Richard Ford

But we don't necessarily start walking barefoot in the spring.

The poet Randall Jarrell says, I came across him in the book Independence Day by Richard Ford, actually.

But he was responsible for this line in a poem called A Girl in a Library.

And the line was, the ways we miss our lives are life.

Sure.

Yeah, I think that Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff were two big influences.

I loved Richard Yates, too.

And, of course, Dennis Johnson.

Okay.

And I think that...

I learned a lot by trying to write like them and especially like Richard Ford and with voice, but like the heart that Tobias Wolf has in his writing.

And I think when I, that kind of helped me kind of form a style.

And, you know, I would get asked about the business by people and there really isn't kind of a story out there about the day-to-day in what we do on Press Row.

You know, there's the one fictional treatment, Richard Ford's The Sports Writer.

Not really.

That isn't the day-to-day at all.

I want to love the author because I love his or her book so much.

But really, you know, the author Richard Ford said this better than I can.

He said it beautifully.

He said, I think readers are always disappointed when they meet me because I put my best self into my work and I am not my best self.

I, I, we were racking our brains to think of any kind of present day literary feud, like true, like in the, in the sense of, you know, the clip that we were just listening to and nothing came to mind.

Well, the most recent ones were a long time ago, like Richard Ford and Colson Whitehead.

Yeah.

Yeah.

got physical.

I think it got spitty and physical at one point.

Richard Ford spat in his face, I think in reaction to a review that Colson Whitehead had written.

And I remember reading some of that review and Colson Whitehead was like, the man came into the room, he put the cup down, he sat in the chair, whatever.

I got all this time to like think about, okay, well, if I'm giving this language to Kathy, how do I have to balance this someplace else? I also think this is a really specific kind of book for adaptation because it's too big to adapt to.

all of Paul and I adapted this book wildlife by Richard Ford together.

And that book is very slim.

And like, we're basically using the whole book and like, it's really much more matter of how do you translate his prose into images and to blog and less of like, what do you pick and choose? But like, I'm not transcribing like a third of that book.

We will.

But the second quote, this is the one that really anchors the whole psychological profile we're exploring, is from Richard Ford's The Sports Writer.

The quote is, I'll always tell you the truth, unless of course I'm lying to you.

Yeah.

They are actively hunting for someone who is already morally compromised, someone who is comfortable in the gray areas, but who actually possesses the raw intellect to weaponize that comfort.

Exactly.

They need someone whose relationship with the truth is conditional, which perfectly mirrors that Richard Ford quote from the beginning.

But that raises a massive logistical question for me.

I thought that would be super cool.

I was hoping it'd be Richard Ford so I could see him at the White House with Trump just to see how that whole g- thing goes down.

[laughs]

That guy, that guy is, is a lot.

I, like, you're like baiting me into, rage baiting me into saying dumb things-

I'm trying

... with Richard Ford, and it's like [laughs]

Or, uh, Colson.