Life Stories #95: Lauren Collins

Back in 2016, I had a fantastic conversation with Lauren Collins, a staff writer with The New Yorker who had just published When in French: Love in a Second Language, which is simultaneously a personal story about how Collins fell in love with a French man without really knowing the language—he spoke perfect English, sure, but there was still a significant aspect of his life, his personality, his identity that was closed off to her until she could become fluent—and a broader account of how language helps shape the way we see the world, and how we work to maintain control over that power. (In particular, I’m thinking about how the French government has an académie whose job it is to maintain the purity of the language, coming up with alternatives to pesky English words that threaten to slide into usage.)

How, I wondered, had Collins decided to combine her personal narrative with the reportage and research? “I had never really dabbled in memoir,” she explained…

“I mean, I’m a huge reader of memoir; I’ve always loved it. I’m a huge admirer and student of the genre, but I had just had drilled into my skull at The New Yorker you don’t write I. And if you do, you’d better really earn every single one of those.

So it wasn’t my natural inclination to write something personal. That said, here I am in my personal life, just becoming totally obsessed by and immersed in French—and I’m eating and drinking and breathing and reading and sleeping and… not yet dreaming, but I’m totally into French, and I think as a writer, any time, you know, no matter how much you might think the spheres are going to remain separate…

I mean, I thought, you know, this has nothing to do with my work, this is something I’m doing for love… But once something grabs hold of your mind like that, I think as a writer it just inevitably spills over into what you’re doing professionally. And so the more I thought about it, incrementally, it became clear to me this story was so much richer if I explained why I cared about all this stuff, which was the very, very personal story.”

Sorry this episode has languished in the editing queue for so long! It’s been a bit of a crazy year, but I’m catching up now, and you should keep an eye out for more episodes as I work through that backlog and conduct some new conversations…

Listen to Life Stories #95: Lauren Collins (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (If you’re already an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

photo: Philip Andelman

17 November 2017 | life stories |

Life Stories #94: Okey Ndibe

When Okey Ndibe came to America at the end of 1988 at the invitation of fellow Nigerian Chinua Achebe to edit a magazine about African culture, nobody thought to tell him about winter. He’d read about winter in American novels, of course, but he just assumed it would be like the annual cold snap in Nigeria, when the temperature could drop as low as sixty-five degrees, and he dressed accordingly. After his flight arrived in New York City, he stepped out of the terminal to look for his escort, and quickly learned what he was in for in the months ahead.

Never Look an American in the Eye is Ndibe’s memoir of his first years in the United States, how he gradually acclimated to our climate and our culture—and, too, how he’s had to deal with American assumptions about him and his cultural heritage. (For example, although he’s an American citizen, who didn’t even begin writing fiction until after he’d been in the United States for a while, one of the first editors to see his debut novel on submission rejected it because she didn’t see how readers could be interested in an “African writer.”) It’s all shot through with Ndibe’s warm sense of humor, which we talked about for a bit before I asked him what had prompted him to write a memoir after two novels:

“I’ve lived a very interesting, rich life in America, [but] it wasn’t always like that when it was happening. When I wasn’t getting paid as an editor, when I was working for food, it wasn’t ‘interesting.’ When I had to lie about writing a novel, and had to go and write one, it was painful; it was difficult. When I was stopped by the police, it was terrifying. But as I looked back, it struck me that I had a very rich harvest of American narratives—and this is the quintessential immigrant culture in the world. I thought that the ultimate homage I could pay to America for the gifts that it’s given me… is to tell my part of this immigrant drama that is America.”

Listen to Life Stories #94: Okey Ndibe (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (If you’re already an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

photo: courtesy Okey Ndibe

16 June 2017 | life stories |