An Interview with George Packer

I’ve lived in Prospect Heights for eight years. It’s a wonderful neighborhood to raise a family (we have two kids, the older one in kindergarten at the Brooklyn New School) and to be a writer. Many writer friends live within a few blocks, but more importantly, so do many reader friends. (No readers, no writers!)

This must be one of the most densely literary neighborhoods in all of New York—the coffee drinkers engrossed in books at Milk Bar and Hungry Ghost, the subway riders at 7th Avenue and Bergen Street holding copies of the New Yorker. Given how perilous the times are for the two kinds of writing I do—literary non-fiction books and long-form magazine journalism—it still gives me a rush of hope to see how many of my neighbors are avid consumers of both.            

My new book, “The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America,” is about many American people and places, but Prospect Heights and Brooklyn are not among them. This book isn’t in the least autobiographical—in fact, the first person singular doesn’t appear anywhere, a first for my non-fiction books.

But “The Unwinding” is a biography of America over the past generation. It’s the story of how the social contract came apart and left Americans more and more alone to find their way to stability and success. I’ve tried to create a different sort of history—not the big events of the past thirty-five years, but history as it’s lived by people whose lives are caught up in the larger currents of the country.

“The Unwinding” contains portraits of celebrities—shapers of our culture in different areas, from Newt Gingrich and Robert Rubin to Jay-Z and Alice Waters—but its main characters are the non-famous. I found them in the more obscure corners of the country, such as the North Carolina Piedmont, the Tampa Bay exurbs, and Youngstown, Ohio, as well as in Washington, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street.

The book looks at some of the places that aren’t doing as well as our fortunate neck of the woods. During the past generation America has become more free, more inclusive, and also less equal—so unequal that, in traveling from Prospect Heights to a town like Stokesdale, North Carolina, in a former tobacco region that’s fallen on hard times, I sometimes had the feeling that I was going farther from home than when I used to report from Burma and Nigeria.

It’s an unsettling feeling, how America has come apart in these years, and I wanted to convey it in the book. I’ll be reading from and discussing “The Unwinding” at Dean Street (755 Dean at Underhill) at 7 PM on Thursday, June 13. Sales of the book will benefit the Brooklyn New School. I hope to see you there.
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George Packer became a staff writer for The New Yorker in 2003 and has covered the Iraq War for the magazine. His book “The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq,” was named one of the ten best books of 2005 by the New York Times and won the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award and an Overseas Press Club’s book award.  He has taught writing at Harvard, Bennington, and Columbia.