In 2005, The Atlantic published an essay by Walter Kirn titled “Lost in the Meritocracy.” The story about Kirn’s experiences in education both before and during his time at Princeton elicited a flood of reader response from people who identified with both the personal and structural problems that Kirn identified. This year saw the publication of Kirn’s memoir, Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever, a project which spurred from the ideas in his initial essay.
Regardless of how he spent his time at Princeton, since graduation Kirn has established a two-tiered career as a journalist and a fiction writer. Kirn has contributed to The New York Times ‘Book Review,’ Time, GQ, Esquire, New York and many other publications. He’s also written five novels and one collection of short stories including Up in the Air, which will be released as a film this Christmas starring George Clooney. Kirn spoke with us about writing a memoir, getting his personality reviewed, and the constant struggles of a freelance writer.
Lost in the Meritocracy began as an essay in The Atlantic in 2005. What about these experiences did you feel was important for you to write about, and why did you wait until now to do so?
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I’m mostly a novelist, but as a storyteller, I’m always looking for underdeveloped territory. I felt there was a real lack of honest narrative about educational experience, the college years. The ratio of rhetoric and PR to truth telling is skewed. I had a particularly hard time at college for reasons that were personal, but also somewhat structural. And over the years I’ve come to feel that people are less than candid or forthcoming about the college years as a phase of life. I felt like Ivy League education had really come across as a lot of B.S.
| “Turning myself into character and turning my actual experience into a story while remaining faithful to actuality was a huge challenge for me.” |
Was the perspective of more than two decades necessary for you to write this story? In what ways do you think that distance affected the telling of it?
I don’t know that I ever achieved much perspective on the matter, because I never thought about it. College was one of those experiences I was told I should feel one way about. I was supposed to be happy all the time. I was supposed to be grateful. It may speak to my limitations as a person that I felt as miserable as I was. It was only the occasion of starting to think about it again 20 years later that I had any perspective whatsoever because I just blocked it out of my mind. The reason I wrote a book was that after I wrote the essay, I had a sizable response in the letters of personal outpourings. Everyone, it seemed, had been less happy than they were supposed to be and less well educated than they were pretending to be. It seemed a rather widespread experience in college of trying to keep up with people you haven’t decoded yet, doing far more social studies of campus than sociology in your academic classes.
In what ways has the experience of having children affected your thinking on your own education and its value?
In the book, I tried to look at education in the longer term structuring of personality, and I saw that a lot of my personality, and a lot of my generation’s personality, had been engineered, so to speak, by the ideologies and technologies behind our education. It turned out a certain kind of person, of which I was typical, in a way. Of all the forces on the personality we’ve examined in the memoir over the last 20 or 30 years, family dysfunction, etc., perhaps the most obvious had gone unexamined: Education. What we do in school all day. The kind of person they present as ideal to you that you try to be or rebel against being. As I saw this in my children’s lives, I did come to think about it more. In their public elementary school in a small town in Montana, not unlike the small town in Minnesota that I grew up [in], I was surprised at how much more nuanced the elementary school curriculum was compared to when I was a kid, which seemed to be about turning out junior astronauts or something. Between the physical fitness certificate and the IBM-generated reading comprehension kit, I felt like we were being trained for some sort of un-uniformed army of future corporate-nauts.
You’ve written a lot of nonfiction over the years, but never anything book-length. In what ways did the experience of writing novels make the process of writing a nonfiction book easier?
It made [the process] much harder. You don’t have a novel without a story or without a character or all these other classical elements. You think when you sit down to write a memoir that you have a story to tell because you have yourself and what happened to you, but that doesn’t make a character in a story. Turning yourself into a character and making the story story-like are still jobs that you have to do when you’re writing a memoir or nonfiction. You can’t just record a sequence of events and have a narrative. In other words, turning myself into character and turning my actual experience into a story while remaining faithful to actuality was a huge challenge for me.
You realize that the conventions of storytelling are even more important when you’re telling a real story than when you’re telling a made-up one. It’s tempting in the memoir to just set down a dull list of events. In telling the story, you really have to decide what’s important [and] what’s not important: which events speak to the themes of the book, and which aspects of your own personality can be focused on so as to create a coherent character, and what scenes seem to distract from the telling.
| “I feel like I got into whaling five years before whale oil was replaced by petroleum. In the late ’90s, I had very lucrative magazine contracts in several places of the sort that aren’t offered anymore.” |
The book has a very different structure than the essay, but it does start and end with the same scenes. Did you think of the framework of the book as the same as the essay or was it just by coincidence that it worked out this way?
[The book] takes a much broader cut of time. I start with my earliest memories of what I considered my education and I do come to the same end point. The essay was much longer before it ran. It had to be cut to run in the magazine, and there was a lot of stuff that I sacrificed that I just didn’t want to sacrifice. There’s a lot of the formative influences on me could be traced to a time earlier than my admission to college, and the essay doesn’t make a lot of sense because you didn’t completely understand the person. I wrote it just wanting to get down a few things, but on re-reading it, I was made this way at a much earlier stage than I thought. I was part of an effort to statistically segregate and promote American youth that starts when kids are about five and starts much earlier than college.
What do you feel are the essential qualities of a good critic and in what ways did Princeton teach you what not do?
Deconstructionism was in the air at Princeton. There was still a somewhat classical English department probably, but in other arts and departments, philosophy, comp. lit [comparative literature] and so on, deconstructionism had a huge prestige and it was starting to infiltrate the English department. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I came to see criticism in a much more pedestrian fashion. I would say there’s a difference between a book reviewer and criticism proper. I’m a book reviewer. Small “b” small “r.” I have to produce a piece of writing that’s entertaining and absorbing and even perhaps enlightening in itself. You’re a journalist in a sense. You go somewhere others haven’t been and bring back the news and something of the flavor and maybe do a little analysis too that helps you understand why things are the way they are there.
Criticism was held out to be such a high-faluting game in college. It was a way of subverting and deconstructing these texts which had been the instruments of the power structure for so long and would now be exposed as such. I’ve taken a consciously modest approach to it. I reviewed the Thomas Pynchon novel for The New York Times that I was quite aware most people will never go read. They may have never read a Thomas Pynchon novel. Maybe they’ve tried to read one and given up. Maybe they’re huge fans. The best I could do was put the thing in a snow globe and deliver it to people so that whatever that enterprise that Pynchon’s engaged in, it has some life out there even for those who aren’t going to read the thing itself.
| “[The Colbert Report] is a high-intensity experience for the writer because you have to go up against this stylized, ferocious comic genius who starts out at 100 miles per hour and goes to 150 while you’re still trying to catch up.” |
Being a fiction writer, does that affect how you review books? Do you review books in the manner that you would like readers and critics to read your fiction?
One thing I try not to be is at all personal. I realized, when you write a memoir, as opposed to a novel, a lot of the reviews are of the main character as a person rather than as a character. I’ve never had the experience of having my personality reviewed before.
I was writing fiction before I was writing reviews, and I have certain practices. I don’t read any other reviews of a book; I don’t read any of the material that the publisher sends along. I prefer to know as little about [the book] as possible. The notion that novelists are working out certain questions in their work, that the sequence of novels that they create are related to others in some coherent way seems, in my experience, to be exaggerated. Not even the writers of most novels know where the heck most things came from. I try to take each novel as a discreet mysterious object that deserves to be inspected purely on its own terms without reference, usually, to the writer’s other works.
As part of your publicity, you appeared on The Colbert Report, which has become a very sought-after slot for authors. How did this happen, and what did you make of the experience?
I got on [The Colbert Report] because I had originally been on about a year and a half before to discuss an essay I wrote in The Atlantic on multitasking [“The Autumn of the Multi-Taskers“, November 2007] and apparently showed up well enough that they asked me back. [The Colbert Report] is a high-intensity experience for the writer because you have to go up against this stylized, ferocious comic genius who starts out at 100 miles per hour and goes to 150 while you’re still trying to catch up. It does sell books. It’s what they used to call a gas, really, to interface with pop culture on that level when you’re used to doing your work alone. I was on there really because I’d been on there before — and why I was on the first time, I really don’t know. Somebody read something I wrote and thought I might be interesting. But, you know, writers should be at least as amusing characters as politicians, and we see politicians on TV all the time.
How has living in Montana affected the way you work or pursue work compared to a freelance writer who lives in say, New York or Los Angeles?
I never set out to live in Montana. I was living in New York, and I got out to Montana for a story and I couldn’t go back. I think living in Montana allows me to see America as it sees itself. Sarah Palin was not such a surprise having lived in Montana. When I moved out here in 1990, Montana really was far away. I wrote about books for New York magazine where I had to fax my reviews in. There wasn’t a Starbucks. There were few chain outlets or national franchises. Over the years, Montana has been knit into the great cyber fabric of the whole culture. It let me be an outsider, and I think novelists are by nature outsiders — certainly critics are. Criticism implies a distance on the object being criticized, and I feel like living in Montana allowed me to live at a distance from mainstream America.
I also found that frankly there is a parochialism to the media that I found kind of shocking. I wrote a big article on methamphetamine in 1998, I believe, on what was a kind of ubiquitous plague everywhere in the Midwest that I’d been hearing about for years and coming up against for years. My editor in New York didn’t know what I was talking about, as if I was reporting from Burma. I’m very glad that I live in Montana after living in New York because I think that the virtues of living as a writer in a major media center are the sense of standards of excellence that are required in various fields and they breed a certain professionalism and devotion to higher standards that might not feel so urgent in other places, but as far as places to gather material about the human experience, they could be somewhat limiting.
Has the economy had an affect on your contracts with different publications or altered how you pursue work?
Totally. I feel like I got into whaling five years before whale oil was replaced by petroleum. In the late ’90s, I had very lucrative magazine contracts in several places of the sort that aren’t offered anymore. I was able to support myself as a freelance writer. I made a decision early never to teach, so I decided I would support myself freelancing as a journalist. It was possible to do in a way it just isn’t now. People at least as talented as I am who happen to be 15 years younger have to work so much harder, write so much more, and take for it so much less than I had to. It’s really disconcerting. It takes a long time and a lot of concentration and energy and a lot of time to do this well, and the compensation for that time and energy has declined dramatically. I was fortunate in that I got a start when things were a little bit healthier, but if I were starting out now, I think I’d be scared witless.
The other big news right now is a film version of your novel, Up in the Air, starring George Clooney is about to be released.
This is every writer’s wet dream of what happens to a novel of theirs. It so far exceeds what was created from my expectations of what could be drawn from that material that I’m almost speechless. Even if I weren’t involved. It’s a great movie. I couldn’t be more delighted. To be in this declining industry at this somewhat depressing time and have the good fortune of having one of your books turned into a wonderful movie is one of the acts of grace that keeps you going as an artist.
Three tips for transforming a story from personal essay to memoir:
1. Identify underdeveloped territory that strikes a chord with readers.
2. Look at different ways to explore the subject and restore elements that had to be cut from the article.
3. You can’t just record a sequence of events and have a narrative. “You really realize that the conventions of storytelling are even more important when you’re telling a real story than when you’re telling a made-up one, because it’s tempting in the memoir to just set down a dull list of events.”
Alex Dueben is a freelance writer living just outside New York City.
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