Michael Chabon: Unintentional writer; likes liars with dual reality; childhood trauma; male friendship; encyclopedic memory; spontaneous characters

“I’m not at all an intentional writer. I don’t plan. I don’t think about how my writing will strike the reader…So it wasn’t until Ayelet [his wife] read the manuscript that I realized it was funny” (1, p. 6).

“I’m interested in liars. I always have been…I’ve always been interested in people who say they’re one thing and turn out to be another thing. I don’t know why—it’s just a motif that interests me, and then they are fun to write. It’s very entertaining to write a character who you get to actually give two biographies to, or two realities, or more…” (1, pp. 13-14).

“His mother, Sharon, now a lawyer, and father, Robert, a doctor, lawyer, and director of a medical center, divorced when he was eleven, a traumatic event he has described as ‘the worst thing that ever happened to me’ ” (1, pp. 16-17).

“I seem to choose to tell stories—and it feels like the stories choose me—about men and their relationships and friendships” (1, p. 18).

“Encyclopedism is definitely a part of my family. First and foremost, there’s my father, who knows everything…and at times in his life has deliberately set out to master various branches of knowledge…That was extremely valuable to me, too. I read the encyclopedia when I was a kid for fun. And I read the dictionary for fun. I discovered that I had fortunately inherited from my father his memory for things like that…I just can’t help it, in a sense” (1, p. 19).

“In the case of Mysteries, it is, as he says, the kind of expected semi-confessional first novel, a narrator close in many ways to myself” (1, p. 20).

“Some characters come together, from their aches and sources of those aches down to their smallest particulars of speech and dress, very quickly and effortlessly. And once I have a good sense of them, I can sort of sit back and let them do what they do” (1, p. 46).

I plan to buy his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), which he started as a college student, then worked on in an MFA writing program: It was submitted for publication by the professor and became a bestseller. Chabon won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000).

1. Brannon Costello (Editor). Conversations with Michael Chabon. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2015.