Joe Skinner (Narration): Interviewing an interviewer can be incredibly intimidating. So maybe more than any other guest, I was more than a little intimidated preparing for this episode’s interview. I spoke with journalist and author Taffy Brodesser-Akner, who is known for her high-profile celebrity interviews for outlets like GQ and The New York Times.
Joe Skinner (Interview): So you’ve done a lot of celebrity profiles obviously, and I was wondering how it feels for you when it’s turned around and you’re the one getting interviewed.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner: It’s a great question, but I always, I always felt bad for the people I was interviewing because you could see, they know in a way that you don’t quite remember because you’re busy doing your job, that what they’re saying is going to have this lasting impact. And that it’s going to follow them because especially if you’re doing it for somewhere like the New York Times or even when I was doing it for GQ, that that will change the story of them in the public sphere in a big way. But I feel, if I’m very honest, that I’m still so attached to the idea of myself as a journalist, that sitting here with you, I don’t feel that I’m being interviewed. I feel like I’m talking to colleagues,which is a nice way to feel. But also, I will leave here and say, “Oh my God, what did I say?” And for the days until this comes out, the things I did say, which were probably innocuous, will morph into like toxic, cancelable, like everything, like as if I unleashed a spew of horrific things. So it’s a little stressful, I guess, is the short way of answering.
Joe Skinner (Narration): Taffy made a name for herself interviewing actors like Tom Hanks, Gwyneth Paltrow and Bradley Cooper. She’ll spend long stretches of time with these people for her pieces. And they’re really fun to read — she brings to them a distinctly funny narrative voice, often explores the act of profiling itself, and yet she always manages to cultivate candor from her subjects. And her motto seems to be – keep it simple.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner: You know how they say there are no stupid questions? I actually think we should embrace the idea that all questions are kind of stupid. The people who ask questions, I’ve been guilty of this, and I see other people doing it where they are trying to show me how much they know about me through the question. Do I wanna impress you with my question or do I want to get a real answer? Because usually the real answers come from not asking any questions. They come from just sitting there. I have done interviews where I don’t ask any questions and I’m just silent and I just let people talk.
Joe Skinner (Interview): Are you more focused on trying to build a rapport with that person or more focused on heading towards answers that you’re searching for?
Taffy Brodesser-Akner: My primary focus is to convey to them that I am going to listen to them, no matter what they say. Because at the point they are in their celebrity, they have a gripe with the world about how they’re perceived. I never have a question that needs an answer. All I have is a question in my head, which is why have they chosen to tell me this? I think it’s always a mistake to think that you can ever convince the person you’re with, no matter how many times you show up, that you’re not a reporter, that that thing isn’t a tape recorder, that that other thing isn’t a notepad, that this is a relationship that it isn’t. They know what this is. And if you remember that, and you’re not kind of always trying to romance them, then I think you stand a chance at seeing not their real selves, but their real self in an interview, which is as close as I’m going to get.
Joe Skinner (Narration): Taffy has a knack for getting at the psychology behind how the subjects of her profiles think and act. It’s an intuition that I think translates naturally to her work in literature and getting inside the heads of her characters and why they act the way they act. And it’s why I wanted to start this episode with such a heavy focus on her process behind these celebrity profiles. There’s a lot more going on there than just the A-List name in the headline and a fun puff piece. There’s a pursuit of common humanity.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I feel every artist wants to be understood, and I feel actors especially, which is the lion’s share of who I’ve interviewed, actors are so busy playing other people that they never got a chance to convey who they are.
Joe Skinner (Interview): So would you say when you’re writing one of these pieces, the goal is, like you said, to figure out the best way to get to know somebody?
Taffy Brodesser-Akner: The goal is to hear what they think of themselves and to hear how hard it’s been. Like, I’m more interested in fame than I am in a person’s origins. I’m more interested in what it’s done to them to be this famous. Like, that to me is the thing I’m so interested in. It’s like, what does it do to your sense of yourself? What does it do to your art? What does it do to your ability to walk down the street? And what does it do to your ability to have a conversation with people? Are you always thinking about how famous you are in that conversation? Like, I don’t know. I don’t know. Because I know what it’s like to do publicity, to make a show. I just now came from meeting with one of my best friends, who after my book tour this year, we’re going to go on a trip, we’re trying to figure out where we’re going to go, and I said, I would like you to also remember that while we’re there, I will still be just talking about myself the entire time because you can’t go three weeks with people just asking you about yourself without some sort of residual thing happening where you think you’re interesting. You think you must be interesting and worthwhile. And it’s going to take a couple of days to remember that I’m just regular. And I hope she forgives me. Here, this is my plea for forgiveness. (Laughs)
Joe Skinner (Narration): Hi, I’m Joe Skinner, and this is American Masters: Creative Spark. In each episode, our guest breaks down their creative process behind a single work of art. Today, I spoke with writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner about how her career as a journalist transformed into an ongoing career as a novelist, eventually culminating with her newest book, “Long Island Compromise.” Taffy definitely has the gift of gab. I could talk to her forever about her work as a journalist. It’s not surprising then that “Long Island Compromise” has its own infectious stream-of-consciousness style to it.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Did you know that someone could answer for that long a period of time? Did you know? Did you know? (Laughs)
Joe Skinner (Interview): No, no, no. We’ve had so much shaggier answers than that. That was… That was nothing.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Thank you. (Laughs)
Joe Skinner (Interview): No! That was not nothing. (Laughs) But so then, how did you make the shift from journalism to fiction is the next question. And how did you find yourself taking these different strategies and skill sets that you’ve developed into your work?
Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Um, that’s a great question. I always just thought of myself as a writer. Which is maybe like self preservation at the New York Times where you write about celebrities. You are sitting with people who are uncovering Russian interference in elections and Facebook perniciousness and corruption. And you are skydiving with Melissa McCarthy. That’s your thing. So a self preserving part of me has just always said, you know what, you’re just a writer. Before I was a reporter, I was an okay writer, but not a very good one. I was laboring under the misapprehension that everything is made up, that all great books, they are completely made up. And what I didn’t realize is that it’s all reporting, only you are no longer, subject to the tenets of factual truth. Which is bad, because the truth is so interesting. The truth is so Perfect. I first learned how to write screenplays in school in college, and I would write these screenplays and they were not very good because I did not have enough faith in the reader that the reader could recognize things that were like contradictions or the weird way people actually are, which is, you know, they are nice, but they’re also casually cruel, all of the weird ways that we are. And then I had to write journalism because nobody wanted my screenplays. And because you’re held to facts and reality in nonfiction, you have to tell the truth. And so the inherent contradiction in the way people are, because I was writing profiles, you couldn’t pretend it didn’t exist because you were under the constraints of the truth. And the reader loved it. The reader loved seeing that a person could be this and that. And I realized you have to assume that your reader is as smart as you are, that if you successfully and skillfully convey something, they will believe you. You just have to prove it. I think that was the transition. When I was writing my first book, “Fleischman is in Trouble,” I was writing a magazine profile that was just going to be longer and not about a real person.
Joe Skinner (Narration): You might be familiar with Taffy’s fiction work already because of that first novel, “Fleishman is in Trouble,” which tells the story of a Manhattan couple undergoing a divorce. Her work always tends to feel extremely of the moment in theme. In “Fleishman,” she comments on modern ideas around gender roles and marriage, and satirizes app-based dating among a wealthy Manhattan professional class. And if you haven’t read the book, you might have seen the TV show, she was the showrunner on that too, and wrote it, with Jesse Eisenberg in the lead role.
Archival clip from “Fleishman is in Trouble.”
Taffy Brodesser-Akner: A friend of mine told me he was getting a divorce and I hadn’t spoken to him in a lot of years because his wife didn’t like me. And he showed me his phone and all of the exciting new things that were on his phone. And he was like the fifth person that year who told me that he was getting a divorce. And I had come to understand that if I didn’t hear from someone for a while, if they like, were laying low and they were social media silent for a while, they were going to come and tell me they were getting a divorce. Like, you could just set a clock by it. And I left him that day and I sat down at a Le Pan Quotidien and I wrote the first 10 pages of “Fleischman” in one sitting. Later that day, I wrote the next 20, like I couldn’t stop.
Joe Skinner (Narration): So Taffy sent those early pages to her agent at the time, who told her the characters were too unlikable. So she did what any reasonable person might do in that situation — she found another agent. He loved it, and “Fleishman is in Trouble” went on to become her first novel. But there was another book she’d already taken a crack at before “Fleishman.” And in that situation, too, her first agent thought the characters were too unlikable and the story too misanthropic. But her new agent was into it.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner: He said, finish “Fleischman” because you have momentum on it, but this will be the next thing we publish.
Joe Skinner (Narration): That next thing would go on to become “Long Island Compromise.”
Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I started writing it when I was on a 14-day or 12-day work trip for ESPN the Magazine in Russia, following the U. S.’s only male synchronized swimmer. And I started writing it about sort of financial rage, like my understanding that I was finally at this place where I felt that I was successful in my career and I still had no money. And I started writing about the rage, that was the underpinning of the question, am I better off for being someone who doesn’t come from money, who didn’t have any growing up, who doesn’t have any now, and is able to support myself and survive based on my skills and my desperation? Or would it have been better to have money and never have to ask that question and never feel scared. And the book started out as this sort of argument for, “aha, I’m better because I can survive.” When really the truth is I’m very jealous of people who don’t wake up in the middle of the night worried about their rent or their mortgage, which is not a night’s sleep I’ve ever had as an adult. And it became so much more than that question about money because I put this kidnapping into it.
Joe Skinner (Narration): After a quick break, we’ll dive into “Long Island Compromise,” starting with the kidnapping at the center of the story, and how it sprawls out from there into an intergenerational family saga about how one family has dealt with their trauma.
The opening chapter of “Long Island Compromise” kicks off with a story about a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher, who, on a random Wednesday in 1980, is kidnapped from his suburban driveway on his way to work. He is returned to his wife and kids a week later, with no resolution on who orchestrated the kidnapping. The Fletcher family struggles with this incident over the next forty-something years.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner: The kidnapping is based on a true story. I can say that now. Before I would have said, I’m just like, I was lying to myself. I was like, I’m just including a kidnapping. But in my defense, I want to say when you grow up knowing somebody who’s been kidnapped, it’s just one of many stories you know. So, what are you ever writing, but stories you know? So I went to the guy I know who was kidnapped and I told him I was writing something with a kidnapping, and I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t. And I was glad this was my second book, because by then I was comfortable with the fact that this is kind of how it works. That it sucks to know a writer, that a writer will come and steal your soul, and that you can pretend you didn’t, but it’s actually just better to say you’re sorry. Sorry that I am like this. This is what a generation beneath me would call a toxic personality trait. But this is what I did. And he gave me his blessing. He was like, yeah, sure, once you’ve been kidnapped, it’s just a story you have. Sure it’s more for him, but I realized that the reason I couldn’t put it away was at first I told myself a kidnapping is such a great distillation of the money question because the money question is: does money make you safe or does it put you in danger? So in a kidnapping, the money puts you in danger, but then it saves you. Ah! Ouroboros. You know, like you’re just eating your own tail at that point. And the question I asked in the first place is unanswerable because I don’t know what I would be like if I had money. And my rich friends don’t know what they’d be like if they didn’t.
Joe Skinner (Narration): The book takes place in a wealthy suburb of Long Island. It’s very much the milieu of what some may consider to be the classic American dream.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I knew that this family would be a compendium of rich people I grew up with. I can’t give you a one for one on who any of them are. And in fact, a couple of rich people read this and had to correct some stuff about being rich, like, I have this sort of Scrooge McDuck fantasy about, like, what it must be like, only to find out that I don’t even know the half of it, which was very, very upsetting.
Joe Skinner (Narration): Much of the story is ripped from Taffy’s own childhood observances. Like the source of the family’s income in the novel, and what afforded them their waterfront Long Island home, it’s the very specific spoils of them starting a polystyrene foam factory
Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I knew that they would have a factory, because so many of the wealthy people I grew up with were in manufacturing, were in sort of like a post-war, like, it was like a really Jew-y immigrant thing to start a boring factory that would eventually make a lot of money, but that started out as a sort of like, “I know, we’ll invent carpeting for offices, or we will invent a certain kind of lock,” or something like that. Something that was so unglamorous and yet did some real business. I was just taking little pieces of things and the kidnapping was always there. It was just always there as a thing, because when I was growing up what is the question that a child who has no money would ask about a kidnapping? I say this in a forgiving way of myself because I’m sort of disgusted with myself to admit this story, as you should be when I tell it, which is that my reaction always to the kidnapping was, “wow, imagine being rich enough to be kidnapped.” Before you stop and think, “wow, what, what that, what must have that been like? And how does that change a person? And how does that change who they are in the world?” The first question is, one day, I want to be kidnapping rich.
Joe Skinner (Narration): Over the years, we see how the kidnapping has affected not just Carl, but each member of the family, which consists of Carl’s wife Ruth, and his mother Phyllis. But the meat of the novel, and much of its stream-of-consciousness and maximalist structure, centers around each of the three children, Nathan, Beamer and Jenny.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner: This was so hard to write but they came to me as a full family. The plot changed a million times, but there was no extricating this family. And I had such a hard time with Jenny. I wrote Jenny so many times. I wrote that like 100 pages so many times that there’s a list of majors she had because she was so indecisive about what to do in the world. Actually, for every one of those majors, I have 100 pages of her doing that actual thing before I stopped and said, no, her whole thing is that she can’t decide what to do. So that exists. And even when my editor was like, “what would it look like to only have two kids in this family?” The family was so real to me that the first two kids would not make any sense unless there was a third. Which, you know, I have three sisters. One of them was born when I was 15. So the first three of us, very much follow a sort of like sort of birth order thing. The oldest is in charge of keeping everybody safe and is the most responsible and least risk taking. The second lives in direct opposition to that. And the third one is like, what is wrong with all of you? I cannot wait to be done living in this house. And I feel like that’s how a lot of people in a set of three goes.
Joe Skinner (Narration): The children’s lives all seem to circle around a core family pathology. Nathan, the eldest, is a lawyer who is made impotent by his all-consuming fears. The middle child, Beamer, is a Hollywood writer with every possible addiction known to man, to numb his own pains. And the youngest, Jenny, is dead set on not being defined by the family’s kidnapping trauma, yet she inevitably comes to define it maybe the most acutely. The novel is loosely broken up into three sections, one dedicated to each child, and is narrated by a Greek chorus style of unseen characters from the neighborhood, who quite literally describe the Fletcher family as “terrible” people. But Taffy doesn’t like describing the characters as “unlikable.”
Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Here’s the thing I’ll say. Everyone I know is extremely likable. And a thing I know for sure, having interviewed some controversial types, is that something in evolution kicks in and you end up liking everyone. Like, can you actually think of people you really don’t like and never did? I could think of like three of them and they are, they have a diagnosis. They have some sort of sociopathy or something, but like, I tend to like everyone. I tend to really think that people behaving how they are is generally defensible in some way. I maybe have too much empathy, which sounds like a brag, but it’s probably just a coping mechanism to deal with difficult people in my life. But I don’t go to literature to spend more time with likable people. Martin Epstein, a playwriting teacher, said to me, “a character doesn’t need to be liked. All your characters need is energy.” And I have taken that because I think likable is such a moving target. Some people really don’t like me, but some people really do. What does that mean? Am I likable? I don’t know. It depends on who you ask. You run the risk in everything you write of flattening things to appeal to so many people. And I have found, especially since I was under the constraints of the truth for so long, the more specific you could get, the better off you’ll be. Most of the people I wrote about in nonfiction, the profiles I wrote, those people were not what you would call likable characters in literature. Like if you had to transpose them into literature, they were not likable people. Yet they were fascinating. So how could I bring that experience to the reader?
Joe Skinner (Narration): The characters in “Long Island Compromise” experience an ever-popular theme in media today: intergenerational trauma. Taffy’s writing explores this trauma in a way that I think helps me as a reader to have empathy during the characters’ less likable moments.
Joe Skinner (Interview): I don’t know what’s in the water right now, but there’s so much about intergenerational trauma and family trauma in storytelling right now. You see it a lot. I feel like you’re probably going to hear a lot of the word “Succession” come up a lot as you’re going on this tour.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I hope so. Your mouth to God’s ears. “Succession,” that was, that was a successful show, right? Right?
Joe Skinner (Interview): Why do you think there’s so much storytelling around that right now in our culture?
Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I think, you know, Parul in The New Yorker wrote this great essay about the trauma plot and how everything now is about trauma and it was critical of it.
Joe Skinner (Narration): The piece that Taffy’s referring to came out in 2021, called “The Case Against the Trauma Plot.”
Taffy Brodesser-Akner: But I was like, yes, exactly. Everything’s about trauma. Everything is about, like, that it is, it is, I believe it is neglect on the behalf of the storyteller to not try to explain how everybody got that way. And I think what has changed is that we have gone from being people who call a kidnapping trauma to people who call, you know, your parents picking you up too late when you were in kindergarten, a trauma. I’m not going to argue. I really do believe that if you received it as trauma, I believe you. I accept it. And the post traumatic stress diagnosis is not even as old as I am, right? Like, it came in the seventies and I think we’re all figuring out how we got here. And that is sort of the late capitalism of storytelling, that we’re sort of at the end of really new ideas in how to tell a story. So we are going backward and trying to figure out how did we become this way? The greatest storytellers, including Jesse Armstrong and his incredible writers on “Succession,” they knew how to dole out that story with just the tiniest bits of this is what it was like for these kids growing up. And when you understand why someone’s like something, that’s when they become defensible. It’s certainly a big part of storytelling, but I think it’s an evolved part of storytelling. I write profiles, I am interested in how people got to how they are because the alternative is either not explaining it and then we call those people sociopaths or we didn’t create characters that are interesting enough to wonder that about. So I’m here to defend the trauma plot. I’m here to say that, we are in a society that talks about therapy a lot. I just saw this sort of backlash to let’s stop talking about everything that’s therapy. I’m for that. I am for slowing down, doing the work. But I’m so interested in how people who are 10 years younger than I am are able to unpack their feelings in a non-defensive way. How they are able to talk. That is going to lead to better and better relationships. It’s exhausting though. and I also think that we are getting better as people for understanding who we are. Also, we’re very interested in trauma because either led to or, or led, us finding out more about how to fix trauma. There are all these new therapies for it. I think that’s wonderful.
Joe Skinner (Narration): I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that the three kids in “Long Island Compromise,” Nathan, Beamer and Jenny, struggle mightily with their respective traumas. And despite being family, they can be pretty cruel to each other as a result. For Taffy, this was all part of the point in getting to know the family dynamic. The goal was never to tell a story about overcoming your traumas, or defeating them, more about living with them.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I guess what I think is that the thing I say at the end, which is, you run away from your family trauma, you try your hardest to define yourself against it, to survive it, only to find out that the surviving it was the story of your life. My family friend who was kidnapped, his son recently said to me, “you know, it wasn’t my kidnapping. I had no right to be traumatized by it.” Yet, he looks over his shoulder. He knows what his father knows, which is you could be walking down the street and someone could just take you away. You and I don’t know that. We could hear that. We could read it in the book. We could even read a harrowing section about it. But we don’t walk down the street knowing that there is a before and after to a thing that might happen. And I think about trauma and that’s, a kidnapping is a horrific trauma. But anything that you receive as trauma is a horrific trauma. I think all trauma is the same and I think the reason if you read this book and can recognize yourself in a family that exists after a kidnapping, it’s because all trauma is the same. The story of your life becomes surviving that trauma. And then the craziest thing happens to you in your 40s, which is, you come to fall in love with your trauma once you accept that it’s never going away and that the story of your life was to survive it. You come to embrace it. And then when that happens, you fall in love with your family. Because no matter how much you’re running from them, no one else will ever understand what you’ve been through. Not your spouse, not your child, your siblings. They’re the only ones who will get it. Your parents might get it because they’ve been witness to it, depending on what the nature of the trauma is. But who knew that that’s the thing that could happen as you get older, that you wouldn’t heal from it. You would start looking at it differently. That’s amazing to me. I think it’s what all the siblings have. I think they come at the end to understand that they never stood a chance, that they tried and they tried, but they never stood a chance. And when they have that realization, they are sitting next to each other. Can you imagine? My husband is an only child. And the struggles he has in caring for his mother, is that there is no witness to what he went through. That I could try my best, but his witnesses are pretty old. One of them died. None of them are his sibling. And that’s really something to me, to watch that. Whereas all three of my sisters understand where I’ve been, what I’ve seen, and the shorthand of it. Just to be witnessed, is a miracle.
Joe Skinner (Interview): So I feel like in the end in kind of a twisted funny way that’s like a story about love.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Yeah. I mean, all family stories are love stories, right? They are the most complicated love. They’re the thing you can’t survive. But also, I used to teach a personal essay class when I was very, very, very broke. I would teach like three times a week and in a personal essay class, everyone wants to write about mostly their mother, sometimes their father. And I would hear these stories about horrific things that mothers have done. And inevitably, the writer of the story was still in touch with the mother. And at first I’d be like, you’re still in touch with your mother after she did that, or your father after he did that, or your siblings? A family is a chronic condition. That’s what I’ll say about that. That a family is a chronic condition. And if you are very, very lucky, eventually you come to understand that you are lucky to have it.
Joe Skinner (Interview): Well, I think we just found the title of the episode there.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Wait, which is it? The chronic condition? Your family is a chronic condition? Ha! Your family is a chronic condition, the Taffy Akner story. Don’t send that to my parents.
Joe Skinner (Narration): That’s our show. Thank you so much to Taffy Brodesser-Akner for taking the time to talk. You can find “Long Island Compromise” now in hardcover and paperback. I swear, it’s actually really funny and a breezy read, even with all the trauma. And don’t forget, if you like what you heard, please rate and review the show, and tell your friends to listen to American Masters: Creative Spark wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also listen on our site at pbs.org/americanmasters. American Masters: Creative Spark is a production of the WNET Group, media made possible by all of you. This episode was produced by Diana Chan, and by me, Joe Skinner. Our executive producer is Michael Kantor. Original music is composed by Hannis Brown. This episode was mixed and mastered by Evan Joseph. Funding for American Masters: Creative Spark was provided by the Rosalind P. Walter Foundation, Thea Petschek Iervolino Foundation, the Anderson Family Fund, the Marc Haas Foundation, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, the Charina Endowment Fund, the Ambrose Monell Foundation, and the Kate W. Cassidy Foundation.
