You never know exactly what you’ll find in a Kyle Minor book. Minor has written gripping, haunting fiction — but his latest book, the essay collection How to Disappear and Why, shows a very different side of him. At times formally inventive, at times hauntingly candid, Minor’s new book investigates the concept of disappearance from all angles. We chatted over email about the creation of this new book and the paths that led him there.
“Hiding In Plain Sight” tells a complex and often moving story. How did you first encounter Jan Karski’s story? What drew you to writing about him?
I first heard about Jan Karski from Harry Thomason and Philip McMath. Harry told me that Karski, a young Polish diplomat, had tried, at great risk to himself, to get to Churchill and Roosevelt at the height of World War II to warn them that the Germans were snatching Jewish people throughout Poland and herding them like cattle into slaughterhouses. Karski had watched the progression of this with great horror, and he had even traveled in disguise to a last-stop transport depot near the end of the train line and witnessed some of this with his own eyes. Harry and Philip were hoping to make a film about Karski, and maybe one of these days they will. They asked me and Blake Kimzey to write a screenplay, and they had a little bit of source material in the form of a play McMath had written and staged in Arkansas. So we got to work. It was one of the most bracing experiences of my life, digging into the history, reading not only Karski’s memoir, which was lightly fictionalized in deference to Cold War and CIA imperatives, but also the more authoritative biography by E. Thomas Wood and Stanislaw M. Jankowski, and, eventually, many accounts from the voluminous Holocaust oral history and document collections that used to be sequestered to libraries but which are now freely and easily available online. When Blake and I finished working through drafts of that screenplay, we had something I had come to believe was very important and historically neglected, but we didn’t own the rights to do things such as novelize it, and it seemed like forward motion on the movie project was stalling out. Meanwhile, I was writing a book of essays about why and how people disappear or are disappeared, and I was thinking about the balance of Karski’s life, much of which was lived in Washington, D.C., as a Georgetown professor and prolific rehabilitator of rental properties. The sadness of what he had seen, and of the failure he felt in preventing more of it, must have been crushing. To many of the people close to him, it certainly was. They kept committing suicide, and he kept moving forward, reminding people of what history had shown humans to be capable of doing to other humans. The choice to keep living seems, in light of what I learned in the two years I spent immersed in these things, to have been counterintuitive, and difficult, and honorable. Karski never really spoke explicitly about these things, but I couldn’t help but imagine his choice to keep living as an act of personal courage and sacrifice. And humility: Six million disappeared against their will. How could he dishonor their memory by choosing his own death?
Before reading your book, I was unaware that a Winnie the Pooh movie uncannily depicted the mindset of fascism. Reading your description of it, I am a little shocked that this movie exists; has there been, to your knowledge, any controversy around its themes and plot?
You’re talking about Pooh’s Heffalump Movie, a Disney direct-to-video morality play about genocide for an audience of children, with a soundtrack by Carly Simon. It is one of the darkest movies I’ve ever seen, and I am amazed that someone was able to get it made, but I’ve never heard anyone else talk about it. I was introduced to it by my very young child, who was rightly disturbed by what he learned about how people are. My mother had sent it in the mail when I was a graduate student at Ohio State, and I’m sure she had no idea what she had sent. In the movie, Rabbit leads a band of vigilantes to rid the Hundred Acre Wood of the scourge of the Heffalump, and I realized when I wrote about it that the essay was a weird companion piece to the Karski essay. Of course, when you think about it a little more, you realize that children’s literature is full of genocide and genocide-adjacent stories: in Horton Hears a Who, in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in Harry Potter, in The Hunger Games, in The Midnight Zoo . . . It’s not hard to understand why. They are writing about a recurring theme not only of ancient history but also and especially of the 20th and 21st centuries, and because they often write in allegory or fantasy or cartoon containers, it becomes paradoxically easier to look at the awful thing. I think Pooh’s Heffalump Movie is one of the greatest direct-to-video animated films of all time, and that its only rival is the comedy The Lion King 1 1/2, which foregrounds the meerkat and warthog jesters Timon and Pumbaa while the primary mythic drama of The Lion King happens in the background, in imitation of what Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead did to Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
How to Disappear and Why is often a very candid book; I’m thinking in particular of “The Uber Diaries.” But you also mention that there are certain things you won’t write about. Where does that line between candor and privacy exist for you?
This is not an easy question, and it’s a question for which my answer has vacillated career-long, and for which I guess it also vacillates throughout How to Disappear and Why. My first two books took on what William Styron called “the unfinished business of childhood,” which, for me, involved getting some distance on a childhood immersed in a fundamentalism that rejected science and carried some of the dark inheritances of 19th century American South in ways that were sometimes acknowledged and sometimes not. Here’s the problem, though: My parents were not intellectuals. My father went back to college my senior year of high school, and over the last thirty years he has become increasingly sophisticated–even a little progressive, I would say–concerning American culture. But that wasn’t always true. My parents were coming out of working class situations from a position, retrospectively, of real poverty, and they were trying to figure out how to climb out and make a life for their children. When they enrolled me in a private Christian school, they didn’t know it had been founded during the post-integration era of the segregation academy, they weren’t seeking instruction in young-Earth Creationism and men riding on the backs of dinosaurs, they didn’t know that the subterranean culture of the place included extreme tolerance for old-South masculine violence rituals on playing fields and in locker rooms. And they weren’t students of theology. They didn’t understand the very recent, very American nature of what the preachers were saying on Sundays. They were just trying to improve their lot in life, and their children’s, and these were the proximate places and organizations that seemed like they could help. But when I started writing about these things, I was eight or nine years deep into making myself a student of them. Once you get some distance on what is received, you start to see it, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it. There are life consequences, and there are narrative consequences, and not I wasn’t just telling the secrets, I was also showing where I had come from in a way that was deeply threatening to everyone’s idea of what life had been, for the family, for the community, for everything important. That was an extremely disruptive thing I did, and when my second book of stories, Praying Drunk, met a broader audience than anyone expected, my family started hearing from unhappy people from the past. For a while, that caused some breach in the relationship. For me, this was terribly painful, and I just don’t want to go through that again. So the answer I’m giving you, the right-now answer, isn’t an answer rooted in some sense of deeply-held writerly ethics. It’s an answer rooted in the desire to protect myself and people I care about from a second round of pain.
You make use of a lot of different structures throughout the collection, including in the title essay and “On the Desire to Reject Narcissism.” How do you find the right balance of form and content?
I didn’t have a plan, although a shape and a structure and an idea of the way the pieces of the book would work together emerged as I was writing, and in many cases, one essay birthed the next. “On the Desire to Reject Narcissism” is subtitled “Notes Toward a Follow-Up Essay to ‘The Uber Diaries.'” I was feeling a real tension between continuing to write about myself and my experiences and my observation that the culture has become increasingly me-centric, in a manner that those who like to diagnose might regard as narcissistic, and more and more I was asking myself the question: Am I one of those? And I don’t think there’s a single answer to a question like that, because to describe narcissism is to describe a set of behaviors, and as behavior goes, most human beings are a moving target. We operate out of our wants, needs, and desires. We bear contradictory things in tension without resolving the tension. We can be capable of great nobility and great ugliness at the same time, even on the same day, even in the same action. And I am human. I am one of those. So I wanted to examine it. And I wanted to examine it in the books I was reading and the people I was knowing and the social strata I was moving through, up and down and up again. But when I started to write about it, the subject was too broad. There was too much to notice. There were too many false starts. And then I realized: This is what the essay is going to be. I can spend twenty pages, just crafting the many different openings that might illustrate some version of the theme, and that itself began to accumulate in a way that showed a lot about the territory that expanded outward from the inciting question. So that’s why that essay works that way. And that’s more or less true of the formal origins of all those essays. There are lists, associative wholes and fragments, digressions, rhizomes, ekphrastics, synesthetics, linear and nonlinear narratives, lyrics, literary journalism, Cheeverian diaries. The only one that’s really very conventional is the Karski essay, and that’s only because I wrote it first, before I started to see where the book was taking me. And I’ve started in some ways to see the Karski essay as a kind of litmus test for the kind of reader who is engaging me in conversation about the book. If the greatest essay in the book is the Karski essay, that’s probably a reader who prefers an orderly, conventional narrative approach, and who, perhaps, might think that content does more than form to make meaning. I’m not sure I’m that kind of reader today, but maybe tomorrow I will be. I have been before.
A question about the acknowledgements: you write that Lawrence Weschler “caused me to rethink my relationship to the intellectual work of reading, reporting, and writing.” As a longtime admirer of Weschler myself, I’m curious — was that through conversations with him? Through reading specific works of his? All of the above?
I first encountered Lawrence Weschler through a series of “convergences” of disparate art pieces in the early issues of McSweeney’s. At the time I was a graduate student at Ohio State. He came to give a talk there, at the Wexner Center, and he agreed to let me interview him in his hotel room the same day. I was surprised by some things about him. He seemed kind of nervous and fragile. He had a cold and he seemed worried about giving it to me. I hadn’t yet read enough of his work, and he seemed to know it, and through the course of the interview, it seemed like he was holding my hand a little, walking me through the many long threads of his life’s project, which is something more than journalism — he seemed to have been spending his life chasing the human desire to enter into wonder in the midst of a world full of atrocity. So when he covered the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, of course he went to the museum to see the Vermeers, and of course that is where he encountered the judge he had previously seen only behind bulletproof glass, and of course they contemplated together the light from the window just beyond Vermeer’s female subjects who were doing domestic things, and how just beyond that window, no doubt, armies were killing each other in the fields, in a historical moment in which “all Europe was Bosnia.” This conversation was very important to me. It changed how I thought about what essay writing was for, what story writing was for, what journalism was for. And the intelligence evident in his books–of which I immediately began to read all–also showed me that a writer can have intellectual commitments and honor them explicitly in the work, and enrich the work with them, an idea sharply at odds with some of the Raymond Carver minimalism that was still much in the air, and which did so much to impoverish a couple of generations of American literature at least. And then, ten years later, I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and he came there, too, and offered a master class. This time, in preparation, I made a secret website for my classmates, where I collected as much of the Weschler material from the web as I could. I wanted to help create a situation in which everyone might go in loaded up with questions and press him with them. I figured this might be the last time I would be around Weschler, and I wanted to squeeze every last drop of insight from this writer I now believed–still believe–to be one of the great underappreciated genius minds of our time. Of course, he was gracious and he did offer of himself enormously, although I wondered if the intensity of my approach was off-putting. I know what it’s like to walk into a place where you’re meeting people who know a lot about you from your books, but you don’t know them at all, you don’t really know where they’re coming from, and it can be a little bit frightening. Anyway, and yet again, for a second time, I learned so much from listening to Weschler, and when I turned my attention from fiction to essays, I thought about how much I owed to him, how his books and his ideas about the making of things had reshaped my own ideas and rewired my brain in some important ways. The amazing thing is: He’s still going. He has this incredible Substack, with publishes with astonishing frequency, and every issue is its own idiosyncratic magazine. Every time I read it, it gives me hope.
Would you say that your approach to writing has changed over the years between the publication of Praying Drunk and now?
Yes. I wrote Praying Drunk over a ten year period in which I was very much trying to learn how to be a writer. In so many of those stories, I was running on instinct, and I was exhausting the lifelong preoccupations, the dark memories and questions that kept me up at night. I might never again write a book of such intensity, and I might never again write a book that reaches so many readers. But when I read it now, I feel like I’m hearing from a very young person, a writer who hasn’t yet achieved a stable sense of self, a persona very much lacking in adult experience. I’m not young anymore. I’m fifty years old, and I will never burn with the intensity evident in that book. And I really did want to find a new way to be a writer and a person, a healthier way, a less self-obsessed way, and a way that is in greater conversation with the public discourse as opposed to the primarily personal discourse. I think that writing How to Disappear and Why was in large part an attempt to think that through, and try to get to it. At the end of the book, there is a kind of ars poetica for the work ahead. I think I also mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, when I was writing about Alice Elliott Dark. It goes like this:
There is a time to sing the song of oneself, but that time is not forever.
There are other songs.
The song of nature. The song of healing. The song of progress. The song of the ecstatic. The song of myth. The song of history.
In the voice of every singer you can hear the sickness, but not in every song.
All this time I’ve been wishing the wrong wish, but it’s not too late.
For the song to grow the self must recede.
I see a path forward.