57: Jonathan Eig
Source: Chicago Tribune
“And I called him up and told him, ‘I am not going to finish this book unless I see the letters you’ve got... So I beseech you, I beg you, please, would you share those letters with me?’ And there was this long pause… I was sweating bricks, and he said, ‘Okay!’”
About Jonathan
Jonathan Eig is a bestselling author whose writing has given the world insights into some of the most influential minds of our time.
Jonathan was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Monsey, New York. Raised by an accountant and a community activist, he would be imbued with an almost contradictory set of skills that would amalgamate to establish the inquisitive yet authoritative voice that hundreds of thousands of readers have come to love.
As a young kid, Jonathan spent hours reading the Rockland County Journal News. Comics were his gateway drug, followed by sports, and at age 16, Jonathan started writing for the paper. His first story was about his junior high school ski trip to Sterling Mountain, New York. It may not have the scoop of a lifetime, but Jonathan was hooked.
After polishing his journalistic skills at Northwestern University, where he also worked on the Daily Northwestern, Jonathan went on to work as a reporter for The New Orleans Times-Picayune (pi-kuh-yoon), The Dallas Morning News, Chicago Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, his writing career continued its unstoppable ascent.
Although Jonathan’s parents contend that his claim to fame is appearing in a Jeopardy question (solved correctly for $200), his list of achievements is the literary equivalent of a career criminal’s rap sheet: long, diverse, and impressive. With multiple New York Times bestsellers, awards from Esquire, ESPN, National Book Awards, and at least one book hailed as a must read by Barack Obama, there is no shortage of recommendations for the man’s work. (Although his parents would still argue that Jeopardy supersedes all of these.)
Perhaps his greatest recognition, however, is being named a “master storyteller” by Ken Burns, the legendary filmmaker and documentarian who is arguably one of the most qualified people of our time to bestow that title.
Jonathan doesn’t just explore the past, though. He’s gotten into shaping the future. In 2020, he kicked off his foray into children’s books, publishing the first few entries in the Lola Jones series, inspired by his daughter.
But my favorite part of the man’s bio is the role of his Jewish faith in informing his work. Especially given recent events, we are often reminded that the Jewish people share a history of oppression with African Americans, which, incidentally, is why so many Jewish people were involved in the civil rights movement. For Jonathan, it’s all about storytelling, specifically how slavery and its aftermath are central to our story as a nation.
From exploring the mavericks of generations past to shaping the minds of the future… it’s all in a day’s work for the man who may or may not wear a blazer to his home office.
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Max Chopovsky: 0:02
This is Moral of the Story interesting people telling their favorite short stories and then breaking them down to understand what makes them so good. I'm your host, max Japofsky. Today's guest is bestselling author Jonathan Icke, whose writing has given the world insights into some of the most influential minds of our time. Jonathan was born in Brooklyn and grew up in New York. Raised by an accountant and a community activist, he would be imbued with an almost contradictory set of skills that would amalgamate to establish the inquisitive yet authoritative voice that hundreds of thousands of readers have come to love. As a young kid, jonathan spent hours reading the Rockland County Journal. News. Comics were his gateway drug, followed by sports, and at age 16, jonathan started writing for the paper. His first story was about his junior high school ski trip to Sterling Mountain, new York. It may not have been the scoop of a lifetime, but Jonathan was hooked.
Max Chopovsky: 0:58
After polishing his journalistic skills at Northwestern University, where he also worked on the Daily Northwestern, jonathan went to work as a reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Dallas Morning News, chicago Magazine and the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, his writing career continued its unstoppable ascent, although Jonathan's parents contend that his claim to fame is appearing in a Jeopardy question solved correctly for $200,. His list of achievements is the literary equivalent of a career criminal's rap sheet Long, diverse and impressive, with multiple New York Times bestsellers, awards from Esquire, espn National Book Awards and at least one book hailed as a must-read by Barack Obama. There is no shortage of recommendations for the man's work, although, again, his parents would argue that Jeopardy supersedes all of these. Perhaps his greatest recognition, however, is being named a master storyteller by Ken Burns, the legendary filmmaker and documentarian, who is arguably one of the most qualified people of our time to bestow that title.
Max Chopovsky: 2:01
Jonathan doesn't just explore the past, though. He's gotten into shaping the future. In 2020, he kicked off his foray into children's books, publishing the first few entries in the Lola Jones series inspired by his daughter. But my favorite part of the man's bio is the role of his Jewish faith in informing his work, especially given recent events. We are often reminded that the Jewish people share a history of oppression with African Americans, which, incidentally, is why so many Jewish people were involved in the civil rights movement. For Jonathan, it's all about storytelling, specifically how slavery and its aftermath are central to our story as a nation, from exploring the mavericks of generations past to shaping the minds of the future. It's all in a day's work for the man who may or may not wear a blazer to his home office to write so, literary legend Jonathan Eig, welcome to the show.
Jonathan Eig: 2:53
Thank you, Max. I'm wearing the blazer because I just came from speaking at a school, so I don't usually get dressed up to work. Normally you'd find me in my sweatpants and t-shirt.
Max Chopovsky: 3:02
I respect that. Also, there is nothing wrong with getting dressed up to go to work, because if your commute involves nothing but a short trip down the stairs, you have to have some sort of delineation between home and work life.
Jonathan Eig: 3:13
Yeah, maybe I'll try it Might help. I'll bet you. Robert Caro wears a tie to work every day.
Max Chopovsky: 3:18
For the record, you don't need help. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If sweatpants have gotten you all of these awards broke, don't fix it. If sweatpants have gotten you all of these awards, keep the sweatpants, All right. So you are here to tell us a story. Do you want to set the stage? Is there?
Jonathan Eig: 3:33
anything that we should know before you get into it. No, I'm going to tell you the story of how I wrote my first book and how I made the discovery, really, that allowed me to transition from being a newspaper writer to being a book writer.
Max Chopovsky: 3:45
Love that. All right, let's do it. Tell me a story.
Jonathan Eig: 3:52
As a young reporter I always loved copying other writers who I admired. Sometimes I would actually type their sentences to see how it felt to type a sentence that Hemingway typed. But I often, more often, I stole ideas for stories. You know, I would read something in Sports Illustrated and I would think I want to write that same story. But I'm in New Orleans, so I guess I'll have to write about something in New Orleans that might allow me to copy that same approach to a story. And that was really how I learned to be a writer, and a storyteller is by, you know, admiring other storytellers and trying to do what I can to imitate them.
Jonathan Eig: 4:20
So around 2000, right after the book Seabiscuit came out, I read that book and just gobbled it up. And one thing I've learned is that when you gobble something up you got to stop and pause and think what made that so special? Why was that book so wonderful? And for Seabiscuit I began to really break it down and realize that it was not like any other sports book I'd ever read, that it was about something much bigger than sports, that it was about the Great Depression. It was about something much bigger than sports, that it was about the Great Depression. It was about underdogs, it was about overcoming adversity, and that the sports just offered a really nice vehicle for telling the story and packing it with action, and that it had the advantage of all of these sports writers who were covering the horse races. So you had these eyewitnesses who served as primary sources for you, for Laura Hillenbrand, in writing about Seabiscuit. You know, 50 years later, 60 years later, whatever it was more 70 years later, and I just over dinner with my wife talking to her about Seabiscuit, I said I wish I could write a book like that. What you need here are the elements you need. You need a sports figure who was really well covered, but their story wasn't appreciated at the time because it was really about something much bigger than sports, like Lou Gehrig.
Jonathan Eig: 5:24
Lou Gehrig's story is really about dying young. It's a classic tragedy and the baseball is really just the action that gets you to his illness. And somebody ought to write a biography of Lou Gehrig that really builds to the illness. That that's the main goal of the book and my wife, to her everlasting credit, said why don't you do it? So I thought, okay, I will. I had never written a book, but I figured I could probably figure it out as I go. So the first thing I did, realizing that, understanding that the key to it was understanding his illness was, I called the Mayo Clinic and I said would you please send me Lou Gehrig's medical records? And they just laughed at me because there's this thing called HIPAA which I guess I was vaguely aware of, and those are private. Good luck to you. And I decided I was going to write the biography anyway, that I was going to try to tell Lou Gehrig's story and somehow I would figure out what happened to him when he got sick.
Jonathan Eig: 6:18
Now he doesn't have any kids. He never had children. He didn't have any nieces or nephews and he was incredibly shy. Didn't have any nieces or nephews and he was incredibly shy. He was very private. He never gave interviews. He hardly ever spoke about himself. He never wrote an autobiography, no memoir. You know Babe Ruth, his teammate, would write an autobiography every off season just to bring in a little extra dough, but not Gehrig. He wanted no part of being famous. So I had no way of figuring out what he went through. And he was diagnosed at age 37 with ALS Lou Gehrig's disease we call it now, but disease that melts your muscles away and he was the strongest man in baseball. But we have no idea what he went through.
Jonathan Eig: 6:57
So I began trying to figure out. How am I going to tell that side of the story? How am I going to get to know this really shy man who left me very little paper trail to work with? I spent about a year writing the proposal. I got a contract to write the book, but I really struggled with the idea that I was going to fail because I was not going to A crack the code of his personality and, b I was not going to be able to describe his illness and I thought I guess I'm just going to have to write about what people with ALS typically go through. But I spent three or four years on the book and I began doing intensive research. I called doctors at the Mayo Clinic, thinking that maybe some of them had seen his medical records and they might at least be willing to describe them to me. No dice. There I did find a doctor who was trained by the doctor who treated Gehrig and he told me that the doctor had talked to him about Gehrig's case and that he would read my book and check it for me if I got tell me if I got things right or wrong, but I really had not much to work with, I just kept going.
Jonathan Eig: 7:56
I kept going like on faith that I would find something, some way to tell this story. And then one day I went to the home of an autograph collector in Libertyville, illinois. He had baseball auction catalogs going back for 20 years and I just flipped through every page of every auction catalog. It took me days, because auction catalogs are not indexed and they're not alphabetized. You just have to flip every page of every catalog and there were hundreds of them no-transcript collection but it didn't say how many more. So, wow, this was big. This was exactly what I didn't know. I was looking for it, but this is what I was looking for. This could be the key to solving the Lou Gehrig mystery.
Jonathan Eig: 9:02
And I should say that you know I was having dreams about Gehrig because I felt like I wasn't getting anywhere, getting to know him, and in my dreams I would see him across the room and he would walk out before I could get to him. I would see him hitchhiking and I would stop the car and he wouldn't get in. So he was really elusive. But here was a chance to see some of his own letters and we had never seen any of his personal letters. So I began looking for those letters. I wrote to Christie's, called them and wrote to them and said can you tell me who purchased those letters at the auction? And they said no, it's private information. I said would you forward a letter to the buyer for me and then he can reply if he wants to? So they agreed to forward a letter to him, but I got no response. I forwarded two more letters through Christie's, got no response. So clearly it seemed to me the guy with the letters didn't want to be contacted.
Jonathan Eig: 9:51
But I didn't give up. I began calling every baseball memorabilia collector in the country whose name I could find. I had a list of hundreds of people who collected baseball memorabilia and every time I talked to one of them I would say tell me some more names of collectors. It took me six months. I called hundreds of memorabilia dealers and collectors and buyers until one guy said oh, I remember that item from Lou Gehrig, I remember those letters, I bid on them and I lost. And the guy who won it was something like Ansel, jim, ansel or Ansel, I don't know. Ansel, jim, ansel or Ansel, I don't know. So now I started Googling the name Jim Ansel or Ansel, spelling it every different way I could and I found a guy in Baltimore who was a baseball collector whose hometown paper had written a story about him, and I called him up and I said Mr Ansel, my name is Jonathan Igan.
Jonathan Eig: 10:40
I'm working on a biography of Lou Gehrig. I've been at it for three years now and I'm working on a biography of Lou Gehrig. I've been at it for three years now and I'm not going to finish the book. I'm not going to turn it in, I'm not going to write this book unless I can see those letters that you've got that Lou Gehrig wrote to his doctor. The whole world needs to see those letters. People with ALS, people who are dying of the same disease, need to know what he went through, and Lou Gehrig's story will never be complete. We'll never know what he really meant until we see those letters. And, furthermore, you know, someday you may decide to sell them, your children may sell them and they'll be cut up into little pieces and the text of those letters will be lost forever. So I beseech you, I beg you, please, you know, would you share those letters with me and there was this long pause on the phone. I was sweating bricks and he said, okay, yeah, what else do you want? And I was like that's it, I just want the letters. And he said come on anytime. I said how many letters are there, by the way? He said there's about 200. I was like what? Yeah, he said, plus, I've got the letters that the doctor wrote to Lou as well, because the doctor made carbon copies. So this was a goldmine. And now I had the heart and soul of my book.
Jonathan Eig: 11:53
One of the challenges in writing a biography is that you can't just repeat the details, the names and the dates. You have to understand the person's soul. You have to know what motivates the action in a person. And Gehrig had eluded me until that time. But now I got those letters and they were 200 pages of letters that he never imagined anyone was going to see. Right, he's writing to his doctor.
Jonathan Eig: 12:17
These are private and you know they could have revealed that he was a coward.
Jonathan Eig: 12:22
It could have revealed that he was scared, that he was depressed, could have revealed that he was, you know, a racist or an anti-Semite.
Jonathan Eig: 12:27
Right, anything could have been in those letters. But what they revealed was unbelievable courage and humility and that he was willing to subject himself to all kinds of experiments. And once he realized that there was no chance for him, he said let's just do this so that maybe we can learn something about this disease for the next guy who gets it. And he began to talk to the doctor about his wife and what she was going through and how hard this was on her. And what I realized was that he was shy because he was so confident of himself and didn't feel the need to brag and didn't feel the need to tell the world what he was going through. But he was more heroic than I ever imagined and I think without those letters I would not have had a book. I certainly would not have had the book that I had and that I would not have understood why Lou Gehrig, in his famous final speech, called himself the luckiest man. He was lucky because he knew how good his life was.
Max Chopovsky: 13:18
Yeah, and that book was. I think that was your first big sort of book that got you noticed in a way. Right, that was my first book.
Jonathan Eig: 13:28
Yeah, and there's no question that if I hadn't found those letters, I would have had a pretty mediocre book, and that I might not have had the chance to write another one.
Max Chopovsky: 13:37
Well, those letters were a serious, serious barrier to entry and without them, right, the book would have been kind of a regurgitation of what was already available. But with those letters, now you had the content to be able to paint possibly the most accurate portrait of the man possible, at least with respect to this disease and how he approached it. It's like Walter Isaacson collecting Da Vinci's notebooks and at least getting access to them in order to write that book. That information was so critical.
Jonathan Eig: 14:13
No question about it, because you've really got to know your subject. You know it's an audacious act to take on someone else's life story. You can never be perfect about it. You're never gonna really know what's inside someone's heart and soul. So just the act of trying. You have to go into it knowing you're going to fail to some extent. And you're just trying to fail to the smallest extent possible. And there's always a danger that you're going to end up just regurgitating what other people have written and that you're not going to really be contributing to the story, to the legacy. But you never know, going in, just how much you're going to find. That's part of the problem is that you agree to take on a book and then three or four years later, when you've done the work, you feel more confident. But you have to go in without that confidence, knowing that and that fear is part of why I work so hard, I guess.
Max Chopovsky: 15:06
And the person might turn out to be somebody entirely different than what you thought.
Jonathan Eig: 15:10
Yeah, Like I said, what if those letters revealed that Gehrig was just a schmuck, that he didn't care about anybody but himself? Right Like that would have been a very different end of my story.
Max Chopovsky: 15:19
How fortunate for you that he turned out to be such a resilient and humble human.
Jonathan Eig: 15:25
Yeah, and I think I sensed that from the evidence that I had gathered. I think I sensed that he was a decent man. But he could have been decent and dumb. He could have been decent and just kind of like clueless, but he was decent and warm and loving and thoughtful too.
Max Chopovsky: 15:41
Now let me ask you this, because writing a book is an endeavor, writing a biography is an even more involved endeavor. Writing a biography of somebody who's passed away is the next level of involvement and effort, and writing the biography of somebody who's passed away and didn't leave a lot behind in the public sphere is sort of next level effort involved. What was so important to you about writing this book that made you take all of these extra steps when Christie's wouldn't put you in touch with him and when the doctors at the Mayo Clinic wouldn't give you his records? And then, when you sort of hit these dead ends and started trying to track down these collectors one by one, what was it that kept driving you?
Jonathan Eig: 16:31
Well, for one thing, it's just the fear of failure, the fear that the New York Times is going to review this book and say he blew it. But beyond that, it's a feeling of responsibility that I have. Gehrig isn't asking me to be his biographer, muhammad Ali didn't ask me to be his biographer, but I feel like they're going to judge me, maybe looking down from heaven, or at least karmically, somewhere in the universe. I'm being judged for whether I gave this life the respect that it deserved and that I did everything humanly possible to tell it as completely and as fairly and as honestly as I could. And if I just phoned it in because I was lazy or because I wasn't getting paid enough and I was bitter, that would be just a failure, not just to me, but to my readers or to the people who are the non-readers, because they're not going to pick up the book, but ultimately to this man, to this person's life. If you're going to dare to tell someone else's story, you damn well better put everything you've got into it.
Max Chopovsky: 17:28
Agreed, Agreed. I was thinking more in terms of well, why not just abandon the project once you get to a point where most rational people would say, maybe the universe is trying to tell me that this isn't meant to be?
Jonathan Eig: 17:42
I did abandon one. I set out to write a book about Alan Pinkerton, the first private eye, the first head of the secret service, and first of all, his papers burned in the Chicago fires. There wasn't that much to work with, but second of all, the more I researched him, the less I liked him, and I finally just decided that I didn't want to spend any more time on this project, in part because it wasn't enough material to work with, but also because, like I didn't see the upside, like I wasn't going to I wasn't going to like this guy anymore, though, if I spent more time on it.
Max Chopovsky: 18:12
The accounting concept of sunk costs, which many people don't grasp, but you nailed it with that one.
Jonathan Eig: 18:17
Yeah, I definitely felt like, and it's tough, because I spent more than a year on that and didn't get paid and had nothing to show for it.
Max Chopovsky: 18:29
Yeah, you got to listen to your gut on that kind of stuff. When you sit down to write a book and you're six months into it, whatever your schedule was, you have to sit down in front of a computer and create new content and you know that in the grand scheme of this book it's probably going to be a very minor dent in the manuscript. And yet it has to happen because it's a building block for the next day. How do you manage that? I can't imagine doing that.
Jonathan Eig: 19:13
Yeah, max, you've kind of identified the worst part, that six to nine month mark, because you feel like it's daunting, you're never going to really understand it. There's too much work to be ahead. You've got years and years to go and you don't really understand your subject that well yet and it's just impossible for one person to comprehend and coalesce all of this material. And you just got to tell yourself it's like running the marathon when you're at mile nine or 10, and it just feels like you're never going to get to the end. You have to tell yourself that focus on one step at a time.
Jonathan Eig: 19:48
I'll tell myself I don't need to think about that much. I just need to think about the fact that I have to write about his childhood. Let's just focus on that. Let's just think about, like, understanding this man's roots or this person's roots and how they, what shaped them. And I can do that. I'm not going to think about all the other stuff I'm going to have to learn later, trying not to think about the big themes that I haven't even discovered yet, that I don't really understand really about yet. Trust the process that you'll get there. But it's hard because it's years and years where you have to keep motivating yourself and you don't have an editor cracking the whip, you don't have anybody looking over your shoulder at all and if you waste those first couple of years, nobody's even going to know, nobody's going to say what have you been doing all this time?
Max Chopovsky: 20:27
Right, I'm a fan of the marathon analogy, but I think in this case it's not applicable. It's actually so much harder than a marathon because with a marathon, you train for 26.2 miles and you know what to prepare yourself for psychologically in mile two and mile 10 and mile 20. With a book, the marathon is a variable length marathon and you don't know at which point in the marathon you might learn that you're running two marathons back to back and you can't prepare yourself for that. And so it's like you might be halfway through the manuscript, what you think is sort of your halfway point, and then you realize this is not the way I want to structure this book. This is not the way I want to structure this book. This is not going in the right direction. I have to pivot, and all the way up to scrapping the entire thing and starting over Like that to me is devastating.
Max Chopovsky: 21:24
That would be devastating because you are in effect writing off X number of months or years that you spent going in a direction that turns out to not be the right direction. I mean, that's the worst case scenario. But even in the best case scenario, what if you had 400 letters or 500 letters? It would have taken you that much longer to go through all those letters, sort of catalog them, and understand how those letters impact the story arc of Lou Gehrig and how that all fits into your narrative.
Jonathan Eig: 21:53
I just can't even imagine that and you know there's going to be surprises along the way and, as you said, you don't know how long the journey is going to take. And that's all part of going in. You have sort of a best case scenario in mind, but you know, for example, you know, with King, I knew that it was going to be the hardest book that I had to write. I knew that it was going to be incredibly challenging and I also knew that it was going to be incredibly exciting because I was going to be talking to people who knew Martin Luther King and what a gift, what a blessing it would be to have time with those folks. But then COVID hit. You know, like a year and a half, two years into my process. So I was just getting started with my interviews. You know I had interviewed maybe 50 people, 75 people, and most of them in person and then COVID hit and not only did I lose access to those people, but archives closed. So now I can't just stop working and wait for COVID to end. I've got to.
Jonathan Eig: 22:49
Covid may never end. I've got to keep working on the book. But how? How do I do it? How do I get access to the materials I need? How do I do interviews? How do I deal with the fact that I work from home and now there's four people in the house and, like, my kids, need me all day long and I'm being constantly interrupted? And my little one thinks it's funny because I'm just sitting there at my desk, I don't appear to be working. Writing doesn't actually look like work. So I'm the one she comes in and shoots with the water gun. Just, you know, just because it's funny. All of this stuff like changes the whole process of writing a book and there's no, you can't plan for that.
Max Chopovsky: 23:24
You're not the first person to write a biography of Martin Luther King. When you started the process, how did you convince people that you needed to talk to them for, in their eyes, yet another bio on the man about whom arguably kind of everything has been written? You know that was surprisingly easy.
Jonathan Eig: 23:45
Because when I called people like Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young and Harry Belafonte the people who I thought would be the hardest I said to them we've turned King into a mythological figure, you know, we've turned him into a monument and nobody knows what he was like except for you, and we need another book that reminds people that he was human. And they all said, thank God, yes, we do. Please, let's talk. And then when you talk to people who aren't famous, you know that was the one I was most nervous about the famous folks, because it's hard to get time with them. But for other folks, like his barber or his childhood friend from Auburn Avenue or his roommate from seminary, they were just like, bring it on, like I want to tell you what ML was really like, because I'm tired of all this. I have a dream garbage. You know. That's not who he was. So I had a really like it wasn't hard getting people to talk to me. So I had a really like it wasn't hard getting people to talk to me.
Max Chopovsky: 24:34
Now with King, because you talk about, you sort of uncover who the person is as you write about them and as you do your research. In the case of King, it's been well known that he had a bit of a darker side to him as well. Did that make it more challenging for you to try to arrive at a character that people could empathize with?
Jonathan Eig: 25:01
Yeah, I was nervous about how people would receive that. I knew it was important to be honest and to trust readers to handle the ambiguity, knowing that they weren't going to believe all the good things I had to say about him if I didn't include the bad things, and also knowing that the FBI weaponized his flaws in an attempt to destroy him. So it's important to include that in the story. But I was still nervous about how people would feel about seeing their hero reduced to flesh and blood and the fact that he cheated on his wife, that he plagiarized, that he attempted suicide twice as a teenager, that he was hospitalized for depression numerous times.
Jonathan Eig: 25:33
Like I was nervous about it, but I just felt like, as long as I handled it sensitively and kept it in proportion to his achievements, that it would work out and it was worth the risk. Like what was the worst that would happen is people. There might be some pushback and people might say they don't want to read that kind of book and it won't sell or I'll be criticized for sensationalizing his sex life. But I felt like it was worth that risk and hoping that I could trust readers to embrace a more flawed and complicated human portrait of King, because we're all flawed, and it's been the case, I think, for the most part. The reception for the book has been what I hoped.
Max Chopovsky: 26:11
It's a great takeaway honestly, because you're right, People do put these sort of larger than life figures on a pedestal and you almost wonder if a book that exposes or at least talks honestly about some of their flaws would shatter that illusion that most people have of this person. And it's refreshing, it's almost like it almost helps you believe in humanity a little bit more when you realize that people are willing to say, okay, well, that person was really, really prominent, did some wonderful things for humanity and was honestly one of the most important figures of the century.
Max Chopovsky: 26:46
But he wasn't perfect, because nobody is, and it's good to be reminded of that, and the fact that people are willing to do that is not a bad thing.
Jonathan Eig: 26:57
Yeah, I don't want to sound too optimistic because everybody's we're living in the age of cynicism, but I've been really thrilled by the fact that people can handle a nuanced portrait. And you know, there was a fear that the book would be canceled before it came out that people would just say nope, don't want to read that, go away. But it's been the opposite. I have people coming up to me in tears saying I had no idea how much he suffered. I've got mental health issues in my family too, and just knowing that King went through some of that just makes me love him more and admire him more because he kept fighting for us at a time when he was struggling. And that's beautiful. It's really, really inspiring to me and it's nice to know that our society is still capable of that kind of empathy, yeah, especially in this day and age.
Max Chopovsky: 27:45
So I'm curious about something. So my grandfather was also a journalist, well-known journalist in Ukraine. When Chernobyl exploded, I was four and they evacuated us from Kiev. We were living in Kiev at the time, but he was sent to Chernobyl in a helicopter to document some of what was happening, and then he witnessed these boys effectively being offered the cancellation of the rest of their military service in exchange for just throwing this piece of metal off the roof, not knowing that it was highly radioactive.
Max Chopovsky: 28:18
He was the first guy to interview Yuri Gagarin, who was the first man in space, because he was also same as you, very relentless and inquisitive and industrious and willing to stop at almost nothing to get the story. And at the same time he had a really successful career as a fiction writer, poetry, some prose, and so he developed on these parallel paths, these two careers that are sort of offshoots of the act of writing but completely different otherwise. One of them is a very inquisitive, skeptical search for answers from people who, generally speaking, are reluctant to give you those answers, because he was in the sort of economic department at his newspaper. So he would talk to these factory owners or factory managers which during Soviet times literally had no incentives to run an efficient factory and so they wanted to cover everything up. And on the other hand, he was really good at seeing the most beautiful parts of humanity, whether it's an embrace between a mother and a son or the beauty of nature. And it's always been so fascinating to me that one person could embody these two almost contradictory perspectives on the world.
Max Chopovsky: 29:45
One is nonfiction in the strongest sense of the word and the other is fiction in the strongest sense of the word. You follow these paths even though you know your books may be a little bit more on the nonfiction side because they're biographies. But let's be honest, every biography has to have I'm not going to call it embellishment, but a story. And the way you structure the facts and the way you structure the information that you find helps to create a narrative that really draws readers in. So in that sense I'm going to say you have a little bit of creative liberty with that, not that you're changing the facts at all. But then, on the other hand, you have a much more black and white sort of nonfiction reporting for the newspaper. What was the relationship between those two sort of paths in your mind?
Jonathan Eig: 30:34
Wow, that's a great question. You know, I always felt like when I was a newspaper reporter, I was first of all always wanted to be a newspaper reporter, as you said in the introduction, starting at 16. And I was exploring to see what kind of newspaper reporter I wanted to be. Did I want to be Woodward and Bernstein investigative reporter? Did I want to be a foreign correspondent? I found, after trying everything, even like music criticism that I want to be a foreign correspondent.
Jonathan Eig: 30:54
I found, after trying everything, even like music criticism, that I really wanted to be a feature writer, that I liked spending time with people, I liked getting to know them and trying to figure out what made them tick. And the feature writing is really where I felt my heart was and I think that's a part of it that I'm interested in human connections. I love doing interviews, I love exploring what we all have in common. And these books sometimes they're big, heavy history books, but I think I'm trying to write with soul and I think that's really. I want people to feel like they can connect with people from history and people from different cultures. Muhammad Ali was my biggest idol as a kid, the thought that I could write his biography. That's cool. But what's really cool is that I'm trying to find connections to him and to understand him and to help readers understand him and like what a thrill that is. To me that's just like the highest calling. I could imagine it really is it really is incredible?
Max Chopovsky: 31:50
Did you ever get to meet him?
Jonathan Eig: 31:53
I met him once. I thought about using that for my introductory story, because I spent five years trying to get to him and traveling several times to where I thought he was going to be and getting close. I actually got into his house once and spent three hours in his house with his wife and Ali was in the next room and never came out. And then, because he wasn't feeling well, and then finally, just a few months before he died, his wife called me and said you gotta come and I flew down to. I drove down to Louisville and met him at a ceremony and I whispered in his ear and told him I was writing this book about him and is there anything he wanted to say? And he didn't answer. He couldn't speak anymore at that point, but his wife, lonnie, told me that he heard me and that he was glad that I was writing the book and that he wanted me to come and read it to him when I finished. And I never got to read it to him because he passed away.
Max Chopovsky: 32:41
Where in Louisville was he at the time?
Jonathan Eig: 32:44
It was at the Ali Center. There was an event honoring him. Then I got there before the event started and Lonnie introduced me to him. I have one picture of me meeting Ali and I've never showed it to anybody because I look so stupid. It's like I look exactly like the 10 year old John I would look if he were meeting Ali. I just had this like incredibly geeky look on my face. I've never showed it to anybody except my family.
Max Chopovsky: 33:08
That's the only acceptable way to look when you're meeting somebody like Ali. If you have no motion on your face, you're a robot.
Jonathan Eig: 33:16
Yeah, I don't like it.
Max Chopovsky: 33:21
Wow, yeah, I think that's the only way that you're supposed to look when you're doing that, when you're meeting an idol. So let's go back to the story you told for a minute. What is the moral?
Jonathan Eig: 33:30
of that story. I think the moral of the story is that obviously persistence pays, but also that making a human connection, understanding another person, takes work.
Max Chopovsky: 33:41
Yeah, that is very true, because you have to ask more than you say, you have to listen, you have to be open to their perspective and understanding that they're a function of their time and sort of everything that made them into who they are time and sort of everything that made them into who they are.
Max Chopovsky: 34:00
I share your love for interviewing people and I think I got that from my grandfather, and this show originally was just supposed to be a really quick sort of tell me the story, I'll ask you the follow-up questions and we'll call it a day 20 minute episode tops. But it's hard for me to resist when I'm talking to such interesting people, not asking other questions and in some cases the conversation just happens to veer off in a completely unpredictable direction and to me sometimes that's the best part of the episode. I mean, the stories are good but sometimes the best part is the unexpected, and that was my struggle with the show when I was thinking about how to structure. It is that the cool part is sort of at face value, that people are telling these stories. But I also just don't want to waste the opportunity of getting to know somebody, even if that may not be sort of what's on the bill. You know what I mean.
Jonathan Eig: 34:53
Yeah, I love that and you're good at it. I can tell already and I think that's part of being a good interviewer is being open-minded. Like you know, we all do this, especially young journalists you go into your interview with a list of questions and you roll down the list of questions and then you stand up and say thank you, we're done here, and you didn't listen to anything they said and you didn't react to anything they said. And the other person could have said I've killed a hundred people and I have them all buried in the backyard. And your next question would be how long?
Jonathan Eig: 35:20
have you lived here?
Max Chopovsky: 35:23
You know what? It's so funny that you mentioned the list of questions. So my grandfather told me the story once. He said because I was always curious how he would get these incredible, deep insights from these people who at times were impossible to even reach. It was like you needed to get Muhammad Ali's take on the greatest heavyweights of his time and you needed him to do a full analysis for you that only he could do right, Like, how do you do that? How do you even get ahold of him? You have to wait five years. You have to sit in the next room with his wife while he's not feeling like. You have to get creative and it has to be compelling to the person that you're talking to, because you might only have a few minutes with him. There was somebody that my grandfather wanted to interview and, as with most people that he wanted to connect with, they were hard to reach and there were multiple gatekeepers.
Max Chopovsky: 36:15
I mean multiple gatekeepers and he was in this man's waiting room and I believe he was a really well-known doctor, like one of the most well-known doctors in Ukraine, which was at the time part of the Soviet Union, and his secretary finally said fine, you have five minutes with him, that's all. And he literally had dozens of questions written down for this guy and he ended up being in there for four hours. The guy canceled all the rest of his meetings and then they ended up going to dinner together and they became friends after this and I said how do you manage the fact that it's really unknown? You literally might have five minutes with somebody or you might have an hour. Even if they tell you you have an hour, they might cut it short after 20 minutes. You never know he goes.
Max Chopovsky: 37:04
I have three lists of questions.
Max Chopovsky: 37:06
I have one list that assumes that I only have five minutes with the person.
Max Chopovsky: 37:11
I have another list that assumes I have 20 minutes with them and another list that assumes I have an hour, and there are some questions that those lists have in common, but for the most part, the ones that are for the shortest allotted time period are the ones that will tell this person that I've really done my homework on them and that I'm really really curious about them as a human, not just in the subject matter for the article he goes, and when I ask those questions it opens the door to the next list.
Max Chopovsky: 37:39
And then it opens the door to the next list and, as you said, critically, it's not just robotically reading off the questions. It's about having a conversation that's prompted by the questions and then they almost become follow-up questions, that each one leads to its own sort of mini dialogue, which is fascinating because that makes journalism and frankly, partially, you know, I think, writing fiction, especially biographies, more of a social science than even the art of writing. Right, Because you have to understand people to be able to get them to reveal some of these things to you.
Jonathan Eig: 38:11
Yeah, there's no question about it, and that's what makes it so lovely. It's about making connections and about trying to understand people, and I think I would have really liked your grandfather because I could totally relate to that. You know, I remember when I interviewed Rachel Robinson my whole book really depended on her. Like I wasn't gonna be able to do this book if she didn't cooperate. And she finally, after a long time, agreed to meet with me and when I got to her office she wouldn't let me interview her at the house. She insisted on the office, which is a bad sign. And then when I got to her office it was in the conference room instead of her office, which is strike two. And then when we sat down, my whole book is depending on her. She says I only have 20 minutes Strike three, man.
Jonathan Eig: 38:49
But you know, I did what your grandfather did. I said I'm here, I'm not, my list of questions goes out the window. I just want to make her understand that I'm interested in her. I just want to show her that I care about her. And my only question really was you know, what was that like for you? What was 1947 like for you and for Jack as a couple? And then I had to go to work and show her how much I cared about the story and convince her to give me another interview down the road. But yeah, you have to just think about. I'm not interested in gathering information anymore, I'm just interested in getting back in the door for a second interview and for gaining her trust and her respect.
Max Chopovsky: 39:20
Yes, it's like to use a sports analogy. It's like being at fourth and 20 and just going for the pass instead of trying to kick it. That's right, because you might not complete the pass, but you have to go for it.
Jonathan Eig: 39:33
Yeah, or you could punt and wait for the next set of downs hope for better field position next time you could. I guess I was thinking more of the Super Bowl, the position that-. Oh, if it's the fourth quarter, yeah, they definitely should have gone for it on that one.
Max Chopovsky: 39:46
So you obviously tell stories for a living and you have to think about not just how to tell a good story, but how to condense reams and reams of data into a narrative that gives people enough detail without being overbearing and yet doesn't leave out critical details. So it's really just. It's such an art and it's such an ability to throw away facts that otherwise would be amazing, but just don't rise to the level of necessity for the story. And so, if we look at storytelling overall, what do good stories have in common in your mind?
Jonathan Eig: 40:30
Wow. They have characters that you care about and who grow more complicated as you go along. They have characters that you care about and who grow more complicated as you go along. They have something at stake. They have bigger ideas. It would be easier to write a 3,000-page book about Martin Luther King than it is to write a 600-page book about Martin Luther King. Now, writing a 300-page book would have been harder because that's too short, but you have to give it enough time to develop and to understand and to grow and let the character grow. But when I think about the great novels, the ones that I get most excited about are the ones where the characters are evolving as they go along and I'm not as much interested in the plot, like who did it? Who's going to die at the end? Which of these are they going to get away with the money? I'm interested in seeing the growth in the character. Those are the books I like the best. I love that.
Max Chopovsky: 41:17
It's funny you mentioned. You know it's easy to write a massively long story. I can't remember if the quote came from, if it was Teddy Roosevelt or somebody else. That was like if you want me to speak for hours, then I need a week of time to prepare. Or if you want me to speak for hours, I can start now. If you want me to give you a 10 minute speech, give me a week of time to prepare, because it's so easy to just throw it all in.
Jonathan Eig: 41:40
Right, absolutely. And I joke about it because people make fun of my book, saying it's too big. How are they ever going to read it? And I say you know, you have no idea how much longer that could have been. It took me a lot of work to get that down to 600 or so pages.
Jonathan Eig: 41:56
It could have been an anthology. Yeah, I thought about it actually. At one point I actually approached my editor about doing it in three volumes because I had so much material on Montgomery that was just unbelievable and most of it had never been seen before and I just hated to leave it on the cutting room floor. But my editor was right Nobody's going to read volumes two and three and if you want people to really appreciate it, you want to give it to them in a form that they can digest and you want people to. My goal was to make people cry at the end of my King book, and they weren't going to cry at the end of three volumes, unless they dropped it on their toe.
Max Chopovsky: 42:31
I'm putting the finishing touches on a screenplay that I wrote about that's based on my family, and we're actually shooting the short film in a few months, and the screenplay originally started at just shy of 40 pages. I've never written a screenplay before. I had no idea what I was doing. It just started with snippets of conversations that I would have with my parents that were so ridiculous that literally you couldn't make it up Right, and so I thought, you know this would be an interesting basis for a screenplay that explores how parents want their children to be successful, but they also have to manage expectations that, hey, you're probably not going to be the next Taylor Swift. So where, in between encouragement and reality, do parents fall right with their kids? It's kids. It's a very nuanced approach that I think most of us will probably say we don't get it right. I sure as hell don't get it right most of the time, and I realized pretty shortly after finishing the first version of this that there's no way this thing is going to get into any festivals as a short, because it's about three times the length that it should be, and so I started cutting it, and cutting it, and cutting it, and at some point I got to the point where I'm like I cannot cut this anymore without taking out characters or taking out scenes. And so I started taking out characters and I started taking out scenes, and every single time I would finish a new version.
Max Chopovsky: 43:49
I would ask the people that probably deserve a whole lot more than what I can offer in exchange for all the time they've spent critiquing this thing. Is anything missing? Do you feel like the narrative has suffered? Do you feel like the character arcs have suffered? And almost every time they've said no, I actually don't miss anything that you've taken out which tells me that I can keep going. And I keep going until they said okay, well, now maybe this character is a little bit incomplete, but it's hard to cut things that you feel are just nuggets of gold, whether it's a really funny line or a really interesting fact, and but then you have to sort of choose is it more funny or more interesting than something else? Because it's. It is kind of a zero sum game at some point.
Jonathan Eig: 44:33
Oh, no question about it. The line I often heard in newspaper newspaper world was kill your babies. You got to kill your babies and it hurts, but oftentimes it does the reader a favor that your job is to tell the story and it's not to. And the other thing that for me is like I want to show off. Oh, I need to let you know that I had this amazing interview with this historic figure, so I've got to put some quotes from them in there. But that's not serving your reader well, because you're just doing it for your own ego or your sense of vanity 100%, 100%.
Max Chopovsky: 45:06
Now, as a father, you, I would assume, tell stories, use storytelling in your personal life. However, as you and I know, children do not have the equivalent attention span of the attention span that's equivalent to listening to or reading a 600 page book. So, with that in mind, how do you use storytelling in your personal life with your kids?
Jonathan Eig: 45:32
Well, all the time, I mean when they're little, especially now my daughters are 20 and 14. We also have a 33-year-old kid, who's another story for another day. But when they were little they would just love to hear stories Like tell me a story, tell me another story, tell me another story, like we were in the car. Sometimes they would say, okay, now tell me another story, and I would just make stuff up off the top of my head and I was good at it. I've lost some of those muscles now, but I felt like that was part of my job was to entertain, and that was before they had their cell phones, so that they actually cared, they actually listened to me.
Max Chopovsky: 46:07
Yeah, I do that Not as much now as I used to, which I do want to do it more often, but I would love, at bedtime, to lay down with them and then just start a story that I would make up as it went along. And my wife and my kids keep telling me that I need to start, that I need to write a, at least write the stories down, so eventually, I can write a book about them.
Max Chopovsky: 46:27
I'm like, I know people that have written books and it is. It takes over your life, and so I think I need to have a year when there are no other you know no short films. Maybe the podcast takes a break where I can focus on the book, because it's really hard, like it's. Writing a book is incredibly difficult.
Jonathan Eig: 46:42
It's rewarding but I guess, just like it's rewarding, it's difficult. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with just telling babbling to your kids too. I had one story about how I broke my arm when I was like 10, that my daughter used to want me to tell it, like over and over again. I would tell it and then she'd say tell that story again about how you broke your arm. Okay, here it goes. I would tell it like three times in a row. So you know, you just got to keep the kids happy At any cost.
Max Chopovsky: 47:09
So if we think about morals in a story, does every story have to have a moral? And if it doesn't, is it still a good story.
Jonathan Eig: 47:20
I don't know. I've never thought about it that way. I think sometimes the reader has to find their own moral in the story and you don't necessarily have to know what it is, or you might know what it is for you. I always tell people like you should know what the story's about with one word. It may not be a moral, but what's the story about? Is it about religion? Is it about race, is it about money? And you should know that with every paragraph you're writing and make sure you're not straying too far from what that book is really about or that story is really about. But it might be something entirely different to someone else reading it. And that's okay, because if you're telling the life story with enough complexity and enough nuance, then some readers should find different meanings in it. So I don't know that every story has to have a moral. I think it has to have an idea.
Max Chopovsky: 48:00
I love that. I love that you are an avid reader. So what are a few of your favorite books? Fiction, nonfiction, genre agnostic, that nail the art of storytelling.
Jonathan Eig: 48:20
Well, I mentioned Seabiscuit, which played an important role in my career. But I'm mostly a fiction reader. Like, I read nonfiction almost, like you know manuals, you know looking for how it's done. But fiction I can really lose myself in because I don't really aspire to ever write. I've written some kids' novels but I don't think I'm ever going to. I've tried writing grown-up novels and they're not good, but I think I lose myself more in fiction and I take much more pleasure in reading fiction. You talk about emotional development of characters. You know Anna Karenina doesn't get much better than that. So I tend to, you know, mostly read the classics, although I love like a James Lee Burke novel when I'm in the mood for something fun. He's a fantastic writer.
Max Chopovsky: 49:12
So you know, every once in a while something with just lots of plot and action is a nice distraction for me, Do you ever find yourself trying to analyze it at all when it comes to fiction? Because you maybe snap out of the sort of story for a second and think, huh, that's really interesting structure there. Or can you truly lose yourself in it?
Jonathan Eig: 49:27
No, I still find myself analyzing it a lot and I just don't feel like I can ever really emulate it as well as I can for nonfiction. But yeah, certainly sentence structures, organization, even character development, I find myself analyzing it too, but I get lost a little bit better in fiction than I do in nonfiction. Oh, Willa Cather I should mention. That's another one I can't get enough of Willa Cather. I think I've read almost everything, all the fiction she's written.
Max Chopovsky: 49:54
Wow, so classics. I do want to go back to that for a sec. There's so many books out there and if you just go by Amazon reviews, in a lot of cases you'll end up reading the wrong stuff. So if you just think about classics, what are like a handful of classic books, classic works of fiction or nonfiction that you could think of if you were to recommend a handful?
Jonathan Eig: 50:18
Like I mentioned, I'm a huge Tolstoy fan, a huge Cather fan. I love Henry James, even though, like a lot of my friends, I can't understand it at all why I like Henry James. But yeah, I tend to go old school on that. It's harder for me to. I still read a lot of contemporary fiction, but it's the classics that really get me, and COVID was good for that. It's harder for me to. I still read a lot of contemporary fiction, but it's the classics that really get me, and COVID was good for that. I read a lot of the big books. I'd never read War and Peace until COVID, so I felt like that was a good time to finally dive in. And then same thing with Anna Karenina. I just read it recently and I was like what was I waiting for?
Max Chopovsky: 50:57
But I'm not sure I would have been ready for it in my thirties even, I think. Yeah, I'm not sure I could have appreciated it Interesting. Okay, that's good to know. So last question for you, jonathan, if you could say one thing to your 20 year old self.
Jonathan Eig: 51:12
What would it be? Loosen up man, have some more fun. I took myself too seriously sometimes I think, but yeah, that'd probably be it. Buy a nice, have more fun car. I always bought practical cars.
Max Chopovsky: 51:25
I should have bought something more fun. That's good, that's good. Well, they do say that youth is wasted on the young.
Max Chopovsky: 51:32
Yeah especially wasted on me young. Yeah, especially wasted on me. Listen, I've talked to plenty of people who overcorrected for acting young when they were young, and so I think it's a balance. I used to work at GE and my boss at GE used to say everything is good in moderation, including moderation. Everything is good in moderation, including moderation. Wise words yeah, wise words. Well, that does it, Jonathan Ige, best-selling author and wonderful human being to have a conversation with. Thank you for being on the show.
Jonathan Eig: 52:10
This is really fun, Max. You're doing a great job with these. Now that I've listened to a few, I feel honored to be in the company of your guests. This is a great conversations you're having.
Max Chopovsky: 52:23
Thank you. I'm just fortunate enough to have some wonderful people be very generous with their time, so I thank you for that as well. For show notes and more, head over to mosspodorg Find us on Apple Podcasts, spotify, wherever you get your podcast on. This was Moral of the Story. I'm Max Trapofsky. Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.