Transcript: Jason Guriel

An interview with the author of Fan Mail

Before the Internet, before the literary world was overrun by online politics, before everything you read — and wrote — had to advance an agenda, there was the solitary person, in a room, losing themselves in the words on the page. There was the fan. My guest on the program this week has written a book of essays on fandom and his own obsessions. In the process, he confronts the big cultural forces of our age.

Jason Guriel is a Toronto writer. His latest book is Fan Mail: A Guide to What We Love, Loathe, and Mourn.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview here.

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TH: It’s great to have you on to talk about your book of essays, Fan Mail. As you know, I loved this collection, so much that I blurbed the book. I just want to say for listeners: I love your writing and find you to be one of the most original thinkers in Canadian literature. But I also just really like the premise of this book, which is a kind of defence of obsessive fandom, something that I think has been eroded in the era of “the personal is the political” and everything that comes with that. You have a great line in the book: “I chase my whims, and I don’t check boxes.” It’s been really nice to see this book doing so well. I want to start today with the advice that you gave your young son about the benefits of obsessively loving something, and the place that fandom has had in your own life.

JG: Where to begin? I grew up before the Internet. I was born in 1978. I grew up in a suburb of Toronto. My parents were working class. There were no family vacations. I didn’t do after-school sports. Basically, I watched a lot of TV, I read a lot of books, I read comics. You were left to your own devices back then. You had no actual devices like the ones we have now. So I found myself very often going deep and being obsessive about my little niche interests. Whether it was, again, reading comics, drawing at the kitchen table for hours on end, obsessing over Star Trek — all the fandoms that you might have in your youth.

I had the time. As you suggest, I think a lot of that space has been eroded. To be a fan back then was to be a fan in isolation. Occasionally I would go to a comic convention. I remember a couple of times my dad had to drive me out to the airport, to a convention centre to go to a Star Trek convention. It was a big deal. But for the most part you were on your own. There were no Internet chat rooms; there were no online communities. I think, by the way, that was all for the best. I’m not sure those spaces necessarily breed the best behaviours or attitudes.

But yeah, I had a lot of time to myself, a lot of time to go deep into my passions. It’s something I have been trying to inculcate in my kids, especially my son, who’s nine. He’s starting to develop a love of reading. I see some of the same tendencies that I had in him, and it’s something I really hope I can continue. I mean, just the other day he asked about getting a Nintendo Switch for Christmas, and it’s like, “Oh my God, though, is that going to derail the going deep into books and so on?” But we’ll see.

TH: I’m Gen X too, and I really relate to that space that you’re talking about — of being alone in your room and having this long stretch of time and becoming so fascinated by something. I think there’s a real benefit to that, in so many different ways. I’ll say, though, as much as I related, I do think there’s something distinctly male about this particular kind of obsessive fandom. It reminds me of sports fans with their stats. But also, when I was working as a music journalist, the encyclopedic knowledge of male hip-hop fans. What do you see as that relationship between fandom and masculinity?

JG: That is an interesting question. I do think that’s a fair point, and I’m not necessarily sure exactly where that comes from — if it’s cultural or biological or whatever. But I think of the music snobs in High Fidelity obsessively bantering about their insider knowledge and their arcane knowledge. I have probably become less like that over time as the vagaries of real life take over and you have less time to devote to minutiae and looking at liner notes and what session musician played on this album. That is probably a good thing. But yeah, I’m not sure exactly where that comes from, but it is something that does seem to fire up men of a certain generation, for sure, to go deep into the arcane and the stats and so on.

TH: I think there’s something really wonderful about it. The book is divided into sections, love, loathe, and mourn — as you write, “the three primal functions of the fan.” I’ll touch on each, starting with your love of the great Canadian science fiction writer William Gibson. His book Pattern Recognition is one of my all-time favourite novels. He’s also just a very generous person online. You see him interacting with a lot of people. I know he’s interacted with you. What do you see as his lasting legacy? What made him make your list?

JG: Well, I discovered him as a teenager. God, it must have been the early to mid-1990s. I bought Neuromancer off the shelf at the local mall in a bookstore. Didn’t really know much about it, but it looked great, had great blurbs. I fell in love with his science fiction writing, very much as a fan of sci-fi at the time. I think, over time, though, I came to realize that he was just a brilliant writer, period, full stop. There’s a lot of stuff I read in my youth, like genre fiction, that I would probably never go back to, and if I did, I’d be mortified that I ever enjoyed it. But one of the things I realized over time about William Gibson is that he’s just an incredible prose stylist. The texture of his sentences. What I loved about his writing was there was a kind of precision and almost a fealty to physics, a weird realism in this writing about ostensibly fantastical worlds.

And what’s interesting, the book you point out, Pattern Recognition — my sense is he wrote that almost as a dare to himself. It was a post-9/11 novel, and he had a line at one point: “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” I feel like I could write a novel set in the present that feels like a science fiction novel, and Pattern Recognition very much is that kind of book. But over time, I just found myself less attracted to him as a futurist and more drawn to him as an incisive, stylish writer who always situated the reader in his worlds.

He himself has a kind of obsessive fan quality. If you know anything about his life, prior to becoming a novelist, he wrote about how he was a so-called picker in the 1970s. He would go out and find these rare collectibles and then sell them to wealthy patrons. And you see in his characters a kind of obsessive fandom. The protagonist in Pattern Recognition has this Japanese replica of an old U.S. military bomber jacket that has been meticulously reconstructed by these Japanese obsessives who are themselves fans of this particular article of clothing. She herself has become a fan of that article of clothing. It gets a cigarette burn at one point, which is a serious plot point in the novel. But Gibson’s obsessive focus on the world, you see it refracted through his characters as well. I was always drawn to writers like that.

TH: I know what you mean. Let’s move on now to loathe. I want to draw attention to one of your essays in that section about criticism’s “selfie habit,” which points to the fact that literary reviews have become very self-referential. Can you unpack this dynamic for us — as you put it, “a critic in the mood to share” — and why you see that as objectionable?

JG: This book goes back about 10 or 12 years. I wrote that piece, God, it was maybe a decade ago. I was noticing at the time a tendency in myself — but also in quite a few writers that I was seeing online — a tendency to bring themselves into an essay that was ostensibly about a book or a movie or a beloved band. These essays would often kickstart with this little microdose of memoir: “I remember the first time I heard The Replacements — it was the summer of ‘80.” That kind of thing. I was seeing it everywhere, and it was starting to bother me. I was wondering, where is this coming from?

I pitched it around, and it eventually landed in The Walrus. The headline they came up with for that piece was “I Don’t Care About Your Life.” The day that it was published online, it went sort of viral. I became the person on Twitter that day. People were just furious about it, which always tells me … It’s so funny that you never know which pieces of yours might bother someone. Sometimes the pieces I’ve written that I thought, “Oh, that’s going to get me in trouble,” do nothing. Then a piece that I thought was somewhat innocuous blows up. This was one of those pieces. It really irritated people, and I wasn’t necessarily sure why. I do think that [it was] one of the things I say in that piece: I worry that we have lost a shared tradition of cultural reference points. We have deconstructed the canon — I mean, this has been a decades-long process — but we have deconstructed the canon to such an extent that we don’t necessarily have a collective body of cultural touchstones anymore. So we are thrust back onto ourselves and filtering our experience of the world through our own life.

At the time, the only real point I was trying to make in that piece was: This is a real trend, and it’s something that maybe we should be aware of. It’s not about never having the first-person pronoun in an essay, but maybe it’s something that we all need to be aware of. Are we filtering the work of others too much through our own lens? Should we be trying to locate works of art in relation to a larger tradition and a body of criticism — as opposed to just that time we first heard that album back in the summer of whenever? But that piece really did roil Twitter. I think that must have been 2015. I was finding around 2013, 2014, some of these essays were really starting to explode in scary ways, and the backlash to some of these pieces was getting very heated at that particular moment.

TH: You were very early in pointing some of this stuff out, and I think that’s interesting. You also wrote about the pitfalls of literary community. That essay is from 2017, but I think that that’s more relevant than ever today. You write that “in recent decades, the idea of the writer as an individualistic outsider has acquired a layer of dust.” And you pose this question: “What do we lose when writers are afraid to stand alone?” So what do we lose?

JG: I think we lose the ability to be honest in our work. That was another Walrus piece that sparked quite a few reactions. I had been finding, for quite a number of years, this constant refrain in the culture — “We need more dialogue, we need more community” — often coming from people who could be quite vicious online, ironically. One of the strange dynamics I’ve always noticed is that writers who can be quite snarky and stylish and witty in a review are quite lovely in person and online. And the people calling for more community and more dialogue can be quite personal. Maybe you’ve experienced some of this.

I was finding the calls for more community slightly ominous by 2015, 2016, 2017. We were also in a period of increasing hostility on social media platforms. You would see mobbings happening. There was the Steven Galloway stuff. There were all kinds of little scandals exploding and people organizing in swarms. So, to me, “community” did not have this warm vibe around it. It felt a bit ominous. What we needed were writers and critics willing to be honest and willing to say what was on their mind.

It’s funny because I listen to probably a lot of the podcasts that you listen to and follow particular writers on Substack. We trace a lot back to 2020. We were all stuck at home, the George Floyd murder happened, and there was a huge explosion of political consciousness, and, in some quarters, particularly in the progressive left, a real desire for people to fall in line. I had been seeing that, though, for almost a decade prior — really back to 2013 and 2014 — in little niche enclaves like the Canadian poetry world. People being very vocal about, “If you publish a negative review of someone, that’s like a form of assault.” That kind of thing was already emerging quite a long time ago.

TH: Oh, the hyperbole.

JG: It was very hyperbolic. What’s funny — you would also see people that were a little bit remote from the poetry world back then would say, “Ah, the poets are fighting again.” But it’s been so interesting, in retrospect, to read writers like Meghan Daum — who I know you’ve had on your show — who, I’m pretty sure, has talked about how 2014 was a moment where things were starting to pivot. I haven’t done deep research on this, but I know some writers have talked about the way virality was really increasing around that time, and by 2012 or so, a lot of the social media platforms were adding elements like retweet and “like” and these little technical innovations that were enhancing the ability for people to really go viral. That’s maybe part of the story. But I sometimes wonder if that was something that was happening in the early 2010s that created the conditions for a really overheated online literary culture to take root over the coming years. I don’t know how you feel, though, when you started noticing that.

TH: To be honest with you, I don’t think I really fully started to get it until 2020. Yeah, I think I was late coming to it. What I think is so interesting about this book — this book is not about the culture wars, not at all. But what I think is so interesting about the book is there is this subtle thread running through it of you chronicling the rise of some of these things, in very subtle ways, as your essays unfold. Which I think is interesting.

JG: Yeah, it is interesting in the sense that over the course of the 2010s, as I wrote a number of these essays … There was a moment when I wrote about the comic book Cerebus, which is this Canadian indie institution. But the artist behind that book was considered a problematic figure, as the kids would say. I hate that word problematic. But I remember wanting to mark the 40th anniversary of that book, while in the back of my mind thinking, “Well, Dave Sim — some people consider him a misogynist. This was a massive comic book series that published over 26 years and had a huge fandom. But can I write about this particular figure?” I remember writing about Brian De Palma more recently, and Ed Piskor, the late cartoonist, who actually died by suicide in the aftermath of an online mobbing last year. Often the artists that interest me are not perfect figures. This book has pieces about Harold Bloom and Phil Spector — I mean, Phil Spector shot someone — but I do remember, over the course of writing the essays in this book, sometimes feeling like “This is a potential third rail” or “This is a potential live wire subject.”

But my focus has always been more the aesthetic. More criticism, as opposed to culture writing. I’m interested in what makes a work of art successful as opposed to the social forces of power that produced it or that oppressed other particular writers, and so on. So it’s interesting that you point that out. It was not the focus of the book, but it is a thread throughout. It was a weird time to be writing essays over the last decade or so, especially if you wanted to write a negative review. You could draw heat for that.

One thing I have noticed in Canada is that our critical culture has really diminished over time, and I think it does tie into the community piece and the “everyone being too online” piece. And, of course, the economics of book pages really diminishing and shrinking over time — there just doesn’t seem to be a lot of venues for us to publish a review, even a witty takedown of a writer we don’t like. And even if we want to do that, are we looking over our shoulder all the time? Are we going to get retribution for that? I think that that general atmosphere has been bad for criticism in this country.

I’ve tried to fight against it when I can. Even now, I’m working on an essay and I’m like, “Oh, this one might get me in trouble.” But you have to push yourself a little bit — especially now. When I started writing book reviews in 2007, this culture didn’t exist. I say two things: I was really glad to have a childhood before the Internet. I was also really glad to start writing before social media platforms really went off the deep end. To be able to write in a certain kind of solitude, knowing I didn’t have to worry what was going to be said about me tomorrow on Twitter. That was, I think, a good thing for writers. Maybe that world is long gone at this point, but it is a period of time I miss.

TH: Caring about criticism — telling the truth about a work of art — and caring about aesthetics has itself become a countercultural stance now because of where our culture is at.

JG: One hundred percent. I quote Leon Wieseltier at one point in the book; you know, the editor of Liberties. He did this review of A.O. Scott, the New York Times critic, back in 2016. Scott had this book — I think it was a book about criticism that came out — and Wieseltier reviewed it for The Atlantic. This was prior to Wieseltier’s own cancellation, which happened a long time ago. He’s long since been resurrected. But Wieseltier had this wonderful line where he talked about Scott as a clearly smart, talented writer, but someone who seemed uneasy making choices. He “honors the heights, but gladly descends from them.” Scott had this habit, Wieseltier found, of always correcting high thought with the social and economic lowdown. In other words, Scott was this critic playing at being a critic but not really taking a stance on anything.

I do think that that is a place where we are now as a culture. We are wary of having taste. We are wary of passing judgment. I review, at one point, Carl Wilson’s book about Céline Dion. That was his famous poptimist manifesto, in a way. That book to me was an early signpost of where we were going as a culture. Céline Dion, to my mind, is sentimental and tacky and not necessarily someone we should be bringing all of our critical resources to bear on. And he was like Scott — a critic willing to not pass that aesthetic judgment. So yeah, the critics that excite me the most are the ones who make decisions and choices, and do so in a kind of witty, fun prose.

TH: Yeah, and there are some funny lines in the book. For listeners, here is one. You’re talking about Toni Morrison’s statement that all good art is political. You disagree. You say that “the blunter a piece of political art gets, the more bludgeoned we tend to feel.” And you attack this idea that exists in literary culture right now, that somehow the art is doing the work for the movement. You say, “As for helping people, there are probably more ways to support those who feel threatened by the prospect of a Muslim registry” — for instance — “than toiling over your novel at Yaddo.” Which I thought was hilarious.

While we’re talking about the greater culture, though, I want to get your take on something that is not in the book — that has been a big topic this year — and that is the conversation in literary circles about the fate of the white male writer. There was an op-ed in The New York Times, “The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone,” and then a viral essay in Compact, “The Vanishing White Male Writer.” It notes that, “perhaps most astonishingly, not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker.” We’re seeing now waning enthusiasm about literature as a whole from young men. On last week’s Lean Out podcast, Adam Szetela pointed out that the industry is dominated by women and that some of these dynamics might be influencing the kind of fiction that gets published. How are you thinking through that conversation?

JG: I think there’s probably a lot of truth to some of those pieces. I do wonder if the publishing industry is not catering to a certain demographic of young men. I worry about that with my own son too. I notice this looking on a streaming platform and the kinds of representations of young men in contemporary kids’ movies. You don’t necessarily see a lot — as much as you might think. And so I’m constantly thinking about what are the cultural products that maybe will give him some role models and some examples. That does seem to have diminished a fair bit. It does not seem to me that the publishing industry is oriented at all to the interests of younger male writers. I don’t know what we do with that or where we go from there. But it does not seem to be a subject that mainstream media is particularly focused on at all. I do worry about what my son is going to read in 15, 20 years. Will he be turned off books altogether if there’s not much on offer? I myself don’t read much contemporary fiction; I don’t see a ton that’s particularly worth reading.

TH: I hear that a lot from men. I hear that a lot. The last point that I wanted to touch on was this idea of how insular literary communities have become, including CanLit. There’s a great line — you’re talking about poetry in particular in one essay — and you say, “It can seem like a pyramid scheme made up of creative writing professors and students who aspire to be creative writing professors. The by-products — the poems — are preserved in journals no one reads, pressed into place like brittle leaves.” There doesn’t seem to be this interest in writing for a mass audience anymore, this idea that we want to all be talking about a book. It made me think about fandom. Do we not want fans anymore?

JG: Oh man, it’s such a great and depressing question to think about. When I started out, my aspiration as a young writer in the early aughts was that I wanted to write for the big magazines that had a big readership. It was thrilling to get a poem in Poetry magazine or to get a piece in The New Republic and to know that you might irritate some people, or some people might like it. But there would be some kind of collective response.

We are so siloed now. You put out a piece, and all the writers that used to be on old Twitter are all on, I guess, Bluesky now. X seems like a bit of a ghost town. Substack is kind of cool, but it feels like readerships are so dispersed at the moment. I don’t know how we reach that larger readership. But my orientation is always towards a smart general reader who wants to be entertained. That is the person I’m always trying to write for. I certainly don’t want to write for one political niche group. I don’t want to write for an academic audience. I want to reach as many people as possible. But we have really cut ourselves up into these little demographic slices, and I feel sometimes like no one is hearing anyone else. But Substack is kind of cool. A lot of writers that I really love, who used to be at some of the legacy media publications, they’re all on Substack. Tina Brown, I just got her latest Substack email this morning. I love her writing; she is so good. But it occurs to me, man, it’s hard … All these voices are now coming to us in this very dispersed way. It’d be lovely if we could gather them together in some kind of physical object, put a staple, binding, and have a proper magazine. But we’re just not doing that anymore.

I had an op-ed in the Toronto Star a week or two ago, and I went to a variety store that I know always keeps it — they still have the Star. I went to the wrong one a few doors down, and I was like, “Do you have the Toronto Star?” And they were like, “What is that?” They didn’t know what the Toronto Star was. I couldn’t believe it. I said, “It’s our city’s newspaper.” And they were like, “Oh, oh, no, no, no — we don’t have any of that stuff here.” Then I found a place that had the Star. But I was like, what hope do we have if the owner of a variety store in Toronto doesn’t know what the Toronto Star is? So I don’t know. I struggle with this all the time because I miss the era where you sent something to an editor, and it appeared in the big flashy publication, and it reached people.

The idea of cultivating an audience on your own, it’s tough. I mean, you’re doing it, which is cool. Meghan Daum — we mentioned her earlier — she’s talked a lot about this mid-career pivot. It’s this Gen X phenomenon. We’re all reckoning with this changing economic marketplace, and we have to figure out a way to cultivate an audience on our own. It’s a lot of hustle, and it’s a lot of administrative work. You had to set up this lovely podcast today on a platform. More power to you. But man, I have a sentimental attachment to that earlier era.

TH: As do I. That’s part of what I think is so beautiful about this book — it’s bringing that ethos and that sensibility to the next generation, and I’m glad for it. I want them to know what it was like before we were just endlessly scrolling. What it was like to — as your book talked about, in On Browsing — walk into a bookstore and discover a book that you never knew you wanted or needed, and have it change your life. I mean, that’s powerful stuff.

JG: Yeah, I think so. There have been little flickers. There are signs of life. I was reading recently that Tablet has now reintroduced a print magazine, and there’s that County Highway, that publication in the States that’s like an actual newspaper. So I wonder if there is going to be — especially with the rise of AI — a kind of backlash and a movement back to the physical, and the analog. Do you see any hope of that? That we might return to something like that? It’s going to be untenable for people to have dozens and dozens and dozens of subscriptions to individual writers. That feels, to me, unsustainable. What do you think about that, as a podcaster?

TH: I agree that it’s unsustainable. I think that curation is going to be one of the big themes of this decade, because people can’t consume everything — we’re just so inundated all the time. I’m Gen X, so I’m very nostalgic about print. But it occurs to me that instead of going backwards, there must be a new era that will be birthed. We just don’t know what it looks like yet.

JG: Yeah, I think we’re going to need a little bit of gatekeeping again — the curation idea — because we need editors. We need people to say yay or nay. Michael Moynihan on The Fifth Column was saying something a few weeks ago about this. He was talking about how he came up. I think his point was that the Internet enabled him to get around the gatekeepers that would’ve previously prevented him from building a career with VICE News or whatever he did. But he was like, “I’m kind of missing the gatekeepers now, in the face of the conspiracy theorists, all this stuff that we’re drowning in online.” And so I do think you’re right. We’re going to have to get back to a place where there is some curation, where there is a way of organizing these voices. I just don’t know what that looks like.

TH: I don’t know either. But I do miss the editor. I was edited for many years — and I still am sometimes — and the process of being edited is, I think, what makes you the writer you are. You need that, you need it. I don’t know how to explain it to younger writers, but there’s something about giving in a first draft and getting asked all these critical questions, and you go deeper and deeper and deeper until you get to something that you knew you knew, but you didn’t know yet.

JG: Oh, so much. I know exactly what you mean. I’ve had a number of editors over the years — like Carmine Starnino at The Walrus, who edited this book. Chris Wiman, who was the editor of Poetry magazine back when I wrote for them a long time ago. And I remember pitching something to The New Republic over a decade ago, a total slush pile pitch. I had no connection to that magazine. Chloe Schama, who was then an editor with The New Republic, got back to me and she was like, “Okay, well, tell me more about this.” I started writing a bit for her — it was just when The New Republic was about to implode, I think, one of the Facebook guys or something had bought it. She was such a great editor. I think she’s an editor with Vogue now. But I’ve had a number of these editors who plucked me out of oblivion. Writing for them made me better. I knew immediately, “Oh my God, this is an opportunity. The gatekeeper has given me a shot. I’ve got 1,200 words; they’ve got to be the best 1,200 words I’ve ever written because they don’t know me from Adam.”

I really miss that. If I don’t have that — if there isn’t someone on the other side that I’m trying to impress and dazzle — I find it sometimes hard to be self-driving, to be self-propulsive. I need to know that someone might say no. The thing I struggle with in our current moment is the self-publishing ethos. That’s kind of where we’re all heading, in a way. But I need that impressive person above me who’s going to help shape me. And sometimes maybe reject the piece, and save me from myself.