David Marchese spends much of his time talking to the most famous people on the planet. As co-host of The New York Times’ “The Interview” series, he sits down with actors, politicians, musicians, writers, and athletes—from Mick Jagger to Raphael Warnock to Lena Dunham—in hopes of gleaning something about what makes these figures tick. (The Times bills them as the world’s most fascinating people. Their enormous fame, it’s implied, is just the byproduct.)
Part of Marchese’s ability to dig into the marrow of these individuals’ lives comes from his rigorous, off-camera research process, which includes scouring Internet archives and calling up out-of-print books for the odd tidbit that might inspire a genuine response from guarded interviewees.
This literary appetite extends into Marchese’s private life. Readers like Marchese are a rarity in the digital age—individuals still rereading their favorite books annually, instead of struggling to get to the end of a few chart-topping novels a year.
Here, he offers a glimpse at his overflowing bookshelves.
What do you tend to gravitate towards when reading for pleasure?
Almost all of my reading for work is nonfiction, so I’m very hungry to read novels. Sometimes I give myself excuses to read novels: I interviewed Kristen Stewart last year, and she had mentioned reading Kathy Acker’s fiction. So then I was like, I should probably read Kathy Acker so I can better understand Kristen Stewart, which was sort of helpful, but really it’s just a reason for me to read a novel that I hadn’t read before.
I hope I don’t sound like an ass, but I really read a lot, so I still also try to carve out time to read nonfiction. It’s just stuff that I’m interested in that has nothing to do with work. The last couple of books I read, can I tell you what they were?
That would be amazing.
One of the last two novels I read was Light in August by William Faulkner. The way that he talks about his themes, about the South and race and class and sex, I fully get why this guy is in the canon. But I didn’t remember such a thematic and emotional heaviness to his prose—in a way that’s almost like the humidity of the South in the summer. This is not really my thing. I was impressed by it and deeply respected it, but I didn’t actually love it.
The other novel I read recently—which I love, it was like the sixth time I think I’ve read this novel—is Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. I actually said to my wife, “I think this might be my favorite book.” It’s a post-apocalyptic novel that takes place thousands of years after there’s been some sort of atomic or nuclear desecration of the world. It’s written in almost a degraded form of English, so it’s the first time you read it, you have to read every line three times to understand what he’s saying, but the more you get into it, you realize Russell Hoban is making every line mean multiple things, and the way he’ll spell a certain word opens up the potential meanings. I find the whole thing endlessly absorbing. It’s like a puzzle that you never quite solve, but the process of continuing to try and solve it only gets more and more pleasurable.
It reminds me of A Clockwork Orange, which is one of my favorite books. It makes you think about the process of reading as you’re reading it because you’re learning the language that the author’s using as you go.
A Clockwork Orange is a very good reference point for Riddley Walker. It’s not nearly as brutal as A Clockwork Orange, but [with] the use of languages, there’s some very close similarities.
Is there a book that you go to when you’re looking for writing inspiration?
I originally wanted to be a music critic. So occasionally when I’m feeling uninspired or want to reconnect with my youthful, inspired feelings about journalism, I go back to the music journalists who are very important to me.
I go to Lester Bangs’s collection Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. This could be apocryphal, but the writer Greil Marcus said something like, It just turns out, at one point in America, the best writer in the country was Lester Bangs. I can read his review of an Alice Cooper album over and over again. It never gets boring. He just had the energy and the passion, throughout his whole life that, for me, really ebbs and flows. Being able to put my finger back in that socket, it’s very useful.
The other one is Greg Tate, who has a collection called Flyboy in the Buttermilk. He’ll take an artist who maybe is overly familiar—the one I was just reading about was about Carlos Santana, the guitar player—and opens up the world of that music with such an impish use of language that brings me back to why I wanted to get into journalism in the first place.
I’m curious if there’s one of your own articles where you’re like, I got there. I had my finger in the socket.
The difference is that I’m talking about people who are great writers, and my work for the last 10 years has been interviewing. I think my work always sucks, but the ones that I wouldn’t vomit from giving to someone would be… The New York Times Magazine, at the end of every year, does an issue called “The Lives They Lived,” which is basically a collection of obituaries of notable people who died in the last year. I did one when the comedian Norm Macdonald died. He was my favorite comedian, and I also had interviewed him a few times over the years and got friendly with him. I felt like I knew him a little and felt justified in writing an obituary style piece of remembrance for him. I feel like I honored the person that I knew with that piece and honored the artist and the enigma of who he was.
There are also a couple of interviews that I think are definitely only something I could have done. I did an interview last year with the novelist Ocean Vuong, where he ended up telling me a revelation about his life that arose because I just sort of asked a follow-up question that was born solely out of curiosity in the moment. If I have anything to offer to people in my interviews, it’s a spirit of curiosity from an emotional and intellectual level.
I’ve read that you have an extensive research process before you go into interviews. What does that look like for you on the day-to-day?
It’s mostly done from my desk. I do try to find information that is not easily googleable. I do order a lot of out-of-print books, old biographies that are not easy to find.
It’s not for work, but this Montgomery Clift biography I was reading, I took it out of the library and I saw it had the stamps of when people had previously taken the book out. I think the last time the book had been checked out was like 1986. You end up feeling some weird little connection to whoever that person was from 1986.
The coolest one I remember: I had a period where I was reading British weird fiction from the first part of the 20th century, and there’s a writer named Algernon Blackwood, and they had a copy of a book of his in the Brooklyn library system. I got it and then realized that the book was from 1918 or something like that. It was almost a 100-year-old copy of the book, and it’s just kicking around the library system.
Is there someone that you’d love to see a biography of that doesn’t have one yet?
The first thought I had was Stevie Wonder. Of course he has a biography, probably more than one, and maybe it’s okay. But, a super well-written, in-depth biography of Stevie Wonder would be something I would be excited about. If I’m in between books, I know I can always pick up a book about music and get lost in it. It’s a staple for me. It’s like my peanut butter and jelly.
I remember I read Love and Mixtapes when I was in college.
By Rob Sheffield!
Talk about someone who just has endless enthusiasm for the work that they do.
It’s really impressive that people are able to maintain that enthusiasm as they get into middle age and older. I would guess [Rob] is in his 50s. Lester Bangs died when he was 33, so he didn’t have to face the problem of being immersed in music that was aimed at audiences much younger than he was. But Rob has been able to maintain such enthusiasm for pop music, it’s pretty impressive.
Is there a book someone should read if they want to get to know you?
In my 30s, I probably would have said Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño. When I was a teenager, it was probably Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. Now, I think the book is Shadowbahn by Steve Erickson, which also has a music aspect to it.
It takes place in an alternative version of contemporary America where the Twin Towers mysteriously reappear in South Dakota, and it seems like perhaps they’re being haunted by the ghost of Elvis Presley’s stillborn twin named, Jesse Garon Presley. This brother and sister end up making a pilgrimage to the Twin Towers. [Erikson] gets at how music both speaks for us and for our culture. There’s themes of race and power and family, handled very enigmatically. He’s not spelling anything out for you, but also if you read the book and were to make a playlist of all the songs mentioned, you’d have a playlist of non-obvious, slightly hidden-gem songs.
Is there one book that helped you understand the world we live in right now?
Earlier this year, I read a book called Bright Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich. It’s a screed about how positive thinking is ruining the country. I think there was something in that book about a particular kind of can-do American attitude that can actually end up being extremely corrosive. A kind of individual version of manifest destiny that, when it’s played out in the world, is not good for anyone.
David Marchese’s Required Reading
Lulu in Hollywood by Louise Brooks, 1982
(Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
“It’s her memoirs about working in Hollywood during the great age of silent films, and she’s very acerbic. It has that extremely dry, 1930s New Yorker tone. She wrote it as an older woman, when she’d kind of been forgotten in her 70s. It’s super sharp and gimlet-eyed reminiscences of Hollywood. It depicts things from 100 years ago, but it feels alive today.”
In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje, 1987
(Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
“He’s one of my favorite novelists. It’s a love story, but it also involves anarchists trying to blow up a water filtration plant in Toronto. That might be the best novel that I’m aware of that takes place in Toronto, which is my hometown.”
At Freddie’s by Penelope Fitzgerald, 1982
(Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
“I’ve read it probably four times, always around the holidays. The atmosphere in the book is gray and English, but the characterizations and the wit and the sarcasm is bittersweet. I find it endlessly charming.”
Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch, 2006
(Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
“I know it’s embarrassing to admit, but I’m not immune to self-help books. The book actually changed my life because I read it at a real low point. He’s writing about transcendental meditation, and there’s one part in it where he says, and I’m paraphrasing, that transcendental meditation can help you become more you. The problem that I was having at that time was that I wasn’t living as myself, like I was some thwarted, meek version of a person that I knew was inside me. Not like I’m some fully actualized person now, I still have tons of problems and don’t achieve things that I wish I could achieve, but I read that and I thought, I would like to be more me.”
Be Here Now by Ram Dass, 1971
(Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
“We don’t have to take things so seriously. It’s a cliche, but be in the moment, don’t worry about what’s happened, don’t worry too much about what might be coming. When I go back to it I can give myself a little boost.”
Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks, 1998
(Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
“It’s the story of the abolitionist John Brown. I think that book is magisterial. If people are looking for a novel that they really want to immerse themselves in and get lost in, and that’s a long ride, Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks would be the one.”
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