Jared Rypkema: A common thread that struck me is your desire for your boys to at some point understand you as much as you’ve tried to understand them. Do you have a hope that one day they’ll read these pieces and understand a little more about you as a person?
Ben Tanzer: It’s funny, but I’m not sure that was a conscious thread at all. Which points to a couple of things. You can discover a lot when you write about yourself, that you might not really understand to otherwise be a constant thread in your own life. But more importantly, that said thread is important to you at all, which in this case it clearly is.
So yes, that is my hope, and yes, I hope that the nuances I found myself exploring in these pieces explain things, decisions, or lack of decisions, shortcomings and obsessions, that may never have the opportunity to be discussed or broached. And yes, this is also a topic that I come back to again and again as a writer as well – how it is we make sense of things as we battle confusion, feel trapped by our self-imposed limitations, and engage in endlessly poor communication.
So, again, I guess I do hope for this, though I also hope they see this collection as one big love letter to them, because that I was definitely conscious about when I wrote it.
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