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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leif, the literary editor to The Spectator,

and my guest this week is the Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, Viet Tan Wyn,

whose new book is not a novel, but a memoir. It's called A Man of Two Faces, a Memoir, a History,

a Memorial. Now, the first thing your readers will notice, I think, is that the title of this book

recapitulates in some way the first line of your novel, A Man of Two Faces, that think, is that the title of this book recapitulates in some way the first line

of your novel, The Man of Two Faces, that phrase. How are the two connected to you? Is that a deliberate

stitching of them together? Absolutely. First of all, thanks for having me, Sam, and for catching

that. I'm a very reluctant memoirist, and that's probably a good thing. I don't know who should

be an enthusiastic memoirist and whether we should read anybody like that. But the only way I could

persuade myself to write this book was to imagine that, in fact, part of the sympathizer

that novel had some autobiographical origins in me feeling like I myself as an individual

had two faces growing up and couldn't really write about that. So I wrote a novel that was much

more about someone who was much more interesting than I was. And then when it came time to write

the memoir, I allowed myself to do it by pretending that I was a sympathizer now writing about me to help me

gain some distance from myself and allow my two faces to have a dialogue with each other.

One of the formal decisions you take in writing this is quite early on, after only a few pages,

you flip to the second person singular. It's a you book. Well, actuated that decision.

You know, in writing The Sympathizer and its sequel, the committed, I'm writing about someone

...