Michael Chabon Is A Nerdy Night Owl
A profile of the author in advance of his new novel, ‘Moonglow’
Any profile of Michael Chabon is also necessarily a portrait of his marriage to the writer Ayelet Waldman—the two are “wholly intertwined with each other,” writes Awl pal Doree Shafrir. Waldman does a fair bit of the legwork herself in describing her husband:
“He’s never doing what’s fashionable,” Waldman said. “He’s always just doing what sparks his interest.” That, said Waldman, extended to Telegraph Avenue, which she characterized as “one of his great unheralded masterpieces.” She continued, “He engages with the emotional life of an African-American midwife in a way that’s so believable and authentic and nuanced and complicated. I know that there are some writers who feel like unless they’re actually fucking an African-American midwife they couldn’t write that character, but he did it, and I think he did it beautifully because he approaches writing women now in the same way he approaches men, with a humble openness.”
The fifty-three-year-old Chabon is most notable for this kindness and open-hearted approach to life. Perhaps it’s not unrelated to his resistance to Twitter, and his preference instead for Instagram as his main social network!
Moonglow is fictionalized autobiography (or would you call it autobiographical fiction)—the grandparents in the book are loosely based on Chabon and Waldman, down to Waldman’s struggle with mental illness. Indeed, the only thing that seems to have changed in the Chabon-Waldman household since we last checked in with them in the Times Fashion & Style section in an article entitled “Parents Burning to Write It All Down,” is a greater openness about writing about each other.
Married Writers Who Published Revealing Accounts of Parenthood and Life
Compare 2009:
When they do write about their children, Mr. Chabon and Ms. Waldman check with them first. If the topic might be sensitive, they read the child sections aloud and ask for their permission to publish.
with 2016:
Typically, no one in the family asks permission to write about another member of the family. “We don’t ask that question. Our attitude always is, ‘You get what you get.’ That’s what it means to be the child, spouse, parent of a writer.
I presume this has more to do with writing about the children while they’re still figuring themselves out, but now that they’re mostly grown up and the youngest was the subject of a viral essay in GQ, all bets are off. (In the photo that went along with that 2009 Times piece, the husband and wife are pictured with fingers, hands, wrists, and elbows intertwined, Chabon leaning against Waldman, who sits sideways in a leather armchair, her feet resting atop what appear to be oversized leatherbound books. It’s perfect.)
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