Transcript - Episode 5: The Meanest Thing You Could Say to Me
Hey, It’s Me
EPISODE # 5
Hosts: Mike Sakasegawa and Rachel Zucker
Transcript by: Leigh Sugar
Transcripts formatted after those from Disability Visibility Project
Please note: transcripts are transcribed directly from recordings of live conversations; as a result, quotes and statements may be approximate and there may be unintended memory errors.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Hey, Mike, it's me. I just shared a Google doc with you. I don't know if you got the notification. I'm also going to put the link in the WhatsApp chat. I, uh, wow. It's interesting how emotional I feel about sharing this document with you. I wonder if you can already guess what it is, before you open it, if you knew what was coming, I'm curious. I feel worried that it's too much, that you won't like it, that this isn't the right thing to be sending you. I've been getting it ready, sort of like rushing and pushing myself to get it ready. And I'm really grateful for that push to send it to you. And yeah, I would love to talk to you, with you about this.
I guess, I was about to say, I'm not asking you if it's good or not, but of course I want to know if you think it's good, but also even more than that, I want to know what you think about it, all the things about it, and I've never done anything like this before, sent something like this, to someone like you in order to talk about it on a podcast, but also part of me is like, it's totally fine if you don't want to do this, either because it's too long or because it's uncomfortable in some way.
And why am I making this some kind of big reveal? I don't know. That's just what I'm doing. There's some kind of shyness, anxiety, worry, superstition, something, but I want to make it really clear that I've thought about this a lot. I know what I'm doing. I have, I don't know if it's the right thing to do or not. But you certainly aren't pressuring me into doing it. I have thought about this. Alright, curious as always to know all the things you think. Bye.
[Music]
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: So the thing that you sent me, and you did not say this in the message, and I was not able to figure out what it was that you sent me until probably, you know, three quarters of the way through the message. Uh, but the thing that you sent me is the, is part one of the piece you've been working on, which you're calling a novel, the title of which I think you had told me before or the working title anyway, is My Guru.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Which I think we should probably talk about that at some point.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: So, you also separately in the WhatsApp message, text message sent me, uh, said that this is the first part of five. So I've only read part one. There are five sections. They're not all done yet. I think you said the second section is the most done?
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: And that you had sort of rushed to get this first section into a, a, a form that you felt was presentable?
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yes.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Have I got all that right?
RACHEL ZUCKER: So, so right..
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Okay. [Laughs].
So there's a, there's a lot of stuff that I think we could talk about when it comes to this thing that you sent me, but I think the question that I want to ask you first is, what kind of a conversation do you want to have about this? You kind of touched on it in your message, but I want to ask you, you know, like face to face.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah, I mean, so I think I'm not sure what kind of conversation I want to have, but maybe I can tell you, maybe I already said this in the message. I don't remember, but maybe I can just reiterate or tell you why I sent it, and that might reveal, like, what kind of conversation I want to have, or that we should have.
I, there were a lot of reasons, and some of them are like a little embarrassing and some of them are just totally normal. But I think I just have had this feeling over the past few weeks that I'm ready to like, be more public about the fact that I'm writing this novel. And so I think I said this, but so I, I'm in this writing group. And there's five of us, me and four other people, so they've heard aloud a lot of this, and then they've heard, they've read on the page, a lot of the first, a much earlier version of book one, but no one else has, except for the fact that I did read aloud at a reading at NYU from part two.
[5:15]
And that felt like a very big deal to me to like, say, especially at NYU, but just like at any public reading, like, “I'm writing a novel,” and then to share it. And so I've been feeling like I want to be, I'm ready to have people outside of my writing group read it. And so, there's two reasons that I sent it to you, or several.
One is that I really want to know what you think. And I'm interested in bringing it into this podcasting space with you. And because like, of all the things that I want you to look at and, and, and, talk with you about, my writing and particularly this novel is is the biggest one. And it's like been so interesting to me that you have known for a long time that I'm working on this and I've talked a little bit about it here and there, but you haven't read any of it. So I really wanted to know what you think.
But then, you know, you're in it. So I really wanted to know what you thought about that. Yes. Yes. That wasn't like a surprise, but like, I wanted to know what you thought about the way in which I've put you in it. And, and also if you feel comfortable with it, because I'm not going to show it to anyone outside of my writing group until I've spoken to you about that.
You know, I, if you wanted me to change your name, if you wanted me to take stuff out, if you wanted, you know, to just talk it through, like I wanted to make sure that I had that conversation with you before putting it more publicly out into the world. So some of those are some of the reasons.
And then I also wanted the kind of push and the accountability of like getting this first section presentable, and that's been, that's been, that's brought up a lot of interesting feelings and thoughts for me.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Okay. I, you know, obviously I've been thinking about this, you sent the, the document to me a few days ago, and I've only read it once, which is not my sort of standard procedure if I'm going to talk to an author about their work, but I think in a lot of ways standard procedure, I mean, is an interesting way to think about this because you know, as you know I'm used to talking to people about books, and that's either usually going to be me interviewing an author about a finished published work, or it's me talking to someone else about somebody else's finished published published work. I've never talked to anyone in a recorded format about a work in progress before, and especially a work in progress that I've only seen part of.
So like the kind of conversation that I'm able to have is a little different, I feel like, but also because, I mean, I could imagine that you and I, that I'll have you back on Keep the Channel Open at some point to talk about a book that you published at some point in the future. And even talking to you about stuff that, that you've, I mean, I guess so far we've only had one podcast episode on my show where we were talking about a published work of yours.
And I think all the other times have been two book clubs and one panel. And we weren't really friends at that first one. So I think that adds a different dimension to all of this. I have had friends come on the show to talk about their stuff and I, it, it always does feel a little different, but this is a little next level for me [laughs].
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah, this is, this is kind of intense. I mean, I've never shared something so unfinished. I mean, until I had this writing group, I'd never shared, I'd never had a writing group like this for like a long piece of prose, and like I freaked out when I first sent them my pages in January, and I still get nervous every time I read aloud to them from the book in progress.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Let me ask you, why do you get nervous? Because you, you have experience both with publishing and with reading, uh, works that are very personal, very revealing, and I know that you have experience reading poems that are personal, revealing, and brand new, and potentially unfinished.
[10:08]
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: What's different about this?
RACHEL ZUCKER: Well, first of all, the entire second section of the book is about reading that poem that I wrote about Seattle guy in front of Seattle guy in San Francisco. So the, the question you're asking me now is actually a kind of central question in the book itself. Like, why do I get nervous? And also like, what's at stake for me and whether my writing is a form of self harm or harm to others or something else.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: All of which is stuff that you also address in The Poetics of Wrongness.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yes. Yes. So why do I get nervous? I'm not totally sure. I mean, I guess I feel like, and, and to some extent it, it, like part of why I wanted to bring it into to you, but also in this podcast space that we have, into, Hey, it's Me, is because I, I am, and this is part of what Part One is about, is like, what, what is our relationship, you and me, what are my relationships with other people? What is my relationship to writing? How does writing connect me to other people or protect me from other people? And like, what is, ethical in order to share, you know, what, what is the relationship between public and private, and like, even without having given you this part of my novel, like we're, we're working through a lot of those things on, Hey, it's Me, at least from my perspective, we are like, what is our relationship? What's the nature of it? Like what is public, what is private? Where does the podcast fall in the midst of that? Why do we do it? Why do we want an audience? What's our relationship to audience?
So I don't know. Like this is, let me, let me start with something like really specific about how, about the book. So because the, it starts with your voice. In the book, the whole novel starts -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Well, it actually starts with Dionne Brand's voice, but okay.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yes. There's an epigraph, but -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I actually wanted to ask you about that epigraph because I tried to look it up and the closest thing I could find was something she said on Between the Covers. Is that where it's from?
RACHEL ZUCKER: That's where it's from. Okay. So, good sleuthing. Good job [laughs]. So yes. And so that's also relevant, right? Like it was something I overheard and, and, and because there are mixed forms in the novel and a lot of it is spoken, or a lot of it is just transcripts. But they're not verbatim transcripts as, as, you know, you probably realized -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: They read like like verbatim transcripts.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah. So -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Especially because I remember, I remember saying… most everything that I say in the book, I remember saying.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah. So it's been so interesting because one of the things that's happened to me is that I re-listened to hours of our conversation, excuse me, not our conversations, our messages and trans—and I, I had an AI, you know, generate the first, uh, round of transcripts, but then I edited the transcripts and that editing, I was, it's been really, really interesting to think about what my guidelines for that editing are.
One thing is that in terms of our relationship, I've had an experience, which I assume and hope you have not had, otherwise it'd be weird if you hadn't told me, like I've re-listened, and then edited in this incredibly, like, precise way to your voice, both in my ears and on the page.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Hang on a second. Hang on.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: What do you mean, I haven't had this experience that you know of?
RACHEL ZUCKER: Well, you, like I, you've listened to my voice on Commonplace. You've listened to my voice on messages, you've listened to my voice on Keep the Channel Open. You've, you've done editing on that -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: And on this, and on your messages that you send me for this.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Right, but you don't re-listen. Yes. Okay. Okay. That's right. Well, until, until this podcast though, you hadn't been relistening to our WhatsApp messages, had you?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I mean, uh, usually not way after. I mean, so oftentimes I'll listen to them twice or sometimes three times if I, if they're long and I, there's something I want to pick out.
[15:03]
But yeah, I don't, I don't typically edit those ones, but I have had a lot of experience listening and re-listening to things that you say and editing them and trying to make them sound like you, but the best possible version of you.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yes. Yes. That's what I do.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I’ve done that many, many, many times over the course of the past five years.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah. So that's part of what's fascinating to me about our relationship. Like that we, like, I don't have that with other people.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Don't you do that for other people on Commonplace?
RACHEL ZUCKER: Well, not to this extent. No, I mean, seriously. So in any case, that to me seems very interesting. And then, and like thinking of how to have, you know, our brains filter so much and add so much context and, and when we're speaking live face to face or even over Zoom, and so the transcript, as you well know, of a live conversation, doesn't sound, when you read it on the page, like a live conversation. It's got all this stuff in it that your brain filters out, which it doesn't filter in the same way when you're reading it on the page.
And so I've, first of all, I took out, you know, anything that I felt would be, that you wouldn't want other people to know. And that was kind of like more about you and less about me, which has had an interesting effect in the novel because it makes me seem unbelievably self-obsessed, even more self-obsessed than I am, because when I have taken out, like, the parts where you're talking about your kids or your girlfriend or your life, you know, because I'm like, that's not mine to share with anybody, it makes it sound like you and I only talk about me, which isn't accurate. But so there've been all of these like interesting things.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Kind of a weird, weird thing to say that like, me, or the me character choosing to talk about you makes you sound self-obsessed.
RACHEL ZUCKER: No, the me editing out all the stuff that you talk about -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I know but that’s not apparent on the page, like there no, like somebody who's approaching this as a text has no way of knowing that you've done that, you know? So what you're left with on the page is a character who's just choosing to talk about you and about your stuff.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm, that's interesting.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: One of the things that I find really sort of challenging about, about knowing how to talk about this book is that it's, it's incredibly difficult to fully separate myself from me as me and my memories of these interactions, and just view this as a work of literature, and view the people on the page as characters rather than as a, just a recording of actual things that happened. But I do think that there are, like, how I'm going to be able to receive this and how just some random person, like, if assuming that you publish this, then somebody will read it who doesn't know you and doesn't know me and doesn't know Michael and doesn't know David and doesn't know Erin and has never heard of any of these people, except maybe they've heard of you. Right? But -
RACHEL ZUCKER: Or not.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Or not. And so all they're going to know is what's on the page.
RACHEL ZUCKER: And they might, they might be like, this is not a novel. This is some other kind of bullshit recording -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: That’s addressed in the text also, because there's a conversation that you're having, I think with Erin, in, is it okay if I just say you in this and me because -
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yes, yes. It's too crazy otherwise, what are we gonna do? Or maybe, maybe in real life we should, it's just like, even we should start referring to ourselves as “the character known as Mike” and “the character known as Rachel,” but that would be crazy.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Well, and, you know, this too, both as like, as a poet, as a reader, as an interviewer, and as a teacher, that, that when we talk about poetry, we're supposed to talk about the speaker of the poem. We're not supposed to talk about the author of the poem, right? And there's definitely an aspect of that here as well. I mean, it's very related, right? Like, even though the protagonist, uh, narrator of this, well, okay, the narrator and the main character are not necessarily the same.
[20:00]
RACHEL ZUCKER: And they're not necessarily a protagonist.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Okay. The central character of this piece is named Rachel Zucker. There's a difference between the Rachel Zucker who is depicted and the one who is telling the story, who I guess technically isn't named, but is still assumed to be Rachel Zucker.
And then there's also the Rachel Zucker who is actually writing it, writing both of those. So I don't think it's crazy to talk about these as characters.
RACHEL ZUCKER: No.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: But, but also it's, I think that what's difficult for me to talk about this and to make that separation is not the act of seeing these as literary inventions or literary… as functioning in a literary way, it's rather that I have a lot of context that's not on the page where I know, I know things about you and about your life and about me and about my life and to some extent about the other people who are talked about, you know, your father, your kids, your friends. I know things about these people that aren't on the page, so it's hard for me to forget that when I'm reading it. You know what I mean?
RACHEL ZUCKER: I don't think you should try that hard. I mean -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: But if I'm going to be talking about this as a work of literature, then the only thing that's like really relevant to a reader is what's on the page.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Okay. But, but let's just say this, and this, this is, I think is really interesting, right? Like, in some ways you're an ideal reader for this book. And in other ways, you're the worst reader for this book. And you can only be the reader that you are for this book, right? Like, there's, I'm going to, at some point, hopefully, there will be, I'll have a reader that I trust who doesn't know any of these people, and they're going to be able to speak to that.
You're not going to be able to. There's no way you're going to be able to forget. And I have a lot of anxiety, like now I've put my writing group more and more in the book, in later sections, as well as their feedback on the book is in the book. And, you know, as this process has gone along, I've been like, what am I doing? Like, I'm not going to be able to trust their feedback because now they're characters in the book. That's just what it is. That's just how I'm writing this crazy-ass book. I'm not going to be able to get that kind of feedback. I'm not going to be able to get objective, whatever that means, feedback from you, or from my writing group at this point anymore, nor will I be able to from any of the people who are in the book.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Okay. So you asked me, in the message you sent, you asked me, you said, “I'm not going to ask you if, uh, you like it, but of course I want to know if you like it.” And then, “I just want to know everything that you think about it.”
And this is why I was sort of asking you what kind of a conversation you want to have about this, because it's a real different kind of conversation if we're having, if we're going to talk about this as though I'm interviewing you about it, or as though I'm like, you know, offering you critique and feedback on a work in progress, because I'm one of your, you know, alpha readers or whatever. Or if we're talking about this in the context of, you and I are friends and how does this affect me and how does this affect our friendship? Those are like really different conversations.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Okay, let me ask you a specific question, and I have other questions but like maybe this will help to just like get specific. You knew I've been writing this novel, or whatever it is. You knew you were in it. When you actually read it on the page, were you surprised? Were you not surprised? If you were surprised, what surprised you?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I would say that, in, on the whole, I was not surprised, that, cause you had described me and me on the page, to me, at several points before, we've talked about the fact that I'm in this book, and I knew the format in which I'm in this book are relatively, you know, edited, but relatively accurate transcriptions of what I actually said to you in these WhatsApp messages.
I was a little bit surprised that you left in all of the sort of stumbles and stuff and, cause the way that I talk is very choppy. I know that more, more intimately than probably just about anybody does because of the fact that I constantly have to be listening very closely to how I speak in order to edit it for my own podcast and for this one now.
[25:07]
But the way that I speak is very… Like, for example, just now I had a long pause where I was trying to think of what to say. I tend to repeat myself and double back on a sentence or stutter or whatever. And to a large extent, you probably did edit some of that out, but it's very apparent on the page that that is how I talk.
I was a little surprised at how, at the fidelity of the transcriptions. Apart from that, the only thing that I was a little bit surprised about was, there's a section, I think it's about two thirds of the way through book one, where you and I are talking about an episode of Commonplace where, should I say who we were talking about on this?
Okay. We're talking about Carl Phillips, and how he was on your podcast, how he was on Commonplace. And I make reference to a previous conversation, which does not appear on the page, which we had had where you had been talking to me about how you felt about the Carl Phillips interview, and then I'm giving you my feedback about how I, how I heard that interview after you'd released it.
I was not expecting that. And I'm fine with you leaving it in. It did make me a little bit uncomfortable just because, because, I mean, I think that there is not necessarily a judgmentalness to the way you and I are talking about him, but rather, there is a sort of behind-the-scenes, this is something that we're talking about when we don't think anybody else is going to be hearing it. And so we're not very guarded about the way that we're sort of psychoanalyzing this third person [laughs].
And I, I don't expect that Carl Phillips will ever be on Keep the Channel Open. Uh, but I do, I did kind of think like this would make it a little bit awkward if he ever reads this, specifically because we're talking about how he, how he arrives at an interview.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yes.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: And, and a little bit we're talking about, like we're a little bit, I think more you than me, but we're a little bit giving away some of the trade secrets about how we as interviewers are not exactly being manipulative, but not not being manipulative.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah. How we're preparing, how we think about this, how we, how we, yes, how we manipulate to some extent, I don't think in a bad way, but how, how we make someone feel comfortable, how we think about like, what we want to achieve in the interview space and who the person is and what they're like, and whether they're guarded or open, or whether they have topics that they want to talk about.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: And we’ve talked about this on the record before, because when we, you, me, David, and Dujie had that Craft of the Literary Podcast Interview panel that appeared on Keep the Channel Open, I think you ran it on Commonplace too.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yep.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Uh, when we, when we did that, we talked about this exact thing, but it sounds different because we knew other people were going to be hearing it [laughs]. So, you know, that was probably the only thing that was really surprising to me about how I appear in this book, and, you know, on the record, I'm fine with it being in there.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: But yeah, it was a little, but, but on the whole, no, I didn't find any of it surprising. It was basically what I expected based on how you had described it to me before. And also, you know, having some familiarity with your writing already. I haven't read all of your book. You have a lot of books, Rachel.
RACHEL ZUCKER: I'm sorry [laughs].
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I haven't read all of them, but I've read some of them, and I’ve read some of your standalone poems as well. So like, I, I'm not unfamiliar with your work.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Okay. So you're surprised at how many of the, of the stumbles that I left in, and you were surprised to see the Carl Phillips stuff. But you weren't surprised cause you knew the other stuff, but okay. So now, were you surprised and, because you know enough of my work, sometimes this book to me feels entirely different than anything I've ever done.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Yeah. I wanted to ask you about that.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Right. Other times I'm like, it's just the same fucking thing that I've just, it's like the Rachel's, it's like the Rachel Zucker show over and over again, you know, in a longer prose form with like more pieces.
[29:56]
And I don't know, I go back and forth between, between those two feelings. I guess I'm wondering, like, this is kind of like a pathetic question, but whatever. Here we are. I'm asking it. Like, were you like, this is what she spent all her time doing? This piece of shit? Or like, This? This? Oh, no. How? Oh, how am I going to tell Rachel? Like, this is not a novel. This is not good. This is embarrassing. Nobody's going to want to read this.
Like, you know, you and I have talked about this podcast, Hey, it's Me, and, and you, you've said, is anyone going to want to listen to this? Right? And so I wonder -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I think a big part of that, it has to do with the fact that podcasting, for the most part, people receive it differently from literature or things that are presented as art.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Okay, so one of my questions that I'm asking myself and now I'm asking you is, will anyone want to read this? And that's something that keeps -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Well, does anyone want to read anything else that you've ever written?
RACHEL ZUCKER: Some, a very few people do, and most people don't. And I wonder if like, working on this as a novel or as a memoir, but it's clearly not really a memoir, but it's clearly not really a novel. It's some other kind of like hybrid, you know, autofiction, I guess, really is what it what it is. Autofiction.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I think you have this really weird, not, I mean, not weird, but it's like this, this, this tendency that is kind of self-destructive, even though I get it, where you are, you're constantly downplaying your career as a writer. And you've written like 10 books at this point, probably, maybe more than that. I haven't counted them recently, even though I did just edit the copy for our About page for this show, which has all your books on it. And even people who write books, most of them don't, haven't written as many books as you.
And, you know, we can say whatever we want about like sales numbers or awards or whatever, but like the fact that you've been able to get that many books published is in itself an accomplishment that most people in their entire lifetimes will never achieve.
Aside from which you have had recognition, like not every published author gets to do a Bagley Wright lecture series and then turn that into another book, like these are things, you are a known quantity. You're not maybe like a household name like Stephen King, but then what poet is, you know?
RACHEL ZUCKER: Right but now, this is not a book of poetry and -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Nor is, nor are all of your books are not all books of poetry.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Correct. I hear you. I mean, I think I do have a tendency to do that, but also there is a lot of fear around this for me that like, doesn't seem to go away, no matter how many books I publish, and when I'm working on this book, when it's in process, when it's, you know, and and, you know, it wasn't always that there were, I didn't start off putting the transcripts of our audio messages in the book. That came later. And once I started doing that, I was like, “Oh, shit, I'm ruining a perfectly good novel by putting in these audio messages.” And then I started putting in text messages, and then I started putting in screenshots, and then I started putting in, you know, and then, you know, there's, uh, you know, things get, in some ways, weirder, in some ways, less weird as the book goes on. And I'm not the first person to be doing these things, but each time I've done them, it's felt like a balance or a struggle between, on the one hand, feeling like, this is the authentic way to tell this story, or this is just like, this is organically what feels absolutely right to me and the creative process, so I have to trust that I have to go with that.
And at the same time, like, I really do care about an audience. I really do want, eventually, I think, to publish this book. And I want people to enjoy reading it. And I want it to, I don't want to make people feel stupid. And I don't want, it's not that I want to be like famous or I want to make money, but I want, and this is in the book. Like I, I want a relationship with my reader or with my audience, and that's important to me. And so part of the question that I'm asking is, is about that. Like, I guess, like, I know that you can't be objective because you're in it. So maybe you won't be able to answer this -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Well, nobody can ever be objective, but okay.
RACHEL ZUCKER: but I guess I'm asking… Right. I guess I'm asking… I'm not asking you, is this a great work of literature? You know, it's unfinished. It's partial. You're in it. There's all these reasons why you're not going to be able to answer that, you know, but I am asking, like, was it readable? Was it enjoyable?
[35:28]
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Yeah of course it was readable!
RACHEL ZUCKER: Well, I don't know that! Maybe you're sitting there thinking like, you know, I can't believe she published all these books and she knows how to write a book and this one sucks. You could have been, you could have thought that, right?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Sure. I'm not, like I say, I'm not a, I think in a good position to judge this book in particular on quality. I also just in general, don't like talking about a book or any work of art in terms of quality. I don't really like to be able to say, “This is good” or “This is bad.” Rather, I like to be able to say, something maybe like, “I liked this,” or “This, it had this effect on me, and this is why.”
RACHEL ZUCKER: That's what I'm asking. Did you like it? And what affect did it have on you?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I don't know if like is the right word. I appreciated it. And you know, for the context here, of course, is that both you and I are people who have taken extremely personal details of our lives and made art out of them. And, and of course, this is something that you get into in the Poetics of Wrongness is the ethics of doing that.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: And I think beyond the ethical questions of it, there is also always going to be the question of, like, these other related questions about like, is this healthy to be doing this? What are the effects that this is going to have? Is this interesting to anybody? All of those are questions that I have asked about my own work as well, whether writing or photography or whatever it is that I've done.
And so, in that context, like if I'm going to, if I'm going to ask these questions about your work, I'm going to ask them about my work. I mean, they're not any different from the questions that I would ask about, I don't know, like Sally Mann's work, you know, or, you know, many of the poets who you consistently reference people like Alice Notley or Sharon Olds, people like, Sylvia Plath, you know, like, and, and obviously all of these people do have an audience who, again, I don't know if like is the right word, but who value this work, right? And I think that that is something that one could say, and that I would say about, about this as well.
It's a little hard to, to make any kind of definitive statements about this piece, since I don't, I've only seen the beginning of it, and I don't know how it evolves, you know, and I don't know how it ends.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Are you excited and interested in reading more?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I'm certainly interested. Because I think that, that there are hints of where it's going in the text and then also based on things that you've told me about what the book is ultimately about. And I can see the seeds of that in this first part.
You know, you have told me that ultimately this book is about your relationship with writing, and there are formal choices that you have made in this first section that are really foregrounding writing as an act, right? Like, how the writing process works. You know, like all of the sections where you have all this struck-through text and edited text, that is calling attention to the fact that this is text, right? And the ways in which, the Rachel character on the page is talking to people to other people on the page about the book that you're reading, that is also calling attention to the fact that it is a written thing.
[39:51]
And in some ways, it's not even like, uh, that, like, it's not that out there, you know, I mean, like, I mean, even if you think about something like, doesn't The Outsiders end with, “And then I, I wrote this book,” you know, like something like that, like -
RACHEL ZUCKER: Well Philip Roth, Philip Roth does this shit all the time. And so does Paul Auster. And I, I mean, I certainly didn't invent, you know, any of this.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: You know, I'm not I'm not talking about originality. I'm talking about tradition.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think and I think I do feel in… mostly it's men. I mean, uh, Nicole Krauss is, uh, Uh, Chris, Chris Kraus's book, I Love Dick. I don't know if you've read that. Have you?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I didn't even know that was a book. I knew it was a movie.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah, it, it was a book before it was a television show. And, uh, so that's a, yes, I think I'm in a lineage of other people, and have been influenced and maybe in conversation with other people. Mostly it's men who do this stuff, this particular kind of, I don't know what the word to call it. You know, you're reading the book that the person is writing, I mean, you're always reading the book that the person is writing, but the book is about the writing process. Right. And, for the most part, the books that I read at, uh, have read at like formative parts of my life have been by men. Particularly Philip Roth and Paul Auster, really come to mind, but women do it also. It's more, it's more often, you know, autofiction is a complicated term and, often I think applied much more to women than to men.
In any case, yeah, I wanted to go back to one thing you said, I know I interrupted you, but you said like, yeah, I'm, I'm calling the, I'm calling your attention to the fact that this is a text, you know, with the, the struck-through parts and, you know, talking about the book, and that's why I left the stumbles in, to the extent that I did. I actually took a lot of them out and I had to like re-, I had to really think very hard about the punctuation, because the transcription, the way the transcription deals with punctuation is not necessarily the way I hear your voice. And so, but it was really important to me that, that those conversations that are, not texts, are very, very clearly not texts. And one of the best ways to do that is to include the stumbles and the things that you don't include on the page.
As the book goes on, one of my intentions, and I hope I'm doing it well, is that it becomes less clear what is an audio message, what is a monologue, what is a conversation, what's a recreated conversation on the page, and what's dialogue. Because dialogue is fictively spoken language. But of course, it's not really, when you're writing dialogue into a book, it's a text, but it's like the illusion of spoken language, right? And so those, as the spoken language becomes more textual, those markers of what makes something very clearly a transcript of spoken language start to fall away a little bit.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: And you address this both in the style as well as the typography.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yes.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: It just occurred to me that your transcription process, that we are having this conversation transcribed at some future date. But at least you won't have to do that transcription yourself [laughs].
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yes, but if I put the transcription of this conversation in my novel, I will have to edit it on the page. And that's what I have discovered is that that's a very different process. That's another kind of editing.
And this also actually brings me back to a conversation that we had about this podcast, Hey, It's Me, and recognizing that the way that we edit, and what we even mean by editing the podcast, our podcasts, and this is a little bit different.
[45:00]
And I do more content editing and you do more engineering and mixing. And so what I'm doing on the page is very similar to the content editing I do in the audio. And I think that you tend to -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: It's so funny to me that you, that you, that it turns out that Commonplace is much more heavily edited than Keep the Channel Open. It's just because I feel like, that's not, I don't think that's what you would guess based on knowing the two of us.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah. And, but in a very particular way, because I think that you are much more attuned and sensitive to clarity of sound and no distractions in the background, no trucks going by, no mouth noises, no, you know, like you want to clean the audio and make it pleasant to listen to, and I want to content edit to clean the audio in a very different way. It's more about rhythm and clarity of sentence. I mean, I don't move things around for the most part. And if I do, it's like, I'm overt and explicit about doing that. So I'm not doing that kind of content editing in audio.
I am on the page, obviously. But it's really about the sentence level. It's, which is a funny thing to say about audio, but I didn't realize this until we started working on, Hey, it's Me. I didn't, my own editing process wasn't visible to me until I realized that it's different from yours.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I mean, I would say it's funny, because what I would describe as my editing process, like after all the audio processing and stuff is done, is that I am particularly only editing for rhythm. That is to say, I take stumbles out. I take out repetitive words. I'm trying to make the sentences that people say more clear. So the kinds of things where I, for example, will double back on a sentence and retake the beginning of a sentence three or four times, which does appear in the transcriptions in this book.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Oh, and do you know why? Do you know why?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Well, you just said.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Okay. But also because in the moments where, to take those out would, would be to remove the emotional or the affect of that. So, both of us do it, you know, in the transcripts, you see it. It's like when, when things start to get more emotional, when things start to get tricky, when things start to get complicated, we start repeating ourselves, right? And to take that out makes us both sound like robots on the page.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Yeah. I think that, I mean, it's an interesting thing where I, when I'm editing, an audio clip, I'm going to be thinking about the listener experience. And so I will leave pauses in, but I'll usually shorten them because, you know, in real life, a pause might be seven seconds long, which, to a listener, they're gonna wonder if, like, once it goes past about a second and a half, they're gonna wonder if something's wrong with the audio, like if it stopped playing or something like that.
Or, like, there was a thing that Rachel [laughs], but oftentimes I would take it out, where when you're coming up to a sentence, you'll go, like that. And normally I would take that out, especially because I know that in our conversations about the audio, when we would send these edited versions back and forth between each other, you complain about how you sound, you know?
RACHEL ZUCKER: Also, I, you, you keep leaving my track too loud. I'm too shrill and I'm really trying to be a little further away from the mic right now. I, and I know that's, it's a problem that I have.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I’m going to let you in on a little secret.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: That's on purpose.
RACHEL ZUCKER: What! You're making me sound shrill on purpose?! More, more shrill than I, than I actually am? You're letting me talk louder than you?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I'm not making you sound shrill. Okay, first of all, shrill, shrill is is about tone and timbre, not about volume. But also, uh -
RACHEL ZUCKER: I sound like I'm screaming all the time.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: No, you don't. And, and when I'm, when I'm mixing the episodes, I intentionally always leave the other person two dB higher than me.
RACHEL ZUCKER: You gotta stop that with me.
[50:21]
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Okay. Well, on this show, we'll think about it. I'm going to continue to do that on my own. Part of it too, has to do with the, pitch of our voices. And also it's not the same for this show because we are both on good mics, but it does actually make a difference, the microphone quality that I use versus what my guests use on Keep the Channel Open makes my voice sound louder than it actually is because it's a clearer recording. I mean, this is getting a little into the weeds. We're kind of off the topic of the book.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Okay, let's go back.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I wanted to ask you and again, this is a question that is addressed in the text. Why is this a novel? And more than more than that, why does this feel different from your other other writing essays and poems?
RACHEL ZUCKER: I don't know that it's a novel. When I turned in the pages that I had to my writing group, one of the things that Alyssa said to me was, “This isn't about the breakup. This isn't about Michael. This is about, you know, that's the catalyst for this book, but I want you to lean into the fictive space.” And I ended up, of course, putting that in the book. But my first feeling was like, “What does that even mean? Like, I, like, what, what does, like, what does that mean to lean into the fictive space?” And she was like, “Well, you could make stuff up.” And I'm like, “I can't, I don't know how to make stuff up.” And in fact, by putting these, what I think of as primary sources or, or primary documents, in other words, text messages and audio messages into the book, I'm actually, it's like, it's like a documentary. Photographs too. It's like a documentary style rather than leaning into the fictive space.
That said, imagining it as a novel rather than a memoir, because I don't think memoir really describes it either, enabled me to, I guess, to lean into the fictive space. I don't think there's anything that I have changed that I've made up, but calling it a novel, and imagining it as a novel allowed me a lot more freedom and play within the, like, almost personality that I have, right? Which, and, and it also, the question of genre, is like part of what the book is about, I think, as well. Like, what is a novel? What is a memoir? What is a poem? You know, why am I writing it? You know, who is it for? What is it about? We said this earlier, but like, is it good for me? Is it bad for me? Is it good for the people who I've mentioned in the book? Is it good for the reader? Is it bad for the reader? So, why is it a novel? I don't know. I don't know that it is a novel.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: If I were to judge this as a work of fiction, right? There's stuff in here that just feels a little too on the nose, like the fact that I have the same name as your ex-boyfriend, except that he has the fancy grownup sounding version of the name and I have the casual little kid version of the, or almost like the more casual like, blue collar sounding version of the name, which is also reflected in our diction, right? And of course, part of this is the format of spoken versus written language.
[54:53]
But when you two are texting each other, you're texting each other the way that writers text each other, with punctuation and grammar and shit like that.
RACHEL ZUCKER: But that's because he's a fucking editor!
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I understand that. And that is part of it.
RACHEL ZUCKER: And that's part of the relationship.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: But what I'm saying is that when you, if this were, like completely fiction, right? Then there would be no reason for an author to give these two men the same name, unless she was specifically trying to tell the reader to compare them. The only reason that you would give two characters the exact same name is because you're juxtaposing them on purpose for some literary reason.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: It just happens that that is, in real life, his name and my name. Like, there isn't a reason for that, right? It just, it's just a coincidence. But in literature, in fiction, you don't have the luxury of coincidences. Things have to be for a reason. You know, and even if those reasons aren't apparent or, or purposeful to you as the writer, the reader is going to infer something from it.
RACHEL ZUCKER: But I, but it's meaningful to me. It always was sort of oddly meaningful and interesting, even if it was a coincidence, like coincidences -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Right, but you can find meaning for it in your own life because you're you, right? But in real life, no person is the main character, right? In real life, no person is more important to the story of the universe than any other person, right?
Like I, my existence and Michael's existence, we don't exist in order to teach you some kind of a lesson about how men are, you know, or, or relationships or something like that.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Well the main character of my book is not so clear about, first of all, the differences between real life and what's happening in the book, and what life is for and what writing is for, and whether other people exist or not, and whether even she slash I exist or not. So this is actually a big problem. It's not a big problem, this is a part of, this is a characteristic dilemma that I have.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Uh huh. And, and, and as literature -
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: You can do that, right? This is what I'm saying. Like as literature, you can do that. And even in real life, in the context of your own life, everybody is the main character of their own story. And so it actually is within certain bounds, uh, reasonable and healthy and beyond that just normal to see other people in that way, you know, like, but outside of that, right, because I'm approaching this, this as me, and I'm the main character of my story, right? [Laughs] So like, the fact that I appear in in your life as like, like that this coincidence is meaningful to you? It's not meaningful to me in the context of my own life, right? It is meaningful in the book.
And so like, if someone, like what I was thinking is like, if someone were to come up to you who doesn't know you and doesn't know me and doesn't know Michael and doesn't know anything about any of our lives, were to read this book and then come up to you at like, let's say you're doing a book tour. And say, “Why did you give these two men the same name? Like that just seems really weird. Like why did you do that?” And then what's your answer going to be? Like your answer is, “Well, this is, those are their actual names.” Like if that's your answer, then why is it fiction?
RACHEL ZUCKER: I mean, I've been asked that exact question about my poems for years and years.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Poems and fiction, poems and prose fiction are not the same thing.
RACHEL ZUCKER: They're not -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: It matters very much how, how like both form and genre matter very much to how people receive it, as a reader.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Well, first of all, I'm not sure that the names will stay, uh, and I’ve thought about that, I mean, what's going to happen about Michael? Like I don't know. Like, am I going to ask him if he wants me to change his name? Am I going to ask him if he wants me to take stuff out? I mean, I'm so clear that I'm asking you, but why am I less clear that I'm asking him?
[1:00:00]
So, you know, I, I actually changed Erin’s name to Nancy, initially, and I read her aloud just one very short section. And she was like, “Why are you calling me Nancy?” And I was like, “I don't know.” I thought like, because there was one thing I said, which I actually later took out. So like I didn't have, like, there was one thing that like, at the time she wouldn't have wanted her family to know. And I felt at the time that that was like an important thing in the novel. And then, so that's why I changed her name. I didn't change anybody else's name. And, and then when I read it to her, she was like, “No, change it back.” Like she really didn't want, and I was like, “You can pick a different name. What name do you want to pick if the problem is Nancy?”
And I thought for a while, I was like, “All right, if I, you know, if Mike asked me to change his name, what am I going to pick?” Am I going to pick like, I thought of like, Thomas and Tom. I thought of like, you know, two male names that like sound similar. And then I was like, or you don't have to keep this, the, you know, the, maybe the meaningfulness that they have, the same name is like, not that important. So I've thought about this.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I think it would land really differently if these characters have different names.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Right? Right? Okay. So, so one answer to the question, at this imagined future book tour, which that's lovely of you to even put that out there as a possible future, is, uh, I needed them to have the same name.
I don't think you're getting the answer that you want. Like, so let me ask you a question.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: It's not, I don't, I don't think there's an answer that I want.
RACHEL ZUCKER: I know, I know, I know, I know, but I'm being, I'm being a little difficult. What do you think this is? What, what genre do you think it is? And what genre, even if it's even if it's not what you most think it is. First, what genre do you think it most is?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I think that I would put this most closely as poetry.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Fascinating. That's like the meanest thing you could say to me. No, I'm just kidding. It is kind of mean, but that's okay. I -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: It’s not intended to be cruel.
RACHEL ZUCKER: [Laughs]. No, I know. I know. I know. Okay. And now different question.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Mind you, I don't know what poetry is.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Nobody does. It's just poetry is the thing nobody wants to read, which is why I said it was mean. [Laughs]. Okay. So what… it's closest to poetry. That's the reality as you, as you see it. Well, what genre do you think strategically? I should call it both for writing it and publishing it?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I have no idea. I mean, I guess it would depend on what the, the, and I mean, strategy is, is, strategy is something, uh, that is, it's a tool to achieve a goal. Right. So I guess it would depend on what your goal is. I, I think that how a book is, I think that genre inflects how a book is read.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Okay, forget about the strategic question because, because I think that's like, that's a digression actually. I think what I meant by that is, what kind of reader do I want? And, to some extent, if the book stays the way it is, for the most part, it's going to be, it's a hybrid genre book. It's, it's, uh, like, like we keep saying, it's like, it's not the first of its kind. It's not the first hybrid genre book, but it's, it's, it's definitely fucking with the genre lines and it's, I'm not sure, I'm not sure who is gonna wanna read this book if anyone's gonna wanna read this book, but if… am I trying to get people who generally read novels to read this book and be sort of uncomfortable and delighted potentially with the way in which it is and isn't a novel? Am I trying to get the people who, you know, generally read memoir or generally read poetry? You know, that's like one way to think about the strategic stuff, you know, the, the stuff about marketing and publishing and stuff, stuff like that's none of my business. I don't care.
And then, you know, more than that, I think writing it as a novel - I mean, I started writing it as a short story. I've never written a short story before. I mean, not since high school. I hate short stories. Uh, and then I started writing it just as prose, because it clearly wasn't a short story. And then it was a, for a, for a long time, it was a memoir. And then, I started calling it a novel and, and that has enabled me to feel differently about it and do some different things in it. So, you know, maybe I'll end up thinking of it as a poem. I mean, I guess it's a little bit like, not in tone, thank God, but like William Carlos Williams’s Patterson, you know?
[1:05:53]
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I think that, I mean, what I'm thinking of, for example, like the thing that you told Alyssa where it's like, you can't make stuff up, it reminds me of how, for my own, like for my photography, for example, when I was making work that was, uh, more figurative and less abstract, that it was really important to me that I could alter my position, you know, where the lens is, but I can't move anything in the scene. It has to be how I found it. The viewer of a photograph doesn't care whether or not I moved anything. Like if I go into my daughter's room and I see her stuffed animal, like, in dramatic light on the bed and I just happened to find it that way and so I take a picture, or if I set that up, the viewer has no way to know that and also doesn't really have a big reason to care, because the only thing that matters is actually what is visible in the frame.
Unless, you know, I add that as text, you know, but it's important to me, right? There's something, and that, like I view this book as being akin to the kinds of photographs that I, the type of photo series that I started off doing, you know, I'm doing less of it now, but even now, a lot of the work that I make now is… it's not manipulated in the moment of capture.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yes.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: It might be that I'm doing something in the processing of the image, you know, to turn it into a high-contrast black-and-white, for example. But the, the, the moment of capture is how I found it. And I think that, I guess I wonder, like, if you were to change the names or things like that, if you were to fictionalize elements of it, because right now, the reason why I have trouble with calling it or reading it as a novel is because there aren't any parts of it that feel or that are to my understanding of the events, and my understanding of you as a person, that are fictional. Like everything that's in there is an event that actually happened or is your commentary on that event.
So it's, it doesn't read like fiction and I, I don't know to a person who isn't familiar with you as a person, in some ways, maybe that doesn't matter. You could still receive it as fiction and it might still mean the same thing, uh, but it might not, you know? And so like if you were to change all the names and the main character's name isn't Rachel Zucker anymore, that would certainly affect how it's read. Because literally, it would be different words. And I wonder if how it would affect how it means.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah, I mean, I'm really glad you brought up photography. I think that's, I mean, it, it, it was probably the most influential genre for me, much more so than poetry in my becoming a poet. So it's, it's foundationally influential to me as a kind of medium and genre. And I think that, you know, we don't think of… I actually think it like, describing the book as a photograph, or photographs, feels more accurate to me in certain ways than poems.
[1:10:00]
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I will just tell you that photographers love to talk about images as poems.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Great. Well, they, they're welcome to. I, I think, you know, I have a photographic relationship to the real. Or, you know, I'm thinking of Sharon Olds, who uses the phrase, “apparently autobiographical.” And photography is like, it's just a really good way of, of describing exactly what you're saying. Like, yeah, even if I haven't changed the names or the events as you know them, you know, or as they happened, the compositional strategies and the compositional choices of, you know, how close I am, how far away I am, what kind of camera I'm using, what kind of film I'm using, if I'm using film or digital, what kind of lighting I have, what I do in the darkroom, if there is a darkroom, you know, those are all choices that can be, you know, seen and felt.
Or, if I have rules for myself about, you know, am I gonna, you know, move something around or am I not going to move something around? I actually think that can be felt in the, in the photograph as well. Not to the same extent as some of those other compositional choices, but you know, a photograph is not just like reality. It's a photograph. It's a representation of reality. And, and, and this book, is absolutely not reality. It's a representation of reality.
And I mean, nothing happens in this book. And this is, this is something that's bothered me a lot. And I'm kind of like getting used to it. Like, people tell each other what's happened, or they write to each other, but nothing actually happens in the book. So everything is filtered.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: There's lots of fictional forms where that's also like a, like in an epistolary novel, for example, that's also how it works.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Right. So I guess what I'm saying though, is like, what makes something a novel? Is it, is it the fact that it's like provably not true? Or like it, like, those people didn't exist? Or things didn't happen that way? I mean, what are the limits of what makes something a novel, and what makes something nonfiction?
I mean, I am the God of this, right, like just like you were saying earlier, like, you are presented in this book as a character as a side character. And I hope you will not feel badly about this, but you appear less and less frequently as the book goes on.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: The book isn't about me.
RACHEL ZUCKER: I know it's not. But you, but you know, that's the thing. Like, it's not reality. It's certainly not your reality, right? It's, I'm directing the reader in these incredibly manipulative ways. Even if I'm using text, I mean, in some ways it's a collage, right? Or parts of it.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I think there are, I mean, so there's sort of different things here that you're addressing and one of them is like, what makes something a novel? And that obviously, like, there are, there's been a lot of ink spilled on that question. I mean, Alexander Chee wrote a whole, a whole book of essays that address the topic of an autobiographical novel. People talk about this with what's his name? Knausgård. Yeah. Who I haven't read just to be clear, but I know people talk about…
RACHEL ZUCKER: Ugh [laughs]. I have nothing good to say about that.
Okay, let me step over because we've been going for a while. Yes. Let me say one more thing. Uh, throw, throw something out there and we can see where this goes. And if we can, we can stop whenever, you know, whenever we should, we, whatever.
Hafizah Geter came to Reading with Rachel, and this is on the Commonplace episode of those conversations. And one of the things that she said, and I don't remember if this was something that she was taught by one of her writing teachers or something that she came up with, I think it was, might, it might've been something she was told, but I'm getting it from her. She said, once you figure out what, what question your book is trying to answer, things fall into place.
[1:15:00]
And I had been thinking about that since she said that about my, my book. Let's just call it a book instead of a novel. Can we agree that it's a book? [Laughs].
Can we agree that it's a book in progress about my words on the page? Okay.
So I've been thinking about this, like, what is the question my book is trying to answer? And I had all these other ways of describing it, including, as you said, that I said to you, it's about writing. It's about, you know, it's the story of a sad, heartbroken poet who's not writing and then she starts writing again, you know, it's all these things, but it was this series, those two dates that I went on with the guy that I just went out with that told you about in the messages. It was, something he said to me that made me realize, I think I know what the question my book is trying to answer.
And I wrote it down and I, it kind of, I, I'm both very grateful to have this clarity and very embarrassed by how simple it is. But I think that the book is trying to answer the question, why was my breakup with Michael so much more painful than the end of my 25-year marriage?
The way that I'm answering that question is maybe the way a poet writes a novel, or maybe it's just a very bizarre way of like getting to the place where I can answer that question. Cause I didn't even know that that was the question until this deep in, and I'm not saying that's the only question, but I do think on some level that is like, one of the fundamental questions that the book is trying to answer, like why did this… why did the relationship and then the the loss of this relationship, completely reorder my thinking, my way of being in the world, my writing, uh, my way of understanding life?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I don't know how to respond to that [laughs].
RACHEL ZUCKER: What it was, what did that, what did that do to you?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I guess the thing that I'm thinking about is that, okay, so here's, here's the, the, the sequence of thoughts that I had as you were describing that. One, first, huh? Okay. That's not where I thought this was going. And then I thought I don't know if that is in the text, and then I thought well, but I've only read the first part. So maybe this becomes more apparent as it goes on.
Which sort of just brings me back to what I was saying at the beginning is, it's really hard to make any kind of commentary on them a thing that I've experienced only the unfinished first section of [laughs]. I think that the book should be whatever you want it to be.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: And I think that if that is the central question of the story, then I mean, I think that that is a question that is, I think that there are many novels that people have valued very much over many hundreds of years that are dealing with questions like that one, that people have found a lot to admire or to learn from. And I don't know if the first section that I read is leading there yet, but maybe it is. I don't really know.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Do you feel embarrassed for me? Do you feel excited for me? Do you feel worried about me when you think about me continuing to work on this book and one day showing it to other people?
[1:20:00]
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: So the working on it and the showing it are very separate in my mind.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Okay.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I should say that just in general, I tend not to get excited about anything. Excitement is not really, uh, part of my experience of life for the most part. And that's a whole other thing that probably is worth getting into with my therapist. If I have any concerns about you, it is just because of the things that you have told me outside of this conversation. For example, the message that you left me, one of the messages you left me in between the intro message for this episode, and now, you were saying that the process of editing that first section into something that you felt comfortable showing me, was bringing up a lot of shit for you that was very painful. And so, as your friend, I'm not going to be able to hear you say things like that and have no concerns.
Obviously, I'm going to have concerns about you re-traumatizing yourself, which is also something that's in the text. You do bring that up in the text. So in terms of the writing of it, worried is not exactly the right word. I have some expectation that it will be difficult for you, and I don't like to see you in pain. I don't like to see you suffering. But I also recognize that sometimes challenge and difficulty and even suffering can be ultimately a positive experience in the end, that having gone through that experience, will have been necessary and fruitful for you. And I'm hopeful that that is the case.
Once the book is finished and put out into the world, I also have a mix of feelings about that because my expectation is that whatever this book ends up being, that it will elicit from its readership, a range of different responses. And some of those responses I am expecting will be very tedious for you.
And so I'm not, again, like I'm sort of preemptively like defensive for you, because I don't want you to have to deal with, “Well, this is really more of a comment than a question” kind of shit at a reading or a book tour event. But I also expect that at least some of the people who read it will get it.
And so that you will be able to have a lovely experience of connection with people who read this book. And I look forward to that for you. Does that answer your question?
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah. What are the tedious responses that you imagine? Like -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: You know, people asking you questions that are like this, the, the stupid questions that you have had to endure about all of your writing, the judgments or, I mean, because you come down to it like form and style are one thing, but in many ways, this book is, the subject matter of this book is not outside of your wheelhouse, you know, and all of the same questions that are all the questions that are coming up about this. What is this? What is, is this a poem? Is this a memoir? Is this fiction or nonfiction? Is it ethical to be talking about other people in this way? Is, like, are you being manipulative? Are you using these people? Are you being selfish? Those kinds of negative questions are questions that you have been dealing with for your entire career as a writer, and I anticipate that the same people who or type of person who has had those questions about, you know The Pedestrians or the Poetics of Wrongness or Mothers, right, are going to have those same questions about this book. And that is going to be tedious and possibly painful for you.
And you know, I would, I would like to spare you that if it were possible for me to spare you that. It's also not my position to spare you that, and, and to some degree, you know what you're getting into and you're choosing to do it anyway. So like, you know, you're a grown up and you're responsible for it for these things, so, but I am your friend, you know, so I don't like to see you have to deal with shit that you don't want to deal with.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Do you wish for my sake as my friend that I was not writing a book like this or that I wasn't writing a book at all? or are you like -
[1:25:01]
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I wish as your friend that you're the, that people could just be a little bit more thoughtful and chill in the questions that they ask of artists. And really that's got nothing to do with you. You know, like, I guess I, what I wish is that the world were, uh, a different and more empathetic and compassionate and thoughtful place, but it isn't.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Well, maybe we should end there. I, I'm just, I'll say maybe one really, really quick thing, which is to say, you know, I, I went to a reading a few months ago, of a person who was reading from his new novel, which was like really a novel because it took the reason that you knew it was a novel was that it took place in a time period when he was a young child, so, and it had characters who clearly weren't him. So it was discussing, you know, things in that it, it was more visibly a novel and so yeah, nobody was asking those kinds of questions. Like, what is it? And, you know, why did you do this? And why did you do that? Like, but people were, people also were not asking some of the questions that I felt, which were like, who cares? Why do you write about these made-up people? Why'd you write about this time period that, like, you didn't even live through? Like, who cares? And I don't know. I mean, I loved Paul Auster's last novel.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: And you also love Star Trek [laughs]
RACHEL ZUCKER: I know.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: And that’s all made up. And that's a time period that nobody, none of us have ever lived through.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Star Trek is real, Mike. When are we going to talk about the end of Discovery? I'm so upset [laughs]. I'm so upset. We should have talked about that instead. I'm, I don't know when, if ever, I will get over that. I'm, I'm extremely upset.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I do have to get going.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah. goodbye. I'm stopping all the things [laughs]. It's our best ending yet. It's our tagline is, I do have to get going.
[Music]
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: You've been listening to Hey, it's Me, with Rachel Zucker and Mike Sakasegawa.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Hey, it's Me is a production of Rachel Zucker and Likewise Media.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Editing on this episode is by Mike Sakasegawa, music is by Podington Bear, and transcription help is by Leigh Sugar.
RACHEL ZUCKER: You can find more information about the show, including contact information and transcripts, at heyitsmepodcast.com.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: If you'd like to hear more from us, you can find Rachel's other show, Commonplace, at Commonplace.today
RACHEL ZUCKER: And you can find Mike's other show, Keep the Channel Open, at Keep the Channel Open.com. Thanks for spending this time with us.
Take care.