We have a son named Henry as well. Oh. Also enjoys the hot pocket now and then. I tried to make them. I tried to make them because I was like, okay, we're going to like a hot pocket. It's not that far off like a calzone. So that's been feeding Italians from time immemorial. So perhaps we should just have a go at making a hot pocket. And Henry was like, what is the Italian word for Kelso and me and again? And I was like, so, and he was like, yeah, mom, you made a song. It tastes like a sock. Nice. Hello, I'm Minnie Driver. Welcome to the mini questions season two. I've always loved priests questionnaire. It was originally a 19th century parlor game where players would ask each other 35 questions aimed at revealing the other player's true nature. It's just the scientific method really in asking different people the same set of questions. You can make observations about which truths appear to be universal. I love this discipline. And it made me wonder, what if these questions were just the jumping off point? What greater depths would be revealed if I asked these questions as conversation starters with thought leaders and trailblazers across all these different disciplines. So I adapted Proust questionnaire and I wrote my own 7 questions that I personally think are pertinent to a person's story. They are. When and where were you happiest? What is the quality you like least about yourself? What relationship real or fictionalised defines love for you? What question would you most like answered? What person place or experience has shaped you the most? What would be your last meal? And can you tell me something in your life that's grown out of a personal disaster? And I've gathered a group of really remarkable people, ones that I am honored and humbled to have had the chance to engage with. You may not hear their answers to all 7 of these questions. We've whittled it down to which questions felt closest to their experience or the most surprising or created the most fertile ground to connect. My guest today is the author Anthony daw, whose book all the light we can not see won the Pulitzer Prize. This turns out is not surprising at all if you have ever read a single word he has written. His more recent novel pad cuckoo land is genuinely one of my favorite books ever. And the level of lyricism present in his writing is there when he speaks to. I wrote down so many things he said all the way through the interview. You know, as though the whole thing wasn't being recorded and I had to take notes. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. I'm very interested to start out with since my mother died, but since my mother died, I think about the things that I didn't realize until after she'd gone, that went into the basic architecture. The stuff that was in passing rather than the big moments. And it was weird it was like, it was like having the foundation of something revealed when I really just been looking at the building. The whole time, this beautiful building because she was this amazing person. It's been like this weird posthumous gift to feel all these other things so like now when I do something and my son rolls his eyes and makes things that I'm super embarrassing and that we've spent 5 hours making a sock. I do go now you know what? He's going to remember this because we listen to new order while we made this calzone and we chatted about something. So interesting because that's kind of the lesson for beginning writers want to write about the big architecture. You know, they want to write about love for what it feels to be confused. But the only way to deliver that to another person is through detail through like these MoMA by moment details of life. That's how memories get built, you know, is new order and making a calzone. Exactly. And you know what? I had this teacher who I dedicated my book to my English teachers. My three teachers were so huge in my life as a whole. But Alistair, one of them, on a Monday morning, a piece of a four paper would be posted on the notice board in my school from the age of ten onwards, and there would be a list in his really beautiful strange italic handwriting. And it would be like drinking a cup of tea, tying my shoe laces, getting out of bed, and he had to write two sides of a four, describing this extraordinarily mundane thing, and he was like, this is just like exercise. He was like, this is the same as you're running around playing fields, playing hockey basketball, whatever it is. So many years later, when I was still working my way through the anthology of what he told me to read in my life, he said, it was about getting you to pay attention to not just having to do this thing. The thing was not the thing, but to your life, to all those things that it would trigger that whenever you noticed something, it would trigger the memory of your interest in the fact that you've had that muscle built in from an early age to appreciate it and to be able to kind of develop ideas from it. Yeah. Detail is how you communicate with people. If you had said, I have this teacher, Alistair. He was meaningful to me. That would kind of bounce off me. But if you describe his handwriting and you describe this list on his door and the details of what he was asking you to do described tying your shoelaces, it means something to me. That's how you communicate emotion. It's ironically, it's like you're reaching for the stars, but the way to do it is like the tiny little pieces of broken glass on the ground. And that we keep retrieving memory. I've just moved back to the town that I'm from. I don't like how it feels because I don't feel like I can make new memories here. I'm so in the trough of what went before. And I'm fascinated by it at the same time as feeling incredibly sad. It feels palpable. I keep asking everybody, how do you create new memories in a totally familiar environment? That's super interesting. It makes me think about Germans and like the 70s trying to deal with the weight of the memory of all the stuff that had happened. And you're just trying to like listen to music and be 18 years old and there's always this to renew. I mean, I think that's what's so beautiful is grass always ends up growing over the battlefields and it's so important to remember that blood was spilled there, but at the same time allow space for young people to move around. So our twin boys just went off to college. Oh wow. Yeah, I worry so much about this world. I keep saying like, well, the world's warming up Owen, like it's gonna get worse. You know, he doesn't need that. He needs to be able to go make new memories and discover the world a new and go to a party as if it was like the first time anybody ever went to a party. To go to any good parties, I want your basic going. Can you believe the ice caps? Not. What about that cappa gamma? That's totally it. Yeah. And then his mom's like, ask him about COVID. Oh my gosh. She's like the cherry on top. That's very funny. Well, God, I'd better get on 'cause I could really just ask you about a thousand questions that have nothing to do with these 7 questions, but I will glean all the answers that I would like to ask you out of these 7 questions that I'll ask you. Willie tell me where and when you were happiest? Of course. I thought about it. I'm gonna choose a general win, but a specific wear, I love to ski, I live in Idaho and the mountains in the United States. One of the last places middle class families can still ski and afford it. We raised our boys skiing in this mountain called brundage mountain about two hours north of here where they just put a keg of beer in the snow and like grill hamburgers and you could still get a season pass for about 200 bucks. Oh my