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Tricia Ford: Hi, listeners, this is Tricia Ford, fiction editor here at Audible. With me today is writer Nathan Hill, who's here to talk about his new novel, Wellness, a smart, funny, and poignant exploration of modern marriage, our tech-obsessed health culture, and the bonds that keep us together. Welcome, Nathan. It's a thrill to meet you. Thank you so much for joining today.
Nathan Hill: Oh, it's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
TF: Before we get into it, I can't not mention The Nix, your 2016 debut and Audible's top pick for our best of the year. I have to tell you, the entire editorial team adored this book. You have so many fans here, so a lot of people in this building right now are very excited that you're here to talk to us. And it's one of our all-time favorites.
NH: Aww, thank you. Thank you so much. That audiobook, it's funny, the producer very early on said, "We could look at a lot of different voice actors for it, but I think Ari Fliakos is the one." And she sent me some excerpts from his work, and not having any real experience in this space, I trusted her judgment and he sounded great. And then, months later, I got the audio and he was so good.
He did this thing that I couldn't believe he did, which is make jokes—that I had written and rewritten 100 times—funny to me. He found humor in places that I didn't know it existed. He did voices that were just so persuasive and convincing. And I ended up, even though I was almost sick of the book by then, I listened to the whole audiobook that he did because he brought it back to life, even after I had kind of been done with it. So I was just so thrilled with his performance, and I was really happy that listeners agreed and he got the recognition he deserved for that. It was amazing.
TF: So that brings us to Wellness, where Ari has a comeback. But it's been a little while since The Nix. So with it having been our favorite, we've been patiently awaiting your next novel. And everyone's very curious: Did you envision Wellness right after finishing The Nix? When did it come to be? When did it start?
NH: There is a 15-year gap between me writing Chapter One and writing Chapter Two of Wellness.
TF: Wow.
NH: I actually wrote the first chapter almost 20 years ago now. I was in my mid-20s, and I had just moved to New York City. I was living in a tiny little studio apartment in Queens, and my apartment's only window looked out onto this brick wall of other windows that looked into other apartments. I just had this vision, this kind of tableau in my head of two people walking by their windows and catching little glimpses of each other here and there, and becoming interested in each other and, slowly, over the course of time, kind of falling in love with what they see.
I wrote that as a short story, and I thought it was fabulously romantic at the time, and then I kind of forgot about it for a really, really long time—until many years later, when I was in my mid-40s, and I was happily married for many years. I remembered that short story, and I thought from that perspective, like, "Okay, that's pretty romantic, but also, those two are really pretty naïve, you know?" They're kind of idiots, mistaking these projections and fantasies they were having about each other, mistaking that for real love or what it really takes to make a marriage work. And it got me thinking, where would they have gone, if they got married, had kids, grew up, where would that relationship go? And especially if the world got as strange as the world has gotten these last several years, what would've happened?
So I picked up that thread again, and I must've done that after edits on The Nix were done but before it came out. I had a little space in between finishing edits and publication, where I just started making notes for this new thing. After The Nix tour was done, I went back to it and then wrote most of it actually during the pandemic, during the lockdown. I wrote the lion's share of the book at that time.
TF: I can kind of get that feeling from it. But it's not a pandemic book at all.
NH: No, it's not, and I kind of intentionally set it before the pandemic because, I don't know ... I may or may not write about the pandemic, but if I do, it's going to need a little time to metabolize. It's hard for me to write about something while it's still happening. It has to be in the rearview mirror for me to get some perspective on it. So I set this book before the pandemic, in 2014.
TF: Right. And in Chicago, in the Arts District. It's very vivid, so it's interesting that Queens, New York, was the inspiration, but you made it Chicago.
NH: [laughs] Well the fact is, I'm actually more familiar with Chicago than I am with New York. When I was a kid, we lived in the suburbs of Chicago for a short time. And when I was an undergraduate in college at the University of Iowa, we would travel to Chicago from time to time. And then my wife and I lived in Chicago every summer for 15 years. She's a classical musician and played with the Grand Park Symphony, which is this summer festival in downtown Chicago that puts on free classical music concerts, which are fabulous—if anybody out there is curious, you should, over the summer, really go hear the Grant Park Symphony Orchestra. So every summer, my wife and I would live in Chicago. So I'm more familiar with that city, and I thought it was also a better setting for this particular story.
TF: It definitely works, and it's very interesting to hear just how much your two central characters, Jack and Elizabeth, were the spark and inspiration for the entire novel, because there's so much going on. Part of what I was really curious to ask you about, in your writing process, was the research that must have been involved in this book because there's so much referenced: scientific [studies], psychological studies, so much about art, about history. What was that part of your process? Was there a period where all you were doing was research, or was it a mix of writing and research?
NH: It was a mix. I knew that I wanted Elizabeth, one of my two main characters, [to be] a scientist. She's a psychologist, and she's studying the placebo effect. So I felt like I needed to do a lot of research in order to write her effectively, and so I kind of lived on Google Scholar for a very long time [laughs]. I felt like I could've earned a bachelor's degree in psychology for how much reading I did. But mostly, I would find a study that I thought was really interesting, and then I would follow the citations to other studies and follow those citations and get on Google Scholar and see what newer studies had cited those studies, and just try to build these chains of information.
Eventually, I found so much stuff that was so fascinating, and things that I didn't know before that I thought would work in the book really well, that I just kind of started slipping it in. Musicians I know have this phrase; they say they practice a piece until they have it “under the fingers,” which means they kind of don't have to think about it anymore. It's just natural, and that's what the research felt like to me: I read and read and read and read and read until I felt like I had the stuff under my fingers, and then it just sort of naturally worked its way into the writing.
Similarly, for Jack, he's a photographer, kind of an abstract artist, and he's going to art school. So I thought, "Well, I'm going to have to give myself an education on photography.” He's from the Kansas prairie, so I started researching the landscape, the art of the Midwest, and again, the world just gives you so much. And so I was like, "Well, that's fascinating. I need to put it in there." So, honestly, the research is just a result of me being super curious and excited about the things I was learning.
TF: It is like getting, I would say, possibly even a master's degree with the depth that it goes! [laughs]
NH: [laughs] Thank you.
TF: There are a few studies that laypeople might be familiar with, but part of me was trying to figure out, “Did he make any of these up or are they all real studies?” Like, we know the marshmallow test—I know Audible listeners love the audiobook of The Marshmallow Test. I'm not going to give anything away about what you reveal of that, but it's fascinating. And that's a real study that I recognize.
NH: Yeah, that's a real study.
TF: Are any of your studies fake?
NH: They're all real.
TF: They're all real?
NH: I think there's only a couple that I make up. And I only made them up because I claim them to be done by one of my fictional characters. They're real studies, but when I cite them in the text, I give them the name of the character, Dr. Otto Sanborn, who is Elizabeth's mentor. But the studies that I claim he does are real studies. I just give them a fake name. So everything else is real.
That was really important to me. Especially, there's this section that I call "The Unraveling" that dramatizes one or two hours of childcare of a toddler. I think it has something like 60 citations within it as Elizabeth tries to let her parenting be guided by the best research, and it's overwhelming. It was really important to me for all of those citations to be real because, I think, there's a phenomenon that happens. We talk a lot in our culture about people being led astray by misinformation or disinformation, but I think it's also possible to not only be misled by information that's false, but it's also easy to get misled by information that's true if you don't have context for that information, you know?
We have a firehose of facts coming at us all the time about how we should live and what best practices should be for parenting, or for health and wellness, or exercise or what have you. And it's just so much information that it's really hard to look at it with any kind of perspective or wisdom. And I think that's what's going on with Elizabeth there. She's kind of a victim of "information overwhelm," and so it was important to me to have a lot of information and for all that information to be true.
Because I think we can all get mixed up—this happens in wellness spaces all the time, where some study of 30 people somewhere, like, finds some strange link between some chemical and health and longevity, and then suddenly everybody in America is eating, like, seven Brazil nuts every day or something. And this happens all the time, and I feel like we need a lot more context and wisdom when we look at this information. So that was my attempt at trying to capture what it feels like, at least to me, to be living with access to all this information and trying to make heads or tails of it.
TF: And her sense of overwhelm is so palpable ... she's holding so much information in her brain, and [while] listening, I'm just right there with her. I feel horrible for her!
NH: Thank you. I'm glad that came across.
TF: With what you're describing with wellness and with part of what Elizabeth gets involved in in one part of the book, there's a wellness cult. Did that come from any personal experience or was that completely made up?
“That happens a lot in the book, where I think a good idea curdles into error when people aren't able to be sort of flexible or rational about it.”
NH: I have no personal experience with cults of any kind, fortunately. It came from just offhand comments that people would make about, like, "Sending good vibes into the universe." I have friends who say things like that, and I never really thought about it until I started really looking into, "What does that really mean?" I listened to a bunch of podcasts about sending “good vibes into the universe,” and it's funny. A lot of the problems of the people in the novel come from taking a good idea and then holding onto that idea a little too rigidly and a little too ideologically.
So you know, having “good vibes” and being confident and having a plan and a good attitude and all of those things, obviously, have some correlation to a little more success or a good feeling or well-being—that's an absolutely true thing. But then when you take that idea to its extreme, where it's like, “No, the universe is actually made up of good energy and bad energy, and my energy changes the world for everybody,” it turns into a kind of magical thinking. Then you take a good idea, and I feel like it turns into something that's not nearly as good when it's held onto too rigidly and too ideologically. So that happens a lot in the book, where I think a good idea curdles into error when people aren't able to be sort of flexible or rational about it.
TF: That's interesting, because a lot of what you're presenting [seems] critical of these wellness-fanatic types. And it's ridiculous and privileged and a lot of negative things. But there is some goodness in there. I was wondering your take on, beyond the critical eye, it can't be all bad. What do you think the future of wellness is if we make it something a little less rigid, like you're saying?
NH: That's a really good question. It's funny. It's like my first drafts tend to be kind of critical and then, as you continue revising, and start looking under the hood of the characters—whom you're satirizing a little bit—suddenly, I always feel so much more tender toward them and kind of bring a more gentle self toward them as I revise and revise. Then, ultimately it's kind of like, "Oh gosh, how can I be critical of these people?" I do a lot of the same things myself, you know?
For someone who's had terrible things happen to them, the idea that I can make bad things not happen to me by a positive state of mind has got to be incredibly seductive, you know? And I understand that. In terms of wellness, the last time I went to the doctor, I sat in the waiting room, filling out paperwork in triplicate even though I'd already done it online and then sat there for an hour past my appointment. And I got to see the doctor for 10 minutes, and she couldn't remember the stuff she'd told me the last time and kind of repeated herself, and then I got charged $200 for the visit that I had to fight my insurance company to pay. And that's just a normal doctor's visit that we've all come to expect.
Compare that to the wellness spa or Instagram influencer who seems to really hear you and care about you, and I absolutely understand why that's seductive. If we believe that eating seven Brazil nuts a day or whatever is going to prevent us from having to deal with the medical industry, then great, I understand why people want to do that.
I think the way out of irrational belief is just to have a system that doesn't treat people so poorly, you know? I think people are in desperate need of being heard, of feeling listened to, of feeling they're important, of feeling really cared for, and we have systemic problems with doing that for everybody. I have a personal pet theory that the rise of wellness practices coincides with a rise of deep precarity in the US that, like, we all feel that we're one business reshuffle away from being irrelevant, that we're one health emergency away from being bankrupt. And in that situation, it provides some psychological relief to find answers in other places. So I think, I mean it's not very satisfying, I think the problem is systemic, and we want individual answers because we live as individuals. But I think it's a problem that collectively we have to solve.
TF: One of the central themes explored is the placebo effect. It's a major theme that Elizabeth follows as part of her career. And I couldn't quite grasp if it was a bad thing or a good thing, and I'm curious to get your feelings on it: Is a placebo effect a good thing?
NH: It totally depends on the context, I think. Placebo to me is such a fascinating concept. I mean, not only biologically, but also historically. The word comes to us originally from funerals; it was a Latin word that meant “I shall please.” And in the 14th century, it was the name given to professional mourners, like someone who was paid to go to a funeral and chant a line from a certain Psalm. And the line was “placebo domino in regione vivorum,” which means, “I shall please the Lord in the land of the living.”
So the word is wrapped up in these ideas about being pleasing, but it's also in ideas about being fake. I mean these people were fake-mourning at these funerals, and Chaucer made fun of them in The Canterbury Tales. There's one character whose job it is to act like he's sad at funerals, and his name is Placebo. So, it's about being pleasing and also about being fake, and that's one of the root problems of my main characters is that they've twisted themselves up to be pleasing—pleasing to their families or their community or their culture's expectations of them, or even their own spouses—and so what happens in the novel is that the pleasing exteriors are finally starting to crumble and they're seeing the less-fake stuff underneath.
But whether it's good or bad, I don't know. There's a lot of good research showing that there's some bit of every medicine that we take that has some kind of placebo effect attached to it. Like when I take something to cure a headache, how much is it the compound and how much is it that I've traditionally taken things like this to cure headaches and they've cured headaches in the past, so I expect my headache to be cured? And so in some ways, it helps cure the headache, just the expectation of it. Or if I take a sleeping aid that is the color blue instead of the color red, because I associated blue with sleep more than I do red, that's a little bit of the placebo effect happening.
This is a book about the stories we believe in and how our worlds come to be defined and sometimes constricted by what we believe about them, and so what better example of the power of belief than the placebo effect?
“Sometimes I think when we do certain things or feel certain things, it's not necessarily because we want to or even because they're true, but because we're serving these former selves. And if we're not aware of that, then we can nourish these former selves and keep them strong almost on accident—not necessarily because it's helpful, but because it's just familiar.”
TF: Back to your central characters for a minute, Jack and Elizabeth. Somewhere in the middle, they need to excavate their individual lives separately, to figure things out from childhood in order to hopefully reconnect. Do you think that's a universal need for people? Do you think you need to separate in order to reconnect?
NH: It depends on what you're carrying around with you, you know? I think we carry around, all the time, these former versions of ourselves, like the self we were when we were going through an awkward phase and thought we were ugly, or the self we were when we were small and afraid. I think these previous selves kind of trail behind us and then even, sometimes, inhabit us. Like when I'm having a fight with my wife, I'm responding to some problem in the present, but I'm also, at the same time, that four-year-old kid who was injured in some important, memorable way that shaped me forever and made me forever on guard for certain things.
Sometimes I think when we do certain things or feel certain things, it's not necessarily because we want to or even because they're true, but because we're serving these former selves. And if we're not aware of that, then we can nourish these former selves and keep them strong almost on accident—not necessarily because it's helpful, but because it's just familiar. And I think that's what is happening with Jack and Elizabeth. They're stuck in stories that were helpful at one point in their lives, but now they need to start telling new stories. And you're right, they need to kind of separate and almost get back to the root of where the stories came from in order to see how they've been invisibly acting upon them all these years.
TF: Do you think their trauma is a necessary part of defining who they are? Do you think the trauma story is something that's key to all storytelling?
NH: I think, for these two characters, yeah, they need to really process what's happened to them. But I don't necessarily think that that's key to all storytelling. There are plenty of books that I love that have nothing to do with that subject, so I don't think it's necessary for story, but it was necessary for this story.
These two, they decided to run away from their dysfunctional families and go to Chicago and kind of intentionally become orphans. And so it really begs the question, what are they running away from and why?
TW: It works very well, and the pace of the reveal is so satisfying in terms of exploring what's happening now, and the past and what's revealed when next to everything else happening—it's just great. You get such a great feeling for these people.
NH: That makes me so happy to hear. As we're recording this, the book isn't out yet, so I haven't had a whole lot of responses yet. So that's really gratifying, thank you.
TF: Oh, you're welcome. And it is great. And there were times, and I feel like I'm getting a little heavy here, but I definitely cried for these people.
NH: Aw. It's okay, so did my wife.
TF: I mean, as heartbreaking as what they go through is, I want to come back to the lightness. This brings back what we were talking about with the narrator, Ari Fliakos, and his ability to hone in on the humorous parts of the characters and the story—because they're ridiculous in some ways, and the people they encounter are kind of ridiculous, but that makes them all the more real. Like, Elizabeth is super smart, with all the scientific stuff in her head driving her crazy, but she's very human at the same time. And her move to Chicago; I was inspired by her strength to do that. And Ari was bringing in the humor. Do you find it important to put humor up against the more traumatic, tear-inducing things that happen? Do you think having the humor there makes it more palatable in some way?
“Whenever I finish a new chapter, I'll read it to [my wife]. She's an awesome audience, and she loves to laugh. Making my wife laugh is one of the best things—so I try to do it a lot.”
NH: I like to try to be funny on the page, primarily because it entertains me as I'm writing. I made a deal with myself a very long time ago, as I was writing The Nix, that there was no guarantee that anybody would ever read The Nix or buy The Nix or publish The Nix. It's a very unstable profession, writing, and so I might as well have fun while I'm doing it. That's fun for me; trying to write some comedy makes it fun in the chair. And then, you know, I have this routine with my wife that whenever I finish a new chapter, a first draft, I'll read it to her aloud. She's an awesome audience, and she loves to laugh. Making my wife laugh is one of the best things—so I try to do it a lot.
So that's where a lot of the humor comes from, but also just, strategically, if you're writing a long book—if you're asking somebody to read 600 pages—I think it's kind of bad manners to have it be, you know, a nightmare of trauma the entire way. I feel like I want the reader to laugh. I want there to be some lightness because if there's this light pattern and then suddenly something dark happens, it almost seems darker against that pattern, you know? So there's a strategic thing about the comedy, but it's also just me just having fun and [being] playful and trying to make my wife like me better.
TF: Getting someone to laugh out loud is an accomplishment, even if they're an easy laugher like your wife.
NH: [laughs] Thank you.
TF: That also brings to mind some of your support characters. This is very deep into Jack and Elizabeth, but it's a long, winding book and they come across lots of different people throughout a long period of time. I'm curious if you had any favorite supporting characters?
NH: I think Benjamin Quince was really fun to write. When they meet him in the '90s, he's this guy who's, like, in his seventh year in his master's program and he's just the quintessence of the sort of music snob, uh, dude. He's all about being "alternative." He rails against the mainstream. And then, when we meet him again 20 years later, 15 years later, and he's now become a very rich real estate investor and fitness bro. And those two things did not seem all that separate to me. It's, like, both when he's young and he's old, what defines him is that he has some kind of insight or knowledge that nobody else has access to, and that makes him special. So it's about music and art when he's younger, and it's about tinctures and wellness potions when he's older, but it's kind of the same underlying psychology that drives him. And he was very, very fun to write.
TF: He's a character for sure. [laughs] I was trying to picture, you know, is he the kind of fitness bro who now has a shiny, bald head or does he actually have more hair now than he did before? I couldn't quite decide, I was somewhere in between those two.
NH: Right. [laughs] I'll let you have whatever image works for you.
TF: He was a standout. And like, kind of a bad guy, but not evil.
NH: Not evil, he's just consistent. [laughs]
TF: You cover so much in Wellness. Do you have any central themes that are most important to you?
NH: I think the most important thing that I was really thinking about was this way that we have a tendency to narrativize our lives, and tell stories about ourselves and tell stories about our worlds and about the other people in our lives—and how our lives are really defined by those stories. Jack and Elizabeth have this fabulous origin story, but later in the novel, I think you realize that origin story itself is something of an obstacle that they need to overcome. I was sort of thinking about Romeo and Juliet, if they hadn't died at the end of the play. You know, if they escaped and moved far away and had kids and, 20 years later, like, Juliet is not a big fan of motherhood and Romeo has a dead-end job. You know, they hit midlife and look back and be like, "We're freaking Romeo and Juliet. What happened?"
In some ways, that story would hem them in a bit if they couldn't grow out of it. So I think the primary thing I was worried about was this way that even good stories, even true stories, can curdle into error if we hold onto them too inflexibly. I give this line later in the book to Elizabeth's mentor, but he says something along the lines of, "Believe what you're going to believe, but believe gently, believe curiously, believe with humility." That's sort of something I try to live by: to try to always be as passionate about how I might be wrong as how I might be right. I don't have a lot of morals in my stories, but that's the closest I'll come to one.
“That's sort of something I try to live by: to try to always be as passionate about how I might be wrong as how I might be right. I don't have a lot of morals in my stories, but that's the closest I'll come to one.”
TF: One thing that that I think listeners would love to know a little bit more of your thinking on is the tech side of it, those algorithms. What's your take on that? What should we be watching for and looking forward to and being afraid of?
NH: That's a great question. There's a section in the book where I'm essentially dramatizing the dissolution of a relationship between Jack and his father via the so-called media algorithms that kind of mediate it. Like I say, the book is about the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we believe in. And I had the sad experience over the last several years of losing people in my life whom I thought were, you know, reasonable people who... I felt like I lost them to Facebook conspiracies or down internet conspiracy rabbit holes. Suddenly they became very angry, very combative, very aggressive folks who believed all kinds of nonsense. And I had to sever some relationships, and I really mourned that.
So I was trying to get at the heart of that with that section. I was trying to figure out, what is it about the underlying math of how these platforms work that is making this happen? Obviously, the big tech companies are very hush-hush about their algorithms, but they have patented all of them and those patent applications are public record. So I must've read just hundreds of pages of Facebook patent applications. I mean, they are dry documents, but that's where I found a lot of the material in that section, and the algorithm on Facebook is necessarily content-neutral: it doesn't know if a story is true or false, it just wants you to engage with it. It has no capability of discerning truth from falsity, from reality, from conspiracy—and nor does it seem to want to.
So yeah, I thought it was an appropriate thing to put in a book about how believing in stories can sometimes lead us astray. I don't know, I guess I'd say, again, I don't have really any moral of the story, other than just to be as aware of the stories that are entering your mind as the chemicals you put in your body, you know? Sometimes the stories are having a bigger effect on you than the chemicals are.
TF: So what are you working on now? What's your next Nix or next Wellness?
NH: Right now I'm sort of taking a little bit of a break. I worked really, really hard through the pandemic on this book. I haven't written anything new in a bit. I'm not working on anything specific right now. I'm kind of noodling with a few ideas. But honestly, my book tour is starting, and I haven't been on tour in several years, so I'm sort of bursting to see people again, especially after, you know, gosh, when I couldn't wait to be in a room with people in like, year two of the pandemic. So my book tour's starting, and that's really just all I'm focused on right now is talking to readers. So [to] anybody out there, I'm coming your way! Please come out and say hi.
TF: Do you generally work on one thing at a time, or do you have multiple things going at once?
NH: I've tried to do multiple things and I find that I'm bad at it. I tend to just work on one thing, because I find that my mind is a little too spread out. I just actually read a story this morning about Lauren Groff, who apparently has three different novels going at the same time—physically—in three different parts of her office at home, and she can just kind of rotate between them. And once again, I'm amazed by her mind. I can't [laughs] do that at all. If I have more than one project, I just feel completely overwhelmed.
TF: Everyone has their own way of doing things [laughs].
NH: Yeah, I guess so.
TF: Now, another thing I'd love to get from you and kind of close things out with is one question. I know you love Ari, but do you have any other favorite books that you've listened to, especially this year, 2023?
NH: So I started doing this during the pandemic where I would get a print copy and the audiobook of the same book and kind of go back and forth. So, you know, I would go on a bike ride and listen to it. And then I'd—right before bed—pick up where I left off when I was reading. And I really love doing that, and I just finished doing that with The Covenant of Water. Abraham Verghese narrates it himself, and he is extraordinary at it. I could not believe how good he was at narrating a book. I was really jealous [laughs]. He's a great performer as someone who, as far as I know, has no training in that. So yeah, I thought his performance of The Covenant of Water was really spectacular.
TF: It is. It was one of my personal favorites, too.
NH: I also bought the hardcover, so I was going back and forth, listening and then reading, and then listening and reading. It was a really pleasant experience.
TF: Were there any other novels, or even podcasts, any other kind of listening that you've enjoyed over the last several months?
NH: I did—it was earlier than the last several months—but I listened to The Overstory Richard Powers's novel. And I did that the same way, like listened to it, read it, listened to it, read it. I feel like that's a really nice way to listen to these big books. In terms of podcasts, I listen to The Ezra Klein Show all the time. I like to listen to the SmartLesspodcast, those guys are hilarious and you just want to be in a room with them. The folks at Crooked Media have been putting out something called Offline about a lot of the problems with social media and being online all the time, and that was, as you could probably tell, relevant to what I was writing about. So I've enjoyed their conversations as well.
TF: That's great. Well, thank you for the recommendation.
NH: Yeah, you bet.
TF: Thank you so much for your time, Nathan. It's been a pleasure getting to chat with you.
NH: Oh, thanks for inviting me. This was really fun.
TF: And listeners, if you're looking to get lost and awakened by a novel about the absurdities of modern technology and modern love, intimacy, and connection, dive into Wellness by Nathan Hill, available now on Audible.com.
