Michael S.A. Graziano is the author of the new novel Love. His many other books include The Divine Farce. He is also a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Princeton University, and he lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Q: What inspired you to write Love?
A: It can be hard to figure out what inspired a story. Sometimes, I start five or six stories as experiments, and only one of them catches fire and makes me want to finish it.
In this case, though, the inspiration is much more straightforward. I did a little experiment on myself, trying to learn how to draw portrait using pencil and paper. For three years I practiced every day, and was surprised by how much progress I made.
That experience, obsessing over drawing, even dreaming at night about putting graphite to paper and capturing facial expressions, turned into the story Love.
I realized that to draw a face, you have to love it. You have to wonder who the person is, what's going on inside his or her mind. Drawing is an act of love — but at the same time, it distances you from the person you're drawing. That was the core of the story. I wanted to write about that experience, and the rest emerged from that initial feeling.
Q: How would you describe the dynamic between your two characters?
A: The two characters in the story, the man and the woman, are definitely different aspects of myself. And as opposite as they are, they're also kind of the same person. I like that tension between their similarity and their contrast. The starving artist and the business mogul.
To make the point, imagine a sad, bored, middle-class person, with no adventure and no autonomy and no purpose in life and no hope anymore. That, you might say, is the third character in the story.
Now imagine that person fantasizes about being someone else. What might those fantasy roles look like? A romanticized starving artist? A powerful business leader? They both represent escape. They both represent self-determination. I think that's why those two characters work so well together. They understand each other at some level.
But the artist, being an artist, turns his girlfriend into an art project. And the business leader, being a business woman, turns her boyfriend into a financial project. That's probably not healthy for either of them.
Q: Did you know how the story would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: My stories are typically so rewritten and so rethought that there is no easy answer to how it evolved. When I first started writing down notes, I didn't know where it would go.
But once I understood the larger picture, I could write the whole thing. Certainly, when the opening sentences were written, the ending was already in mind. The story, at a deeper level, is all about the question: who is the artist and who is the art? The very beginning is obsessed with that question as is the end.
But art is love. It isn't some intellectual or elitist thing. It's falling in love. All esthetic joy in the world comes from falling in love. So the title is apt: the story is literally about love. And I knew that from the very beginning of the story.
Q: You write fiction and also neuroscience books--do you see any overlap between the two?
A: Writing any kind of book requires a narrative structure, so a lot of the problem-solving is the same, regardless of the topic. And maybe my work in psychology has influenced the way I understand people, and therefore the way I write characters.
But I don't think there's a direct connection between my science and my fiction. Sometimes I'm more inspired by the science, sometimes more by the fiction. These days, I find more of a connection to the fiction.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I always have a very large number of projects going on at the same time, and then survival of the fittest kicks in.
Right now, I've got a book of short stories that I'm very excited about. In an age when AI is taking over writing, and fewer and fewer people understand what it means for an actual human to practice and develop the skill of putting words together, I'd like to publish a book showing how my stories evolved from the age of 11 to adulthood. I think that's valuable.
I also have some science books in various stages of development. But we'll see what comes out.
You know how sharks are supposed to die when they stop moving? (Probably a myth.) I think writers die when they stop writing. So I'm always writing, and most of my books never get published. At least half of my books have never been read by anyone other than myself. That's probably how it should be!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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