Ed Park is the Editor of The Believer and the author of the highly-recommended workplace novel Personal Days, which I’ve blogged about recently. He graciously agreed to talk to me about his book, as well as the world of email culture, where he’d rather be working, and why people read corny business-advice books.
STA: Why a workplace book?
EP: I think the immediate reason is that I was going through a workplace situation that was–well, it wasn’t bad, but it was falling apart. I found a way to step outside of my own situation through fiction. It is fiction–the characters aren’t based on specific people. Before then, my fiction was disconnected from my life, so it [the book] was a real surprise for me. I wrote it very quickly.
STA: Do you think Americans appreciate this book differently because of how much time we spend at work and how invested we are in it?
EP: I don’t know if it’s just the US. It’s interesting, because I was thinking ‘why aren’t there more books about work?’ I think we have an image of ourselves that we separate from our 9-to-5 life–there’s something of a barrier there, artists don’t want to appear mundane, but it actually provides a lot of material. Even awful stuff makes good art.
In a way, we don’t want to be defined by work. “I do other things, I’m not just my cubicle.”
STA: You’re right that there aren’t a lot of workplace books–but there are a lot of workplace TV shows, from Grey’s Anatomy to Ugly Betty to Law and Order. Why do you think there’s a disconnect?
EP: I think the serial nature of TV helps because work is a regimented thing. TV needs to last longer, and there are always new challenges and conflicts at work.
STA: Personal Days takes place in the 1990s, after email but before iPhones and BlackBerries. Do you think it could have worked in another time period?
EP: I think it could work in a different time period. In Personal Days, there is fractured or lost communication tied to email and email culture. It’s from before social networking, so you can almost do electronic carbon dating. I do think the email and CC culture…that’s not as easy to duplicate, but it represents mystery and alienation. The situations in the book are translatable.
STA: Do you have your own office horror story?
EP: It wasn’t just one thing. When [the company where I used to work] got bought out by a different company, the head honcho came in and had a bit of a swagger. We had a senior staff meeting, and he immediately ripped into a section that I’d been the only editor of, without regard. It was appalling. He was tearing into people. That was shocking to me. It wasn’t the end, but I knew my time was up.
STA: In the book, a character named Jill works on a document known as “The Jilliad,” which is full of quotes from business advice books. Have you read a lot of those books yourself? What’s your take on them?
EP: How “The Jilliad” got written did not progress in a linear way. I needed a change, so I sat at a typewriter and the first thing I wrote sounded like one of those books. I kept generating workplace axioms. I haven’t read any of those books, but I see people buying them in airports. It’s like the complete opposite of why I read. Reading should be about pleasure, because it is not useful. These work books are what I’d least like to read, but they do exist in our culture, and they do become bestsellers.
STA: If you could work in any fictional office, which would it be?
EP: You know, I’ve been reading a lot of Sherlock Holmes books lately. I kind of want to be Watson and have a friend who leads me on adventures. So maybe a detective office. Put me down.