Every year he was in office, I looked forward to President Obama’s reading list. I lived for the overlap. To share taste, to read in common, is to speak a common language. Did that scene from Richard Price’s Lush Life when the guy gets killed still rattle around in his head the way it did in mine? Had five years of intervening Franzen discourse changed the way he read Purity versus Freedom? Did he think the politics of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland helped make it her most complicated, and best, work?
In 2017, the year Obama left the Oval Office, Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing appeared on his annual list. It also won the National Book Award for fiction that year—six years after her win for Salvage the Bones, making her the first female novelist in history to win twice. Jesmyn has been described as the heir to both Toni Morrison and William Faulkner, and neither comparison is hyperbole. In our September issue, she wrote of personal and collective grief, searing the losses of this year into our hearts. For this issue, she spoke to the 44th president about his memoir, A Promised Land, not just as a reckoning with the first half of his presidency but as a literary enterprise, one that rests on techniques of character building, comic timing, a structural capacity for empathy. They talk about what it means to represent vulnerability and pain on the page. It is a meeting of the minds of two essential writers of our time, one of whom just happened to be our president for a while.
If 2020 sent Barack Obama back to his roots as a memoirist, this year also sent Stephen Colbert back to his roots as an improv performer. Working from home since mid-March, like so many of us, Colbert has reinvented himself yet again—a new chapter in his arc from proto-Daily Show correspondent to culture-defining Bill O’Reilly caricature to David Letterman’s kinder, gentler successor. And as has been the case for all of us, the circumstances of this year have shifted his focus, arguably toward what he’s been wanting to focus on all along. As Colbert tells Joe Hagan in our cover story, “There’s all this loss going on in America. And on a nightly basis, because there’s no audience, I can talk about loss, but what I’m really talking about is, ‘Look at what we love. It’s on fire.’ ”
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