Eric Puchner: “Dream State” | Oprah’s Book Club

In this episode of Oprah’s Book Club: Presented by Starbucks, Oprah and author Eric Puchner discuss his newest book "Dream State" - a novel New York Times bestselling author Elin Hildebrand calls “an absolute masterpiece.” Set in Montana, Oprah’s 111th book club pick is a page turner and emotional rollercoaster that spans 50 years in the lives of college friends starting in the early 1990s. As we witness this tight circle experience friendship, a love triangle, marriage, raising kids aging and death, the novel evokes powerful questions about what really matters in life. For this conversation, Eric and Oprah are joined by a live audience enjoying Matcha Lattes in a Starbucks cafe in the iconic Empire State Building. Eric talks about character development, his writing process and his thought-provoking depiction of friendship, marriage and parenting while taking questions from the audience of avid readers. BUY THE BOOK! https://amzn.to/4q7DjuA ⁠https://books.apple.com/us/book/dream-state/id6504841280⁠ https://books.apple.com/us/book/dream-state/id6504841280 Listen to the Audiobook on Spotify: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/4x3YoAvjZDfv7zEFg4CB8N?si=547a878fa812404f https://open.spotify.com/show/4x3YoAvjZDfv7zEFg4CB8N?si=547a878fa812404f%20 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@Oprah https://www.youtube.com/@Oprah%20 Follow Oprah Winfrey on Social: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/oprah/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/oprahwinfrey TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@oprah?lang=en Listen to the full podcast: Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0tEVrfNp92a7lbjDe6GMLI Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-oprah-podcast/id1782960381 #oprahsbookclub

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Oprah Winfrey?

  Welcome, Eric.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 0:09Oprah Winfrey?

  You were so stunned when I called.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  I was incredibly stunned when you called. In fact, my publicist had made me think that he was just calling to talk about something kind of boring.

• 0:17Speaker 02

  Hello?

• 0:18Oprah Winfrey?

  Hello, is this Eric?

• 0:20Speaker 02

  Yes, it is.

• 0:21Oprah Winfrey?

  Eric, hi, it's Oprah Winfrey.

• 0:23Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 0:25Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 0:26Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  I teach at Johns Hopkins University, and I get terrible reception in my office, so I was crouched in my car in this kind of ugly parking lot. And then it was Oprah on the line and almost dropped the phone. I was completely astonished.

• 0:38Oprah Winfrey?

  Well, it's great to have you here. I told you we were going to be in a Starbucks Books in Conversation. And you know what you said? Oh, will I be a part of that?

• 0:49Oprah Winfrey?

  That's the whole idea, Eric.

• 0:54Oprah Winfrey?

  Hi, everybody. Welcome to Oprah's Book Club, presented by Starbucks. Hello. We're here in the gorgeous New York City Starbucks, and we are having some interesting books, conversation, and coffee. And we are all readers here. Hello, readers.

• 1:16Oprah Winfrey?

  I think that your neighborhood Starbucks is a great place to get together with friends with a copy of my new book club pick and connect over a delicious cup of curated coffee. The pairing for this book is a matcha latte. My 111th book club pick is a real page-turner and an emotional roller coaster, wouldn't you say? It is the novel "Dream State" by Eric Puchner. An absolute masterpiece, a wonder of character and craft. Beautiful, brilliant. One of the most anticipated books of 2025. That's just some of the literary praise for Eric Puchner's novel "Dream State."

• 2:01Oprah Winfrey?

  It's set among the serene lakes and picturesque mountains of Montana, which is its own dream state. This is a story about Cece, who's arrived alone in town one month early to plan her wedding. It's also about her fiancee Charlie, who's a doctor back in Los Angeles, and his best friend Garrett, who just happens to be the officiant for the wedding. When the tumultuous wedding day arrives, Cece makes a shocking choice that affects everybody in her life. That's when Dream State becomes a story about a love triangle spanning 50 years. This is a story of opportunity, grief, commitment, family, marriage, longing, regrets, parenthood, connection, human nature, friendship, and life.

• 2:46Oprah Winfrey?

  I sat down at Starbucks in New York City with the author and a cafe full of readers. Merry people in here? A lot of merry people? Resonated, right? The audience told us why they connected so deeply to these beautifully written characters.

• 3:01Speaker 03

  Your writing style is brilliant. You create the characters. They're so in-depth and they keep going.

• 3:06Speaker 04

  When I read this line in the book, I was just immediately just like, I was like, yes.

• 3:10Speaker 05

  I wanted to know where the title came from and what you were thinking about it. The way that you move time along in the book is magnificent.

• 3:18Oprah Winfrey?

  Dream State really affected how I received my own marriage. That's why Eric Bookner's Dream State is my 111th Oprah's Book Club selection. So we don't want to give away the plot, but my hope is that people buy and read the book, Dream State, and then come spend some time with us on this podcast to hear how you wrote this piece of art, it really is. But for now, I want you to set up for us the characters and the plot. What's the story? And first of all, how did this story come to you?

• 3:52Speaker 01

  OK.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Well, it didn't come to me all at once.

• 3:56Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  But the story is about a lake house in Montana, northwestern Montana, in the fictional town of Salish, Montana. The lake is actually based on a real lake, Flathead Lake, in Montana. And the house in the book is based on a house that I have been going to for the past 25 years, every summer with my family. It's my wife's great-grandfather's house. He built it. And it was out of the family for a while, but then it came back into the family. The story about the house that it's based on is that my wife's great-grandfather was a Lithuanian Jew who immigrated to Montana and was so destitute, he lived in a packing crate for a while

• 4:40Speaker 01

  and then ended up starting a dry goods store and making some money that way and ended up building this house. He lived in Glasgow, Montana, but he ended up building this house on Flathead Lake in the 19th, early 1930s. It took a long time because apparently the carpenter was a total drunk. And if you go and you look at the house, there's not, whenever someone comes to do work on the house, there's not a single right angle in the entire house.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  But it's a house that is really near and dear to my heart and that I love.

• 5:09Oprah Winfrey?

  Is the house still there?

• 5:10Speaker 01

  Oh, it's still there. We go, I'm going this summer. Yeah, so we go there every summer.

• 5:14Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay, well, that's good to know. Because we know what happens in the story.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:18Oprah Winfrey?

  But we're not saying. Okay. Our audience has read the book and came ready with questions. Kim, where are you? Okay, there you are.

• 5:24Speaker 03

  Hi. Your writing style is brilliant. And you create the scenery, you create the characters, and they're so in-depth and they keep going. How does your process begin? Like, what inspires you?

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Well, thank you for saying that. You know, writing a novel is really hard. It's never going to be perfect. And one of the wonderful things about a novel is its ambition and that it can afford, in a way a short story can, it can afford to be a little bit messy. So when I was thinking about this novel, I was thinking about something that actually happened, which was this kind of awful wedding story. And I was actually the officiant. In this wedding, I won't tell you who it is, but people who I know well. And they had, they had a wedding at the house in Montana in which everyone got norovirus, which is, features in the book. But you know, if you don't know what norovirus is, it's incredibly infectious.

• 6:21Oprah Winfrey?

  I had it.

• 6:24Oprah Winfrey?

  I had it this summer and I so related and like, we all were at the dinner table. Then somebody else got it and somebody else got, it is the worst possible feeling. I thought I was gonna die and I thought, death is gonna be okay. It's all right. Just let me go. Just let me go. Yeah, it's really bad.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  It's super contagious, so.

• 6:47Oprah Winfrey?

  That's why I don't know how Charlie stood it. I don't know how Charlie made it through.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  You know, what happened in the actual wedding was that one of the flower girls threw up on the way down the aisle because she was sick.

• 6:58Oprah Winfrey?

  Anybody here ever had it, norovirus? No? Oh, okay. You have? Yeah. Yeah. Coming out of both ends, it's terrible.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  It's not pleasant.

• 7:06Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  And the.

• 7:07Oprah Winfrey?

  But I lost six pounds. I was so happy.

• 7:12Oprah Winfrey?

  Small ways. I thought, wow, this is great. Hit the goal. All right.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  It is a good way to lose weight, definitely.

• 7:23Oprah Winfrey?

  Great way to lose weight, really quickly. Go ahead.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  So the groom.

• 7:28Oprah Winfrey?

  The flower girl was throwing up. Oh, boy. And what do people do when that happens?

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Well, it's in the middle of a wedding. You can't stop a wedding. And the groom was also green because he had it, but he didn't want to admit to having it. And so, and then afterwards, much like in the book, they had hired a square dance band to play. And so everyone was do-si-doing and passing the norovirus from one to the other and another to the other. And so, I had this in mind as like something I wanted to sort of head toward as the kind of fulcrum of the book. And I knew I wanted to write about that setting because I love that setting so much.

• 8:01Oprah Winfrey?

  So this novel started because of the norovirus?

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 8:04Oprah Winfrey?

  At the weddings? Wow, okay.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I mean, I was heading towards that, that moment. I really didn't know what was going to happen after that, honestly. I just knew that that was going to, everything was gonna change. And I also wanted to write a sort of novel about marriage. A kind of marriage story, a marriage plot that ends with the wrong marriage. I thought that was interesting.

• 8:30Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay.

• 8:33Oprah Winfrey?

  And that just came to you. I want to write about a marriage plot that is the wrong marriage.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  It did, because I didn't, I mean, the marriage plot has been done so many times. And the epigraph of the book is from Midsummer Night's Dream. I was thinking about that sort of plot that ends in a marriage. And I thought, how can I make that original? And so I thought, well, we'll have a marriage halfway through the book, but it's not the right marriage. And in fact, they don't get their marriage papers certified, so they don't end up being married. So I was just interested in that. And I didn't actually come up, I don't want to give anything away, but it were to the end of the book, returns to the marriage that we see a glimpse of halfway through the book. For a long time, I didn't know how to end the book. I was, I knew that it was spanning 50 years,

• 9:21Speaker 01

  that it was going into the future, that it was about this next generation as well, and how they would deal with the mistakes from the past, both the sort of, you know, mistakes that the characters have made, but also the mistakes that society has made. But I didn't know how to end it. And I was at a writer's residency, Yato in New York. And I was there for a week. And I was like, I finally got this residency. I have a leave off of work and I don't know, I can't write. I don't know what to do because I can't end this thing. And then it occurred to me to go back to that original wedding and to finish it and to write it as if this was a different, almost like dream life that might have occurred. And I actually started crying. I was so happy that I had come up with a way to end the book.

• 10:02Oprah Winfrey?

  I thought the dream life had something, the dream state, which is the name of the book, had something to do with this psychotic depression or depressive psychosis that Garrett went through. It had nothing to do with that?

• 10:16Speaker 01

  No, it had a lot to do with that as well. Yeah, thank you for picking up on that. And there's also a moment when Jasper, who becomes a drug addict, is talking about feeling like his life is always a dream. And I just started thinking about the way that we feel like we're often sort of trapped in a dream these days. Everyone's on the internet all the time. These awful things are happening in the world. We're on our phones, we see that they're happening. And for Jasper, it's particularly acute because he has a heart condition. And there's, you know, something in his heart that saved him, saved his life. And so he feels, sometimes feels that his life is dreamlike.

• 10:58Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay, we've been asking this question. If you could have coffee with any of the characters in the book, who would it be?

• 11:04Speaker 01

  I think I would have coffee with Cece. I just, I like her a lot. And I think she would-

• 11:08Oprah Winfrey?

  How many are your Cece coffee people?

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Wow, okay.

• 11:12Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay, I would have thought more.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  I think she would make the best coffee. By far. Garrett is, he makes like cowboy coffee.

• 11:19Oprah Winfrey?

  No, you're gonna meet in a Starbucks and have the coffee, okay? But you would have coffee with Cece. I would have had coffee with Jasper. Okay? Anybody else? Who would you, who would you choose to have coffee with? Yes, yes? Jasper too? Jasper people? Jasper people, okay? Garrett people? Okay? Charlie people?

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 11:42Oprah Winfrey?

  No Charlie people.

• 11:46Oprah Winfrey?

  Lana people, yeah, yeah, okay? Very good, all right. So you said that you were drawn to characters who find it difficult to navigate through life because those are the people who you often are drawn to in your own life. And so that was also a part of the writing for this.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, it's partly that when you write a novel, only trouble is interesting. But also, I think one of the wonderful things about a writer is being able to empathize with people who are really struggling. And I'm interested in that in my work. I'm also interested in my life. And I, I wanted to write about Jasper in particular. I have two close friends of mine, my best friends in high school, both became heroin addicts. So I was interested in writing about that epidemic.

• 12:33Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay, Jannick, you have a question. Normally novels last, you know-

• 12:38Speaker 05

  They're sometimes shorter. They're like 10 years in span, 20 years. You chose to do a 50, almost 60-year spanning novel. Why did you choose to do something so lengthy that covers so many friendships, relationships, drama, all that kind of stuff? And what do you hope that people take away from it?

• 12:56Speaker 01

  That's a terrific question. I'm really drawn to novels that are ambitious in that way with their use of time. One of my favorite novels is Light Years by James Salter. Also sort of focuses on a house and a family. I guess I'm drawn to novels in which time is the antagonist because I feel that's sort of the way that our lives are led. And grappling with that reality was really important to me. And obviously also I was interested in climate change and the sort of devastating effects, particularly in the West, American West. Because one of the things that's happened since we started going to this area in Montana 25 years ago is that I've watched it change dramatically.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  I've watched the landscape change. It's not far from Glacier National Park. It's gorgeous there. It used to have 150 glaciers. It's down to 25. So all that snow that used to be there isn't there anymore. And so it's having an effect on all the lakes and the lake levels. It's having a huge effect on biodiversity. And also with all the fires, sometimes we go there for a week or two weeks, and we can't go outside for most of that time because the air quality index is like in the red and it's very unhealthy. So it's tragic what's happening there. And so, but I wanted that to be, that to be part of the book.

• 14:18Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah, I think the scenery, Montana, first of all, Montana's having a moment right now. And I think all of it feels like it's its own character.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you.

• 14:28Oprah Winfrey?

  And you wanted it to, you wanted to.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  I did, absolutely.

• 14:30Oprah Winfrey?

  That's on purpose.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 14:33Oprah Winfrey?

  I think also the desire to be authentic comes through a lot in the book. I remember in the beginning, I was struck by that sentence where she was being complimented by all the teachers because she wanted to be a pediatric neurosurgeon and then realize that she just liked the sound of it. And like the way it sounded and the way people treat you when you say I'm gonna be a pediatric neurosurgeon versus actually what that really means, yes. So there's a lot of play on what it means to be authentic in this book.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I'm really interested in this sort of divide between our private and public selves. And I think one of the trickiest things in life is bridging that divide. I also think like what we think we want isn't necessarily what we truly want or what we should want. And I'm very interested in characters who think they want the wrong thing for themselves. And we as readers know that, no, actually, that's not, that's not what you want. With Cece, it's sort of like trying on different masks because pediatric neurosurgeons, since she was a kid, she was sort of in love with those words. I mean, that's, that's language. And once she got to med school, she realized, God, I hate this. This isn't, this isn't fun, and I'm not interested in this.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  So she has to change tack, but she also is confused as to, she, she wants to do something great in the world, and she just doesn't know what to do.

• 16:00Oprah Winfrey?

  Well, one of the things we, I think we all appreciated about this book are that the characters are going through so much of what we all have experienced in our own lives, like, where am I going and what does this mean? And how am I defining myself? And am I just defining myself? Is this really real to me? You were able to capture that so well. And also, I think male friendship, which I'd never thought of this this way before. You say on page 140, male friendship was all about rhythm. It was a kind of song without words, an instrumental you knew by heart. You learned the rhythm together and practiced it all the time for days and months and years, perfecting it by feel.

• 16:39Oprah Winfrey?

  It was the swing of your silences, the karaoke track behind the gibberish you sang. What the hell? Were you thinking then, when you wrote that? How long did it take you to come up with that? First of all, you have the idea, and then you have to form the words to express this idea to us. How long did that take?

• 17:03Speaker 01

  A long time. I labor over my sentences. I write them and rewrite them and rewrite them.

• 17:08Oprah Winfrey?

  Because you love sentences.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  I love sentences. I'm never so happy when I'm rewriting a sentence. I mean, I love my family, too.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  But it does make me uniquely happy for some reason. I think a lot about-

• 17:24Oprah Winfrey?

  When you finished that sentence, you just went, "Yeah."

• 17:29Oprah Winfrey?

  "I'm gonna have a matcha latte." "Yeah." Yeah.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  I think a lot about male friendship. I have... I think a little bit like Garrett and Charlie, who are the two main male characters in the book, have a sort of friendship in college that I never really found in college. I didn't find until I was later. I never really understood how to talk to most men in a way that they understood. So it wasn't until later and I went to grad school, and then I was at Stanford for a while doing a fellowship there that I made the best male friends of my life. But they're all writers, you know, and we have a common language, I think.

• 18:16Oprah Winfrey?

  You all love sentences.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  We like sentences, yeah. But I also think that so much of male friendship revolves around like wanting to say something to that person, like, "I love you, man. You're amazing, you know? You're terrific. You're really important to me." But not being able to say it.

• 18:33Oprah Winfrey?

  But if you said that, they'd go, "Ooh."

• 18:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. Because that's not... Being that sort of direct can be misinterpreted, I guess. And so you have to sort of communicate that in subtler ways.

• 18:48Oprah Winfrey?

  And that's what you mean by the rhythm?

• 18:50Speaker 01

  The rhythm of your-

• 18:51Oprah Winfrey?

  A song without words.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  I mean, when you're hanging out with your male friends, you can insult each other, and it's like, "I love you," right?

• 18:57Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah. I don't know that, but okay.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. And you're lucky.

• 19:02Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah, okay, okay. So that's what you meant by it's a song without words, okay? An instrumental you knew by heart. You learned the rhythm together, and you practiced it all the time, because that's what guys do. They're doing that all the time, for days and months and years. And it was the swing of your silences, the karaoke track behind the gibberish you sang. Explain that to me, the karaoke track. Behind the gibberish you sang.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  So it's not the words, the words that you're saying to your male friends. That's just sort of gibberish. It's jokey, it's banter, it's insult humor, right? But then there is like the rhythm of your of your of your speech, of the conversations, of the all the times that you've spent together doing various things. That's in the background. And that is the sort of the heft of the friendship. That's the karaoke track that doesn't change.

• 19:51Oprah Winfrey?

  Well, that's why this is a brilliant sentence. Really good sentence, sir.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  I'm glad I could explain it.

• 19:59Oprah Winfrey?

  Thanks for listening. We'll be right back with more of my conversation. Welcome back to more of my conversation. OK, Sarah, Sarah, you have a question?

• 20:08Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 20:09Oprah Winfrey?

  OK.

• 20:09Speaker 03

  I have a question about the theme of grief and loss. It just seemed so consistent throughout the whole story. And particularly each of the characters and how they experienced it in this different way. And so I was curious if you were writing from a place of your personal experience or from like if how your language and the sentences and everything was informed by your own personal experience.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  I actually was writing the novel and started writing the novel more seriously after my mom died. My mom had Alzheimer's for 10 years and it was really horrific, actually. So I was feeling that very much. And it's all I could think about. So C.C.'s plot, her backstory and the death of her mom when she was young, that didn't happen to me. This, you know, my mom died fairly recently. But yeah, it was it was important to me. And then, of course, there's another death in the book, which happened skiing. And I'm a lifelong skier. I sort of kind of grew up in Utah because so much of my family lives there. And I've had both my brother and my sister have seen people die in avalanches. They're really serious. They go hella skiing, do all this serious skiing.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  And so I was also thinking about that kind of loss too. Sudden, very sudden loss.

• 21:26Oprah Winfrey?

  I think the way that you explore the mysteries of marriage will resonate with a lot of people. Did you all think married people in here? A lot of married people? OK, resonated, right?

• 21:39Oprah Winfrey?

  I think this is such an astonishing section on page 289. You say, "They'd been married 24 years to the day, and yet these spaces still widened between them, ones they didn't have the energy to cross. Then, out of the blue, on their anniversary no less, he discovered he couldn't speak to her properly, or really at all. He might as well have married a plant. It was heartbreaking. It broke Garrett's heart. Sometimes marriage felt like a dazzling present they didn't want to soil or scratch, didn't have the courage to actually use, and so they locked it up in the garage where neither of them could touch it." Okay, have you been able to crack the code, the secret to marriage?

• 22:24Speaker 01

  I just want to say I loved hearing you read that sentence. Will you do my audiobook? That was wonderful. No, I haven't cracked the code of marriage. I mean, I think that marriage is everything. It's those moments, and it's the moments when you feel incredibly connected. I think that there's a moment in the book where Garrett becomes a wildlife biologist, and he's thinking about sort of occasionally being attracted to his partners who come up and work with him. And he uses this equipment to track wolverines, and he thinks about using sort of like satellite equipment to track the future. And he always like says, like, "I try to like find myself 10 years in the future, and I think, would this be a good idea

• 23:09Speaker 01

  to cheat on my wife with this person?" And he says, "No, it's a terrible idea," right? Even if you're feeling incredibly estranged from your spouse. And so I think that one of the things that makes marriage wonderful for me, I mean, I speak for myself and deeply meaningful, is that you have this commitment that informs everything you do. And even when it's the really hard times that you're going through, that commitment sees you through. And it's, I can't think of anything more beautiful in life, honestly, than committing yourself to a person despite having hardship.

• 23:45Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay Heather, where are you? Okay.

• 23:48Speaker 06

  Um, yeah, dream state really affected how I perceive my own marriage. When I finished reading the book at three in the morning, I went into the living room where my husband was asleep on the couch. And he's been sleeping there for like a few months now because I have menopause and I have hot flashes and I, you know, drenched the bed. And he snores very loudly. And also, my mother also passed away recently and his father passed away. And so just all the busyness and all the loss that we've experienced, I felt like I needed to put a separation between us. So that I could breathe. But I realized after reading this book that what I really needed to do was to connect more with him. And to actually put away the cellphone and the computer.

• 24:29Speaker 06

  Um, so my question to you is, when you were writing this book, did your, um, did you see your, your own marriage in a different lens?

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Wow, that's a beautiful question and thank you. Um, I feel like I can-

• 24:42Oprah Winfrey?

  My husband thanks you too.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:46Oprah Winfrey?

  He is off of that sofa after three months. And what did it dream state? Honey, I was reading this book and now you can come off the sofa. I feel better. Really, that really was it? What, what, what part of the book did that for you?

• 25:01Speaker 06

  Um, how Garrett wakes up one day and he sees, he looks at Cece and he says, oh, it was, you know, she was like a plant.

• 25:08Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 25:08Speaker 06

  And I didn't want to wake up next to my husband or, you know, during the day and, and think of him as something that I had to care for. But something that, he really was something that I needed and we need each other and I need to put away all the other stuff.

• 25:22Oprah Winfrey?

  Wow.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 25:24Oprah Winfrey?

  Well, that is good for a novel to do that, yes.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  I, I feel like I can die happy now.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Wow, um, that's, that's wonderful. I totally forgot what the original question was, however.

• 25:38Speaker 06

  So my question is, while you're writing this book, do you see your marriage in a different lens?

• 25:44Speaker 01

  I think it helped me see my marriage in the way that I have always seen it. And I think it was healthy to sort of interrogate what marriage is in the book. And to have a character like Garrett, who begins by saying like, you know, "Oh, God, why would you want to get married? It's just a bourgeois construct." And he sort of comes around. And it's interesting because my wife and I, we never thought we'd actually get married. We lived together for years before we actually got married. How many years? We've been together for close to 30 years. And we've been married for 20. So we never thought, we wanted to actually tie the knot. And then we said, "Oh, well, let's just do it so we can have a big party with all our friends." And also, there was health insurance and that sort of thing. And we did it, and it actually did change something.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  You know, we were both surprised. We suddenly had that extra feeling of just like security and love that we didn't have before. And she's a writer, too, and you both love sentences. So that makes, that loving sentences. She may have come to hate my sentences. She read my book so many times for me. We read each other's work all the time. But yeah, I hope that answers your question to a certain degree. So Ha is here, and she has a question.

• 26:54Oprah Winfrey?

  The way that you move time along in the book is magnificent for my reader's mind and also for my writer's mind when I'm thinking about craft when I'm reading. Did you intentionally do your time transitions that way before going into the writing? Or was it something that came as you were writing the story?

• 27:15Speaker 01

  That's an excellent question and a very sort of writerly question. Yeah, we think about that stuff all the time, right? What do you leave on the page and what do you alide? I write my novels the way most of my friends write novels, which is they're, you write an exploratory draft, your first draft. There's a E.L. Doctorow quote where he says, "Writing a novel is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights." And that's always how I feel. So I'm always struck when I read a quote. Quote from Nabokov or something who says, "Oh, you need to plan out your entire novel in advance, or you're not a real writer." I'm like, "I don't know anybody who does that." If you don't surprise yourself, you're not going to surprise the reader.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  And the characters aren't going to come alive in the way that you want them to come. You want them to come alive and start doing things that you didn't expect. That's what's fun for me in the writing.

• 28:06Oprah Winfrey?

  And where are they, like, alive in your head? It's like, living with voices?

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Yes, it is. I mean, you walk around, if you're deep in a novel, it's very aggravating for your wife. But very fun, because you walk around and you have this entire population in your head doing things. You go for a run and the whole chapter writes itself, because Cece decides to do something you didn't expect.

• 28:28Oprah Winfrey?

  Wow. And then what?

• 28:32Oprah Winfrey?

  You're running, you don't have your computer or a pen. So you're running, and you've got to get back and put that down, right?

• 28:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I don't have a photographic memory or anything. So, yeah, running is very important to my writing process. I think people have this sort of idea, which is not the right idea, it's a false idea, that you have to actually be actively sitting in front of your computer, waiting for inspiration to strike. And if you leave your computer, you're not writing. I think some of the most productive time I take as a writer is when I'm just walking around. I've turned off that sort of intellectual part of my brain, and some secret part of my brain is bubbling away. And so sometimes I go for a run, and it's like teleportation. I'm immediately back at my house. I don't remember the run at all, but I have a whole new chapter in my head, and I have to rush upstairs and furiously write down what I can.

• 29:24Oprah Winfrey?

  Do you write computer or hand?

• 29:25Speaker 01

  I do the actual composing on a computer, but I jot a lot of notes down by hand.

• 29:32Oprah Winfrey?

  This is one of my other favorite quotes in the book, on page 278. "Life was a long, incompetent search to get back to a feeling you had when you were six." Didn't we all love that? Did you all? How many of you underlined that or noted that? And the reason I liked it so much is because you didn't say four. You didn't say five, or eight, or 10. You said six. And everybody, don't we all remember six? I mean, because it's like first grade. It's, you're feeling yourself. You got your patent leather shoes on for Easter. I mean, where did this line come from?

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Just something I feel. I mean, it's hard for me to say where it came from. I just have always sort of felt that. You feel things so deeply when you're that age. And the world is like a sensory experience all the time. And emotionally, it's such a charged time.

• 30:35Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah. Erica, this is one of your favorites too, right?

• 30:37Speaker 04

  Yes, I think this sentence beautifully captured like what I'm feeling right now in my life. I'm in midlife right now. And there's just so many things that are constantly going through my mind. And I find myself living in this like perpetual nostalgic state of reflection of like who I am now versus who I was when I was a kid. And how I connect the dots back to that. And really kind of chasing what happiness and freedom looked like then. And so when I read this line in the book, I was just immediately just like, I was like, yes, I was like, this is it. Like, you know, you try to capture how you're feeling in life. And you like look for sentences that kind of in words to kind of express that. And so I was really touched by this.

• 31:14Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Thank you. That means a lot to me. Thank you.

• 31:17Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah. And so you remember you were six. Were you writing then? Did you love sentences at six?

• 31:24Speaker 01

  I did. I always, I knew I wanted to be a writer at a very young age. But it wasn't until I was a little bit older, I started writing very bad poetry. We had an old typewriter and I would clack away. And I loved E. Cummings. So of course I didn't use any punctuation or anything. And I remember writing, this is when I was a bit older, 13 or something. And I wrote a poem called "3 a.m. and Train on Sacks." Coltrane, right? John Coltrane. Because I liked jazz. And I'd never been up till 3 a.m. in my life. But I had this idea of, you know, God, it's so cool to be a writer, right? So you stay up till 3 a.m. And you listen to really great jazz. And you do that sort of thing. But then my, I have an older brother who's about 10 years older than me.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  And I must have been about eight. And for Christmas, he got the collective stories of Ray Bradbury. It was just, he has a lot of stories. Those of you who know Bradbury, and it was like this big. And it was one of those old tomes from the 70s that has the author's photo covered the entire back of the book. And so I was starting. Before that, when I read stories, I thought the language just fell out of the sky miraculously or something. I didn't think about authorship, that somebody actually wrote those words. This is the first time I kept looking at the back and there was Ray Bradbury. I was like, oh, my God, he wrote this sentence. And he wrote this sentence. Wow. I mean, and I was like, I want to do that. And that's when I first.

• 32:46Oprah Winfrey?

  And I want my picture on the back. Yeah, that's really great. You say this about parenting, what a mystery your own children were. You gave them everything and it was like tossing a coin into a well. I think so many parents relate to that feeling. Does this phrase come from your experience as a father?

• 33:06Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely.

• 33:07Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  I think the biggest thing I've learned from being a parent, and I've loved being a parent most of the time. One of the biggest things I've, I've learned is that you love your kids and you have an idea of who they're going to become, and they don't become that. There's no kid on earth who like, you know, adhered to the idea of their identity that their parents had for them. But then you love them anyway. They're completely different people than you expected and you have to love them anyway. And that's been like really profound for me.

• 33:33Oprah Winfrey?

  Thanks for listening. We'll be right back. Welcome back to more of my conversation. Wonderful. Okay, Julia, where are you?

• 33:42Speaker 05

  I'm right here.

• 33:42Oprah Winfrey?

  Hi.

• 33:43Speaker 05

  Hi. So my grandmother suffered from dementia for years and it was a very incredibly hard and difficult and emotional time for my family, especially my dad. He had to make a lot of the tough decisions. And reading about the character in the book and seeing how the family navigated love, responsibilities, and the biggest thing, managing your own grief, made me really think about how a writer can go about writing about dementia and the family. And I wanted to know.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  Sort of your personal experiences connected to that? And how you went about creating that demographic? Yeah, that's a wonderful question. Very well put.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I really didn't feel like I had a choice but to sort of write about my mother. She was occupying my thoughts constantly. So, one of the things I tried to do was to capture dementia in the way that it really is. I don't know if I accomplished that or not, but much of that stuff in the book actually happened. But I also, there's a section, a brief section of the book where I enter my mom's, my mom, God, she's not my mom, I'm sorry. I enter Cece's point of view.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  And try to imagine what it must have been like for her. And obviously, Cece's very different from my mother. And Cece's thoughts are very different from my mother's. But that was a really important step for me to take. I wanted her to have a voice while she was in the throes of dementia as well. And it's one of my favorite passages in the book.

• 35:17Oprah Winfrey?

  And as one of the main characters, Garrett, nears the end of his life, he shares this regret that he should have enjoyed himself more, his only youth. Wow, nobody wants to be Garrett in that moment. "I should have enjoyed myself more, his only youth." Do you have those same regrets or know somebody who has those regrets?

• 35:40Speaker 01

  I think everybody in this room has regrets, don't they? Yeah, I mean, one of the things I wanted to do in the book-

• 35:47Oprah Winfrey?

  Y'all do? You do?

• 35:50Speaker 03

  Time just gets away from you depending on when your life starts.

• 35:55Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 35:55Speaker 03

  So, I had children early and then you go to work, you have bills to pay. And I had children before a lot of my friends did. So, they were out traveling and doing more things and I'm lifing. I'm taking care of my children. And then, in turn, my mother got sick and I was taking care of her. So, now, I'm trying to-

• 36:19Speaker 03

  Be conscious in doing something that I want to do. Whether or not anyone else wants to do it. I'm an only child, so I'm used to doing things by myself. I'm gonna do what I enjoy doing. So now I'm lifing.

• 36:33Oprah Winfrey?

  You're lifing?

• 36:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:34Oprah Winfrey?

  Enjoying life?

• 36:35Speaker 03

  Enjoying life.

• 36:35Oprah Winfrey?

  Enjoying life?

• 36:36Speaker 03

  Trying to.

• 36:36Oprah Winfrey?

  Thank you. Enjoying lifing with us here in the Starbucks cafe.

• 36:40Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 36:41Oprah Winfrey?

  That's why you're out having coffee with us today. So where did that line come from?

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Well, I'm somebody who often experiences regret. I'm not saying that the regret is actually apt or well-placed. But I can't even like order dinner without feeling like, oh, I ordered the wrong thing. Immediately after I ordered it. So, but I think it's a sort of dangerous mentality to have this kind of life is elsewhere mentality. And that's sort of what, I mean, it's a main theme of the book. Is this these sort of trap doors of regret that you can fall into. When actually, you know, if Cece had ended up marrying Charlie, she would have had a different life and she would have had regrets.

• 37:25Oprah Winfrey?

  Spoiler. That was a spoiler. Okay, that was a spoiler.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I mean, I think life, part of learning how to live is learning how to live with regret and not let it overshadow your happiness. It's so easy to sort of drift to that other life you might have had.

• 37:45Oprah Winfrey?

  Well, I think she would have had great regret if she'd married him, don't you?

• 37:51Speaker 01

  Probably, yeah.

• 37:53Oprah Winfrey?

  What do you all think? That she would have had regret had she married Charlie? Yes, because, yes, why do you say so?

• 38:00Speaker 05

  There was no right decision for her to make. She was gonna be regretful either way. She would have been regret, she would have regretted not exploring the openness that she was experiencing with Garrett because she was sharing so much with him. And she didn't have that openness with Charlie, it felt like, at least early in the book.

• 38:14Oprah Winfrey?

  Yes. And so she was either gonna experience the regret as she or experience the guilt, experience the guilt also. Okay, Uzur, you actually have a question for Eric.

• 38:28Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, I do. Uh, when I picked up the book, I thought, early in the book, you mentioned Montana. And I thought Dream State was going to be about the dream state of Montana and its beauty. And then everything goes to ruins, things burn down to the ground to the end. But then I was also thinking about the book and I thought, was Dream State the life of low consciousness that all of the characters almost go through? So, and I'm sure the right answer is something else entirely in your head. So I wanted to know where the title came from and what you were thinking about it.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  Well, I'll just start by saying a disclaimer, I'm terrible at titles. Like, I, I have.

• 39:05Oprah Winfrey?

  Clara Keating just said this about small things like that. He said, she's terrible too, okay. There's the writing and then there's the titling.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  They should, they should form it out to somebody else. He's just a title specialist. That's their job, right? Um, so, um, the, actually, the original title was Old Light. Uh, you know, I liked that.

• 39:25Oprah Winfrey?

  Old Light?

• 39:26Speaker 01

  Old Light.

• 39:28Oprah Winfrey?

  No.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  I rest my case, right?

• 39:34Oprah Winfrey?

  No. No. I'm not picking that up.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Okay, I'm so glad I changed it.

• 39:44Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay, go ahead. Old Light. All right, I don't even see where that comes from.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  It comes from a poem, but I, it's, um.

• 39:54Oprah Winfrey?

  We didn't read the poem, so we're picking up the book. We don't know what you're talking about, okay.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  No, you're absolutely right. I, um, so, yeah, Dream State, I mean, it has the obvious sort of literal meaning, which is like, this is a state that's beautiful, Montana. Um, but it's also getting less beautiful in many different ways. And so it's an ironic title. But then, as I said before, I was interested in this idea of life seeming more and more like a dream these days. Um, and that has to do with climate change, but it also has to do with the way that we seem to live our lives so much online, partly. Um, so, yeah, it just seemed to resonate in that way. And then, and then with the final chapter, and I won't say anything to actually be a spoiler, but, um, there's a sense of a whole nother, a whole nother life that could have been lived that sort of, you know, reflects like a dream.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  And so that. All of those things, yeah.

• 40:47Oprah Winfrey?

  Yes, I love this sentence on page 371. Maybe marriage was like that. Gradually, you renamed the world and created a new one, one only you could enter. You turned flowers into money, took the lullaby of exciting days and called it happiness. I just love that sentence. And I know you gave yourself a round of applause when you finished that sentence. Then you said, "The lullaby of exciting..." Yes, "of exciting..." Where did that line come? I love that. "The lullaby of exciting days and called it happiness."

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Well, I think I was trying to get at the fact that almost despite herself, Cece finds happiness in the routine of her marriage. And I feel that. And I think as we get older, I think, I don't know, I don't want to speak for anybody else. I feel that more and more, that it's actually, it's not the exciting stuff. It's sort of the kind of banal stuff. It's the waking up, having coffee with your wife, reading the paper stuff together, sitting on the front porch. That's happiness.

• 41:59Oprah Winfrey?

  That's the lullaby.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the lullaby. And there's a way that I think when you have an incredibly close relationship with somebody, you change the world. I mean, things, because you have this connection, you see things in a way that no one else really sees them. It's idiosyncratic and unique. And I think that's what I was trying to get at there.

• 42:19Oprah Winfrey?

  That's what you did get at. Beautiful sentences. Thank you so much. We're glad you love sentences. Eric Puchner, thank you so much for "Dream State." And I know all of us will be thinking about it and talking about it. Thank you so much.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 42:37Oprah Winfrey?

  So buy the book, Dream State. Grab some friends. Head to Starbucks for a matcha latte and dive in. And we're so glad that you were able to join us here at Starbucks today, everybody. A big thank you to our wonderful Starbucks partners for supporting us. Thank you all for listening and watching. And we hope you'll all join our community and become a part of all of our conversations. Subscribe to the Oprah Podcast on YouTube and follow us on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Bye, everybody. Dream State.

• 43:17Oprah Winfrey?

  Dream State. Excellent.