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Wednesday, July 1, 2009:

By a strange coincidence, the paperback edition of Pharmakon came out on the same day I began to work on the screenplay of my novel, which is being produced by Liz Giamatti and Dan Carey at Touchy Feely films. I began talking to Liz and her husband Paul  (who grew up in New Haven and attended Yale) about making a film of Pharmakon several years ago, when the three of us found ourselves watching our kids at the same Brooklyn playground. It was both weird and serendipitous that Paul knew the street where I lived as a child, and where a former patient came to kill my father.

The novel is out in France now, under the title Le Remède et le Poison, published by Editions du Seuil, and for those who read French, reviews can be found in Humanite Dimanche, Inrockuptibles, Télérama, Journal du Dimanche, Elle, L'indépendent, Technikart, L'Express, La Vie, etc. For those whose first language is Turkish, Hebrew, or Italian, translations in those languages will be published in 2010.

As happy as I am about the paperback and having the opportunity to adapt the novel for film, it has been a sad time. Angela Praesant, my friend, German translator and editor, died on June 20th. She was both brutally honest and laceratingly funny, you could count on her to tell you what she thought, not what you wanted to hear. For me, and I think many writers, doubt is the enemy. And because Angela always told you the truth, an email or a few words from her had a magical ability to clear your desk and your mind of anxiety. In the days since her passing, I find myself reaching to call her, and then remembering: she's gone… but not forgotten.

Monday, March 9, 2009:

In the months that have elapsed since my last blog entry, I have been distracted by the following:  

1. The start/stop stop/start that goes into getting on a roll with a new novel.
2. Efforts to turn Pharmakon into a film.
3. Working on a new movie with director Neil Burger. 
4. Worrying about whether or not Obama was going to be elected.
5. Celebrating the fact that Obama was elected.
6. Worrying that America has been too ravaged by war, Wall Street, the Bushes, etc. to be fixed in time for Obama to be reelected four years from now.
7. Because the bankruptcy of America plays a part in my new novel, I have been interviewing former Masters of the Universe and reading the business pages (something I had never done before). This crash course in the world of risk has taught me two things: 1) no one knows how much worse it’s going to get before it gets better, and 2) no one admits they are part of the problem. The net result of this is I find myself so anxious writing about the epidemic of anxiety that is so virulent in these past months I have trouble writing more than a few paragraphs without being distracted by my anxiety.

Happily/luckily Pharmakon’s publication in the UK and going on book tour in England and Ireland last week has had a rejuvenating effect. They have their own version of Wall Street woes. But unlike Americans, the English think it rude to talk about money, and even more un-American, they still try to talk about books. They also still have old-fashioned book parties that start at seven and end at several hours after midnight. Perhaps it is because they endured the Blitz, they know how to distract themselves with old-fashioned alcohol-fueled book talk.

Call me naïve, but I returned to New York with a boyish/optimistic hope; perhaps the upside of people not being able to afford second homes and Caribbean vacations and new cars and restaurants with linen tablecloths and overpriced wine will be people staying home, cozying up with someone they love, and reading books like they used to before they became addicted to cable TV.

Thursday, September 18, 2008:

The Lucky Ones premiere, Toronto Film Festival

Sadly, movies hit the market with a different velocity than novels – for most authors, there are no red carpets, nor such an overabundance of squealing fans armed with digital cameras that sawhorses are required to hold them back. Sadder still, the crowd that greeted the stars of The Lucky Ones with screams of “Rachel!” and “Tim!” did not call out “Dirk” – such is the life of a screenwriter/novelist. Not wanting to sound like Andy Rooney of 60 Minutes fame, I want to make it clear that it was a thrill to see characters I had co-conjured (with co-writer and director Neil Berger), appear fifteen feet tall on a silver screen – no question, a childhood fantasy fulfilled. Best of all was hearing the audience laugh when I intended them to laugh and get sad when I hoped that they’d feel sad. Not to brag, but one woman I saw outside the movie was actually weeping.

 As I said, the red carpet world of film festivals is a giddy ride for a novelist/screenwriter. You’re driven in limousines, you can order shrimp cocktails you don’t have to pay for, but you also have to come home – the morning after our gala, my wife and I discovered our daughter back home had head lice – after being picked up at the airport in yet another limo and dropped off at our house in Brooklyn, we promptly had to board the F Train and visit a Hasidic woman who specialized in head lice removal, and had treated my daughter and her classmates the previous day – luckily, they were found lice free.  

As they say in Hollywood, “It was good to be me,” going into the weekend. On Saturday, my daughter turned seven. The birthday party we threw for her and four of her friends began with a visit of a Russian hairdresser who gave them coifs a la John Waters’ Hairspray, this was followed by dinner in front of the TV blaring Hairspray while my daughter’s friends complained they could still smell the peas in the spaghetti even after the peas had been removed. A quick trip to the pizza parlor pacified their palates. Then it was on to several hours of karaoke – listening to Hannah Montana’s latest album three times is a torture worthy of Abu Ghraib. This was followed by a sleepover in which I got very little sleep. But the next day, the “happening me” feeling lingered as I set off for the Brooklyn Book Fair, where I had the privilege of reading with two of my favorite authors, Alice Mattison and Patrick McGrath. We had a panel discussion about family secrets, and it was particularly interesting to hear what Patrick had to say – whereas my father was a psychopharmacologist, his father was in charge of the largest and oldest hospital/prison for the criminally insane, Broadmoor. In spite of heat and humidity worthy of Rangoon, a good time was had by all. And the cozy feeling that I was part of the larger and kinder world of stories and storytellers stayed with me as I walked with my editor and friend, Carole DeSanti, down the brownstone’d blocks of Brooklyn Heights. Until she asked, “Did you hear about David Foster Wallace?” 

I did not know the man, but I admired his singular and overwhelming gifts. Hearing he had taken his own life was a shock that sent my mind reeling back to a friend who had taken his life just a few blocks from where I was standing in the first week of August. (I wrote about him in the August 10 post below.)

Monday morning, I was still thinking about my friend and Wallace – the friend who I had never met but known through the real life of words, and the friend I had known through the real life of having children the same age – together they stood side by side in the frontal lobe of my brain the next morning as I read Wallace’s obituary in The New York Times -- he, like my friend, had felt compelled to leave this world after having stopped taking his medication – the poison or the cure? If anyone has the answer, please don’t hesitate to write.

Tuesday, September 9, 2008:

The Lucky Ones, Life as a Road Trip

 At several points, I interrupted the writing of Pharmakon to coauthor (with director Neil Burger) the about-to-be-released movie, The Lucky Ones. When I began writing these two projects, I thought they had little to do with each other, Pharmakon tells the story of the tragic side effects wrought on a pioneer of psychopharmacology and his family by ambition, good intentions, and a drug study gone terribly wrong. And The Lucky Ones is a road movie about three soldiers returning to America from an unnamed conflict. When I was on the road for my book tour, and was asked what if anything they had to do with one other, I began to realize they had more in common than I was aware of when I was writing them. Pharmakon is a semi-autobiographical road trip into my own past. The Lucky Ones is a road trip into the heartland of America, an attempt to take the temperature of where we are now. The similarity that somehow eluded me while I was working on these projects is the characters in The Lucky Ones, like the charters in Pharmakon, are trying to come to grips with the madness of violence, make peace with the gross unfairness of bad luck and disappointment.  

They are both stories about outsiders trying to fit in. Due to circumstances beyond their control, they are out of touch, out of step with their homeland. Most interesting of all for me to realize is that they both chronicle America’s struggle to find/preoccupation with happiness. Chronologically, the three soldiers in The Lucky Ones could be Friedrich’s grandchildren. But they, like Dr. Friedrich (and like most Americans) take the Declaration of Independence’s declaration literally when it comes to our right to pursue happiness. Dr. Friedrich spends three decades trying to find a way to literally prescribe happiness to a depressed nation; The Lucky Ones now find themselves coming back to America having had to fight for it.  

It is strange to analyze one’s work as if in freshman English class, but I now see for me, The Lucky Ones is a hopeful post-script about family. The Friedrichs are a traditional family, as strange as they are all-American. They are both stories about people struggling to make sense out of the cards the universe has dealt them. The characters in both the movie and the novel, for all their differences, share the realization that something needs to be fixed in America and in themselves. But just what’s wrong and how it can be mended before further damage is done is open to debate. 

In both screenplay and novel, I am interested in the individual’s struggle to make sense out of madness. Most important of all, both works convey my belief that when life is funny and good and happy, it is also somehow a little bit sad, if for no other reason than we know that cozy feeling can’t last. Likewise, it has been in my experience that when life is terribly sad (at one point I had to have a heart operation in which I had a one in three chance of dying), it is also funny. Both The Lucky Ones and Pharmakon are stories about people who are surprised by what they discover in themselves and those they love. And hopefully, those who see the movie or read the book will be reminded of the simple fact that life is most wondrous in its unpredictability.

Monday, August 18, 2008

One of the questions that every writer’s asked on book tour more times than they care to answer is, “Why did you become a writer?” And as I traveled from New York to Washington for a reading last week, I found myself rolling down the same set of steel rails I had ridden home form school each day for eight years, it occurred to me that the answer I had never given to that question but was closest to the truth was, I became a writer because of the daily commute my parents inflicted on me by sending me to a boy’s school some twenty-odd miles from my home. Every morning, from 5th grade on, I had to catch the 7:10 train from New Brunswick. I got off in Elizabeth, but most of the other passengers went on to New York City. I boarded it with the kind of men icon-ized by the TV show Madmen. Businessmen, stockbrokers, ad execs, all sporting hats and attaché cases, climbed on board with me. As I joined them in the seats of the Pennsylvania railroad car, watched them read their newspapers, I wondered what change in me would occur in the course of growing up that would make me end up like them. For they seemed scary and unapproachable as they buried their heads in newsprint. Like them, I wore a jacket and tie and was armed with a briefcase, and dreaded the idea that I would end up like them even before I knew what they really did.

Over those school years, I became kind of a mascot for the men in the grey flannel suits who climbed on board the train with me each morning. As to the past that lead me to become a writer, I took my first step down that slippery slope when I vowed, whatever I became, it would not involve catching a 7:10 train. But by the time I was fifteen, I was on a first-name basis with many of them. And in a few case these men who once seemed so strange were no longer Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones, but Bill and Chuck. And by the time I was sixteen, every afternoon I would join them in the bar car, play cards with them, share cigarettes, and sometimes even have a sip of their beers. Riding that old stretch of track again last week reminded me that the stories these suburban warriors told me were strangely inspiring in a backwards sort of way. For invariably every one of those men I played cards with in the smoke-filled bar car would get round to the subject of regret – the job they should have taken, the girl they should have married, the business trip to Europe or Asia or wherever that they never should have come home from – one executive bar car buddy even pointed to a red-haired secretary one spring day who got off on the stop before us and told me she was his girlfriend. Which I found particularly surprising since he lived across the street from us with his wife and children.  

My train to Washington did not stop at the station I once got off at as a boy. And as it flew by in a blur, I wondered about those men, those first grownup friends I made out in the big world. I wondered where they were now, and after doing the math, realizing most would probably be dead, I made a mental note to give a better answer next time I was asked how I became a writer, and ceased to feel like a boy.

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Last Monday, I had my first reading in New York City. Book readings, by their very nature, are strange and antiquated adventures for a writer. My first reading was made a quantum leap stranger by the horrifically stranger than fiction fact that as I sat in the Tribeca Barnes & Noble, reading passages from my novel and giving a short talk about the birth of psychopharmacology, the shadow the tragedy cast over my family, our desire to prescribe happiness, and our inability to do so, a friend of mine was either preparing, in the process of, or had just committed suicide in Brooklyn. He wasn’t my best friend, but I liked him, and always enjoyed bumping into him on the street, and sought him out when I’d see him at parties in the neighborhood or at school functions – his young daughters were best friends with my daughter. His mood had seemed dark for the past few months, though he was incredibly successful and had received everything every Ivy League graduate and young aspiring Master of the Universe could want materially, he was unusually candid about how he “hated” his job. When he said it, I always thought to myself, everyone hates their job at times. But my friend, I realize now, was telling me something I wasn’t hearing – he really meant it. In hindsight, I sense that though he loved his wife, thought himself lucky to have her, and adored his children, he longed for another life that he somehow felt was beyond his grasp.

 But I have to stress, the warning signs were minimal. If I were to list my hundred friends and acquaintances and pick the ones most likely to take their own lives, I would have put him among the ten least likely. As friends and neighbors tried to make sense of how a man with so much to live for could choose death, I discovered that he had been depressed and “stopped taking his meds.” Two weeks earlier, we spent the afternoon on the beach with our families, the subject matter of my novel came up. He promised to make one of my readings. And he also volunteered vis-à-vis mental health in general, “Psychotherapy takes too much time and costs too much to make sense to me.”  (I’m not sure if those were his exact words, but certainly it was something very close to that.) 

As I write this, I think of him holding his daughters’ hands, staring out to sea, his back to me. I can’t calculate what his decision will cost his family in the long run. But the violence he inflicted on himself has left me unnerved, saddened, and baffled.

A Welcome from Dirk

I’m Dirk Wittenborn, and I welcome you to my webpage with more than a little trepidation. For I am a Luddite when it comes to computers in general and web pages in particular. I am also slightly dyslexic and very impatient. All of which, in a roundabout way, relates to my novel, Pharmakon. In telling the story of the Friedrichs and Casper Gedsic, I wanted to try to convey a visceral sense of the way different people think, and how the constant flow of thought that careens through the synapses of our brain affects how we feel. Or how we think we feel. Or how we think we think we feel.
 
Each of us is the world’s greatest expert on our own brains. And though few people give much thought to the thousands of thoughts that we entertain in the course of our brain’s attempt to focus and facilitate those activities that take up most of our lives, i.e., food, sex, relief of boredom, escape from the tedium we have to put up with to get the money required for food, sex, the relief of boredom, and the illusion that we’ll ever escape the tedium of whatever 9-5 activity we have to put up with to get the money to purchase what can only be bought with death … peace of mind.  
 
Perhaps it is different for the Dalai Lama. But everyone I’ve met has a great many thoughts they don’t know what to do with. Being a writer, I write them down. Which of course is not the same as making sense of them. And though I subscribe to the belief that people are the same pretty much the world over, having just come back from two and a half weeks in Europe with my wife and child, I have observed subtle national differences when it comes to how much people reveal about their actual thoughts and feelings. When I ask my French friends how are they doing or, as is my habit (to use my father the psychologist’s favorite conversation starter “How’s life been treating you?”) they answer with an enthusiastic grimness, “Terrible. Awful. Not so good. I’ve been better.” One Parisian told me, “What can I say? The train has left the station for me.”
 
But in America, I have observed a disconcerting trend, particularly in those population clusters that are connected with movies, media, books, and entertainment in general. If you ask someone how they’re doing, the answer is invariably, “Fantastic! Fabulous!” Or, the most dishonest of all, “It’s all good.” If the question is posed to you and you answer with a simple, “Good,” your friends whisper behind your back, “Why not great? I wonder what’s wrong?” And your less than close acquaintances mutter, “I’ve heard it’s been a hard time for him.”
 
Of course, these are just my thoughts. But the fact that I’m thinking them tells me I’m feeling them, too. In fact, I’ve been feeling something is not quite right for a while. Having had a father not unlike Friedrich, I am not a stranger to paranoia. And the thought has occurred to me that we are all operating under the influence of something—is it in your medicine cabinet, your stash box, glassine envelope, at the local bar… or perhaps it’s in the water. Not to be paranoid, but the fact of the matter is, a great many drugs don’t break down in your system, i.e., they’re still active when your urine leaves your body, and in spite of all the purification, even after the toilet’s flushed, the germs removed, in the next glass you’re being dosed. Now if you don’t believe me, I suggest you might look at this: “[O]ver 40 million people -- are contaminated with trace amounts of pharmaceuticals including antibiotics, anti-seizure medications, anti-inflammatory drugs, psychotropic drugs, pain medications and even caffeine.”
 
For those of you who enjoy worrying about stuff like that, I suggest you take a look at the ARHP blog.
 
Or read David Healey’s book, here.
 
Or peruse the June 10, 2008 New York Times editorial, “Hidden Drug Payments at Harvard,” here.

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“everyone I’ve met has a great many thoughts they don’t know what to do with”

PHARMAKON is available now.