ON WRITING... With Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro

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0:54Welcome to How to Fail. I'm so excited to bring you some more highlights from our extensive How to Fail back catalogue. and I'm hoping that you might find the comfort that you need or have your interest piqued by some of my favourite guests. Now, this week is a particularly special week because it just so happens to be my new book publication week. One of Us, my new novel, is out in the world from the 25th of September and I want to be really honest with you because I always am with my lovely House of Fail listeners. I'm feeling really anxious and really exposed. And I'm having to remind myself to breathe into that anxiety and to turn it into a love of adventure and a belief in excitement.

1:44But I wanted to share that with you because I think it's really important to be real about this process. And it's something that I'm often asked about. I'm often asked, how do you write a book? And of course, the easy answer to that is you have to start writing and you have to carry on writing and eventually you will get to the stage where you have a draft that you can then edit. But that's only the beginning of the story. There's a whole other part of the story, which is if you are lucky enough to get published, and I do consider myself so blessed that this is the 10th book I've had published.

2:22This feeling of anxiety and exposure and a sense of sight imposter syndrome never entirely goes away. And I have come to understand that it in and of itself is part of the writing process. So now, even though it still feels the same, the accumulated wisdom means that I understand it's a transitional phase and I will get to the other side of it. But if we are to care about our work and to put that work out into the world, then if you're doing it right, it should always feel exposing because it means that you are being truthful about emotion and feeling and stories. So obviously, I had to take this opportunity to look back at some of my favourite writers who have been on How to Fail.

3:12First, you're going to hear an extract from my conversation with arguably one of our greatest writers of contemporary fiction, Kazuo Ishiguro. You might know his most famous book, The Remains of the Day, which won the Booker Prize and was adapted into a major film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. His other works, including Never Let Me Go and The Buried Giant, have earned him countless awards, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017. He was actually the first Nobel laureate I interviewed on this podcast. He talks about feeling like an imposter in the writing world, starting out at the University of East Anglia, and a writing technique he coined the crash.

3:54Highly relatable. Then we're going to hear from the legendary Salman Rushdie, the writer whose reputation is such that it transcends the literary world. This is a man famous enough to have had a cameo in the first Bridget Jones movie and curb your enthusiasm. In August 2022, Rushdie was viciously attacked while delivering a lecture in New York. The violent attack almost cost him his life, but against all expectations, he survived. In this excerpt, he talks about his book Knife, in which he reflects we would not be who we are today without the calamities of our yesterdays. First up, here's Kazuo Ishiguro.

4:37I mentioned there that when you applied to the UEA Creative Writing course, you felt this sense of dread, fear of being humiliated. Were you humiliated during that course? No, I wasn't actually. There were only six of us on the course. It wasn't like it is now. People didn't really have a concept of a creative writing course in those days. This was really a pioneering course. And actually, even within the University of East Anglia, a lot of the other academics really frowned people. upon it. They thought it shouldn't exist. We shouldn't be giving MAs for things like this. It only existed because Malcolm Bradbury, the guy who put this on the course, was a celebrated writer and academic.

5:19To be frank, I wasn't. I was pleasantly surprised that the standard wasn't that high. Although, you know, I think there was some interesting writing being done on the course and very rapidly I was seen to be the star of the course, which I wasn't so sure about myself. but before I went yes I didn't know what to expect because I was a bit of an imposter I hadn't really written much fiction. Do you feel like an imposter now or do you think the Nobel Prize has helped you maybe get over that? I don't think the Nobel Prize has done anything one way or the other about that I mean we can talk about this later when we come to failures I mean at some deeper level I worry about the whole imposter thing yes but not at the level of do I deserve to be published?

6:01Do I deserve to be called a writer? I don't think I ever had much doubts about that once I got going. But at a more profound level, I do ask, is what I do really that worthwhile? Does it merit something like a Nobel Prize alongside scientists? People have made huge breakthroughs in medicine. Do I merit a Nobel Prize alongside such people for what I do? And I guess some of the things that have been happening in the world in recent years do lead me to actually wonder, what is the purpose of writing novels and putting them out there? Is it that important? In fact, have we been contributing to something that's a bit dodgy, given the way we seem to have shifted over onto emotions rather than truth and fact?

6:46This idea that, oh, what you feel is what matters. If you feel it, then it's true. I'm kind of wondering if the huge emphasis I've always put in my work on being able to communicate through emotions and to relate to readers emotionally. Is that a sound way to be going about things? At that kind of larger level, I've often thought, you know, is this thing, what I do, is it just some sort of cultural accident that it's been given a certain place in the hierarchy of things? And I get given prizes and knighthoods and things, but actually that's just some sort of historical and cultural accident. And is it actually so valuable?

7:23Is it actually contributing to something adrift away from truth and a kind of dispassionate way of looking at things? Fascinating. I don't have an answer other than saying that I think what you do is incredibly valuable because every single one of your novels encourages the reader to examine what life means and what brings it meaning. and it's interesting to me that you're talking about how useful emotion is because it strikes me now that Clara and the Sun is a meditation on that in many ways in which you use the point of view of an artificial friend who doesn't fully understand the nuance of this human world that she finds herself in or even sometimes what she's literally seeing and therefore you as a writer have to use deceptively simple language to reveal quite profound truths.

8:15And I just wanted to know on a technical level how difficult that was for you, because essentially you have to see the world anew. Yeah, but I've always had a habit of doing that ever since I started to write. I've always written from the point of view of an outsider, a foreigner, a peculiar kind of near-autistic butler, a clone. It's my kind of favoured stance, is to use a distanced and sometimes peculiarly kind of emotionally restrained viewpoint to look at human beings. I'm always after perspective, and so I like to create things that perhaps offer readers a slightly startling perspective on familiar things.

8:55No, Claro wasn't such an amazing departure for me at all, really. I didn't feel. It felt oddly natural to me to be talking through a robot. I don't know what that says. Was it startling for you to see the world anew when you moved to Guildford from Nagasaki at the age of five? It was startling at some level, but not as much as all that. Because I mean, if you can cast your mind back to when you were very young, but everything was startling. When you're only five, you remember when, well, maybe you don't remember, but I mean, presumably there was a time when you couldn't walk and so the world was something that you crawled around and then suddenly you could walk and you could run and you couldn't speak and then you could speak and so it just seemed to be part of that it was another new batch of experiences but you know I went to school at the same time for the first time as the English kids did so I was kind of in sync with my peers in that sense I didn't have that weird experience of coming to a school where people had been together for ages and they all spoke in this different language.

9:58I felt I was kind of learning things at more or less the same pace. It was odd because I don't remember actually not being able to speak English, but obviously when I arrived, I didn't speak English. But I don't really have a memory of consciously learning the language. You mentioned the butler there from The Remains of the Day. Just before we get onto your failures, Is it true that you wrote the remains of the day in four weeks using a technique you and your wife describe as the crash? No, it's not true at all. This has become a bit of a weird myth. I mean, I said this in some interview. Maybe I wrote about it somewhere.

10:35No, this was just a way to get the rough stuff, the rough draft done. And I was finding at the time difficult, partly out of self-discipline, but partly because of other obligations, to just get down to it. And so we just cleared the deck of everything. I mean, in those days, we didn't have things like the internet. So it was easier. You know, I wasn't allowed to pay any attention to the answering machine. I wasn't allowed to open any mail. In those days, I used to spend a lot of time shopping and cooking. I didn't do any of that. I was just given one hour off for lunch and two hours off for dinner.

11:08And then after dinner, I'd have to go and work again. And I had Sundays off. That was it for four weeks. We just thought, you know, let's see what happens if I did that. and it wasn't just the amount of time it was the psychological space you entered into when you did that it was a bit weird but yes it was like before we had this concepts of virtual reality and alternative realities it was like I found myself entering a fictional world that seemed to be more real than the world outside and on Sundays I would go outside and giggle I wander in the street outside and giggle at everybody. And the fact that the High Street, Sydenham High Street, was on the slope seemed to be hilarious.

11:49I love also the idea that you and your wife were involved in this endeavour together. Is she very much someone whose opinion you respect as a reader? Will she be someone who reads your work first? How involved is she in the creative process? Oh, she's vital to the creative process. You have to understand that for one reason or another. We've been together for 40 years. And so she knew me before I was a writer. You know, when we met, I hadn't written anything. I was a would-be singer-songwriter. And so she was there criticizing the very first things I wrote on paper and saying, ha, you know, what's this?

12:24Do you reckon you're a writer because you've written this? I mean, look at them. So, you know, stories, whatever. I mean, she was the first person to look at them, scrutinize them, say which ones were good, which ones weren't. And so I've kind of got used to that. I mean, she's a very good critic and editor, but the important thing is I know where she's coming from. I know when to ignore her and when not to ignore her. Most of the time, I don't ignore her because I get in real trouble if I do ignore her. And it's almost second nature to me that she's part of the team. Sometimes you get these musical duos that nevertheless, their act is named after just one person.

13:00Like a person I really admire at the moment is Gideon Welch, the American singer. but actually they're a couple. It's Gillian Welch and David Rawlings but it's a two-person act with a name. The band's name is Gillian Welch and I kind of feel it. It's a little bit like that with me and my wife. She doesn't just edit afterwards. I mean, she sometimes gives me the ideas to start with. That's so lovely. And your wife's name is Lorna. Let's give her her name. Tribute to Lorna. Lorna Shiguro. Now I've got another member of the family who I have to get past before I can send anything off which is my daughter, who's now a published writer.

13:35She had a short story collection out early in 2020. She has a book coming out and her first novel coming out at the same time as me in 2021. And I have to get past her as well now. And so for Clara, for instance, I thought I'd finished Clara back in 2019. Yeah, in the spring of 2019, I thought I'd finished it. But my wife told me I had to do about four months more work on it. She didn't say do four months more work. She said, you know, you've got to change this, this, this, this. And it took me four months. And then I thought I'd better show it to my daughter. And then she gave me a huge pile of notes.

14:08And so I spent about 10 more months on account of these family members who wouldn't allow me to show it to my agent or anything. It's tough. It's very difficult. But I mean, what can you do? Why did you call it knife? Well, I mean, just two reasons. One is the obvious reason, which is that it starts with a knife attack. My head works in a very pre-associative way. So I started thinking about knives that I knew about in art and film and books and so on. And then I thought language itself is a kind of tool which I can use to fight back, if you like. So I began to think of language and this book as being kind of my knife.

14:56not in order to injure anybody but in order to as it were cut things open and understand and explain them You make the decision not to name the assailant the would-be assassin you call him the A and you also made the decision to write Knife in the first person your previous memoir Joseph Anton was written in the third can I ask why you made those decisions? Well not naming him I just didn't want his name in my book Yes fair enough Yes.

15:27And I actually remembered this thing that Margaret Thatcher used to say about the IRA. She said, don't give them the oxygen of publicity. And I thought, okay, you know, let's not give this guy the oxygen of publicity. It's one of the few moments in my life when I've been inspired by Margaret Thatcher. There's more than one. Well, you know, actually back in the bad old days when there was this major police protection here, I mean, I met her a couple of times when she was prime minister. And the most unexpected thing about Margaret Thatcher is that she's very touchy-feely. With men, I hear. Yeah, she puts her hands on your arm and shoulders and how are you, dear, etc.

16:14It's very kind of, in a way, auntie-like. but very unexpected and quite disarming. And the third person, when I wrote that earlier book, Joseph Anton, it was quite a long time after the events that were described in the book. It was several years later. And what I thought is that the me who was writing that book was slightly different than the me who was being written about. I was in a better place. I was in a better spirit. Life had improved. and the person being written about was in a very difficult situation and under a lot of stress and so on. So I thought there's a little distance between the two me's.

17:00And the third person, in a way, dramatized that difference. This time, there's no distance at all. But the thing about that is somebody attacks you with a knife. I thought there's no way this can be written except in the first person. Because also it's a very unguarded and undefended book, And I think it doesn't require the distance of the third person. We chatted a bit before we started recording about whether talking about this re-traumatizes you. And you've been kind enough and generous enough to say that you're okay with it. Yeah. That's got a little switch in my head has flipped. So that instead of me talking about the attack, I'm talking about the book about the attack.

17:42Yes. So I'm talking about a book. And that, I think, is a way of defending myself from the risk of re-traumatising. Let's talk about the book then and that opening account of what happened to you. Would you mind telling us your memory of seeing the assailant? Yeah. The Chautauqua Institution is this very pretty, beautiful, peaceful place in upstate New York. It's kind of sylvan and peaceful and full of silver-haired liberal retirees. Nobody locks their door. It's the last place on earth where you'd expect an act of violence to occur. There's this amphitheater space, which is actually quite large.

18:27I mean, it seats like 4 ,000 people. But on this occasion, there are probably 1 ,500 people in the audience. And we had just come out on stage to have a conversation about my friend Henry Rees, who runs an organization in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. which gives refuge to writers from various parts of the world who need refuge. So they were celebrating the 20th anniversary of his project. And so I was there for him. I wasn't there to talk about me. I was there to talk about him. And we'd just come out and been introduced and sat down in our chairs. And I saw this person get up from the auditorium, not very far back, I was six or seven rows back, wearing dark clothes and wearing a face mask, a black COVID face mask.

19:14And he started running. I was on the right hand side of the stage and to my right, there was a small flight of four steps down from the stage level to the audience level. And he just sprinted up the steps and rushed at me. I had a pretty good idea of what it was. You recount in the book that idea of, oh, it's you, that sort of familiarity of, oh, this has come at last. Yeah, because I had, I mean, back in the early days, after the initial threats, obviously, I had thought about it. You know, I thought about the possibility of an attack like that happening. And then I'd stop thinking about it. Because, you know, I moved to New York City in just after the millennium.

20:00I mean, like January 2000. And I'd been living there for, at that moment, for more than 23 years. and I'd been leading the ordinary life of a writer. I'd been doing things that writers do. I'd been going on book tour, I'd been doing readings and going to literary festivals and giving lectures and writing books. There had never been a moment of trouble and so I thought, you know, okay, that's over and then it wasn't. You recount this thought process and you also write that the thought of death, you were quite matter of fact. about. But you didn't feel pain, or at least you can't remember feeling the pain.

20:43Yeah, it's very strange that. I mean, as part of the work of writing the book, I had to read about other people's witness evidence of what they saw and heard. And quite a lot of the people who were interviewed said that they'd heard me screaming with pain. Oddly, I have no memory of pain. It's, I guess, some kind of shock reaction. So I remember being on the ground and seeing a lot of blood and seeing people rushing to help. What I don't remember is pain. So there's this curious disconnect between outside me and inside me. So I tried to write about that. You do, however, remember, as part of your extensive rehabilitation process, your eyelid being sewn up and that being excruciating.

21:29Oh, yeah. They said if we stitch the eyelid shut, then the eye will be able to moisturise itself and will allow it to heal. and I said that sounds really painful they said no no there'll be a very powerful local anaesthetic all I can say is either they lied or if that's how much it hurt with the anaesthetic I can only imagine how much it would have hurt without the anaesthetic because it was agonising picture to yourself a needle going through your eyelid actually one of my worst fears I salute you for getting through it And thank goodness you did. And thank goodness you're here. I wonder how your relationship with your body has changed through this process.

22:14Well, I mean, really, that's a great question because, you know, if you're a novelist, you don't really pay a lot of attention to your body. And this was such an intensely physical experience that it connected me in a way to my physicality. It showed me the kind of miracle of this thing we live in and its ability to heal. I mean, for example, my liver was badly damaged, but the liver regenerates. So, boom, it's just back. I also lost an enormous amount of weight. You look extremely well, I have to say. In the years before the attack, I'd put on a lot of much too much weight. This thing happens and I lost 55 pounds.

23:00I mean, not a diet technique to be recommended. Is that your next book? It's the Rushdie Diet. Exactly. It's like Jane Fonda's workout book.

23:12Please do follow How to Fail to get new episodes as they land on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Please tell all your friends. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary. Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates excludes Massachusetts. Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change. Your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just$5. Only at McDonald's for a limited time.

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