American Nerd

Interview with the author (Salon).

"You write at the beginning of the book that you "empathize with nerds and antinerds alike," and even say there are reasons to despise your younger, nerdy self. With that mix of sympathies, what did you set out to find or explain?
I wanted to find out what makes someone nerdy in the eyes of their peers, and also what compels them to keep doing the nerdy activities: what they get out of it, what urges it fulfills, whether it was a voluntary decision for them to be nerds, or whether it was foisted upon them. I wanted to give the reader a window into the heads of nerds, and into the heads of people who hate nerds.
Do you feel like nerds are an especially misunderstood class of people?
I actually think people are pretty good at understanding what makes a nerd a nerd, on a gut level. But they aren't in touch with why they hate nerds. They haven't examined their prejudices and their own feelings vis-à-vis nerdiness.

"Nerd" really implies being an outsider, being picked on as a kid, social awkwardness.
What makes people insiders in high school is their ability to intuitively figure out how the hierarchies work. Some nerds can't follow the hierarchies, don't know how, and sometimes don't even perceive them. Other nerds are unwilling to follow them. But in general most of the people we consider nerds are people who are oblivious to or incompetent at following the hierarchies.

One of the slightly frightening things about the explosion of Asperger's diagnoses is that because Asperger's syndrome refers to a hard-wired neurological state, kids are essentially being told that they are hard-wired to be nerds. It's a really fraught diagnosis. I wonder if there are kids who would've benefited from just being able to think of themselves as nerdy, and then gone on to become something else, instead of being told when they're young, "You have Asperger's syndrome, you're always going to be a socially awkward systemic thinker."

I've talked to lots of people who've had the experience of going on a first date and getting the "I was such a nerd in high school" line. It's come to mean, "I'm not afraid of telling you exactly who I am." The nerd is thought to have a level of authenticity that no other subculture can have, because the nerd is incapable of presenting himself in a false way.

When I was selling this book, my editor asked me, "Are you a nerd?" I was like, "I don't know, I certainly was as a kid, but now..." My agent interrupted me and said, "He's a nerd." It's the funniest question to have to keep answering, because for the first time in my life some advantage adheres to me if I say yes. I'm probably the one person on planet Earth who might have to affect nerdiness as part of their professional life."

You know what's funny to spot right after that? This article on Nerve about how this guy's artist ex did a whole series of works about him and his dorkiness.

"I speak English. I've never left the continental United States. I love Ray Bradbury, and my favorite band is the Beatles. The "White Bread" painting conveys the message that one could surmise all these things just by looking at my skinny white body: this guy might be an okay lover, it says, but he'll start talking about Star Trek as soon as the sex is over. Eventually, Gabriela decided not to render this message as abstractly as she had in "White Bread." Why imply that I talked about Star Trek in bed, or that I cried more than she did, when she could make a whole series of drawings illustrating it explicitly? So she did, and now the story of our romance is forever preserved in a group of gallery-exhibited drawings collectively titled The Ryan Series.

The Ryan Series is twenty-two monochromatic drawings, each depicting a moment from our relationship. Accompanying each piece is a prominent title at the top of the drawing. And while I had my favorites, like "Ryan in the Shower Telling Me He Loves Me Too," the really good ones were less complimentary: "Ryan Crying on the Subway Platform," "Ryan Crying on the L Train," "Ryan Crying on My Couch."

So, back to Star Trek. The great thing about dating foreign women is they don't have the same prejudices about sci-fi that many American girls seem to have. To Gabriela, Star Trek was just one more part of our weird, monolithic pop-culture. "Ryan Telling Me a Star Treck Episode From Start to Finish" is a cute illustration of this aspect of our time together. She misspelled the word "Trek" — I didn't have the heart to tell her, and the piece was accepted with the others by the gallery regardless. Later, she was profoundly offended that I hadn't alerted her to the error, and hastily drew a new one.

The breakup had been in the mail for a while, and finally arrived when she kissed someone else. I was visibly devastated, an opportunity that provided her a bit more material: "Ryan Crying One More Time," and "Cry Ryan Cry." We agreed to spend a period of time apart before trying to be friends. The night we broke up she sent an email to my roommate that said, "Please take care of him now." He and I promptly got drunk and watched Star Trek IV, the one with the whales."