Jonathan Safran Foer: ‘There isn't a person on Earth who doesn’t smoke pot’

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Jonathan Safran Foer: ‘There isn't a person on Earth who doesn’t smoke pot’

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The bestselling author, 40, on avoiding Twitter, the anxieties of parenthood and the memory of a childhood accident that’s shaped his life

Andrew Hankinson

 13 May 2017 14.00 BST

As a child I was encouraged to participate in adult conversations, encouraged to go out into the world and assume a role that runs the risk of making a kid very annoying. Because my brothers are also writers, there’s an assumption it was a kind of intellectual home. I don’t know that it was. Did we have more books than my friends? Probably not. Did we talk about literature? No.

I don’t think there’s a person on Earth who doesn’t smoke pot. That’s my little pet theory. I think everybody smokes weed and it’s just not a big deal. I don’t do it a lot, but you know, life is long and the days are sometimes hard.

When I was nine years old, we were making sparklers at camp and a number of the kids were really, really badly injured. There was an explosion. I was a little bit injured. I was in hospital for three or four days. It’s still an experience I’m wary of discussing.

People don’t have knowledge of me as a person. They have knowledge of me as a writer – we’re talking about two different people. A lot happened to me very quickly and I was propelled into a certain kind of professional life. I’ve been as lucky as any writer in the world, but that was never my goal. The goal is always to write something I’m proud of.

My greatest regret is not living in the same city as my brothers and parents. I took for granted I was going to live in New York. I wasn’t aware of how hard it would be to return to DC, where I grew up. I really miss it.

I remember Joyce Carol Oates saying to me that the most important writerly quality is energy. It’s absolutely true. I teach at NYU, I have for about a decade or so, and maybe five of my students continued writing two years after they graduated. It’s not that they were more talented than the others, they just were able to summon the energy.

My kids often make me cry, not because of sadness or happiness or pride, but just the kind of muchness of being a parent. Situations are often instantaneously overwhelming.

I don’t subscribe to a newspaper. The only magazines I really get are for my kids. I don’t use the internet a whole lot. I don’t use Facebook. I don’t use Twitter. And I think that makes me really lucky. I don’t experience FOMO, that fear of missing out, because being born when I was, just on the cusp of all that technology, I have always missed out.

Whenever somebody tells me they’ve finished a novel, I am in a kind of awe. It’s an amazing accomplishment to be able to care about something for that long, to reach the end. When I meet people who’ve been in a relationship for a long time, I feel the same.

God isn’t a pressing question in my life. Israel’s a more pressing question. It’s not the easiest thing to be a Jew in the present moment.

The art of the creative process is not seeking and finding, it’s bumbling.

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