Abraham Verghese

You know, I think of The Covenant of Water as a spiritual revelation, a soulful, mystical experience from the first sentence to the very last.

So I am here in my tea house right now with the author, Dr. Abraham Verghese.

Hello, and welcome.

Hi, Oprah.

when you get to it that way.

Um, yeah, like, like Abraham Verghese, another story.

I mean, people like this-

Oh, God, please

And I think one of the things as you study literary technique and trying to portray voice and character, part of that is close observation.

And I think that what novelists do, and I cited Abraham Verghese's lecture in my New Yorker article about that, is novels pay close attention to to details of character and voice.

And I think that's actually very useful as clinicians, particularly in the primary care fields where a patient may come in and just say, I feel tired.

And our job is to figure out if they just didn't get enough sleep or they have life-threatening cancer or they're depressed or they're a victim of domestic violence, all these many things.

I think in your New York article, you mentioned a variety of medical writers, including Oliver Sacks.

Do you feel you have a specific inspiration or a series of people that you really look up to in your storytelling?

You know, I think all of the writers I mentioned, including John Stone, Abraham Verghese, Perry Klass, you know, Sherwin-Nuland, Richard Seltzer, all those classic folks really influenced me in my training as I was going along.

And now I just feel, I just love reading the writers in Bellevue Literary Review.

I mean, he's obviously very, very bright.

I joked about this when I was talking about Northwoods, that like he's over there with like Abraham Verghese at Stanford.

And I'm like, apparently, if you want to write like a gigantic literary novel, like and have a huge success in the literary world, you just have to become a doctor at Stanford because that's what happens.

You become a doctor at Stanford and suddenly you're churning out like all of these bestselling literary novels.

And it was much easier to write.

And at the book launch on May 2nd, I quoted one of my favorite authors, Abraham Verghese, who is also a physician.

And in his book, Covenant of Water, he did say, through a character who is teaching a little boy English, About the book Moby Dick, when the little boy said it's all a lie, he said fiction is a great lie that tells the truth about the world.

I love that.