 With that avalanche of contradictory attributes and qualities, I'm sure we could all find a home. But I want to thank Neil Baldwin for his very, very kind and generous words. And to say specifically, I'm not sure about the steadicam, but I don't like the handheld camera, so you are certainly on the right track. If I had to choose between the two, you're absolutely right. It would be the steadicam, certainly. We only have a little bit of time, and there are several things that I want to do. I'll start by saying that the new novel for which I received the National Book Award for Fiction this year and really a wonderful honor and a great joy to me to have received this prize and to have my fiction assume what for me it has always had, which is the central place in what I do, though I do do lots of other things as well. I will start by reading a little bit from In America, which is this novel, the last novel I wrote, and tell you I was just now thinking, well, what should I read from? As you will shortly see, I like to read, and there are a number of parts of the book which I have enjoyed reading aloud to audiences. And then I thought, well, in a way it's kind of obvious what I might read since I can only read a couple of pages because I do want to make a few remarks about the writing life as I've been invited to do. I thought it would be appropriate to read a couple of pages from a chapter which takes place in San Francisco. And to tell you, first of all, for those of you who don't know the book, that the principal character is a great actress, Polish, who abandons her career in Poland. She is the greatest actress in Poland. They think of someone like Sarah Bernhardt. The year or rather the decade that's perhaps easier to think of is the 1870s. She and a group of friends and bringing her husband and a small child from a previous relationship immigrate to the United States. She's giving up her career and real glory. She's one of the most famous people in her country, national heroine. To come to the new world, to change her life. She is involved in a project, I word again, project of self-transformation. And she wants to give up the theater. And she and her friends buy land. The book starts in Poland and it's about their decision to come and about the trip. And they first come to New York and eventually make their way to California. Land is purchased in Southern California in a little vineyard community. It had about 2,000 people called Anaheim. Not too far from another small but much larger town of 10,000 people called Los Angeles. In other words, Southern California was quite underpopulated. Not empty as colonial people always say. There were Native Americans and of course there were Mexicans and there were Chinese laborers. But there were very few European immigrants or descendants of Europeans in Southern California. Of course with the usual presumption of people of European origin one says Southern California was empty at the time. At the time San Francisco was anything but empty. San Francisco had over 300,000 people, between 300 and 400,000 people making it far and away the biggest city in the United States west of the Mississippi. It had about half the population it has now. In a major city it had many theaters. It was the great metropolis in the western part of the United States. Well, eventually they buy this farm. They want to live communally. The model is very vaguely a brook farm. And eventually it doesn't work. Most of the people go back to Poland. The main character whose name I give her is Marina. She goes back on stage. She comes up here to San Francisco and she seeks an audition with a man who is the director of a theater called the California Theater, which was the great theater, probably the second best theater in the whole United States. The best being Booth's Theater in New York City. Again, it's the 1870s and eventually she does get an audition with this Barton who is the manager of the stage. We would say the artistic director of the theater is also an administrative director. Word is sent to him that this great Polish actress is in town and wants an audition. You can imagine Barton's response. I mean, it's not described in the novel, but as I thought of it, as I imagined it, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, great Polish actress, right? What does that mean? But finally, he does give her an audition. And it's that little bit of the beginning of the audition scene, which is in the chapter called Seven. It's actually the eighth chapter because there's a prologue chapter called Zero. It's that that I want to read you. And I also have a lot of associations with reading this to you because in fact, as I was thinking about the book and thinking about the story, I actually began by doing a little bit of reading in the California Historical Society here in San Francisco. I mean, doing the reading and foraging about for the right kind of historical details in Poland and in Southern California, New York, that actually came later. But when I was just first thinking of the book before I actually started writing it, it was immediately after finishing The Volcano Lover. So I'm talking about the beginning of 1993. I happened to be in San Francisco and I was spending a lot of time with a friend here, Stephen Barkley, who made a contact with me with the California Historical Society. So I was reading San Francisco newspapers from 1877, almost the first bit of what other people call research, but I call reading, which I did to get the sort of material world and the historical world correct. Anyway, I'll just redo this little bit. The novel is mostly in the third person, but there are monologue parts. There's one whole chapter that's told in the form of a letter, therefore in the first person. It begins with a monologue, ends with a monologue. It's a monologue by Edwin Booth. Eventually, when she does go back on the stage, she becomes the most famous actress in America, with a Polish accent and all. And it ends with a scene with Edwin Booth, the greatest actor of the era, whose younger brother, as everyone knows, of course, had assassinated Lincoln, also an actor, John Wilkes Booth. But that, of course, comes much later in the book here. It just describes how she, before what I'm reading, she seeks an audition with this Barton and tries to figure out what she's going to perform if she gets an audition. And then here is Barton's response, Barton's monologue. Now, you mentioned genius, said Angus Barton, although Marina hadn't mentioned it. And genius speaks in every tongue. I'm not saying that isn't true. And I'm not saying I don't believe you weren't some kind of star in your own country, or your compatriots here in San Francisco who've been writing me letters and coming to the theater and imploring me to see you and leaving me articles about you, which, of course, I can't read. They couldn't be making it all up, could they? But this is America. And you say you want to act in English, even though it makes no sense for a foreign actress to come here and not act in her own language since our public is used to that and think they do understand, as long as they know the story, though I hold to the old-fashioned idea that when it comes to a play, the audience ought to understand the words. And I'm not saying the public in America hasn't opened its arms to foreign actors, but they come from countries that Americans like, the sound of, like France and Italy. And I'm afraid your country isn't one of those. And they come here on a tour with everything nicely prepared and everyone eager to see them and then they go home. And I'm not saying I won't give you an audition if only to get your friends to stop badgering me, if I'm willing to do that. But you must agree that I can be honest with you. I shall criticize you. Frankly, I'm not going to mince my words. Yes, said Marina. And I'm not saying I think it's a complete waste of my time for me to give you an hour on Wednesday morning. I can't spend any more time with you now. I have an appointment in a few minutes. But I don't want you to get your hopes up. You seem like a nice woman, very dignified with your mind all made up. I like that. I like a woman with spark, a woman who knows how to stand up for herself. But you have to bend in this country too, everyone does. And I'm not saying that you've not heard this before, but theater has to be good business. People here don't go so much for highfalutin ideas of theater, such as they keep on with in Europe. And I'm not saying that you don't know that. But what I see before me here is a lady, and perhaps back in your country, a refined woman like yourself would make a great impression. You can impress the public with that here too. But they don't want a steady diet of lady. Not even our rich folks in San Francisco. And we have plenty of them now with all the Comstock bullion, like the late Mr. Rauston who built this theater in the Palace Hotel too. He liked a lot of fancy European things. And I'm not saying that they're just a bunch of snobs living in the mansions on Knob Hill who all take boxes at the California Theater because rich people want to think they have culture. That's why the city has so many theaters. And there are quite a few Jews in society here. And I guess they're the most cultivated, but you can't play only to them. So I'm not saying that San Francisco doesn't have some people who know what they're seeing when Booth comes and does a turn here. One of the big stars on tour from Europe comes through. All of them hoping to play at the California, because everyone knows that after Booth's theater in New York, it's the best theater in the country. And that makes our public extra hard to please, especially the newspaper men here, who are just waiting to puncture the balloon of some big foreign reputation. And I'm not saying that ordinary people don't go to the theater too. And if you don't please them, it doesn't work at all. They have to cheer and laugh and poke each other in the ribs and cry. I was wondering if you could do comedy roles. No, from the look of you, probably not. Well, that settles it. You'll have to make them cry. Yes, said Marina. He looked at her sharply. I don't discourage you or disarm you with all this prattle? No. Ah, I see. You are proud. You are confident. You're probably intelligent. Well, he snorted that's no asset for an actor. I've been told that before, Mr. Barton. I suppose you have. But you could be more condescending. You could have said to me that intelligence is no asset for a woman. Yes, I could have said that. I shall hereby make note not to say it to you. He stared at her with curiosity and irritation. I'll tell you what, Madame. I can't pronounce your name. Let's get this over with. Are you prepared to do something right now? Of course she was not. Yes. And we'll part as friends, right? No hard feelings, and it will be my pleasure to invite you to my box any evening this week. I'm not going to waste your time, Mr. Barton. Barton slapped the desk. Charles, Charles, the young man peeped through the door. Go run over to Ames' office and tell him to hold tight. I won't be free for another half hour. And send William to put some lamps on the stage and a table and chair. A chair is enough, said Marina. Forget the table, shouted Barton. And Barton led her from his office through a maze of corridors. As Barton led her from his office through a maze of corridors, he said, And what are you going to do for me? I was thinking of Juliet, or Marguerite Gautier, or perhaps Adrien Les Couvreurs. These are all roles I have played many times in my native country and have now learned in English. She paused as if hesitating. I think if you have no objection, I shall show you my Adrien. This is the role in which I made my debut at the Imperial Theatre in Warsaw, and it has always brought me luck. Barton whistled and shook his head. Yes, the climax of Act IV, when Adrien recites to her rival in front of a glittering assembly, the insulting tirade from Ferdre, and from that straight into Act V. Perhaps not all of V, said Barton quickly, and I won't need Ferdre. In any case, Marina continued imperturbably, I shall require the good offices of a young friend who is waiting in the lobby and has my copy of Adrien with her to join me on the stage to read. We had Restory in San Francisco with her troop doing that only two years ago, but she was at the Bush. Of course, she did in an Italian. Maybe she did one speech in English, no matter, you couldn't understand a word, she said. After she paid for most of her reviews, the public came and in the end it was quite a success. Yes, said Marina, I was sure you were familiar with the play. They had reached the wings before her was the dim stage and waiting at the center, a plain wooden chair, a stage she would be walking again onto a stage. Marina paused for a moment, a moment of genuine hesitation, so overcome was she by excitement and joy which she supposed Barton would interpret as stage fright. No, not even stage fright, but ordinary panic. The panic of the amateur who, having passed herself off as a professional, was about to be caught out in her deception. Well, he said, here you are. Yes, she said, here I am. Of course, I'd just love to read you the whole scene. And at the end, as you know, he says, my God, you are the greatest actress I ever saw. Can you forgive me? And she says, let's discuss the terms. All right, I'll just say a few words. Maybe I think the format, if I remember what Neil has told me, is to have some kind of exchange or question and answer. So I will just say a few words about writing. I, to paraphrase something that Oscar Wilde said about art, when I think about writing, and it's a bit the way Neil so generously introduced me, I think that writing is something of which could be said that anything you say is true about it and the opposite of anything you say about it is also true. But obviously, one does write out of a certain temperament. And I find that the word temperament, if I'm asked to explain what I do or what kind of choices I make, I'm much more interested in exploring that idea that there are certain temperaments which are perhaps more suited to becoming writers. Talent is, there's a lot of talent around. Talent is not uncommon. What is uncommon is a certain kind of temperament, a certain kind of obsession. Lots of people have talent, especially when they're young and why some people become writers or artists of different kinds. I think really has much more to do with character than anything else and with certain kinds of choices that you are impelled to make in your life. For instance, in the case of being an actor, you have to have a high tolerance for solitude because being a writer involves being alone a lot. Some people like that and some people find that quite intolerable and indeed are drawn to, I'm speaking of people with an artistic vocation, to forms of art making which are more collaborative and have that reward of being with people and often very passionate relationships, the performing arts are of course all like that. I have been a, Neil says he read me in high school, I mean gray haired people come up and tell me they read me in grammar school now and they say okay. I have been a published writer for close to 40 years now and I wasn't precocious actually. I mean my first book, I was 30 when I published my first book. Of course I had been writing before, I had been writing since I was 7 and I had published a few things, stories and some book reviews starting in my teens but I think I actually started to do big work, ambitious work rather late. It took me a while to get up the nerve and feel that I could do it to have the confidence that I was doing something that I could like or I could respect or I could admire and that was the criterion. I've written four novels and a lot of stories. There's already a collection of stories, there will soon be another collection. A lot of essays and various non-fiction prose texts I've written plays, I've written film scripts which I have then directed. I have all this different kind of activity and I'm here to tell you that after close to 40 years of professional activity it doesn't get any easier. In fact it gets harder and again I can only speak for myself but I can't imagine I'm the only person like this. Again it's my temperament I'm speaking from. Unlike a lot of other, well this is an artisanal solo activity writing in an age of machine-made mass productions but it doesn't have the benefit of most other artisanal or handcrafted activities like carpentry or bricklaying or surgery in that there is some kind of skill that you develop and some things become, I don't want to say automatic because that's too negative but they're sort of in your hand, they're in your mind and you don't sort of sweat over the execution of each step of this process. Somebody who performs an operation, I mentioned surgeon, I'd go from bricklaying to surgery because after all these still are hand activities, I think someone who has performed a complex operation a hundred times is obviously not experiencing the same kind of tension. I don't say one is completely relaxed but there is a certain thing that is built up through experience that gives you a feeling of proficiency or mastery or whatever, this is just common sense. I want to say that for me, and I do believe this has to be true for, I'm not the only writer to feel this but I can always speak for myself, for me it's if anything the opposite. I am experiencing that it is a lot harder to go on writing because I'm more self-conscious than ever. That doesn't mean I believe that you will see that reading what I do. The idea is that all those traces of self-consciousness of course have to be eliminated in the final version of whatever I write but for me writing is very much rewriting. I find that as I go on, I am setting the bar higher. Perhaps that's what accounts for the fact that it seems harder. Things that I would have been satisfied to do 10 years ago or 20 years ago I'm not satisfied to do now. In other words perhaps all I'm doing is confessing to the very American idea that I should improve or get better as a writer not simply go along with a certain degree of mastery or proficiency which I may have had from the beginning or at any rate early on. I actually do think that I'm a better writer than I used to be and not just because it seems harder, it is harder but I think I know more but because I know more than it often feels as if every sentence is across roads, a fork in the road at any rate. With respect, obviously I mean with respect to writing as an art with respect to writing as part of that enterprise called literature there are all kinds of service writing writing devoted to information or the expression of opinion in which I don't think these sorts of scruples have to apply and I do do a little bit of that too even now. There are certain causes where I feel I'm competent to speak and I might write a short text which I'm expressing some viewer inside or principal or whatever. That is not difficult. If anything that kind of writing of course is easier but the writing that is called literature, the writing that is embodied in these two novels, the last two novels where I really feel I've been entered a whole new phase as a writer, the volcano lover and in America those are the product of an immense amount of reworking if you will, writing by will, writing from conscious ambition to each time I write surpass and perhaps contradict myself. These are very Emersonian and also remind me as I hear myself speaking of very very American themes as Whitman also comes to mind. I contradict myself very well, I contradict myself but I don't think there's any virtue in contradicting yourself. I just discover that I start thinking something else after I've thought one thing for a very long time. It doesn't appeal to me anymore and I just start thinking yes but it's also something else. So for me being a writer is finding a greater expressiveness, a greater eloquence of more inner freedom and you don't do it by directly pursuing those goals obviously you just do it by writing, by writing and rewriting and rewriting until you see it's better by your own standards, your own standards of course have been formed by great literature, the literature of the past. You are not writing for posterity. Joseph Brodsky used to say something like, you're writing for your predecessors, you're not writing for posterity, you're writing for the people whom you most admire, who are for the most part dead. They are the great writers of the past. They set your standards, they set your idea of what literature is. It's not that you think you're on that level but that's the standard by which you measure yourself and by which you know yourself to be still struggling and moving towards something that can always be better than it is. What I'm not doing and then I come to the perhaps more entertaining aspect of this account, what I don't think I'm doing, what I don't want to do, what I don't aspire to do is to express myself. I don't think of writing as psychotherapy. I don't write in order to express myself, I don't write in order to define myself, I don't write in order to find out who I am, I don't write in order to become immortal. All these things may sound amusing to you but I have heard an awful lot of writers say that and I've heard an awful lot of readers assuming that writers say that. Many, many years ago, I hope I'm not being indiscreet but I will be if that's what it is. Many years ago, about more than 20, 25 years ago, I was in Italy and I got to know a young, youngish, I guess my age, a professor of literature in Italy whose name was Mberto Eco. He had not written a word of fiction but he was very clever and amusing, it was fun to know him and we hung out together for a while and he said, I'm going to write novels and I said, oh, great. He said, I'm going to write best-selling novels. I figured out how to do it and I thought it was just a case of sort of megalomania but he had figured out how to do it and I said, well, how did you do that? He said, I've been reading Alexander Dumas and Eugène Su, two great best-sellers of the 19th century. I said, and you figured it out. He said, yeah, I know exactly what has to go into a book to make it work. And I said, well, is it so important to be a best-seller? And he said, well, it isn't that. He said, don't think it's about money. Maybe in the end, since it did happen, it was about money but this is not what he thought and I believe him. He said, it's about immortality because I know if the books really are best-sellers then they'll be in libraries. And 200 years from now, somebody will be sitting in a library reading a novel by me and that means I'm still alive. And I said, no, you won't. No, you're not. I had a very plebeian down-to-earth idea about what it was to be alive and what it was to be dead. And Echo, well, that's work for him. He thought he was gaining immortality. Anyway, writers have all sorts of fantasies about what they're doing and because we live in an era which a certain kind of psychobabble is very common and people are told all the time to develop their selves and know themselves and all the rest of it, then they think that every activity which they performed has to be justified because it's a form of self-expression. Now, I'm not saying, of course, I'm not expressing myself. I mean, I have only what's inside my head than what I know, whatever wisdom I've gained. So, of course, I am limited to myself, but it's not about me and the point is not to do that. I mean, I'm always trying to get in touch with what's not me and that's what's important and I'm just the instrument of doing that. And I think that what I make is, as I say, I'm the one who makes it. I don't want to say I don't understand that it's not created by me, but it's not, the point is not to express me or to convey something about me. These are unfortunate byproducts that, in fact, I am in some sense expressing myself because, well, you can't step over your own feet. But I believe very strongly that the purpose of great art is impersonal or transpersonal and that I am just the servant or the instrument of whatever I can do that is of value. And if there would be any personal aim or purpose, something in this difficulty that is writing, that is for me alone, it certainly wouldn't be self-expression, which I think is a very trivial goal or ambition. It would be hard to pronounce the words. It would be something like salvation. I think that I, in some way, transcend myself through writing. I'm precisely not confined to being myself through writing. It's a way of being in touch with and connected with much larger realities, the reality of other people's lives and what writing can do in the way of extending our capacities for sympathy. And it's also about our relationship to the language of which we are just the servant. So I don't, as I said, I don't do it to express myself. I'm making something in the old sense that Aristotle talked about art as poesis, a kind of making of an object. And if there is a motive, then it is a motive of respect. I have been transformed. I have been created and transformed and continue to be changed by my relationship to various arts, music, painting, film, literature, dance. They all have a great claim on me. Literature is the one that I felt I most called on to work in. But it's also, in a way, an act of gratitude as much as an act of emulation, humility, perhaps much more than ambition. It comes from being a reader. I think a writer is, first of all, a reader. And my deepest motivation for wanting to be a writer and wanting to be a good writer and wanting to be a better writer is the ecstasy which I have had as a reader. I'll stop there and see if there's someone who wants to ask a question. Thank you. Just one technical announcement. I guess it would be a technical announcement. There's going to be a handheld microphone that Marsh is going to pass around so that the questions can be recorded. You don't have to have any questions. Yes? In your life as a writer, in your career, you've engaged in a lot of huge different projects in theater, in film, in writing. And you must face a multitude of opportunities and projects and ideas and your own awareness of the needs in the world, the work you engage in for writers on behalf of causes in the world. So my question is, how do you choose at any given time what to give a certain length of time to? How do you choose one project to focus on for one length of time and manage to focus on it to the exclusion of everything else that demands your attention? Well, that's a very important question. I mean, it's actually the central question of a practical kind that one might ask oneself. I'm not a disciplined person. Again, I have to go back to the notion of temperament. There are novelists, Iris Murdock, the late Iris Murdock was supposed to have been one of these, who had a fixed writing schedule, let's say from nine to five, making it up. If she finished a novel at 3.30 and had an hour and a half left of her daily writing stint, she would start another novel. I would break and probably not go near a writing task for two months. I'm quite undisciplined. I work very intensely, sometimes 18, 20 hours a day. And then there are days and weeks that I don't write. So again, the answer I'm about to give you comes from the fact that I'm undisciplined. I work by obsession and a disciplined person, a person with a schedule, lots of writers, lots and lots of writers, most writers actually work on schedules. John Updike, for instance, is supposed to, I don't know, I've never been to his place, so I'm very remotely acquainted with him, but apparently he has three rooms with three different computers and there's one room for the fiction, one room for the nonfiction, one room for the correspondence. And he has set times that he devotes to every single day, every day of his life to those three activities. So I start by being undisciplined. And then, again, I don't know why I'm quoting Oscar Wilde for the second time who said, I can resist everything except temptation. Things just come along and grab me and I find myself doing it. It's not a question of principle. I wish it were. Why did I go to Sarajevo? I had absolutely no connection with Sarajevo whatsoever. I've never been there, I've never been in Bosnia, I have no family connection with that part of the world, with the Balkans, it meant absolutely nothing to me. I happened to go along, I was invited to go along, to accompany the director of a humanitarian organization who was making a quick fact-finding trip one year after the siege started. And I'm a bit of a daredevil, and I thought, ooh, let's not get to go to a war and risk my life. Okay. And I went along. The thing that turned some people off attracts me, risking my life as something I have done a number of times. I'm a bit adventurous, even at my advanced age still. And I went and I thought, my God, this is the most amazing situation. A genocide in Europe. Death camps. A siege. A good side and a bad side. How often does that come along? And I thought, well, I'm going to come back. I'm going to find work here. I'm going to do things, I'm going to come back. That absolutely completely screwed up my life for three years. I mean, apart from the danger and difficulty, and, well, the toughness of life there. I mean, the bullets were whizzing past your head. There was no glass in the windows. There was no water in town. It was cold in the winter. No running water. No heat. No electricity. No, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It was very tough. But it was a sort of amazing experience and a great privilege to be welcomed there and be given work to do there. And I didn't do it as a writer. I did it as a person. And I dropped everything. I had started in America in January 1993. I went to Sarajevo. I'd written about, well, pretty much the first two chapters of In America. I didn't start it again. I'd take it up again for three years. Now, that was very irrational. Obviously, I'm not going to work in Sarajevo on my novel. I mean, you can imagine what it was like to live there in that sort of ditch with, you know, explosions going on. War is extremely noisy. Nonstop noise except between three and five in the morning when they are too drunk and stop firing and dropping things in the city. And so there, why did I do it? I don't know. Let me just try to put it in a more compact way. I think my idea of a human life or a good life, I'm very, I've talked about literature. I'm very much a product of 19th century Russian literature with those questions that you find in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Chekhov and all those writers. How does one live? How should one live? How can one live better? And I think a better life is a life in which you forget about yourself every once in a while and just throw yourself into something which can come along quite adventitiously. And it's not about you and it's about doing something for other people. I think that if altruism isn't honored, I don't say everybody can do this. And also I don't mean you have to go to a war and risk getting yourself killed. It can be doing any kind of social or public work in your own community, in your own block, in your own workplace. It doesn't involve anything as weird as going halfway around the world to sit and get bombed on with people you didn't know before. But I think that part of your life should not be about you. It should be about service. It should be about sacrifice. It should be about altruism. And so these things come along. And I don't think of them as causes. I mean, I guess they are, but I never talk about it like that. I just say, well, sometimes something comes along and you just want to do it. And then you have to drop everything and do it. And then you don't do it for a while. And I'm not saying that what happened in Bosnia is the worst single thing that happened in that time. It's sometimes just an accident. You meet someone who says, come here. Come down. Look what's happening in this prison. Look what's happening in this shelter for battered women. Look what's happening in this school. Look what's happening in this garden. My friend Alice Waters in Berkeley has been doing food programs in Berkeley and Oakland high schools because she thinks that that's something she ought to do to teach high school kids something about food that isn't processed and frozen and so on. And that's something she wanted to do because she cares about people and she cares about quality of what people eat. And that's the amazing thing that she is doing. I know many, many people who have some component of service. So I really think of it as service not causes. And I'm very devoted to the idea of not pronouncing in public opinions about things I do not have firsthand knowledge of. You know, writers are very often treated as opinion machines. And you're supposed to, if you're reasonably articulate and you do go out in the world and you're not a recluse, then people can ask you about everything, what you think about everything and you're supposed to have an answer. And I think it cheapens what you do. Of course I have opinions about lots of things but I hope that I will continue to have the discipline only to express opinions and take part in public actions. We're concerned something. I have an extensive, deep firsthand knowledge of and commitment to. And that interrupts writing and it interrupts your life. Your writing interrupts your life. Your art interrupts your life. Your vocation, your passions interrupt your life. Or your life interrupts your vocation, your passions are writing. So I just think maybe again to answer the question and I've gone on at such length because it's the question that most interests me. It's the thing I most think about. The formula should be more is more. The more you can take in, the more you can reach out, the more activities you can engage yourself in, that's better. People have a tendency to close down as they get older and it's very understandable. They have all kinds of obligations and worries and problems and a certain kind of depression kicks in where you just say, oh, this is my life. Is that all there is or something like that? But you know, you can change. You can, you know, maybe in heaven nothing changes but here in earth in order to become better you have to change a lot. If I might ask you, in your prologue chapter to this book, could you explain just a few words about that chapter and how you established the point of view and the multilayer kind of concept that you seem to be expressing there? Well, the prologue chapter, the novel in America is framed by two monologues. First, long after I finished it, well, not long, well after I finished it, I thought it's really like the masks of ancient theater with the comic mask and the tragic mask. So the first, the prologue chapter, what I call zero, is there's an alter ego me. It's not me. I kind of, it's a caricature of me actually. I don't really identify with that voice but it borrows some things from my life. And this person living at the end of the 20th century becomes a time traveler and suddenly drops in on a party on a late December night in the city of Krakow, late December 1876. And a lot of people are moving about. It's late in the evening and there's one woman in the center that everybody seems to be paying attention to. And the voice starts speculating, well, where am I and who is that and who are these people. So it was a kind of one of those ideas that worked. You know, you get in the middle of the night and say, ah, I know how to begin the book. I'm going to begin it with a kind of parable which is both a description of how you make up a story, what the imagination is, and the beginning of the story. I want to draw the reader in. These people are all talking about something that they're going to do, that some of them are going to do. And the other people disapprove and what can that be? Well, it turns out, of course, it's the project of the actress giving up her career and going to America, going to America to live in a farm, to live, to found a commune, what we would call commune. And people think it's crazy. Why would she do that? But you're not told this straight out. The voice, the fly on the wall, the time traveler is eavesdropping, as it were. And even says, I don't understand how I can understand this language. Language I don't know. Language, of course, being Polish. Though occasionally they drop into French, which educated people did in Slavic, in Poland and in Russia at that time. They all knew French. The point of it, how it came to me, it came to me in a flash like everything. You have an idea and it comes to you in one minute and then there goes the next six years of your life, working it out. So it came to me as just an idea. But I really liked it because I thought it's like a play. Well, actually, it's like a movie. It's almost like a movie, I think of it. And this person is watching and thinking. So it's a parable about how you make fiction. And another way I thought of it is this voice, this invisible time traveler who's dropped into the party, is auditioning for the novel, the novel that you're about to read, saying, well, I wonder who that is. Maybe that's her husband. Yeah, I'm sure that's her husband. And who's that child, that sort of unhappy looking child, sleeping in a chair over there? I bet that's her child. Actresses are always lousy mothers. And then you see the stories start to build. And then on the other end, of course, is the Booth monologue. I can't write until I find the form. There are a lot of people who write novels. And I think it's wonderful if you can do this. They just take their little rowboat out into the ocean and keep on rowing. And they get someplace, someplace, sometimes terrific. I have to know where I'm going. I have to have a plan. I have to have an idea of how many chapters there. I have to have an idea of the structure. I have to know the story. I often, I know the title. I know the first sentence. I know the last sentence. I know who I'm dedicating. I have to have a lot of stuff, more like kind of architect plans. Before I, I'm not going to just build a kitchen. I wonder where the bedroom is going and where the living room might be. And, you know, I have to see it. The volcano levered a very specific kind of structure. This is a very different kind of structure. I would never use this structure. Again, it seemed the right structure for this material. You have to find the form. I have to find the form before I can begin the book. And the form is form in a very literal sense, the structure. The way the book is organized. And it was organized as the central narrative. It goes over from 76, 1876, 1888, and the two framing monologues. One or two more questions. Yes. Yeah. I'm curious. Thank you. I'm curious about the connection between Sarajevo and this book. First of all, it's dedicated to the friends in Sarajevo. And just after you started the book, you took three years and went to Sarajevo and come back. It seems like it probably wasn't the same book that you started out to write. So, you know, how did the things... Well, oddly enough, it was. It was. I really, my terror was that I would never, that I would lose the book. But I really wanted to write the book I had thought of before I went to Sarajevo. Why do I dedicate the book to my friends in Sarajevo? It's just a way of ringing the Sarajevo bell and reminding people of what happened there, not so long ago. But it wasn't influenced. I'm very slow. I'm slow to process things. I'm not even ready to write about Sarajevo yet. I've recently been very ill. I've been a cancer patient, again, after an interval of more than 20 years. And that's quite an interesting experience, I mean, apart from the horror of it, which is just how different it is to be a patient now than in the late 70s. Medicine has really changed. And the way in which one is a patient has really changed. And attitudes toward cancer have really changed, et cetera, et cetera. And I think, well, you know, this is something I should share with people because it's useful. And I feel very evangelical about this. Particularly about cancer, which for so long has been a very stigmatized illness and not one that one talks about. I remember when I was a cancer patient for the first time, I have to say, smiling. This is not a metastasis. It's a new primary cancer. When I was a cancer patient the first time in the late 70s, and I remember running into an old acquaintance of mine in an airport, and I was very, very ill then. I was supposed to be stage four. I was supposed to be dying. And I ran into this friend who I hadn't seen since I became ill, but who had heard that I was ill. And he said, how are you? And I said, well, apart from the fact that I have cancer, I'm feeling great. And I thought he was going to faint. He was so horrified by my levity and by the fact that I could just say the word. Because in those days, and those of you who are older will remember, even the word cancer was not often used. People talked about a long illness or the big C, or she has, you know, and that kind of thing. Of course, that's change. And I'm a tiny bit responsible for that change because of a book that I wrote then, a little tiny book called Illness as Metaphor. And then I'm thinking, well, what about Sarajevo? What about being ill again? I'm in remission. These are big experiences. I have something to share. I'm very eager to share things that would be morally and psychologically useful to people in the form of literature, needless to say. It's not a pamphlet. It's not journalism. But am I ready yet? It could take years more. I don't know. I have to write from a deep place. I had been thinking about actors all my life. That's what goes into in America. I couldn't write this book if I hadn't lived a lot of my life among actors. I know many, many actors, many directors. I know more actors and directors than I do writers. And I'm very familiar with that mentality, that psychology, the way they think. I'm also attracted to theater people, to performers. I'm fascinated by them. And I've thought about it. I don't mean in some intellectual way. I've just taken it in over many, many years so that now I, when it came to write this book, I knew I could portray in real depth complexity three-dimensionality, a certain temperament of a certain kind of actor. And I've been told this by many of my actor friends. Oh, that's me. That's me. And people are quite different. They all think it's them. And I think that's great. That's wonderful. I mean, that means that I really did it. But I think it's very important to digest these things. Maybe one last... Oh, somebody over there has had to... You. Yes. Yes. I think you had your hand up for a while. Let me just come around. Against interpretations dimension once tonight. And I was talking about with a friend of mine the other day. And we were kind of trying to remember really what that book was directed at. Could you... It has a rather polemical title. Could you sort of recall what you were doing there and how does that look to you now today so many years later? Well, I think you're speaking as someone who hasn't read the book or doesn't remember it. And I don't think that I should be. Yeah, well, I don't feel that I have to give sound bites describing my work. No, I can't do that. I cannot sum up my work in a sound bite. It is there to be read. And that's what I thought is in the book. I have read the book. Okay, but I can't sum it up. I can't tell you what I was doing. I don't think that way. I wasn't doing one thing. It's a lot of different... Different essays with different themes, different passions. I think it's kind of clear if you read it, if you care to read it, what it was about. It's early work. I wouldn't do that now, but I think most of it's quite good. Yes? You mentioned about Women's Architects Conference held in Japan. Yes. Could you tell me a little bit on how do you associate the architects? How do I associate with... I mean, what's your interest in architects? What my interest in architects? I don't know how to answer that question. I'm interested in everything. I'm interested in Japan. I'm interested in architects. I'm interested in women who are accomplished professionally. A couple of years ago, I was invited to a conference of architects in Japan in a city called Gifu to address, to get the opening address. And I've been thinking about... I don't know. I'm sorry. I must seem very inarticulate to you, but I don't know how to explain what it means just to be interested in things. I mean, I look at buildings and I read books and, you know, wherever I go, I'm just looking. I have hungry eyes. What can I say? Thank you very much.