Naturally, Christian Cooper finds the opportunity to address his viral encounter with a racist dog walker in Central Park in his heartfelt and highly anticipated memoir. However, infused with insights on queerness, nerd culture, and so much more, Better Living Through Birding ultimately underscores the importance of admiring the big picture when faced with life’s trials.
Audible: Better Living Through Birding addresses the viral moment from 2020 when a dog walker initiated a racist confrontation with you in Central Park. At what moment did you decide to write this memoir?
Christian Cooper: When my proverbial 15 minutes of fame seemed to last a bit longer, I thought to myself: If people are going to shove these microphones and cameras in my face, I’m going to use them to say what I think needs to be said. And as I used that larger platform to talk to a bigger audience about the things that I’ve stood up for my whole life—justice for Black people, equality for queer people, protection of a diversity of birds and the natural environment we all need to survive—I realized I could delve deeper on those things, and more, in a personal way. I could move beyond the viral moment by talking about my life as a whole, while simultaneously putting that viral moment in context. Plus, thanks in part to birding, I had decades of exotic travel filled with romance, spirituality, and self-discovery with which to salt the narrative. So I figured I’d give it a try!
When my proverbial 15 minutes of fame seemed to last a bit longer, I thought to myself: If people are going to shove these microphones and cameras in my face, I’m going to use them to say what I think needs to be said.
For the range of serious topics this listen covers, your memoir is definitely filled with humor throughout. What do you believe is the importance of remaining lighthearted in the face of life’s trials?
I figured out a long time ago not to take myself too seriously! Life throws you so many curveballs—you either learn to laugh about it or get hit in the hip by the bad throws and go limping off the field. Actually, you’ll still get hit, but at least you’ll be laughing while you wince in pain.
What did you learn about yourself while writing your story?
The very act of writing my story underscored my need for story in my life. I wasn’t content to unspool the experiences in strictly chronological fashion, even though the book is nonetheless roughly chronological. It was more important for me to find the underlying themes, to present the facts in a way that gave coherent shape to the narrative—to tell a story! I’m accustomed to writing fiction, where I have total control of the narrative; writing memoir was so much harder, because nobody’s messy life conforms to a convenient narrative. And yet there are ways to pull narrative strains out of the seemingly random assemblage of events, and that was the challenge for me of telling my story. That need to tell a story crops up repeatedly in the book, as when I make sense of a close encounter with an especially beautiful bird by crafting a myth about the bird's origin. Story gets to the heart of the matter for me, as nothing else can.
Also, I learned I use too many exclamation points! It’s a bad habit picked up from writing comic books, where we tend to go bombastic!!!
Why did you choose Better Living Through Birding as the title of your memoir?
Birding has been a thread through nearly my entire life and colors the way I look at the world, so it just made sense to me. And it wasn’t a tough decision—it was the first thing that immediately popped into my head, and it stuck.
