Recently I was flying across the country and my friendly seatmate told me she was a flight attendant. We chatted and then I asked her to tell me the weirdest thing she’d ever seen on her job.
“I once delivered a dinner tray with grapes on it to a man in first class,” she said, “and a little hand reached out of his jacket and took a grape.”
It turned out the man had a monkey stowed away in his jacket, a small monkey I presume. But this is what she saw: a large hand attached to a man in first class reaching for a grape; a small hand emerging out of his chest also reaching for a grape.
Did the man sneak through security clasping a monkey in his shirt? Did he bring it through in a carrier then tuck it away? So many questions! But the image of a little hand reaching out for the irresistible grape stays with me. And that this flight attendant thought at first it was a man harboring another, smaller, man.
I tend to ask this what’s-the-weirdest-thing question of everyone I meet who seems game--cabbies, doctors, people who style hair. I have banks and banks of hidden-monkey type stories. Some make it into my writing; some just remind me of the fact that this strange experiment called life has more odd results than I could imagine on my own.
I do a lot of research, particularly interviewing, in my writing. In The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here I interviewed many scientists and much of what we talked about involved straightforward questions about theories of things like time. But I always try in my interviews—at the end, when I can’t mess things up—asking a curveball question. What obsesses you? What are you doing that’s exciting but maybe a little strange?
One scientist, Donald Hoffman, told me that he was trying to find a mathematical equation that would correlate in some way with the idea of God. Wow.
Researched nonfiction has become an important part of the genre, particularly the kind of personal yet fact-fueled work done by writers like Michael Pollan, Mary Roach, and Atul Gawande. When I teach research writing I teach it as cultivating and enabling curiosity before anything else. That means when you have a talkative seatmate on a plane, you try to figure out what they’ve seen and known that you haven’t. It also means being curious about those you know, like family members, and trying to draw out their stories. Maybe just cultivating the habit of believing that everyone who passes you by in this world has something interesting and unique to tell you.
The “I” of nonfiction is going to run out of steam sooner or later if it sticks too much to that pronoun. Sometimes that “I” needs to be not alpha and omega but conduit or channel.
Looking things up is fine. I go online to find out facts many times a day. But information that’s on a website probably has been lifted from another website and that from another, etc. Sometimes you’re just tucking into a brew of common assumptions. Either way, individual human knowledge is different. It involves minds and perspectives that happen all of once in this world.
Ask five weird questions a day until you get in the habit of it. Write me and ask me a weird question, if you need some practice. Write an essay called “Five Weird Questions” with five different people and their answers. If other people do it too it can just be a thing, like writing about your thumbs. Which makes me wonder about the strangest thing you all have experienced while hitchhiking . . . I’ll stop now.