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-Hello and welcome to Book Lust. I'm Nancy Pearl.
My guests today are Jennifer Habel and Chris Bachelder,
whose new book is called Dayswork,
and I have to say it was my favorite book of 2023.
Jennifer, Chris, thank you so much for joining me today
to talk about your book and what you're reading
and what you're writing and just a whole bunch of literary --
a literary half an hour. That's what we should call this.
So --
-Thank you for having us.
-Oh, you're welcome. I have two questions.
The first one is, how did you describe the book to your agent,
your literary agent, and how did he or she
then describe it to the publisher, Norton?
The editor at the publisher. How did she sell it?
-We're both mystified by that -- no --
because I think it was a challenge.
Yeah, well, Chris, I think you first wrote to Molly about it.
So how did you describe the book?
-Yeah, so this was complicated by the fact
that we were looking for an agent.
We were looking for a new agent
and trying to acquire somebody and attract somebody's interest.
So this is what we had to attract people's interest.
And it's a difficult book to describe,
and it's a difficult book to introduce to the marketplace
in certain ways in terms of its relative plotless-ness
and in terms of its strange form and its strange subject matter.
So we were sending it around to some agents
and seeing if we could get some interest.
And it's a tough thing because you want to prepare them.
You want to prepare the agent for what's coming.
But you also don't want to just kind of kill it
before they see it. You don't want to say,
you know -- it would be my tendency to say,
"Oh, I know this is super weird."
You know, you don't want to kind of set it up like that.
So, just kind of try to explain
that it's a, you know, a pandemic novel
and a woman who's become obsessed with Herman Melville
and making her way through the pandemic,
trying to take stock of her own life
by sort of taking stock
of Melville's life, and leave it at that.
And we were lucky enough to end up working
with Molly Atlas at CAA now. And the book was much weirder
then than it is now in its initial form.
She was just really game. You know, it's a perfect person
to find the book and to work with.
She was interested in what we were doing,
saw some potential for how it might change,
and was able to pitch it to Matt Weiland at Norton
in a way that -- I don't know how she did that,
but in a way that got Norton on board as well.
And she also had a couch.
She had been offered a couch, Herman Melville's couch,
so she had that to talk to us about.
And her father was involved in this, in Dayswork,
in an interesting way.
He had commissioned the biography
that Elizabeth Hardwick wrote on Melville.
So she had some personal connections and she was game.
-I do remember our editor
saying that he so well recalled Molly
calling him with an impassioned sales pitch.
So she worked some sort of magic.
I don't know what she said, but we're grateful
to her and grateful to Norton for taking it on, for sure.
-I think it's a perfect publisher for the book
because their books are so diverse in the sense of --
you know, you can't predict, like, and say,
"Oh, this is going to be a Norton book."
You know, and -- yeah. Very interesting.
I know I talked about this book a lot.
One of the things that I do in and around Seattle
and wherever is, you know, do a series of, you know,
talking about ten or 12 books to an,
you know, a literacy fundraiser or things like that.
And, you know, this was a book --
usually books are pretty easy to describe.
I mean, like Chris, you know, The Throwback Special,
you can say a group of men
who are basically strangers to one another
except they get together once a year to reenact.
I mean, that's a pretty elevator-pitchy kind of thing.
But when I would try to talk about Dayswork,
I would say, "Now, when I describe this to you,
you're going to think this is probably the weirdest book.
You know, and it doesn't really --
you know, and you're going to finish it
and, you know, many of you are going to love it,
and many of you are going to go on
and read Moby Dick after you finish this book."
And then usually there was an audible gasp
in the audience from people. Like, "How could I possibly --
you know, why would I read Moby Dick?"
And then I say, "And it's going to be difficult for you
to explain to anyone else why you loved the book so much."
And so, you know, and I've heard from people who have said --
I mean, at least two people who are,
you know, one a good friend and one my sister, you know,
both of whom I told about the book
have gone on to read Moby Dick.
And, you know, I don't have my sister's, you know,
thumbs-up or thumbs-down, whatever.
But the man who read it,
it was on his list -- your book and Moby Dick
was on his list of the best books of the year.
So, all right. Now, my second question,
although I think we'll go back
to how to talk about this book, maybe.
My second question is -- and this has come from actually
that man who, who, who loved the book
and then ended up loving Moby Dick,
which he had never read before.
He said, "Why is it called a novel and not a memoir?"
And you must have gotten that question.
So how do you deal with that?
-The origin of the book was me attempting
to write poetry about this.
So it sort of started there. And then that was not working.
And then Chris and I started working on it together.
I thought, "Maybe it's nonfiction."
But then Chris said, "You know, it really seems to be about
this voice that, you know, is coming into play here."
And that's really sort of fiction.
You know, it's a study of this narrator, in a way.
And actually a lot of the stuff --
well, I wouldn't say a lot. But a good portion of the things
that are said about the narrator
and her husband are actually made up.
So I think it has the feel that it's memoir, but actually --
for example
Chris never went down to the basement to quarantine.
So I, you know, the couple is based on us
is not the same as us.
And I don't think we were really trying to tell an actual truth,
I guess, in writing it.
I think it tells a kind of a truth,
but it's not the truth of actuality.
It's more of maybe the truth of the spirit of our relationship
or something, if that makes sense.
-We did, you know, have some days
of discussing genre. You know, early on,
I think I was saying, "This is not poetry."
And then the nonfiction question did come up.
There's so much quotation, and that's all,
that's all of course, nonfiction and not made up.
But it just seemed to be -- it was a voice,
and it was Jennifer. But it wasn't quite her.
And we were both building that voice together.
And it was this narrator's attachment
to this material that seemed like --
that made it novelistic in that way.
And I think, you know, I think Jen's right.
It sort of tells the truth of our marriage,
but the conversations are made up.
And much of the things that happen in the book are made up.
I mean, it's an interesting question.
If you sit together and have a conversation in the morning
and put it in a book,
in a sense, you've had the conversation, you know?
Like you're making it up.
It's artistic, but it -- I have thought about that.
In a sense, we did have these conversations.
They were just in the service of the book.
-So Jen, you write -- you're a poet.
And you write, among other forms of poetry,
a form called a cento.
And when I -- at first I'd like you to explain it cause
you would do it better than I would.
But I was very reminded of those poems of yours
when I read Dayswork.
So could you talk about what a cento is?
-I basically think of it as a poem that's stitched together --
it uses other people's words and stitches them together
to make a new poem of sorts.
And I've always been very interested in quotation
in writing.
And, you know, as I thought about, like,
how did I get started as a writer?
Really, I kept a commonplace book where I copied down
other people's writing that I loved.
And I really think that was probably the first way
in which I was almost practicing to be a writer.
And I remember in graduate school,
we had to do a year-long project on just something,
some craft element we were interested in.
And I did quotation, just studying how you could use
other people's words in your own work.
And so moving into making those centos
that were entirely of other people's words was,
in some way, a culmination of something I'd sort of been
practicing and experimenting with for a lot of years.
But it's hard. You can't just -- you have to find a way
to transform it into something of your own, you know.
And for every one of those centos I've made,
I think I have ten that were failed, you know,
sometimes using even the same source materials.
And usually for me, it involved finding a form in some way,
like transforming the form of the poem
to create something that reflected me in some way.
But I think I've just always been in love
with the way people sound,
you know, when they speak and on the page.
And so a lot of Dayswork, I think,
also has to do with my sort of affection and love
for how various people in the book sound
and trying to bring them into this larger thing.
-I just think the magic trick of that poem,
and then what we were trying to do in the book too,
is you get the words,
the wonderful way that people speak and write.
But you also get the quietly or implicitly --
behind the scenes, you get a sense of the narrator
or the person who's manipulating or arranging or curating this.
So, you know, if it's going well,
you get both, you get the wonderful --
you get the quotation, and then you get, you know,
the protagonist underneath it all,
who's revealing herself, you know, kind of subtly
by how she arranges this material.
-Yeah. And one of the biggest struggles in this book
was how much the narrator would speak herself.
And we really worked and struggled with that proportion
and heard consistently from people
that she needed to talk more.
So that was really our -- our major revision
was bringing her in more. Yeah.
-I think your explanation gives me --
it makes a little clearer to me why I love this book so much.
Because what I love when I read are characters.
But it's mostly, I think now,
voice and the way the language is used.
And maybe for me, one of the best parts of this book
are all the quotations.
I think that's what got me thinking about,
you know, your poetry, Jen, the Robert Haas poem,
which the narrator uses about Melville's son --
oldest son, I believe.
I mean, that's something that just --
that I've, you know, thought about.
I, too, kept a commonplace book of quotations, which are now --
because I'm so much older than you all --
that are falling apart
because I've thumbed through them, you know, so long.
So are you still doing that? Keeping the commonplace book?
-I do. Not as, you know,
regularly as I did when I was younger,
but I still do that.
I have notebooks. And, you know, when I was younger,
I used to have these beautiful, like, art sketchbooks.
And I had like nicer handwriting
and was much more self-conscious about it.
Now it's in these, like, 69-cent rolled notebooks
that are just tossed around the house.
But, yeah, I still do it. I imagine I always will. Yeah.
-Yeah. I remember copying down,
I think it's a G.K. Chesterton poem called Lepanto.
And it's, like, pages and pages and pages.
And I remember in college, just trying to handwrite,
you know, all of that because all we had --
I mean, we didn't have -- it's much easier with computers.
But it's more meaningful when I think when you write it.
So that was one thing that I thought that the book made me
think about was that cento and you being a poet, Jen.
And then, Chris, one of my favorite books ever,
also, is The Throwback Special,
which, although it's probably have a subject
heading in Library of Congress
or wherever that it's about football.
I mean, I would describe it as pretty much a --
it's a fabulous character-driven novel.
And you've made each of the characters in it
who are men who come together once a year
to reenact a football play.
You don't have to even know anything about football
or like football or love football to love that book.
What you have to love is character-driven novels
and great writing.
And that's what Dayswork reminded me of, too.
Did you see --
I mean, is that the kind of book that you like, too?
Character-driven with great writing when you're a reader?
-Yeah. Absolutely.
Well, and let me say thank you for those words.
That's really, really kind of you and means a lot to me.
But, yeah, the -- and I had never thought about it before.
But this idea of gathering a lot of people together,
which is in the hotel in Throwback Special,
but that's what we've done in Dayswork, too:
just gather, you know, create a space
where these people can gather and speak to one another.
But, yeah, I think I've -- for me, writing is about,
because I'm probably not going to get involved in projects
that are very propulsive at the plot level,
at, like, causally linked action.
You know, I mean, I enjoy movies and books like that
and wish I had those skills, but I don't.
So it's about how can you create dynamism or how can you
create energy or propulsion if you don't have it
at the level of plot and causation, you know?
And so it's a tone.
I think it's tone and it's just careful,
precise writing and this interplay of voices,
you know, in kind of episodic ways.
So I hadn't thought too much about the connection
between The Throwback Special and Dayswork,
but I do think they share certain things.
-Yeah. I mean, just -- you both as writers
and how that's represented in the way Dayswork
is played out I think -- it just was fascinating to me.
So who's the big Melville fan? Did you both --
is that something that drew you together
that keeps your marriage strong,
is this love of Melville, of Herman Melville?
Because I have to say, I myself was assigned Moby Dick
in the tenth grade, and I did not read it.
I couldn't -- I just found it totally uninteresting.
But I still got an A in the class,
so I feel like I accomplished something.
-Well, you know, in a way, neither of us.
I mean, we both had read Moby Dick before writing this book
and had read some other Melville.
We both, I would say, love Bartleby, have like,
just, just came into this
just loving Bartleby separately and together.
But really what happened was I came upon an article
that was written by Jill Lepore
about the composition of Moby Dick
and Melville's time in his farmhouse, Arrowhead.
And it highlighted the work that his sisters did
to help him write Moby Dick, and his wife.
And I became fascinated with that, basically,
with the family that lived with him
while he was writing Moby Dick.
And we used to live in Western Massachusetts.
So I think I was also drawn to this idea
because of having lived there and loved that area.
So I actually initially started researching the women
in Melville's life, his sister Augusta and his wife,
and thought that I might write something about them.
But sort of quickly, I, you know,
just got sort of overtaken by reading
about Herman Melville and thinking about him.
So really, you know, it was the biography of Melville
that was the entry point to this project
more than a love of his work that preceded this.
Although, you know, I am a great fan of Moby Dick
and have gone back and reread it since writing Dayswork.
And that was -- it was a pleasure to just read it.
During the writing of Dayswork,
I avoided reading a lot of Melville's fiction
because I thought I would become overwhelmed
with the desire to quote his writing.
And it would, it would just sink everything, basically.
-Yeah, I had written about him a little bit
and taught him, I realized, and he had been in my life.
But if five years ago, you had said, you know,
"In five years, you and Jen are going to collaborate
on a novel about Herman Melville,"
it would have seemed the most astonishing thing, right?
It wasn't like our lives were -- in terms of collaboration,
I think our lives were moving that way.
But in terms of like, working this hard
and this long on Melville would have been a surprise.
I think Jen got into it. I got into it.
People talk about the Melville vortex.
You fall into it.
He attracts these kind of people, throughout history,
people who kind of lose their lives and their minds to him.
So that happened to us a bit.
But I think we were also just really interested in him
as a case study of the working artist,
you know, and the case study of somebody
who, like, is it worth it? Was it worth it for Melville?
He wrote Moby Dick, but he was miserable
and he made a lot of other people miserable.
That interested us. We don't have to have the answers,
but we were interested in exploring it.
And he just became this way for us to do that,
for our narrator to take stock of her own ambition
and her own life by, you know, in an outward way,
by tackling Melville. But, yeah, it was a surprise.
Yeah. I had always liked Melville, but I wasn't --
and I will say, I think this kind of cooler approach
that we had to him is good in a way.
People really lose their minds about Melville.
And they want to defend him,
and they want to advocate for him.
Right? Because there's some unsavory things in his life.
And I don't think our narrator --
I think our narrator is a little bit more distant.
She's appraising him. There are things about him
she finds tremendously wonderful,
but there's things she's troubled by.
I just don't think Jen or I ever felt like,
"Oh, we have to protect him.
We have to protect his reputation."
-One of the things that I was struck by reading the book was,
as you said, how many people, like, loved Moby Dick.
Toni Morrison, for example.
You know, I wouldn't -- for some reason,
maybe because I had not loved the book enough to finish it --
I mean, how could all these people think --
how could all these people just absolutely adore this book?
And I thought, too,
his friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne was fascinating.
And I loved in the book, you know,
the way you refer to one of the biographers
who certainly fell into the vortex as "the biographer."
"The biographer."
You know, my sister, when I last talked to her said,
"Well, I don't -- who is 'the biographer'?"
So I had to say was kind of explained
at the back of the book and all of that.
Do you think you'll go on and --
do you think you'll ever do another collaboration?
-Yeah, it's funny that you ask that.
We we are experimenting with writing sort of a companion book
to Dayswork, which is from the husband's perspective,
although not dealing with the same exact period of time.
And it's very early stages. So we'll see if it works.
But it's very different than Dayswork.
It's different formally, and it's not research-based.
But what I you know, we're sort of thinking of it
as like a Mr. and Mrs. Bridge kind of --
-Oh, I was just going to say that. Yeah. Yeah.
-Yeah.
So, yeah, I think we're going to keep going and see
if we can at least do one more book together.
-Wow, that's -- well, I can't wait.
And I really want all the viewers of Book Lust
to go to the bookstore, go to the library,
and check out Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel.
And Chris and Jen, thank you so much for coming by
and doing this Zoom interview.
And I hope when you come to Seattle,
I can show you some of the bookish spots around.
That would be lovely to meet you both in person.
So thank you.
-That would be great. Thank you, Nancy.
-Thank you so much. Thank you so much.
Real pleasure.
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