Good morning from beautiful autumnal Seattle. Last night I met yet more of you at an event at Town Hall Seattle. There is something so magic about the virtual becoming real, names on a screen becoming handshakes and hugs and last-call drinks at the bar.
I’ve spoken to so many of you in recent days, and I was thinking of what I take away from these conversations. It may be this: It seems to me people are ready to turn the page not just on this era, because obviously, but on this culture we’ve been living in.
Donald Trump is not just a president; he’s a culture. He is a reflection, in many ways, of what we had allowed ourselves to become as a country. And what I sense in the air is a desire to turn away from that culture.
What is that culture? It’s hyperreactivity as a way of moving through the world. It’s contempt across whatever chasm of difference, or even crevice of difference. It’s assuming the worst in others. It’s assuming others lack the complexity that only you possess. It’s the flattening and reduction of everyone and everything. It’s refusing to imagine what it might be like to be others.
The other day, in Washington, D.C., one of my parents’ friends quipped to me: I thought you were brave when you wrote a book criticizing billionaires, but now I think you’re really brave because you’re writing the kind of book no one wants.
Thanks, auntie!
But she was right. I knew what she meant. This last decade has been so perpetually stressful, rage inducing, demanding of righteousness, that there is little space for other ways of being in our common life.
One of the bitter ironies of the Trump era is that Trump fosters in his opposition the mimicry of behaviors, habits, and attitudes that make it harder to get past Trump.
I can’t say that I set out to write a book in the opposite spirit; it sort of just emerged from the relationships I built with a range of characters and the substance of what I found. But the auntie was right. In the end, what I made was what no one wants now: full of moral complexity, inviting people into the shoes of people unlike them, asking them to like people they don’t agree with — just like them and ride along with them.
And as I have met so many of you and talked to you and felt the energy in these rooms, I have begun to feel that: maybe, actually, contrary to the auntie, people do want this now. Maybe we are ready to turn the page and peer into our next era.
I don’t yet know what that era looks or feels like; I don’t know what its leadership or slogans will be. But I do know this much: It will be centered on humanizing rather than dehumanizing each other, on curiosity rather than knowing it all in advance, on endeavoring to imagine the lives of others without feeling you’re complicit in them.
It will be an age defined by Team Human, not the dehumanizers or the machines.
I think even the auntie knew it. She was teasing me, but she was there that night. And you have been there night after night as I’ve crossed the country three times already.
And yesterday I learned that, thanks to you, MAN IN THE MIRROR debuted at No. 11 on The New York Times bestseller list.
I wasn’t expecting it. I had done a little self-management meditation in the morning preparing myself. This book isn’t viral-friendly, I told myself. It’s not provocative. It’s an attempt at art, not a fist-shaking manifesto. Let it have a slower life, I told myself.
But then you, and some others perhaps looking for what you’re looking for, lifted it up. You signed up to get it in your hands early. You spread the word. You came to events. You took a chance on a hard story. You pitched it to your beloved book club.
You did this. I mean that quite literally. I couldn’t feel more upheld by this community and in general than I do right now. When I found out, I called my wife, Priya, and even as I gave her news she basked in, she turned the tables on me and gave me some news.
What I take from all of this is that people are ready — you first and foremost among them. Ready for the next incarnation of us.
I tried to write myself out of this era by making this book. And it seems to me that more and more people want to venture together into whatever comes after this.
Let’s walk towards it, fast, steadily, together.
You are doing a brilliant job publicizing the book, talking about it in ways that make it irresistible even to the most reluctant. Few writers are capable of this. You are meeting the moment in the most challenging of media times. Thank goodness, because everyone needs to read this book!
That was beautifully worded. Thank you for never being afraid of doing what you truly believe. So proud of you! Your book has allowed me to view the world around me through a different lens. That is the magic of your book and your poetic words.