Chris Bohjalian – Favourite Things

Each week Reaction Weekend brings you Favourite Things – interviews with interesting people about the skills, hobbies, pleasures and pastimes that make them who they are.

Chris Bohjalian is the  best-selling author of twenty-two books, including The Red Lotus, Midwives, and The Flight Attendant, which is an HBO Max limited series starring Kaley Cuoco. His other books include The Guest Room, Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands, The Sandcastle Girls, Skeletons at the Feast and The Double Bind. His novels Secrets of Eden, Midwives, and Past the Bleachers were made into movies, and his work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages. He is also a playwright (Wingspan and Midwives). His latest novel, Hour of the Witch, was published by Doubleday this week.

These are a few of his favourite things…

Reading in the bath

I can read a book for hours in the bath. But it’s critical that I don’t bring my phone. The bath, minus the phone, is one of the ways I rediscover that great, distraction-free solitude that can be found in a novel. I read the way I did before the digital age.  

Crunchy peanut butter

I don’t eat breakfast because I want to get right to my desk in the morning and my wife and I usually don’t eat lunch until early afternoon. I subsist in the morning on great, Roman emperor-like spoonfuls of crunchy peanut butter between six in the morning and when I actually sit down to a meal like a civilised grownup.

Fountain pens

Although I write on my computer, I print out a batch of work every fifty or so pages, and then I edit them with a fountain pen. I like fountain pens because they demand that I think more slowly – otherwise I make a mess. And thinking more slowly helps me to find the right synonym: rose instead of red, burgundy instead of rose. Writing is precision, and it is with fountain pens that often I find the right word.

Walking my dog in the woods

We talk a lot these days about being mindful. Well, I am the least mindful person on the planet. I am riddled with anxieties and self-loathing, and I’m utterly incapable of living in the present. But the closest I come to being mindful is when I am in the woods or the fields around my home with my dog. The dog is a rescue who is gentle, loving, smart and capable of eating a whole package of English muffins and feigning absolute innocence.

A great bar

I come from a family with alcoholics on both sides, so I will never romanticise alcoholism. But I appreciate a great bar, either alone or with my lovely bride: the elegance of a well-polished mahogany balustrade, the phantasmagoric colours of the well-lit bottles of booze behind the bartender, the dreamlike shapes of the martini glasses, the wine glasses, the high ball glasses. I wrote the opening of The Flight Attendant on cocktail napkins in one bar and at least two scenes I can recall from my new book, Hour of the Witch, in two others.