'Connor has this beautiful passage that I've thought about so much with respect to this book. Let me just read it to you. It's really short.
“This story has been called grotesque,” and she's actually writing about “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” here. She says, “but I prefer to call it literal.” And so it's really important to understand what she means by literal here. “A good story is literal in the same sense that a child's drawing is literal. When a child draws, he doesn't intend to distort, but to set down exactly what he sees. And as his gaze is direct, he sees the lines that create motion.” And then she goes on from there to talk about the lines that create spiritual motion. So she, she translates that into what an adult writer would be doing with this vision. I loved that idea of the child's directly gaze and seeing the lines that create motion.
I actually remember David Lynch once talking about a duck. And he said he loved looking at the duck, and he said, “There's parts that are really fast.” And I thought, oh, how interesting that, what he sees when he sees the duck is motion. And that just gave me a little window into David Lynch's mind. But I think we're seeing something similar here, where she's talking about a child seeing motion. And so I'm so glad that you love, sort of, the distorted sizes, the distorted images in the book where things aren't as they appear—but to us, right. They aren't, as they would objectively appear, but they appear maybe the way they're felt through an inner vision. Especially through the inner vision of a child. And I think she does a nice job of transitioning into an older inner vision through the book, but that those early images, the very first one of the little girl at the desk has this Alice in Wonderland feel, this almost larger than life, archetypal feel. This little girl, at the center of the picture with this huge desk and all of these items, and she is just writing and writing. And her mother is this tiny little presence off to the side, looking through the door at this vast expanse of room around her that just seems to capture her mind ia a little child.
And for me, my childhood room was like that. It was this expanse around me that housed my imagination and the possibilities of the world around me, that was more infused, again, with that sense of magical realism. There's so much in a child's mind that isn't literal—and I'm using that word not the way Flannery O'Connor uses it. I love her use of literal. For her literal is talking about an inner vision. What is not visible to the naked eye, what is felt, what is experienced is also the literal.
So in a symbol, where you think of the figurative and that the concrete object both are literal, both of those, the thing that the image points to and the thing itself are both the literal. So, I think in this children's books, one of the things I was so happy about and having Ping Zhu illustrate it is that she's not a Flannery O'Connor insider. She's coming from the outside. And I think one of the risks that you were sort of pointing to, when you were asking me these questions, is that Flannery O'Connor is a cultural icon. And so there's a huge danger in writing about her, of sort of falling into hagiography or just sort of playing off the big tropes of Flannery O'Connor's life. And Ping Zhu was very aware of that, and because she was coming to it with completely fresh eyes, I think she brought her own vision. And one of the beautiful things she says about her own childhood is that she wasn't painting a lot. She didn't do a lot of art as a child, but she liked to invent worlds. And when she came to this art, she wanted to invent a world. And you see her, in some of her early imaginings for this book, doing collage and trying to figure out, what is this strange world gonna look like? And she talks about collage as almost like sketching. Like you can take these shapes and these colors and put them in different places and see what it's going to look like.
And again, she was trying to build up, invent this interior world of a child. So that's a long answer to your question.
Elise:
It's fabulous though. And I love what you're saying about vision, because another thing that struck me about the book was all of Flannery staring, and that that word that she's “staring”—I mean, this is something that children get scolded for. Don't stare, don't do that. And as adults, we kind of like clean it up a little and say, I'm paying attention to this thing. I'm not necessarily staring at it.
Amy:
I'm studying.
Elise:
Exactly right. But staring is visceral. Staring can be violent. And there's another spread after her father dies, which you mentioned before, that she stared harder and the illustration, we don't see her eyes. We just see her sunglasses and everything she's seeing in the reflection of those glasses.
Do you think, this is a big question, but I want to ask it, do you think that staring at something as violent as death is something that is worth paying attention to, whether as children or adults?
Amy:
I think we can't help but stare. I think the secular world in particular has a really hard time with death, because there is no way of really articulating its meaning. Death in some sense is the end of meaning. And so staring at it is maybe something one is forced to do, sort of the way Thomas Merton says that as we bear it in a brutish way, like an animal, we bear it. We bear, we bear death. So we stare at it because we have to, we stand at the grave site, we look at the tomb, right. And then we walk away, and we try to forget, we try to not, at least, have the most violent aspects of death with us anymore.
But within a religious context, which Flannery O'Connor was coming from, there's meaning in death. And so there's value in staring. And the experience that Flannery O'Connor had with her father's death was, as she said, grief has come up on, but even more than grief, wonder. And there she's opening up into this beautiful realm that is going to inform her entire fiction. So even though she would, I'm sure, like any of us would have done anything to have another day with her living father, it was the entryway for her into the world of her art, and into the world of the deepest forms of meaning, and into the sources of her faith. So, to me, absolutely death is worth staring at. And although I didn't have an experience of tragedy as a child, the way she did, I had, for several reasons I had this very early experience of being conscious of mortality.
And I always thought of it—Annie Dillard gave me this language—she talked about death being a hot coal that people carry around as opposed to death forgetting men. And I always felt for me that, since I didn't grow up religious, I grew up in an atheist agnostic family, that awareness of mortality, it was my sort of hot coal that was both a burden and my source of meaning, my source of seeking God or seeking this deeper invisible realm of mystery.
Elise:
You mentioned earlier the book that she tried to self publish, that she wrote as a teenager, which is also engaged in because she wrote it in some ways in response to her father's death and the violence of wonder. And that book's title is Mistaken Identity. And I wondered if you would talk a little bit about it, because you're having to go into the archives and bring this out. What are you noticing? What's the plot of this particular book?
Amy:
So this story is wonderful. And it was a dawning awareness for me, because I found the book first, and then on the second trip to the archives, actually two years later, I found the letters where she tried to get it published. And then I realized that she had written this in the wake of her father's death. And the year before she had this experience where—it's interesting, because it seems like she got derailed with cartooning, because when she was fourteen, she says that she realizes that it's given to her to bring literature into being. So she actually has this vocational awareness at 14, which somehow then gets translated to cartooning for a while.
But that happened the year before she wrote these books. And one of the things that's amazing when you see these books, is that not only was she trying to bring literature into being by writing, she was physically trying to bring it into being, because she was having no success with the publishing world. So she self published these books, she hand punches all of the holes. There must be 30 down the side, and she winds copper wire. So she hand binds these books, which is so beautiful.
And so I just imagine her in this state of grief, like sitting there with her glasses and her flyaway hair, sort of furiously winding this copper wire through these hand-bound books, trying to create literature. So you see her passion in that moment.
But then the story itself is about one of her geese named Herman, who—and this really happened. She thought it was Herman, and then Herman lays an egg, in real life he lays seven eggs. And they realized that Herman is Henrietta. So the whole story is called Mistaken Identity and it's really comic. I think she came to her comic sensibility before she came to her tragic sensibility. And really her genius came when she realized those two things were kind of stemming from the same source.
I think she felt her tragic sensibility but wasn't able to put it into this story. So the story itself is just comic. But what we see in the end is the emergence of this egg, right? And the egg is the thing that transforms, that becomes the effect of—Herman becomes Henrietta's true creative self, right? He's the creative production and the true identity being revealed, but what's even more remarkable is that she is aware of her own relationship to this. It's really her transformation that happens in seeing this egg. So I feel like it becomes almost like her original metaphor. It's the metaphor behind her other metaphors, which is this moment of transforming that happens, that affects not only the person involved, but the viewer as well.
So I love it for all those reasons. And I'm working on the introduction, trying to say that this is a book that happens at this watershed moment in her life and opens up to the rest of her literature and allows us to see her writing with maybe a fresh vision.
Elise:
That's extraordinary, and I can't wait for it to come out. Do you have a release date?
Amy:
Well, I hope it will. I hope it will. I think, honestly, I think that we've really hit a snag with Flannery O'Connor publication because of the Paul Elie article. I haven't really seen that yet. We're still waiting, but we don't yet have a publisher. And I'm concerned because there has been a lot of sort of damaging ramifications from that article. So we can talk about that eventually, but I hope that this book will be published.
Elise:
Well, I hope so too. And everyone listening, join in good thoughts that this will be published, and activism that this will be published. And we will talk about the Elie article because it's crucial, it's completely necessary. And maybe as a bridge into it, as we're talking about all of these issues of grief and wonder and fascination and the long slow progression of the interests that were born in her, that she had the courage really to see through, her entire life. That story, as you mentioned earlier, about birds ends with the peacock, and the peacock is kind of the universal symbol of Flannery O'Connor. And I want to read a part of The Strange Birds of Flannery O'Connor. It's the peacock page, when she sees first, the backside of the peacock and then the front. So this is your writing. “Later, back at the farm, the peacock raised its tail. Flannery stared. At first, she saw only the back of it, the long knobby legs, and tail feathers puffing out like underwear. But then it turned, and a thousand haloed suns seemed to gaze down at her. Flannery didn't know if she should laugh or kneel. It was the strangest, most beautiful thing she'd ever seen. Like an unfurled map of the universe, she thought.”
It's really breathtaking language. You really did justice to that moment.
Amy:
Thank you.
Elise:
Are peacocks, and precisely that movement, that shift in perspective, that ugly backside, and then that stunning, glorious, as you write, thousand haloed sons, is that revelation, is that the beatific vision for Flannery?
Amy:
Yes. It definitely is the beatific vision. And that's definitely what Flannery O'Connor thought. One of the things that, and I think I maybe get to this in the very next page, is she not only was entranced with staring at peacocks herself, but she's entranced with watching other people encounter peacocks, because I think she's always—it was almost a tool for revealing their soul, right. For revealing what it was that grabbed them. So one thing she says, she says she has yet to see somebody laugh when they see the peacock's tail unfurled. And yet, in that page that you just read, there's that other side of them that is comic. So you see those two things coming together. The comedic and the regulatory or the stunningly beautiful, the beatific. But I think it's really key that when she thinks about peacocks, she thinks about what it produces in the viewer. Not only herself, but in other people as well.
Elise:
So you mentioned a moment ago an article by Paul Elie which appeared in the New Yorker this summer. And you and I are talking in January —July, not January, July 2020.
Amy:
I could use a little January right now, actually.
Elise:
I was just thinking that—I think that was really a Freudian slip.
So, this article by Elie appeared in July, and I'll give a little bit of background for our listeners who may not have read it. And then I really want you to take over, and I'll explain why in a moment. But Paul Elie is an American author. He has written a book entitled The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage. The first part of that title is taken from a Flannery O'Connor short story. The book is about American authors who engaged Catholic faith, and he focuses a lot on Flannery O'Connor. And it's important to note that in the print edition of the New Yorker, his article was titled “Everything That Rises.” But in the online version, the title is “How Racist Was Flannery O'Connor,” which is obviously clickbait. And as of this morning, unfortunately, a basic Google search of Flannery O'Connor, the number one hit is the Wikipedia page, the number two hit is this article.
And it's unfortunate because Elie makes strong statements about O'Connor's racist remarks in her correspondence, but what is unfortunate is he does not give proper credit to the host of scholars who have already pointed to that and have thought through it with nuance and sort of accuses lovers of Flannery O'Connor's, thinkers about Flannery O'Connor as not being savvy enough or not being brave enough to encounter these racist remarks. And as you've indicated, this is now having damning effects for work on Flannery O'Connor, because the venue of the New Yorker is enormously powerful and most people are going to find their way to that and not some of the other texts.
Now you wrote what I believe to be the strongest rebuttal of the article, as well as the most considered explanation of these racist comments and the work that's been done, and your piece was published in The Bitter Southerner, and we will link to it in our show notes.
So I'd like to just hand it over to you, and kind of give us more context for the problems of that article.
And then here we are, again, in 2020, white people must be in a moment of reckoning with this country's history being built on chattel slavery, with practices of policing and police brutality that unjustly target Black Americans, with the systemic issues in this country that disadvantage people of color. So we cannot not take seriously the issues of race in O'Connor. And as I said, I think you're one of the people that's done the most work on this, so I'll just hand it over to you.
Amy:
I think I'll start out with something that's not in my Bitter Southerner piece. So the Bitter Southerner piece, I tried to keep it very focused on his omissions and his mischaracterizations of women and Black scholars. So I tried to focus on that. But there was so much because of that focus that I wasn't able to get to that is also problematic about his piece.
I think one of the things that I think about in an ongoing way is, what was his motivation for writing this? Because as a person who loved Flannery O'Connor himself, why sit down and write such an unnuanced piece, which I could, I could pretty much take apart every single paragraph of this article, even the parts where he's praising Flannery O'Connor, none of it is deep. All of his readings are not only incorrect, but just shallow. So it's a really hard piece to understand.
So I've been thinking a lot about Flannery O'Connor's relationship to the word piety; piety is something she cannot stand. And it's easy when you talk about morality, there is a really big risk, always which Flannery O'Connor saw. She definitely wanted to have a moral vision, but she was extremely concerned about morality degrading into piety. So I wanted to share a few things that she wrote about piety, just because I think it's really important to this discussion.
So she says these sorts of things. She says “I distrust pious phrases, especially when they issue from my mouth. I try militantly never to be affected by pious language. The pious style is a great stumbling block.” She talks about pious pat, pious trash, some pious liberal fraud, “all the pious articles I read turn my stomach. I doubtless hate pious language worse than”—she's writing to somebody else. Piety is a dirty word to her. And when I think about this article, I feel like it was motivated by piety, not by morality. I feel like we see sort of this worst version of piety, which O'Connor explicitly think obscures the truth. If you're pious, you cannot see. Your vision is completely clouded over and you are looking almost through these statements of how you're supposed to be, whether or not you understand them, and the chances are you don't. So you say, I am supposed to, as a white person be part of this reckoning. And so I will go forth and do it. And it feels like there's almost a roboticism in his approach to this that is motivated by this piety. And that's my best reading of it. My worst reading is that there was actually some sort of professional greed or desire to hurt. And I have to see that a little bit because of his treatment of women who are currently working and doing amazing work on O'Connor and race.
So that's the first thing I want to say about it, and I think this issue of piety has a lot to do also with us understanding Flannery O'Connor's racist remarks in conjunction with her fiction. So I think if we think about piety, that will help us to understand what's going on there.
But in terms of my article, I could just say a bit more about it. There are numerous Black scholars who he either treats very lightly, or he doesn't treat at all. And I honestly was shocked as I read it, because I've been working with Emory University toward a potential exhibit—these are just conversations now; we don't have a date set—but we've been working on this dual exhibit with Benny Andrews, who's an African-American artist who decided to illustrate the Flannery O'Connor story “Everything That Rises Must Converge.”
And I actually am wondering a bit if Paul Elie took that title from this potential exhibit, because he was not unaware of it. I let him know that it was happening; it was a title that we had batted around for this exhibit. I don't think it's the title we would have ended up with, but it's central to Benny Andrews. He illustrates this book in this incredible, elephantine limited edition, which I will give you the link, so you can link to it in your notes, because it's definitely worth looking at. They have a lot of illustrations from the book, maybe all of them, on the site.
And then they also have this afterword, which is four pages. It is a profound, personal reckoning with O'Connor. One of the things that is terribly lacking in Elie’s piece is any personal engagement at all. We never get that “I,” and I think that moving from the “we” to the “I” is really how you avoid the piety. And we don't get that from Paul Elie at all.
In contrast, with Benny Andrews, the whole thing is a personal essay. It's here I am. I am a Black man. I grew up 30 miles down the road from Flannery O'Connor. We lived in the same world, but we lived parallel paths. How can I, living in a world he calls a murderous, inhumane world, that she was part of, and he accuses her in the strongest possible language of being part of that world, calling it a murderous, inhumane world. How can I decide illustrate her work? And he says it, he says the reason why is “I have looked into her works, and I have found revelations.”
So now you see this person, and he puts it at this crossroads of experience, and he refuses to let go either side of his experience. He says, I lived in this world with her. Her world was inhumane, and my people were completely subjugated by this, and yet I read her work and I see revelations. And he's writing as an artist, and he sees in her this commonality. He reads her letters. He talks about her letters. He talks about the problematic parts of her letters, but he says, I see the world that I lived in, and I see myself, basically, as an artist in her work, that's what I'm after. And so how does he resolve this? He says, well, I've decided to do this, and now it's on you, the viewer, he says, to stand at the crossroads. And this is how he puts it: he says the Negro and the white lady have met at the crossroads, and it is now left to you to wonder, wonder, and wonder more.
And I just think that is such a profound image. And the way he gets there, again, is by his personal engagement with both the revelation that he found in Flannery O'Connor's work and with the profound racism of the world that she occupied and didn't distance herself enough from. Even by just virtue of being a white, privileged woman in this world, no matter what she had said, there would still be this distance.
And so all of that was on the table. And so I was just appalled that he [Elie] wasn't dealing with this work of Benny Andrews, that he talks about Alice Walker but doesn't talk about her amazing essay “Beyond the Peacock,” about, again, her own personal encounter with Flannery O'Connor, both her love and her hate. Nobody could say it more strongly than she does: her hate of Flannery O'Connor and her profound love for Flannery O'Connor.
She is standing there in the midst of this in the way Paul Elie never could, because, first of all, he's not Black. And second of all, he's not a woman. And I think we get that from Alice Walker, powerfully. I mean, how many women had risen to literary fame from the South before 1960? There's only a handful. That's why Alice Walker was reading her. And that is part of the reason why Alice Walker loves her.
I was asked recently, did I come to Flannery O’Connor partially because she's a woman? And at first, I didn't know what to say, but I've been thinking about it that ever since. And of course, there's an aspect of that. As a woman writer, having a model in, how do you make your way in the world as a woman, as a writer, how do you do it? You look to other women, and so of course Alice Walker was looking to her for that, as well. So she contends with this, so you have those two powerful voices.
And you have Hilton Als, who I wouldn't put quite in the same category, but because I don't think it's quite as personally, his essays is a little bit more distant, but there's still that personal element to it.
And then of course, finally, Toni Morrison. She doesn't so much write about O'Connor’s racism, but she writes about O'Connor and race in profound ways. In a book that was published in 2017, she is just floored by Flannery O'Connor's story that chronicles the passage of Mr. Head and his nephew into the city. And it's really, in Morrison's mind, how race is constructed, how a sense of whiteness is constructed. So she looks to O’Connor's writing for that. And then in this beautiful interview, the very last question with Morrison—this is just two years before she died—the person says, who do you admire? And she conjurs up just one single name, and that is Flannery O’Connor. And I love how she puts it. She says, “She is hostile. She is very, very good.”
Here is Toni Morrison. And it's so hard to find writers that cause you to write, that inspire your own ability to write. And Morrison, more than anything else, is a profound artist. And so she found in O'Connor somebody that spoke to her heart as a writer. She's not going to let that go. It's too hard to find. So in these four writers, you find this tremendously powerful, complex vision, none of which Elie deals with.
And then of course, there's the central text by Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, Radical Ambivalence, that he dismisses and honestly defames, defames her in many ways, because of all of his incorrect statements, not only about her as a writer but about her work. So that's kind of a summary of my Bitter Southerner, but I would also love to get back to the piety thing.
Elise:
I would love to, please.
Amy:
Yeah. So one of the things he does, again, that is really egregious, is that he quotes a second letter from O'Connor in which she says probably the most incriminating thing that she says in any of her letters. He doesn't talk about the first part of that letter, which I will mention, but the reason why this is so terrible is that he calls it a published letter.
Well, it wasn't published until Angela Alaimo O'Donnell worked in the archives and with the estate, because you cannot publish something unless the estate gives you permission. She got permission for that, and he does not credit that. So he takes this piece from a letter that is writing to Maryat Lee, who is her very, very liberal friend activist friend who lived in New York. And the start of it is that Flannery O'Connor had obviously been very upset by some racist thing that had happened locally. And Maryat had said to her, hey, why don't you write a letter to the newspaper? And Flannery said, I'm not going to do that. That's not how I function; that's not how things get done around here. And furthermore, it was just a pious thought.
Okay, that's what she says. Now, if you know what she means, you have to take that word “piety” and know that's loaded for her. When she says piety, she is saying, I am going to now castigate myself, because I am going to militantly rid myself of piety. So the very next thing she says is “anyway, you know me, I don't like Negroes.” So that's the big, horrible line. She is confessing. She is confessing there. She is saying, you know me, I don't deserve to write a pious letter, because look at who I am: I'm a bigot. Just like my terrible character, Mrs. Turpin.
She signs a later letter, “Mrs. Turpin.” He [Elie] uses that to say that she's sort of embracing her racism and siding with Mrs. Turpin in this collective way. It's almost impossible to get that as a reading, because Mrs. Turpin, through the voice of another character, [O’Connor] accuses of being a “warthog from hell.” If she calls herself Mrs. Turpin, she is accusing herself. She is pointing out the sin that is within her and saying, this is who I am. Don't mistake me for somebody who's pious.
So now, to me, what O'Connor is doing is having the reckoning that we are being called upon to have We are being called upon to have a reckoning with our interior state, right? And for O’Connor to accuse herself of any form of sin was in dead earnest, because for her, this had deep, profound, eternal ramifications. So she's not saying this lightly. Granted, she does it in the context of a fairly lighthearted letter. But if you really want to read in some sort of sola scriptura away, not only sola scriptura, if you want to banish context, one at least should have the benefit of the other words the author wrote.
So at least we could put this letter in the context of her other language, which he does not do. She has many statements in her letters that show a very different relationship to Black people of the time, et cetera. The real problem she had was she didn't like James Baldwin. Or to say that, that's a little bit too strongly put: she liked his fiction; she didn't like him because she saw him as a militant activist. And again, what worried her about that was piety. Now, I think she was wrong, profoundly and horrendously wrong about James Baldwin. But what she was reacting to was this intense fear of piety and it obscuring truth.
Elise:
You've given me so much to think about. I hope that you will write this piece about piety.
Amy:
I would like to write this piece about piety, but I also feel like I may have an unhealthy obsession with Paul Elie's article and maybe need to write one more thing to purge myself of it.
Elise:
I was going to say, maybe once that's exorcised, this will come out. Yeah, I just see so much resonance with our current moment, because I do think what so many of us are struggling with right now is, how do I show that I am appalled by racism. At the same time, how am I honest about the racist tendencies within myself, or the ways in which things that are racist, are horrible, and I sometimes still want to watch that movie or read that book. And that “I, we” thing is so important, because if we don't put ourselves on the hook, to use O'Connor's language, then we're just pious fools, yammering on, obeying the rules, being factual to a fault, but expressing no truth. To kind of pull together a lot strands of our conversation thus far, that truth is so, to go back to your language from the beginning of our conversation, it is rich soil. There are many nutrients in it. It's not one thing. And that's not relativism either.
Amy:
No, no, no, exactly. She has this beautiful, statement. Gosh, if I could find it for you, I would read it. It's about the monstrosity of goodness. She's talking in the very last essay in Mystery and Manners, and she's talking about writing the biography of a disfigured child in a monastery. She doesn't want to write it. She wants the nuns to write it. She said, I'm not the person to write it, but she has this beautiful passage at the end, where she talks about how we are used to looking in the face of evil and forcing ourselves to do that. And we're used to seeing the grotesque and evil, but when we look into the face of good, we also find the grotesque.
And I absolutely love that, because you're totally mistaken if you think we're going to whittle down the world of art to the saints and there is where we will find the good to look upon. That is insane, because it's not how it happens. At least if you believe in the fallen nature of humanity, any good that comes is going to be in the context of monstrosity. And what you see in O'Connor’s fiction is, again and again, any good that ever comes, comes in this distorted form. Like I just did a very intense reading of The Violent Bear It Away. And there was this child evangelist, Lucette Carmody, in it. And that the whole beautiful paradox she presents for you is this is an exploited child, like clearly, absolutely exploited. You see her in the sort of garish reality of her exploitation, with her cheesy parents and the cheesy stage, and the tabernacle that she's within, and yet when she speaks, pure poetry comes out. Right. I feel like this is the voice of God, right. This is a prophet speaking. And you have to deal with that in O'Connor again and again, and again and again.
And so I think, to speak directly to this question, I mean, how do we deal with this. And when we're encountering art or encountering the artists we love is exactly the way Benny Andrews asks us to: we stand at the crossroads, and we don't deny our reactions because that is such, that is piety. When you say, “Oh, no, no, no, no. I didn't have that reaction. I didn't feel love there. I didn't notice the revelation. Right. I had the right reaction. Don't get mad at me.” And I think this is born of fear, born of fear of the internet mob, and everybody fears it. I don't think it's only white people fearing the internet mob. But you really have to say, I’m not going to let go of this.
I recently wrote a letter to my illustrator Ping Zhu, because she is a committed activist, very radically left. And this Elie article has been hard on her. And I wrote to her, and I thought it was really important for me to not only give her some of the backstory around this article, but to tell her that I love O'Connor. I wanted to say, listen, the racism is important. We can't deny it. It's there in her letters. I'm not trying to defend those statements. However, I personally love O'Connor. She's changed my life. She's helped me through dark times. I looked to her for wisdom, even about racist issues. I looked to her for wisdom about immigration. I looked to her for wisdom in so many things, and I could never whittle her life down to a single word. And so, to me, that is so important to just be honest about our reactions. And to not let the fear of the internet mob too much interfere with our ability to speak. In my Bitter Southerner article, I tried to get to that point, at the end, of look, there is value here, whatever the complexities are, there's value.
Elise:
And you ended your piece by giving the last word to Hilton Als, to someone else, and his great quote, “the shit and the stars.” And if we think we're going to, as you said, if we're going to be in one and not the other we're sadly mistaken. And that word “monstrosity,” which is important to O'Connor and important to your own articulations, it's related to our word “demonstrate.” They come from the same root, which means, “to look.” So, yeah, we just have to, we have to stare, we have to do that hard work down at the crossroads and look really hard.
Amy:
You know, that made me think of something else that I think is really important. It's really easy to try to come up with a policy that we're going to use for all situations. Right? So we'll say, okay, now all monsters I will deal with in this fashion, but I think there are certain crimes, certain monstrosities that can be monstrous enough that they do negate the art. When what you are doing in your life and your art are sort of one in the same, it becomes even more problematic. With O’Connor, we have something that is much more orthogonal. We have statements in her letters that, in many ways, are contradicted by her fiction. I think there are deep readings. There's so much room for interpretation here and scholarship, so I don't necessarily want to talk against them. A particular scholar that thinks some of her portrayals of Black characters speak towards a certain racism that is born out of either a lack of knowledge, or a lack of sympathy, or a lack of communion, I mean, I'm sure that's accurate. And so yes, in some sense you could accuse her fiction of that, but there are many ways in which her writing is transgressive and amazing when it comes to racism, revelatory when it comes to racism, when she's accusing her characters of the deepest forms of bigotry and racism that go into constructions not only of whiteness, but Southern aristocracy, the Southern order, et cetera. And that's very much at the core of what she is accusing in her fiction. So we have a much more complex, complicated situation. So I just didn't want to come away saying, I'm going to look at any monstrous person. Not necessarily, there might be some people whose monstrosity negates their art, but that is not what we're dealing with here.
Elise:
No. And I'm glad you made that distinction.
So making meaningful distinctions, and, again, to go back to an earlier point in our conversation, “discernment,” being good readers, understanding the difference between the text and the author's note is pretty important. Thank you.
Maybe we can transition to something that is related and kind of bring our conversation full circle, and that's that collaboration is really central to your work and what you're interested in. And really all of us, whether it's a solo-authored story or article or piece of visual media, we're always in conversation, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.
Amy:
Even the artist and the audience have that relationship.
Elise:
So is that why collaboration is so important for you?
Amy:
Yeah, that's really interesting. In terms of my own relationship to collaboration, I guess I think, absolutely, artists are always working in this larger world of other art. So even if the collaboration is sort of a quiet internal one where you're just taking in other art, you're always working from the imaginations of other people. And sometimes that can become even more profound when you're directly collaborating. So, I have always fantasized about working in picture books and in film, because, in those two genres, the text and the image are working together.
So about the Zhou brothers, we were talking about how metaphor can become the story. And for me, the reason why I wrote the Zhou story is, I was visiting their gallery, which was on the South Side of Chicago. They have these wonderful third Fridays, it's not just their gallery. It's a huge industrial-built building that's been converted into all of these studio spaces for artists. So they've really seen it as their mission to foster the young lives of artists and help them sort of rise up in the world, since that was such an important thing that happened to them, was that sort of fostering of their art through other people.
But anyway, I was visiting their studio, and I came across their catalog. And I read in the very beginning of that, the younger brother, who's sort of the writer the two, he said, people think that collaboration is about harmony, but they're wrong. He said, you create something beautiful, and somebody comes along and destroys it, and you have to find a way to go on together.
And I think this says a lot about what we've already been talking about, about violence. And these contradictions that can happen between art and artist. And what you see with them is that that contradiction happens within the process of them making art. So I thought, and then knowing their life story, growing up during the cultural revolution, both of their parents and mother being tortured for years in jail, their father being thrown into labor camp and never coming home, and their sister being sold, having to be sold away. So the family being very oppressed by the cultural revolution. And yet, they love China. And there was this incredible moment for me, as a writer. I had one line, when I gave them my piece that I'd written, and I met the Zhou brothers. I was so nervous because I thought, here I am meeting, you know, like, hi Jackson Pollock, you know, that's like, these incredibly amazing world-class artists.
I actually did it, the first time I met them, I met only the younger brother and his son, and he said to me that he loved this story and felt like it captured his childhood in a way that he found revelatory, because it opened up into this whole possibility of speaking to children. But he had one word he wanted to take out of my piece.
And that is, I said, when his older brother was in his education camp, I said, he still was painting the fat face of chairman Mao. And he said, don't call his face fat. And then he put his hand over his heart. And he said, because Mao is everything. And I said, “Oh!” It was this incredible moment for me, a moment of revelation where I thought, “You still embrace Mao, and China, and all of this, the communist revolution, you still embrace it, even through all of this violence.” But then I saw it. That's the whole heart of your life, is how to go on after somebody has destroyed everything. And so to me, this was about the brother's relationship. This was about their relationship to China. This was about their relationship to art. And I thought when I saw—I hadn't yet had that profound, sort of, affirming of the vision, but I already knew that these three strands were going to be the story ,that they're, they're going to tell the story of how do you continue to make art in the face of fighting with your little brother, right? That's such a reality for siblings, right? How do you, how do you stay siblings? How do you stay loving each other? How can you create art together when your visions are obviously different? And how could you love your nation? Which I think is such an important question for us now. How can you love your nation when you realize what it has done, what it is doing, what it has done, right? And how do you go forward?
So to me, that was his story, and that is the heart of collaboration, and it is standing at the crossroads, and it's all the things we've been talking about, about the uncomfortable position of encounter. Of just allowing the realities—they weren't going to deny that they still love their homeland, that it was the source of who they were as artists. They can't deny that, or they deny themselves.
Elise:
And give us the release date, too, for the book, because I want people to go and get it.
Amy:
Yeah, I think it's September 4th.
Elise:
That’s what I thought. Okay. Yes. So go get it in your library.
Again, that moment where you have these, again, two nations coming together and managing to love both. And that really is a question I've seen so many people asking right now, how do we love America? Can we still love it? And there are many ways to answer that question. We have to keep asking it and thinking about it.
And maybe love is a good stepping stone to the final idea I want to get to you about which is infinity. We can't go any higher than that. Because your book, The Boy Who Dreamed of Infinity. I told you this, I have been in either a rabbit hole or an infinite loop. I did not know about Srinivasa Ramanujan until I was preparing to talk to you.
And I'm someone who gets a stomach ache when math starts happening. I just don't, it's hard for me to think through it practically, but I love thinking about it imaginatively. And this mathematician had no formal education and managed to create theorems that our math today is still catching up to, he created solutions to problems that he could not possibly have known existed.
And your father discovered his last notebook. And so I just would love to know what it was like knowing about this man growing up. And do you think that these ideas of mathematics and infinity gave you a way to think about the ultimate infinite, God?
Amy:
Yes. So this happened, my father discovered the last notebook when I was five years old. So it was the summer before I turned six. I was very little. And the only thing I remember from that trip, which I talk about in the author's note, is that, well, I remember the whole trip seems sort of watery to me, like England is so wet, right?
So, we were staying with this British mathematician, Lucy Slater, who I'd also love to write about. She was an early woman in mathematics and has a fascinating story. We were staying with her, and she had this living link back to Ramanujan’s time. Her advisors, when she was a student at Cambridge, they, when they were very young, had been at Cambridge with Ramanujan.
So she told my father that there were these boxes from the estates of some of these mathematicians that she had known kept at the Cambridge library. And she didn't say anything, like, they weren't particularly interesting. They just existed. You might be interested in looking at them. So he was on this quest that he went to find these old boxes.
But at the time Ramanujan had completely fallen out of knowledge in the mathematics world. I think after he died, G.H. Hardy was personally heartbroken. He said that knowing Ramanujan was the one romantic incident in his life. And so when Ramanujan died, I think almost out of the pain of it, he stopped really working on Ramanujan’s mathematics, and it just kind of faded. There's trends in mathematics as there are in any discipline.
So it's sort of receded from the mathematical world. But my father, when he was in graduate school, had a very old advisor, Rod Mocker, and he did his dissertation on what are called the mock data functions, which Ramanujan named. And my father believes that he named them for mock turtle, Lewis Carroll from Alice in Wonderland, the mock turtle, which I love. The term, if you don't remember, the mock turtle is the one that can't stop crying, that sings and cries. So I love thinking about these functions being named for these turtles.
So I was very little on this trip. And what I remember from that trip is my father, we were hunting in these boats, these English boats called punting boats. We were punting and my father falls in the river. So I remember this splash in the river, and now I've associated it with this moment of discovery. So there was this beautiful story that kind of reached me through my father's trips back and forth to India. So he was always bringing stories back, you know, he'd meet with the prime minister. Ramanujan’s widow was still living, and he was part of the movement that helped set up a fund for her. He was collaborating a lot with Indian mathematicians. And there were documentaries being made that my father was part of, so we would see those.
And then on top of all of that, my father was always doing mathematics, and my father's a vocational mathematician. Like he's somebody who does it from his heart. It is a religious experience for him. And my father, when I was born, was an atheist. So what I grew up with, what he said to me, was very different from the world that he created for me. And I do very much credit my father, both of my parents with any sort of religious sensibility that I have, even though my father used to bring the Mormons in and argue them out of their faith. So, I mean, I did grow up with that as well.
And I wasn't baptized when I was a child. My parents really didn't—and then even their parents weren't very religious. So I came from a pretty long generation of “Nots.” But there was this mathematics, this thing that was objectively true, that I saw my father pursuing. And I saw the kind of joyousness of that, like him bounding up the stairs and dancing around the room with my mother because he discovered something. And there was very much a belief, explicit belief in our family that mathematics was out there. There is a controversy, especially in the philosophy of mathematics—is mathematics invented or discovered? And the number theorists tend to very strongly side on the side of discovery, because number theory is rooted in numbers, and numbers are much more tangible objects, right? You can feel numbers. And so, that number theoretic world, that feeling of this, these numbers swirling around our house, I think, gave me my first sense of divinity and divine inspiration, et cetera. And then of course Ramanujan believed that his mathematics was divinely inspired. So there was that story happening alongside this.
And then the romance of discovering something is such, again, a metaphor for what happens in mathematics. So I think all of that was always there. And that is sort of a parallel track. I had school mathematics, which bored me to tears, but I always knew that that really wasn't mathematics. That was just some little exercise you had to do in school, but there was this other world waiting for me.
Elise:
I love your language of discovery, too, because I think the infinite and eternity can sometimes seem so terrifying. And it is—it's unfathomable. But one way to think about it is it’s just something that could be constantly uncovered, that there's no end to the discovery. And the closest I think we come to that is falling in love, loving. And I don't know if you agree with that.
Amy:
Oh, I absolutely do. Yeah.
Elise:
Yeah, you can love numbers. You can love another person. You can love the way the light comes through the leaves at a particular time of day. And you could never get tired exploring that.
Amy:
Yeah. That's, oh, it's all about love. I mean, and mathematics is all about love. And that's, really, more than anything else, what inspired me to write this story. Because I think, for children in school, mathematics is a book that has a little quarter inch of answers at the back. And there's absolutely no love in that. As G.H. Hardy said, Ramanujan's collaborator, he said, when I was a young boy, I loved math because I loved beating other boys. And so if you love math, when you're in school, you love it because you can win. But unfortunately, a lot of children are not on the winning side of that. Even people who could potentially become mathematicians aren't on the winning side of that. So I think, very much, that mathematics is about love.
And I love also what you're saying about infinity. I think the skepticism we might have of divinity is parallel in the math world as a skepticism of infinity. I've been reading about this recently because I'm preparing again to teach calculus. So I've been thinking about the history of calculus and where it all arose.
And so it was Newton and Leibniz. And they came up with this way of approximately instantaneous rates of change, and they did it by thinking about infinitesimals, which are that tiny version of infinity; they're the infinitely small. And so they came up with a lot of the ideas, but they weren't rigorously afforded yet by a mathematical proof. And so that came and in the next wave in the 1800s. But, at the time, Bishop Berkeley, who is a famous thinker of that age, was critiquing Newton. And he talked about these infinitesimals as the ghosts of departed quantities. And I just—isn't that wonderful.
Elise:
I love that!
Amy:
Yes, I know! The ghosts of departed quantities. And I thought, how beautiful, because he's understanding somehow that they have some reality, but they're not, they're not real enough yet for him. So we needed this theory to come and talk about limits, which gives us the idea of approach, and the idea of getting closer and closer and closer to something. And then maybe you can make that idea of the limit quite rigorous, so that it really becomes a provable fact. But yes, I think the skepticism of infinity is incredibly fruitful, so it can lead it to so much.
Elise:
I agree. And, you know, speaking of fruitful, Amy, this conversation—my mind is going in what I assume are infinite directions at this point. But I just, I see so many connections here, because you're talking about making that limit that we're driving toward very provable. And we've been having this complicated conversation about truth and fact and the way that we negotiate the limit by a variety of means. Even though it might be a point on the grid, we can get there, but there's a lot of ways to that point.
And this has honestly been one of my favorite conversations. I've enjoyed every second of it. Thank you so much.
Amy:
You too. I knew I was going to love this conversation with you, but I loved it even more than I thought I would. So thank you so much for inviting me.
Elise:
Anytime. You're always welcome back.