-Congrats on the novel. This is your third novel.
-It is.
-The first two were very well received.
Does that make you feel very confident
before your third novel comes out?
-Oh, sure. -Oh, good.
-No, no, no. No, you can't be.
Because it's -- you know --
You're writing in total isolation.
It's like getting dressed in the dark.
Like, the complete dark.
And then, you have to go out on stage.
-Yeah.
-And you don't know what you've done.
You don't know what anybody's gonna see
until it's too late.
-And not only dress in the dark but, I would guess,
over the period of like three or four years.
-Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. -Yeah, it's four years of...
-Four years of like, "These are the right pants."
-Yeah.
-Do you show it to people over the course of the four years?
Do you -- -I do.
You know, a few trusted readers. And for this one,
because it is about the AIDS epidemic in Chicago,
very sensitive subject, a lot of historical research,
I really needed people to read it who could tell me
where I'd gone wrong... -Oh, that's very helpful.
-...who were there and lived through it.
-There are sort of two parallel stories.
There is, as you mentioned, it's Chicago in the '80s
and the AIDS crisis, and then modern-day Paris.
Characters from both sort of live in both the stories.
Is that something -- With a plotting like that,
do you have to know that when you set out to write the story?
-It might have helped, but I didn't.
-Oh, okay. Got you. -So, yeah, I, um --
I started off writing this story, you know,
eventually, after a few missteps,
about the crest of the AIDS epidemic in Chicago.
It was all set in the '80s.
And as I interviewed people, as I thought about it more,
one of the things that was the most fascinating to me
was the aftermath,
the ripple effect 30 years later.
How were people picking up, going on with their lives,
when they'd been handed a death sentence
or when they'd lost everyone of their generation
and they're the only survivor?
So that was woven in later.
-I was certainly more aware of San Francisco and New York
as cities that were devastated by the AIDS crisis.
And having spent a lot of time in Chicago,
and you, obviously, are from Chicago,
were you aware going into it as how affected Chicago was?
-I knew a bit.
You know, I was a kid when this was going on.
And I was certainly tuned in to what was going on in the news.
You know, you stay home from school,
and you watch "Donahue" or whatever,
and you see some stuff.
But, of course, that was never about Chicago.
Even though I was living in Chicago, I wasn't aware.
-Right.
-Became aware more as an adult, as I met people.
I'm out there in the art world in Chicago,
meeting people who were affected.
Most of what's out there, in book form and film form,
is about New York, San Francisco, maybe L.A.
And I feel like Chicago has been really underrepresented,
which actually made it harder for me to do my research
but blessing in disguise, 'cause I couldn't just
hide behind some books in the library.
I had to get out and actually interview people.
-This is very impressive, 'cause I sometimes think
that our perception of authors
is they just get to make up worlds,
and they don't actually have to lock into the details of it.
But you used Google Calendar and Google Maps extensively
to write this.
How exactly were those tools that were effective for you?
-So the Google thing -- So I --
I've tried all kinds of outlines for my novels.
With this one, the calendar was really tricky,
because I'm moving back and forth between time periods
but also dealing with AIDS.
The amount of time that would elapse between someone
maybe getting the test and getting the results.
You move one thing and your whole plot falls apart.
So I clicked back in my Google Calendar
like five or six years until the days of the week
matched up with the days of the week in 1985.
And then, I would enter all my events into the calendar.
-I noticed that the days matched up.
I checked. I always check.
[ Laughter ]
That's the first thing I do when I read a book.
I'm like, "I'm gonna go on my Google Calendar.
If these don't match up..." -You know what?
Someone does. -Someone does, that's true.
-And we're gonna get the e-mails.
The writers are gonna get the e-mails if we don't do that.
But the funny thing now is, I'll use my Google Calendar,
and I'll try to be looking up something I have to do,
so I'll type in, like, "Wisconsin,"
and it'll come up 15 things about my characters
going to Wisconsin,
but I was just trying to look up the Wisconsin Book Festival.
So I did that.
And then, the Google Maps, there were two things.
I had this amazing intern one summer
who made me an interactive online map
of every gay bar in Chicago in 1986,
which I hope was fun for him. I don't know.
[ Laughter ]
So I could kind of walk around then, with it printed out,
walk around Chicago and see where everything was
and kind of try to picture it.
The other thing is, as I'm researching Paris,
the other part of the book, you know,
you can do that thing where you take the blue dude
and you drop him into the map, and you can walk around
and you can look left and right, which was awesome,
but I was really hoping
I'd have to justify a research trip to Paris.
And this totally supplanted it so...
-You are a child of a Hungarian immigrant, yes?
-Yeah. -And you would have --
When you were growing up, you had immigrants stay with you?
-Yeah, I had this kind of wild childhood.
My parents are both linguistics professors.
And then, we -- we're sort of a hub
of Hungarian immigrants in Chicago.
Yeah, not really a normal childhood.
-Yeah. -It was kind of awesome.
And my dad's a poet. So there was a lot of --
He was writing his poetry in America
but in Hungarian and then smuggling it back into Hungary.
-How do you smuggle poetry? [ Laughter ]
-Funny question. So, what you do,
if it's 1970s, is, you get a box of disposable diapers.
-Yep, that's what I would've done.
[ Laughter ]
-Because disposable diapers were brand-new.
You could get them in America.
You can't get them in Hungary.
So it's a pretty normal gift
to be sending across the ocean to your relatives.
And you cut them open, you take out the filling,
and you put a poetry manuscript in every diaper.
Then you reseal the box, you send it,
they open it, they take it out,
and you have diaper poetry. [ Laughter ]
-That is incredible.
Because every writer I know... [ Applause ]
...would basically, at some point think,
"A baby should [bleep] on this." [ Both laugh ]
And you're a professor in the MFA program at Northwestern.
-Yeah. -Do you like teaching?
-I love teaching, yeah. -That's great.
-You know, it makes you so much better at what you do
to have to articulate it.
You know, 'cause other art forms, you see someone work.
Right? If I were a painter, I could watch someone paint.
If I were a musician, I could watch someone,
you know, compose, make music.
I can't go and stand over my friends' shoulder
when they're writing novels. -Right, yeah.
-That would be super creepy.
But I can work with students as they're writing novels,
as they're writing short stories.
And I'm learning from that in a way
that is not otherwise available to me as a writer.
-That is very cool. [ Applause ]
And thank you so much for being here.
-Thank you. -Congrats on the book.
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