No One You Know: Strangers and the Stories We Tell by Jason Schwartzman
Outpost 19, 2021
Laura Evers: Let’s start with your name. As you joke in your interview with The Breads, you just so happen to share your name with a famous actor. To what degree has that tie impacted your identity as a writer?
Jason Schwartzman: During the era of the book, I was deep in a depression and my sense of self became fragile. I had always loved the actor’s work and his movies, but there was a point when Jason’s ubiquity started to feel like a paper cut to my own identity. Sometimes people were disappointed when I’d show up and social media folks relished telling me I was an imposter. When I started feeling more like myself again, I became delighted by our connection once more, and in the many cases of mistaken identity that continue to occur. Recently, I was amused to see myself listed on Amazon as a co-writer of Isle of Dogs and Funny People. Probably, at least for the duration of a first glance, some people will assume No One You Know is his book. I think that plays into a theme of the collection: identity is more fluid than we think.
Your riveting opening entry to No One You Know, “The Shape of a Story,” appeared previously in Hobart, and several of the other stories were published in online literary journals beforehand. When did you first think about grouping them together in a collection, and how did the theme of “strangers and the stories we tell” emerge from this process?
The idea of a book didn’t occur to me until later. These odd stranger interactions were filling up the void of my life, and I recorded them when they were uncanny or revealing. I felt a strong impulse to preserve those moments just so I could remember them. Eventually, I took a memoir class and like Amy Krause Rosenthal, whose work I discovered later, I didn’t have an Epic Dramatic Thing to write about. What I had were dozens of these stranger stories. I also read Bluets by Maggie Nelson around then, which broadened my idea of what a nonfiction book could be (her lyric essay, which I adore, revolves around the color blue). When I gathered an initial chapter for the class, I liked how the stories seemed to build on each other. As I wrote, my idea of who a “stranger” was started to change. Alongside the random people on the street and all the dentists, my ex-girlfriend was in there, along with old friends, doormen, and others. I began to see knowing someone as an unending project. One that was highly incremental and often in flux. The themes I kept coming back to were closeness and distance, often mediated through language and storytelling.
Speaking of shape, can you share a little bit about how you decided to organize the chapters and headings of the book?
I wrote the book while trying to move through a heart-crushing breakup. I was doing my best to hold onto tiny glimmers of our love even as we became more estranged from each other. At the same time, because I felt invisible and intimacy-starved, that tore me open to strangers. While I found plenty of disconnect and rejection with them, a certain warmth and affection bloomed, too. My idea of what made a stranger became jumbled. I structured the book to chart that jumbling, a path of getting closer and drifting away and then coming back, and on and on, whether in person or in memory or through language. The chapters all represent different points in knowing someone—or not knowing them anymore. In between are fragmentary conversations I had that are meant to be almost choral and longer essays further exploring the themes.
Designing pathways is within the area of Urban Studies, which you majored in at Washington University in St. Louis. How did those studies inform your perceptions of place, particularly St. Louis and New York City, which serve as the settings for several stories?
Urban Studies gave me a lens to notice the hidden sinews of a city. I became more clued into sociological, historical, and psychological contexts when thinking about everything from neighborhoods to defended space to social roles to ideas of community. Cities have stories, too, and we drink them in, whether we know it or not.
You mentioned earlier that one theme in this collection is that identity is more fluid than we think. How do the cities in No One You Know participate in the ongoing process of identity formation, both as distinct spatial entities and also in shaping how people recognize (and misrecognize) themselves and others?
The conversations I had were sometimes more open and wilder in St. Louis and more surface-level in New York. I think on some level, that’s a reflection of density. The size and speed of New York famously shuffles people right past each other. The modest size of St. Louis turned out to be a sweet spot—big enough to still have lots of people who don’t know each other, but small enough to frequently create pockets of intimacy. There were more situations like the one in “The Green That’s Left” where it was just me and a dude on the train platform, so there was psychological space for him to ask something, in that case, about my bagful of four-leaf clovers, with the interaction going sideways from there. In New York, with its crowds and frenetic pace, some of the interactions required more of a micro-leap to get started or be sustained. I consciously highlighted the idea of two different cities in the book because my own sense of self seemed to vary between them—I felt much more stilted and closed in New York, where I grew up. I was both swallowed by its massive scale and constrained by being in a place that felt populated with older versions of myself. In St. Louis (still one of my favorite cities), I felt unshackled and expansive, far from home and anyone I’d ever been—free.
Issue 21 of Whale Road Review features an interview with writer Siân Griffiths, who says of her short story “Slippers” that she is “more interested in the small, seemingly inconsequential, everyday love we can feel in person-to-person interactions, even with relative strangers.” What emotions or feelings would you use to describe these very interactions you chart in your book: is it a form of love, or something else?
I thought of it as a kind of love. A phrase I kept coming back to when I wrote many of these stories was: “I love him/her for this.” At their brightest, the moments of connection with strangers were marked by kindness, openness, affection, and humility. There was usually an intensity. A jolt of some kind. Something surprising. The pleasure of detour. Too often we silo notions of love into the romantic. But we love friends, don’t we? You can have love for strangers, too. I did.
In “The Man Who Has Everything” you listen to a guy who calls himself Riley tell stories that may or may not be true. Riley is also one of the few people whose name you reveal to the reader. You remark, “I feel a listener’s high, escaped from my routines. There is nothing he won’t tell me.” So much has been said about the relationship between writing and reading. For you, what is the relationship between writing and listening?
To me, listening is a literary act. The other person is a narrator, and I have the privilege of swimming into their world through their words. Their chosen details, images, and references help color in the grain of their thinking, much like a story. It leads to wondering, which is often an engine for me in my writing.
Visiting the dentist is often described in superlative terms: depending on who you ask, it’s either the most banal, the most inconvenient, or the most terrifying experience one can go through! But your story “A Screw Loose” offers a different take on this exchange. At one point your dentist “pulls down her surgical mask so we are face to face. In such a clinical setting, it registers almost as a kind of nudity, and my recent isolation makes the unexpected intimacy especially potent.” Given the ubiquity with which masks are now worn in non-clinical settings, how does the current climate inform your relationship to this past moment in your life?
It’s definitely a head-spinner. What was then an unexpectedly intimate moment for a very lonely person could now be a scene from a pandemic-era horror film! When some folks read the book jacket and see “during a lonely and difficult year,” they naturally assume it occurred during the pandemic. But it was just another year that happened to be difficult and lonely! Reading that mask passage now reminds me how much I’ve been missing the intensities that proximity brings, even if it happens to be a dreaded dental visit when they’ll inevitably make me feel bad about my plaque buildup.
You use the word intimacy to capture the unanticipated vulnerability and exposure you experience in the dentist office. I can’t help but think about how the word “intimate” can also function as a verb, as deployed by JoAnn Balingit in her poem “Limón-Homage.” The last stanza is: “smiling refugee, perfect immigrant / intimate the way you twist / and tenderize the world.” What do you make of the visible, yet subtle, active quality of the word “intimate” here?
It’s fun to think about the dance of noun and verb for the word “intimate.” As a verb, it means “to hint,” and I think it’s true that closeness often pulls closer through subtlety and hinting. To name or label a thing too quickly or directly can weaken it, but hinted, its power becomes amplified in the space between.
Publishers Weekly says that some of your “most evocative writing is around the elusive camaraderie that develops during pickup basketball games.” What is it about pickup basketball games that warranted several entries, and do you agree that in those stories is where some of your most evocative writing resides?
Like the subway and parks, pick-up basketball games are a vestige of the public in a world that continues to privatize. Courts are one of the few places I can think of where you immediately collaborate with strangers in a continual, complex way without commerce inflecting the interaction in some way (like with a bartender or a meat slicer). I think that helped make it an ideal stage to tell stories of identity, with different “games” functioning as mini-chapters. For all the humor mined from the banality of athlete post-game interviews, sports can be a rich arena to reveal character.
In “The Rules of Getting to Know Someone,” you describe what governs the expectations of a first date, stating that, “I don’t think people are their words. People and their words are different things—the important thing is to meet.” In a different story entitled “In Our Words,” after you stumble upon some handmade notebooks your ex-girlfriend made for you. You write, “To her, words meant little. To me, they meant everything.” If people aren’t the words, and words mean everything, how is meaning constituted out of people?
Many of the stories grapple with how much we can rely on language to connect with another person. Sometimes words end up being things that bring us closer together, let us relate, and other times they’re distancers. Ways of hiding or deflecting. Sometimes language is slippery, sometimes it’s sturdy. My own position on that vacillates throughout the book. It still does.
Although this is a book predominantly about the interactions you have with people, animals also surface on occasion: in addition to the family dog, Indy, there is the bear in “The Shape of the Story,” a rumination on whale autopsies in “Crowds,” and tropical fish haunt the background of your mobile phone in “Screen Saver.” Why the animals?
Most of the stories are not saturated in visual detail, partially because the experiences were so fleeting and also because many took place in interstitial landscapes like elevators or buses or street corners. An idiosyncratic thing someone said often turned out to be a much more salient thing. But there usually turned out to be a powerful image or detail that I felt underscored a theme or mood of the encounter. Sometimes, that turned out to be an animal. For instance, “Crowds” involves two different people struggling to move on from past relationships, so when the podcast host started describing how every beach may have an immovable whale buried beneath it (!), I saw a natural metaphor there of people having their own hidden, immovable histories. In “The Shape of a Story,” the bear (never glimpsed directly) usefully symbolizes the elusiveness of stories and self.
In a recent Human Parts article entitled “A Visit to the Land of Nod”, you write about how the nod acknowledges the human in all of us, citing that “the slightest movement of the head can lend a sense of welcome and grant the gift of recognition to a fellow pedestrian, acquaintance, whoever you happen to cross paths with” (italics mine). Does this map in any way onto how you wish to acknowledge your readers through No One You Know?
The idea of recognition was very much on my mind when I lived these stories and when I wrote the book. Strangers helped me rediscover traces of myself that I worried were getting lost. On a meta level, I love the idea of greeting the reader as one more stranger, and for the reader to receive me, the author, as a stranger, too. I had that latter idea in mind when I structured the book. The first vignette (“Distance”) is of two strangers approaching each other from far away and I chose that, symbolically. That’s also how I started the nod essay. I think it’s fair to imagine reader and author arriving from afar at a similar proximity. Sometimes I think of the book as a single, extended conversation I get to have with the reader wherein we simulate a process of getting to know someone. In this case, me. As the collection goes on, the stories get more personal, and the category of strangers expands to include friends and family, until I’m comfortable revealing more things about myself.
You’re the Founding Editor of True.Ink, “a legendary adventure magazine reimagined for the modern treasure-hunter.” Can you offer a snapshot of how one becomes a modern treasure-hunter, and what a revival of the classic adventure magazine entails?
In its heyday in the 40’s and 50’s, True featured writers like Hemingway, Breslin, and Huxley detailing larger-than-life pursuits like searching for shipwreck gold, solving mysteries, and profiling esoteric characters. We aimed to bring back that plucky spirit with a magazine where readers could not only read about adventures but go on their own, too. We’ve raced to Cuba on General Patton’s old schooner, hosted a late night barn dance, and gone in on a whiskey barrel with hundreds of members, along with many other capers. I’d say the treasure we care most about is being spontaneous and curious, open to any quest that the day may beckon with, big or small.
–
Jason Schwartzman‘s essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, Narrative.ly, The Rumpus, Hobart, River Teeth, Nowhere Magazine, Human Parts, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, Hippocampus Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the senior editor at True.Ink, a revival of the classic adventure magazine. No One You Know is Schwartzman’s debut book.
Laura Evers is a Ph.D. student at Washington University in St. Louis, where she writes primarily about 20th century American literature and visual culture. She’s also an editorial intern for RHINO Poetry.