Nathan Hill on Whether Love Can Really Stand the Test of Time
Oprah describes her 102nd Book Club pick as “a love story like no other.” While most romances focus on how two people fall in love, Wellness explores how—or whether—two people can stay in love.
In this video, author Nathan Hill reveals how his own life helped him envision the lives of Jack and Elizabeth, the troubled couple at the heart of his novel.
Wellness was inspired, in part, by Hill’s view from his old New York apartment. “My window looked out across an alley into a wall of other windows,” he says, admitting that from that vantage “you can kind of see into other people’s apartments.” He imagined what it would be like for a couple to catch glimpses of each other through windows like his own.
Imagining other people’s interior lives came easily to Hill. He moved around a lot growing up—“I think I lived in eight homes before the age of 16”—and this experience served as “training” for writing fiction. By always meeting new people, and trying to understand where he fit in relation to them, he was “constantly trying to figure out what’s under the hood of someone else,” which he now understands as “one of the jobs of a novelist.”
In the video, Nathan also explains how he channeled his own (very real) passion for photography into the fictional character of Jack and how traveling the world changed his perspective on the power of landscape.
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