Interview with Meghan O'Gieblyn, author of Interior States: Essays
Meghan O'Gieblyn, author of Interior States: Essays, recommends some fantastic books! Before jumping into the interview, please check out Meghan's book:
Review from Book Depository:
A fresh, acute, and even profound collection that centers around two core (and related) issues of American identity: faith, in general and the specific forms Christianity takes in particular; and the challenges of living in the Midwest when culture is felt to be elsewhere. What does it mean to be a believing Christian and a Midwesterner in an increasingly secular America where the cultural capital is retreating to both coasts? The critic and essayist Meghan O'Gieblyn was born into an evangelical family, attended the famed Moody Bible Institute in Chicago for a time before she had a crisis of belief, and still lives in the Midwest, aka Flyover Country. She writes of her existential dizziness, a sense that the rest of the world is moving while you remain still, and that rich sense of ambivalence and internal division inform the fifteen superbly thoughtful and ironic essays in this collection.
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Interior States: Essays
The subjects of these essays range from the rebranding (as it were) of Hell in contemporary Christian culture (Hell), a theme park devoted to the concept of intelligent design (Species of Origin), the paradoxes of Christian Rock (Sniffing Glue), Henry Ford's reconstructed pioneer town of Greenfield Village and its mixed messages (Midwest World), and the strange convergences of Christian eschatology and the digital so-called Singularity (Ghosts in the Cloud). Meghan O'Gieblyn stands in relation to her native Midwest as Joan Didion stands in relation to California - which is to say a whole-hearted lover, albeit one riven with ambivalence at the same time.
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Book Depository €11.15
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Q. Do you have a favourite smart thinking book (and why that book)?
One book that I've returned to many times over the years is William Cronin's Nature's Metropolis. It's billed as a history of Chicago and its relationship to the frontier, though it's really about the entire Midwest and how the hinterlands provided the raw material for the city's industries in the nineteenth century. I read the book for a college course and expected to find its discussion of "commodity flows," the grain market, or canal engineering a little dull. But it's an entirely compelling and energetic book. It feels like a Victorian novel in its capacity to take on the intricacies of various systems and industries while maintaining an expansive, omniscient scope. The book had a particularly strong effect on me in that it was conveying the history of places I knew from childhood: Michigan lumber towns, the Great Lakes, the Chicago stockyards. It had never occurred to me that all these places once belonged to a vast network of commerce. I returned to the book pretty frequently when I was writing Interior States, as I wanted to capture the sense of the Midwest as a dynamic system, a nexus of rivers and railroads that was constantly in flux, where nothing was stable because things were constantly passing through the machine.
Review From Book Depository:
In this groundbreaking work, William Cronon gives us an environmental perspective on the history of nineteenth-century America. By exploring the ecological and economic changes that made Chicago America's most dynamic city and the Great West its hinterland, Mr. Cronon opens a new window onto our national past. This is the story of city and country becoming ever more tightly bound in a system so powerful that it reshaped the American landscape and transformed American culture. The world that emerged is our own.
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Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
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Book Depository €14.57
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Wordery $20.41
Q. What's the most recent smart thinking book you've read (and how would you rate it)?
I loved the book of pandemic essays Zadie Smith put out last summer, Intimations. There are a handful of writers who, when they publish anything new (fiction, essays, whatever), I drop everything to read it, and she's one of them. The collection is very short and most of the pieces are personal. She writes about tulips, about suffering, about her nail salon, all seemingly incidental topics, though somehow each piece manages to distill what it feels like to be alive right now. This past year or so, I've come to value writers who are able to offer a sense of perspective, not in any kind of authoritative way, but rather by using themselves as a starting point, paying attention to what they are feeling and observing and then considering whether it connects to a larger truth.
Review From Book Depository:
Deeply personal and powerfully moving, a short and timely series of essays on the experience of lockdown, by one of the most clear-sighted and essential writers of our time
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Intimations: Six Essays
From the critically acclaimed author of Feel Free, Swing Time, White Teeth and many more
'There will be many books written about the year 2020: historical, analytic, political and comprehensive accounts. This is not any of those - the year isn't half-way done. What I've tried to do is organize some of the feelings and thoughts that events, so far, have provoked in me, in those scraps of time the year itself has allowed. These are above all personal essays: small by definition, short by necessity.'
Crafted with the sharp intelligence, wit and style that have won Zadie Smith millions of fans, and suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these unprecedented times, Intimations is a vital work of art, a gesture of connection and an act of love - an essential book in extraordinary times.
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Book Depository €6.52
Waterstones £5.99
Wordery $7.84
Q. Do you have a favourite childhood book?
I read a lot of C.S. Lewis as a child, including the Narnia series and Till We Have Faces. His fiction has unfortunately gained a reputation for being crudely allegorical, which is true only if you judge it by the standards of literary fiction written for adults. Lewis was unusual in that he understood that children were interested in ideas and capable of a very elementary form of hermeneutics. Many of his characters and storylines symbolize theological concepts, which were already familiar to me. As a child who did not grow up in an intellectual milieu, the series marked my first exposure to the notion that books could have a subterranean layer, that stories could be engaged in some kind of larger discourse. It was the same reason I came to love the Russians in college, novels that were telling a story about particular characters while also dramatizing social, political, and religious debates.
Review From Book Depository:
All seven tales in The Chronicles of Narnia are bound together, with full-colour illustrations, in one magnificent hardcover volume with a personal introduction by Douglas Gresham, stepson of C. S. Lewis. Talking beasts, heroic deeds and epic battles between good and evil await you in C. S. Lewis's classic fantasy series, which has been enchanting readers for over sixty years. This edition presents the seven books-The Magician's Nephew, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Horse and His Boy, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, and The Last Battle-unabridged and arranged in C.S. Lewis's preferred order, featuring full-colour artwork by the original illustrator, Pauline Baynes.
(All links earn commission from purchases that help fund this site. Prices accurate at time of writing) Review From Book Depository:
Fascinated by the myth of Cupid and Psyche throughout his life, C. S. Lewis reimagines their story from the perspective of Psyche's sister, Orual.
'I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer . . . Why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?'
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The Complete Chronicles of Narnia
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Book Depository €39.47
Waterstones £35.00
Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold
Till We Have Faces is a brilliant examination of envy, betrayal, loss, blame, grief, guilt, and conversion. In this, his final - and most mature and masterful - novel, Lewis reminds us of our own fallibility and the role of a higher power in our lives.
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Book Depository €8.91
Waterstones £8.99
Wordery $11.96
Q. Do you prefer reading on paper, Kindle or listening to an audiobook?
With the exception of the daily news, which I access online, I read almost everything on paper. I do have the Kindle app on my phone, and occasionally if I need a book urgently for research or something, I'll download it. But I'm convinced that I retain less when I read on a screen. Memory is already so fluid and plastic: if I don't have the physical mass of a book lying around, I begin to doubt that I actually read it.
Q. Do you have a favourite bookshop (and why that shop)?
The Midwest has so many fantastic independent bookstores. Before the pandemic, I used to spend a lot of time at A Room of One's Own, a feminist bookstore that's been here in Madison, Wisconsin (where I currently live) since 1975 and specializes in books by women, non-binary and queer people. When I lived in Chicago, I used to frequent Women and Children First, in Andersonville. And in Ann Arbor, there's a wonderful shop called Literati Bookstore. Even though I can't visit these stores right now in person, I try to place orders through them as often as I can, as opposed to relying on Amazon. They need all the support they can get.
Many thanks to Meghan for recommending some fantastic books! Please don't forget to check out her book Interior States: Essays.
Daryl
Image Copyrights: Alfred A. Knopf (Interior States), WW Norton & Co (Nature's Metropolis), Penguin Books Ltd (Intimations), HarperCollins Publishers (The Chronicles of Narnia, Till We Have Faces).
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