Fairly softspoken and incredibly close

me, my student, jonathan safran foer

Jonathan Safran Foer came to Pitt. He spoke winningly on laughter, using notes but kind of musing, as though he were working out the ideas for a new essay. In the Q&A session, he spoke candidly about his writing process, admitting it’s difficult, struggling to find the right metaphor.

If you are a traveler, it’s about the destination, he said. And then, “writing is the airplane; it’s not the foreign country.” What is the foreign country, the questioner asked. Acknowledging that his metaphor was collapsing, he finally decided that writing “is a journey without a map.”

“I’ve never written a book I’ve intended to write. As it turns out, there are things I care about more than what I thought…. The things that are at the heart of my book are things I didn’t know were at the heart of me.”

He also said that he finds writing hard, and that he’d heard from the likes of Don Delillo that it never gets any easier. Perhaps in total that was hard for grad students to hear — writing is hard, stays hard, and you’re writing your way forward in the dark — because some of my colleagues found him, they told me, arrogant. Perhaps they’re feeling a little professional jealousy of this wildly successful 30-year-old writer. Because I thought he was open and humble and genuinely engaged with the people in this particular audience, of which there were more than 200.

Which was why it was a surprise when the winner of the raffle for his latest book, Joe — photos of Richard Serra sculpture and a prose poem by JSF — was Irene, one of my students. She’s a professional and mother from Botswana who has come to Pitt to earn an American bachelor’s degree. There we are: Irene’s the one with the book, Jonathan Safran Foer is the surprisingly tall guy, and I’m the other one.

About the author

I like sitting in Jack Webb's booth.