Book’s best character is its author
What is it like to be a journalist on a remote island 3,000 miles from the industry’s center in Manhattan?
“If I had a therapist, I’d probably be unpacking it with him,” says Jon Mooallem, the New York Times Magazine writer who spent 12 years in the Bay Area before moving to Bainbridge Island near Seattle, before quickly diving into his thoughts on belonging the surreality of “Twitter Society,” and what people get wrong about a writing life in the woods.
But soon enough, he catches himself and starts to laugh.
“I should have just said ‘pass,’ ” he says. “You really cut right to the core of a lot of uneasiness and angst, I think. But I do like it here.”
Mooallem is a master of angst and whimsy (though he hates that word), big feelings and big ideas. His articles, many of which feature him as a character, take you to far-off locales and to the exposed hearts of an eccentric cast of characters. He’s your favorite writer’s favorite writer.
Now a book, “Serious Face,” out Tuesday, May 17, collects articles and essays from his last decade in magazine journalism. There are stories of monk seals and misunderstood Neanderthals, forest fires and bears, con men and Charlie Kaufman.
“Serious Face” takes its name from a piece about a Spanish bullfighter from the 1940s with an uncanny resemblance to Mooallem. “It only took reading a handful of pages of the biography to understand that Manolete’s conspicuous ugliness seemed to be a defining feature of his persona,” Mooallem writes. “He was ugly the way that Einstein was a genius, the way Gandhi was nonviolent, the way Jeff Bezos is rich.”
Mooallem spoke to The Chronicle by phone from his front porch on Bainbridge Island, where the reception is spotty and birds chirped throughout the call.
Q: What is the distance between the Jon Mooallem who goes to the gro
cery store and makes pancakes for your kids and the “I” character in your writing?
A: I’ve actually been thinking about that quite a lot, because of the piece about my face. I think in some ways there is distance, but just thinking that hard about your perspective on something, distilling it down into prose, and then publishing it somehow also makes it a more real part of you. It never feels like a performance or anything, but I think all of us have a sense that you’re much bigger than something that you, at any one moment, can communicate. But like I said, I don’t understand myself. But do any of us? I don’t know ...
Q: Has writing about yourself always come naturally?
A: It’s sort of bizarre because I got into magazine writing during a time when, mentalhealth-wise, I wasn’t doing so great. It was a huge relief to take the puzzlesolving algorithm that was running in my brain all the time and had been turned on myself and turn that outward. It was freeing to just try to absorb things that were happening in the world and think about what they meant. I think that was the whole point for me.
So, it’s strange now to put more of myself in stories. In most cases, the editors that have pushed me to do it have been absolutely right, but I just have real trepidation about it because of that history. I guess I don’t really trust the process of thinking too hard about myself — it doesn’t always work out so well for me. It feels fraught for me is all I’m saying. I do spend time just kind of imagining what mean people on the internet might say about something. But I hope it doesn’t change me too much.
Q: Is there a favorite scene or story from the “Serious Face” collection?
A: There’s a piece that I did almost 10 years ago about these monk seals in Hawaii. I had forgotten how special of an experience that was. There were all these endangered monk seals being murdered and, in a roundabout way, I ended up actually solving the crime.
When I was talking to the young guy who killed the first seal, it just felt so unreal at the time. Looking at the piece again, after all these years, it was almost like there was a whole other layer of disbelief about how unlikely the whole scenario was. I had enough distance to forget what it felt like to be there and to experience it more as a reader might.
Q: I’ve spent time in Maui, and I couldn’t believe you were able to take the reader to Niihau, this mysterious private Hawaiian island, in the middle of a magazine piece.
A: I was finishing putting together this book in the summer of 2020 at a time when any assignment that I had before the pandemic started I had finished and I had not been able to take on more work because I was just gonna be a parent for the foreseeable future. So, all I really had the time to do was finish this book. There was a part of me that almost felt like I was dead and I was looking back — like this was the document that would encapsulate my life after I was gone. I literally had the thought: This book would make more sense if I were dead (laughs).
I just could not believe the bizarre scenarios that I had managed to find myself in over the course of the last 15 years. And that monk seal story was definitely one of them. How are you going to talk your way onto a private Hawaiian island essentially run by a 21st century feudal lord and not try to convey what that felt like? I mean, what a waste of an opportunity. What a waste of an experience.
“Like I said, I don’t understand myself. But do any of us?”
Jon Mooallem, author of “Serious Face”