The Jew­ish Book Coun­cil is pub­lish­ing an extend online edi­tion of our Jew­ish Book World inter­view with Adelle Wald­man, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., over three installations.

Pre­vi­ous­ly: Nathaniel P. and Jew­ish­ness in the pos­tra­cial meritocracy

Nat Bern­stein: In a nov­el that is so rep­re­sen­ta­tive of dat­ing, mod­ern com­mu­ni­ca­tion (or the lack there­of), and the lit­er­ary world, I couldn’t help but notice the near absence of social media — Face­book, Twit­ter, online sources, dat­ing sites, etc. — in Nate’s life. Was this a con­scious decision?

Adelle Wald­man: Per­son­al­ly, I have an iPhone, and I use the Inter­net a lot — so does every­one I know — but when I think of the sto­ries of my rela­tion­ships and my friend­ships, social media isn’t cen­tral: it’s some­thing I do when I’m bored or I’m pro­cras­ti­nat­ing. There’s an extent to which I keep up with old friends from col­lege and high school from whom I might have oth­er­wise drift­ed apart, but I don’t think my pri­ma­ry rela­tion­ships have changed that much as a result of social media. So it wasn’t so much a con­scious deci­sion to keep that out of the nov­el so much as I didn’t want to put any­thing in unless it felt organ­ic to the sto­ry. I wasn’t par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in writ­ing a nov­el that’s about social media or the inter­net or the way we live now in terms of the dig­i­tal age; I was inter­est­ed in writ­ing a nov­el about emo­tions and gen­der and relationships.

NB: I real­ly con­nect­ed to the painful accu­ra­cy that The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. deliv­ers with regard to the mod­ern, urban Amer­i­can dat­ing scene — it felt pret­ty val­i­dat­ing to read, even (or espe­cial­ly) at the most uncom­fort­able moments of Nate’s inter­ac­tions with the women he’s involved with. Since the novel’s debut, do your read­ers now approach you as some kind of rela­tion­ship guru? How do you feel about that?

AW: I’m just so hap­py to hear that, because in a lot of ways, I want­ed the book to be val­i­dat­ing — espe­cial­ly for women. I think the book can be painful to read as a woman, because Nate’s thoughts are hor­ri­fy­ing: I basi­cal­ly took all these inse­cu­ri­ties I had, the things that I most feared a man I dat­ed might have been think­ing about me, and I made Nate think them. I’ve been Han­nah, who feels like she’s act­ing kind of crazy, and then she’s upset, and then she’s embar­rassed, and then she feels ridicu­lous — but then I real­ize, no, she’s not: she’s act­ing in response to some of Nate’s behav­iors. And in some ways I’m struck that male read­ers, in par­tic­u­lar, have a lot of sym­pa­thy for Han­nah, and that when they relate to Nate, they relate to Nate with a sense of shame and misgiving.

I’ve def­i­nite­ly been get­ting emails from peo­ple that are incred­i­bly inter­est­ing, but they get very per­son­al. I have one from last night, from a guy who wrote to me in response to the book, and he said he relat­ed to Nate a lot: he’s about 30 and dat­ing, and he’s not proud of Nate-like-ness but he doesn’t know what to do about it. I feel like this man is telling me all of his dat­ing life, hop­ing that I’m going to be able to say some­thing like, ​“Oh, this is what you’re doing wrong,” and of course I can’t! I’m fas­ci­nat­ed as a nov­el­ist, and I appre­ci­ate that he’s talk­ing so can­did­ly about his expe­ri­ence, but I just wor­ry that I’ll let a whole lot of peo­ple down. I wish I knew… The best advice I can give women is not to date Nate. I’m fond of Nate in a lot of ways, but I don’t think he’s a good boyfriend. I think he’s a great per­son to be friends with, and that’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly the most sat­is­fy­ing advice. And to be Nate — that’s just tricky. I don’t have a five-step solution.

NB: Do you feel like they’re sort of miss­ing the writ­ing itself and focus­ing on the rela­tion­ship deconstruction?

AW: I think it would be ungrate­ful as a writer to be too crit­i­cal of any­one who’s going to read your book and then take the time to write a note about it, so I tru­ly appre­ci­ate all of the respons­es I receive. After I’d worked on the nov­el for many years — and I was an SAT tutor, and I had no agent, and I’d nev­er pub­lished fic­tion — it didn’t seem like a sure thing, and it’s just real­ly grat­i­fy­ing for the book to be in the world and to get nods.

I guess in terms of the wider cov­er­age — and I’m so wary of say­ing this, because I’ve been so lucky in terms of the cov­er­age the book has got­ten, and I don’t want to sound like I’m com­plain­ing, because I real­ly feel very for­tu­nate — but I guess if I had one com­plaint it’s that I think the reviews empha­size Brook­lyn and the writ­ing scene a lit­tle more than I would like. In my mind, whether unre­al­is­ti­cal­ly or not, I always thought of the book as more about uni­ver­sal issues in terms of dat­ing, rela­tion­ships, and human psy­chol­o­gy, and I just set the book in Brook­lyn among writ­ers because of the world I knew, and because I thought it added a lit­tle col­or and dra­ma. I just wor­ry that peo­ple might not pick up the book because they think they’re not inter­est­ed in Brook­lyn: one of the things I didn’t want to do was spend a lot of time talk­ing about organ­ic every­thing and how Brook­lyn streets are just packed with strollers — I didn’t want to do just a lot of Brook­lyn satire. I set the book in Brook­lyn, but it’s not so much about that. So I guess that would be my one concern.

NB: I was struck by that, too, in terms of the book’s recep­tion. The accu­ra­cy with which you described rela­tion­ships: it didn’t seem Brook­lyn-spe­cif­ic to me in the same way that oth­er peo­ple seem to be read­ing it — it seemed like very much my expe­ri­ence wher­ev­er I am.

AW: I’m so glad to hear that, that’s so much what I hoped. It was so much my expe­ri­ence before I moved to Brook­lyn, as well. I moved to Brook­lyn maybe when I was about thir­ty, and I basi­cal­ly met the per­son I’m now mar­ried to at my house­warm­ing par­ty when I moved there; I real­ly didn’t spend much time as a sin­gle per­son in Brook­lyn. The expe­ri­ences I had that were most like Hannah’s, for bet­ter or for worse, are not lim­it­ed to Brooklyn.

NB: You com­posed some real­ly great epi­grams about dat­ing and mod­ern rela­tion­ships for the nov­el. How did you come up with these quips? Were they ideas you’d thought up and scrib­bled down over time? Did they come out of real-life con­ver­sa­tions? Are they con­tem­po­rary trans­la­tions of Wilde or Austen witticisms?

AW: Most of these remarks come from a char­ac­ter named Jason, who’s Nate’s sort of jerky best friend, and I have to say: I would think of Jason’s thoughts while I was on the tread­mill at the gym. I don’t know why; I would just have these weird thoughts, and then I’d be like, ​“Oh, Jason could say that!” I spent so many years on this book — four years of active­ly writ­ing it, basi­cal­ly — so I was so steeped in this stuff, just think­ing about rela­tion­ships and gen­der, and try­ing so hard to fig­ure out Nate’s psy­chol­o­gy, to fig­ure out how he’s going to expe­ri­ence these things real­ly dif­fer­ent­ly than I would, what would he think about them. There wasn’t any con­scious try­ing to update Austen, but I found that just being so steeped in think­ing about dat­ing stuff that at ran­dom moments I’d find myself hav­ing these sort of epi­gra­mat­ic thoughts, and I just had to find a char­ac­ter whose mouth to put them in.

NB: So Jason — who feels par­tic­u­lar­ly Wildean — is pret­ty essen­tial to the novel.

AW: I also think that Jason is impor­tant for Nate in that Nate gets to feel that he’s bet­ter than Jason, which is how he jus­ti­fies his own behav­ior. And I think there’s a lot of truth in that, and it’s not just Nate: we’re all a lit­tle bit like that. We all have ways of mak­ing our­selves feel bet­ter when we feel poor­ly, and one of them is to com­pare our­selves to oth­er peo­ple and think how great we are, how nicer and bet­ter we are in comparison.