What the Jellyfish Learned from the Ant: An interview with Dana Adam Shapiro

  Dana Adam Shapiro is the author of the darkly comic and heartwarmingly quirky novel The Every Boy (read an excerpt here). A former senior editor of Spin and a founder of Icon magazine, Dana also produced and codirected Murderball, the Academy Award-nominated documentary about quadriplegic rugby players. He is currently involved in two more film productions, including the adaptation of The Every Boy for Plan B. I caught up with Dana over the phone for a few minutes last week to chat about the paperback release of the novel, his magazine writing and film work, and, most importantly, what a jellyfish could possibly learn from an ant.

A good place to start, I think, is the very front of The Every Boy. The cover design for the paperback is a bit softer than the hardcover, and has a different style. What do you think about the two covers, and does it matter?

I prefer the hardcover, but I understand why they changed it. The original was this picture of a jellyfish. It was kind of vague, which I liked. Maybe some people thought it was a book about the ocean. I don’t know. The new cover is more “youthy.” Is that a word?

Is that who you thought the target market was when writing Every Boy? The “youthy” demographic?

[laughs] I never really thought about demographics when I was writing. There are three stories in the book—a love triangle between teenagers, an estranged middle-aged couple, and an 85-year-old widow. I’m writing the screenplay now, so I’m re-evaluating everything, and I think the strongest, most complex character is Harlan, the father. He really is the heart of the book. It’s an inversion of Father Knows Best. Harlan is learning how to be a man from his son. He’s kind of spying on him — reading his journal. There’s a forbidden quality to it, something he wasn’t supposed to see.

Does it matter to you, then, who your reader is, or what demo the publisher targets?

Not at all. I recently had lunch with a book club of about 12 women in rural Pennsylvania—the youngest one was 60 years old. They took me out to this old Victorian house, I think there were doilies on the table. I was a little nervous, you know, these are like church-going heartland Americans, seemingly buttoned up, and there’s a lot of sex and death in the book. But they were really great. We drank champagne in the middle of the day.

The nostalgia in Every Boy is a little painful, since we know on page one that Henry dies. Was this always the way you intended to tell his story?

I thought about the movie Stand By Me a lot when I was writing. I think most people remember it as a movie about kids, but it’s an older guy (Gordy, all grown up) looking back on his childhood and realizing that life didn’t get any better. So there’s that melancholy, that nostalgia. As for opening with a death, it’s really just a narrative device – like Citizen Kane or Sunset Boulevard. You open with a corpse. And then there are these inevitable question marks: How did this person die? Who was this person? Who’s gonna miss this person? In this case, he washes up on shore, so there’s something violent and mysterious about it. Did he drown? Was he murdered? Did he kill himself?

With such a loveable character, did you ever start to regret while writing that you whacked Henry?

Not really. I think the book is much more about life than death. But when I finished writing, that was kind of depressing. That’s when I started missing him. You know, you spend so much time hanging around with these people and they’re gone.

And I guess there’s no chance for a sequel since you killed off so many of them?

Yeah. Someone said the other day that they’d like to find out what happens to Jorden. But I have no intention of doing that.

That’s good thinking.

[Laughs] Yeah.

While we’re on the subject: why all the death?

Good question. I’m not sure. Totally random ideas while I was writing. Except for Henry, of course. Maybe it was the ghost of this article I wanted to write back when I was at Spin called “Five By Twenty Five,” based on this theory that most 25 year olds know five dead peers. Not adults, not strangers—peers. I asked around and it seemed to hold true. For example, I knew this girl who died of a rare lung disease, a guy who jumped head-first into a pool, one killed himself, one died in a car accident, and one from auto-erotic asphyxiation (or so some said). So maybe it was an attempt to incorporate that idea.

There’s something left behind by everyone who dies in the book – Henry’s ledger, and Mope Pope’s ominous tags. How does that theme play into the novel, and in your own work?

That question of what do we leave behind, or did I make any marks in this world, was something I definitely thought of while writing the novel. I wrote most of the book while living in Cape Cod with my grandmother and her brother and sister—the youngest of whom was about 85. All of their spouses are gone, and they were back together again, just like when they were kids, fighting over the clicker. Well, there were no clickers when they were kids, but you know what I mean. Now they watch a lot of cooking shows, golf, and Turner classic movies. Very, very loudly.

Did you find it difficult to write such vastly different characters and narratives, and with different chronologies?

The easiest thing for me was writing Henry’s journal entries. Thinking about how a fifteen year old would write and what would be important to him, in the language that he would use. Very stream of consciousness. Everything is a very big deal at that age. The other half was a little more “writerly” – and so that was more difficult.

The Pilgrims were an interesting addition to the narrative – they brought to the forefront this theme of wanting to change oneself. Where’d they come from?

I did this article on the head of Nickelodeon back in 1999 and he was telling me that up to age 11, popularity is determined by sense of humor. And right around 11 it starts to switch to looks and clothes. That’s the age where kids become conscious of their exteriors, how they’re perceived, and they start to construct an identity. I think fifteen year olds are the most self-conscious. As for the Pilgrims, I was doing a bunch of research while I was working on Murderball, reading a lot about quadriplegics, and I came across these people (apotemnophiles) who amputate their own limbs. So they represented how far some people will go to fulfill their image of themselves. You know, some people dye their hair, get lip implants, chin jobs, sex changes. And some cut off their hands. It was an exploration of what is actually “alternative.” What is subcultural. Tattoos? Piercings? Che Guevara silkscreens? Probably not.

In regards to research – The Every Boy is loaded with these great factoids and interesting minutiae. As a journalist, do you keep a folder full of cool factoids that you want to include in your work?

Well, I appreciate you calling them great. I don’t have a folder, but while I was writing I’d randomly come across facts and, well…  I wouldn’t shove them in, but sometimes I’d gently nudge them. My biggest criticism of the novel is that it’s a little bit of a kitchen sink. There’s just a lot going on in there, and I think I should have been more brutal of a butcher. I dunno. What did you think? Was that stuff interesting to you?

Me? As a reader, I liked it. It added to the book’s eccentricities, like Henry’s mom washing a peeled banana. That was a great detail.

Thanks. What I was hoping to get across is that these people are arming themselves with their eccentricities. There’s something sad about it—we’re watching people hide.

So do you think part of the resolution of the novel is that Henry’s parents, er, un-quirk each other?

Yes. They strip each other down. OK, I’m gonna bust out some of those factoids for a second: Jellyfish have no brains, while ants have these huge brains. Jellyfish are passive drifters. Ants can only thrive when part of a community. Harlan is like a jellyfish, his wife is like an ant. So it’s like a fable: What the Jellyfish learned from the ant.

There was a point in the middle when I was just like, screw the novel, I’ll write a series of children’s books. So I started coming up with this list of odd pairings, like “what the slug learned from the cheetah, what the blank learned from the blank.”

And how’d that work out?

[laughs] It didn’t.

But you’ve obviously kept busy otherwise: you’re producing another adaptation, a romantic comedy, is that right?

I’m doing that with Kristin Hahn, who was a producer on The Departed. We optioned a book called Kicked, Bitten, and Scratched, which began as an article by Amy Sutherland in the New York Times called “What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage.” It’s about her time spent at an exotic animal training school and how she started using these techniques on her husband.

And how’s the Every Boy screenplay coming along?

It’s great because I get a second crack at the same material. I get to kill my darlings.

This serves as a good segue into some of our user-generated questions from Gather, which mostly deal with your multifaceted career. For starters: do you have a favorite trade as far as writing goes – magazines, novels, screenplays, etc?

What I love about magazine writing is that you get to go places you would never otherwise go. Documentaries, too. I guess fiction is the same, but you go without leaving the room.

So how do you balance between all of your vocations?

I haven’t done a magazine article in a long time, and I miss it. Actually, I just saw this amazing movie last week—Charles Burnett’s “Killer of Sheep”—and it was the best film I’ve seen in a long time, so I’d like to write something about the re-release. And I’ve been working on another documentary about this inter-racial couple that grew up in the rural South. How do I balance? I’m not sure. Most people have different aspects to their jobs. I guess these are the different aspects of mine.

And how did you get into writing novels and screenplays – or, more broadly, what combination of elements got you to where you are today?

Well, luck has to be half of it, because it’s not a meritocracy—there are obviously so many talented people out there that never get heard. I got started because—ready for this—my second cousin’s friend’s daughter was dating this guy who was about to start a magazine. His name was Dave, and the magazine was Icon. So that was the beginning. Then Icon went out of business after eighteen issues, and just then the senior editor at Spin quit. So they hired me. Two years later, I left to write the novel and to make Murderball. If there’s any strategy, I guess I just always did what I liked. If you’re lucky enough to know what you want to do, then you should really just go ahead and do it. Sounds like a Nike ad, I know, but I think it’s true.

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Chris Steib is the editor in chief of Void magazine. His Gather column, "The Only Game in Town" (AKA: The Game), focuses on emerging trends in the publishing industry and assorted other book- and writing-related miscellany. He can be reached at steib@voidmagazine.com.