Lit Talk: Author Gay Talese

Italian-American author Gay Talese has lived for the majority of the twentieth century and made an illustrious career for himself. With Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and others, he helped to define the genre of New Journalism in the 1960s, and since then has been covering topics from Frank Sinatra to boxing to mob violence to swinger culture. At the beginning of this interview with Robert Birnbaum, the full version of which is available here, Talese discusses inspiration and what makes a writer.

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Robert Birnbaum: I know you are an avid Yankee fan. Is there a story that you think sportswriters are missing about the Yankees and the Red Sox?

Gay Talese: I could come up with 50 stories that I am thinking about.

Robert Birnbaum: Seriously?

Gay Talese: I have, without being immodest to you or anyone, a way of looking at a subject—it could be the Yankees, it could be a tree in Boston—where I would say to myself, There is another way of looking at this tree, or this ballgame or these players. Yes, indeed. Do you want a whole series of story ideas? No.

Robert Birnbaum: In A Writer’s Life, you are sitting at a restaurant and you see a man eating a fish—then the paragraph continues on for another page or so—it reminded me of when we were in high school biology and you are shown a drop of water under a microscope—

Gay Talese: Yeah, it’s the imagination of the nonfiction writer. It is nonfiction we are dealing with, as you know—it’s what can be—the way of seeing is very private but can be very creative, and you can take any assignment, any subject, and write about it if you can see it in a vividly descriptive or instructive way. And as you mentioned, I am a restaurant-goer. I go to restaurants a lot. I work alone all day. At night I like to have something to do where I am around people and a restaurant is the best excuse of being around people. I don’t care about the food that much. I care about the atmosphere. Restaurants are a wonderful escape for me. And are for a lot of people. People go to restaurants for so many different reasons. To court a girl, to make some deal. Maybe to talk to some lawyer about how to get an alimony settlement better than they got last week. What I have done since I was 50 years younger than I am now—which is to say 24; now I am 74—I think what I do is write nonfiction as if it were fiction. On the other hand, it is clearly, verifiably factual—but it is a story. It is storytelling. It isn’t telling you a story of somebody you already know. It is, more often than not, somebody you do not know. Or if it is somebody that you do know that I am writing about, it will be something that you don’t know about that person. It is a way of seeing, a way of going about the process of research. It might be interviewing, or it might be hanging around. For example, many colleges in their writing programs teach some of my work. What they often do is teach something like “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” something I wrote when I was 25 years younger or more. That isn’t about Frank Sinatra at all. I didn’t even talk to Frank Sinatra—

Robert Birnbaum: [laughs]

Gay Talese: What I did was I hung around people who hung around Sinatra. You mentioned in reference to the book I have out now, “You go to a restaurant and you see a guy having a certain fish for dinner.” And he is eating the fish, and across the room I am watching him from another table eating the fish. And I am thinking, Now let’s take this fish and do it in reverse. Instead of the fish in his mouth, let’s take it out of his mouth and move the whole process of that fish back to the time when it was in the kitchen being prepared by the chef. And before it was in the kitchen with the chef being cooked to a certain specification by the diner, it was in a box of ice and before it was in a box of ice, it was being transported by plane to a New York airport, thence to the Fulton Fish Market. But before that the darned fish was in the water somewhere being caught by some disgruntled fisherman who was in water that he shouldn’t have been in—

Robert Birnbaum: [chuckles]

Gay Talese: And he is having trouble with his wife and he is on his miserable ship off Newfoundland somewhere and this awful guy, this awful guy, is a fisherman now, and he is grousing to himself when he catches all these damned fish and a whole process is going back into the personalities of the people who catch fish, the people who are trolling—watching fisherman in places they shouldn’t be because they are in lawless waters. All these things that can rise to the mind of a creative person just by virtue of being across the table from a person devouring a piece of tuna. It’s all traceable in a factual sense if you move backward. But it also is something that many, many people sitting in a restaurant, idling their time over their own dinner wouldn’t have the curiosity—it’s all about curiosity.

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Readers will have the opportunity to see Gay Talese promote two re-released works, Thy Neighbor’s Wife and Honor Thy Father, in New York City on Tuesday:

Tuesday, July 28 at 7:00 p.m.
150 East 86th St.
New York, N.Y. 10028
212.369.2180

--Emmaline Silverman

Photo by Fred R. Conrad/New York Times