"You have to feel it, experience it. That's how I work"

Thanks to those of you who joined for our live conversation with Bonnie Tsui on Friday. It was a fun and frank chat about her book On Muscle and the people and ideas it contains. For an hour, we discussed all manner of topics that the book brought up—and still felt like there was so much more to talk about.

Here are some things we learned along the way.

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The book came together in a pretty chronological manner. Bonnie started the journey by learning about Jan Todd, the strongwoman who appears at the start of the book; Meanwhile Ku Stevens, the Native runner who appears towards the end, was the last piece of the puzzle.

“When I first started poking around at this, Jan Todd—that opening section on strength—was the first one that was an anchor… where I felt OK, there's something here: that's my starting point. Actually, strangely enough, it did end up where… the endurance remembrance run was the last scene, the last experience that I reported on.”

But it wasn’t clear until very late in the process whether the Ku Stevens section would even happen.

“It wasn't until August 2023 when I could actually go do the final run and follow and run along and just be a part of that collective body moving through the desert. And so that was a little nerve wracking, because most of the book was finished. When that run was coming up, I thought, OK, I really hope it works out. It's something that I instinctively felt was so important to experience myself. Yet I also had been in touch with these people, and had written around it a lot, but, you know, but of course, there's just for me as a journalist, you have to be there, you have to feel it, experience it, have the 360-degree sensory experience. That's how I work. I want to follow the curiosity, and I want to be there to take it in.”

“I actually had written a bunch of material that would have worked if it wasn’t first person, like me experiencing it. There were two runs before it; I had conducted some interviews; I had gone to see him run and met his family and all that. But the week before, my mom got sick, and so I had to travel back to New York. She was in the hospital. I remember thinking, OK, well, if I don't go, what happens? And it ended up that I did, but really up until the last second I was wondering. You know, that's how life is. I try not to worry too much because, but I do. My brain does work ahead, it is always thinking. I do lie awake at night worrying about it.”

The book’s structure, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, came together fairly naturally—but still took work.

“Certain things fell into place right. It feels right when they drop into place, then you can kind of work things around it, but it always is changing. I had the sense from the beginning that I wanted the thematic sections to be qualities of muscle that were tangible; qualities of the actual stuff of muscle—like strength, form, action, flexibility, endurance—that could double as character traits that we ascribe to ourselves as human beings and strive for right in personhood. Strength and endurance were kind of always there, they were more obvious. But endurance was also maybe longevity. I think flexibility was “stretch” but was it an action word, or was it a noun? Was it a state of being? I like to play with those things. And sometimes, those are not quite set, it feels it's in flux in a way that is disturbing as a writer—because you're just not sure yet—but I think that's OK. That’s part of the process. And then, when you kind of get a critical mass of material, and the shape is becoming clearer, as with this book, then you start to understand where everything else falls into place.”

There was a lot that was left out, though. For example, why doesn’t massage (and what it does to muscle) feature in the book?

“I thought about massage a lot. I see a therapist who is amazing, and I would be facing the table thinking about how she's grinding into all these different muscles and what am I getting from that, and what is she feeling as she's working on me? I did have several really great conversations with massage therapists and people who do treat the body in this way. But I had to leave so much out because the topic of muscle is so vast—and so really the challenge is to choose the stories that will hold together in a way that make a satisfying book. And I think there's no great reason why I didn't put [massage] in there, other than it didn't fit into what I had going on.” 

“There always have to be things that end up in the outtakes folder. There are whole chapters of body building history that didn’t go in. I made a deliberate choice, actually, early on in the book, to not have that in there—or steroid use—because they are such huge and also really outsized topics that I think I would have only been writing about them. But really, there have been volumes written on those topics, and they really do demand so much more depth and rigor than I could give to them in this book.”

Maybe there are more books coming! Because while it stands as its own book, On Muscle is definitely in conversation with her previous book Why We Swim.

“After Why We Swim, I was having a really, I love my team of creative people who I work with, my agent and my editor. They are just wonderful, and have sort of been on this creative journey with me for the last 10 years. The germ of On Muscle was when we had a conversation about what the next project could be. And it was just a brainstorming free-for-all. What became clear was just that I wanted to kind of keep going along this path of movement and the body and our human relationship with our environment. How we move through the world. And so when you think about movement and our bodies, of course, muscle comes up. But it was almost in passing that my agent said what about muscle? And everyone just kind of went, ooh. Just the word is so evocative and yet so tangible. It had both a substance and heft to it, and also all of this metaphorical, layered meaning that could be so rich for exploration. 

In fact, my son Felix wanted me to call [this book] Why We Flex. And you know what, in my mind it is still Why We Flex, kind of. But I do think that they [the two books] are friends… they are companions.”

One thing that definitely featured heavily in the book was her relationship with her father, a graphic artist who instilled a love of physical activity in her, but left the family and moved back to China when she was younger. I asked Bonnie if she would have been the same surfer, swimmer or athlete if he hadn’t left. Would she have written this book if he hadn’t left?

“I never actually thought about that. I thought about other aspects of what I would be like if my parents had stayed together, or if he hadn't moved so far away. But I have not asked myself that version of the question, which is so interesting, I think I would be, but maybe not. Maybe I wouldn't have examined it quite so closely? Because it’s not just that Why We Swim and On Muscle are both investigations into our human relationship with the water, our human relationship with our bodies in the world, but it's why is my fascination so specifically enduring? Why does it mean so much to me to find out? I think probably you're right. The urgency of that feeling would be different, for sure. That's a really great question, because what is the propulsion behind the examination, right? Why do we feel compelled to do the thing and also to it's an itch we have to scratch intellectually? Why is that? I'm going to be thinking about that for a while.”

And to wrap things up, we asked Bonnie for two reading recommendations.

First, a book that influenced her when she was writing On Muscle.

“One of the books that I talk about is such a classic text in human anatomy: I had the great fortune of going to the British Library to look at this in the rare books room. It was a volume of Andreas Vesalius. He's known as the father of modern anatomy.”

“It's just these beautiful prints where the body is in a pose, but there’s a dynamism to it, and it's sort of like peeling back the layers and you see the muscles, because it's about dissection, and what you can learn from taking the body apart.Just because of the art aspect: there's a bunch of art in this book, because of my dad being an artist. I wanted that feeling, and it made me think that I also wanted these bookends of the introduction and the epilog [of On Muscle] to have art, and it was art that I made for the book as well. So that was really meaningful to me; that book was pretty integral to the writing.”

And, lastly, a book that Bonnie turns to over and over—whether for inspiration, solace, comfort, or joy.

“To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. It actually is relevant to the writing of On Muscle and Why We Swim in that there is a revisiting of relationships between parents and children right from the beginning of the book to the end of the book, and time passing and looking at things from a different angle, different perspective. There's also even an art link: there's the character of Lily Briscoe, who's working on a painting. This is a book that I have read in high school, in college, post-college, as a mother… and looking back at it as a parent versus being a child in high school, it's so interesting. Every time I read that book I find something new. The language is so beautiful, and it's so it's just so poignant. There's a poetry to it.No matter what topic that I write about, I want there to be a poetry in the lines, like on a sentence level. I want it to be beautiful. So I think that is something that I always aspire to.”

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Well, thanks again to Bonnie—and to everyone who joined or sent in questions and comments. These conversations are such a joy; it’s always an honor when somebody wants to share their work and time with us.

That’s all from me this holiday weekend: next time you’ll hear from me will be the announcement of our June pick—a fascinating and provocative book that I’m incredibly excited to share with you all.

Onwards

Bobbie