'The Haters' has some of the generalities of band experiences that I've had - the camaraderie, the grubbiness, the outsized collective ambitions and frequent painful collisions with reality - but very few of the specifics. I guess it was a way for me to take some of my experiences to their logical crazy extremes.
Jesse Andrews
I started playing music around 13 or 14, played jazz in high school, and played other stuff in college. After college, I tried to make it as a musician. I lived in a big squalid house full of dudes outside of Boston. We were all musicians. We built this studio in the basement and played there all hours of the day.
'Munmun' happened because the human world's dizzying inequality - of wealth and of power - had begun to send me over the edge, and I had to write something to try to help myself understand it a little better.
I think screenwriting gave me more of an affinity for plot - my first novel, 'Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,' doesn't have a very sophisticated roadmap. But screenwriting required me to learn a higher level of plottiness, and I tried to bring that to 'The Haters.'
Hebrew School was my first introduction to real feminism. I remember that much more than I remember any kind of actual religious teaching.
As a teenager, I didn't read a ton of teen fiction, and now I feel like I wish that I had.
My tastes are pretty varied. For instance, I love Wilco. But it's considered dad rock. It's one of my favorite bands, and yet I find it impossible not to think of myself as a dad-in-training when I listen to it.
You never say and do the things you wish you had said or done when someone close to you may not be around in awhile. Closure is impossible; that's the heart of the grief you will carry with you for the rest of your life.
I liked art history. Also liked the gender ratio, especially compared to applied math and physics.
Writing is more important than being a writer.
There's a certain trope in young adult fiction. A young girl gets cancer and becomes this radiant person who's a fountain of insight. Everyone who encounters her is changed for the better. That doesn't happen all the time. The whole thing is much more difficult to process. Adults have trouble with it, so why shouldn't we expect teens to?
Young adult fiction is getting more popular among adults because the writer is trying hard all the time to maintain the reader's interest.
Young adults are honest readers. They won't stay with a book unless they have a reason, so it has to move along.
I watched a ton of films growing up, but in a haphazard way. There was nothing scholarly or focused about it.
As a teenager, I was undeveloped and out of touch. The arts was another arena in which to do combat and challenge myself. I read difficult books like James Joyce's 'Ulysses,' but I didn't really understand it, and no one was going to call me on it because I was 16.
It wasn't until I got to college and had a lot of my ego beaten out of me... That's when I started to turn to literature as something deeper than a way to put up points.
You show up at high school, there's all these kids you don't know, and you're terrified that people will have some kind of wrong or unpleasant impression of you. You just don't want anything to ruin your public persona, because you actually have a public persona in high school.
I fought tooth and nail: I didn't want to learn Hebrew. My Bar Mitzvah came around, and I didn't want to read the Torah portion. I look back with a lot of chagrin about how I behaved.
If you're in a band for long enough, you see your bandmates at their best and their worst, and if you can stick together through that, you're basically family to each other.
Why do I love Roald Dahl? His voice, more than anything. It's irreproducible. It's so musical, and it's funny even when it's not trying to be, which is most of the time.
Everyone's got this hidden infinity that you only get glimpses of. They're always more complex than your conception of them will allow.
I never took creative writing.
I was in a lot of bands growing up.
I was trained in jazz, which I love.
James Joyce actually is rewarding you in all of these incredible ways.
My process is pretty messy, and there's a lot of creative destruction in it. When I set out to write something, I'll write some passages from it just to figure out who these characters are, how they talk. And I have a dim sense of what it's about and where it's going to go, but I know that's going to change, too.
My first drafts are always terrible, and I hate them, but the process for me is all about writing the bad version until it tells you what the good version is. And then you write that.
I'm influenced by Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace: writers who are often not content to just stack paragraphs and have to break out of that.
I don't think you can write from a reactive place. I think you just write the thing you want to write about, and if other people are writing about it, that doesn't really come to bear on what you want to do.
In a way, there's nothing new under the sun, so anything you write about has been written about by other people. All you can do is bring yourself to it, bring as much honesty as you can to it.
If something is being written about a lot, there's a conversation there; there's a dialogue there. There's probably a reason for it that it resonates deeply in some way.
I went to a really diverse and wonderful school in inner-city Pittsburgh, where all the various groups and types of people got along pretty great, and a lot of interesting stuff was going on all the time - and I still hated high school. It's just a rough, rough period in one's life.
My grandfather was terminally ill, and any interaction with him felt so incomplete. It seemed impossible to say or do anything that was enough. And, of course, that was true. Nothing could have been enough.
You want a storybook kind of closure with someone when they die, but I think that kind of thing is impossible.
