The Art of Storytelling with Amor Towles, New York Times Best-Selling Author
Willy Walker: Good afternoon and welcome to another and a very special Walker Webcast. It's a great joy for me to have my long time (that's a better term, Amor, than old) friend, Amor Towles, join me on the Walker Webcast. As I said to my colleague, Victoria, who's here in the studio with me beforehand, I don't usually get nervous in Walker Webcasts because I'm usually talking about topics that I engage in every single day and to a great degree, feel like I have a certain degree of mastery. Talking about novels and writing with someone like Amor Towles is taking me into a completely different realm where I hope I've done enough homework and I hope I ask enough good questions that those listening can get out of Amor all the wonderful things he has to share. But these are the ones that make me nervous, to be perfectly blunt and straightforward about it. Amor, to those who don't know your work that well but are tuning in, let me do a quick bio, and then we will dive into all sorts of questions that I have. One thing I wanted to do, Amor, before we start, I asked Kokko, who runs backstage on this, to pull up a picture of the two of us that I found while I was doing my research. That's in West Chop, the two of us, and that's my eldest son Jack to my left. I'm assuming, thinking Jack's now 22. I'm thinking that's probably about a decade ago, but it just popped up as I was putting into my photographs “Amor Towles” and boom! Up came this one, which I thought was a fun one of the two of us from a number of years ago.
Amor Towles: And my wife in the back row there.
Willy Walker: Exactly, there's Maggie.
Amor Towles: In the sunglasses.
Willy Walker: It's great. Okay, Kokko, you can take that down. So, Amor Towles is an American novelist, having published three major novels, Rules of Civility in 2011, A Gentleman in Moscow in 2016, and The Lincoln Highway in 2021, plus his new short story collection, Table for Two, in 2024. These have collectively sold over eight million copies and been translated into more than 40 languages. A Gentlemen in Moscow alone has sold over two million copies by 2024. When Amor was 10 years old, he threw a bottle with a message into the Atlantic Ocean. I'm assuming, Amor, that was off of West Chop. Is that correct?
Amor Towles: That's correct.
Willy Walker: Several weeks later, he received a letter from Harrison Salisbury, then managing editor of the New York Times, who had found the bottle. As I was thinking about that, Amor, I thought maybe it had drifted over to McMeadows and Kay Graham had picked it up at the Washington Post, wasn't hiring at that time, so she put it back into the Atlantic and it made its way over to the Times. Amor and Salisbury went on to correspond for many years afterward. Amor graduated from Yale and received a Master of Arts degree in English from Stanford, where he was a Scowcroft Fellow. From 1991 to 2012, Amor was an investment manager and director of research at Select Equity Group in New York. Amor wrote his first novel, Rules of Civility, while still in the investment business and came up with the idea of A Gentleman in Moscow while attending an investment conference in Geneva. Gentleman in Moscow was on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list for 59 weeks and was a finalist for the 2016 Kirkus Prize for Fiction. Amor's third novel, The Lincoln Highway, was published in 2021 and was chosen by Amazon as the best book of 2021. Bill Gates reviewed Lincoln Highway on his Gates Notes blog in 2022, calling Amor one of his favorite storytellers and praising his distinct setting, plot, and themes compared to A Gentleman in Moscow. In April of 2024, Amor published a book of short fiction titled Table for Two. It is a great pleasure and honor to have my friend Amor join me on the Walker Webcast once again. Amor, we were just talking a moment ago about our mutual friend, Jamie Lee Curtis, having pinged you before this and what an incredible career Jamie has had and what an incredible supporter of friends she was. The two of us kind of spurred into a number of different experiences that both of us have had feeling a little bit out of our league, if you will, in talking to various people. I was watching an interview you did with Michael Lewis, whom you clearly are in the league with Michael Lewis as it relates to both critical acclaim, as well as maybe you haven't written as much as Michael, but that's because he got a good head start on you. He bagged his Wall Street career a little earlier than you did. But one of the things that I thought was so interesting was the story about you and Michael finding out that Peter Conway, your older brother Stokley, and Michael had all gone to tennis camp together in Vermont or something.
Amor Towles: That's true. Willy and I grew up spending summers together on Martha's Vineyard Island or part of our summers. And it was sort of, there was a pattern of kids from our community occasionally going to a tennis camp up in New Hampshire. So my brother went, Peter, our shared mutual friend went, and it so happened that Michael Lewis was there when they were all teenagers. I became friends with Michael Lewis because when he read A Gentleman in Moscow, I dedicated one of my books to Stokley, my son. I've dedicated one of my books to Stokley, my sibling. And another to my father, Stokley. And so Michael wrote to me and said, there can't be more Stokleys out there. You must be related to the one I knew in tennis camp 50, whatever it was, 40 years ago. And so that began our interaction and we became friends over the years from that.
Willy Walker: Where do these names come from, Amor? Amor, Stokley, Kimbrough?
Amor Towles: They're all family names. They're also weird family names. My name comes from a tradition of the Puritans in New England in the 1600s, and 1700s, who avoided naming their children after saints because they viewed that as a Catholic tradition. So they would name their children after virtues instead. So you had that history of female names like Charity and Chastity and Prudence, Patience, where all became names in New England, and Courage could be a name for a man, Amor, Latin for love.
Willy Walker: Amor.
Amor Towles: Virtue turned into a name but you know it as an old family name in New England dating back hundreds of years.
Willy Walker: That's really interesting, I'd never known that and never thought about Amor being amor; that's fantastic. So, Amor, I want to start with the adaptation of Gentleman in Moscow to a mini-series because that's sort of where we left off our last conversation, and it hadn't come out yet. Why was it made into a miniseries rather than into a feature film?
Amor Towles: I mean, that was me, I suppose. As an author of a book that's going to be adapted, you don't have a lot of control, but you have certain kinds of levers of control. And that's one of them, you can decide whether you would prefer your story adapted into a feature film or miniseries. Given that that story spans 30 years, 32 years, I really felt it was important for it to take advantage of the new form of long-form television, where you could really see the story unfold, the characters develop, and Russia change, which would be hard to achieve in a two-hour movie. In a two-hour movie, they probably would have decided to really focus on only a portion of the overall story. Another big change is that in the last 20 years, long-form television has become such an extraordinary format that, 20 years ago, you could not attract Hollywood actors of significance to appear on television in any form. The rise of things like the Sopranos really changed that, in that suddenly actors in Hollywood saw that there was an opportunity to pursue their craft in a totally different fashion, which is through an extended story where the characters evolve and it's not shot in 60 days. It's not this rapid-fire group of scenes. It really is a story which unfolds and then suddenly begins to attract all these terrific actors. So the combination of being able to have the story be told at length but secondly, the possibility of attracting really a significant actor to play the role of account despite being on television sent us in that direction. We were very lucky that we ended up with Ewan McGregor as the star because he's fantastic as an actor, as a person, and as someone who's personifying the count.
Willy Walker: Ewan, as well as the director, sat down and sort of interviewed you before they went and actually made it. Did you think that the adaptation was, if you will, consistent or reflective of the original book?
Amor Towles: I think of it as about 80 percent, right? It hewed the story about 80 percent, which is huge. In the world of adapting novels for screen, you can end up with 0 percent, where it really has nothing to do with or even is contrary to. But the team was very focused on and interested in bringing the story to life onscreen in a way that was true to the book. That was a great concern of Ewan's. It was a concern of the set people, the props people, the costume people, really across the board. And so as I say, inevitably when you're going to do an adaptation, you are going to start to rethink elements of the story or to deal with or take advantage of the video, the visual medium. And also have to cast off elements that are not supported by the visual medium. You're going to end up with some kinds of changes. That's why 80 percent is high. But of course, it's imperfect. So there are times where I watch it, I'm like, there'll be a scene where it's word for word like it is from the book. While watching it, I'll be like, “Oh, that's very good. That's very good. Yeah, that's a very nice scene, you know?” And then there'll be a scene where they start to veer from the book and it'll start to irk me. In the end, I think they did a very good job. The book is better. What can I tell you?
Willy Walker: It was interesting, I heard you say that in one scene where they did sort of create a whole new scene, you were sort of standing there saying, “Hold on a second, that's not supposed to be here.” You looked over and Maggie was crying and you were like, “Okay, well, maybe that works.”
Amor Towles: “My honey, this is not in the book.” “I know, but it's such a beautiful scene.” And I'm like, “Oh, okay.” So sometimes they do that, too. Sometimes they introduce elements which are better. But Ewan called me and said, “Listen, before we start shooting, would you spend an hour or two with me on Zoom? Because I want to interview you about everything you know about the character if it's not in the book.” It was really that he was about to invent the character from a performance standpoint, and he just wanted as much information as possible from the source, as it were. And you see that in his performance.
Willy Walker: I think that that does show an incredible amount of respect to your work in the sense that I'm assuming—I mean, I listened to Michael Lewis say to you when the two of you were having a conversation, Michael was sort of like, “They, A, don't want to hear from you and B, they sort of wish you were dead.” Not to criticize Michael's works in any way because I've read them all, and I think they're fantastic. But I think the respect that this group had for your work of art is somewhat unique from maybe a Tom Clancy book, which is a page-turner. They're incredible, but they take it as the foundation of something they're going to put on the screen and then may not have the exact same respect for it like they had for your book. But thinking about Ewan calling you is a launch point for another question that I had, Amor, which is the way that you create your characters. Because I do find it to be fascinating. There are a lot of different branches from having listened to you talk about this extensively. But I guess the core question would be this, what more did Ewan get from you as it relates to Count Rostov when he called you? I know that you went and researched or not, as the case might be, A Gentleman in Moscow. Your knowledge of Russian history, going to the Metropole Hotel only after you'd actually written it, all of those things would say that there really wasn't a whole a lot of backstory to it that he would get from that discussion with you because you get so into the character, but you're actually creating it all from your mind and not from personal experiences. So I'm just curious about that point, because you spent two hours giving him and obviously there's more character to him than you put on the pages I'm assuming and yet at the same time, I do find it to be very interesting that you aren't a historian in the way you create these characters.
Amor Towles: It's a complex question. So I'll give you a short version and a long version in terms of this sort of topic. The short version is, or a shorter element, is that when I'm inventing a character, it's very important in writing a book like A Gentleman in Moscow or any of my work, to really be able to hear the main character or the narrative voice very clearly. It's just going to define the entire project. What is the language that's going to be used? What is the tone of the voice? Is it humorous? Is it cynical? Is it shy? Is it mean-spirited? Because you can tell stories in any different tone. And based on the personality of that central character, the way you would approach metaphor is going to be different. The way that you approach dialog and setting is going to be different. Are there going to be long philosophical thoughts that are described? Or they're going to be short quips or more like Hemingway's prose, which is just blunt with very little description of interior thought? These are decisions that have to be made ideally at the front end to both understand the scope of what you're about to write and also then to provide the continuity and to infuse the work with its own particular personality and life, right? I'm a planner and we've talked about this in the previous time I was here. So I do design my books at length before I sit down to write them—I mean, over a period of years. And that's one of the things that you're trying to grasp with. But nonetheless, even with the planning, as you're thinking through the character, usually what happens is in the first chapter where I'm finally sitting down to write the book, there'll be a sentence or two where I really know what I'm dealing with tonally. I said this to Ewan and Ewan said, “Do you know what the sentence was from A Gentleman in Moscow?” And I said, “Yeah, I know exactly what it was.” And the sentence roughly is the Count has been arrested. At the beginning of the book, he's being taken to the hotel where he's going to be suffering from house arrest. The Count is being followed by two Red Guards. He stops at the elevator, turns to the guards, and says, “Gentlemen, the lift or the stairs?” They look at each other, not sure what to say. The Count thinks to himself, how can you be expected to succeed on the field of battle if you can't make a decision between the lift or the stairs? So, he makes a decision on their behalf and says, “All right, the stairs.” He takes the stairs two steps at a time, as had been his habit since the Academy. Now, when I wrote that series of sentences, it came out really quickly—da-da-da—and I remember hitting the end and thinking, “Oh yeah, that’s the guy.” There’s so much information in that series of sentences for me: he’s the kind of guy who would stop and ask his captors—politely—which way to go. The fact that he’d have a highfalutin response to their inability to make a decision—How can you expect to succeed on the field of battle? —despite never having been in battle himself. And then, he takes the stairs two at a time, as had been his habit since the Academy—a sort of robust, youthful sense of himself. And I shared that with Ewan. When the premiere was screened, Ewan won't watch any footage of the dailies. So he's really seeing the premiere for the first time alongside me. At the end of it, there's a point in the premiere where the first hour, the Count gets summoned to the manager's office upstairs in the hotel. And Ewan says, “Hey! Did you notice seeing whatever? And I was like, “Notice what?” And he goes, “When he goes to the manager's office” and I was, like, “What are you talking about?” He goes, “The count, he took the stairs two steps at a time. This had been his habit since the Academy.” And he rattles it off to me word for word, just like I had said it. So you realize that, again, this is a side conversation, but that was a keynote for him. Then he said in episode six, “You'll see that I'm taking them one step at a time. Because it became a way for him also to sort of to show age.” But it was a way, because he immediately, just like me, he understood the sort of the enthusiasm built into that, sort of, the optimism built into it, and the sort of sense of rigor or whatever, all these sort of little human traits. That kind of is sort of a window, both on the character development, but also the translation for the screen.
Willy Walker: It's fascinating. Just you talking about the steps and I hadn't thought we were going to talk about this, but when you talk about the coffee being hot and the Count realizing that the butler had run it up the steps because it wouldn't be that hot had he not run it off the steps. And just that being something that you started at the beginning, but then you weave it through the story going forward and it goes back to that original concept of who the Count is going to be.
Amor Towles: Yeah, yeah.
Willy Walker: Fascinating. Similarly, though, Amor, as you build these stories, you talk about the scaffolding you put in place, the outline you put, and then diving into the actual writing. Talk for a moment about left brain, right brain, because I find it to be fascinating about why you do so much planning and then how it lets your right brain run.
Amor Towles: So, my normal practice is when I have an idea for a book I'm interested in, I will start to keep notebooks, and I may be keeping notebooks on multiple stories simultaneously. Within those different piles, one is getting bigger and bigger and bigger as I keep returning more and more in my thoughts to a particular idea, imagining it fully. Meanwhile, I'm writing a different book. So, while I'm writing A Gentleman In Moscow, I'm imagining and planning The Lincoln Highway, let's say. So in this multi-year process of filling notebooks, I will ultimately try to understand everything that happens in the story—all the people, their backgrounds, their personalities, the settings, of course, the events in detail, and their implications. I might be doing some of the conversations that are going to end up happening, some of the philosophical components, some of the poetic elements. I'll be trying to capture the tone, as we were talking about earlier. In the case of Lincoln Highway, that's from eight perspectives. So that's involving also the tone of eight different types of storytelling. As you move from different perspectives, the tone is different for each of the eight characters. So that all goes into this planning. Then eventually at the end of that, when I'm ready, I build an outline that's quite detailed; it might be 40 pages. And then I start to write the book. And for your listeners, what Willy's referencing here is that what's a little counterintuitive about that process for me is why I do it, because it sounds so technical and scientific and it's not LEGO. I'm not building something out of LEGO; it’s that the counterintuitive part is related to the way in which our brains operate. We know basically today that, yes, the left and right hemispheres of the brain operate a little differently. They share many tasks, but over the course of a day, one or the other may come to the forefront to oversee or lead what we're trying to achieve in our life. The left brain tends to be more of the scientific, analytical, decision-making side of the brain, whereas the right brain tends to be more artistic. That's where the subconscious is tied to; it's where dreams come from. It's where the poetic understanding is tied to. As I say, in the course of a day, one side of the brain or the other may lead, depending upon the task in front of us or the circumstance. So what I've found for myself is that if I were to try to write a novel that I had not planned, you get to a chapter, chapter seven, and you don't know what's going to happen, what would end up happening is that the left side of my brain would have to take over. Because there's a lot of decisions that have to be made in a chapter, Okay, so what's happening? Okay, the guy comes through the room. What does the room look like? What's his name? Who is he? Why is he here? What is he saying? How does that make the main character feel? What's going to happen after this? Does anybody else come? What time of year is this? Blah, blah, blah. And so as I say, if you're trying to invent it kind of on the fly while you're writing it, that decision-making mode is really going to have to be an important part. But if I can do all that in advance, if I know all the decisions, then that instead allows me to enter the chapter and allow the right side of my brain really to guide the writing of that chapter, meaning the artistic subconscious side, because really what I'm trying to maximize is the poetic contribution to the language. So the metaphor that's surprising or the silly character who suddenly does something that is not a part of the plan, but is true to them, their personality, the word choice, which is unusual or interesting, the cadence of the sentences, all, you know, I want to maximize the subconscious poetic influence on the crafting of those sentences and diminish the analytical side of my participation. And yes, the advanced planning, I think, helps me achieve that.
Willy Walker: You talk a bunch about vocabulary. I'm curious about, I've heard you talk about, there's a vocabulary for baseball; there's vocabulary for finance. And as you're sitting there getting ready to dive into, if you will, running with that character, do you access that vocabulary just out of your own accumulated knowledge, or do you sit there and try and dive into the person ahead of, if you well, letting the right brain run and do some research on the vocabulary that person might use.
Amor Towles: There's a combination for me, but the bigger piece of the combination has to be the one that feels natural, and comes natural. And so, and I'll also break the parts in two. What would be an example? You're a butler in England in the 1880s, and that's going to have all kinds of language, which is very particular, because the English quality to it, the language of an aristocratic house, the role of the butler is going to use a different kind of language than the Lord. You know, they're not going to speak at the same level. I mean, not that the butler’s dumb, but they're going to, because built into the butler’s language is deference and politeness and reserve. So they're going to have to be sort of curtailing at least how they're speaking in the public room versus how they might speak in the kitchen. To do that well, you can't go and look at what are the 50 most common words that butlers use, try to memorize them, and then start writing passages. You have to sort of feel like, “I've read this character, and reading through 19th-century literature, I feel I have a flavor for this. I have a flavor for it in dealing with people who are sophisticated, service-oriented people in the contemporary world. I have a flavor for different levels of the English language, meaning in England, how the aristocrat might speak versus how the uneducated servant might speak.” You have to have some sort of a cumulative feel for it that you have the confidence that when you sit down and start to write it, that it's going to sound right, and it's going to sound organic and convincing. Whereas, if you're just trying to, as I say, build it from having done some quick search, I don't think you're going to use the language in a way that's as seamless and as organic as, ultimately, the craft requires. So you have to kind of pick and choose the things you're going to try to bring to life. But I said, as there's a combination here, once I feel that, yeah, I'm confident here in operating this, I may go and infuse myself in some way in the language of a time to sort of sharpen my feelings. And an example of this would be The Lincoln Highway. It takes place in 1954. It's just 10 days. The eight characters who tell the story come from different backgrounds. And one of the things I did in the maybe two years before I wrote that book is that I read a series of novels that were written around 1954 and that were mostly set in the mid or early 50s. And I read James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Hat, I mean, The Gray Flannel Suit, excuse me. Of course, Flannery O'Connor's short stories collection, her first short story collection, A Good Man is Hard to Find, is that what it's called? No, it's a, whatever, it is the one that that's in. And Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye. Now what's interesting about those four books is they're all written basically within a 12 or 18 month timeframe. But James Baldwin's writing about Harlem and New York around that period. Chandler's writing Los Angeles, a crime in Los Angeles. Flannery O'Connor is writing about people in the deep gothic South from different economic backgrounds. And then you have Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is kind of an invention. It's the precursor of Mad Men. It's the invention of the post-war story of this new type of American professional, the guy who took the train from Greenwich into the city and made a white-collar wage and came home and had a martini while the kids were quiet or whatever. He kind of was the first person to tell that story that Updike picks up and Cheever picks up and everybody else. Anyway, my point being that you read these four books partly just sort of like What is the tone of 1954? And do we say fridge or refrigerator or icebox? Which is it at that time? Or is it changing? Would a different person say icebox and refrigerator based on their class or based on where they lived in the Midwest or the Northeast or the Southwest? That book opens in the Midwest. And I have an advantage there because my father was from St. Louis. And I receive notes all the time from Midwesterners saying, “How did you get that Midwestern tone?” And I don't think I could have researched it. I think it was because of listening to my aunt and my grandmother in St. Louis as a boy and just sort of picking up on sort of little things about the way that they talked to them, bringing that to life in a more specific way in the narrative.
Willy Walker: Talking about the notes you've received, I heard you say, which I found to be fascinating, that 90 percent of the comments that you get from people reference a paragraph or a sentiment that resonates with them are basically experiences you never had. So in other words, like that Midwestern, somebody writes to you and says, incredible how you got that and it makes me think about this, this, and this, and you never experienced it. It's not going from Amor Towles' history of sitting there and saying, “I'm going to take that experience of my life and somehow weave it into my novel.” It's something that you have fully created on your own, which I mean, I think it's so emblematic of your genius in the way that you can go and create these characters and make someone think that you actually lived the experience when you didn't.
Amor Towles: You're nice to put it that way. I'm going to take it down a few steps off of which is, that is especially true. What you're describing is especially true when people are writing to me about something, a passage that they thought was particularly moving, or insightful, or a sentence. They'll see me when I go speak on the road, or they'll write to me and, you got amortowles.com, you go to the contact page, you can send me a question or comment. So I receive notes all the time from readers but when they say, this passage meant a lot to me or opened my eyes or touched me, and I read it to my husband, or I sent it in a letter to my daughter, or if I have it on a post it note on my computer screen as a reminder, or whatever it is. 99 percent of the time, as you're saying, that thing that they're quoting back to me is something that I would never have said in the course of my daily life—that insight or that observation, that philosophical viewpoint, or that sentiment. What's happened is that it's a part of the fiction writing process. What has happened is I have invented a person who I am not, who has a personality I don't have, and a background I don't have. And I've put that person in a situation in which I have never been. And at a certain point, that individual, based on their personality and their background, looks at that situation and suddenly will say, you know, da-da-da, da, da. And when those sort of moments come, they're not usually planned in the writing, but they can come very fast. Usually I hit the period and I'll be like, “Well done, Count. Wow, that's a really interesting thing to say,” because that's the way it feels. It does not at all feel like it's a product of my experience, of my personality, of my insight. It is that you feel like a conduit at that moment. It is a gift from this other viewpoint. Now, of course, we know scientifically that fiction can play a very powerful role in building empathy. This is one of the reasons why it's very important for literature to be studied by the young. It is the best opportunity for the young mind to experience or practice looking at the world through different eyes where they see the world differently and they come to different conclusions about it and have different feelings about it. This is what empathy is. And we're not born with it fully developed. It is something that has to be fostered. The writer gets a version of that benefit, right? The writer gets their own version. Through the invention process, through the displacement, through the creation of these people that are not, myself, we learn. We have a broader view of the world. We have insights that we would not have had otherwise. We have emotional experiences we would have not had otherwise, and that's just one of the great gifts of being a writer. It's a freebie.
Willy Walker: Well, first of all, I find it really interesting about the people who write to you and share their own experiences because I listened to a number of town halls that you did where people get up to the microphone and instead of asking you a question, they share an experience. And I listened to you do an MPR interview and they open up the lines to people and instead of anyone asking a question they come in and say, “This made me feel about that.” And they share their experiences. And I'm sitting there going like, “Ask the guy a question, it's sort of like, don't just sit there and share your own experience.“ But that has got to be one of the great gifts of what you do is that these people, because of reading what you have written, it opens them up to share their emotions back with you.
Amor Towles: Absolutely, and my ambition in writing what we call literary fiction. That's what I, you know, my whatever. That's the field that they would describe the work that I do, I guess. But you're trying to create literature. You may fall short of that goal, but that's the game plan—what you hope when you're creating a work of literature or something that aspires to be the truth. You're not creating something with a message. That's for sure, right? So if someone says to me, “What is that book about?”, and I could answer that question in like a sentence or two, that book is a failure of mine, right? Because instead, what you're trying to do is to create something which is this combination of an enormously intricate combination of an array of elements of craft—images, metaphors, silliness, illusions, allegories, personalities, philosophical moments, conversations, emotional experiences, all this stuff. And that it's not in your control in the sense that you know what it all means. Instead, it's in your control your sense that you have a sense that as an artist that it is working together; it feels right. But what hopefully it will allow is that people from different backgrounds, different races, different genders, ideally over decades or even centuries, could enter that work, be engaged in it, entertained by it, and walk away with a very different perception of what it means than what you might feel. That's the nature of it. It's supposed to be something—that's one of the reasons why we return to Shakespeare century after century after a century and continue to have a robust debate about what Hamlet means. There isn't an answer to that, right? What it is this incredibly complex and rich landscape for human inquiry. That's what the play is. And out of that, based on our backgrounds, our personalities, and our insights, we may all draw different conclusions, which are very valid. So that's the goal. There's nothing more satisfying than to have a reader, you know, reach out with some sort of personal experience that you could never have anticipated where the book is resonating with them in a way that is surprising. And I won't belabor this, but like in one example, of course, John Musk came out in 2016. And I guess in the fall of 2020 or early 2021, I received an email and it was by an officer of a nuclear aircraft carrier, one of the American aircraft carriers. The deal with the nuclear aircraft carriers, just like the subs, is they go out for six months at a time and they have two crews. So you serve six months, 24 hours a day, and then you land and you switch crews, and the other crew then goes and serves six months. And this officer was scheduled to land on the docks in San Diego, basically on March 14th, 2020. And they're pulling into San Diego and all the families are there. There's thousands. More than a thousand people on an aircraft carrier. There's all the families, they have the kids, everybody. We don't hear mom, dad, your dad's mom and dad are back. As they're pulling into port, the captain receives a notice saying, “I'm sorry, but because of COVID, you can't get off the boat. We can't afford to have you get off of the boat, and we can't allow anybody new to get on the boat so we're going to turn the boat around and you're back out for six months.” And it was like, it was a crushing moment for the whole crew. You're ready to do your duty. And so you man up and do it, but it was always a heartbreaking moment. And he said, “I was so down, and about a week after we were set out for the second six months, somebody handed me A Gentleman In Moscow and said, “Read this.”” And he says, “It saved me through that period; it helped me get through that.” And I'm like, this is mind-boggling. Like, you know, you can't anticipate this. I couldn't anticipate COVID, perhaps for sure, that we would all be experiencing some version of house arrest, but sort of this whole notion that this person with this extremely specific and unusual set of circumstances would find some kind of satisfaction and emotional comfort out of the book—that's what an amazing thing. Those are very both touching and satisfying when those things happen.
Willy Walker: Similar to the sub-captain picking up A Gentlemen in Moscow, Stephen Isserlis, the renowned cellist, read A Gentlemen in Moscow and the two of you became friends. Last time we spoke about your work, Amor, you pointed out the fact that you don't send it out to other people for fact-checking it. When you wrote A Gentleman in Moscow, you hadn't even stayed at the Metropol Hotel and then went up there, and after you'd written it, you went up, but you didn't want the confines of the hotel, if you will, in real life to impact the way that you were creating the story in your own mind, and then only went up there to make sure that there wasn't something that was so technically wrong in the way you wrote it that you would have to go back and edit it. But you did send Isserlis Bootlegger… Tell the story about what you learned after sending Isserlis the short story The Bootlegger, because I thought it was an interesting story.
Amor Towles: Yeah, so that's a story in the collection, Table for Two, that came out a year ago and in a paperback this year. But that story, the first five pages of that story are the most autobiographical pages I've ever written in my life as a writer. And sort of quickly as an intro, what happens is a young man or a guy in his 30s goes in with his wife. They decide to go to Carnegie Hall. And they want to see a particular performer. And this is what happened to me. I said to my wife, “Hey, we should go to Carnegie Hall.” We weren't big Carnegie Hall goers. We're like, yeah, “The kids are sleeping through the night. We got babysitters now. Let's go, let' go to Carnegie Hall.” My wife's like, “Oh yeah, sure. Let's do that. That sounds fine.” And I had read that Evgeny Kissin, who was considered really the greatest piano player in the world at the time, was coming to play in America for the first time in his career. And his debut was going to be at Carnegie Hall. And I was like, “Oh, let's do that.” And my wife's like, “Okay.” And so, I called Carnegie Hall and I'm like, “I want to get tickets for this Evgeny Kissing concert I've read so much about.” And they're like, “Oh, well, you can't really get those right now.” And I said, “Oh well, how do you get them?” He says, “Well you have to be a patron.” And I'm, “Oh okay, what does it take to be patron?” And they were like, “Well we need to make a donation.” And I go, “Okay, well how big's the donation?” So numbers are exchanged and they tell me the amount. And I'm like, “Okay, yeah, we'll do that.” And I give a credit card number and I'm like, “Okay, now as a patron, I would like to buy two tickets to see Evgeny Kissin at Carnegie Hall.” And he goes, “It's not that simple.” And I'll be like, “What do you mean? You just told me that patrons could do it.” And he said, “Well, at this stage in the season, only patrons can buy tickets, but patrons can only buy series of concerts.” And I was like, “Oh, okay. What's a series?” You're like, “Well, that's four concerts that are thematically tied together.” And I'm like, “Okay, so you have to buy all four?” And they're like “Yeah, exactly.” You know, my wife is rolling her eyes. She's like, “Okay, you know, at this point, we could have had a date in Paris, like, you now, for what this is going to cost us, right?” So anyway, so I do. We buy the tickets, we go to the concert, and the first night we go, an old guy arrives in a trench coat, coming down the aisle, “Excuse me, excuse, excuse.” Sits down next to me. And I noticed just before the concert begins that he's got something sticking out of his sleeve. And eventually, I realized, “Oh my God, it's a microphone.” And the Old Fox is recording the concert. And I just got so, and the way the series works is you sit next to the same person every concert. So every week we would go back and the guy would be sitting next to me and it drove me crazy. Like I couldn't pay attention to the music. So anyway, 20 years later, 25 years later, because that was when I was 30, I was writing some short fiction in between, I don't know, The Lincoln Highway, I suppose, and I thought,” Yeah, let's go back and return to that moment.” And I remember at the time being like in my fantasy, being like, “I'm going to turn him in.” And I never turned him in of course, but I was like, “Yeah let's see what happens if the young man in the call turns him in. Let's see what happens.” And so I wrote the story. In the story several performances are described. I knew that the story was going to culminate with this very euphoric description of a piece of music. And pretty quickly I was like, “Yeah, I want it to be the prelude to Bach, the Bach concertos, sorry, the Bach pieces for cello. The prelude, to the first of the suites for cello that Bach wrote.” And I had to figure out who's going to be the cellist that night playing that performance. And I was like, “Is it Yo-Yo Ma? Do I make somebody up?” And then, as you say, by coincidence, over a couple of years before, I'd become friends with Stephen Isserlis, who's one of the world's top five cellists. And we had lunch, and I'd seen him perform, and he was a fan of my work, and I was a fan of his. And I said, “Oh, it could be Steven.” Great. But so that's a case where I felt like I do have to reach out to Steven to ask him permission. You know, does he have his blessing? And he's like, “I'd love it, I love it.” So I wrote the story and then I did send it to him and I sent it to them to say, “Listen, I want you to read this because you can still pull out, you can change the name of the character if you don't like this, but also if it's something doesn't ring true to you, you should let me know. I don't want it to, I want it to be consistent with how you would think about your own work or whatever.” And he was like, and right away, he came back, his name was, “I love this. And it's a great honor to be in it, but you should know, because this performance, this piece of the first of the Prelude to the Bach, the first to the cello suites happens right before the intermission in the story.” And he's like, “That would never happen.” He said, “Not just with me, but any serious cellist, you would never, first of all, play the prelude by itself, and you certainly wouldn't play it at the end of a performance before the intermission. You're always going to play the suite probably in its entirety, or a significant portion of it. And so the prelude would be the first thing you'd play. And by the time you got to intermission, it would be something else. It'd be deep into the suites, or the last of the suites.” And he said, “I'm sorry, but that's just the fact.” I kind of paced back and forth. And so I wrote them and I came back and I said, “Hey, I revised the piece.” And I sat down and was saying, “Listen, I've approached this in a different way. Tell me what you think.” And what I had done is I changed it so that he's playing something else through the first half of the program. And shortly before intermission he looks at his watch and he says, “Hey, my accompanist on piano must be in a good mood today because we finished three minutes early and I don't want to shortchange you. So I'm going to play one more piece and I'm going to play the, you know, the prelude to this.” And so Steven goes, “Amor, that absolutely is something that would happen.” He says, "You go, that's a perfect solution. However, I would never wear a watch.” And I was like, “Oh, right!” It's like, 'cause the guy looks at his watch. I was, like, “You know, Stephen looks at the watch. And I'm like, Stephen, is it because you, that's interesting. Is it because it would be off putting to the audience or you don't want to get out of the moment.” He's like “No, because the cello that I use is a 1750, whatever and it's worth a million dollars. So you don't wear a watch while you're playing the cello.”
Willy Walker: Because you might scratch it, because you may harm the instrument.
Amor Towles: It's not an exaggeration about the price. It is a million dollars plus, but it's not his. So at that level, if you're a fine cellist, a fine violinist, there are collectors and institutions who want you to play. So they will contact you and say, “Would you use our cello in the coming half a decade?” And they get to test drive it. And if they like it, then they get to use it for every performance that they do for the next five years, let's say. And so it is. It's not simply protecting it for the heritage of the instrument and for the love of the instruments. It's also because it's somebody else's. But yes, so you do not wear the watch. And so, yes, we ended up putting the watch in Steven's pocket. It's a pocket watch in the story.
Willy Walker: So one of my favorite short stories, Amor, in Table for Two is the Ballad of Timothy Touchett, and for a number of different reasons. One, there's his desire to be a writer and he ends up being a forger. So the way that he went to that. Second, the way you describe him starting to make some money. I found it to be just fantastic. There was a line in it, I think, where you say, “Show someone making $100 more a week, and you've got them gripped by the throat.” And the way you described that also made me sit there as I was listening to it and say, “How much of this struggle of Timothy Touchett was Amor's own struggle of being a banker, wanting to be a writer and sitting there and seeing that extra hundred dollars on a weekly basis say, this feels really good?” And I guess my, first of all, I would ask you, was there a little bit of Amor Towles in the Timothy Touchett? And then second of all, did you ever experience having Bananas Foster at the Four Seasons or is that created in your own mind?
Amor Towles: Yeah, certainly the New York stories, because the first half of Table for Two are these six short stories set in New York. Five of them are set around the year 2000. And that is certainly a moment in time I witnessed firsthand, right? So each of those stories have a little bit more, certainly compared to, as you know in Moscow, The Rules of Civility or The Lincoln Highway, they're infused with a little more of my firsthand sort of witnessing, not necessarily of events, but of traits or of spaces of, you know, behaviors, you know that are a part of contemporary New York life. And so, yes, that story is about a young aspiring writer. I arrived in New York City at the age of 25 as a young, aspiring writer, so there's a little bit of overlap there too. And yes, Timothy, his problem is that his big fear is that because he grew up in kind of a suburb in the middle class, in a suburb that he doesn't have any, he hasn't had enough experiences to write about, and he sort of frets over the fact that, you know Faulkner lived in the Jim Crow South and Hemingway was driving an ambulance in the Spanish civil war and Dostoevsky was sentenced to death by the Tsar, and you're like, these are experiences and you don't, and as he says something like the only challenges he had were mowing the lawns, shoveling the snow and raking the leaves, you know, that that was his, you know, those are the trials he faced and that his parents didn't even have the generosity of spirit to get divorced so like that's his mindset, because at least that would have been something, right? And so, is there a little bit of that? You know, it's an ironic depiction of me, but certainly coming out of middle-class New England, I feel like I've come to terms with it. But it is sort of grabbing it. And so then it's sort of this comic revisitation of that moment in life and seeing how it could take this young, aspiring author in the wrong direction. And so, the second half of your question, the Four Seasons, I don't know, maybe I have had Bananas Foster at the Four Seasons. But the bigger thing was, he's earning a little bit more money, a little more money. And so he splurges on a big night, his big pay bonus, he gets a big bonus and that's where he takes himself. And, we were doing that, certainly in the early nineties, where you'd be almost the youngest person in the room, or among the youngest people in the room because it was your anniversary. And you're surrounded by all these people who dine there every night, who look like kings of the world. And you've saved up to go to this special dinner. But I remember vividly that dynamic and being so allured by it that the first time you see that kind of table service in a fine restaurant, suddenly the maître d' is wheeling out this beautiful silver thing and opens it and lights something on fire. And it could be Bananas Foster, but it could there's ways in which steaks are served. As Diane or whatever, where they do the same thing. They pour cognac on it and light it on fire to finish it right at the table, and being like, wow, that's the height of glamor. So you remember that, and so yes, the kid, him witnessing that is probably a version of yes, of me admiring that from afar, myself.
Willy Walker: And one of the other things in that story, which is so great, is that when he comes back to his apartment on the eighth floor of his flat on, I think it was on Fifth Avenue, you're describing what he is feeling and what he's seeing. And as you describe the sights and sounds, he hears a siren. And that is part of your outlining and laying it out. To the point of you coming back to that at the end as he hears the siren showing up to arrest him. I thought that that was, I sat there and thought about the way that you lay out your stories. And I said, there is the outline coming to life, if you will. In other words, if he hadn't done the scaffolding around the story, he doesn't know halfway through to lay that little crumb there that you're going to come back to at the end of the story.
Amor Towles: Yes, I mean, there's certainly that is true. And I think at another level, too, which is related in harmony with what you're saying, is that what you hope is in a way that you're not paying attention to is that if you thought about it enough in advance that there may be things that you aren't even aware of. I remember, for instance, in Rules of Civility, I remember editing it. And I was double-checking, I think, during the final editing, the facts around maybe it was something like Shackleton or somebody like that. And while I was doing it, suddenly I was like, I realized, oh, that's interesting. Now that we're drawing on this reference to Shackleton, Ulysses being shipwrecked is mentioned in the book. And then I'm like, wait a second, so is Robinson Crusoe. And suddenly you're like, oh my God, there's like multiple shipwrecks that have been mentioned at different times in the course of this book. But that's totally unconscious. You don't realize that. And that's fantastic when that kind of thing happens when the motif that you're not aware of. And I think, again, to your point, the more you've thought about it in advance, the more likely that your subconscious is beginning to infuse the way you imagine the story with elements that are in harmony with each other that you're not even really particularly conscious of. It could be language around water; it could be the frequency several times in which you look through somebody's looking through a window and you’re just not aware of it a big one. In the case of the story collection we're talking about, I was handing in Table for Two and I hadn't titled the collection. When you write a novel, you usually have a working title. You may change it later, but it's with you all the time. For a collection, you don't necessarily have a working title. But I wrote all those stories in the last 10 years. I wrote probably a third to a half of that book in the 18 months before handing it in. So it was all being written in a relatively constrained time. And to picture this, as you're handing in your final draft for the first time to your editor, what's just happened is that you've read the book from beginning to end, probably something like six times in 12 days. You know, that's what you're doing. You clear out a week and you start on page one and you go through it and then you go through it, and you through it and you go through it. Looking for, not only typos, but sentences you want to change, passages you want to revisit or whatever before you hand it in. I was doing that. And I don't know, maybe time number four of that rereading, I was like, oh, that's interesting in the story, the bootlegger, the main character and the old man who was the bootleggers, they sit down across from each other at a kitchen table and they have a very intense sort of conversation that has a big impact on both of them, you know, because of the events that they've been involved in. And they're basically strangers. And then I was like, oh, but you know what's interesting is that in the story just before that. And I Will Survive, it kind of opens with a young woman being called by her mother to come up and the mother sits her down at the kitchen table and says, “You know, I think your stepfather is cheating on me.” And that hatches a sort of series of events and conversations between the two of them. I was like, oh, that's interesting that the two people at the table appeared in both of those stories. And then you're sort of like, wait a minute. And I went back to the beginning and sure enough, it is in every one of the stories. And in fact, Eve, which is the second half of that collection, is a 200-page novella called Eve in Hollywood, which picks up with the character Eve Ross from Rules of Civility. It opens basically with her at a breakfast table with a retired homicide detective on the train to Los Angeles. And at the end of that story, they're back at a kitchen table, the two of them. And this is all totally subconscious. I had no thoughts about this, but clearly something in the last decade was really making me interested in this notion of how we in our daily lives, in our relationships with strangers, family members, friends, romances, colleagues, whatever, there can be this moment where something occurs that needs to be hashed out and it ends up with two people at a table, facing each other and beginning to sort of dig into it to, be open about or to test about it or argue about it, or whatever. And the course of that relationship may change meaningfully on the basis of that conversation. And that was a buried subconscious pattern that was running through the stories. And thus the book became called Table for Two.
Willy Walker: Awesome. As I think about it, I think about the incredible privilege that I have to be able to have a conversation with someone like you. And this is a table for two in another format. We're running out of time. I've got a couple of quick things to end up on. And I should just end it on that wonderful story about how you came up with the title for Table for Two. But you did talk about Eve in Hollywood. I do find it very interesting, Amor, about how, because your composition of work is expanding, you're weaving various characters through and Eve, who was originally in Rules of Civility, comes in in the novella on the back of Table for Two. On Eve, it starts out with her heading back to Indianapolis to go back home and she gets to Chicago and decides that she's not going to get off the train because she likes to surprise people and getting off the train would have been too predictable for her. I was just curious. Do you ever try and live your characters where you're sitting there saying, “I need to pull an Eve today, and just not get off of the subway train at the right stop?”
Amor Towles: I wish it was more like Eve. There's an element to writing that is aspirational. You're like, “Oh, that person is terrific. I wish I acted more like that person in my life, yeah.” She's very, as you say, she hates it when people think they know what she's going to do and she's prepared to do the opposite just to teach them a lesson. I don't have that brass, I don't think.
Willy Walker: So then the final thing is you're working on your next novel, and the reason that you stop to do Table for Two is that you realize that there were two characters in your next that you had written about inside of your short stories, and therefore you put that down. My understanding is that the next story starts in Cairo, ends in New York City in 1999, and has two characters that we've seen before. You want to share with us what two characters we're going to see show up in your next novel?
Amor Towles: Absolutely not.
Willy Walker: I knew the answer to that one before I asked it, but I had to ask it.
Amor Towles: It does start in Cairo at the end of the Second World War and it goes to New York in 1999, so it does cover a meaningful amount of ground. But yes, there are two characters that will resurface, for readers of my work and both from who appear in Table for Two.
Willy Walker: I love it. Final question on that one. I understand that you write from basically 8:30 in the morning until about 12:30. Do you ever get in the groove anymore where you just don't put it down where you're just so in it? You've got a character that you're developing, the right side of the brain is running where it's now 8:30 at night and you've just sat there and just cranked through, or are you pretty disciplined as it relates to, I got four hours of work on this thing today. I'm going to start at 8:30 end at 12:30, and then I put it down.
Amor Towles: So the answer is it's pretty, it is not like. “Where's Dad? He's been in his office for 20 hours and he comes out having written for, like Jack Kerouac up till six in the morning, whatever, drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes and writing through the night.” That doesn't happen so much. However, my version of that is that this is coming up, is in July, my family's very often away for the month and for summer vacation and I do not go with them for the entire month. I, rather than go back and forth. And what that allows me to do is really, is it gives me that month or even the six weeks in New York, where at least Monday through or Sunday night through Friday afternoon, I am by myself, and I can then really write at different times during the day. So I will do the normal morning work. But then, you know, and I'm going to work through lunch, but then I might exercise, and then I might do a little work in the afternoon, but then, I'll go to a restaurant. My normal behavior is to go to a restaurant, let's say around six o'clock, and I'll write for an hour over a drink, and then, write for an hour over the appetizer, and then write for an hour over entrees, spending from six to nine at the restaurant, or seven to 10 or something. And I rotate, there's 10 restaurants in the city that know me well and that I've been going to for years. And that's very satisfying. I could not do that all year. And sometimes I come home and I continue to do some work at midnight, as you say. And what was really valuable about that moment in the year for me is not simply the ability to work at different times of day, but that there are many weeks where I will not speak to another human being other than a waiter between Sunday and Thursday. And so I can get completely into the world in which I'm working. And that allows me to see things in the writing and in the story that would be harder to see in the normal process of being interrupted by life, every day, for half the day or whatever. And so, I do that, but again I could not sustain that level of emotional artistic intellectual attention probably for much more than that. I can probably only do that about four to six weeks a year at that level. And then of course I miss my family.`
Willy Walker: Thank you for an hour of a table for two and being able to talk about all that you do. Your writing is just fantastic. It's a gift to all of us and I'm just super thankful for your time and for your friendship.
Amor Towles: Thank you, William. And you're one of the best interviewers. It's easy to come back to this, really. Nobody does their homework like you. So I really appreciate it. I appreciate it. It's good to see you.
Willy Walker: It's great to see you.
