30 Years of Oprah’s Book Club: The Authors Behind the Stories We Love

31:13I'll ask you that first, Ocean, and then you, Viola. The greatest compliment, I think, is when someone says, you've articulated a sentence which is available. Words are available to all of us. They weigh nothing, and yet all of us are here because of it. You know, it's kind of a magical thing. Yeah. When a reader says, you use the sentence to confirm my life. Wow. And I never sit down with that goal because I'm not presumptuous enough to believe I can confirm anybody's life. But what you realize is that when you build a book, you kind of build a town square where everyone can embody. And if a reader can stand in the place that you've built and say, this feels like a confirmation of the life I've led, it truly feels miraculous.

32:03And I think that it's not about, you know, craft or how well you've done something, but that simply you've made my life feel realer to me than I thought was possible. And again, that's not something one sits down at the desk to do. Well, I call that for you poetic literature. You have this great ability to capture life on the fringe for people and to look at people who have been marginalized in a way that makes them feel like they're not just leading ordinary lives, but that there's something extraordinary in their humanness. That's, I think, one of your gifts. Well, I relate to what you said, you know, in your book club and on the show, because I think on the most fundamental level of being a novelist, you can talk about craft all you want, and that's great, but at the fundamental level, I don't think you can be a successful novelist if you're not interested in people.

32:57You have to truly be invested in human beings. Right. Yeah. The same thing for an actor. I was about to say that. And that's what you've done on your show and now, and I think it's the same work. It's just a different medium. Yeah. So what's been the most gratifying for you? When people just say, me too. Oh. that's it. That's the hook. You know, the thing about I never want to say anything that's full of crap. But I also a little bit don't want to make myself look bad. But the thing about writing a book that I feel lands and getting accolades for it, you're always driven by this incredible imposter syndrome.

33:45when you're in the public. You are. You're afraid of being misunderstood. You're always misunderstood. People want to put greatness on you, and you always want to. Yeah. It's like, really? Am I great, or am I really crappy? All right? So you get the accolades, and you're like, phew, they didn't find me out. Oh, my goodness. Yes. That's what you were saying. I was exactly what I was saying. But then there's another peel that's underneath that. OK, because once again, it goes back to the constant asking of the why. Why do you feel such a need to not be an impostor? Why do you feel the need to get the accolades?

34:27And it goes back to Icarus, right, who wants to be as close to God as far as he gets burned up. All right. We want to justify our existence. We want to believe that we were wonderfully and divinely made as just who we are. We want to feel worthy. Listen, I can't go back to the past and change the fact that, you know, I wore a soiled underwear for weeks. And I would never comb my hair. And all of my teeth were rotten. I can't change that. by getting an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony Award. So I have to have some sort of reconciliation that God loves me too. Even with the soiled underwear.

35:24You know, it's like Joseph Campbell said, he said, I never met a human being that wasn't extraordinary. I have to believe that I am extraordinary without all of that stuff. I think that's what, so when someone even says, me too, I'm like, oh, okay. So you're going through that too? So it's a connection. It's a connection to feel not alone. Yeah. And it's a connection to feeling like that extraordinariness of life comes from just being you. That simple. I know that's a hard thing for people to embrace. I always say, when I won the Oscar, when I won the Oscar, I always compare it to buying a car.

36:10I say, as soon as you buy a brand new car, you drive it off the lot, it starts to depreciate in value. That's what it felt like. I'm like, oh man, I got an Oscar. Okay. Okay. What am I supposed to do with this now? But that's what I'm supposed to do with it. that it's just a physical manifestation of something that I should already feel inside. I don't need the gold statue to be able to justify that. How about you, Barbara? The greatest compliment from your readers, how you make them feel. I think we're probably all going to say about the same thing, that when someone says, you saw me. Yeah. And that has, over the years, taken so many forms.

36:57I, after Demon Copperhead, I got letters from kids who came up through the foster care system. Right, I'm sure. Who said, how did you know? I didn't think anybody knew what this was like. Or from people who had gone through addiction or who had lost a family member. People who have been through really hard things that I, in fact, haven't. I mean, I was not, I didn't grow up in the foster care system and so forth. But when people with these very specific painful experiences tell you, you got it, you saw me, that is that's a remarkable compliment because I don't know whether you, you know, you say we're not setting out to do that.

37:38Maybe not specifically. And there's so many specific ways that people do feel seen. But there's a quote from James Baldwin that I really love. And I'll try to get it almost right. He said, it was through books that I first understood that the same things that tormented me tormented all the other people in the world and all the other people who've ever lived. It's that torment. It's interrogating our torment. The things that worry us the most are the things that connect us. So when somebody says, you saw me, I feel like I've done my job. I've reached through that portal, understanding that everybody who reads a book is having a different experience.

38:29And they're bringing their own experience and their own torment and their own dreams and wishes and regrets. But they've found something in there that validated what they needed the most. How would you answer that, Abraham? Well, one of the nicest compliments I ever got was for my first nonfiction book, set, you know, in the territory Barbara writes about so nicely. Someone said to me, you know, I lived in this town all my life, and I never saw the things that you saw. I mean, I was just blind to them, and you brought them out. And I always thought that the very thing that had made me feel inadequate, quit being an outsider, you know, never quite getting all the rituals of Friday night possum pie or whatever it was, were also an advantage.

39:23I always had this sense that being an outsider was a disadvantage. But as a writer, I think I saw things that others were blind to. And this was a, you know, just a good feeling that I got that right. And maybe I was blessed to be able to see it. But the other great compliment that I've received, I think, is when someone writes to me saying, typically a college student saying, because of your book, your novel, I want to go into medicine. And that just, I mean, that to me is worth more than anything, because my calling to medicine came from a book. It was one book, you know, and I think that's what books can do.

40:01One book, as someone says, can break the ice of the frozen sea, one word. It was that sense of one book that just launched me into medicine. And so when I can do that for somebody, I save those letters. They're very precious. It's the reason I set out to write a novel in the first place was to write a book like the one that brought me to medicine. Well, you know, you started in, was it East Tennessee? Was it East? Yes. Yes. And you ended up writing because you weren't able to put into the medical journal what you needed to say about the AIDS patients you were treating at the time. Is that how you became a writer?

40:43Yeah, very much so. I think, you know, all of us in medicine are deeply embedded in story. I mean, the word story is in the history that we take from the patient. It's a story. So stories are all around us. But the story of that small town in the 80s, where suddenly we had more HIV patients, HIV-infected patients, than anyone predicted for a town of 50 ,000, and the mystery of why, which turned out to be gay men coming back from the big cities after many years. But I wrote a paper describing why these numbers were so high, this phenomenon of emigration to the big city and then this tragic return.

41:24But I always felt that the scientific paper didn't do justice to the tragic nature of the voyage, to the heroism of the families. And it was really the desire to tell that story and recognizing the inadequacy of the language of science that made me become a writer, aspire to become a writer, try to tell that story. And so you ended up writing a book about that experience instead of just the medical paper about it. Yes, indeed. Yeah. And, you know, I think that was the moment that made me feel like, well, maybe I can write. But I still must confess I feel like a pretender in this company. because really these are the writers I look up to.

42:06Please, I don't know how you did it. I mean, Barbara, you say you go from your coffee to the writing table every day. Ocean is obviously teaching and writing. You are doing rounds and then coming home and sitting at your kitchen table at night and you came up with this novel? I think that's extraordinary. I almost feel like I can't claim it because it does feel extraordinary. And when I look back at some portion of it... And that is your name on the book. And that's a big book. And that's a big book. I was going to say that. That's a big book. Absolutely. But I don't want to be too much aw shucks, but really it does feel extraordinary.

42:46And that's the thing about writing. I think we'll all agree. It's hard work, but there are also moments when we're tapping into something that wasn't ours, at least for me. It's just completely magical. Yeah. I feel like a novel is 95 % just sweat and 5 % magic. And you never, and that thing that comes and you say, where did that come from? And I know Alice Walker, notwithstanding, I know it came from inside me, you know, a dream or something. But when Alice thinks, I remember that, obviously, Color Purple, I have the first edition. I remember reading about it as a book review, reading it as a book review in the New York Times in 82, getting up, putting on my shoes, galoshes, because it was rainy Sunday and going out to get the book and then reading the book and then going back and get every copy that was in the store.

43:42So I passed out a lot of copies of The Color Purple long before I had a book club. But I think what she and so many other authors I've spoken to are talking about is that it feels like a visitation at some point when the characters remain. Do you, do you not, you don't have that feeling? Yes, but I feel like I put them there. Okay, you put them there. Because of the, because it doesn't just. They didn't just show up on your own. They don't just show up, no, because, you know, we invent them. We all approach it in different ways, but we invent characters who will serve our story. And they need to be very specific.

44:23They have to have just the right kind of damage. Sometimes I feel like we're psychologists in reverse. We start with character and then back up and give them all the damage that they need, you know, in order to behave the way they do. But we also, and I wonder if this is similar, I imagine that it's similar to acting. Once we have this character, we really have to get into that character by imagining what parts of our own experience would inform this kind of, this obsession or this animosity or this fear. I feel like I have to be as fully invested in my villains as in my heroes. I don't even believe there are real villains because everybody believes they're doing the right thing.

45:12You know, they all think, well, even if it's a violent, awful thing, they think, well, these people don't know it, but this is what I need to do. Even if it's self-serving, they say I have to do this. And in order to create that character believably so that they don't just look cardboard on the page, they can't just be a bad guy. I have to really spend time inside the mind of someone who would do that bad thing. And inevitably, and I love redemption stories. Usually I can come up with, you know, something in the background that twisted them, that made them this way. So by the time I've done all of that work, imagining all of this stuff that's in a life that's not even going to go on the page, then it is a visitation, but I feel responsible for it.

46:02How do you know when a sentence is done, Ocean? I don't think it is, don't I? Exactly. When the editor cries it from your cold fingers. That's how I know. Well, a book is an artifact of consciousness. And in a way, I always felt a book is like a photograph. It's a photograph of the author's mind on a certain day, usually the day when the editor pulls out your hand. Exactly. And says, it's now or never, kid. You know, we're going to the factory. We're going to print. You can't keep putting red marks on this. So I think there's a kind of friction between handing something off and also accepting that, like a photograph, a photograph captures you in time, but the day after that photograph is taken, you've changed, you've grown.

46:55And so a book feels that way. And so when I read from the, like, even on the last tour, there's notes all over. And I said, the oral tradition is my chance to redraft this sentence. I'm always taking that chance up. And I've made peace with that. I just felt like maybe the best way to write the best sentences as you grow is to write the next book. One of the things you said that I was so moved by in our conversation when we first talked about The Emperor of Gladness, you said, kindness without the hope of return. Kindness without the hope of return is a theme that runs through your writing. Please explain that.

47:38I think, you know, growing up in tough poverty, witnessing violence, experiencing being raised by women who escaped war and having them be storytellers, they were my first teachers, you know, and they had to gesticulate, they had to change their tones. They were both actors and storytellers all at once. And so I think for me, seeing that function, that attention is a kind of kindness, knowing that we don't know where it will go, we don't know if it can really rescue us. And I think it's easy and maybe even predictable to experience harm and tragedy and then be cruel. Of course, right? The world broke me, so I'm going to break everything around me.

48:27The tough part, the really, I think, special part is to see, witness great pain and humiliation and then choose kindness, dignity and joy amongst each other. That's difficult work. And I think I want to celebrate that in my own fiction. I ask my characters, who will you become after this? Wow. And it becomes a reflection of oneself as an author. Who will I become after this tragedy, this difficulty? So the toughest thing is to be kind without expecting anything back. But the kindness itself becomes the achievement. That's the hardest act. It's so easy to be cruel. It's easy to be bitter and hate the world.

49:18But the work, that internal work of saying, I'm going to absorb this, but then turn it into a type of healing for myself, my family, my community. That's a lifelong work. And I think it's still the great mystery of my life as an author. I'm not any higher than anybody else. I'm not great at it. And some days I don't know how to be kind. But I think that mysterious ambition to absorb hurt and then give out healing and love is an extraordinary human mystery. Because it's not logical. Often you want to be able to consolidate and protect yourself. But to then become courageously soft after tremendous harm, it feels counterintuitive.

50:07And yet when you meet that person, you know you've met something extraordinary. Right? We recognize it. The challenge is actually making that work. And I think it's a lifelong work. I think it's also, I'm really grateful that books take so long to write. If they were quick, we might miss that opportunity. Okay, I've noticed in a lot of my book club conversations that authors can write the book and then have trouble with the title. Does the title, did this title come easy? No, not at all. Not at all. It was a very late title. But when we stumbled onto it, I remember being very excited because that word covenant, which is a sort of an unusual Old Testament kind of word.

50:51As I kept thinking about it, it occurs three or four times in the Hippocratic Oath. It's very much in the Bible. you know, and it had this echo that felt just right for the period, for the characters, for the backdrop of the story, the setting in that Christian community. So once I got it, it was, it was, uh, I knew that that was it. You knew it? Yeah. Did you know Finding Me before, was it called Finding Me before you found you? No. No. I don't know what it was called, but I actually wanted the word home in there. Uh-huh. I did. I wanted the word home, but it didn't sound. Why? Because of coming home to yourself?

51:33But then I was like finding home. Ah. And then I was push, push, push, finding me because home was me. Mm. I was trying to find a safe place of belonging within myself. Mm-hmm. So then I just sort of settled on it. And it worked for me. It did. It's a good title. And it's perfect. And the cover is perfect. It is. Yeah, and the cover was perfect. And the cover was perfect for it, looking inside yourself. Demon Copperhead. I come to titles early, generally, because a title is so important. To me, a title of a novel is like this key that opens. It needs to be a key. So you knew it was going to be called Demon Copperhead?

52:25Yeah, the day, the minute I understood that I was going to do an Appalachian translation of David Copperfield. Well, okay, I was going to call it Copperhead. A novel was published called Copperhead. You didn't want to confuse people. Well, I didn't want to do this to that person, you know, that writer. I didn't want to step on his title. So I thought, okay, Demon Copperhead. Demon Copperhead, and that was that. I think that, you know what? That's a tough title, actually. I thought that was, you know, when I first heard it, I literally, I read so many books, I'm like, Demon Copperhead, what is that?

53:06Yeah, well, that's fine. All my titles are sort of, I mean, I think it's in a blood. Yeah, everybody, you know, so many, even my own relatives will say, I love that devil copperhead. Actually, on the plane today, somebody walked by me saying, I loved your devil copperhead. My titles are, I love a title that has some cognitive dissonance in it. You know, a little friction, like Poisonwood Bible, two opposite things. And, you know, friction or movement. And I love a title that really goes all the way through the book, that it opens doors inside the book. So, yeah, I need to have a title early. if I don't, if I get to the end of a book and I don't have a title, I'm in deep, deep trouble.

53:55This came from where? Early on the first draft, I don't have titles when I draft because I just don't want to be haunted by that. So I just go into the story. But I figured I said, I got to. I love how all of you work so differently. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I said, I'm just going to go into the story and the title will come. But when Emperor Gladness came, what I hope for my titles is that the meaning of the title is one thing when you see it. And that meaning should change by the end of the book. Exactly. So the same phrase should have a completely different meaning. And that's the poet in me. It's like the alchemy of language.

54:32It's the same words. It's very triumphant when you see it in the bookstore. But when you read, the process of the book should change language itself. And I think after, at the end of this book, you'd be like, oh, wow, Emperor Gladys is not what I thought it would be. And so the book becomes a process of distortion of language, which is what language is. It distorts. It keeps changing, even though we think it's fixed. And so when a title could have a different resonance, a different impact at the end of the book, then that really excites me as an author. I'm going to ask this of all of you. I know this is true for you, Viola.

55:08So let's begin with you. Did you discover a truth about yourself through your characters? Well, my characters are of people in my life. But was it personal therapy to write it is really the question. It's absolutely personal therapy. For you, yeah. You know what? I keep going back to the saying that, you know, on your last day on Earth, your last image being the person you became meets the person you could have become. I think that's what guides me. The person you became meets the person you could have become. For better or for worse. That last image. And the reason why I'm saying that is because, listen, I'm a mediator according to Myers-Briggs.

56:04I'm in a very existential phase in my life. I just feel like you have to burn when you're going through any sort of anxiety, depression, which I definitely was going through with the book. I just finished a television show. You know, I'm in my late 50s. I've gotten a whole bunch of accolades, all of that, and felt empty. the disillusionment of not really hitting that final ceiling which was I remember you said this to me once transcendence I feel like you have to burn I feel there's something in you that has to like sort of reset to be like a phoenix and reborn redone everything and um so I go back to the story of my father when he's beating my mom.

57:03And I had so much social anxiety at that time. That's how I see myself even now, social anxiety. Shy. Introvert. You know, not as pretty as, not as whatever as. So this story keeps coming at me, right? I'm looking for something to sort of, once again, justify my existence, justify that, Viola, you got it. You got something, girl. Okay? The story's coming, coming, coming. And in the story, I stopped my dad from splitting my mom's head open. Yeah, I remember that. And I screamed at him at 14 with my baby sister in my arms, who was a year old. And I screamed with the authority of a Goliath. Mm-hmm.

57:52I just said, stop. And you give me that glass, you stop. And I made him do it. I made him give me that glass, and I bashed it on the table and said, don't you ever do that. Okay, silence in me when I was writing it. And then I wrote, what I discovered is I had it in me. I had it in me. It's the biggest discovery about myself. It's, you know, you talk about cognitive dissonance. I think that so much of what I was looking for is sort of, it's like people say, don't go back to the past. It hasn't changed. There's nothing back there for you anymore. Yeah. Okay. But I never thought that shame, even if it never goes away, the pee in the bed, even if it never goes away, the social anxiety, even if it never goes away, okay, that there cannot be anything beautiful that can grow in that garden.

58:56Hmm. And what I realize is you can count it all as beauty. All of it. Every last bit of it. Every last bit of it is a connective tissue that makes up you. That's the hardest thing about acting, actually, because it's close proximity to Hollywood. Hollywood is about selling tickets, putting butts in the seat, being beautiful all the time. You know you got a love scene, so you got to get thin, go to the gym, scan, face, beat, or whatever. And then you have your art, which has nothing to do with that. It's got to do with the stretch marks. It's got to do with the lines under your face. The more honest you are, the most beautiful you are.

59:48that's what i had to discover in that book the beauty of the imperfection and that's what stepped out um at me and and and especially well i stepped out with because i just because everybody when they write kids kids are always beautiful in in in movies you know kids never say sucker mother get it you know get an f on a test you know but um yeah Yeah. If that makes any sense. It makes all the sense. How would you answer that question? Did you discover a truth about yourself through the characters? I think the thing I discovered was something that I couldn't articulate, but as I kept writing more and more, especially this book, The Covenant, and the character of Big Amici, is my conviction that the ordinary was sacred.

1:00:40And it was something that I sort of kept coming back to, that the ordinary, that the goodness in an ordinary person like that, if you managed to capture it well, it was sacred. And so I felt like I... But you do that throughout the book and in all of your writing. There's no difference between the leper and the physician. I didn't quite get it until I was writing and shaping these characters. The sense that, you know, in their ordinariness was something precious and sacred. Yeah. You know, it was something really consequential. And then the second insight was I was finding redemption, that there was no character in there that I saw as villainous.

1:01:25Yeah, just like Barbara said. Because I felt like everybody has regrets. Yeah. Wasn't there a critique of yours? Somebody critiqued you in saying all your characters were too good. I know. Yeah. Which I thought was great because then I had accomplished in a sense. Yeah. What I didn't know I was trying to, which is to say that we are sacred, and we're all looking for redemption in one way or another. So that was a profound insight that I carry with me, the sense of the sacred and the ordinary, the sense of, you know, anybody has a side that, even if they don't know it, is on its path to redemption or seeking it.

1:02:03They may not know it yet. And your answer to that, sir? Well, I learned a lot about relationships being a novelist because I think you're called the author. You have authority. You can make people do things and move them about. But if you are a careful author, you give every character a matrix of inevitable traits. They wouldn't do this. They wouldn't do that. Where they come from. And when you do it well enough, you get to a point where you say to yourself, I need this character to go cuss out her mother. And right away, you realize she wouldn't do that, though. I've led her up to this point, and now if I force her to do this, I will betray both her and the art I've made.

1:02:59And I started to realize, because I started as a poet. And when fiction writers used to say that, I thought, oh, come on, guys. You know, when they say things like, oh, the characters tell me what to do, right? And I said, oh, come on, but you wrote it. But only until I became a novelist did I realize, no, after a while, you've given them enough traits, enough background, and they start to do things that maybe you yourself wouldn't do, but that is who they are. This woman would not go and cuss out her mother because she's built into this matrix. And if I did, I would betray her. And I start to look at the people around my life.

1:03:36And I realized that love was about meeting people where they are. I can't change and force that change just because I think it's the better thing. I have to meet my brother, my family, where they are in this matrix of who they become. And love then is a kind of grace rather than forcing a better reality into it. Well, I can't thank you all enough. This is like heaven for me, being able to sit with you. Thank you. Barbara Kingsolver, Abraham Brighese, Viola Davis, Ocean Vuong, thank you for being a part of this. And for our friends at Audible for presenting today's very special anniversary episode of Oprah's Book Club.

1:04:21A reminder, our partners at Amazon have created a storefront to make it so easy for you to find all 124 selections. Just a quick scan of the QR code right there on your screen. And thanks to all of you readers who have been with me, many of you, for 30 years. 30 years. Here's to it. See you on the next episode. Go well, everybody. I hope you all have enjoyed this conversation as much as I have. To buy a copy of my book club selections by Abraham Verghese, Barbara King-Solver, Ocean Vong, Viola Davis, and all the Oprah's book club selections, head on over to our very own Amazon storefront by scanning the QR code on your screen.

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