Recorded on Wednesday, March 18, 2026

TRANSCRIPT

Arsean Maqami '12 Welcome, everyone. It's great to have you with us tonight. Thank you so much for joining us. For this sweet talk, writing about Parents and sons featuring Joe McGinnis Jr. from the class of 1994 and Sam Sussman from the class of 2013, moderated by Professor Moriel Rothman-Zecher, assistant professor for English literature here at Swarthmore. Professor Rothman-Zecher’s first novel, Sadness is a White Bird, won multiple awards and numerous other accolades. His second novel, Before All the World was named an NPR Best Book of 2022 and has numerous other accolades and awards from there. My name is Arsean Maqami, class of 2012. Before we get to tonight's talk, I just want to go over a few preliminary pieces of business.

SwatTalks is a speaker series brought to you by the Swarthmore Alumni Council, which is the leadership body of the Swarthmore Alumni Association. For those of you who are new to our talks, or for the regulars who just need a refresher, for the first half hour, Professor Rothman-Zecher will go over the conversation. There'll be pieces read by both Joe and Sam.

Afterwards, for the second half. Questions will be answered. And going from there. Please use the Q&A feature at the bottom of the zoom. And please include your name and class here. With your question handing it over to you.

Moriel Rothman-Zecher Wonderful. Thank you so much. And thank you, everyone, for joining us. We have a lot of folks here from, I imagine, all over the world. And I'm very happy to be here with Joseph and Sam this evening to hear from both of them. Both from their creative works and about their creative processes and the way this evening will go. As mentioned, this will have short readings from both of our featured authors and then a conversation between the three of us. We will then open it up to Q&A from the audience.

So feel free to type in your questions or prepare your questions as they come up for me. For you. Without further ado, I will introduce first Joseph, and then Sam will hear readings from each of them and then open it up into further conversation. So to begin with, Joseph McGinniss Jr, is the author of Damaged People, a memoir of Fathers and Sons, as well as other books.

But in this particular work, McGinniss Jr. tells the story of his affectionate yet stormy relationship with his father. The celebrated political and true crime writer Joe McGinniss, recounting his father's tumultuous career while also tracing his own McGinniss Jr., a critically acclaimed novelist, acknowledges the literary debts he owes his father, but lays bare his desire to forge a different path as a father himself.

Moriel Rothman-Zecher
Hailed by David Sheff as, quote, brave, sometimes painful and always engrossing, Damaged People is a testament to the heartbreak of unfulfilled expectations and the beauty of second chances. Please join me in welcoming Joseph McGinniss Jr.

Joseph McGinniss '94 Thank you so much, Moriel. That's very, very kind of you. And thank you, everybody for being here. This is just such a wonderful series. It's just such a privilege to actually be a part of it. Having watched so many hours of it, so. Okay. So damaged people, about my father, about being a father. I'm going to read a very brief section.

From the first chapter and actually two, two short sections. Shouldn't take more than a maybe 2 or 3 minutes just to give a sense of what it was like, being his son. So here's the people, and it's.

We begin in chapter one, 1976. The photoshoot was on Saturday. A big magazine was doing a story about dad's new book. He picked the three of us up from school. He was easy to spot, over six feet tall, with dark hair that always needed trimming. And to be sure, he was always waving and calling out to us with his smile of crooked teeth.

Of the three of us. I was the youngest at six, and the one who ran to him, and he scooped me up in his powerful arms and hugged me so tight, and I let him foist me off the ground and carry me to his metallic blue suburban, where we piled in and buckled up and were off. I did the math in my head half a Friday, all morning, afternoon and night on Saturday, and more than half of Sunday with dad.

He lived close enough to pick us up once a month and drive to whatever house he and Nina were renting in New Jersey. The Philadelphia rock station crackled through the speakers as he tuned to the radio, and Cynthia and Sarah sprawled out in the back seat, and I'd climbed into the backpack as the mood shifted only slightly. When we left Swarthmore and cut through the dreary suburbs of Rutledge and Ridley Park and strip malls and gas stations and cookie cutter red brick houses, because I knew the route by heart and what was to come, the one inevitable stop before the highway.

A small pub, dimly lit bar and liquor store set back from the main road. His signaling slowed and I deflated as he pulled in and parked and left the radio on. And we waited. I stared at the glowing neon red open sign and watched the front door, hoping for some reason he'd emerged empty handed. He moved far enough away so that there would be no confusion about whose responsibility it was to get us ready for school, to pick us up, to take us to the dentist or piano lesson or basketball game, to get us fed and make sure our homework was done and that we didn't spend too much time in front of the television or on the phone to rebound my missed shots. He didn't have to worry about pop-ins or surprise visits. One of us kids barging in after school unannounced 90 minutes away meant life as he wanted it. Drinking without restraint and parties when he felt like it, and getting high and slipping it off and writing and editing and jogging and listening to records and reading newspapers and magazines and taking long phone calls with old high school friends and planning trips to horse races and mountain ranges and more riding and drinking.

The follow up to his record setting and fame making debut, The Selling of the President, was a spare, thinly veiled autobiographical novel about a young, famous author crashing and burning on his book tour. Few people read it. The reviews written were unkind. His new book wasn't going to sell either, but we didn't know the difference and didn't care.

Time with him was the point. We dropped our things on the carpet of the living room floor and scrambled down to the red brick, red floor, brick floor, basement kitchen for potato chips and root beer. The weekends were all Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen and Hank Williams records on the stereo and barbecues lit and pachinko and Othello played, and Polaroid pictures taken and walks in the woods and skipping rocks across the nearby creek and throwing the Nerf football to me until I nailed the perfect leaping touchdown catch.

And then one last little section here.

Despite the cold, quiet dysfunction of his childhood, dad had learned and memorized the words to lullabies, which he gladly saying to us at night. He was a barely passable falsetto, singing voice. I do wonder where he learned to hug so tight that I felt how much he loved me. He crawled on the carpeted floor with any one of us on his back, falling together in laughter time and again.

Maybe that was him doing all the things he'd wanted to do with his own father. And then he drove us home and drove away. Maybe, like height, cynicism, depression and drinking that was inherent to the walking away. It was hard to see in the glint of Red tail lights on those Sunday nights, but that was him doing better.

More obvious examples filled the two days I just spent with him. That's where the tears came from. Children know when their loved he was going, where he wanted to live, how and with whom he chose. I was part of that book dearly. I was a fraction of his month. Two full days and a week here. There. He had that kind of power.

He could slice and dice me into pieces of the whole person I was meant to be.

You know, so that's just a section. I hope that wasn't too long.

Moriel Rothman-Zecher No, no, it was wonderful. Thank you for reading that night.

Joseph McGinniss '94 Thank you.

Moriel Rothman-Zecher I could listen to you read for a while. Thank you. Thank you for that. Next, it's my pleasure to introduce Sam Sussman, who is the author of the novel boy from the North Country, a three time USA today bestseller and finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards and Fiction boy from the North Country was hailed by Kirkus as, quote, the most beautiful and moving mother son story in recent memory and named by Oprah Daily as the best debut of fall 2025.

Sussman has written for Harper's, The Washington Post, and been profiled in The New York Times. He holds a BA from Swarthmore College and an MPhil from Oxford. Please join me in welcoming Sam.

Sam Sussman '13 It's so great to be here. Moriel, it's great to see you. Thank you for doing this. Joe, it's great to be with you. I don't know if Swarthmore is my favorite place in the world, but it's certainly my favorite place in America, and it's really just a pleasure to be with everyone. I see 110 people in this chat.

I don't know when the last time I was with 110 Swatties. It was probably when I was a student. And it's really a pleasure. So this is my novel. And I'll just say that it came out in September. I've been on book tours for much of that time. And one of the real highlights was being invited by Moriel to come to Swarthmore.

And it was just such a pleasure to be back and talk to students. And I'll also just say, for those of you who have not read Moriel’s work, you're really missing out. Who wrote two of the most extraordinary novels of the last decade. And I really, really encourage you to read his work if you're not familiar.

So, I will read just a few minutes, from Boy from the North Country. And I really look forward to the conversation that follows.

On winter afternoons. My mother and I walked into the snow in our warmest coats. My mother carried her wooden ax, standing over maple trees that fell in that year's storms. She lifted the ax I overhead and swung, swung it into the fallen trees. The rhythmic thudding echoed as I wandered the forest, searching for kindling. Sometimes the sound paused, and I turned to see my mother struggling with the ax overhead, its blades stuck in the round cut of wood.

A woman in a green winter jacket with auburn hair about her shoulders and a fierce glare in her eyes. We carried the wood to the iron braid beside our fireplace, and my mother sent the burnt offering on the stove. She lit a match and set the flame beneath the kindling, and stoked the fire with a rusted steel poker, and flames blazed and warmth spread through the den.

And my mother said, where shall we go tonight? I walked to the bookshelf and, like an adventurer surveying the globe, grandly pointed to our destination on that sofa by the fire. We visited Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest and King Arthur and Camelot. My mother's eyes moved across the pages. Her voice changed tone and temperament as she conjured the Arthurian knights into the room.

I have no memory earlier than this. My mother's words creating the world.

Moriel Rothman-Zecher Thank you. Sam.

Beautiful reading. Thank you to both of you. And it's such a joy to be here with both of you, to get to hear these fragments of your works. These works center around orbit, orbiting around relationships between sons and their parents. My first question for both of you is something along the lines of this. So our job as writers is to try our best to write about people as they actually are.

I think that's I'll, I'll posit that. And if you disagree with that, then you can push back. But the question that comes in immediately, the complicating question is there are few people in our lives more regularly dehumanized than our parents, right? And that could be from a lot of directions. That could either be from the demonic or the hagiographic.

It could be from the sense of parent as ultimate nemesis, as barrier toward freedom and well-being, as the cause of all of our ills, that our suffering or parent as saint, as angel, as doer of no wrong, as a redeemed, larger than life human. And so, I guess I wonder, with that kind of broad question, how did you both go about it?

How do you both go about writing either, non-fictional or fictional parental characters, knowing the potential pitfalls that if you fall too much in this direction or in that you fail to write about a real person.

Sam Sussman '13 It's a softball. So, Joe, you want that first. This is what SwatTalks gets.

Joseph McGinniss '94 Yes, I love it. Got it. Got. Goodness. All right. Yeah. So, look, okay, I started, what I like is a Lamott quote. First of all, you own everything that happens to you. And the second part of that quote is, if people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better. So, you know, she's spot on there.

The thing is, you have to write what you find, what you see. You got to write the truth. All right. Look. And the reality is, if you're writing nonfiction, and you're writing about a person.

And they're a family member and they're a parent, and they're a writer, and they've taught you to tell the truth. When you write and write the truth as you find it.

You don't really have a choice. I mean, you don't, you don't. You got to go. You got to. The other thing is, you got to touch the wire. So if you want the reader to really fully appreciate what it is, you feel what it is you find, then you've got to. You're going to shock yourself. You're going to hurt yourself.

You're going to, you're going to. It's going to sting. Otherwise you're not doing it right. And in my case, look, my father wasn't here for it. So, you know, I've got to be fair to him. You know, he would have something to say in as a rejoinder. But he wrote his own memoir, and he called out his parents for their failings.

There's their efforts, but their failings, too. And I just think that it's just not worth doing if you're going to hold back, because what good is it for the reader if you're not giving them an unvarnished look at the truth as you felt it and found it? You know, Sam, has had a different, which I find fascinating, route to take with fiction and his focus on his mother.

He made more progress, than maybe when you read it, you don't necessarily feel like, wow, this guy nailed it. Whereas I know Sam can speak to it. Better. His mother is sort of a heroic figure in many ways. At least fictionally.

Sam Sussman '13 Well, and thanks for that. You know, I think there’s so much here, it's such a rich question. There are the judgments that we make about our parents, and then there's the journey behind those judgments to come into our own understanding of who our parents are and what they were thinking about the life decisions that they made.

What I'm writing, it's not a fictional novel. It's no secret that the mother at the center of it is drawn from my mother. And it's very much the story of a young man who does not understand the decisions that his mother has made. He doesn't understand her values. He doesn't understand. Really basic things. Like why she will talk to him about what she knows about the identity of his biological father.

She will talk to him about major parts of her life before he was born. And he also doesn't understand why they are living this quiet, pastoral life in the woods of upstate New York, in a place where, as the sort of child of the countercultural late 60s and 70s, they just don't belong. And my novel is so much about the journey of the son coming into an understanding of, all the ways in which he's misunderstood his mother and all, all that she's sort of kept from him and why.

And I guess more than a definitive judgment. What I'm interested in is that process of intimacy and mutual knowing. And I think in some ways there's no one in our lives that we know more intimately than our parents. And there also tends to be no relationship where we know the other person so thinly for so many years.

So, you know, there are many parts of my mother's life that I admire enormously. And I tried to write into the book, but it's not, that to me is actually sort of not the centerpiece. It's more the journey toward understanding the complexity of another person's life. And I wrote that in all its honesty and, and, you know, there's a scene where, you know, I'm in my character as a teenager and just tells his mother, you know, the reason that you don't have a romantic partner, that you don't deserve to be loved.

And, you know, I knew that I had to write sort of those terrible teenage moments of conflicts, in order to earn the real intimacy between this mother and son that evolves. By the time that he's in his mid 20s. So that's a little bit of how I tried to approach the question.

Moriel Rothman-Zecher So my next question and this is, you know, on the subject of keeping it light. Joe, you mentioned a little bit about, you know, your father's death. And I know both of your works were published after your parents died. And I wonder how their deaths affected your writing, whether you had thought, as you started out as writers, that you would write about relationships with your parents, whether something changed after they died, and how you see the relationship between your parents' respective deaths.

And the works that you subsequently published?

Joseph McGinniss '94 So yeah. That's great. That's a great quote. Okay. So. My father was … He shared a lot, with me and with his children, about himself and what he went through. In many ways, email wasn't necessarily his friend, in the sense that he could just fire off whatever he was feeling at any moment about himself and what he was going through. Whether or not we could handle it, wanting to know, what it might do to us emotionally, how fraught it was, how it might affect each of us independently.

My sisters, my two stepbrother or half brothers, he put it all out there about himself, couldn't, you know, filter. And so, he sort of established this, this sort of  … To me, it wasn't his death, it had no impact either way in terms of what I was going to write or how I was going to assess him from my point of view and his impact on me because we'd had it out. We dealt with everything under the sun for years, and so when he died, we were going through the same thing with communication and understanding each other.

And I wrote, I wrote a short piece, in The New Yorker about him, not long after he died, called lessons from My father. And there was. There was just a sense of peace that he understood that as a writer, I was going to have to do what he did. So. Well, he was a master at ripping any sort of mask off of any sort of facade and getting right to the heart of things.

So there was, I can't say that his passing had much of an impact on how I approached him in my writing. It, other than inspiring me to just do better and work a little bit harder.

Sam Sussman '13 You know, for me. So my mother passed away when I was 26, and that was a really, really formative experience in my life and, experienced it. Not at all as a writer when I was going through that experience with her, what I've now written about, I never thought, oh, let me write about this. But it changed everything in my life.

It changed how I thought about her, how I thought about myself. And ultimately, as a writer, it really changed how I thought about sort of the purpose of writing and, you know, so the character in my book was sort of taken from my life, comes home in his mid-twenties and his mother is sick, and it's the first moment where he has to grapple with some sort of adult responsibility.

And he's in the middle. He's been writing a novel for years, and he knows he can't. It's not exactly working. At one point he says, I've never known how to tell my own story, not even to myself. And he kind of can't figure out why he hasn't been able to write. He's got a wonderful education.He’s diligent. He's worked hard. And as he's spending this time at home with his mother, he's gradually realizing that the way he's come to think about art or literature is sort of, almost as a completely cerebral intellectual project. And he’s gradually realizing that the sort of origins of his love for literature have come from this woman who has this sense that, any sort of work of art, but certainly a novel should sort of have a moral or spiritual component or dimension.

And he's realized that he's kind of lived his life in some ways without that. And he's been so intellectually driven, certainly a medical side effect of a Swarthmore education that he's sort of missed what his mother was always trying to teach him. And, and, I mean, that's a simplification of my own life experiences, but definitely, you know, I think before that experience in my own life, I was kind of taking the emotional experiences that I've had in my own life, familial dynamics, and sort of setting them far from my own life and trying to transpose them onto a sort of larger national political events or questions.

I, you know, wrote a novel that sort of set these dynamics over a 911 drama, that kind of thing. And after my mother's death, I really felt, no, I need to narrow it in and just write about the intimacy of a few lives. That's what I want to try to do. And so, yeah, that death transformed so much in my life and, and I guess the last thing I'll say on that subject is it, you know, when you go through grief in that way, you want a place to put your memories of another person.

And as a writer, inevitably, you know, writing about my mother was a way of spending more time with her. It was a way of thinking more deeply about her life. It was a way of sort of ordering or collecting my various thoughts and memories about who she was. And putting all of that into a book was deeply meaningful for me.

Moriel Rothman-Zecher Thank you both. So I'm now going to invite folks in the audience to type in questions as they come, and I'll sort of read them, sift through them, and try to get to as many as possible in a way that feels organic, in flow with our conversation. So the first one I want to bring to both of you is a question from Pam Hoffer, in which Pam writes, each child in a family has their own history with a parent.

When you write about your family, you present a history that may be significantly different for how a sibling experienced their relationship. How has your writing affected your siblings, your relationship with them, and has their response recast any of your perspective? And so in addition to that, just sort of seeing the question of how, how does writing about a parental figure, how does two sibling characters factor into each of your work in the fictional or non-fictional sense?

Joseph McGinniss '94 Well, Moriel, that's a great question, Pam. So to give a sense of my situation, prior to publication, my half brother and stepmother wrote a letter to Simon and Schuster saying that they were going to sue for defamation if we went forward with the memoir. So that gives you a sense of the subject matter and how sensitive it was to people.

So in my case, outward for me, I had my sisters, my older sisters in the book, who I wrote about. We went through the same thing. We went through missing our father and not having our father. And over the years, we connected in the same way we all understood why we didn't have him his fault, his, you know, his amazing affection and intelligence and career and. But just how much pain we shared, and what a hero our mother was to raise the three of us on a nurse's salary. Having been left by him in 1970. So we connected.

Until the book came. Because, as Pam pointed out, every sibling, every child, experiences a parent differently and that can evolve. And that doesn't always not always one note and it can shift in perspective changes over time. And so my sisters got to a point where they didn't see things quite the way they used to see things.

And so it did bring up a lot of, a lot of, uncomfortable, conversations. Certainly has taken its toll. But again, this is kind of what happens, you know, the title Damaged People, comes from a quote, the writer J. Anthony Lucas, all writers are basically, I'm paraphrasing, all writers they're hard, damaged people. Writing is a way to heal those wounds. And, you know, the process for healing that damage. So my sisters were damaged. My father was damaged. I mean, for God sakes, we're all damaged. But it was a question of how much do I share? And now their names are changed, but how much do I share about their hurt and their pain?

Enough to make the point that the resilience my father showed in the end, was only surpassed by their resilience and my mother's resilience. So I'd like to think that it may be a painful process to lay out a lot, a lot of this, the ugly inside stuff. That is pretty sensitive. But in the end, it's the bigger picture.

And the takeaway that, hey, we went through all this and we raised amazing children. We have amazing spouses. We are largely content. We are empathetic people. We are better off for it. And I think that in the end, that's their takeaway, even if getting there may take longer for them than it did for me.

Sam Sussman '13 Well, there's the great Graham Greene quote that when there's a writer in the family, the family is doomed. But I don't think that's fair. It's so obviously the other way around that when there's a doomed family, then it will produce a writer.

I made the decision not to write about my sister. So I wrote and it's interesting because I published a short nonfiction memoir essay on the sort of rough story that went into, Boy from the North Country. And I mentioned my sister in that memoir essay. So sometimes people will come up to me after they've read the novel and say, you know, what did you do with your sister?

And I promise that she was okay. She has a thriving life. But I made the decision not to include her in the novel, because I didn't feel that our relationship or her relationship to our mother was the essence of the story that I was writing about. And I also felt that it was hers. It wasn't mine.

That's her private life, and I don't have a right to yank it into my art. And, I also felt comfortable in the feeling that there were many, many other important people in my life and my mother's life who I didn't write about in the book. And, you know, books are remarkable. Things.

I think we're all here because we love them. But the one thing you can't do with a book is fit an entire life. And everyone who's been important to you and, you know, I think the interesting thing around this conversation is that, I can and have said to my sister many times that, you know, we each had our own experience and, just that I've written mine doesn't make it any more legitimate than her perspective.

And still, there's a sort of inherent unfairness there that I am a writer. So I've published my experience and perspective. And that's not how she expresses her love or attachment. And so she hasn't. But I think it's important to acknowledge the asymmetry. And, it's a wonderful question and I'm happy to have it.

And, and, I got this question at a bookstore event recently, and I gave a similar answer, and someone started saying that your sister must hate your book. She must hate your book. And I said, I don't think so. I don't think so. And then the person came up to me afterwards and started telling me that they had published a memoir, and his sister hated his book.

So, I think that, you know, that is a common experience, a difficult experience, but, that's, that's a little bit of, of my experience.

Moriel Rothman-Zecher Thank you both. So the next question is from Tillery Arundell, class of 1993. And it's particularly for Joe, but I think it could be asked to both of you. The question is, did you feel like your book was a way to get closer to your father? Were you chasing him with words?

Joseph McGinniss '94 Yeah, that's a wow. That's deep. Okay. So, like, by choosing my father forever. I can't say. I think more of what motivated me with this book and this writing.

And examining him was to better understand why I was making the mistakes I was making as a father.

I didn't really when my son was born. In fact, my life was transformed, because my father drank and it freaked me out as a kid, and as an adult. But as well, when it was formative, it scared the hell out of me.

I hated to see him drink. He wasn't a violent rocker. He was just trying to give a night that was with him. And every night I wasn't. I never drank as a result. Ever.

I was like, I'm not going. I can't end up like that. That's in the genes. But when my son was born, it was almost like that compulsive whatever DNA, that compulsion lit up, and I was like, I became addicted to my son. I was like, I love this, I need this, this is everything. And it got to a point where I probably felt like, you know, this is too much like, I gotta make sure that I am not putting too much on him, and I gotta check myself.

Where is this coming from? And I had to examine my father and his addictions and his compulsions and sort of unpack what I was feeling. So what was my compulsion was my son, my addiction was my son. What I was feeling. So I felt like writing about my father, examining him, trying to better understand what made him tick and what was inside of him was really in, in service to, like, I got to be better for my son.

So I got to be a better father. And I can't understand me if I don't understand him. So I hope that helps to answer the question for me.

Sam Sussman '13 I would not say chasing. I would say understanding that there were, you know, about a third of this novel is told from, June, the mother's perspective. And it's her telling her son about her life before he was born and what led her to the choices that she made and what the formative experiences of her life were.

And I think that sitting within that material and sort of the process of transforming my mother's account of her life into that novel, it made me feel that I was knowing her better. And there's something very powerful, you know, we all have thoughts about parents, people we know, friends, lovers. But actually sitting at your desk every day for two years and inhabiting the perspective of a character based on someone you knew, that for me, was a profound, transformative experience.

You just go to depths. I felt that I went to depths that hadn't previously existed in our relationship, and it was a way of continuing that relationship. After her death. And I think we really struggle in our culture to articulate, the way that those relationships continue after someone's life has ended. And, writing this book, really, I felt that powerfully.

And I'll also say that you know, there were difficult decisions at my mom made at the end of her life about, how much she shared with me about her medical condition, how much she knew about how much time she had left, and the way that she tried to balance, protecting me from what could have been difficult news while also just wanting to have the freedom to live outside this feeling that, there was very limited time.

And that's not an easy balance to strike, and certainly not when your child is your caretaker. And so, you know, I, I think I came to understand the way that she thought about what she shared and didn't share with me towards the end of her life, much more powerfully by writing it. And so, so for me, chasing gives the connotation that there's sort of, almost a futility that we're writing about parents because that's the closest we can get that I sort of feel more optimistic about the experience of writing about a parent that that there's really a deep knowing that's possible through literature.

And I think it's interesting because there's a discourse that floats out there that sort of says, you know, what is literature good for and it makes you feel empathy for people who are really different from you and have a different background. And that may be true, but I think it's also literature that it is true for knowing the people we're closest to in our lives.

It's true for knowing ourselves. And those are all the things I found most powerful in reading and writing. And were certainly formative for me in writing this book.

Moriel Rothman-Zecher Thank you. So the next question is from Sommer Schaffer and Sommer appreciates both of your beautiful writing and thanks each of you, and then goes on to ask a question that I was also wondering about, which is to both of you, what are some of your favorite books that center parent child relationships and how do these work?

These books inspire your craft and imagining in this, in these works and in future works.

Joseph McGinniss '94 You know, I think maybe Sam could go because as a, you know, he wrote a novel.

Sam Sussman '13 Yeah, sure. Well, one of the books I thought most about was Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness, and that also sort of live somewhere between fiction and nonfiction. Oz’s was a nonfiction novel. There are large sections of it that are something other than nonfiction. It's sort of a parable, a fairy tale. What's extraordinary about that book is that Oz's mother died when he was 12, and he wrote that book in his late 50s and early 60s.

And he circles her life in an extraordinary way. He writes about her from the perspective of being a young child who was so close to her, and he writes about her from the perspective of being a 10 or 11 year old who's starting to kind of become, you know, more a teenager who doesn't understand her, feels distant. He writes about her from the perspective of the 12 year old, who feels abandoned by her suicide.

He writes about her from the perspective of being the final age that she lived in her 30s, and almost looking at her eye to eye and understanding more deeply the disappointments that might have shaped her life. And by the time he is finishing that book, his writing about her, he writes about being, an age at which he could be her father, at the age when she died and the depth of observation that he finds as he just circles and circles her life and sees it through so many new perspectives and continues to unearth new ways of understanding who this woman was and how deeply she is within him.

That, to me, is maybe the most extraordinary, per child book I've ever read. At times that I would feel stuck with this, I would actually, I would call my best friend to also, absolutely loves Amos Oz, and we would just read sections back and forth to each other and talk about the book.

Joseph McGinniss '94 I will say one major influence on mine was my father's memoir, Heroes. It was. I devoured it so many times when I was too young to understand, too young to appreciate. And then, of course, when I was writing my own version, my own take on him and what I understood and what I needed to learn, Heroes was instrumental.

So I just, I stuck to that. Then I understood that that was what was going to lead me. You know, I wouldn't stray too far and try to write something that wasn't.

And sort of in conversation with him, and sort of, and do the best I could to, to bring my understanding, his voice, his, his assessment of his own life, what he did and why. And then using that. And I got to be honest, it was Heroes. And with his emails, I had to go through so many emails, pages and pages and pages of letters from him.

And that was hugely influential. So I didn't … unlike my fiction, where I had models for the books, I wrote the books, the novels that I wanted to read that moved me the most. But say, for my last novel, Carousel Court, Revolutionary Road was a huge influence on that. And I just said, you know, I got it.

I want to somehow find a way to update Revolutionary Road. Okay. So I had a model for that and similar with the first novel, but with this one, my model was my father's memoir and his emails and my own work for the New Yorker about my father and my son. A few years ago.

Sam Sussman '13 I love Richard Yates. That's such an extraordinary one man show. Yeah, yeah.

Moriel Rothman-Zecher Thank you both. So the next question is one that I'm interested in as well. This is from Christine Grant Halpern. And it's another angle of research where we talk right now about inspirations and whether in the form of books or memoirs or emails. This question asks both of you whether you considered talking to others who knew your parents, to learn better, recall about that parents relationship with each of you?

If so, could you tell us about that? And if not, if you chose not to sort of do that version of interviewing and understanding the landscape, why not?

Sam Sussman '13 I'm happy to say I didn't then I think perspective is so important in any writing. You have to know and be confident in the perspective that you are writing in. This novel is written from my perspective as my mother's son, and that's what I'm transforming into a novel. And there were certain factual things I wanted to know that I would.

Sam Sussman '13 You know, I talked about my part of the story that says sort of my mother's experience as a young woman in the bohemian 1970s New York arts world. So I talked to someone who was in the studio with her because I was curious about it. I just wanted to confirm my own memory about certain playwrights that they had studied, small factual things.

But I think it would have been so easy for it to spiral into everyone who'd ever met my mother. Other people's perspectives. That's endless. And that's a research project that's different. And if I were writing a biography of my mother, I would have done that. And if I was running an autobiography, which would have been a ridiculous thing for me to do, I would have done that.

But a novel is about perspective, and I wanted to stay really firmly within my vantage point. And this novel is written from my memory of my mother's memories. That's what I'm writing about here.

Joseph McGinniss '94 Very similar. I didn't want to write a biography. I easily could have done that with my father. He had a thousand friends and yet was very lonely. And he had so many admirers and so many enemies and so many allies. But that's a biography. And he's … I frankly think he was a force of nature.

And I would devour a biography of my father. I revere his career and his tenacity and his intelligence.

Yeah, this is from the heart. Memoir is your experience with the person you're writing about and the life you've lived. So no need for that in this case.

Moriel Rothman-Zecher Great. So I'll, I think we have time for one more short question directed to each of you, and I'll, I'll take I'll maybe I'll name both of the questions and give you a chance to address these. And then if there are any last things that you want to share with the group before we wrap up for the evening.

So this one I'll direct towards Sam. And this is a question again from Sommer Schaefer, about autofiction, whether there is too much, conversation around autofiction and whether every piece of creative writing is, in a sense, autofiction, and, oh, and and then the question to Joe that I want to let you ponder while also addresses this is from Bill Guerin, class of 1981. And this question is, how did the healing you experienced in writing about your family of origin affect your approach to parenting? So I'll turn it over to Sam and then to Joe, and then we'll conclude.

Sam Sussman '13 Well, I couldn't agree more with the premise of the question. You know, there are those that think all fiction is auto fiction. There's that great quote from Jonathan Franzen where he says, nothing more autobiographical was ever written than Kafka's Metamorphosis. But so no matter what we're writing, the we're drawing on, our emotion, perspective, memory. These are the elements of fiction.

And I think, you know, whether you kind of have the pretense of, okay, this is it's fantasy or it's a historical novel. I guess I'm skeptical of those sorts of claims to a broader objectivity. Right? Those are wonderful genres. I read and admired them, but they're ultimately written from the perspective of one person's life experience. One person doing what all writers are doing, which is sitting at a desk and trying to transform their memories and experiences in life into a novel.

And, I think it's sort of a in a way, it's what makes the novel so unique as an art form that it can kind of come from nothing except our own experience. That's different than, you know, let's say, photography, where you can wander into the streets and you can sort of vanish. Of course it's what. It's what you see.

It's your eye, but you can sort of vanish behind the lens and make it so much about the subject. Right. But when you write a novel, you imagine the subject that comes deeply from within. So and if we're just doing last words, I'll say how much of a pleasure this was. And, Moriel, great to be in conversation with you.

And, I hope people will read the book and read Joe's book and read Moriel’s book. Reading is so under attack in our culture. And as Swarthmore alumni, I hope it is a community where people proudly read. And I'm grateful to swap talks for organizing this, and I hope everyone engages with the books.

Joseph McGinniss '94 So, so well said. Wow. Perfect. Sam. Could not have said it better. So I do echo Sam's sentiments about gratitude for this. It couldn't be more important. Long form reading immersion. You know, just escaping from the short attention span and all the chaos and just losing yourself in someone else's world. In their mind, their imagination. It's it's it couldn't be healthier. So as far as the question about, if I, if I remember correctly, it was about how my parenting was impacted by my process and examining my father and then my upbringing.

You know, so, like, when you have a formative fracture, when say, a parent leaves, and is divorced and then kids are and that's formative in their character. Usually you can go in one way or the other. You can either say, I'm going to avoid commitment because I don't want to get hurt again or I need a commitment from somebody.

I want to feel connected, to have that connection I didn't have. I was toward the sort of like I need to connect, in that vein. And so it definitely informed my impulses and my instincts around relationship building and connection and emotions and the one fear I had, though, as I got closer to marriage and then with parenthood was, wait a second, at the last possible moment, maybe it is inherited. Maybe this is just something. Once I commit. And if I'm fortunate enough for her to say yes. Shit. What if something kicks in and suddenly I’m like my father, and suddenly I’ve got to get out?

And, Lord have mercy, if you do that when you have a child, the stakes are even, you know, dare I say higher? And so that's haunted me a little bit, maybe a little too much. And I dragged my feet and I took a great risk that missing out on an amazing spouse and the light of my life, my child. But fortunately, I was able to take that emotional fracture from my father. And the lessons of perseverance and commitment to family from my mother and the nurturing from both of them, and was able to do what he couldn't. And, I think and I know that he was incredibly proud of all of his children and the relationships they were able to form and maintain and the beautiful, wonderful children they've all had and we've all had and, you know, they're they're all at home.

They've all been raised by the parents that spawned them. And I know he was so proud, to see for all of us to have done, what he struggled to do.

Moriel Rothman-Zecher Thank you so much, Joe and Sam, for your work, for your writing, for your generosity of time and intellect and spirit this evening, for your openness and tenderness. It was really a joy to get to be in conversation with both of you and to everyone in the audience. And I'm seeing a few more things pop up into the chat.

Just, notes about this, these being wonderful conversations and a final note from Martha Spencer. Not a question. Just have to say, “The best SwatTalk ever.”

So a lot of appreciation coming from that direction. And I want to say to everyone out there, given that I know that you were all on computers or phones, given that this is on zoom, if you have, you know, four minutes after we wrap up here, it's a really meaningful thing to do to make a few clicks and buy both of these books, ideally from local bookstores and to support these authors and to support their writing. And, as Sam said, there is something really meaningful to our collective, that we are still spending time reading, talking about books, thinking about how we shape our worlds and selves through books. So thank you, everyone, for joining us this evening.

Thank you to Melissa and Amy and everyone, on the back end for organizing this. And I hope everyone has a very good night.