‘The Most Important Thing Was Never To Get a Real Job’

A conversation with the essayist and cartoonist Tim Kreider.

Welcome to my long-planned two-part conversation with the essayist and cartoonist Tim Kreider. This is part one.

Since we are where we are, I’ll begin by saying that Tim writes on a somewhat regular basis at his Substack, The Loaf. This recent essay, Open Sesame, on “the Berlin Wall, the Constitution and the latent power of language,” is particularly great. I urge you to read it and subscribe to The Loaf if you like what you read.

IRL, Tim is the author of two collections of essays, We Learn Nothing and I Wrote This Book Because I Love You. His cartoons have been collected in three volumes by Fantographic: Why Do They Kill Me?, The Pain: When Will It End? and Twilight of the Assholes. If you are not intrigued by the titles of these books, I doubt you and I have much in common. (It’s OK, we can still be friends.) You can find more about Tim and his work at his website.

Tim and I have been working together on a somewhat consistent basis for more than 15 years — I edited and published the first essay he submitted to me for a New York Times Opinion series about alcohol, called Proof, in 2009 (“Time and the Bottle”).

Since that time, Tim has published more than 25 essays in The New York Times Opinion section — including a few blockbusters like pre-viral-age viral phenomenon “The Busy Trap;” the meme-birthing “I Know What You Think of Me;” the funniest and most compassionate essay ever written (IMHO) about a domestic animal, “A Man and His Cat;” the articulate and rage-filled “It’s Time to Stop Living the American Scam” — and the one with my favorite title of all time, “You Are Going to Die.”

As time went on I grew to appreciate his qualities as a writer. Insightful, angry, genuinely funny, with an almost annoying obsession for crafting elegant prose, a penchant for breaking the rules of journalistic decorum by being scathingly critical of terrible people and telling the unvarnished truth and most of all, an underlying appreciation for life’s gifts — friends, great movies, books and art, and the opportunity to be alive.

All this gave me, in the very first years of my being a newspaper editor, the sense that my job could be not only socially redeeming and virtuous, but artistically pleasing and fun as well. I’ll always be grateful to Tim for that.

OK, let’s dish. This exchange was conducted by email and a few back-and-forth editing rounds. My words are in bold. Tim’s are in the more elegant Roman.

TIM KREIDER: I’m just gonna break in here to thank you for the compliment about my “obsession for crafting elegant prose” (graciously ignoring the “almost annoying”). I recently confessed to my students that I was the author of the meme “the mortifying ordeal of being known,” [from “I Know What You Think of Me”] not to impress them with my internet immortality but to point out that one reason that phrase entered the online vernacular is not because it’s an especially original insight (though it does, evidently, resonate with the zeitgeist) but because of its euphony: the assonance and alliteration of “mortifying ordeal,” and “known.” Euphony and cadence are the only areas in which the very abstract symbolic system of writing gets to exploit the subrational sensory pleasures of music, sneak in past the left brain and move us on levels to which other art forms have more direct access. This by roundabout way of saying the elegant prose does matter to me, and not only for fussy prima-donna-ish reasons.

PETER CATAPANO: I knew I couldn’t sneak that by you unexplained. It was “almost annoying” only because I was your editor and responsible for carrying out your wishes, sometimes at odd hours. The readers were always the beneficiaries of that process.

Anyway, I want to start by just asking you flat out: Why do you do this? Why do you bother to write? Is it because you find doing the work and living the life actually enjoyable, or is it more an inexplicable compulsion like pickleball or doll collecting that can’t be explained by logic?

TK: The most important thing was never to get a real job. I was cheered to see, in an exhibit of Pierre Bonnard I visited about five times at the Met some years ago, the artist quoted as saying he didn’t start out wanting to be a painter, per se; he just didn’t want to be a lawyer and have to sit at a desk. I think of this desire as the essential prerequisite for any artist.

When I was a kid I was good at writing and drawing, and I thought about being an artist or cartoonist, but around age 14, writing seemed like the cooler, more prestigious of the two, so I decided I’d focus on that. (Thus are we all hostages to our 14-year-old selves' career choices.) I went to a writing program in college, but then got sidetracked into being a cartoonist after all for a decade or so because that was the first thing I got paid for. I’m only good at those two things, plus parallel parking, so my career options were limited.

You sent your first piece to me, “Time and the Bottle” — on heavy drinking in your youth — in 2009. I remember loving how you were unapologetic about your seemingly foolish behavior and the enjoyment you took in it. And another piece you wrote soon after, “Reprieve,” about getting stabbed in the neck in Greece and almost dying, but losing the “I’m so grateful to still be alive” euphoria way too soon. I felt like you were saying a lot of things that people privately knew about themselves but were too afraid to admit.

Is there something about owning up to your own vices and character flaws — just being really honest about yourself, even when its unflattering — that you think is important to your role as a writer?

TK: I appreciate what you say about my first essay being unapologetic. I loved David Lynch's recent announcement of his emphysema for this reason: rather than being a cautionary lecture or public recantation, it reiterated how much he'd enjoyed each and every cigarette. I'm so bored and annoyed by the default assumption that now that we're all grownups and have kids of course we’ve put all that foolishness behind us and don't drink or smoke or do drugs anymore. We eat right, go to the gym, do yoga and all that unendurable shit. I don’t think it’s actually true of most people. Our virtue is just something we all have to pretend for each other in public.

When I was growing up, no one expected writers, of all people, to be virtuous. Writers were people like William S. Burroughs or Hunter S. Thompson — unrepentant reprobates. It was more or less expected they’d be indecent, which was at least part of the appeal of the vocation. Of course that’s all over now. Writers, like everyone else, are expected to be unimpeachable or else everyone gangs up and destroys them on the internet for fun.

I think it’s a good thing that we now collectively frown on things such as shooting one’s wife in the head (as Burroughs did), but this rigid pose of upright public virtue gets really tedious and oppressive to me.

I guess I do think it’s a writer’s job—my job, anyway—to try to talk honestly about what people are actually like, and resist the consensual fictions we all tell each other (and ourselves), everyone acting publicly as though they have their shit together and then going home to be heartbroken, addicted or depressed, binge-eating or -drinking or -watching TV just to try to shut their brains up. People are a mess. We do wrong things. We want what is bad for us.

There’s a quote from “Reprieve” that really struck me when I read it and stayed with me ever since. After getting stabbed in the neck in Greece and almost dying, then failing to maintain your gratitude for being alive you wrote:

You’d like to think that nearly getting killed would be a major, permanently life-altering experience, but in truth it was less painful, and occasioned less serious reflection, than certain breakups I’ve gone through. If anything, it only reinforced the illusion that in the story of my life only supporting characters would die, while I, its protagonist and first-person narrator, would survive. I’ve demonstrated an impressive resilience in the face of valuable life lessons, and the main thing I seem to have learned from this one is that I am capable of learning nothing from almost any experience.

Essentially, “we learn nothing,” the title of your first essay collection. Do you still hold that view?

TK: I think it’s possible for individuals to learn things, although slowly, and at great cost, mostly through loss and regret, and usually too late to do much good. A best-case scenario is that you graduate to better, or at least different, problems. (A while ago I wrote about yearning for the fun glamorous problems of youth while being mired in the godawful boring problems of middle age.) Whether it’s possible for humanity to collectively learn anything other than devising increasingly clever devices, mostly to bash each other the head with, I don’t know.

It’s an essentially comic worldview that people are ineducable recidivists who will inevitably do the same dumb thing countless times—a kind of eternal recurrence of idiocy.

I’m remembering a passage from Rick Russo’s novel Nobody’s Fool, where the (anti)hero is confronted by a small-town cop who’s been his longtime nemesis:“I'm about to fuck up, he thought clearly, and his next thought was, but I don't have to. This was followed closely by a third thought, the last of this familiar sequence, which was, but I'm going to anyway.”

I think one of the powerful aspects of reading your work is hearing someone admit that life is absurd and brutal and on the face of it meaningless, but if you can manage to spend time around the people you like or love and have a few laughs without oppressing or killing anyone, it is still worth living.

TK: I hereby endorse the worldview you paraphrase. You might like a more elegant formulation from Carl Sagan’s only novel, Contact: “See, in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.” It would be a misrepresentation to pretend that this sustains me through all troubles. I just don’t think there’s anything better to be had. Stoicism, Taoism or Zen seem like perfectly sound philosophies to try to live by, but these require a temperament and discipline unavailable to me.

Before you became a full-time writer in the late mid-aughts, you were a cartoonist for more than a decade for the Baltimore City Paper. Your comic was called “The Pain — When Will it End?” What drew you into the cartooning world? What was your mindset and motivation at the time?

TK: I just read Peanuts cartoons and Marvel comics like most kids, up until I made the accidental lateral move from Garfield collections to B. Kliban’s book Cat, which was a gateway drug to the rest of his essentially surrealist oeuvre. And the mid-Eighties, when I was in college, was an exciting time in comics: along with the first graphic novels for adults, like Watchmen, there was an efflorescence of minicomics (the cartooning equivalent of indie bands) like Chester Brown’s Yummy Fur.

I copied and stapled my own minicomics back then along with many other Gen Xers who later became colleagues and friends of mine. I originally set out to do surreal single-panel comics like Kliban’s—and did, for a long time, until I got somewhat involuntarily conscripted into politics. Those earlier cartoons are still among my favorites, even if they’re not as carefully drawn as later ones, because they’re less topical, more universal and timeless. I mean, who reads political cartoons from 20 years ago?

Who or what were your favorite targets/subjects at the time, and how do you see them now?

TK: My chief enemies, as a cartoonist, were George W. Bush, a hapless nitwit who was let’s say semi-legitimately elected, and his evil henchman/puppet master Dick Cheney. George and Mister Cheney became a sort of comic duo in my work, funnier and more harmless than they were in real life; I was forced to empathize with them against my will, just through the need to draw them, to inhabit their facial expressions and make them act and emote. Those guys now, in retrospect, seem like C-minus politicians, the lowest possible passing grade; they at least ostensibly believed in republican democracy and the peaceful transfer of power.

I’m glad I’m not a political cartoonist anymore, or any kind of satirist. For one thing, I’d gotten burned out on outrage by 2008. And besides, reality has outstripped any attempts to parody it. Look at the man that nearly half of Americans voted for last month: he’s already a cartoon, a caricature of infantile evil, a moral grotesque. What’s to exaggerate? What can be said that isn’t already nakedly there in his face?

The only good thing I can say about Donald Trump is that his body count as president was relatively low. Unlike most Republican presidents, he didn’t seem to have any interest in starting a war. George Bush was responsible for as many as half a million deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan — The Lancet was keeping count for a while, but I don’t know what the tally is now. Probably no one really does.

Was the transition from cartooning to writing essays a conscious one? What was behind it?

TK: I used to believe that I’d quit doing comics only after I’d gotten published in the Times and undertaken a writing career, but this was actually a revisionist memory; in truth, I quit drawing a weekly comic soon after Obama’s inauguration, and evidently had no idea what I intended to do next. But maybe not having to draw a new cartoon every week, or not mentally identifying as a cartoonist anymore, freed up the space for me to start writing more seriously.

I’d never entirely succeeded in giving up on writing—I’d published critical essays in Film Quarterly and The Comics Journal—but it’s hard to know whether I would have persevered with it for as long as I have had I not gotten published in the Times, through which I got an agent and a book deal.

It seems pretty obvious that the cartoon world is more tolerant of (and even gleefully indulges) vulgarity, rage, profanity and other transgressions than is the literary essay writing world, where a certain “decorum” is usually enforced. Do you miss that freedom to be gross, transgressive and viciously critical of public figures?

TK: [smiles wistfully] I do. One thing I loved about cartoons was that there was no expectation that they should be fair or even-handed. Instead of the Marquis of Queensbury rules of real journalism, it was the artistic equivalent of crotch-kicking, throat-punching and eyeball-gouging. Art, more than writing, is a subrational medium that bypasses argument. There are some truths that just can’t be said politely.

Thanks to the journalist Noah Eckstein, who helped with the editing and preparation of this post.

[COMING SOON: Part two, in which we turn to the writing craft, the editor-writer relationship and other mysteries.]