Bruce Holsinger, CULPABILITY
[0:00]Welcome to Totally Booked.
[0:02]I'm Zibi Owens.
[0:04]I've interviewed more than 2,000 authors on this show
[0:07]and learned endless amounts about storytelling,
[0:10]reinvention, and life itself.
[0:11]Because when you talk about books,
[0:13]you're really talking about life.
[0:15]So get ready to hear from today's best authors,
[0:18]the best-selling and the not-yet-discovered.
[0:20]Come find your next great read and the story behind it.
[0:24]Enjoy.
[0:27]I was so excited to talk to Bruce Holsinger
[0:29]about culpability.
[0:31]My mother recommended this book to me
[0:32]said, oh my gosh, Zibi, you've have to read this.
[0:34]So I read it, even though it had come out a year before.
[0:37]It had been an Oprah's book club pick
[0:39]and I don't know how, but somehow I had missed it.
[0:41]And I read it and could not put it down.
[0:43]I can't stop thinking about it.
[0:45]And so I posted about it.
[0:47]We started DMing and I was like,
[0:48]could I talk to you tomorrow?
[0:50]So this was a hastily scheduled podcast
[0:53]because I just had to talk to Bruce to hear more about him
[0:57]and his life and how he wrote this extraordinary book.
[0:59]More about Bruce, Bruce Holsinger is the author of four novels,
[1:03]including the displacements and the gifted school.
[1:06]And many works of nonfiction, most recently on parchment,
[1:09]animals archives in the making of culture
[1:11]from Herodotus to the digital age.
[1:14]His books have been recognized
[1:15]with the Colorado Book Award, the John Heard Fisher Prize,
[1:18]and more in addition to him being an Oprah's book club pick
[1:23]and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
[1:25]Holsinger teaches in the Department of English
[1:27]at the University of Virginia
[1:29]where he specializes in medieval literature
[1:31]and modern critical thought and serves as editor
[1:33]of the quarterly journal, New Literary History.
[1:37]I loved this book.
[1:39]If you read it, I don't know, DM me.
[1:41]I want to talk about it.
[1:42]I feel like it's such a provocative AI centric,
[1:46]family story that I just cannot get enough of.
[1:49]Welcome, Bruce.
[1:50]Thank you so much for coming on Totally Book
[1:52]to discuss culpability. Congratulations.
[1:54]Thanks so much.
[1:55]I'm happy to be here with you.
[1:57]As you know, I'm obsessed with this book.
[1:59]I could not stop reading it.
[2:00]I know I was late to the party.
[2:02]I don't know how.
[2:02]I just somehow, I don't know.
[2:04]Sometimes I just miss things the first go around
[2:06]and I'm so glad that I read it.
[2:08]I am obsessed and wow, I have a stop thinking about it.
[2:12]Oh, good.
[2:12]I'm glad to hear that you all so many books come out every month
[2:15]that, you know, how can you keep track?
[2:17]Even you, I guess we have a hard time keeping track.
[2:21]OK, for those who haven't read culpability yet,
[2:23]would you mind telling them a little more about what it's about?
[2:26]Yeah, so the premise of culpability
[2:28]is about how a family gets through an accident,
[2:32]something, something bad that happens to them.
[2:34]They're in a car on the way to the cross tournament.
[2:38]They get in a really awful accident
[2:39]and the people in the oncoming car killed.
[2:42]A few members of the family are injured,
[2:44]but nobody's super seriously.
[2:46]But the twist is that the car is in self-driving.
[2:49]It's an autonomous mode.
[2:51]So the novel ends up being about issues
[2:54]moral responsibility in the age of artificial intelligence.
[2:57]Every member of the family is responsible in some way
[3:00]for what happened on the highway that day.
[3:03]And the whole rest of the novel after the accident
[3:05]is the family kind of reckoning with the aftermath,
[3:08]reckoning with this changing world around them
[3:11]and how it bears on their own relationships
[3:13]to each other, whether sibling to sibling, parent to child,
[3:16]a spouse to spouse, but just gets very complicated and sticky.
[3:20]And everything is even more made even more complicated
[3:23]by the way AI is just interpenetrating so many aspects.
[3:27]Oh, my gosh.
[3:28]Well, there are so many compelling themes.
[3:31]The characters are so incredibly real.
[3:35]I mean, I know that sounds like a trite thing to say about a novel,
[3:37]but the way you developed each one of them in such detail,
[3:42]I really felt like I got to know each one.
[3:44]Can you just speak for a minute
[3:45]before we get into AI and everything?
[3:47]Just about you as a novelist, developing characters
[3:51]and making them each so real, clear
[3:55]to the point where I feel like I could tell maybe
[3:58]what they were going to do next by the end of it.
[4:00]Oh, that's such a great compliment.
[4:02]Thank you.
[4:03]Yeah, I, you know, this is my cup of ability
[4:05]as my fifth novel and my first two were historical novels.
[4:09]And they were set in late medieval England.
[4:11]And for me, one of the hardest things
[4:13]has always been character.
[4:15]And I often will set aside.
[4:18]I've probably written twice as many novels as I've published
[4:20]because I set aside books when I can't figure out
[4:24]who my characters are, when I can't really
[4:26]get inside their hits.
[4:28]And often, you know, writing, it's only
[4:30]when I really start loving someone
[4:33]that the novel really starts filling out.
[4:35]And the story comes.
[4:37]And story always comes with character.
[4:39]I think theme does too.
[4:41]I'm a very, I like writing suspensefully.
[4:43]I have a very big, I'm not an outliner,
[4:46]but I like to think about what and how you keep things moving
[4:50]pretty quickly.
[4:51]But that also just is never sacrificed to care.
[4:54]And in the case of culpability, it was particularly
[4:56]difficult because all my other novels
[4:59]are written in third person multiple points of view.
[5:02]This is the first time I've written the first person novel
[5:04]where you really have one character.
[5:07]There's a lot of other ancillary elements of the book.
[5:09]You know, we can talk about those.
[5:10]But for the most part, the book is written
[5:12]in the point of view of the dad who's sitting
[5:14]in the passenger seat when this accident happens.
[5:16]And that didn't start out.
[5:18]That's that way.
[5:19]The first draft was in three or four different points of view.
[5:23]And it just wasn't working for me.
[5:24]And it was because I couldn't nail the main character
[5:28]or one of the main characters, Lorelei Shaw.
[5:31]He's the wife of Noah, the mom of the kids in the car.
[5:34]He's also a world leading expert in the field of AI.
[5:37]And it was just trying to write from her point of view.
[5:40]And I couldn't.
[5:41]And I realized really one of the things
[5:43]that the story is about.
[5:44]It's about Noah's relationship to her.
[5:47]And what if I kind of narrowed everything down
[5:49]so that the book would be, yes, the story of an accident,
[5:52]the story about ethics and AI.
[5:54]But also the story about this woman,
[5:57]this remarkable genius who is only partially known
[6:01]by her husband.
[6:02]And that's when I really felt like I started to nail.
[6:05]It was precisely by getting out of her head
[6:08]and getting into the head of only ever as been
[6:11]is when it really started to play.
[6:13]Wow.
[6:14]Well, Lorelei is probably of all of them
[6:16]the most diviniting a nigma, right?
[6:18]She has so much going on even when we look in her notebooks.
[6:22]It doesn't even make sense necessarily to the outsider
[6:25]because she's just has so much going on.
[6:27]And yet, here she is, especially by the end,
[6:30]in such a position of importance in the communication
[6:35]about what AI is going to do for the world.
[6:39]And yet, we have to see her in the kitchen making breakfast.
[6:42]So how do you sort of square both of those?
[6:45]Yeah.
[6:46]How do you create this kind of depth to her?
[6:49]And for me, it's always important with characters,
[6:52]especially when I'm writing adult characters,
[6:54]is their jobs, their careers.
[6:56]What obsesses them when they're out of the house,
[6:58]away from their families.
[7:00]And in her case, once I figured that out,
[7:02]it became, it wouldn't say easy,
[7:04]but it became much more of a joy to kind of fill out
[7:06]those other aspects of her life.
[7:08]And what obsesses you and your out of the house?
[7:12]Oh, well, I'm in my day job when I'm not writing novels.
[7:14]I'm a professor at English Literature.
[7:17]I teach at the University of Virginia.
[7:19]And so I work on medieval literature.
[7:21]I'll often teach classes about Chaucer
[7:23]or a big literary survey that goes from
[7:26]Bea Wolf to Paradise Lost.
[7:28]Yes, so that's what obsesses me.
[7:29]Medieval books, manuscripts, medieval stories.
[7:32]But they also inspire me in my working on contemporary literature.
[7:36]I'm always interested in stories
[7:38]within stories like in the Canterbury Tales,
[7:41]which has, I think, something like 15 or 16 different genres
[7:44]of literature represented within it.
[7:46]And I like writing across genres,
[7:48]playing with kind of metal literary gestures in my book.
[7:53]So interesting.
[7:54]So the AI component, I'm fascinated
[7:57]like everyone probably in the world right now with AI.
[8:00]And I feel like I only recently have gotten into using it
[8:04]myself because I was so scared of it.
[8:06]And now that I'm deep in it,
[8:08]it becomes something consuming me.
[8:10]And so the book was really timely in that way
[8:13]for the rise of AI becoming not just for industry,
[8:21]but the average person at home is now feeling like it's part
[8:24]of the day-to-day and now it's, you know, Google is AI
[8:27]and you can't get away from it.
[8:28]Like it's just integrated everywhere.
[8:30]Lorelei has a very unique viewpoint of this
[8:34]as someone who is really driving the ship,
[8:36]actually we could talk about ships later,
[8:37]but driving the boat on this one.
[8:41]When you think about AI and the self-driving car even,
[8:45]and you know, I took my first Waymo a couple months ago
[8:47]and you know how all of this affects how we make decisions.
[8:52]Do you feel there are clear answers here?
[8:54]I know we look at all of the sides of this.
[8:57]But how do we know what is right and what is wrong
[9:00]and who's in charge and all of that?
[9:02]Does this consume you as well?
[9:04]Oh, yeah.
[9:05]I'm really, I mean, it consumed me
[9:06]when I was writing the book and I would say even more
[9:09]since the book came out, just doing so many events,
[9:12]really at this point around the world
[9:14]and talking to every time I'll do an event,
[9:17]I'll get a question from somebody in a completely new
[9:20]industry debate where AI is becoming, you know,
[9:24]just the kind of bottom line where everybody is thinking
[9:26]about it from the medical community
[9:28]to people working on autonomous weapons.
[9:31]I was just a conference down in Alabama
[9:33]with, there was a whole panel on autonomous weapons systems
[9:36]and there is a small theme of that in helping building
[9:39]to self-driving cars, which is of course
[9:41]what the precipitating incident in the book is really about.
[9:45]And, you know, the novel started out having nothing
[9:47]to do with AI.
[9:48]It was just a simple kind of analog story
[9:50]about seeing from a family in a mini van.
[9:53]They have an accident.
[9:54]Everybody's responsible in some ways,
[9:57]but it didn't have anything to do with self-driving cars or AI.
[10:00]And then I was on a tour for my last book, the Displacements, I was out in Santa Monica,
[10:05]and I was on my way to a bookstore of that, not at Zivi's at that time, but at a different
[10:09]one.
[10:10]And I got in a Waymo for the first time, and it really shook me, and I just, and as I was
[10:19]mulling over how it felt not to have a driver, I thought, okay, well that would be really
[10:23]interesting if the car could be an autonomous mode, but I wasn't thinking about AI.
[10:29]And then I've started rewriting it with that in mind, and then Chachi PT comes on to
[10:34]the scene suddenly, the whole world is talking about AI, and I realized what the book
[10:39]is about.
[10:40]And you know, the everything, the discussion about safety versus, you know, human-centric
[10:48]versus AI, that's all at the center of the way, Lorelei thinks about autonomous navigation,
[10:55]right?
[10:56]It's 30,000 people on our roads every day in the United States, the safety studies
[11:02]that have been done in, I think, especially in the Bay area on Waymo's versus Ubers and
[11:07]Lifts, there's really no comparison in terms of incidents per passenger hours, but just
[11:13]the other day, a Tesla and self-driving mode, out into a building and an elderly woman
[11:19]died.
[11:20]And you know, so if that had happened in a regular old car, you never would have heard
[11:24]the story.
[11:25]Right?
[11:26]It wouldn't be news.
[11:27]It'd be a tragedy, but it wouldn't be news.
[11:29]So I think the world is very nervous about these systems and driving let alone everywhere
[11:34]else.
[11:35]Yeah.
[11:36]It's a very mixed bag.
[11:37]I was definitely really scared sitting in the back seat, mostly because you can't talk
[11:43]to the person.
[11:44]Like at least in an Uber, you can, I mean, usually, you know, speak to them.
[11:48]And if they speak your same language and say, you know, careful or watch out or whatever,
[11:53]which, of course, might actually be worse than not taking it off.
[11:57]Yeah.
[11:58]And you get in an Uber or Lyft.
[11:59]What's the first thing them driver does?
[12:02]They start looking at their phone for their next fare, right?
[12:05]Yeah.
[12:06]And their eyes are off the road.
[12:07]That's, you know, their gig workers, that's what they need to do to make money.
[12:10]Yeah.
[12:11]But I still think I was more nervous merging onto a highway in the passenger seat when
[12:17]my son for the very first time went onto a highway than I was in a way.
[12:21]Oh, my God.
[12:23]We have no driver.
[12:24]Yeah.
[12:25]So, you know, human error versus she learning, I don't know.
[12:30]Yeah, exactly.
[12:31]You also in the book, yes, AI, but also as you said, love, which I feel is the counterpart
[12:37]to AI.
[12:38]Like it is the counterbalance rather.
[12:40]Right.
[12:41]The more we become automated, the more we think about what life means.
[12:45]And I feel that love rises up to the top as one of the guiding principles.
[12:49]And so you have both the escalation of AI, but then also both young love, midlife, love,
[12:57]sibling love, parent love, and all the different ways from like lust and newness to very
[13:03]old love to the couple next door.
[13:05]I mean, you have so many ways of showing us the power of this.
[13:10]Talk a little bit about about portraying love and how you feel its importance lies in the
[13:17]current landscape.
[13:18]You know what?
[13:19]No one is ever asking that question before.
[13:21]And I'm so thrilled to think about it now.
[13:24]Yeah, I guess it's, you know, when you're writing about a family, you have so much
[13:29]kind of inherent conflict, right?
[13:31]You have conflict between siblings, you have often conflict between spouses, how many
[13:36]novels are written about that.
[13:38]And you know, that I guess when a family is going through something, what is a source
[13:42]of resilience, what can get you past that?
[13:45]And in my last novel, the displacements, it was about the world's first category 6 hurricane
[13:51]when it does to South Florida and to Houston.
[13:54]And this, you know, we follow a family that's seemingly very well off from South Florida.
[13:59]They end up in a massive kind of mega shelter in Oklahoma for people who are displaced.
[14:05]You know, and they're miserable, but really what gets them through it is these new bonds
[14:09]of love, especially from a mother for her stepson.
[14:14]And after her stepson's father dies, and he really becomes his mother in that story,
[14:21]even though he's very, you know, clashing at the beginning, driving each other, raising
[14:26]and in culpability, I guess, similarly, you know, we start out, I don't think Noah and
[14:31]Laura lie are estranged, but they are, you know, they have a very close, kind of loving
[14:36]sexy marriage, but they, you know, there are things about her that he just doesn't know,
[14:42]comprehend, and he's allowed that ignorance to kind of wild his vision of her and maybe make,
[14:48]help him make bad decisions because she suffers from a C.D., she's, she's really obsessed
[14:55]with her job, and, you know, she's in two moves in this world, I've tech billionaires and so on
[15:01]that he just doesn't have access to, and he doesn't one access to it. And yet, you know, by the
[15:06]end of the story, I don't want to give anything away, but, you know, they've discovered new ways
[15:09]to love each other, not as new ways, all through new ways they've learned about each other,
[15:15]new things they've learned about it. And the same way for their son, Charlie, who really goes
[15:20]through some things, but ends up, you know, okay, in the end, but he's changed a lot, and that
[15:26]change, I think his helped him see his parents' love in it. So interesting. Do you feel like you
[15:32]think now more about what it means to be human when the way I do, right? Like, what does that even mean?
[15:38]Well, in fact, I, you know, this, this writing this novel and, and again, mostly just that the year
[15:43]or so since it's come out, I've started working on a new project that's about AI and the
[15:48]humanity of art. Because there's so many artists and so many different mediums that have been
[15:53]experimenting with what we call artificial intelligence for so long. And I think right now all the
[15:58]discourse and polemic, the humanity of the artist is getting lost a little bit. So this book
[16:04]is, is about that. It's about pushing back against what those, those sources of humanity that
[16:10]are always going to be discernible, no matter what role AI has in producing art. I don't want it to
[16:16]have a role, but it is, it's already way before we were arguing about Chi Chi PT. There were artists
[16:21]like Dario Amadeh, Sheila Hetty writing a story in the New Yorker using a kind of early version
[16:27]of a chatbot. So I, to me, those, it's something that, you know, the history of art is always had that
[16:34]kind of tension between the medium, the machine and the human. That is, this is just another part,
[16:41]I think of that long history. Oh, I can't wait for that. What's that called? Do you have a title yet?
[16:45]Yeah, I think it's, well, at the moment, it's called Songs of the Parrots. Artificial Intelligence in
[16:50]the humanity of art. Parrots comes from this very famous, early essay about Large Language Models,
[16:56]where they were, they're, where they're these. The metaphor of parent is used to talk about how
[17:03]AI, you know, shoots our language and everything back to us. I think it's that helpful.
[17:09]And callability was an Oprah's book club pick. Did that change your life? How is your life changed
[17:14]since that happened? Oh, my God, it has completely changed my life in ways that I never
[17:18]could have foreseen. And it, you know, it's just given the book much more visibility than any of my
[17:22]other novels. But it's also made the book part of a public conversation about AI that I think has
[17:30]you're completely changed my brain chemistry in ways that I wouldn't have anticipated.
[17:35]Yeah, but she was so generous. You know, it was like the lightning bolt out of the blue last summer,
[17:39]you know, there are 200 novels that were published over the summer that easily could have been
[17:43]a thing. So I just felt so, so lucky to get that nod. I'm sure more than 200. I'm sure many more
[17:51]that work. Well, I mean, I imagine ones that were sent, right? I think I don't think imprints
[17:56]are allowed to send everything comes out. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. There were times where I wasn't sure
[18:05]there was one moment in particular where I was like, oh, wait, maybe I'm not supposed to really
[18:10]like Noah. Like maybe he is more sort of culpable or more enmeshed in some negative decision making
[18:18]or whatever. How do you feel that writing characters with all of that nuance and having times
[18:24]where your narrator is not betraying the reader, but definitely like veering off the course a little
[18:31]bit. Yeah. Yeah, because Noah in terms of just his, what he knows, he's not an unreliable narrator,
[18:37]but he is a little bit of a clueless narrator, oblivious at time, right? And I, I never,
[18:43]I probably write a lot of unlikable characters just because I love unlikable characters.
[18:48]I love, I love getting into a novel where someone is just really detestable. But I find things to
[18:54]root for or to hate read or whatever. I really enjoy that. Like one of my favorite reads recently
[19:01]was yesterday. And that character was purposely unlikable, of course she was. That novel doesn't
[19:07]need any more publicity for me. But I just enjoyed that part of it so much just kind of getting
[19:13]into that. And that's why I always love 19th century novels like Charles Dickens, some of my
[19:18]favorite characters or people like Uriah Heat, right? Just these detestable old characters,
[19:23]but, but he just, you want to see what they do in the world. So I've, I've always, I kind of embrace
[19:29]unlikable characters in many ways. So interesting. I love it. Yeah. Well, what advice do you have
[19:34]for the aspiring novelist? Hmm. Well, the biggest piece of advice, it's a, the biggest cliche,
[19:41]stick to it. And what I mean by that especially is often what most keeps aspiring
[19:47]novelist from publishing novel is only writing one novel, right? And often, you know, when I'm teaching
[19:53]a class or when I'm when I'm working individually in a mentoring situation, you know, someone will finish
[19:58]a novel and help.
[20:00]It'll be in great shape and they'll query it, they'll try to get an agent, and they won't, or they will get an agent, the agent will send it out, they won't get an offer.
[20:08]And then they'll just start working on that same novel again rather than starting something completely new.
[20:14]I think if you finish the novel, that's great, you've done a huge thing, don't put it away, don't think about it, and start something else, because it's going to be better.
[20:23]That was my lesson now at the same time, of course you see 25-year-olds getting huge success for their first novel, but that's very unusual.
[20:30]I think it's much more...
[20:32]And quite annoying.
[20:33]Quite annoying, exactly, thank you.
[20:35]Yeah, good for them.
[20:36]Yes, good for me.
[20:37]I think I'm much more normal career in that I spent 10 or 12 years trying to get a novel that could get an agent, and that she would represent, and it finally happened, but after a long time.
[20:52]Interesting.
[20:53]Well, I think about Danny Shapiro's signal fire, which she found in her closet, after such a long break, and then she went back to it finally with a whole new attitude, and it became...
[21:02]Yeah.
[21:03]But you know, you just never know.
[21:04]There's a lot of stories like that, I'm sure you've read many of them.
[21:07]Yeah.
[21:08]Well, I have a request, which I don't even know how you would pull this off, but I feel so attached to this family.
[21:13]Like, I would like more updates.
[21:16]So I feel like you should do a holiday card this season with, like, what they're all up to us.
[21:22]A little holiday letter.
[21:23]You can just post it or something, because I would like the update, and I want to, like, keep track of them and see how they're all doing.
[21:29]So if you get extra time to do a little, you know.
[21:32]Yeah.
[21:33]I'm trying, I'm in the middle of this new novel I'm writing, and other contemporary family drama.
[21:40]And I still do so many events for culpability that those characters keep bubbling up.
[21:45]Yeah.
[21:46]But maybe I should say goodbye to the holiday letter.
[21:48]That's a great idea.
[21:49]Well, maybe you could have them have little cameos in your new book.
[21:53]Yeah.
[21:54]I hope you went off and just do that.
[21:55]That's very fun.
[21:56]That's an idea.
[21:57]Bruce, thank you so much.
[21:58]Thank you for all the thought provoking themes and issues that are continuing to percolate in my head.
[22:05]But also just the story of how one family gets through life.
[22:08]Because ultimately that is all we were all doing is just.
[22:11]Yes, exactly.
[22:12]It's getting through life.
[22:13]Yeah.
[22:14]So thank you for all of it and the experience of reading such great fiction.
[22:19]Oh, thank you.
[22:20]You should be for having me.
[22:21]My pleasure.
[22:22]My pleasure.
[22:23]All right.
[22:24]You get to work on the holiday.
[22:25]Hey.
[22:26]Good to talk to you.
[22:27]So good to talk to you too.
[22:28]All right.
[22:29]Thanks.
[22:30]Thank you.
[22:31]Thank you.
[22:32]Thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi, formerly momstone.
[22:34]I have time to read books.
[22:35]If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens.
[22:42]And spread the word.
[22:43]Thanks so much.
[22:44]Oh, and buy the books.