Welcome to the book show, a celebration of reading and writers.
I'm Joe Donaue.
Neil Gaiman, one of the world's most beloved fantasy authors,
is One the Hugo and Bram Stoker Awards and the Newberry Medal.
His eclectic catalog includes the Sandman,
Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and the Graveyard book.
And Alley's written his first novel for adults in eight years.
In the ocean at the end of the lane,
a seven-year-old boy lives down the lane from the hemstocks.
Three generations of women who run a farm in rural England,
when supernatural things start to occur,
the youngsters realize is that the hemstocks are not what they seem,
and are the only ones who can help.
It is a bewitching and harrowing tale of mystery and survival,
and memory and magic, which makes the impossible all too real.
Before a crowd of 1,500 in Saratoga Springs
is a great pleasure to welcome Neil Gaiman to the book show.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
I'm now in the remarkable position of being everything I ever wanted to be,
and having done pretty much everything I ever wanted to do,
which is a very odd thing to happen.
You know, I'm starting to feel like I'm an episode of the Twilight
Zone.
And obviously, the next thing that happens is I wake up in the gutter
as a whino, and I go, no, no, I have a New York Times best-selling book.
I wrote a Sam, and I want dog dog, and I'll be going...
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
And I'll be going, no, you're a whino.
You just imagine this.
You've been walking around now for weeks.
You think you're married to a rock star, and...
LAUGHTER
I don't know, so that's how it feels right now.
At what point did it change for you?
Was it very gradual?
Or... It's been very...
It's, you know, that thing where you boil a frog so slowly
that he's just sitting there thinking he's having a bath.
No, I don't know.
I started out as a journalist, and didn't really want to be a journalist,
but wanted to be a journalist for everything that I could learn
being a journalist, and was very happy to forsake journalism
for comics in, you know, the late 80s,
when you didn't write comics for the money or the glory,
because there was no money, and absolutely no glory.
LAUGHTER
And then slowly the world changed, and by the time I've been doing this
for a couple of years, I remember having a conversation
with somebody who turned out to be the literary editor
of the Daily Telegraph at a Christmas party,
and he said, so what do you do?
And I said, wow, right, comics.
And he looked as if I just told him that I do bad things to corpses.
LAUGHTER
And he couldn't exactly just leave, so he said,
well, what kind of comics?
I said, well, I'm doing, I think, called Sandman.
I did a book called Barlin Cases.
I think the time I was just working on signals,
and I was like, hang on, you're on the old game, and...
And I said, yes, he said, well, I've heard of you.
You don't write comics, you write graphic novels.
LAUGHTER
LAUGHTER
And I felt a lot like a hooker who just been told she was a lady of the evening.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
So comics, I carried on doing that until about 96,
and when I finished Sandman, and had lots of other things
that I wanted to do that I couldn't do while I was doing Sandman.
So then I started out in novels, and that was just small.
Never where I came out and didn't make any bestseller lists.
And Stardust came out and didn't make any bestseller lists.
And Smoking Mirrors came out, the Short Story Collection,
and coincidentally, made no bestseller lists.
But what was weird was that we can, and we count,
a month in and month out, people continued buying the books.
And I remember when I was about to do my next book,
and it was time for my publisher to pay me money
for what turned out to be American Gods.
They paid me quite a lot of money, and I got a phone call from an editor
at another publishing house.
He was a friend of mine, and he said, Neil, I...
You're going to think I'm an idiot, but they paid you a lot of money.
And I said, yes.
And he said, but I see your sales figures.
And how can you be worth that money?
LAUGHTER
And I said, why don't you go and look?
Don't look at what I sell on my first week.
Go and look at what I sell a week in and week out.
And he phoned me back two days later, and he said,
you're a proper author.
LAUGHTER
And I said, yes, apparently I am.
And so then American Gods came out,
and by the time that American Gods had finished coming out,
I was actually a proper author.
You know, it did actually do.
Make the lower reaches of the top 10 of the New York Times list for a week,
and then it won me the Hugo and the Nebula and all of these awards.
So at that point, I became a little-known children's author.
LAUGHTER
And that was fun, with Caroline, and with the wolves and the wolves.
And then, I don't know, things sort of...
It was like I was a big fish and a lot of very small puddles.
And then gradually, the water level in all of those puddles
was slowly rising while we weren't looking.
Now, I'm this ridiculous fish who gets to be
to completely destroy the metaphor.
Absolutely amphibian, in that I can...
I'm allowed to move from medium to medium.
I'm allowed to move from kind of book to kind of book.
And that is the thing that I treasure most.
The new book, as I mentioned, is the ocean at the end of the wane.
And it's one of the most beautiful novels I've ever read.
It's absolutely gorgeous.
And the thing that struck me, and I'm wondering,
because there are sentences here that are just perfect,
because you have that background in comics,
does that sharpen the writing?
Yeah, I mean, what I learned in comics,
which I treasure to this day,
more than anything else, was I learned economy.
You only have a certain amount.
You can probably comfortably fit about six or seven panels on a page
for a page looks really cramped.
You can probably fit maybe a couple of word balloons
in each of those panels.
But you can't put more than about 30 words in any panel.
So you really learn compression even more than you learn working on Twitter.
You learn to squeeze things and go,
OK, what am I trying to say and how am I trying to say it?
But I think actually the skills involved in writing comics
are very different to pro skills.
When I finished writing Sandman,
and the next thing I did really was the never-wear novel.
I found it very difficult,
because I kept wanting to describe things
in the way that I was used to describing things,
which was describing them to an artist who was going to draw them.
So I would put all the information,
everything that an artist would need to draw,
I would be putting in in never-wear.
And I had to sort of unlearn that,
not that that was a literary technique,
but I had to remember that you can describe things best in prose
by just a little pencil line here
and a little bit of shading over there.
And you can leave things to people's imaginations.
There are things you don't have to describe.
If you do describe them, you only have to put in
one or two beautiful little salient details
and people's minds will fill in the rest.
So much of the descriptors of this book
and the press that I have read so far
has talked about it being an accidental book for you somewhat
of becoming a novel accidentally.
Well, my wife is a musician named Amanda Palmer.
And last year, the beginning of the year,
she went to Australia four months to make an album,
to rehearse the band, to finish the songs,
to record the album.
I missed her, and I missed her a lot.
And she wasn't just making the album.
That would have been fine,
because we would have just skiped and chatted
and emailed them phone.
She really was making the album.
She was head down.
There wasn't really room for anything else in her life,
including me.
So I was off sort of suddenly missing her
for the first time in five years.
We'd been together, or we'd been in constant communication.
And so I started writing a short story for her.
She doesn't really like fantasy very much.
But she likes me.
And she likes honesty.
And she likes feelings.
I don't normally do feelings, because I'm English.
And male.
But I thought, I'll write her a short story.
And it'll be about a sort of seven-year-old meal.
The family won't be my family.
The actual events won't be real things that happened.
But it'll be looking out at the world
from pretty much a seven-year-old me.
That was what I started out to do.
And I took a anecdote that my father had told me
a few years ago.
I took a weird little family who had lived in my head
since I was nine or ten.
And I put them together.
And I started my book.
I didn't start my book.
I started my story.
And then I kept writing it.
And after a week or two, I thought, it's not a short story.
It's a novelette.
They come in around 10,000 words.
It's obviously a novelette.
And so I carried on for another week or so.
And I thought, well, it's an novella.
And then I carried on for another few days.
And then I sent an email off to my editor, Jennifer Brale.
And I said, Jennifer, I'm apparently writing a novella.
I know they're impossible to publish.
And I've no idea what will do with it when it's done.
But just early warning, there is a novella.
It's being written.
And I finished this thing that I thought was a novella.
And Amanda came back just as I finished.
Just as I was finishing, she came back from Australia.
And we met in Dallas, Texas, where she was mixing the album.
And I would go off to a coffee shop every day.
And I would type up the book and start doing my initial sort
of second draft on the manuscript.
And I typed up the book.
And I'd read it to her every night.
When she got back, jet lagged and exhausted
from mixing her album.
And I would read her what I typed up that day
until she fell asleep.
And then the next morning, when she woke up,
I'd say, where do you remember up to?
And she would say, let me have just turned up carrying the bucket.
I go good.
And I go back a bit earlier and keep reading.
But when I finished typing it, I did a word count,
because you can do that.
And I sent off a very, very surprised email
to my editors saying, I wrote a novel.
So it was absolutely an accidental novel.
And I think I don't think I ever would have had,
I guess, the Hutzper to go, I'm going to write a novel starring
a seven-year-old and me.
And it's going to be set in the world that I grew up in
and in that landscape, because I wouldn't have thought that.
I was planning, I've meant to write a great big
adventuring novel instead and never actually wrote it.
I wrote that.
The dedication to the book for Amanda, who wanted to know.
So given her love, quote unquote, of fantasy,
what was the reaction?
She loved it.
She loved the book.
And I said, I thought, good, my work here is done.
It was really fun.
She was my audience.
I'd never done that before.
I'd never actually gone.
I'm writing a book, really, for one person.
And I wrote my book for one person.
And I was very happy.
And I spent several months playing with it,
tidying it, tightening it, just getting everything to work
exactly like I wanted.
And then I gave it to my editors.
And they said, this is wonderful.
I sent it to a few friends.
And they were saying things like, this is the best thing
I've ever done.
And I went, oh, how odd.
How odd.
I, I, I, I, and then, you know, I, it wasn't really
until the, um, the early advanced reading copies of ocean
at the end of the lane started going out.
And people that I didn't know, and who had no cause at all
to be nice to me, started saying in print
that it was the best thing I'd ever done.
Or that they cried a lot.
Somehow I wound up writing about their childhoods, too,
that I realized that I had accidentally done something
very clever.
And I think I would probably be more big-headed and insufferable
about it if I had any clue how I'd done it
or any idea how to do it again.
And so I'm just going, OK, did that.
That's wonderful.
We used the word accidental.
But was there a conscious moment where you said,
because you were writing it for one particular person,
your wife, and that person is an adult,
that this would not be geared to our children?
About three quarters of the way through the book,
I started puzzling over who it was for.
And I started thinking a lot about who it was for.
And I, and in the margins, because I was handwriting this,
I would write little notes to myself
that were ideas and pondering about things.
I remember actually discovering while I was typing it out,
a large circle note to myself in a margin that just said,
in adult books, you can leave in the boring bits.
It is true.
I was giving a lecture in Chicago.
I'd been invited to give this thing
called the Zina Sutherland lecture.
Given that all I was thinking about at the time
was the oddness of the ocean at the end of the lane,
which I think I just finished.
At the point where I had to write my lecture,
the lecture was absolutely all about whether or not,
really, it was just all about what's appropriate for children.
Is childhood appropriate for children?
Well, I was eight, and I was walking home from school,
and I met some kids from a rougher, tougher school.
And they told me a dirty joke with a rude word in it.
And they made me promise not to tell anybody.
So of course, the next morning at my school,
I told that rude joke that I didn't actually understand,
but I felt it made me sort of seem sophisticated.
And I told it to three other boys.
And a lunchtime, I was called in to...
Actually, it wasn't lunchtime that day.
Lunchtime, the following day,
I was called in to the headmistress's office.
And she said, Neil, tell me about four letter words.
And I had never heard that expression before.
But that was the kind of thing that English teachers
and teachers generally would ask you.
So I'm going, well, bath, them.
Bats, cats, dogs.
I'd realized you could take three letter words and add an S to it.
And I remember her telling me to shut up,
which was the first time a teacher had actually said, shut up.
And I was sent home from school early.
And that night, my mother came home very, very late.
And she'd been called in for a meeting.
And she explained that one of the boys
that I told the dirty joke to, I told his mother,
who had been so offended that a word so incredibly rude,
I cannot tell you what it was.
But it rhymed with duck.
Had been used that this child had been pulled out of school
and taken away from that school and was never going to be returned.
And it was only because the school,
which was a very small private school,
had lost one set of school fees
that I was not being expelled, I was told.
And I love looking back on that.
I go, that's not really a story you'd ever tell an eight-year-old.
It's a story that eight-year-olds go through.
It's about weirdness and helplessness
and not quite understanding the adult world.
So the ocean at the end of the lane for me was all about.
It's not really a book for kids.
Kids don't need to be told what it's like to be kids.
They're there.
That's where they live.
Whereas adults who have completely forgotten
what it's like to be kids.
And also know what it's like to be an adult
and know the strange gulfs of memory.
They were the people I wrote the book for.
And that exploration of memory is beautiful and it's fascinating
because I guess we all have that, don't we?
Where there's these things that we can just think of
that are so crystal clear.
And then we're told from somebody else
about something that happened that we have no recollection of at all.
Memory is such a deceiver and it's so dangerous.
You wonder back through memory at your own risk.
And it's also of course one of those really weird things
because sometimes there weren't people around
who remember the same things as you.
And sometimes there were people experiencing
almost the same things as you with memories running
on a parallel track that are not yours.
That can be really weird when you have two kids
a couple of years apart.
And one of them had a miserable childhood
and one of them had a ridiculously happy childhood.
And they were going through the same places
and then they talk as adults.
And you have that sort of oddness.
In the case of Ocean at the end of the lane,
it wasn't just memory but I was fascinated
while I wrote it at how much, how many weird things
that I'd completely forgotten came back to haunt me.
I mean things I didn't put in the book.
There's a lot of food in the book.
And it's nice food.
Comfort food.
It is comfort food.
It is food as love.
And of course I didn't put in the opposite of that
which is food as punishment, the kinds of things.
I was raised in England at a time when you,
particularly at school, you had to clean your plate.
A plate of food was put in front of you.
You could not leave the table until all that food was gone.
There were children starving in China.
You could never figure out what the one had to do with the other.
That's what I was thinking.
Especially when adults rejected,
summarily your suggestion that perhaps the food
you didn't want could be sent to these children
who were starving in China,
thus solving both problems.
But I just remember Wednesdays at my school was nightmarish
because it was a sad little salad of a crispy leaf
and a half of tomato and a large lump of pickle beetroot.
And I would sit there slicing my pickle beetroot
into paper thin slices that I could put into my mouth
and wash down with water without actually chewing.
And this process took a long time.
And in the end there would just be me
and one teacher glaring at me
because she obviously wanted to go up to the staff
from and have a cigarette, but she couldn't
because I was just slicing this beetroot and washing it down.
I also found it interesting that when you refer to the characters,
most of the time it's by their full name except for the narrator.
There's more than just the narrator.
He doesn't have a name, but then his mother is referred to as his mother
and his father, his sister, and occasionally you'll get other people
adults in the plot and they are described by their function
because he doesn't know their name.
The policeman is the policeman.
But then you have characters who have to have their full names.
My favorite of which is Ursula Moncton.
I googled it after I'd, you know, sort of that thing where you go,
I think I'm going to call her Ursula Moncton.
And then you hit Google because you do not want a real Ursula Moncton.
And you are hoping against hope there's nothing
and there was nothing and I was thrilled.
It was like good.
But the fun about Ursula Moncton as well.
I think one reason why she has both names is Mary Poppins
has both names always.
She's never referred to as Mary in the book.
She's always Mary Poppins.
I liked the idea that Ursula Moncton was the flip side
of Mary Poppins.
This sort of, you know, Mary Poppins comes into your life
for the spoonful of sugar and I don't know what's
in her Ursula Moncton's spoon, but it's not sugar.
No.
Sort of a spoonful of cyanide or spoonful of nightmares.
And was it conscious not to name the NERGAR?
Yeah.
It was very conscious.
There was in the very first draft in handwriting
he got referred to once by name or addressed once by name
by Ursula.
But then at the point I realized I got through the entire book
only naming him once.
I thought, you know, I'll lose that.
We don't generally speaking walk around thinking
of ourselves as names.
We think of ourselves as ourselves.
I don't walk around going, I am Neil.
Or even I am Neil Gaiman.
Look what I'm doing in my Neil Gaiman way.
I, you know, when I, it's just I.
Having that's names, you know, names, especially if you've
been signing your name a lot, they could even less likely.
I look down.
I am NERGARGAR.
The new novel is The Ocean.
At the end of the lane it is published by Moro Neil Gaiman.
Thank you so much for being with us.
Such a pleasure to have you on the program.
Thank you very much for having me, Joe.
Thank you so much for listening.
We enjoy hearing from our listeners about the show.
You can email us at book at wamc.org.
You can also listen again and find this or pass book shows
at wamc.org.
This has been an off the shelf edition of the book show
in partnership with North Shire Books and Manchester Vermont.
And Saratoga Springs, New York, Northshire.com for more
information.
Sarah LeDuke produced our program, book
Marcus for next week.
And thanks for listening.
For the book show, I'm Joe Donnie-U.
