An Interview with Jonathan Safran Foer

West 10th: Based on your experiences as an undergraduate student and now teacher, what challenges have you found young writers face?

Jonathan Safran Foer: All writers face the same challenges, in a sense—how to work in a kind of void; how to work without any kind of immediate peer group or regular feedback; how to be your own judge and your own boss. That’s something that young writers share with very old, experienced writers. Young writers are maybe unique in that they’re writing into a different culture than has ever existed before, a culture that’s probably more skeptical of writing and the arts and probably less receptive to it also, so that’s a unique difficulty.

West 10th: Is there any particular piece of advice that you’d offer?

JSF: Not exactly. Writing is something that, in a way, eludes advice. But Joyce Carol Oates, who was a professor of mine, once said that energy is that most important quality for a writer to have. I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant when she said it, and I’m still not exactly sure, but what I take it to mean is that from the sentence level, the level of word choice, to the level of a career—how you move within books and between books—it’s very easy to get depleted, to feel tired, to get jaded or lazy. To really do it properly, to stay with it, to make a life of it, you have to keep mining your own energy. There wasn’t any advice in there about how to do it, just that this is what you should expect to be the most difficult thing.

West 10th: How are your roles as a teacher and a writer related? Have you found a relationship growing out of your experience as a teacher now?

JSF: Everything is interrelated—my role as a teacher, my role as a father, my role as a citizen—whatever it is, they all interact with my role is a writer. Writing is a particular expression of life, a way of looking at experience, so one really nice thing about teaching is that you’re constantly around ideas. Excitement about writing is contagious. When you’re left on your own, in a room, it can sometimes get hard to muster. When you’re around people who are excited about it, it’s much easier.

West 10th: Does your experience of writing in New York or being a writer in New York influence your work?

JSF: I guess I don’t find it a particularly strong direct influence. I don’t find it irresistible to write about New York, and I don’t even necessarily feel any strong identity as a New Yorker, even though I choose to live here and wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. I think I’m lucky in the sense that my life in New York is peaceful and comfortable, and I’ve had peaceful and comfortable periods of life elsewhere. If I were living in Iraq or who knows where else, or in a different time, then I might feel a different necessity. I don’t think New York influences my writing all that strongly—except in the sense that it doesn’t. It’s not constantly infringing on my imagination.

West 10th: Do you consider Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close to be post-9/11 literature? Is writing different in a post-9/11 world?

JSF: Well, we won’t know for a really long time. We have all sorts of ideas about what’s important or what literature is. In ten years and twenty years, who knows what people will think about the books we write now or what books will be read? I didn’t think of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in those terms when I was writing it. When I write, I never think of my writing in terms like those. It’s much more intuitive—it’s not intellectualized. I find it much more expressive or organic or imaginative. I think a mistake that’s sometimes made is thinking that writers and reviewers or students of literature think in the same languages. In my experience, they don’t. I know a lot of writers do like to write reviews and essays about literature. I don’t. There’s an old saying, which I find myself saying a lot, which is that a bird is not an ornithologist. Just because you do something, doesn’t mean you’re a student of it, or know why you do it, or can talk confidently about it.

West 10th: You were quoted as having said, “finally having a writer-president—and I don’t mean a published author, but someone who knows the full value of the carefully chosen word—I suddenly feel, for the first time, not only like a writer who happens to be American, but an American writer.” Do you think that this identity of “American writer” will inform your work from now on?

JSF: I don’t think so, actually. It’s one thing to feel a certain way, it’s another to have those feelings guide your actions. With writing, I don’t even feel like I have the luxury of that sort of change or flexibility. I rarely feel like I’m choosing between good alternatives. I write what I write because it’s the only thing that can seem to work in a given moment. I don’t know, maybe it will creep in somehow without my being aware of it. But it would have to be that way. It would not be because I suddenly feel a different relationship to America and want to incorporate it.

West 10th: What are you reading right now?

JSF: I’m working on a non-fiction book, so I’ve had to do a ton of reading related to it. Otherwise, I tend to read things that people recommend—things that find their way in front of my face. Someone just gave me a book called, The Holocaust is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes [by Avraham Burg.] But it’s not exactly pleasure-reading, or representative of my reading in general. There aren’t stacks of such books on my bedside table, that’s what I mean.

West 10th: Who are your literary heroes?

JSF: Kafka is probably at the very top of the list. Bruno Schulz. Yehuda Amichai. David Grossman. Saul Bellow. Those are a few.

West 10th: How long did it take you to write your first published novel, Everything is Illuminated?

JSF: I’d say about two-and-half years or so.

West 10th: Did you ever imagine it would be made into a movie?

JSF: I didn’t even imagine it would be made into a book, to be honest. I didn’t have much of an imagination about my writing. I guess there were questions I didn’t ask or things I didn’t think about. I don’t know if it’s because it was too exciting or because that would have required too much confidence, or confidence I didn’t have, but I didn’t really think about it at all.

West 10th: Did you like the movie?

JSF: There are things I liked about it; there are things I didn’t care for. You know, it’s very different from my book, as it should have been. But that makes it hard as the writer to have any kind of normal relationship with it.

West 10th: What do you consider to be the quirkiest part of your writing process?

JSF: I guess it’s quirky to call oneself something and to do it well so rarely. I feel like if I do ten minutes of really good writing in a week, that feels like a pretty good week. Can you imagine a doctor who said, “I was only a good doctor for ten minutes this week?” That would not be a practicing doctor. People rarely believe me when I try to convey how hard I think writing is and how poorly I’ve been doing it. But that’s a very strange thing about the profession and something I’ve noticed a lot of other writers share.

Jonathan Safran Foer is the best-selling author of Everything Is Illuminated, which won numerous awards, including the Koret Award for best work of Jewish fiction of the decade, and the Guardian First Book Award. His second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, was a finalist for the IMPAC Prize. Foer joined the NYU Creative Writing Program faculty in 2008, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.