good morning Hank it's Tuesday so I
don't talk much about my personal life
here for reasons that are contained
within the phrase personal life but
today I want to tell you a story about
my wife Sarah before Sarah and I started
dating we had a two-person book club and
one of the books we read together was
the Human Stain by Philip Roth and when
we got together to discuss the book one
Saturday afternoon at her apartment in
Chicago we discovered we both
highlighted the same passage the
pleasure isn't an owning the person the
pleasure is this having another
contender in the room with you and
haircut I always knew Sarah was smarter
than me but it's been my ambition to be
a contender in the room with her and for
the last 16 years we've been reading
each other's writing and challenging
each other's ideas her thinking about
art and love and how to make things has
shaped everything I've done in my
professional life so deeply that really
it's kind of impossible to disentangle
our work I mean on our first date she
said to me imagining the future is a
kind of nostalgia which I promptly
inserted into Looking for Alaska and
still think is the best line in the book
and in turn I've read and helped to edit
the wall labels she wrote as a museum
curator and the art assignment videos
she writes now for her brilliant series
with PBS Digital I didn't like art when
I met Sarah or at least I didn't yet
know that I liked art but she is so
talented at helping people to see what
can be useful and interesting and even
transformative about making art and
looking at it through her work Sarah has
shown millions of people that art is not
only about like 17th century masters
painting portraits or for that matter
only about the billionaires who collect
those portraits and use them as tax
shelters art is people throughout
history trying to capture and express
something significant something about
what it felt like to be alive or what we
valued or how we might shift our values
and by helping me to understand that
Sarah has helped me find art not just
interesting but essential because every
once in a while art just cracks me open
like the first time I saw this Raymond
Pettibon painting that ended up taking
over my novel Turtles all the way down
or when I first saw the imagined maps of
Guillermo qui t'a which inspired much of
my novel Paper Towns other people's
creative work fuels yours and vice versa
I learned that from Sarah and a lot more
people are about to learn it from Sarah
because she is publishing a wonderful
book called you are an artist this isn't
really Sarah's first book in her work
museum curator she co-wrote Andy Warhol
enterprises and edited a really
fascinating book about graphite but this
book is written for a much broader
audience and it's so good I really think
anyone who's interested in making stuff
or understanding how stuff gets made
will love it because as the title puts
it so succinctly you are an artist
whether you know it yet or not the book
brings together lots of assignments that
are commissioned from artists as part of
the art assignment but it also has lots
of new assignments and fascinating
essays about how contemporary artists
are working and I've just learned so
much from this book like the first thing
that I learned is that it's probably
harder to support someone who is writing
a book than it is to write a book but
also I learned so much about art and how
life giving the act of creation really
is for humans it's so good I feel like
Sarah's not gonna brag about it
adequately because she's like an
esteemed scholar and curator and not a
carnival barker but fortunately she
married a carnival barker you are an
artist is an amazing book that will help
you see the world in new ways and just
maybe change your life it has a
phenomenal cover beautiful color
illustrations throughout seriously your
life and your home are incomplete
without this book you are an artist is
available for pre-order now wherever you
get your books and it comes out on April
14th Sarah thank you for being a
contender in the room with me and
congratulations on your wonderful book
you continue to astonish me even after
all these years in fact maybe especially
after all these years Hank I'll see you
on Friday