Inside the Mind of Rowan Hooper: The Shocking Truth Behind Togetherness Revealed
This interview, conducted over Zoom during a heatwave that underscored the urgent need for climate action and a major shift in human relationships with nature, has been lightly edited.
Hillary Moses Mohaupt: I’m always curious about how authors put together a book, because that process can look so different from one author to another. I loved reading this book, and as I was reading it I wondered about how you went from being in these spaces, these wild places, and then writing about it?
Rowan Hooper: With a bit of difficulty, to be honest. It was hard, because I had a lot of material that I’d gathered in person, in the field. I went to Brazil, Malaysia. So I had these first-person, adventure accounts, from the field, and then I had a lot of historical stuff from Herodotus to Darwin, and from modern-day scientists that I’d met. And I thought, “How do I get all of this to work together?” It took a while to figure out how to do that. In the end, I just said I’m going to write it how I’ve been feeling it, and I didn’t worry too much about it jumping from being a first-person account, to looking back into the past. It kind of all worked out in the end, but I was lucky that I did have a lot of time to think about this. My other two books were written the way you’d write a piece of journalism, just one tone throughout, whereas this one had the feel of creative nonfiction. It was a different process but I really enjoyed that, and having the time to do more things, to think harder about it, was really valuable.
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