Book Club: A Conversation With Alexandra And Maria, Ctd

In our next clip, Maria and Alexandra discuss the idea that a writer is a “professional observer”:

Meanwhile, on her blog Brain Pickings, Maria quotes Alexandra, a professor at Barnard who specializes in dog cognition:

I am, professionally, an observer of animals — by which I mean nonhuman animals. I actually have been less interested in looking at people… But of course, as it turns out, the human animal is also infinitely more complex than I give us credit for. And I appreciated — a lot — the fact that, at the end of this book, I could take a walk with anybody — it didn’t have to be an expert… — and I became more appreciative of anyone’s perspective. If you can just get somebody to talk about what they see when they’re walking down the street, they will almost inevitably be seeing something different than you. Because they are a different person, and there’s a whole background there. And, actually, I think that is a kind of writerly trick — it’s sitting in the restaurant and making up stories about the people who sit around you… being interested in [them] and being able to imagine, backwards, their stories.

Follow the whole book club discussion here, and email your thoughts and observations about On Looking or the podcast to bookclub@andrewsullivan.com. You can listen to the entire conversation from Alexandra and Maria below: