Paul Auster - 11/01/22

·1 hr 8 min·5 clips

Brian Koppelman kept a Paul Auster quote on his front door for 15 years while raising his kids.

The emotional terms are unusually plain. Koppelman tells Auster that before he became a writer, Auster was the writer he read when he wanted to understand what a life in books could look like. Auster takes that in gently. From there, the conversation moves out of admiration and into craft, especially once Burning Boy and Stephen Crane take over. Biography starts to feel close, almost private. Auster says Crane took time to get inside, until he could feel him with something like the inward familiarity he has with fictional characters. But biography has a hard wall. Nothing can be invented, and that limit gives the work its tension, because the facts still have to hold while memory and testimony keep slipping around. Koppelman catches those unstable details. He spends time on the different stories about which suit Crane wore, and Auster allows that maybe each witness held one piece of the truth. That uncertainty gives the interview some life. Crane does not get flattened into a neat legend. The contradictions become part of the evidence that he was real. Koppelman keeps returning to that. His questions tie Auster's fiction, his writing about memory, and the urge to break myths without turning cold. Auster sounds comfortable there. Historical subjects, for him, can feel fully alive: impossible to touch, but present enough to live with after enough attention. The ending stays personal. Koppelman talks about reading the hardcover, listening on bike rides, and liking the books Auster narrates himself. Auster stays modest. The farewell leaves him almost deliberately hard to find online, which sends listeners back where he seems to prefer them: the books.

As heard by us

A personal literary debt leads into a searching conversation about biography, memory, and the discipline of invention.

Brian Koppelman's conversation with Paul Oster opens on literary influence as something lived with, not simply admired. Koppelman remembers reading Oster in his twenties, then carrying one line from his work into family life by placing it on the front door while raising his…

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Why you'd press play

You get a candid look at how Paul Auster's books shaped Brian Koppelman's life, then watch the conversation turn toward Auster's Stephen Crane book, Burning Boy.

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