Life Stories #9: Gary Marcus

Photo: Athena Vouloumanos

It’s been a while since I’ve posted an installment of Life Stories, the podcast series of interviews with memoir writers about their memoirs and the art of writing about your life. Here’s a conversation with Gary Marcus about Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning. Marcus, a psychology professor specializing in language and cognitive development, was 38 years old when he decided to ignore all the previous life experience that suggested he had no talent for playing music and start studying the guitar. It turns out he’s not so bad, after all—and his professional training has led him to some interesting ideas about how we pick up new skills such as learning to play a musical instrument. Strictly speaking, Guitar Zero is only partially a memoir; it’s also got a fair amount of science and interviews with expert guitarists like Pat Metheny.

Listen to Life Stories #9: Gary Marcus (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

2 July 2012 | life stories |

Read This: Beautiful Ruins

photo: Hannah Assouline

Short, shameful confession: In mid-June, I took my Flip camera to the HarperCollins offices and recorded nearly a half-hour of conversation with Jess Walter about his new novel, Beautiful Ruins. It was a really good interview, which is why I’m embarrassed to say that earlier this week, I accidentally deleted it from the Flip’s hard drive before I had transferred it to my computer. (It’s even more frustrating than it sounds, because I was trying to get out of a delete menu that had inadvertently opened, so I could make the transfer.) I tried taking it to a data recovery specialist, but they were unable to pull the file back from the abyss…

But a lot of the things we touched upon in that interview are connected to the reasons that you really ought to read Beautiful Ruins, starting with the fact that it’s a wonderful story, unlike anything Walter has ever done before. In fact, we started out by talking a little bit about how he’d gotten his first book deal for a nonfiction book about the Ruby Ridge standoff, which he had covered for the Spokane newspaper. He could’ve built up a portfolio of true crime books after that, but instead (after co-authoring Christopher Darden’s memoir) he segued into writing crime fiction, winning an Edgar for his third novel, Citizen Vince. The novel after that, The Zero, had its noirish elements, but was quickly noticed for its literary qualities, earning a nomination for the National Book Award.

And the novels since then, The Finanical Lives of the Poets and now Beautiful Ruins… well, one way of looking at would be to say that he’s moved even further away from his roots, but he talked to me about the continuity he saw in them, that he had always been focused on the story rather than on the genre. And we talked about how he was in the fortunate position of having publishers who supported a creative path that might not necessarily be easily marketable… except, of course, that “he’s really good, and can totally surprise you” is actually marketable, to the right readers.

(more…)

29 June 2012 | read this |