Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell. Photograph by Bennett Miller.

If you’re a longtime fan of Sarah Vowell, it’s hard not to get annoyed when people say things like, “Oh I just love her audio books.” And it doesn’t happen exclusively with people who consume their literature in MP3 form. Perfectly intelligent and even adventurous readers, who sometimes read books not suggested by The New York Times bestseller list, will tell you how much they enjoyed listening to Vowell’s Assassination Vacation or The Wordy Shipmates or that old classicTake the Cannoli. It’s not that they’re lazy or don’t see the value in reading a book rather than having it read to them like they’re a child being lulled to sleep at bedtime. They just love her voice. Which, O.K. fine, is kind of understandable. If you’ve ever heard Vowell on NPR’s “This American Life,” you’re already familiar with her distinctive nasal drawl, which sounds like a librarian with a sinus infection and is admittedly hilarious. Her inimitable soft palate is why she’s on Ira Glass’s speed dial, and why she got that lucrative (at least for a humor author) voiceover gig at Pixar. But her voice — as with David Sedaris’ voice, who has a similar audio book cult following — might as well be auto-tuner trickery. It sells albums, but it has nothing to do with the substance of the song. It’s her ideas, her unapologetic nerd-girl take on the world, that makes her a writer worth watching, and actually fucking reading. I called Vowell to talk about,Unfamiliar Fishes, her new book about the Americanization of Hawaii, or as she describes it, “a painful tale of native loss combined with an idealistic multiethnic saga symbolized by mixed platters in which soy sauce and mayonnaise peacefully coexist and congeal.”Eric Spitznagel:In my high school history classes, I was always bored. But as an adult, I’m fascinated by history, U.S. or otherwise. I read historical biographies and watch the History Channel incessantly. When did history get more interesting?

Sarah Vowell: Do you think it has more to do with the fact that you’re closer to death now? I think it’s natural for somebody to have more interest in dead people the closer they are to becoming one.

Is that what happened with you? Did you become a history nerd because you got a whiff of your own mortality?

No, I think you’re right, the history they taught in high school, at least when I was a teenager, was heavily edited. I certainly didn’t know that Thomas Jefferson had a thing with one of his slaves. We didn’t talk about that kind of stuff. American history in particular was just civics in disguise. And not deep, probing civics, but more like, “The United States’ path to glory.” We would always end at World War II, just because we “ran out of time.” Nobody wanted to deal with Korea or Vietnam. I learned that America never lost a war. And I started school the year we pulled out of Saigon.

The kind of history that’s in Unfamiliar Fishes needs to be taught in high schools. Especially the part about how there’s a hula specifically for celebrating the genitals of Hawaiian royalty.

That’s interesting stuff, right? When I first heard of that, I giggled. But the story behind it is so much more complicated and interesting than one would think. It sounds like, “Oh those Hawaiians are just a bunch of libertines, dancing up a storm about their king’s private parts.” But those hula dances were serious business. The dancers were like nuns. It’s deeply steeped in a complicated, academic, religious tradition. It’s about celebrating the past and how a leader’s genitals were their connection to the future and continuing the traditions and the bloodlines. In a way, it’s fairly stodgy and conservative stuff. I don’t want you to come away thinking that the Hawaiians are more fun than they are.

This isn’t a paid endorsement by the Hawaiian tourism board?

Not at all. I think when most Americans picture Hawaii, they actually don’t even think about people. They probably just picture a smiley hula girl or something.

You write in Unfamiliar Fishes that you “envy people who celebrate their leaders’ private parts.” Were you being tongue-in-cheek?

Not really.

So you think the problem with politics in this country is that there just isn’t enough penis worship?

Well, let me put it this way. There are [U.S.] presidents that I really respect and admire, but I’m not going to get all weepy about whether or not they procreate. That’s a reverence for leaders that the Hawaiians have that I’m never going to have. As a smart-alecky, irreverent New Yorker, it was a nice change of pace to meet people who are reverent and have deep feelings of respect. Because when you’re smart-alecky and irreverent, you don’t get to feel those things very often. I’m reverent about irreverence, I guess. But that’s different.

David Sedaris has called you a “funny historian,” which sounds like its own literary genre. But you seem to be the only one doing it. There aren’t a lot of writers out there mining history for laughs.

I honestly don’t think about what I do, I just do it. It is odd though how people always seem to remember the funny parts. My stories are filled with tragedies and massacres, and Unfamiliar Fishes is all about the downtrodden and epidemics and unfairness. But for some reason, people just remember the jokey bits. Which is guess is good. My books are kind of like childbirth. People don’t remember the pain.

That’s remarkable if only because it’s so rare. It’s not like Howard Zinn’s books ever made somebody laugh till milk came out of their nose. Nobody ever says about Niall Ferguson, “Oh man, get a few glasses of white wine in him and you’ll be throwing up with laughter!”

Yeah, that’s true. Although, I’ve been on the lecture circuit for a few years, and college students loved Howard Zinn. He’s somebody you didn’t want to follow. I always got the feeling that college students wished I was as fun as Howard Zinn. But to your point, I think the humor comes from me not being a historian. I’m not an expert. I usually start from zero and learn from there. And so much of history is just terrible. It’s Wounded Knee and mass graves and Stalin. The only way to possibly think about those things without bursting into tears is to use that old human coping mechanism of nervous laughter. You’re really making me think about and question what I do and whether I should be doing it at all.

Is there a chance you only wrote Unfamiliar Fishes because you wanted to visit Hawaii and get a tan?

That presupposes that I’m fun.

And that would be untrue?

Let’s just say that when I went to Australia for a book festival, they said, “We don’t really get people as pale as you around here.” So, to write the kind of book that I’ve written, you’ve got to go to Hawaii for six weeks and spend every day in a refrigerated archive while wearing a cardigan sweater, reading the brittle correspondence of the dead. That said, it did change me a little. Before Hawaii, I didn’t understand the point of the beach. But as it turns out, it can be a nice place to read.

You’re just figuring that out now?

Yes, you can read there. If you look over the top of your book, there’s a pretty impressive large body of water in the distance. And it requires as much effort as sitting in your rocking chair in Manhattan.

Last year at a Public Library Association conference in Portland, you said that after devoting so much of your life to historical research, “It turns out I’m an imperialist.” How did that happen? Was it like a literary Stockholm Syndrome?

I wonder what I meant. I really shoot my mouth off a lot. I probably meant that I’m a cultural imperialist.

How is that different?

Well, in Hawaiian history, the real villains are the missionary offspring. The government that they created between overthrowing the queen and handing over the islands to the United States was this demented oligarchy that was way less democratic than the constitutional monarchy they usurped. But on the other hand, I’m still an American and the idea of monarchy is ridiculous to me. I remember at one point, when I was doing research for this book, I was sitting in the state archives of Hawaii, getting miffed by some monarch acting monarchical. And it made me wonder, “Where does this come from in me?” Because it really bugs me.

Growing up in this country, anti-monarch sympathies kind of get hard-wired into your DNA.

They really do. We get fed these stories about the colonials and Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. But I also had this very clear image in my head of the publicity campaign for the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen.” And those pictures that Jamie Reid did of Elizabeth II with a safety pin through her nose. It’s not just a disdain for monarchy but a mockery of it as well.

Cover courtesy of Riverhead Books.

And how does this relate to Hawaii?

Although the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy was pretty fishy, a part of me can understand why they did what they did, because it’s the one thing I have in common with them. I have no respect for that form of government, for royalty or monarchs or any of that stuff. It’s like my fascination with the missionaries, who were probably not people you’d want to hang out with for an entire evening.

That was a hard pill for me to swallow. I always think of missionaries as religious bullies with a single-minded “Accept Jesus As Your Lord and Savior and We’ll Give You a Sandwich” agenda. But as you point out, they were also all about literacy.

Right, their obsession with literacy was the core of Protestantism. You have to be able to read your Bible. And in Hawaii, they invented a written language for the Hawaiian language and published millions of pages on their printing presses, almost all of it in the Hawaiian language. They basically taught the entire Hawaiian population to read in a generation. And that’s probably a form of cultural imperialism too. Just in the way I interpret it as a good thing. It’s favoring the written tradition over the oral tradition. I’m a writer, I confess to that, so writing about the history of Hawaii forced me to face my biases a little bit.

Even if it’s cultural imperialism, they’re still pushing for education, which goes against every stereotype I have of the devoutly religious. From my experience, the people walking around with Bibles are not usually the same ones saying, “You know what? You should do some outside reading.”

That’s true, but that was a different time. In the history of the world, if you’re one of the peasants, the one access you have to learning is through religion. If your kid can become a priest, then your kid gets to spend time with books all day. But reading begets reading.

Once you’ve learned how to read the Bible, how hard can it be to pick up one of those Harry Potter witchcraft books?

I’m a working class person whose parents didn’t go to college and I was raised as a fundamentalist. I had to go to church three times a week and I was supposed to read the Bible every day. And to me, like anybody who grew up in an anti-academic background, you’re taught to read the Bible and then you start reading other things. Reading just leads to more and more questions. So it’s probably to the advantage of a certain worldview to discourage learning and education, even though that’s really not in keeping with the origins of Protestantism. It’s about protest. It was created as an argument for “You need to read this book and make decisions for yourself. You can’t let some priest tell you what to think.” Buried inside of Protestantism is really the death of it. Because you read this one book every day, and that just leads to more books, and eventually you grow beyond the Bible. Education is a whole can of worms. You can’t contain people.

Should we be worried when the Texas State Board of Education decides that high school textbooks should reflect a more Christian sensibility?

It’s worrisome only because the Texas State Board has so much influence on how textbooks are published in this country. It’s one thing to try and reflect your local values, but it’s such a huge state, and they have so much control over what students in the rest of the country read and learn from. But I do take their point.

You do? You think high school history classes in the U.S. need more biblical fables?

I think it’s pretty important in understanding the history and culture of the United States. I’m an atheist who was brought up in the Christian tradition, and I think every student should read the Bible, just in terms of its importance as probably the most influential literary work on the planet. You would be crazy to think otherwise. But on the other hand, I don’t think it’s constitutional and therefore legal to assume that your faith is or should be the standard that everybody else is held to. So that’s troublesome.

It’s also not a historically accurate version of the United States. If you’re only going to teach about the founding fathers who were Christians, you’re going to leave out guys like Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin.

And you probably can’t include Lincoln, who maybe wasn’t the churchiest guy who ever lived in the Oval Office. It’s hard to cast stones, because I’m sure the godless heathens are just as fundamental about their beliefs. There are probably parents who would cringe at the idea of their children reading the Bible as homework, just as there are Christian parents who would cringe at their children reading the Koran as homework. But come on, those are important books. And part of what education is about is learning about people who are different than you.

You’ve said that Al Gore lost the 2000 election because he was a nerd. So how did Obama slip through?

That’s a great question. I guess because Obama is just as big a nerd as Gore, right? I don’t know. Honestly, I think most Americans vote—at least the ones that do vote—entirely in their own self-interest. They vote for the person they think is going to be best for their bank account. Not that I can criticize that too harshly. I don’t have kids, so I understand that people with children can’t vote as idealistically as I do in my Ivory Tower. In the last election, I think most people thought, “The economy’s in the toilet. Which guy seems like he’ll fix it faster?” He just happened to be Obama, whereas my friends and me saw it as this really idealistic thing.

He’s taken a lot of hits lately, and a lot of criticism that he hasn’t lived up to expectations. As an avowed nerd who votes idealistically, have you changed your mind about Obama?

No, I haven’t really. And that’s saying something. After the 2000 election, when that other guy became president, I didn’t think I could be more disillusioned. But in 2004 when he was re-elected for a second term, despite the previous four years of nincompoopery, I kind of lost my rosy colored glasses about the electorate. Now I just fear them. They’re like a dog with a bone or something. This country is really schizophrenic and insane.

I love how you won’t even mention Bush’s name, like he’s Lord Voldemort from aHarry Potter book.

I just don’t like to say his name.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but that was my second Harry Potter reference in this interview.

I did notice. Congratulations, I guess. But with Bush, I’m still something of a grandpa. I still don’t like it when people refer to him by his middle initial. Because that’s just disrespectful to the democratic process.

It is?

I think so. I still have enough respect for the presidency that the idea of referring to the president by his middle initial in a derisive manner just seems childish and mean-spirited. So I handle that by never mentioning his name at all.

Unfamiliar Fishes is released on March 22 by Riverhead Books, available for pre-order on Amazon.com.

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Author Sarah Vowell is a contributing editor to Ira Glass’s wildly popularThis American Life, and more recently known as the voice of angsty teen Violet in The Incredibles. Her latest book, Assassination Vacation, chronicles her visits to the gravesites and monuments honoring Presidents Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley. It’s a great read, and an even greater audiobook (featuring the voices of Jon Stewart, Brad Bird and Stephen King). Vowell spoke with Torontoist on the Boise, Idaho leg of her book tour about the Greatest Canadian, and whether – Louis Riel, Wolf and Montcalm notwithstanding- our country’s decided lack of assassination commercialism leaves her cold.

TO: What was the greatest Lincoln moment for you?
SV: It’s like I mention in the book, at that museum, the National Park Service has this whole area surrounding Lincoln’s Springfield home that has all these other museums surrounding it. Before I had been there, I had been to Lincoln’s tomb, and it had sort of left me kind of cold. And I went to Lincoln’s house, and I also didn’t have much feeling for it. But then, in that museum on the same site as his house, they had Lincoln’s drain pipe displayed – like, his plumbing. That was just a kind of holy-moley moment, where I realized there are these other rich guys who have these marble tombs, and impressive to anyone – it’s like as long as you can pay for it, you, too, can have an impressive marble tomb. But when they put your plumbing in a museum…that more than any other object – more than the Lincoln memorial even – just spoke to me about how that man was revered.
O: You’ve already dissected Canadian vs. American humour; do you perceive Canadians as having a fascination with anything that might resemble the American preoccupation with memorializing its history of political violence?
SV: You sort of have to have political violence to memorialize it. I mean, let’s say you were a culture that didn’t just resolve most of its differences sitting in nice rooms, agreeing to disagree, then you might have one. We just have more of that stuff than you.
TO: So does Canadian history bore you to tears?
SV: Yeah – it’s truly dull, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I mean, it’s a bad thing from a storytelling point of view, but from a living-in-Canada point of view I’m sure it’s aces to live somewhere where people aren’t shooting each other constantly. You know, like in the last book I wrote, I talked about the founding of the Mounties. That was just so amazing to me that you would, before your west was settled, you thought, oh, we should send a police force out there to make sure there’s law and order and rules before people get there to settle, so that everything will be all tidy when they get there. I would say I know way more about Canadian history than most Americans, but I still know hardly anything at all.
TO: No large wager in a Final Jeopardy question?
SV: I know who your first prime minister is, and I know you’ve only had your own flag for about 10 minutes, but…
TO: Who, living in the pantheon of celebrity (political or otherwise) right now will be the Next Big Thing in memorializing, 50 or 100 years from now?
SV: I think now it’s pretty much that Nelson Mandela’s the only game in town. Because he has already achieved this mythic status, and his death will only highlight that more.
TO: The book has a Toronto connection – to anarchist Emma Goldman, who died here in 1940. Did you do a lot of research into Emma Goldman, and do you see her influence on McKinley’s assassin being that direct?
SV: She has no direct connection in terms of co-conspiring to kill McKinley, but her rhetoric inspired the McKinley assassin. He says, her words set me on fire, when he heard her speak I think it was in Cleveland. She was talking about the gall or yolk of government, and how it’s just crushing the people. So the McKinley assassin hears that and thinks he should do something about the galling of the government. So she inspired him, and she was under suspicion after he was arrested for helping him. But I don’t write about history in any sort of proportion, and I spent a lot of time on her for the mere fact that I find her so interesting. My books historically are skewed that way, because I skew them toward, I hope, what’s interesting. So she did inspire him, but I spend a lot of time on her simply because I am fascinated by her and she’s so quotable. She’s the kind of person I love writing about, because she’s so often wrong. But she is not boring. I actually have a lot of problems with her, and people like her. She half-heartedly says she’s against violence, but whenever somebody does something violent in the name of a good cause, she always defended them and rhapsodized about them. Even the McKinley assassin, too, she remembered him fondly. I find that very dangerous, to glorify violence that way. But again, not boring. Goldman’s autobiography – and again, I disagree with her – she is so naive in so many ways (which is great, too), but her autobiography is one of the great autobiographies. She is just such a singular individual.
TO: Are you planning to visit the site on Spadina Avenue in Chinatown where her body lied in state (it’s now a restaurant called Bright Pearl)?
SV: Oh yeah, I’d do that – if my ‘keepers’ allow me to even eat lunch!
TO: Are there any other potentially macabre sites in Toronto you would be visiting?
SV: Not that I know of. But that’s not saying much.
TO: In the book’s acknowledgements, you single out artist Marcel Dzama as your favourite Canadian. After Dzama, who is The Greatest Canadian?
SV: Neil Young. He’s pretty good. I mean, the problem is that I know music. Um, I guess I like Trudeau okay. But I would still pick Neil Young.