When you buy a book, it's not there to please you exactly. You know, it doesn't please you exactly the way you think it will. It's a very ambiguous relation. I hunger for that kind of relationship rather than the relationship I have with a piece of publicity or with political speech or with the newspapers. There's something freeing in literature that I really need right now. I'm writing a lot of short stories at the moment so it's a good time to think about it. A lot of it is from the street, I can't drive, I still age 40, almost 3. So walking around, getting on buses, getting on trains, that's a lot of my life every day. And I get a lot from that. I always think of myself as, you know, I'm not particularly travelled, I'm not a great adventurer, but I walk bits of cities all day long and I get a lot from there, particularly in New York where so much of the life is street life. And then a large proportion for someone like me is from other books. You know, I'm a product of what I read. So it's a mixture of the personal, the experience and the red. There's a funny anecdote about Philip Roth that when he was in, he just finished one of his books in his 50s I think and he lived just by the Natural History Museum. So he walked down the road, went to the Natural History Museum and had that enormous ballena, that whale, you know, hanging in the main room and he stood and looked at it for a little while and then thought, what am I going to do? Look at whales all day and he went back to his apartment and started another novel the same day. I suppose that's what I mean. I would rather stay in the museum and look at the whale for a bit longer. I don't want to spend my entire life at my desk. Every literary festival I ever go to is about identity and every writer I know doesn't want to have an identity. So we seem to be talking across purposes. For me when readers say to me, you really help me with my identity. I'm flattered by it but the purpose of my fiction as far as I was aware was to demonstrate how flimsy a thing identity is. These things that you think of as such essential qualities of your life being Italian, being French are all contingent. I think good writing can remind you of contingency. It doesn't mean those things are important. Lovely to be Italian, it's beautiful to be French. But it's also not natural. These things are kind of accident of birth of construction and knowing that can make you perhaps less likely to kill somebody over such an issue. Then in New York this morning, yesterday morning and the first question the young black girls stood up and said, what are you doing here? Why are you talking to all these white people? The room is mostly white people, it's 10 am in the morning in New York or event. And why are you not giving us something? We need something right now. You need to give us a tool to go forward. She was asking for it. She's basically an activist I think. It's somebody who stands in a position and speaks for a group. And I completely recognize my inability to do that and how disappointing it was for this young girl. But I think in my essay, what I'm trying to say to young people is that at this moment of urgency, I absolutely understand that you have to be at the barricades in a group. You have to speak of yourself in these collective buzzwords and terms. You have to actually think as a group in order to survive this moment. But you are still an individual. You still have an existence separate from these politicized categories. And it's important going forward to know that about yourself. Something a society in which the self is completely flattened and collectivized, we've seen it twice over in the 20th century on the right and the left. And as tempting as that flattening is, it's always dangerous. So I'm writing essays to remind myself that yes, it's time for the fight and we must come together in this mass. But that is not the whole reality of our lives. It can't be. Anything which doesn't involve language is interesting to a writer. So many writers of music obsessives. Dance is like that for me. It's like a language that escapes language. When people are dancing, you have a kind of, I have a sentimental idea that you see something of the anima in this moment. And I guess what interested me in swing time was the idea, which is totally sentimental, but held by many diaspora people, that there is something about black people and dance. That's both something that's what interests me about it, that racism depicts and also black people themselves hold dear. It's like the prejudice against, I don't know, overly intellectual Jewish people and also Jewish people's fondness for their own over intellectualness. These things are kind of fascinating because they seem to describe a tribe and they're also used as a form of insult to a tribe. So I just, the fact that it exists on that razor's edge interested me. Was it about dance that was so meaningful to so many people from the diaspora and meaningful to me? I really feel in America right now that journalism is what's standing between us and the book of lips really. It's not just journalists, journalists and academics actually. In good times, in the high 90s or even during a barmer's time, journalism and academic seem like a kind of irrelevant pursuit done in some ivory tower as they say in America. Now, when I read sociologists on race or I read Tony Hesie Coat, so I read New York Times recent investigation of Trump, they're giving people the tools to fight in whatever this resistance is going to be. They give you intellectual tools so you can make arguments. I feel a great debt to journalism at the moment and a very close relation to it. When you're in a country where the truth is not being told at the highest level, it makes you feel demented. I think everyone in America is getting to know what it feels like to live in Peru sometimes, in Colombia sometimes, in Brazil sometimes, when the highest powers are corrupt at every level. America is now a country corrupt at every level. The soul of the country is corrupted, so journalists are what's left, basically.