One Drink Book Club | Anything is Good by Fred Waitzkin

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to another edition of the One Drink Book Club. Today we're discussing the novel Anything is Good with the best-selling author Fred Waitzkin. Anything is good is a compelling story of a brilliant man raised in an upper middle class household in New York

[00:00:22] who falls into homelessness and ends up spending 20 years on the streets in Florida. Fred, welcome to the One Drink Book Club. Thanks for inviting me. I'm happy to be here. I finished the book last weekend and I really enjoyed it. It gave the reader a unique look at

[00:00:38] life as a homeless person. But before we get into that detail, I just want to talk about what we're drinking tonight since it is the One Drink Book Club. I don't know if you brought a cocktail

[00:00:48] tonight. I'm going to disappoint you big time. Let me tell you what happened. I mean, first of all, I'm a beer drinker and I thought that was going to be disappointment number one.

[00:01:00] But I drink a beer every day of my life because that's what my dad drank and it became part of my life. And also, I'm a lifelong fisherman. So every day when I come in in the evening,

[00:01:12] whilst the boat, I drink a beer. But tonight, frankly, I was so tired because I was up at four o'clock in the morning list like working on a video that we made for this book.

[00:01:24] And so I got a nice coffee because I just figured a beard put me to sleep. So forgive me. If we talk again, I promise you I'll drink a beer. That's my drink of choice. I'm sorry. Well, that sounds good. Well, what were you fishing for?

[00:01:38] Believe it or not, I'm a Marlin fisherman and I started off as an eel fisherman when I was 10 years or 11 years old with a dock in Great Nook, Lula Island. And I started

[00:01:49] fishing myself on my own boat when I was 13. And I fished my whole life. My wife and I would take first of all, we used to go out and out boards and fish for Marlin, believe it or not.

[00:01:59] And then we were both a little further along in our career. We bought an old 42 foot hadirist and we took fantastic trips with our family to the southern Bahamas. And we participated in tournaments. We caught a lot of big fish. But we don't do that

[00:02:13] anymore because my grandson who I adore, who's 12 years old, his name is Jack Weitzkin, who's a vegetarian. It finds the idea of sports fishing and pooling. So I gave it up to him. I gave it up. Wow. Well, that's, I mean, that sounds fabulous. And what a neat

[00:02:30] way to kind of do things with your wife and family. Well, I did make a cocktail tonight. And what I did was I researched cocktails that were popular at the Fountain Blue

[00:02:42] Hotel in Miami. The hotel plays a part in the book and is kind of a touchstone as a way for the the main character as well as his friend that they both remember it. And so I made a drink called the

[00:02:57] Poodle Room, which is basically a twist on the Clover Club at its vodka, a strawberry, coriander syrup, lemon, egg white and mint. So wow, sounds wild. I figured, well, there was another drink they had called the Dirty Little Secret,

[00:03:14] which I thought also held some appeal just since Ralph was so dirty in this book. It would kind of go with things, but I'm not a big martini guy. So. And also, and also the Fountain Blue

[00:03:27] had a lot of dirty little secrets. I can promise you. I'm sure. I'm sure. So, so let's talk about the book. The book's based on a true story about your life and your childhood friend Ralph. What made you decide to turn this story into a book?

[00:03:42] Between books is always a tough time for Fred. You know, when I'm working on a book, I know who I am. And when I'm finished writing a book, I'm wondering what I should write next.

[00:03:55] I'm not quite sure who I am. And, you know, I'd finished writing a book and I couldn't figure out the next book to write. And then about the same time, within months of one

[00:04:05] another, I lost my two closest friends in New York. They passed away and these guys that I loved, death, and guys that I'd have lunch with every two weeks and sort of like the emptiness was

[00:04:15] profound in my life. And I thought about giving Ralph a call. I didn't know whether he was alive or dead. I had spoken to him for three years, but I did know that he lived in Southeast

[00:04:24] Florida in a little Section A department, you know, a tiny little hardly more than a room. And I called him up and he was there. And we started chatting a little bit.

[00:04:34] And I asked him if he would tell me about his life because I didn't know much about it. You know, we were very, very close in high school, best friends. But then the other years,

[00:04:43] I was mostly out of touch with him, occasionally in touch, mostly out of touch. And that phone call became scores of phone calls. And the story he told me was one of the most

[00:04:55] amazing stories I'd ever heard in my life. So that's where the idea for the book came. It really was amazing. I live in the Washington, D.C. area. So I've seen a lot of homeless

[00:05:05] and walk into work. You'll see the same people over and over again. They kind of have different corners where they either they're panhandling or otherwise. And I've often wondered, what is the transition? Where were you at some point in your life when you ended up here?

[00:05:23] What does that look like? And then the other thing is, you know, you have a very basic look at them. You don't know what they're doing during the day at night and what their actual lives look like.

[00:05:37] And so I thought it was really interesting to see how Ralph had a routine. I mean, he had friends or acquaintances, but he had kind of the normal things that you would have,

[00:05:50] I think, in any kind of life. But then he even had a job of sorts that he gave himself as kind of a counselor to other homeless people and he had almost do office hours it seemed like. And so

[00:06:02] I thought, I mean, when it was just really fascinating. And when you heard his story, what were the kinds of things that really surprised you? What made you go, wow, I had never thought about that or that I had no idea that that existed?

[00:06:17] So much. So much occurred to me. I mean, for one thing, you know, when you read the Fred in the book and Fred is always is often a character in my books. He's a counterpoint to Ralph

[00:06:29] in the sense that in the sense that Fred Fred's an author, you know, he lives a fairly conventional life. He has a wife, he has two children. He loves pro basketball. He loves pro football.

[00:06:41] He didn't have much time for Ralph. In other words, when Ralph was a homeless person, Fred wasn't much interested in him. In fact, he thought that Ralph was wasting his time living as

[00:06:48] a homeless person. He thought of Ralph sitting on a bench in a filthy place doing little other than that. And so in that sense, Fred is a character like most of us relative to the homeless people.

[00:07:01] You know, we see people, I mean, in this in the city of New York now, what I've read recently even said about 200,000 homeless people living on the streets. But you see them and you

[00:07:11] don't see them. I mean, you walk past them and they're like the furniture of New York City. So what did Ralph showed me? He showed me that there was a subterranean world functioning where there were friendships, where there was violence, where there was hunger,

[00:07:25] where there was joy, there was a joy of music, where there was falling in love. It was like there was a world underneath our world that I didn't know there was

[00:07:33] then it existed and it blew my mind. And it's in my nature as a writer, whatever I'm writing about to learn a lot about one of the books that I wrote years earlier was about Gary Kasparov,

[00:07:44] the world chess champion. And I wrote his biography and I didn't know beans about chess. I mean, my son was a great chess player for sure, national many time national champion. But I didn't know anything about chess. I mean, except that I didn't know anything about chess.

[00:08:00] But I'm pretty good at studying something, learning how to translate it so that I can describe it to you so that you get it. In other words, in that book about Kasparov,

[00:08:10] I was able to render the game in such a way that you could feel it in the tips of your fingers. You might not be able to feel so you could play the blues on the board,

[00:08:17] but you could feel what he was trying to do. And that's what I tried to do with Ralph's world. I tried to present the world of the homeless to you and to myself, to my style.

[00:08:29] It was interesting to see how he clearly was a very smart guy and he tackled some of the problems in a way that a smart person would tackle them. But without using any of the resources

[00:08:42] that you or I might have at our disposal, what's the show naked and naked and afraid and they dump you in the water with nothing? I've seen that a few times, right? That is essentially what he was trying to survive in. I mean,

[00:08:55] when he got kicked out of the last home that he had, he didn't even have shoes on. No money, no shoes and his glasses were broken. It really was starting from zero. Literally nothing. Right. And it's interesting from what angle how the mind works. I can relate

[00:09:17] to it myself. I'm not to say that I would be Ralph, but I can relate to it myself because certain things that a philosopher knows, he was a brilliant philosopher. I mean,

[00:09:26] Saul Kripke, who was his close friend, was one of the two great philosophers of the 20th century. And there are few people that could speak to Saul Kripke about Maudet logic. Ralph was among them. Though he was really at the highest end of this intellectual pursuit, this esoteric

[00:09:40] intellectual pursuit. But because you're very good at one thing, doesn't necessarily mean you're good at something else. So although he was phenomenally good at talking about philosophy and writing philosophy, it didn't mean that he knew how to function in the world

[00:09:56] in the way that another guy might be able to function in the world that never studied academically, anything. And so when you took this guy Ralph and you put him out into the homeless world,

[00:10:06] he was like a baby. I mean, he really needed to learn everything in order to survive. He needed to learn where to go to the bathroom. He needed to learn what he'd have to do

[00:10:16] to wash himself. And for example, finding food was amazing. I mean, I don't know if you'd like those chapters about finding food, but that was an art form in itself, right? But finding the dumpsters and the tall dumpsters and figuring out how to when to go,

[00:10:30] that the police weren't there, but then that the food got dumped, you know, in a more recent period. Oh yeah, there was a whole schedule. I mean, it actually reminded me of fishing. The ways you go out and catch fish is you got to know the tides,

[00:10:43] you got to know the when it's going to happen, what are your best odds. And he clearly developed those skills just to get, you know, basically dumpster dive. And you could see that Ralph was

[00:10:54] the philosopher in that because he couldn't go into the dumpsters himself, but he could psych it out. He could figure out which dumpsters were the safest to go to, how to get into them,

[00:11:03] how to get out. But, you know, he figured it out and the guys in the park ate well for a while until the police cracked down on them. And, you know, it was quite remarkable how these guys

[00:11:14] survived for years and years. You alluded a little earlier to the fact that he had a sort of career. He became kind of a lay psychologist. He wasn't a psychologist. He had no background in it.

[00:11:24] The people that lived in the park and the various parks they lived in quickly perceived that this guy had an understanding of life that they didn't. So they came to him for answers and he gave them hope, almost like a religious figure or say,

[00:11:38] and he did this for years until he met the girl. He clearly had an ability to listen and was completely non-judgmental. I mean, he just seemed that his whole life, like he just

[00:11:48] didn't have a bone of judgment in him. And so I think it was safe for people to talk to him because he wasn't going to criticize them. He wasn't going to take them to task but would

[00:11:59] listen to them. And also, as he described it to me, was a profound experience for almost people in the park because most people didn't care about hearing one another but he cared. And just that

[00:12:09] was a healing element of it. Just to be speaking to someone, not necessarily that he was going to give the recipe to live a better life because even while he was helping people,

[00:12:19] he reflected that it was very hard for anyone to get off the streets once they're on the streets, which is something that I've observed myself now since I wrote the book.

[00:12:27] I'd like to think that I don't think of homeless people as furniture the way that I did four years ago. This involvement with Ralph has changed my life. I mean, there's a homeless lady that lives in

[00:12:36] my park and the park across from my house on 6th Avenue. I mean, it's utterly remarkable. Vivian, she lives on a park bench. Now when I say she lives on a park bench, she lives on the

[00:12:48] park bench in the winter when it's 10 degrees below, she's living on the park bench underneath a green blanket. In the summer, when it's 96 degrees, she's on the park bench. This astonishing idea. I mean, think about that. I was reflecting this morning actually with a

[00:13:06] lady named Sherry who looks in on homeless in the area. I was asking her a hypothetical question. If you're living your life on a bench covered with a black in the heat or in the cold or

[00:13:17] in the rain and that's your whole life, living on the bench, is life worth living? It's an interesting question, isn't it? I mean, are you sure you'd want to live that way if that was

[00:13:26] it? If there was nothing else except living on the goddamn bench? I don't know that it would be. And I think that the being heard thing is interesting. I've often thought that because

[00:13:36] you learn it as a defense mechanism as you're walking by people who are panhandling. You learn to not engage and to basically ignore them because if you engage then it's a whole interaction that you have to extract yourself from. And so sometimes it's easier to just eyes forward.

[00:13:56] And I've thought that it would be unbelievably bizarre if you're a person who is constantly talking to people who act like you're not there. And how much would that take out of your soul, essentially, where you would almost wonder if you even existed or were you invisible?

[00:14:15] Because you would talk to people all day who'd never acknowledged that you're speaking. That's a great point. I hadn't thought of it exactly like that. It's soul robbing. It really is. I mean,

[00:14:27] it must be profoundly debilitating. It would be hard to maintain a real sense of self with that happening all the time. It's a great point. It's a great point. Well, one of the things in your book and Ralph's story I thought was really interesting was

[00:14:40] this relationship with Jenny, who was a Chinese woman who was much younger than him, who didn't speak English, was kind of an artist in a way. I mean, she was a dancer and she clearly

[00:14:51] had some issues because she had kind of this pretend daughter and imaginary daughter who knows what that was born out of, what kind of trauma created this imaginary person. But they had this quirky kind of bizarre relationship, but it really was a real relationship. I mean, they were

[00:15:11] together. They were caring to one another. They helped one another. Was it hard to write as Ralph about that relationship? Because at that point in the book, the narration is from Ralph.

[00:15:23] And I would have a hard time even... I mean, it's such a bizarre relationship and it would look so different than the relationships I had that I have a hard time writing about,

[00:15:35] or writing about it from the first person. Let me tell you the secret about when I was about a year and a half into this book. Well, first of all, let me back up a little bit. I mean,

[00:15:45] I wrote this book differently than I'd ever written any other book before. I mean, in my prior books, I took time off to go on vacations with my family, to watch football, to play sports

[00:15:59] with my kids, and then I'd go back to the manuscripts. My first novel took me 10 years. When I think about that now, I think it's preposterous. In fact, it upsets me. I should have written

[00:16:09] it in three years. It took me 10 years. But with this book, I wrote it without a break, and I finished it in less than two years, which might not seem so fast to you, but for me,

[00:16:19] to write a whole book in less than two years is really moving. Also, I've become a faster writer, and I've decided that writing fast, which is something that Hemingway and Jack Kerouak did, has something to be said for itself because you discover things without thinking about them.

[00:16:36] And if you're thinking about everything you write, you're missing at a whole level, which is below the surface. But if you're writing quickly, the stuff just comes up. Then you go back and rewrite. Anyway, I was a year and a half into writing this book,

[00:16:49] and all of a sudden, I felt the cold freeze of fear because I didn't know how to end it. I didn't know how to end it, and I was really confused. And one night, I got into bed,

[00:17:02] started to fall asleep, and all of a sudden, I saw what the next scene at the edge of my sleep. I saw what the next scene was, and I always have a little pad behind my bed at night.

[00:17:14] Or if I'm riding my bike, I have a pad in my pocket. I turned around and I jotted down the scene. And in my office the next day, I took out the little piece of paper and I tapped up the scene.

[00:17:26] I went to sleep the next night, and I had this pre-dream of the next scene, and I wrote it up. But the next four months, the next four months, I dreamed this in the entire ending of the book. Everything that you read came to me either

[00:17:40] before, just as I was falling asleep or just when I was waking up in the morning. It was magical. It was magical. And so the issue of Jenny, which you brought up,

[00:17:53] really blew my mind. Because when I had the idea, when it came to me in this dream vision, that Jenny would have a baby that wasn't really a baby that was an illusion. I thought no one's

[00:18:05] going to believe this. But after two days, I believed it. Now it was it. In the follow-up to this, did Ralph ever find out what happened to Jenny? No. But again, let's just, for the sake of ethereal honor, let me point out that this

[00:18:25] book is not completely a nonfiction book. In other words, it's my style to write, like for example, I'll be writing about two characters, right? The characters will go here and then they'll go there. And they probably win here and there. And then I'll take them somewhere

[00:18:40] else. So not everything that you're alluding to actually happened to Ralph. Well, that's fair. One of the things that came up in the story is when Ralph first started dating Jenny was prior to that Ralph had nothing in terms. He had no possessions. He

[00:18:59] didn't really have anything of value with him. And once he immediately was with Jenny, he found himself to be a target of other more aggressive people who were homeless in the

[00:19:14] camps or in the parks because he now had something they wanted or that he had some sort of, not that she was a possession, but he was tied to something good. And I thought that was such an interesting concept which would make it incredibly hard

[00:19:30] for anyone to get off the streets because there's no halfway point. You can't accumulate a little wealth. Okay, I've saved up $200 and now I have a deposit on the top. Impossible. Impossible. Yeah. You are either all, you're totally homeless with no resources or you're not.

[00:19:51] And there's no kind of middle-class homeless or upper middle-class homeless. It doesn't exist. I thought that was really interesting. I talked about this for days with Ralph because I wanted to understand it. And he explained to me

[00:20:08] that while he was a lay psychologist living in one of several communities, he had a little bit of power, a little bit. He said nobody has a lot of power unless they're physically devastatingly strong. Then they have more power.

[00:20:23] But he had a little power because he was in elder and he was respected. Once he became involved with Jenny or if he had become involved with Jenny or if he had a girlfriend in that environment, the power would leave in a second, particularly if she was attractive

[00:20:40] and he would be dealing with a predatory war and to exist he had to get out of there because there would be no way that he could hold on to Jenny. Impossible. She'd be taken away from him even by guys that seemed pacific, according to Ralph.

[00:20:54] And of course there are a lot of guys that aren't pacific at all. So we had to escape with Jenny. We had to do it. That was, I thought, an eye-opener for me because when you do, if you do it all,

[00:21:07] put yourself in the position of somebody homeless, I think what people who are not homeless do is say, okay, what would be the steps that I get out of this mess?

[00:21:20] Maybe I could find a job and then I would get some income and then I would find an apartment and then I would have an address. And then I would, you know, you have these things in your mind

[00:21:29] of what you might do. And that simple passage talking about what his situation was with her essentially blows that theory out of the water. And it helps you or it would help me,

[00:21:44] as I think about this, be less judgmental of the people you might see in the streets who you think, geez, you're young, you're able. Why are you in this position? It really showed how tough it is to get out of things like that and get out of there.

[00:22:02] On the other hand, when you think about it, the fear that drove them out of that park together helped to make the life that they lived under the fishing pier a kind of garden of eating, even though it was a preposterous place because of the juxtaposition.

[00:22:17] Sure. Which was part of the architecture of the book. I found myself thinking that life under the pier seemed kind of cozy and kind of nice. I'm sure it would not be for all the reasons that you would think of with trash and

[00:22:30] the smell of the rotting, the rats and the bait and everything else. But it did. There was a feeling that of all the places you could be homeless, that was not so bad or

[00:22:43] not as bad as some people. Particularly if you were in love with a wonderful woman. Yeah, exactly. Jenny was the one who used the phrase anything is good, which you then used as the title. And she did it when she was learning English and she was

[00:22:59] trying to say everything is good. But she then said anything is good. I thought it was such a great passage and a great way to title the book. Did that come to you in a dream? Where did that come from?

[00:23:13] It came to me a dream also. That whole section did. The idea of it was that, I mean, in a simplistic sense, he loved this girl so much. You have to realize he was a

[00:23:25] philosopher of language. That's what Saul Kripke did in the highest level. He was a philosopher of language, but he was so charmed by this girl and the way she spoke English, which I mean, it was Chinese English is what she spoke. Right.

[00:23:40] There was some strange mixture between the two that he fell in love with her English. This philosopher of language, he was trying to teach her how to speak regular English at first, but she won. Right. He loved the way she spoke.

[00:23:55] So that became their language. That became their love language. But then she resented it. You know, she wanted to learn English. Yeah. But anything is good is an interesting idea also.

[00:24:05] I mean, after I came up with it, I did a little research. And if you type in anything is good into the internet and you read what Alan Watts, the Zen Buddhist philosopher used to say about,

[00:24:16] he actually did a little animated cartoon. I think it's cold. Anything is good. I'm not sure about that. But I think it's what it, and the idea of it is, is that the way Alan Watts talks about

[00:24:26] it is, you know, you think about some terrible thing that happens to you. And then you go down the road in life and you find out that leads you to something else that's really rather

[00:24:35] wonderful and vice versa. Something terrible can happen in your life. And you find that it brings you to a beautiful element in your life that you hadn't expected. So you really never know.

[00:24:47] That's what the idea of anything is good came from. There is a song by a band called Boydog Hondering that probably came out in the 80s and it's called Thanksgiving. And the lyrics basically

[00:25:01] say, Thanksgiving for everything that went wrong because if it hadn't gone wrong, I would have never met you. And I always thought it was such a charming song and a charming, so Ralph was clearly

[00:25:12] a genius in a lot of ways. But he didn't also, he didn't know how to make his way in the world. He clearly was missing some genes and somebody always took care of him like his parents took

[00:25:24] care of him, his sister took care of him. He had a girlfriend that took care of him kind of when he was in the early 20s. And even the cousin that he ended up living with down

[00:25:33] in Florida took care of him for a few months before he kicked him out onto the street. Do you have any feel for, was there a diagnosis with Ralph in terms of was he on the spectrum?

[00:25:45] What I mean, he clearly was missing an ability to take social cues and to just kind of the practical side of living. I can't answer that question precisely. Number one,

[00:25:58] I don't know the answer to it and I'm not a psychologist. But for sure, there are a lot of smart people that if they're thrown into dire circumstances could drown. In other words, even academic people that if they're cared for or they have a strong backup system,

[00:26:20] maybe a wife to guide them a little bit or and they're doing brilliant work in philosophy or psychology or English literature, they can function. But you take them and put them in the homeless situation and they could founder because there's a lot of people that don't know

[00:26:35] how to survive unless everything is coddled for them. So I think for sure Ralph hit a low point when he became homeless. I mean, in the earliest days of the homeless sections of the book, when you read it, you're reading about a guy that was in a lot

[00:26:52] of trouble. But then he learned how to function over time and he learned how to function very well over time. So there was a period of time where someone would have diagnosed him as this or that.

[00:27:06] But I'll tell you this right now, Ralph is, we were best friends in high school and we're best friends now. I mean, he's brilliant again and he's normal. I don't know who the hell is

[00:27:17] normal. He's sort of normal. I mean, if he was on the program now and you were asking questions, you'd be delighted by his answers. He's so smart. So I think there was a period of time at the

[00:27:29] beginning of the homeless period, soon after he got thrown out of the cousin's home where he would have been diagnosed as something. But now he's just a brilliant normal guy, older guy.

[00:27:42] Oh, good. Well, that's good to hear. I was going to ask how Ralph is doing today and also, I assume he's read the book, what did he think of the book?

[00:27:50] That's a great question. I have to tell you this. Long ago when I started writing articles for The New York Times, I was once with a friend sitting at a friend's house who was another New York

[00:28:01] Times journalist and he'd just written a profile on Tom Wolf, the author. And we were having dinner and the phone rang and it was Tom Wolf who wanted to respond to the

[00:28:15] profile. And he talked to him for 15 minutes and then he came back and I said, what did he say? His name was Tony Schwartz. He's the guy that wrote the Trump biographies by the way.

[00:28:24] And he said to me, you know, Fred, when you write a biography of someone, if it's a serious biography and they only love it, you made a mistake. You did something wrong. Now, I wouldn't say that exactly about Ralph's.

[00:28:38] I mean, I think if you asked Ralph, he'd say he loved the book, but it was extremely interesting to me to watch and read the book because when I was writing the book, I always try to make

[00:28:51] the story follow. In other words, it starts someplace, it gets to some place, and I guide it someplace towards the end if it feels real because I think that like a tremendously important part of writing is story. This is something I didn't understand

[00:29:04] as a younger writer. I think if you have a great story, you've got it made even if you're not a great writer. You're a very good writer and you have a great story,

[00:29:13] you've got it made in the shade. When Ralph read the book, I wrote the book with a sense of moving from the beginning to the end so that would hold together as a story. There

[00:29:21] were certain things I didn't put into it or certain things I did put into it. But when Ralph read the book, he read it sideways because he lived it. So he gets

[00:29:31] to page three and I'd say, what do you think? He'd be telling me all these things that weren't in the book because that's what he was thinking about. He read the whole book sideways, but

[00:29:41] I think if you were here, you would tell you he loved it. But it was great to listen to him. So you've been a successful writer for a long time. What has changed about your writing

[00:29:52] process as you've gained experience and perspective? You talked a little bit about it and writing faster. Yeah, big deal. I'm telling you, when I used to write feature articles for magazines, people really liked my articles, I think. But everybody knew

[00:30:07] that you couldn't give me too many articles to write because I was so slow. And I resented deadlines. They'd give me an article to write and work on it for seven weeks. And you can't run a magazine that way. But as I started to tell you earlier,

[00:30:23] as I've gotten older, I've discovered that my idea about that was wrong. That you get some of your best ideas by not thinking about it, by just letting it come quickly and writing as fast

[00:30:35] as you've been thinking. We'll go back and rewrite to make it as sculpted, to make it as perfect as you can. But that's one way in which my writing style has changed. I write much

[00:30:44] faster than I did before. It's also liberating. It feels good. Writing so slowly was an agony in retrospect. That's one way in which my writing has changed. Other than that, I don't know. I mean,

[00:30:55] someone else could say. You got a lot of notoriety and accolades after writing searching for Bobby Fisher from a creative standpoint. Did things get easier or harder for you after that? Did

[00:31:07] you feel more pressure writing the next book or the books following that? Or did you feel like, hey, I've got a really good one under the belt so I don't feel the same kind of pressure?

[00:31:19] You won your major, so to speak if you're putting in golf terms. Or did you continue to feel or did that make more pressure? It's a great question and I hadn't thought about it

[00:31:31] because it was a lot of years ago. First of all, I was thrilled that the book was so successful because I had never imagined that that would happen. But then I was destroyed because

[00:31:40] I was afraid to write something because I didn't think I could match it. I didn't think I could match it. And so I was completely jammed up. I don't know how long it was for a year and a

[00:31:49] half or two and a half or three years. So yeah, I thought at one point I'd never write again because I just thought whatever happened, I couldn't touch that. But it was a soft moroccan way to think. It really was because the success of searching for Bobby Fisher,

[00:32:07] and I'm proud of the book. I'm proud of it but it was lucky. In other words, I wrote the book and it sold a few copies. It wasn't a big deal. Then one day I was sitting in

[00:32:17] the living room with my wife and the phone rang and it was Scott Rudin on the phone and he said to me, Fred, I'm sitting in the car with Francis Ford Coppola. Do you know who that is?

[00:32:27] In my little living room in New York. I said, yeah, I do. He said, we want to make a movie out of your book. What do you think about it? What can I think about it? But that didn't

[00:32:37] didn't frankly define the greatness or the non-greatness of the book. That was lucky. In other words, it was something that appealed to them. They saw the potentiality for a movie. I think

[00:32:48] several of my other books were at least as good as that book. I mean, I believe that to be true. So I'm glad it happened but it gave me a lot of trouble. I had to grow away from it for a while.

[00:32:58] I reviewed on the show the most recent book about Harper Lee who had, she never came out with really another book. I mean, she was so frozen by the success to kill a mockingbird. It really kind of tanked her career. Not that I think everybody would say

[00:33:17] Harper Lee was very successful but it made it almost impossible to put out another book. I mean, there were a lot of reasons behind it but that was one of them. Interesting. No, it's profound. I can understand it. Yeah.

[00:33:30] I mean, what occurs to me ironically is that I have a few friends that relate that way in terms of marriage. They had a great marriage and then something happened in the marriage and fell

[00:33:45] apart. They never want to try again. It feels like they can't mash it. So they live in isolation and said it's for the next 25 years. I've seen that happen in life. I think that's something that can happen to you. That's really interesting. I would have never

[00:34:02] attributed it to kind of like a success, fear of not reaching the same peak again. Oh, interesting. It's also really sad. Very sad. Fidelity to a ghost in a way. Well, that's kind of a sad point to end the discussion but I really appreciate

[00:34:21] you taking the time for it. I really enjoyed the conversation and I enjoyed the book. I did too. I thought we had a great talk. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much. You're good at what you do. You're good at what you do. Thank you.