At 63, George Saunders, a one-time geophysical engineer who emerged, in middle age, as perhaps America’s most celebrated fiction writer, finds himself navigating questions about who he really is. “There’s so many different selves bouncing around and they come to the microphone at different times,” he said recently, over the phone from his house in California. “At this point in my life, I look back and go, okay, what was the self that I most liked? And how did I encourage that self to come forward? And when am I at my worst? And why does that person show up? That idea that our moral presence in the world has to do with urging these better selves forward.”
This question of evolving selves is one of the threads holding together the stories in Saunders’s newest collection, Liberation Day. As in his past collections—including CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Tenth of December, a finalist for the National Book Award—his characters often find themselves inhabiting absurd fantasy worlds (this time around those include an underground amusement park, a dystopian human entertainment system, and a dark political protest organization) while navigating an all-too-real question: Why do we so often fail to be our best selves?
Much of Saunders’s work—his short stories, but also his nonfiction; his viral graduation speech at Syracuse, where he’s an English professor; and his first novel, the 2017 Man Booker Prize–winning Lincoln in the Bardo—has pondered that question. His answers are often both hilarious and deeply moving, and have won Saunders a MacArthur “genius” Grant and legions of fans. But Saunders’s true trademark is perhaps his compassion. He writes with a humanity that veers away from judgment and toward a deeper understanding of his characters’ lives. These days, it often feels like we’re living in one of his dystopias—our own Civil War land in bad decline. And so it’s reassuring to have George Saunders reemerge and guide us through the chaos.
GQ: What do you see as the animating idea holding these stories together?
George Saunders: From the paragraph level all the way up to the level of ordering stories, it’s mostly, like they ask at the optometrist, “Is this better or is this better?” It’s intuitive. The working assumption is that there’s something in me that comes out in that mode that’s smarter than if I’m aiming to do a certain thing. It’s like a rollercoaster: You get to the end and you’re not analyzing, you’re just sitting there with a kind of a crazy grin on your face.
But then when you look back at it, you must be like, “Oh, there are themes in there.”
One hundred percent. So why did I pick Liberation Day as the title? The book is thinking a lot about the phenomenon of being alive and uncomfortable. Then there’s that eternal human dream, that there will be a transcendent moment where we won’t have to feel alive and uncomfortable—we would just be alive. So [the stories] could be a series of people trying to get free and not exactly succeeding.
My first pass at that idea was that what’s keeping us unhappy is this dysfunctional attachment to self, ego and all that. But then as I was writing the stories, I noticed that these people really like being themselves. Certainly that’s true with me. I mean, I love the idea of, “Oh, I’m not attached to myself,” but jeez, am I ever reading the reviews. So maybe it’s just an acknowledgement: Let’s not be facile about this shit, you know? If you say you don’t want to have any attachment to your ego, that’s a really high-level goal. Let’s not kid ourselves. We do love ourselves. That’s why it’s so hard to break free. Again, that’s totally not what I was thinking of as I was writing it. But as I read it, each of the stories seemed to be about somebody who is trying to get liberated and then tripping up on their own feet.
Based on your recommendation on The Ezra Klein Show, I started reading In Love with the World, a memoir by the Tibetan Buddhist Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche that centers on a near-death experience. He has this line, “We are all the self-inflicted victims of mistaken identity.” That felt to me like a way to sum up these stories.
When I’m writing, that’s what I feel. You start with some solid identity: a grouchy old lady. Then in rewriting it, I’m trying to get those little moments of self-contradiction or humor. When you do that, you’re taking that original heading—grouchy old lady—and then you’re poking at it and particularizing it until it’s inadequate. Now you feel like you know her, then you might even feel like you are her. Suddenly, you see that you use language to make these broad indicators for simplicity, and they’re really useful, but they’re not true.
Theoretically, the advantage is that then the situation has more workability.
Like, if I think somebody is “idiotic Trump supporter,” and that’s it, well, I got nothing to do with him except ignore him. But if he’s “recovering cancer patient who is on the Internet too much because he’s lonely, but also he’s mean as hell,” I can sort of sidle up to that guy and find a way in, if that’s my goal… If I can think about him in that nuanced way, it’s better for me. I may not change his mind. I may have to push back in an angry way. But when I do that, I’ll have a fuller view of who I’m pushing back against.
I don’t think it’s a recipe for changing the world necessarily, cause the world is pretty freaking stubborn. But it makes me feel better to not be anxious and angry and hateful. I had a review one time where somebody said that I write better out of love than anger. That’s true. I think it’s true in terms of my personhood too. I would just rather be a little bit of a gullible schmuck who’s very affectionate than some proud, strong guy who holds the line. That’s just my disposition.
I imagine that you might become more attached to your identity when you have a public image, and when you’ve had some success.
One hundred percent.
So how do you give yourself some distance from what you might describe as the public persona that is George Saunders?
I think I’ve managed to avoid the first-order fuck-up just by having good manners. Because inside my head, there’s an incredible ego storm, and it absolutely heightens around times where you’re talking about yourself 24 hours a day and you’re hearing praise. I always say, it’s natural, it’s okay! It’s like if somebody ate a bunch of cheese and then said, “Oh no, I don’t get farty.” Of course you do! One of the ways of managing it is to expect it… And I know at some point it gets too much. Like at the end of this book tour, I’ll be just a little bit broken with self-regard. Then you just have to be a dumbass for a while. Stay home and be quiet and wait for it to wear off.
I reread your essay “The Braindead Megaphone,” speculating about the ways in which our media getting dumber might make collective society dumber, and was struck by how prescient it is. Have you revisited it recently?
Chris Hayes wrote an essay that mentioned that piece. I did go back and read it. I felt it was prescient, and I also felt like, “Oh, how sweet, you got it just wrong.” I kinda thought, whoever wrote that piece, he was on to something, but he was kinda like a drunk bloodhound: He was following it, but he was missing some other signals. I didn’t think the megaphone would be a person, or a movement. I thought it was just a tendency in our media environment.
I’m thinking of a sequel of some kind. These days, it’s a hundred percent true that the medium is the message. A given person standing there and information is coming in. That information has a motivation, an agenda, a profit motive. With social media, you have an agitation goal: to agitate is to engage. You have partisanship. You have all these things. So you end up with a fairly shallow mode of communication. Then you multiply that by the number of engagements that we have in that mode. So if you take a very shallow, superficial agenda-laced mode and you multiply it times 40 billion, then you have a certain effect.
Conversely—now this is where it gets a little naive—if you say, okay, let’s think of a novel which has the agenda of truth, beauty, whatever, and it’s carefully written over many years by one person, it gets deeper with each pass, it gets more empathetic with each pass, then you multiply that times a billion, that would be cool.
That’s not gonna happen, but I’m struggling with how a lot of the feeling of sickness that we have in our public discourse, in my mind, has to do with the mode and the frequency of communication. It’s like if you had somebody eating 30 bags of chips a day, and then you had 20 million people eating that number of chips a day, you’re gonna see something in the public health.
In that essay, you warn about elevating the literal over the complex, the materialistic over the spiritual, the banal over the intelligent. It feels like the delta between those things is getting larger. It seems like it’s getting worse.
I think it’s getting much worse.
So where are you finding hope?
If I’m being honest, it’s weird how dismal I’m feeling about things. But then I’m giving myself a pep talk. I heard this in some Buddhist context: The worst thing a human being can feel is despair. Because it just doesn’t do anything. It sidelines you. Also it dulls your appreciation of anything that’s good. As a 63-year-old, I’m thinking, okay, so I got 15 years maybe. So there’s a sense of urgency. And then going, okay, look, do you really wanna feel like shit the rest of your life because of these outside projections? Some of which are true, some of which are projections. I don’t. I don’t want to feel ineffective. I don’t wanna get to the end of my life and go, “Oh wow, for the last 15 years you’ve been a miserable, grumpy guy because of the news.”
On the other hand, I don’t wanna be somebody who says, “But we still have roses!” The honest answer is it’s ongoing. On a given day, if I can get up to the writing shed and concentrate for two or three hours, I come down feeling better. I think that’s not nothing. I think maybe because we’re so involved in distant news, we think it’s somehow not intellectually honest to concentrate on the beauty close at hand. But it’s a moral necessity that we allow ourselves to do that.
You’re 63 now. What are the big questions you’re asking yourself at this stage?
I’m noticing that I have a lot of different modes I can be in. I can be affectionate or present or grumpy, and that’s not a choice. It’s not a matter of willpower to say, “Hey, let’s be loving today.” [My wife] Paula and I went through a period where we were meditating three or four hours a day with this group. And that was amazing, and then we stopped. Now I’m noticing the difference [in myself], you know? So the biggest question in my mind is, after the tour, how do I wanna arrange my life so that that more affectionate person is reliably present? It seems to me like almost every other question is subsumed in that one, because if you’re at 85 percent present and affectionate, or you’re at 40 percent present and affectionate, those are two different universes. So I think that’s what I’m thinking about most: I’ve got x number of years. I can choose right now to start doing things that make me more affectionate towards the world. I oughta do that.
You and your wife, Paula, have been together for over 30 years—and you got engaged after three weeks. How did you know?
I don’t think we did. There was some kind of mutual attraction that had an element of, “I think this person can help me.” We both had that in our own respective ways. It was a real pull towards each other. Like any marriage, it’s had its ups and downs, and we had to figure out after that initial attraction who we were. For me, it was just that she’s really interesting. In every weather, she’s interesting. Even if she’s not agreeing with me, she’s really interesting.
In addition to being anxious, I’m also really defensive. So I don’t really want to hear much criticism. But with her, I learned that [her counsel] always benefited me. Once I learned to quiet that defensive voice and listen, she’s always right. That was a big step for me. Because now I can see defensiveness is just a bad habit that I have, at least with regard to her. So when she says something, I have a process of going, “Oh, that hurts.” And then, “Okay, well, hey, just stay there a minute or a week, and then I’ll see my behavior starting to contour to whatever she [says].” That’s a great gift, to have somebody who’s such a good guide. But also it’s a great gift to find out that you’re guidable. That you’re not as smart as you thought you were. I hope she has a parallel with me. But I don’t know. I think I got the better end of the deal for sure.
In your Syracuse graduation speech, you said, “Succeeding will take up your whole life while big questions go untended.” How would you advise a young person to think about success or ambition?
Well, I think they should do it. I give the speech to my students that it doesn’t seem high-functioning to have a really strong desire and then squash it. Especially if you wanna be a writer, you have to pretty much use all the energy sources that you have. Ambition is gonna be one of those. You always hear musicians say, “Oh, I started playing cause I wanted to get women.” And the response is, “Ha ha ha…” But I think that’s valid. If that’s a strong motivation to get you to play your scales, then go ahead. It’s very high-functioning to be in touch with and allow your different desires. You don’t have to live by them, but it’s just like hunger or thirst. If you were really hungry, what kind of person would say, “No, I’m not. That’s evil.” You’re just hungry.
And then, I try to encourage them to think that success and excellence are the same thing. Now, it probably isn’t literally true in the world, but it’s pretty close. So I try to assuage their anxiety by saying, trust me that, if you try to become your best self as a writer, your most unique, high-level self, then all that success will follow. Just assume that. Then, you only have one problem. A lot of students have anxiety about, “I wanna be a good writer, but also my social media presence isn’t that great.” I’m like, no, don’t worry about that. Just, just do the one thing. Be the best writer, the most unique writer you can be, and then have a little trust in the universe that it’ll do something for you.
That’s really helped me. I got to that place when I was young and success was not coming and I was getting older, and I just kind of put all my eggs in that basket. Like, “I don’t know if this is true or not, but it’s gonna help me to assume that if I write a great book or a good book, everything else will follow.”
How were you able to make that decision before you found success?
Well, for one thing, I didn’t have any way of doing anything else. I didn’t have any way of conjuring up attention for myself, except that one thing. After I wrote the story “The Wavemaker Falters,” I could feel that there was some power in that, that I hadn’t ever gotten before in my other work. It felt like I had to double down. Cause I was 30, or 32, and we had the kids and one of our cars had broken, and I was riding the bike to work. So it was like, okay, I don’t have the bandwidth to work the day job and write stories and try to make sure that those stories were popular or would be accepted. I just couldn’t do it. It’s like in those movies when the sliding doors are closing, and the guy’s gotta run across the room and fly through them. I had one chance—that door was closing ’cause of age and increasing responsibility, and I said, “Okay, I’m gonna try to kill two birds with one stone and write stories that are really innovative and trust that the world will get them.” It was more of a desperation move, really.
A theme that has emerged in this conversation is the idea of tolerance. Instead of judging your characters’ voices, you follow them. Instead of judging your ambitions, you use them. It’s almost a radical acceptance, that non-judgmental Buddhist thing. Is that fair to say?
It seems to me another way of saying that is to go, I would like to be in relation to the truth no matter what. So if you’re looking at your motivations, you can just go, well, what’s actually there? If you’re looking at a character, the voice comes out and instead of saying, “I don’t want that voice,” you say, well, what’s there?
That’s true for me even in teaching. When I first started, I thought, well, I’ll try to withhold a bunch of stuff so I can look cool, mysterious, and enigmatic. That was so much work. But to say, okay, no, I’m just gonna be truthful. If I have a bad day writing, I’m gonna try to use that in the class. Or if I’m teaching my story by some great writer and I don’t really get it, I’m gonna say that. It had a double effect. One, it’s so relaxing. There’s never any stress if you’re just trying to tell the truth. And it works as a teaching technique, because if you had that reaction, likely they had it too. When you acknowledge it, they relax and then we can all work on it together.
Way back with CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, I thought, say what you think is true, and let the world do with it what it will. In a story, too, maybe you wanted it to be this kind of story, but it’s telling you otherwise. Then the only play is to go, okay, I accept you and I’m gonna try to listen to you and get you what you need. As opposed to, I’m gonna roll you back and force you into the mode that I had in mind for you. That’s never gonna be original. The second thing might be.
You’ve brought up anxiety a few times. Is that something you’ve struggled with?
Yeah. And it’s not clinical. But it’s pesky. It feels like a monkey-mindedness. I just try to see it as, well, anxious is also alert, anxious is you care, and trying to work with it. Because anxiety is a great friend when you’re writing your story. You’re anxious that it’s gonna suck, so don’t let it. The anxiety can convert into verbal energy. However, there are times when it gets to be too much and, and then it’s an impediment. You never get to rest. Even at 63, you don’t get to rest.
Do you see writing as a spiritual practice?
For me, the spiritual practice is observing that when I’m writing a story, my mind flickers on and off in different places. Sometimes it’s just in deep concentration on the prose. Other times a voice will go, “This is gonna get into The New Yorker for sure!” There are so many different things that your mind can do, even in a few split seconds, in terms of motivation and intention and all that. So that’s interesting. You might attempt to say, “Cut it out, don’t talk about The New Yorker.” But actually you don’t have to. It goes pretty fast on its own and, and you’ll feel the mind go, let’s get back to work. That’s one way that I think it is a spiritual practice—just like rock climbing would probably be. You’re watching your mind and you’re noticing its traits, that it’s transient, jumpy, and variable.
The second way I think it might be a spiritual practice is what we talked about earlier. In my stories, when I first have a character, I’m often kicking her. I can be a bit sarcastic toward the person. Like in the story “A Thing at Work,” in this collection, I’m making fun of this lady who talks too much and is a little chubby. The reader gets on board and we’re making fun of it together. That won’t be a story. It’s a riff, it’s a little funny. So then the next move is to start boring down into her a little bit and trying to become her. That’s where I think that something interesting can happen. I donno if it’s spiritual, but it’s certainly more ethical. You’re saying, okay, I’m making fun of this person, let me not do that for a second and let me kind of go in her point of view. There’s something in that, that’s really good.
I’m not sure that it always exports into real life. I can be writing that story and somebody cuts me off in traffic and I’m just like, “I know their political party and I don’t like them.” But there are times where if I’m given a second to pause, I can kind of go, Oh yeah, wait a minute, let’s just do that fiction thing on that person. Imagine that what you’re seeing in them right now is not their full manifestation. And this thing that’s coming outta you is not your full manifestation. So slow down a little bit.
This interview has been edited and condensed.