I Think You're Totally Wrong Read Online Free PDF

It—
    CALEB: Aargh. Stop. Anyone who didn’t appear in episode one will be eliminated as a suspect.
    DAVID: Uh, it actually wasn’t in the first episode, come to think of it. It felt like the first episode. I figured it out toward the beginning. The killer may have been anywhere in the first several episodes. Anyway, what these twenty episodes build to is this: the men are always certain, and they always get it wrong. Basically, men know nothing and women know everything, intuitively. In some sense it’s a feminist parable disguised as a detective story, but it’s very delicately done. The merest bass line thrumming away. When you told your story about Jen cheating on her boyfriend and then Harv cheating on Jen and then Jefferson seeing his sister die and becoming a meth head and on and on, I was only slightly interested in it. It was just a “story.” It has to flip over into something, into “X.” I need an X factor. Without that, it’s just life.

    CALEB: Let’s talk about that former student of yours you keep writing about—the guy who served time in prison for “shooting a dude” and whose prison credo “Do your own time” you don’t like.
    DAVID: “His stoicism bores me.”
    CALEB: Why keep writing about him?
    DAVID: I’m running out of ideas. That’s where you come in. You’re fresh blood.
    CALEB: Ha ha.
    DAVID: I’m serious.
    CALEB: I want to know more about this guy. Did he kill or injure his victim? Was it assault? Was it murder? Manslaughter? How many years did he serve? In your books, the only question you ever ask is, “How do we deal with the fact of mortality?” In essence, “We die. What do we do about that?” That’s your modus operandi, but I’m interested in why we kill.
    DAVID: Why people commit individual murders or genocide?
    CALEB: In Vollmann’s
Butterfly Stories
there’s a restaurant owner in Phnom Penh who survived the Khmer Rouge, watched them kill his wife and children, and did nothing because if he’d showed emotion, he, too, would have been killed. Vollmann writes a sentence or two about suffering and moves on. I wanted Vollmann to stay.
    DAVID: And what I loved is that Vollmann moved on. He knew we could fill in the blanks. That’s where the art comes in.
    CALEB: I grew up around Cambodia, metaphorically. My parents went to Angkor Wat in 1956; they shot 16mm film. Mydad was in Saigon for a year, and he has a lot of books from that era. They subscribed to
National Geographic
. I remember this issue: “Kampuchea Wakens from a Nightmare.” I was maybe twelve years old. After college, Cambodia became an obsession. I became engaged to a Cambodian woman; it lasted a year. Later, I went to Cambodia. I’m now writing a Cambodian woman’s biography. That’s my X factor: suffering, the sociopath, the serial killer, atrocity, Pinochet, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, what motivates Ted Bundy?
    DAVID: Do you somehow think that will get you closer to anything?
    CALEB: It seems futile, but yes, I do.
    DAVID: Yeah, let’s hear about another murder. You got the happy solution to murder?
    CALEB: What’s frustrating is the vacuum. No one’s interested in Cambodia, but we follow celebrity waistlines. Books about Cambodia and such: I read these books over and over again.
    DAVID: What kind of books—genocide porn?
    CALEB: Atrocity can become cliché, but—
    DAVID: I’m much more interested in pulling back and seeing the big picture.
    CALEB: Huh?
    DAVID: My closest friend, Michael, has been spending the last decade writing a book called
Investigation into the Death of Logan
. His father died in Vietnam in ’63, almost certainly a suicide. His wife, Norma, died at forty-six of cancer. And German soldiers in World War II had to return home from the Eastern Front because the war had made them insane. Michael is convinced that he and Norma decided she