Erik Larson on Why the World Needs Another Churchill Biography

Goodreads: I thought your book was incredible, and I could not put it down. I didn't know I could be so engaged with a 500-page historical book. 
 
Erik Larson: That's great to hear. But it's a little disconcerting because that's actually the second time in 24 hours I've heard somebody say exactly the same thing. I'm glad that people are overcoming their aversion to 500-page tomes of history! 

GR: The book has it all. Sex, drama, celebrities, and, of course, war.  

EL: Yeah, what else could you ask for—violence, sex, and gossip? 

GR: You’ve said the idea for this book was born when you moved to New York and imagined what 9/11 must have been like for those who lived through it. Can you say more about that? 

EL: I found myself wondering, What must that have been like? What was it like where there were 57 straight nights of bombing, then intensifying, but more sporadic raids? How could anybody endure it? And then I started thinking, Well, how did Churchill do it? He had a family…how did he and his family do it? 

I'm an anxious parent, I'll be the first to admit it. I worry about my three daughters. And the things I worry about are stupid things: boyfriends, smoke alarms, carbon monoxide detectors, stuff like that. But if you're Churchill and you've got a 17-year-old daughter and the rest of your family are grown, your son is newly married, and your daughter-in-law’s pregnant…how scary is that? 

GR: Right. I had not grasped the relentlessness of the Blitz until reading your book. 

EL: Me, too. Even though I was fascinated by the Blitz, I’d shied from it as a subject because it seemed such common knowledge. Like, everybody's heard of the Blitz. And I never had a sense of how one might go about doing a fresh take on it. But then, delving into it, I realized, wow, I didn't know anything about this. 

GR: Is there a message for today in your book?

EL: Unfortunately, there is. [Laughs] When I set out to do the book, there was no conception that we would have a president named Trump—nothing. And now, suddenly, we do. As I was working on the book, it kept hitting me, day after day, how different Churchill was—how much of a leader, how much of a unifier, how much he raised the national level of courage and enthusiasm to fight the war. The juxtaposition between that and what we've got now—regardless of anybody's politics—is shocking. But that was not my intention whatsoever because this wasn't even an issue when I started. 

People have been asking me if the world really needs another book about Churchill. And my reply is: Yes, now, more than ever. Because we need to be reminded of what real leadership and courage were like. 

GR: I was impressed by the scenes of Churchill walking through London during bomb raids. You have that great line in the book, “it is one thing to say ‘Carry on,’ quite another to do it.” 

EL: And that's the motivating energy in the book. That’s why I felt like I could say something new. I don't want to blow my own horn, but I'm going to: Nobody has done this kind of thing on Churchill before. The tendency with Churchill is to engage in hagiography, making him up to be a saint or a hero, like he won the war all by himself. And it's very clear that he did not. He needed support from the people around him, and he needed them to do a lot of the lifting. And nobody has looked at the interplay of those relationships in that time of crisis. And just this idea of how do you function—but you have to function! And how do you do that when there were 57 nights in a row of deliberate bombing of your city? I'm not going to say that this is the perfect book on that subject, but it gives a glimpse of that. 

GR: Can you say in a nutshell what it was about Churchill that inspired people to stick with him when the country was getting destroyed day after day?

EL: I think it was a combination of his sheer courage and confidence, and this wonderful gift of rhetoric that allowed him to articulate and model courage in a very compelling way. He never wavered. In his speeches, there was just absolute confidence that Britain would be victorious. But confidence alone would have been foolish. He leavened that with sober appraisals of what the realities were. He didn't try to sugarcoat things. 

But somewhere in there—this is going to sound stupid—there's also a little bit of magic…I don’t know, even having spent all this time with him. I can attribute it to concrete, identifiable markers, like the guy was a hell of a speaker and he was confident. He also modeled courage on a daily basis, walking through raids or going to the rooftops when the bombs were coming and dragging people along with him. 

One of the things I found most astonishing, frankly—I'm known worldwide to be a nervous flier—and here's Churchill, taking off in a two-engine Flamingo passenger plane with half his government as the Luftwaffe is dominating the skies over the Channel, cities are on fire—and he flies to France! To me, that was one of the most amazing moments. It's just like, wow, what a nut! 

His daughter Mary—who I adore, she's my favorite character in the book—talks about how she was afraid for him because he was flying. That’s something you never hear in books. Most say: He flew to France. Well, OK. But his family was terrified that he was flying to France! I like those little details.

GR: Did you always know you were going to focus on his first year as prime minister? 

EL: I didn't think of it in those terms. A big part of what draws me to a subject is the shape of the narrative. I'm in this for the story. I don't care if people learn—I like it if they do—but I'm in it for the real, true, nonfiction story, but story. And after the first couple of months of research, I knew that certain threads miraculously came together on May 10, 1941, one year exactly since he became prime minister. That astounded me. First of all, the last big raid. Mary's personal conundrum comes to an end. Rudolf Hess parachutes into Scotland. And then, three days before, in the House of Commons, there's a challenge to Churchill because things aren't going so well. 

You know how if you’re reading a really good novel—I also hasten to add, always remember this is not a novel—but in a really good novel, often a lot of things come together right at the end? One of the things that absolutely thrilled me, thinking about this, was this confluence of threads on the same day. 

GR: I've read that you described yourself as a compulsive rewriter. Was that true for this book?

EL: Oh my God! I tell my wife I'm still suffering from posttraumatic Churchill-book-writing. I have a very strict personal ethos, which is that I only turn in something that I would be very pleased to see in a book the next day. And honest to God, by the time I finished the first draft, which my editor would never see, I think it was 200,000 words. Like a Bible! 

And so I started trimming and realized, Oh, God, I don't want to cut this. I gotta cut this, I gotta wrestle this narrative into shape or nobody's going to read this. 
I'm a compulsive rewriter, but I am definitely a compulsive cutter. I'm very happy if I have a hundred percent more stuff than I actually need, I feel confident that the result is going to be pretty good. If you end up with less than you actually think you need, you're screwed. You're filling up with whatever. By the time I got through that first round of cuts and rewrites, I’d cut about 40,000 words. 

GR: You cut a book from the book!

EL: Absolutely. And I was going nuts. All I could do was take the book and lay out the chapters all through my house—in this case, my apartment in Manhattan—so that I could see everything and get a sense of the layout and shape. And I would go along watching it, almost like reviewing my troops, trying to eliminate chapters where I could. It's painful. Then my editor, who did a tremendous job with this book, cut another 40,000 words. 

GR: What are you reading now?

EL: Emma Straub's upcoming book, All Adults Here. She was the moderator of a panel I was on, and I felt that I should read her book. It’s great. I’m really enjoying it. Prior to that, I was reading A Man Called Ove. It’s a novel about a crusty old fart. It's very good, very moving. 

Also, I've been weirdly in a rereading mood. I don't know why, maybe it's just the contemplative reading of January? Among the books I’ve been rereading are Michael Connelly's Angels Flight, one of my favorites. And a couple of Henning Mankell’s Swedish noir books. And I really loved The Woman in the Window. You know, the thriller written by that guy who is sort of crazy. There was a big New Yorker profile—

GR: Oh, I remember that profile! Though I never read the book. 

EL: Well, the problem with the profile is that people who read the profile were like, “I'm not going to read that book, the guy's nuts.” I didn't read the profile, but I read the book and loved it.

GR: You have such an incredible track record. What are your hopes for this book?

EL: I try to not have any particular hope for quote unquote “success” for a book. I want people to like it. I want people to be moved. I want them to read to the end—that's the important thing. And I want it to be right. But you can't help but also periodically think, “Oh, God, what if this is the one that falls off the rails, and everybody’s out there muttering, 'Oh, that guy's lost it.' [Laughs] I just try not to think about it. Do the best you can and get that book out and hope the reception is good. 

GR: Having been immersed in British history for the past several years, I have to ask: Do you have a take on Harry and Meghan?

EL: I know nothing about Harry and Meghan. I have read nothing. I've seen photographs. I know there's some big brouhaha. I am not interested. [Laughs] So there you go.