What is it like to be a journalist on a remote island 3,000 miles from the center of the industry in Manhattan?
“If I had a therapist, I’d probably unpack it with him,” says Jon Mooallem, the New York Times magazine writer who spent 12 years in the Bay Area before moving to Bainbridge Island near Seattle before quickly immersing himself. in your thoughts. about belonging to the surreal “Twitter Society” and what people get wrong about a writer’s life in the woods.
But very soon, he recovers and starts laughing.
“I should have just said ‘approve,'” he says. “You really hit the center of a lot of restlessness and anxiety, I think. But I like being here.”
Mooallem is a master of anxiety and whimsy (although he hates that word), big feelings and big ideas. Articles about him, many of which feature him as a character, take him to faraway places and into the exposed hearts of an eccentric cast of characters. He is your favorite writer’s favorite writer.
Now a book, “Cara Seria,” which goes on sale Tuesday, May 17, compiles articles and essays from his last decade in magazine journalism. There are stories of misunderstood monk seals and Neanderthals, wildfires and bears, hustlers and Charlie Kaufman.
“Serious Face” takes its name from a piece about a 1940s Spanish bullfighter bearing an uncanny resemblance to Mooallem. “It only took reading a handful of pages of the biography to understand that Manolete’s conspicuous ugliness seemed to be a defining characteristic of his personality,” writes Mooallem. “He was as ugly as Einstein was a genius, as Gandhi was non-violent, as Jeff Bezos is rich.”
Mooallem spoke to The Chronicle by phone from his front porch on Bainbridge Island, where reception is patchy and birds sang during the call.
Q: What is the distance between the Jon Mooallem who goes to the supermarket and makes pancakes for his children and the “me” character in your writing?
AN: I’ve actually been thinking about it a lot, because of the piece about my face. I think there’s distance in a way, but just thinking so much about your perspective on something, distilling it into prose, and then publishing it somehow also makes it a more real part of you. It never feels like an act or anything, but I think we all have the feeling that you are so much bigger than something that, at any moment, you can communicate. But like I said, I don’t understand myself. But any of us? I don’t know…
Q: Has writing about you always been something natural?
AN: It’s kind of weird because I started writing magazines at a time when, mental health-wise, I wasn’t doing very well. It was a great relief to take the puzzle-solving algorithm that was running in my brain all along and had been activated in myself and turn it into something external. It was liberating trying to absorb the things that were happening in the world and think about what they meant. I think that was the whole point for me.
So, it’s weird now to put more of myself into the stories. In most cases, the publishers who have pushed me to do it have been absolutely right, but I have real trepidation about it because of that story. I guess I don’t really trust the process of overthinking myself, it doesn’t always work that well for me. It feels tense to me, is all I say. I spend time just imagining what bad people on the internet might say about something. But I hope it doesn’t change me too much.
Q: Is there a favorite scene or story from the “Serious Face” collection?
AN: There’s an article I did almost 10 years ago about these monk seals in Hawaii. He had forgotten how special of an experience it was. There were all these endangered monk seals being killed, and indirectly, I ended up solving the crime.
When I was talking to the young man who killed the first seal, it seemed so unreal to me at the time. Looking at the piece again, after all these years, it was almost as if there was another layer of disbelief at how unlikely the whole scenario was. I had enough distance to forget what it felt like to be there and experience it more as a reader would.
Q: I’ve spent time in Maui and couldn’t believe you could take the reader to Niihau, this mysterious private island in Hawaii, in the middle of a magazine article.
AN: I was finishing putting this book together in the summer of 2020 at a time when whatever assignments I had before the pandemic started were over and I hadn’t been able to take on any more work because I was only going to be a parent predictably. future. So all I really had time to do was finish this book. There was a part of me that almost felt like she was dead and was looking back, like this was the document that would sum up my life after I was gone. I literally had the idea: this book would make more sense if I were dead (laughs).
I just couldn’t believe the strange scenarios I had managed to find myself in over the course of the last 15 years. And that monk seal story was definitely one of them. How are you going to talk your way onto a private Hawaiian island essentially run by a 21st century feudal lord and not try to convey what it feels like? I mean, what a waste of opportunity. What a waste of experience.
Serious face
By Jon Mooallem
(Random House; 308 pages; $28)
Book launch party: In person with author and artist Wendy MacNaughton. 6-9 p.m. Wednesday, May 18. Free. Northern Light, 4915 Telegraph Ave, Oakland. 510-891-1113. northlight.substack.com