Poured Over: Drew Magary on The Night the Lights Went Out

“And so, what was to me a relatively–at least in terms of storytelling–a tidy story of me collapsing and having my wife and my co-workers save my life and be getting up and getting out of the hospital and getting to write again, was a bit more involved than that.” In his new book, The Night the Lights Went Out, Defector columnist Drew Magary delivers a darkly comic and deeply honest story about his recovery from the traumatic brain injury that almost killed him. Drew joins us on the show to talk about what happened the night he almost died, what came later (including his deafness and cochlear implant), why he writes (and what he learned self-publishing a novel), the books and writers he loves to read, and more. Featured books: The Night the Lights Went Out, The Postmortal, The Hike and Plan B by Drew Magary. Produced/hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang.
Poured Over is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays.

…From this Episode…
Drew Magary: And so I had a hard time understanding what happened everyone else, you know, around me, who saw me collapse, and saw me almost die. And I was the only person who was not party to that. And so it was this weird situation after the fact where I just sort of re-engineer my trauma through them to get a better understanding of what exactly I had been through what they had had to go through to save my life and to get me back upright and like, alive again. And that was a bit of a process. It was not an easy process. But here I ended up speaking to you. So that’s good.
B&N: I have to say listening to the podcast and reading your byline now, I would be hard pressed to know that you really suffered a traumatic brain injury.
Drew Magary: Yeah, yeah, I I’ve done a good job. Cosmetically speaking you wouldn’t know because my injury was to my head. I fractured my skull. Those were internal injuries, there was blood. But it was through my scalp and my hair has grown over and ever since then, if you shaved my head, it would be a train wreck. Like it would not look good. But thankfully my hair has grown over it. Just not really a trace of it save for the cochlear implant on the right side of my head. But that came quite a bit later after my accident, a bit of a souvenir.
B&N: So what’s on your bookshelves?
Drew Magary: …I read a ton of nonfiction, like a ton of nonfiction. So it’s like Hampton Sides, and Candace Millard. And historians like that, like, I’m very big into that. Like Eric Larson. In a lot of novels, you see the writing, which I don’t care for, you can tell that they’re trying to win a Nobel Prize. And with a lot of good historical nonfiction, they don’t want to get in the way of the story. What they have found is so extraordinary. And it’s like, just you take Devil in the White City  by Eric Larson. It’s a perfect book. And the reason it’s a perfect book is because he knew the story was so good, you know, all he had to do was give it to you, you know, sort of in the right way. And the story told itself. And you know, and that was also something, frankly, that I learned with this book was that I died and then came back to life, the story writes itself…I have other favorite books, like The Road, and Carter Beats the Devil and stuff like that. In general, what I’m always looking for is for the pages to fly, and everything to move. And you know, that sounds like oh, I just want page turner. But it’s halfway between fine literature and an airplane book, where I’m going to blaze through this thing, but it’s gonna stick afterwards. That’s what I’m always looking for.