SongWriter Season 5 Continues with Jean Hanff Korelitz and Warren Zanes

By Ben Arthur  |  June 28, 2023 | 4:43pm
Photos by Michael Avedon & Piero Zanes Fine
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SongWriter Season 5 Continues with Jean Hanff Korelitz and Warren Zanes
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SongWriter is a podcast that turns stories into songs, featuring Questlove, David Gilmour, Joyce Carol Oates, Steve Earle, Amanda Shires, Susan Orlean and Neil Gaiman. You can hear an exclusive preview of next week’s episode featuring Jean Hanff Korelitz and Warren Zanes only at Paste.

Author Jean Hanff Korelitz is not convinced that film adaptations are sufficient evidence of a book’s success. Though adaptations of her own work star Hugh Grant, Tina Fey, and Nicole Kidman, Jean is quick to point out that even after this a first draft of her latest novel, The Latecomer, was soundly rejected by her publisher.

Which isn’t to say she, and her fellow writers, don’t care.

“We all care about it enormously; if we say we don’t care, we’re lying,” Jean says. “But there have been so many great adaptations of not-so-great books, and there have been fantastic books that just didn’t work on screen.”

The Latecomer was eventually snapped up by a new publisher, and went on to become a bestseller that – you guessed it – will soon be adapted into a television series. A rambling, multi-generational portrait of a family coping with trauma and riven by secrets, Jean recounts that the book was influenced by the writing of John Irving.

“The book that I had in the back of my mind as I was writing was The World According to Garp,” Jean says. “Whenever I mention Garp at a signing or a Q&A, the same thing always happens: There’s this audible sigh. This is such an incredible compliment to any writer. Decades after reading that book, people are still sighing with the beauty and the sweetness of it.”

To write a song in response to her novel, Jean picked an old family friend, Warren Zanes. A professor, a songwriter, and an author, Warren spent his late teenage years in his brother’s band, The Del Fuegos. During his time with the band they toured with Tom Petty, and many years later Warren and Tom reconnected to collaborate on the biography, Petty. This in turn led to other writing opportunities, including a recent critical history of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.

One of the themes in The Latecomer that resonated with Warren is how unspoken pain can grow and flourish in a family.

“It’s actually more powerful when it’s a secret,” Warren says. “When it’s a secret, that’s when it really lays down its deadly laws.”

In part Warren was drawn to this aspect of the book because of some complicated dynamics in his old band. Though The Del Fuegos presented as a democratic band of equal partners, Warren recalls that the power and creative control really rested with his brother Dan.

“I made my brother go to therapy with me years after to really talk it out, because I was hurting,” Warren says. “The sibling stuff goes deep. I didn’t go away kicking up my heels, but I heard some things in those sessions that I needed to hear.”

Ben Arthur (@MyHeart on Twitter) is the creator and host of SongWriter. His latest song is “Baby Hitler.”

 
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