Eric Puchner
Appearances
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
A long time. I labor over my sentences. I write them and rewrite them and rewrite them.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
I'm never so happy when I'm rewriting a sentence. I mean, I love my family, too. I... But it does make me uniquely happy for some reason.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot about male friendship. I have... I think a little bit like Garrett and Charlie, who are the two main male characters in the book, have a sort of friendship in college that I never really found in college. I didn't find it until I was later. I never really understood how to talk to most men in a way that they understood.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
So it wasn't until later and I went to grad school and then I was at Stanford for a while doing a fellowship there that I made the best male friends of my life. But they're all writers, you know, and we have a common language, I think.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
We like sentences. Yeah. But I also I also think that so much of male friendship revolves around like wanting to say something to that person like. I love you, man. You're amazing. You're terrific. You're really important to me.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Because being that sort of direct can be misinterpreted, I guess. And so you have to sort of communicate that in subtler ways.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
The rhythm of your... A song without words. I mean, when you're hanging out with your male friends, you can insult each other, and it's like, I love you. Right?
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
So it's not the words, the words that you're saying to your male friends. That's just sort of gibberish. It's jokey. It's banter. It's insult humor, right? But then there is like the rhythm of your speech, of the conversations, of all the times that you've spent together doing various things. That's in the background. And that is sort of the heft of the friendship.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
That's the karaoke track that doesn't change.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
I actually was writing the novel and started writing the novel more seriously after my mom died. My mom had Alzheimer's for 10 years, and it was really horrific, actually. So I was feeling that very much, and it's all I could think about. So Cece's plot, her backstory, and the death of her mom when she was young, that didn't happen to me. My mom died. fairly recently.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
But, yeah, it was important to me. And then, of course, there's another death in the book, which happens skiing. And I'm a lifelong skier. I sort of kind of grew up in Utah, because so much of my family lives there. And I've had both my brother and my sister have seen people die in avalanches. They're really serious. They go hella skiing, do all this serious skiing.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
And so I was also thinking about that kind of loss too. Sudden, very sudden loss.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
I just want to say I loved hearing you read that sentence. Will you do my audio book? That was wonderful. No, I haven't cracked the code of marriage. I mean, I think that marriage is everything. It's those moments and it's the moments when you feel incredibly connected. I think there's a moment in the book where...
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
Garrett becomes a wildlife biologist, and he's thinking about sort of occasionally being attracted to his partners who come up and work with him. And he uses this equipment to track wolverines, and he thinks about using sort of like satellite equipment to track the future.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
And he always, like, says, like, I try to, like, find myself 10 years in the future, and I think, would this be a good idea to cheat on my wife? And this person said, no, it's a terrible idea, right? Even if you're feeling incredibly estranged from your spouse. And so I think that...
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
One of the things that makes marriage wonderful for me, I mean, I speak for myself and deeply meaningful, is that you have this commitment that informs everything you do. And even when it's the really hard times that you're going through, that commitment sees you through. And I can't think of anything more beautiful in life, honestly, than committing yourself to a person despite having hardship.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
Wow, that's a beautiful question, and thank you. My husband thanks you, too. Yeah.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
I feel like I can die happy now. Wow. That's wonderful. I totally forgot what the original question was, however.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
I think it helped me see my marriage in the way that I have always seen it. And I think it was healthy to sort of interrogate what marriage is in the book. And to have a character like Garrett who begins by saying, like, you know, oh, God, why would you want to get married? It's just a bourgeois construct, you know. And he sort of comes around.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
And it's interesting because my wife and I, we never thought we'd actually get married. We lived together for years before we actually got married. How many years? We've been together for close to 30 years. We've been married for 20. So we never thought we wanted to actually tie the knot. And then we said, oh, well, let's just do it so we can have a big party with all our friends.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
And also there was health insurance and that sort of thing. And we did it, and it actually did change something. You know, we were both surprised. We suddenly had that extra feeling of just, like, security and love that we didn't have before.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
She may have come to hate my sentences. She read my book so many times for me. We read each other's work all the time. But, yeah, I hope that answers your question to a certain degree.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
That's an excellent question and a very sort of writerly question. Yeah, we think about that stuff all the time, right? What do you leave on the page and what do you elide? I write my novels the way most of my friends write novels, which is you write an exploratory draft, your first draft. There's an E.L. Doctorow quote where he says, writing a novel is like driving at night in the fog.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
You can only see as far as your headlights. And that's always how I feel. So I'm always struck when I read a quote from, like, Nabokov or something who says, oh, you need to plan out your entire novel in advance or you're not a real writer. I'm like, I don't know anybody who does that. If you don't surprise yourself, you're not going to surprise the reader.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
And the characters aren't going to come alive in the way that you want them to come. You want them to come alive and start doing things that you didn't expect. That's what's fun for me in the writing process. And where are they, like, alive in your head? Is it like living with voices? Yes, it is. I mean, you walk around.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
If you're deep in a novel, it's very aggravating for your wife, but very fun because you walk around and you have this entire population in your head doing things. You go for a run and a whole chapter writes itself because Cece decides to do something you didn't expect.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
Yeah, and I don't have a photographic memory or anything. So, yeah, running is very important to my writing process. I think people have this sort of idea, which is not the right idea. It's a false idea that you have to actually be actively sitting in front of your computer writing. waiting for inspiration to strike. And if you leave your computer, you're not writing.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
I think some of the most productive time I take as a writer is when I'm just walking around. I've turned off that sort of like intellectual part of my brain and some secret part of my brain is bubbling away. And so sometimes I go for a run and it's like teleportation. I'm immediately back at my house.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
I don't remember the run at all, but I have like a whole new chapter in my head and I have to rush upstairs and run furiously right now.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
I do the actual composing on a computer, but I jot a lot of notes down by hand.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
Just something I feel. I mean, it's hard for me to say where it came from. I just have always sort of felt that. You feel things so deeply when you're that age. And the world is like a sensory experience all the time. And emotionally, it's such a charged time.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
Thank you. That's, that means a lot to me. Thank you.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
I did. I always I knew I wanted to be a writer at a very young age, but it wasn't until I was a little bit older. I started writing very bad poetry. We had an old typewriter and I would clack away and I loved E Cummings. So, of course, I didn't use any punctuation or anything. And I remember writing this is when I was a bit older, 13 or something. And I wrote a poem called 3 a.m.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
and Train on Sacks. Coltrane, right? John Coltrane. Because I liked jazz. And I'd never been up till 3 a.m. in my life. But I had this idea of, you know, God, it's so cool to be a writer, right? So you stay up till 3 a.m. and you listen to really great jazz and you do that sort of thing. But then my older brother is about 10 years older than me. And I must have been about eight.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
And for Christmas, he got the collective stories of Ray Bradbury. He has a lot of stories, those of you who know Bradbury. And it was like this big. And it was one of those old tomes from the 70s that has the author's photo covered the entire back of the book. And so I was starting... Before that, when I read stories, I thought the language just fell out of the sky miraculously or something.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
I didn't think about authorship, that somebody actually wrote those words. This is the first time I kept looking at the back and there was Ray Bradbury's like, oh, my God, he wrote this sentence and he wrote this sentence. Wow. I mean, and I was like, I want to do that. And that's when I first.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I think the biggest thing I've learned from being a parent, and I've loved being a parent most of the time, One of the biggest things I've learned is that you love your kids and you have an idea of who they're going to become, and they don't become that. There's no kid on earth who, like, you know, adhered to the idea of their identity that their parents had for them.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
But then you love them anyway. They're completely different people than you expected, and you have to love them anyway. And that's been, like, really profound for me.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
Yeah, that's a wonderful question and very well put. Yeah, I really didn't feel like I had a choice but to sort of write about my mother. She was occupying my thoughts constantly. So one of the things I tried to do was to capture dementia in the way that it really is. I don't know if I accomplished that or not, but much of that stuff in the book actually happened.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
But I also there's a section, a brief section of the book where I enter my mom's my mom. God, she's not my mom. I'm sorry. I enter Cece's point of view and and try to imagine what it must have been like for her. And obviously, Cece is very different from my mother and Cece's thoughts are very different from my mother's. But that was a really important step for me to take.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
I wanted her to have a voice. while she was in the throes of dementia as well. And it's one of my favorite passages in the book.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
I think everybody in this room has regrets, don't they? Yeah, I mean, one of the things I wanted to do in the book... Y'all do?
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
Well, I'm somebody who often experiences regret. I'm not saying that the regret is actually apt or well-placed, but I can't even order dinner without feeling like, oh, I ordered the wrong thing immediately after I ordered it. So... But I think it's a sort of dangerous mentality to have this kind of life is elsewhere mentality.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
And that's sort of what I mean, it's a main theme of the book is this these sort of trap doors of regret that you can fall into when actually, you know, if if Cece had ended up marrying Charlie, she would have had a different life and she would have had regrets.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
spoiler that was a spoiler okay that was a spoiler so um yeah i mean i think life part of learning how to live is learning how to live with regret and not let it overshadow um your happiness um it's so easy to sort of drift to that other life you might have had well i think she would have had great regret if she'd married him don't you Probably.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
Okay. Okay. Well, it didn't come to me all at once. Okay. But the story is about a lake house in Montana, northwestern Montana, in the fictional town of Salish, Montana. The lake is actually based on a real lake, Flathead Lake in Montana. And the house in the book is based on a house that I have been going to for the past 25 years every summer with my family.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
Well, I'll just start by saying a disclaimer. I'm terrible at titles. Like I have...
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
They should farm it out to somebody else who's a title specialist. That's their job, right? So, actually, the original title was Old Light. Old Light? Old Light. No. Yes, sir. I rest my case, right?
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
Okay, I'm so glad I changed it. Okay, go ahead.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
No, you're absolutely right. So, yeah, Dream State, I mean, it has the obvious sort of literal meaning, which is like, this is a state that's beautiful, Montana. But it's also getting less beautiful in many different ways. And so it's an ironic title. But then, as I said before, I was interested in this idea of life seeming more and more like a dream state.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
these days um and that has to do with climate change but it also has to do with the way that we seem to live our lives so much online partly um so yeah it just seemed to resonate in that way and then and then with the final chapter i won't say anything to actually be a spoiler but um there's a sense of a whole nother a whole nother life that could have been lived that sort of you know reflects like a dream and so that all of those things yeah
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
Well, I think I was trying to get at the fact that almost despite herself, Cece finds happiness in the routine of her marriage. And I feel that. And I think as we get older, I think, I don't know, I don't want to speak for anybody else. I feel that more and more, that it's actually, it's not the exciting stuff. It's sort of the kind of banal stuff.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
It's the waking up, having coffee with your wife, reading the paper stuff together, sitting on the front porch. That's happiness.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
Yeah, that's the lullaby. And there's a way that I think when you have an incredibly close relationship with somebody, you change the world. I mean, things, because you have this connection, you see things in a way that no one else really sees them. It's idiosyncratic and unique. And I think that's what I was trying to get at there.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
It's my wife's great-grandfather's house. He built it. And it was out of the family for a while, but then it came back into the family. The story about the house that it's based on is that my wife's great-grandfather was a Lithuanian Jew who immigrated to Montana.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
I teach at Johns Hopkins University and I I get terrible reception in my office, so I was crouched in my car in this kind of ugly parking lot, and then it was Oprah on the line. I almost dropped the phone. I was completely astonished.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
and was so destitute he lived in a packing crate for a while and then ended up starting a dry goods store and making some money that way and ended up building this house. He lived in Glasgow, Montana, but he ended up building this house on Flathead Lake in the early 1930s. It took a long time because apparently the carpenter was a total drunk.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
And if you go and you look at the house, there's not, whenever someone comes to do work on the house, there's not a single right angle in the entire house. But it's a house that is really near and dear to my heart and that I love. Is the house still there? Oh, it's still there. We go. I'm going this summer.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
Well, thank you for saying that. You know, writing a novel is really hard. It's never going to be perfect. And one of the wonderful things about a novel is its ambition and that it can afford, in the way a short story can, it can afford to be a little bit messy. So when I was thinking about this novel, I was thinking about something that actually happened.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
which was this kind of awful wedding story, and I was actually the officiant in this wedding. I won't tell you who it is, but people who I know well, and they had a wedding at the house in Montana in which everyone got norovirus, which features in the book, but if you don't know what norovirus is, it's an incredibly infectious stomach flu.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
I don't know how Charlie made it do it. You know, what happened in the actual wedding was that one of the flower girls threw up on the way down the aisle because she was sick.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
Um... It is a good way to lose weight, definitely.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
Well, it's in the middle of a wedding. You can't stop a wedding. And the groom was also green because he had it, but he didn't want to admit to having it. And then afterwards, much like in the book, they had hired a square dance band to play. And so everyone was do-si-do-ing and passing the norovirus from one to the other to the other to the other.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
And so I had this in mind as like something I wanted to sort of head toward as the kind of fulcrum of the book. And I knew I wanted to write about that setting. Um, because I love that setting so much.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
Um, so yeah, I mean, I was heading towards that, that moment. I really didn't know what was going to happen after that, honestly. Um, I just knew that that was going to, everything was going to change. And I also wanted to write a sort of novel about marriage, um, a kind of marriage story, um, A marriage plot that ends with the wrong marriage. I thought that was interesting.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
Welcome, Eric. Thank you so much. You were so stunned when I called. I was incredibly stunned when you called. In fact, my publicist had made me think that he was just calling to talk about something kind of boring.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
It did, because I didn't... I mean, the marriage plot has been done so many times, and the epigraph of the book is from Midsummer Night's Dream. I was thinking about that sort of plot that ends in a marriage, and I thought, how can I make that original? And so I thought, well, we'll have a marriage halfway through the book, but it's not the right marriage.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
And in fact, they don't get their marriage paper certified, so they don't end up being married. So I was just interested in that. And I didn't actually come up. I don't want to give anything away, but to the end of the book returns to the marriage that we see a glimpse of halfway through the book. For a long time, I didn't know how to end the book.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
I knew that it was spanning 50 years, that it was going into the future, that it was about this next generation as well and how they would deal with the mistakes from the past, both the sort of mistakes that the characters have made, but also the mistakes that society made. has made, but I didn't know how to end it. And I was at a writer's residency, the Otto in New York.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
And I was there for a week and I was like, I finally got this residency. I have a leave off of work and I don't know, I can't write. I don't know what to do because I can't end this thing. And then it occurred to me to go back to that original
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
wedding and to finish it and to write it as if this was a different almost like dream life that that might have occurred um and i actually started crying i was so happy that i had come up with a way to to end and the book i thought the dream life had something the dream state which is the name of the book had something to do with this um uh psychotic depression or depressive psychosis that garrett went through it had nothing to do with that no it had a lot to do with that as well um
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
Yeah, thank you for picking up on that. And there's also a moment when Jasper, who becomes a drug addict, is talking about feeling like his life is always a dream. And I just started thinking about the way that we feel like we're often sort of trapped in a dream these days. Everyone's on the Internet all the time. These awful things are happening in the world. We used to be. We're on our phones.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
We see that they're happening. And for Jasper, it's particularly acute because he has a heart condition. And there's something in his heart that saved him, saved his life. And so he sometimes feels that his life is dreamlike.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
I think I would have coffee with Cece. I just, I like her a lot.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
I think she would make the best coffee. By far. Garrett is, he makes like cowboy coffee.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
Absolutely. I mean, it's partly that when you write a novel, only trouble is interesting. But also, I think one of the wonderful things about a writer is being able to empathize with people who are really struggling. And I'm interested in that in my work. I'm also interested in my life. And I wanted to write about Jasper in particular.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
I have two close friends of mine, my best friends in high school, both became heroin addicts. So I was interested in writing about that epidemic.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
That's a terrific question. I'm really drawn to novels that are ambitious in that way with their use of time. One of my favorite novels is Light Years by James Salter. Also sort of focuses on a house and a family. I guess I'm drawn to novels in which time is the antagonist because I feel that's sort of the way that our lives are led and grappling with that. reality was really important to me.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
And obviously, also, I was interested in climate change and the sort of devastating effects, particularly in the West, American West, because one of the things that's happened since we started going to this area in Montana 25 years ago is that I've watched it change dramatically. I've watched the landscape change and It's not far from Glacier National Park. It's gorgeous there.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
It used to have 150 glaciers. It's down to 25. So all that snow that used to be there isn't there anymore. And so it's having an effect on all the lakes and the lake levels. It's having a huge effect on biodiversity.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
And also with all the fires, sometimes we go there for a week or two weeks and we can't go outside for most of that time because the air quality index is like in the red and it's very unhealthy. So it's tragic what's happening there. But I wanted that to be part of the book.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
Yeah, thank you. And you wanted it to. I did, absolutely. Oh, that's on purpose. Yes, absolutely.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
Yeah, absolutely. I'm really interested in the sort of divide between our private and public selves. And I think one of the trickiest things in life is bridging that divide. I also think, like, what we think we want isn't necessarily what we truly want or what we should want. And I'm very interested in characters who think they want the wrong thing for themselves.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
And we as readers know that, no, actually, that's not what you want. With Cece, it's sort of like trying on different masks, because pediatric neurosurgeon, since she was a kid, she was sort of in love with those words. I mean, that's language. And once she got to med school, she realized, God, I hate this. This isn't fun, and I'm not interested in this.
The Oprah Podcast
Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club
So she has to change tact, but she also is confused as to, she wants to do something great in the world, and she just doesn't.