Interview with New Yorker Writer D.T. Max
D.T. Max reports for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine on everything from the late David Foster Wallace in “The Unfinished,” to Chicago-based chef, Grant Achatz, who battled tongue cancer, in “A Man of Taste.” In his book The Family That Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery, Max traced science’s path toward understanding prion diseases and victims of fatal insomnia. Fringe’s own Alexandra Sheckler interviewed him by phone last October.
How did you start your writing career?
I started writing in the early 1990s and I was an editor in book publishing. You have to find a certain amount of books to publish, and I just couldn’t find enough books I liked. So I got fired at some point from the publishing job. I started looking around for something else to do and started doing book reviewing for the St. Petersburg Times. Over time I began writing about writers and authors and stuff that I knew from my other work, and at some point in the late 90s, I was more or less writing full time for The New York Times‘ magazine section.
I wrote a story that was very widely read on an interesting strange literary question. There was a writer named Raymond Carver who was a very good short story writer, and for some time I heard a story that his editor had done a lot of rewriting on his early work. My interest in the question was if it was fair or unfair, or whether he wanted to be part of it or if it had been done against his wishes. And that story was on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in 1998 and that really was the beginning for me.
Did you always know you wanted to be a writer?
I think it was pretty much my destiny. I have a neurological problem that prevents me from walking very well, so I’m really not able to go to a job. I was destined to be a writer that works primarily from his house.
From an internal point of view I guess I could have done a couple different things. I never would have been as happy or as focused as I am as a writer. There’s nothing more pleasurable than the way time passes when you’re writing. You feel yourself kind of in another world; and I can’t imagine that I would have liked to not have that experience regularly as if any book editor would. I mean maybe editors have it, but I don’t know where they get it.
How have you developed your writing style? Looking back on older pieces, how has it changed?
I feel as if my style has changed quite a lot. I might go back and look at older pieces and be surprised at so little it’s changed. But two things have happened during the course of me becoming a writer.
One is: I once read that you should never use questions in anything you write because you are supposed to provide the answers. Although I think there is some truth to that, there is an error there because I actually question the reader quite a lot in my work. There was a period maybe five years after I began to write full-time when I began to question my pieces, and I found that actually was a terrific system. [An article] should ask questions and provide an answer ultimately, but it’s also about the view out the window as you take the trip. But, by asking questions, it allows the reader a much clearer understanding that they’re taking a trip.
Two: Later on I became very mistrustful of adverbs. You’ll probably find in my pieces very few adverbs and adjectives. Even when I read my kids children’s books I edit out the adverbs and adjectives when I read to them. Compared to other magazine writers, I’m not unique in this. There’s a fair push away from that kind of writing which I think the reason is that so much of our writing is corrupt by advertising, and advertising is full of adjectives and adverbs. You know, ‘brilliant,’ ‘best,’ ‘happily.’
