Writing With One Eye Squinting at Doom

Cast ironwork porch, Mobile, Alabama (1936) | Walker Evans / Library of Congress / No known restrictions

Nancy Lemann’s forthcoming novel, The Oyster Diaries (New York Review Books, 2026) is her first publication in over twenty years—and not for lack of trying. Despite the enduring appeal of her first two books—both set in New Orleans—The Lives of the Saints (1985) and The Ritz of the Bayou (1985), which, after forty years are being reissued by NYRB and Hub City Press respectively, her past two decades as a writer have been characterized by failure, or so she says. “The Doom,” she likes to call it—a long dry spell devoid of any published books. In February, Lemann sat down with Coleson Smith for a conversation about The Oyster Diaries and her writing process.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Coleson Smith: I read a biography of Albert Camus a few years back. In it, the biographer talks about how Camus wrote in themed cycles that paired works of different genres. The Stranger went with The Myth of Sisyphus; The Plague with The Rebel. Do you see any benefit to viewing Lives of the Saints and The Ritz of the Bayou as a creative pair?

Nancy Lemann: Evelyn Waugh used to write nonfiction travel books and a novel based on the same material. Writers are craftsmen, but they recycle some of their stuff and use it in different ways. I had to read the Ritz of the Bayou some months ago so I could write the afterword. And in it there’s the oyster grader, right?

Smith: Yes.

Lemann: And he’s in The Oyster Diaries too?

Smith: Yes. And Mr. Collier, too, in Lives of the Saints. There seems to be that recurring eccentric, classicist character in your work.

Lemann: Who’s kind of the antithesis of New Orleans, in a way. And yet he’s so embedded in it and such a part of it. Because he’s bookish and pedantic and studious. And let’s face it: It’s a party town.

Smith: In an interview you did with BOMB magazine in 1988 you mentioned that it took seven years for you to publish Lives of the Saints. What did you do in those seven years while you were waiting?

Lemann: I had jobs, went to graduate school, and I was writing. But yes, it took three months to write the book and seven years to get it published. It’s much harder to do business than it is to write. I think writers tend to be shy and solitary, and they tend to have a problem with self-promotion, and maybe even with cold calls where you have to sell yourself. Eventually, I had to move to New York to make it happen. I heard Gordon Lish give a lecture, and I just smote my forehead, and I felt he was the one man who would take a chance on me. The only one. When you’re different, you have a harder road.

In those days—it was before computers—you had a big paper manuscript. So I went to Knopf in person. I had my manuscript that I’m clutching. I went the receptionist and said, “Is Gordon Lish here?” Either they called him or he was just there, and he was just walking out, and he said, “I’m racing, babe. What is it?” I was 27 or. I said, “This is my heart’s blood.” And I gave him the manuscript. It was on a Friday. And Monday—this is a complete fairy tale—he called me Monday morning. Unheard of. He called me Monday morning and said, “You and me, kid, we’re going straight to the top.” And he also said, “Will you be willing to make changes?” And this thing came over me that happens about two or three times in life, where suddenly you turn into a businessperson, and suddenly you make a completely uncharacteristic business comment, and I said, “After the contract, right?” The reason I said that is because A Confederacy of Dunces had recently come out. And there was that horrible story where [John Kennedy Toole] worked with Bob Gottlieb for years, making changes without a contract, and eventually Bob Gottlieb did not publish it, and [Toole] committed suicide. So, that was what prompted my remark, really.

Smith: I understand how you got the book published, but, on a day-to-day basis, how did you find meaning? There had to have been doubt. What did you do to keep yourself going?

Lemann: I do think that writing is a compulsion. There is no reward, really. Success is a fluke. Failure is the norm. But writing is a compulsion. Failure and rejection are just a huge part of the life of an artist. It’s just a fact of life. And so you don’t stop writing. You just write books you can’t get published. To write is what keeps me going. It’s what I’ve done ever since I was age ten. That’s how I cope with life.

Smith: You fill the proverbial drawer with manuscripts.

Lemann: For sure. And the ones that are unpublished, they fester in your soul.

Smith: A professor once told me that, with regard to writing, “Nothing is ever wasted.” It’s funny how with projects you’ve worked on that don’t go anywhere, you can still draw from them in ways. Do you find that with this latest book of yours?

Lemann: Absolutely. For The Oyster Diaries, I confiscated some bits from what I call “the Doom”—this twenty-year period of failure. I confiscated and cannibalized little bits of it for that. Yes, it’s just always there. It’s very painful to look back at it, but if you can, occasionally, with one eye squinting, look at the material you have, then you can definitely use some of it. But business is the hard part. Much harder than writing. It seems very arbitrary, maybe because aesthetic taste is so subjective. One person hates what another person loves.

Smith: After the central tragic event in Lives of the Saints, we read about the effect despair has on Claude Collier, the love interest of the novel’s narrator, Louise Brown. I’m going to quote from the book: “It told him that his desires were futile and that it is futile to hope or expect things, that hope is a tinsel thing which vainly flaps its tinsel wing, and told Claude therefore to be strong, alone.” Now I’m going to jump to The Oyster Diaries. We get this quote from Kirkegaard: “It is a very beautiful sight to see a man put out to sea with the fair wind of hope. But one should never permit hope to be taken aboard one’s own ship, least of all as a pilot, for hope is a faithless shipmaster.” Given these two—

Lemann: —And then I conclude by saying, “Only when you cease to hope are your hopes realized.”

Smith: Sorry that I trimmed that out.

Lemann: Which is a tenet that I have discovered in my long life to be true.

Smith: Geoff Dyer wrote the new introduction to Lives of the Saints, and he talks about this “hypnotic repetition” that we get in that book. I see it in Ritz too. At times, it reminds me of a jazz riff. These lingering phrases, sometimes repeated immediately, sometimes in a different context, where they take on new meaning. I’m wondering if you see any relationship between your work and jazz, or any sort of music, because I know other sorts of music come up in your work too.

Lemann: Well, my husband says it’s biblical, the repetition. But yes: jazz, being from New Orleans, maybe. I mean, I was always musical. I played the piano starting when I was three. And my father—Bach and everything in The Oyster Diaries. There’s a lot of intuition involved, not only craftsmanship. There’s a flow. Copyeditors constantly are trying to destroy me and ruin my style. Because I have a specific style, and they’re constantly trying to regularize it. And it’s very painful because I have to be very assertive. And that’s hard for me, because I have to stand up to them and say, No!

Smith: That’s the reason you’re writing glows for me—it’s the style of it.

Lemann: Think of the irony, though, that I have to fight for that. They’re trying to ruin it. And now everything is digital. So you have to explain yourself in little boxes or bubbles digitally when they try to ruin it. Not to compare myself, but Nabokov would always just write these “thunderous” stets. That’s what he called it, “thunderous stets.” You know the word “stet” in copyediting? It means “leave it like it is.”

Smith: I copyedit sometimes to pay the bills.

Lemann: Oh … okay.

Smith: I’m a little more hands-off, though, I like to think!

Lemann: I wish you’d been my copyeditor. So [Nabokov] didn’t even have to explain, but he’s a guy. He’s in the patriarchy—my daughters have taught me—so he can be more assertive. But I do feel like if I explain nicely, then that’s what really makes them relent. Now that it’s all digitalized, you have to explain in those little boxes. And so you’re wasting all this time.

Smith: Was that the case with these latest books?

Lemann: Yes, yes. All my latest magazine pieces and … I mean, Chris Beha [former editor in chief at Harper’s Magazine] was pretty great about it. I must admit, he wasn’t like that. But yes. Yes. The answer is yes. Not editors. Copyeditors. Now I feel bad criticizing them, they’re just doing their job.

Smith: Your books are full of references to all different kinds of thinkers and writers. I wonder if you have a rationale for those. You seem to do it in such a measured and effective way. What’s your secret?

Lemann: I think it’s just because I’ve always felt that as a writer, you can learn as much, if not more, from books as you can from life. I think that’s the source of it. Because every time you read a book—maybe more novels with this, fiction—you’re just looking into another soul, you’re looking into another brain.