Author Interview: Chris Adrian

Earlier in the summer, SLM staff writer Jeannette Cooperman talked with Chris Adrian, pediatrician, writer and student at Harvard Divinity School. Esquire named him to its most recent list of the “Best and Brightest,” and Farrar Straus and Giroux just published his third book, a collection of short stories called A Better Angel.

You’ve finished med school and the revered Iowa Writer’s Workshop; you’ve written three critically acclaimed books and been published in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s and The New Yorker; you’re now finishing a divinity degree at Harvard and preparing to start a fellowship in pediatric hematology/oncology at the University of California-San Francisco medical center. Do you ever get teased for over-achieving?

A little bit, for being scattered. But medicine was always what I wanted to do. My mom especially decided early on that I was going to be the doctor in the family, so I got a stethoscope for a birthday present when I was 4. By the time I was a teenager, they changed their mind, because managed care was beginning and they were hearing how much more difficult it was to be a doctor. They tried to talk me out of it, but by then it was too late. I just could never imagine doing anything else.

What’s the appeal?

It’s relatively easy to convince yourself that you are doing a good thing, even though a lot of days you are treating an ear infection that may not even need antibiotics, or just reassuring parents—which is nice too, having them leave considerably less freaked out.

Why do you write so often about doctors who are either frankly inept or convinced they’re going to make a horrible mistake?

Partly it’s just my own fear of screwing up and having a catastrophic outcome.

Has that ever happened?

No, but I’ve certainly made mistakes. Never anything that wasn’t caught in time, and even those weren’t going to be catastrophes. But even the little ones make you realize that you are on a thin line sometimes, even in something as supposedly straightforward as taking care of more or less well children. You hear enough horror stories in your training—and oncology is full of stories about people missing the diagnosis. So it's more of a way to deal with my own anxiety about that. Making a character who’s a caricature of my incompetence.

You imagine yourself as lethally incompetent, you imagine angels squabbling and getting high, you imagine children drinking blood and killing poodles, you imagine the world destroyed and all that’s left a floating pediatric hospital, a world unto itself … Is having such a vivid imagination ever a liability?

It can be a little distracting. I worry that the time I put into writing or thinking, imagining different sorts of outcomes or branch points for stories out of some of the interactions I have as a physician, if all that energy wouldn’t be better put to use reading journal articles or doing research that advances the fund of knowledge. Every once in a while I decide to give myself a hard time about that.

The Children’s Hospital was so funny, profound, disturbing, surreal, incisive and miraculous that you were immediately pronounced “utterly original.” Are you?

No. I have a hard time saying exactly who my influences are, but I know who I’ve learned a lot from and who I’d like to be like. Herman Melville—I learned an awful lot from reading Moby Dick over and over again. I learned that you can be pretty enthusiastic about writing something where there’s a terrible lot at stake. I started reading him as a student, when there was a lot of minimalist stuff still enjoying hegemony. There was something about Moby Dick that made me feel better about writing this crazy novel where half the characters were dead people; I felt like I had license.

And Donald Barthelme, who I was introduced to as an undergrad, and folks like Marilynne Robinson, her fiction and also a book of essays called The Death of Adam that made me excited about coming to divinity school. She writes about theology and theologians and the idea of there being a sort of fake or pretend history upholding our present, and how if you go back to the sources, what actually happened is a lot more interesting.

You often write about angry children. Flashbacks or observation?

Both. There’s a sort of misremembered sense of the powerlessness of being a kid. And you are reminded as a pediatrician when you are obliged to do something unpleasant to a child for the sake of diagnosis or treatment that they get a lot of insults that pile up, and the idea of hitting back at the world in various ways rose in part out of those observations. Anger’s a manifestation of grief for a lot of them. The girl who goes around stabbing little furry creatures is killing her way back to her parents [who died in a car accident].

Do readers ever recoil from your accounts of violent, almost demonic children?

I don’t hear that terribly much. I hope that the stories are usually as funny as they are horrifying—that helps diffuse a little of the horror and keeps people reading. I’m not so much trying to be funny; it just generally comes out that way, to keep myself engaged. If it’s not funny or amusing, I lose interest. But I don’t really figure out that a joke has happened until I go back and read what I’ve written.

What other emotions interest you?

Sadness would be up there. Some of the situations I write about grow out of being sad about something, and the motivation is to try and write a story that I think is going to make me feel better about something unpleasant. It generally never works. But I start to understand what happened.

What ideas interest you?

That notion of fake or misunderstood history, and the way it gets presented to kids. How a child comes to some understanding of who to trust and who not to trust. And some understanding of what actually happened, either historically or very personally in his own family.

Whom don’t you trust?

Almost all politicians, and most media. You feel like nobody has the time or space to really be thorough about presenting any kind of argument or even information. And I also tend to mistrust people who are particularly sure of themselves.

Sifting through all the praise, what’s your favorite compliment so far?

This nice lady wrote a letter to the publisher asking if I would sign a book for her sons, ages 3 and 5. She’s made a project of gathering books she thinks they will like when they are older. It seemed pretty nifty to be in that club.