How Patrick deWitt writes stories that are built to last

Note: Text has been lightly edited for clarity and does not match audio exactly.

Phoebe Neidl: Hi, listeners. I'm Audible Editor Phoebe Neidl. I am a huge fan of the author I'll be speaking with today, Patrick deWitt. Patrick is a novelist who has been shortlisted for all sorts of literary prizes, and he's even won some. His books include French Exit, The Sisters Brothers, and The Librarianist. Today, we'll be talking about his latest novel, Dodge City. Welcome, Patrick.

Patrick deWitt: Thank you, Phoebe. Nice to be here.

Thank you so much for joining us. So, Dodge City is about Lee, he's a young man living in Southern California in the late 1960s who decides he's going to flee to Canada because he's been drafted into the Vietnam War. But first he drives across the country to visit, one by one, his father, mother, brother, and twin sister. I'm curious what your original inspiration for this novel was. Like, from what seed did this grow?

I don't have a particularly vivid memory of there being one moment, but more like several moments, the most obvious one being just that my father was a draft dodger who had a somewhat similar experience in that he had dual citizenship, but he was Canadian born and raised, and he moved to Southern California as a young man, ostensibly to go to school, but really just to sort of have the adventure of moving somewhere sunnier and a little bit more engaging culturally than Fort Erie, Ontario. No offense to Fort Erie, Ontario. He didn't want to leave, but he was drafted, and he left. If he hadn't been drafted, he wouldn't have met my mother later in Vancouver, so it's sort of a story that casts a long shadow in my family. I didn't want to write my father's story per se, but just as an inciting incident, a draft notice is a good one, I think. So, just from the point of view of a storyteller, I like that.

Then there's also the personal connection to it. I hadn't written about the ’60s before. The ’60s have been really formative to me in terms of the things I like, a lot of them came out of the ’60s. The slow realization of who the characters were and the potential for something like, not political commentary, but I hadn't really addressed anything political in my work overtly, and I thought maybe it would be time to sort of tackle that or ask a question. The question being, “What are the limits of one's relationship to his or her country of birth?” Obviously, this is a question that's relevant again now today.

So, anyway, all these little threads coming together to form the jumping-off point. As is always the case, the book didn't become the book I'd anticipated it becoming. It became much less about the question of should one attend a war that one has been invited to, and it became much more about the family dynamic and the smaller interpersonal human stories, which is, to me, something that's more interesting. So, the political piece of the puzzle sort of fell away and I began to focus more on the family dynamic.

Then the fact of travel by car. I've done a lot of driving around the last few years, and there is something that occurs when you're driving long distances by yourself that I wanted to, not address, but sort of investigate or get at. I drove down here from Oregon to Los Angeles a couple days ago. I've made that drive so many times, especially in the last few years. And it is a really nice sort of reset experience. There's no distractions and you're just driving and thinking your thoughts as you amble along, and you do a lot of unpacking. So, writing a book about long drives, I sort of had an excuse to make any number of very long drives. I crossed the country at one point from New York to Portland, thinking about this country I live in but was not born in. I'm rambling, Phoebe.

Yeah, no, it's a lot of threads, I can tell, that came together. The long drives actually make me think of my second question, which I want to talk about quests. Lee is driving this Jaguar across the country for this company that transports vehicles, and he's supposed to drop it off in New Jersey. The clerk at the company who's interviewing him beforehand asks if he's questing, which I love this. “The owner of the car would rather not have the driver be on an existential quest.” Of course, this is exactly what Lee's doing, more or less. And it feels like you're winking at us, your readers, with that line. I love that. But also, you've used that word, I think, in a lot of interviews, talking about your own quest. I'm curious what that concept means to you, and does novel writing or the novel format feel sort of inherently quest-y to you?

Well, my quest is related to the composition of the books. It's a longform quest, which I hope will last me through the rest of my life. I think my use of quest, which you may or may not be referring to, is it came up in an interview I did where I was pointing out that I'm not a good recipient of, like, when people buy me books or give me books or want to share books with me as a gift, it never works out, because I feel like somebody's nosing in or horning in on my quest. And part of my quest is to seek out books that speak to me and will eventually inform my work in some way.

The maintenance of interest in one's art or medium or whatever it is you're fascinated by—it doesn't have to be artistic—is a necessary thing. So, the idea that somebody's going to give me a book which will line up with what I need at that particular moment, it's a long shot. I don't like the idea of obligatory reading or somebody's giving me something, so I must read it. My friends and family know not to recommend books to me or to give me books because I feel like it's not really their place to be. I sound like a bit of a dick. I don't mean it dickishly. I just mean, "This is my quest. Thank you very much. You read your books and I'll read mine."

In the larger picture, my quest dictates my day-to-day existence. My driving down here was a part of my quest. The intention being to work here, but also just to pay attention to what's going on in the world. Everything is material when you're an author. And oftentimes, motion is really helpful for jump-starting a story. Or it's happened so many times where in transit from point A to point B, something has occurred that's absolutely crucial to a piece of work I'm tinkering with at the time.

I sort of recognize that I was a quester or that I was on a quest rather than setting out to be on one. I mean, as a 12- or 13-year-old or whenever it was that I started picking up books, my father's books, to read them, I didn't understand. I was just looking for a way to pass time, pleasantly, not knowing that I was falling into what I would later think of as my position or my vocation. It's a great gift to have a quest or to be on a quest, and not everybody gets to really engage in a quest that is meaningful to them. So, it's something that I'm protective of, and it's something that I'm thankful for. And of course, it could end any day. I could burn out or I could lose interest or whatever. But in the meantime, I have something to do, and it's just a relief to feel moved to carry on and to continue to search for things that can inspire me to begin another book.

So, I'm in that phase right now where I'm 9 or 10,000 words in on a new book, and I don't really know what I'm doing. And this phase of the quest always feels very tenuous, and it's a little bit alarming at times because you can finish something and it's still not good enough to publish. Or you can start something and feel so strongly at the outset, but then it diminishes and fades away. I'm just at the point rounding the corner where I recognize that this one's gonna go, and it's a great relief because now my time is accounted for for the next year, two years, three years, however long it takes to write this book. So, that's a comfort. You don't want to pause the quest. It's better to, for me anyway, to continue on. It gives my days energy and meaning.

You mentioned that you really like the ’60s. I love the Mike Nichols film The Graduate. My older brother, actually, Ben, was named after that character. That movie really feels like a bit of a spiritual ancestor to this book. Does that sound right to you, or does that sound crazy?

No, it doesn't. I mean, the reference points for any book are usually pretty various, and it's a bunch of different things, but I actually watched The Graduate while working. I'd seen it a couple times and I watched it more for visual [research], because some of it takes place on a college campus in, I think, '67, which is the year that Lee leaves Los Angeles. I'm not a great one for research, but I was trying to figure out in '67, were there sandal-wearing, Jesus-looking men wandering around? And there were, but it was pretty niche, I think, still. If you look at the few scenes where Dustin Hoffman is walking around the campus, you can really get a sense of the fashion, and that was helpful. Also driving a sports car quickly, obviously, is something to do with this book.

The way it works for me, my brain, I don't have a razor-sharp mind. I've got quite a soft brain. It's all in there, but it's hard to access. I don't have a math brain. It's hard for me to recall facts. I can remember feelings and temperatures and the way things smelt or tasted, but I can't really remember the why or where or when. So, oftentimes in the writing of a book, I will sort of echo either my own earlier work or another person's work of art, either a book or a movie or a poem or whatever, and not necessarily know until later, somebody might point it out, or I might never know. And the more work that's created, the more often this phenomenon occurs. But with The Graduate, I was aware of it.

He started out as comedian, Mike Nichols. I think the humor in that movie and the humor in the way Ben is talking to his parents and that generation is a match with your humor in the way Lee was talking with Mr. Dewey and Mr. Headley. I want to talk about Lee and how you developed him as a character. He's very practical. He's not an ideologue. He's not a part of the counterculture. He's a mechanic, and I feel like he understands machines, and he understands this war is a machine and it's going to chew him up. It's kind of this very practical decision. So, he reminded me of Ben from The Graduate in that way, too, in that he wasn't really a part of some counterculture. His pushback was more rooted in his own individuality and wanting to control his own destiny. But I'm curious, in developing Lee, you said the story was inspired a bit by your dad. What brought Lee to life for you? What made him sort of click into place?

Lee and Bob Comet, from the last book I wrote, The Librarianist, both started out somewhat elusive. They're both a little bit elusive to me. I understand them both, and I know what they would do in a given situation, but I think I inhabited these characters a little bit less than someone say, like, Eli Sisters or Francis Price. It was more sort of knowing somebody from a bit of a remove, which I don't think of as being a bad thing, but I'm conscious of it as having been true for the last two books. With the new book I'm working on now, I'm sort of trying to buck that a bit and maybe get a little bit more first-person feeling with the protagonist.

But Lee Clark is not my father in basically any way. My father was much more extroverted and a bit wilder. And my father was this really handsome, alpha, fun-having man who was also a good guy, and his father was a linguist. My grandfather spoke some insane number of languages fluently. Like, he was in Ripley's Believe It or Not, and stuff like that.

Wow.

So, my father came from a household where books and language were part of the daily landscape, and that was passed on to my father. My father was, and is, a carpenter, contractor, but he's always read and still is very much interested in literature and books, and he's never without a book that he's got on the go.

Regarding Lee, Lee came into focus for me over a period of time. He wasn't a character like Francis Price or Eli who sort of jumped right to life from page one. His life was meant to be sort of symptomatic of the time rather than this highly unique individual existing in this particular historical landscape. I think of Lee as a stoic, and not passive, but somebody who really values his time apart from the rest of humanity, save for his girlfriend. He's not somebody who's looking to immerse himself in a culture, and he's wary of the coming counterculture, because it does seem to him to be somewhat of a diminishment of the individual. He's not a joiner, I guess, is the easy way to say it.

This is also what he comes up against when the draft comes. It's not that he is a pacifist or that he's outraged, so much as the idea of a war occurring as the demand put upon him by an unseen force that he must take part or there will be this grave consequence, prison or whatever. It's very much, to me, a pro-individual story. And as time passes, I see that I can't really relate to groups of people, even small groups of people, whether they're well-meaning or ill-wishing, I just, as time passes, I feel like my life is becoming more my own rather than less. And I think that that's something that Lee would probably be able to relate to.

There is a lot of me in the character of Lee, really, in terms of his points of view and his attitude towards life and his relationships with others. But he is not a particularly vibrant, vivid character. He's one who we get to know how he's feeling, but he's not necessarily going to jump off the page and explain precisely how he's feeling about this or that. Somebody who you can deduce what's going on in his mind by the way he acts and what he does or does not do. He's not a great pontificator or anything. So, as a protagonist, that's challenging. I didn't mean for it to be this way. This is just how the character came to be. So, you get to know him sort of through other people or through the lens of the narrative voice rather than anything that he says or does.

Cal was interesting, too. Like you said, this is a very pro-individual story. She has her feet a little more in the counterculture than he does, but she's also not an ideologue. She's also a more kind of sophisticated, independent thinker than that. But it is a little bit of a source of tension between them. They come from two different worlds. I was curious, in developing her, maybe what you kind of had in mind with that tension.

But also, if there was a theme to this book, if I had to pluck one, to me, it felt like it was free will. All of his family members are kind of at their own crossroads, except for his mother is recounting her big crossroads in the past in leaving their father. But it's a book that just makes you think about all of the decisions we have to make in life about how we want to live our lives. Were you, with his siblings and Cal, kind of mindfully exploring moral philosophies about free will or how you make choices about how you want to live. Did that guide your thinking in how you created them?

I think I was doing that, but it's one of those things where after the fact, after completing the novel, I can see, "Oh, I suppose I was doing this." I think that the characters offer a kind of resistance or balance in contrast to Lee, who is very stark, or plain almost. And there are these other figures in his life who are less so. Cal, I just wanted him to have love, and I have a sort of weakness for love stories. But I wanted it to be a love story that was not simple. That hesitation on her part to fully engage or to be monogamous or whatever. She's fighting for her independence in her way, and he's fighting for his in his way.

The stories of each of the unique family members, they're all engaged in their unique crucible. They each of them have an issue. And some are in better states than others. The father, obviously, is quite degraded. And the mother has sort of come over the mountain and is now flourishing after having left Lee's father. The brother's doing poorly. The sister's kind of just really wild. But they're each of them very much mired in and engaged in their own lives, which, A, just makes for interesting writing. You don't want to write about somebody who has very little going on, or I don't. And B, I think it makes for superior reading. And you figure out where Lee stands by way of his engagement with these other people. Learning about his relationship with his brother, for example, you learn a lot about Lee.

I want to ask about the audio. I know you're a pretty low-tech guy. You're not on social media. I don't think you have a smartphone, all that sort of stuff. But I'm curious if you're an audiobook listener at all.

I just had this chat on the drive down. My friend Kelly was demanding that I get into it because she says it makes long drives so much simpler and more pleasant. I have never listened to a book on tape that I can recall, but I think that's not owing to any sort of resistance to the medium so much as not really having access to or knowing how to. I'm pretty behind.

Yeah, you're pretty offline, it sounds like.

Yeah, I recorded my first book. I didn't really enjoy it (laughs). The people I did it with, the engineer and everyone, everyone was completely lovely. I'm not a good performer, especially when I'm reading my own work. I just get really kind of monotone and low-affect. And I'm not doing it on purpose, I'm just not suited to it. And then one fun part of publishing books is—since then, I haven't read any of my work. I haven't offered, and no one's asked me to, and that's as should be, I think—but somebody's going to read the book, and so they give you three or four readers, and then you listen to their earlier work, and you decide, or you weigh in, at least, regarding who you think would be best suited to the text, and I really enjoy that.

Yeah, Micky Shiloah was the guy who did this one, and I thought he was wonderful. I don't know if you've heard any of it yet.

I haven't, because I have a funny thing about looking back. I would be hesitant to do that. I think it's good to, like this interview, for example, you just kind of let it be. You move on to the next thing. But when I look back, I tend to, especially with interviews, it's invariably, "Why did I say that?" or "I didn't say that correctly" or "That's not true at all. What am I doing?" So, you do these things, and then you sort of just get on with your life. I'm always thinking more of the next thing rather than the thing that has passed.

Well, I think he does your work proud. It's good.

That’s great. It's so wonderful that it exists. It's like having a play of the book or something like that. It's an exciting second life for the book, which I'm really appreciative for.

Yeah, I think he really excels with the dialogue. I'm always amazed when one narrator can kind of inhabit these different characters and dialogue scenes so well, and you really feel like you're getting that sense of listening to more than one person, just by small tweaks in their voice. And there's a lot of dialogue in this book, and I think he did great with it. I enjoyed it. I read it first and then I listened to it. It was great.

But I want to talk to you about craft a little bit, because you are a writer that is so exquisite to me on the sentence level. There's a spareness and a simplicity to your prose, but not simplicity as in the opposite of complexity. Like, it feels like you've boiled things down to their essence. So, I'm curious how much do you fuss with your sentences? Do you write a quick and dirty draft of a novel and then go back and it's a lot of refining? Don't tell me they come out that good on the first go.

No, no. Thank you. Thank you, first of all. But no, I usually don't do an entire draft and then start back at the beginning. Usually, I kind of edit as I go. I'll write 10 or 15 pages, let's say, which could take a day. Well, no, it could take a week or a month, that amount. I'm not a hugely speedy writer. And then usually I'll get to the end of a chapter, and then I'll go back to the front and then tidy and tidy and tidy.

I've learned that if I do an entire draft and then start over, it can be really debilitating because the whole thing's a mess. So, I'll do a draft of a scene or a chapter, and then I'll go back and zhuzh it, knowing that there's going to be further zhuzhing down the line. And then I commence with scene 2 or chapter 2, and I do the same thing, so that by the time I get to the end, when I get to the front, I can recognize that there is a decent book in there somewhere. And this is when the real violence occurs. So, I guess my second draft is actually more like my third draft because I've been tidying as I go. But that's just best for me, because the first sentences and the first take is usually, oftentimes, defiantly sloppy and shitty.

So, just getting down a feel. It's more about a feeling, getting the feeling down, figuring out what the feeling is that I'm aiming for. And by feeling, I mean how I feel when I'm composing this world and living within it for this period of time. But it also, obviously, has to do with what the reader will be feeling. So, the second draft being the third draft, and then from that point on it's just back to front, to back to front, to back to front, however many times I can stand it. And basically, what winds up happening is I'll edit up to the sort of bitter end, and then the editors will say, "The book is done now." And then I'll say, "Okay, good." At a certain point, I sort of need someone to take it away from me. I don't mean that they're sort of angry at me. It's just a deadline, a deadline looms, and the book is done by dint of the deadline having been met.

I am careful about my sentences, and I appreciate that that's something that you're picking up on. I do feel as time goes by that I want to say the emotions that any book worth its salt conveys are complicated, and a book doesn't say one thing, a book says a hundred things or a thousand things, but I want to present these things as bare bones as is possible, not in the minimalist Raymond Carver way, but just like, let's get to the point. And oftentimes that leads itself to brevity and simplicity.

I'm wary of not just having a sentence move well, but like a paragraph or a page, and I think about white space on the page a lot, and I think about, is this in the way that a pop tune kind of pulls you along, like a well-crafted pop tune? There's not a great effort in listening to a pop tune. It's one of the joys of pop music. And I do think of my writing as pop. Like, it's serious; it's serious, to me anyway. And I'm saying things that are meaningful to me and come from my heart, but I want to present them plainly and without any great fanfare, necessarily, or theatrics. So, I'm aiming for something that is sort of contradictory. I'm aiming for something that is emotionally rich, yet childish or simple, simply presented.

Yeah. It's really hard to do.

Well, it's a fine line, but I'm thinking of when I was young, when I was reading, for example, like the Monterey books of John Steinbeck, like Tortilla Flat, I read when I was 14 or something. And I just knew I could do this because it was so easy. “Look at how easy it is.” And it takes you decades to even get anywhere close to that level of excellence. But in the same way you listen to a pop song and you're like, "How hard can it be?" And it is hard. As an aim, I like that it's sort of modest and grand at the same time. Anyway, my bullseye is I know now more quickly what I want, and I know now more quickly how to get to a position of being satisfied with my text. But it doesn't really get any easier. It's actually maybe getting harder as the books go by. I find it harder to start the books for some reason. I think I should probably be taking more time off between them, but it doesn't really work out that way.

Yeah, that kind of writing you do I think is really hard to get it down to that. That it is so rich, but there's a plainspokenness to the language that still reflects the richness. It feels like a magic trick. And then on top of which, humor is such a consistent part of your books. One of my colleagues recently interviewed the horror author Paul Tremblay. I don't know if you're familiar with his work, but he said that while he was writing his most recent novel, that he would get started in the morning by reading a few pages of one of your books, particularly because he was looking to achieve a humorous tone. I'm just curious, for you, did you find that when you started writing, the humor was kind of baked into your voice, like, "Oh, this seems to be just a part of me," or was that something you cultivated consciously?

First of all, it's generous and kind of Paul to have said that. I appreciate that so much. But I come from a family of people who are—I don't come from a family of gifted comedians particularly, but we recognize the value of humor, especially in the face of unfunny things. Like, humor as a tool. So, that was just my lot growing up. And then also I was exposed to things like Monty Python. Growing up in Canada, we had a lot of British television, so it was like Monty Python or Fawlty Towers or Blackadder or The Young Ones.

Then I began to try to write, and at the age of say, 15, 16, 17, I was pretty angsty. I was pretty miserable for a few years, and I was under the impression that writing should be grave. My writing was very self-serious and bleak, and I thought that ugliness was something that should be [in it]. I still think that there's a value to ugly behavior and ugly things in terms of the writing of books. Ugliness or shabby behavior is a feature of all my works, I think. But it became much less the focal point for me. And at a certain point, I had to recognize that the writing I was doing, I didn't know that it was bad. Looking back, it was simply bad. I'm talking about like, 18 to 23 or 24. It was simply badly done and wrong-headed. But at a certain point, I recognized that I was betraying who I was by writing in this overtly serious style.

Then I located other authors who I thought were doing both, that is to say they were painting bleak pictures or darker pictures, but there was this lighter element to it, and that this was much more truthful to who I was. So, in figuring out who I was as an author, at a certain point, I had to sort of admit that I did have a comedic point of view, and that to exclude it from my work completely was dishonest. It was a relief when I sort of, like, “Okay, I can be funny and still discuss these ugly things that I wanted to discuss.” There's room for both in my work, as there is a room for both of those things in life. I think one's worldview should be represented in one's work if one is an artist, right? But that comes with time, or it took me many years to sort of recognize who I was as an artist.

So, you were a bartender for years in your 20s. I worked for many years in the restaurant industry as a bartender, waitress. My husband actually owns three bars in Brooklyn, so I know that realm well. You said it was a really great perch to observe people and kind of develop characters from. You don't tend bar anymore, I'm assuming, but do you still take inspiration from people you observe in public anywhere? Writing is solitary, but do you seek out public places to kind of fill that well to observe people?

I don't intentionally leave the house to observe or peep, but peeping is absolutely a part of my life. My ears are just attuned to it. And I don't think it's normal. I mean, it's voyeurism. Part of driving long distances is you're forced to interact with people at the gas station, at the hotel, restaurants, coffee shops. You stop and you have an interaction. I'm aware always of potential, something potentially usable. It's a sort of magpie existence where I'm always looking for the shiny thing to store away and then use later. I have a storage area in my mind, and it's just tidbits, or feelings, or a sight or a sound or something that I ate. It's all just up there, and I don't know what’s in that big room, but I'll be working on something having nothing to do with anything, something that’s purely fictitious, and then some factual recollection will push itself up to the front of my mind, and I can use it.

So, it's an odd thing, but the observation of human nature and stories—and I'm very inquisitive. If you and I were to meet, I would right away probably start plying you for information about your life. It's not like I'm aggressively looking for details of other people's lives to use, but it is interesting to me. I think that at the root of my work—I don't know that there’s necessarily a through line, maybe there is, but I don't know that I could verbalize it right now—but I am fascinated at being alive and the stories that come up organically or that we force onto ourselves. Human nature. Just the whole saga of a life, even a quiet life, is deeply interesting to me.

So, I'm always on guard. I always carry a notebook, and if I hear something, I might jot it down. I might never look at it again, but that's definitely a primary feature of my quest, the hunt for more material. Because that room can never be filled. I want more and more and more all the time. Give me more information about what it's like to be alive. Not what it means to be alive, because that's not really a part of my quest. Just what it's like. What it feels like to be alive.

Back to how well-crafted your stories and your sentences are, the image that came to my mind picturing it was a master carpenter perfectly dovetailing two joints together. Like, that's what your sentences remind me of. It made me think, are there other crafts or art forms that you feel, besides writing, that you have a particular kinship to that you think feed your creativity? I think for a lot of writers, maybe music because of the rhythmic fact of it, but is there anything in particular that you feel like, "If I hadn't been a writer maybe this"?

Yeah, well, all the men in my family, or most of the men in my family, either are or were carpenters. I grew up doing that. I'm making a library. I can do all that stuff, not particularly well, but I can. I have a workshop in my basement, and I made the sort of dream shelves that I've been wanting all my life, and I still need to finish them, but they're done. They're up. They just need to be stained or whatever. I make lamps. I make furniture. The first thing I did when I bought the house is my brother and I ripped the roof off the house and I made what is now my room, which was just a dead space before, which is a great big writing area with redwood walls and ceilings.

The phases of my life where I'm happiest are where I'm working on a book that I'm feeling really engaged with in the morning, and then in the afternoons I have something going in the shop. So, you go downstairs and there's sawdust flying everywhere and you're listening to the radio, and that's a whole other reality down there. I'm really not thinking. There's no language in my mind. So, it's a reprieve, but then I also write in the evenings. So, I'll write in the morning, and then I have this physical thing I'm doing, tactile thing, working with wood. I love wood so much.

That's so interesting, because I didn't know that, and that's legit the image that came—like, there's this craftsman-like quality to your writing, in an excellent way, that it actually brought that image to my mind. That's super fascinating.

There may be a correlation, because shabby work with woodworking. You can sort of hide things with fiction. Plot, for example, the plot can be so fascinating or propulsive that you don't necessarily notice that the page is a little sloppy. But with woodworking, it's harder to hide those things. What woodworking taught me is the sense of rightness that comes from taking the time to put something together well, so that every time you use it, let's say it's a lamp, every time I turn on a lamp that I've made, it's not like I'm overwhelmed with pride or whatever, but there's just the slightest sense of, “This is working and because I made it correctly. And now, look, the result is that it's lighting this room that I'm in.”

So, I understand the importance of, or the satisfaction that comes from, a job well done. I don't know that those things are connected. It might be just a general truth. I think that what I just said, you could plug that into anything. But there could very well be a connection there. But again, I think it comes back to that thing of wanting to achieve that sense of ease that you read, say, again, in Tortilla Flat or True Grit or any of the [Charles] Portis books, really. Part of the reason why those books resonated with me then and still stand up now so many years later is because they're made intelligently and elegantly. There's a brutality to the creation of text that passes those tests because you have to be quite hard on yourself. But, as with anything, I think it's worth it.

That's why I think people could be reading your books for a long time, for that reason. I think there's such a quality to them that I could really see holding up, you know? I really do.

Thank you. I think that there also has to be a thing, part of it is I really like the idea of user-friendly art. I was not a scholar at all. I was quite a shabby student. I didn't make it through high school. I didn't go to college. But I was fascinated by storytelling and by sentence construction, and so I, as a young person, especially, it's not that I was offended by lofty fiction. And by lofty, I mean, thorny, hard to get through, laborious. There's something to be said for those types of works, and some of my favorite books are thorny and laborious. But there's a special place in my heart for work that goes down easy but then resonates. Something that's simply made but sturdy.

And yeah, I want the work to last, and I think of that. That's part of the criteria for what stays and what goes. Will this book make sense or be useful? Topical fiction is something I avoid as a reader because I don't really care about a moment. This is a general statement, and there must be exceptions to what I'm saying, but I prefer sort of the universal story. My readership, I think, is pretty—it's not one person. I know this because I hear from them and I meet them at my readings. There are quite senior people and then teenagers, and that it can bridge that gap is, to me, is something that I'm happy about.

Yeah, that's a good sign. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Patrick. This was really a thrill for me. I am a big fan. I'm so glad that you're out there in the world doing the work that you do, so keep doing it.

Thanks so much, Phoebe. I'm happy that you're reading.

And listeners, Dodge City by Patrick deWitt is available now on Audible.