Patrick Radden Keefe - ‘Lying Is More Prevalent Than People Think’

28:40And he basically gave me an ultimatum and he said, you know, you'd better get your act together or you're out of that school at the end of this term. At the time, I was really furious and I think I was really hurt. I'd never felt that kind of sort of emotional coldness from him, the idea of just days going by in which he couldn't address me. And it's a thing I think about a lot. I mean, I've thought about it in the context of this book because, you know, there's a lot in this book about Zach going to school and these questions of kind of competitive schools and parental sacrifice and parental love and how you parent in adolescence.

29:17And in my case, it sort of worked spectacularly in the sense that I ended up doing well. I wonder, it'd be interesting to wonder what my dad would say now I should ask him. Yes. Because I think, I mean, to me, the downside would be that it, I think there was a kind of, if I had done years and years of therapy, I think what we would have arrived at, which I already know for free, is that. Classic New Yorker writer. Yeah, there you go. Is that it sort of conditioned. there was a kind of implicit sense that love is conditioned on success. The kind of the good thing and the bad thing for somebody coming out of a situation like that is that I became somebody who, who sought and has received a lot of affirmation from the world.

30:02Like I'm in the business now of writing things and putting them out in the world and people review my books and, you know, readers engage with my articles and books and write me lovely notes. And it's kind of all worked out so far because I get that, that like drip, drip, drip of positive affirmation. And that I think drives me to work very hard. But I think that, I think it's also probably a pretty, um, probably not the best foundation for one's sense of self In the sense that if I met with real failure or if I wrote a book and nobody read it or I wrote a book and it was completely panned, I'd like to think that I'd have, that I would still be me.

30:52Yes. And that the kind of sense of who you are as a person isn't contingent on the sort of dopamine hit of people telling you you've done a good job on something. I'll bet if my father were with us right now, he would say, job done, mission accomplished. You know, my tough love parenting when you were 13 paid off. I don't know on the question of sort of my sense of self. I will say that in terms of sort of opening my eyes at a pretty early age to how lucky I was, and that being given a privilege is also being given a responsibility, and that you should recognize that and be sensitive to how good you've got it and not squander it.

31:37I think those are all good lessons. I relate a lot to what you just said about external validation and the fear that my internal sense of self is so shaky without it. And you have to be careful with that because at some point, I suppose the question will be, is this enough? Like, when do I stop? Do you think you will ever reach that point? Or do you think that you will want to do more work, more diverse work, rack up those modeling campaigns, do another podcast, do another book? Do you think you will ever sate that interior beast? Well, OK. I mean, I guess there's two things I would say. One is that if I'm only doing this to chase validation or affirmation, it's pretty deeply buried because the truth is that I love the work.

32:32I love the work for what it is. Like if I have an issue at home with my family, it's that I love the work so much that it doesn't feel like work and that I will just work all the time. Occasionally people will say, oh, you're a workaholic. and I always think that that sort of misunderstands me because it's not I'm not doing this out of any sense of obligation I'm doing it because it's like cake it's fun I love it in terms of the kind of the sort of hamster wheel of it it's not a sense of oh god I can't stop um it's that I I would sort of get bored like I get bored at the beach I love the beach for a day but um and my wife loves the beach for a week.

33:16And every time it's a bit of an argument about how long are we going to do this? Because I will be going mad by day two. I guess the only other thing I would say is I wrote a big piece for The New Yorker about Anthony Bourdain before he died. And there were some respects in which I really identified with him and other respects in which I didn't. And I think a big part of his history and his life was that he had, you know, he had a very addictive personality and he had a lot of demons and he was a very depressed person in ways that I didn't even fully appreciate when I knew him. Um, but I understand better now.

33:53And one of my big questions for Tony over the year that I spent working on that piece was I kept saying like, why are you still moving at this tempo? You don't need to be. He had this brilliant television series, but he'd been doing it for so long that he started to go back to places that he'd already been. I think there was a sense with Tony that he was afraid of what would happen, like what he'd get up to if he stopped moving. And I think as I get older, that's something I want to be mindful of just because I think that ultimately, you know, we're all gonna get old. Hopefully. Yeah. And sort of at a certain point you slow down and I'd like to think that there's, you know that you have enough of a sense of who you are and and what matters outside the four corners of your job have your parents ever said that they're proud of you oh yeah all the time oh that's nice have they read your work oh my parents i have an incredibly close relationship with my i realized i've just made my poor father sound cold and withholding um uh my mother's the withholding one um the uh no they your mother's a legend oh she's amazing a philosopher of psychiatry what a cool job she's written more books than i have yeah she's great the um i my parents are both in their 80s i talk to them all the time they read my work before i'm basically my wife and my parents read my work um before anybody else does uh i feel very lucky to have a a very close relationship with them.

35:28So they're great. I'm just chuckling because I was just in Ireland on a book tour and I met a woman who's a bookseller in Cork. This was in Galway, but she'd come to this event. And I said, oh, my parents love Cork. My father's is Irish citizenship and my parents had spent a month staying in an Airbnb in Cork last year. and um and i said my parents were in cork and she said oh i know your father would come into our bookstore and announce that he was your father i was so mortified she didn't even need you know as soon as she said he would come into the bookstore i sort of i knew oh god it kills me um anyway so probably too proud yeah yeah no such thing so many of your books are about families, which might be a really trite thing to say because ultimately everything is kind of about a family.

36:27But are you aware of that linking thread? And do you think your interest in families and dysfunction and loss has changed how you show up in your own family? Oh, interesting. I mean, I'm aware of it for sure. Not in a sense of, um, I never go into stories when I'm looking for stories, I never, I don't have a list of ingredients in mind. The only thing that I go by is whether if you start telling me a story, do I feel myself leaning forward? It's almost physiological. I, I, I think I've, I've gotten better over the years at listening to my own gut. And if I, if I feel really compelled when you're telling me something, that's usually a good indication that A, it'll be a fruitful thing for me to spend time on a B, I can make it compelling for readers.

37:18It's only in retrospect when I look back that I realize that I have these fixations. And one of them for sure is family. Let's move on to your second failure, which is that you knew from the age of 16 or 17 that you wanted to write for The New Yorker. But it took a long, long time for you to get there and a lot of rejection. Tell us this story. So I started reading The New Yorker in high school. I discovered it in what we call the periodicals room of my high school library. I was really taken with it. I was taken with the articles themselves and the stories and all the rest of it, the cartoons, the whole package.

37:58But I was also sort of taken with the idea of the New Yorker writer as a cultural archetype. And decided that that was what I wanted to do. and when I got to college I was a research assistant to Simon Shama who at the time was the art critic for the New Yorker and that only intensified my the sense in which I was kind of just obsessed with the magazine and the lore and all of it and I actually started pitching the New Yorker myself in college to no avail and pitched and pitched and pitched I started I have a rejection letter on my wall at home framed from 1998. Went to grad school, went to law school, was pretty convinced that it wasn't going to happen for me.

38:45The whole reason I went to law school was to have a proper job in case the writing thing didn't work out. Finally, they accepted a pitch in 2005, so it had been seven years of pitching. The piece came out in 2006, and I thought, I've arrived, ready for the rest of my life. I was 30. I'd just turned 30. They said, no, no, no, you haven't arrived. We're not going to make you a staff writer. You're not good enough. Not yet. You are good enough that we'll do one freelance piece a year. And so for the next six years, I wrote one big article for the New Yorker a year, and I did all kinds of other stuff to make ends meet.

39:30I wrote screenplays. I had a job at a think tank. I did all kinds of other things. And it was tough. It was a long process. And they finally, they only actually offered me a full-time job when somebody else offered me a full-time job. Yeah, you were offered a full-time job by the New York Times and then they finally gave you one. I want to come back to that, but I want to ask first of all, I'm very intrigued by when someone decides to quit. Because sometimes if you decide to quit, it's the most powerful thing you can do. And sometimes it is just giving up. So was there ever a point during this very, very long process where you thought, what am I doing?

40:14I mean, yeah, constantly. Because, and for a couple of reasons, like part of it was that it didn't make any economic sense, that I was sort of hustling and I was doing all this other stuff. There were times where I felt like I'm doing all this other stuff to subsidize The New Yorker, in effect, because I was spending all this time writing. You know, my big project was always the article that I was working on. It just wasn't paying me very much. And if I'm being really honest, some of it was that I felt indignation because I felt like the work was good. So the message I was getting back was you're not ready, and I really felt like I was ready.

40:50And I should say I'm not somebody who wildly overrates his. It's not a situation where I always think that I have it figured out. And there are certain things I'm not as good at. And I know it usually. And so it felt unfair. You say that you still have resentment about that long audition process. I do. Here I am talking about it. I love it. I love hearing this. I do. I mean, I don't, I don't, I have a, it's funny because Justina, my wife, and I were very different in a lot of ways and then in some ways were really similar and one of the ways in which we're really similar is that we both just remember the slights forever yeah and it's just and you know it can be a small thing and it's not that I most of the time the people whose slights I remember they don't even know it because I would never mention it but I always remember what I think I would have eventually gotten to with my shrink is that if you're somebody who's seeking affirmation and feels as though you just have to work a little harder to get the affirmation that eludes you, you do end up in this kind of crazy situation, which is that if there's some entity out there, be it a parent or a magazine or an editor who keeps withholding it, you will continue to just find greater reserves of energy to work that much harder because the thing kind of keeps escaping you there may be some paradoxical sense in which it was good for me do you think that you have proved yourself now do you think that you are getting the approval yeah at the new yorker specifically yeah okay yeah um how do you feel about your new yorker cartoon of your face oh i mean not great i don't think uh it's weird You would think that I would have a face that would sort of lend itself to caricature.

42:50Yes. But most caricatures are bad. I feel as though most of the, anytime people, it hasn't been that many times, but like the three or four times when somebody has done a kind of artist rendering of my face, I always feel like it looks like Doogie Howser without a nose, you know? Has any part of your ambition ever been about being the editor of The New Yorker? No. Would you, if it were offered to you, would you say yes? I mean, it's not being offered is the thing. This is a question that comes up periodically because there was a period of time where David Remnick was talking about how he was going to not be at the magazine forever.

43:28And this parlor game started where people started to throw out names. And mine was one of the names, but there were many names. And I think that David probably won't be there forever. But I also think that he's a, He's a just a once in a generation figure and I want him to stay. I want him to stay for longer than he's probably going to want to stay. It's all just, you know, it's academic ultimately. I mean, I love doing what I'm doing and I feel very lucky to do it at David's New Yorker. What happens next? I have no idea. I'm so delighted with the status quo I want it to last as long as possible Okay fine, Kendall Roy Okay So when you're crafting A piece for The New Yorker How much Is it what you leave out That makes it good?

44:28What a great question I love this question Everything is what you leave out Everything Distillation, the whole thing What a great question Because I feel as though it took me a while to realize that reporting is so hard. Finding some detail, getting some little side story, some amazing quote, some statistic, that I think that there's a mistake that a lot of writers make, which is they look at the thing and they're thinking about their own kind of sweat equity and obtaining it. And that's the basis on which they decide whether or not something should go in the article. And that turns out is lunacy because you're not thinking about the reader and what the reader actually needs and can handle.

45:16I was just in Galway last night trying to speak in a diplomatic way because there were a lot of Irish writers in attendance about my frustrations with the literature of the Troubles and what I was trying to do differently with Say Nothing. And one of my frustrations is that there are so many great stories in Ireland that there is a kind of storytelling tendency in which everybody is just like cramming. It's like they give you the whole buffet. And there's not enough selection that happens. And it's partially because all the characters are great characters. All the stories are great stories. but sometimes just saying i'm going to give it all to you uh i think is really counterproductive because there's just it's like a cognitive load problem for readers i think this was always true i think it's even more true now that we all have these phones that have broken our brains and so to me telling a story is all about what you leave out and in terms of my research what you're getting is three percent of it because you do hundreds sometimes thousands of interviews well never thousands on a single thing but hundreds for sure yeah

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47:54Offer valid June 11th, 2026 through June 28th, 2026. Exclusions apply for licenses. See homedepot.com slash license numbers. With London falling, you had this depth of material. How do you craft it and draft it? Like just get really technical with me. Yeah. What's the process? So I don't, I, the vast majority in terms of time of my work is research. I write quickly at the end. And for me, it's really helpful to write quickly. I feel like on the good days, there's a kind of velocity as it goes onto the page. And when it's really working, I feel like the reader, I can just transmit that to the reader.

48:36And you can sort of feel that velocity. I want you turning the pages. I want you absorbed. I'm getting all these wonderful notes from people who've read the book, and they say they've read it in two or three days. And I love that. That's what I want to hear. It's not that I do tons of research and then I sit down on a blank page, and at the end I crank it out very quickly. What actually happens is I start outlining really early. So I'll be doing the research, and pretty early on in the research I do this thing. For me, I always use the back of an envelope. I'll just say, what are the big beats in this story?

49:08What are the big hinge moments? And usually it starts with just kind of seven or eight beats. And the helpful thing about doing that early is that it directs my research, is that I don't waste as much time as I used to, where I'll kind of encounter some fascinating side character and spend four days doing all this research, only to then decide this is actually kind of extraneous to the story I'm telling. Do you literally do it on the back of an envelope? I do, yeah. That's how it starts. What size of envelope? Just a kind of standard manila, you know. I mean, the best is doing it on the back of a hotel station.

49:43Nobody has a hotel station anymore, but it sort of goes back to that idea that I was, as a teenager, I was in love with The New Yorker, but I was also in love with the sort of romantic archetype of The New Yorker writer. So, you know, give me a, I'm the guy who like stays at the Chateau Marmont, steals all the stationery. I expect the Chateau Marmont or the Sunset Tower. Exactly. Final question on this failure before we rattle through your final one. But do you have a point with every manuscript where you think, I am the world's worst writer, what am I doing? This is terrible, I've lost all of my skill.

50:16Asking for a friend. Or because of the nature of the material, do you not have that because you're just too in it and getting through it? I'm too in it. Yeah, I mean, bracket that thought because I think on the third failure, we will be able to get into that kind of self-doubt. on this kind of writing, I don't. I mean, I don't, this may seem like a kind of cheeky or evasive answer, but I, these days I don't take on a piece of nonfiction writing unless I know I can make it sing. So no, I realize that maybe it's kind of an obnoxious answer, but no, on this kind of stuff, I don't, I don't have those moments.

50:54It's more, I'm actually, I'm enjoying it. And in a way, I think what you're too humble to say is that you are in service to the story. So maybe you feel it's less about you as a writer, even though you're an exceptional writer. And the way that you write is so compelling and so riveting. But maybe it's that thing that we started off talking about, about having a clear and moral purpose. You're doing it for other people and other people's stories. Sort of. Like, I didn't write this book for Matthew and Michelle Brettler. You know, it was a good story. And that was what drew me to it initially. It does have some kind of, I think, pretty profound moral bones to it, which is part of what's interesting to me.

51:33But I had to be very clear to the Brattlers from the outset that I, and I always am with people I write about, I'm not writing this for you. You know, that we will, I want you to share with me as much as possible, but you need to know that when I sit down and write, you're not the audience I have in mind. Because I think if you do that, I think you're cooked as a writer, if you do that. But people will sometimes say that there are, you know, there are twists in my stories, right? As if this is some kind of cheap, like genre fiction gimmick that I'm introducing. And the truth is that there are twists in life.

52:10And when I am writing in these big reversals, part of what I'm trying to do is capture how crazy it is to be alive and to kind of encounter these types of, you know, at the end of Say Nothing, when I identified the murderer, that was one of the most shocking moments of my whole life to make that discovery myself. All I want to do is capture for the reader the sense of just like heart hammering, you know, hair on your arms, standing straight up. Shock that I felt. Well, you do it brilliantly. Your final failure. And I don't know if you know this but there's one other person who has chosen exactly this failure really yes during the course of how to fail who john ronson oh john ronson said this specific failure is your failure to write movies well not to write them but to get them made yeah yeah oh i've written plenty of them yeah yeah this is what you were doing to sort of make a living during all of those years of new yorker rejection yeah i during those years when i was a freelancer i um i started getting jobs writing screenplays for, I think my first thing, I wrote a couple of pilots for HBO.

53:27This is almost 20 years ago. And then started writing feature scripts for studios. And at the time, you know, I was a freelancer. This was big money. And they would fly me first class and put me up at nice hotels in LA. It was very glamorous. I got health insurance, which I didn't get through the New Yorker from the Writers Guild, none of the movies got made and none of the shows got made. It was one of those interesting things where at times I have wondered whether I'm just not good at it. Like I'm definitely good enough to keep getting the jobs, but I, I struggle with screenwriting. You know, I think I'm pretty, I think I'm pretty good at it after all these years.

54:10I'm still doing it now. I'm writing something for HBO right now, but it's different in the sense that I don't have the same facility where when I sit down to write nonfiction, it just kind of pours out of me. It doesn't take a lot of agony. I mean, to go back to your earlier question, it's like, I don't have those kind of moments of profound self-doubt. But I wonder, because you're a novelist and you mentioned having that feeling. I think the difference for me is when I'm doing fictional screenwriting, it's the sort of paralysis of, of you can do anything. Yes. The paralysis of possibility. Yes.

54:48Yes. It's that. And then the amount of other people who are involved. Oh God. Yes. Let's talk about that. Yes. That was the worst bit. It's the worst. So you have experience with this, right? I'll never do it again. Yeah. I don't, I've had moments where I've asked myself, why am I still doing this? Because I don't need the money in a way that I used to. And I find it difficult. And on some level, the time I spend writing a script that may or may not get produced is time when I could be writing an article or a book that I know is going to be a fact in the world. I know it's going to come out. In a weird way, maybe it all goes back to my first failure.

55:25You know, maybe on some level, the fact of this thing that's just kind of just outside my grasp is part of what keeps me going and keeps me sort of trying. but I also think there's another thing which is that I think it's good I'm turning 50 in a few weeks there are things that I do that I know I do well and I love doing them I also like being outside my comfort zone I sort of like the vertigo and so I think maybe part of what's happening with the screenwriting is that it's that I think it's actually kind of healthy for me to struggle with work in a way that I don't struggle with my day job. I do think that there's something really important there about being engaged in the work.

56:14And as you say, challenging yourself, not just doing the things that you already know you can do. That's growth. Yeah. I think it is growth. Yeah. I think there's a danger in a certain kind of mastery. I think it's very often the case that somebody figures out how to do a thing and do it well. And then the world actually tells them, you know, what would be great is if you just keep doing that again and again forever. And I think I would find that quite boring and stifling. But also, I think that what ends up happening is that you sort of stop to grow, you stop growing as a person. And at a certain point, you're just kind of, you know, you're just sort of going through the motions and don't want that.

56:55So I can't imagine that happening to you. Never stop growing. Never stop writing. Thank you so much for coming on How to Fail. Thank you so much for the gift of your books. Thank you. And happy birthday. Thank you. Thank you. It's a big one. Thank you so much for listening and watching. This episode has been brought to you by Dove Whole Body Deodorant. Please 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.

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