Elliot Ackerman, WAITING FOR EDEN
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[0:47]I'm really excited to be interviewing Elliot Ackerman,
[0:49]who's the author of novels waiting for Eden to darket the crossing,
[0:53]which was a finalist for the National Book Award in green on blue.
[0:56]He also wrote places and names on war, revolution, and returning.
[1:00]He's a former Marine and served five tours of duty in Iraq,
[1:03]in Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star,
[1:06]the Bronze Star for valor, and the Purple Heart.
[1:08]His work has been published in the New Yorker,
[1:10]the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, and many other publications.
[1:13]His stories have been included in the Best American Short Stories,
[1:16]and the Best American Travel Reading.
[1:18]He splits this time between New York and DC,
[1:21]and I have to say Elliot is also dating a dear friend of mine,
[1:25]who was the first guest on my podcast, Lee Carpenter,
[1:28]who's the author of 11 Days and Red White Blue.
[1:31]So Elliot comes to me through Lee, but also because of his amazing work
[1:36]as a National Book Award.
[1:38]Finalist.
[1:39]So welcome, Elliot.
[1:40]Thanks for coming on mom's don't have time to read books.
[1:42]Thanks for having me.
[1:44]So much to talk about.
[1:45]You have the most decorated past, a marine who did five tours, and an author.
[1:51]Tell me about this intersection of now writing and the military,
[1:55]and how you got into becoming a novelist.
[2:00]My mom was a writer, so I always grew up around books.
[2:04]I grew up knowing authors, so it didn't seem like the weirdest thing to me.
[2:10]And then when I went to college, I started history and literature at school,
[2:13]but then when I went into the Marines, and I always maybe suspected that I might write,
[2:17]but didn't really commit myself to it till I decided I was going to leave the Marine Corps
[2:21]and transition into something else.
[2:23]But I think we all have different facets of our personality.
[2:26]It's the people who know me the longest, because sometimes when I'm promoting a book,
[2:29]people will ask me as soon as it is at all that you left the Marines
[2:31]and became a writer, it doesn't seem like something that a Marine would do.
[2:34]And usually I say, you know, the people who've known me the longest,
[2:37]I should say, isn't it odd that you had up in the Marines?
[2:39]Because you're always sort of like this creative artistic kid,
[2:41]and then you wound up in the Marine Corps.
[2:43]Yeah, how did you end up in the Marines?
[2:45]Maybe I should have started with this.
[2:46]Well, I had this idea that I wanted a job when I came out of school,
[2:49]whether I was good at my job or bad at my job mattered.
[2:52]I wanted responsibility at a young age, and I was also sort of like,
[2:55]that kid who never stopped playing with his GI Joes.
[2:58]So I think you combined all of that, it led me into the Marine Corps,
[3:02]and I happened to surf during some very interesting and busy years.
[3:06]Wow, and you've done a combination of writing about your experiences,
[3:10]and then coming up with fictitious people living through some of the elements that you
[3:15]experienced yourself.
[3:16]Do you find it therapeutic to write about what happened?
[3:19]Do you find it necessary to go back?
[3:21]I read your article about going back to the place and where I'm forgetting where it was,
[3:26]but the doorway where your friend was murdered,
[3:29]and he went back and had to revisit, and like, what does that like for you?
[3:33]Sure, well, I don't think it's like, I don't feel like it's necessarily therapeutic,
[3:37]because like, there's a real struggle that goes into writing books as you're trying to figure them out.
[3:42]I think that all of us are writing about the human condition and my understanding
[3:47]of what it means to be a person is informed by obviously many of my own experiences,
[3:51]and I think when you go to war, one of the things war does is it gives you a real
[3:55]wide-angle view of like what we are capable of doing as humans, both at the one extreme,
[4:02]right, the extreme acts of courage, like acts of love, things that you would never see
[4:09]just sort of a normal day in New York City, and then on the other hand, like these extreme acts
[4:14]of like depravity and savagery.
[4:16]So you get that at a young age, and that sort of just informs
[4:21]your understanding of your characters, your understanding of the story,
[4:24]but often when I'm working about on a book, even if, you know, the war is going on,
[4:28]or there's conflict going on on the sidelines, it's not like I'm drawing from a specific
[4:32]military experience as I'm drawing from my understanding of just what it means to be a person
[4:37]and trying to make my characters come alive.
[4:40]And how did you come up with the idea of waiting for Eden, which was beautiful and kind of
[4:45]haunting in a way, and just so raw, but also so much love.
[4:50]You look with a lot of my books.
[4:52]It will sort of start, a lot of the story with two things, like I'll have kind of an idea of what
[4:58]I think a book is about, like, thematically.
[5:01]Like I'm thinking about, you know, thematic questions.
[5:04]And I think I want to try to tell a story about those thematic questions.
[5:07]You know, for waiting for Eden, it's sort of these themes of like what does it need
[5:10]to be faithful to someone?
[5:11]What does it mean to stay true to someone who has been
[5:15]diminished in some way?
[5:16]I mean, in Eden's case, he's severely physically diminished.
[5:19]But, you know, diminished emotionally, whatever it is, how do you stay faithful to that person?
[5:23]And the other thing that comes to mind often will be like, they'll be a first line frequently
[5:27]that will like pop into my head.
[5:29]And when it's sticky, like when that line kind of can't get on my head on my
[5:33]head on my head around for months, you know, I'm like, well, I think this is the
[5:35]maybe the beginning of a book and that's when I get serious.
[5:37]And I really try to start telling the story.
[5:39]So in waiting for Eden, the first line of the book is, you know, I want you to understand,
[5:43]Mary and what she did, but I don't know whether or not you will.
[5:46]And so there was this idea of, you know, Mary, the wife, Eden's wife, and Eden has been,
[5:52]you know, the concept of the book is, you know, he's basically been incapacitated,
[5:55]he is in a hospital bed, he has not been able to communicate effectively for years
[5:59]and Mary's been keeping this vigil over him.
[6:01]So the book sort of started with that line.
[6:04]Okay, what Mary did?
[6:05]I didn't know what she had done.
[6:07]And I didn't know who was offering up that opening line.
[6:12]But I knew that I knew a couple things.
[6:13]I knew that I wanted the book to feel very intimate.
[6:17]And so that's why I had that kind of first person voice.
[6:21]But then that posed a problem, right?
[6:22]Because like, who's saying this?
[6:24]So I'm like, well, there's only two characters in my book at this point.
[6:26]It's like, Eden, well, Eden's in a bed and he can't talk to anyone.
[6:29]Okay, so it's probably not Eden.
[6:31]He's not going to be my narrator.
[6:33]And maybe it's Mary, Eden's wife, but I'm like, well,
[6:36]you know, that probably wouldn't work because she would be talking about herself
[6:39]and she can't do this objectively and or objectively.
[6:42]And then there's limitations on, you know, what you know about Eden.
[6:45]So it's like, well, maybe, maybe you need to have on a mission.
[6:47]You need to have a level of omniscience.
[6:49]Well, I don't want to tell this story in the third person.
[6:51]Because the third person, you know, it would give you that omniscience
[6:53]to say what's going on with everyone to move around that story.
[6:56]But it gives you too much distance.
[6:57]So I'm like, huh, so how do I like solve this problem that I have
[7:00]between needing of certain level of omniscience,
[7:02]beneath in the intimacy of first person narrator?
[7:06]Also, it's a ghost.
[7:08]It's a person saying this is a ghost.
[7:11]And the question, but we can look at like, who's this ghost?
[7:14]And the identity of like kind of who this ghost is and who this voice is and how
[7:18]he factors into the relationship between Mary and Eden actually becomes
[7:21]what much of the book is about.
[7:22]Well, that's so crazy.
[7:24]I mean, the whole time I was reading it, I was thinking about that line.
[7:26]I mean, often you read first lines and I can't even think of what they were.
[7:29]But like, you had like the reader hooked in like, well, what is it?
[7:33]What happens? What's she going to do?
[7:34]And I was like, on the edge of my seat.
[7:36]I mean, like the book could be called Mary's choice as easily as it could be called,
[7:40]you know, waiting for Eden because she, you know, she's totally central to that story.
[7:44]I mean, it's really the story of her, Eden and this ghost.
[7:47]It's a love triangle in my own space.
[7:49]It's also about Mary being a mother at the same time.
[7:51]Yes.
[7:52]And I know I often see things through that lens just being a mother,
[7:54]but having to care for a child at the same time is caring for a husband, put her in such a
[8:00]really just precarious emotional position.
[8:03]Talk to me about that a little more. There was some, there was a quote in the hospital.
[8:06]She said, after a year, the guilt for her daughter overcame the guilt for her husband.
[8:11]Right? So Mary didn't know where to spend all that time. Who should she take care of?
[8:15]Tell me about that conflict.
[8:16]Well, I think you have kids and I have kids too.
[8:18]You know that guilt, right? You there's never enough of you to go around.
[8:21]So I mean, in the opening of the book, she's been keeping this
[8:24]vigil at her husband's bedside for several years and
[8:27]the one had you mythical, isn't that so noble for it?
[8:29]But she's been doing that at the expense of her daughter because her daughter has gone to live
[8:32]with her mother. And so the sort of the, the event that precipitates the action,
[8:37]the book is she's been keeping this vigil evens in the bed and it is Christmas time.
[8:41]And she decides that she's going to go spend Christmas with her daughter.
[8:45]And again, she feels a lot of guilt about this for now. She's going to leave Eden.
[8:48]The doctors say, don't worry. She's not going to know that he's not going to know that you're
[8:51]gone, which at least her to ask, well, if you're not going to know that I am gone,
[8:56]did he even know that I'm here? So she's sort of resting all of this.
[8:59]And in the opening pages of the book while she's gone, Eden suffers a stroke.
[9:04]When he suffers that stroke, my mind is almost like like it's like a deck of cards
[9:08]is reshuffled. So he suffers this stroke either sort of an event that terrifies him and he gets
[9:15]so afraid he suffers a stroke. But when he comes out of it, his brain has kind of been
[9:19]reorganized. And although parts of him are now even more diminished,
[9:23]certain parts of him have been awake. And then for the first time, he's conscious of the
[9:27]circumstances that he is in. And he tries to communicate what he wants to have happen next.
[9:33]And the whole book is told over, you know, it's told much of it in flashbacks,
[9:38]but it's also really the present tense actions told her the few days of him trying to communicate
[9:42]what he wants to have happen. And you have the nurse come in on that Christmas because when
[9:47]the family's gone, then you still fill in the room, right? It's not like the room is,
[9:51]I feel like it's, I can see it as a play, right? You have the bed on one side of the stage.
[9:56]So then you have the nurses come in. And once seen with the nurse, I found particularly
[10:00]powerful when she touches Eden,
[10:01]who had suffered a lot of burns,
[10:02]and she was a little squeamish to you,
[10:04]so you write, she ran her finger up to the edge of the bandage
[10:07]and looked at his eyes again,
[10:09]and seeing that they saw nothing,
[10:10]her finger leapt from the bandage's edge
[10:12]onto the bare skin of his chest.
[10:14]It was burnt and smoked bloodless, but not lifeless.
[10:17]The surprised her.
[10:18]The little piece of flesh she touched
[10:19]had more struggle in it than her whole body.
[10:21]Beneath her finger was survival.
[10:24]It was what a body could and would be
[10:26]when battered just to the edge.
[10:28]Whoa, that is so good.
[10:30]I mean, that's so good.
[10:31]So tell me more about that.
[10:33]How are you like sitting there just right coming up
[10:34]at these sentences?
[10:36]Tell me about that passage.
[10:38]Do you even remember where you were when you wrote that?
[10:40]No, I think I was at a cupcake shop.
[10:43]No, come on.
[10:44]Yeah, I think I was at a cupcake shop.
[10:45]That's my problem.
[10:46]I should be getting more cupcakes than that one by the way.
[10:49]I think I was at a place where I like to get coffee
[10:51]in a ham, and she's biscuit in the morning,
[10:53]and I did a quiet corner.
[10:54]I had to do a lot of work.
[10:55]So anyways, I don't know if that's what you're doing.
[10:57]But the idea is like the human body
[10:59]is sort of fighting for itself.
[11:01]And like, even when no one is really advocating for it,
[11:04]but it's like more than just the spirit of it.
[11:08]Right?
[11:09]Yes, and it's just like, you know, I think
[11:10]with a nurse that's just like, you know, she's a young nurse.
[11:12]She's basically taking care of him for this one 24-hour period
[11:15]where he has this sort of psychosomatic event
[11:19]that recognizes his brain.
[11:21]I mean, I don't want to ruin it for the rear,
[11:23]kind of how it all goes down.
[11:24]But they are not going to say anything.
[11:26]But you know, you have a sense of what you want the scene
[11:30]to feel like.
[11:31]And I wanted there to be a sense of juxtaposition.
[11:34]And that scene, I guess, you eat in who's really been through
[11:37]like the worst a person can be through.
[11:40]And this sort of pure spirit who's in her shoes
[11:43]is very young nurse.
[11:44]And she's kind of drawn the unlucky shift,
[11:46]which is watching the burn word on Christmas Eve.
[11:50]And so, you know, because she's young,
[11:52]and she gets that shift because it's not a popular shift.
[11:55]And she's just sort of watching him.
[11:56]And she's curious, you know, about him.
[11:59]She's curious as to what he represents
[12:02]and probably the vocation that she herself has chosen,
[12:05]which is caring for people who've been hurt in this way.
[12:07]And she wants to touch it.
[12:09]You know, she literally wants to just see what it feels like.
[12:12]And when she puts her finger on it,
[12:14]it's like she kind of sees everything.
[12:17]Like everything that a person is capable of
[12:19]in the whole range of pain that she in her life
[12:23]will probably be responsible for trying to ameliorate
[12:27]in some way as a nurse.
[12:29]I mean, she's not a named character in the book.
[12:31]She's just in that scene.
[12:32]But I think, you know what you want to feel like
[12:36]is where you try to create the scene
[12:38]around the feeling you're attempting to convey.
[12:40]It's like, you've been looking at an injury.
[12:41]It's the same thing on your, like,
[12:43]just want to peek, you just, but you don't really.
[12:45]Yeah.
[12:47]I mean, I'm sure you've actually seen so much of this carnage
[12:51]having been like, most people I feel like writing,
[12:53]well, I shouldn't say that.
[12:54]I was going to say most people writing
[12:55]haven't maybe they imagined it,
[12:57]but I feel like you've been in it, right?
[12:58]And so then you have to writing about the relationships
[13:02]and what happens on them later.
[13:03]You have all this data from friends.
[13:05]I'm sure people who have been through this,
[13:07]like have you seen this happen in real life?
[13:09]Anything like this or even just on a more minor scale,
[13:13]people struggling with their relationships at home
[13:15]and being injured or the after effects.
[13:18]This is a long and rambling question,
[13:19]but what have you seen that maybe is most similar to this?
[13:23]I mean, I have unfortunately seen
[13:27]like a pretty wide spectrum of individuals
[13:30]who've been hurt and nasty things.
[13:34]However, I don't feel in some way that helps me
[13:36]when I sit down and try to actually tell a story
[13:39]because I know what I'm sort of drawing on.
[13:42]Like I know the well I'm going to.
[13:44]That I'm pulling this up from.
[13:46]And it's not necessarily that.
[13:48]I mean, maybe it helps with certain technical things
[13:50]where I'm writing about medical stuff.
[13:52]I'm going to go, I know this because I had to study it at one point.
[13:55]But it's more, you know, the book is about trying to
[14:00]love someone and stay faithful to someone
[14:03]who has been diminished.
[14:05]And I think that's something like we all experience,
[14:07]whether the diminishment is as radical
[14:10]as what has happened to Eden,
[14:11]but in other cases, in some ways,
[14:14]no less painfully when the diminishment is something less radical.
[14:18]Because when it says radical is what happened to Eden,
[14:20]everybody can see it and understand it.
[14:22]When it's less radical, it's tough
[14:24]because you might be the only one who sees it
[14:26]and understands the depth of that diminishment
[14:28]and how you have to learn to love someone again
[14:31]and how you have to understand the ways
[14:33]you can give yourself to them again.
[14:34]Does it make you question how you would respond
[14:37]in a similar situation?
[14:39]I think I feel like novels, novels, I read that.
[14:42]I like aren't answers.
[14:43]They're actually the whole books are all questions.
[14:45]You know, like the most, I feel the most elegant
[14:47]works of fiction, the ones that I sort of aspire
[14:50]to try to write are the ones where the story
[14:54]has carefully set up a series of questions,
[14:58]never answering them for you,
[15:00]believing you as the reader walking away,
[15:03]trying to answer them for yourself.
[15:05]So I don't feel like the book doesn't necessarily
[15:09]answer questions for me, but what it does is it in writing,
[15:11]if frames my questions clearly for me.
[15:14]And I mean, I know you're dating a good friend of mine.
[15:16]So I don't want to like make anything sound bad.
[15:20]But do you think that if anything were to happen to her,
[15:22]you would stay by herself.
[15:24]I would like this on the record.
[15:25]Yes, I would.
[15:27]Okay, there, thank you, good.
[15:28]I think you should have asked the reverse.
[15:30]Oh, would you stay by me?
[15:31]Sorry.
[15:33]Oh my goodness.
[15:34]So how do you write?
[15:36]So sometimes you write in cupcake shops
[15:37]and have biscuits and whatever.
[15:39]Where else do you like to write?
[15:40]Do you usually write out and about in the world?
[15:42]Do you like to write in the office in an office somewhere?
[15:45]Like tell me about a little more about your process,
[15:46]how long books take.
[15:48]And I often write out in the world just because I like
[15:52]the general energy of being in the world.
[15:54]If I sit at home at a desk all day,
[15:57]I sort of, no matter how much I've done,
[15:58]I feel like I haven't done anything.
[15:59]Whereas if I just go out to the cupcake shop
[16:02]or the cafe or the diner or whatever quiet corner
[16:04]I get into, I don't know, psychologically
[16:06]that were better for me.
[16:08]You know, and I would say it's not very sexy,
[16:09]but I'm kind of like a grinder,
[16:11]like I grind it out every day.
[16:12]So I will, if I'm working on new material,
[16:15]I will say I'm writing, I write 1,000 words Monday to Friday
[16:18]and I sit at my desk and I do that
[16:20]or if I'm revising a book,
[16:21]I'm going to be like,
[16:22]I'm going to try to get through like,
[16:23]today's work is 15 pages of revisions
[16:25]and I get through that work.
[16:27]And then I'm done.
[16:27]And I don't think about it.
[16:29]I have a discipline of trying not to think about it
[16:31]and try to let my subconscious,
[16:33]just let it sit in my subconscious.
[16:35]So I always finish a day writing,
[16:37]knowing what's going to happen the next day
[16:39]that I write at the bottom of the page.
[16:41]Tomorrow this happens, this happens,
[16:43]they do this just so I can get started again.
[16:45]I'll frequently like finish in the middle of a sentence
[16:47]so I can end the sentence
[16:48]and have something to pick up with.
[16:50]And that sort of has been my process
[16:54]and it seems to work for me,
[16:55]but there's, you know, as you mentioned,
[16:56]Lee, I mean, I live with Lee
[16:58]and I see how she writes and she writes,
[17:00]you know, very differently than I do, you know,
[17:03]with equal or greater effect.
[17:05]Well, you helped edit something I wrote
[17:07]right after business school
[17:07]and she like handed it back
[17:08]and she's like, I think you have way too many explanation marks.
[17:12]So I was like, I think about Lee
[17:13]like basically every email I write
[17:15]because I'm always using explanation marks
[17:17]and she never is.
[17:18]And I'm like, okay, well, this is,
[17:20]I, it turns out this is just how I write.
[17:21]But everybody does that.
[17:22]It's nice because when you do get an explanation mark
[17:24]from her, yeah, no, it's like shower.
[17:26]It's like one of those emojis.
[17:27]It's like exploding on the screen.
[17:29]A friend and friend.
[17:29]Yeah, so funny.
[17:31]It's who are you working on anything now.
[17:33]I am.
[17:34]I have, I have another novel that comes out in May
[17:37]called Red Dress in Black and White.
[17:39]That's also an Istanbul during the Gessie Park Rides of 2013
[17:43]which were a very big political moment there.
[17:45]And it's about an American woman
[17:47]who is married to a Turkish real estate developer
[17:51]and she over the course that present action
[17:54]in the novel takes place over a course of a single bay
[17:56]in which she is running off with her lover
[18:00]who is an American photographer
[18:01]and trying to take this son with them.
[18:03]It's that sort of, as the twist of the novel,
[18:05]as you read it, as you realize the hero of the book.
[18:08]Wait, don't tell me, don't ruin it.
[18:10]I'm not ruin it.
[18:10]Okay, okay.
[18:11]The hero of the book quickly becomes
[18:13]the Turkish real estate developer husband.
[18:15]So you sort of, you sort of, it's a window into that world.
[18:18]So that must be funny.
[18:20]You must have finished.
[18:20]That's finished, right.
[18:21]So as you know, you know, that's been finished for a while.
[18:23]So that's not a good enough answer.
[18:24]Another like amazing book coming down the fake is not,
[18:28]yeah, that's not enough for you.
[18:29]What else, what else are you doing?
[18:31]I mean, the thing I'm most actively working on is...
[18:33]I'm just kidding.
[18:34]Okay, I know.
[18:35]Okay.
[18:36]Is a guy named Adam O'Chimster Verides.
[18:38]He was the commander of NATO as a retired four star admiral.
[18:43]And we know each other from the Fletcher school,
[18:44]which is where I went to graduate school.
[18:45]He was the dean there.
[18:46]I'll not one I was there.
[18:47]And we have the same editor at Penguin.
[18:49]And so the idea came up to co-write a book,
[18:52]which would be a work of speculation
[18:55]about what it would look like
[18:56]if the US and China went to war in the year 2034.
[19:00]Oh, wow.
[19:00]And I have written that together
[19:02]and just finished up sort of a first draft,
[19:04]which has been fun.
[19:05]It's been sort of a departure for me.
[19:07]But I see, I write a lot about foreign policy
[19:09]and do lots of journalism.
[19:10]So that has allowed me to kind of merge the two a little bit.
[19:13]And we've had great fun doing it together.
[19:15]Are you ever gonna maybe run for president
[19:17]or get into politics in a big way?
[19:19]I feel like you have this amazing background.
[19:21]You're obviously brilliant.
[19:23]Like, what about leaving the nation?
[19:25]What do you think?
[19:25]No, I like telling the truth.
[19:27]Ah, you can do that in books.
[19:30]No, that's not for me.
[19:31]No, I swear.
[19:32]Yeah, no, I just shamed for the rest of it.
[19:34]All right, well, I tried.
[19:36]Do you have any advice for aspiring authors out there?
[19:40]Yeah, you got to work.
[19:41]Like, do the work?
[19:42]I mean, it sounds really obvious,
[19:44]but sometimes it's not obvious
[19:45]that you have to do the work.
[19:47]You have to read.
[19:48]I think people sometimes don't recognize that like,
[19:50]my process too is like,
[19:51]and I read as much as I write.
[19:53]And I try to read really widely
[19:56]without a very specific agenda
[19:58]because that's how you get the...
[20:00]good stuff. And don't let rejection beat you down too much. You know, you have to it's horrible
[20:06]to says when you use a sports metaphor, but like I call it up a bats, like you have to
[20:11]get up to bat and you have to keep getting up to bat because that's the thing you can
[20:15]control is how much you're putting yourself out there. And, you know, if you only, you
[20:20]know, connect on something, get something published or whatever is, you know, one out
[20:23]of 20 times. Well, if you're getting up to bat 100 times, like that's, that's pretty
[20:27]good. Like you're going to do all right, but if you, you know, you only get up and try once
[20:30]or twice or three times, like, you know, you might be great, but you're not trying enough
[20:35]and so you're going to think you're failing. So, so one of the great things about writing is
[20:39]since many respects, you have the control. One of the horrible things about writing is that you
[20:44]have the control. Love it. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on mom's
[20:50]don't have time to read a total pleasure. Thanks for listening to mom's don't have time
[20:55]to read books, the award-winning podcast. This episode has been sponsored by Book of the Month
[21:00]Club, Book of the Month Club, dot com, and your code zibby to get your first book for just
[21:05]five dollars. You can follow me on Instagram at mom's don't have time to read books. Thanks
[21:10]so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the Sound Editing, and thank you to
[21:14]Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music. Thanks
[21:18]For listening, you can always email me at zibby at zibbyowens.com.