PBS+Books

Our film could have been about a radio show host, a comedian, a really good singer, a screenwriter, a journalist – but I made the decision that Garrison Keillor should be portrayed above all else as an author. He has written more than a dozen books, not counting various collections of short stories, anthologies and collections of poems.

He says in the film, “All I can do, is write.”

My favorites:

Happy to Be Here is a collection of short stories written between 1970 and 1983.

Most are hilarious, because they are ludicrous. As the title says, reading this book will make you happy. They are Keillor’s take on the human condition – he is down to earth, nostalgic, and reminds us who we are as Americans.

Leaving Home is a collection of monologues about the "fictional" town, Lake Wobegon. Each of the 33 tales start with the familiar, “It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon…”

But I’m not so sure Keillor thinks these are fiction. He says in the film, “I used to think this was a fictitious town, but now I’m not so sure”.

We tried to use that same ambiguity in our documentary, to make it a quasi-biography, so you are not sure what’s true and what isn’t.

One Wednesday (the Lake Wobegon monologues have to be written by air time every Saturday night) I heard him say to himself, “It’s Wednesday already, I better see what has been happening in Lake Wobegon”. This made me realize the town exists as a real place in his mind, and he simply visits there in his imagination each week and reports to us what has happened.

In my opinion, Keillor’s best and most sophisticated novel is Love Me, written in 2003. I read it right before we started production, and it revealed an aspect of him I didn’t know existed. A romantic side. Obviously autobiographical, it’s about a young writer named Larry Wyler who gets a job at the New Yorker, meets some very interesting New York women, and ends up finding happiness in his own backyard. Reading between the lines in Keillor’s work, I always felt there was an underlying sexual view of life in the Lake Wobegon stories. In this love story it’s out in the open.

I tend to read a lot of books that could have potential for future Secrets episodes.  At the moment, I’m in the middle of The Lost City of Z, by David Grann.  It tells the story of the mysterious disappearance of Colonel Percy Fawcett, his son, and his son’s best friend in the Amazonian jungle in 1925.  Great story, really well-written, with some surprising and interesting twists along the way. We are actually developing the Fawcett story into an episode of Secrets, so keep an eye out for it.

One of my recent favorites (which will go back on my nightstand as soon as I finish lending it to anyone and everyone who will take it) is When A Crocodile Eats the Sun, by Peter Godwin.  Told through the personal story of the author and his family, it’s a remarkably insightful and heartbreaking story of a country (Zimbabwe) being torn apart by a ruthless dictator who is determined to hold onto his power, no matter what the cost to his country and it’s people.

Also on my list is an oldie but a goody waiting for a long-overdue reread.  It’s The Serpent And The Rainbow, by Wade Davis.  Based on a true story of a Harvard scientist who goes down to Haiti looking for the anesthetic drugs used in secret voodoo zombification rituals, the book tells a gripping tale of science, religion, politics and death.