Kathryn Schulz, writer: “The world is very big, that's why it's so incredible to find the ideal person”

Author Kathryn Shulz, seen by Sciammarella.SCIAMMARELLA

The Eastern Shore peninsula, between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, is another character in the non-fiction book

A Wild Wake

, by journalist Kathryn Schulz.

The others are the author of one of the most interesting recent autobiographical pieces of American narrative (the kind they call

memoirs

), as well as the two people to whom the essay is dedicated.

One of them is her father, a charismatic, polyglot and talkative Jew, head of a “happy family” who died in 2016 at the age of 74 “in peace” and surrounded by the love of his family.

The other is Casey Cep, Schulz's wife.

They met 18 months before his death, just when the writer, a reporter for

The New Yorker

magazine and a Pulitzer Prize winner for a report on the threat of a “really big” earthquake in the northwest of the country, assumed that the true love would elude her forever.

Both stories, not so extraordinary, are intertwined in a diptych about the “amazing” idea of ​​discovery and grief over loss;

of a loved one, yes, but also of a necklace, the house keys, the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and the rest of the 200,000 objects that on average we lose, the book says, throughout our lives, lives in which, they say, we spent six months looking for all kinds of things.

“As every narrative of grief is a reckoning with loss, every love story is the chronicle of an encounter,” argues Schulz.

More information

'Memories of a family where nothing ever happens', by Laura Ferrero

The author moved to this corner of the State of Maryland, on the East Coast of the United States, at the request of his wife, who is also a writer and grew up on a farm in one of the rural communities in the area.

The appointment for the interview was in Easton, a town about 15 minutes from the house where they both live with her daughter, who is just under three years old, and the talk ended up happening in whispers in the public library.

It is one of the richest municipalities in the United States and was during the pandemic one of those places that saw its population increase thanks to teleworking.

It is also a place with history: located under the Mason-Dixon line, which marked the border between the North and the South, Frederick Douglass, abolitionist politician and writer, and Harriet Tubman, heroine of slavery, were born in the area under the yoke of slavery. Underground Railroad.

Both escaped their fate, and both are, according to the writer, “among America's greatest self-made patriots.”

“It's kind of a miracle that as a nation we've stayed together,” Schulz explains.

“Meeting Casey was for me also getting to know the South and realizing that the North still sees itself as an innocent and heroic actor.

It is obvious that the sin of slavery persisted much longer here, and that it took a war to end it. The idea that the North was an enlightened and benevolent place in which equality was defended is ridiculous.

The Underground Railroad [a network of houses and people that helped plantation fugitives escape to freedom] did not take enslaved people out of the Deep South, but rather took them to Canada, because the North was an unsafe place. and deeply complicit with the system of slavery.”

“Slavery persisted longer in the southern United States, but the idea that the north was benevolent is ridiculous”

The writer was born 50 years ago in Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland (Ohio) 700 kilometers from Easton.

Cep is also a journalist at

The New Yorker

, although the couple did not meet in the newsroom, but rather because of a friend's idea that she thought they could get along.

The idea of ​​writing

A Wild Wake

, Schulz says, was actually the decision to turn a 6,000-word article published in the New York weekly after the death of her father into an essay of just over 200 pages.

“I felt very lucky to be able to do it, he was an avid reader of the magazine, although I think it would have bothered him to see that he was only able to land on its pages after he died,” she says.

That this material hid a book had been suggested to him by “a couple of people,” including his literary editor, but he was not convinced until that night when the couple was driving “deep in the middle of nowhere in Alabama” while Cep (C. in the book) was investigating the history of the novel that Harper Lee never finished after publishing

To Kill a Mockingbird

(that investigation ended up in another book:

Bloody Hours

).

“It's not that I didn't think there was something more to say about my father, because I could talk about him endlessly.

And there are always new things to reflect on in grief, but I really didn't want to spend another two years of my life focused solely on grief.

Then I came up with the idea of ​​a mirror that reflected death and finding love.

Suddenly, loss, taken in the abstract, seemed as interesting to me as discovery: the chance encounters and life-changing discoveries, the accidental revelations and the intentional searches.”

From that talk in the car also came the structure of the essay, which is divided into three parts.

The first talks about grief, the second, about falling in love.

The last one is dedicated to marriage and the conjunction “and”, with its “power” to project us “into the future”.

It was Cep who that night in Alabama uttered the expression

Lost & Found,

which is the original title of the essay, which in English is more graphic.

It is an expression that can be literally translated as “lost and found” or refer to one of those offices that store lost objects waiting for their owners to claim them.

The book is also about that, the strangeness of finding the right person in the great warehouse of lost souls.

Also to believe, against all logic, that something like this is possible.

“That is why the experience of falling in love is so miraculous, and the feeling that predominates in it is amazement,” considers Schulz.

"The world is very big.

Even one of its small corners, New York, is unfathomable.

That's why meeting the ideal person is so incredible.”

Shooting Stars

Schulz likes the license of the title of the Spanish version (translated by Marta Rebón).

“It seems to me that the person who chose

A Wild Wake

is an attentive and careful reader, that she understood that shooting stars are important in the book.

“I've always been interested in the relationship between our little lives and the vast universe, and I think that title does justice to my fascination, so it seemed pretty perfect,” she explains.

Schulz refers to one of the most interesting passages in the book, which mixes the personal essay with the literary and philosophical: in that passage, the story is told of an 11-year-old boy who sees a meteorite fall to the earth, a “stele wild”, while returning home one Sunday.

Robert Frost, at his home in Vermont.Tom Hollyman (GETTY)

Its author also defines the book as a kind of “anthology of hidden poetry.”

“Writing about grief and love is not the most original idea in the world.

I said to myself: Why not borrow from the poets, from their incredibly long tradition of using the language of pain and love?”

And this is how the verses of Robert Frost, Jack Gilbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Elizabeth Bishop ended up on the pages of

A Wild Wake

.

“Let's not fool ourselves, the vast majority of people do not read poetry, but they do have a certain familiarity with it,” says Schulz.

“Do you know when?

When they go to church or synagogue.

When they get married, or when they attend a funeral.

And I think that is because the verses are a kind of distillation of emotions capable of moving people, even those who would never look at a book.”

When asked if the abundant library of books on grief helped her get through hers or, at least, write her essay, Schulz, who before being a reporter was a literary critic, answers bluntly: “No.”

“In my case, poetry helped me much more.

The process of overcoming the death of a loved one is very personal, it is part of what makes it complex,” she warns.

“Those kinds of stories don't usually move me, although maybe I shouldn't say that, because there is actually a book behind my book:

A Sorrow in Observation

, by CS Lewis.”

In it, Lewis mourns his wife, H, whom he fell in love with when he was older, and who died of cancer shortly after their marriage.

“[Lewis] wrote that beautiful and very disturbing little book in which he opens up about one of the fundamental problems of religion: how is it possible that we suffer so much if there is an all-powerful and benevolent God?

He faced that problem when he himself found himself suffering terribly.”

“Now almost everything is mediated by personality and the individual, something I look at with distance and curiosity”

Literature also flies over Schulz's work in

The New Yorker

.

Perhaps his most controversial article, with which, he says, he broke the record for “receiving emails full of hate” was the one in which he asked why, “given his lies, his inconsistencies and his myopia,” the United States continues to venerate

Walden

, by Henry David Thoreau, one of the most influential essays in his letters.

The journalist says that she knew what she was exposing herself to when she sat down to write it, and that she also received congratulations for it.

“I made some people happy,” she remembers.

“Many high school English teachers wrote to me to tell me that they had to teach this book for 15 years, and that they hated it more with each class.

Thoreau has been dead for a long time, it's not that he was attacking a young novelist, but someone who in this country has something like 200 million defenders.

None of my arrows were going to prove fatal.

To be honest, I had a lot of fun, but let's just say I'm not a very welcome figure in Concord,” she says, referring to the Massachusetts town where the 19th-century writer retreated for a year to a lakeside cabin.

Thoreau is also one of the totems of the personal essay in the United States, a tradition more robust than ever and that pervades everything in these times of social networks and unbridled navel-gazing.

Schulz, who before

A Wild Wake

published

In Defense of Error: An Essay on the Art of Making Mistakes

(Siruela), distrusts the “narrative of the self.”

“Now almost everything is mediated by personality and the individual, from books to Instagram,” he admits.

“I look at him with a kind of distance, curiosity.

It's not my thing, although I don't want to be misunderstood: I find human beings incredibly interesting, otherwise I wouldn't be a journalist.

Now, as a reader I also enjoy being able to read a non-fiction story in which the author does not appear.

"I'm not a psychologist, and this is just a guess, but I wonder if it might be that we feel a little disconnected from each other, and that reading about other people's lives is a way to regain that connection," she explains in a whisper. at the public library, before finishing the interview and getting lost on the roads of the Eastern Shore peninsula, one of the characters in his book.

'A wild wake'.

Kathryn Schultz.

Translation by Marta Rebón.

Gatopardo, 2023. 272 ​​pages, 21.95 euros.

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