The following interview between Garth Stein and Bryan Devendorf, was conducted at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle, on September 20, 2013, when Bryan was on tour with his band, headlining two nights at The Paramount Theatre. Bryan, the drummer for The National, was also editor at Soho Press for How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets.

Garth: So I had this book, How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets, and I’d given it to my agent. She sent it out, and then no one wanted it. So I said, well, I should rewrite. I figured it would take me a couple of months. Of course, it took me two years. And when I was done I gave it to her and she was like, “I don’t like this book. You’re on your own.” And if you get fired by your agent like that? No other agent will touch you.

Bryan: Toxic. So what was she reacting to? The fact that it starts with a death?

G: Probably—

B: That it’s a downer?

G: Yeah, I think—

B: It’s not really a downer, but I mean—

G: I think people either get Evan or they don’t. He can be frustrating to people because, you know, the character has a lot of problems with his own self-worth and he has insecurities, and that’s, of course, what the growth is in the book. But I think if that frustrates you as a person, sometimes you don’t have patience for Evan. I don’t know. At that point, since I couldn’t get another agent, I sent it out to publishers on my own. There are maybe four you can submit to unsolicited, and Soho was one of them. Honestly, I never expected to hear anything, and then one day you called. It must have been mid afternoon and you called and said, “Hi, my name is Bryan Devendorf. I’m calling about your book.” And I was like, “Oh, really? What?” And you said, “Well, I’d like to make an offer.”

[laughter]

G: And I was like, “Seriously?” And you said, “Do you have representation?” And I said, “Can I call you right back?” So I hung up and I called my old agent. She said, “How are you doing? Are you still writing?” And I said, “Yeah, I sold the book that you didn’t want to sell.” She said, “Oh, really? Interesting.” I asked her to represent it so I would have an agent on my team, and she said, “I don’t really feel comfortable with that. I’ll pass you to a different agent at the firm.” So that’s how you started dealing with a new guy. That’s how I got an agent back.

B: Wow. That was my first book I got to go it alone on.

G: Really?

B: Laura [Hruska, the late co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Soho Press] was probably coaching me from behind, like “say this and this and this …”

G: Oh, that’s funny.

B: I was probably a very nervous dude that day, like my first phone call and … “hello?”

G: I know, and it’s so funny because you were probably thinking that I’m some—you know, you always think the other guy is more important or more something—

B: Yeah.

G: Because I was like, “I can’t believe an editor just called me!”

B: Right. Little did you know …

G: So your band, The National, you were playing out and doing all that kind of stuff even then, right? Your day job was being an editor.

B: Yes. We had been at it probably for about four, four-and-a-half years before I started working on Evan.

G: Wow.

B: And then we were going on tour intermittently, and that was why—

G: But tours like minivan tours?

B: Oh, yeah. All self conducted—

G: Driving to Kansas.

B: Driving ourselves. We never drove to Kansas. We actually had our first bit of success in Europe. We would fly over and carry our—I would carry my snare drum on the plane, get in a van and drive around to the little clubs.

G: That’s how the Beatles got started.

B: Oh, and we played the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, I guess—

G: Oh, really?

B: The Red Light district. We played there a couple of time.

G: That’s cool.

B: Um … Cavern Club? Liverpool was the Cavern Club. The one in Hamburg was … doesn’t matter …

G: But anyway, so you then did the book. You edited the book. We worked together on that.

B: Yeah.

G: And then it came out in 2005, in May of 2005, and promptly sold no copies.

B: [laughs]

G: No one cared. People are supposed to care.

B: Well, I think, I don’t know if you want to stack ‘em up—but the same kind of thing happened with our band. We put out a record in 2001 and no one cared. And then put out a record in 2003 and no one cared …

G: I remember when we first started working together, you asked me if I was into music and you sent me—

B: Check out my band?

G: Yeah, you sent me three CDs—maybe it was just two and I bought the next one, because one was coming out, I think. I don’t remember the exact situation. But I remember listening to it and thinking, hmm … interesting.

B: [awkward laugh]

G: Because at that point, my seventeen-year-old son, who wants to be a rock star, he was eight at the time—he’s been playing the guitar now for almost ten years—so I was trying to stir his musical education, you know, introduce him to different things, because otherwise he would still be listening to only Led Zeppelin—

B: That’s a good place. That’s where I started, I think. Or that’s where I started with the drums, at least.

G: Well, that’s why, in the book there’s a reference to Evan playing a Led Zeppelin song—because as you recall, Evan is thirty-one and his has a fourteen-year-old son and they get reunited, so he has never really had a relationship with his son—he’s never seen the kid at all, except when he was a little, teeny baby, and so the kid doesn’t really understand what this father guy is up to and all that—

B: Trust issues, to say the least.

G: So at the end of the book there’s a little moment when the kid tells his grandmother that he wants to try guitar lessons. That’s supposed to be moving …

B: Oh, yeah.

G: But anyway, so you edited the book, it came out, it got some okay reviews, I think. The Seattle Times gave it a nice review. But no one really cared about it. And then this weird thing happened. I remember this specifically. My family and I were up in Vancouver near Christmas at the end of the year. We’d gone up for a fun getaway after school was out, and it was a disaster. My wife got horrible pneumonia up there and we were dragging through. It was really terrible. And I got a phone call from Ailen [Lujo, former marketing director of Soho Press]: “Hey, you won a PNBA Book Award.”
    And I said, “I don’t even know what that means.” And she said, “It means you get a check for a thousand dollars.” And I was like, sweet! “And you get to go to a banquet.” So I went to the banquet and I had to give a little award speech, and I got verklempt—a little teary—because Evan has epilepsy and my sister grew up with epilepsy, so for me there’s a very personal element of the book. But then this terrific publicist, Dawn Stuart, called me up and she said, “You need to use this.” And I started going to every single bookstore I could go to, to do readings for two or three or four people. It was humiliating and terrible.

B: I can relate to that!

G: You know? Right? Have you ever done clubs where you—

B: Empty. Total ‘oh-fer.’

G: But you have to—

B: Just the bartender and the doorman once in Louisville. It was a fun show.

G: Very funny. I always say the worst reading is one person. Because they actually want something. I went down to Plano, Texas and did a reading for one person and it was horrible—

B: Wow.

G: The guy wanted me to read to him, and I’m like, “Dude, let’s have a cup of coffee and talk, but I’m not reading to you.” And he was like, “No, read.”

B: [laughs]

G: The ‘oh-fer’ I had was University of Oregon. I had zero people show up. And the guy who was the buyer at the time, Colin Rea, was mortified. He was so sad. He was like, “Come on, let’s go out for beers.” And I became friends with him. He’s a really great guy. So it wasn’t all for naught. But that’s the life, right? Now how many people do you play for?

B: Uh, it depends on the city, I guess. Here in Seattle … what’s the capacity of The Paramount, like eighteen hundred? Two thousand? [Ed. Note: For concerts, the capacity of The Paramount Theater is 3,000.] Then there are festivals that are like a broader thing. We played a show for like four hundred people in July … All different sizes.

G: Hmm. But you know people are going to be there, and they have expectations.

B: Yeah.

G: They want you to play that song.

B: Uh huh. But we don’t always play that song.

G: Well, are you letting them down when you don’t?

B: I would think so. I mean what are you going to do though?

G: I don’t know.

B: Because there are so many songs that we have. Over the course of fifteen years we’ve been a band we have six or seven records. There’s maybe ninety songs. Maybe a hundred. We might play fifteen or twenty, so …

G: Yeah, yeah. But The Stones still always play the song.

B: Yeah.

G: They play—

B: The hits—

G: To their expectations. And—

B: Willie Nelson played the same set every night for years and years and years. Just the hits.

G: Really? I’m fascinated by—my son wanted to go see Bob Dylan and so I went with him, which is just a weird experience, because he’s Bob Dylan and he’s weird. He’ll play the song you want to hear, but he’ll do it in such a fucked up—

B: Yeah.

G: You know? He sings all the words backwards or something so you’re sitting there going, “Do I—do I recognize that song?” So you hate it. You say, “Don’t even play it if you’re going to play it like that.

*  *  *

B: Evan has been … in the past he’s had a successful career as a guitar player in a rock band, but he sort of hasn’t lived up to his father’s expectations, his own expectations. What were you thinking, like what motivated you to create a character who was … an underachiever?

G: In a weird way, the character of Evan has habitually sabotaged himself. And I think this is a theme that I tend to work with in my books. The idea that we sometimes can be afraid of our own success and so we either consciously or unconsciously or subconsciously or super-consciously undermine ourselves so we don’t have to deal with that success, because then we have expectations for ourselves and other people have higher expectations for us—

B: To maintain a high level of performance or to just be something that you’re not for someone who has this idea of what you are. Like, you’re not that person. That’s just somebody else’s concept of you …

G: And I think that can be driven by a lot of things, like that kind of an identity thing. But there’s also a fear that “I might be that good, and maybe I’m afraid to confront that.”

B: You feel like a fraud, maybe, or …?

G: Not so much a fraud, I don’t think. I think that it’s—for me, I think the idea I had was: If I work really hard and show how good I am? Then I’ll have to work really hard all the time to always show how good I am. And maybe if I don’t live up to that … When I do writing workshops someone will ask me, “What’s your favorite thing you’ve written?” So I’m working on my fourth book and I’ve written a play, other stuff. And I say, “The thing I’m writing now has to be my favorite. It has to be the best. If it isn’t, then I’m not done with it yet. If I haven’t made that connection? Then it’s not fair for me to go ask you to pay twenty-five bucks for it, or nineteen bucks, and waste your time reading it if I don’t think it’s the best thing I could possibly do.” And Evan, the character in the book, can’t deal with this issue, because he, as he says, lives down to expectations.

B: A big piece of this, which we haven’t mentioned, is his condition, that he has epilepsy.

G: He has epilepsy.

B: And it has sort of given him this, for lack of a better term …

G: An excuse.

B: He has stigmatized himself.

G: Yes. The thing is, he did it to himself. He gets it as a result of a head trauma that he receives when he’s a kid. They’re playing Truth or Dare, and his brother is dared to run in front of a car. That’s a true story that happened when we first moved to Seattle when I was a kid. We moved up from Los Angeles, and I was playing Truth or Dare with these kids and one of the kids dared another to run out in front of a car and make the car slam on its brakes. And he did it. No one got hurt. But it impacted me in a way that I thought, that’s got to the stupidest thing. I mean, no. The stupidest thing would be to drink Drano and see if you die. But the second stupidest thing is to run out in front of a car on a wet Seattle night when the streets are slick … I used that in the book. Evan’s little brother gets the dare and he starts crying, so Evan steps in and says, “I’ll take the dare for my little brother.” It’s a selfless act that he does. He gets hit by the car, and the head trauma that he receives gives him epilepsy. So he always feels—and his father reinforces that feeling—that he has let his family down. That he was supposed to be the Good Son, that he was supposed to be the smart one, he was supposed to be a doctor, he was supposed to go on to do great things—a leader of the Free World. Instead, he never finished school, he works at a guitar store, he doesn’t have any aspirations to do anything, and he got a girl pregnant in high school, she had the baby and moved off. So. Now he’s confronted with a chance to rehabilitate himself when the custody of the kid is given back to him. He has to decide, am I going to be a father, or not?

B: And he’s also faced with the parents of the deceased girlfriend. A custody battle ensues …

G: There’s a struggle over the kid. And there’s also a struggle with Evan’s parents. His parents say, “We’ll raise our grandson. You can’t do it. You’re not responsible enough.” And that just—

B: It reinforces what he believes. All the work he’s already done to build this wall.

G: Right. In a weird way I think that under some circumstances he might have taken them up on that. But, the problem is, he meets a girl. And he falls in love. And she’s no-nonsense. She says, “You have to be true to yourself.”

B: As Laura Hruska said, it’s a belated coming of age.

G: It is a belated coming of age.

B: And that people do change. He does ultimately succeed in his journey.

*  *  *

B: Were you ever in a band?

G: Yes, I was in a band. I was in a band a long time ago, back in New York. My wife is a drummer—

B: Was she in the band, too?

G: Yeah. And so I learned how to play the bass so I could be compatible. We were just dating at the time. There’s nothing hotter than, first of all—

B: A girl drummer?

G: Yeah.

B: For sure. It’s true today. It was true then, it’s true today.

G: East Village bars. We played—we didn’t do a whole lot, we weren’t together that long, but we played in East Village bars, and I was really good a setting up drums. I had a whole system down. You know, you had to do everything, it was taxi cabs and stuff, horrible. And I played the bass and she played the drums in this band, The Deena Ray Turner Band. She would wear these little short dresses and Converse sneakers and have this huge drum set, she’s not very big and has long hair and she’d be wailing on the drums and I thought, that’s hot. So. I fell in love. But then I realized that wasn’t really my bag. I could fake being a musician, but not so good. But then just recently, my writer friends convinced me to join a band. We call ourselves The Rejections. It’s like the Rock Bottom Remainders, which is the band with—

B: Stephen King’s band?

G: Yeah. Stephen King and—

B: So weird to think about.

G: Mitch Albom, and Amy Tan, and a whole bunch of people.

B: What does she play?

G: She sings. She’s the front person. She dresses up in a dominatrix outfit and walks around stage yelling at people.

B: Follow up question. Do you listen to music when you write?

G: I do.

B: Oh, you do?

G: I actually listen to music when I write. I never did before. It sometimes can depend on what I’m writing. I don’t listen to much with lyrics, or a whole lot of lyrics, or at least distinguishable lyrics. I won’t listen to the Beatles or The Rolling Stones, or something I would have heard so many times I know. I’ll listen to—if I want generic, or more background—I would go with Philip Glass or some kind of jazz stuff. The Bach cello concerti work really well. I do listen to The National, believe it or not.

B: Gloom and doom and lots of lyrics.

*  *  *

G: By the way, when you have a book that sells really well, you get a cool desk. I have a sit-to-stand desk. It’s hydraulic. Push a button and it goes bzzzz, so I stand up to write. It’s cool.

B: I always wanted one of those at Soho. I have terrible back problems, but even in those days Juri [co-founder of Soho Press] would be like, “Get a stand up desk.” And Laura would say, “You know what you need? A glass of gin!”

G: [laughs]

B: Not that she was endorsing drinking, but—

G: It relaxes you!

B: The muscle relaxing properties of alcohol.

G: Well, that’s what tall people suffer from. Back problems.

B: The curse. Sitting down a lot. Of course I make my living sitting down. I’ve always wanted to stand and drum. Moe Tucker.

G: Oh, really? Sheena E.

B: Oh, yeah. I was always confused. There’s Sheena Easton and Sheila E.?

G: Oh, is it Sheila E? Who was the one who played with Prince and stuff?

B: Sheila E.

*  *  *

G: Oh, man. It’s hard for an unknown writer writing a book about a guy with epilepsy. How do you sell that book? It opens at a funeral.

B: Yeah.

G: But you believed in it.

B: Well, I think because the one thing I learned working at Soho was that there’s no … you just know it when you see it. Really, it’s something about the voice and the way the story unfolded, and there’s always pieces coming together and you really root for this guy. I mean, I was able to identify with him, with my own … I always said I’m pursuing a musical career and it’s a distant dream, like how do you become what you want to be?

G: Right.

B: But it also, you know, he has epilepsy. And I’d never experienced that, but I had my own sort of awkwardness with my being, like you say, a tall person, and just being kind of this geeky, gangly guy, and it’s just like how do I—I built these walls around me, and how did I get from this gangly kid from Ohio to be this, like—that’s why I talked about being a fraud earlier, like, I felt like a fraud, this kid from Ohio just sitting in an office in New York, judging people’s ability to write. “Many thanks for your submission … unfortunately it’s not right for us …” and people would demand answers, so I would actually give them actual critiques, and sometimes that would make it worse. So they’d think, “Okay, if I change this then you’ll publish it, right?”

G: Right, right.

B: No … so then I went back to the form letter. But I guess for me it was, again, my own coming of age belatedly. Like I learned way more at Soho than I ever did at college in Ohio or … just being at Soho with people who had … like Juri was a refugee from the Second World War and grew up in the South Bronx after living in a displaced persons camp in Germany. You know, and then went to fight in Vietnam and in the mountains and he sort of like made it on his own in publishing. He didn’t really come from the Ivy Leagues or anything of that sort. And he became publisher of Dutton or something in the 70’s, where he could directly call Nelson Doubleday at like Shea Stadium and say, “Nelson, I need this much more to buy Silence of the Lambs. Are you at the beach?” “No, I’m at the ballgame,” [Doubleday said] because of the crowd noise. And Laura came from, she was one of the first women to graduate from the Yale law school, and she had her own … she was an artist and a writer … she was always … not protective, but I was never really sure what her pen name was. Juri and Laura had met as editor and author, I think—

G: Oh, fascinating!

B: Back in the 70’s maybe, or early 80’s.

G: Oh, and she didn’t want it out.

B: Well, it wasn’t that she didn’t want it out. It was just kind of you didn’t really ask about it. It was a weird kind of … almost like a family dynamic developed there, where there were certain things that you knew—

G: Don’t ask why that door is locked, just walk past it.

B: Yeah.

*  *  *

G: Okay, so: editing anecdotes. Here’s what I remember. Like you said, we didn’t do a lot with structure, but we did do some line edits and specific things. And I remember there was one particular word that you wanted me to change, and I kind of didn’t really want to change it. I don’t even remember what the word was. I’ll think of it maybe—

B: Ah, this rings a bell.

G: So I would do a pass and I wouldn’t change it, and then your editorial notes would come back and you would say, “this and this and this, and I really think you need to change this word.” So I would do all the changes except that word.

B: Oh, you must have thought I was such a dick.

G: No, no. And then your editorial notes would come back. And I remember the third or fourth time this happened the letter said, “I really have to stress the importance of your changing this word.“ And I was like, okay, that was a controlled explosion. I’m going to change the word for him. And so I did.

B: I do remember something like that.

G: It cracked me up. But it was a fun experience. [They laugh.] Bryan, have fun on the rest of your mini-tour. Have a good show tonight.

B: Oh, yeah. We love the Northwest. Portland. Vancouver. Then we’re heading home.

G: Back to Ohio.

B: This was great.

G: Watch your head.