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[NANCY PEARL] Hello and welcome back to Book Lust.
I'm Nancy Pearl.
My guest today is Julie Otsuka, whose new book,
"The Swimmers" was just published this year.
Julie, thank you for being on the show.
[JULIE OTSUKA] Nancy, I'm thrilled.
Thank you so much for having me.
-I wanted to talk to you.
Well, there's lots I want I want to ask you.
But the book that you that you became known for,
which I believe was a Seattle Reads book,
I think you were here for "The Buddha in the Attic."
-No it was for "When the Emperor was Divine."
-Your first your first novel.
One of the things that I love
about your books is, well, you're a beautiful writer.
Let me just say, you could just pick sentences out
and you just want to like, oh, my goodness, where did that come from?
You're so great at that.
But I loved that in
in when
the Buddha "The Buddha in the Attic" and in "The Swimmers,"
you don't tell the stories in a traditional way.
I mean, there's not a third person
narrator.
You use in "The Swimmers" and in "The Buddha in the Attic"
you use the second. Oh god
I always get this confused.
You talk about it from the point of view of we. We did this, we did that.
And I in "The Buddha in the Attic,"
you talk, you do that to such great effect that we get, as readers,
I think we get the sense of of this community
of Japanese Americans
and what is happening to them in their lives.
But it's a community.
It's not necessarily one person.
And then in the last chapter
of "The Buddha in the Attic," this is not a spoiler.
We all know what happened to the Japanese during World War II in the United States.
In the last chapter, the we has has moved from being the Japanese Americans
to the people left behind
in the cities, the small towns and cities where they lived.
That was so powerful to me.
I where did where did that idea come from?
-Actually, I think I might have gotten one of the ideas when I was in Seattle.
I remember
after one of the readings that I gave was a white woman
who'd been alive during World War II and she'd been a child during the war.
And she she told me that she had a Japanese classmate.
She must've been in first grade, maybe. And one day she just.
She disappeared and she never knew what happened to her.
So I always wondered how
her classmate's disappearance was explained to her
by her parents.
Did the teacher say anything.
So, you know, I'd always had my mind that I kind of wanted to explore
what it would be like from the point of view
of a mostly white town after the Japanese neighbors have disappeared.
But I didn't quite get to it in "When the Emperor Was Divine,"
so I save that for "The Buddha in the Attic."
And I realized, I think fairly early on when writing "The Buddha in the Attic"
that that would be actually the perfect last chapter for the novel to suddenly flip.
-And it was the perfect last chapter. It was.
Your books are so short and compact,
and yet they pack such a punch,
you know, such an emotional.
It's like they reach out and grab you
and take you into the pages of the book.
Is is that a fair description, do you think?
-You know, I don't set out to.
I mean, I'm.
I work, you know, very intuitively.
So I'm not
setting out to try and make an emotional impact.
I'm just kind of writing scenes as I
see them in my head or
else as I hear them in my head.
And I don't think I often realize
what I'm doing or that or how it's even coming.
I mean, people tell me that
"The Swimmers" is so sad and I don't think I realized how sad it was.
I was know I thought it was
kind of funny, you know.
But I mean, I think humor and sadness are flip sides of the same coin.
But and I also I don't aspire to be compact.
I'd love to be able to write 200 page novel.
You know, I aspire to be longer, but
for some reason, every single one of my novels is about exactly the same length.
That just seems to be how long it takes me
to get through whatever story it is that I have to tell.
-How did you decide to put "The Swimmers" together?
Because when I think about it, I think about it as two novellas
that are connected by one
one character.
And, and I wondered
when I was reading it, when I finished it and was thinking about it
how you
made that decision.
-Well, I had sketched out the first
couple of scenes of
the swimmers in the swimming pool
maybe 15 years ago while I was still writing "The Buddha in the Attic."
And then I just thought, oh, this would be a fun idea for a story.
And I just kind of stashed them in a drawer
and I'd also written
the middle chapter, "Diem Perdidi," a couple of years after that.
But still, that was while I was working on The Buddha in the Attic.
And then when I finished The Buddha in the Attic I had no idea what to do next.
But I mean, I looked at those swimmers,
swimming pool scenes again and I just thought, I can't not write
at least this story because it's such that it was just such great material.
I thought...just a fun world to
dive into. (both laugh)
so corny, but.
At a certain point I
knew that one of the swimmers was suffering from dementia.
And then at a certain point I realized that
she could be a bridge to the character
in Diem Perdidi and I never imagined the Diem Perdidi chapter
somehow fitting in with the pool scene. Once I had that idea
then I thought, oh, okay.
Well, that, you know, that would be the logical thread tieing these two disparate pieces.
I mean, I would tell people for years
that I was writing a book about swimming and dementia.
It just sounded so bizarre.
And I didn't know if I could pull it off.
But but once I realized that one of the characters could be there very
peripherally in the beginning.
I mean, hopefully you don't even know that it's going to end up being Alice's story,
she's one of many.
And then
when you
go into the second half, then you realize that
she's actually been there from the very beginning.
From the very first paragraph, actually.
-Right. When when when people say how sad
the book is, I think for me that's kind of undeniable.
How sad, especially the second half is.
But it was so
the sadness was
was contained in in in kind of a truth and the language.
I think that I finished it and of course it was sad.
And I think I might have had tears in my eyes at the end,
but I didn't come away,
I came away from it thinking this is one of the best written books I've ever read.
So, I mean, goodness, goodness.
So and then I gave it to a friend and she said, it's so depressing.
I mean, she read it and appreciated the language
excuse me.
But she said, Oh my gosh, it is so depressing.
But partly I think it's because all of my contemporaries
are, you know, at that age where dementia
is on our minds, you know, all the time
are are so so we should, I think, maybe even back up a little bit.
And and just how do you describe the book
for our viewers who haven't read it?
-Yeah, well, I mean.
I do say it is about dementia and swimming, but I mean.
It's it's a it's such
a hard book to describe,
you know?
I mean, it's it begins in a recreational swimming pool,
so it's really about a community of people.
And they're,
I would say, rather obsessed, fanatical about their need.
It is a need to swim, but it's a kind of
a found community.
These people haven't selected each other as their fellow
brothers and sisters in the pool. They just end up there.
And so it's about the, you know, the bonds that form.
And I also see the second half as
being kind of a reflection of that
underground world.
And that
especially in the Bella Vista chapter, you have, again, a community of people
that have thrown together, not necessarily because they want to be there, but
and again, there are rules, just like in the pool, there are rules
and both are confined boxes really of a box.
It is a concrete pool and you have a box which is a care home above ground.
So I kind of wanted to compare these two worlds.
-Yeah, I and I think that
the, the group of swimmers are, for the most part,
described by their habits in the pool.
So so we don't know their names
and I
and I suspect that many of their fellow swimmers don't know each other's names.
There's always the person who's, you know, maybe goes too fast in lane two.
And then the swimming pool closes because a mysterious crack
is found in the foundations
which throws everybody's lives,
everybody of these swimmers lives into,
like, what are we going to do?
Because we need to swim.
Which, of course, begs the question, are you a swimmer?
-Oh, well,
you know, I grew up in in Southern California,
so I did you know, I went to the beach every day in the summer.
But that's a very,
I mean, I never was a lap swim in a pool, but so I but I did grow up
feeling very comfortable in the ocean, in the water.
And I did junior lifeguards.
And I just swam a lot. (giggling)
But I was never you know, I was never a
competitive swimmer at all, but I just swam because it was fun.
And then.
My thirties
I began to swim
at a local pool in New York City, and that was the first time I'd ever swam laps.
But I
loved it.
It was just really...It was
such a different experience of being in the water than swimming in the ocean.
It was just, you know, you're in the same lane every day.
You're staring at a black line.
And yet it's very kind of quieting and meditative.
And I also just I really just enjoyed the
the really odd array of people that went there
and as well as a scene in the locker room, you know, the women's locker
room, it's just one of those rare segregated spaces.
And that was its own world, too.
So yeah, but then I stopped swimming
many years ago also, so I don't I don't do that anymore.
But it is a place that I, you know, that
the water is a place that I have spent a lot of time
in my life and I'm very comfortable in it.
-So the first part, the first half of "The Swimmers," which is set it
swimming, is told from the first person plural point-of-view.
And the second half of the book
at Bella Vista
is told from a different point of view.
"You" you do.
And and it's really about, I read it is really about a mother
and a daughter who are now faced with who
as probably all mothers and daughters have had their conflicts
but are now faced with certain things that they have to deal with together.
-Yeah, I mean, life is finite, right?
I mean, it does come to an end. And I think that
it's easy to
ignore that for a long time until, you know, catastrophe strikes
or the beginning of the end begins with the onset of something like dementia.
But they are forced to deal with each other in a finite amount of time
and in a confined space.
So everything in a way so that what you're saying,
that being compact, that's, that's another way of compacting things.
I mean, the pressure is greater.
-Yeah.
Um, I always, I, not
every novel is or short story is autobiographical,
but I know from my own experience of writing a novel that you as the author
are, are in it in one way or another,
even though that character is
I mean, in my novel, none of the characters are exactly me,
but there's bits and pieces of me and the various different characters.
Is that is that true, do you think is that
does that statement resonate at all with you?
-Yeah, I think I mean, my first novel was really not about me at all.
It was something going to happen to my mother and her family.
So it was
in that way removed from myself.
And my second novel was even more distant from me.
-Right, right.
-And this is the one that
is definitely closest to me.
Yeah.
And I felt
I think another reason that I use the second person is
because I kind of find it unbearable to write in the first person.
You know, I just I needed a little bit of distance
from the me character
and the you voice is a way to just somehow, aestheticize of the whole experience.
And when I was looking at.
-Yeah, yes. Did it always was it that way from the beginning? The "you?"
-No, actually. Diem Perdidi was always written from
the very beginning in that second person voice, which I actually love.
-I love it. I love it, too.
-It's a fun voice to use, right?
It is very, very fun.
But the last chapter I tried from the first person, you know,
is to try also try focusing it more on the Alice character rather
than on the daughter.
I just tried it many different ways.
And then finally I, you know, I thought, Oh, well, why don't I use the voice
like in the Diem Perdidi chapter.
-Right, right. Yeah.
A neurologist
friend of mine read this book and said that,
that your description of the care home
and what was happening to
the mother was so right on.
He said he'd never read anything that told the truth about it better than this.
-That's so interesting because I thought I was really exaggerating things.
Not that I didn't thinking I was just
describing reality straight on,
I thought I was really hyping it up and making it so.
That's very interesting to hear.
-Yeah. Yes, he didn't.
He he he also thought it was just an amazing
an amazing novel and very true.
The daughter is a writer who feels extremely guilty
in her life because she's moved away and she has her life.
And, you know,
there are mother-daughter issues, as we all know, mothers and daughters.
I have two daughters myself, so I know.
And I was a daughter. I definitely know that.
And you're
a writer and you live in New York City and you grew up in Southern California.
But it's not a picture of you.
I mean, you distanced it in many ways,
which was that a conscious decision or did you?
-Yeah.
I mean, I,
I took
you know, I drew from my own experience, as
you know, as the daughter of someone who was ailing from dementia.
-Right.
-I took bits and pieces, but some things it completely inverted.
So I would never want this to be read...
-Yeah, yeah.
-Because many things.
Are you know, are not true.
-Yes, and I think that sense of that inverting the truth is what,
you know, the best writers do
or else you're going to write auto fiction, which I'm not a fan of.
-Yeah.
I mean, for me, everything has to be in the service of the narrative of the story.
-Right.
Right.
So I see on your wall.
It looks like a bunch of notes.
Is, is that like work in progress or what does it serve?
-Yes, it's
and like I was saying earlier, I have another wall to my left
and another, you know, cardboard hanging over a shelf over there.
But these are notes for
just different things that I'm working on.
And I wish I had more walls in
my apartment.
And I think I work very visually.
I mean, it's very, you know, very kind of tactile.
You know, I can if I'm
working on one scene or thinking about one thing, I can
just, you know, gather all the notes for that
that scene and just put them in one place and kind of look at what I have.
And and often I'll just forget that I'd written something down
and I'll be walking past and I'll look at something and be, oh,
you know, I wrote it about a few months ago and isn't that interesting?
That it completely slipped my mind.
So, you know, so I guess it's just I write down
what I think are interesting things that I might want to return to and I just
stick them on my wall.
-Was that how you've always worked?
-When you were working on your first novel?
-You know, actually, on my first novel idea, I was living in a different apartment,
but there was a small I guess it was like kind of
like a walk in closet, like as you were going to the bathroom.
And so I but I just worked in there
and I didn't have any windows or anything, but I just stuck stuff.
I, you know, I was renting,
so I just taped stuff up to I didn't write about paint or anything
and it was like, like living inside my brain.
It was kind of great.
So yeah, I think for "The Buddha in the Attic,"
I used index cards more and not
so much the notes.
-Uh huh, that's right. Oh, no.
I was just going to say that
my husband, who is a Buddhist
when we lived in a bigger house, used to meditate in the linen closet.
So, I can identify with your walk in closet during the writing there.
-On top of a mountain...a linen closet and everything.
Right.
Wherever you are, you are.
-It was it was pretty weird the time we had an overnight
guest who, you know, opened the linen closet to get
a washcloth, I believe, or a towel
and saw him meditating.
That was very cute.
What do you read?
What do you like to read? What kind of books?
-Oh, well, I have I mean, I read the first two years
of the pandemic and I was just loving and reading a lot of
Rachel Cusk. Are you familiar with her work?
-I am, yes.
Yeah.
-The whole "Outline Trilogy" is just truly amazing.
I, you know, even though I write semi humorously, I don't read.
I mean, I love Julie Hecht.
-Uh huh. Yes, me too.
I love it.
Yes, "Do the Windows Open" is my favorite.
Yes. With that has the line
in the in "Do the Windows Open" where she says
it is true that the dentists have the highest suicide rate
among other other physicians... not high enough, in my opinion.
The character says I yes, I love Julie Hecht.
-She's great. I mean, she's just brilliant.
I think she's really one of the best.
Yeah.
And I mean, I like Marguerite Rawalt too, although I haven't met her recently.
When I was
first beginning to write, I was reading a lot of Hemingway.
I think you could probably see that in "When the Emperor Was Divine."
I was really impressed by
his short stories, by the Nick Adams stories, particular.
But and now and I mean, I always read a lot of nonfiction
just from my research.
So I write a lot of
memoirs about alzheimer's. But
yeah, but I always like to be reading something, you know.
It's great if it feeds me.
I mean, yeah, it really does.
Some of them readers, I mean, some writers, I
guess don't like to read anything at all, I think while they're writing.
-Right.
-But I feel like it always helps, especially if I'm kind of stuck.
-Well, you have I think when like writers say, I, I,
you know, I don't I don't read fiction when I'm writing fiction
because I don't want that voice to get in my head.
But you have such a distinctive voice that that it's
I can understand why that isn't an issue for you.
-Oh, yeah.
I mean, although, I mean, I guess
like Hemingway was, I mean, it was definitely in my head, you know,
but I guess maybe I feel like "The Swimmers" is probably
a voice that's
closer to my real self rather than a constructed voice.
I feel like the voice that
I used for "When the Emperor was Divine" was more constructive.
Just a voice that I, you know, that I tried on and used.
But but I, you know, I'm I'm open to influence.
I don't I don't mind that.
-Yeah, good. Are you working on something?
Are you always working
on a new book or a story or whatever?
-I'm always working on something, but I don't always know.
I mean, when I finished,
"When the Emperor Was Divine," it took me about a year of just sketching
out different scenes.
I had no idea what I was going to do next.
And then and then with "The Buddha in the Attic," like I said,
I did go to those swimmer stories, but more with the idea
that I just need to write these stories
because they're really fun ideas, not the beginning of my next novel.
And now I'm working on something, but
I don't really know what it is yet, you know,
if it's fiction or nonfiction, but.
You know, but it's, itt's a little
too early
to say what it is.
But I am working on something.
And I always it's really a nice feeling to be working on
something when your novels just come out because it's, it's a very.
weird, disorienting time.
-Yeah. Yeah, I it is.
I know.
And waiting for the reviews and yeah.
It's just a difficult time.
What, what would you write with nonfiction?
Would you would you write the same?
Would you stay in the same subject matter,
do you think or and don't share it with if it's too soon?
I mean, don't worry about just say, I don't know, whatever.
-I think I mean, I could say yes in a way.
Yeah, yeah. But.
You know, I would.
I'm thinking more about contemporary times.
-Uh huh, uh huh.
Has the recent anti-Asian attacks,
has that influenced your thinking
about what you want to write?
-Short answer: yes, completely.
-Yeah. Yeah.
It would be very hard for it not to, especially with for a writer
as as sensitive as you are.
Before we we stop, I just I just have to say,
with "The Buddha in the Attic," that that first chapter
of the picture brides coming over
is so darn powerful.
I mean. Oh, my gosh, Julie,
I that that I, I don't know.
That should have been published separately as a short story somewhere.
Was it?
-It was in Granta. Yeah. And the,
the middle chapter also was published
in Granta. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
-Yeah.
If you had written nothing else beside that, that first chapter,
you would still be just a terrific, terrific writer.
And I just can't recommend your, your books highly enough for, for our viewers.
So thank you. Thank you for.
-Thank you so much.
-Thank you for
being you and writing the books you're writing. And
and good luck with whatever you're working on.
I, for one, will read it very enthusiastically.
Thank you.
-Thank you.
Thank you.
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