George Saunders

And if you're an angry, violent person and that gets supersized, then you're in hell.

Well, Oak Forest is a working class suburb of Chicago.

So our family was a very funny family, lots of high energy, talking at once and joking.

And that was kind of the way that you showed affection was to joke with somebody.

So it was very warm, a lot of political discussion.

And the main thing was that if you were a kid and you could sort of hold your own with the grownups, you were welcome to sit at the table.

So I remember, you know, reading the newspaper so that I could compete with my uncles on the political stuff.

And so there's a real kind of 1960s political energy and a lot of comedy.

And it's just a liberal household.

I would say so.

I mean, it wasn't overt politics.

But for example, my father worked in the city.

He sold coal to buildings in the south side of Chicago.

So he would come home with these crazy, I mean, crazy adventures.

He once held up against a Coke machine for an hour at gunpoint by this crazy guy.

And what was remarkable to me about that is he came home just fired up about it, like, wow, what a day, you know, and not afraid.

So I think a lot of my storytelling came from that, you know, that you could live through something quite difficult, but...

But see it as a gift, you know, as a story and a story.

And my mother also very good storyteller, very kind of she's from Texas.

So she had a different mode of storytelling.