Jonathan Lerner
Author Interview - Jonathan Lerner
Author of Performance Anxiety: The Headlong Adolescence of a Mid-Century Kid
It was the school year 1964-65. I was sixteen turning seventeen: smart but insecure, desperate to be an adult, acting like I already was one, and terrified at the prospect.
I had friends. I had fun. I liked my school. I got my first car, and drove as if the new Interstate Highways were being laid down just for me. Drawn to Black culture and the civil rights movement, I took the first steps on an activist path that in a few years would see me helping found the militant Weather Underground. I was having sex with girls in order to obscure a then-unmentionable fact—that I am gay. Meanwhile, my father was checked out while my mother was dying, and then dead, and that's another thing that couldn't be discussed.
That senior year of high school passed in a whiplash of thrills and panic. I learned a lot—but it would be a long time before I really grasped those lessons.
Author Interview - Jonathan Lerner
Author I draw inspiration from:
Let's just say I'm in awe of Aleksander Hemon. His most recent novel, The World and All That It Holds is grand in scope, funny, heartbreaking, seductive, uplifting, magically realist and, for me as a writer, both intimidating and inspiring. Besides, he writes brilliantly in English, which is his second language.
Author Interview - Jonathan Lerner | Author I Draw Inspiration From
Favorite place to read a book:
On the screened porch—where there's a couch and a good lamp—on summer evenings. The rest of the year, I make do on the living room sofa. I've got good lamps there, too. Good lighting is a must.
Book character I’d like to be stuck in an elevator with:
Given that he is famous for rarely bathing or changing his clothes I might find it especially challenging to be in a small enclosed space with Jackson Lamb, the acerbic, self-regarding, down-at-heel but brilliant spy master in Mick Herron's "Slow Horses" series. But worth it for the entertainment value I'm sure.
Author Interview - Jonathan Lerner | Book Character I’d Like to be Stuck in an Elevator With
The moment I knew I wanted to become an author:
Writing, as a craft and career, sort of snuck up on me. When I was young I assumed I would be something in the arts—a visual artist, or a set or lighting designer for theater, or maybe some kind of craftsperson like a weaver or potter. I never got too far into studying those disciplines. Instead I dropped out of college after two years and got deeply involved in the radical student movement; that was in 1967, when the issues were Civil Rights and the Vietnam War. As an activist I gravitated toward tasks that I only later understood all had to do with publishing. I wrote articles and leaflets, and edited some of our publications. I often did the graphic design and layout for them too. I even learned, in a rudimentary way, how to operate a small offset press, a folding machine and a staple binder, for producing pamphlets. By my early twenties I was tired of my rather precarious life as a full-time activist and was trying to figure out what I could actually do, as a career. And it dawned on me that I already had some experience as a writer and editor, that I liked doing those things, and I wasn't bad at them either. It was still a very long time before I was able to support myself as a writer—as a freelancer writing magazine features, I should say, my books have been satisfying to write but haven't been very profitable—and in the meantime I did a lot of the other usual things to get by , like driving a taxi and waiting tables. I was lucky to get my magazine career rolling by the nineties when it was still possible, or easier than it is now, to make a living as a freelance. That was before so much publishing went online, and the business models changed so that freelance fees became a fraction of what they had been in the heyday of print magazines.
Hardback, paperback, ebook or audiobook:
For reading, I am definitely an ink-on-paper guy. I spend too much time in front of a monitor in my work life to want to read that way for pleasure. I do listen to audiobooks but only on long car trips. They make the miles met away.
The last book I read:
Our Evenings, by Alan Hollinghurst. I've read most of Hollinghurst's novels. I haven't loved them equally—sometimes I find his characters irritatingly selfish (and unnecessarily sex-obsessed), and none of the other books has quite the rapturous effect of The Line of Beauty, which won the Booker Prize in 2004. But perhaps because Hollinghurst and I are both gay and roughly the same age, even when his writing sometimes annoys me his novels all feel like intimate visits with a lifelong friend—and as we must do with lifelong friends, I'm willing to forgive their minor transgressions. Our Evenings follows its protagonist from childhood to late middle age on a trajectory that's not common but is totally believable. It's lush with detail—and nearly 500 pages long—and at the end I felt as if I had to pack reluctantly but in a hurry, to make a flight back to my own home, and I might never see that guy again.
Author Interview - Jonathan Lerner | The Last Book I Read
Pen & paper or computer:
I write on a computer, although I do sometimes scratch out some notes or the semblance of an outline in pencil on a legal pad. I might write more by hand if I could read my own scrawl. When I was young I had very nice, and legible, handwriting. Whatever happened with that? Now even when I jot down a shopping list I seem to be in such a great hurry that I don't even finish words let alone clearly form letters. You ought to see me in the grocery store, blocking the cereal aisle while trying to decipher what I'm supposed to buy.
If I weren’t an author, I’d be a:
I wish I had been a linguist. I'm fascinated by the origins and evolution of words, and by the relationship of languages to other aspects of the cultures that produce them.
Favorite decade in fashion history:
I seem to like each decade more than the preceding ones. I think that's because, incrementally and increasingly, anything goes. And anything goes=comfort and fun. (P.S. I bought my first pair of Birkenstocks in 1977 and have been wearing them ever since, which is to say waaaay before practically everybody else. At the moment I have four pairs, including a special-edition in saturated teal blue suede. Eat your heart out.)
Place I’d most like to travel:
For a long time most of my magazine work has been travel writing, so I've been lucky to visit many countries and continents. I long to revisit almost every place I've already been. Those prior visits now just seem like little tastes, and I want more. But there are still places I've never been that call me. Lately I've been fantasizing about taking a cruise through the islands of Chilean Patagonia, but also about going by ferry from Scotland to the Shetland Islands. There must be similarities in those two vastly separated locales that are drawing me—fierce seas, few people, windswept island vistas, extremes of weather. I guess that suggests the sort of escape-experience I'd be looking for. (I fell in love with the Shetlands, where I've never been, vicariously from the TV cop series set there, called Shetland.)
My signature drink:
Manhattans in the winter, gin and tonic in the summer.
Number one on my bucket list:
I've been studying Spanish. I have a pretty good vocabulary now and can read quite well, and write decently too. Informal conversation is the hardest, though. My dream is to be in, say, Madrid, take a seat at a bar, and strike up a searching, intelligent conversation with the person next to me. You know, about the history of the neighborhood, or the state of sexual politics in the country—something pithy. So far it's never happened. Last time I was in Spain and repeatedly flunking this oral exam it finally dawned on me that I'm just not that gregarious. I don't even strike up conversations with strangers here at home in English. Sheesh.
Anything else you'd like to add:
Read or die.
Find more from the author:
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https://jonathanlerner.info
About Jonathan Lerner:
Author Interview - Jonathan Lerner
In addition to Performance Anxiety, his new memoir of adolescence, Jonathan Lerner is the author of the novels Caught in a Still Place, Alex Underground, and Lily Narcissus, and the memoir Swords in the Hands of Children. He is a journalist focusing mainly on urban design and environmental issues, and a longtime contributing editor at Landscape Architecture Magazine. He lives with his husband the philanthropic leader and community advocate Peter Frank, in New York's Hudson Valley.
