Life Stories #12: Daniel Smith
Tyler Maroney
In this episode of Life Stories, my podcast series of interviews with memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I chat with Daniel Smith about Monkey Mind, his “memoir of anxiety.” Naturally, we plunge right into talking about anxiety—one of the particularly interesting things that came up during our conversation was when he explained that he didn’t become anxious revisiting many of the traumatic experiences that defined his early life; the anxiety he felt tended to be more about the frustrations of writing itself.
We also talked about the therapeutic techniques that have proven successful for him, which focus on a mindful awareness of what’s going on in his head when anxiety strikes, and about the surprising role that Botox plays in alleviating one of his worst physical symptoms.
We discussed the importance of building up new patterns of thought that allow anxiety sufferers to keep things in check, because if you don’t, anxiety is really good at biding its time and waiting for the opening to strike. As it happens, Smith wrote an essay for the New York Times earlier this week along a similar theme, inspired by a comment his brother made, which gets reframed as: “Don’t be an idiot.” Specifically, don’t be “an impractical and unreasonable person, a person who tends to forget all the important lessons, essentially a fool, one who willfully ignores all that he has learned about how to come to his own aid.” He mentions the things that have worked for him, acknowledges alternatives that might work for other people, but, ultimately, “I’m not sure it matters what a person chooses—so long as he chooses and keeps choosing.” It’s a tenaciously optimistic mindset that you can feel in every moment of our conversation.
Listen to Life Stories #12: Daniel Smith (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).
15 August 2012 | life stories |
Read This: Imagine and Magic Hours
Nina Subin
I haven’t had a lot to say about the controversies surrounding Jonah Lehrer and Imagine—and you’ll notice that I’m not putting up my usual link to Powells.com so you can look at and buy the book. That’s because it’s been pulled from the market after a journalist discovered that Lehrer had fabricated quotes which he attributed to Bob Dylan in the opening chapter. Even if that revelation hadn’t come less than a month after a brouhaha over Lehrer “plagiarizing” himself in his blog posts for The New Yorker, this would still have been a book-killer; since the knives were already out for him, it soon became a question of whether he’d have any writing career left at all.
I didn’t have any particular problem with Lehrer recycling his own work; sure, he could’ve thrown in a “As I said in This Magazine” when appropriate, but not doing so wasn’t nearly as awful as, say, Fareed Zakaria’s recent lifting and tweaking of an entire paragraph from a Jill Lepore piece in The New Yorker, which is pretty much the exact form of plagiarism that drove Ruth Shalit—hands up; who remembers Ruth Shalit?—out of magazine journalism. My opinion was undoubtedly subjective: Not only was I a fan of Imagine, I’d also done an interview with Lehrer shortly after the book’s release. He came across as a genuinely nice guy, and I respected and admired the way he’d been able to leverage his interests into meeting and interviewing some of his creative heroes. So, yeah, totally willing to give him the benefit of the doubt the first time around.
Once it turned out that he’d made parts of Imagine up, that position became harder to maintain; at the same time, I didn’t particularly feel like dogpiling on him at his weakest moment. Part of it was that the blowback from his actions affected his publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which is also my former employer. So I knew the people who were forced to deal with recalling the book from stores and fielding questions from the media— under different circumstances, I could’ve been one of the people forced to deal with it—and I didn’t want to add to their troubles. And, honestly, I still liked the book that I read, and the author that I met.
14 August 2012 | read this |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
