June 7, 2022 • 42 mins
Writer and essayist Adam Gopnik has been called “one of the greatest thinkers and wordsmiths of our age.” He is best known as a staff writer for The New Yorker, to which he has contributed non-fiction, fiction, memoir and criticism since 1986. The international best-selling author has penned ten titles spanning memoir, essays and children’s literature and is the recipient of three National Magazine Awards and the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. Gopnik is also a talented lecturer and storyteller, appearing with the Moth and in a series of one-man shows he created. It seems there isn’t anything Gopnik can’t do, as he recently transitioned into theater as a book writer and lyricist. Alec speaks with Adam about his time writing in Paris, the mystery of mastery and the search for a beautiful existence and full life.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from My Heart Radio. My guest today is uniquely
blessed with intellectual curiosity, air udition, and an insightful wit.
He's also been called one of the greatest thinkers and
wordsmiths of our age, and is rumored to read up
(00:24):
to four books a day. He's also a true New
Yorkers New Yorker, the brilliant Adam Gopnick. Gopnik has been
a writer at The New Yorker for over three decades,
first as an art critic and then as their Paris correspondent.
He's written fiction, non fiction, humor, memoir, and criticism for
(00:46):
the famed magazine, covering everything from sports to spirituality with
equal aplom He's the international best selling author of ten
books and an accomplished lecture and storyteller. He has appeared
regularly on the Moth Radio Hour the CBC and created
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a series of one man shows, including The Gates, an
Evening of Stories with Adam Gopnik. For someone with such
a prolific and varied body of work, I was curious
to learn about his writing process. I'm right in the
kind of the back room. We think of it as
the engine room of the Titanic, right where Daddy has
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stripped to the waist shoveling coal into the furnace while
to keep the boat going for another day. We hit
the iceberg long ago, and we're listening, but we're gonna
keep moving forward. And I always have my door open.
The kids always know seven days a week, six hours
a day too, Yes, and they were always aware. Someone
teach you that, to someone lends you that. Yeah, Actually
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someone did teach me that. I had a great teacher
and inspiring teacher who I wrote an essay about called
Last of the metro Zoids, when he died tragically and
stupidly young of cancers. Name was Kirk Varnetot, and he
ended his life as the director of Painting and Sculpture
at the Museum of Modern Art. But he had been
my professor in graduate school, and he was someone of
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impeccable talent, the greatest lecture I've ever heard, an inspired curator.
But he had a work effort like no one I've
ever known, which he had derived, as he would tell
you himself and did tell you often, from playing football
and coaching football. That had been his passion In college,
played defensive line, though he was wildly undersized then and
going out to Stanford, and couldn't decide whether to continue
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coaching for Bill Walsh, who was at Stanford then here,
or to become an art historian. And he said to
me a memorable line, He said, the thing about being
a football coach is you have to be smart enough
to do it well and dumb enough to think it matters.
My father was a football coach, was he really? My
father coach high school where he played at SU and
then he went to They caught high school football where
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we grew up, and my memories of that mentality. There
was a sign above the entrance to the coach office
as you walked out the door, and the sign said
if you score, you may win. If they never score,
you will never lose. And the boulder letters said defense
wins championships. Well, that was very much. Though Kirk was
the most sophisticated of intellectuals, he was at heart a
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football coach. And when I arrived in graduate school in
New York in nineteen eighty, I was something of a
wise guy. I grew up in an academic family, but
in a very contentious, smart when the argument at the
dinner table kind of family, what'd your dad do? My
dad was a professor? No, no, when when you when
you left Philadelphia? How old were you when you went
to Levin? When we left Philadelphia? And then I and
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then grew spent the next nine years in Montreal, really
kind of grew up in exactly. And my mother to
my mother was a professor too, And actually I should
add them in many ways a more distinguished scientist and
scholar than my dad was. My dad spent a lot
of time as a dean, was extremely good at it.
My mom is famous in her field for having discovered
the first identifiable chromosome linked to grammar, linked to language,
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which is called if I used to know my heart
show f XP you forgotten? Yes, exactly twops. Anyway, So
I came I came of age very much in that
kind of Jewish intellectual family, with elements of the Glass
family of Salinger and of the Corleone family of Mary
Open leaving at eleven, I wonder, I mean, I always
identified that period as a huge transition childhood. It's very
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sent you to say that it was hugely tough, hugely tough,
because I had just sort of begun for the first
time to have a circle of friends. And we smoked.
We couldn't get marijuana, we smoked marigold cigarettes and all that.
It was hugely tough moving to a strange city, and
it took me quite a while to adjust. As in Philadelphia,
where I spent my childhood, really I had actually been
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a kid actor, and I had been the kind of
the Jackie Coogan of Andre Gregory's avant garde theater. You
know Andrew Gregory, it's still to this day a very
dear friend, my oldest friend in the world. And he
had an avant garde theater in Philadelphia. Oh do you
really yes? Yeah, Well that was that that family. And
so I had played countless parts for Andre and as
I say, we're still intimate friends. And so I had
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a very uh incandescent and some always a blessed child.
And so that transition was extremely, extremely difficult for me.
And you went undergrad to McGill. I went undergrad to McGill.
I've got many friends because mcgils such a great school.
I have many friends whose children have gone there. And
my neighbor in my first home and I m Aganson
was skip Sheldon Huntington's Sheldon who was on the medical
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staff there or the hospital staff. That he was a
medical doctor who also I think his family him or
his mother's family were heirs to the merc drug and
he was my guy. And I'm McGill such a great
school when you were there growing up. Was it a
feder company you were going to go to McGill, Yes,
there was no, There was no question. It was the
It was the family tavern. Really, not only I tell
my kids. In fact, they ended up because I got
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a discount because my both my parents were professors, and
then I did well and I got various fellowships and
ended up paying me to go to college, so which
was in this day as unusual. My friend Malcolm Bladwell,
who's also a Canadian of the same generation, points out
accurately that that's the Canadian model, that you go to
the nearest good school to your home. And the whole
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insane American rigmarole which we have gone through is I'm
sure you have gone through and will go through of
college visits and the insane competitive overdrive that takes places
essentially unknown in Canada. My nieces and nephews live in
Edmonton and they went to the University of Alberta, which
is a terrific school and is nearby. But yeah, I
went to McGill and art history. I did art history.
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I did our history because I was torn between doing
psychology and art history. My older sister, with whom i'm
extremely close intellectually did psychology and it's the psychologist to
this day. But I have four sisters. I should add,
you're one of how many six? I'm one of six,
so it's positive science, right, one of six I had.
This is a whole other subject, but we I had
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an extraordinary childhood, which I hope to write about it
in my next book after this one. But I had
seen an incredibly pretty girl going into the art history
department and I thought, that looks interesting. We're interested in psychology,
which tended to study what is she studying? And I've
found out and I followed her in and forty two
years later we're still married, so that worked out all right.
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But it was also nice because I was talking. I
was you know how it is when you know that age,
you're agonized about everything. Everything is in agony. And I
said to my psychology advice, but what should I do
Should I do art history of psychology? It seemed hugely
important at the time. And he said, is this a
difficult decision? And I said yes, And he said, then
it's unimportant. He said, all difficult decisions in life are
unimportant because if they're difficult, that means there's a lot
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to be said on both sides, so you can't really
take a wrong turn. My wife has a degree in
art history from n y U. And when I said
to her at one point, why that in a menu
of things you might have said, I said, why that?
And she goes cool. It's because it's the history of
the world of humanity, history of humanity and the history,
and it has this magical element, and that is that
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you look at ill fixed pictures, at things that don't move,
that don't dramatize, that don't have you know, attached them,
and suddenly they seemed to sum up a period and epoch,
a mood of meaning you understand the Italian Renaissance better
by looking at Leonardo than you do by reading six
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volumes on the period. So I loved it and still do.
I came to New York with, as I've written about
in my book, at the Stranger's Gate. We got on
a bus leaving Montreal like kids out of a nineteen
forties musical, and came to New York. The building where
we are right now we're writing, was where Martha had
her first job. She was a film editor at that time,
studying to be a film editor. Was was actually a
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film editor. She was with eventually too, the Masals, but
she had trained with her parents were founding filmmakers for
the National Film Board of Canada. I don't know if
that means anything in American now, but it was the
great documentary are familiar and this was her first job,
and it is a sign of how different New York
is now. And then that this building on Ninth Aven
and was so isolated that I would come, I would
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take her down on the subway in the morning and
pick her up again at night because they routinely found
dead bodies in the dumpster. And there was truly on
this block where now there's ah. You have your choice
between a great French, great restaurant of the south of
France and a fine bistro from Alsace. There was nothing.
There was absolutely nothing. So when you leave and you
come to New York, what motivated that decision. Why did
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you want to come to go to graduate school at
n y U and not remain in Canada, go somewhere
else because it was a period of your life for
your fairly peripateticus. Yes, absolutely, but because we had fallen
in love with New York and it was I had
fallen crazy New York. Oh no, No, she was Icelandic
girl from Montreal. She was. It couldn't have been more
Canadian in background and temperament is to this day. But
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we had been to New York and we had fallen
crazy in love with it the way you do, or
people have done historically. And then even then, even in
the seventies, and and my you know, my folks thought
we were a little bit crazy because there was the
Tali into the seventies in New York was still taxi
driving New York, you know, with steam coming out of
the manholes and psychos driving the cabs. But we had
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fallen crazy in love with it, and I as I
am to this day, it's not. That's an emotion that's
never changed for me. And it seemed like a time
of possibility. And when you're twenty years old, you don't
it's hard to keep anybody away from anything. My father
came with me when we got on the bus going
down to Manhattan, and he said to me, you know,
it's like, you know d'artagnan's father and the three musketeers
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seize him off from Gascony, if you remember, and says,
when you get to Paris, fight duels with everyone you meet,
which he then does and becomes a musketeer. My father
said to me when I was getting on the bus,
he said, when you get to New York, remember never
underestimate the other person's insecurity. And those turned out to
be the wisest words anyone has ever given me. And
every mistake I've made subsequently was because I underestimated someone
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else's insecurity. And every time I've had an empathetic insight
into a situation, professionally or or personally, it's because I
remembered that. Remember my uncle, my father's youngest brother, who
was a bit of a for lack of a better
way of putting, was kind of a Karawackian figure like
around the road, very bohemian and very never had a job,
lived off of his Korean War pension, and you know,
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a very strange guy, but super bright, super intellectual guy.
You're reading books, consult he said. Remember one thing, he said,
even if you really are one in a million, there's
seven other people like you in this city. So you
can form a little club with that. Then you can
hang out with your mind. People absolutely make a you
make a cohort instantly. In New York and my dad,
though it was the tail into the seventies, there was
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still it was still in some ways a more if
I made attractive city than it is now because exactly
because there was so much that was decrepit and there
was so much that was despairing, there were these wonderful
little islands of light and poetry and music. When we
first came to New York, we used to go and
here the G eight jazz pianist Ellis Larkins play at
the Carnegie Tavern, which was this little bar right behind
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Carnegie Hall, and there was this amazing jazz poet who
just played it sets a night. For the price we
weren't even we didn't even know enough to drink in
those days. For the price of a perier, you could
be in this cool dark room where this genius was,
this artatum level pianist was playing for free, reflectively, with
melancholy elegance night after night. That was part of the
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magic of New York in that period before Uber and
so forth, mid to late eighties. I would get into
a cave only calves or the subway back then I
would say to the driver, how's the driving business. That
would strike a conversation with them. And the one guy
that I think he was Russian, he said that, he said,
New York is not the same in the more. He says,
all the artists are gone, he said, because of the
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rent is so high. He said, all the artists are
leaving the city. He said. Now it's only these bankers
who get up in the morning and go running along
the reservoir, then go downtown and try to kill each other,
you know. And I remember there was I felt much
more romantic about New York. And then I think that's
true and the only um antidote I have to I mean,
we were lucky enough to come of age in a
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rat infested loft in Soho at a time when Soho
was still an art village, and you would wake up
in the morning and you would see Richard Sarah walking
along Brent Street, scowling as he envisioned another monstrous wall
of cortense steel or uh. Donald Judd, the great minimalist,
was still occupying his house, which is now a little museum,
So you had a sense of those very specific energies
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of art. I remember there was even a couple who
were literally manacled together for a year as a conceptual
art exercise, and you would see them going up and
down West Broadway in a state of total bliss and equanimity.
And so we were lucky enough to see that last frontier.
And it's true that one of the tragedies of New
York in my lifetime is is that those frontiers of
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bohemia that had persisted since the Civil War really have vanished.
And yet when I say that, I recognized the limitations
of my own vision, because for my kids didn't experience
it that way. They experienced bed Sty, and they experienced Williamsburg,
and they experienced Brooklyn. You know, it was one of
the great transformations of our time. You know, I'm sure
you've read because it's a favorite book of all of
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us who love the theater, Moss Hearts, Act One, which
is a story about the subway. Basically, it's about getting
on the Subway in Brooklyn and being brought into the
wonders of Manhattan, and generations of imaginative New York pilgrims
made that trip from the Bronx of Brooklyn into town.
And then suddenly it was like the suction on a vacuum.
It suddenly turned the other way around right, and everyone
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was departing Manhattan for Brooklyn and the Bronx. Remember my son,
Luke said to me at one point, very seriously, he said, Dad,
he said, you know, I know you like this neighborhood,
the Upper East Side, which you know I had mortgaged
every atom of carbon in my body in order to
provide for them as an abode. He said, but you know,
the food is so much better than Williamsburg. He said,
I really wanted to come out with me for my generation.
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I I joke, I said, oh my god, Brooklyn was
where you would go to buy like serious hardcore drugs
or a gun. But there's two things when I look
at your your facts and so forth in your CD
that stand out to me that I'm always kind of
fascinated by. One is expatriotism. And you go live in
Paris for five years now? Was that the only long
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term stay you had outside the United State. That was
the one and only. That was the one and only.
I mean we've gone, you know, likes, we visited London,
and we've been kind of you know, regular habituaies of
Paris since, but that was the only extended time was
you know, what was it like for you to, like,
I'm assuming what was the Paris idea? Your idea someone
sent you because of you were you were, you were
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commissioned because you were going to write these journals if
you will know you keep journals. It was our idea.
Martha and I had fallen in love with Paris and
with the idea of Paris. I guess we're sort of
constantly just loyal love is fall in love with New
York and fall in love with Paris and go on,
and we're not cheating on New York Paris exactly exactly.
It was our that was our lover. New York. New
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York is our our spouse, and Paris our mistress. Someone
wrote a book with that title. By the way, Paris
was our mistress. But in any case, we had fallen
in love with it. And when our son Luke was
born in knew that if we didn't go now, then
we would be entrapped, if not entombed by New York
necessities preschool exactly. And so we decided to do it.
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And I threw my cap over the wall. You know
a beautiful story of Frank O'Connor's, you know, when they
growing up as a poor Irish kitten cork and whenever
they came to a wall that was too high to scale,
all the little Irish ways threw their caps over the wall.
Because once your cap was on the other side of
the wall, you had no choice but defined a way over.
You couldn't go home without your cap. And I've always
thought that's a lovely image of the key moments we
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have in life. So threw my cap over the wall,
said to the wonderful Tina Brown, who was then the
editor of The New Yorker, Listen, I really really want
to go to Paris. And bless her, she said, all right,
go go to Paris. Right to us from right for
us from Paris, And so we off, off we went.
And it was I don't think I had this fully
formed as a thought, but it was some kind of intuition.
I knew Paris would be a more interesting place to
write about than London exactly because it threatened to become
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a bit of a backwater. You know, it was a
time I loved the nineties. I thought the nineties were great.
They were as good as the nine nineties, were as
good as the eighteen nineties, and lots of ways. But
there was this encircling girdle of American life, in American influence,
which you felt very strongly in London. In those days
it was kind of triumphant Anglo Saxism, and France and
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Paris were the last place to resist that, so you
were actually witnessing the alternative, like the little Gaulish village
in the Asteris comics. This was the last place that
was going on. So I knew would be a more
interesting place to write about, because losers, so to speak,
are always more interesting to write about than winners. And
and we settled in and those were five amazing years.
They were also, you know, there's a moment I think
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in every from nine till two thousand and one really
came home to nine eleven. Also, I think in every
writer's life, and this may be true of every artist's life,
I think it is true of every artist's life there's
a moment when you sort of know you've hit it,
when you find your voice, you find your stance, and
you sort of know, even if you don't like me,
you have to admit that this is good. And I
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felt that way writing in Paris for the first time.
I've been writing for a decade for The New Yorker already,
but I sort of knew when I wrote my first piece,
I said, Oh, this voice is mine. This voice is appealing.
There's something about the way I can write here with
a certain kind of ride attachment, but also with a
certain kind of lyrical enthusiasm. I felt, I knew that
it was working. And there's just there's no feeling as
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good in a writer's life as that moment when you
when you know inside there's literally a kind of physical vibration,
a hum when you sit down to your typewriter or
computer when you feel that. And I felt that so
strongly in Paris, author Adam Gopnik. If you're enjoying insights
(18:54):
into the inner workings of The New Yorker, listen to
my conversation with an author formerly at the helm of
the publication, Editor in Chief Extraordinaire, Tina brown Well I
think I'm a compulsive reporter. Actually, I mean I have
what I think of as observation greed. Right most of
the time, I'm propelled to go out, not because I
(19:16):
actually want to go out, but I think I got
to see that, you know, I need to see that. Curious.
I'm really curious, and I have a great desire to
report on the action. Here the rest of my conversation
with Tina Brown in our archives at Here's the Thing
dot org. After the Break, Adam got Nick shares the
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secret to a perfect marriage. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're
listening to Here's the Thing writer Adam got Nick. This
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family spent five years living in France. In his time there,
he composed the Paris Journal for the New Yorker magazine,
as well as a collection of essays the New York
Times best selling Paris to the Moon. I was curious
why he decided to leave the City of Lights after
what seemed to be such a charmed and eventful time there.
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That was our decision as well, Martha. We had just
had our new baby, Olivia, and which was sort of
the climactic, the culminating episode, and what I knew would
be the book that I had organized, and Martha said
to me, you know, in New York we have a
full life, but an unbeautiful existence, and in Paris we
have a beautiful existence, but not a full life. And
we had to make that choice. It's a choice I've
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often regretted. Frankly, Alex and I still love Paris deeply
and have thought of it, but it Our son Luke
was about to start serious school, and he had been
to preschool, in kindergarten and first grade in Paris. And
I love France and I love French culture, but the
worst side of French culture is French education. It's brutal,
it's very effective, and you know, the kids emerge being
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able to recite Ruscine and give you the square root
of sixty in a way kids in our schools, yes, exactly.
You know, you don't necessarily, but it's a hard life.
You know, you're there from eight in the morning till
four and in the afternoon. A good thing about it
is that French kids tend to be sensitive in a
way that American kids are often spoiled, because they're aware
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from a very early age that existence is unappeasable, authority
is unappeasable. We don't teach our kids that authority is
unappeasable until it smacks them on the side of the
head when their nineteen or twenty and they start working
or joined the army or whatever. I often think, Luke, my,
my wonderful son was a philosopher. Now, on his first
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day at school, went in New York. And I came
home and said, how was it? And he said, Dad,
the teachers are too nice. And I said, what do
you mean, teachers? Everything you do they say is good.
He said, I drew a picture of myself. It wasn't good, Dad.
The nose was too big in the ears were wrong,
and they said it's wonderful. We're going to put it
right up on the Picasso. Hello. Yes, And I said,
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what would they have said in Paris? Oh, in Paris
they would say, no, it does it's nothing. It's it's
it's nothing. And he spotted instantly the profound insincerity of
American education, the superficiality of the encouragement that we often
give to kids. It's unearned, you know, he just as
you've done it, so it's good. I find that for me. Well,
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I mean, I'm sixty four years old, and I got
remarried and I have six children. The oldest is eight.
I have I have six children, eight, six, five, three
about to before one and a half and one because
the sixth one is a surrogate and my wife is
pregnant again with our seven child. So, and I have
an older daughter, SO who's twenty seven this year, she's
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twenty seven. But my point is is that you know,
in school with them now, the thing that we're navigating
not in some overwhelming way or some you know, it's
it's sporadic. Is this me two time up thing where
people's behavior which is like, you know, innocent boys will
be boys and people say off handed things as kids
just shock each other. Now it's like people are marched
down to an office and a report is filled out
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and filed, and you know, it's like a zero tolerance,
zero tolerance for some acts of childhood. Y. Yeah, you know,
we didn't experience that directly because our kids kind of
just missed it. Right we're in college, but by that time.
But I certainly, and it's the subject of the book
I'm working on I'm trying to finish for tomorrow, literally
for tomorrow right now, is that American life is attuned
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to achievement. Past the next test, get into the next grade,
get into the right college. And there's something very empty
about that hamster wheel of achievement that we put kids on.
And your kids are aware now they're how old and
there are there beyond college? Luke, No, they're both still
in University Lucas twenty six and he's getting his PhD
in philosophy at University of Texas at Austin. And Olivia
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is uh twenty one, and she's five years younger to
the day, which tells you, I'm thinking the same birthday,
the same birthday, and and they and she's at Harvard,
she's in her third year at Heart. She's switched. She
was in government originally. You know, they only have really
one subject at Harvard that they teach world domination, and
so she switched from the government side of world domination
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to the history side of world domination. Now I'm told
by friends who know you and I know a bit
about you, they told me that you have the perfect marriage. Well,
you know, I hope that's true. We have been married
for a very long time and have been through every
twist and turn that life can offer. From migration to
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New York at the age of twenty on a bus,
to children, raising children, watching children leave home, which is
a big one. And through it all we've been remarkably
harmonious and happy. I give Martha all the credit in
the world for that. It's not I'm the difficult, jumpy,
moody one. And she's a woman of incredible equanimity and
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insight and general steve spirit. And she's the caregiver to
the kids, to the dog, to me, and she's an
extraordinary woman. So I feel that that's, you know, the
most profound blessing in my life. Certainly in your writing
career where you go from g Q onto the New
Yorker was writing? I mean, you're making these observations about
art to fantastic schools, and you go on to do
(25:20):
it at the graduate level. And is the soul of
the writer always there and you're writing during your college career,
or when do you you become the guy that gets
hired by the GQ magazine. I never wanted to be
anything else but a writer from the age of ten,
I can I can locate it to a particular moment.
First of all, I was a crazy reader as a kid.
I love to read. I read The Therber Carnival literally
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till the pages came off in my hands in bed
when I was six and seven. But at the age
of ten, I wanted to go see a spy movie,
very bad spy movie, a Man from Uncle movie. And
my parents had said, yes, you could go on Saturday,
then on Friday the way parents will as I'm sure
you do, as I have done. So oh, no, it's
not gonna work, because we have to do this. And
I was so hurt and indignant. I went back to
my room and I a ten page letter of protests,
(26:01):
which I slipped under their door, and my dad's sweet
good manity is and was came and said, oh, I
didn't realize you felt this strongly about You really have
expressed yourself here. Of course you can go. And I said, oh,
that's interesting. You can put words down on paper in
ways to change the inner workings of someone else's mind.
And I felt an enormous power that was implicit and
(26:23):
inherent in that activity. Never wanted to me anything but
a writer. And though I did do art history, and
I was blessed, as I said at the at the
beginning of our conversation to have worked with a genuinely
inspired and great teacher. I never really wanted to do
art history. Art history was just an excuse. I mean,
I never wanted to do it professionally. It was an
excuse for getting to New York and being able to
tell my parents I was going to study, not to
(26:44):
walk the streets and try and sell my songs, which
was the reality of what we're going to get to
music in the world of magazines and that publishing world.
I grew up and you took about reading as a child.
I devoured everything from when I was ten to twelve
years old. I was reading The Godfather when I was ten,
yars or all or whatever. And and my point is
that g Q, you know, the Nick Poleeggie era New
(27:05):
York magazine, when Felker was running all the that bike
on era. I mean, I feel like magazines were very,
very different. Obviously then all magazines were the heart of
American culture in in that period, even when I mean
there had been since the nineteen twenties at least, and
they still were in the nineteen eighties. And you know,
Condemnast was a kind of temple. It was a strange
(27:25):
mysterious os run by the remote figure of signed new house.
With all of these glamorous magazines, everyone had a car.
So when I went to work, you know, I just
wanted a job. I really just wanted a job that
involved putting words on paper and seeing them in print.
I would have taken any job that there was, and
I was lucky enough to get a job as the
at first the fashion copy editor of GQ magazine. That
(27:49):
was my first grown up job, and that meant, you know,
fashion copy of the little blocks of type that appear
next to close in fashion magazines, you know, where they
have little kind of illiterateti tags. They're called, you know,
summer shirts, and then there's a like ten line description
of the of the summer shirts. And my job was
to edit and rewrite those things. And I thought I
was at the heart of show business. I thought it
(28:10):
was the greatest job anybody had ever given. And as
I tell in at the Stranger's Gate, I came up
with a two line and a literative tag to word,
a literative tag so potent it was simply Kiara scoro
chic for a group of glowing linen shirts. Kiara scorer
cheek that they promoted me on the strength of those
(28:30):
two to become the grooming editor. And then I was
responsible for all of the copy about lotions and moisturizers,
and they're in shampoo's except for fragrances, which was specially
because basically those magazines depend on Yes, there's another floor
and another thing and the thing I can't convey adequately.
I loved it. I loved every minute of it. I
(28:52):
never thought for a moment, why am I wasting my
talent splitting words and hairs and coming up nodly? Did
I give it a go? But I else it's and
it's very difficult to recreate this time for our kids.
You know, Now you write something and you posted online
and a million people can see it. Right at that period,
it was sort of I said to my kids. It
was there were like two hundred computers and all of
(29:12):
New York, and you wanted to get your hands on
one of them, and it kind of didn't matter which
one you got your hands on. The village voice of
the Soho News obviously not to be disingenuous, The golden
machine was the New Yorker, and that's very much where
I wanted to go and where I dreamt of going.
But I was just delighted to be in this business
of turning words on paper into words in print. It
(29:33):
just filled me with joy, and so I had to
I had terrific, a terrific couple of years doing that,
and my kids is still astounded because in a couple
of occasions I crept into a fashion story as a
haircut story once. That's how I met the wonderful photographer
Brigitte Lacombe. She came in it did my portrait, and
that wonderful French woman. It gets more French with every
(29:55):
succeeding year that she's in America, and she came into
my picture, and the kids, having a a glimpse of
that moment of improbable glamour, are still impressed. Martha actually,
who had modeled in Canada and was extraordinarily beautiful woman
still is, had a whole story about her and Mademoiselle,
and the kids still think that this is, you know,
(30:15):
just unreal. This is not your parents, This is the
two other people. What other magazines do you think are
holding their own in the world today. Oh, it's a
it's a good question. I read the New York Review
of Books which I think is still a thriving enterprise.
I read specific people a lot, and that's one of
the things that for good or ill, that the digital
areas and it's disaggregated magazines a lot. So I read
(30:37):
John Chait in the in New York, for instance, not
that I don't read New York Magazine, but I read
that specifically. Or I read David Frum in The Atlantic,
and not to the exclusion of other Atlantic right, not
to the exclusion of other people. Yeah, it's you know,
it comes more naturally that you you're online and you're
you see that someone's tweeted something interesting. I try and
(30:58):
read our magazine and New Yorker, of course, but I
do think we've done a pretty good job of staying
I hate the word relevant. I hope we've done a
good job of staying irrelevant in the sense that I
that you when you open the magazine, I would hope
that you don't know what you're going to read about,
and that the basic gambit of The New Yorker has
always been well, it was not unlike when I was
in Paris. As you say, Paris, I'm not interested in Paris.
(31:21):
Why should I be interested in Paris. What's this guy? Oh,
this is kind of interesting, This is kind of funny. Okay,
I'll stick with this. No, we're in your wheelhouse. Do
you see a place or did you ever contemplate a
place for a film? Oh? I always kind of played
a place for film and that. And Martha, my wife,
is a filmmaker and all of that, and like every
she's still doing that totally. Yes, indeed, she's she's producing
(31:42):
and writing screenplays now gone on from editing. So it's
very much a presence in our house and has been
for forty some years. I've tried my hand a couple
of times at screenplace and never really, you know, never
quite felt at home doing that. I've collaborated with her,
and I think we've done some nice things, but I've
never really I love movies, you know, in my life.
In fact, I will be honest with you, you know,
(32:03):
I would have been delighted and had my life taken
a slightly different turn, and that had been a bigger
part of it. I love I love him. I truly
love the theater, and so writing for the theater is
at the center of my my feelings and something I've
I've been able to do. But there was an, if
I can tell a funny story, that was a moment
because all you know, like every writer, your stuff gets
optioned for the movies and then bought for the movies,
(32:24):
and then the script has developed and so on. And
there was a moment in our history when I had
written a story called Bumping into Charlie Ravioli about my
daughter Olivia's imaginary friend, which had become a well known
and anthologized and the studio wanted to option it for
a movie. And then they looked into the contract and
discovered that Harvey Weinstein had bought outright Paris the Moon
(32:46):
for another movie, and he had bought the characters in
that book in perpetuity, and the leading characters. So since
the leading characters in that book where me and our
son Luke, we couldn't be in the movie of Charlie Ravioli.
So there was a moment, Man, how's this for a
twenty one century moment when half of our family was
owned by Mirramax and the other half were owned by
Sony Pictures, right, and they would have to negotiate like
(33:08):
the gopnic cinematic universe to have us all in in
one movie. But no, I've never I've never written a movie.
I was telling that my producers that in my lifetime
there were two names that would vex me because I
was around super sophisticated people who would pronounce their names differently.
They called him Richard Avden. Yes, Brits would call him
Richard Avedon, and I thought, that's not how I learned it.
(33:31):
And a woman I worked with, who was a very
famous and internationally famous model, pronounced the designs named Balanchanga
but described to me you being I guess adopted by Avedon.
Dick Avedon was with Kirk Varnett of the great influence
on my life, and when I think about everything that
I wear, eat, look at, was very much still under
(33:52):
his influence and spiritual agis. He was an extraordinary man,
obviously a great photographer, but also a man, an incandescent
force in the world, a man of limitless energy and
and mischief and fun, but also a very serious artist.
And one of the things that he wanted to implant
in me, and as I say, he really adopted Martin
(34:13):
me as as kind of surrogad kids, was that it
was possible to live a very rich and good and
pleasure enhanced life, pleasure, affirming life, and at the same
time be a serious artist author Adam Gopneck. If you're
enjoying this conversation, be sure to subscribe to Hear is
(34:34):
the Thing on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts
or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back,
Adam Gopnick tells us the most audacious thing he's ever written.
(34:59):
I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing from
my Heart Radio. From art criticism to children's literature to
food writing, no genre is off limits for Adam Gopnik. Recently,
he expanded his resume even further into musical theater as
a book writer and lyricist. When I first came to
(35:21):
New York, it was to be a songwriter. I had
a cassette of my songs, and I had written The
College Show, which was based on the life of Vladimir Tatlin,
the Russian constructivist architect. And I assumed I was three
weeks from Broadway, when are we gonna get our hands
on that on that musical? So I I actually have
promised our friends Marcy Hysler and seen a good rich
that I would do one of the songs from the
show at one of their four Below evenings. So that
(35:42):
was my ambition, and I wasn't able to push it forward.
I was going to be Stephen Sante, not not John Updyke,
could have become either one, but I've you know. But
my other ambition was to be an essayist from New
York Is. So that did work out. And then it
had always been very much part of my life, caring
passionately about the musical theater and writing songs for all
occasions and writing lyrics. And then um, the great American
(36:05):
composer David Shire approached me about writing a musical with him.
I didn't know it at the time, but he had
said to his wonderful wife, d d Con why don't
guys like this everyone to write for the musical theater. Indeed,
he had said to well, you don't know, maybe he does.
And she approached me at a theatrical thing and said,
would you be interested in writing a show with my
husband David Shire? And I said, I can't imagine anything
in the world I would rather do. So David and
(36:27):
I got to work and we wrote a show together
called Our Table. We wrote more than sixties songs, I
mean complete finished piano vocal songs about a little restaurant
struggling to survive in New York, and Melissa Erico came
in to play the lead of the female lead in
a workshop and I was astounded by her gifts because
(36:47):
my stuff is literary and it involves a lot of
complicated puns and ambivalent emotions. She's super bright woman, and
she was It was like in a fairy tale. She
was the first musical theater performing edition. Very beautiful. I
haven't an unbelievably voice like a Mozart flute, as someone
once said. She understood everything that I was writing and
could deliver all of those bitter sweet, ambivalent, complex emotions.
(37:10):
So we did a full production of it, which unfortunately
she couldn't be in out in New Haven. Like every
musical goes to try out and often die. And it's
still the thing. I'm proud of stuff. We have a
very good live concert recording of it that we did
at fifty four below with Melissa singing the lead along
with Andy Taylor and Constantine Marules. Is that available? Yes,
it is on Spotify with a beautiful cover by Brigitte Lacom.
(37:33):
Actually Brigitte did us a wonderful cover image. You go
on Spotify our table Adam Copnick, Melissa Erico. So we
did that, and then Melissa and I enjoyed working together enormously,
So I started writing all kinds, especially material for David.
And I wrote a song which I love called Cry
for Joy, this kind of a theme song for her
swing show. Wrote a lot of parodies, and then she's
(37:54):
just done a beautiful album of film noir inspired music,
but no music. Oh no. On the tray, I was
just about to say on the country, it's occupying an
ever larger part of my life. I have two new
shows underway with Andrew Lippap, who wrote The Adams Family
and The Wild Party, and David Shayer and I are
in the middle. Were about one acting to a new
show for Melissa called Troubadour right now, about the invention
(38:16):
of the love song at the court of Eleanor of
Aquitaine in the in the thirteenth century. As I say,
I love the theater nothing in life. There's a song
in our table called It's Never Reigning in Seattle, which,
of all the countless things I've done political books and
family memoirs and and so on, is a single thing
I probably proudest stuff because it's a song about the
(38:36):
necessity of lying to your children. In the situation in
the in the show is that the father that chef
has been telling his beloved daughter, who was very much
modeled on my Olivia for years, that they have an
offer in Seattle, but never moved to Seattle because it
rains all the time in Seattle. You have to bring
the customers out like sponges before you see them never
going to Seattle. Rains all the time. And finally they
have to go to Seattle because they lose the restaurant.
(38:59):
And then he's she says to him, you know, it
rains all the time in Seattle, and then he sings
to this song it's never raining in Seattle. And for me,
that's what we do with our children, you know, we
have to There never been a song about how we
have to lie to our children sometimes to reassure them
of the of the salubriousness of the world. That's the
thing I'm proud of. Stiff. What are you working on now?
I'm just I mean literally finishing four to send to
(39:21):
my publisher tomorrow, a book called tentatively the Real Work
on the mystery of mastery, and it's it's about the
business of of learning to master things, particularly in middle age.
You know, I learned to drive when I was in
my fifties, got my driver's license only my fifties. I
think I am the only New Yorker ever to get
to pass his driver's test on the same day as
(39:43):
his son. Luke was twenty and I was fifth, and
we took our test on this on the same day.
I learned to draw in the last few years, learned
to write music and all of those things. So it's
all of these essays about learning to do things, but
it's not a collection of essays. It's a book about
the ark of doing things. It ends, I think hope affectingly.
It includes a chapter that is the I won't even
(40:03):
try and describe. It is probably the most audacious thing
I've ever written in deeply embarrassing in some ways, but essential.
And then it ends with I've been taking boxing lessons
for the last year and because I just I'm fascinated
by mastery, something that's so alien to a little Jewish
intellectual like me as boxing, being able to enter into
(40:24):
it and learning the great perpetual lesson of all accomplishment,
which is that you break it down into small parts.
You learn the small parts, the little segments, and then
over time, miraculously the little segments become a seamless whole
and you find, oh my god, I'm actually throwing a
sequence of punches. So I'm simultaneously was taking boxing lessons
and I'm doing ballroom dancing with my daughter Olivia. And
(40:47):
so the last chapter is just about the ways in
which the steps of your feet in ballroom dancing and
the jabs of your hand in boxing compliment each other.
And it's the you know, the perpetual cycle. The other
thing that fascinates me, Alec is the way that when
you're being trained box, you're always made to be aware
of the invisible opponent, the invisible enemy, right, because everything
(41:08):
you do is in response to this person who you
never actually see and you never do exactly And I
find that a very powerful metaphor for life generally. Right,
we construct ourselves in the eyes of an invisible other.
Thank you so much, Just delighted to be here, My
(41:29):
thanks to writer Adam Gopnick. This episode was recorded at
CDM Studios in New York City. We're produced by Kathleen Russo,
Zack McNeice and Maureen Hoban. Our engineer is Frank Imperial.
Our social media manager is Daniel Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin.
Here's the thing is brought to you by my Heart Radio.
(42:01):
Who about the fun Time
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from My Heart Radio. My guest today is uniquely
blessed with intellectual curiosity, air udition, and an insightful wit.
He's also been called one of the greatest thinkers and
wordsmiths of our age, and is rumored to read up
(00:24):
to four books a day. He's also a true New
Yorkers New Yorker, the brilliant Adam Gopnick. Gopnik has been
a writer at The New Yorker for over three decades,
first as an art critic and then as their Paris correspondent.
He's written fiction, non fiction, humor, memoir, and criticism for
(00:46):
the famed magazine, covering everything from sports to spirituality with
equal aplom He's the international best selling author of ten
books and an accomplished lecture and storyteller. He has appeared
regularly on the Moth Radio Hour the CBC and created
(01:07):
a series of one man shows, including The Gates, an
Evening of Stories with Adam Gopnik. For someone with such
a prolific and varied body of work, I was curious
to learn about his writing process. I'm right in the
kind of the back room. We think of it as
the engine room of the Titanic, right where Daddy has
(01:28):
stripped to the waist shoveling coal into the furnace while
to keep the boat going for another day. We hit
the iceberg long ago, and we're listening, but we're gonna
keep moving forward. And I always have my door open.
The kids always know seven days a week, six hours
a day too, Yes, and they were always aware. Someone
teach you that, to someone lends you that. Yeah, Actually
(01:49):
someone did teach me that. I had a great teacher
and inspiring teacher who I wrote an essay about called
Last of the metro Zoids, when he died tragically and
stupidly young of cancers. Name was Kirk Varnetot, and he
ended his life as the director of Painting and Sculpture
at the Museum of Modern Art. But he had been
my professor in graduate school, and he was someone of
(02:10):
impeccable talent, the greatest lecture I've ever heard, an inspired curator.
But he had a work effort like no one I've
ever known, which he had derived, as he would tell
you himself and did tell you often, from playing football
and coaching football. That had been his passion In college,
played defensive line, though he was wildly undersized then and
going out to Stanford, and couldn't decide whether to continue
(02:33):
coaching for Bill Walsh, who was at Stanford then here,
or to become an art historian. And he said to
me a memorable line, He said, the thing about being
a football coach is you have to be smart enough
to do it well and dumb enough to think it matters.
My father was a football coach, was he really? My
father coach high school where he played at SU and
then he went to They caught high school football where
(02:53):
we grew up, and my memories of that mentality. There
was a sign above the entrance to the coach office
as you walked out the door, and the sign said
if you score, you may win. If they never score,
you will never lose. And the boulder letters said defense
wins championships. Well, that was very much. Though Kirk was
the most sophisticated of intellectuals, he was at heart a
(03:17):
football coach. And when I arrived in graduate school in
New York in nineteen eighty, I was something of a
wise guy. I grew up in an academic family, but
in a very contentious, smart when the argument at the
dinner table kind of family, what'd your dad do? My
dad was a professor? No, no, when when you when
you left Philadelphia? How old were you when you went
to Levin? When we left Philadelphia? And then I and
(03:39):
then grew spent the next nine years in Montreal, really
kind of grew up in exactly. And my mother to
my mother was a professor too, And actually I should
add them in many ways a more distinguished scientist and
scholar than my dad was. My dad spent a lot
of time as a dean, was extremely good at it.
My mom is famous in her field for having discovered
the first identifiable chromosome linked to grammar, linked to language,
(04:02):
which is called if I used to know my heart
show f XP you forgotten? Yes, exactly twops. Anyway, So
I came I came of age very much in that
kind of Jewish intellectual family, with elements of the Glass
family of Salinger and of the Corleone family of Mary
Open leaving at eleven, I wonder, I mean, I always
identified that period as a huge transition childhood. It's very
(04:26):
sent you to say that it was hugely tough, hugely tough,
because I had just sort of begun for the first
time to have a circle of friends. And we smoked.
We couldn't get marijuana, we smoked marigold cigarettes and all that.
It was hugely tough moving to a strange city, and
it took me quite a while to adjust. As in Philadelphia,
where I spent my childhood, really I had actually been
(04:46):
a kid actor, and I had been the kind of
the Jackie Coogan of Andre Gregory's avant garde theater. You
know Andrew Gregory, it's still to this day a very
dear friend, my oldest friend in the world. And he
had an avant garde theater in Philadelphia. Oh do you
really yes? Yeah, Well that was that that family. And
so I had played countless parts for Andre and as
I say, we're still intimate friends. And so I had
(05:08):
a very uh incandescent and some always a blessed child.
And so that transition was extremely, extremely difficult for me.
And you went undergrad to McGill. I went undergrad to McGill.
I've got many friends because mcgils such a great school.
I have many friends whose children have gone there. And
my neighbor in my first home and I m Aganson
was skip Sheldon Huntington's Sheldon who was on the medical
(05:28):
staff there or the hospital staff. That he was a
medical doctor who also I think his family him or
his mother's family were heirs to the merc drug and
he was my guy. And I'm McGill such a great
school when you were there growing up. Was it a
feder company you were going to go to McGill, Yes,
there was no, There was no question. It was the
It was the family tavern. Really, not only I tell
my kids. In fact, they ended up because I got
(05:49):
a discount because my both my parents were professors, and
then I did well and I got various fellowships and
ended up paying me to go to college, so which
was in this day as unusual. My friend Malcolm Bladwell,
who's also a Canadian of the same generation, points out
accurately that that's the Canadian model, that you go to
the nearest good school to your home. And the whole
(06:09):
insane American rigmarole which we have gone through is I'm
sure you have gone through and will go through of
college visits and the insane competitive overdrive that takes places
essentially unknown in Canada. My nieces and nephews live in
Edmonton and they went to the University of Alberta, which
is a terrific school and is nearby. But yeah, I
went to McGill and art history. I did art history.
(06:33):
I did our history because I was torn between doing
psychology and art history. My older sister, with whom i'm
extremely close intellectually did psychology and it's the psychologist to
this day. But I have four sisters. I should add,
you're one of how many six? I'm one of six,
so it's positive science, right, one of six I had.
This is a whole other subject, but we I had
(06:54):
an extraordinary childhood, which I hope to write about it
in my next book after this one. But I had
seen an incredibly pretty girl going into the art history
department and I thought, that looks interesting. We're interested in psychology,
which tended to study what is she studying? And I've
found out and I followed her in and forty two
years later we're still married, so that worked out all right.
(07:17):
But it was also nice because I was talking. I
was you know how it is when you know that age,
you're agonized about everything. Everything is in agony. And I
said to my psychology advice, but what should I do
Should I do art history of psychology? It seemed hugely
important at the time. And he said, is this a
difficult decision? And I said yes, And he said, then
it's unimportant. He said, all difficult decisions in life are
unimportant because if they're difficult, that means there's a lot
(07:37):
to be said on both sides, so you can't really
take a wrong turn. My wife has a degree in
art history from n y U. And when I said
to her at one point, why that in a menu
of things you might have said, I said, why that?
And she goes cool. It's because it's the history of
the world of humanity, history of humanity and the history,
and it has this magical element, and that is that
(07:58):
you look at ill fixed pictures, at things that don't move,
that don't dramatize, that don't have you know, attached them,
and suddenly they seemed to sum up a period and epoch,
a mood of meaning you understand the Italian Renaissance better
by looking at Leonardo than you do by reading six
(08:20):
volumes on the period. So I loved it and still do.
I came to New York with, as I've written about
in my book, at the Stranger's Gate. We got on
a bus leaving Montreal like kids out of a nineteen
forties musical, and came to New York. The building where
we are right now we're writing, was where Martha had
her first job. She was a film editor at that time,
studying to be a film editor. Was was actually a
(08:41):
film editor. She was with eventually too, the Masals, but
she had trained with her parents were founding filmmakers for
the National Film Board of Canada. I don't know if
that means anything in American now, but it was the
great documentary are familiar and this was her first job,
and it is a sign of how different New York
is now. And then that this building on Ninth Aven
and was so isolated that I would come, I would
(09:05):
take her down on the subway in the morning and
pick her up again at night because they routinely found
dead bodies in the dumpster. And there was truly on
this block where now there's ah. You have your choice
between a great French, great restaurant of the south of
France and a fine bistro from Alsace. There was nothing.
There was absolutely nothing. So when you leave and you
come to New York, what motivated that decision. Why did
(09:27):
you want to come to go to graduate school at
n y U and not remain in Canada, go somewhere
else because it was a period of your life for
your fairly peripateticus. Yes, absolutely, but because we had fallen
in love with New York and it was I had
fallen crazy New York. Oh no, No, she was Icelandic
girl from Montreal. She was. It couldn't have been more
Canadian in background and temperament is to this day. But
(09:49):
we had been to New York and we had fallen
crazy in love with it the way you do, or
people have done historically. And then even then, even in
the seventies, and and my you know, my folks thought
we were a little bit crazy because there was the
Tali into the seventies in New York was still taxi
driving New York, you know, with steam coming out of
the manholes and psychos driving the cabs. But we had
(10:14):
fallen crazy in love with it, and I as I
am to this day, it's not. That's an emotion that's
never changed for me. And it seemed like a time
of possibility. And when you're twenty years old, you don't
it's hard to keep anybody away from anything. My father
came with me when we got on the bus going
down to Manhattan, and he said to me, you know,
it's like, you know d'artagnan's father and the three musketeers
(10:37):
seize him off from Gascony, if you remember, and says,
when you get to Paris, fight duels with everyone you meet,
which he then does and becomes a musketeer. My father
said to me when I was getting on the bus,
he said, when you get to New York, remember never
underestimate the other person's insecurity. And those turned out to
be the wisest words anyone has ever given me. And
every mistake I've made subsequently was because I underestimated someone
(10:59):
else's insecurity. And every time I've had an empathetic insight
into a situation, professionally or or personally, it's because I
remembered that. Remember my uncle, my father's youngest brother, who
was a bit of a for lack of a better
way of putting, was kind of a Karawackian figure like
around the road, very bohemian and very never had a job,
lived off of his Korean War pension, and you know,
(11:21):
a very strange guy, but super bright, super intellectual guy.
You're reading books, consult he said. Remember one thing, he said,
even if you really are one in a million, there's
seven other people like you in this city. So you
can form a little club with that. Then you can
hang out with your mind. People absolutely make a you
make a cohort instantly. In New York and my dad,
though it was the tail into the seventies, there was
(11:42):
still it was still in some ways a more if
I made attractive city than it is now because exactly
because there was so much that was decrepit and there
was so much that was despairing, there were these wonderful
little islands of light and poetry and music. When we
first came to New York, we used to go and
here the G eight jazz pianist Ellis Larkins play at
the Carnegie Tavern, which was this little bar right behind
(12:05):
Carnegie Hall, and there was this amazing jazz poet who
just played it sets a night. For the price we
weren't even we didn't even know enough to drink in
those days. For the price of a perier, you could
be in this cool dark room where this genius was,
this artatum level pianist was playing for free, reflectively, with
melancholy elegance night after night. That was part of the
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magic of New York in that period before Uber and
so forth, mid to late eighties. I would get into
a cave only calves or the subway back then I
would say to the driver, how's the driving business. That
would strike a conversation with them. And the one guy
that I think he was Russian, he said that, he said,
New York is not the same in the more. He says,
all the artists are gone, he said, because of the
(12:49):
rent is so high. He said, all the artists are
leaving the city. He said. Now it's only these bankers
who get up in the morning and go running along
the reservoir, then go downtown and try to kill each other,
you know. And I remember there was I felt much
more romantic about New York. And then I think that's
true and the only um antidote I have to I mean,
we were lucky enough to come of age in a
(13:11):
rat infested loft in Soho at a time when Soho
was still an art village, and you would wake up
in the morning and you would see Richard Sarah walking
along Brent Street, scowling as he envisioned another monstrous wall
of cortense steel or uh. Donald Judd, the great minimalist,
was still occupying his house, which is now a little museum,
So you had a sense of those very specific energies
(13:33):
of art. I remember there was even a couple who
were literally manacled together for a year as a conceptual
art exercise, and you would see them going up and
down West Broadway in a state of total bliss and equanimity.
And so we were lucky enough to see that last frontier.
And it's true that one of the tragedies of New
York in my lifetime is is that those frontiers of
(13:55):
bohemia that had persisted since the Civil War really have vanished.
And yet when I say that, I recognized the limitations
of my own vision, because for my kids didn't experience
it that way. They experienced bed Sty, and they experienced Williamsburg,
and they experienced Brooklyn. You know, it was one of
the great transformations of our time. You know, I'm sure
you've read because it's a favorite book of all of
(14:15):
us who love the theater, Moss Hearts, Act One, which
is a story about the subway. Basically, it's about getting
on the Subway in Brooklyn and being brought into the
wonders of Manhattan, and generations of imaginative New York pilgrims
made that trip from the Bronx of Brooklyn into town.
And then suddenly it was like the suction on a vacuum.
It suddenly turned the other way around right, and everyone
(14:36):
was departing Manhattan for Brooklyn and the Bronx. Remember my son,
Luke said to me at one point, very seriously, he said, Dad,
he said, you know, I know you like this neighborhood,
the Upper East Side, which you know I had mortgaged
every atom of carbon in my body in order to
provide for them as an abode. He said, but you know,
the food is so much better than Williamsburg. He said,
I really wanted to come out with me for my generation.
(14:58):
I I joke, I said, oh my god, Brooklyn was
where you would go to buy like serious hardcore drugs
or a gun. But there's two things when I look
at your your facts and so forth in your CD
that stand out to me that I'm always kind of
fascinated by. One is expatriotism. And you go live in
Paris for five years now? Was that the only long
(15:20):
term stay you had outside the United State. That was
the one and only. That was the one and only.
I mean we've gone, you know, likes, we visited London,
and we've been kind of you know, regular habituaies of
Paris since, but that was the only extended time was
you know, what was it like for you to, like,
I'm assuming what was the Paris idea? Your idea someone
sent you because of you were you were, you were
(15:42):
commissioned because you were going to write these journals if
you will know you keep journals. It was our idea.
Martha and I had fallen in love with Paris and
with the idea of Paris. I guess we're sort of
constantly just loyal love is fall in love with New
York and fall in love with Paris and go on,
and we're not cheating on New York Paris exactly exactly.
It was our that was our lover. New York. New
(16:02):
York is our our spouse, and Paris our mistress. Someone
wrote a book with that title. By the way, Paris
was our mistress. But in any case, we had fallen
in love with it. And when our son Luke was
born in knew that if we didn't go now, then
we would be entrapped, if not entombed by New York
necessities preschool exactly. And so we decided to do it.
(16:23):
And I threw my cap over the wall. You know
a beautiful story of Frank O'Connor's, you know, when they
growing up as a poor Irish kitten cork and whenever
they came to a wall that was too high to scale,
all the little Irish ways threw their caps over the wall.
Because once your cap was on the other side of
the wall, you had no choice but defined a way over.
You couldn't go home without your cap. And I've always
thought that's a lovely image of the key moments we
(16:45):
have in life. So threw my cap over the wall,
said to the wonderful Tina Brown, who was then the
editor of The New Yorker, Listen, I really really want
to go to Paris. And bless her, she said, all right,
go go to Paris. Right to us from right for
us from Paris, And so we off, off we went.
And it was I don't think I had this fully
formed as a thought, but it was some kind of intuition.
I knew Paris would be a more interesting place to
write about than London exactly because it threatened to become
(17:07):
a bit of a backwater. You know, it was a
time I loved the nineties. I thought the nineties were great.
They were as good as the nine nineties, were as
good as the eighteen nineties, and lots of ways. But
there was this encircling girdle of American life, in American influence,
which you felt very strongly in London. In those days
it was kind of triumphant Anglo Saxism, and France and
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Paris were the last place to resist that, so you
were actually witnessing the alternative, like the little Gaulish village
in the Asteris comics. This was the last place that
was going on. So I knew would be a more
interesting place to write about, because losers, so to speak,
are always more interesting to write about than winners. And
and we settled in and those were five amazing years.
They were also, you know, there's a moment I think
(17:49):
in every from nine till two thousand and one really
came home to nine eleven. Also, I think in every
writer's life, and this may be true of every artist's life,
I think it is true of every artist's life there's
a moment when you sort of know you've hit it,
when you find your voice, you find your stance, and
you sort of know, even if you don't like me,
you have to admit that this is good. And I
(18:11):
felt that way writing in Paris for the first time.
I've been writing for a decade for The New Yorker already,
but I sort of knew when I wrote my first piece,
I said, Oh, this voice is mine. This voice is appealing.
There's something about the way I can write here with
a certain kind of ride attachment, but also with a
certain kind of lyrical enthusiasm. I felt, I knew that
it was working. And there's just there's no feeling as
(18:33):
good in a writer's life as that moment when you
when you know inside there's literally a kind of physical vibration,
a hum when you sit down to your typewriter or
computer when you feel that. And I felt that so
strongly in Paris, author Adam Gopnik. If you're enjoying insights
(18:54):
into the inner workings of The New Yorker, listen to
my conversation with an author formerly at the helm of
the publication, Editor in Chief Extraordinaire, Tina brown Well I
think I'm a compulsive reporter. Actually, I mean I have
what I think of as observation greed. Right most of
the time, I'm propelled to go out, not because I
(19:16):
actually want to go out, but I think I got
to see that, you know, I need to see that. Curious.
I'm really curious, and I have a great desire to
report on the action. Here the rest of my conversation
with Tina Brown in our archives at Here's the Thing
dot org. After the Break, Adam got Nick shares the
(19:38):
secret to a perfect marriage. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're
listening to Here's the Thing writer Adam got Nick. This
(20:00):
family spent five years living in France. In his time there,
he composed the Paris Journal for the New Yorker magazine,
as well as a collection of essays the New York
Times best selling Paris to the Moon. I was curious
why he decided to leave the City of Lights after
what seemed to be such a charmed and eventful time there.
(20:24):
That was our decision as well, Martha. We had just
had our new baby, Olivia, and which was sort of
the climactic, the culminating episode, and what I knew would
be the book that I had organized, and Martha said
to me, you know, in New York we have a
full life, but an unbeautiful existence, and in Paris we
have a beautiful existence, but not a full life. And
we had to make that choice. It's a choice I've
(20:46):
often regretted. Frankly, Alex and I still love Paris deeply
and have thought of it, but it Our son Luke
was about to start serious school, and he had been
to preschool, in kindergarten and first grade in Paris. And
I love France and I love French culture, but the
worst side of French culture is French education. It's brutal,
it's very effective, and you know, the kids emerge being
(21:07):
able to recite Ruscine and give you the square root
of sixty in a way kids in our schools, yes, exactly.
You know, you don't necessarily, but it's a hard life.
You know, you're there from eight in the morning till
four and in the afternoon. A good thing about it
is that French kids tend to be sensitive in a
way that American kids are often spoiled, because they're aware
(21:28):
from a very early age that existence is unappeasable, authority
is unappeasable. We don't teach our kids that authority is
unappeasable until it smacks them on the side of the
head when their nineteen or twenty and they start working
or joined the army or whatever. I often think, Luke, my,
my wonderful son was a philosopher. Now, on his first
(21:48):
day at school, went in New York. And I came
home and said, how was it? And he said, Dad,
the teachers are too nice. And I said, what do
you mean, teachers? Everything you do they say is good.
He said, I drew a picture of myself. It wasn't good, Dad.
The nose was too big in the ears were wrong,
and they said it's wonderful. We're going to put it
right up on the Picasso. Hello. Yes, And I said,
(22:08):
what would they have said in Paris? Oh, in Paris
they would say, no, it does it's nothing. It's it's
it's nothing. And he spotted instantly the profound insincerity of
American education, the superficiality of the encouragement that we often
give to kids. It's unearned, you know, he just as
you've done it, so it's good. I find that for me. Well,
(22:28):
I mean, I'm sixty four years old, and I got
remarried and I have six children. The oldest is eight.
I have I have six children, eight, six, five, three
about to before one and a half and one because
the sixth one is a surrogate and my wife is
pregnant again with our seven child. So, and I have
an older daughter, SO who's twenty seven this year, she's
(22:49):
twenty seven. But my point is is that you know,
in school with them now, the thing that we're navigating
not in some overwhelming way or some you know, it's
it's sporadic. Is this me two time up thing where
people's behavior which is like, you know, innocent boys will
be boys and people say off handed things as kids
just shock each other. Now it's like people are marched
down to an office and a report is filled out
(23:11):
and filed, and you know, it's like a zero tolerance,
zero tolerance for some acts of childhood. Y. Yeah, you know,
we didn't experience that directly because our kids kind of
just missed it. Right we're in college, but by that time.
But I certainly, and it's the subject of the book
I'm working on I'm trying to finish for tomorrow, literally
for tomorrow right now, is that American life is attuned
(23:33):
to achievement. Past the next test, get into the next grade,
get into the right college. And there's something very empty
about that hamster wheel of achievement that we put kids on.
And your kids are aware now they're how old and
there are there beyond college? Luke, No, they're both still
in University Lucas twenty six and he's getting his PhD
in philosophy at University of Texas at Austin. And Olivia
(23:54):
is uh twenty one, and she's five years younger to
the day, which tells you, I'm thinking the same birthday,
the same birthday, and and they and she's at Harvard,
she's in her third year at Heart. She's switched. She
was in government originally. You know, they only have really
one subject at Harvard that they teach world domination, and
so she switched from the government side of world domination
(24:16):
to the history side of world domination. Now I'm told
by friends who know you and I know a bit
about you, they told me that you have the perfect marriage. Well,
you know, I hope that's true. We have been married
for a very long time and have been through every
twist and turn that life can offer. From migration to
(24:38):
New York at the age of twenty on a bus,
to children, raising children, watching children leave home, which is
a big one. And through it all we've been remarkably
harmonious and happy. I give Martha all the credit in
the world for that. It's not I'm the difficult, jumpy,
moody one. And she's a woman of incredible equanimity and
(24:58):
insight and general steve spirit. And she's the caregiver to
the kids, to the dog, to me, and she's an
extraordinary woman. So I feel that that's, you know, the
most profound blessing in my life. Certainly in your writing
career where you go from g Q onto the New
Yorker was writing? I mean, you're making these observations about
art to fantastic schools, and you go on to do
(25:20):
it at the graduate level. And is the soul of
the writer always there and you're writing during your college career,
or when do you you become the guy that gets
hired by the GQ magazine. I never wanted to be
anything else but a writer from the age of ten,
I can I can locate it to a particular moment.
First of all, I was a crazy reader as a kid.
I love to read. I read The Therber Carnival literally
(25:40):
till the pages came off in my hands in bed
when I was six and seven. But at the age
of ten, I wanted to go see a spy movie,
very bad spy movie, a Man from Uncle movie. And
my parents had said, yes, you could go on Saturday,
then on Friday the way parents will as I'm sure
you do, as I have done. So oh, no, it's
not gonna work, because we have to do this. And
I was so hurt and indignant. I went back to
my room and I a ten page letter of protests,
(26:01):
which I slipped under their door, and my dad's sweet
good manity is and was came and said, oh, I
didn't realize you felt this strongly about You really have
expressed yourself here. Of course you can go. And I said, oh,
that's interesting. You can put words down on paper in
ways to change the inner workings of someone else's mind.
And I felt an enormous power that was implicit and
(26:23):
inherent in that activity. Never wanted to me anything but
a writer. And though I did do art history, and
I was blessed, as I said at the at the
beginning of our conversation to have worked with a genuinely
inspired and great teacher. I never really wanted to do
art history. Art history was just an excuse. I mean,
I never wanted to do it professionally. It was an
excuse for getting to New York and being able to
tell my parents I was going to study, not to
(26:44):
walk the streets and try and sell my songs, which
was the reality of what we're going to get to
music in the world of magazines and that publishing world.
I grew up and you took about reading as a child.
I devoured everything from when I was ten to twelve
years old. I was reading The Godfather when I was ten,
yars or all or whatever. And and my point is
that g Q, you know, the Nick Poleeggie era New
(27:05):
York magazine, when Felker was running all the that bike
on era. I mean, I feel like magazines were very,
very different. Obviously then all magazines were the heart of
American culture in in that period, even when I mean
there had been since the nineteen twenties at least, and
they still were in the nineteen eighties. And you know,
Condemnast was a kind of temple. It was a strange
(27:25):
mysterious os run by the remote figure of signed new house.
With all of these glamorous magazines, everyone had a car.
So when I went to work, you know, I just
wanted a job. I really just wanted a job that
involved putting words on paper and seeing them in print.
I would have taken any job that there was, and
I was lucky enough to get a job as the
at first the fashion copy editor of GQ magazine. That
(27:49):
was my first grown up job, and that meant, you know,
fashion copy of the little blocks of type that appear
next to close in fashion magazines, you know, where they
have little kind of illiterateti tags. They're called, you know,
summer shirts, and then there's a like ten line description
of the of the summer shirts. And my job was
to edit and rewrite those things. And I thought I
was at the heart of show business. I thought it
(28:10):
was the greatest job anybody had ever given. And as
I tell in at the Stranger's Gate, I came up
with a two line and a literative tag to word,
a literative tag so potent it was simply Kiara scoro
chic for a group of glowing linen shirts. Kiara scorer
cheek that they promoted me on the strength of those
(28:30):
two to become the grooming editor. And then I was
responsible for all of the copy about lotions and moisturizers,
and they're in shampoo's except for fragrances, which was specially
because basically those magazines depend on Yes, there's another floor
and another thing and the thing I can't convey adequately.
I loved it. I loved every minute of it. I
(28:52):
never thought for a moment, why am I wasting my
talent splitting words and hairs and coming up nodly? Did
I give it a go? But I else it's and
it's very difficult to recreate this time for our kids.
You know, Now you write something and you posted online
and a million people can see it. Right at that period,
it was sort of I said to my kids. It
was there were like two hundred computers and all of
(29:12):
New York, and you wanted to get your hands on
one of them, and it kind of didn't matter which
one you got your hands on. The village voice of
the Soho News obviously not to be disingenuous, The golden
machine was the New Yorker, and that's very much where
I wanted to go and where I dreamt of going.
But I was just delighted to be in this business
of turning words on paper into words in print. It
(29:33):
just filled me with joy, and so I had to
I had terrific, a terrific couple of years doing that,
and my kids is still astounded because in a couple
of occasions I crept into a fashion story as a
haircut story once. That's how I met the wonderful photographer
Brigitte Lacombe. She came in it did my portrait, and
that wonderful French woman. It gets more French with every
(29:55):
succeeding year that she's in America, and she came into
my picture, and the kids, having a a glimpse of
that moment of improbable glamour, are still impressed. Martha actually,
who had modeled in Canada and was extraordinarily beautiful woman
still is, had a whole story about her and Mademoiselle,
and the kids still think that this is, you know,
(30:15):
just unreal. This is not your parents, This is the
two other people. What other magazines do you think are
holding their own in the world today. Oh, it's a
it's a good question. I read the New York Review
of Books which I think is still a thriving enterprise.
I read specific people a lot, and that's one of
the things that for good or ill, that the digital
areas and it's disaggregated magazines a lot. So I read
(30:37):
John Chait in the in New York, for instance, not
that I don't read New York Magazine, but I read
that specifically. Or I read David Frum in The Atlantic,
and not to the exclusion of other Atlantic right, not
to the exclusion of other people. Yeah, it's you know,
it comes more naturally that you you're online and you're
you see that someone's tweeted something interesting. I try and
(30:58):
read our magazine and New Yorker, of course, but I
do think we've done a pretty good job of staying
I hate the word relevant. I hope we've done a
good job of staying irrelevant in the sense that I
that you when you open the magazine, I would hope
that you don't know what you're going to read about,
and that the basic gambit of The New Yorker has
always been well, it was not unlike when I was
in Paris. As you say, Paris, I'm not interested in Paris.
(31:21):
Why should I be interested in Paris. What's this guy? Oh,
this is kind of interesting, This is kind of funny. Okay,
I'll stick with this. No, we're in your wheelhouse. Do
you see a place or did you ever contemplate a
place for a film? Oh? I always kind of played
a place for film and that. And Martha, my wife,
is a filmmaker and all of that, and like every
she's still doing that totally. Yes, indeed, she's she's producing
(31:42):
and writing screenplays now gone on from editing. So it's
very much a presence in our house and has been
for forty some years. I've tried my hand a couple
of times at screenplace and never really, you know, never
quite felt at home doing that. I've collaborated with her,
and I think we've done some nice things, but I've
never really I love movies, you know, in my life.
In fact, I will be honest with you, you know,
(32:03):
I would have been delighted and had my life taken
a slightly different turn, and that had been a bigger
part of it. I love I love him. I truly
love the theater, and so writing for the theater is
at the center of my my feelings and something I've
I've been able to do. But there was an, if
I can tell a funny story, that was a moment
because all you know, like every writer, your stuff gets
optioned for the movies and then bought for the movies,
(32:24):
and then the script has developed and so on. And
there was a moment in our history when I had
written a story called Bumping into Charlie Ravioli about my
daughter Olivia's imaginary friend, which had become a well known
and anthologized and the studio wanted to option it for
a movie. And then they looked into the contract and
discovered that Harvey Weinstein had bought outright Paris the Moon
(32:46):
for another movie, and he had bought the characters in
that book in perpetuity, and the leading characters. So since
the leading characters in that book where me and our
son Luke, we couldn't be in the movie of Charlie Ravioli.
So there was a moment, Man, how's this for a
twenty one century moment when half of our family was
owned by Mirramax and the other half were owned by
Sony Pictures, right, and they would have to negotiate like
(33:08):
the gopnic cinematic universe to have us all in in
one movie. But no, I've never I've never written a movie.
I was telling that my producers that in my lifetime
there were two names that would vex me because I
was around super sophisticated people who would pronounce their names differently.
They called him Richard Avden. Yes, Brits would call him
Richard Avedon, and I thought, that's not how I learned it.
(33:31):
And a woman I worked with, who was a very
famous and internationally famous model, pronounced the designs named Balanchanga
but described to me you being I guess adopted by Avedon.
Dick Avedon was with Kirk Varnett of the great influence
on my life, and when I think about everything that
I wear, eat, look at, was very much still under
(33:52):
his influence and spiritual agis. He was an extraordinary man,
obviously a great photographer, but also a man, an incandescent
force in the world, a man of limitless energy and
and mischief and fun, but also a very serious artist.
And one of the things that he wanted to implant
in me, and as I say, he really adopted Martin
(34:13):
me as as kind of surrogad kids, was that it
was possible to live a very rich and good and
pleasure enhanced life, pleasure, affirming life, and at the same
time be a serious artist author Adam Gopneck. If you're
enjoying this conversation, be sure to subscribe to Hear is
(34:34):
the Thing on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts
or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back,
Adam Gopnick tells us the most audacious thing he's ever written.
(34:59):
I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing from
my Heart Radio. From art criticism to children's literature to
food writing, no genre is off limits for Adam Gopnik. Recently,
he expanded his resume even further into musical theater as
a book writer and lyricist. When I first came to
(35:21):
New York, it was to be a songwriter. I had
a cassette of my songs, and I had written The
College Show, which was based on the life of Vladimir Tatlin,
the Russian constructivist architect. And I assumed I was three
weeks from Broadway, when are we gonna get our hands
on that on that musical? So I I actually have
promised our friends Marcy Hysler and seen a good rich
that I would do one of the songs from the
show at one of their four Below evenings. So that
(35:42):
was my ambition, and I wasn't able to push it forward.
I was going to be Stephen Sante, not not John Updyke,
could have become either one, but I've you know. But
my other ambition was to be an essayist from New
York Is. So that did work out. And then it
had always been very much part of my life, caring
passionately about the musical theater and writing songs for all
occasions and writing lyrics. And then um, the great American
(36:05):
composer David Shire approached me about writing a musical with him.
I didn't know it at the time, but he had
said to his wonderful wife, d d Con why don't
guys like this everyone to write for the musical theater. Indeed,
he had said to well, you don't know, maybe he does.
And she approached me at a theatrical thing and said,
would you be interested in writing a show with my
husband David Shire? And I said, I can't imagine anything
in the world I would rather do. So David and
(36:27):
I got to work and we wrote a show together
called Our Table. We wrote more than sixties songs, I
mean complete finished piano vocal songs about a little restaurant
struggling to survive in New York, and Melissa Erico came
in to play the lead of the female lead in
a workshop and I was astounded by her gifts because
(36:47):
my stuff is literary and it involves a lot of
complicated puns and ambivalent emotions. She's super bright woman, and
she was It was like in a fairy tale. She
was the first musical theater performing edition. Very beautiful. I
haven't an unbelievably voice like a Mozart flute, as someone
once said. She understood everything that I was writing and
could deliver all of those bitter sweet, ambivalent, complex emotions.
(37:10):
So we did a full production of it, which unfortunately
she couldn't be in out in New Haven. Like every
musical goes to try out and often die. And it's
still the thing. I'm proud of stuff. We have a
very good live concert recording of it that we did
at fifty four below with Melissa singing the lead along
with Andy Taylor and Constantine Marules. Is that available? Yes,
it is on Spotify with a beautiful cover by Brigitte Lacom.
(37:33):
Actually Brigitte did us a wonderful cover image. You go
on Spotify our table Adam Copnick, Melissa Erico. So we
did that, and then Melissa and I enjoyed working together enormously,
So I started writing all kinds, especially material for David.
And I wrote a song which I love called Cry
for Joy, this kind of a theme song for her
swing show. Wrote a lot of parodies, and then she's
(37:54):
just done a beautiful album of film noir inspired music,
but no music. Oh no. On the tray, I was
just about to say on the country, it's occupying an
ever larger part of my life. I have two new
shows underway with Andrew Lippap, who wrote The Adams Family
and The Wild Party, and David Shayer and I are
in the middle. Were about one acting to a new
show for Melissa called Troubadour right now, about the invention
(38:16):
of the love song at the court of Eleanor of
Aquitaine in the in the thirteenth century. As I say,
I love the theater nothing in life. There's a song
in our table called It's Never Reigning in Seattle, which,
of all the countless things I've done political books and
family memoirs and and so on, is a single thing
I probably proudest stuff because it's a song about the
(38:36):
necessity of lying to your children. In the situation in
the in the show is that the father that chef
has been telling his beloved daughter, who was very much
modeled on my Olivia for years, that they have an
offer in Seattle, but never moved to Seattle because it
rains all the time in Seattle. You have to bring
the customers out like sponges before you see them never
going to Seattle. Rains all the time. And finally they
have to go to Seattle because they lose the restaurant.
(38:59):
And then he's she says to him, you know, it
rains all the time in Seattle, and then he sings
to this song it's never raining in Seattle. And for me,
that's what we do with our children, you know, we
have to There never been a song about how we
have to lie to our children sometimes to reassure them
of the of the salubriousness of the world. That's the
thing I'm proud of. Stiff. What are you working on now?
I'm just I mean literally finishing four to send to
(39:21):
my publisher tomorrow, a book called tentatively the Real Work
on the mystery of mastery, and it's it's about the
business of of learning to master things, particularly in middle age.
You know, I learned to drive when I was in
my fifties, got my driver's license only my fifties. I
think I am the only New Yorker ever to get
to pass his driver's test on the same day as
(39:43):
his son. Luke was twenty and I was fifth, and
we took our test on this on the same day.
I learned to draw in the last few years, learned
to write music and all of those things. So it's
all of these essays about learning to do things, but
it's not a collection of essays. It's a book about
the ark of doing things. It ends, I think hope affectingly.
It includes a chapter that is the I won't even
(40:03):
try and describe. It is probably the most audacious thing
I've ever written in deeply embarrassing in some ways, but essential.
And then it ends with I've been taking boxing lessons
for the last year and because I just I'm fascinated
by mastery, something that's so alien to a little Jewish
intellectual like me as boxing, being able to enter into
(40:24):
it and learning the great perpetual lesson of all accomplishment,
which is that you break it down into small parts.
You learn the small parts, the little segments, and then
over time, miraculously the little segments become a seamless whole
and you find, oh my god, I'm actually throwing a
sequence of punches. So I'm simultaneously was taking boxing lessons
and I'm doing ballroom dancing with my daughter Olivia. And
(40:47):
so the last chapter is just about the ways in
which the steps of your feet in ballroom dancing and
the jabs of your hand in boxing compliment each other.
And it's the you know, the perpetual cycle. The other
thing that fascinates me, Alec is the way that when
you're being trained box, you're always made to be aware
of the invisible opponent, the invisible enemy, right, because everything
(41:08):
you do is in response to this person who you
never actually see and you never do exactly And I
find that a very powerful metaphor for life generally. Right,
we construct ourselves in the eyes of an invisible other.
Thank you so much, Just delighted to be here, My
(41:29):
thanks to writer Adam Gopnick. This episode was recorded at
CDM Studios in New York City. We're produced by Kathleen Russo,
Zack McNeice and Maureen Hoban. Our engineer is Frank Imperial.
Our social media manager is Daniel Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin.
Here's the thing is brought to you by my Heart Radio.
(42:01):
Who about the fun Time
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