George Saunders

So she's not really doing what she claims to be doing.

That's, I think, the kind of...

Her kind of sin or her tragedy is that I think she had a genuine insight.

But when you go to apply it, it's going to take a little less autopilot than she's on.

That's the hinge.

There's good and bad and evil.

In any specific situation, there is.

Because in specifically the book, this guy spent many, many years knowing the truth and denying it.

Now, the mechanism by which he did that or the rationale is interesting.

But he knew that climate change was a thing, and he consciously or unconsciously denied it.

That's where he was out of sync with truth.

One of the books I had in mind while I was writing this was Death of Ivan Illich by Tolstoy.

And in that book, it's a much more modest sinner, and his sin is just that he lived his life by the credo that I just want to do what everybody else is doing.

I want to be normal.

So at the end of his life, he gets stomach cancer and it was based on a real thing that Tolstoy's neighbor supposedly screamed for four straight days at the end of his life.

And Tolstoy heard the story of like, wow, what would make you do that?

So in the book, the guy has this intense physical pain, of course, but Tolstoy has layered in this idea that Ivan is starting to realize that he wasted his life by this idea of being normal.

Yeah.

And there's a beautiful moment where after many, many days of saying, why am I suffering so much when I lived the perfect life?

He finally says kind of to God, all right, maybe I didn't.