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Jonathan: (looking at phone) Oh, new voicemail. Let's just see who it was.

Alana: Certainly.

Jonathan: I just got this three days ago, I never had one before, but I figured if I was gonna travel.

Alana: ... good to have.

Jonathan: . don't wanna end up in, like, an airport.

Alana: Yeah.

Jonathan: (listening to voicemail) I love when people go on and on about something so ridiculous

Alana: Yeah.

Jonathan: So, let me turn this turn off.

Alana: Oh no, it's okay.

Jonathan: No I don't want. the fact of the matter is, no one is gonna call with something important.

Yeah, so, look, I could have done something realistic, something transcriptional, but that's just not the point. Really, the point is to create something evocative and sympathetic.

Alana: ... you'd lose the art part.

Jonathan: Yeah. So often you have to compromise reality in the interest of believability. You know, you have to tell a lot of lies to tell other kinds of truths.

Alana: That makes sense. Yeah, I really felt like Oskar, even though he was sort of sort of a prodigy, sort of a not-the-normal kind of nine-year-old. Though I thought he was believable as a nine-year-old! I cracked up when he didn't know who Winston Churchill is.

Jonathan: ... right right.

Alana: ... and the joke that he tells in the limousine on the way to the funeral; I read it and stopped and called my grandfather 'cause he loves bad jokes and I needed to tell him that one right away.

Jonathan: Wait wait, which joke?

Alana: The one where he kicked a French chicken and what did he say. (Jonathan laughs) Oh I was so excited, my grandfather thought it was the best joke of the day.

Jonathan: Ah, ahh, that's great.

Alana: ... he told it to everyone. But then on the same page, literally on the bottom of that page, something else made me start crying. So I think that the novel really does a good job of representing the real in the sense that as much as you're depressed, there's always funny moments in it. Is that difficult, doing that without having an uneven tone?

Jonathan: I think it's just what life is like. It's what my life is like; every day something happens that's kinda funny, and every day something happens that kinda makes me upset. I just want whatever I write to reflect that. Not that it necessarily comes naturally; I mean, I have to consciously think about how I pace things, where I put something like a joke, where I would put something heavier, and so on.

It's funny, I feel like the real question which people don't really ask is, how did you choose to write about September 11th? I feel like one doesn't choose to write about it-one chooses not to write about it. It's such an important, huge, central thing to the culture and to the country that you'd consciously have to choose not to write about it. Writing about it is, it's like, obvious, the humor and tragedy. I think one has to choose not to include both things. They're both so obviously part of you know life.

Alana: I think that's a very true way to see things. I was actually only a senior in high school on 9/11 and so I wasn't, it didn't impact me the same way. You know-we all got sent home from school, but later that day I got my hair cut. Because I didn't know anyone who died and I didn't know anyone who was directly influenced, I felt removed from it. It is true that I was sad that I felt removed from it.

Did you live in New York at the time?

Jonathan: Yeah.

Alana: What was that like?

Jonathan: I felt kind of removed too. I've felt more strongly about it as time has passed. I mean, it's not the kind of thing for you to. look, getting a haircut sounds perfectly natural thing to me, actually, because what are you supposed to do?

Alana: Yeah.

Jonathan: You're in shock, you're confused. Does life go on, doesn't life go on?

I don't mean that everybody should write about it but I mean it's clearly something that people are thinking about, having strong feelings about, and it also seems like writing usually reflects whatever an author is thinking about or feeling. Just in that sense I would think it's only natural it would pop up again and again in writing.

Alana: In terms of getting Oskar's grief sort of 'right', did you talk to people who had lost family members?

Jonathan: I didn't talk to anybody. I read a lot of them though. You know there are literally hundreds of accounts that...

Alana: (the food arrives) ... thank you.

Jonathan: ... thank you. And that was how I got that perspective. But it's not. like, it's really dangerous to get into that conversation, with the idea that you can legitimize.

If I said I'd been in the building then that would really affect the way people read the book. I don't actually think it should. I mean, every book depends on making some sort of leap outside of yourself. That's what literature just depends on. And what's good about literature is the idea that we can share things even though we're not all the same person.

So I never like going too far down that road of saying, yes, I was in New York, but even if I hadn't been in New York, I think I would have the same, the same.

Alana: ... the same desire to talk about it, write about it?

Jonathan: Yeah, or no, maybe I wouldn't have the same desire but I'd have the same right. I'd be equally justified as an artist in writing about it. And yes, I did do some research, but that doesn't, like, bolster the case.

Alana: (gesturing) So, please feel free to eat!

Jonathan: Please you ... See, this is pretty good.

Alana: Yeah.

Jonathan: Now, why are you a vegetarian?

Alana: I, well, when I was eleven.

Jonathan: ... if you don't mind my asking

Alana: No, it's no problem.

I just didn't want to kill animals. I didn't feel like I had a right to kill anything in order to.

Jonathan: ... and I ask just out of, because it's something I think about a lot. I don't mean to make you.

Alana: ... mmn-mmn.

Jonathan: ... put together an argument. Do you eat fish?

Alana: No.

Jonathan: Do you wear leather?

Alana: No. Although my bag is leather because my father bought it for me, but.

Jonathan: Obviously one shouldn't throw things like that away.

Alana: No. Everyone sort of makes exceptions.

Jonathan: Okay, great. That's interesting to know.

Alana: I have friends who are vegans who sort of, you know, they won't eat eggs or dairy because they feel that's exploiting the animal. I draw the line where if it's not factory farming, if it's humane. If chickens will give eggs and cows will give milk in a relatively natural manner, I don't see any reason not to use that. Honey: I have friends who won't even put honey in their tea, and I'm like, that's a little more than I'm willing to do.

Jonathan: So you run in pretty political circles? Or at least that's what it sounds like.

Alana: Yeah, most of my friends, or some of them. I have one set of people who are sort of the writer friends and another set of who are all photojournalism majors or they work for newspapers. It's hard, you can't have a conversation about anything without it becoming a conversation about ideals.

Jonathan: Lucky you!

Alana: It's nice.

Jonathan: I'm just starting to do some stuff with PETA, actually.

Alana: Oh, that's cool.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Alana: My friends used to laugh at me because when I had a car I had all kinds of pro-animal bumper stickers, you know: real men don't wear fur and so on. My family thought it was hilarious since they're just, they're not inclined to.

Jonathan: ... right.

Alana: ... see things the same way.

Jonathan: Some people get turned on to it as young kids.

Alana: I have one friend who-actually, I dated him sort of briefly-and his roommate was a vegetarian, and I was a vegetarian. We didn't really bring it up to him, he took a trip home to visit his family in California, and he went to In & Out Burger, and he had a ten by ten, which is ten patties on a single bun. So he ate that, and he's never eaten meat again. That was his, like, last hurrah of meat.

Jonathan: Ten. Ten patties. For one person.

Alana: It's disgusting! It's nasty. He has pictures. It's really disgusting.

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