Adam's grand third act

"When I write I get to be my best self."

I'm no fan of myself. I've learned to tolerate myself. Like, okay, this is who I am. I don't know if anybody runs around and goes, gosh, I'm so glad I'm me. So, I don't have that, but there is an acceptance, and I think that gets better as you get older, and I think it's easier as you get older… but when I write I get to be my best self.

-Adam Nathan, writer

Ah, dear reader, what a delight awaits you today!

Before you plunge into the words below, I urge you to find a cozy nook, perhaps wrap yourself in a blanket, and instead of reading, close your eyes and listen. In this interview, the extraordinary Adam Nathan brings to life poignant excerpts from his oeuvre. Through his lyrical cadence, he leads us into imagined realms where humor hangs with mystery, play lives alongside compassion, and pain, love, and redemption reign as royalty.

He speaks of the tender moment when his mother read to him in his youth, feeling “as supple as a tiger cub in his mother’s mouth.” I suspect you, too, may find that same warmth enveloping you. Adam, no stranger to the full spectrum of human emotion, crafts stories that gut and mend, reminding us that to feel—even the sharpest of pains—is far superior to numbness. From that raw experience, the heart transforms, becoming more than mere anatomy; it evolves into a vessel of shared vulnerability and grand humanity.

And speaking of grand, Adam has embarked on a monumental journey: to write 100 stories in 100 months—an astonishing span of 8 1/3 years fueled by relentless creativity and fervor. He’s nearing the completion of his first ten, which we discuss in our conversation. I implore you to seek them out in their entirety. They will haunt you, tickle you, and join you at the kitchen table, urging you to question assumptions, live more authentically, and cultivate gratitude for this magnificent thing we call life.

This is my third act. This is where I feel I contribute and where I feel something that I'm leaving behind is special. Nobody really cares whether I'm writing a hundred stories or six or a thousand. But I'm telling myself, look, you have a hundred stories to say It – It with a capital “I” – and if you live that long, the hundred stories are what you're saying life means to you.

Transcript:

Kimberly

Adam, what a privilege. This is a little bit scary for me because I admire your writing so much. mean, I was actually just earlier this morning peeling tomatillos over the sink and I kind of go blank in my head when I have these monotonous tasks and I was wondering What does Adam do when he's doing monotonous tasks in the kitchen or the yard? Because in my mind, I imagine you have these worlds that you visit.

Adam

No, I love the not in this tasks. Like for me, stuffing envelopes, like I remember working someone's political drive and it was like 80 ,000 envelopes to stuff. I'm like, just fantastic. I don't know why it's like a Zen shutdown of the system. No, I love it. No, extra thoughts there.

Kimberly

Really? Wow. So, okay, so you're not building stories and thinking about your characters. When your fingertips hit the keyboard, that's when you're writing.

Adam

That and weirdly in the middle of the night. When I wake up in the middle of the night, I can't go back to bed. I'll start having an idea and then, I gotta go write it down. I’m like, Am I gonna wake up Melanie? So I sneak into the bathroom with the phone, I'm like tap, tap, tap. Then I go back to bed and then 10 seconds later I have another idea. They're not good ideas, they're just ideas that I'm afraid I won't remember anything. So I guess in the middle of the night and I don't know, rewriting and rewriting stuff.

Kimberly

Are you a bit of an insomniac then?

Adam

More than I used to be. I mean, one of the things about age is sleeping gets trickier, you know?

Kimberly

Okay, well, now that we have that out of the way.

Adam

The rest of it were home clear!

Kimberly

I know now that we both go blank in our heads with monotonous tasks. This is a good thing.

So I want to begin with you reading an excerpt. We have a couple little treats today because Adam's going to read a few different things for us. But my introduction to your work was through this beautiful series, memoir series, that you wrote about your family, mother, your father, and the unfolding of your own understanding of your childhood. It’s called Scheherazade. And I felt like these specific relationships to your mother and your father, those really grabbed me.

In the opening chapter of Scheherazade, your mother curls up on your bed with you to read her childhood copy of The Arabian Nights. And I'd love for you to read to us because I'm imagining a little bit of your mother might even be speaking through you as you share this with us. Can you open with that?

Adam

I can. Now you had a longer piece to read here. Do you mind if I cut it in the middle of it and just give a quick context on it? You've given most of it, but there was a lot of chaos in my family so story time, when you had a parent really focused on you directly, was special. Anyway, so yes, I'm in bed. I'm five years old. I'm reassembling my childhood as much as you can as an adult.

And she's reading Tales of the Arabian Nights, the tale Ali Baba.

“Open Sesame,” the swarthy, hawk-eyed captain cries out.

And the great wall of rock opens of itself.

“The rock opens of itself,” says my mother with significance. I’m aware there is a lesson here: she is reading with the reflective, reverential cadence of a pastor approaching his main point, his holy ground.

“The rock opens of itself,” she says again.

She parcels out each syllable this time. She is not honoring the story now, but its language, and through my mother’s repetition and my own submission, I am vulnerable to the love of words, of her words, of the sound of her words, of their curious mixture. I am as supple as a tiger cub in its mother’s mouth.

My mother releases her fingertips from my neck. Her hand retreats to the pages of the storybook. She adopts a fresh cadence and tone, shifting from aria to recitativo.

The tigress releases her cub and turns away. The cub must follow the fine trail of language on its own.

Kimberly

I mean, I love your mother. I can't imagine anybody reading that and not wanting to curl up with the two of you on your bed and be read to like that. It's remarkable. I want to ask you when your mother read to you, what shifted in your heart? What awoke in you?

Adam

I think there's two things going on. There's the obvious. It's a mom and it's a child and it's story time and focus and there's tenderness there. But there's another piece of this which is really important in Scheherazade, which is about language and words and families. A lot of it's about how my parents, how important books and literature and words and what you said and what you wrote, how much it meant to them and how that has transferred into my own life. It's not the only thing it's about, but it's a big part of it. And I think one of the things in there is also just about the mystery of language opening up, that words really matter. There's a whole layer on top of a story itself, what they sound like. And that's a gift. That's a gift. That's why I love writing, right? I wouldn't love it if I didn't, I think, grow up in that environment.

Kimberly

The rock opens of itself. Now when you were five years old, did you visualize a rock opening up? What did that mean to you then?

Adam

Well, two things. One is yes, the rock sliding open is huge. I might have also seen it in a movie somewhere. It might have been in some Sinbad movie. Maybe it's just like Batman with the bat cave opening. But yes, the open, the gesture in the opening. But the words there I just made up. I mean, I just created Ali Baba. I have no idea what her copy of it sounded like.

But I think that's the beauty of a character coming in on a wild horse and saying all this stuff is very appealing to me.

Kimberly

Yeah, and in a way, maybe I'm totally reading into this, but it feels like in a way your mom is telling you that it's your job to discover who you are, what's on the inside, the way that she pauses on that, and that someday young Adam will grow into adult Adam and open who he is from within. I don't know.

Adam

Yeah, she was extremely independent.

She's kind of amazing in a lot of ways. A very challenging person to be your mom, but she was brilliant and really strong visioned. And in many ways a very successful career. But I think for her, some of that was also that her kids would go, you know, figure it out. But I know that I remember being in like fifth or sixth grade and reading the Hardy Boys. And that was just like, Why are you reading the Hardy Boys? I remember it was kind of, was, it was looked down on. And I loved them, man. I could have read left to right on that shelf. And I remember the snobbery in that, you know, but for her it was like, hey, there's more beautiful things out there, why don't you read those? But for me, it was just the pleasure of whatever their names were and their stories. I don't know if I'd like them now, but I, that's part of her way, both my parents' way of looking at language. There's better language and there's worse and be on the right team.

Kimberly

She had high expectations of you.

Adam

She had high standards. Both my parents are kind of intellectuals, and I think if you're like that, you want your children to meet that bar. I don't think I did actually meet that bar, but I have my own thing.

Kimberly

Well, so your dad, let's switch over to your dad a little bit because, well, everybody has inner demons. Your dad revealed them more through his writing. Similar to my own father, there was a lot of wrestling going on inside. Reflecting on your dad and sort of honoring the complexity of his inner life, you wrote something beautiful in “Scheherazade, The Love Letters.” Do you have that little section that starts, But now his most beautiful qualities?

Adam

So wonder if there's a context here. I think a key piece is my dad was not someone who ever looked forward to having children. It wasn't part of his dream of himself. And yet when he had kids, when he had my brother and I, it blew his mind. I would say it was kind of the best thing that ever happened to him in a way. So here I'm talking about that in this excerpt.

But now his most beautiful qualities were sneaking in from behind and around and below like vines. They were flowering up, pulling on his leg, asking to be picked up, looking at him directly and without guile. Love itself moving only inches from his face, pulling off his glasses and laughing, patting his bald head, making the days beautiful with soft smiles and clever children's thoughts. His having children was not just an opportunity for him to love his children, it was an opportunity for him to love himself.

Life had in its own time, and rather effortlessly, outsmarted him.

Kimberly

Would he agree with that? I mean, would he, if he could read what you just wrote and read to us, would he agree with what you shared? That life had outsmarted him.

Adam

I really don't know. I don't know if he would, he didn't always recognize things other people said—my dad's name is Barry—Oh Barry, you're this or that. And everyone in the room would think, Oh God, you absolutely are, you're that. And he'd be like, I just don't know. So he would agree how much he loved his children. He was effusive about us, which is very odd, because really about nothing else in his life was he like that.

Kimberly

I guess I asked because I'm wondering, sometimes we can see these things in other people because they reflect something within ourselves. And I'm wondering, do you feel like life is outsmarting you in a way?

Adam

No, I have a few choice regrets like I wish I hadn't done that but, touch wood.

I think my life has unfolded exactly how I would want a life to unfold.

You know, I love my family. I've been married for 30 years. We're happy together. My children are beautiful. It's like, I like my work. I love my writing. So, you know, we're ticking a lot of boxes here.

Kimberly

Well, that surprises me though, Adam, because you also are able to express terrible pain in your writing. So you have both, you're not just skirting around on rainbows, you definitely can go there. What do you think it is about writing that creates this kind of safety when, for your father in life, it wasn't perhaps as easy to hold both. Do you feel like the writing allows you to go there? Even on the surface, your life is quite lovely and your dreams have come true in many ways.

Adam

The first thing that you talk about is, you know, some of the darker stuff in my writing. I'm not saying because I, how I'm happy with my life, there aren't a million things I'm afraid of, or that aren't going right. I'm just saying like, the way my life has unfolded, I don't want it to have been otherwise. And I don't want to be 25 again, I don't want to be 30 again, I don’t want to be seven again. I've done those. So that doesn't mean there aren't lots of very rough things and things that I'm frightened of and a lot of stuff that you're probably thinking of that I write are things that cause me great anxiety and so I'm working it out on the paper.

But what was the second part of the question about writing?

Kimberly

Well, you sort of started talking about it. Do you feel like the writing actually creates a safe place for you to work that out? Work some of those more difficult emotions out?

Adam

Yeah, they're not demons if that word was coming to your mind. I don't think of the challenging things in my life that way.

I'm no fan of myself. I've learned to tolerate myself. Like, Okay, yeah, that's who I am. I don't know if anybody runs around and goes, gosh, I'm so glad I'm me. So I don't have that but there is kind of an acceptance and I think that gets better as you get older and I think it's easier as you get older. But when I write I get to be my best self. This is not my best self. I love talking to people in conversation, but when I'm writing and I'm really connected I feel like something good is happening. Even if it's writing about scary things. I, God, if you don't know me, what are you gonna think of this? If we have a gift to give, for me, whether it's only four people get it or not, I feel like the gift I have to give is something that happens when I'm writing between me and the page that somebody else might feel that same way. That they go, I know that place and that's a connection that's possible for me on the page with other people that's enormously valuable.

Kimberly

Okay, well, I'm gonna raise my hand because I am one of those people and I know you have more than four readers. Well, let's talk about The 4th Pip because this is the one that just jumped in my mind as you were saying that. This serialized story, which should be a novel—I mean, to me, it feels like it could go on and on. The characters are so alive.

Adam

That’s so sweet.

Kimberly

There’s humor, mystery, play, compassion, pain, shame. Your characters have energy. And I know that's just such a blanket term, but I really mean that. Like they come alive, they buzz off the page and they live. Still, I read 4th Pip months ago and they're still, these characters are still running around kind of like ghosts in my yard. I wanna talk to you about your character development, but let's open so that everyone else can kind of jump on board with this fabulous story.

Let’s talk about the chapter, “The Bulldog: Part V”

Adam

Yeah, again, quick context, context. The girl, it's light, it's comic-serious. And a girl discovers on Christmas Eve, she's given this record set, K-Tel records, if you're kind of my age, you used to know there's big sets, K-Tel records, and it would show you on the TV scroll every song you're going to get. So she got one for K-Tel soul hits of like the early 70s. It was like the best thing. She had a little record player and would play them.

So she goes up to her room and something pretty amazing happens. She finds out that she can sing exactly like the singers on the records. But there's a twist and we'll get to it. All right.

But everyone knew she was called the bully because of her nose.

Oh her age. She's probably 13.

But everyone knew she was called The Bully because of her nose. It was flattened back into her face almost vertically — like a bulldog’s nose. Her sister described it unhelpfully: “It’s not my fault your nostrils look like black beans growing fur on their backs.”

So The Bulldog knew what it was to be unfixably, irredeemably unattractive.

Because of it, she spent long hours of her childhood looking in the mirror with the broken lightbulbs, not because she was searching for beauty that she knew wasn’t there. She spent hours looking in the mirror so that at some point, eventually, she wouldn’t care anymore.

She told her mirror she was “tearing off the band-aids,” and she tore them off one afternoon at a time. She would grimace and distort her face and hoist her shoulders up and down like she was silently having a tantrum. She made herself as ugly as she could, and then she stared into these horrible faces until she got used to them.

The two of them were “unwrapping the mummy” together she explained to her mirror. And, little by little, her plan worked. She could say “The Bully” and then “The Bulldog” out loud to the mirror and, eventually, she could say the worst word of all — the one under both of those words — with her mean laugh. It was like becoming a comic book villain.

It had never occurred to her until the Christmas Eve of the K-Tel records that the mirror might have something to say, too. And that evening she heard the mirror for the first time.

The mirror’s beautiful, but terrible secret for her was this: when she pumped her entire body up and down like she was having a tantrum, and she scrunched her face into the spitting image of ugliness, and she shook her body like something spastic was going terribly wrong during her transformation into a comic book villain — only then would her beautiful voice appear.

The trick was to sing at exactly the same time she was making herself ugly.

For whatever reason, she had to be ugly to be beautiful.

Kimberly

I just love that. I love that. And I love the image. I have to ask, did you or your kids or your wife ever try to do, like, did you mimic her at some point? I mean, I almost want to see a family Christmas card everyone…

Adam

Oh did I? No. I was tempted to do it a little bit while reading, but it's so distracting that I won't. It's better you kind of picture. And that's a big thing in the story, you know, like her shame around. She has the voice of Gladys Knight and her shame around being herself, but having to be so ugly for other people. And it was a tension I loved in it. It was a character I loved, right? So.

Kimberly

In anything that I work on in Unfixed, to me, if there is a common thread, it's always that there's the paradox, there's the tension of opposites, there's the pain and there's the joy and there's the ugliness and there's the beauty. To me, that is where we can really touch into the heart of another when we can see both sides. And I wanted to ask you if, clearly, that is part of a lot of your characters. Is that an element that you try to consciously bring in when you're developing a character or is there something even more essential that you try to develop in them for this life to happen?

Adam

I don't know how actively I think about what I'm going to do to develop a character. It's more like as things come in, I go, Not that, not that, not that, ooh, that!

I knew the end of the story has her being fully accepted by other people. And the second that idea dropped in that these other characters would bring her into their world. I was like, yeah, there it is, that right there, at 3 AM, I wouldn't need to write that down. It was like, Okay, that will happen.

And I think a lot. I plan a lot when I write, but the things that are the best just show up. You know, it's fishing. You go out and you fish every day. And, you know, if you do it enough, you get some stuff in the boat.

Kimberly

Yeah, I imagine you observe your kids a lot too. You express a deep, deep love for your children and for anyone that wants to go back and read some of those. They're just extraordinary. What was the one that you wrote for your daughter? It's called “Chicago: Little One.”

Adam

Little One, yeah from a song.

Kimberly

Well, I wrote to you that you left a dad sized hole in my heart. I imagine as your children were growing up, you saw the tension of opposites in them developing from sweet little bundles of joy to teenage angst. Do you feel like some of your character study came from just a quiet observation of them? You have a remarkable ability to hold the ugliness and the beauty together in your characters. And I don't think that's a natural human quality. So I guess I'm asking where did that come from?

Adam

So I remember, I actually think I do have a little insight into this. I remember at one point trying to become the great writer-observer. This lasted a couple weeks. Like, OK, l’d ook around you in the coffee shop and write down all the things you notice. And I mean, it was interesting. I definitely noticed more things than if I hadn't done it. But what I really do is I think I've always been, I hate this word, I'm fairly sensitive to things that are going on emotionally around me. This might be part of being a child of an alcoholic, in an alcoholic family, we have to be so wired in, but all those little impressions that are felt, that is what's coming back out. That is, the study is that. It's a life of little feelings, little anxieties, love. That’s what’s under all the work.

Kimberly

Interesting. So that's kind of cool because your tagline, I don't know if I haven't looked in a while, but it says “Feel something” or it used to say “Feel something.” Does it still say that on your substack?

Adam

It doesn't. I have very complicated feelings around that. First of all, I'm to say the obvious. It's so easy to read that. It's like this incredibly precious thing. Like, Feel something. “Fuck you! I'll feel what I want and when I want.” All right. And I know that if you don't know me, that's a very legitimate place to end up, I get it.

But it is what I'm trying to do. I want people who read me to feel what I have the privilege of feeling when I write it. Now, I may not do that. The writing may not help them get there. But when I am writing, I am definitely feeling something or I wouldn't do it. I don't get up at 5am to become a writer. I could care less about becoming a writer. I get up so that I can lock into the page and get excited and feel something. And then if I create that, I want to go out and share it with somebody so that they do. You know, I have strong opinions on politics. I'm not bringing those to the site. You know what I mean? So.

Kimberly

That's fascinating to me. Just in light of what you just shared about being a little kid and a child of an alcoholic parent and the ability of you to pick up all the nuances of emotion that were happening and in a way, maybe they saved you. And so as an adult, you're doing the same for us, like, hey, here's a character. I want you to feel something about this person. Here's a complex set of emotions that this person's experiencing. I want you to feel something about that. it's kind of like the little guy, little Adam, is still processing the world through your writing. I don't know.

Adam

Certainly not untrue. I just enjoy it flowing through me. I think there's a cost to that.

Kimberly

What's the cost?

Adam

Well, you know, I had a challenging childhood and there's costs to everything, You know, I don't want talk about the cost.

Kimberly

You don’t have to talk about that.

Adam

Yeah, there's a cost, of course, whatever we are, there's pros and cons on it. But I always notice that, and for people who have this in their lives, people that were children of alcoholics or drug users that have a very intense childhood, and mine could have been much more intense than it was, it's like, they always have almost a spidey sense of what's going on around them. They can feel it, they know it, they know who's not in a good mood, they know why, they know what this means, they know this is escape zone, this is like know who to worry about. I think because that's on all the time, one of the weird life benefits of all that is pretty locked in to people.

I don't know by the way that my kids have. I don't think anyone in my family has that same kind of thing that I do. Because basically, you know, I grew up in really happy family.

Kimberly

They didn't need it to feel safe.

Adam

They didn't need it, right? I hope I'm not upsetting my kids if they watch this and go, yes, they do have spidey sense. Do you know what it was like living with you, dad?

Kimberly

I'll interview your son and daughter next. We'll get the backstory.

Okay. Let's talk about death because this is so fun. I really want to dive into this. I appreciate the way that you've handled the dark side of life, the heavier aspects of life and death is no stranger to you as well. You tackle it in the The Gondolier, Moby—I’m naming these so that people can go back and read them and I will hyperlink them so everybody can—The Snowfield, Finisterre.

In The Snowfield you almost comedically lead us into the staging of one's own death, which actually I’ve been thinking about lately a lot, this idea of being able to choose when we die.

But then you come back and kick us in the face with The Snowfield: Part II where you ingest fear, anger, longing, hope, and then finally, of course, beauty. And I'm just going to read this one little couple sentences:

“You hold out a hope that my mad dog will be my companion in the snowfields of surrender, that he will be with me in my final moments in the dimming half light, in the cold. And having seen me safely home, that he will take his leave and wander off into eternity.”

I want to know what you mean by your “mad dog companion.”

Adam

A couple things to lead up to that. You're right, the humorous part is a little bit of—if you're baseball fan, a changeup before a fastball, right. It's like, this thing is fun—it was very interesting publishing that in two pieces and seeing, Wait, wait till part two!

My parents both died in their late sixties, I'll be 59 in a few months. They died at 67 and 68. So certainly that affects my thinking about dying.

But the mad dog. I am 100 % certain that I will be difficult, self-pitying, angry, impossible, unreasonable when I'm expiring. If I have cancer—one, I've seen it. I've seen, it's hard particularly with cancer, it's hard dying of cancer. It's hard dying a lot of things, but that's certainly a bad one. And so I don't expect any, it's not gonna be like Mother Teresa going out, it's gonna be like—the nurses don't wanna come into my room. Will you take it? Will you take the bell, he's upset again, right?

So I know that me and I expect that me to show up.

Years ago, there was this crash of a plane crash in Sioux City, Iowa. You've seen this. You've seen this. One of those things that 2020 would be on. The plane is in flames and it's cartwheeling and it's just a total disaster. Everybody didn’t die, I think half the people on the plane died, but it was like on 2020 or something they were doing a thing about it and two of the people that lived said-

When they were warned that they're going to crash. Oh God this totally chokes me up.

Strangers held hands across the aisle and they said, It's been a good life.

That to me is the mad dog wandering off into eternity. And I wish that for everybody. I certainly wish it for myself. At the end, I would just like to be that. All right, here we go.

Kimberly

Yeah, but damn, here we go…but damn, here we go, because it's been a good life.

Adam

It was OK. It was more than OK. It was good. It was grand. The word grand means a lot to me. I don't particularly like people. I don't think we're that likable. We do horrible things. There's so much to not like about us. If the other animals had to vote, we're definitely one of the lower percentiles. They're like, The ones with no hair, the two leggers—

But we have a capacity for being incredibly grand.

There's something big that shows up with us about how we relate to the world that's captivating. And I think the people holding hands across the aisle is, I think what happens in The Gondolier is, where we're bigger than ourselves and it's grand, and I'm very interested in that. And of course, death is a chance to challenge that, what's there. How do you meet that in that place?

Kimberly

Yeah. I want you to read something from The Gondolier. Before you do, I just wanted to share something. My dad died when he was 49 in a car accident. And just recently I've been counting the days. It was 49 and six months in a day. And in 14 days, I will have passed his date of life and I'm fucking scared. Like there was a part of me that is like every night I go to bed and like Whew I made it. And I've obviously been touched by death early on in my life because of his death but it's up for me right now because I feel this time in the next two weeks of like Whoa what if I don't pass his date. And I'm not trying to create scary moments for myself, but I even have had a few weirdly close calls in the last week where I'm like, I'm not ready to go either. I have that mad dog with me and because life is so fucking beautiful and I need to squeeze it more and more and more.

Adam

Is it superstition? Is it the anxiety of a superstition or is it something else in there?

Kimberly

It's both. I'm not a very superstitious person, but this is one I'm kind of, and I remember my brother visited it too. He's three years older than me. Something about having this larger than life father disappear like that at such a young age makes us feel like, How could we possibly pass that? So it's bringing something up that is largely superstitious. And I ‘m gonna be fine. I really feel it. But I think it's just bringing the conversation up in my mind more like, Whoa, this is impermanent. This experience is impermanent and I don't have any control over it.

And that's perfect segue because you in The Gondelier talk about that agency. Ugh, I have like a little rock in my throat even as we talk about it.

This story changed me. For everyone listening, if you have not read The Gondelier, stop this interview right now and go back and read it and then pick it up.

Would you like to do the backstory or should I? You'd do it better.

Adam

I'll say right now, I don't know if I can get through it.

Kimberly

I can't either, so...

Adam

I don't know if I can get through it. And I'm not sure how willing I am to sit here up on the ropes the whole time. If I don't get, maybe I'll just get through it just fine. It's right on the nerve for me. But I'll try. There is some context needed here:

Big picture, there's an astronaut who has to be deployed into space. You know, they don't get a lot of say in it. They pick your name, you have to go. But the dates that he's up there coincide with his daughter's appearance in the senior high school senior year ballet that she's been looking forward to since she was—I'm never going to get through this—I just, I can feel where this is going. Enjoy this everybody. You're to watch me, you're going to watch me… this is what I like when I'm writing, you might as well see it.

Since four, she's wanted to do this and she's very willful and she's set her mind about it and she's the lead and the lead is the gondolier. And in this scene, he's just told her dropping her off at ballet that he will not be able to go.

Oh I'm never going to get through this. All right. So here we go. So they're having an argument. That might make it clear. She is really unhappy and hurt. She doesn't get out of the car, they pull over before she gets out, kind of off to the drive and they're talking through it. All right.

Without looking at him, she said she would have to tell him the gondolier secret since he wouldn’t be there for the performance.

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you that, the gondolier’s secret: From the very beginning of this ballet school, they know that before the lead character goes out, the gondolier somebody whispers something to her. She's told the gondolier secret. And nobody ever knows that. You don't know what it is and only the gondolier knows, only the people who've been the gondolier each year and like the head of the ballet school. And it's just like one of those little dreams that everybody in the program knows about.

Without looking at him, she said she would have to tell him the gondolier secret since he wouldn’t be there for the performance.

“The gondolier secret isn’t really a secret anymore. Everybody knows it,” she said.

“Do you already know it?” she asked suddenly, turning to him for the first time.

“No. I have no idea,” he’d said.

“It’s about the gondoliers. They aren’t who you think. They aren’t all about American tourists and honeymooners. Someone is going to come up to me in the wings and tell me right before I go out that the Venetians used the gondolas to bury their dead out on the islands. There was nowhere to put bodies in the city because the city was sinking. So the gondoliers were the ones that paddled the dead out to the islands. That’s where the gondolier is going. There were coffins inside the boats. They’re basically driving hearses.”

She looked away from the car for a second. “The gondolier isn’t about romance at all really. Well, it is, and it isn’t.”

She had gathered her composure. “The idea is that the teachers tell you before you go on, so you feel what you’re dancing in your heart.”

His daughter looked away from him for a minute. She still didn’t get out of the car.

“I can’t believe you’re not going to be there. I’m going to be mad for a long time, you know.” She turned and stared right at him, and shook her head up and down so he understood she wasn’t kidding. “Anyway, I have to go. I don’t really know why they call it Belle Nuit.”

“I do,” Mikhail said.

Kimberly

And that's not the final image. That's not the final image, but that takes us to it.

Adam

This is not the final image. Don't give it away.

Kimberly

So without giving it away, I want to know how you, because your characters do this, access agency in helpless situations.

Adam

Well, this story starts in it, you talk about fear and stuff, the basic premise (and you know this within a page or two) is an astronaut floats away from a ship. I was thinking about this yesterday with the civilians in space. And he floats away from his ship, and they are not rescuing him. There's nobody coming, man. He is just floating. Well, for me, that's just, I mean, for all of us, it's terrifying, right? That could be horror, pure horror.

And so everything from there is trying to crawl out of a very black hole. And what would that be and what would that look like and could you do it? Could you say there, It's been a good life and hold that in your heart? Could you do it? I couldn't do it, but I think somebody could do it. And that's what it's about.

And then I think I figured it out. You know what mean? Then writing it, I figured it out. I wouldn't have written it if it was just slide into the void and horror, right? I like horror, but not horror that's, I'm not a sadist. You know?

Kimberly

Yeah, yeah. Part of it seems like the dark night turning into the belle nuit—the beautiful night—is it partly perspective, because to be able to reach across the aisle and hold hands is the perspective of It's been a beautiful life, not just the horror of the moment. Is that part of how we access agency?

Adam

I think agency is about connection and I don't think you just say to yourself, It's been a good life. I think you say to another that it's been a good life. And that's what The Gondolier is about. That's what, when I say things are grand, don't know if I'm really getting at the sense of grand, but grand, of epic human scale and sensitivity.

That's what Mikhail finds. He finds connection and purpose. You know, he knows that the whole world knows he's floating off into space. Believe me, right now, if one of those civilians was floating off into space, we would not be talking about an election. And we would be there.

And it's a big shift between This is a horror and Who can I be with the whole world watching me right now? Who can I be for my family? Who can I be for everyone?

Kimberly

I see. So do you think, are you saying that if he didn't have the whole world watching him, he might not…

Adam

No, he would have done exactly what he did for the main reason that he did it. And I can't say any more without giving away.

I think there's also a sense that we're all in that boat together. So if you say he did it for the whole world watching, that has a kind of heroic view. And I think it's nobler than that. It isn't because he's a hotshot quarterback. It's because he sees the shared fear and vulnerability and maybe terror that we all have. And in some ways is modeling something big for us.

Kimberly

Yes, yes. But that's heroic. That's heroic with a capital H. That's grand with a capital G.

Adam

And he's certainly modeling it for his daughter.

Kimberly

Oh my gosh.

Adam

This is like Barbara Walters, you ask me questions, the interviewee is breaking into tears and he can't read his work. Anyway, that's me. You're, yeah, probably anything you need to know about me, you just figured it out right here, other than when I'm irritable and difficult and like a cancer patient.

Kimberly

I'm so glad that you were willing to go there, Adam, because this is why I like to do these. We can get into the craft and we did. But to me, I want to know, What is that driving force that gets you to keep telling stories?

And you're to quote, Charles Dickens and Ebenezer Scrooge, I wrote this down because I want to know “What strange bit of undigested beef”inspired you to write 100 stories over a period of a 100 months. And that passion, that drive that's in you just continues. I don't think you probably could have done a thousand stories in a thousand months.

Adam

We're running out of months!

I've had some interesting sections to my life. Aside from my personal, my family life, you know, I was an actor in the movies for a while and I had that, warts and all. Then I had my own business and that was a huge chunk of my life.

Writing is really, I've always written, I've written always, but it's just gone into the desk drawer. You can hear where the writing used to live. That was where the writing went.

This is my third act. This is, again, where I feel like I contribute and where I feel something that I'm leaving behind, something that's special. Nobody really cares whether I'm writing a hundred stories or six or a thousand. There's a kind of athletic-ness about it of, know, Look, I will swim across the English channel, right? But I like the structure and the discipline of that. I like big projects. I walked a thousand miles and apparently I like things with zeros.

But I'm telling myself, Look, you have a hundred stories to say it, with a capital “I”, if you live that long, this is what you're saying life is to you.

That's like having a mission and having a mission gives life something special. I think about these stories a lot. Like I’m obsessed with them. I'll give you a little teaser. If anybody's listening this far, we have a baseball story coming up that's pretty light because frankly, I'm just killing everybody here. But there will be the last story of the first 10 will be called Marilyn. And it will be about Marilyn Monroe, and it will be about loving women.

And the crazy thing, in Howl, I don't know if you read Howl, but in Howl-

Kimberly

Yes! God, I loved Howl, but I won't read your critique of it because I loved it too much.

Adam

Okay, I don't even know what I think about it anymore. But in Howl, the mom is reading Life Magazine the week after Marilyn Monroe dies. Two days ago, Friday, yeah, I was going off to the gym and on the street here in New York, someone's selling old magazines. This magazine's from 1962. And there on the side is “Memories of Marilyn”, Life Magazine.

So I said to the guy, I can't take this into the gym. I said, Look, can you set this aside? I'll come back and get it. So I'm like in the, woo, woo, woo, something's supposed to happen here. It's not, by the way, it's a slightly different issue. It's a commemorative issue. It's just the pictures that are the same. It doesn't matter. So I was reading, though. I took it home. And I don't have any great connection to Marilyn Monroe. But I took it home, and I was just looking at these beautiful pictures of her and seeing, for me, projecting onto her, both a distrust in her doing a woman to the world, and then also thinking about what's behind that and the loneliness of what's behind that. And then I thought about what it would be as a man to connect to that. So that'll be story number 10. That's all I know is that I saw a magazine on the street, and I know the story's called Marilyn. After that-

Kimberly

So in Howl, there is a mother who very much identifies with that sort of veneer.

Adam

Yeah, yeah, with the veneer, that's exactly right. The baseball story is called The Knuckleball Artist, though. It is not deep. It's just, I hope it's entertaining. We'll see. I'm way behind on it.

Kimberly

Well, that's what I love about your, 100 Stories is because you go everywhere. You even wrote a story out of emojis. and I was shocked to see that people could even reply in emojis. That takes some mad skills.

Adam

I loved it that people replied in emojis. That was great. None of us knew what the hell we were saying to each other. We could have been spraying out random emojis, but it was really fun.

Kimberly

Chloe Hope

actually, I believe that she sat down and deliberately, what did she write? Genesis or something?

Adam

She added another story. My book was, I did three stories from Genesis and emojis. And then think she added another one. She added The Technicolor Coat…

Kimberly

Joseph and the Technicolor Dream Coat

Adam

Joseph, yes, we're adding little musicals from the 70s, but yeah. So she did that and the Jews are taking it to Egypt and then they're freed and there's prophecies and dreams. She took a hard one. She did a hard one. I'm like garden, tree, apple, snake.

Kimberly

So, do you have anything coming up? I mean, I know you have more stories coming up, but I also noticed that you started another project and we've just got a couple minutes left and I wanted to make sure I address anything that's up for you right now that we can support or celebrate.

Adam

This is kind of a thing for everybody. Yes, I just started something called Best words, Best order, which is a quote from Coleridge? I forget. But basically, poetry is the best words in the best order. So the point of this is that I want people who've written very beautiful pieces of work on Substack to just read those, like one minute snippets of what they've written, but nominated by someone else. So it isn't like, go send your stuff. But people sending in beautiful work saying why they loved it, and then finding ones that probably most resonate with me, and then having that writer read them.

So if you look for the Best words, Best stories, I would love it. Did you have you nominated anyone? You did, right? Yeah.

Kimberly

Ii did. I nominated

Jonathan Foster

, and I have a whole list of other people. And it reminds me of, we both follow

Nina Schuyler

who I'll be interviewing in a couple of weeks, I'm excited to talk with her. But she does a very analytic-

Adam

Stunning Sentences

Kimberly

Yes, yes, Stunning Sentences. I'm excited. I saw it, but I haven't read it yet. I love that people are gonna be reading it. That added element of hearing someone's voice, even just hearing you today read and choke through your beautiful excerpts took it to another level for me.

Adam

It'll be a pleasure, be a pleasure having that happen. Although my subscriber count has gone down since I put it out, I do not understand subscribers and substack.

Kimberly

You can’t watch that shit. It sucks because you are— I'll close with just praising you because you truly do have a gift to offer people you. I was overwhelmed writing the questions for this interview because you have such a volume of work that has changed me and I don't say that lightly. So you do have a gift and anybody that's unsubscribing from that, it’s their loss, truly.

Adam

It's not, look, you know what? Nobody's for everybody. I, know, what I love is the people that do like me and their comments and that, you know, I didn't have any, I probably had 10 people reading me until I was 57 years old.

There would be no third act without people reading and embracing my work. So they're the hand across the aisle for me.

Kimberly

Could we see a collection someday?

Adam

Yeah, so I will. As soon as I've got 100 stories, I think I'm going to bundle each 10. So I think hopefully before Christmas, everybody will be on this. I'll sell 7 copies of something that cost me $3 ,000 to put together. Welcome to self-publishing. I will bundle up the first 10, hopefully in November.

Kimberly

Awesome.

Adam

Yeah, we'll see how it goes.

Kimberly

This has been so fun. I can't wait to continue to read everything that you offer and thank you for going there with the depths that are in you.

Adam

Kimberly, your work is so deep and so connected. I feel like I know your little elementary school self. I think I said that to you before and I thought, I don't think you really get how much I think I know who you were. I could be totally wrong, but I don't think so. You’re lightning rod connected too. It's an honor to be, it's a joy, forget honor. It's a joy to be able to talk about my work with you, with someone I instinctively trust and appreciate. Thank you.

Kimberly

Thank you.