Recently named as one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world, the writer tells Ben Johncock about his very reluctant engagement with computers
'Picture a caveman trying to send a fax' ... George Saunders's desktop. Photograph: George Saunders
That's me and my wife, circa 1987, Albany, New York. We were just finishing up our creative writing Masters at Syracuse – actually I had a year left and she was moving on to study with Toni Morrison at SUNY Albany. And I think she was pregnant with our first daughter, Caitlin. If we juxtaposed a photo of me now with that one, we could call it "The Surly Tragic Passage of Time".
My wife, alas, looks pretty much exactly the same now as she did then. Both good for me ("I am married to a beauty!") and bad for me ("O, Paula, is this your father? Poor thing seems to have been the victim of a shipwreck.") I remember it as a really hopeful, beautiful time. We had only met a year before, were all fired up about life and love and art. We got engaged in three weeks, pregnant on the honeymoon – and then, I suppose not long after the photo was taken, Paula went into (very) early labour, while we were driving through the Black Hills in South Dakota (where she's from).
So she had to go to bed for the rest of the pregnancy, on an anti-contraction drug that has since been outlawed for causing heart attacks. Amazing, really, how at any given moment a person can't even begin to imagine what lies ahead. (By the way, that endangered baby is now a beautiful, happy 24-year-old.) I think we have to be frugal with our photo-viewing. I love it when you find a photo from a time you've forgotten about – one that, maybe, someone else had possession of. It makes you realise how linear and reductive memory is.
I had this photograph (above) in my office for years but never looked at it, and just the other day caught sight of it. It's from 1999. The New Yorker had this "Twenty Best Writers Under 40" issue and gathered those of us who were chosen for a group photo – this is a quarter of us. Seeing this, how young we all were, was sort of shocking and bittersweet. That's (left to right) Junot Díaz, Rick Moody, Edwidge Danticat, David Foster Wallace, Jeff Eugenides, and Chuck Norris. Er, me.
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My wife, alas, looks pretty much exactly the same now as she did then. Both good for me ("I am married to a beauty!") and bad for me ("O, Paula, is this your father? Poor thing seems to have been the victim of a shipwreck.") I remember it as a really hopeful, beautiful time. We had only met a year before, were all fired up about life and love and art. We got engaged in three weeks, pregnant on the honeymoon – and then, I suppose not long after the photo was taken, Paula went into (very) early labour, while we were driving through the Black Hills in South Dakota (where she's from).
So she had to go to bed for the rest of the pregnancy, on an anti-contraction drug that has since been outlawed for causing heart attacks. Amazing, really, how at any given moment a person can't even begin to imagine what lies ahead. (By the way, that endangered baby is now a beautiful, happy 24-year-old.) I think we have to be frugal with our photo-viewing. I love it when you find a photo from a time you've forgotten about – one that, maybe, someone else had possession of. It makes you realise how linear and reductive memory is.
I had this photograph (above) in my office for years but never looked at it, and just the other day caught sight of it. It's from 1999. The New Yorker had this "Twenty Best Writers Under 40" issue and gathered those of us who were chosen for a group photo – this is a quarter of us. Seeing this, how young we all were, was sort of shocking and bittersweet. That's (left to right) Junot Díaz, Rick Moody, Edwidge Danticat, David Foster Wallace, Jeff Eugenides, and Chuck Norris. Er, me.More
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