Would you be interested in the margin notes in a random person's copy of some novel?ĭorst: I don't know, because there have been times in my life when I've really been put off, when I wanted a pristine copy of a book. So I definitely have value-switching all over the thing.

And Jen and Eric, they speak with more like a reader's-brain voice, so I found myself identifying more with them as readers. And, with S., I thought I would not be interested in Jen and Eric at all, because I thought, 'They're stupider than Straka.' You know? Or 'They're college students, even though one's a grad student, but Straka is a master and is what I really wanna read.' But it all just overlaps too much. But, if it's like David Foster Wallace's copy of Blood Meridian, then I'm more interested in the annotations than the text. It's like, 'I don't wanna read your undergrad ideas about Jane Austen.' I'm just so put off by books that are marked up, like my younger brother's notes on Dickens? Ugh.

I have, one, no interest in her annotations on Jane Austen, and, two, no interest in – the book is just ruined. And when I was first looking at the book, I was like, 'Oh God, that's not a font, somebody handwrote that!' And Jen's handwriting evolves over the book, it changes, and that's so cool.īucher: That's a weird thing for me, because if you've ever been married or moved in with someone, and you merge libraries – I see my wife's college copy of Jane Austen, and it's got her handwriting in the margins. At one point they had the same person doing both Jen's and Eric's writing, just as a placeholder, because they hadn't found the second one yet.Įgerton: There's total personality that comes across in that writing – you know immediately who they are from the way that they write, in so many ways. But they found a couple of people they wanted to work with. I had this vision where they'd, like, send fifty people over, they'd be up on a stage writing while people watched them. Meyers: Yeah, did you audition people for the handwriting?ĭorst: I think they found people in-house. We join the second half of the conversation already in progress, at the point where Matt Bucher is saying:īucher: Did you have instructions about what the handwriting in the book should look like? Brenner have been lightly grilling the author on the whys and wherefores of his stunning new opus. It's the top of the hour, the weather a sunny 37 degrees Fahrenheit, traffic proceeding more or less smoothly through the city's major streets, and you'll recall that the first part of this transcript was published here yesterday, and that Jodi Egerton, Jill Meyers, Matt Bucher, and W.A. transcript here in the everbright pixels of your Austin Chronicle. … and welcome back to the Doug-Dorst-and-four-other-literary-types-talking-about-S.

S doug dorst