Austinist Interviews Andy Greenwald

[Note: We had a wonderful but long interview. We cut out a few of our less inspired questions. Transcribing is tedious work, why do it if the results will make us look lame?]

Your first book was nonfiction and was very well-received. Why did you decide to switch to a novel this time?

Most of what I read is fiction, and I have a great love for certain novelists. I dreamed of writing a novel but I never presumed I had the ability to by any stretch. And I still sort of don’t. While I was writing Nothing Feels Good I spent a lot of time procrastinating and thinking of other books I’d like to write. I felt that in the last part of Nothing Feels Good, which deals with people’s online lives and diaries, I had only scratched the surface. I felt like I had not really been able to focus on the emotions behind the phenomena, how it made me feel and the vibe I was encountering online. There was more of a story there. I didn’t think I could write a novel, but I thought I could write this novel. I felt like this was a story I could tell, and also one that I really wanted to and needed to.

So both the plot and process grew pretty organically from your first book.

I’ve done it twice now, and I’ve noticed this is a pattern that I have. When I am supposed to be writing one book I will spend time thinking up another. It happened again when I was writing Miss Misery. But when I found myself procrastinating and reading people’s diaries online, I started to think, what if this went completely off the rails? What would happen if someone got so caught up in this that he lost his own life? It sort of spun out from there.

What did you spend your time procrastinating on during Miss Misery?

It’s a novel I’m hoping to do next called Bryce Jubilee. The main character, David’s best friend from Miss Misery, moves to LA. I want to do a story about Los Angeles, and that seemed like a good way to do it. Also, I realized that I’m a pretty happy person, and I have two books on my resume called Nothing Feels Good and Miss Misery. I want to write a book with “jubilee” in the title, or something equally celebratory.

If you’re generally a happy person, why do you choose to write books about broken hearts and emo kids? What is your connection to the topic?

It’s a strange one. The bands that I wrote about in Nothing Feels Good were not my favorite. In many cases they were ones I never paid much attention to until I started covering them for Spin. At first I was almost dismissive of the music. But when I got to see it in context – the kids, the crowd, meet the people around it – I realized that while the music wasn’t necessarily familiar, the emotions of young people are extremely familiar, probably universal. I think that teenagers, particularly in high school, are at a tough time in their lives. They start to reach out for connection, you want to define yourself but you’d like to do it with something bigger, so you become a mod or a punk or a goth, or you get obsessed with a movie or actor or band. You start to identify with it, and I really love that. And I like how the Internet, access to media, and different forms of communication had changed what it meant to be a teenager. So for me it was almost a sociological study.

Do you think that was different from the experience you had growing up?

Well, I am really glad I didn’t have anything like a LiveJournal because it would be humiliating now. But it’s hard to find subculture when you’re young, something that is underground that makes you feel cool for knowing about it. The Internet has really changed that. Here was a secret subculture that was also being offered to anyone. Not just the coolest underground kids but the majority of kids, the ones who go to Abercrombie but still get their hearts broken. Also, in writing the book I wanted to treat with respect the reality of how young people communicate. Which is say constantly, all the time, very fast paced. My day wouldn’t be complete without instant messaging, texting my friends back home, email, calling cell phones, checking up on people through their blogs. It bugs me when older people turn their noses up at anything young people do, dismissing it as silly or a fad, so much less serious than what they did. Just because this communication is more frequent and full of strange acronyms doesn’t make it less meaningful.

It is a strange dichotomy. Even though the communication is constant it is also intense, like everyone bleeding on the page with their blogs.

Yeah, and I do think it makes things more hectic. Teenagers are facing the same emotions, the same gossip at school, but then they have a second universe to deal with online.

How did those ideas evolve in Miss Misery?

I wanted to take a closer look at the distance between the way people are online and offline. Which to me is also the same difference between the way people are and the way they want to be. Because online you can sort of idealize yourself and your life, you can gloss over things. So I took three different types of people and tried to look at what their split would be, how it would play out. Also, what it is like to think you know someone when you really don’t.

Even if it is in this sort of hyper-modern context, where everyone is living online, you are exploring universal themes.

That’s what I hope. Just like there are a lot of pop culture references, a lot of music references, much to some critic’s chagrin. But hopefully that is just window dressing, just contextual. I wanted a sort of funny, fast-paced story that my parents and my grandmother could read, not get the references, and still connect to what’s going on.

But pop culture does play a big part in this book, and with your background in music journalism it makes sense. Why break away from that?

In the larger sense I would just like to be a writer. Music criticism was an avenue for me to get published, and it’s wonderful and I love it, but I would also like to be able to do other things. Hopefully this was a step in that direction.

What process did you go through writing this book?

On my birthday in 2004 I got a call from my agent that an editor who had gotten the synopsis and sample chapter just moved to a new imprint, Simon Spotlight, and got the go-ahead to do fiction. It was incredible luck and timing. So I sold the book on a proposal, which isn’t really common for novels, signed the contract in May, and had a few harrowing mid-twenties life experiences before finally sitting down to really write in October. At that point it had to come out, so I just wrote, pretty much uninterrupted, for five months. I finished right after the Eagles lost the Super Bowl. I figured, my heart is broken, but at least I didn’t have to go to Philadelphia for the parade, I might as well finish the book. So I got the last chapters out in a day and a half.

How do you think it turned out, are you happy with it?

Yeah, I’m happy with it. I feel like it was so much a part of my life for so long that it just had to come out the way it did. It is what it is. One of the things I learned from the first book was that no one is going to come and write a better book for you. You just have to do it and do your best and know it wouldn’t exist if you hadn’t done it.