Nathan Hill - The Nix

“Set it up. How many hundreds of pages will that take, exactly?”

“I’m going where the story is.”

“You agreed to deliver a book that told your mother’s story while also ripping her to shreds, rhetorically.”

“Yes, I know.”

“It’s the ‘ripping her to shreds’ part I’m worried about right now. Because Son of Packer Attacker Defends His Mom might be persuasive in a few quarters, but Packer Attacker Gets Eviscerated by Own Flesh and Blood has serious appeal.”

“I’m trying to tell the truth.”

“Plus it’s a little coming-of-agey.”

“You didn’t like it much, did you.”

“Slipped into some familiar coming-of-age conventions, is all I’m saying. Also what’s the big message here? What’s the life lesson?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s no secret that most memoirs are really self-help books in disguise. So what’s your book going to help people do better? What is it going to teach?”

“I have not thought about that for even one second.”

“How about, for your life lesson: Vote Republican. ”

“No. That is not at all what I’m writing about. Not in the same galaxy.”

“Listen to Mister Artist Guy all of a sudden. Look. In today’s market, most readers want books with accessible, linear narratives that rely on big concepts and easy life lessons. The life lessons in your mother’s story are, to put it kindly, diffused. ”

“What’s the big life lesson in Molly Miller’s book?”

“Simple: Life Is Great! ”

“Well, that’s pretty easy for her to say. Born into money. Prep schools on the Upper East Side. Billionaire at twenty-two.”

“You’d be amazed at the facts people are willing to set aside to believe that life is, indeed, great.”

“Life is hardly great.”

“And this is why we need Molly Miller. The country is falling apart around us. This is plain even to the pay-no-attention-at-all crowd, even to the low-information undecided-voter segment. It’s all crumbling right in front of our eyes. People lose their jobs, their pensions disappear overnight, they keep getting those quarterly statements showing their retirement funds are worth ten percent less for the sixth quarter in a row, and their houses are worth half what they paid for them, and their bosses can’t get a loan to make payroll, and Washington is a circus, and they have homes full of interesting technology and they look at their smartphones and wonder ‘How could a world that produces something as amazing as this be such a shitty world?’ This is what they wonder. We’ve done studies on this. What was my point?”

“About Molly Miller, life being great.”

“Here’s how desperate people are for good news. Rolling Stone wanted an interview with Molly. But because they were reporting on her writing and not her music, they said they wanted it more ‘real.’ A more real interview, to reflect the more real memoir, I guess? Setting aside for a moment that the memoir itself was focus-grouped and ghostwritten? And that the ‘more real’ Rolling Stone interview would be staged from the get-go? What they wanted wasn’t reality, per se, but a simulation that felt closer to reality than their usual simulations. But whatever. We brainstormed and spitballed and one of our junior publicists, this recent Yale grad who is going places let me tell you, he has this dazzling idea. He says let’s have them watch her make pasta at home. Brilliant, right?”

“I’m guessing there’s a special reason it was pasta.”

“It focus-tests better than meat. Steak and chicken have too much baggage these days. Was it free-range? Antibiotic-free? Cruelty-free? Organic? Kosher? Did the farmer wear silken gloves to caress it to sleep every night while singing gentle lullabies? You can’t order a fucking hamburger anymore without embracing some kind of political platform. Pasta is still pretty neutral, unobjectionable. And of course we’d never show anyone what she really actually eats.”

“Why? What does she eat?”

“Steamed cabbage and mushroom broth, mostly. A reporter sees that and it becomes a different kind of story altogether. How the poor teen idol is starving herself to death. Then we get dragged into the whole body-image debate, which no one ever scored any mass public points arguing either side of, ever.”

“I don’t think I really want to read about Molly Miller making pasta.”

“In the face of national calamity and utter annihilation of their personal prospects, people generally go in one of two directions. We have reams of paper showing this. They either get righteously indignant and hyperaware, in which case they’ll usually begin posting libertarian screeds on iFeel or something, or they’ll sink into a somewhat comfortable ignorance, in which case Molly Miller warming up marinara out of a jar is pleasantly and weirdly diverting.”

“You’re making it sound like a public service.”

“There is no creature more arrogant than a self-righteous libertarian on the web, am I right? Those folks are just intolerable. And yes, it is a public service. You want to know my secret hope for your book?”

“Sure.”

“That it’s the one to replace Molly’s on the best-seller list. You know why?”

“I find that wildly improbable.”

“Because there are very few products that appeal to those two groups of people: the angry and the ignorant. Very few products can make that jump.”

“But my mom’s story—”

“We’ve tested this. Your mom has huge crossover appeal. This is rare and usually unpredictable, the thing that pops out of culture and becomes universal. Everyone sees what they want to see in your mom, everyone gets to be offended in their own special way. Your mother’s story allows people of any political stripe to say ‘Shame on you,’ which is just delicious these days. It’s no secret that the great American pastime is no longer baseball. Now it’s sanctimony.”

“I’ll be sure to work on that.”

“Remember, less empathy, more carnage. That’s advice, me to you. And by the way? Those ghostwriters we used for Molly’s book? They’re available. I have them on retainer, should you need assistance writing your book.”

“No thank you.”

“They are seriously professional and discreet.”

“I can write the book myself.”

“I’m sure you would like to write the book yourself, but your record is not what I might call promising, book-finishing-wise.”

“This time is different.”

“I’m not judging you, simply pointing out certain historical facts. Speaking of which? All these years, I have never asked: Why couldn’t you finish your first book?”

“It’s not that I couldn’t finish it—”

“I’m curious. What happened? Did I not send enough letters of encouragement and praise? Did you lose your inspiration? Did your ambition buckle under the weight of expectations? Were you — what do they call it— blocked ?”

“None of those things, really. I just made a few bad decisions.”

“A few bad decisions. That’s how people explain a hangover.”

“There were some poor choices made, on my part.”

“That is a pretty blithe way of explaining your total failure to become a famous writer.”

“You know, I’d always wanted to be a famous writer. I thought being a famous writer would help me solve certain problems. And then suddenly I was a famous writer and the problems weren’t solved at all.”

“Certain problems?”

“Let’s just say there was a girl involved.”

“Oh lord, I’m sorry I asked.”

“A girl I very much wanted to make a big impression on.”