I Can't Help You: An Evening with Jonathan Franzen

When Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections and How to Be Alone, walked onto the stage at Benaroya Hall Tuesday evening, he produced a few papers from a bag he brought on stage, like a professor about to teach a class.

“I’m just going to read the text,” he said shyly before removing his jacket.

His Seattle Arts & Lectures talk was structured around responding to four questions that Franzen loathes to hear during Q&A sessions because of both their generic nature and the difficulty involved in giving useful answers:

While each of his responses to these question were thorough, explaining why these questions annoy him so much (“Everything a writer has ever read has left a mark on them”) and what his answer to each one is, Franzen’s lecture was more a call to arms than a straightforward Q&A.

“With every book, there is a new enemy to identify,” he said strongly and repeatedly.   

For Franzen, the enemy has often been the themes of his books - depression, shame, guilt - and as he closed his answers to the four questions, he stated unequivocally, “Unless the writer is at personal risk, it’s not worth reading. Or, for the writer, not worth writing.”

It was a motivating idea, however, I don’t believe a large portion of the audience heard him that well, since during the Q&A, the same questions he had just bemoaned were asked again. 

Perhaps the problem was that all these questions focused on one central question that wasn’t directly answered - how do I become a writer like you? 

Franzen did answer that without addressing it specifically, suggesting that in order to write a book “you have to become a different person,” and you have to do this with every book.

To the aspiring writer, this isn’t as directly helpful as being given a list of books and a time of day to write, or telling writers that characters and plots don’t have to be developed and crafted skillfully from scratch, but it’s an answer that opens up the possibilities of fiction for those who write it.  

Even if it makes doing so a little harder.