The Complexity of Dementia

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Why do we make heroes high status in the real world and relatively low status in the world of serious fiction? What accounts for that demarcation? I think that there is, it's as though high culture fiction is a kind of a culture of its own with its own set of values. And those values consist among many others of complexity and also a great privileging of the intimate,. The person in front of you, the humanness of individual humans.

As a writer of profiles, Larissa MacFarquhar is granted the privilege of listening to, learning from, and sharing the stories of extraordinary thinkers like Derik Parfit, Noam Chomsky, Hilary Mantel, and Paul Krugman. And she’s often drawn to write about the individual thinking behind extreme altruism, dementia care, and whether to stay in a small town. Motivating her is a desire to place readers inside someone’s head: to see what they see and to think how they think.

In their dialogue, Larissa and Tyler discuss the thinking and thinkers behind her profiles, essays, and books, including notions of moral luck, exit vs voice, the prose of Kenneth Tynan, why altruistic heroes are mainly found in genre fiction, why she avoids describing physical appearances in her writing, the circumstances that push humans to live more extraordinary lives, what today has in common with the 1890s, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded December 17th, 2018 Other ways to connect

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