A Q&A with Ben Dolnick, author of You Know Who You Are
Q: Your main character, Jacob, is a middle child. Did you have any experience with this growing up?
A: I’m actually a youngest child (it’s just me and my older brother), but I knew from fairly early on that I wanted Jacob to be in the middle. This was mostly, I think, because I’d seen a kind of drifting quality in many of the middle children I knew — a need to sort of build themselves up from scratch — that I felt matched up with how I pictured him. It’s also probably because it’s always been something of a daydream of mine, as it may be for lots of younger children, to get to be someone’s older sibling for a change; I accepted a while ago that this wasn’t likely to happen for me in real life, so I thought I might as well grab the opportunity in fiction.
Q: Is it true your last novel, Zoology¸ was inspired by a summer working at the Central Park Zoo? What inspired this book, You Know Who You Are?
A: Yes, Zoology was very much born out of a summer I spent working at the Central Park Children’s Zoo. I’ve now spent so much more time writing and thinking about the zoo then I ever did working there, though, that I often have to stop and think about what actually did happen versus what I made up. But when I started that book, having an actual experience to use as a touchstone — a set of animals I could describe, a place I could visit — was very useful as I went about the nervous-making business of writing a first novel.
With You Know Who You Are, the initial spur was probably my realization, after finishing Zoology, that I still had a ton I wanted to say about growing up and that it wasn’t always going to be as vivid to me as it was then. At first I didn’t even think about whether it would become a book; I just sort of lowered my bucket and brought up load after load of broken Legos and tattered yearbooks and popsicle sticks. Once I’d gathered enough material, though, my interest became mostly structural. I knew, for instance, that I wanted to write a book in the third person, since Zoology had been in the first person and I wanted a break from that. I also knew that since Zoology takes place in a pretty narrow time-frame — just a single summer when the main character is eighteen — I wanted to figure out how to cover a broader stretch of years (this one starts when the main character is eight and finishes when he’s twenty-three). Figuring out how to do that — I eventually realized I could lay out the years of Jacob’s life like pieces of meat on a shish kebab, and then count on the reader’s growing knowledge of him to act as the skewer — was the main work of writing the book.
Q: You deal sensitively with a mother’s illness through the eyes of a child. Was it difficult to write these scenes?
A: Sometimes it was, although one of the things I love about writing is that it can transform even the most agonizing kinds of emotional pain. Even just sitting down to write a journal entry about something terrible that’s happened to you — suddenly you’re shifted, however subtly, to a position slightly outside yourself; you’re having to use the powers of observation that belong to a part of you that is separate from the part of you that life knocks around. It’s something like the pleasure of singing very sad songs — no one wants to have his heart broken, but singing about having your heart broken, now that’s something that you’ll stand on stage at the karaoke bar and relish.
Q: Your story is part coming of age story, as Jacob Vine discovers his true self. Do you think this is an experience everyone goes through, discovering who they are?
A: Hmm. I always wince a little when I hear “coming of age,” because it sounds to me, for reasons probably having more to do with my own nuttiness than anything else, like a description of a kind of soft-focus movie in which people sit around campfires or jump in swimming holes and nothing much is at stake. One of the things I really wanted to get into this book is my belief that all the bold-face dramas that characterize adult life — loss, love, envy, compromise — are there in childhood too. There are only so many keys on everyone’s mental piano, I tend to think, and if you’ve lost a best friend, then that grief will be played with many of the same notes that will sound decades later if, say, you happen to get divorced.
But in childhood, of course, the dramas are all happening for the first time. Probably everyone does go through that experience of feeling truly ecstatic for the first time, or truly devastated, and realizing: huh, I guess those feelings are in me. It’s like sounding out the dimensions of a dark room.
Q: What is your writing regimen like?
A: Probably it’s much too generous to describe it as a regimen, unfortunately. First thing each morning I take my dog to the park, and then I spend my day, with plentiful interruptions, flailing away at a jumble of pages. Sometimes this means rereading what I’ve already written, futzing with sentences, and sometimes it means writing out new stuff, knowing it may very well end up in the outtakes bin. I have a kitchen timer I keep on my desk, for when I really want to force myself to bang out some set number of hours, but really it all feels very jerry-rigged and haphazard. I often wonder, when I’m poking through the fridge for the third time in the morning, or when I’m reading an interview with Lebron James, what other writers are doing with themselves at that moment — but one of the excellent things about working at home is that I’ll never know.
Q: What do you hope readers take from your story?
A: I guess my hope is that at some point in the book — and this is an ambition not just for this book but for my whole career, really — the reader will feel some tiny bit of what I feel when I’m reading Alice Munro or Philip Roth or George Saunders or whoever. I know this is insanely optimistic, but it is one of the fantasies that keep me writing. The writers I love create a kind of spacious feeling in my head — a sort of quiet roominess, in which I can see and think much more clearly than I ordinarily do — and if I could contribute one little bit toward that cause for someone, I’d be beyond delighted.
