-Our next guest is an award-winning author
whose new novel, "Trust," was published today.
Please welcome to the show Hernan Diaz.
[ Cheers and applause ] ♪♪
It's so lovely to have you here.
-Oh, it's such an honor to be here.
-I have high praise for this book.
Not only did I love it, but my mother, Hillary,
loved it, as well, so double Meyers.
-No. -Well done.
-Double Meyers? -Double Meyers.
And I couldn't help but noticing,
looking at the cover of the book,
it looks very familiar to where I go to work every day.
-Oh, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Well, this is actually 30 Rock.
And it's really remarkable how --
The book is about money to an enormous extent
and sort of the almost gravitational pull
that money has and its ability to distort reality
and create myths around itself.
And one of the ways in which it creates these myths
is by monumentalizing itself through buildings
like this very building we're in right now.
-Of course. Yeah.
The Rockefeller in the name is not a coincidence.
-It's not a coincidence.
But the book -- Sorry.
The book is not about sort of oil money.
It's more about sort of finance capital.
-And it takes place in New York in the '20s and the '30s,
and is that what drew you to that specific era?
-Well, what I liked about that era,
what was attractive to me
is that it's very sort of fossilized.
It's very iconic.
We have all these narratives around this era,
but I think that behind those fossilized narratives,
there are certain voices and certain strands of history
that had been silenced, and I was interested in that.
-And, you know, you talk about the mythologizing about money,
and so much of it is about -- The people who make it
tend to get to tell the stories about how they made it.
And this book is laid out in four parts,
and it's really fascinating once you realize, as a reader,
what you're doing.
It's a novel, a manuscript, a memoir, and a diary?
Do I have that right? -You got it absolutely right.
-Did you lay out to sort of -- Did you know you were going to
have these four specific pieces to sort of tell a story
in parts that, once you read all four,
you would see it as a whole?
-Right. Yes.
No, I did know it was going to be four different pieces.
In fact, when you open the book,
the first thing you see is a table of contents.
So it is a bit of a puzzle, and hopefully the reader
will become sort of a detective who pieces everything together.
And I knew, to me, it was very important,
in addition to the plot, it was just the difference in voices.
And that is what these different genres gave me, yeah.
-You also -- You take the opportunity
to both tell the story from the male perspective
and, as well, from the female perspective.
And it very much draws the contrast that
the female perspective has far less opportunity
to tell the story the way they see it as happening.
-Oh, totally.
I mean, researching this book or doing archival work,
one thing that I noticed is that all the narratives
around wealth are about men.
It's the "great men," you know?
There are no women at all.
It's a womenless world.
At the most, they have been relegated to the place of
wife, secretary, or perhaps victim.
Those are the three roles assigned to them,
both in history and in fiction.
So I wanted to take these stereotypes
and slightly subvert them.
There are wives and secretaries and, to some extent, victims
in the book, but these roles are flipped
in very important ways in the narrative.
-I, you know, was very taken with, obviously,
there's a great deal of knowledge
about financial markets, how they work,
the sort of, you know, instruments that people
who have wealth use to accumulate more wealth.
How did you know anything about that?
-Well, I didn't. -Okay.
-Yes.
-That makes me feel better, because I was like...
-No, no, no.
I come from the humanities,
like, a comp-lit background,
and I've always been, like, a bookish person.
And money is not, sadly, to some extent, my thing, yeah.
-You've got to buy Hernan's book, you guys.
-Please. Yes. -It's not like he hates it.
-I'm not against it.
-Yeah, he's not against it, yeah.
He's not going to name a building after himself.
Give him a break. [ Laughter ]
-It was a steep curve.
But you know what the most interesting thing about
that curve was, the learning curve,
was that I realized that "money talk,"
let's call it that way, is purposefully esoteric.
Like, it's designed to not be understood
to create this aura around it,
and sort of you, me, we shouldn't really
concern ourselves with this,
because it's too arcane and abstruse for us.
Leave it to the specialists.
And that's a power play, I think, yeah.
-You talked about how the table of contents
sort of imply that there's going to be a puzzle within this book.
You've also talked about the contract between
the author and the reader.
Is that something that you always set out to do
more so in this book than others?
-100%. I mean, I think that's at the core of the book.
What is the distinction between history and fiction,
fact and fabrication?
And, you know, we learn all the time.
Historians tell us how much of history,
what we have come to accept as historical fact,
is, in fact, sort of an ideological narrative,
and history is revised constantly, right?
So -- And it's the result of power, to an enormous extent.
So I wanted to examine that --
the boundary between fact and fiction
and, actually, how history mimics fiction
and how fiction, in some instances,
can affect reality itself,
how narratives can affect our perception of reality.
-I have also heard -- this strikes me as stunning --
that you still write with a pen.
-I do, and I carried it -- -You carry it. Look at that.
-Yeah. That's the pen. -Is it a really good pen?
-It's a really good pen. -Yeah.
-It's a posh pen.
-Are you a little snobby about your pens?
-Insufferable. -Yeah.
Thank you for your honesty, yeah.
-Look, it's a fountain pen. -Oh, my God.
You write with a fountain pen? -A fountain pen, yes.
And it has a little, like, ink cartridge inside, you know?
-Wow!
-Yeah, this is fascinating stuff.
Gripping stuff, yeah.
-Wow! And, so -- And over the years, have you continually,
like, upgraded what kind of pen you're writing with?
-No. I was given this pen as a gift like 20 years ago,
and it's the pen.
-That's the same pen?
-It's the pen, yes. -You haven't lost the pen?
-Seth, I can't --
-I feel like we're doing a weird, like, "Seinfeld" episode.
-I know.
-[ As Seinfeld ] You haven't lost the pen?!
-No, but if you knew the amount of RAM
in my brain that is devoted to the pen --
-And making sure you -- -Like, "Where is the --" Yes.
-Yeah. -Yeah.
-Do you always, then, have to wear --
Like, if you're not wearing a sports coat,
where do you keep the pen?
In your pocket?
-In a tote bag. Yes. -Okay, gotcha. Yeah.
-I have a little pouch.
Do you really want to go into this, like, to this extent?
-I mean, look, the thing is, I've read the book.
The book is great.
I didn't know anything about the pen.
-And now you know all about it. -Yeah, now I know all about it.
-Yeah, yeah.
-Now I'm gonna ask you off-camera
what this pen runs me.
-Alright. Okay. Yeah.
-And when you tell me, am I gonna gasp?
-Yes.
-Okay.
A million dollars? -A million dollars, yeah.
It's a Rockefeller. -Oh, it's a Rockefeller.
You guys, Hernan Diaz, everybody!
"Trust" is available now wherever you buy your books,
but please support local and independent bookstores.
We'll be right back.