Chatting with Tracy Kidder

To my way of thinking, Tracy Kidder is a famous author—who's not famous enough. I haven't read all his books (and I do intend to), but House remains for me the right book at the right time. In 1985, this true story of the construction of a home in Massachusetts hit me just as I had beome a homeowner, and Kidder's descriptions of the evolution of the design, the negotiations with builders, the groundbreaking, and the roof-raising really hit home, so to speak. But what really got to me was that it was all focused on the human aspirations and struggles behind the project. It's probably one of the first pieces of what is now commonly called "creative nonfiction" that I read, and it marked a gradual shift in my reading (and writing) patterns from fiction and poetry to nonfiction. Before Kidder's Monday afternoon speech at ALA, I had an opportunity to chat with him about his new book, Strength in What Remains, the true story of Deogratias, a young man from Burundi in central Africa. In 1993 he was forced onto a terrifying journey, beginning with a six-months-long escape on foot from ethnic violence in Burundi and genocide in Rwanda. He winds up in New York City, where it sometimes seemed his troubles had only just begun. Asked what his message to librarians would be during his Auditorium Speakers program, Kidder joked, "I've got a new book. I think it's a pretty good book. That's my message, basically!" But he went on to say that he thought of librarians as "great tools for curing ignorance." The role of libraries in his career has been "an intermittent role, although it seems to me I've used them all my life. And, of course, in college they were absolutely crucial, but they were also a great place to meet girls," he laughed. "One of the things I think we may lose in this new electronic age is the lucky find," Kidder said. "I'm just old fashioned, perhaps, but it's partly the presence of the physical books themselves that I find important but also the lucky associations that you make. You go to one part of the library looking for a certain thing and you find something else that you want even more sitting two shelves down, and I don't know how you can substitute that." He also called libraries "tremendously important culutral centers." "The protagonist of my new book is a great lover of libraries," Kidder added. "They practically saved his life and certainly part of his spiritual recovery took place in libraries." Kidder talked more about his new book in the Auditorium Speakers series, explaining his approach to the topic. "I don't want to make Berundi exotic," he said, "I want to make it comprehensible." Writing about a thing is a way of understanding it, he suggested, and among the most difficult things in the world to understand are "tragedy and injustice that are preventable." War, he said, is "the most amazing human stupidity of all." Asked about his next writing project, Kidder said that when he takes on a book like Strength in What Remains, "it always feels like I'm jumping out a window and I don't know what story I'm on."