Sometimes laughter can be the best way to make it through difficult times. And a good joke can go a long way to connecting with another person, no matter how different they are. Those are themes in the two new books “Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One” by Kristen Arnett and “So Far Gone” by Jess Walter. OPB’s Jess Hazel talked to Walter and Arnett about their books at the 2025 Portland Book Festival.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. If you take in a lot of news these days, you might think it would be hard to find a funny novel about the world we’re living in, but maybe you should seek out works by the authors Jess Walter and Kristen Arnett. Arnett’s latest book, “Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One,” tells the story of a clown named Cherry, who tries to find love and the meaning of art in Central Florida. Walter’s book, “So Far Gone,” shows how families can come together even across widening political divides.
OPB’s Jess Hazel talked to Arnett and Walter in front of an audience at the 2025 Portland Book Festival, and there was a lot of laughter.
[Audience applause]
Jess Hazel: And we’re actually gonna start with a brief reading from both of them and we’ll start with you, Jess.
Jess Walter: I don’t think there’s too much to set up with this except to know that Rhys Kinnick is the protagonist, and he’s been at Thanksgiving with his daughter and her husband, Shane. He’s been nursing beers and he’s a terrible nurse, and this beer isn’t likely to make it either. And he gets in a squabble with his conspiracy theorist son-in-law and this picks up right after that.
[Reading an excerpt from his book, “So Far Gone]
“Thanksgiving Day 2016, Kinnick drove away from his daughter’s house with no idea where he might be going. His right hand throbbed below the ring finger knuckle where he’d broken one of the small bird bones in the back of his hand, punching Shane’s thick head. He almost wished Shane had punched him back, but for all his bluster, Shane wasn’t really a violent sort. Kinnick had to give him that.
“He sped north on I-5 through patches of fog, his cell phone in the passenger seat like a disapproving friend, alternating buzzing and ringing. He reached over for it and read the text messages as he drove, glancing back and forth from road to screen and back. Celia’s, his ex-wife’s, were of the ‘just turn around, you made your point’ variety. Bethany’s more, ‘don’t bother coming back.’
“He should call Bethany. That was the right thing to do. She’d left two voicemails, and she was the one he owed an apology to. All he had to do was press her name on the screen and boom, even speeding away at 80 miles an hour, technology would put her right next to him, in his ear, his brilliant baby girl as clear as if she were in the car with him.
“He turned his iPhone over in his hand. Remarkable. Every human connection he had left in the world was contained inside its miniature electronic circuitry. Kinnick didn’t know a single phone number by memory anymore. They were all just filaments, bits of data in this device. He could rattle off the exchanges of his youth, Walnut 49378, Keystone 62454. But without this $600 Pop Tart of modern science he had no way of reaching any other human being and they had no way of reaching him.
“This device knew him better than anyone ever had; it knew his weakness (best happy hour near me), his tastes (‘70s soul and R&B), his worries (erections after fifty), his crude, sad desires (adventurous 40-to-50-something, dates only, not looking for a relationship), even what socks he preferred (athletic, white and black).
“It knew every place he’d ever walked and driven, and he was surprised to be surprised to see the phone fly out the car window. He had been the one to lower the window in the first place after all, so it shouldn’t have shocked him, but it was almost as if the act of flipping it out the window had preceded the idea. A quick glance in his side mirror and he saw it cartwheel once on the shoulder and then disappear in the weeds between lanes.”
[Reading ends]
[Audience laughter and applause]
Hazel: Thank you, Jess. And now we’ll have you, Kristen, read a bit from your book.
Kristen Arnett: OK, now I’m gonna read about a lesbian clown. [Laughter]
[Reading an excerpt from her book, “Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One”]
“When I clown, I become something bigger than myself. And hey, I know what it’s like to have to work harder for what I want than anyone else. I’m a queer person living in Florida, aren’t I? To clown, you need lots of things: clothes and makeup and props. And above all else, you need time, large uninterrupted swaths of it. That’s when you can plot and plan and polish your craft, try out those pratfalls without anyone watching, perfect your gags. That way, when you get out on stage, all the audience sees is your persona, no visible seams.
“Of course, there’s the other obvious clowning hardship, you’re universally despised. Grown men will cry out for mommy when they see me walk down the street. Kids often run screaming. They do this because they’re frightened by the lore that’s been built around my profession. To them, I’m the boogeyman, something that crawls out of their closet in the middle of the night, intent on devouring them whole. Many of the things I love about clowning – the swagger of it, the slyness, the bold colors and absurd shapes my body makes – are, for some, the exact behaviors that fuel their worst nightmares.
“You need very thick skin. Clowning requires a kind of steeliness that I associate with my coming out process, the knowledge that there will always be people in life who will hate you for who and what you love. There are women who won’t date me once they find out what I do for a living. I’ve lost friends over it. My own mother nearly disowned me the first time she caught me in full clown gear. I’d wanted to surprise her with how good I’d gotten, show off my act, tumbling, juggling, magic tricks.
“Dwight, my brother, had already seen me perform back when I was first starting out. He’d liked it fine, he’d said, but it wasn’t exactly his thing. That I understood. My big brother was never going to be the kind of guy who’d admit that I was funnier than him. But my mother, that was different. I’d wanted her approval. The look on her face, I’ll never forget. It was if I were the most revolting thing she’d ever seen, like she couldn’t believe she’d given birth to something so foul.
“‘Cheryl,’ she said after several agonizing seconds had passed, ‘What do you want me to say?’ That was the first and last time I ever performed in front of my mother.
“But you get used to it. Much like you hone tricks for your act, you devise the necessary skills to remove yourself from sticky situations. You learn to spot trouble before it happens and therefore avoid it entirely. Eight years into clowning, I can easily recognize the guy who might deck me if I get too close. Men get violent when confronted by the things that scare them. I watch their fists. Are they balled up, knuckles white? If so, I keep to the opposite side of the room. I twist my act like I’m turning the wheel of a car and completely change direction. I’ll tell jokes they already know, no surprises. ‘Orange you glad I didn’t say banana?’”
[Reading ends]
[Audience laughter and applause]
Hazel: Thank you both so much for reading those selections. And starting with you, Kristen, because you probably had to collect quite a few jokes for a whole book about a clown, do you have a favorite knock-knock joke? [Laughter]
Arnett: The thing is I have too many. I think this one is funny … Like many jokes are, it’s funny when it happens to you in the moment, right? It’s who you were with and what happened. So it was really high with my ex-wife. We had gotten this old joke book and we’re reading them aloud to each other. And she read this one which is …
Knock-knock.
Audience: Who’s there?
Arnett: Wendy.
Audience: Wendy who?
Arnett: Wendy teacher comes back, hide the candy. [Laughter] I laughed so hard at this for a point in time that I lost all sense of self, like my body hurt. It was the kind of laughing that you feel like is a violence upon your person, but so much of it was very incidental or just stupidity.
Hazel: Those are the best jokes, the stupid ones.
So Jess, I was curious about whether your escape from reality would look similar to Kinnick’s. He was about to go out into the woods pretty much at the end of the scene you just read for us. Is it a similar kind of escape? Because I know some of that setting was based on your experiences, right?
Walter: Oh, not escaping, no. And I actually have to tell my favorite knock-knock joke because … [Audience applause]
Hazel: I like that. I like that a lot.
Walter: Because when my daughter, Ava, was tiny, she was one of those kids who got to like 12 pounds and stayed there forever. She was this tiny little being who could speak in perfect sentences. So I taught her this joke and she would say …
Knock-knock.
Audience: Who’s there?
Walter: Ava.
Audience: Ava who?
Walter: Ava big load in my diaper. [Laughter] So for this tiny person to say this joke, I felt like it was the peak of my literary career. But no, my escape … So Rhys Kinnick leaves that moment and drives up to a cabin in the woods with no heat, no electricity, and he goes off the grid. And I wanted to read that section about the phone flying out of the window because it was a bit of wish fulfillment for me and I think you should always have a moment of wish fulfillment in a novel.
It was during that period when my [phone] – I don’t know if your phone ever does this – one Sunday afternoon, buzzed at me and told me I’d spent an average of six hours and 20 minutes on it that week. And I write on a laptop. I mean, there’s no reason for me to be doom scrolling. And every candidate for every office in America was asking me for $1.50 to save democracy. I was saying, “yes, please, someone …” [Laughter]
So I just imagined disconnecting from that anxiety, but I could never do what Rhys does. I sent him to the place that my family owned that I lived on as a kid, the very same house with no electricity, no power that we still own. But even when I lived out there as an 8-year-old, I thought, I don’t think there’s sushi anywhere near here. I hate to tell you, Mom and Dad. [Laughter]
Hazel: A very sophisticated 8-year-old.
Walter: I was very sophisticated, yes, and I had a big load in my diaper also. [Laughter]
Hazel: So you both write about places, or your characters live in places that are often perceived as more conservative. Jess, for you, the area surrounding Spokane, there’s parts of Idaho, parts of Oregon in “So Far Gone.” And then for you, Kristen, it’s Central Florida. And I think something that happens in liberal bubbles often, like places like Portland, folks forget that people from all walks of life live everywhere including places that are perceived as conservative. Your characters kind of live counter to that assumed common culture.
Can you speak a little bit more about how the settings for your stories impacted your writing?
Arnett: I have two jokes and they’re the same joke. Every bar I go into is a gay bar because I’m gay, and anything I write has Florida in it because I’m a Floridian and I am a place writer. So those things are embedded regardless of if I’m mentioning Florida in it, but I’m always talking about Florida.
So, I’m thinking a lot about Florida all the time as a queer person living in the middle of this red state. And when you live in Florida, you are also like, Florida won’t let you forget about it, right? It’s like natural disasters, creatures that could kill you. Also, the idea of who we are and the fact that people have such intense ideas about what Florida is. Imagine you go somewhere at a party and you’re like, “oh, where are you from?” And you’re like, “Orlando.” Watching people’s faces move in different kinds of ways is a way in which I’m like, “it’s an interesting way to live.”
This particular book, I wanna write very much about what it’s like to be an artist, a working artist living in a space where people pay a lot of money to come there and engage with art, and then leave being like, that is tacky. And I think it’s not worth anything. So I was like, what is it like for these people to be … Because Orlando, Central Florida, is specifically many people living year round who are living working artists – dancers, theater, make-up and costuming. Which, if people think straight people are doing that, that’s crazy. [Laughter] So, ask yourself why you thought that [Laughter].
It is like, oh, these people are having a day job like many artists do. Here’s my day job and then to fund the thing that I’m actually passionate about. And this particular character is a clown. She’s working these like specific kinds of clowning gigs so that she can do the kind of clowning she wants to do. She also works a day job at an aquarium store. But this is like how many people are living and functioning.
And also, I try to remind people, too, Florida is a massive state. So even being in Orlando, I’m writing about Orlando. I’m not writing about Miami, I’m not writing about the Keys, I’m not writing about the Panhandle, or Tallahassee, or Jacksonville, or Destin, or Tampa, or any of these places. They’re all disparate like climate, people and communities. Even being in Miami, the spoken word is mostly Spanish, right? It’s like a huge Cuban community.
So to say you know everything about like one giant place I think it’s like a huge fallacy. And as a writer, it makes me so interested to write about that, the things that people think they know, because I love being like, “no, you don’t know anything.”
Walter: Yeah, it’s interesting, being from Spokane and spending my entire life there, how defensive I can sometimes get. And it’s funny, I remember – this is somehow my 30th year in publishing – telling an old publicist of one of my first books, who wanted me to drive from Spokane to Portland and Seattle in two days … I’m like, “these things are far apart.” When I was trying to explain, I said, “Well, Seattle is sort of like Manhattan and Portland is clearly Brooklyn. And then I guess Spokane is Staten Island?” [Laughter] I didn’t know how to explain Spokane to a New Yorker.
But in that time, Spokane has also changed in ways that I think so many urban areas have. And I have to tell you, as a touring author, there is nowhere in America that you can go where, especially in the cities, especially among educated people, you won’t find like minds. And really, the divide that we used to imagine goes along different lines, it’s one of the things I really wanted to write about, what I think of as this reality gap in America. You can be in downtown Little Rock, Arkansas, and it is the coolest, hippest place you’ve ever been with the greatest people.
I always hate to break it to Northwest people, but Spokane is the same way. I used to bristle when Seattle people would say, “Why do you live in Spokane?” As if, “Dear God, we’ll put you up.” [Laughter] And I would always say, “Well, because I think it’s kind of morally reprehensible to live in a place where a teacher can’t afford a house. [Audience applause] And sadly, that’s not even true of Spokane anymore. We’re as Zillow drunk as anyone else. Just walking around like, “my house has tripled in value,” like zombies or something.
But it also has a seven-to-one liberal to conservative city council. I think that cities have become places where you would recognize people who think like you do, who think all over the country. But I also like living in that proximity of a larger, more contentious world – which of course in Oregon you do also. It doesn’t take long to get out of town and see a giant truck with all sorts of flags that you don’t recognize.
Hazel: Well, and if you’re in a liberal bubble like Portland or if you’re just 45 minutes down the road, you do interact with both worlds, all of us do. Can you share more about how these stark divides are showing up in our families now and why you chose to write about that dynamic?
Walter: Yeah, I think one of the reasons I wrote the novel is I felt like it touched us in ways that I didn’t recognize. And I think of the generation gap of a few generations ago and the way that divided families. I think of a novel like “American Pastoral” and really digging into that, and this felt to me something very different but also that had reached the family level and the neighbor level. I know the politics of everyone on my block by their bumper stickers, by the signs they put in the yard. I don’t think my parents ever knew the politics of their neighbors. It wasn’t divisive that way. And I found that to be fascinating. It felt like something worth writing about, how these local things that used to connect us maybe don’t.
I thought back to … we had this, oh my God, incredibly racist aunt. We would try to correct her all the time. We finally just invented the racist drinking game where we’d make these giant martinis and every time she said something racist, we would drink them. And she’d be like, “You guys are so fun.” And we’d be like, “Yeah, we’re very fun.” [Laughter] This is the woman who’d raised my mom and it was more like a grandma than an aunt. She would say, “Oh, people don’t mind if I say that.” [I’d say,] “I think they do, Aunt Betty.”
But I have a nephew that doesn’t talk to the family anymore. One of my best friends from elementary school – we were space science nerds together – he now believes the earth is flat. And I started out just writing, maybe we don’t bridge these gaps entirely, but how do we keep it from tearing us apart? And as often happens with a novel, you start with this small thing and then hope that it becomes a sort of a generalized thing that you can almost imagine across larger cultures in a way.
Hazel: And you both write with a lot of sympathy for your characters, all of your characters, even the ones who are behaving badly, who are conspiracy theorists, things like that. Where does that sympathy come from for you personally?
Arnett: Being a person. Also just failing at things in life over and over again. I am very strongly of the opinion that we learn way more from our failures and messes than we ever do from success. Sometimes success, at least in my own life, puts a cap on – and now you know that. And it’s like, no. I also very strongly feel if I ever feel like I really know something then I will die, then I’ll just be dead, because there’s no more left to learn. Yeah, it’s over for me now. [Laughter]
But it is like a thing where, to write characters, or to feel like we’ve written a story that feels compelling and worth time and worth questions, is to write people. And people are full of myriad things, right? We can write a character who can be so loathsome, but also, the character has a life that maybe we don’t know anything about. That’s plenty of people around us, including people who are loathsome. We can be like you who are a piece of [beep], but I also understand you have had things occur in your life, or you have things that I don’t know or no one understands.
There’s ways in which I don’t feel like I’m doing a good job as an artist and a writer, unless I’m fully examining the full breadth of what a person can hold, or the idea that a person might be this thing right now, but that might not be them in the future also. I love people and I think that what makes me want to make art is because I really deeply love people, and I wanna know more about who they could be and what else they might hold.
Walter: Yeah, I totally agree and I think it comes out in Kristen’s writing. But it also has to do with the topic we’re talking about, which is humor. And as you said, it starts with fallibility. It starts with seeing through your own biases, foibles and mistakes. The process of writing opens you up to that, just as the process of reading does. It’s become sort of cliche to say that reading makes you more empathetic. But I also think the process of writing, of creating these characters, imagining what they might be thinking,
I do think it opens those doors.
And to me, it connects to humor. Most of the writers that I love … I think Nabokov said, “I can’t imagine a great writer who isn’t a humorist at some level.” And that’s because of the ability to see into human nature to the point where we’re all a little bit hypocritical and flawed. I have all these signposts in my memory from when pain connected with humor. My dad was the funniest person. I used to think of him as sort of my comedy sensei. And I remember when I was a little kid, Spokane had a World’s Fair in 1974, Expo ’74, the environmental World’s Fair – the smallest city, still, to ever host a World’s Fair. I wanted to go. We were living at this cabin in the woods that I write about, and I was so excited to go because they had a roller coaster and I was going to get to go on a roller coaster for the first time as a 9-year old.
So we saw all the exhibits. That was all fine. Then we got in line for the roller coaster. We’re walking up and I was so excited that the carney lifted the bar, put us in – me next to my sister – put the bar down. And as I had seen on the “Brady Bunch” or somewhere, you raise your arms on a roller coaster. So even before it started out, I had my arms up, and I lurched forward and bashed my face against the bar. [Laughter] So we’ve gone about 3 feet and the carney stops it, lifts the bar, takes me up, sets me on the ground and sends me back to my dad. And I’m just walking, blood flying out of my nose and mouth. And without even looking down, without uncrossing my arms, my dad says, “How was it?” [Laughter]
I laughed so hard, but the pain was gone at that moment. I thought that was so funny, Dad. And bloody snot bubbles coming out. I just thought, within that pain is an amazing story I’ll probably remember and tell some people in Portland 52 years from now. And it is like this weird key to understanding yourself and other people, and how we connect in that failure and those foibles, and in a clown trying to find her art, and then someone punching his son-in-law and running out into the woods. I do think that, for me anyway, that process of relating to characters starts with imagining their roller coaster.
Hazel: And with humor often comes kind of that sense of absurdity. I think it’s pretty hard to argue that we live in anything other than an absurd world right now. From the president posting AI-generated videos of himself dropping unidentified brown matter on the American people or laying shirtless on a beach in Gaza, to things like here in Portland – protesters outside the ICE facility here donning inflatable costumes and riding their bikes naked. All of this [is] very absurd. [Applause]
But how do we use humor to navigate such absurd times? Sometimes it feels like putting chocolate sauce on chocolate sauce. I don’t know how to even describe it, but it is that sense of how humor can get us through this?
Walter: Oh, look at me first, huh?
Hazel: [Laughs] It’s a big question.
Walter: Well, I will not be riding a bike naked, I’ll tell you that. [Laughter] You know, it’s funny. I guess, for me, in a couple of ways … One, history always makes me feel better about the time we’re in because it’s always been thus, and we may not have noticed it because of where we live or how things are going. You can look at various moments when the pendulum swings in certain ways. It is more absurd, more insane than it’s ever been. You can feel the overreach. We just saw the results of it in this last election, but it’s hard to come out of that moment and flash forward in time. So I guess, for me, it goes back to the humor connecting you to other human beings.
And I guess I’ll just tell one more quick story. Most people have really liked the novel. One guy sent me – and I never responded to Amazon reviews or anything like that – his Goodreads review in an email, and it was one star, and it said, “I’ve always liked Jess Walters’ books, but I’m never reading him again because he thinks if you voted unlike him, you’re an [beep].” And I wrote him back. I said, “I don’t think that at all. It says right there, Kinnick believed that.” And he wrote back, “I know those are your beliefs.” And I said, “No, I believe 12% of people are [beep]. I have crunched the numbers. I’ve done scientific experiments. They are on both sides. I gotta say, your side’s got a little more, but they’re on both sides and they tend to collect at the extremes.” And I said, “I really don’t believe that.” And we went back and forth. At one point, he said, “I asked ChatGPT, ‘Is Jess Walter liberal,’ and it said, ‘Yes.’” [Laughter] And I said, “Well, you could have just asked me. Are you never gonna listen to a liberal person?”
Anyway, so we went back and forth. I said, “No, I promise this is what the character thinks. I hold up much more hope than this.” And at the end he wrote me back and I don’t even think he realized that he said this, but he said, “Sorry, I’ve been kind of an [beep].” And then he changed his Goodreads review from one to three stars.
[Audience laughter & applause]
Arnett: Let’s clap for that for sure. Yes. Changing one Goodreads review at a time. [Laughter]
Walter: But, the humor of that back and forth connected us in a way that I think, again, goes beyond politics, beyond bumper stickers and beyond the moment we’re in.
Arnett: First of all, I’m gonna try that now. Maybe I’ll provoke somebody in a Goodreads review and have a conversation with me.
Walter: That’s right, all the one-star reviews on Goodreads, yeah.
Arnett: I truly think at the heart of that is the idea that it’s maybe more on the micro level, instead of this macro. It’s on this granular, one-on-one interactions with people, because I wrote a book about a clown. And I was like, this is going to be maybe hard for some people and people are experiencing so much [beep] that it’s like, oh, clown whatever. I was like, yeah, because everything feels incredibly absurd.
So, to write in the smaller level inside of human interactions with each other, this back and forth, it’s like the idea of just a conversation back and forth with one other person in a way where it feels like maybe somebody learned something, maybe somebody didn’t learn anything, maybe somebody unlearned. These are the things that still work on a smaller level, because it’s a reminder [of] this idea that people are malleable and they can change their minds. They can change your one star to three. Yeah, it’s a beautiful story. [Laughter]
Walter: I wonder how he tells it. He’s probably like … [Laughter]
Arnett: He’s like, I felt so bad for him that I just went in and moved it to three stars so he’d stopped emailing me.
Walter: ChatGPT also says he’s a little middlebrow. [Laughter]
Hazel: During times where it’s difficult to speak truth to power, the clown or the jester character can come in clutch, for sure. Cherry has moments throughout the book where she speaks truth to the powers that be in her life. Why do you think that clowning can be an effective way to say things that you might otherwise get in trouble for saying?
Arnett: Well, it’s also like we talked about before too, like the idea of the clown as the persona, right? The idea of the clown as drag, clown as this kind of idea of affecting a gender or possibly outside of gender, and then also the clown is like an alien construct, if we can think of it this way. The clown is the quintessential too-muchness of everything – too big clothes, the makeup that is obscured, big hair, things that are outside of expectation or abnormal, the flower that squirts you, the way that a body might move, and then also the voice, affecting a voice.
The first chapter of this book … I don’t feel like it’s a spoiler, it’s a clown [beep] a mom in a bathroom. That classic tale. [Laughter] And inside of it, I read this chapter aloud to a room of people. To me, I was like, I can’t wait to read this to people, because it hits this one part where the woman has a fetish and so she’s like, “I’m paying you, so can you do the voice?” So when I’m reading this, I do a clown voice to the audience. And the kind of response is like looking out and watching people slapping their hands over their face or their ears, or holding the top of their head.
Hazel: You can’t just say that you have a clown voice and then, not show us the clown voice.
[Audience laughter and applause]
Walter: I agree, it’s two-to-one.
Arnett: Oh God …
Hazel: The longer you wait, the more anticipation builds.
Arnett [speaking in clown voice]: Thank you for being here with me today to talk about clowns! [Laughter]
Hazel: I feel like I completely derailed things for clown voice, but it feels worth it.
Going back to Kinnick, at the end of the scene that you read, he throws his cell phone out the window and seven years have passed. What stood out to me was he had this expertise as a journalist in finding facts. He goes out in the woods, comes back, has an incredibly difficult time finding information. And of course, an old guy not knowing how to use a cell phone is very funny, but …
Walter: So, I’m told, yeah. [Laughter]
Hazel: But how do you think that this super fast development of technology has impacted our ability to find facts and then, in turn, impacted our ability to understand what’s actually true?
Walter: Boy, we do not have enough time, but if there’s a villain in the book, it is our reliance on technology. There’s a new book called [inaudible] about how these tech companies provide some process that then becomes terrible and that you are by then addicted to. Uber is a good example. Look, it’s $7 to get from the airport home. Oh, now it’s $48, and the price goes up when you need it, and they’ve killed the cab companies. Oh, and every 13th driver is a criminal who might rape you. So the process of addicting us to this technology, which we used that now uses us, that was that realization I had when my phone hit six hours.
I am a former reporter and so one of my deepest sorrows is the way my old industry has been destroyed by something that now more than half of Americans say they get their news from social media. We know what they’re getting. They are getting people commenting on the news in ways that make no sense. So to watch a job that I did with great honor and humility, and to watch that it’s become such a rare thing ... If you ask Americans now what’s your reaction to the media, the first thing that pops into your head is “Fox News, it’s terrible” or/and “MSNBC,” if you’re on the other side.
But the media used to land on your porch. It had the story of how the cross country team did at State and it connected the community in a way that I think we are vitally missing. So I really wanted Rhys to be a former reporter who now confronts a world where information has become a commodity, where these algorithms push people toward more and more extreme beliefs by design. I just don’t think we have to look far to see what’s really gone wrong because it’s in all of our pockets right now.
I love going to libraries. I love going to communities. I went to Boise, Idaho, right when they were passing a law that if a librarian didn’t want to remove a book, they could be personally sued if someone complained. So, I went and congratulated them on finally beating back the book. Sure, you’ve given your kid a device where they can access literally 4 million images of porn at any minute, but thank God you’re keeping them from reading a book about gay penguins [Laughter] … because they might either become gay or a penguin [Laughter].
I can muster a lot more rage than I even put in here, but then realizing when Kinnick comes out of the woods after years of being off the grid, how would he find anyone? He doesn’t even have his daughter’s phone number; it was a button on his phone. And that, to me, was really jarring as well, the way in which we’re so connected to this thing, that we have to demand that its use become slightly more ethical and less destructive, I think, if we’re gonna come out of this tailspin that we’ve been in. [Applause]
Hazel: I have one more question for the both of you, and then we will have time for one or two audience questions, so I hope the ones we pick are the best in there. [Laughter] Your characters have to grapple with this in different ways in both books, but what does it mean to connect with people whose versions of reality differ from our own, especially when those people really matter to us, when they’re our family, our mothers, our son-in-laws?
Arnett: In trying to write this specific relationship between this mother and child, both of them are gay, and I was thinking what if this character had a mom who was also gay, but the kind of gay that made her homophobic. And then I was like, oh, here’s the thing, too – there’s this idea of a need for somebody, especially in this parental role or care role, where I want them to completely understand who I am and where I’m coming from. And inside of this book, the reverse is [also] true, right? This is also a character who doesn’t completely understand her mother at all or where her mother is coming from.
So I was like, what if the resolve of this is an acceptance of I’m gonna meet you a little bit where you are, and maybe that relationship is just not gonna be this one I had conjured in my mind, like the relationship can’t be this thing, the fantasy of this built mother-daughter bond. It’s just that’s not the thing that it is, but can it be this other thing where we can reach whatever that is? And that is a thing where it’s the idea of maybe I can reach you at this space, but it’s not gonna be this big thing that I wanted.
Walter: Yeah, I think that word “acceptance” is exactly right and not acceptance of everything, obviously, but that common ground.
That made me think the last time I was at the Portland Book Festival. I read from a short story from my last collection called “Town and Country,” which is about a young gay man whose father is suffering from dementia and has gone down the Fox News rabbit hole. And one of the things that has happened with his dementia is he keeps asking his son, “Is this your girlfriend or where’s your girlfriend?” What often starts to me as a humorous idea, the Sisyphean idea of a grown man in his 40s having to come out to his father over and over and over, became this really interesting question of …
Arnett: That’s a horror story.
Walter: I know, it is! [Laughter] Except what if his father accepts him sometimes, and sometimes doesn’t? And then what does he offer his father? His father refers to himself back in the day as “quite the cocksman,” and lives in a world where he just wants to drink and smoke. He’s trying to find a nursing home. And this happened to me, with my dad. I had to try to find a nursing home. I mean, he had smoked since he was 11, and they won’t let a dementia patient smoke in a nursing home, it turns out.
So, I dreamed of this place that I wrote a short story about called the “Town and Country,” where their blood pressure medicine comes in a martini glass, and the menu is in 38-point type, and everything is 1970s pricing: “I’ll have the $3 London broil.” And where they can give them enough penicillin, they can do whatever they want in their rooms. [Laughter] I dreamed of this Rat Pack nursing home because I wanted to send my dad to it. And I wrote a short story about it. I cannot tell you how many people come up to me and say, “Does that place exist?” [Laughter]
I think, again, to go to that thing we talked about, the way humor and humanity connect ... In writing that story, I discovered a place that would make my dad happy, and I did find a place where you could have one or two cigarettes a day. They would take him out for one and he could have a beer in the afternoon. And at the very end, before he didn’t recognize anyone, I would bring him a Pall Mall and he would flip it in his fingers, tap it, put it in his mouth. I would light it. And for a moment, he would say, “How are you, Jess?” And then he would be gone again. But that nicotine was the drug that he knew best.
That kind of understanding, that late-game understanding with my dad and me feels somehow valuable in the larger way. We can connect here. We may never agree here, but we can connect here. [Applause]
Hazel: We do have time for at least a couple of questions, so raise your hand if you have a question and then speak it loudly. We have microphones pointed at the audience.
[Pause] The question is, are you actually a clown? Did you take clowning classes?
Arnett: No, but thank you so much. That’s such a compliment. You would think that. [Laughter]
I actually grew up around a lot of clowns in a way that I actually didn’t consider upon writing this, because then people have been like, where would you even see a clown? And I’m like, maybe it’s weird that I was around so many clowns growing up. I also grew up very evangelical Southern Baptist. The only reason I wasn’t homeschooled is because my mom tells this joke where she’s like, “I hate kids,” and it’s not a joke. [Laughter]
So I ended up, unlike all of my friends who are all at church and homeschooled, [going] to public school. It made it so most of the time I [was] kind of straddling these two spaces. But quite often, we had all of these homeschool moms that worked at church, and we had a lot of fairs and festivals. They tried to keep things inside of church so you’re there all week long like, you’re not going anywhere else or talking to anybody, doing anything. And they would have kids fests and a lot of these moms, like a lot of these moms, had clown personas, would dress up and have costumes, full gear and face, and do balloon animals. They do face painting for kids. You were not allowed to call them like Ms. Smith or Ms. Hannah … like, “My name’s Busby today. I’m Busby all day and I won’t respond to anything else.”
Thinking back on it, I was like, “that’s normal,” but then this is the only time that these women, who were homeschooling, doing church stuff … and it was very traditional kind of gender roles inside of women in my church growing up. And that was the only time they got to be something else, and play at this character, and be a completely different thing other than what they were. So there was a lot of that, thinking back, where I was just like, I’ve actually been around a lot of clowning in my life in a way that I was like, what other ways was I around clowning in this kind of capacity?
Then I also watched a lot of YouTube videos. One in particular – and I’ll try and keep this brief – it’s from the ‘90s and it’s a guy who looks like a youth pastor. He’s wearing jeans and a sport coat, and has a specific kind of hair, and he’s in front of a fake brick wall. He’s like, “Today, we’re gonna talk about this aspect of clowning.” And he describes the classic slipping on a banana peel. And he starts talking about the physics of the body, what makes a good pratfall. First of all, what would be funny, but then how not to harm yourself in the process so you don’t slip and do some ACL damage or something. And he’s like, “OK, now that I’ve talked to you about the specifics I’m gonna bring out the clown.”
So, he leaves and then this clown walks out. It’s like a classic Bozo kind of situation. The clown says nothing, slips directly on the banana peel, gets up and leaves. Then the guy walks out and he’s like, “And that’s how it’s done.” [Laughter] The funniest part of it wasn’t even the clown. It was the guy talking about, “Hey guys, today we’re here to talk about the pratfall.” And I was like, this is what clowning is, is all the [beep] surrounding it maybe. Also, if you work on a project for long enough, you start making, like, “That’s a metaphor for clowning.”
Hazel: Everything can be a metaphor for clowning, for sure. We do have time for one last question.
[Pause] The question is: Jess, you have such interesting male characters. What do you think about men?
Walter: They’re among my top genders, but not really number one, I guess I would say. So, what do I think about men? [Laughter] It’s so funny reading about this new crisis in men because I’m like, I’ve been in crisis forever. Where were all these experts studying me when I was like haplessly drifting through life? But no, it’s fascinating to see and I would always tell my son – who is gay, but would also whine about how hard it is for young men now – “I just don’t think historically that argument’s gonna get you much.”
But I do love writing all kinds of characters, and all kinds of genders and ethnicities. I think it’s one of the great things about being a writer, you can imagine yourself around the world. But I do have a soft spot for those hapless males that seem to show up in my novels. I keep thinking like one of these times I’m gonna write a real heroic figure and immediately he’s worried about erections after 50 or something. So, out the window. [Laughter]
Hazel: Well, thank you so much Jess Walter, Kristen Arnett.
[Audience applause]
Miller: That was authors Jess Walter and Kristen Arnett, in conversation with OPB’s Jess Hazel at the 2025 Portland Book Festival.
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