George Saunders

You know, could feel that I, for all of my external defects inside, I was a glowing knight of objectivity.

And also, the other thing was, I remember reading Atlas Shrugged on a trip with some high school friends.

And at that point, I wasn't going to go to college.

I was in a band.

And there was a guy in the band who knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy in the Eagles.

That was our, yeah.

Yeah.

So my career plan.

But I was reading Atlas Shrugged in His Car, and I hadn't read a novel since maybe Johnny Tremaine in third grade.

And just the novelness of it, you know, the places and the way it called up a world in my mind and the fact that it was 1,084 pages.

Right.

That was actually what I loved was she was a novelist.

And so I kind of, you know, I think I voted for Reagan the first time, a lifelong regret.

But then at some point I graduated from the School of Mines, went overseas and was working in the oil fields.

I was walking home, possibly a little drunk one night in Singapore, and there was a big foundation of a hotel that was going up.

And there was some movement in the bottom, and I kind of staggered up to the fence.

And there were, I mean, hundreds of what I came to see were elderly Malaysian, Singaporean women clearing the site by hand, you know, tearing boulders off.

And something in that moment, it just snapped, and I made the connection between...

Those women and my extended family, many of whom were struggling with kind of the big boot of capitalism at that point.

And I thought, oh, I'm on their side.