Pop Culture of My Life: Kevin Wilson on True Grit, Origami Yoda, and the one VHS tape he couldn't quit

There are literary novelists you slog through, trying mightily to improve your mind or at least impress your social network, and then there is Kevin Wilson. In books like The Family Fang (later made into a movie starring Nicole Kidman and Jason Bateman), Perfect Little World, and Nothing to See Here, one of EW's favorite books of 2017, the Tennessee native spins tales so droll and clever and casually surreal, it feels less like reading than falling in with a delightfully subversive new friend.

This week, Wilson returns with his new fifth novel, Now Is Not the Time to Panic, the tender offbeat tale of two teen misfits who find a cure for their summer boredom by going viral — if that were yet a term in the analog mid-'90s — with their own homegrown agitprop. Once again, via the voice of his stubborn, awkward, and endearingly messy protagonist Frankie, the writer proves his particular talent for inhabiting young female points of view, a gift he attributes to his lifelong fandom of Carson McCullers.

"She wrote so much about the flexibility between genders — you know, of being a girl, but thinking you might be a boy," he says of the writer, poet, and essayist who penned The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and other Southern Gothic touchstones. "And I kind of love that permeability of identity at a young age where you're still trying to figure out who you are." Plus, he adds with a laugh, "I think early on I was like, 'I need a little distance from these characters to obscure that it's me.' So I thought, "I'll make it a woman, and that will give just enough distance that I can hide all these aspects of myself in them."

Below, Wilson reveals a few of his favorite things, including the True Grit heroines, Goon Squads, and Houston rap playlists that sustain him.

The first reading experience I remember as a kid

It was this Wonderful World of Disney picture book called Button Soup, where Daisy Duck visits her Uncle Scrooge and he doesn't really want her there, but then she mentions she can make this button soup from nothing. Even as a really little kid, I had issues with bad thoughts and it was hard for me to eat, so my parents just let me read at the table, and I would read Archie comics and things. This book [became] kind of a totem, like I could live in the story and it would protect me. But also it's a story about taking these disparate ingredients and putting them together to make something better than you had before, and that was super appealing to me.

The book I was obsessed with in high school

I wasn't a very thoughtful reader, partly because we were just so limited in this rural place where we lived. But in high school I was obsessed with this magazine called Details, which was kind of like GQ but maybe a little glossier. I had a subscription and I would read it and just be like, "This is the key to the adult world."

There was a one-page book section in it, and my mom would drive me to Tower Books in Nashville where I would get Dennis Cooper or Russell Banks or Francesca Lia Block, any book that it mentioned. If I could find it, I would buy it. And I thought if I read those books, if I wore a sharkskin suit, if I used this hair gel, maybe Claire Danes would marry me, or maybe Leonardo DiCaprio would. [Laughs] But the books themselves weren't as important as the idea, this opportunity to expand my options, you know?

My favorite hero or villain in literature

I'm not really interested in villains, or maybe my heroes are villains too, but it's Mattie Ross from True Grit. What I loved about her was that she was so convinced of her rightness in every single moment. Which would be incredibly irritating in real life, but I loved trying to imagine what would it be like to have that kind of certainty at such a young age, and to move through the world like that. She was so funny and sarcastic and she wasn't afraid of adults, so she was just huge for me.

The other would be Frankie Adams in [McCuller's] The Member of the Wedding, which is kind of the same thing. In so many ways, she is kind of the corollary to Frankie in Now Is Not the Time to Panic — this one green hazy summer, where she believes she's going transform and become someone new. I love that idea of being a kid and hoping that you'll become something different and yet feeling constricted by your family, by the small town you live in.

A classic I've never read

I mean, if it's longer than 400 pages, I probably haven't read it. In college, I was so far behind everyone because I had spent my entire high school years reading It's Like This, Cat [by Emily Cheney Neville] like 50 times, and it had made it impossible for me to catch up. And so instead what I decided was, "Okay, I can't cover all the classics. I can't catch up, so I'm just gonna let that stuff seep into me by osmosis, by the larger world insisting upon those, and I'll get the gist of it."

But anything Russian, I've never read it. Dickens, almost nothing. Shakespeare, almost nothing. There are these huge gaps that I fill in just by nodding my head when people mention them, and I feel like I can get away with it. [Laughs]

A book, movie, or TV show I've read or watched over and over again

The thing I've seen more than any other is a movie called Primary Colors, with John Travolta and Emma Thompson playing Bill and Hilary Clinton, and the reason is that the only time I've lived out of the South, I worked in the Gender Studies program at Harvard for two years. I was completely lonely and I didn't have cable. I only had a VCR, so I would rent movies, but somehow I came into possession of an actual VHS tape of Primary Colors.

I was living in a single room in a house in Cambridge, Mass., and every day when I got home from work I would just put it in and play it on a loop. It was background noise, and there was something super comforting about it. I remember there's the main character [played by Adrian Lester] who's kind of the young, idealistic guy who's gonna help Bill run for president. The candidate wants to meet with him, and his girlfriend is like, "Are you gonna wear a tie?" And he says, "No, no tie. Leather jacket, cool."

I say that a lot in my head now: "Leather jacket, cool." It's such a dopey little movie, but for me a lot of times repetition is about the comfort, you know? Like you get to live inside of it. And so I've probably seen that movie 90, a hundred times. I can't even count. It was just always on."

A book that always makes me laugh

It's True Grit, again. I reread it with my oldest son out loud, and I was kind of amazed at how fun it was. Mattie Ross is so deadpan, so straightforward. She just wants what she wants, and all these adults are saying the sneakiest, most sarcastic s--- to her, and she doesn't care, it doesn't stop her. I find that really funny, just the disconnect.

The last book that made me cry

My wife and I alternate reading to our sons, they're 14 and 10, but we still do this every night, so we always have four books in play. Some of the books I've read to my oldest, Griff, I have now also read to my youngest, Patch — like basically any book by Tom Angelberger, who wrote the Origami Yoda series. Or Jennifer L. Holm, who wrote Turtle in Paradise and The Fourteenth Goldfish, has one called Penny From Heaven. My kids will tell you these are children's books and they're silly, but there's always a moment of real recognition of humanity in them.

I'll just start weeping as I'm reading, and my kids delight in it. My eldest told my youngest, "In the second Origami Yoda book, Dad is gonna cry." And I was like, "I probably won't," and then I just started sobbing again. [Laughs] I think part of it is that I'm reading it out loud, which makes it a little more emotional, but man, these writers, it's just so lovely and beautiful and it it makes me happy that my kids have books like that. I don't know that it makes me happy that they have to listen to their dad weep all the time while we read them.

The book I wish I'd written

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. I think, "How did she do it?" It's a book I've taught almost every semester [at Sewanee: The University of the South] since it's come out, so I've reread it more than probably almost anything, but every time I do I find something else in it that I'm kind of amazed I didn't notice before.

And I think that's why I wish I would've known how to write a book like that from the beginning — to have all of those pieces in your head at the same time and be able to connect them. It's just such a hopeful, beautiful book. And as I get older, you know, it's all about the passage of time, so I wish I'd had that wisdom earlier."

The music that helps me write

I need a little bit of dissonance to focus, so I tend to listen to anything that's super droney and hypnotic. I'll listen to a lot of rap music — there's a guy named Harry Fraud who's a producer and all of his production is really cool to me, this nice little piano and things. But the rest is all the Houston stuff that's chopped and screwed, so it sounds almost underwater and the voices are really deep, deep, deep, and it makes me feels like I'm in an aquarium.

Sometimes when I'm writing, it's just a single song. There's a guy named Sam Amidon, or Phoebe Bridgers, and I'll just play one song on a loop for like an hour and a half. Eventually I stop hearing the lyrics, it's just the sound that's really helpful. I really hate outside noise in the world, so sometimes I need noise right in my ear. I have a white-noise app, and there's one called Purple Noise — I like Purple Noise out of all the color noises.

My literary crush

That's hard, but I think it's Carson McCullers. She's just the big writer for me, and I love her work so much, but also there's a kind of loneliness to her life when you read her biography. She grew up in this tiny town in Georgia then goes to New York, and she's always searching for some sort of connective tissue between her and these other people. She's unsure of her sexuality — or maybe assured of it, but not sure why it's so diverse and strange to her.

But I think what I love about her is just how vulnerable and open she is, both in life and in her work. And that was always appealing to me — that you could have all these hidden parts of yourself that you weren't sure how they fit, but on the page you could be completely open and completely vulnerable and completely alive in ways that you couldn't be in the real world.

The book I always buy as a gift

It's a graphic novel called Relish by Lucy Knisely, an autobiographical book that walks through her relationship to food and cooking. It's broken up into little chapters and each chapter has an actual recipe from her life, so I read it with my oldest son and we made all the recipes. It's kind of about an awakening to your own identity, but also realizing your identity after the fact when you look back at the history of your life and assemble it, and it's so beautifully drawn.

Again, I like picture books about food because it helps with my brain. [Laughs] So I love looking at Lucy cooking or eating croissants. Without a doubt, it's just always a book that lands with teenagers, even kids, adults — anyone that likes food or graphic novels, it just fits every occasion.

My favorite screen adaptations of novels, and the ones that disappointed me

Well, number one is Primary Colors [laughs], but honestly there are very few that disappoint me. And if they do, I'm not sure that it's the adaptation itself — it's more just that I have such a specific idea of it in my head.

The other one I really love that people haven't seen is the original The Member of the Wedding. It's an old, old movie, really lovely. The girl who plays Frankie in it is just such a great actor, Julie Harris, and I think she's also in the original Haunting of Hill House too, which is another book I love. [Ed note: She was.] To me, adaptation is about taking the book and making it into something new so that it translates to this new medium. So I rarely think something is bad, it's more just like the movie's not for me.

What I'm reading now

We have a little place here called the Hospitality Shop on the Mountain. These older women all run it and it's like a thrift store but volunteer — this tiny little yellow house that we go to every weekend, and there's just weird stuff there you find. My youngest son found a pair of bootleg Yeezies and was super jazzed. [Laughs]

But I always look at the books, and there's this writer I really love that Maude Newton turned me on to a long time ago. Her name's Theodora Keogh, she was a granddaughter of Teddy Roosevelt and she wrote all these crazy pulpy novels that are really, really transgressive and weird. They're hard to find on Amazon, a lot of them aren't even on Kindle, so I've been steadily buying up the original copies when I can find them, and a couple weeks ago I found one of her books, a Signet version called Street Music. When her first novel came out — I think this is right — it was the only book that Patricia Highsmith ever reviewed favorably that was written by a woman.

So that's what I'm reading right now, Street Music. It's really great, and part of why I love it is that everything cool and new that's happening in contemporary fiction, there are corollaries or connective tissue, and when I read Theodora Keogh I'm like, "Oh, she was doing this in the '50s," you know? It's kind of cool to remember that. There's some apocryphal story that she lived in the Chelsea Hotel and had a pet margay, which is like a tiger cat, and it bit part of her ear off while she was asleep. She's just kind of fascinating.

The other one is an advance, Small World by Laura Zigman. It's about these two sisters who have lost a sister previously in this tragedy and they're each recovering from divorces. I love stories about siblings, I love stories about reckoning with childhood, and she's a great writer in that she can move between a lot of different tones really skillfully.

The book I most want to be remembered for

I think this is a really cool question, but I don't think about that stuff too much because I got what I needed from the book when I wrote it, you know? And once you make it, you can't control how that signal is gonna reach a receiver, or what it will do to people, so you just send it out and you hope that it comes back to you someday in some way.

But the book that meant the most to me in the writing of it was Nothing to See Here, and it was partly just me finally figuring out some stuff about myself and how I write, but also figuring out that I could use brevity. I mean, I have written three books that have spontaneous human combustion in them, so I feel like I should probably claim the Kids on Fire [mantle]. I think that's the lane I have found myself swerving into, and I don't know that it's a very wide-open territory. Yes, I'll be the Fire Children author. [Laughs]

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