Hernan Diaz grew up in Argentina and Sweden, attended college in London, and now lives in New York City. He worked as a professor and academic editor for years before publishing his debut novel, In the Distance, in 2017. In the Distance was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2018, and Diaz’s second novel, Trust, won the award in 2023. He has published short stories and essays in The Paris Review, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and The Yale Review, among others, and has received numerous awards and honors, including a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Trust, Diaz’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, centers on fictional 1920s financier Andrew Bevel and his wife, Mildred, with each of the novel’s four distinct parts peeling away layers of the artifice and mystery surrounding the Bevels. As a lifelong music lover and hobby instrumentalist, one thread of Trust that fascinates me is Mildred Bevel’s passion for music and patronage of real-life composers like Amy Beach, Igor Stravinsky, and Charles Ives.
Diaz visited Butler University in September 2024 as part of the Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series, and we chatted about craft, the writing life, and how music inspires him.
Jenny Schuster (JS): When did you start writing? Have you always written fiction?
Hernan Diaz (HD): Yes, I started writing when I was a child. As soon as I learned how to write, I started writing fiction. When I was around four, I was reading and writing. That is the only thing that, I think, stood out in an otherwise very average childhood. From that very early age, I knew that I wanted to do that. At that time, I was living in Stockholm, then we moved to Argentina, and there weren’t really MFAs or creative writing programs or workshops of any kind available. They simply didn’t exist.
When it came to thinking about how to make a living, when I went to college, it seemed to make sense to get a degree in what would be the equivalent of comparative literature. Academia gradually sort of sucked me in, and I was also interested in it, especially in philosophy and theory. Fiction was what had led me to that path, but then that path, unbeknownst to me, took me elsewhere, took me away from writing and actually reading fiction. I found myself reading more philosophy than novels and drifting away from literature.
And then I decided to correct that and resume the original course. I always read novels and tried to write them, but on the side. At a certain point in my life, I decided I didn’t want for that to be the side gig, the thing that was more or less contingent in my life. I wanted for my professional life to revolve around that, and so I left my tenure-track job. I was teaching at SUNY at the time and got this job as an editor, which freed up a bunch of time, and then my day job became my side gig. There was no personal investment in that; it was just a job. My true passion and my true job, even though it didn’t pay at the time, was to write.
JS: When you were in the job that wasn’t your passion—I always wonder about a writer’s daily routine—where in your day did you fit in writing?
HD: I’m sure that’s a concern for a lot of writers because most of us have two jobs: our day jobs and our writing jobs. I would encourage everyone to write on their jobs and to steal stationery and to use the printer. (Laughs.)
JS: (Laughs.)
HD: I did a lot of writing on the job, and I also tried not to take any work back home and be very, very zealous and protective of my time. And I think it has also to do with a certain kind of libidinal investment. Of course I wanted to do a good job, I’m a perfectionist, I’m a neurotic, but I tried to be dispassionate about it, and I think that’s very important. I think, for me, it was crucial to have found a job that didn’t burn the same kind of fuel that I need for writing. And teaching burned the same kind of fuel, or a very similar part of that fuel, you know? Because you have to read all the stuff that you’re not necessarily interested in. So this was completely separate, and when it was done, I was tired, but not emotionally tired.
JS: How long was the phase where you were working as an editor and writing as well?
HD: (Sighs.)
JS: Not to put you on the spot. (Laughs.)
HD: No, no. I just left my job a couple of months ago, but I was there for thirteen years. That’s why the heavy sigh, because each time I think about it, thirteen years is a very long time. And, yeah, it was great for me, but now I’m sort of elsewhere. It was time.
JS: You’ve talked in past interviews about the rejection we all face, all of us who are kind of at the beginning of our writing journeys. If you could tell yourself a couple years ago something about this, give yourself some advice, what would you say?
HD: It’s hard. It’s extremely difficult to live with rejection. Anyone who walks into this path in all earnestness and with the commitment that it demands should know, unless they’re extremely lucky, that they will face a whole lot of rejection. And it hurts. It hurts a lot. For me, the hardest part of that was to tell myself that what I was doing had worth for me and merit for me, despite the world telling me that it didn’t. And that creates a disconnect that is very strange because you become a solipsist to a certain extent, and it’s a weird form of narcissism that is necessary. You have to tell yourself that what you’re doing is worthy enough for you to continue doing it in the face of utter indifference from others. Gradually, you also start feeling a little crazy because you keep telling yourself one thing while the world is telling you the opposite.
So, there was, for me—I’m talking about my own experience—this feeling of derangement and anger and sadness and heartbrokenness because I care. This is, aside from my family, the one thing that I really have devoted literally my entire life to. So, what I would tell my younger self—I certainly stuck with it, so that is a piece of advice that I don’t think I needed. What I would definitely have told myself is to be more sociable. I think that would have helped me a lot. It would have made things less painful, and maybe I would have found a road toward publication earlier. But I was a misanthrope, and I was just doing my thing in utter solitude. I think I thought there was a certain degree of purity in that, but, boy, was I ever wrong. It would’ve been so much better to be able to commiserate with others, to just be able to share this experience with others who are going through a similar thing, and maybe to find help in others and connections, and I don’t mean that in a climby, cynical, gross way. It’s just—widen your social horizons. That is so tremendously important, and I didn’t see it at the time, and that was foolish.
JS: I think that’s really good advice because when I started writing again, it was the same thing. It was just me, just myself, and I wouldn’t even tell people what I was writing.
HD: Right, but it’s important to preserve that space of radical solitude. I think, for me, I can’t think or write without it, but I wish I had learned about the other side as well and found a way to make them coexist, which I’m still kind of struggling with, to be honest.
JS: So, I loved Trust. I was just thinking—we have a book club at my office, and we read Trust about six months ago, and it was such a fun discussion. I’ve since re-read it, and a lot of my questions today are about music since there’s just such a strong musical thread running through it. I could probably ask you twenty-five questions just about that.
HD: Let’s do it. I love talking about music.
JS: Perfect. So, when you were originally working on Trust, how did music come to be a part of the book?
HD: Well, music is a big part of my life. If I ever considered a different career, that was music, which I was very serious about for a while. And I still am. I don’t play anything anymore, but I’m a very devoted and serious and, I think, competent listener. So, I listen to music while I write—also because I have tremendous issues with noise, which I find, terribly, sort of an aggressive part of life. I’m very sensitive to it. So, that’s a way also to create kind of a wall for myself.
In the case of Trust in particular, of course, the book was about money, finance, capital, and this woman, Mildred, and her role and her place within that world of finance. And I thought that she would be an artist who was thwarted by the gender roles of the time, which is something you see in all the literature of that period. Edith Wharton, for example, wasn’t allowed to write by her parents. Especially in that upper crust, it was unladylike to devote oneself to the arts. So, I thought, obviously, music has such a big overlap with math. She could have been a poet, she could have been a dancer, she could have been a visual artist, but that didn’t give me that intersection with mathematics, which was very important for me. Her fierce passion for music wasn’t allowed to express itself, so it was channeled and funneled into the realm of math. That’s how music came into this particular project.
JS: It sounds like you were a musician yourself.
HD: I had a really strange, I think, path. Maybe not that strange. I started out by playing jazz. I was very interested in jazz, and I was very proficient at it, I think. Note that I didn’t say “good;” I said “proficient.”
JS: (Laughs.)
HD: But this connects with my academic career. I was reading so much philosophy and aesthetic theory and aesthetics in general, and I became very interested in quote-unquote classical music and musical theory, the history of music and forms, and so on and so forth. And I started studying a little bit of composition and harmony and counterpoint and all of that and kind of veered away from jazz, never to return. I mean, I still listen to it, but that is kind of my journey. And I think maybe I killed it a little bit for myself by turning it into a hyper-intellectual endeavor, you know?
JS: You killed the love of music or just the idea of performing?
HD: The idea of performing and, to some extent, the sheer physicality of it, something that you feel on your skin and your body, and this pre-verbal experience that is music. I did everything within my power to drag it back into the realm of concepts and words and discourse in general. I don’t know. Just—I was a pretentious youth. (Laughs).
JS: Oh, I can’t believe that. (Laughs.) Were you a piano player, or what was your instrument?
HD: I played a bunch of instruments. I started out playing saxophone, then, yes, everything leads to the piano. I’m a lousy piano player. But it’s the best tool to understand music, I think.
JS: I only ask because I also mediocrely play a few instruments—piano and flute. So, I could tell when I was reading Trust that you obviously have an insider’s understanding of music, which I really appreciated because I feel like music is extremely difficult to put into words and to write about.
HD: Yeah, I agree.
JS: And one of the things that I loved on my second read—Mildred is trying to explain a concept of investing to her husband. He essentially does what she says, but it doesn’t turn out right, and then she says he was like a player piano. And I really started to think of her as a composer. I don’t know if that was what you had in mind, that she’s a composer and he’s the guy who’s just like, “Okay, I’ll look at the sheet music, whatever.”
HD: Yeah, but also there’s the artist in Mildred, as well. You can have the dexterity to “execute,” and I’m using that cold word totally on purpose, a piece of music, but there’s something else. So, what I liked about that character is that she has both of those things, which is unusual, and that is something that I struggle with on the page, too. For me, it’s about that rigor and control and precision, but, at the same time, emotion and heart and a degree of spontaneity that is everything. And I’m not particularly interested in either of those two things on their own. It’s such a tough negotiation between those two spheres because they’re obviously quite antithetical. But I think it is in that struggle, in that dissonance between these two fields, that art takes place. That’s the way I look at it. I’m not particularly keen on hyper-formal experiments that go nowhere, however sophisticated and complicated and complex and stunning they may be. Just like I’m not interested in a raw scream, or whatever.
JS: I also wanted to ask about the multi-part form of the novel because my mind is always transposing music onto it. I began on the second read looking at it as a symphony because there are themes and motifs that tie through the movements.
HD: Yeah, it’s a sonata form.
JS: Yeah, exactly. Was that what you were thinking when you started in that form?
HD: Oh, absolutely.
JS: That’s fantastic.
HD: The mimicry between music and literature back and forth is everywhere in the novel, beginning with, yes, the sonata form. Every good sonata form ends with sort of a revisitation of all the themes that are gathered together in this final coda at the end, which is precisely what happens in the book, where you get the whole story yet again, but everything kind of comes together. As you well said, there are motifs that are sometimes quoted verbatim. I’m very interested in repetition in music and in literature. I think one of my favorite composers is Morton Feldman, and I’m very interested in that brand of minimalism.
JS: I’ll write that down; I’m not familiar with him.
HD: Oh, you’re not?
JS: No. I have very large blind spots in what I’m familiar with but I love minimalism.
HD: Oh, Morton Feldman is the best of the bunch, I think. And he’s sort of a generation before Steve Reich and Philip Glass and John Adams. He’s a contemporary of John Cage. He was active between, I want to say, the late fifties and the mid-eighties. He set Beckett to music. He also composed this piece called “Rothko Chapel” for, obviously, Rothko Chapel. I think a good place to start with Feldman would be his Piano and String Quartet, and there’s a beautiful version of that by the Kronos Quartet, and I forget who the pianist is. That, to me, condenses the spirit of his work very beautifully. It’s just one movement that is about an hour long. And it seems to be motionless music because, again, it’s extremely slow and extremely repetitive in a trance-like way. So, it’s music without development. And I think development—and this is again where music and literature meet—is the cornerstone of Western music. There is this kind of diegetic narrative gesture.
And we were talking about dissonance a moment ago. The very idea of dissonance and resolution is very narrative. There is a conflict, which is the dissonance that has to be resolved. That’s at the most micro level. But, if you think again of a symphony, it has this journey-like structure, it has this very narrative structure, and you expect for things to happen, which, again, is a very narrative way of looking at music.
Feldman destroys all of this, just like Beckett destroys it, if you read almost anything by Beckett, but I’m thinking of the Trilogy, especially The Unnamable or later work like Company. It feels like stasis—it feels like nothing is happening because there’s no development in the traditional sense of the word. But what happens is time. Time is what happens. I mean, many other things, but, so, suddenly, a certain amount of time has gone by, and you realize that you’re elsewhere within the music, and the music is elsewhere. It has shifted. And I think that is beautiful.
So, repetition. In everything that I write, and In the Distance, too, the book that I’m writing now, in many of my short stories and unpublished work, I like to even repeat verbatim passages, which happens in Trust several times. Repetition is a big thing for me, and I’m very interested in what it does to the reader.
But even this whole idea in Trust of the bell motif and how it’s inverted and reverted and in a serial way, something that happened in Baroque music all the time and then Schoenberg picks up in his own way. But it is a form of repetition, too, like you have a set series that is repeated in different orders. The intervals may be inverted, but it is the same series that is repeated, creating different effects. And, again, I’m really into that.
JS: The bell motif is something else that I just adored on the second read, the thread of the bells going through, and Mildred’s obsession with the particular notes. I highlighted like crazy the second time I read the book, especially in that part.
HD: Oh, that makes me happy.
JS: Along the lines of Trust as a symphony, I did wonder, since I’m interested in writing multi-part works as well, did you start with one part and the other parts kind of grew out of it?
HD: I am not super methodical as a writer. I become methodical when I know enough about the book that I’m writing. Then, rules emerge, but they don’t pre-exist. I try to be as open as I can and let it shift as it needs to. So, I don’t outline; I don’t draft. It started out as a straightforward novel. And I knew it was not going to work, but I wanted it that way for a number of reasons, the first being that money is multitudinous. Money, I mean a fortune, contains the labor of all the people who brought that fortune into being and whose work was expropriated. Let’s face it: that’s always what happens with fortune. I thought that whatever this nascent book was going to be, it would have to have this kind of polyphonic, again a musical term, and choral structure to reflect—scaled down, of course—the choral dimension of capital.
But I started writing this straightforward novel, then very early I realized—oh, let’s make this a novel within the novel. This also allowed me to write in this kind of obsolete tone that I love, sort of a turn-of-the-century, nineteenth- to twentieth-century prose that I adore. But, again, it’s very dated, and it would be like writing music like Mahler. I mean, you could, but why would you?
JS: Right. He did it.
HD: I was very happy to have found this frame. And then the book quickly became even more than about money; it became about storytelling itself, and the power of narrative, and the narratives of power. And off it went.
JS: That’s fantastic. I wondered about that because “Bonds” is first, and I think that’s so interesting to see how the rest of the novel grew out of that.
HD: Yeah, and they weren’t written in that order. I knew “Bonds” was going to be the novel within the novel. Then I thought, okay, the real man on whom this is based will respond to this book. And then I thought further—oh, wait, no, it should actually be ghostwritten by somebody else. That added a third. And then I knew that I wanted the voice of the wife to close it all up. But I wrote “Bonds” first, then I wrote Ida Partenza’s section, the third part. Then I wrote the second part and the last part last—so, one, three, two, four. Because one and three also present the whole narrative. It was a way for me to learn about my characters and their falsehoods, too.
JS: It is interesting re-reading part two after being already familiar with Ida’s story. I really think that this is a novel that you gain more from every time you read it.
HD: Oh, that’s lovely to hear.
JS: You’re picking up on new things. I really picked up on a lot more the second time because I was familiar with the story already, familiar with the characters, and familiar with kind of where we were going. I think the fact that readers can do that is a credit to you because it’s an amazing experience.
HD: Well, there’s no greater praise than hearing that someone has re-read this work. That is bonkers. It’s such a gift. Thank you for doing that.
JS: I also love talking about and deconstructing point of view.
HD: Me, too.
JS: I read and adored a short story you wrote last year called “Triptych.” Trust has several different points of view, and In the Distance is in third-person point of view. “Triptych” is in what I once heard described as “ostensible third,” which means that it seems like it’s in third, but then there’s a narrator that steps forward near the end. And I adored that, and I would love to hear what you think about point of view when you’re writing your various works. How do you settle on a certain direction?
HD: I’m very, very strict about point of view, and it’s one of the formal aspects that I think the most about, even before I set pen to paper: is it going to be first, is it going to be third? How much does this narrator know? What is this voice privy to? Of course, when one thinks of point of view, one thinks of Henry James’s 1912 preface to Portrait of a Lady, where he describes the house of fiction and the window. It’s not just the point of view in a directional sense. Over whose shoulder are you looking?
But point of view also presents the additional challenge of how deep that gaze goes. So, I could be looking at you, I can see your movements, I can see what you’re wearing, but do I also see into your mind? And if I see into your mind, how even more do I know about your past, or do I know just what you’re thinking right now? I think gauging that distance, in addition to the perspective itself, is extremely important.
So, I take this very seriously. I think if the ethical dimension of storytelling—and I’m not talking about the subject matter of what’s being told formally—presents itself anywhere, it is in point of view. It’s extremely important because it’s an ethical question. Where there is an administration of knowledge, there is power.