Jonathan Santlofer on Finding Empathy for His Villainous Characters
[0:00]Welcome to Totally Booked. I'm Zibi Owens. I've interviewed more than 2,000
[0:06]authors on this show and learned endless amounts about storytelling,
[0:10]reinvention, and life itself. Because when you talk about books, you're really
[0:14]talking about life. So get ready to hear from today's best authors,
[0:18]the best-selling, and the not yet discovered. Come find your next great
[0:22]read and the story behind it. Enjoy! Jonathan Sandlerver is the author of 10
[0:29]Perfect Guests, a novel. And in case you think this is just going to be
[0:33]an episode about the book, we really dug deep. There were times where I
[0:39]felt like I was going to cry and we really just went there, which I
[0:43]love about this podcast. You never know what's going to happen when you
[0:47]start talking to someone. I met Jonathan because he contributed to
[0:50]on being Jewish now, my anthology. And so I am eager to support his new
[0:55]book and really loved it. Jonathan Sandlerver is the author of the
[0:59]USA Today Best Sellers, The Lost Fan Go, and The Last Mona Lisa. The
[1:04]International Best Sellers, The Death Artist, and Nero Award-winning Anatomy of Fear.
[1:09]His best-selling memoir The Whittower's Notebook has been called The Year of
[1:13]Magical Thinking from a Male Perspective and was a featured segment
[1:16]on fresh air with Terry Gross. He is the editor of seven anthologies,
[1:20]including The New York Times' notable book. It occurs to me that I am America.
[1:24]His short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies and collections.
[1:27]As an artist, Jonathan has been making replicas of famous paintings, AKA
[1:32]legal forgeries, for collectors for many years. His work is in such
[1:36]collections as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of
[1:40]Chicago, and Tokyo's Institute of Contemporary Art. He is the recipient of two
[1:44]National Endowment for the Arts grants, has been a visiting artist at the
[1:47]American Academy in Rome, the Vermont Studio Center, and serves on the board
[1:51]of Yado, the oldest arts community in the US. He is also known for his latest novel,
[1:56]Ten Perfect Guests, which is out now. He lives in New York, where he is currently at work
[2:00]on a new novel. Welcome, Jonathan. Thanks so much for coming on totally
[2:04]booked to talk about ten perfect guests, a novel. Congratulations.
[2:09]Thank you. Thank you so much. It's great to see you. Be here.
[2:13]Great to see you. We both have books coming out around the same time.
[2:17]That's true. We sure do.
[2:22]Yeah, so thank you for even noticing that. Thank you. Okay, your book is so fun.
[2:28]Like, I know you weave so many different viewpoints and all the chapters are short and punchy
[2:34]and different perspectives. It's immersive. It's like, it's poking fun of a society the whole time
[2:43]in a way and a certain world of the jet setting art sets and the rivalries. Well, maybe I
[2:50]should let you describe it, but I have to say it was super fun and just totally enjoyable as a read.
[2:59]Oh, good. No, I actually was just going to let you go on and on,
[3:02]because anyway, you were describing it. It's sort of the way I feel, you know, that I wanted to
[3:08]write a very immersive, fun book, a scapist book. I think we all need a little escape these days.
[3:15]But, you know, I couldn't write a cozy. And so I really did think about something I think
[3:24]about often, which is, you know, taking a, you know, like a popular form, an entertaining form,
[3:31]and putting some real subjects under it, you know, like greed and lust and betrayal and all those
[3:40]fun, awful things. But, you know, aside from juggling 10 characters, I must have been out of my mind,
[3:48]it was a really fun learning experience for me, because I had never written an actual
[3:54]who'd done it before. And I kind of learned a lot on the way. I must admit that across from my
[4:02]desk for the first few months, I had a list of the characters and their main traits. I even did
[4:10]little funny drawings of them until I got to know them. And then I took that away because it was
[4:16]kind of limit, you know. And as you said, you know, one of the things I was trying to do was have
[4:22]the whole book is the third person and omniscient, close third. But I wanted you to be in the
[4:29]point of view of every character's head and to feel like you were thinking along with them.
[4:36]And I don't know. It started to come very naturally to me quite soon. I mean, I'm sure you know
[4:42]that as a writer, you're writing something. It'll be beginning. It's kind of unfamiliar. And then
[4:47]you forget, right? And you're just doing it until, of course, you fall out of it. And then it's like,
[4:54]oh, what happened? But I really wanted, I mean, the things you said, I really wanted to do that
[5:03]to have people. I wanted to set it up. So it had a sort of slow burn at the beginning. You got
[5:11]to meet everyone. And then it would kick up and get faster and faster. Right? And it all really
[5:20]centers on the funeral quote unquote of a beloved art figure in the world who after his death
[5:30]has summoned everybody to this island to say, you know, you're risking losing your inheritance
[5:36]if you don't come on Memorial Day weekend to this event that I have put together. And you know,
[5:42]here's the plane and the boat and the person and, you know, good luck. And it's like a mishmash of
[5:46]people from his past all. It reminds me of the opening of the white lotus or something everybody
[5:52]like coming on. You know, this is your cast and who you're going to be hanging out with. And
[5:57]what is all of that? What are their stories? And then like every good sort of character drama,
[6:02]essentially, the backstories become really fascinating too. And you immediately connect with
[6:08]different characters, like the former people's most sexiest alive actor who is now just like trying
[6:14]to stay relevant and like has all these deaths looming. And you just like feel his like, oh my gosh,
[6:21]I had it all and I let it go. And so immediately you're like, oh, maybe I'm rooting for him. And
[6:26]you know, so how did you how did you get that going so quickly? Well, to be honest, I don't,
[6:31]you know, in the book, I hope it does catch on, you know, quickly all of those various things.
[6:39]But you know, Zippy, it's not so quick when you're writing it. You write a lot. And then for me,
[6:45]it's always like, I always overwrite. But I like to edit. You know, once I have a story,
[6:52]once I have pages, I just take it out. And, and you know, once those characters came alive to
[7:01]me, and you know, you might think this is funny because, you know, in a certain way, they are
[7:08]a nest of vipers, you know, they're all competing and they all have sort of have done something
[7:15]kind of terrible. But I also had tremendous empathy for all of them. You know, I sort of had to
[7:21]find that as I was writing it so that I cared about them. I always have to, you know, you can't
[7:28]write a book if you don't care about your characters. And the truth is sort of awful characters
[7:34]of the most fun. You know, you have to care about them. But the nastier, the better. So,
[7:40]yeah, I found it. I guess I found it. I was going to say fairly soon. But again, I'm not sure about
[7:48]that because I forget, you know, I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and I think originally,
[7:55]I was going to have less characters. And I realized I wanted to play with all the familiar tropes,
[8:04]you know, a big cast of characters and isolated plays in this case in Ireland, you know, everyone
[8:11]has a motive, one of them is a killer, but also to kind of charge it up and make it feel pertinent
[8:19]to today. And I think the way I did that was through their characters, you know, through each
[8:24]of the characters and what they were going through, what they had done, somebody who had said to me,
[8:30]like, who'd read it, a good friend of mine said, oh my god, I love them. They're all so nasty and
[8:37]fun. And I said, it's true. But didn't you feel for them? And she said, well, I did. I did, mainly
[8:44]because of their desperation. I said, yes. But as you read, as you said, you find out what has
[8:54]motivated them, what they have done, why they've done it. And for me, that was kind of as
[9:00]important as, let's say, finding out who the killer is or finding out why this is all happening.
[9:09]I mean, those, that's the bigger question. But finding out why each of them is there,
[9:15]what their guilty of, why they may or may not be playing a part in this and paying a price for it.
[9:24]That to me was as important as anything else, certainly, you know, because, you know, this kind of
[9:31]story, though you have these physical elements of the island, the paradise that, of course, turns
[9:37]into the worst possible place. But the story still has to be generated or moved forward with
[9:46]these characters, you know, and how they're going to act in that situation and where they're
[9:52]why they're there and why they're, as you said, you know, why they've been invited and the fact
[9:57]that they're going to lose their inheritance.
[10:00]You know, of course my daughter, when she was started to read it, it said to me,
[10:05]just wait a minute, are you the nasty dead artist?
[10:09]I said, what?
[10:10]I said, couldn't I have at least a beneath?
[10:14]I who was the sexiest man alive was look like, oh, daddy.
[10:18]Really.
[10:19]But I had fun with all of them.
[10:26]You know, some of them I feel a little as I wrote them where I felt closer to them and closer to
[10:33]them.
[10:34]You do that.
[10:35]The fact that you have a long history in the art world and are an expert over there.
[10:41]It is no surprise that you base this around art in general.
[10:45]Can you talk a little bit about your background and your fine art experience and your love
[10:50]of now writing about this world, your previous books and how the role of you as observer
[10:56]in both art and literature kind of pervades this narrative?
[11:00]That's a great question because you put two things together.
[11:04]When I was a young kid, I was a terrible student, which I'll admit.
[11:10]I was slightly dyslexic, which I didn't find out until I went to art school.
[11:16]And then on the first day of my drawing class, my drawing teacher, this little off-topic,
[11:21]but it's interesting.
[11:22]My drawing teacher came over and he said, I've never
[11:26]seen anybody draw the way you do because I would draw like that with both hands, but
[11:32]representationally.
[11:34]And I said, well, that's the way I see it.
[11:36]I see two halves and then I'm putting them together.
[11:40]And he said, wow, does that, how do you see other things like that?
[11:44]I said, yeah, when I'm reading, I see that and it's hard.
[11:50]So he sent me to the reading clinic at the college and this wonderful therapist.
[11:58]Well, you have a kind of mild, interesting form of dyslexia.
[12:04]And so anyway, I worked on lots of exercises and it changed the way I thought tremendously.
[12:10]First of all, I became an avid reader because when I was young, because I had trouble
[12:16]reading, I loved comic books because I could look at the picture and sort of figure
[12:23]out what was going on.
[12:25]And in any case, I ended up going to art school and when I told you I was a bad student,
[12:32]the only thing I ever felt I was really good at was that it art.
[12:37]I could draw anything.
[12:38]I had this gift.
[12:41]And so I went to art school, I loved art school.
[12:44]It was like the greatest thing in the world for me.
[12:48]I mean, I was with all these people who were just like me in many ways.
[12:52]And I pursued my art life and my art career and my idea of becoming an artist, which
[13:01]I did.
[13:02]I was very, very lucky, very fortunate.
[13:05]I was in a Whitney exhibition and I got a gallery and I was basically had a very successful
[13:11]career.
[13:13]And then my gallery in New York decided I should have this sort of retrospective show and
[13:20]they collected 10 years of artwork from collectors and museums.
[13:24]And it went to a show in Chicago and that show opened.
[13:28]You may notice on a Friday and the building burned down the next day.
[13:32]So I've lost 10 years of artwork, mainly it wasn't most of that work was sold, but it
[13:38]was also my last new six paintings.
[13:42]And you know, it was fairly traumatic at that time, but changed, but you know, you look
[13:51]at things and nobody died, you know, they're just objects.
[13:57]I could distance myself enough to say that.
[13:59]At the same time, I had been invited as a painter to the American Academy in Rome.
[14:06]And so a few months later, I packed up my wife and myself and my eight-year-old daughter.
[14:12]We went to live in Rome for, and I'll tell you, Rome is, Rome's a really good place to
[14:19]be depressed.
[14:20]It's so beautiful.
[14:23]We had a wonderful apartment.
[14:25]We lived across the street from the Academy.
[14:28]The only problem was I couldn't really paint.
[14:31]I was kind of thrown out of my, this thing I've always wanted.
[14:36]And I kind of looked at it and thought, well, you know, you chose this because you felt
[14:41]it was your only avenue.
[14:44]And I had been writing about art for art magazines.
[14:48]I'd also been working for Travel and Leisure, which I love.
[14:52]And I don't know.
[14:54]I had the hubris to try and write a novel because I was having trouble painting.
[14:59]And I worked on a novel while we were, you know, I did draw.
[15:03]We went to a lot of churches, the oldest synagogue in Rome, all these places where I did drawings
[15:10]of the architecture and copied paintings, and that was fun.
[15:14]But I also worked on this novel, which was about a kind of 40-year-old artist who'd lost
[15:21]all his work in a fire.
[15:23]And when I got back to New York, I really, I couldn't stand it.
[15:28]I reread it and I hated the character.
[15:32]I thought he was so entitled and whiny and so I killed him on the page.
[15:38]I just really had fun.
[15:41]And you know, I say to people, if you're depressed, just write out the killing yourself
[15:48]on a page, because you wake up in the morning and, you know, it's very sort of litter
[15:53]in a literary way, very cathartic.
[15:56]But I dumped that book and I said, oh, I'm going to write something like this.
[16:01]And that's how I wrote my first novel, which was The Death Artist.
[16:06]And that book was fairly successful and I was very surprised.
[16:10]And then I just continued to write.
[16:12]But I always had some aspect of the art world in there because it's what I knew.
[16:17]And what I liked and you know, the art world is just tailor-made for mystery crime.
[16:24]You know, it's something like, according to Interpol and the FBI, it's like the third
[16:30]or fourth biggest criminal activity in the world.
[16:35]It's behind like arms dealing and human trafficking.
[16:39]So because there's so much money involved, art is expensive.
[16:44]But I will say that, you know, I tried to keep both careers going for a while while I wrote books.
[16:50]And it suddenly, not suddenly it slowly became overwhelming.
[16:55]And so now I draw and I paint for myself.
[16:59]I do make commission paintings of fakes for people, which is really fun.
[17:04]And so I know what it's like.
[17:06]Like when I wrote my book, Last Mona Lisa, I had a whole scene with an art forager
[17:12]and I knew exactly what it felt like because I can do it.
[17:16]But the art I mainly do is for me.
[17:19]And because my life shifted into writing as more my career, you know, but I really know it.
[17:26]And that's why in this book, I think, I mean, not all of the characters are art-related for sure,
[17:34]but they have a relationship to this artist who has died.
[17:39]That was too long and excellent.
[17:40]It wasn't. I found that very interesting.
[17:43]And when did the widower's notebook tell me about that?
[17:47]When did that happen?
[17:48]Well, you know, my wife died very unexpectedly, very tragically.
[17:55]And I just found that I had a contract to write another book.
[18:01]And I couldn't quite do it.
[18:04]And I was, you know, we all experienced grief in our lives.
[18:09]And we know people who go through grief.
[18:12]And I don't think any of us are getting out of here without experiencing it at one time or another.
[18:19]But this was so unexpected, having my wife was not old and not sick.
[18:26]So what happened was I was invited to Yado, the arts retreat, where you should go, by the way.
[18:33]You would love it. She would really love it. And be good. You'd write and work well there.
[18:38]But anyhow, while I was there, I almost didn't go, but the director sort of said,
[18:46]come out of your life. Yado's a healing place. It'll be, and I did. I went.
[18:51]And what I ended up doing was taking the, I had been keeping rough notes in like literally
[18:57]a notebook just about what I did every day because my life felt so discombobulated, so like
[19:06]unreal, you know. And so I would write things down how I felt what I was experiencing.
[19:13]I never experienced, you know, any organized ways of breathing at all.
[19:18]I was teaching during that time. And I will say that teaching was great because my students,
[19:24]I didn't tell them. And I had to perform and, you know, that was good for me. But anyhow,
[19:30]I went to Yado and I just was rewriting or organizing these notes because it made me feel
[19:37]good to do that. And I was friends with the director at the time. And she said, what are you
[19:44]working on? And I said, well, and she said, can I read some? And I said, okay. And she read it.
[19:50]She said, you know, this is a book. And I said, oh, I don't know about that. And then I showed it to,
[19:59]well.
[20:00]well-known writer friend of mine, Joyce Carol Oates,
[20:03]and Joyce had written her widower story book.
[20:07]And she said, you know, Johnny, you have to write this book
[20:11]because men, they just don't write these kind of books.
[20:15]So I did, and my agent showed it around
[20:19]and Penguin picked it up right away.
[20:23]And then I was very nervous, very reluctant to let it go,
[20:28]but I did.
[20:29]And I will say that in the end, I'm very glad I did,
[20:33]because I heard from so many people,
[20:37]so many people who had gone through similar things.
[20:40]And I heard from a lot of men, which was fascinating.
[20:45]Men would say, I just remember those first contacts
[20:50]I got from men, so many men who said, thank you
[20:53]for expressing what I couldn't express.
[20:57]I'm going to get very emotional at the moment,
[20:59]but I'm going to try not to.
[21:02]I don't think in a way that the book was cathartic for me.
[21:08]I mean, I didn't feel better.
[21:10]What I felt better about was other people's reactions.
[21:14]And it's a cliche, but time helps.
[21:18]You move forward with your life.
[21:21]I had a daughter, and who I was always close to,
[21:25]we became very, very close to that, even more than we had been.
[21:31]And I remember a therapist friend of mine
[21:36]saying, soon after Joy died, she said,
[21:39]you know, something good may come out of this
[21:41]that you would never expect.
[21:42]And I got really mad at her for saying that.
[21:46]But in fact, when I thought about it, my daughter and I
[21:51]became really, really close.
[21:54]And that was a wonderful thing.
[22:00]And we're still very close.
[22:01]And anyhow, I would say, writing is writing.
[22:06]I don't think the writing in that book is different than my writing.
[22:10]Anywhere.
[22:11]In fact, I think it was in the New Yorker
[22:14]when they reviewed the book that they said,
[22:17]it had the quality of a thriller, like a paperner.
[22:22]And I remember being so shocked by that.
[22:25]And then somebody else said it to me.
[22:28]And I was very surprised.
[22:30]And I thought, that's the way I write, you know?
[22:34]So in fact, the subject matter, of course,
[22:37]is totally different.
[22:39]But the way I write, I guess, is the way I write.
[22:42]And I think in some ways, when I look back on it,
[22:46]it may be enriched the way I think,
[22:50]or you know, the way I certainly, if I write about somebody
[22:53]who's grieving in a serious way, I
[23:00]can understand it to a better, you know,
[23:04]a deeper kind of thing.
[23:05]I mean, I think we all share a commonality
[23:10]in grief, but that we don't grieve differently,
[23:12]even though it's a shared thing.
[23:16]In this book, you know, in 10 perfect guests,
[23:18]there's, I was going to say, it's not everything
[23:23]that's serious is undercover in this book.
[23:26]You know, it's buried under what I would say is fun.
[23:30]And I wanted to say that way.
[23:32]You know, when I wrote my last book was the lost baggo.
[23:36]I did a lot of research into Nazi art including,
[23:41]and it was very, very emotional to read.
[23:43]I read a lot of people's first hand accounts
[23:47]of what had happened to their families.
[23:48]And it was devastating to me.
[23:52]And at the same time, I saw this documentary
[23:55]made with Billy Wilder, the film director and writer,
[24:00]who I always loved as movies, you know,
[24:03]some like it hot, the apartment, all these great movies.
[24:07]And I had no idea that his entire family had died
[24:12]in the camps.
[24:14]And he was, he had been left as a young man,
[24:19]like publicly in his late teens, he went to Paris
[24:22]and studied film and ended up working in the French film
[24:27]industry and then went to Hollywood and did,
[24:31]and was collaborating, but was working well.
[24:34]And the army asked him if he would film
[24:39]some of the liberation of the camps.
[24:43]And he went to Berlin and did that,
[24:45]not knowing what had happened to his family.
[24:49]He only found out later.
[24:51]But he made this 25 minute film, which is so horrifying.
[24:57]And he screamed it in Berlin, right?
[25:01]And this was at the very end of the war.
[25:04]And the people in the theater, he recounted this
[25:07]in this documentary, he said, half of the people left,
[25:11]but the people who stayed when he talked to them
[25:14]when they were leaving, he said they were almost stunned
[25:16]into silence.
[25:18]And it taught him, he said, it taught me something
[25:22]that if I wanted to get my message across,
[25:26]I was gonna have to find another way.
[25:29]So he went back to Hollywood and he made a movie
[25:31]called A Foreign Affair, which is basically,
[25:36]it's insane, but it's a rom-com,
[25:39]Marlated Dietrich is a cabaret singer.
[25:42]And she's having an affair with a high ranking Nazi.
[25:47]And then the Americans are coming for the kind of cleanup
[25:51]after the war, but it's a comedy.
[25:54]And he used that his whole life,
[25:58]the idea of using entertainment as a way
[26:03]to teach people something.
[26:05]And I think it's a remarkable gift
[26:08]that he's given to writers and filmmakers and all of us,
[26:13]right?
[26:14]So that you can write about really tough things.
[26:19]I mean, this book to me, I mean, I think I hope it's like a
[26:23]lark, that it's fun.
[26:26]I don't want it to be at all heavy.
[26:28]The lost thing was a little bit heavy,
[26:31]but this is not at all.
[26:32]So, but I still think I'm playing with greed
[26:36]and those kind of things.
[26:38]So yeah.
[26:39]Amazing.
[26:40]Well, thank you for being so open and for sharing all of that
[26:43]about your late wife, Joy, and we didn't roll more to it.
[26:50]We were all, we covered them after today.
[26:52]But thank you for giving us so much
[26:56]really meaningful backstory to 10 perfect guests,
[26:59]which, yes, is an escapist, fun,
[27:01]you know, almost decadent slice of the art life,
[27:05]but it comes from a place of so much more.
[27:08]So thank you for that context and congratulations.
[27:10]Thank you, it was great.
[27:11]You know, I didn't expect to be talking
[27:12]about any of that other stuff.
[27:14]So I, you know, I hope that's okay.
[27:17]And of course this book, yeah, this book for me
[27:20]was in some ways the most fun book I ever wrote
[27:24]and I hope people take it away.
[27:26]You can absolutely feel it.
[27:27]Congratulations, Jonathan.
[27:29]Thank you, we'll celebrate your book in the fall too.
[27:32]Okay, thank you so much.
[27:35]All right.
[27:36]Okay, bye bye.
[27:37]Thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi
[27:40]formerly momstone have time to read books.
[27:43]If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review,
[27:46]follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens
[27:49]and spread the word.
[27:50]Thanks so much.
[27:51]Oh, and bye the books.