The Global Gratitude Show

Sometimes when someone becomes an icon or they have an image attached to them, they get reduced down, and people only see that one particular image. For example, with somebody like JFK, it might be, “He was preppy and he dressed well, and his dad had money,” and then that becomes the whole story.

With Dag, there’s this idea that Dag considered the UN his church, and he was the secular pope of it. But that’s not the case at all. And you have people who portray Dag as a secular saint, or he say that he was weird, he was unknowable. He was in a block of ice. He didn’t have any friends. He never let anybody get close to him, and all of that is just a bunch of bunk.

And so I wanted to debunk those myths and to show that there’s not a statue, there’s not an icon, there’s not a secular pope.

There is a human being and a very warm, friendly, amazing, wonderful, humane human beneath all of those titles, and I really wanted to have that intimate first-person point of view to show this is what Dag was thinking. This is where his head was at as he’s navigating these difficult and scary situations, so that the reader can be right there with him as he’s navigating minefields.