Lee Gutkind: Story Behind the Story
At age 70, nonfiction master Lee Gutkind didn’t feel old—until other people started treating him differently. On top of that, his life was falling apart. An author and editor of more than 30 books, Gutkind decided it was time to turn his writer’s gaze from others toward himself and write his first memoir, My Last Eight Thousand Days. Read an excerpt from the book: “Keeping Your Edge at 70.”
Gutkind talked to Transformations editor Steven Beschloss about why and how he wrote My Last Eight Thousand Days, and where he thinks the field of creative nonfiction is heading.
You’re a nonfiction writer who has largely told the story of others. How hard was it to write a book that’s so personal, and particularly one that’s told with such emotional honesty?
It was very difficult and it was at least 10 years in the making. Indeed, I have focused my career on immersing myself with other people and writing about other things—organ transplant surgeons, roboticists, veterinarians, child psychiatrists, national league baseball umpires. I do what we call immersion work. And by immersion, I don’t mean a week or a month—I mean even a year, or many years. My organ transplant book took four years to research and write.
I was in my middle sixties and then, as people will see in my book, my life changed. Things happened that made me incredibly uncomfortable and in many ways frightened me. My two best friends died. My mother died at 94 years old, and I loved her so very much. The literary event of my life fell apart. A relationship I had for 10 years fell apart. Things were falling apart all over the place. And I felt that I was very much alone and I’d lost my support system.
Frankly, I didn’t want to immerse anymore. I didn’t want to write about other people anymore. I needed to understand a lot more about myself. So I took a deep dive. I reversed the roles. Instead of immersing myself with other people, I decided it was time to figure out who I was.
One of the things that’s so striking about the book is that you really depict your insecurities. And you share with us a lot of the personal details of your life. How did you get to that point?
When you get older, there are all kinds of things that you have hidden from the world. And then suddenly you’re 70 years old and you know you’re not going to live forever—and you even know that maybe you’re not going to be able to write forever. So it’s kind of time to out yourself.
And if you’re going to write a book, if you’re going to do something that really means something—and I really, really wanted to do something that meant something, and that would last—I needed to be perfectly honest about my life and what I thought and what challenged me.
A lot of younger writers choose to write memoirs. You chose to do it now, in your seventies. Had you thought about doing it before, or was it that you had just hit a series of moments in your life that made it necessary to do this?
I actually thought about never writing a memoir. I really liked what I was doing, and I foolishly thought that writing about myself in the first person would be not challenging enough. I learned that if you’re going to do a memoir and do it well, it was a hell of a lot more difficult and more challenging than writing about a surgeon or a roboticist or a football player. And by the way, this is the mistake that many memoirists make. They think they’re writing about other people, and they focus on what people did to them—but the memoir, the deep dive into yourself, is a look at you.
And so I had to learn a lot more about this [type of] creative nonfiction. I may well be the godfather behind creative nonfiction, but even the godfather doesn’t know everything. There was a lot I needed to learn through hard work and repetition—and writing is repetition as you well know, it’s revision and revision and revision. I kept writing the stories and adding the meaning to it and the reflection, and sooner or later, I got to the point where I really thought that I had gone as far as I could go. When you read this, it may seem embarrassing or humiliating, but I needed to get it right.
What strikes me about your book is that, while it may be about you, it’s really a book about aging and loneliness. Can you give an example or two of what people usually get wrong about aging?
The way in which people perceive we aging people is harmful to all of us, and really affected me a great deal. Even the idea of a “senior moment” annoys me because, if you’re 32, do you not forget stuff? Do you not lose your keys? Maybe it takes a 70-year-old longer to find the keys, but it’s very easy to lose your keys no matter how old you are.
I have been such a confident person in many respects throughout my life, but as I got older, I started to feel really uncomfortable—not about my own confidence, but about how I was being perceived. I think this happens to all of us, where we elderly people are as capable—and perhaps much more capable than those who are 30 and 40—to do the things that we need to do.
In creative nonfiction, “creative” is style and “nonfiction” is substance. And when you do a memoir, you just can't talk about yourself; there needs to be something else of substance to focus on. For me, I was motivated by the pressure and discomfort of getting older.
In the process of writing your book, did you interview others? Did you reach out to others to check whether your memories aligned?
I didn’t. I wanted this to be my story. When I do my immersion work, I check and I recheck, and I fact check, and I go back to almost everyone I write about. But a memoir is the writer. We all perceive truth a little bit differently, so maybe it’s not totally accurate and true if one were to assign a professional fact checker to it. But I wanted my reader to know how I felt and what I thought and why I thought, and the actions that I took from inside me, from my soul, from the deepest part of what I could remember. And I held nothing back.
Where do you think the field of creative nonfiction is at right now? Is it still flourishing, full of promise, or do some of the changes in media and magazines and the writing industry make you worry about what the future may hold?
I'm intrigued rather than worried. When I really got deeply involved in the genre, which was in the early 1970s, I just thought it was so cool. It was so challenging and wonderful to be able to mix journalism and reporting with the literary techniques that novelists mostly use—dialogue, description, point of view, reflection. Creative nonfiction now is the fastest growing genre in the publishing industry and in the academy, but in the 1970s, it was called the “new journalism”—and it really wasn’t new, but that’s another story.
To break the rules of the journalism community—to forget about the who, what, why, where and when “inverted pyramid”—and to use other techniques to make the information you were communicating about people and places more compelling through narrative was so exciting. It was a conservative movement in many ways, but more people began to do it. The more people began pushing the boundaries, the more doors were open to experimentation and to telling stories without worrying really about the genre itself.
Now it’s just happening, and it’s really happening in the academy. Academics, economists, physicians, scientists are no longer just writing for the 200 people who read their academic journals. They’re writing for the 200,000 people.
This interview has been adapted from the launch for My Last Eight Thousand Days at Changing Hands Bookstore on October 20, 2020. It has been edited for clarity and length.
More from Lee on Transformations:
Lee Gutkind is the author of My Last Eight Thousand Days: An American Male in His Seventies and the founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction, the first and largest literary magazine to publish narrative nonfiction exclusively. He is a professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University.