The Rumpus Interview with George Saunders

Rumpus: I don’t want to leave the topic of your
book, but I love what you said about starting a piece with as few
conceptual ideas as possible. Do you approach nonfiction the same way?
For the New Yorker story you wrote about Trump, for example, did you begin with a similar kind of open-mindedness?

Saunders: It’s a different form of that. With
nonfiction, I go in trying to be really honest about what my
preconceptions are. In the Trump piece, I knew I didn’t like Trump and I
confessed that to myself and also to my interviewees. I’d always say,
“I’m a liberal and I’m left of Gandhi and I don’t like Trump and this
article is me trying to understand why you do.”