Ask the Author: Jonathan Safran Foer
Answered Questions (3)
Jonathan Safran Foer
There is a difference between being "political" and advancing a political argument. HERE I AM is overflowing with arguments, but doesn't have an argument to make. So there is undeniably a sense in which it is political—it overflows with politics. (It seems that anything that in any way involves Israel involves politics.) But unlike EATING ANIMALS, which as you say is "expressly political"—I was making a case against factory farming—this novel presents a chorus of perspectives and voices, not holding one above others, but creating an argumentative environment.
Jonathan Safran Foer
We express ourselves differently. Sometimes it feels better, or at least easier. Sometimes it feels worse, or at least shallower. You're probably asking the wrong person, though, as I don't use Snapchat or emoticons. Technology is used in the book not in order to comment on expression, but as a means for characters to be "elsewhere." Jacob conducts a fantasy life through his phone, but also by browsing real estate ads on the Internet and imagining lives he knows he'll never live. Sam, his eldest son, spends much of his free time in the virtual world of "Other Life." And Jacob's father, Irv, is a kind of xenophobic lawn sprinkler, shooting off his every opinion—and some opinions he probably doesn't actually have—by means of his blog. In the cases of those three generations of Bloch men, technology facilitates being somewhere other than in one's life.
Jonathan Safran Foer
There wasn't any one "idea," but a number of disparate starting points: an affair discovered on a cell phone (which originated in a television project I was writing several years ago); an earthquake in Israel (a curiosity born from an afternoon spent at the Geological Institute in Israel), notes to actors in a future depiction of a family (a short story I'd been working on for as long as I can remember). I have yet to write a novel from a plan, but instead work on what interests me, blindly, until a plan emerges. So it's an inefficient process. Much of what interested me over the past few years didn't have a place in this novel, and so sits in a "castoffs" folder on my computer. But some of what interested me, without having any obvious purpose, ended up changing the direction of the book.
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