Born on Valentine’s Day in 1955 and raised in Kansas City near Loose Park, New Yorker staff writer David Owen has mined his childhood for literary gems like this: “During parties at our house, a cloud like an inversion layer would fill the downstairs, and the next morning, when Anne and I went down to pour bowls of cereal for ourselves and wait for cartoons to come on, there would be overflowing ashtrays everywhere, and sodden cigarette butts floating in the bottoms of almost-empty beer glasses, whose sides were spider-webbed with dried foam. The nineteen-sixties were the golden age of smoky, inebriated parents.” (“The Dime Store Floor,” The New Yorker, Jan. 25, 2010).
After graduating from Pembroke-Country Day School, Owen attended Colorado College before graduating from Harvard University with an English degree.
Owen has written a number of books, most recently Volume Control: Hearing in a Deafening World (Riverhead, 2019). He lives in Morris, Connecticut, with his wife, writer Ann Hodgman, and their poodle, Henry. IN Kansas City spoke with him by phone recently while he was recovering at home from a broken leg he suffered while playing golf, slipping in a muddy spot he had warned others about.
There is a comforting sameness about The New Yorker, at least in terms of fonts and page layouts, in an era of upheaval and decline at many newspapers and magazines. What changes have you experienced at The New Yorker over 32 years?
Everything is much shorter now. I remember when I started there were no limits on how long you could go on and on, and when I look back on some of the things I wrote then, I’m amazed that they ran at the length they ran at.
Now assignments come with word counts or parameters. They stick to them, with rare exceptions, and things are edited more tightly than they were 30 years ago. There’s more of an emphasis on articles that bear some relationship to the things that are happening right now.
One of the things I used to like about the old New Yorker is that you might read a profile of a film director, say, who had no film coming out. It would just be an interesting person. That was nice in one way, but it’s a better way now. It feels more anchored in the real world than it did 30 years ago and especially before that, before my time.
Do you think it’s better? If I read a profile of a film director who doesn’t have a movie coming out or maybe is even dead, I feel like if it’s new to me, it’s news.
Right. I think readers have less patience with that now. There are so many things that could be written about, and I don’t mind having assignments anchored to something that is happening right now, which it usually is.
Your most recent piece for The New Yorker, “Lost in the Mountains,” is a thrilling account of a camping trip you took in Colorado, but it happened when you were a youth in Kansas City. Not to give away too much, but a fellow camper at your camp went missing while you were there. He was eventually found, but not for two weeks. What was the hook in that story?
That falls into the broad memoir category that The New Yorker does a lot of. They are often called either “Personal History” or in this case, it was in the online New Yorker in a category called “The Weekend Essay.” It was just an interesting story, and I think what was interesting to my extremely young editor was just how different [laughs] childrearing was 55 years ago from the way it is now.
That article, the fact-checker was young, and she couldn’t believe it [laughs]—she was wanting to call people and ask, “Did they really not wear helmets? Did they really let you go for three days without food?” All those things were true. Less likely to happen now.
What that essay made me think about, having also enjoyed a lot of unsupervised free time growing up but then having children of my own, is how difficult it is to find the balance between letting kids experience life independently and make mistakes while also protecting them from grievous harm. How did you and Ann negotiate those competing interests with your own kids?
Yeah, it’s hard. One thing, I would always remind myself that most of my favorite memories of growing up involve doing things that were risky in one way or another or that I shouldn’t have done, that were forbidden.
You want to protect your kids but at the same time you don’t want to prevent them from doing the kinds of things that you yourself remember as having been especially meaningful or fun or interesting.
In that piece about summer camp, I mentioned that the summer after that, when I was 17, my parents let me and one of my 11th-grade classmates go all by ourselves on a backpacking and mountain climbing trip in that same area [where the camper was lost]. In those days, there was no GPS and no cell phones. I kind of showed my dad on a topographical map where we were going to go, but we didn’t have an itinerary. We were just going to wander around in the mountains for a couple of weeks. We carried all our food and 150 feet of manila climbing rope.
‘‘One of the things that I’ve wondered, with my parents’ generation, is whether they had just survived the Second World War, and maybe it just felt like all the bad things had already happened, and they were sort of mellow about possibilities. There were also fewer dangers then. There were fewer guns, there were fewer cars. The world didn’t seem as filled with perils as it does now.”
My mother told me later she had no idea why they had let us do that. She thought maybe we were just so persuasive that they fell for it. But I think they also—my father had very happy memories of going to summer camp in Montana, where they basically lived like cowboys. They rode horses and roped cattle and branded cattle. He found a prehistoric axe head. He pulled fish out of streams with his hands. It was one of the great experiences of his life. He went with friends of his from school, and they traveled by train to get there, and so I think that he was very sympathetic. And I’m really glad. But I was also glad [laughs] that my own kids never asked if they could do the same thing, because you would really feel like, “Gee, can I let you do this?”
And I think it’s even harder now. Both my kids have kids and when I think, “How do you let your kids ride a bike in the street? When you let them walk to school, what do you do about phones?” All these questions that to me seem much harder than the questions my wife and I faced, or my parents faced when I was a kid.
One of the things that I’ve wondered, with my parents’ generation, is whether they had just survived the Second World War, and maybe it just felt like all the bad things had already happened, and they were sort of mellow about possibilities. There were also fewer dangers then. There were fewer guns, there were fewer cars. The world didn’t seem as filled with perils as it does now.
You said your kids never asked to do the kinds of things you did. I never reflected on that, but my kids also didn’t ask to do the same kinds of things in junior high and high school that I asked to do. That’s interesting.
Yeah, right? One of the guys I play golf with is exactly my age. He went to Brown. The way that he traveled home for vacations, with his parents’ full approval, was hitchhiking from Providence to Chicago.
It seems like we all did it back then.
A lot of things that now seem almost insanely dangerous didn’t seem that way then necessarily.
The outdoors seems, from your writing, to have had a powerful pull on you when you were younger. Does it still?
In a way. Now the main thing I do outdoors is play golf, so that’s very different from what I was like when I was a kid. I had this idea when I was starting at that camp you know, fifth grade, sixth grade, I thought, “Oh, I’ll live my whole life in the mountains. This is what I want.” That was part of the reason I went to Colorado College to start with, was the incredible pull of—you know, I pictured myself living in a cabin in the hills someplace. But then I changed my mind [laughs] and moved to the East Coast. And I’ve been a very East Coast person since then.
What caused you to change your mind and move to the East Coast?
I’d been the editor of the college newspaper and the college magazine, and I had a great time. I really liked it. But I felt that I had done everything that I wanted to do, so I withdrew, and I took a year off in which I worked and traveled. I saved enough money to spend three months bumming around in Europe, and then I applied to other colleges and ended up at Harvard, which is where I finished and where I met my wife. We met actually writing for The Harvard Lampoon, the humor magazine. That was one of the reasons I was interested in Harvard—I was a big fan of The Harvard Lampoon.
Was it a pretty straight line from The Harvard Lampoon to The New Yorker?
No, it wasn’t a straight line. I worked for a few months as a fact checker, at New York magazine. I hated it. The pay was terrible, the hours were endless, and I quit without really knowing what I was going to do. The first thing I did was write a book. I pretended to be a high school student at a large public high school about an hour and a half away from New York. You’d get arrested for it now, and you should be, but the school knew I was 24 and not 17, and I went for a semester and then wrote about it.
That led to Esquire magazine excerpting some of that book, and I wrote for Esquire for a while. And Harper’s magazine was in the same building as Esquire, and I showed them a couple of things I’d written for Esquire, and I wrote for them for a while. Then the editor got fired and I wrote for The Atlantic Monthly. A difference between the early ’80s and now is that Harper’s and The Atlantic competed in one way, but they shared an advertising sales force. I wrote for The Atlantic for about six years, and then I sent some things to The New Yorker and started writing for them. And that’s what I’ve done since then.
‘‘. . . if you look back through the things that I’ve written, I’ve written a little bit about a huge number of things, so I know a little bit about a lot. I feel like I know a lot but it’s an inch deep.”
At this stage of your writing career, what are the topics you are most interested in exploring and why?
There are lots of them, and if you look back through the things that I’ve written, I’ve written a little bit about a huge number of things, so I know a little bit about a lot. I feel like I know a lot but it’s an inch deep. Which is the way my mind works, I think. It’s kind of a short attention span. But it’s great, because when something comes along, if I get interested in it, I know that I can write about it. At exactly the time that I started writing for The New Yorker, I took up golf, kind of late. I was 36. And I realized as soon as I did that if I write about this, I’ll be able to have a lot of experiences that the average golfer couldn’t have. And that turned out to be true. For 30 years I wrote for Golf Digest, and I’ve written some golf things for The New Yorker, too. But I got to travel all over the world. I got to spend time with Tiger Woods. I got to do all these things that the average golfer isn’t allowed to, and it was only because I could turn it into a job, and so it’s great.
I did the same thing when my wife and I foolishly bought a very old house. It consumed a lot of our time, energy, and money. But I was able to make a subject out of it, too, starting with a piece for The Atlantic Monthly about sheetrock and plaster, and then a couple of books. [My wife] has written several cookbooks. We’ve both been fairly effective at turning the ordinary parts of our lives into topics that we could write about, and that we could cobble together into a job.
You wrote in one piece for The New Yorker about going with your sister on a tour of places from your childhood in Kansas City to see if they smelled the same. You also talk about how you can lose scent memories if you try too hard to recreate them.
Yeah, it was funny. It was my sister’s idea, to go around and see if these places we remembered smelled the same. There was a doctor’s office and the Nelson-Atkins—we both had these vivid memories of what the art gallery smelled like when we went there on class trips. That was one of the disappointing ones, because it did not smell the same. I think it was because so much renovation had been done. Whatever the source of that smell had been when we were kids, it was gone.
But there were lots of places where we went, and you’d catch this whiff of what a doctor’s office smelled like in a medical building on the Plaza.
We went to the house that we grew up in, and it was completely different. The people who had bought it had totally changed it. But the basement still smelled the same and it was weird. You feel like you sort of step into a time machine.
And then the thing that struck me, and it was over my father’s Old Spice deodorant, was that you find a smell that evokes the past for you—it doesn’t just evoke it, it sort of transports you back into the past—but if you then experience it too much, if you sniff it too often, it fades away. It becomes something you associate with your life now and not with your life then. You kind of have to be sparing with these little mini portals into the past.
Interview condensed and minimally edited for clarity.