Eric Weiner Looks to Ben Franklin for Life Advice in 'Ben & Me'

Award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author, Eric Weiner, stops by to discuss his newest nonfiction book, an unconventional biography about Benjamin Franklin, titled Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder’s Formula for a Long and Useful Life. Part memoir, part biography, part travelogue and more, Ben & Me explores the various parts and details of Ben’s life and uses it as a guide to teach readers how to navigate their own personal lives. From “Habitual Ben” to “Buddha Ben,” “Social Ben,” “Naked Ben,” “Resilient Ben,” and “Bookish Ben,” the titles of the chapters reflect the different angles of this notable figure. In the book, Weiner also includes a great number of details about Ben, revealing some of his flaws, such as the fact that he wasn’t a good public speaker, he acted more as a business partner than a romantic partner to his wife, and that he was an absentee father from time to time. Despite that, Ben also had many strengths. For instance, he was a world traveler and spoke seven languages, he was chosen to help draft and edit the Declaration of the Independence because of his background as a printer and a writer, and, of course, he was the creator of one of the greatest inventions, the lightning rod, which was also known as the Franklin rod.

As far as his writing process, Weiner explained that he always begins with a chapter to work with as his template. He said, “I always need a model chapter… it’s never the first chapter or the last chapter, it’s somewhere in the middle, that captures the tone, the voice, the essence of what I’m trying to do with the book, and in this case… it was the “Buddha Ben” chapter that was the model… and realizing that was one side of him, that’s when I realized for each chapter I could find a different Ben, and since he contains so many multitudes… I thought, ‘let me do that,’ and it worked, I think, that I was able to make the book more than just chronological because, again, I didn’t want to write a conventional biography that’s existed, so I found a theme, a different aspect of Ben, and it sort of, as I say, fits him and his personality as well because he was so multi-faceted.” While the book is ordered chronologically, Weiner didn’t always write in sequence, at times going back and forth in Ben’s timeline. Additionally, he did most of his research before sitting down to write the book and it consisted of two parts: first was his fact-finding, academic research where he delved into library books and gathered as much information about Ben as he could, and second was his travel research, in which he went to places that Ben had lived in, worked at, or traveled to. “I do go into the footsteps of him in Boston, Philadelphia, of course, in London, Southampton, England, France, so I take you on the road and then I take you into my life as well, but the research is done before I sit down to write.”