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Jon Mooallem on Serious Face, Curiosity, and Writing About Ordinary People
Mooallem discusses the questions behind Serious Face and his approach to narrative nonfiction.
Quick facts
Nature · MemoirOn my shelf
Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America
Mooallem’s debut grew out of watching his toddler daughter’s world fill up with cartoon owls and butterfly pajamas while the actual owls and actual butterflies quietly disappeared. He follows three species on the edge — the polar bear, the whooping crane, and the Lange’s metalmark butterfly — into the strange, often absurd machinery of American conservation: helicopter bear relocations, ultralight-led crane migrations, a butterfly reserve squeezed between a Denny’s and a freeway offramp. The book is less about animals than about what our efforts to save them reveal about us.
What makes Wild Ones work is that Mooallem refuses easy sentiment. He’s constantly noticing the gap between the story we tell about caring for nature and the chaotic, undignified reality of actually trying to do it. It’s funny, it’s sad, and it never once tips into nature-writing piety. This is the best entry point into his voice.
Narrative History
This Is Chance!: The Shaking of an All-American City, a Voice That Held It Together
On Good Friday 1964, the second-largest earthquake ever recorded flattened parts of Anchorage, Alaska. Mooallem reconstructs the disaster and its aftermath through Genie Chance, a local radio reporter who ended up anchoring the airwaves for days straight, turning her station into the city’s only functioning communication network. It’s a disaster book that becomes a book about how a community actually holds itself together when the ground gives way — literally.
This is Mooallem at his most cinematic. He builds suspense like a thriller writer while never losing the small human details — who fed whom, who checked on which neighbor — that make the book feel true rather than staged. Elizabeth Gilbert wasn’t exaggerating when she called him one of the most curious writers working; this book proves it on unfamiliar ground, well outside the animal-and-nature territory he made his name in.
Essays
Serious Face: Essays
A collection spanning wildfire evacuations, a hospice director who works at the literal border of life and death, a failed magic trick involving Charlie Kaufman, and Mooallem’s own reckoning with a photo of his own face taken a century before he was born. The essays are formally different from each other but share one question, which Mooallem states outright in the prologue: why are we not better than we are?
Serious Face is the clearest demonstration of what makes Mooallem worth following as a writer rather than just a subject-matter journalist. He can make an essay about a pigeon-racing scandal sit comfortably next to an essay about mortality, because his real subject in both cases is the same thing: human beings doing their confused, well-meaning best. Read this after the first two books, once you already trust his eye.
Frequently asked questions about Jon Mooallem’s books
From the bookshelf
“I'd been puzzling over myself, torturously trying to unlock the truth of who I was. The truth is, I am the puzzling.”
— Jon Mooallem, Serious Face
For more writers who turn close observation of ordinary chaos into something worth reading, browse the full shelf.
