Amor Towles is the author of the New York Times' bestsellers, The Lincoln Highway, A Gentleman in Moscow, and Rules of Civility.

In Table for Two, Towles shares some of his shorter fiction, six stories based in New York City and a novella set in golden age Hollywood, all written with his signature wit, humor, and sophistication.

Amor Towles is joined in conversation with Alexandra Jacobs, a book critic for the New York Times and the author of Still Here: The Madcap, Nervy, and Singular Life of Elaine Stritch.

She has contributed to many other publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Observer, and Entertainment Weekly.

Recorded at the University of Louisville Kentucky Author Forum, this is Great Conversations, Amor Towles and Alexandra Jacobs.

[applause] Thank you.

And here we are, I can't believe it, at a Table for Two.

the same title as your superb recent book of shorter fictions.

And you say on your website that the title must have sprung from a conviction in my subconscious that our lives can often change materially due to a single conversation at a table for two.

So tonight you might be materially changing not only my life but the lives of some 700 people, including the overflow audience out in the lobby plus those watching later on PBS, but no pressure.

[laughs] But seriously, I absolutely adored this book.

And I shouldn't be saying this as a critic and it will probably disqualify me from ever reviewing you again, but I simply adored it, partly because the novella part of it brings back Evelyn Ross, who's a treasured character from your first novel, Rules of Civility.

But also because I think you sort of refurbished the short story in this book.

And one of the first things I wanted to talk to you about was just what you think of the state of the short story and what made you decide to return to that form.

All right.

Well, I think like many, I began writing fiction as a kid.

And I wrote fiction in high school and college and graduate school.

And I think like many novelists, the short story is where I began, because it is the best form in which to try to master elements of craft.

In that shorter form, every time you write a short story as a younger person, you try to approach it in a different way.

You write about a different person in a different set of circumstances and describe their lives in a different style.

And through that, you begin to master different ways to approach setting or dialogue, or thematic, or poetics.

And so it's kind of the perfect foundation for trying to figure out how to be a better writer.

So it's a long history of doing it.

But where were you reading short stories when you were growing up?

Like, what was your encounter with that?

Yeah.

And I don't think that as a young person, you're writing them because you've read them necessarily.

It's just that it's a.

It's manageable.

It's a manageable format because it's not going to take you three years; you know what I mean, and whatever to do.

So what ends up happening for me is having spent the last 20 years really focused on writing the novel.

I'll tend to write short stories in between my novels.

When I have sort of a break, I'm not ready yet to dive into the next novel, and so I'll write shorter fiction in the meantime.

So all of the work in Table for Two was written in the course of the last, you know, eight or nine years.

But as long as you're asking, one of the things that I thought a lot about after finishing that collection is sort of the difference between the processes of writing a novel versus a short story, at least for me.

By way of introduction, I should say this first, which is that in high school my English teacher, [Dick Baker], was a great hero of mine.

And he was the person who - he was a man of great intellectual curiosity and great precision.

He was the one who taught us all how to read well, you know, with a pen and how to dissect a novel.

He's the one who taught us how to write well, how to make an argument.

And in our papers, he would hand it back with all marked up with the shortcomings of our writing style.

But for me, the most common comment that I would get in the margins of my papers was S-U-G, which stood for sweeping unsupported generality.

[laughter] And he meant that as a criticism, you know.

So although it turned out to be like my superpower, right?

[laughs] So what I'm about to tell you, this is a cautionary remark.

I'm about to give you a sweeping unsupported generality about the difference between the novel and the short story.

So I think that in retrospect, as I look back as a reader of novels, as a writer of novels, that when one is crafting a novel, I think consciously or subconsciously, in the course of the first, let's say, 30 pages, the author is very interested in orientation.

You need to give your reader a sense of when is this taking place, you know, not simply the year, but what are the times like?

Where is this taking place?

What's the feel of that spot?

Who are these people involved?

What might have happened in the recent past that's going to have bearing on where this book is about to go?

And so in that opening sort of sections, all that has to be laid out.

And in a fine novel, of course, it's done quite seamlessly.

And you can go back and take your favorite two or three novels.

And if you go back and read the first 30 pages, I think you'd be surprised at how much information is embedded in that short section to prepare you for the launch into the work.

And this is very important in the novel because so much of the way a novel constructs meaning for us as readers is through evolution.

Characters evolve over the course of the story.

You know, they change.

They come to new ideas.

Themes are layered.

Events unfold in an interconnected way.

And each one of these ideas is an evolution, which requires a firm starting point.

To understand how a character evolves and understand how a series of events are connected, you need to start knowing where you are.

And so this is very valuable in the novel.

It does not exist in the short story.

The short story does not have the time.

As an author, you don't have the time to build that orientation into the story.

And so, instead, I think what the short story is - the best analogy I can make is it's a little bit like you go to dinner at a restaurant with your - you know, whoever, with your partner, and you sit down.

And there's a man and woman at the table next to you, and they are in a heated conversation.

They're so wrapped up in it that they're not even lowering their voices.

So you can't help but overhear.

And so as you're kind of with one eye on your menu, you're listening.

You're like, you know, "Wow, are they married?"

[laughter] How old is she?

[audience laugh] "What did he do last night?

And who's Tony?"

So as you're listening, you're kind of processing this.

Now, what happens is just as you're about to piece it together, you're beginning to get a picture of everything that's happening, they pay the check and leave.

And you want to run out into the street after them and be like, "Wait, I have questions."

[laughter] But you can't do that.

So my point being that the short story I think is very much like this.

It's the eavesdropped conversation.

It is the eavesdropped conversation.

And no one's there to tell you where you are, who the characters are, what the background is.

You're dropped into it.

And in the course of the short story, you're rapidly trying to sort of orient yourself to who these people are and what are the stakes involved at something that happened the night before or what have you.

And just when you're beginning to piece it together, it's over, and you don't have the author providing you some elaborate resolution, thematically or in terms of events, or in whatever form.

And I think that's very liberating, that difference, I think, both for the author and for the reader.

I think it's a different sort of pleasure to be able to drop into that conversation and to try to piece it together and not have the heavy hand of the author wrapping it up for you, and so that you have sort of both the freedom and the responsibility to imagine what happens from this point forward.

I think you could write a long essay about the short story.

[laughs] And I would love to read it.

Speaking of short stories, there's a thing like that from your biography that I read.

It was almost exactly like that.

I felt like I was just being given a glimpse into your life where you threw a bottle into the Atlantic Ocean and there was a message in the bottle.

Perhaps you could tell me what part of the Atlantic, you know, which beach.

So this bottle goes out with the message, and I want to know what the message was.

But then, it happens to be intercepted by Harrison Salisbury, who at the time was the managing editor of the New York Times.

Now, doesn't Harrison Salisbury sound like one of your characters?

Well, in fact, he did wind up making a cameo in A Gentleman in Moscow.

But I guess I want to know, what did you write?

How did he find it?

What happened?

It sounds like fiction.

[laughs] Okay.

Well, it's all true.

My family would instill summers on Martha's Vineyard Island off the coast of Massachusetts.

And when I was eight - and I'm almost certain that the sort of the origin of it is, you know, parents have dinner party.

You get up in the morning, there are wine bottles that are empty.

[laughter] Corks here and there.

And you're like, "Oh, wow, a bottle and a cork.

We're in business."

So I wrote a note, and I was eight.

So the note said, "To whoever finds this bottle, I hope this bottle has made it to China."

That's what I was hoping.

[laughs] The universal hope of children.

Yes.

You got on the jetty.

You try to time the tides right off the coast.

And then, the weeks go by and maybe three weeks or something like that.

And summer ends, we go back to the Boston area where I was raised.

And you have that sort of nice thing where you kind of after the long vacation, you come in in the house, nobody's been in it for, you know, a couple of weeks or whatever.

And the mail's piled up.

And so my mother was going through it and she's like, "Oh, there's a letter here for Amor.

But the return address is the New York Times."

[audience laugh] What are the chances?

And I was like, "Yes."

[laughter] And that's my mail, you know.

[laughter] So I take it.

And so it turns out that the letter is a little typed up letter, you know, in a - you could tell it's whacked out on a Smith Corona.

And it said, "Dear Master Towles, my name is Harrison Salisbury.

I am one of the editors of the New York Times."

And so we went into a correspondence.

The opening sentence was, "Dear Master Towles, I am sorry to report, your bottle did not make it to China."

[laughter] So then, yes, we corresponded between the times I was 8 until I was 18.

And then, the first time I went to New York City was when I was 18.

And I went and met with him.

And he was quite elderly at that time.

But it was great fun.

And those of you who don't know Harrison Salisbury, he was New York Times correspondent in Hanoi during the Vietnam War.

And he was the person at the New York Times who was overseen with launching the op-ed page when that was integrated in the New York Times.

And he was a war correspondent before that.

So he's quite a storied journalist.

But, when I was writing A Gentleman in Moscow - and this is kind of a quick diversion about my process, I'm not a research-driven guy.

So I tend to write about things that I know enough about that I can hopefully imagine the rest.

You know, that's kind of the way I work.

And so when I wrote A Gentleman in Moscow, I didn't do a lot of research for it because I had read about Russia, and I loved Russian literature.

And that was the foundation for inventing that book.

But, one of the things I had not done, for instance, was I - that book takes place almost entirely inside the walls of the Metropol Hotel across the street from the Kremlin in Moscow.

And I had never spent the night in the Metropol Hotel when I wrote the book.

So I thought, "Okay.

Well, I'll write it.

I'll imagine it fully, and then I'll take the first draft, and I'll fly to Russia, and I'll revise it in the hotel.

I'll move into the hotel.

I'll start the revision while I'm there," which is typically the way I'll work.

And how did your wife feel about that?

That's a good question.

I'm trying to think how old - it depends on how old the kids were, right?

Yeah.

[laughs] No, she's supportive.

She's supportive.

[laughter] Because I don't do the research in advance, but I will sort of decide, "Oh, there's some things I would like to research, but I'll save it until the end."

And so one of the things I figured out along the way I was writing the book is that from 1930 to 1950, anyone of significance, you know, fame or whatever you want to call who went to Moscow either stayed at, ate at, or danced at, or drank at the Metropol Hotel, because there were only a few fine hotels in the city.

And so if you went to Moscow in the '30s, the '40s, the '50s, you went.

And so I began collecting references to the Metropol Hotel from the memoirs of well-known figures.

So, E.E.

Cummings writes about the Metropol Hotel in his memoir of Russia.

John Steinbeck writes about the Metropol Hotel in his memoir of Russia, so as Lillian Hellman.

Not a research guy.

Okay.

I appreciate you saying that, because the distinction making here is that I don't want to know that before I write the book.

I want to imagine it fully without the interference of Wikipedia or a history of Russia, or whatever the various material.

But as I say, I'll identify, oh, this will be interesting once I'm done to go dip into that.

So I started stacking sort of the Xeroxes of these various journals without reading them.

And then, carry them with me to Moscow and read them when I got to the Metropol Hotel, having written the first draft.

And while I was doing that, I discover, which totally makes sense, is that all the journalists who were based in Moscow in the '30s, the '40s, and the '50s wrote extensively about the Metropol, because it was - the hotel was about, say, five blocks from the Foreign Correspondents' office.

And so it's where they drank.

So they all drank there.

So I had gotten to maybe five or six of the journalists' memoirs and found Metropol references and Xeroxed them and stacked them, ready to go.

And I kind of glanced.

Right before I was going to Moscow, the draft was done, and I'm glancing at one of the first ones.

And the first thing the guy says is, "Oh, I'll never forget the day," because it was the day Harrison showed up in Moscow.

And I was like, "Oh, my God, of course."

Of course, I'd completely forgotten.

Harrison Salisbury was the New York Times Bureau Correspondent in Moscow after the end of the Second World War and for the launch of the Cold War.

He was there.

And so I was like, "Of course, he must have written a memoir of it.

So I go out into the secondary book market.

Sure enough, he wrote a memoir of it.

And I buy it.

I get it shipped in overnight.

I carry it to Moscow.

I move into the Metropol.

And I opened the first page.

The first page basically says, in 19, whatever it is, 48 or whatever it is, 51, "I arrived in the city of Moscow.

And I tell the taxi cab driver in Russian, 'Take me to the Metropol.'"

Because it turns out that's where Salisbury lived for the first three months.

It must have felt just such an incredible moment of serendipity or blessing.

Yeah.

Audibly it's, oh, that's the technical term for what's happening, right?

Right.

Better than a light bulb.

Yeah.

Exactly.

So I read his whole memoir.

And then, you have this sort of another window in my process, which is that you got the first draft.

You're reading these sort of things.

And you are discovering things that you may say, "Okay.

Well, this is -" that might add flavor, accent, interest, cause you to have new ideas.

And so something that Lillian Hellman wrote about ended up in the book.

Steinbeck, for instance, he's there in the '50s.

And the hotel's super bureaucratic.

And he makes this comic description of what it takes to order dinner.

Because the waiter writes it down, but then he has to bring it to the head waiter, who then puts his initials on it, and then it's made in duplicate, and it goes into the kitchen, where one is given to the head of the kitchen, one is given to the cook.

They're both initialed, and it goes on and on, and on.

And so I was like, "Oh, man, that's so terrific."

And so I integrated that into when the count is working in the restaurant, and his nemesis, the bishop, becomes the - you know, overseeing, the manager of the hotel.

The bishop institutes this ridiculous bureaucracy, which drives the count crazy, anyway.

But that was stolen from Steinbeck.

So same thing, there were a number of things that Salisbury describes, where I was like, "Oh, that's so beautiful," that belongs in the book.

And one of them was - for those of you who read the book, you may recall this, but it's a very small, but beautiful little thing, which is that he was out wandering the city alone, and he sees an old church.

All the churches were decommissioned at the time, of course, but there was a line out of it.

And he's like, "Oh, that's interesting.

Why is there a line?"

And it turns out that the church was decommissioned and turned into a milk distribution center.

So it's all women of all ages, but mostly older, probably, but being lined up to get their milk.

And then, he was sort of intrigued by this is a relatively small out-of-the-way church.

Like, why would we - so he goes in, and he speaks to some of the ladies in the line.

And what he figures out is that in the back of the church, there was a beautiful mosaic of Mary and Jesus, whatever, and for whatever reason, the Bolsheviks had never bothered to tear that off the wall.

And so the standing thing was, at this particular church was if you're waiting in line for milk, the person behind you will save your place if you want to go and pray secretly in this little alcove.

So saving places in line was not a thing that was very popular.

You get out of the line, you're gone.

So this was sort of a special thing.

So he figures this out.

And anyway, so that gets included in the book, too.

And then, the final thing I'll tell you about it is that I had done all this, and I was like, "You know, okay, great."

Second draft, you know, feeling very good about it, feeling good that Salisbury's memories, a couple of them had been woven into the story.

And then, kind of at the last minute, I was like, "You know, he should be in it, what am I thinking, because he was here at that time."

It's a matter of respect at this point.

Yeah.

And I'm right, because the book ends in the 1950s, and that's exactly when he was there.

So I put him in the story.

So in the 1950s sections, the American journalist Salisbury shows up.

And at one point near the end, the count needs a disguise.

And so he goes in the coat room of the restaurant, and he steals Harrison Salisbury's trench coat and hat, and wears it.

You know, at this point, of course, Mr. Salisbury was dead.

And so this was my tribute.

Yeah, it's the beautiful thing about fiction.

Yeah.

This is my tribute.

[crosstalk] This man who had shown me such kindness as an eight-year-old.

Yes.

And he wasn't your last important mentor.

No.

No.

And I mean, I'm sort of jumping all over your life here, but after you went to Yale and Stanford, and you got your master's, and you were going to pursue literature after school.

And you wrote for the Paris Review.

You had your master's thesis published in the Paris Review, which doesn't happen to everybody.

And can you tell us a bit more about Peter Matthiessen and that relationship?

Yeah.

So as I said earlier, I've been writing fiction since I was a kid.

And so when I got to Yale as an undergraduate, it was very much a part of my course of study there.

I was a literature major.

I jam-packed my schedule with the reading of literature, but then also I was doing writing seminars at the same time.

And I was fortunate enough that in my junior year, I guess it was, Peter, this great American writer, I think he's the only person who's won the National Book Award for both fiction and nonfiction, which is really mind-boggling in itself, because he was a great novelist.

He was a great naturalist and a great writer of natural history and anthropology.

So anyway, he came to the campus, first semester.

I applied to get into his seminar.

I got in.

And what ended up happening is that in one of those seminars, you're kind of handing in stories, you know, every week or what have you.

And every week, Peter would read what was handed in, and he'd say, "Okay.

Today, I want you to read your story, and we're going to talk about it.

And you read your story and talk about it, and we're going to talk about it."

And in like the first three weeks, he had me read three of my stories, like in a row.

And so at the end of like the fourth week or something, he said, "Hey, listen, can you stay after class?"

And so I said, "Sure."

So everybody left.

And Peter said, "Listen, Amor, I don't know who you are.

I don't know why you're here.

I don't know what you want from this.

But I think that you may be gifted at this.

So I'm going to take your time in this room very seriously, and I hope you will take your time with me just as seriously."

And as you anticipate, this became a very important moment in my life, mostly because if you - any, I think, young artist who really at the age of whatever it is, 8, 10, 12, really decides I want to do this thing, dance, rock and roll, whatever it is, film, you kind of start, you immediately go into a bimodal life where half the time you're like, "I think I can really do this."

Even as a young person, I think I can do this.

I think I could be a writer.

And as I read other books, and I look at my own writing where I see my peers' work, something tells me that I think I can do this.

And then, the other modality is, "Are you nuts?"

[laughter] Why would you think that you could do this?

There's no evidence that you could do it."

So there's that moment for, I think, any young artist where you or someone on the outside who you respect, you admire, points to your work and says, "You know, this is actually quite terrific."

And that has a lot of bearing because that moment, you can't get it from your mother.

Well, I was going to say, what did your parents think of this?

What is your.

I love my mom, but it doesn't work anymore, you know?

[laughter] At that critical juncture, you need it from the outside.

Right.

It's got to be an outsider.

So yes, that was a great gift that Peter gave me in helping sort of launch me in my ambition of being a serious writer.

Right.

But there's a gap.

Yes.

There was a gap.

Can we quickly address the gap?

You want the second half of the story?

I just want - yes, I want the second half of the story.

[laughs] So what ended up happening is, then I went to Stanford and wrote fiction there, and I moved to New York City to be a novelist, and I had stories in the Paris Review, which was great.

And Peter was still a mentor of mine.

So what ended up happening is that I needed to work in New York.

My goal was to be a writer, and I was writing a book, but I was feeling claustrophobic and lonely and living in an illegal sublet in the East Village.

And all my friends were going out and whatever.

And I was broke.

So a friend of mine started an investment firm, and I joined him.

And, you know, for the next 21 years, I was an investment professional.

You know, I helped build this firm, which still thrives today and is terrific, you know, filled with terrific people and everything, and does terrific work.

But along that road, in the first 10 years I was working, I joined - I stopped, basically stopped writing.

And I would have lunch with Peter every year or twice a year.

And he'd say, "Hey, how's your book coming?"

And I'd say, "Oh, it's coming along."

And he could tell it wasn't coming along.

And he was really disappointed, and deservedly so because we had that conversation that I'm going to take you seriously.

Yes, he reached down with his finger and tapped you.

Exactly.

And here I was years later, drifting, artistically speaking.

And so he was very disappointed.

And so finally after, I don't know, maybe five years of that, we go to lunch.

And at the end of lunch, and he says, "Listen, Amor."

And this probably in his '70s at the time, he says, "Amor, at this point, I've seen several generations of artists, including my own generation.

And what I can tell you is that there's something about Wall Street, that the work is compelling enough, interesting enough, that the people are fun enough, that the pay is good enough, that when a young artist goes to Wall Street, he says, my experience is that they never come back.

And so I think you should consider your life as a writer over."

And thanks for lunch, you know.

So in a way, in retrospect, of course, this was his second gift to me.

You know, the first was to say, "I think you have this in you."

But the second was to be like, "I think you've blown it.

And I think you may have been a waste of my time."

Now, I never asked him whether he secretly hoped for otherwise.

[laughs] [laughter] But that's what I needed in a way to say, "Okay.

Even though I have this job, even though it's a lot of fun, even though we're out having a good time with our friends in the city, and at the age of 30 or whatever we were our early 30s, it's time to force myself.

To reorient.

And so I began writing on the weekends.

And I spent seven years writing a novel, I didn't like and set that aside.

I learned a lot from that.

I wrote Rules of Civility.

It became a bestseller.

And then, I retired from the firm.

And I've written full-time ever since.

Coda, last little bit.

Thank God, Peter was still alive at the time.

That was going to be my next question, yeah.

So when the book became a bestseller, you know, he invited me out to lunch out in Sagaponack.

And I drove out.

And we had lunch together.

I think it was certainly a relief for me.

But I think it was a relief for him, too, to know that his effort was not ultimately wasted.

Not in vain.

No.

I observed, I don't think of you as a historical novelist at all, which is interesting.

Because it seems that the vast majority of your work is set in other eras.

And I'm wondering, is there something about our era that makes you steer away from it?

Today is tough, you know.

The answer is really that I don't have - because you're right.

I appreciate you saying that.

I don't consider myself an historical novelist.

I don't consider myself as one who writes historical fiction in whatever that means.

Whatever that means.

And not to stigmatize historical fiction, but I just don't think.

Yeah.

You know what?

And there's people who I think really set out to write historical fiction.

There's people who love to read historical fiction.

So I'm not trying to.

Who do a lot of research.

Yeah.

And I'm not saying.

They're research guys.

Well, that's true.

█ and gals.

Yeah.

Some of them really are.

Who are very interested in making sure that they recreate this moment in time for the reader.

And the readers love that dynamic.

And I'm in a different - I'm doing a different thing.

But I think that the answer is why were my first three novels set in different times?

And they're getting closer.

And half of Table for Two or much of it is set in around the year 2000.

So I'm edging in.

[laughs] Will there ever be a work that integrates the iPhone what I'm asking.

Well, yeah.

[laughter] And so I think the technical answer is that when I have idea for a story.

And I'm like, "Oh, yeah, that's a great idea.

Let's think about that.

Let's focus on that as a potential short story or novel."

When I do that, one of the first questions you ask is, "When did this take place?

Where does it take place?"

And for each idea I have, there is a better answer.

It's not necessarily today.

Oh, that idea, yeah, that'd be so great in fill in the blank, in the '50s.

Now, it might be that that would be so great around the year 2000 or whatever, you know, or today.

So a lot of the time is tied to what period does the story deserve to be told in.

And that's where that comes from.

But the deeper answer, I think, is that as a novelist, I am - there are a lot of writers who do terrific, timely work.

So, like, for instance, a lot of nonfiction is timely work.

People are writing about what's going on at the White House or what's going on in the Middle East, or what is the new rise of social media or the phone, me, you know.

And so there's a lot of nonfiction that are written to the times.

They're meant to be timely books.

And my driving impulse is I'm not really interested in writing timely work.

I'm interested in really writing timeless work.

And for me, my instinct about myself as an artist is that I can do that better.

I can write a timeless work if I kind of shove the timeline a little bit.

And I can kind of push some of these things off the table that fill our daily lives already.

And whereas I think if you're writing a book about today and you're including all that stuff, you feels bound to the times.

We're all.

Well, and it moves so fast.

I mean, yeah.

And then, you have that.

It's all changing.

So for me, I am interested in whatever the story is, is that somehow it has the ability to present a timeless experience for the reader.

And I'll choose the timing based on my instincts around the tale.

Do you think you would have been more comfortable in another era?

And if so, which one?

Which one?

If you could choose to time travel back, I mean at the Paris Review parties, it sounds like, would have been a fun thing for you.

I love cultural history.

And so there's many periods over the last thousand years that you'd love to be in.

My God, you'd love to be in Florence as the Renaissance is being invented.

You'd be carrying buckets of water in the street for a living.

But I am one of the people who does believe that there's no time I'd rather live in than now, really.

I mean, that's ironic given, I guess, the way I write.

But I think it's amazing what we're witnessing.

And of course, there are great luxuries to our times in terms of access to health care and whatever.

But romantically, you know, yeah.

It's not a coincidence, I suppose, that when I was thinking about all the things I was going to do first that Rules of Civility is where I started because I love the '20s and '30s, you know.

And I love the movies of the '30s.

Again, that's probably why I was so intrigued in following Eve in the collection, which takes place in Hollywood in 1938.

My father was a great movie lover.

And as I grew up, I came of age in the '70s.

That was the era - I was in Boston, but we were in shooting Distance of Cambridge.

And so that was the era where there were two movie theaters in downtown Cambridge that showed a different double feature every day.

And in the style of that time, they were paired double features.

So meaning like, it would be one - you know, on Tuesday it would be two Audrey Hepburn movies.

And on Wednesday, it would be two Marx Brothers.

And then, it would be two Western classics and then two gangster movies, and on and on, and on, and two James Bond movies.

And so my youth, a lot of it was my dad and I going in on Saturday or Sunday, you know, to do the double feature of something.

And he was a fan of the '30s and '40s and Bogart and all that.

And I very much became a fan of that, too.

And so that certainly fuels that sort of love.

Of course.

And then, it was revived in the '70s.

So then, you get the call.

Your novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, has been optioned for what they - it's funny, they used to call it a miniseries.

Now, they call it a limited series, which sounds very much more, you know, like a vintage connoisseur wine thing.

Anyway, starring Ewan McGregor.

Ewan?

Ewan?

Yeah, Ewan.

I say Ewan.

You say Ewan.

Anyway, you get that call, and what - Hollywood is beckoning and opening its arms, tell us what happened next.

Like, what was your involvement and experience?

First of all, let me say that I say Ewan, and he has never corrected me.

[laughs] Maybe he's being polite.

Yeah.

That does not mean it's right.

That does not mean I'm right.

I try not to say it with a Scottish accent, because that's a bad habit.

Well, how does he say your name?

That's the question.

He got it right.

But of course, when you want to be a writer as a kid, and it's your whole ambition, you don't grow up being like, "I want to write a book that is read by many and then turned into a movie."

[laughter] You don't care about that, really.

But you write the book, and what you hope, of course, is number one, that you've written a book that you yourself are like, this is approaches as good as I can do it.

I mean, I'm proud of it, artistically.

Then, if it's well-received, that's terrific.

If it's received by a lot of people, even better.

The conversation that people are having in their own lives about the work, that's what you're there for.

That they are moved by it, or that they had an insight about it, or that they're talking about it with their spouse, or their kid, or - that's really what you're in it for.

When they say, "Listen, we'd like to turn it into a movie."

You're like, "You know, that's not my ambition, but okay, that's pretty good.

That's fun.

That sounds like fun."

But you kind of have to kind of treat it as that.

Like, it's a fun, an amazing luxury to have happen to your work, but it's not your work because you kind of have to have a, I think, for me, for many, a healthy distance to it, because it is going to be an adaptation.

They are going to change things.

And you need to be prepared for that.

And they also may do a job that's great, and you may do a job that's bad, and you don't want to be too bound up in that.

Your book is the book.

Because they could do a job that's bad that is a hit.

Well, that too.

Yeah, that's even worse, right.

[laughter] So it's very complicated.

So anyway, when the team was beginning to work on A Gentleman in Moscow - and they're being very polite in terms of including me in certain things.

And so I was involved in hiring the head writer.

I was involved in hiring the director.

I was involved in hiring Ewan, you know.

And, I mean, I had a veto on who would be the leading actor, who would be the leading lady.

And what they kind of said was, "Listen, Amor, if we get you involved in hiring the writer, the director, the lead actor, the artist, then what we'd hope is that you could have confidence and take a step back and let the team do their job," which is great advice.

But they would then reach out and say, "You know, we want you to know where we are."

And so they send me the drafts of the first three episodes.

And right at the time that I received them, I am in Berkeley, and I'm having lunch with Michael Lewis, who's a friend.

And Michael Lewis, of course, wrote Moneyball and The Big Short, and Blindside, all these terrific works of nonfiction that were turned into great movies.

So he's very experienced in this particular topic.

So over coffee or whatever, he says, "Hey, so how's A Gentleman in Moscow, how's the project going?"

And I said, "Well, they just sent me the drafts of the first three episodes, and they've asked me for my feedback, and I think they may be just being polite."

And there's a pause, and Michael says, "Amor, they're definitely just being polite."

[laughter] And he says, "In fact, not only do they not want to know your opinion, they wish that you were dead.

[laughter] Yeah.

I made Michael pick up the check on that one, you know.

[laughter] Michael's right in so many ways, but it wasn't that bad.

Going to the set was a lot of fun, and seeing the creative effort that these other artists are putting into the work was very humbling and satisfying.

Because yeah, I'm a writer, but here's a costume maker with 30 years experience, who's spent the last three months doing drawings out of the book to try to imagine what all the various characters are going to look at, not just in 1922, but in 1930 and 1940.

And it's just incredible.

And you go on the, what do you call it, the trailer, and there she is with all the.

Regalia.

Yeah.

And saying, "I want to walk you through.

Here's the choices I've made and why."

And this is true, so I'm with my wife, and she says, "Let me just give you Anna, Anna Urbanova, to give you a sense of how I approach things.

And we're going to start with 1922 or whatever, and when she's at the height of her fame, and she's arrogant, and later she's going to be humbled, and I'll show you that.

So at the height of her fame, and she's beautiful, and she's young still, and we really wanted to have an authentic deco feel for her first two dresses."

And one of which is backless.

And so we scoured England.

We shot in Manchester, England.

We scoured England, and we could not find what we want.

And so we found two period dresses, one in France, one in Spain.

And when she says period, what she means is, they were made in 1922.

And so she takes these dresses out, and they're 100 years old.

And they found these in order to capture that moment in the film, and that's going on set wide.

You know, the prop people are doing that.

The set designer's doing that, everything.

These people are incredibly talented and experienced who are putting their attention to try to bring a detail to life.

Now, some of you may watch the series and be like, "Oh, it doesn't suit me or it does, or whatever."

But that's the nature of the adaptation.

But Ewan McGregor's amazing, and we were very fortunate that he was the person who ended up playing the lead role.

Yes, and it widens your audience.

Yeah, I want to put that, and you're right.

The main reason you actually say yes when they call is - can we make your thing into a thing, a series or a film, a feature film?

The main reason you say yes is because you crossed your fingers that it is going to bring new readers to the book.

That's right.

Which is really where you start, and where you're - that's your hope.

Yeah.

Have you had moments as an author where you have been recognized as a celeb?

When did you realize you had made it as an author?

Oh, that's an interesting question.

[laughter] Well, I mean, there's shallow answers and deeper answers.

I want the deep answer.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

I was going to give you the shallow one.

No.

[laughs] I'm going to give you the shallow one first.

Fine.

The shallow one is you do get these things where it's - someone will reach out to you and say - you know, a good example is I got an e-mail one day from my agent saying, "Hey, listen, an e-mail is coming in hot.

I know you're probably working, but make sure you look at it."

So e-mail comes in a few minutes later, and it's someone saying, "Hi, I am personal assistant to Jackson Browne, the rock and roll star.

And he's a big fan.

He's performing tonight at the Beacon.

He would love to know whether or not you'll be his guest at the show."

And you're like, "Wow, I loved Running on Empty, and I love Jackson Browne."

So like, that's the shallow version.

Where you're like, "Oh, man, that's so exciting."

And I'll just pose a quick footnote, what do you call it, the personal assistant says, "Bring a friend, meet us.

You don't go to the main entrance, go around the corner to the stage door in the alley, you know, it's a door with a bang on the gray door."

And so I call my buddy, and I'm like, "Hey, you're not going to believe what just happened."

And he's another rock and roll fan.

I'm like, "Well, you know," he's like, "Oh, my God, I'm definitely coming, you know, cancel everything."

So we go uptown.

We have dinner.

We have drinks.

We're all excited.

And then, we go to the thing, we go down the alley, and we knock on this gray door, and nothing happens.

[laughter] And I was like, "Oh, my God, it's my brother-in-law."

[laughter] It's my brother-in-law, Dan, has set this whole thing up.

But then, the door opens, and it was Jackson Browne going, "Hey, boy."

You know, I was like, "Hey."

[laughter] But there was a moment there where I was like, "Oh, man."

But the deeper thing is - because the question is like - I don't know how you phrased it, but when do you know that you feel like you've reached a point as an author.

Security.

And maybe there's never security, because writing is awful every time you sit down.

I don't know.

And this is the deeper answer.

The deeper answer is that I'm writing books - different writers are writing in different ways and for different purposes, and with different ends.

But I am, as I said, trying to put this thing into the world, which is rich and complicated, and has many - like, when someone says to me, "What's your book about?"

I'm like, "If I could tell you what my book was about, the book would be a failure."

It's not supposed to be about something.

It is a world in which life is unfolding with enough poetics, enough poetry, that different readers can come to it and walk away with different impressions.

That's the grand ambition, to create something that can be read by a man or a woman, a Jew or a Gentile, someone wealthy, someone, you know, of working class, someone an American, a foreigner, whatever, Black, White, Asian, of any, could come from any background, and get lost in the work, and walk away with impressions and emotions that are meaningful to them, and favorite passages, and insights, and something that it's like the tuning fork of the book is hit for them on page 282.

And that's what you're trying to achieve.

[applause] Well, thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Yes.

My cousin Linda said, when I told her I was interviewing her, she's a big fan, and she said that she felt that unlike so many cultural products today, that you had a basically kindly view of humanity, which I found interesting, because that wasn't my, you know, media.

I looked again at the work, and I thought, I don't see clear cut heroes and villains.

Anyway, I just wondered if you agree with that, with her assessment.

Yeah.

Well, I think as a writer, I am certainly more kinder open-minded as a writer than I am as a person.

[laughter] I'm half kidding about it, but the serious part of that is that I do think that part of the goal of being a novelist or a fiction writer, whether you're in short form or long form, in a way, it is probably the most important goal, is that you master the ability of bringing individuals to life.

So if we think of the great works of literature, it's very rare for us to look back and say, okay, this is an extraordinary novel or a great play, where we can't sort of imagine the person or the people at the center of it, Huck Finn in Huck Finn, and Anna Karenina in Anna Karenina, or what, take your pick, and Shakespeare, of course, teaches the 500 years that follow of what the ambition should be, because he's so talented at bringing very deftly three-dimensional figures to life with all of their virtues and vices and their whims and their contradictions and their flaws, and that's, I think, we all inherit that goal.

That in crafting a novel, you're trying to bring people to life, and so I'll quickly describe this, because I think it's interesting, but if I'm working on a book, I'm a designer, so I'll spend years designing a book, and I'll outline it very carefully.

I'll fill notebooks with everything.

I'll know long before I write an outline, I'll know everything that's going to happen.

In my notebooks, I'll design the settings, the characters and their backgrounds and their personalities, all the events, the interactions.

When you say design, you're just saying writing, right?

Or you're drawing little.

I'm writing in notebooks.

And I'm tackling different things and different chapters.

And then, once I know everything in the book, then I write the outline, and then I start to write chapter one.

And so it's this sort of long process.

So when I write chapter one, I do have a keen sense of who the characters are.

I think I've got a sense of the count, and we're describing, I can take a pretty good stab at it, physically, emotionally, whatever.

But what happens is that you start to actually write, and so for those of you who know that book, the count gets sentenced to house arrest, and it's 19, you know, whatever, 22, and he's an aristocrat.

Because I know everything that's going to happen, because I know he's going to, you know, be okay, sort of showing his strong response to his circumstance, but he's going to start to get claustrophobic and frustrated and a little depressed, and then he's going to meet this young girl.

And the young girl is going to have a very different view of the hotel.

She loves it.

She thinks it's adventurous and exciting, and so she's going to kind of become his first friend as a new isolated person, and she's going to sort of open his eyes to the excitement of the hotel and kind of save his sense of optimism and positive sort of being.

So you're writing, you know all this I'm writing, and I'm getting to the moment where they meet, and it's in the restaurant, and they're having some sort of an exchange, and I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And she says this and he says that, and you'll pause.

You'll be like, you know what?

That's just what you might expect from somebody as that I would have described at the beginning, but he would not say that in that circumstance.

He would say the opposite, you know, and here's kind of why.

And you're like, yeah, that's right.

That's what he would do.

And because of that moment, I now have a better sense of who he is, so I go back to the beginning.

And this is also happening during the design process.

This is before even draft one.

Yeah.

So you start to reimagine.

Say, okay, now, I get it, because in that circumstance, he does that.

And then, you start to go, you write through it, and then later, he's going to meet this actress, and they're going to be the flirtatious, and they're going to end up at a dinner and her thing, and again, there'll be an exchange, and he'll say something else.

He'll say, no, that's not right.

He would do the opposite.

He'd do this other thing.

And you go back to the beginning and start again, because you're having a more complex sense of who he is.

Now, of course, what's behind this is the fact that this is the way that we are as human beings, that as human beings, we don't generally have people who are shy and bold or greedy and generous.

What we have is all of us have the capacity for shyness or boldness depending upon the circumstance.

There is that moment where depending on who's in the room and what's been said and how we're feeling and what's happening, that we are more shy than we normally would be or more bold, whatever.

And all of human interaction is this, is all these various contradictory personality traits that can express themselves under the right condition, and so that should be true of the characters, but it's through the imagining of all the events and the interactions that you sort of open the window and the door on understanding the more complex nature of the personality, and that's why you got to go back to the beginning, because now that you have a more complex understanding of the character, a more three-dimensional one, that should to some degree affect everything that comes after, the events, the conversations, the emotional content, and so what you have to picture here as a last note is that I'm doing this for all the characters.

So each time there's an interaction, you're getting a better sense of not only the count but of the other characters, and you kind of go back.

And I think that if the characters in my work, the lead characters, the secondary characters, have a quality of life-likeness, it is definitely because of this, my willingness to keep imagining them in different situations and revising my understanding of them into an increasingly complex and three-dimensional shape.

You developed a system for writing.

I don't call it that, but yeah, I mean, I don't.

Yes.

Were you always this organized?

[laughs] Probably not when I was 20.

Having had a profession, having to write Rules of Civility while having a profession and young kids, you certainly had to be more organized.

I do reflect on what I do.

I think a lot of writers do.

So you do try to draw lessons and understand what's working and what's not working, and then to try to benefit from that as you move forward as an artist.

But I will say one thing about it is that, because this is counterintuitive but very important, I am a planner, a designer.

I do these very detailed outlines.

The counterintuitive part here is that the reason I've become such a devoted outliner is that if we think - this is a soft science a little bit, but we know that the brain is two hemispheres and that they can serve different functions in our daily lives.

So the right side of the brain is the more creative side of the brain.

It has a tighter connection to the subconscious, to the dream state, whereas the left side of the brain is the one that is more analytical, more clinical, and it's better for decision-making, et cetera, and precision, facts.

And so as I say, the two sides of the brain can come into the foreground and back depending upon what we're doing.

Well, what I think I've discovered about myself is that if I don't outline a book in detail, I don't know what's going to happen, that when I sit down to write a chapter, it's the left side of the brain that's going to take over, the decision-making side, because you have to figure out what's going to happen, who's the character, what's his or her name, what are they doing here, what do they say, what's the room look like, did I slam the door on the way out, blah, blah, blah, blah, so all these decisions.

And I think that dampens the influence of the poetic side of my brain as I'm writing that section.

So if I can invert that, if I know everything that's going to happen in the chapter, what that means is that the decision-making side does not have to be in the forefront, and it frees up the more poetic side of my thought process to take over.

And that's where the real ambition is, is to have the poetry infuse the sentences such that you have the unexpected image that's perfect.

You have a metaphor you didn't anticipate, an allegory, an illusion, a poetry of the sound of the words coming together in a cadence you don't anticipate and to have the art of the writing maximized by not being in the decision-making mode while writing the chapter.

So that's kind of why I've become so.

It sounds like flying a plane.

Yeah, I guess so, yeah.

If you were to meet, or maybe you do meet, a young writer today who was perhaps graduating school and aspiring, how would you advise or guide that person?

Or how have you advised or guided that person?

Or do you think they're the competition and you shouldn't encourage them?

[laughs] Tell them nothing.

Yeah.

No.

It sounds really silly and pithy, but really, because when I think about it to myself, and I think about it in my own life, is it comes down to read, write, repeat.

If you want to be a writer, you have to first be a serious reader, and you have to love it, and you have to be sort of constantly moving back and forth, where you say, "Okay, I want to figure - I want to, this Joseph Conrad, what's he all about?"

I read Heart of Darkness in high school, but I've never read any of the novels, and he's famous, what's he about?

So you dig in, and you start to read through Joseph Conrad, but as a writer, so that you're trying to understand, how is he doing what he's doing, and what do I love about it, and what do I hate about it?

And oh, my God, what an incredible facility with the English language for a guy who wasn't born speaking English.

And so you're also building ambitions and aspirations as you're reading it.

And then, you go and you write.

And you don't say, I'm going to do a Joseph Conrad story.

But you go back to your work, and you hope that having internalized sort of the breadth of his artistry, that it's begun to not shape yours in the sense of now you're writing on Joseph Conrad, but more like open up for you a bigger sense of what storytelling can be, how it can be achieved in a different way.

And so you kind of take that as a new - sort of it adds elements to your mastery of craft.

And then, you go back and read something else and write, and then read and write, and read and write, and read and write.

And I think that really ultimately that's, you know.

It's the cycle of life.

That's it.

Well, I think that is a wonderful - I could ask you dozen more questions, but I think that is a wonderful place to end in the practice, to note that the practice of reading is so intimately related to the practice of writing, which duh, but it's just a absolute truth.

So thank you for reaffirming it.

And thank you, everyone, for coming.

Thank you, Alexandria.

Alexandra.

Alexandra.

And we have more to say.

Thank you, Louisville.

Thank you, Louisville, for having us.

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