Pulitzer Prize News: Jonathan Rosen
Jonathan Rosen is a writer. He is the author of The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions.
[Editor’s Note: Jonathan Rosen is a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist in Memoir or Autobiography for his book The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions.]
Harry Potter and the Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions
Max Raskin: The people in my life have absolutely gobbled up your book like it was Harry Potter. My joke is that this is the Harry Potter for elite academics or something like that.
My question for you is: what’s something you have devoured in the past — is there a book or show that comes to mind?
Jonathan Rosen: The difficulty of answering that is that when there's something I love, the next step is not necessarily to consume all of it, but not because I'm such a modulated person. Maybe even for the opposite reason. My system is easily flooded. My wife can watch three Game of Thrones, which we're in the middle of, but I'm like, “Wow, this was amazing. I have to stop.”
MR: Really?
JR: Whether I need to shrink the aperture to let things in, I don’t know.
I didn’t watch Game of Thrones when it came out, but after October 7th, when my mood was so dark and apocalyptic and full of a sense of the barbarism of the world, a friend of mine said, "You really should watch Game of Thrones. I think you'll like it." And I did. I loved it.
MR: I stopped watching after they killed Ned Stark in the first season. I didn’t like that.
JR: I know. It took me a long time to recover. But he persists as a presiding principle, I suppose.
MR: That’s like the Woody Allen line. I don't want to live on as a presiding principle, I want to live on in my Upper West Side apartment.
JR: Right.
MR: What about TV — do you watch a lot of TV?
JR: I'm never boycotting it. It's just we seem to wait about 10 years before we get around to the thing that everybody else has seen. It’s like, “Oh wow, there’s this show called Breaking Bad. He’s a science teacher!” I’m too late for the conversation.
MR: When you were a kid were there any books like Lord of the Rings that you binged?
JR: Lord of the Rings was one of them, and so was The Once and Future King. The problem for me, though, is that I really am an incredibly slow reader, so it was a slow-motion binge; I’d stay home from school, stay up all night, maybe you have to pee and you don't because you're reading, seasons pass, but in the morning Frodo is still in the Shire.
MR: Did you read Harry Potter?
JR: My wife and I took turns reading it aloud to our kids. What I love about Harry Potter is its respect for evil. No dreaming it away.
Like David Foster Wallace, Except Good
MR: Is it weird for you that you're like the J. K. Rowling of the intellectual class?
JR: It's wonderful to hear that people like the book. I never thought of Yale Law School as Hogwarts. Though now that you mention it, Ivy League institutions are full of competitive wizards, quick to cast spells but slow to apprehend reality.
More seriously, this was a painful book to write, about a painful subject, shot through with “the tragedy of good intentions” — as my subtitle has it. But the paradox of writing is that even when the subject is dark, you are inviting your reader inside a world you hope will enchant them, even when the goal is disenchantment, and you’re un-telling stories as well as telling them.
MR: The thing is that people actually read it. When David Foster Wallace writes that big book for smart people, no one actually reads that book.
JR: I'm amazed all the time that anybody reads anything at all. I'm amazed that people write anything at all. Myself included. You see the wall of books behind me, but as Saul Bellow puts it in Mr. Sammler’s Planet: “The wrong books, the wrong papers.” Even when they’re the right books they’re wrong, because life is always something else.
The world is constantly urging you either not to write or not to read, in a way, but people do. I'm really happy about that. I don't mean to sound like the guy in Bull Durham — just happy to be here. But I'm delighted that people read, and that some of them read my book.
MR: Is it weird that people know all the details in the book? Is that unusual?
JR: It's unusual only in the sense that it's an unaccustomed experience. Also, I shared certain things I was used to hiding, including my Bar Mitzvah…my grand humiliation.
Forward, Backward, and Sideways
MR: Let me ask you about writing. You do a lot of research. There's a lot of Judaism, a lot of mental disease, law, law school. As a practical matter, how do you organize your research?
JR: I did do a lot of research — it was impossible to understand, say, the history of psychiatry without it — but I'm a terrible organizer and a lot of the time I felt I was playing a giant game of concentration. It’s a disgraceful admission but I was always wondering where I put the information that corresponded to some dim inner detail I’d absorbed along the way.
MR: But do you write notecards? Do you put it in the computer?
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