Q&A With My Dad

Doing a Google blog search on myself (well, on the name “Yglesias”) I came across a Q&A with my own father. I thought this exchange was interesting:

On a personal note, what are the positive aspects of being an author and son of highly-regarded authors? Any negative aspects to this at any point in your career?

My father and mother (both were prominent and successful writers) were born into desperately poor families. They had a long struggle before they were able to find the time to write. My father published his first novel when he was forty-three, my mother when she was fifty-six. I was privileged to grow up during their efforts to write and so I learned from their example and had the luxury of trying much earlier. My first novel was published a few months before my mother’s and very much during the heart of my father’s career. I didn’t find it was beneficial to me to be thought of as part of a writing family. It caused misperceptions such as that all of us had good contacts that could help each other. The best part of it was that I learned from my parents because I grew up in a household that discussed books all the time, and they were full of the energy and discoveries of young writers thanks to their late start. There were discouraging aspects too. My parents were nearly as green as I when it came to being published writers. Hence their advice, in particular their emotional relationship to writing, wasn’t mature and in some ways exacerbated my own youthful mistakes.

I’m not a fiction writer like my dad is and his parents were. But to me the most helpful thing about having writers in the family was simply that it created a supportive environment for making some idiosyncratic career choices when I was right out of school. In my experience, a lot of college-age people from reasonably privileged backgrounds end up overestimating the amount of downside risk involved in various choices one makes in one’s early twenties, and that their parents typically exacerbate anxieties on this score rather than using their experience and wisdom to lean against it.