Video transcript
2018 NSW PRC author interview - Jesse Andrews

TAMARA RODGERS: Hi, I'm Tamara Rodgers from the Premier's Reading Challenge. We're at Sydney Writers Festival Secondary Schools Day here today at Paramita Riverside Theatre, sitting backstage and getting to catch up with Jesse Andrews. Hi Jesse.

JESSE ANDREWS: Hey, Tamara. Great to talk to you.

TAMARA RODGERS: Yeah, so you've been in Australia for a couple of days now. So what do you think of our amazing country? You managed to suss it all out in three days.

JESSE ANDREWS: With the 15% CPU that I'm operating at. No, it's amazing. If you want to sponsor me for citizenship, I would really appreciate that.

TAMARA RODGERS: We can sort something out afterwards. The Premier's Reading Challenge kicked off a couple of months ago. And kids around the state are reading a whole load of books, being carried by their teachers and librarians to find something new to read. Was reading a big part of your life when you were a kid?

JESSE ANDREWS: Oh, huge, huge, because my mother was a librarian. And so she just brought home books all the time. And just never occurred to me not to want to read them. And pretty soon not to want to make them.

And so you start by making tiny little like cut outs that are stapled together. And there's like a word on each page. And your parents pretend like, oh you're amazing at this!

TAMARA RODGERS: It's the best book ever!

JESSE ANDREWS: And it's seeded early in your brain like, I'm eventually going to get the Nobel Prize for Literature. And then you get a little older. But yeah, no.

It was the kind of the thing that I always wanted to do, even when I was doing other things that I liked. The magic of I don't know, this really pure clay. It's just words.

That's all it is. It's the simplest technology that you could possibly have. And you can build anything out of it.

TAMARA RODGERS: Everyone starts with the same 26 letters, right?

JESSE ANDREWS: Yeah. And umlauts.

TAMARA RODGERS: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what were the kinds of books that really spoke to you when you were a kid?

JESSE ANDREWS: Oh man. I really liked pretty voicy books. And a lot of them were kind of British. Kind of British. They were 100% British!

Roald Dahl was an author that I just adored because he was so fun and funny and specific. And you just always knew when you were reading his stuff. And before that, I would say like AA Milne and Dr. Seuss. And then yeah after Roald Dahl, I mean, I got to a weird point where I started realising that you could use books to signal your intellect.

And that was when I went down kind of a dark path of like, being a 14-year-old reading 'Ulysses' like, on the bus just to make sure like everyone sees that I'm reading it, not understanding anything. But even then, like, a few authors kind of broke through and meant something to me. And I think the main one was Virginia Woolf, who just depicted interiority. There's just this stream of consciousness. Like, here's what it's like in a mind!

Whoa, what? That was crazy! Not that she's the first to do it.

But she's the first to do it as well as she did, I think. And it was like there's a whole sector of your brain switching online for the first time when you read an author like that. It's amazing.

TAMARA RODGERS: So I can think of authors that you've read that as you've been writing your own stuff that have kind of informed what you've been writing? Struggling with the water--

JESSE ANDREWS: It's the basic--

TAMARA RODGERS: --because of the stress of the question.

JESSE ANDREWS: This is what happens when you put a writer in front of a camera. The find very creative ways to just be idiots. So I got a water in my eye. You saw it! What was the question?

TAMARA RODGERS: Sorry. So can you think of authors that you've read that having formed your work in some way?

JESSE ANDREWS: Oh my god, yeah. Other authors-- I mean, the ones I mentioned. George Saunders, I'm pretty influenced by, I would say, because he's very funny, but he writes about things that are very hard to look at in the eye-- power and human frailty. And the way that the structures that we've kind of put around ourselves enable decision making is kind of evil even if the people making them, you can still empathise with them. So he's outstanding at that.

Jennifer Egin is an author that I love. Just one of these chameleonic authors who can kind of do anything. MT Anderson is another one. He writes this high concept books that have a lot of humour in them. I need an author to be funny some of the time. You can just tell when an author has a sense of humour, or if they're more interested in signalling other things about themselves.

TAMARA RODGERS: So can we talk about your new book? Is this only a couple of weeks old now. Like, it's still quite a baby out in the world of publishing, 'Munmun.' Really fascinating.

I read it last weekend and could not put it down. So there's some really strong signals to some other authors' works in this. Do you want to tell us a little bit about what 'Munmun' is about to start with?

JESSE ANDREWS: Yeah. 'Munmun' is set in an alternate reality, a lot like our own. And it's a lot of like, this period of time. And you know the Western world. It's that sort of in California, but could kind of be a lot of places.

But the big difference between that world and ours is that everyone is proportional in size too much money, or munmun, they have. And people vary quite a bit. If you have nothing you're a tenth the size of you and me. So somewhere in the 10 to 15 centimetre range. And we would be like the average person. The biggest character is maybe 50 metres high.

And so yeah, it's a book about money and of course, power and just the wild in-quality that we live with in our world, and the way in which it just makes some people living certain kinds of lifestyle invisible to others, that if you have nothing, your voice can't even reach the giant ears of the rich who are towering above you who might even crush you with their movements and not be aware of them. And so it's not even necessarily, but this system is certainly a pretty evil one.

TAMARA RODGERS: And it really, really depicts the access to services that people have in terms of their wealth, because quite literally, if you are tiny, they are not doctors small enough to operate on you. Yeah? So there's a character who's injured fairly early on in the book.

And the doctors can patch her up a little bit. But anyone who is a doctor is so wealthy that they are proportionally out of scale for you. So they can't really help you. So it really, really does a great job of kind of highlighting those kinds of inequalities in our society.

JESSE ANDREWS: I'm really glad yeah-- I'm so glad that came across to you. Because that was the way in which this device, which is a kind of big crude metaphor, nonetheless made the world resemble ours in our kinds of ways. And certainly access to health care is a big one. To education is another that no one is building schools for little poors, as they're called, because there's no profit motive in building that school. And also there are no teachers to staff them anyway.

And so our main character grows up illiterate and without any kind of education at all. And in fact, the book is written in a sort of idiosyncratic way because it reflects his late arrival to literacy. Only around 15 does he finally, in this really kind of serendipitous way get access to schooling. And so he smashes words together. He spells them funny sometimes.

TAMARA RODGERS: Yeah, it's kind of phonetic spelling, which you can figure out what it means, but it really kind of highlights that idea about literacy and education. So we're going to jump back to 'Me and Earl and the Giant Girl.' A lovely mash up of cancer and comedy. Which are two concepts that don't usually go together.

JESSE ANDREWS: Two tastes that taste great together in your mouth! Ha ha!

TAMARA RODGERS: So this was turned into a movie. And you won a couple of awards at Sundance for that. And I believe that you were the scriptwriter for that.

JESSE ANDREWS: That is true.

TAMARA RODGERS: Say is that because you have amazing talents as a scriptwriter or because they a couple of passages in here that are written in script and they go well? Jesse obviously can write script.

JESSE ANDREWS: You know, I think it has more to do with the second thing. Because I really didn't know how to write script. Yeah, the main character of 'Me and Earl,' a kid named Greg, he's a filmmaker. And so he writes some passages because he is narrating the book.

It's in the first person. In screenplay format, I did that, because I think screenplay format looks kind of funny. The stuff that's in like, all capitals sometimes for no reason! And the font is big too. So you get a lot of white space.

And that means you just get to-- fewer words per page, which is every writer's dream. Yeah, exactly. You get to the end faster. And people don't even realise that they've been cheated out of words.

But when some producers found the book, they maybe thought that I was more familiar with the form than I was. And they said do you wanted to do this? And I was like, I have so much respect for screen writing. It's really meaningful to me.

But then I did learn it, because it is a cool form actually. And it really teaches you economy, that like, you just don't get a lot of words to say something. But you do have to create the framework for an entire movie, which that's a lot of stuff happens in there. So yeah, it was a cool experience.

TAMARA RODGERS: So watching at schools and in libraries, so probably a whole bunch of kids who are being told by the teachers that they need to write stories. And writing stories for them is probably what writing scripts was like for you. Do you have some advice for kids who are trying to find a way to connect with putting their stories on pages?

JESSE ANDREWS: Yeah, for sure. I really want you guys to remember that your first draft being bad is totally normal and OK. Like, my first draughts are terrible. Will, Alisyn, like, every writer-- I don't know those people. Uh, whatever. Just their names, Carl, Lucia--

TAMARA RODGERS: I'm sure Kyle was a terrible writer when we started, too.

JESSE ANDREWS: Well, just the first draft is, of course, not meant to be good. The first draft, is you just putting clay on the pedestal. And it doesn't have a shape. You're generating clay out of your mouth. So in a sense, you're vomiting it, and that's fine.

And it's really the revising is where the thing gets good. So just don't be sad when the thing doesn't resemble what you want right away. It shows you what it's meant to be by not being that thing yet. But it first has to be something that you can see.

So just get the words on the page, and then really start to figure out how do I make this better? What's the thing that I wish that it was? And how can I get there? Yeah, that's the beginning.

TAMARA RODGERS: Awesome. What's next for you? I know you're busy travelling and doing festivals and stuff. Are you working on something at the moment? Do you have a story that's just burning away in the back of your head?

JESSE ANDREWS: Yeah, I have a few.

TAMARA RODGERS: But you don't want to tell us in case everyone steals those story ideas?

JESSE ANDREWS: I don't think I can. I don't think I can. But I don't have a front runner either. I have a few books that I would like to write. And I'm doing some screenwriting as well.

Yeah, that's kind of my day job. I'm very lucky to get to do it. Yeah, and I tell people that I only put things in caps because I think it looks hilarious and dumb.

TAMARA RODGERS: Awesome. Well, it's really great to catch up with you today. Thank you so much for taking the time to come back and have a chat with us. We hope you enjoy the rest of the festival and enjoy the rest of your time in Australia.

JESSE ANDREWS: Yeah, Tamara. Thanks so much. I've really enjoyed this.

And I love Australia. Please take me in your country. That would be-- that would be nice, because my country may not be around for a whole lot longer.

TAMARA RODGERS: OK. Well, thanks so much Jesse. Happy reading everyone.