Meet The Author: Andrew Szanton

[music] We are grateful to our friends at Northshshire Books and Monroe Street Books for their underwriting of this program. Northshshire Books has outlets in Manchester, Vermont, [music] and Saratoga Springs. and Monroe Street Books is on Route 7 just north of Mberry. Both are wonderful independent [music] bookstores and we thank them. Hello, I'm Lewis Meyers and this is Meet the Author [music] where we're joined today with Andrew Zanton from his home in Newton, Massachusetts. Um Mr. Zanton is a collaborative memor memoist and we're going to talk about that what that means and some of the uh remarkable people he's worked with over the years. Mr. Zanton is originally from Washington DC. He attended Princeton as a college student and there had the good fortune to be in a class with John McY the great and legendary writer for the New Yorker. Uh Mr. McI uh actually uh reminisced about Mr. Zanton in a recent New Yorker article from last year. Uh and I was fascinated by by that and wanted to learn more about what he's Mr. Zanton's done in his own career. Um, since then he has written uh uh collaborated on memoirs from uh people such as Charles Evers, the great civil rights activist, uh, Senators Edward Brookke and Senator Bill Bradley, as well as a nuclear as well as a Nobel Prizewinning uh, physicist among others. And he continues to work with students and to post uh, memoirs about everyday people as well on his website. So, Mr. Zanton, welcome and thank you for being here. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> I thought we would uh first look back in time a little bit to to your Princeton days. Uh I mentioned that you were in a class with John McI uh who has written for the New Yorker for gosh 40 or 50 years at this point, still writing I believe. Um and talk about that experience and and the impact uh he may have had on you early in life. Well, it's many effects. One of them, a very basic thing is that if you think about the way we socialize people growing up, novelists have an award, the Nobel Prize for literature. Um, fiction is considered literature. John McY was the first person who directly kind of confronted me with the fact that non-fiction writing can be and is literature. His class was called the literature of fact. So simply to say what you're doing or thinking about doing what you what all of the students in this class are contemplating doing is something serious and important. That in itself was was a great thing. Another was that John was kept the class small and he had one-on-one conferences with each person. So this was not just hearing the great man lecture or reading some of his things. It was going over line by line, sentence by sentence your own work with this absolute master. And many people found it intimidating. It was on some level for me. But I was fortunate to have a father who had also gone over my work all my life with me. So I was more familiar with that sort of having a older man of of more talent and experience uh critiquing heavily what you're doing. And so I found it interesting and I would sometimes ask John," well why would you do this? Turned the tables a little bit and asked him probed why did you do this or that. So I think we began to have a rapport that was a little bit unusual even when I was an undergraduate and he is a very very very very good with words. Um and has a manner which sort of disguises that. Uh he reminds me a little bit of the the person who can build an amazing stone wall without using any mortar simply by looking at the stones and piling them up. And you look at him and he's a very ordinarylooking person, but he's got this just extraordinary ability almost hidden. >> Did you know from an early age, you talk about in college you were already sounded like you were heading in direction of becoming a writer. Did you know from an even earlier age that you wanted to be a writer as as a professional? I think so. Um I think I'm as a born writer about as much as you can be. Uh both my parents read a lot. The house was full of books. Um being an artist of any kind was something that my parents really respected. Um I also was just really fascinated with words. Um I remember for example coming home from school and telling my parents I delirious with joy of this thing which I learned which I assumed they didn't know which was alphabetical order. And I explained to them how in a dictionary you can have thousands of words and you can know exactly where each word is because of this thing called alphabetical order. And as I was explaining it to them they sort of nodded and said yeah we know about that. Um, and I was dumbfounded and and I said, "Why didn't you tell me about it?" Um, and they just said, "Well, I guess we didn't think it was so incredible as you do." Um, so whatever that is, I have some sort of a obsessive compulsive need to deal with words and a love of words, a fanatical interest in compressing words and rearranging words. Um, so it's it's somewhere deep in me. Well, certainly that must have seemed uh your made your parents seem very wise if they already knew about the alphabet. But um let let's talk about being a collaborative memoirist. Now there's another term and I called ghostwriter which may people might be more familiar with but I suspect that there's a difference between ghostwriting and collaborative memorist. Can you sort of explain those two terms? >> Well, a true ghost writer is invisible like a ghost. So, I have had clients who will tell me,"Andrew, I'm going to need you to do much of the writing of this, but for my own reasons, I need to be listed as the sole author." In that case, I am a ghost. I have been a ghost for a number of books. In general, I feel it's more honest to have my name on the cover, and of course, it helps my career to to be known as a writer. So, I ask for that, but I I never need that to happen. Um, there are, as I say, good reasons sometimes why the client can't really afford to have my name there. In that case, I am a ghost. But the work is almost always collaborative. And I see what a good collaborative ghost writer does is to really insist on having a key role in the project. uh if you think of the book as the child of the two people that your parents just as a a baby will have genetic material from both mother and father. I feel a good collaborative memoir should have genetic material from the collaborator as well as from the client. >> Uh way to describe it um uh do people find you? So how do the people find you? who who reaches out to you and and how does that happen? >> Well, in a variety of ways. Um, I I will confess I've never been very good at self-promotion. It was part of the reason I'm very sincere in saying I I appreciate being invited on your program. I don't go around doing a lot of self-promotion. Um, so it's generally a friend of someone who I've already worked for. Um, often when I start working with someone, I'll say, "Who are the people I should interview?" Family members, friends, college roommates, neighbors, childhood friends, anyone you knew who really has interesting information about you that might be helpful. And if the client is a quiet, reserved sort of person, that's especially important. If it's a geralus client with a million stories, it's obviously less important. But often those those threshing interviews that I do with others who knew the client will turn up somebody who will say, "Oh, I didn't know that there were people who specialized on memoirs. You know, give me a call sometime. I might be interested in doing this as well." So, it's it's haphazard. I don't uh never know exactly where the clients will come from. There are uh uh there's also editors and of course for example Robert Carrow with his series of of books on Lynden Johnson has had the great editor Arthur Gelb or former you know late Arthur Gelb work with him over decades now and they had a very close working relationship reportedly they went sentence by sentence. What what would be the difference between an editor and a memoirist? Well, an editor is generally working with material that the writer has produced, not actually producing material. In a great number of my books, the client will say, "I know my story well, but I'm just not a writer. I don't I don't feel comfortable writing." So the most common dynamic with me and a client is we speak on the telephone. I take notes and create a first draft and they edit the draft. I take more notes, write another draft, they edit the draft. So they're involved intimately in telling the stories and also editing what I produce, but I'm usually doing most of the writing. >> You do this over the telephone, for example, people like Edward Brookke, Bill Bradley, Charles Evers. Did you spend much time with them literally in the same room? >> Well, Edward Brookke was living in Massachusetts where I live. So, obviously, if somebody lives close by, I would prefer to be in the same room with them. Um, many of my clients are from parts of the country where it's just not really feasible to spend a whole lot of time together. I always try to spend some time with them because there is something about being face to face. Uh, but sometimes it's just less possible. In the case of Charles Evers, Evers was sort of the king of a little town called Fyet, Mississippi. And um Fyet, Mississippi did not that I could tell have a single white person except me when I was there. Um I went down and stayed in his house. And it was just fascinating to be the minority. Uh to just give one little example, it was very, very hot and I was getting a sunburn. And when I went to the little store there, there was nothing for sunburn. it wasn't a problem for the other people in town. >> Well, I think yeah, I think that's a very good point because without seeing Fyet, Mississippi and seeing the surrounding area that he grew up in, um capturing his voice and his story as you have in this remarkable book called Have No Fear uh would have been more difficult, I think, had you been writing just from New Town, Massachusetts or Princeton, New Jersey, uh places that he had probably never been. And and of course, you'd never been to Fate, Mississippi. So >> he Charles Evers had a phrase to pay the price. He felt that there were a lot of leaders who tried to sort of slip into the civil rights movement, get on television, get a little fame for themsel, but they hadn't really paid the price. To him, paying the price is going on the marches, going doortodoor, signing up voters, doing all the little things that are not fun or easy, but are essential to a movement. And so when I asked him, would you be willing to let me write your story? He immediately came back with, are you willing to pay the price? And so then we have to negotiate. What does that mean? Um, I'm not a member of the civil rights movement per se. I'm sympathetic. I'm much younger. I'm white. I'm a Yankee northerner. What is the price? So that there's always something negotiated with a client. And that was an interesting negotiation with him. But part of the price was coming down to fet. >> Yeah, we should say that uh I I can imagine negotiating it with Charles Evers would be would be quite the exercise because this was a tough guy. Just to give a story from from his book. Uh, of course his brother, older brother Megar Evers was killed, shot in his own driveway. It was a top civil rights activist shot by a Ku Klux Clan person. Charles, the Ku Klux Clan came after Charles Evers, too. Evers was Charles Evers was a big guy. I think over 6 feet, 220 lbs. Uh very strong guy, but uh backed off from nobody. He told he sat on his porch with his shotgun, told the clan to come on. H they didn't. Um and so this is a guy that I imagine working with him must have been quite interesting. >> Yes. Um and he was also a old-fashioned male chauvinist. So you know that that will happen with the clients too. There's no reason to make the book about how women should be treated in your life particularly. But it was just obvious from comments that he made in the lifestyle he was live living that he and I sort of felt differently about that. But it just it wasn't the key to Charles Evers. And so we focus much more on the civil rights movement and his entrepreneurism which was close to his heart. >> And the book really is would have to imagine is his voice. It's not, let me put, it's not the most literary book I've ever read. I'll I'll put it that way. It is rough. It is his voice as, as I imagine, he spoke, but he gets his message and his personality across so much in this book. I'm sure that was very different than say Senator Edward Brookke, one of the I believe was the first uh African-American United States senator in the u postmodern era. Uh and Mr. Uh, Senator Brookke was a very highly educated, wellspoken, very carefully political gentleman because I've read his memoir that you helped write wrote. I I've read Bill Bradley's as well. So, how was it different working with them, say, than a Charles Evers? Well, Senator Brookke was, as you said, very well educated, extremely intelligent, and what struck me as a little bit sad was that he did not want to be seen as the first African-American senator since reconstruction, which he was to the national media. He was a very important symbol, but Ed Brookke was a serious policy guy. He wanted to be known for his positions in foreign policy, in federal housing policy. He wanted to be known as someone who did his homework and knew his stuff and was really, really strong on issues. He certainly wasn't going to vote against civil rights legislation, but he didn't want to spend his time in the Senate on civil rights issues. So when it came time to do his memoir, I like everybody else began with how did it feel to be the first African-American senator since reconstruction. It didn't take long to realize that really wasn't the direction he wanted to go. But it also complicates the finding a publisher and promoting the book because the publisher wanted a lot of stuff about being an African-American. So there there's always this figuring out what the client wants and then there's also connecting the client if they want commercial publication to what the publisher and what the public are going to want. Uh there's a famous case when Lauren Beall was writing her memoir. She was had very mixed feelings about being so associated with Humphrey Bogart being the wife of Humphrey Bogart. She had had a distinguished acting career had done many many things unrelated to Humphrey Bogart. And when she went to write her memoirs, she announced Bogart isn't going to be a very big part of this. And the publisher told her, "He has to be. That's what your public wants. He doesn't have to be all of it, but you got to have a big piece of it about him. That's what readers want to know. What was he really like? What was your marriage really like?" And reluctantly, she did that. And I think it made it a better book. So, it's a it's a relationship. As I said, it's about negotiating. Sometimes you're negotiating. the the collaborator is negotiating with a client. Sometimes the collaborator is negotiating with a publisher or an editor at a publishing house. Sometimes the client and the publishing house negotiate directly, but they're always have slightly different interests and the the publisher wants what's going to sell the most number of copies and the client is interested in saying exactly what they want to say about themsel and those things are not the same. another senator that you know we just mentioned Bill Bradley known as Dollar Bill because he was such a clutch college famous college and professional basketball player with the New York Knicks. He was a road scholar. Um and then he I think in some ways similar to Senator Brookke, Bill Bradley was a very policy wonk really. Um very serious guy and uh how did that how did that play out when you were writing with him? Absolutely. And Bill Bradley is another person I have enormous respect for. Um I I had enormous respect before I started working for him and I respect even even more having done something like 80 interviews with his close associates. Um but it did strike me as as with Brooke. Bill Bradley did not want to be thought of as a great basketball player. He wanted he was proud of his basketball career naturally. But someone a telling anecdote that one of his friends told me was there was some sort of a issue that involved sports or basketball or something a political issue and someone had brought to a meeting an actual basketball and were passing it around and people sort of thought well what's going to happen when Bill Bradley gets the basketball maybe he'll twirl it on his finger or something like that. Um and and they said he sort of handed it off to the next person like it was a dirty diaper. Um it was just it was not where he was then. He was he had done extraordinary things in basketball, but basketball was over and now he really wanted to focus on the Senate. >> When you talk about the work you did, you mentioned 80 interviews in Bill Bradley's case and and obviously a lot with Charles Evers probably down in Mississippi and other places. uh that you probably had enough material to actually write a biography uh as opposed to being their sort of collaborator memoirist. Have you ever were you tempted at that point to say, "Wait a second, maybe I'd like to write a actual biography and just be the sole author." >> I have thought about it from time to time. I won't say I haven't thought about it. Um but I'll give you another metaphor. Being a biographer to me is sort of like being a judge. And being a memoir collaborator is like being a defense lawyer. And I feel more comfortable being a defense lawyer than I do a judge. I like to say to somebody, we're going out into the court of public opinion. Please tell me about yourself. Don't tell me anything that's not true because I don't want to be caught, you know, lying in court. But I'm I'm trying to put you in the best light possible. I'm trying to help you tell your story. That's really where I feel psychically most comfortable, helping somebody tell the story that they want to tell. A biographer is often forced to say things which the subject will find painful, doesn't want to have out there. But just to be objective, the biographer has to bring up these things. And it's just it's a role that I don't feel quite comfortable with. I like to work with people. Sometimes it seems in biographies that the the differential between an authorized and an unauthorized biography biography uh can it suggest that the uh the authorized biography was uh written with more collaboration perhaps than the unauthorized biography? Um, >> yeah. Well, there's there's a whole subject called pathography where, you know, it's just a long list of the drugs that they took and the, you know, other mistakes that they made. And to me, they're they're rather dreary because you never get a sense of what made this person really remarkable. There are all sorts of people on drugs. What was it about them creatively or in some other way that made them remarkable? So, when I'm working with a collabor with a memoir client, I always try to get to that. What are your passions? What are your quirks? What is really distinctive about you? What would your friends say? You're the only person they know who does what. >> Was there ever or have there been other people that you started to work with and just felt this isn't working? Uh either they or you felt this this just isn't working. Uh don't feel comfortable with this particular project. >> Yeah. I mean, I'd rather not give names. Most of them are not well-known people anyway. But there is a well-known phenomenon where a client or potential client will tell the family that for years I'm going to do my memoirs. I'm going to write my life story. But they never actually do it. So the family is sort of used to this is just talk. And then one year at Thanksgiving the person says, "Well, I've hired a collaborator. I've got I've got Andrews in is gonna help me with this and we've already done several chapters." And then somebody at the Thanksgiving table says, "Well, I hope you're not going to be writing anything about daddy's drinking." And that the client says, "That's chapter one." And then the family has a big to-do, and how could you do that? You're you're you're washing dirty laundry in public. Blah blah blah. So sometimes the client will just come back to me sort of sheepishly and say, "Look, it's it's touched off a civil war in my family. The only way we could write this would be to do a sanitized book, which I don't want to do. Um, I may come back to you at some point or I may write this without a collaborator and just stick it in my desk drawer for somebody to find after I'm gone. But I'm sorry, you know, we we can't really go in the direction I want to go. So that does happen and I always have a number of clients at the same time because I know that a certain number of projects for whatever reason will not complete. There are also some unfortunately where the person only starts because they can feel that mortality is very close. they're ill, they're near death, or they're beginning to have serious dementia issues, and sometimes a project just can't be completed because it was started too late. So, one thing I would urge anyone who's listening to this is if you have a friend, if you have a parent, an aging, somebody who really needs to have their book done, do not wait. Get started. It doesn't have to be with somebody like me. It can just be you and a video camera, you and a tape recorder. Um, but very often the family will sort of be in denial because this is a treasured person. They don't want to face the fact that they may not be around for that much longer. So there's the denial and delay and then sometimes it's too late. >> As you were talking about that, I was thinking about one of the most famous memoirs uh in American history, which is uh General President Ulysius Grant's memoirs uh which he wrote when he was dying of uh I believe throat cancer. He was broke. he wanted to leave money for his family and if he wanted to get his story out in his collaborative memoirs collaboratist was um uh Samuel Clemens Mark Twain if I recall uh or at least they had many letters back and forth um >> and and what's especially interesting to me about that incredibly ironic is here is Twain arguably our greatest writer and here is Ulissiz Grant who is not a writer at all and both of them wrote their memoirs and Grant France is much better than Twain's. Twain wrote a sort of a memoir which was unpacked a hundred years after it was written and it was sort of a series of you know shaggy dog stories and and witty boasts and aides. It wasn't really a proper memoir. Grant Grant's memoir is beautifully written. I I strongly recommend it even to those not particularly interested in Civil War history. >> Yeah. Let talk to me about some of the other your colleagues who do this. Are there any other books out there that you would recommend, memoirs that you found particularly moving or incisive? >> Oh boy, it's it's hard to pick out one. Um, there are two brothers named Jeffrey Wolf and Tobias Wolf. And Tobias Wolf wrote This Boy's Life, which was a Robert Dairo movie, and many people may be aware of that. Um, Jeffrey Wolf, Tobias's older brother, wrote a book called The Duke of Deception about their father. So, both sons wrote memoirs of coming of age. The parents split so that the Tobias Wolf book is more about his mother and the Jeffrey Wolf is more about the father. But it's fascinating to read them both because they complement each other beautifully and both writers are are gifted. the um you also write memoirs as you uh for people who are not famous. Um and what is what is that like? Is that the same process or is there some significant difference? >> There are a number of differences. Um one is often the client has trouble believing that their life is important enough. So often it's sort of been put together by their children, not by them. So you know, a 40-year-old will approach me and say, "Would you be willing to to write the memoir of my 72-year-old mother?" Um, and the 72-year-old mother begins by saying, "I don't even know why we're doing this. Um, my life isn't very interesting. I'm not the tiniest bit famous. Um, I I know my children love me and I love them, but does that mean that I should write a memoir? what's going on here? So, it it's sometimes difficult even just to kind of get started. But there's something very nice also about working with nonfamous people in that they often really haven't rehearsed their story. Um, if you think about a celebrity, they're often surrounded by a whole team. They have a management team. They have a lawyer. They have a public relations person. and all of these people are going to be involved if there's something that's going out with that person's name on it to the public. So then I'm kind of part of a a larger team and maybe something one of the more interesting things that I write has to be taken out because the public relations person doesn't want it in there. Um whereas with an ordinary person there's just much less of that. Sometimes there'll be a sibling or a son or daughter or something who has an issue, but generally you get a much more unvarnished account. Um, and as I said, I don't like the term ordinary people because I don't think anyone is ordinary if you just dig under the surface a little bit. If you think about the so-called ordinary people that you know, um, I'm sure they all have passions, they all have quirks, they all have things that are distinctive about them and about their seeing the world. Um, another way to look at it is any skilled person likes a degree of difficulty. So, you know, a basketball, Bill Bradley gets more satisfaction out of making a 25- foot shot than making a layup. And you could argue that writing the memoir of a very famous person is sort of a layup. Um, to to work with an ordinary person is like a 25- foot shot. the uh who would you choose to write to work with you if you were going to do a memoir of yourself? >> Uh well, there's a guy also lives in Newton, Massachusetts named William Novak, Bill Novak, who's very very good at what he does and I've been fortunate to become friends over the years with Bill. Um so if I if I was entrusting anyone with myself other than myself, it would be Bill. But I am writing my own memoir. Um, and I think it's been a healthy thing to do just as it's a healthy thing for a psychiatrist to have been through therapy. Um, it makes it easier for me to understand the resistances that a client will have. >> Yeah, there is. You know, you mentioned that speaking of analogies, there is something about it's almost like a therapeutic process. Uh, I would think when you're obviously it's not therapy and you're not a professional therapist, but there is something about that trust level of trust and intimacy when you're helping someone write their life story that must feel similar. >> Absolutely. And another common issue is boundaries. Um, in other words, I have a set time when I'm going to talk on the phone. At some point, a client may just call me not during that set time. Hey, I want to tell you something. um I can allow a little bit of that but if there's a lot of it then I have to say I'm sorry this is not the time that we set aside to talk and I'm busy right now um if the client tells me there are various things will set off sort of professional alarms and I have to kind of create a boundary so a good therapist does that as well >> we are in an era now with with Facebook and all the uh social media where everyone many people seem to put many of their most private private details out on the uh on the internet. Um is that changed the process or uh how do you see that? Uh and I'm going to add a a second thing. I we we need to we only have a few minutes left, but I want to bring up AI. Uh because there's now going to be AI writing uh whether it's AI slop or whether it's an actual uh book that that's generated by AI. Um can you talk about those things briefly? Sure. Um, to start off with AI, many people have asked me about this. I think that it it will be increasingly possible to just feed into a program where you were born, who your parents were, what your occupation was, where you live, a bunch of other questions, and have, you know, whether it's Chat GBT or some other program, just spin out your memoir, you know, in in a very short time. like any craftsman, I would argue that what I do is really, however superficially it may resemble that, is really something different. Um, if you go back to that craftsman I talked about laying stones without using any mortar, that's a that's a very difficult craft. Now, you can certainly get a mass-roduced stone wall. Um, and you may that may be what you want, but AI is not going to replace me, what I truly do any more than a machine making stone walls is going to replace that guy who does beautiful walls without mortar. It's it it superficially looks the same, but it's not the same. So, I would just hope that people like me who are craftsmen would say this is a craft. It's a difficult craft to learn. It's a craft I spend a lot of time thinking about and it it operates at a much higher level than AI. If you want something quick and cheap and dirty, you know, AI is what you want. But it's not I don't think it can truly replace anyone who is an artist at it. >> Well, I think we'll end with that because I think that's a very powerful statement. Uh, and I appreciate that. I appreciate the books you've written. Uh, Andrew Zanton. uh you can look at the the uh some of the memoirs that he's written of prominent people and perhaps less prominent. Uh they're all worth reading. Uh but I want to thank you for being with us today and we look forward to reading your collaborative books in the future and perhaps your own memoir. >> Thank you so much. If you Google Andrew Zanton Medium, that's where the profiles are listed. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. >> Thank and thank you. [music] And please join us for our next episode of Meet the Author. [music]