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Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The latest novel from Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Michael Cunningham takes place on April 5th, 2019, April 5th, 2020, and April 5th, 2021. Fittingly, the novel is titled Day. The story centers around a family living together in a Brooklyn brownstone. There's Isabel, a photo editor who's feeling [unintelligible 00:00:32] in her marriage to Dan, a musician turned stay-at-home dad who wants to get back into songwriting. When we meet them in April 2019, both Dan and Isabel seem to have an easier time talking to and loving Isabel's brother Robbie than they do each other.

Robbie lives in the apartment upstairs and is still recovering from a bad breakup. He's a sixth-grade history teacher whose work includes reading preteen hot takes on Columbus. In his young life, he seemed destined for medical school. As an escape from his current life, Robbie creates a fake online persona named Wolfe, a doctor who has a decent following. Robbie/Wolfe posts new photos to Instagram multiple times a day. Also in the house are Dan and Isabel's two kids, Nathan, who's an angsty tween, and Violet, a perceptive and slightly anxious little kid.

The family dynamic already complicated in 2019 starts to fully unravel in 2020, and in 2021, the family struggles to deal with a massive loss and put themselves back together in the aftermath of their year of staying at home. Day was our January Get Lit with All Of It book club selection and we were thrilled to be joined by Michael for a sold-out crowd at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library last week. I began my conversation with Michael Cunningham by asking him what was helpful about writing a novel set over three days over a period of three years, and what was difficult about it?

Michael Cunningham: I was at least halfway through another novel when the pandemic struck, and I didn't see how I anyway could write a contemporary novel that did not involve the pandemic. There's no place in the world to set a novel that was not profoundly knocked out by the pandemic. The book I was working on, let's just say that if I had tried to introduce the pandemic, it would have felt like I was introducing the pandemic. Here we are at a slightly awkward party, "Oh, Godzilla, where did that come?" [laughter] Who would expect a 50-foot fire-breathing lizard.

I put that one aside and started this one, which got me right into the middle of the question, how do you write a novel about human beings, novels are inherently about human beings, and deal with a pandemic without writing a novel about the pandemic? Morning is the year before the pandemic, afternoon is at the height of the pandemic, and evening is whatever we're in now. [laughter] Where it's not the post-pandemic, but neither am I wondering if I really washed those bananas well enough. I almost think of it as the pandemic is a brick with a hole running through the middle and the story is a thread that goes through the brick and comes out the other side.

Alison Stewart: We have this nuclear family at the center, Dan, Isabel, their kids Nathan and Violet, and then there's all the satellites attached. Dan's brother, Garth, his complicated relationship with his reluctant co-parent, Chess, and their baby, Odin, Isabel's brother, Robbie, Robbie's alter ego that he writes on Instagram. Who came to you first?

Michael Cunningham: That is a good question. I think it was really these two married people, named Isabel and Dan, and, how do I put this? It's one of those marriages that isn't going quite badly enough to abandon and not quite well enough to be good. This is a difficult marriage to dramatize, obviously, but it's one of those things that I see in our lives so much more often than I see it in our literature. That was really where it began, these two people. Their characters are always pretty vivid to me right at the start, and here they are. Two kids locked in this, "It's okay, it could be better or it could be worse," and then comes the 50-foot-tall fire-breathing lizard, and what happens then?

Alison Stewart: How did you decide their professions? How did you decide Dan would be an almost-made-it musician and Isabel would be working in this industry, which is on the ropes?

Michael Cunningham: Yes, she's a journalist. She worked for a magazine. All I can say is work as important. I sometimes feel that some novels pay too little attention to the work we do. Like on old sitcoms, when our entire lives were at home, and then we took advantage for eight hours and did something, and then came home again. That's just not my experience of my life. I do account for what my characters do for a living and my only principle is it has to be something I could imagine doing.

Blessings on every single person who is a corporate attorney in finance, but those are not things that I would do. I really wanted to be a musician. I would so much rather be Josh Ritter.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Do you play any instruments?

Michael Cunningham: I play the piano atrociously, but enough to satisfy myself. I would never ever play for anyone else.

Alison Stewart: Everyone seems to love having Robbie in the house, Isabel's brother, yet she asks him to move out of the brownstone. What story is she telling herself about why Robbie's got to go?

Michael Cunningham: The story she's telling herself is the surface story. It's Isabel and Dan on one floor of a brownstone that Isabel and Dan have bought, and Robbie lives in this little apartment upstairs, and Isabel has to ask him to leave because they have these two kids, it's only two beds. How are you going to tell a contemporary New York story that does not involve real estate?

Alison Stewart: Real estate. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: You also think, beneath the surface of things, and I'm not quite sure how to put this. Isabel and Dan are both in love with Robbie. For Dan, it's a bromance. He's not secretly gay, and for Isabel, incest is really just not going to happen, but for each of them, in their own way, he is the ideal mate in part because he's there but unattainable. What she really feels terrible about, though she can't quite acknowledge it is, it's time for Robbie to get out of their lives so they can be free of this kind of attachment that is, on one hand, nourishing, and the other hand, is holding a prisoner.

Alison Stewart: Robbie winds up in Iceland. We asked our book club readers online if they'd ever been to Iceland, and several had. Someone DMed to us, "Stayed Valentine's weekend years ago. Winter days short, beautiful, and fun." Someone else wrote, "It was extraordinarily. Rough and beautiful. Lived in wild, at the same time sophisticated." Why did you choose Iceland to send Robbie to?

Michael Cunningham: I have been to Iceland, just like those two people who wrote in, and it is the most unearthly place on earth I've ever been. It's volcanic. The earth is black, but with these little thermal pools, the color of swimming pools at midnight, and then there are these grassy mountains with waterfalls that are coming down from the glacier on top of them, as long as the glacier lasts. I just wanted Robbie to go there. It felt like almost a halfway point between the Earth and some other ground. We should all just go to Iceland.

Alison Stewart: Okay.

Michael Cunningham: Can we just have a group trip?

Alison Stewart: [laughs] Group trip.

Michael Cunningham: Can the library arrange that?

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Robbie is always posting on Instagram, this fake account, this fellow Wolfe and he takes pictures and he doesn't really pay too much attention to whether it's the right time of year when he is posting. Interestingly, as he points out, nobody seems to notice or care. People are just more invested in Wolfe. Why is Robbie so invested in Wolfe?

Michael Cunningham: Robbie has been sort of looking for love in all the wrong places. I understand about that. Though I've been married for a long time. Anyway, not bad. [laughter] Enough about me. I love Instagram. I don't really like any of the others, but I just love it that you can tune into the lives of an infinite number of other people. If you follow somebody long enough, you can begin to see the discrepancies between how they present on Instagram and what you imagine their life-- This is a novelist slightly crazy thing to do, but I love being able to suss out people who live thousands of miles away who I'll never meet.

Robbie, after his most recent romantic disappointment, creates an avatar on Instagram and a non-existent person with photographs borrowed from other sources. What's interesting to me about what Robbie is doing is he's not creating some kind of superhero. This person, this non-person person who he has invented, he's named Wolfe, is what Robbie thinks of as a slightly better version of himself. A little more successful, a little more assured. It's him with the volume turned up just a little and the lights turned on a little brighter. He finds comfort in feeling this companionship with what he imagines to be his improved self.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about his sister Isabel who seems sad. One of the first scenes we have of her is crying on the subway. Why is she crying in that moment?

Michael Cunningham: Somebody, I forget who, once said of Isabel, "Hey, she's got money, she's got a job, she's got a man who loves her, she's got two children. What's the problem?" All I could think to say was, when social or whatever medical science determined that having those things equaled happiness, I just didn't read about it. I know it's a slightly shaky territory, I admit, but I feel like for Isabel, the question is, yes, it looks great. It's not working for you. You get to be not only unhappy about your life but unhappy about being unhappy about your life. Not that she's not a fun kind of girl.

Alison Stewart: We asked people in our book club, have they cried in the subway? Many had. Someone said, "Yes, when my best friend and roommate and I had a breakup." Who here has cried in the subway?

Michael Cunningham: Show of hand. Oh, look, yes.

Alison Stewart: Exactly. [laughter] I was to ask you next.

Michael Cunningham: Oh, my sisters and brothers.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting when you see somebody crying in the subway. You don't know whether to go help them or let them cry in peace. You know?

Michael Cunningham: Yes. Oh, no, I do. Also, it's something that Isabel is thinking of in that scene. Is this person all right in every sense, including, is this somebody dangerous?

Alison Stewart: What is Isabel's take on motherhood?

Michael Cunningham: That is actually a big part of what is making her so unhappy. She would be so horrified to admit this and this is so forbidden. She does love her children, but she doesn't really want to be a mother. She doesn't want to be that person. She doesn't want to be the one who always has to be there whenever the child needs anything. She does it, but not as willingly as she would like to.

Alison Stewart: Or organically.

Michael Cunningham: Organically is exactly the right word for it, yes.

Alison Stewart: I do love Violet. I do love her daughter Violet.

Michael Cunningham: Oh, God, the little girl, yes.

Alison Stewart: Violet is special. She's special-special. She has visions and she might see dead people and things. Does she actually have supernatural abilities?

Michael Cunningham: I leave that open. I think she actually does-

Alison Stewart: Me too.

Michael Cunningham: -but I find with forays into the supernatural, which I believe in. I don't want anyone who might read something of mine to feel like if you don't believe in ghosts and extrasensory perception or all those things, this book is not for you. I want to leave room for the people who are skeptical about it.

Alison Stewart: Dan had a rockstar youth, partied hard, went to rehab, got sober. He seems to really like being a dad.

Michael Cunningham: Oh, he does.

Alison Stewart: Dan digs being a dad.

Michael Cunningham: He very much does. One of the complications is that he and Robbie are raising the children together. That's a big bromance.

Alison Stewart: I thought that, that they were the two people in the book I was pretty sure were the two that loved each other the most.

Michael Cunningham: Yes.

Alison Stewart: The brother and brother-in-law.

Michael Cunningham: I'm interested in, I guess, almost everything, but certainly in bonds between men that are not essentially romantic or erotic, but are hugely powerful. That's these guys.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting that Dan is the one person who loyalty thrives during the pandemic. He really rediscovers himself. He connects with his music again. What does he learn about himself during the 2020 portion of the book?

Michael Cunningham: He learns that he wants to give it a go, that he isn't done as a musician. He wants to take back his early retirement. I think this is true of certainly anybody who does anything creative, and probably anybody who does anything. You have to do it in the face of all reasonable objections. You have to maintain a certain romantic relationship to reality. That's what Dan finds during that year.

Alison Stewart: Chess and Garth have this unusual parenting situation. Garth agreed to be the sperm donor for Chess. Then once Odin shows up, he's really excited about Odin. It just awakens something in Garth. Yet Chess is really reluctant to let Garth in their orbit. Why is she so reluctant to let this man be a father?

Michael Cunningham: The degree of involvement that he rather suddenly wants once the child is there was not the deal. That was not their agreement. Their agreement was that she would raise the child and the child would know him, but he finds that he wants to be more in the kid's life than that and she doesn't want that. Yet, it's hard for her to tell him. It's not that hard for her to tell him to get out of here, but then when he refuses to go away, it gets complicated.

Alison Stewart: He seems to evolve quite nicely over the book.

Michael Cunningham: Oh, yes.

Alison Stewart: At first, I was like, "Oh, I know this guy. I know Garth. We've all known Garth," but then, by the end, it was like, "Aw, Garth wants to try." He seems earnest and really wants to try, not like he feels like he has to try.

Michael Cunningham: I think if fiction writers have any kind of duty, we don't have many duties or obligation, whatever you want to call it, is to look at people very much including people who you think, "Oh, I know that guy. I know that woman," and show ourselves and then readers, "No, we don't. We don't know that person." They just signify in certain ways. It's what's irritating about writers because we're always essentially saying, "No, it's more complicated than that. Whatever it is, it's more complicated than that."

Alison Stewart: You are listening to my conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham at our January Get Lit with All Of It Book club event. We spent the month reading his novel, Day. We'll have more with Michael and some questions from our sold-out crowd after a quick break.

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Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC, I'm Alison Stewart. We continue my conversation with Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of the novel, Day, which was our January Get Lit with All of It book club selection. Thanks to our partners at the New York Public Library, 3,787 of you were able to check out and e-copy and read along with us this month. As usual, our sold-out crowd at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library had lots of great questions. We'll get to some of those in a moment, but first, here's more of my conversation with Michael Cunningham.

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Alison Stewart: Where do you go to observe people?

Michael Cunningham: Here. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Here. These characters feel like people that you've seen, that you have noted, "Oh, I see the way that gentleman walks. I see the look in that woman's eye."

Michael Cunningham: Right, yes.

Alison Stewart: Where do you go to look at the people?

Michael Cunningham: I have a studio like a block down from Washington Square Park.

Alison Stewart: Oh, genius.

Michael Cunningham: Which there's like this Blade Runner cafe, John and Deluxe [unintelligible 00:22:13], it's like half the people in the world seem to be there. I decided pretty early on that I would just go about my business and I see people all the time. We all see people all the time, but not to be looking at anyone or anything in terms of what I can pick up and use. It pretty quickly felt like the wrong lens through which to be looking at people and the world. I think I'm like most people, I see what I see, we all see what we see, and the big difference is then I go home and try to write about it.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] The thing I thought when I think about this book and one of the major themes is this idea of change coming whether you like it or not. Whether Isabel's dealing with this dying magazine industry, it's going to change. Her boss doesn't seem to understand that. Chess is dealing with the changing values of her students and the courses and what she teaches and what they'll accept. Nathan's dealing with his changing social status from year to year with his friends. Is he on the inside or is he on the outside this year? What did you want to explore about the way we react to change and, of course, the pandemic huge unexpected change?

Michael Cunningham: That was a big one.

Alison Stewart: That was as a whopper. [laughs]

Michael Cunningham: That was a whopper. I think any story is inherently inevitably about the passage of time and its effects. You could give any novel or short story to anyone and say, "I hope you like this. It's about the passage of time." Yes, and then you just try to look at how we evolve or devolve or how we become somebody who we were not quite when the story started.

Alison Stewart: There are parts of New York that we will all recognize and behaviors that we'll all recognize. What did you want to capture about life in New York City, especially in those early months of the pandemic?

Michael Cunningham: Really, I just want to try to get it down because I've lived here for a long time. I think one of the less discussed purposes of fiction writers is what witnesses were part of the, I don't necessarily include myself, but the really good ones are part of the historical record. If you want to know about 19th century Russia histories, biographies, but also Chekhov and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, there's that, and there's also, okay, take Napoleon's invasion of Moscow, which is a really bad idea. During the retreat across the Russian steps hundreds of thousands of French soldiers died of starvation and exposure.

Historians and biographers, bless them, record the battles and Napoleon and his generals, but without the fiction writer to think about this and imagine this, a soldier who dies in the snow outside of Moscow, still thinking, "I'm going to make it. I'll get home." That soldier was lost to history without somebody speaking for him. They were all men. That's where I think Tolstoy comes in.

Alison Stewart: Let's take some questions from the audience.

Speaker 1: Hi. I really enjoyed your book. Can you talk about getting Julianne Moore to read it? Because that was a part that I really enjoyed a lot.

Michael Cunningham: It wasn't that great. I know Julianne Moore did the audiobook. I know her slightly because she was in the film version of The Hours, but it was her idea. I just wouldn't have asked her. I would have felt presumptuous, "Hey, can you do me a favor?" No. She was interested in doing an audio and reading a book for audio and it seems that about every 25 years, she and I worked together on something. [laughter] Yes, it's beautiful, isn't it? She did an amazing job.

Alison Stewart: Which character? I listened to it last weekend, whose voice did she get that it sounded like she provided a nuance to the character?

Michael Cunningham: Oh, I'm going to say all of them. That's part of what is so great about having somebody as good as Julianne read the dialogue of the character as you've written it. It sounds very right and not what you were thinking and not wrong, but just, "Oh, yes, right. It's always good to be reminded that no two people read the same book.

Speaker 2: I was curious if you could speak a little bit to the difference between a nuclear family and a communal family. It seems like a lot of our society pushes us towards this nuclear family. They already had such a communal environment, yet at the same time, are working so hard to be separate. I wanted to hear your words on that juxtaposition.

Michael Cunningham: Yes, thank you. Every now, people will tend to talk about how I tend to write about non-traditional families, non-nuclear families. I'm not sure if what I think we mean by a traditional family, which is a man and a woman and their biological children is necessarily the traditional family anymore. When you look at who families are, all honor to that family, but there are so many other, whether it's a single parent raising children or a group of people raising or not raising children. I just love all the variations we collectively are working on the very notion of family and who and what a family categorically contains.

Alison Stewart: Okay, all the way in the back.

Speaker 3: The evolution of your thinking in making Robbie a would-be medical student, and then a sixth-grade teacher. I can understand you're not making him a corporate lawyer or a corporate person, but what was your reasoning, thinking, evolution of your thinking with that character?

Michael Cunningham: I was premed for about 45 minutes because I just thought I would be really good at talking to patients. I didn't really have any ability. [laughter] Being a doctor is something I can very much imagine and the, I don't know, semi-submerged conflict there is Robbie's father so wanted him to be a doctor that he thought, "You know what? I got into medical school and I'm not going to go. I'm going to do something that feels at least as important to me and it's not what you want. Not that I think it's a good idea to live our lives in opposition to our fathers, but that is partly what moved Robbie into being a sixth-grade teacher.

I wouldn't want my part of the evening to end without saying, maybe we all know this, it just means so much to me to get to actually see and talk to the people who read the books. It's such an abstract act otherwise. It's like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean and hoping it washes up somewhere. It really matters to just see people and be reminded that you don't have to like every book or any of the books, but that you're there for them, and thank you. Thank you for being readers. Thank you for being here.

[applause]

Alison Stewart: Thank you, Michael. Thank you. That was my conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham from our January Get Lit with All Of It book club event. We spent the month reading his novel, Day.

 

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