YouSaid · the spoken record

Eric Puchner

lines on the record: 40
first: 2025-02-18
most recent: 2025-02-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, that's a lullaby. And there's a way that I think when you have an incredibly close relationship with somebody, you change the world. I mean, things, because you have this connection, you see things in a way that no one else really sees them. It's idiosyncratic and unique. And I think that's what I was trying to get at there.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think I was trying to get at the fact that almost despite herself, Cece finds happiness in the routine of her marriage. And I feel that. And I think as we get older, I think, I don't know, I don't want to speak for anybody else. I feel that more and more, that it's actually not the exciting stuff. It's sort of the kind of banal stuff. It's the waking up, having coffee with your wife, reading the paper stuff together, sitting on the front porch. Happiness”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know. No, you're absolutely right. So, yeah, Dream State, I mean, it has the obvious sort of literal meaning, which is like this is a state that's beautiful, Montana. But it's also getting less beautiful in many different ways. And so it's an ironic entitled. But then as I said before, I was interested in this idea of life seeming more and more like a dream these days. And that has to do with climate change, but it also has to do with the way that we seem to live our lives so much online partly. So, yeah, it just seemed to resonate in that way. And then with the final chapter, I won't say anything to actually be a spoiler, but there's a sense of a whole nother life that could have been lived that sort of, you know, reflects like a dream. And so that. All of those things”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They should farm it out to somebody else. He's a title specialist. That's their job, right? So actually the original title was Old Light, you know, I liked that.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, I mean, I think life part of learning how to live is learning how to live with regret and not let it overshadow your happiness. It's so easy to sort of drift to that other life you might have had.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'm somebody who often experiences regret. I'm not saying that the regret is actually apt or well placed, but I can't even like order dinner without feeling like, oh, I ordered the wrong thing. Immediately after I ordered it. But I think it's a sort of dangerous mentality to have this kind of life as elsewhere mentality. And that's sort of what, I mean, it's a main theme of the book is these sort of trapdoors of regret that you can fall into when actually, you know, if CC had ended up marrying Charlie, she would have had a different life and she would have had regrets.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And try to imagine what it must have been like for her. And obviously Cece's very different from my mother. And Cece's thoughts very different from my mother's. But that was a really important step for me to take. I wanted her to have a voice while she was in the throes of dementia as well. And it's one of my favorite passages in the book.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's a wonderful question. I'm very well put. Yeah, I really didn't feel like I had a choice but to sort of write about my mother. She was occupying my thoughts constantly. So one of the things I tried to do was to capture dementia in the way that it really is. I don't know if I accomplished that or not, but much of that stuff in the book actually happened. But I also, there's a section, a brief section of the book where I enter my mom's my mom. God, she's not my mom. I'm sorry. I enter Cece's point of view.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, absolutely. I think the biggest thing I've learned from being a parent, and I've loved being a parent most of the time, one of the biggest things I've learned is that you love your kids and you have an idea of who they're going to become, and they don't become that. There's no kid on earth who adhered to the idea of their identity that their parents had for them. But then you love them anyway. They're completely different people than you expected, and you have to love them anyway. And that's been really profound for me.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Coltrane, right? John Coltrane, because I liked jazz, and I'd never been up till 3 a.m. in my life, but I had this idea of, you know, God, it's so cool to be a writer, right? So you stay up till 3 a.m. And you listen to really great jazz and you do that sort of thing. But then I have an older brother who's about 10 years older than me, and I must have been about eight. And for Christmas, he got the collective stories of Ray Bradbury. He has a lot of stories, those of you who know Bradbury. And it's like this big. And it was one of those old tomes from the 70s that has the author's photo covered the entire back of the book. And so I was starting, before that, when I read stories, I thought the language just fell out of the sky miraculously or something. I didn't think about authorship that somebody actually wrote those words. This is the first time I kept looking at the back and there was Ray Breber. He's like, oh my God, he wrote this sentence. And he wrote this sentence. Wow. I mean, and I...”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At six? I did. I always knew I wanted to be a writer at a very young age. But it wasn't until I was a little bit older. I started writing very bad poetry. We had an old typewriter and I would clack away and I loved E. Cummings, so of course I didn't use any punctuation or anything. And I remember writing, this is when I was a bit older, 13 or something. And I wrote a poem called 3 a.m. and train on sex.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something I feel. I mean, it's hard for me to say where it came from. I just have always sort of felt that. You feel things so deeply when you're that age and the world is like a sensory experience.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I don't have a photographic memory or anything. So, yeah, running is very important to my writing process. I think people have this sort of idea, which is not the right idea. It's a false idea that you have to actually be actively sitting in front of your computer waiting for inspiration to strike. If you leave your computer, you're not writing. I think some of the most productive time I take as a writer is when I'm just walking around. I've turned off that sort of like intellectual part of my brain and some secret part of my brain is bubbling away. And so sometimes I go for a run and it's like teleportation. I'm immediately back at my house. I don't remember the run at all, but I have like a whole new chapter in my head and I have to rush upstairs and furiously right now.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it is. I mean, you walk around. If you're deep in a novel, it's very aggravating for your wife, but very fun because you walk around and you have this entire population in your head doing things. You go for a run and like a whole chapter writes itself because CC decides to do something that you didn't expect.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's an excellent question and a very sort of writerly question. Yeah, we think about that stuff all the time, right? What do you leave on the page and what do you allide? I write my novels the way most of my friends write novels, which is you write an exploratory draft, your first draft. There's a EL Doctoro quote where he says, writing a novel is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights. That's always how I feel. So I'm always struck when I read a quote from like Nabakov or something who says, oh, you need to plan out your entire novel in advance or you're not a real writer. I'm like, I don't know anybody who does that. If you don't surprise yourself, you're not going to surprise the reader. And the characters aren't going to come alive in the way that you want them to come. You want them to come alive and start doing things that you didn't expect. That's what's fun for me in the writing.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She may have come to hate my sentences. She read my book so many times for me. We read each other's work all the time. But yeah, I hope that answers your question to a certain degree.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've been together for close to 30 years. We've been married for 20. So we never thought we wanted to actually tie the knot, and then we said, Oh, we'll just have a let's just do it so we can have a big party with all our friends. And also there was health insurance and that sort of thing. And we did it and it actually did change something. We were both surprised. We suddenly had that extra feeling of just like security and love that we didn't have before.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it helped me see my marriage in the way that I have always seen it. And I think it was healthy to sort of interrogate what marriage is in the book and to have a character like Garrett who begins by saying, like, you know, oh God, why would you want to get married? It's just a bourgeois construct. And he sort of comes around. And it's interesting because my wife and I, we never thought we'd actually get married. We lived together for years before we actually get married.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just want to say I loved hearing you read that sentence. Will you do my audiobook? That was wonderful. No, I haven't cracked the code of marriage. I mean, I think that marriage is everything. It's those moments and it's the moments when you feel incredibly connected. I think there's a moment in the book where Garrett becomes a wildlife biologist and he's thinking about sort of occasionally being attracted to his partners who come up and work with him. And he uses this equipment to track wolverines. And he thinks about using”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, I was writing the novel and started writing the novel more seriously after my mom died. My mom had Alzheimer's for 10 years and it was really horrific, actually. So I was feeling that very much. And it's all I could think about. So Cece's plot for backstory and the death of her mom when she was young, that didn't happen to me. My mom died fairly recently. But yeah, it was important to me. And then of course there's another death in the book which happened skiing. And I'm a lifelong skier. I sort of kind of grew up in Utah as so much my family lives there and I've had both my brother and my sister have seen people die in avalanches. They're really serious. They go hella skiing do all this serious skiing. And so I was also thinking about that kind of loss too, the sudden, very sudden loss.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's not the words, the words that you're saying to your male friends. That's just sort of gibberish. It's jokey. It's banter. It's insult humor, right? But then there is like the rhythm of your speech, of the conversations, of all the times that you've spent together doing various things. That's in the background. And that is the sort of the heft of the friendship. That's the karaoke track that doesn't change.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly, exactly. Because that's not being that sort of direct can be misinterpreted, I guess. And so you have to sort of communicate that in subtler ways.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We like sentences, yeah. But I also think that so much of male friendship revolves around like wanting to say something to that person. I love you, man. You're amazing. You're terrific. You're really important to me. But not being able to say it.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think a lot about male friendship. I have I think a little bit like Garrett and Charlie, who are the two main male characters in the book, have a sort of friendship in college that I never really found in college. I didn't find until I was later. I never really understood how to talk to most men in a way that they understood. So it wasn't until later when I went to grad school and then I was at Stanford for a while doing a fellowship there that I made the best male friends of my life. But they're all writers, you know, and we have a common language, I think.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love sentences. I'm never so happy when I'm rewriting a sentence. I mean, I love my family too. But it does make me uniquely happy for some reason. I think a lot of it.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. I'm really interested in the sort of divide between our private and public selves. And I think one of the trickiest things in life is bridging that divide. I also think like what we think we want isn't necessarily what we truly want or what we should want. And I'm very interested in characters who think they want the... Pediatric neurosurgeon since he was a kid. She was sort of in love with those words. I mean, that's language. And once she got to med school, she realized, God, I hate this. This isn't fun. And I'm not interested in this. So she has to change text, but she also is confused as to she wants to do something great in the world and she just doesn't know what the one.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Isn't there anymore, and so it's having effect on all the lakes and the lake levels, it's having a huge effect on biodiversity. And also with all the fires, sometimes we go there for a week or two weeks, and we can't go outside for most of that time because the air quality index is like in the red and it's very unhealthy. So it's tragic what's happening there. But I wanted that to be part of the book. Yeah.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a terrific question. I'm really drawn to novels that are ambitious in that way with their use of time. One of my favorite novels is Light Years by James Salter, also sort of focuses on a house and a family. I guess I'm drawn to novels in which time is the antagonist because I feel that's sort of the way that our lives are led and grappling with that reality was really important to me. And obviously also I was interested in climate change and the sort of devastating effects, particularly in the West, American West, because one of the things that's happened since we started going to this area in Montana 25 years ago is that I've watched it change dramatically. I've watched the landscape change. And it's not far from Glacier National Park. It's gorgeous there. It used to have 150 glaciers. It's down to 25. So all that snow that used to be there.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. I mean, it's partly that when you write a novel, only trouble is interesting. But also I think one of the wonderful things about a writer is being able to empathize with people who are really struggling. And I'm interested in that in my work. I'm also interested in it in my life. And I wanted to write about Jasper in particular, I have two close friends of mine, my best friends in high school, both became heroin addicts. So I was interested in writing about that epidemic.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it had a lot to do with that as well. Yeah, thank you for picking up on that. And there's also a moment when Jasper, who becomes a drug addict, is talking about feeling like his life is always a dream. And I just started thinking about the way that we feel like we're often sort of trapped in a dream these days. Everyone's on the internet all the time. These awful things are happening in the world. We're on our phones. We see that they're happening. And for Jasper, it's particularly acute because he has a heart condition and there's something in his heart that saved him. And so he feels sometimes feels that his life is dreamlike.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I didn't know how to end it and I was at a writer's residency, Yado, in New York, and I was there for a week. I was like, I finally got this residency. I have a leave off of work and I don't write. I don't know what to do because I can't end this thing. And then it occurred to me to go back to that original wedding and to finish it and to write it as if this was a different, almost like dream life that might have occurred. And I actually started crying. I was so happy that I had come up with a way to end the book.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It did because I didn't. I mean, the marriage plot has been done so many times and the epigraph of the book is from Midsummer Night's Dream. I was thinking about that sort of plot that ends in a marriage. And I thought, how can I make that original? And so I thought, well, we'll have a marriage halfway through the book, but it's not the right marriage. And in fact, they don't get their marriage paper certified. So they don't end up being married. So I was just interested in that. And I didn't actually come up. I don't want to give anything away, but it were to the end of the book returns to the marriage that we see a glimpse of halfway through the book. For a long time, I didn't know how to end the book. I knew that it was spanning 50 years, that it was going into the future, that it was about this next generation as well and how they would deal with the mistakes from the past, both the sort of, you know, mistakes that the characters were made, but also the mistakes that society has made.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, I mean, I was heading towards that moment. I really didn't know what was going to happen after that, honestly. I just knew that that was going to, everything was going to change. And I also wanted to write a sort of novel about marriage, a kind of marriage story, a marriage plot that ends with the wrong marriage. I thought that was interesting.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what Well, it's in the middle of the wedding. You can't stop a wedding. And the groom was also green because he had it, but he didn't want to admit to having it. And then afterwards, much like in the book, they had hired a square dance band to play. And so everyone was dosey-doing and passing the Nora virus from one to the other from the other to the other. And so I had this in mind as something I wanted to sort of head toward as the kind of fulcrum of the book. And I knew I wanted to write about that setting.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know what happened in the actual wedding was that one of the flower girls threw up on the way down the aisle because she was sick.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, thank you for saying that. You know, writing a novel is really hard. It's never going to be perfect. And one of the wonderful things about a novel is its ambition and that it can afford, in the way a short story can. It can afford to be a little bit messy. So when I was thinking about this novel, I was thinking about something that actually happened, which was this kind of awful wedding story. And I was actually the efficient in this wedding. I won't tell you who it is, but people who I know well, and they had a wedding at the house in Montana in which everyone got Norovirus, which features in the book, but if you don't know what noravirus is, it's incredibly infectious stomach.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Story about the house that it's based on is that my wife's great grandfather was a Lithuanian Jew who immigrated to Montana and was so destitute he lived in a packing crate for a while and then ended up starting a dry goods store and making some money that way and ended up building this house. He lived in Glasgow, Montana, but he ended up building this house on Flathead Lake in the early 1930s. It took a long time because apparently the carpenter was a total drunk. And if you go and you look at the house, there's not, whenever someone comes to do work on the house, there's not a single right angle in the entire house. But it's a house that is really near and dear to my heart and that I love still.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay. Well, it didn't come to me all at once. But the story is about a lake house in Montana, northwestern Montana, in the fictional town of Salish, Montana. The lake is actually based on a real lake, flathead lake in Montana, and the house in the book is based on a house that I have been going to for the past 25 years every summer with my family. It's my wife's great-grandfather's house. He built it. And it was out of the family for a while, but then it came back into the family.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I teach at Johns Hopkins University, and I get terrible reception in my office, so I was crouched in my car in this kind of ugly parking lot. And then it was Oprah on the line and almost dropped a phone. I was completely astonished.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was incredibly stunned when you called. In fact, my publicist had made me think that he was just calling to talk about something kind of boring.”
2025-02-18 · The Oprah Podcast · Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT