{"id":679,"date":"2010-11-30T16:50:24","date_gmt":"2010-11-30T16:50:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2010\/11\/30\/michael-paterniti-on-storytelling-part-2-the-last-months-of-william-burroughs-mitterands-last-meal-and-magical-cheese\/"},"modified":"2024-03-04T18:53:48","modified_gmt":"2024-03-04T18:53:48","slug":"michael-paterniti-on-storytelling-part-2-the-last-months-of-william-burroughs-mitterands-last-meal-and-magical-cheese","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2010\/11\/30\/michael-paterniti-on-storytelling-part-2-the-last-months-of-william-burroughs-mitterands-last-meal-and-magical-cheese\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael Paterniti on storytelling (part 2): William Burroughs’ final months, Mitterrand’s last meal, and magical cheese"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
\n
\n Today we bring you Part 2 of a discussion on narrative nonfiction with long-form storyteller Michael Paterniti. (If you just tuned in to the conversation, you might want to check out Part 1<\/a>.) A six-time finalist for the National Magazine Award,\u00a0Paterniti won the prize for feature writing for \u201cDriving Mr. Albert,\u201d which became a book by the same name. He is at work on a new book, about cheese. He visited with Narrative Writing instructor Paige Williams\u2019 class<\/a> and other Nieman Fellows in November. This excerpt has been edited lightly for clarity and brevity.<\/em>

Paige Williams: <\/strong>We\u2019ve talked a lot about reconstructing scene without exposition and how to handle remembered dialogue, that kind of thing. What\u2019s your philosophy on that? For instance, how do you handle recreated dialogue?

\"\"<\/a>Michael Paterniti: <\/strong>There\u2019s a scene in [\u201cDriving Mr. Albert\u201d<\/em>] where I went to see the writer William Burroughs. I was in Lawrence, Kansas, with Dr. [Thomas]\u00a0H<\/span>arvey, who had done the autopsy on Albert Einstein, and he and Burroughs were friends. Burroughs\u2019s keepers asked that I not bring a tape recorder or write anything down. I said that\u2019s totally fine. He was sort of near the end. He died like three months later. He was still doing his methadone and his vodka, and he was fantastically crazy through that whole visit. It was great and heartbreaking.

But what I did was \u2013\u00a0and I did it for myself \u2013\u00a0as he would talk I kept going to the bathroom. And going to the bathroom, I use that all the time. I do it to see maybe what\u2019s hanging on the walls in someone\u2019s home. It\u2019s a great way to just take a moment. And in this case, because I didn\u2019t have any paper, just a pen, I wrote on my hand. I wrote trigger words, just repeating what he\u2019d said, and then I\u2019d go back out.

Afterward, I went back to the hotel room and wrote everything he said, the scene. I had promised I wouldn\u2019t use it, but I did write it, and he did die, and I did get in touch afterward to say, \u201cI\u2019m gonna use this,\u201d and they said, \u201cFine.\u201d‘
<\/span>

Williams: <\/strong>Some of the fellows are interested in doing books and some have already published very good books, so we\u2019ll be talking about moving from the article stage to the proposal phase and then to the full book. Was it sort of a no-brainer that the Einstein piece would become a book?

Joshua Prager: <\/strong>A no-brainer<\/em>? Pun intended?

[Laughter.]

Paterniti: <\/strong>In this case I wrote for Colin Harrison<\/a> at Harper\u2019s. I wrote 25,000 words and they ran it at 17,500 words or something. I remember being at the Noho Star<\/a> and Colin reading these 18,000 words back to me as we\u2019re sitting there to edit, and when he finished I said, \u201cOkay,I think we\u2019re done, this one\u2019s done.\u201d But then people were interested in it as a book and as we started talking about it, it occurred to me how much more I wanted to know. That was a good sign. My editor at the time, Susan Kamil, a very good editor, really loves memoirs, so she really wanted this parallel story about myself and Sara, my wife. That\u2019s one of the little subplots: I leave her in this moment when we aren\u2019t really sure if we were gonna stay together. And it was all true, but I sort of felt like if I want to write a memoir, I\u2019ll write that<\/em>.

For the Einstein book, there had to be a character that was me, and from the magazine piece to the book there had to be a much stronger me. I remember thinking many times during the writing of the book that I\u2019m never going to do another article that becomes a book. And when that one inevitable snarky reviewer came along to write,\u00a0\u201cThis was better as a magazine piece\u201d \u2013\u00a0there\u2019s a little part of me, with my current book, where I said, \u201cI\u2019m not going to do this first as an article, I\u2019m just going to eliminate the exercise of having compressed it.\u00a0I want to allow it to be a book in my mind and then figure out how to make it the book rather than move between the two forms.\u201d\u00a0For a lot of people the Einstein book really works, but I don\u2019t know that I will ever do that again.

Williams: <\/strong>So tell us about the new book \u2013\u00a0cheese and the cave in Spain.

Paterniti: <\/strong>So, yeah,\u00a0I was in Barcelona in 2000 to write about this chef, Ferran Adr\u00eca, this molecular gastronomy guy. He invents foods, he invents these foams;\u00a0according to many he\u2019s the greatest chef in the world. He\u2019s an artist and sees himself as an artist, and he works with all these scientists who help him in the kitchen. Eight years earlier, I was in the MFA program at Michigan and when I graduated I was waiting for all the job offers to flood in, but nothing came. And so I went to this deli in Ann Arbor called Zingerman\u2019s<\/a> \u2013

Philippa Thomas: <\/strong>Great deli.

Paterniti: <\/strong>It\u2019s awesome! I was like, \u201cCan I make sandwiches here?\u201d They were like, \u201cNo, you\u2019re not qualified.\u201d I saw their little newsletter and said, \u201cIf you ever need anyone to proofread your little newsletter\u2026\u201d And so they gave me that job. Ari was the owner and he traveled around the world trying foods. He had gone to Spain and found this piece of cheese that had been made in this tiny village in north-central Castile, on the Meseta<\/a>, just in the middle of nowhere, 80 people in this village. The cheese maker, Ambrosio, had said to Ari, \u201cThis is a family cheese that\u2019s been made for hundreds of years and it\u2019s a magical cheese. It\u2019s a cheese that holds all these memories, which is why it\u2019s the most expensive cheese in the world.\u201d

And so when I realized I was going to Spain I found that village. One Sunday I went over with my buddy, Carlos, who was helping to translate, and we went to this village to have this piece of cheese. And this was just for me \u2013\u00a0I wasn\u2019t even thinking this was gonna be a book. And we got there and Ambrosio didn\u2019t have the cheese anymore. He\u2019d had it stolen from him by his best friend because this cheese had become world famous. His best friend had bamboozled him out of this cheese.

Williams: <\/strong>Wait, wait \u2013

Paterniti: <\/strong>It\u2019s like a slow-food-Kentucky-Fried-Chicken-thing gone horribly wrong. He\u2019d signed these documents without realizing what he was signing. This was the story he told. And so Ambrosio, the Bohemian artiste, the authentic farmer, had signed away the company to his blood brother and best friend. In our first meeting, in this cave where they used to keep the cheese, he described to us how he was planning to murder Julian. Carlos was translating, and I kept saying, \u201cWait, he\u2019s going to amputate him?\u201d But that was his plan, and it still may be his plan.

The one thing about Ambrosio: Of everywhere I\u2019ve ever been and everyone I\u2019ve ever spoken to, he is the <\/em>storyteller. He\u2019s incredible. More than anything, I thought: I need to learn from this guy. I just need to come back here somehow. I thought writing about the cheese would give me an excuse to go back, and we went and lived there for a while. So the book has become about \u2013\u00a0in many ways, it\u2019s about storytelling. They have these little caves in Spain that they call telling rooms. It used to be in the old days that the cave was built into the hill, and they would tell stories through the winter in these rooms. They\u2019d tell stories of the village and they\u2019d tell all their secrets \u2013\u00a0everything happened in the telling room. So that\u2019s the name of the book, \u201cThe Telling Room.\u201d

Williams: <\/strong>And the name of your nonprofit.

Paterniti: <\/strong>It is, yeah, but not really intentionally. We just wanted to create a telling room in Portland, Maine<\/a>, to get people to come into this one place and tell their stories. A lot like you guys do here, every week, upstairs. You get to hear someone\u2019s story, and when you hear that story out loud it\u2019s totally different than being alone, reading. It\u2019s a communal thing that happens that\u2019s really powerful and creates this emotional connection between people that sometimes overcomes all the other things that stand between us. So I was really fascinated by this oral tradition. And as the story unfolds, Ambrosio, the epic storyteller, becomes human, and it\u2019s actually been very painful for me because I\u2019m very close to him. His story will change inside the book. There are some things that happen. I won\u2019t go on and on about it but\u2014 he hasn\u2019t killed Julian, but in his mind he\u2019s killed him so many times that Julian is dead. And there were 12 cheese makers who Ambrosio had taught, like the 12 disciples, and there was one guy who betrayed him.

Robert Rose: <\/strong>What\u2019s it taste like?

Paterniti: <\/strong>It\u2019s a manchego. But here\u2019s the thing: The cheese they make now, he calls it the soulless cheese, the dead cheese, the cheese they perverted and ruined by buying cheap milk. They tried to cut their costs \u2013\u00a0it was the go-go \u201980s and \u201990s and they tried to make the business look really good by cutting costs and riding on reputation after they got Ambrosio out of the picture. But Ambrosio had two tins of the original cheese left in his cave, and one he\u2019s never going to open. That\u2019s for the memory of his father, who died a couple of years ago; but the other one he opened and served us just because he felt like he had to do something for me, just to stop me from coming all the time.

Rose: <\/strong>But did it taste like the most expensive cheese in the world?

Paterniti: <\/strong>In that moment, it was truly the most incredible cheese I\u2019ve ever had. But I think I was swept up in it, I don\u2019t think I was very objective.

Prager: <\/strong>How did you have the vocabulary to describe \u2013\u00a0I mean even if reading all about cheeses, unless you have a truly educated palate how would you know how to describe it properly, how to enter that world and be equipped to tell the story properly?

Paterniti: <\/strong>I think it goes right to thatValery quote. I\u2019ll do everything I can to know how to do that \u2013\u00a0I\u2019ll do the legwork \u2013\u00a0but at some point the experience and how you relate it belongs entirely to you. Those details have to become part of you and then they have their own life. And that\u2019s what I try to do more than try to prove that I know exactly how the last molecule of this cheese was made and why it\u2019s the perfect cheese. A lot of things become very symbolic for me in the writing, so if the details are rich enough to construct a universe then perhaps out of that world comes the symbol or metaphor that carries meaning, that carries something I\u2019m trying to say. But I wouldn\u2019t presume to go in and say, like, \u201cI am a cheese expert.\u201d

I\u2019ve struggled more with the writing of the process of making this cheese than anything I\u2019ve tried to write about. So I still don\u2019t totally get it, and sometimes I feel like a fake. If I had, like,\u00a0a beat and knew exactly how to describe relativity or whatever \u2013\u00a0I mean you go to D.C. and there are White House reporters who have been there and know the full history, and then you drop in and you\u2019re supposedly going to write a political piece about Bill Clinton? What do you have to say, really? There are people who\u2019ve been there since JFK was there. So I think that\u2019s when I begin to look at this other way of telling a story. I try to educate myself as much as possible, but I\u2019m not afraid to say that I don\u2019t know, or that I\u2019m here too late, like with the SwissAir piece. To me, that\u2019s when it gets interesting. Time plus story is when things get interesting.

Williams: <\/strong>I\u2019m wondering what your argument is for being a generalist. I\u2019m drawn to writers with catholic tastes and who resist the pressure to \u201cfind the thread\u201d or to package themselves as a person who writes about such-and-such \u2013\u00a0I\u2019ve always liked walking into new adventures or completely unrelated stories \u2013

Paterniti: <\/strong>But don\u2019t you think that gives you a different power? When you\u2019re an outsider there\u2019s something you carry with you that\u2019s different. Like with Clinton, there were fine beat reporters who had been waiting for their one-on-one time with him, and I felt really rotten sometimes yukking it up with Clinton and then walking into this room where all the guys were sitting and they\u2019re like, \u201cYou\u2019re an asshole, I\u2019ve been on this beat for eight years and you just walk in here?\u201d The only thing that I was bringing to that particular story was this idea that this is not gonna be political. He may say political things but I am gonna go after this as just a story about a man.

Williams: <\/strong>Did you tell them that? That was your stated intention?

Paterniti: <\/strong>Yeah.

Williams: <\/strong>And that was Esquire, which is part of it, too, frankly. Even though he\u2019s the president, he wants to be in Esquire.

Paterniti: <\/strong>Maybe that president in particular.

Rose: <\/strong>How did he respond to the piece?

Paterniti: <\/strong>[Doing\u00a0very good Bill Clinton impression] \u201cI loved your story.\u201d I heard somebody told him, \u201cOh, he really got you\u201d and Clinton said, \u201cWell, you should read the Rolling Stone article because that really <\/em>gets me.\u201d And the Rolling Stone article is a Q&A where Clinton talks for like 30 consecutive pages.

Mark Kessler: <\/strong>How did you decide that the cheese story would be a book rather than an article?

Paterniti: <\/strong>I was literally just blown away by Ambrosio, my book\u2019s hero. And then the minute I started going back to the village, these other strands of stories came. I constantly think of the Chagall painting where the farmers are over the village, kissing in the air. The villagers would tell these stories that were supernatural stories. There\u2019s a story about Manuel, whose grandfather\u2019s bones summoned him one night and he actually took to the air. And everybody in this village was like, \u201cYeah, Manuel flies.\u201d And I\u2019m like, \u201cWell, what do you mean?\u201d They took me in the fields and said, \u201cThis is where he took off,\u201d and then they took me two miles down this dirt track and said, \u201cThis is where he landed.\u201d So all these stories started coming up.

Thomas: <\/strong>You clearly have a poker face when you\u2019re interviewing them.

Paterniti: <\/strong>Yeah. And I\u2019m always curious. I mean I was curious sitting across from David Duke when he was spewing all this weird stuff. I\u2019m like, \u201cThis isn\u2019t TV, I\u2019m not getting confrontational, you may be completely offending me, and I will get my say\u201d\u00a0\u2013\u00a0I mean that\u2019s the deal, you\u2019re the storyteller, you\u2019re controlling that. So yeah, poker faced or open to it as it\u2019s coming. But if someone\u2019s about to jump off a bridge in front of you, you don\u2019t watch it so that you can describe it. When that happened on the bridge<\/a>, I did tackle him. That\u2019s one of those moments when you\u2019re not a writer, you\u2019re not doing a job anymore. If you\u2019re standing there and seeing something horrible there\u2019s a part of you that has to figure out how you\u2019re gonna act.

Darcy Frey: <\/strong>So you were saying before that you\u2019ve never struggled so much on a project as on the current book. What\u2019s the main struggle? Was it figuring out the structure or how to tell the story, or\u2026?

Paterniti: <\/strong>Again, I did what I do: four 100-page starts, and none of them felt like they were working. But then I got a little fellowship to go to MacDowell, so I had two weeks away from my family and got into this bubble and I really thought I\u2019d found it. I\u2019d created myself as a double character. This is so elaborate but it sounded so great at dinner when I was talking to other really good writers and poets and artists. And I wrote it like crazy, and I was psyched. It really felt great.

And that all got thrown out. It was too complicated, it was ridiculous, really, in the end, but it unloosed all these words, all this language. And it wasn\u2019t inert anymore. It was alive again. Then I was able to jump on that and ride that back into it. And I went back and saw all those false starts, I was like, \u201cWait a minute, that was actually pretty good. Why did I abandon that?\u201d\u00a0I just need to overlay that with language and set up this idea about storytelling. So all that thinking I\u2019d done, all those false starts, started to work. So now I\u2019m on Chapter 11 and the hardest part of it is going between magazine and book work. I can never get quite enough time just to knock it down. That\u2019s also been a huge challenge.

Florence Martin-Kessler: <\/strong>Have you tried to find a unifying thread among all your stories?

Paterniti: <\/strong>I know for a while there I was writing a lot of death stories. I was struggling with that. Especially when you have little kids \u2013\u00a0it just kind of hit me, my own mortality. But more than that, my need to go deeper there. I don\u2019t think I was consciously saying, \u201cI\u2019ve gotta do a death story,\u201d\u00a0but I was drawn repeatedly to that, and I still am, kind of. But again that goes to that Walter Benjamin essay where he says in death the story kind of gets released. There\u2019s something very freeing to me as a writer when you come late to the story.

Like with Mitterrand\u2019s last meal<\/a>, I was totally free to go have that last meal that he ate and evoke him, and create this kind of biography of him, shaping it exactly the way I wanted, to say the thing I wanted to say. That\u2019s a total death story but it\u2019s also a food story, and a travel story, and a little bit of a love story to my wife. And with the giant story, here\u2019s a man who\u2019s growing and is going to die \u2013\u00a0that\u2019s the big tick-tock \u2013\u00a0so here\u2019s the blinding beauty of his life as it exists now. I think it gives it that pressure and poetry, and that\u2019s what I really love, when you can find that.

J.S. Tissainayagam: <\/strong>Is it that you\u2019re generally observant or that when you\u2019re on a story you switch over and say, \u201cOK, I have to be much more observant now?\u201d

Paterniti: <\/strong>Probably both, but when I\u2019m on a story there\u2019s a definite intention and intensity. It\u2019s like, \u201cI\u2019m not gonna be back here again and so I\u2019d better get this now\u201d\u00a0\u2013\u00a0the way the light is, all the atmospherics. I\u2019m really attuned to that. It\u2019s why I\u2019m there. Information, facts, I can get those later.

Martin-Kessler: <\/strong>Do you take pictures of the people you\u2019re talking to?

Paterniti: <\/strong>I do take pictures and I\u2019ve been doing a lot of Flip stuff. I don\u2019t really do it to package with a story, but just sort of to have it.

 

Michael Fitzgerald: <\/strong>I\u2019m curious how you balance kids and family with the kind of reporting and writing you do.

Paterniti: <\/strong>My wife does the same work,\u00a0so we switch off. When the kids were young we\u2019d try to bring them a lot. Or we\u2019d save up frequent flier miles and bring them. Once, she was in Cambodia for a story for the New York Times Magazine and I babysat \u2013\u00a0we had one child at the time \u2013\u00a0and that\u2019s one of my greatest memories ever, riding on an elephant with Leo in the middle of Phnom Penh while Sara was off getting her important story.

The juggle day in and day out is so tricky. Andit has to do with both of us learning, or beginning to learn, how to allow the other to do whatever he or she needs to. So there are times when that person needs to be off the clock to get that writing done, and they can\u2019t be carrying the guilt of not being at home. You have to just take it off of them for the period that they\u2019re out there, because they\u2019ll be doing the same for you when you\u2019re gone. It would be harder if she didn\u2019t get what I do or if I didn\u2019t get what she does. Everything becomes about efficiency and there\u2019s a little less of the kind of angst-y \u201cThis has to do something remarkable and it\u2019s gonna take my entire soul and so I\u2019m gonna need space and a lot of chocolate milkshakes lined up on a table,\u201d or whatever it is that gets you through.

[To see another story from Paterniti, check out “The House That Thurman Munson Built<\/a>,” the latest installment in the Gangrey series of Stories That Should Never Go Away.]<\/em>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today we bring you Part 2 of a discussion on narrative nonfiction with long-form storyteller Michael Paterniti. (If you just tuned in to the conversation, you might want to check out Part 1.) A six-time finalist for the National Magazine Award,\u00a0Paterniti won the prize for feature writing for \u201cDriving Mr. Albert,\u201d which became a book […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3302,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"topics":[],"authors":[61],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays-on-craft","authors-paige-williams"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMichael Paterniti on storytelling (part 2): William Burroughs' final months, Mitterrand's last meal, and magical cheese - Nieman Storyboard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2010\/11\/30\/michael-paterniti-on-storytelling-part-2-the-last-months-of-william-burroughs-mitterands-last-meal-and-magical-cheese\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Michael Paterniti on storytelling (part 2): William Burroughs' final months, Mitterrand's last meal, and magical cheese - Nieman Storyboard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Today we bring you Part 2 of a discussion on narrative nonfiction with long-form storyteller Michael Paterniti. 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