Paul Auster on writing radical life changes and leaning into random chance
The prolific American author died on April 30, 2024 at the age of 77
As Writers & Company wraps up after a remarkable 33-year run, we're revisiting episodes selected from the show's archive.
Paul Auster was a prolific American author known for his quirky and inventive storytelling.
Auster died on April 30, 2024 at age 77, and leaves behind a legacy of 34 books, including 18 novels, several memoirs and autobiographical works, as well as plays, screenplays and collections of stories, essays and poems.
Eleanor Wachtel spoke with Auster on stage at the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival in Montreal in 2004, where he received the festival's $10,000 Literary Grand Prix. They discussed life-altering experiences and his newest novels at the time, The Book of Illusions and Oracle Night.
Radical life changes come up in almost all of your work, often reducing people to zero, to square one, to no resources. Apart from the inherent drama, why is it such a compelling subject for you?
It's very hard to answer this. I think every writer is the prisoner of his obsessions and for some reason, these kinds of stories compel me the most. I'm most drawn to them. I think it might have to do with some kind of trope, some metaphor about the course of life.
Every writer is the prisoner of his obsessions.- Paul Auster
When some of my characters really fall on hard times, they lose things — it's a kind of phantom death. And then they find they find a way to resurrect themselves. Often, not always. It's got to be that. But I don't really understand, to tell you the truth.
I think about it. I try to understand it, but I haven't really come up with a very satisfying answer.
Because even the epigraph of The Book of Illusions is from Chateaubriand, who says that 'Man has not one in the same life. He has many lives placed end to end and that is the cause of his misery.' What does that mean? Why misery?
Well, it's because in Chateaubriand's case. He really did have many different lives and fate, fortune, the twist of history, kept buffeting him from one place to another. It was very difficult for him to keep his feet on the grounds.
I think all these upheavals were a cause of misery for him — and so then he extrapolates and sees that, well, this happens to most people in one way or another. It's an unfortunate thing.
Your characters are always walking away from their lives. Have you ever been tempted to do the same?
No, not really. No. I'm just trying to hold on to the little life I have.
You and you and your family were in a car accident a couple of years ago. How did that change how you saw the world?
It just reconfirmed my knowledge of the fragility of things. It was a terrible business. I thought my wife's neck was broken. We really were slammed by a large van at a 90-degree angle.
It came right into the door where she was sitting. And the car was just wrecked. But miraculously, we were okay. We were taken to the hospital, but everything checked out and we survived it.
I don't know. Do you get nine lives? Maybe you do. I don't know. But that was one of them right there that day.
Well, I know another one that you've written about, which is when you were 14. And you were in summer camp.
Oh, the lightning story. Well, I think it was probably one of the most crucial events of my life. I think more and more as I look back on it that that's what formed. The way I see the world and that it was simply 20 boys going off on a hike in the woods at a summer camp and getting stuck in a terrible lightning storm. And the boy right next to me was struck by lightning and killed. I mean, he was this far away from me. I had never seen a dead person before, let alone seen someone die like that. And the utter arbitrariness of that moment has stayed with me forever.
And the funny thing is, it was only much later than I thought it could have been me — because I was so close to him it was just a fact of his sudden obliteration that was so horrible.
The utter arbitrariness of that moment has stayed with me forever.- Paul Auster
When you say it's changed your view of everything or affected the way you look at life, can you say how?
Well, I just mean to say that life is so unpredictable. You never know what's going to happen from one moment to the next. And you know, we're often walking along happily and and then, you know, a car slams into us and this is happening to people every day, all over the world. In little ways and big ways.
And there's nothing we can do about it.
No. Because, you see, that's the way reality works. We want it to be rational. We want it to have some kind of pattern that we can control. And to some degree we do, and to some degree we can, but not always. And that's why we have the word accident. I mean, there's a reason for it to exist.
Writers often talk about writing as a way of trying to assert some control over randomness and chance and accident. Do you see that?
No, for me it's just the opposite. I want to let myself go. I want to. I've spent my whole life trying to understand what I would call the mechanics of reality, what really happens, what goes on in the world.
It's so unpredictable as we were just saying, it's so difficult to understand because you're constantly surprised by things. So I tend to let myself go and I think my unconscious is what's really writing these books and the conscious part of my mind is working on the prose trying to make the sentences as clear and musical and efficient as I can.
But the stories are coming out of a place I can't even know where it is.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
