George Saunders

What's interesting about that is when I— No, no, it's totally fine.

Because when I look back at my, you know, so-called career, that was an anomaly.

I couldn't—I thought, that doesn't make sense to me.

I couldn't quite—so I'm glad to know that it was fake.

I can stop worrying about that husband whose wife, you know.

I think the book says, yeah, good question.

There's this Chekhov quote that I'm kind of living by lately, and he says, a work of art doesn't have to solve a problem.

It just has to formulate it correctly.

So in this book, I think there are kind of two characters who embody that question, and I think they're both right.

And so my job, rather than answering your question, is to allow each of them to make the best possible case for their view.

So with this book and with Lincoln and the Bardo, I wrote myself into a place where the question got more and more profound, and I found myself less and less capable of giving a definitive answer.

And you think, well, actually, that's not for an artist to do.

You ratchet the question up, and you go, yeah, that's a tough one.

Yeah, well, there's a guy who's one of these sort of climate change denial architects who's now on the last night of his life, and his name is K.J.

Boone.

And he's got a couple ghosts or many ghosts who come to see him.

And one of them is the ghost of this woman, Jill.

And she died at 22 in 1976.

And her idea about things, because of an experience she had at death, is that...

Nobody is to blame.