Interview with Thomas Chatterton Williams
Thomas Chatterton Williams is a writer.
Contents
Reading vs. Scrolling
Max Raskin: You spend a lot of time reading and writing. On the reading side, how do you actually read? Hard copy? iPad?
Thomas Chatterton Williams: That's a great question. As a rule, I do everything I can to read on paper. I was doing a lot of book-reviewing earlier in my career, and because I was getting so many e-galleys and having to read on Kindle, I started to almost demand that if you want me to look at a book, I have to have a paper copy.
MR: Why is that?
TCW: A variety of reasons. Because we spend so much time on social media and use screens for a lot of things that are not serious, I needed to make a hard division between reading and scrolling. When I have something on paper, I'm active in a way that I'm not when I'm passive on the screen.
MR: Do you write marginalia?
TCW: My books look crazy. There's a ton of marginalia. I'm commenting constantly. Also, I underline very promiscuously, but I dog-ear very selectively. If a page is dog-eared, it's very important, but there's a lot of underlining on many pages.
MR: And what's the point of underlining?
TCW: For referencing back. Those are usually lines that can be quoted, or lines that I think really made a point that was novel to me.
MR: A lot of people in law school would underline every single line in a casebook and I think it’s a way of staying focused. It's almost like, "Okay. I finished that sentence."
TCW: That’s a good point. But if you underlined everything, you've underlined nothing. So there does have to be some selection. But I think that holding that pen there makes the reading more deliberate.
Bic’s Not Fit
MR: Are you particular about your pens?
TCW: Yes. The ink has to flow. It has to be a wet tip pen. It can't be a Bic
MR: [Holds up Uniball Vision]
TCW: I have a bunch of those. The Uniball?
MR: Oh yes.
TCW: I have a bunch from Muji — Uniball is amazing, Pilot is amazing. Then I have the nice pens you receive as a gift, but you almost don't want to use.
MR: I usually don’t like using a fountain pen, but I got this Easterbrook pen with a huge tip. I love it.
TCW: That's amazing. I have an Easterbrook that I got that as a gift from Rikki [Schlott].
MR: When you draft something how do you start writing? By hand?
TCW: When I was starting out in the early 2000s, I would keep Moleskins and notebooks, and I'd try to start by hand that way. But inevitably, the phone is the closest tool at hand. So the Notes app is where a lot of thoughts start — just quickly taking some notes on the phone.
Also, in the past 10 years, a lot of the journalism or the essays I do can start as a tweet. Twitter used to be really helpful, pre-Elon. You'd try out a thought and just get really interesting and sometimes divergent feedback. Through that spark you could immediately know if the subject you were teasing out was interesting to people. A lot of my pieces were just a quickly circulated tweet that then got feedback which made me think that there was something to pursue there.
MR: Truman Capote said that Kerouac’s work was “typing, not writing.” Are you a writer or a typer?
TCW: I edit. I can't proceed to the next sentence or paragraph until I feel like the preceding has been worked over.
I wouldn't say I have to have everything be stylized, the way a Junot Díaz does. But the sentence has to be crafted in such a way that I can proceed to the next.
MR: Do you use Microsoft Word?
TCW: Yes. I'll be doing that for the rest of my life.
MR: Who's your favorite editor?
TCW: A few. I only wrote once for the New Yorker in print and once online before I got hired elsewhere. Dan Zalewski at the New Yorker is famously good. He's a quintessential editor. He is extraordinary.
And both on the level of editing the text and on the level of asking really penetrating questions and suggesting different routes to pursue in research, I thought: That guy is a fucking editor.
I wrote for several years at the New York Times Magazine. I was paired with a young guy, Willy Staley, who's an incredible magazine editor. He really understands how to structure a piece. Funny guy, great dude, and a beautiful writer himself.
And then at The Atlantic, I've been blessed with a couple of editors — Juliet Lapidose and Honor Jones. I just really am in sync with them, and they really help me bring my ideas out. They understand how to work with me. And they always make the piece so much smarter and so much clearer.
At Harper’s, too: Chris Beha and Tim Farrington. People think that legacy media doesn’t matter anymore, and that putting out your own newsletter is the same as writing for Harper's, The Atlantic, or the New Yorker. And it's just not. And most of the why it's not is not the writer, it's the editor. It's the level of care that a whole lot of those people put into the work.
MR: When I interviewed Curtis Yarvin…
TCW: …that’s a guy that needs an editor.
MR: Exactly. He admitted it.
Writing in the Time of GPT
MR: Do you use ChatGPT or anything like that?
TCW: I don't use ChatGPT in my writing, and I'm afraid that sooner than I had realized there will probably be fewer and fewer people born into this world who understand the reason why you wouldn't just outsource your writing to ChatGPT the way you outsource your directional knowledge to Google Maps. It just is so competent. It's mind-blowing.
I think the purpose of writing is also understanding what you think about things. And so if you outsource that, it's not just that you're getting the finished product, it's that you're not going through the motions or the patterns of thought.
MR: Well, most people don’t write — how often does an average 57-year-old write 800 words?
TCW: Probably not as often as they should, but probably not as often as they even used to when they would write more substantial emails to keep in touch with people, before texting supplanted that. Everything has been compressed. But people used to write emails that looked like letters to each other. And I think every time we get rid of writing at some length and expressing ourselves in a more careful way than just speech, I think we lose something.
MR: Someone who has never read your writing, what would be the thing you'd point them to?
TCW: My second book, Self-Portrait in Black and White, about having children who racially present as differently than the way that I grew up, that's very near and dear to me. That was excerpted in the New York Times Magazine. That really represents a lot of who I am, how I write, what I'm concerned with.
Waking Up with Sam Harris
MR: Have you done any podcasts or interviews where you thought you really knocked it out of the park?
TCW: Because I'm old now, I've been doing this for a while, so it's often that the more recent ones seem more like where you are. I really enjoyed a long interview I did with Sam Harris a couple of years ago when Self-Portrait in Black and White was coming out. We had a good, long, intelligent conversation about racial identity. And he was an interesting person to talk to.
MR: Did you become friendly with him?
TCW: I've not met him in person, but I would consider us friendly. I'm a big admirer of both his public intellectual work and also the work he does helping people meditate. I use his app, Waking Up, and I find it really helpful.
MR: Do you use it every day?
TCW: I would like to use it every day. I use it maybe three, four times a week. I was astonished — 10 minutes of just closing your eyes and breathing with purpose can actually reset your concentration level, your anxiety level, and you can just get back into your day in a different way. I say that as somebody who even came to that skeptical.
MR: Are you religious?
TCW: I'm not religious. I went to college and read The Brothers Karamazov, and lost my unquestioning, ambient belief in Christianity that I had growing up going to Catholic schools and not really thinking hard.
MR: Do you believe in God?
TCW: No, I wouldn't say I do. I would also say that I stop short of saying that I'm an avowed atheist who knows there is no God. I think I've been really influenced by some of the writing of Camus. His position was all you can know is this world that you can touch and see. We can try to make some meaning here, but if there's something beyond it, it's out of my reach.
Love Language
MR: How did you learn French?
TCW: It's been a long ongoing struggle. I started taking French when I had a language requirement in high school. Most of the students I was around went into Spanish, but my parents told me to go into French. I was kind of a dunce in French class through undergrad. I studied abroad, and when I came back to school from France from a summer in the Loire Valley, I started dating my French TA. We broke up, but she had gotten me a job teaching English in France for a year. And so I fell in love with the country and the culture of France without having mastered the language. I made a lot of friends, and eventually married a French girl. We're no longer together, but we have two wonderful French-American kids, that I'm still raising in Paris. So my real teachers and correctors in French are my children — they constantly help me, correct me, and explain things to me.
MR: How did you improve your listening comprehension?
TCW: I've been living in France since 2011.
MR: But now you're back in the US?
TCW: I split time now, but I raise my kids there, so I am there for half the year.
MR: Is A Movable Feast the best book about France?
TCW: It's one of them. I think The Sun Also Rises is also extremely good. A Movable Feast is extraordinary. Hemingway had that gift…those books really spark that desire in you to go and be in those places. Those are extraordinary books.
There are books that are written by French authors, too, that just really spark that desire. Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan is an extremely enticing book, and makes you want to be in the south of France.
If we say photogenic or telegenic for things that are beautiful on the screen or in an image, what do we say for a book that's photogenic? Those are books that just make you dream and make you just want to be there.
MR: Evocative, maybe?
TCW: Very evocative. James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room. Paris and the South of France must be two of the places in this world where more people have just read something and jumped on the next flight or boat over.
MR: There’s definitely a vibe. There's Paris syndrome.
TCW: Oh, yeah, there's vibes.
The Michael Jordan of Basketball
MR: I want to talk to you about your fitness routine.
TCW: I love it, man, you're just hitting every interest there. That's amazing.
MR: I did my research.
TCW: I want to write more about fitness, but I haven't been able to. When I was growing up, my real obsession was basketball, so I always thought of myself as fit. I didn't really think it was something that I'd have to do purposefully.
MR: Who was your basketball team growing up?
TCW: Chicago Bulls. I'm that old.
MR: And who was your favorite?
TCW: Michael Jordan is still the greatest.
MR: Not Pippen or Rodman?
TCW: I liked Pippen, he was amazing, but you just know world historical greatness when you see it, and Michael Jordan was like that.
MR: But when I was growing up my team was the late 90’s Yankees and my favorite player was Bernie Williams who I think was definitely not the best.
TCW: I think I have that approach to teams now. But for me, I fell in love with Michael Jordan as a figure.
MR: But what do you do for exercise today?
TCW: So basically, that's a long way of saying, I grew up extremely athletic. When I started becoming a writer and living in New York as a Brooklyn hipster, I just sat at a laptop all day for 10 years, without really giving much thought to exercise.
Then at some point I was in my thirties, and I realized I was going to be a father of a son, and I didn't want my son to just see me as a guy that just sits on his computer. So I started hitting the gym again. I had an exercise routine with some trainers, using weights, and just three to four times a week pushing, pulling, legs, and some stretching.
During the pandemic, because we couldn't go to the gym, I really got into calisthenics and body weight exercises. Burpees, push-ups, and all of these amazing body weight squats and pull-ups. That stuff was producing better results than even the gym. So for a couple of years I just did calisthenics. Today, I’ll ideally work out four times a week in the gym, a mix of kettle bells or weights and calisthenics. It’s crazy, I look back at all the years I wasted — in my late-thirties early-forties, I'm in better shape than I was in my twenties.
Stirred, Not Shook
MR: What do you do diet-wise?
TCW: A lot of protein. Bari had Dr. Mark Hyman on Honestly talking about this. If you're really trying to gain muscle — and this can be hard to do — but I try to get as close as possible to a gram of protein per pound of ideal body weight. So for me, that's trying to get as close to 165, 170 grams of protein in a day, which is hard to do without a shake. But now I'm stepping back from that, and I'm just trying to eat a protein rich diet of eggs and avocado or something like that in the morning.
MR: Do you snack when you're writing?
TCW: No, I don't really snack. But I'll have a big, protein-rich breakfast — either skyr or Greek yogurt and berries, or eggs and avocado. Then I'll try to have a piece of fish or a piece of meat plus quinoa and some vegetables at lunch. And then I'll try to do the same at dinner.
All of that is really good, but then my problem is that I just really like to drink. I want to have wine with dinner.
MR: What's your favorite bottle of wine?
TCW: Burgundy is the top of the food chain. Or Pinot Noir, if you're not in France.
MR: What about liquor?
TCW: I do. I like gin. I like whiskey.
MR: What's your favorite gin?
TCW: I like a gin called Roku. Or I'll have Tanqueray or Hendricks in a martini.
MR: How do you like your martinis?
TCW: I like a martini extremely cold, stirred, with a twist, or with a blue cheese olive and a little bit of a nice vermouth. But mostly gin.
MR: Do you use supplements or vitamins?
TCW: I take creatine. I take magnesium and zinc and Ashwagandha at night to relax.
Comfort Food
MR: Do you nap during the day?
TCW: I can't. I really can't. I would like to, but I just can't.
MR: And do you sleep well at night?
TCW: I always sleep well. I wish I didn't. My dad was one of these guys that could do three, four hours a night most of his life and be productive. But I have to get seven, eight hours to feel good.
MR: Where do you think you’ve ordered the most from in the city?
TCW: I'm a repeat offender at Sant Ambroeus. Also, the Commerce Inn has quickly become one of my favorite spots.
MR: When you land in France, if you had your druthers, where's the first place you’d go to eat?
TCW: There’s a place near me called Jim's Corner. It’s a French woman, and her husband is a guy from New Zealand. They make the best comfort food for a brunch. It’s usually morning when I arrive, and I get my kids, and we go and we have pancakes and avocado toast and bacon and eggs. It’s all this super comfort food my kids love because they're French kids growing up in Paris, and they think it's the most exotic thing in the world.
MR: What do they usually eat?
TCW: They're kids, so they're a bit picky, but they're French kids, so they're eating lentils and lardons.
MR: What’s the last music you listened to?
TCW: I was driving with my daughter, so I got overwhelmed by her taste. She listens to a lot of Taylor Swift, man. The last song that I added to my Spotify is a song called “Bolide Noir” by Central Cee and JRK 19. It's French and English rap.
MR: Do you like rap?
TCW: Yeah, I mean, I grew up on it. That's the comfort food of my music.
MR: What about TV? What's the last show you binge-watched?
TCW: Just finished The White Lotus, like everybody else. I liked it. It's just entertainment, you know? But it's interesting, because it's really aestheticized for our moment right now.
Old and Nouveau
MR: I want to talk about clothing — from which store do you think you own the most clothing?
TCW: For a while I felt I had a lot of stuff that I liked from Margiela. I would have a simple V-neck sweater, and I like their trainers, which can come in real neutral colors. More recently, I really love this French brand, Lemaire.
MR: Like the song…La Mer!
TCW: I don't even know that song!
MR: Where do you get your suits from?
TCW: I love this brand, this Italian brand, Boglioli. It's not fashion or anything, they make suits, shirts…just beautiful Italian stuff. When you live in Europe, you can get nice sales twice a year.
MR: Are you a feinschmecker about anything?
TCW: I'm really into furniture and interior design. Before I had any money, I just studied those magazines. Before it was even online, I just love the genre of interior design, and the idea of making your space as good, and comfortable, and as aesthetically pleasing as possible, which doesn't always have to be just spending the most money.
MR: What's your favorite aesthetic right now?
TCW: I got very lucky, and I bought a place in Paris that has old school Haussmannian details, like the old fireplace, and the wainscoting on the walls, and the molding on the ceilings. I love design that's timeless, and mixing old and new, so I put some Vitsœ shelving on the walls. I have a mix of clean lines, but also comfortable modern furniture in an older setting.