Terry Gross On 50 Years Of Fresh Air (Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso) | Fresh Air

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The occasion for the interview is my 50th anniversary hosting Fresh Air.

Just saying 50th makes me think, what?

When I started hosting the show back in September 1975, it was a local show that only listeners to WHYY in Philadelphia could hear.

It was three hours long, five days a week, and at the time, the only staff was me.

Yikes.

I managed to hang in there until Danny Miller came along and and became my longtime radio partner.

Years later, in 1987, Fresh Air became a daily NPR show heard around the country.

So to mark this anniversary, Sam came to Philly to interview me.

I really like his show and I think he's a great interviewer.

By the way, I recommend the episode with Ira Glass.

Sam does a lot of research and puts so much care into shaping his interviews, so I was really curious what he'd ask me.

I really enjoyed our conversation, so here it is, my interview on Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso.

This is Talk Easy.

I'm Sam Fregoso.

Welcome to the show.

Today, broadcast legend Terry Gross.

This month marks the 50th anniversary of her show, Fresh Air.

What began in 1975 as a local experiment at WHYY in Philadelphia has since grown into a national institution, one that not only transformed public radio, but laid the groundwork for podcasting.

In that half century, Terry has conducted over 15000 interviews with actors authors politicians musicians comedians filmmakers, you name it.

Her disarmingly candid line of questioning, with that calm yet incisive voice of hers, has become a permanent fixture of American life.

And yet, in all those years behind the microphone, she's rarely sat on the opposite side of the table.

By her own admission.

Up until recently, she's been an inhibited interviewee, preferring to remain a blank slate for the listener, someone whose private life is in the background, so that her guests could step fully into the foreground.

But earlier this spring, that became no longer possible.

After 47 years of marriage, Terry's husband, the jazz critic Francis Davis, passed away on April 14th after a protracted illness.

He was 78.

Then, two and a half weeks later, Terry returned to remember Francis on the air.

Which, of course, makes it all the more meaningful to sit with her in this moment to honor not only five decades of fresh air, but also the life she and Francis built together.

And so for today's very special episode, I got on a plane to Philadelphia to talk to Terry about her improbable road to public radio, the craft of interviewing and a few of the conversations that have come to define the show.

Kurt Vonnegut on censorship, Monica Lewinsky, post-Clinton scandal in 1999 and writer Joan Didion on the year of magical thinking.

As you can imagine, this episode, for a show like ours, has been a long time in the making.

And so there's a lot I'd like to say right about now.

But at the risk of resorting to platitudes, I think I'll just do what Terry would do in this situation.

Or I think it's what she would do, which is to let the tape do the talking.

And so with that, here is Terry Gross on 50 Years of Fresh Air.

MUSIC so Terry Gross.

Yes.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Pleasure to be here.

Thanks for coming to Philly to do this.

I'm honored.

I've never been in Philadelphia.

This feels like the perfect occasion to come to Philadelphia.

How are you doing?

I'm doing okay.

You probably know my husband died a few months ago.

But under the circumstances, I think I'm really doing okay.

Okay.

Has it been easy to get back to work in the aftermath of that?

He passed April 14th, right?

Yeah.

Well, I took a couple of weeks off just to organizing the funeral and dealing with some of the immediate stuff you have to deal with.

And during that two weeks, I also wrote the on-air tribute I did to him.

I wanted people to know who he was.

You came back on the air, I think two and a half weeks after he passed, and recorded an episode, a kind of eulogy to him.

Yeah.

It was more like, this is who my husband was.

I'm going to read you excerpts of his writing.

I'm going to play you the music that he loved, that he was writing about in these excerpts.

So you get to know him.

It wasn't about me.

It wasn't about like, oh, the love we shared, the great moments that we had.

I did mention a couple of things like how we met, but it was mostly like here's something else that he wrote and he loved this record and here's why.

I do want to talk about the love you shared.

We'll wrap our way back to that.

So since then, you've been back at work making, what, four shows a week?

It was ten.

I think it went to nine and went to eight.

Okay, so it's slowly gone down.

It's like a countdown clock.

Okay, so you're back at work since then.

Yeah.

It's my understanding that on Fridays, you and your staff have what you've described as a marathon meeting.

Yes.

About who's coming on the show and who's not coming on the show.

Yes.

And since our editorial calendars are often very similar, I thought why don't you share in this safe space of who's coming on, so that we can prepare our calendar around yours?

What's your next question?

Okay, my next question is can you at least tell me what day you plan to sit with David Mamet on Fresh Air?

Yes, that is very unlikely.

I heard your interview with him.

I heard you may be blocking off a whole week for Mamet in September.

Yeah.

Mamet week, I think it's called?

I think it's called Mamet week.

So I want to just go on the record and correct the things that he said about me before we get to him walking out.

There's a moment in Sam's interview with him when he's talking about how all his friends abandoned him.

And he mentions like...

TV shows and NPR, The Atlantic magazine.

I forget if you mentioned The New Yorker.

I think The New York Times.

The New York Times, yes.

And then he mentioned me by name and he said you know that I had abandoned him because I used to have him on a lot.

On a show he called All Things Considered.

Yes.

And he said that Terry Gross from All Things Considered, she even came to Vermont.

And then he also said that in 2008, when we and everyone else rejected him, we sent him a form letter, which we never do.

So I'll start there.

We don't send out form letters.

I don't host All Things Considered.

I don't work for All Things Considered.

And I've never been to his place in Vermont.

I'm glad we cleared the air.

Yeah.

It's just that when somebody gets everything wrong about me, I wonder what else are they getting wrong?

In the prologue of your book.

All I Did Was Ask you write that on your bad days you wonder whether quote.

The autobiographical interview offers much more than the potential for gossip or voyeurism.

Since we're here celebrating 50 years of fresh air, half century in where are you at on that these days?

I still believe in it.

I think a lot of what art is about is finding your life reflected back at you with words or stories that you wouldn't have thought of yourself and that there could be something very clarifying, very affirming about it.

And I also think with an autobiographical interview, when somebody is reasonably honest about their flaws and shortcomings as well as their great triumphs, you can find yourself in that.

Or the opposite.

In art and in autobiographical interviews you can learn about people who are totally unlike you and still see what you share.

You know the shared humanity.

So I still have a lot of faith in them.

There's some books and some interviews where I feel like well, there's a little bit of self-mythologizing here, or a little bit of like intentionally making your life into the moral of the story is, or like anybody can achieve this.

All you have to do is work hard, which I really do not believe.

What do you not believe?

I think that some people have a gift and working hard helps them enhance the gift, focus the gift, improve the craft.

But I could work 10,000 hours learning to play piano or 10,000 hours writing or something.

I would never be great.

Do you know what I mean?

It takes more than time.

It takes a certain... aesthetic that you're kind of born with or that gets ingrained in you.

It just takes more than time.

So that's why I don't believe in like hard work and anybody could do this.

Some things, yes, but not art.

Do you think you had some gift that was innate in asking questions?

Well, I wouldn't call interviewing necessarily an art.

You don't think it's an art?

I don't know.

I just feel like, as an interviewer, if I called it an art, it would sound pretentious and self-aggrandizing.

You've done over 15,000 interviews over 50 years.

At what number are you allowed to be a little self-aggrandizing?

Well, the number isn't what I don't think I'm a bad interviewer.

Don't get me wrong.

I don't think like I really suck at this and somehow I'm still doing it.

Yeah, that would be shocking.

Do you think it's a coincidence in talking about your biography that someone who has devoted their career to asking questions came of age in a house where questions were not exactly encouraged?

Revealing things to the outside world wasn't encouraged.

You can ask questions at home.

You were allowed to ask questions at home.

Yeah.

Because in many interviews you talk about how there's a lot of questions.

You wish you asked your parents, but you never did, or you felt like you never could.

Yeah.

Those are most of the questions about death, because I think maybe the context of that was talking about the Maurice Sendak interview in which he knew he didn't have long to live.

And he was talking about facing dying.

He was talking about losing friends.

Those are subjects my parents didn't want to talk about.

They knew that they were dying when they were dying, but you couldn't talk to them about that.

They weren't from the age of talking personally like that.

What about when you were growing up in Sheepshead Bay Brooklyn, you know, in a post-war apartment building that I think was built on an old racetrack?

That's what I was told.

And, yeah.

What was the environment like between you and your parents and your brother, also your older brother?

What were the kind of conversations you did have?

Well, my older brother was like a role model for me when I was growing up, in the sense that, like he was the person who got like the record player and he was the person who bought records.

And so I really benefited from that.

He knew like what label people were on.

So it's not like he had a huge collection, but, you know, he had some good stuff.

You said once that you were quote, brought up believing that there's some positive value in thinking negatively.

Oh, yes.

I think it's a very Kinahara Jewish thing.

If you think something is going to turn out badly, then you won't be disappointed when it turns out badly.

Sounds a little bit like a Mel Brooks quote.

Hope for the best, expect the worst is a quote.

It's a quote from one of his lyrics.

And that's like, when asked for, do you have a motto?

That's what I offer.

That's your motto.

But also it was like, if you expect good things to happen, they're not gonna.

You know, it went along with my father's, you know, expression.

No one ever said life was about pleasure.

You know, like weekends, you get some time off where you're allotted a certain amount of pleasure.

But during the week, it's like.

What was your mother's motto?

She didn't really have one.

Yeah.

Most people don't have mottos.

Yeah.

I mean, it wasn't literally his motto, but it's something that I heard and certainly that I probably internalized.

Taking this maybe too literally, but what did that inner monologue of thinking negatively sound like for a young Terry Gross?

Frustrating.

A little annoying.

But I think I internalized it anyway.

What part was frustrating?

Well, you know, you want some time for pleasure.

And like when I was a little child, this was more when I was a teenager.

Right.

When I was a teenager I was still a really good student, doing really well in school, but hanging out.

I wouldn't exactly call myself a theater kid, but we had something called sing in Brooklyn schools where you write a long sketch, take Broadway melodies and write lyrics to those melodies.

So I was one of the lyricists.

For all four years, you were one of the lyricists, right?

For at least three of them.

But anyways, yeah, I wanted pleasure in my life.

Being a lyricist sounds pleasurable.

Oh, it was.

It was great.

I loved it.

When you were writing those songs in high school.

It's my understanding that you once overheard basketball players sing your lyrics.

Now, you remember what those lyrics are, don't you?

I'm too embarrassed to reveal them.

Hold on.

You've said in the past that you won't say them.

What if we sang them together?

We're not going to do that.

There's no way we're going to do that.

You don't even know the lyrics.

Well, that's why if you teach me.

No, no.

Imagine yourself as Stephen Sondheim.

Give me one line.

Okay.

I may live to regret this.

That was the alternate title of your book, right?

The alternate title of a lot of my life.

Okay.

So the premise is kind of like a ripoff of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, where the main character finds like a rule book for success, like a self-help book for success called How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

Mm-hmm.

We kind of used the same premise.

And the premise was that we wanted to be, like, cool.

And we didn't know how to be cool.

We needed a handbook.

I wish I had that in high school.

Or that we were going to create the handbook.

I think we needed the handbook.

And so the melody was to L'Chaim from Fiddler on the Roof.

And the opening lyric was...

The book will be our mentor, our noteworthy source of the rules.

It will teach us explicitly in sheer simplicity, step by step, to be cool.

The school will marvel at how cool and groovy we look.

They won't suspect that the gimmick is that we are mimickers of a 16-page book or something like 60-page book.

Excellent.

I'm done.

Excellent.

I'm totally done.

With the interview?

No, no.

I'm not going to pull a mammoth.

Or Bill O'Reilly.

Or several other people I can think of.

Or Faye Dunaway.

Or Monica Lewinsky.

Or Monica.

Or Lou Reed after six minutes in 1996.

Yes.

I can keep going of fresh air walkouts.

It's an illustrious roster, I have to say.

It's a really great roster.

That was fantastic.

Listen, if I really live to regret it, you're going to know about it.

I believe it.

And as will our listeners.

That was amazing.

I don't hear the compliments.

I said that was amazing.

No, you think it's amazing that I revealed it.

Yeah, you're right.

You caught me on that.

When you were sharing the lyrics, I was like, God, how am I going to remember to sing all these?

This is very long.

Was it satisfying to hear your fellow classmates singing your words?

Oh, it was great.

I felt so affirmed because I wasn't in with, like the basketball crowd, even though I was what was called a booster, not a cheerleader, but somebody who just kind of screamed loud and got to wear like a special jacket with the team's name on it.

But I didn't really know the guys and they were like the cool guys in school.

So a couple of those guys singing a lyric that I'd written that was like, wow.

I mean, so towards the end of high school, did you feel like, oh, I could go down this road?

This could be a job or this could be a career.

Being a lyricist?

Yeah.

Absolutely not.

No.

I don't know if I was thinking as deeply about it.

I was a high school kid reading, you know, existentialist essays and novels.

But I don't know how much I was really comprehending all of the subtext.

But you were enjoying it.

Yeah.

From there, where did you want to go?

Well, initially I wanted to be a writer, but I got disabused of that pretty early on in college.

In your freshman year?

Yeah.

One of the teachers read one of my essays, some of it out loud, and said you know?

And he wrote on my paper like you have the ability to really like break up language, you know and do something new.

And then the other teacher assigned us like, just like write me a story.

And I was used to like having an assignment.

Being told what to do.

Yeah, like write an essay about this or a story about that.

And I said to him, like, I don't know what to write about.

And he said to me, well, write a love story.

And I thought, well, that sounds really condescending.

I doubt he'd say that to one of the male students.

And I wasn't like reading love stories or romance stories or anything.

So I just felt kind of lost and realized, I don't think I'm a writer.

Even then you knew you needed an assignment.

Well, yeah, that's the nice thing about interviewing is that, like, you're helping to tell a story, but you don't have to actually write it.

Mm-hmm.

Because writing... I don't know about you.

Do you find writing easy?

I don't.

Was it Dorothy Parker who said, I hate writing, I love having written?

That's about how I feel.

I only love after having written if I think it's good, which I usually.

I don't hold my writing in very high esteem.

Yeah.

Me either.

I...

I like your opening essays, if I may call them that, before introductions or whatever before your interviews.

They're really well written.

Some of them are good.

I like the ones I've heard.

Thank you, Terry.

In 1968, you leave home for college in New Buffalo.

By your sophomore year, you had already decided to drop out and to hitchhike across the country.

Decided is a strong word because I was really torn.

Did your parents try to stop you?

They definitely tried to stop me.

They flew up to Buffalo.

They flew up?

Yeah.

They told me that basically they were going to cut me off.

Do you remember that conversation?

Not the details of it, but I remember it was horrible.

I mean, I love my parents, you know, and although I needed to rebel against them, I didn't want to break their hearts.

My father actually, at least my mother told me because they were in Brooklyn, I was in Buffalo.

My mother said like, your father, you've made your father literally sick.

He's in bed.

And it was just like tearing me apart.

But I felt so much like they were trying to hold on so tight and that unless I kind of really cut the string for a few minutes, that I'd always be like capitulating to their idea of who I should be or who I was.

And I needed the ability to change.

I think one of the real values of college in addition to what you learn in the classroom especially if you're privileged enough to go to out-of-town school or if you have the desire to go to out-of-town school not everybody does is that you get to rewrite yourself in ways that you later realize are hilarious, but some of it was really necessary.

Who did they think you should be?

A good student well-behaved, somebody who they could hold out, as you know, a good daughter who would make them happy according to their standards.

And you have to keep in mind, too, there's this huge generation gap at this point.

I see all these people now who are so close to their parents.

And it was just the opposite with my generation and many people I knew.

And they were Eastern European, right?

My grandparents were Eastern European immigrants and my parents were, you know, grew up during the depression.

My father had to drop out of high school because his father died and he had to help support the family.

You know my mother went to like secretarial school because that's what you did if you were a woman or a girl.

You know there's.

She certainly didn't have the money for college.

My mother was like really smart, but I don't think she would have ever thought of it.

And she read all the time.

And she'd go to the library every week and take out a new book or two.

Sometimes I'd go with her and she'd read the book.

So did you feel like you had to break their heart in order to find your own way?

I didn't feel like I had to break their heart.

I just felt that I had to, at that point, disobey them.

And it wasn't even my idea to do this.

I mean, to go cross country was my boyfriend's idea.

I was really in a lot of ways looking forward to like settling in in this like student housing complex of garden apartments, not a dormitory.

And, you know, we'd be living together next door to other of our friends.

And that'd have been nice to just, you know, kind of nest a little bit.

But I felt like, well, it'll be an adventure.

And I did need to break away.

Was there an underlying mission?

The destination was California.

That was the destination.

Was it all inspired by Dennis Hopper and Easy Rider?

Oh, 0%.

It's not like I didn't like the film, but I wasn't seeing myself in that context at all.

I'll paraphrase Joyce Johnson here.

She was Jack Kerouac's girlfriend for a while and later became an editor and writer a book editor and writer.

And in her memoir, it was called Minor Characters.

And it was about seeing the men you know, Kerouac and Ginsburg and all those guys, from the perspective of the girlfriend, the person on the margin.

And she said, like, for men, the adventure was, you know, going to Mexico, driving cross country.

For women, it was being the girlfriend of the guy who did that.

Ah.

That was the adventure.

But I didn't see myself quite that way.

But I did see myself as like, this isn't really me.

I'm more of a homebody.

It's a huge decision to make for something that's not you.

Yeah.

This is the position I felt in, like, who am I going to choose between my boyfriend or my parents?

Okay.

And I'm not sure it occurred to me that I could make up my own mind.

You didn't think there was a third option?

Yeah.

I didn't think, like, what do I really want?

Screw what they want.

What do I want?

You know, so I really...

I'm not proud to say that.

What are you not proud to say?

That I wasn't thinking for myself on making the decision.

I was thinking like, which of these two sides am I going to choose?

As opposed to what do I really want in my life?

Do I really want to do that?

I was enjoying college.

It seems to me that you're, it sounds like you're blaming yourself a little bit.

Like it's some kind of personal failure that you didn't know that there was a third option there.

I think I wasn't quite a feminist yet and I wasn't quite rewriting the rules of the game in my mind and thinking about what does equality mean?

What does independent mean?

What do I really want out of life?

It was after that trip that I really started reading a lot of feminist literature and going to a consciousness-raising group and all of that.

Speaking of trips, when you took LSD, you brought a pen and paper to accompany you on this trip.

And you said that I had a subject in mind.

Did I say I had a subject in mind?

You said, I'm going to have a subject.

What was subject?

The trip.

The trip itself.

Yeah.

I think I thought I'd write about that.

Okay.

And you thought that would open up your writerly... Doors of perception.

And did it?

Well, it opened up my perception for sure.

But the whole idea of writing about it seemed absurd because the whole idea to me of the experience was the experience.

Because when you're writing, you're standing apart from the experience and describing it as opposed to fully experiencing it.

And to me, this is about like, that's ridiculous.

Get rid of the pen and paper.

Just experience this.

Live this.

Where were you when you did it?

Central Park.

Not for the whole time.

You were walking around, I assume?

Sitting, walking, writing.

No, just kidding.

Uh-huh.

My last question about this period, you went to Woodstock.

Oh, yes.

You seem exasperated, me bringing this up.

No, no, no.

It was a mixed experience.

How come?

Did you ever see the movie Weekend, the Godard movie Weekend?

Yes, I have.

It reminded me of a scene from Weekend, a kind of nightmare scene.

And then when we got there, it was just like I was so crowded.

And having to use those really filthy Johnny on the spots, it was so unpleasant.

Is that a port-a-potty?

Yeah, like a porta potty.

They're called Johnny on the spots.

Well, some of them are.

It sounds like a band that could have been playing Woodstock.

Yeah.

But, you know, I enjoyed the music and I was glad I went.

It was really it was it was an exciting experience.

Is there a performance that you still when you think back on the time you go, God, that was amazing.

I was there.

Because I've seen the movie, I'm sometimes not sure who I saw and who I saw in the movie.

Yes, of course.

But I think Sly Stone.

I think I really saw him.

That's amazing.

By the end of the trip.

You once told Philadelphia Magazine back in 1992 that you felt very much like a voyeur.

I felt like everybody had a life and I didn't.

This was nice traveling cross-country.

Right.

What did you mean by that?

Along the way, but especially in California, we were mostly crashing in people's houses.

And everybody had a thing that they were doing, like they were an artist or they were devoted to something gardening or something.

They had a passion.

Single-minded.

Yeah.

Yeah, and they had a passion that they did well and that gave their life meaning and purpose.

The way you sort of were in high school as a lyricist.

Yeah, and just as a student, you know, and having friends and all that.

And I didn't feel like I had that, especially since I'd already decided I wasn't a writer.

So seeing all these people, like, I wanted that in my life so badly.

But you didn't have it then.

No.

And it's not until you come back home, you finish college and you're working a not-so-interesting job that typing out faculty policy menu.

You could call it not interesting.

No qualifier necessary.

I actually have a not so interesting explanation as to why I said not so interesting and I won't share it here.

No, share it because you do so much research.

No, no, no.

Well, yes, yes, yes.

It's because you said everything interesting was happening outside the classroom.

It was the protests.

It was the music.

It was... The movies.

The movies, everything.

And so... The readings.

In my framing, I had the not so interesting in reference to, this is why it's not so interesting.

Oh, I see.

Okay.

Yeah, I got it.

See, everything was... I don't know if you know this, Terry.

In interviews, we like to stack things up together.

No, absolutely.

Definitely.

And I edit things in my mind as I'm doing the interview.

Do you do that?

Oh, my gosh.

Constantly.

I've been editing this whole time.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

It's distracting, but you got to do it.

It's very annoying.

But you have to.

Why?

Why can't I just be here with you?

Well, you are here with me and you're very much in the moment.

I'm trying.

But there's a part of your brain.

Always.

That's editing and it needs to because say you want to edit out what we just said.

I think, now that we're talking about editing in this sort of metatextual way, I think we may keep it in.

Well, that's the thing.

So you'd have to edit out what I'm saying right now if you edited out the thing before, which is why you have to edit.

Like you have to decide right now, like, do I think I'm going to leave that in or not?

I'm going to leave it in.

Okay.

Because it's a teachable moment between, I think, the best to ever do it and someone who's learned a great deal from that person.

I appreciate that.

So tell me, at your terribly boring job writing faculty policy manuals for Buffalo State College, was it on the job, while you were listening to the radio, that you first discovered the power of the medium?

That was a good part of the job.

There were two good parts of the job.

One was the donut in the morning that they had a box of donuts.

I was eating that back then.

But the really really good part was listening to WBFO, which was this extraordinary NPR affiliate on the campus.

It was like there were maybe five paid people and maybe a hundred volunteers there.

The show I used to listen to in the afternoon was called This Is Radio.

And that was the show that Fresh Air was initially modeled on.

And I loved all the music that Wally Gajewski, who was hosting at the time, played.

Because it was a mix of jazz and blues and rock and folk.

And it was just...

Great.

And I also realize, when you're doing something that isn't really engaging your mind, how wonderful it is to have something to listen to that your eyes aren't required for, but you can feed yourself on it.

It keeps you emotionally and mentally fed.

So the way I actually got into radio was not by listening, because I never dreamed that I could do that.

But at this point, I was kind of fishing around to like, what am I going to do next?

I still don't have the passion, the work kind of passion.

You wanted to be one of those people you met on your road trip.

Yeah, like to have the passion that they had.

And coincidentally, one of the women who I live with because we were living in a group situation couple, single person and she was going to be on the feminist show on WBFO, the station that I was listening to.

So she's going to be on the feminist show.

So all the women in our house kind of gathered around the radio to listen.

And she really surprised us.

She came out on the show, which wouldn't have been a big deal, but she hadn't told us yet her roommates.

So when she came home we had a long talk and she said that her girlfriend was gonna move from the feminist show to the lesbian feminist show.

And suddenly there was an opening on the feminist show.

And I'm not the kind of person who at least back then I wasn't the kind of person who would go and say hey, can I work on your show?

I have no experience.

I've never done this.

I don't know anything, but I'd love to work on the show.

But now that there was an opening and of course there was no money being paid, so they could only get volunteers, I had my roommate's name and I had a recommendation.

She gave me the number of somebody to call.

And I said, well, why don't you come and do an audition?

And I did.

Wow.

Why do you think your roommate was more inclined to come out on the air than in the comfort of the apartment you shared together?

It was kind of like sharing something that's almost like a little bit of a secret with the person next to you on the airplane, because you know you're not going to see them again and you don't know who they are.

They don't know who you are.

I think it might have not occurred to her that we'd all be listening, that this really was a very public thing.

So that's my only guess.

I don't know.

Maybe doing it publicly enabled her to do it personally.

I can't read her mind, so I don't really know.

And I never asked her.

But I'm so grateful to her.

If that hadn't happened, who knows what I would be doing now.

It would probably not be radio.

That seemed like one of those moments that changed your course.

Serendipity.

As you begin working in radio and then come to Philadelphia to work on Fresh Air.

There's something about the fact that she did share it on the air and not in the apartment and form the way you thought about the power of the medium.

Like oh, this can be a space in which people share things that they do not share in their day-to-day.

Absolutely, yes.

I speculated about the reason why, but I'll never really know.

Tom Boswell, who was or is still a sports writer, once said that he thought that sometimes people felt more comfortable talking to a professional person.

You know what I mean.

And so like if you're talking to an interviewer, like they're a professional not in the way that a psychologist or a psychiatrist is but you feel comfortable placing yourself in their hands.

I don't know if that's true, because I think a lot of interviewers are, especially in part of the personality press, are very prying and that people don't trust themselves and build big shields around themselves.

After the break, more from Terry Gross.

.

Did you feel like a professional when you started your show?

Hell no.

I wasn't.

Yeah.

I had no idea what I was doing.

You know what I did at first?

I was used to writing term papers.

My first two shows was like Women in the Blues.

And my other first show was about women's clothes.

Like, why were there bras and girdles?

Like, restrictive undergarments.

Hmm. long trains on skirts and stuff.

And so I didn't know anybody who knew about that stuff.

So I went to the library and did research and read my paper.

It was like the worst radio you can imagine.

We actually have a clip from that.

Do you want to put it in here?

I'm kidding.

There's no clip.

Oh, thank God.

You terrified me.

I appreciate that you think I could find that one.

Well, you do so much research.

If anybody could, you would.

In your Proust questionnaire, you wrote, who would I be?

Where would I be without the year of 1978?

What happened in 1978?

I'll take it chronologically.

Danny Miller, our executive producer, who was a senior at Temple University, became an intern on Fresh Air.

I had been doing the show myself, three hours a day, five days a week.

It was still a local show.

And when Danny came, suddenly the show was, it was fun.

You And we shared very similar taste in music and movies and comedy.

So instead of this like enormous lift every day, suddenly it was fun.

And he booked guests and he lived just a couple of blocks away.

So I remember once there was like a blizzard and he just ran and got some comedy records and brought them over because no one was going to get to the station to be a guest.

It was good.

And then the second thing that happened was that I had been told one of my good friends worked at the campus record store on the Penn campus, which is just a few blocks away from the radio station.

And I knew from my friend that Francis had a huge record collection, including a lot of out-of-print records.

So I had dinner with Francis, talked about the possibility of him doing a feature.

He did an audition tape.

It was incredibly well written.

Like, I wasn't expecting that.

And he became a contributor to the show.

And then we started seeing each other.

And that's how our relationship began.

Then Bill Seamring came.

And Bill was basically the creator of All Things Considered.

The show that you used to host?

Yeah.

Yes, exactly.

The show that I used to host in David Mamet's mind.

Just to be clear, that was all in David Mamet's mind.

So, yes.

So Bill Seemering was, I think, the first vice president for programming at NPR.

And he'd also been a former general manager at WBFO in Buffalo.

So he became the station manager in Philly.

And he is just, like, such a wonderful person.

And such an ear for radio and so creative in his thinking about radio.

So those were three things.

And it's because of Bill that we became a national show.

He told NPR we were worthy.

Did you first fall in love with Francis or did you first fall in love with Francis's writing?

It's hard to say because I already liked Francis.

I wouldn't say I'd fallen in love with him yet.

But his writing amazed me.

And his writing is who he was.

How do you mean?

That was his passion.

And we were talking about having a passion.

He wasn't really writing much at the time.

He was working at the listening booth.

Yes, and that was a record store, but he was listening to music constantly.

It's hard to describe music.

He could really do it, plus he knew all of the history behind it.

And I did encourage him to write after that.

He started writing for Cadence magazine, in which you don't really get paid, but you get a platform.

And he might have just started doing that himself, but I encouraged him to write afterwards.

And he started writing for them.

And then he started writing for the Enquirer freelance.

But he started developing a portfolio and really learning how to write a review for a newspaper.

Thinking about the two of you living these parallel lives together, him becoming a writer, you working tirelessly to make this show.

Because as I said earlier, we're talking around the 50th anniversary.

There's over 15,000 interviews.

And I thought we could talk about some of them together.

Great.

So with the help of Bill Seemering, the show became national in 1985.

It was weekly national, and in 87 it became daily national.

Right.

The first clip I want to play is from 1986, where you're talking to author Kurt Vonnegut about writing and censorship.

At the time, some of his catalog, including Slaughterhouse-Five, was being taken out of schools across the country.

And here you're asking him about what sections of his books have created so much unrest in certain pockets of America.

Can you describe some of the passages in your book that are responsible for them being banned?

No, and neither can the book banners, as they customarily haven't read them.

And These are nice people.

They're usually not very well educated.

They have kids.

They want to help the community in some way.

They run for the school committee.

And so suddenly, for the first time in their lives, they are dealing with books, since high school or whatever.

And so they are over their heads.

But there are organizations which will give them lists of bad books which they don't even have to read.

Are these books on your shelves?

I think what's new is not the censorship, but the opposition to censorship.

I think for 200 years, people have been perfectly free to censor school libraries, public libraries.

Nobody has opposed them.

And what is new is that suddenly they're being opposed.

The eerie timeliness of that.

The cyclical nature of his words and that battle around censorship.

When he left that interview, a producer at the time said that he walked out and he said wow, she's really amazing.

That's one of the best interviews I've ever done.

Oh, I don't remember that at all.

Well, no, it wasn't told to you.

It was told to a colleague.

But it strikes me as like wow, the moment the show went national, there were already people seeing and hearing the kinds of interviews you were doing and the kinds of work that you were trying to make.

I'm curious how did you and your EP, Danny Miller, how were you reimagining the show when it went to four times a week?

Five times a week?

Well, we needed to get on to stations, because if you're not being carried, you're not going to last.

You need a certain amount of stations to carry you.

So we had to come up with a format that was format-friendly for stations.

So, instead of it being long-form interviews, like an hour long, often what we did, very often what we did we divided the show into segments so that stations could cut away and have IDs and weather updates at regularly scheduled times.

And so the format was the first half hour would be one interview, then there'd be a seven minute music review, an 11 minute interview that was highly edited and that would be long distance, and then a four minute book, movie or music review.

And we got some hate mail from Philly, thinking like you sold out to the suits you know, because like, where's the fresh air?

That I knew that was like more long form.

Now it's so like chopped up.

We got one letter saying spring arrived and fresh air died because we premiered nationally daily on May 11th.

And it's good you're still holding on to that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That piece of mail.

Yeah, yeah.

In my mind.

Did you like the change of direction the show was going in?

I didn't like the format when the first half hour was live, as it was for the first few months that we went national.

Because I just saw every second ticking away and thinking, that answer was really long.

I've been robbed of like four minutes and I'm not going to be able to get in the question.

I wanted to ask even more.

And instead of radiating some sense of calm, I think I was just getting more and more anxious.

Like, Don't you know the time that you just wasted?

You know, this is in real time.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is there were plenty of interview shows in the mid 80s and it was becoming an emergent form and a very popular form.

What did you want to do in that format that you felt like others were not doing?

I don't think I thought about it that way.

I thought I'm just going to do the best I can.

And tell me what the best you can look like.

Well, my approach to interviewing tends to be, when it's in the arts of any sort pop culture, music to try to find the connection between somebody's life and their sensibility.

Some people are born with a gift, but the gift is shaped by their upbringing, their parents, the world around them, if they were poor, if they were rich, if they were sick, if they were well.

And that shapes the stories that you tell.

It shapes the things that you are exposed to and your gift kind of forms around that.

So what created the person whose work we love and who is that person?

Do you think one of the reasons you're especially attuned to doing the kinds of interviews that you do is because you were an English major?

I think that is very connected in two ways.

I always loved reading and books.

So, you know, talking to authors was a joy.

I mean, like, I don't have to join a book club.

I get to talk to the writer.

That's the thing I liked about English class is that you got to talk to people who had just read the book and to a teacher who had probably like, taught it a hundred times.

But I think as an English major, you learn to read between the lines.

You learn what makes a good sentence, even if you can't write one yourself.

You learn a lot about language and what makes something interesting.

There's a boring way and an interesting way to tell a story, and you learn the difference.

You get exposed to new words.

I also always love movies and music.

So finding out who the people were, how that was created, all that.

I loved it.

One of the writers who did it very well and who came on your show very often was John Opdyke.

Yes.

And I want to play a clip from the first time you had him on in 1987.

I believe it was.

A writer's job is to, by way of fiction, somehow describe the way we live.

And to me, this seems an important task, very worth doing.

And I think also to the reading public.

It seems, even though they might not articulate it, it seems to them something worth doing also.

In a way, what you are doing is you are giving – Pascal said this somewhere –

You're giving back people themselves.

You are.

By describing as best you can the fantasies of your own life, you are showing other people what their lives are like.

And in a way, you are giving people life.

You are clarifying their life for them.

So this is not an insignificant task, is it?

No, it's a great way of looking at it, too.

Well said, John Offdyke.

He spoke in paragraphs.

He did.

He literally spoke in paragraphs.

He spoke as he wrote.

That's exactly right.

I loved his writing.

Oh, I love his writing.

I don't have to put it.

He's not here anymore, but his books are.

I love his writing.

The way he's describing the utility of writing, the job of the writer.

Clarifying, giving people their lives.

Do you see the function of fresh air in similar terms?

Only in the sense that I think you can find yourself in other people's stories true stories as well as in their art.

It can be very affirming to hear somebody's story and say like I'm not the only person in the world who felt this.

Or like, I've always felt it.

I couldn't express it, but that person put it perfectly, which is often how I felt about Updike and his writing.

Do you still get that from interviews for yourself?

Yeah, my life is not perfectly clarified.

And my life keeps changing.

As you go through different stages of your life, your needs, your body, your interests, your future, your present they all keep changing.

And there's different things you want to read at different stages of your life that you find sustaining in some way.

You said the...

There's so many things here.

No, but it's interesting.

I'm seeing myself reflected in you.

What I mean by, I don't mean you're borrowing from me.

I mean, like, sometimes in the middle of an interview, I even say this to my guests sometimes.

I say to them, just as you just did to me, just give me a minute.

I don't know what I want to ask you yet.

I just need to think about what direction I want to head in.

On making the show you've said in the past, it's like you're slowly being changed every day by doing this job.

And as we talk about the highlights of the show, I want to talk about some of the moments where you had your own David Mamet walkouts.

Yes.

I mentioned Bill O'Reilly earlier, Lou Reed, Faye Dunaway.

But there's one in 1999 that has really stayed with me.

And it was with Monica Lewinsky.

And at the beginning of the episode you said I had a really ambivalent reaction when asked whether I should do the interview.

Yeah.

Yeah, we've gotten called by the publicist.

Yes.

And he said, in asking about her relationship with former President Clinton would I be a good journalist or a voyeur?

And there's that word voyeur again.

But in this case, it was literally about sex.

Yes, in this case it was.

And there's a section before she walks out that I thought we could hear together.

Sure.

Monica Lewinsky is my guest, and as you know, she has a new book called Monica's Story.

Let's talk a little bit about what you believe the relationship with President Clinton was about.

You've described the president as your sexual soulmate, and yet he had told you that he had had hundreds of affairs before he was 40, but after he was 40 he'd made a concerted effort to be faithful.

Then he confessed to you that he kept a record of the days he didn't cheat on his wife.

So when you hear something like that from someone, what delusions can you have about the specialness of your relationship?

Well, I think.

So I think to go a step further and say that his being good was necessarily days that he didn't cheat on his wife is kind of a jump.

That's a little bit too much to make and it's not really fair to him or to Mrs Clinton.

And I don't...

I think I felt that also at the time when he sort of said hundreds of affairs, that I didn't necessarily think that was literal, that there were a hundred other women, but I don't know.

I think for me that it was...

It was understanding and it was seeing that we had some sort of a connection.

And the connection started, it was a physical attraction.

There was an attraction there.

And it developed into a lot of other things that come from being intimate with someone not just physically but emotionally.

You describe in the book that the first time you engaged in oral sex he talked with a congressman on the phone about Bosnia.

And at the same time, while that's happening, you're thinking, we clicked at an incredible level.

And you know reading that, I just couldn't help but wonder how he could be on the phone while this is happening and you're thinking about how incredibly well you're clicking.

I...

I certainly am not going to go through and reenact for you verbally what was going on and what my feelings and emotions were at the time.

I think you just have to accept at face value that that's how I was feeling and that that's what was going on for me.

It's an interesting piece of tape.

Yeah.

How did you feel listening to it?

I have very mixed feelings about having done it.

I had mixed feelings before the interview, and I had mixed feelings after the interview.

And I wrote at the end of the—because she walked out.

She walked out after I asked a more explicit question, which was—after the oral sex question.

That's when she walked out saying the questions were too intimate—.

They were.

This is not a question I.

I don't usually ask people about having oral sex with somebody, but it was in her book.

And reading her book, I felt like, how can I not ask about this?

And I don't know...

You had this problem with Nancy Reagan.

Yeah.

But I felt like I had to ask.

I didn't feel good about it.

But at the same time I was told afterwards that she was led to believe that the interview would be about recent trips she had taken and about writing the book and all that, not really anything so specific about the affair with Clinton.

And she ended her tour after this interview.

She didn't just walk out on me like that was the end of the tour.

You put an end to it.

Well, yeah, it's not what I wanted to do.

I don't want to hurt her.

When the interview was over and I later wrote the back announce to the interview, I said she wasn't comfortable with the question.

I wasn't comfortable asking it.

And this seemed like her walking out, seemed like a fitting end to an interview in which the interviewee was uncomfortable.

And so was the interviewer.

Do you think you heard her?

I know I did.

And I'm really sorry about it.

I've never apologized to her in person, but I'll stand by the fact that I asked the question, like in that moment.

I will stand by having asked her that.

But trying to imagine what she was going through at the time and like so why did she even write a book?

I imagine she wrote the book because there was probably a lot of legal fees.

She probably got a really nice contract.

Why did she go on a tour and be interviewed?

That was probably part of the contract that she'd have to sell the book.

I can't imagine what it was like to go through what she went through.

And now I think she's really managed to turn the worst thing that happened in her life into something that's really productive and useful for other people trying to help women who have been trolled.

Because there was no such thing as trolling, yet there wasn't an internet, but she was really just dragged through the mud in every way imaginable.

Whatever level of responsibility one thinks she should take for what happened, it's still.

I can't think of anything more horrible.

Yeah.

Experiencing what she did in the aftermath.

I'll tell you that I had not heard that tape until preparing for this episode.

And two things stood out to me.

One, the show, as you've said many times, reflects culture.

It doesn't create culture.

It reflects culture.

I think what that also means is it also reflects the cultural and moral values of the moment.

And I think at that time that interview was very much in line with how she was interviewed in other places.

But it struck me as like given what we have gone through in the intervening 26 years, would you have done that interview like that now?

I'm not sure I would have done the interview, and I wasn't sure I should have done it then.

But reading the book, it seemed so delusional to me.

But that's through the lens of who I am.

And she was young, and it obviously didn't seem delusional to her then.

I felt like I had to ask it.

It's not the only thing I asked, and I had other things I would have asked.

But it really stood out to me.

And You know, I think maybe what I'm trying to get at is that when I hear that tape it doesn't sound like the woman who started her radio program on woman power.

Right.

But at the same time, like I said, the culture, like you said, the culture was different then.

And I felt a responsibility as a journalist to you know, address something in the book you know, because everything had already happened.

And she's still insisting at that point that there were sexual soulmates and that they clicked at an incredible level.

Like, look at how she's evolved.

So I think we were both living in a different time.

I don't think she would have written that if she was writing it today.

The whole language was different.

I'm not saying that to excuse myself but, like I said, as a journalist I'm willing to still justify that.

If she was able to write that, that I'm able to ask about it.

I think actually hearing that and hearing you talk about it is a good reminder to everyone how much not only we change, but the culture changes.

And how two people with pretty good intentions can hear and mishear and not reach each other.

It's good and it's okay that people change.

Oh, it's definitely good that people change.

And we ought to be tolerant of that.

Oh, you mean in terms of cancellation?

I think so.

I mean, the amount of guests you've had of people whose careers were basically asked to ignore now.

You had Louis on many times.

Louis C.K. came on.

Yes, and I loved our interviews.

I felt so bad that this person, who I'd come to admire and enjoy so much, had done something so thoughtless and harmful.

In the case of Louis...

Yeah.

Or even Monica, for that matter.

How do you think about the limits of the autobiographical interview?

Oh, I think there are limits.

That's what I was trying to get at earlier.

I think that autobiographical interviews are really helpful.

We see ourselves in them.

We learn about people who aren't like ourselves, and it opens up our understanding of different cultures or countries or religions, whatever.

But at the same time, I think there's a lot that's left out.

There's a lot of fiction.

The example I always like to use is, in addition to Louis CK now, I once had, years ago, probably in the late 80s, a poet who seemed like a really sensitive poet to me and who seemed nervous being on the air.

I was trying to be really gentle with him because I don't think he was used to being interviewed that much.

And I later found out that he was accused of sexual harassment of his students.

And I don't know if it was like assault or harassment.

The language was like less precise then, but I felt really bad.

And then he came out with a book that was.

I forget what the title was, but it was all about his sexual obsession.

And I thought like, oh, I thought I knew something about this guy.

I knew nothing.

And that there's so much you do not know about the person you're interviewing, no matter how forthcoming they may seem.

You don't know what's happening underneath all that.

And I don't delude myself about that.

No matter how much research you do.

Yes, because if you're hiding something, you're hiding it from everybody else who's interviewing you too.

Oftentimes, people are hiding it from themselves, even.

Well, that's true, too.

When people have asked you, what is your goal in an interview?

What do you want to get at?

You said I want to talk to people about the time they were struck by lightning, when their lives are irrevocably changed.

You mentioned this earlier about needing different books for different times and how you have changed, having done this show and committed so much of your life to making this show.

And in looking through your body of work, there's one episode, one conversation.

Where Can we play a clip from that?

Oh, sure.

I want to quote something you write in your memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking.

You write, marriage is memory.

Marriage is time.

Marriage is not only time, it is also paradoxically the denial of time.

For 40 years, I saw myself through John's eyes.

I did not age.

This year, for the first time since I was 29, I saw myself through the eyes of others.

This year, for the first time since I was 29, I realized that my image of myself was of someone significantly younger.

Right as writers, you both worked at home and you were with each other just about all the time.

Did you have a sense of who you were outside of the marriage?

Who you were as a single joan didion, as opposed to a joan didion and john gregory dunn as a unit?

Not really no um the, the family, was my unit.

Um was kind of the way i that was actually the way i wanted it.

Um, So no, it was kind of necessary to refine myself.

I hadn't particularly liked being single.

When you were younger, you mean?

When I was younger.

Were there parts of yourself that you kind of relied on him to do?

All parts.

I mean, people often said that he finished sentences for me.

Well, he did, which meant that I...

I mean, I just relied on him.

He was between me and the world.

He not only answered the telephone, he finished my sentences.

He was the baffle between me and the world at large.

She was really good.

And then, in the middle of the episode, one of our producers came in with something from the wire service saying that she just won the National Book Award.

So I broke the news to her.

I heard.

Yeah.

That was amazing.

I hadn't listened to that episode before.

And in discovering it I, of course, could not help but think about you and the year you have had.

Where does that tape land, with you hearing yourself read those words from her incredible book?

Well, I think her relationship with her husband was really different than mine.

But I'll tell you, when I read her book, it was for the interview, because the book was just coming out.

And I found the book impossible to put down and impossible to read.

Impossible to put down Because it's so well written and it's so emotional.

And impossible to read because it's so painful.

And I just kept thinking, what if this happened to Francis?

What if Francis suddenly died?

I can't imagine anything worse.

How do you endure that?

But my experience and hers were really different.

First of all, Francis was not my protection from the world and answering the phone for me and all of that.

Your baffle?

Yeah.

It was nothing like that at all.

I mean, I was the person who drove.

He didn't know how to drive.

There was all kinds of things where I was the one who had to do it.

But he had a long illness.

He was sick for like four and a half years.

COPD and Parkinson's?

Yeah.

And he had major surgery in 2020 that wasn't related to either of those things.

In the pandemic?

And then the pandemic.

When he was in a skilled nursing facility for rehab.

After the hospitalization I wasn't allowed in because they weren't allowing visitors in.

And in the hospital, it was really scary, too.

I was able to visit him, but there was no vaccine.

There was no medication.

There's no anything for COVID.

Okay.

Another real big difference between what Joan Didion experienced and what I experienced is that when her husband died, she kept all the clothing and everything.

Because the year of magical thinking is about like he can't really be dead, so maybe he'll come back.

So she was saving his clothes.

If it stays there, then maybe he'll come out of the closet.

Yeah.

And for me, it was like, I don't really need his clothes.

He wasn't like a special dresser.

He didn't care that much about his clothes.

I'm just going to keep the ones that have some kind of meaning to me, because he wore it so often that I see that robe and I see Francis.

I see this shirt and I see Francis.

What I kept a lot of were his vinyl albums and his CDs.

I sold a lot of them because...

We had a remote locker.

We had a locker in the basement of where we lived.

We had crates and crates on the floor.

There was an archive in there.

We had more than your average record store did.

It was like living in a combination of a used book and record store.

It's like there's a huge long wall of just vinyl albums and other walls of CDs.

That's my shrine to Francis now.

I have his ashes and his ashes are on one of the record shelves.

His ashes are in an urn like a little wooden box surrounded by the music that he loved.

I can think of no better place.

It's also at eye level when I have my meals.

I can see him.

He's surrounded by his music.

It's all good.

It's hard for me to talk about.

I usually don't get very far.

You've gotten pretty far.

You know, when you go through a long-term illness with somebody and then you have a part-time caregiver, and then you have full-time caregiver and then you have 24-hour caregivers, and then you're in and out of the hospital with that person and you see them just kind of slowly decline and then recover a little bit and then decline even more.

And never getting back to where you were before.

It's a very painful thing to experience with someone.

And through it all, you really kept working.

Was that hard?

Or was it in some ways helpful?

It was helpful.

It was helpful to me because I don't think I would have survived if I was just home the whole time.

And I wanted to make sure that I maintained part of my life.

That was important to me.

And we were very lucky.

We had wonderful caregivers.

And our daytime caregiver, who is now a very close friend of mine.

He loves music and he loves movies and he loves television and keeps up with all of that.

And so he and Francis would have, like, great talks.

And Dev, would you know, he'd take them to the movies.

And either you know he'd be able to walk there with assistance or even if he was in a wheelchair, our caregiver was like very, very strong.

And we'd just like wheel him over the cobblestones to get to the movie theater.

And Francis also liked to be alone.

He really wanted to be alone a lot of the time.

And so just being alone in his office in our home was what he wanted.

If I was there, it's not like we would be spending all day together.

So I think what was hard was that I had to work in the evenings to do more research.

Remember, in the beginning you said that um, with that marie sundack tape yeah, which we'll hear a little bit of at the end here that you got to have the conversation about death with him that you didn't get to have with your parents, were you able to have those?

I'm gonna need a minute.

I'm sorry, that's okay.

No, it's okay.

Does anyone in the control room have a tissue?

I think actually I do.

It's just, it's very soon for me.

We can talk about something else if you want there.

The answer was I never really did quite have that conversation.

I think it was very hard for Francis to talk emotionally about it.

It's hard for most people.

I know.

Even though it's something you often ask.

I know.

And you're so good at asking about it.

I tried.

You tried with him?

Yeah.

But you know, there's a distance that you have with an interviewee where you feel empowered to ask anything.

And I always tell my guests.

If I ask you anything too personal, let me know and I'll move on to something else.

So I'll ask the question, feel free not to ask it, not to answer it.

But I'm more cautious when asking people who I'm really close to about things like that.

Because it's a different relationship.

Yeah.

I think about this all the time.

Do you really?

What are your thoughts?

It's hard because, part of doing this with you, I knew going in that we would have to talk about this.

But the other part... Do you need your tissue?

Yeah.

I've heard you say over and over and over again that to be a sensitive interviewer I have to be a lousy friend.

I've heard you say that in interviews for 25 years.

And so I'm thinking about what we ask the people in our lives versus what we ask of the people over the fiber optic cable or across the table.

What I meant, though, was something different.

What I meant was I don't have time.

I didn't then have time for friends.

And I didn't mean in terms of my relationship.

I didn't mean in terms of the questions that I ask friends.

I meant this solely as, like I'm a lousy friend because if you call me in the evening, I'm not going to be able to talk to you.

But to the point, there are things that we're willing to ask people on tape.

Yes.

The important things that we sometimes don't get around to asking people in our lives.

I think for me the violation seems worse if it's somebody who I'm very close with.

Tell me what you mean by that.

Because usually if I'm asking a guest about the death of a husband, like I did with Joan Didion, it's because she's written about it.

I'm not likely to ask somebody about death if it hasn't been a subject of their work or if I don't think that they can handle it.

Ditto with sex.

When I ask somebody about sex, it's because they've written about it, like Monica Lewinsky.

Or John Updick.

Or John Opdyke.

He was great about writing about it.

Can I just quote you one line?

So he said, what is the proper etiquette before having sex?

Do you ask if the person needs to use the bathroom first?

As if you were going on a long trip together.

I just think that's so great.

It's amazing.

He was a horny man, or at least the writing was.

I'd have trouble with his relationships probably, but...

But in terms of his ability to describe things anyhow, it's not like I say to my parents when my parents were dying like I won't be offended if you don't answer this.

So I'll ask the question and feel free not to answer it.

That's a very professional, thoughtful.

This is the part in the hospital where, if you don't like my questions about dying, this is the time to say I don't like this.

Yeah, so I mean, I asked it very gently and backed off because I can intuit what my parents are thinking.

I can tell by the look on my husband's face what he's thinking and whether he really wants to.

You know, talk about something.

And I don't need to go any further if I see the not now piano plays softly.

After one more break, the end of my conversation with Terry Gross.

Thank you.

You mentioned this right at the beginning of this episode, two and a half weeks removed.

You got back in this office and you got to work and you made this piece about your late husband.

And I re-listened to it this morning and it's just fucking remarkable.

Oh, thank you.

And one of the things that stuck out to me is how you gave so much space to the words and descriptions of other people.

You quoted from magazine after newspaper.

And I was wondering if you did that, one because you're a good journalist and two because at that point you didn't have the words yet.

I don't have the words.

I mean, I'm not a great writer.

I think I've made that clear.

And also, I'm biased.

I mean, I fell in love with his writing before I fell in love with him or at the same time.

And part of how I fell in love with him was his words.

I don't mean sweet talking me, i mean just he.

He just used words and conversation and on the page like just so well and loving writing, as i do, you know, made me just have very deep feelings and i had a lot of people come up to me and write to me afterwards saying like i had no idea uh, of all the things that he'd accomplished and how highly regarded he was.

Because the truth is, jazz has become a very, you know, niche kind of music now.

And most people don't listen to jazz.

Even more, most people don't read jazz criticism.

You know our theme music.

So to me, I know what you're saying.

And I like your theme music a lot.

I just don't understand.

Because to me, it's very important.

I want to quote something he wrote.

Yes.

In The Atlantic.

He wrote a piece about Johnny Cash, someone who came on your show in the late 90s, who didn't love doing interviews but said boy, you're really good at your job.

That's what he said to you.

Do you remember that?

Yeah, I do.

And that's the kind of thing you keep in your mind.

Yeah.

Your husband wrote about Johnny Cash.

He was in his late 30s and already had plenty of mileage on him when he was discovered by television.

Longer hair and the shadows and dents of middle age brought out the character in his face, making him almost handsome.

The shadows and dents of middle age.

I love that line so much.

That's one of the things I read in my tribute to him.

I wish I could come up with something like that.

I'm totally incapable of it.

But you look at Johnny Cash's face and you know exactly what shadows and dents means.

You know I was thinking about the shadows and dents in relation to this third act of yours after doing 50 years of Fresh Air.

There's been so much speculation about when and whether you would retire.

Is that something you're interested in?

Not now, no.

You know, there's the saying that nobody ever on their deathbed says oh, I wish I spent more time in the office.

Well, I think, if you're passionate about your work, which has been a kind of theme of the interview, in a way, you know of our interview that it's not time in the office, it's doing something you're passionate about.

Right.

Work really gives my life a focus and meaning.

I find my work very meaningful.

And it's not like, ah, I'm going to retire and golf.

Or I'm going to retire and write the great American novel, which I just haven't had time to write.

But I know, given the time, I've got it in me.

My attitude about writing a book is like, never again.

This book, which is a collection of my interviews with a kind of long opening essay...

I had an excellent collaborator, Margaret Moose Pick, and she did a lot of the editing of the interviews.

She did most of the editing of the interviews.

And yet, just like doing, like rewriting intros and writing the opening essay.

And then it was so time consuming.

I can't begin to tell you.

And that's with help.

So this job that gives your life meaning, that has given it meaning for as long as it has, for 50 years.

We're living in a moment where 11 billion in funding for NPR and PBS and stations across the country have been eliminated.

It was voted on and passed through the Senate, in part because of Pennsylvania's own Dave McCormick, who voted in favor of this cut.

The New York Times have called the cuts a time bomb for the public media system.

As someone who has given as much of their time and life to this medium as just about anyone still doing it, how are you thinking about the future of public media?

I don't know what to expect.

I don't know whether there will be more corporate underwriting coming through or listener support.

But I know that some stations will probably go under.

I know some stations might have to not be NPR members anymore because you have to pay dues to become a member of NPR if you're a station.

And those dues help support NPR.

And stations pay a fee to carry our show.

I don't know what to expect.

I think public radio will probably survive in some form.

I think the form might really change.

I don't know.

I'm really not the right person to predict anything.

I'm not good at that and I don't know.

I'm not concerned about predictions.

I'm more focused on the fact that you say, I have no plans of retirement.

Right.

As someone who's going within the time bomb, as the New York Times called it.

I want to stick it out and do this job that gives me meaning.

How are you feeling day to day?

Day to day, I just do my job.

I don't think about the long-term future of public media day to day, at least not in a consuming way.

I think about it a lot, and I don't know what the future will bring.

I do know, I'll just speak specifically about public radio right now.

It has contributed so much to American culture and journalism.

There is still nothing in the audio space that's like All Things Considered or Morning Edition.

Absolutely nothing.

There's a zillion podcasts.

None of them have reporters around the world.

Maybe the BBC has a podcast.

But there's nothing on the radio.

Let me put it that way, because All Things Considered and Morning Edition aren't whole shows on the podcast.

But there's nothing on radio like that.

There's a lot of communities that are cut off culturally. from a lot of what's happening.

And a lot of those communities have really relied on public radio for their cultural news.

And not everybody even knows how to do podcasts, how to access them.

I meet a lot of people who don't know.

So when I started in public media, when I started on public radio, it was like 1973 or four.

All Things Considered was only two or three years old.

No one knew what public radio was.

My parents thought, like this is some kind of.

This must be some kind of amateurish thing, because I've never heard of it.

It's not going to be a serious career.

You should find something else.

But look at how it grew.

Look at how many artists were connected to audiences through public radio shows.

Look at how many shows it helped create, like our show.

We could never have gone national without a very major CPB fund.

The show World Cafe, same thing.

It helped build WHYY with just a local grant that enabled us to create a newsroom when Bill Seeming was here.

So many podcasts are inspired by public radio shows.

This American Life, Serial, long-form interview shows.

They're outgrowths of public radio.

And for years, I felt like we have no competition.

I don't mean our show.

I mean, like, NPR shows, NPR stations.

How come someone in commercial media isn't trying to copy what we do?

Because it's so good and it has such a devoted audience.

And now, God, there's so much competition.

I feel like I've been just a couple of years away from the early fruits of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

And here I am at the other end of it when there is no more of that funding.

And I think it's really sad and really unfortunate.

Yeah.

Bill Moyers said that some people confuse journalism with liberalism.

And I think that that's part of what's going on here that some people with power, including perhaps the president, see journalism that's fact-based and they think it's liberal because they disagree with the facts.

Congressman scott perry, who represents pennsylvania's 10th district, says this exact thing.

He says it's a no-brainer to slash taxpayer funding of npr and pbs.

They are disinformation and propaganda outlets that only publish leftist talking points.

Oh, that's simply factually totally untrue.

If you listen to the NPR news shows they have Democrats, they have on Republicans, they have on very conservative people, they have on arts of all kind.

It's just factually not true.

And if having on people of different backgrounds, people who are Black Latino queer feminist, if that's a sign of wokeness Well, it's a sign of America.

It's not a political position.

It's a sign of representing human beings who are human beings and who live in our country and who have great contributions that they've made.

As soon as it was safe to come out.

We saw that so many of the artists that everybody loves are queer.

And when the doors opened to Black writers and filmmakers and directors, we realized there were so many talented filmmakers who just weren't given access.

And we already knew that with music.

There was always Black music being recorded.

Artists weren't necessarily being paid properly for making it.

They may have been exploited, but we still got to hear the music.

I don't say that in forgiveness of the exploitation.

I just say that in recognition that that talent was recognized.

So it's impossible to do an art show without what Scott Perry might think of as being woke, just by virtue of having on great artists who happen to be Black or queer or Latino or feminist, and that's reflected in their work, because people's lives are always reflected in their work.

I think many people saw their lives reflected in the work of writer Maury Sendak.

And he came on your show many, many times.

Yes.

And in celebrating 50 years of fresh air in the building where it happened, where it continues to happen.

I thought we could play a clip from your conversation with him in 2012.

I have nothing but praise now.

Really, for my life, I'm not unhappy.

I cry a lot because I miss people.

I cry a lot because they die and I can't stop them.

They leave me.

And I love them more.

But I have my young people here, four of them who are studying, and they look at me as somebody who knows everything of poor kids.

They only know how little I know.

But obviously I give off something that they trust because they're all intelligent.

Oh God, there are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I'm ready.

I'm ready.

Well, listen.

I have to tell you something.

Go ahead.

You are the only person I have ever dealt with in terms of being interviewed or talking to who brings this out in me.

There is something very unique and special in you, which I so trust.

When I heard that you were going to interview me, I thought you wanted to.

I was really, really pleased.

Well, I'm really glad we got the chance to speak, because when I heard you had a book coming out I thought what a good excuse to call up Maurice Sendak and have a chat.

Yes, that's what we always do, isn't it?

Yeah, it is.

It's what we've always done.

It is.

Thank God we're still around to do it.

Yes.

And almost certainly I'll go before you go, so I won't have to miss you.

Oh, God, what a...

And I don't know whether I'll do another book or not.

It doesn't matter.

I'm a happy old man.

But I will cry my way all the way to the grave.

Well, I'm so glad you have a new book.

I'm really glad we had a chance to talk.

I am, too.

And I wish you all good things.

I wish you all good things.

Live your life, live your life, live your life.

Need another tissue.

So many times I play him back in my head saying, live your life, live your life, live your life.

Like when I get caught up in a negative thought cycle, I just, I play that.

My emotions have been very close to the surface since Francis died.

Is that all right?

Yeah, I mean, I should be feeling a lot.

We lived our lives together for 47 years.

It's okay.

Why are you saying that to me?

Because I feel like maybe you're uncomfortable that I'm tearing up.

Oh, no, no.

I'm just holding the space.

Yeah.

I also want to reassure you that I'm okay.

You don't have to reassure me.

Okay.

That's not what this is.

Okay.

Are you?

Yeah, I really am.

I know there's still a wound.

There's an absence.

But I'm okay.

I have a life.

I have friends.

I have work that I really treasure.

I have people who I see every day at work who I really care deeply about.

I enjoy seeing them.

I enjoy being in their company.

I enjoy relationships built around a common purpose.

And I have that.

I have that in a very profound way.

When you hear that tape now.

It has new meaning.

Yeah.

And what is that?

I feel like I understand more what it's like to be in the position Maurice was in, where he had been sick for a while.

He'd been declining, he couldn't travel, which is why we spoke on the phone.

And to know death is near and to still find.

He still found beauty in the world and I love that he did.

That's very meaningful to me.

And I really hope...

That when I'm nearing death, if it doesn't come suddenly like if I know I'm nearing it, I hope that music and movies or whatever still brings me pleasure and connection and meaning.

Yeah.

I know music still mattered to Francis at the very end.

When he says live your life, live your life.

Live your life as we go.

How do you want to go about living the rest of it?

I'm in a day-by-day right now.

I mean, I know I'm not going to retire now.

Give me a good day.

A good day?

Yeah.

A good day at work is when an interview goes well.

Or just a day when you know I'm at the point in my life where I'm not looking for the big exclamatory kind of pleasure.

Do you know what I mean?

I'm not planning on any great physical adventures.

I was never a physical adventurer.

I've always been a physical coward.

Me too.

Oh, really?

Oh, 100%.

And I'm not much of a traveler, kind of a homebody.

But to me, I just want inner equanimity, like inner contentment.

And that could just be having dinner alone or having dinner with a friend.

It could be talking to somebody in an interview.

It could be just working with the people I work with.

It could be taking a walk by myself.

It could be sitting and watching a movie.

Do you know what I mean?

But just to feel content and comfortable in my own body and in my mind.

And that doesn't always happen.

That's what I seek.

And the positive value and negative thinking?

Well, that I can't turn off.

I'd like to turn that off.

But those times occur, you know, and that's when I say it like I'm okay, because I still have times like that, you know.

What did your dad say about pleasure again?

No one said.

Life is all about pleasure.

And he's right, it isn't.

But you shouldn't say that in a scolding way to somebody who's not exactly a hedonist.

You know, if you look at me and look at my, you know the life I've always led.

I've always been, you know, on the introverted side.

Studious.

Yeah, exactly.

You'd never think like that woman, all she cares about is pleasure and she doesn't work.

She doesn't focus.

You wouldn't be saying that about me.

I guess my last question for you is, for 50 years, people have listened to your interviews.

They've read them in this book.

And part of what happens is what Updike talked about that they see their lives reflected back at them by hearing about other people's experiences.

Do you feel that, after 15000 interviews, 50 years, that hearing other people's stories, trying to understand other people, has it helped you better understand yourself?

I think so.

Yeah, in the sense that it's been helpful to me to hear people talk about things that I would be embarrassed to admit to myself.

And I don't mean like criminal, offensive things, but just like thoughts and feelings that I tend to keep to myself because I think it would reflect badly on me or be embarrassing in some way.

And so it's helped me feel more comfortable within myself and also helped me feel that there's value in sharing stories, even maybe mine.

There's a lot of value in it.

Well, I say that because I've been a very inhibited interviewee most of my life, because I wanted to not only be invisible but also be a bit of a blank slate.

And I feel like...

I've been at this long enough that maybe I can say more about myself and say it comfortably.

And thank you for asking such good questions and being such a sensitive interviewer.

I admire your work a lot and felt very comfortable talking to you, even when I was in tears.

You said back in the day, why don't more people do the kind of interviews that we do at NPR?

And I assure you and I know you know this, but I'll say it so we have it on the record that there would not be one episode of Talk Easy if it weren't for you.

Thank you, Sam.

It means a lot to me.

It means a lot to me because I admire your work a lot.

And I think you're really good.

I learn from the best.

Terry Gross, thank you for all the time and... everything in between.

Thank you.

Can I give you a hug?

Yes.

¶¶

And that's our show.

If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to share it on social media.

Tag us at TalkEasyPod.

I want to give a very special thanks this week to the team at Fresh Air and WHYY, the incomparable Molly CV.

Nesper, Tom Grassler, Julian Hertzfeld, Al Banks, and Tina Kallikey.

I also want to thank Sarah Silverman, Heidi Saman, and of course, our guest today, Terry Gross.

You can hear Fresh Air on NPR or wherever you're listening to this right now.

If you want to watch this on video, it will be up later this week on YouTube.

For more episodes, I'd recommend Ira Glass, David Remnick, and Seth Meyers.

To hear those and more Lemonada podcasts, listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen.

You can also subscribe to Lemonada Premium for exclusive bonus content and ad-free listening.

Just hit the subscribe button on Apple or head to LemonadaPremium.com.

Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok.

Our executive producer is Janixa Bravo.

Today's talk was edited by Matt Sasaki and Nick Zahn.

It was mixed by Andrew Vastola.

Our music is by Dylan Peck.

Our illustrations are by Krisha Shaddai.

Photographs today come from Sarah Schneider, with research assistance from Ben Eisen and Corey Attad.

This episode was made in partnership with the good people at Lemonada Media, and I'm Sam Fragoso.

Thank you for listening to this very special episode of Talk Easy.

I'll see you back here on Sunday with a brand new one.

Until then, stay safe, and so long.

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[Terry Gross: 50 Years of Fresh Air and the Art of the Interview]-[Terry Gross On 50 Years Of Fresh Air (Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso)]

📋 Summary

Reflecting on Five Decades of Fresh Air: A Conversation with Terry Gross

The Evolution of a Radio Institution

The Philosophy of the Autobiographical Interview

Personal Loss and Finding Meaning

The Future of Public Media

Conclusion: A Legacy of Connection

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[Terry Gross: 50 Years of Fresh Air and the Art of the Interview]-[Terry Gross On 50 Years Of Fresh Air (Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso)]

📋 Summary

Reflecting on Five Decades of Fresh Air: A Conversation with Terry Gross

The Evolution of a Radio Institution

The Philosophy of the Autobiographical Interview

Personal Loss and Finding Meaning

The Future of Public Media

Conclusion: A Legacy of Connection

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🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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