From The Archives – Lincoln In The Bardo: George Saunders On Writing With Empathy, Listening To The Past & Finding Light In The Depths Of Grief

Welcome to the Service 95 book club with me, Dua Lipa. Today, I'm very excited to share my conversation with the legendary George Saunders, who I spoke to in October 2024 about his extraordinary novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. We talk about writing with empathy, listening to the voices of the past and finding light even in the grief. My chat with George coming up. George, I can't begin to tell you how excited I am, and also slightly a little bit intimidated I am to speak to you because I think, I guess people say you shouldn't meet your heroes. But I feel so lucky to be sat here speaking to you today. I'm a huge fan of yours, and I recommend your books books to anyone who will listen. But for today, it's Lincoln and the Bardo that we're going to be talking about. And that's your 2017 novel that won the Booker Prize. And it was recently voted one of the best books of the 21st century by the New York Times. I just, I love this form of this book, like the cacophony of voices, the ghostly characters in the graveyard, the way it shifts between story told by these bickering spirits to very sensible historical references in a heartbeat. I mean, I personally have never read anything like it. And I guess when I first started reading it, I wasn't quite sure whether this was like newspaper clippings or whether it, you know, I wasn't entirely sure what I was reading. I felt like whether it was like a play script or, you know, I was working it out, but I'm so glad I stuck with it because it's just become one of my favorite reads ever. Also, I guess at the heart of it, you know, overall, is a story about grief. About a father mourning the loss of his son, and a son longing for his father, and at the same time, a nation that's just riddled with grief for the lives that have been lost during the American Civil War. I love how layered it is. And there's so much to talk to you about. So I'm just going to get stuck in. Noah, thank you for that beautiful description of it. That was right on the money. Yeah, thanks. Okay, can we start a little bit with a bit of backstory? Like, how did this idea come to you? How did it start to take form? Like, I understand that it took a little bit of time for you to really commit to this story, and I'd love to hear what finally convinced you to do it. Sure. Yeah, it took 20 years, actually. My wife and I, our kids were little and we were in D.C. visiting her cousin. And just offhandedly, she pointed up at this graveyard and said, oh, did you know that Willie Lincoln was buried there during the Civil War? And I'm like, you know, who's Willie Lincoln? Oh, the president's son. And then she said, not only that, but apparently, according to newspaper stories of the day, Lincoln was so grief stricken that he actually kind of snuck into the crypt a couple of times and somehow interacted with the body. so we're driving along I'm like oh my god that's wow that's a book you know I had this like um instant vision of the Pieta you know with Lincoln holding his son across his lap you know and yeah and I thought oh that's a great book for somebody but at that time I think I had one or two books out and I'm sure you know how it is like you get through the doorway with a certain thing and then you're so happy to have gotten some attention that I was just like I can't do anything except what I've already done, which at that point was kind of a sci-fi comedy really, you know? And I thought, oh, that Lincoln story, it would be, I'd have to be a totally different kind of writer. And I was really a little scared to blow the career that I had gotten so, you know, so tentatively. So I kind of just tucked it away and every so often I'd try it and it wouldn't work. And I, uh, I tried to play, which was like a terrible kind of grade school thing, you know, It wasn't any good. So finally, I got to be about, I guess, 50-something, you know? And I'm like, wow, if I don't, you know, and I can sense this in your work, like, you have to keep growing as an artist or you die. You know, if you imitate yourself, you're dead. So I thought, man, I don't want to be the person whose gravestone reads, you know, avoided the thing he most longed to try. So I just gave, you know, like in art, we give ourselves little cheats, right? So I gave myself a cheat of saying, look, don't tell anybody you're doing this. Just take a six month contract to kind of mess around. And if it doesn't work, you walk away. And if it works, then great. So I worked on it very quietly for six months. And all the things you noted about the form started to kind of reveal themselves. And I go, oh, maybe, you know. So I think so much of being an artist is like trying to trick your habitual nature, which like safety and security and repetition and being sure, trying to trick that person out and go back to the kid you were at 13 or 14 who's just overjoyed to be making something, you know. So this book was important to me because I kind of broke a little bit of new ground. I didn't feel like I had to be funny all the time. I could be a little more earnest. And as you said, I could also use actual historical text. So it's kind of a nice late life growth thing to do, really. It's amazing. I feel like it's so uniquely you also at the same time. It's very different to your other books, but I feel like sometimes, you know, like you said, you feel like maybe you earned it to get to this level of experimentation where you did the things that got you to a certain level. And now you're like, okay, how do I find that inner child and the story that I really want to tell? And how do I find a way to balance the two? And it was really exciting too, to kind of make a big problem like that and say, okay, the only way to solve a problem like that is through form. So how do I narrate a very private event at a graveyard? And you go, oh, well, ghosts. And then for me, the best part was like, sometimes I decided to make up, to use the historical text was kind of new to me. And then I started making them up as well, inventing some. And every time I'd kind of go, the kind of like a little bit Catholic part of me would go, well, can you do that? And I'd just say, well, it's my book, you know, of course. So that was a very, very nice. You can do whatever you like. You have to do whatever you want. Yeah. I love that. I love that so much. Okay. So, so tell me a little bit about the Bardo, you know, this idea of unfinished business, um, in this life that's kind of playing out in the afterlife, you know, and, and how it manifests in this, in this novel. Am I, am I right in thinking it's drawn from Buddhist philosophy? You're exactly right. Yeah. Tibetan Buddhist tradition there's this idea of the bardo and actually bardo just means transitional space so we're in a bardo now we're in the transition between birth and death and then when you die uh there's that bardo which is most people when they say bardo they're talking about that period from you know kind of like the moment of your death until the moment of your next birth and there's a whole um you know many teachings about what that might entail and what it might be like so i originally you know being a nerd i thought oh i'll just read the tibetan book of the dead and then I'll make my book in that world. And I read about 10 pages like, oh God, no, I can't. I don't have the capacity. So my bardo is kind of like Catholic purgatory a little bit, except unlike Catholic purgatory, you can kind of get out of it. You know, in the Catholic teachings, you go to the purgatory and you sit there like in the DMV or something for, you know, infinity. But in this world and in some of the Buddhist teachings, the idea is that since that after death experience is a mental experience, uh, and your consciousness continues, you can sort of work with it a little bit. And so in this book, all these people are in the book because they, they died either unhappy or unfulfilled or agitated, and they have the symptom that they don't actually realize they're dead. So basically they're just living their issue, you know, supersized over and over and over again. So if you were a jealous person and you get into this state, you're super jealous. The Buddhists say that like when you're alive, you know, your mind is so wild. All of our minds are so wild. But when you're alive, the mind is like a wild horse tied to a post. So it's wild, but it's restrained. The idea is when you die, that tether gets cut and the mind goes super wild. Yeah. So all these people in the book are kind of defined by their regrets. And also they can't quite recognize that it's over for them. So I found that very touching, you know, like who's not in that situation where you're always in a constant fight with your own regrets and your own, you know, desires and stuff. Yeah, absolutely. I want to get more into the characters because it is very, very interesting. I mean, there's a lot of characters in this book, but just touching on death, I feel like having read some of your other books, I feel like you do have quite an interest in the concept of death. It's something that I feel like you always, you're very much dancing on the edge of it or trying to discover things deeper with death as a concept. Where has that come from, do you think? Well, some of it is just clumsiness. You know, in other words, like if you're a writer and you want your story to be interesting and you kill somebody, you know, or put somebody in harm's way, it gets interesting. So some of that. But also, I think just from the time I was really small, I can remember being kind of like amazed by the idea that this comes to an end. You know, that you have all these lovely connections with people and you seem like you're born to love. That's kind of what we're here to do. You know, you can't go 10 minutes without becoming fond of something. and then when you get to the point where you go yeah but everything you get fond of you you're going to lose no exceptions you know including your own body and your own health and your you know uh and i can remember thinking that as a little kid and especially i guess in relation to my grandparents being really like terrified like wait i know they're old old people die therefore you know they're going to die and i couldn't like get my head around it and i also noticed that most people didn't really worry about it too much you know you you just are resigned to it or something or ignore it. Yeah. So it's, it's a recurring thing. And I'm, you know, as I get older, I'm even, I mean, for practical reasons, you get more interested in it, but it's such a funny thing that we can, you know, buzz around doing our thing and living our lives and acting so confident, knowing that in some number of years, it's all going to be over, you know? So I think from the Buddhism, I've kind of learned that that could be if now I can't do it yet, but theoretically it could be a source of great beauty. You know, if you woke up every day and went, wow, I am a completely temporary thing. And so is my wife. And so, you know, uh, that could make life quite beautiful, but I think if you're not used to it as I'm not, it's just sort of terrifying and you kind of, you know, squash it down and go to the store. But it is, I love, I love that. I'm going to take that with me after this conversation and the idea that we are temporary and we have to make the most of every day because it's not going to be like this forever. Yeah. But I think that, I mean, I think that comes through in your music. Like when I was watching that clip of that amazing thing that happened at Glastonbury and that was so wonderful, you know, and like somehow seeing that, I mean, I don't know you as a person, but you were there as a kind of, you know, central presence. And that was a beautiful demonstration of kind of like life getting very full in a certain moment, you know? And all those hundreds of thousands of people participating. It was really, so I think that's kind of what artists do is, you know, we're normal people with all the normal problems, but every so often, maybe through well through talent but also through practice you get urged up into this higher ground where you you know you a kind of pure version of yourself maybe a better version of yourself And then I know when you know when I read a great book or see a great performance it reminds me that the kind of dope I am every day is not the only person I am. And it's almost like, you know, somebody rises up and somebody else rises up to meet them. And that, for me, that's almost like a sacramental thing that art can do, you know, just reminds that you're not any one thing and you could be a better thing as well. Yeah, absolutely. That must have been a fun moment for you, eh? Was that a good moment? Oh my God, that was something I dreamt about my whole life. So to have finally been there, I really tried to make an effort to stay present in the moment because I'd only seen it in my dreams of the feeling of what it would be like to stand in front of all those people. So when I was there, I was just like, don't fuck it up, it up, don't forget this, make sure you take enough mental memories. And I think I've like, I think I've got a core memory locked in there now from that performance, but it was, it was, um, absolutely surreal. But can I ask you, when you're in that moment and an audience is responding like that, are you, is your mind going, Oh God, this is happening? Or are you sort of, I mean. Yeah, definitely. It's funny. I was so emotional for like, I mean, months before, but the week In the lead up, I was really emotional and nervous and excited. And then when it came down to me walking on stage and performing, I was like, oh my God, I can't believe this is happening. Just do your job. Just do your job. Just do your job. Don't think about anything else. Just be good at your job. And that was all that was going through my mind. And then when I stopped to speak to the audience, that's when I really got to take it in. Because during the moments where I was performing, all I was thinking was, don't fuck it up. Right. I heard Philip Seymour Hoffman once talking about being, you know, as an actor, being in the moment. You've got it perfectly. But he said when you're on stage and as soon as you start thinking, I've got it, then you don't got it. You know, then you can tumble out of it. Yeah, so interesting. Yeah, you've got to stay alert a little bit. Yeah. But to talk to a performer is really interesting because what I do is so methodical. I mean, it's like every day come in this room and work and work and change what I did yesterday. And, you know, so there's never a moment of pure performance. It's like a cumulative performance. Every day you're adding, taking away. But I think that must be so electrifying to go out on a given day at a given time and have to, as you said, do your job. It's something I kind of wonder at a little bit. Yeah, it's very exciting. But I feel like I read an interview where you were talking about Lincoln and the Bardo, and you said that after a certain point, the book was writing itself and you were just there to witness it. And I thought that was really fascinating. It's like something otherworldly just takes over you. Yeah, and that has never happened before. It was just kind of like I'd go into that. Yeah, I'd go into the room and go, okay, what problems are you having, book? And it would go, well, you know, chapter six, okay. And then turn your attention to that. And somehow it would be like, you know, sometimes you're like, I think Hemingway call it the sweat of the midnight oil where you're working so hard, you know, this was just like, push the door and it would come open, you know, and then you go in and it'd be another room, push the door. So I don't know, maybe it was just because I had it in my mind for 20 years or something, but it was really, I'm so grateful that I've had that. It was kind of an autumn, one autumn when I finished it. It was just one of my fondest artistic memories, you know. Yeah, it feels like it just kind of just flowed out of you. I mean, it's unlike anything else that I've ever read. And I feel like this, I don't know, I feel like you've created this like crazy, bonkers, tragic world in your own way. And I guess going back to the characters a little bit, like you refer to them as a group of monologuing ghosts, which I think is brilliant. But there's so much more to them, isn't there? Well, I hope so. And they certainly kind of reveal themselves to me over the book, you know. And of course, you know, it's interesting because they're always you. somehow everybody's a certain manifestation of you because otherwise you couldn't come up with it so you know you you have um like this roger bevins is a guy who's uh he's committed suicide and he's just in the middle of it he changed his mind and of course he doesn't he thinks he didn't it's not done yet uh so his kind of manifestation is he's always talking about how precious life is and how beautiful and he goes into these long litanies of listing all the stuff of the world and those things were so fun to write because I feel that way. I'm just kind of like, yeah, I like being alive. And so that was fun just to turn that part of my mind to the page and say, well, okay, list 40 things that you love, you know? So yeah, so that was kind of a beautiful thing to do. I think this would be a really good moment for us to read a passage from the novel together and maybe give some new readers a flavor of what to expect. Okay, that sounds fun. Should we do it? Yeah, let's do it. Okay, so we're going to be thespians. Very exciting. So you're going to be reading, or no, I'm going to be reading Roger Bevins III, and you're going to be reading Hans Wilman. So you have just two ghosts. And let's see, the only other thing to know, I guess, is they're going to, this is Lincoln is going to be coming into Willie's crypt for the very first time to see his son's body. And they just, they don't know that it's Lincoln. So they just refer to him as the unkempt gentleman or the gentleman. So, All right. Okay. Ready? Action. All right, let's do it. Okay, all right. The unkempt gentleman was fussing over the small form now, stroking the hair, patting and rearranging the pale doll-like hands. As the lad stood nearby, uttering many urgent entreaties for his father to look his way, fuss over and pat him. Which the gentleman appeared not to hear. Then this, already troubling and unseemly display, descended to a new level of... We heard an intake of breath from the reverend to appearance notwithstanding is not easily shocked. He's going to pick that child up, the reverend said. And so he did. The man lifted the tiny form out of the sick box. The man bent, lifted the tiny form from the box, and with surprising grace for one so ill-made, sat all at once on the floor, gathering it into his lap. Sinking his head into the place between chin and neck, the gentleman sobbed, raggedly at first, then unreservedly, giving full vent to his emotion, while the lad darted back and forth nearby in an apparent agony of frustration. For nearly ten minutes, the man held the... Sick form. The boy, frustrated at being denied the attention he felt he deserved, moved in and leaned against his father as the father continued to hold and gently rock the... Sick form. At one point moved, I turned away from the scene and found we were not alone. A crowd had gathered outside. All were silent as the man continued to gently rock his child. While his child simultaneously stood quietly leaning against him. Then the gentleman began to speak. The lad threw one arm familiarly around his father's neck, as he must have often done, and drew himself in closer until his head was touching his father's head. The better to hear the words the man was whispering into the neck of the... His frustration then becoming unbearable, the boy began to... The lad began to enter himself, as it were. The boy began to enter himself. He had soon entered himself entirely. And at this, the man began sobbing anew, as if he could feel the altered condition of that which he held. It was all too much, too private, and I left that place and walked alone. As did I. Amazing. Oh, you're a beautiful reader. Amazing. I love that. I love that. Thank you so much for doing that with me. Okay, can we spend a little bit of time talking about these characters that we've just met? So let's talk about the character that I just read, which is Hans Vollmann, who's a middle-aged printer with wooden teeth, who dies before he consummates his marriage with his young bride, which is leaving him with a permanent enormous erection. It is, yes. And then there's Roger Bevins, who you already described. Roger Bevins III, that was your character that you just read out, who's a young gay man. who's driven to suicide only to change his mind. And then there's a third character that readers might have noticed that we've omitted from that reading. The permanently shocked Reverend Everly Thomas. Each of them are so unique. And I thought it was really interesting how you said how they're all almost different parts of your personality or a part of you or something. You know, how did you, how did these characters come to you? There's 166 characters in this book. Yeah. I love, I mean, the book is so layered, but it seems like you yourself are very multifaceted to like have all these characters just ooze out of you. I mean, talk to me, tell me, tell me how this, how this all came to be. I mean, some of it is just, I mean, I'm kind of, I was an engineer before, and so some of it is just, it's funny, I get to the artistic by way of the technical. So, for example, when I'm trying to make 166 people, the first thing you know is they can't sound alike. So you have to find small ways to distinguish their voices. That's just a technical thing. And then a lot of times I come up with a character just out of need. Like, for example, with Volman, I wanted somebody who right off the bat we could sympathize with. So I thought, well, that's something we could all relate to is we really desire somebody. We're in love. We have been denied this sort of completion or consummation. And then on Thursday, the person says, yes, tomorrow we're doing it, you know, and then you die that night. Well, that's kind of a, you know, so a lot of these characters are kind of comic a little, you know, they're sort of cartoons almost. But it's just so fun, you know, to kind of say, OK, I need somebody. And there's just this little I can't describe it, but a little mental move where you just sort of suppress certain parts of yourself and exaggerate other parts. and that just blurted out on the page, you know, and then, then you kind of see what you've got. So sometimes you, like with the Reverend, uh, I didn't know I was going to make him quite so stern, but he just kind of came out that way. So it's really, I mean, a book like this is an amazing education and how many people we each contain actually, you know, uh, and this, for me, the writing process is kind of just finding little kind of brain tricks to allow these different people to, to act, you know, to, to come out. And then, then the key thing is once they come out, you have to accept them on their own terms and like, Oh, okay. I, I didn't know that I contained you, but I'm going to honor you with some editing attention and make you, uh, more cribs. So it was, it was really a lovely thing. And, you know, you get up in the morning and sort of say, okay, Lincoln has to go from point A to point B. Uh, let's see if you might run into a few ghosts and, And which ones? Don't worry about it. Just start writing. And then, you know, your subconscious is so rich. And it kind of, on a big book like this, it's working all the time, you know, 24-7. And so at a moment of need, it kind of will just pop out the thing that you, you know, that turns out to be important. So I don't know. In other words, I don't know. I have no idea. Yeah, it just flowed out of you, like we said. It's really funny. While I was reading it, I was having all these thoughts. because I have this irrational fear in the back of my mind of dying a comedy death. Of just something ridiculous happening, slipped on a banana, split her head open, whatever it is, you know, something like that. And then I was reading Lincoln and the Bardo, and I was like oh my God what would happen to me in the afterlife I be beside myself so upset at the fact that I did actually die a comedy death One of the things they say is that you know if you want to know what your death is going to be like just look at this moment Because the mind that you have going right now is the one that you're going to bring there, you know, except supersize. So it's, you know. can i ask you a question about just on this terms of creativity i i'm really interested in you know creative process uh and especially about like when i was younger i was very deliberate uh intentional writer and it really got my way and it was only when i kind of learned to just say I'm going to set aside the intellectual ideas and just play a little bit. So when you're writing a song, it sounds like from what I've listened to, it's fairly spontaneous. And you allow yourself to make a lot of songs. So it has to be the case that some would be not so good. But can you describe the mental state as you're about to write a song? That's really interesting. I mean, there's definitely that thing of just being okay with being a little bit rubbish. because I'm just constantly just writing and letting like spontaneity take in the moment. It always starts just with a conversation and then it's like humming and then something sounds like a word and then the word leads me into, you know, where I'm going next. But it's always reflective of something that's happening in my life. But you're not doing a lot of like judging at the moment. You're just sort of channeling. No, just words, just words on paper. And then I always go back in and like, I rewrite something unless I had some kind of straight and I'm like, you know what, this is perfect, and I don't have to change it, which doesn't really happen. It's just like, it's just getting something down onto paper. Yes, and to answer your question, that's exactly with these characters. When you go to write Volman, the biggest thing for me was to say, don't have a plan about it, just go from head to page, and then if we need to, we can adjust it later. But that's sort of that first moment of allowing real freedom, real playful freedom, which when I was younger, I was younger, I was so kind of constipated about the idea of literature that I had to have everything planned out in advance. And as I got older, I got more comfortable with being, as you say, spontaneous and non-judgy in that first pass. Yeah. Yeah. No, I try and like keep all the spontaneous side of me in the studio where I can write. And then I need to be in control of every other aspect of my life. It's kind of crazy. It's like in order for me to be able to run wild in my writing my day has to be so meticulously thought out and planned and I know what time I'm doing everything it's very it's very funny even the time I have dedicated to being creative is planned but then what happens during those hours is all free and wild and it can be whatever that sounds very familiar to me because it's almost like yeah I'm so afraid of being free, but I have to schedule it. Yeah. It's like, this is my time to be spontaneous and fun. And sometimes naughty and irrelevant. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Okay, I want to talk a little bit more about the 166 characters in this book. And they all kind of serve the story in their own way. They include a soldier, a murderer, enslaved people and enslavers, a particularly tragic rape victim, a racist lieutenant. You could call it a vivid cross-section of American society at the time. There are so many who stood out for me, but I'd love to talk about Eddie and Betsy Barron briefly, because I loved the Barron's. They're crude, hopeless grifters who died drunk in the street, and yet Eddie always says, walk a fucking mile in my shoes. By the end of the book, like, you feel like you have. And I wonder if that's actually one of the essential messages of the book. I think it is. And for me, those two were kind of, well, they're kind of comic relief, you know, because when you're writing a book in 19th century diction, it can get a little fusty, you know, you're, but actually, if I'm going to be honest, they were a holdover from a book I wrote about 20 years ago that didn't go anywhere. And in that original thing, they were from Chicago and they were contemporary or they've been alive in the 60s and they were ghosts and they were kind of big winos, you know, and kind of orgeous. And I just that back and forth between them was so much fun. So then I just thought, well, I'll put them in this book. You know, I'll have to change a few details. But I love that they were, you know, in that particular graveyard at that time, it was a fairly affluent graveyard. So there were no black people in there. And these two people would never have been welcome there. So as somebody who came from a working class background, I'm always kind of alert to that as a thing. You know, class is a real thing. And it's maybe the thing that we don't talk about, you know. So I felt like to have a couple of unfortunate people and even like kind of obnoxious people in there was kind of a nice counterweight to all of the high-minded, you know, spiritual stuff. And every time I got to their sections, I had so much fun. And I would usually write 15 pages and go, well, it can't be 15, and then cut it back. But we did an audiobook, and Bill Hader and Megan Mullally did them. And it's so funny. They did such a great job with it. I was just about to touch on the audiobook. I was literally about to say the same thing on how fun that was to listen to as well. I think they did such a great job. It's exactly the character that you envision. They really brought them to life. Yeah, we had fun. We had to have 166 readers and we got some big names and then we still had like 120. So people from the book company volunteered and from my agency. And then my mom and dad are on there and my sisters, my wife and kids and my two high school teachers. I mean, it's like I listen to it and it's kind of like my whole life in a few hours. It's really special. Going back to the heart of this book, which is, of course, the death of a child. Now, as you said in the beginning, Willie Lincoln, he's not a fictional child, but he's a child who was deeply loved and greatly mourned. And he's described as the sort of child people imagine their children will be before they have children. And the first time we see Abraham Lincoln in this book, he enters his son's crypt to hold his body one last time. It's unbearably sad, isn't it? I mean, for me, I was really feeling, I don't know, the grief. Like it must be so hard to capture the enormity of grief for a lost child. And I just think you do it so convincingly and movingly. Well, I mean, one thing I tried to do was remember that grief and love are just two sides of the same coin. So if you currently are loving somebody, you know, you're set up for grief. That's just the math. So it was easy enough to say, it was funny, you know, to describe Willie, you just had to describe anything that you loved. And then in the world of the book, he's died. So in a sense, I didn't often find myself writing about grief, but I found myself writing about love. So if you write convincingly about the way it feels to love somebody and then you say, oh, the person died, you know, you're writing about grief. So it was kind of a there were moments when I thought, oh, God, this is sometimes an unbearably sad book. But mostly it was it was joyful, one, to be writing about love and then two, to be finding the form, you know, like, you know, I'm sure if you sing a really sad song. but you sing it beautifully, that's basically an optimistic experience. So that was kind of the, you know, there. And then also when you're writing something this over this long a time, you know, you come to the sad part and you go, okay, that's fucking sad. Okay, move on. You know, you've read it 15 times already and you've kind of noted it. So, but it was a very rich experience. And I think the big takeaway was just, as we said earlier, you know, it kind of brought me to the point where I'm like, okay, so the whole thing about this life is we have to love and then we have to lose. Now we can pretend that that isn't the case. We can, you know, turn our eyes away from it, but that's really the truth. So what do we do with that? And so after finishing the book, my resolution was to try to stay on that thing, stay on that question every day a little bit, you know, um, because I think basically the one's understanding of life really revolves around the twin things of the impermanence of reality and the kind of permanence of our feelings about ourselves. We think we're real. We think we're the center of attention. We think we're going to last forever. And the world is kind of going, well, you can think that if you want. So the book just kind of put me in a different headspace in terms of what I want to spend my time doing and worrying about and thinking about. It's a really blessing. Yeah. And I love the The parallels you're drawing between grief and love, I think I'd read somewhere a while ago that grief is just love with no place to go. Oh. That was really interesting. Beautiful. I wish I'd said that. Yeah. Here you can have that. Yeah. I really wonder that when you're writing something like that, how do you know when you've got it right? It must be such a huge weight to carry. Is it just a feeling? Well, I think you have to start with the feeling that you won't really. You know, you're going to, you're like, I always say to myself, this book doesn't have to do everything. It just has to do something, you know, so that takes a little bit of the pressure off. And then instead of saying, oh, I'm going to fuck it up, you think, well, I might get it a little right, you know, so, so some of that self-forgiveness. And then, you know, the way that I work is I, with this one, I tried to read it all the way through at least twice a week. So no matter how long it was, I start from the beginning and read it. So it's kind of like moving through a house and tidying it up as you go, you know, so by, by the time I'd been through it, you know, probably, I mean, hundreds of times, you're pretty sure that what's behind you is good enough or undeniable, then you move forward. And it's, and at some point you're kind of got, well, everything behind me is good. And I've got three pages left, you know, so it's kind of a, I'd say a gradual process. And then at the end, there's a moment where you go, I, you know, I'm sure it could be better, but I just can't see how. And if I, at this point, after these four years, if I start, you know, monkeying around with it, I might destroy it. So it's kind of a, you know, I'm, I'm sure it must be like that in the studio. Cause you can't spend, you know, eight years and you don't want to just spend one day. So you're kind of trying to optimize it, which is, you know, it's, it's, it's tricky, especially with writing because you could theoretically, I could work on a book for the rest of my life. Nobody's, you know, that waiting for it that much. You've got to part ways with it at some point. You've got to part ways, yeah. For sure, and just kind of go with your gut instinct. Yeah. There's a parallel story running alongside this tale of personal grief, and that's the nation's grief during the American Civil War. When the ghosts inhabit Lincoln, you know, we get to hear his innermost thoughts, and we see a man who now understands suffering on a completely different level. And I guess while I was reading the book, I was thinking a lot about the Civil War, and I was wondering what effect that would have on the Emancipation Proclamation. And I was just kind of wondering that at the time of Willie's death, what was the state of the war? Right. Well, this is what, when I was writing that play, I didn't know. And then I went and did the research and it turns out that Lincoln enacted the first version of the Emancipation Proclamation a few months after Willie's death. So it was just interesting to have that timeline and go, okay, your son dies and two months later you do this radical thing. So I thought, well, is there a connection? Of course we don't know, but I kind of think, yes. I think if you have that kind of experience of sorrow and love and all that heightening and then you look up and you see you know these millions of people enslaved there a tenderness that could you know and Lincoln was a very naturally tender person anyway but for my purposes I love that it was that that it followed the events of the book so closely that kind of made sense to me at the very end of the book one of the black ghosts is inside Lincoln and he's kind of subtly educating him and coaching him and so I think I Yeah. And then he then he goes out and he does the Emancipation Proclamation, you know, so that that made sense. And, you know, the thing about the book that was really one of the things that really made me want to do it was that when you do the research on Lincoln, he was having a terrible year. I mean, you know, his son died, but also people really hated him. He was kind of widely perceived as kind of a screw up who had sort of gotten into office on a little bit of a political thing. And he was kind of crude. He used to tell a lot of dirty jokes and he was he looked very kind of scruffy and stuff. So, you know, of course, now we know Lincoln is Lincoln. But at that time, he was kind of somebody that the country was regretting having elected. And he was actually screwing up like there was a lot of real inefficiency in the war and they were losing everything. So for me, that became that that's what kind of elevated into real tragedy was that he's got the weight of the world on him. He's messing up. they throw a party even though his son is sick after the party the kid gets worse and dies and there you are you know you're left with all that that probably had such an a such an effect on him as well yeah he didn't have a happy story to tell himself about himself you know so that's an interesting moment to start how does somebody you know get that low and then somehow you know pick himself up and in the book one of the ways he does it is he takes his attention out of his and he moves it to the world, you know, in that sort of last scene. So I learned a lot just kind of following him around. Yeah, just talking a little bit about that last scene. And I know you just mentioned this character a little bit, but you mentioned the ghost of the enslaved man, and that's Thomas Havens, who rides away from the cemetery with Lincoln at the end of the book. Just tell me a little bit about that. Because the character himself, he's not so... So, like, he's quite understated throughout the novel and then has such a big moment at the end. Right. You know, he's never experienced freedom, though he kind of tells himself that his slave master and wife were like family to him. You know, that kind of, I'm just interested in the story behind that a little bit. Yeah, well, one of the things that the book taught me was that, all right, so early on I thought, okay, I'm a white guy. I'm not going to presume to tell these stories. I'll stay out of it. So then you have a book set in the Civil War with no black voices. So that doesn't seem right. So then, you know, OK, well, I have to try my best. But what the book was set up so that, as you said, that black characters are kind of absent at the beginning. They're trying to get into the graveyard. They're not allowed. And at the end, they kind of take over the book, which was to me very true with Lincoln's experience, because he at the beginning was always say that the war was about union, saving the union. And he would always try for political reasons to not talk about slavery. Then by the end, near his death, he knew very well what the war was about. And he'd seen these very moving examples of black soldiers being slaughtered by the South. And he'd seen the high levels of volunteerism and stuff. So he was, I think when he was young, he was probably a pretty racist guy as everyone was. By the end, he was, I would say, 20 or 30 years ahead of the country in terms of his understanding of the injustice. and stuff. So I kind of loved the way the book sort of at first minimizes the black presence, and then it grows in the book and in Lincoln's mind. And Havens is sort of, I picked him to be kind of, if there is such a thing, the person who was in the least brutal form of slavery. And then he tells himself that story. I was lucky. It wasn't so bad for me. And then in one of his monologues, he's like, wait a minute. I was free for 20 minutes on this one Thursday. Other people lived their whole lives like that. So that's what kind of inspires him to go into Lincoln and try to persuade him. But he was a very, to me, he was sort of a, as you say, a very quiet, almost happy presence. And then sometime during the course of the book, it sort of occurred to him what he'd missed out on. So that motivates him to try to make a change. Yeah, I found it. I mean, it was perfect ending to an already perfect book for me. Like, I just thought it was so interesting. I'm also really interested in how, as a writer, you take on such a huge historical cultural figure, such as Lincoln. You know, how do you write about someone who's so significant in American history without falling into parody or cliche? Like what can you contribute that is new? Beginner artists run into a problem and they quit. Like, ah, that's too much. Artists who are more experienced say, oh, I've got a problem. That's great. That means that the book can grow around the problem. So definitely, like I thought, oh my God, Lincoln's been in South Park. You know, he's always in car commercials. I mean, so I didn't, I mean, that was one of the reasons I didn't want to do it because how do you take that guy on? So for me, I finally just said, well, I have to try. And I kind of broke them into parts. Like, okay, so Lincoln, who knows how Lincoln thought? Nobody. Also, if we did know, it would probably be, I mean, a person in 1860 has a completely different context than we do. And I think a lot of things he thought we wouldn't even be able to make sense of. But I thought, okay, let's break him into parts. Mostly he's grieving father so and mostly a grieving father is a father who has love for their kids which i'm definitely that guy so i'm putting a lot of that and just love you know love and how i felt it he's also a particular guy out in the woods in the cold he probably doesn't have the right coat on uh i i made it that his back is a little bit out which mine is right now so you know so so that kind of thing so then you've got like you already got like 75 of them he's a grieving father who's out in the cold with no coat and his back hurts and then the other maybe 10 is he's got to move so there's action that's nothing so then you're left at the end with about 10 where you have to posit his mental process you know and what i did there really honestly was just sort of took i took the very best parts of myself you know the most compassionate most articulate uh most patient parts and i just put that into him you know so that was the kind of the the risky stuff um so you know it's it's always an illusion you're not really making a character you're just making some sentences and for me the whole thing is if you are reading it and you go oh bullshit that's bullshit and you close the book then we're done you know so in a certain way i'm trying to get you to not close the book uh by whatever means necessary you know but it was it was sometimes very scary to say okay let's do a monologue from lincoln's point of view like oh my god get my top hat on you know what yeah george i could talk to you all day oh it's such a pleasure but i'd love to finish by asking you what would you say to someone who's intimidated to start this book right and i know also when i went on the road i found out a lot of people would come up kind of sheepishly and go like you know i i bought the book uh yeah i did you know and i read i read And some, and I, you know, and other people would write me, you asshole, why do you write, you know, just being difficult? So I totally get that it's a, you know, kind of a challenge. The first thing I would say is if you, if you try to book and it's hard, I'll just give you my word that I made it a little bit of a narrow doorway at the beginning. So that by the end of the book, the book will kind of teach you how to read it. And hopefully you'll have a beautiful experience at the end. So it was no, like, I'm not trying to be difficult for difficulty's sake. We actually did a video that's on service95.com where I kind of talked through the first five or six pages. And my theory is if you notice certain things in those first pages, the rest of the book will open up to you. But yeah, I have family members. Yeah, I own your book. Yeah, it just takes a second to get into the voice a little bit. I think especially because in the beginning you're like, okay, it's a character. And then all of a sudden it starts with like book excerpts. Right. And then that sort of gets a little confusing. But then you're like, okay, now I know what's happening. I mean, one of the things that I've thought is if you have, like if we were writing a book about right now, let's say it's 20 years from now, we're writing a book about 2024. And it says, you know, a duo picked up her cell phone, a small device useful for communicating with people far away. That's bullshit because you just, to you, it's just a phone, you know? So the same way with these ghosts, they're not going to ever say, hi I'm a ghost you know or oh I'm so sorry I'm dead because of them that's not how it is so you have to kind of shorthand at the beginning and then hopefully there's enough little clues in there that the reader would get up to speed and then and then we're off to the races it's true especially with these ghosts because they're in such deep denial that they're even ghosts or like that they're dead George thank you so much for joining me today like I absolutely loved our conversation and thankfully it wasn't intimidating at all. Always such a pleasure for me too and congratulations on the great year you have and I hope next year is even better. Oh thank you. Hey can I ask one question because I'm a really shitty songwriter but when you this is such a baby question so you're working in your notebook and you're writing some lyrics are you is that coming to you with melody or without? When I'm writing my notebook to begin with it's just words and then when I'm in the studio and someone's playing the guitar then I would put the words to a melody So then sometimes if the melody is stronger or a different melody is stronger than the ones that I've paired it to the melody, then I would try and find other rhyming words or something to like fit the stanza more perfectly. You know, change the words around to then fit the melody if it was better. Right. Okay. I see. So the first step is purely language and then the music gets kind of added in later. Yeah. Well, thank you for telling me that. Yeah, that's been the way for me. yeah I'm gonna try to write one good song before I die and so far I haven't found it yet but but that'll help we should write one together oh my god I can help with the melodies if you like oh that'd be amazing I'd love to do that well thank you so much it was really a pleasure and uh good luck with everything I also want to say thank you so much for being so generous because you've written a really beautiful essay for us on how you wrote Lincoln in the Bardo and the choices you made during the process. And you've also produced an exclusive film for Service 95 Book Club on how to read the book, which you just mentioned, that guides readers through the first critical pages. And I really recommend that everybody watches that. It's going to be an absolute gem. And thank you once again so much. And if you want to write a song, let me know. All right. Call me. If you want to write a short story, let me know. Okay. All right. See ya. Thanks for listening. Don't forget, there are brand new episodes added every month alongside these archive episodes. We've got some amazing authors coming up that I just know you'll love. Make sure you're following the Service 95 Book Club podcast so you never miss an episode. And if you love this one, why not leave us a review? Thanks so much for listening and see you next time.