The Terry Gross Interview

This month marks 50 years of Terry Gross as the host of Fresh Air https://www.npr.org/programs/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 the world of podcasting. To commemorate a half-century on the air, Terry Gross joins us for a rare appearance in the interview seat. At the top, we discuss her Brooklyn upbringing (10:26), early memories of writing (13:00), and her improbable road to public radio (29:38). Then, Terry walks us through the formative years of Fresh Air (33:37) and its seminal conversations with Kurt Vonnegut (40:21), John Updike (46:30), Monica Lewinsky (49:30), Joan Didion (1:00:55), and more. On the back-half, Gross reflects on forty-seven years of partnership with her late husband, jazz writer Francis Davis (1:03:24), their shared affinity for reading and music (1:05:57), the future of public media (1:19:16), and why she continues to have faith in (and love for) the long-form interview (1:31:35). Subscribe to our new YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@talkeasypod. Thoughts or future guest ideas? Email us at [email protected]. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Lemonada.

• 0:21Sam Fragoso?

  This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fragoso. Welcome to the show.

• 0:38Sam Fragoso?

  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 15,000 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.

• 1:20Sam Fragoso?

  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, Teri returned to Remember Frances on the air,

• 2:05Sam Fragoso?

  the professional and personal inextricably linked, 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 Frances built together. And so, for today's very special episode, I got on a plane to Philadelphia to talk to Teri 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.

• 2:44Sam Fragoso?

  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 Teri 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 Teri Gross on 50 Years of Fresh Air. Teri Gross.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:30Sam Fragoso?

  Welcome to the show.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for coming to Philly to do this. I'm honored.

• 3:35Sam Fragoso?

  I've never been in Philadelphia. This feels like the perfect occasion to come to Philadelphia. How are you doing?

• 3:41Speaker 02

  I'm doing okay. You know, you probably know my husband died a few months ago, but under the circumstances, I think I'm really doing okay.

• 3:49Sam Fragoso?

  Has it been easy to get back to work in the aftermath of that? He passed April 14th, right?

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, you know, I took a couple of weeks off just to, you know, organizing the funeral and dealing with some of the immediate stuff you have to deal with. So, and during that two weeks, I also wrote the on-air tribute I did to him. I want people to like, know who he was.

• 4:13Sam Fragoso?

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  So.

• 4:14Sam Fragoso?

  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.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  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, 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.

• 4:46Sam Fragoso?

  I do want to talk about the love you shared.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 4:49Sam Fragoso?

  Well, we'll wrap our way back to that. So since then, you've been back at work.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:54Sam Fragoso?

  Making, what, four shows a week?

• 4:56Speaker 02

  It was 10, I think it went to nine and went to eight.

• 5:00Sam Fragoso?

  Okay, so it's slowly gone down.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  It's like a countdown clock.

• 5:03Sam Fragoso?

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

• 5:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:06Sam Fragoso?

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

• 5:13Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:14Sam Fragoso?

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

• 5:28Speaker 02

  What's your next question?

• 5:32Sam Fragoso?

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

• 5:37Speaker 02

  Yes, that is very unlikely. I heard your interview with him.

• 5:41Sam Fragoso?

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

• 5:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:45Sam Fragoso?

  Mamet Week, I think it's called?

• 5:46Speaker 02

  I think it's called Mamet Week. So I want to just call 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 he mentioned The New Yorker.

• 6:09Sam Fragoso?

  I think The New York Times.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:18Sam Fragoso?

  On a show he called All Things Considered.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:32Sam Fragoso?

  Ah.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  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, so.

• 6:44Sam Fragoso?

  I'm glad we cleared there.

• 6:45Speaker 02

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

• 6:51Sam Fragoso?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  You know?

• 6:52Sam Fragoso?

  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.'" Well, since we're here celebrating 50 years of Fresh Air, half-century in, where are you at on that these days?

• 7:14Speaker 02

  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 can be something very clarifying, very affirming about it. And I also think with an autobiographical interview, when somebody's 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.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  So I, 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.

• 8:15Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  Or like, anybody can achieve this, all you have to do is work hard, which I really do not believe.

• 8:22Sam Fragoso?

  What, what do you not believe?

• 8:24Speaker 02

  I, 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, 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, not art.

• 9:01Sam Fragoso?

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

• 9:06Speaker 02

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

• 9:09Sam Fragoso?

  You don't think it's an art?

• 9:10Speaker 02

  I, I don't know. I just feel like as an interview, if I called it an art, it would sound pretentious and self aggrandizing.

• 9:17Sam Fragoso?

  Ah, you've done over 15,000 interviews, over 50 years. At what number are you allowed to be a little self aggrandizing?

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Well, the number isn't what, I, I don't think I'm a bad interviewer, don't get me wrong. I don't, I don't, I don't think like I really suck at this and somehow I'm still doing it.

• 9:34Sam Fragoso?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, that would be shocking.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:36Sam Fragoso?

  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?

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Revealing things to the outside world wasn't encouraged. You can ask questions at home.

• 9:54Sam Fragoso?

  You were allowed to ask questions at home?

• 9:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:56Sam Fragoso?

  Because in, 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.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  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, 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.

• 10:32Sam Fragoso?

  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?

• 10:41Speaker 02

  That's what I was told. And yeah.

• 10:44Sam Fragoso?

  What was the environment like between you and your parents and your brother also? Your older brother was, what were the kind of conversations you did have?

• 10:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:14Sam Fragoso?

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

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Oh, yes. It's, it's, I think it's a very Kinehara Jewish thing.

• 11:27Speaker 02

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

• 11:35Sam Fragoso?

  Sounds a little bit like a Mel Brooks quote.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  "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."

• 11:45Sam Fragoso?

  That's your motto.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  But, 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." Weekends, you get some time off where you're allotted a certain amount of pleasure. But during the week, it's like.

• 12:08Sam Fragoso?

  What was your mother's motto?

• 12:10Speaker 02

  She didn't really have one.

• 12:11Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah. Most people don't have mottos.

• 12:13Speaker 02

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

• 12:20Sam Fragoso?

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

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Frustrating, a little annoying, but I think I internalized it anyway.

• 12:37Sam Fragoso?

  But what part was frustrating?

• 12:39Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:45Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  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.

• 13:04Sam Fragoso?

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

• 13:07Speaker 02

  For at least three of them.

• 13:08Sam Fragoso?

  Mm hmm.

• 13:09Speaker 02

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

• 13:11Sam Fragoso?

  Being a lyricist sounds pleasurable.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  Oh, it was. It was great. I loved it.

• 13:15Sam Fragoso?

  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?

• 13:28Speaker 02

  I'm too embarrassed to reveal them.

• 13:30Sam Fragoso?

  Hold on. You've said in the past that you won't say them. What if we sang them together?

• 13:36Speaker 02

  We're not gonna do that.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  There's no way we're gonna do that. You don't even know the lyrics.

• 13:44Sam Fragoso?

  Well, that's why if you teach me, just give me this. Imagine yourself as Stephen Sondheim. Give me one line.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Okay, I may live to regret this.

• 13:54Sam Fragoso?

  That was the alternate title of your book, right?

• 13:56Speaker 02

  The alternate title of a lot of my life.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Okay. So the premise is kind of like a rip off of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, where the main character finds like a rulebook for success, like a self-help book for success called How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. We kind of use 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.

• 14:28Sam Fragoso?

  I wish I had that in high school.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  Or that we were gonna create the handbook. I think we needed the handbook. And so the melody was to Le 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."

• 14:59Speaker 02

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

• 15:06Sam Fragoso?

  Excellent.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  I'm done.

• 15:07Sam Fragoso?

  Excellent.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  I'm totally done.

• 15:09Sam Fragoso?

  With the interview?

• 15:10Speaker 02

  No, no. I'm not gonna pull a mammoth.

• 15:15Sam Fragoso?

  Or Bill O'Reilly?

• 15:16Speaker 02

  Or Bill O'Reilly, or several other people I can think of.

• 15:19Sam Fragoso?

  Or Faye Dunaway?

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Or Faye Dunaway.

• 15:21Sam Fragoso?

  Or Monica Lewinsky?

• 15:22Speaker 02

  Or Monica.

• 15:22Sam Fragoso?

  Or Lou Reed after Six Minutes in 1996?

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 15:26Sam Fragoso?

  I can keep going of fresh air walkouts?

• 15:30Speaker 02

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

• 15:33Sam Fragoso?

  It's a really great roster.

• 15:38Sam Fragoso?

  That was fantastic.

• 15:39Speaker 02

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

• 15:46Sam Fragoso?

  I believe it, and as will our listeners. That was amazing. There's no-

• 15:50Speaker 02

  I don't hear the compliments. I don't hear like-

• 15:53Sam Fragoso?

  I said that was amazing.

• 15:54Speaker 02

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

• 15:57Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, you're right. You caught me on that.

• 15:58Speaker 02

  I know.

• 16:01Sam Fragoso?

  When you were sharing the lyrics, I was like, God, how am I gonna remember to sing all these? This is-

• 16:07Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 16:07Sam Fragoso?

  This is very long. Was it satisfying to hear your fellow classmates singing your words?

• 16:14Speaker 02

  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 kinda 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.

• 16:39Sam Fragoso?

  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 that I want?

• 16:47Speaker 02

  Being a lyricist?

• 16:47Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  Absolutely not.

• 16:48Sam Fragoso?

  No.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  No. I don't know if I was thinking as deeply about it. I was a high school kid, reading existentialist essays and novels, but I don't know how much I was really comprehending all of the subtext.

• 17:04Sam Fragoso?

  But you were enjoying it?

• 17:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:06Sam Fragoso?

  From there, where did you wanna go?

• 17:08Speaker 02

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

• 17:14Sam Fragoso?

  In your freshman year?

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. One of the teachers read one of my essays, some of it out loud, and said, 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.

• 17:35Sam Fragoso?

  Being told what to do.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 18:03Sam Fragoso?

  Even then, you knew you needed an assignment.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  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. Because writing, I don't know about you, do you find writing easy? I don't.

• 18:17Sam Fragoso?

  Was it Dorothy Parker who said, I hate writing, I love having written? That's about how I feel.

• 18:23Speaker 02

  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.

• 18:32Sam Fragoso?

  Me either.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  I like your opening essays, if I may call them that, before, you know, introductions or whatever, before your interviews. They're really well written.

• 18:42Sam Fragoso?

  Some of them are good.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  I like the ones I've heard.

• 18:44Sam Fragoso?

  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.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  Decided is a strong word because I was really torn.

• 19:00Sam Fragoso?

  Did your parents try to stop you?

• 19:02Speaker 02

  They definitely tried to stop me. They flew up to Buffalo.

• 19:05Sam Fragoso?

  They flew up?

• 19:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, they told me that basically they were going to cut me off.

• 19:11Sam Fragoso?

  Do you remember that conversation?

• 19:13Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  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.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  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? My grandparents were Eastern European immigrants. And my parents were, you know, grew up during the depression. My father had a dropout 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. 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. Yeah.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 21:32Sam Fragoso?

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

• 21:36Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 22:14Sam Fragoso?

  Was there an underlying mission?

• 22:16Speaker 02

  The destination was California.

• 22:18Sam Fragoso?

  That was the destination. Was it all inspired by Dennis Hopper and Easy Rider?

• 22:23Speaker 02

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

• 22:29Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  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 Ginsberg 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. 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.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  I'm more of a homebody.

• 23:18Sam Fragoso?

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

• 23:21Speaker 02

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

• 23:27Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 23:27Speaker 02

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

• 23:30Sam Fragoso?

  You didn't think there was a third option?

• 23:32Speaker 02

  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.

• 23:40Sam Fragoso?

  Well, what are you not proud to say?

• 23:42Speaker 02

  That I wasn't thinking for myself in making the decision. I was thinking like, Which of these two sides am I going to choose?

• 23:51Sam Fragoso?

  Ah.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  As opposed to what, what do I really want in my life? Do I really want to do that? I, I was enjoying college.

• 23:58Sam Fragoso?

  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.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  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.

• 24:39Sam Fragoso?

  Speaking of trips, when you took LSD, you brought a pen and paper.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:46Sam Fragoso?

  To accompany you on the, on this trip. And, and you said that I had a subject in mind.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  Did I say I had a subject in mind?

• 24:54Sam Fragoso?

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

• 24:57Speaker 02

  The trip.

• 24:58Sam Fragoso?

  The trip itself.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I thought I'd write about that.

• 25:01Sam Fragoso?

  Okay, and you thought that would open up your writerly?

• 25:04Speaker 02

  Doors of perception.

• 25:05Sam Fragoso?

  And did it?

• 25:06Speaker 02

  Well, it opened up my perception for sure. But the whole idea of writing about it seemed absurd. Cause the whole idea to me of the experience was the experience. Cause 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.

• 25:35Sam Fragoso?

  Where were you when you did it?

• 25:37Speaker 02

  Central Park.

• 25:38Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, my God.

• 25:38Speaker 02

  Not, not, not for the whole time.

• 25:40Sam Fragoso?

  But you were walking around, I assume?

• 25:42Speaker 02

  Sitting, walking, writing, no, just kidding.

• 25:46Sam Fragoso?

  My last question about this period. You went to Woodstock.

• 25:50Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 25:51Sam Fragoso?

  You seem exasperated me bringing this up.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  No, no, no, I, it was a mixed experience.

• 25:57Sam Fragoso?

  How, how come?

• 25:59Speaker 02

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

• 26:01Sam Fragoso?

  Yes, I have.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  It reminded me of a scene from Weekend.

• 26:04Sam Fragoso?

  Ah.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  A kind of nightmare scene. And then when, when we got there, it's just like, it was so crowded. And having to use those really filthy Johnny on the spots, it was so unpleasant.

• 26:16Sam Fragoso?

  Is that a porta potty?

• 26:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, like a porta potty.

• 26:19Sam Fragoso?

  They're called Johnny on the spots?

• 26:20Speaker 02

  Well, some of them are.

• 26:22Sam Fragoso?

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

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:28Sam Fragoso?

  Yes, go ahead.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  But, you know, I enjoyed the music and I was glad I went. It was really, it was, it was an exciting experience.

• 26:34Sam Fragoso?

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

• 26:40Speaker 02

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

• 26:45Sam Fragoso?

  Yes, of course.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  But I think Sly Stone, I think I really saw him.

• 26:48Sam Fragoso?

  That's amazing. By the end of the trip, you, 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.

• 27:01Speaker 02

  This was nice traveling cross country.

• 27:02Sam Fragoso?

  Right. What did you mean by that?

• 27:04Speaker 02

  Along the way, but especially in California, we were, 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, that had a passion.

• 27:21Sam Fragoso?

  Single minded.

• 27:22Speaker 02

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

• 27:30Sam Fragoso?

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

• 27:33Speaker 02

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

• 27:48Sam Fragoso?

  But you didn't have it then?

• 27:50Speaker 02

  No.

• 27:50Sam Fragoso?

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

• 28:02Speaker 02

  You could call it not interesting.

• 28:06Speaker 02

  No qualifier necessary.

• 28:08Sam Fragoso?

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

• 28:15Speaker 02

  No, share because you do so much research.

• 28:17Sam Fragoso?

  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

• 28:30Speaker 02

  The movies.

• 28:30Sam Fragoso?

  The movies, everything. And so

• 28:32Speaker 02

  The readings.

• 28:33Sam Fragoso?

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

• 28:38Speaker 02

  Oh, I see. Okay. Yeah, I got it.

• 28:40Sam Fragoso?

  See, everything was, I don't know if you know this, Terry, in interviews, we like to stack things up together.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  No, absolutely. Definitely, definitely. And I edit things in my mind as I'm doing the inter. Do you do that?

• 28:52Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, my gosh, constantly. I've been editing this whole time.

• 28:55Speaker 02

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

• 28:57Sam Fragoso?

  It's very annoying.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  But you have to.

• 28:59Sam Fragoso?

  Why? Why can't I just be here with you?

• 29:02Speaker 02

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

• 29:05Sam Fragoso?

  I'm trying.

• 29:06Speaker 02

  But there's a part of your brain

• 29:07Sam Fragoso?

  Always.

• 29:08Speaker 02

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

• 29:13Sam Fragoso?

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

• 29:19Speaker 02

  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?

• 29:32Sam Fragoso?

  I'm going to leave it in.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 29:33Sam Fragoso?

  Because it's a teachable moment.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  Yes, it is.

• 29:36Sam Fragoso?

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

• 29:42Speaker 02

  I appreciate that.

• 29:44Sam Fragoso?

  So, so tell me, at your terribly boring job

• 29:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 29:47Sam Fragoso?

  writing faculty policy manuals for Buffalo State College.

• 29:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:53Sam Fragoso?

  Was it on the job, while you were listening to the radio, that you first discovered the power of the medium?

• 30:01Speaker 02

  That's what the 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 100 volunteers. 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.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  And it was just great. And I also realized, like, 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.

• 31:24Sam Fragoso?

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

• 31:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, to have the passion that they had. And coincidentally, one of the women who I lived 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 was 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 going to move from the feminist show to the lesbian feminist show.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  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.

• 32:43Sam Fragoso?

  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?

• 32:52Speaker 02

  Yes, I've asked myself that. And I think perhaps for her, 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, I never asked her. But I'm so grateful to her. I mean, if that hadn't happened, who knows what I would be doing now?

• 33:36Speaker 02

  It would probably not be radio.

• 33:38Sam Fragoso?

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

• 33:42Speaker 02

  Serendipity.

• 33:43Sam Fragoso?

  As you begin working in radio and then come to Philadelphia to work on Fresh Air, does something about the fact that she did share it on the air and not in the apartment inform 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.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  Yes. I speculated about the reason why, but I'll never really know. Tom Boswell, who was, was or is still a sportswriter, once said that he thought that sometimes people felt more comfortable talking to like a professional. You know what I mean? And so like if you're talking to an interviewer, like they're, 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 the big shields around themselves.

• 34:56Sam Fragoso?

  After the break, more from Terry Gross.

• 35:09Sam Fragoso?

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• 35:53Sam Fragoso?

  It's a world-expanding, genre-bending movie from one of the most distinctive filmmakers working today. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now streaming exclusively on MUBI. You can try MUBI free for 30 days at MUBI.com/talkeasy. That's MUBI, M-U-B-I dot com slash talkeasy for a whole month of great cinema for free.

• 36:17Sam Fragoso?

  I think a lot of us are gonna spend the next few weeks looking for gifts online. And while I like finding something thoughtful for the people in my life, the process can get a little ridiculous. You've got a dozen tabs open, you're comparing prices, and you're trying to remember which store had that one thing you saw that has a deal, and you flagged it, and you saved it, and now you can't find it. Anyway, that's what I like about Shop. Shop brings all kinds of stores together in one place, so you can search for what you're looking for across different brands while discovering new ones along the way, plus tracking all your orders without jumping in-between websites. And just in time for the holidays, they're celebrating the all-new Shop.com with a pretty extraordinary giveaway.

• 36:58Sam Fragoso?

  1,000 shoppers will win $1,000 in Shop Cash. That's $1 million in total, which you can put towards gifts for other people, or maybe something you've had an eye on for yourself. And you don't have to buy anything to enter the giveaway. Enter to win the $1 million Shop Cash giveaway from now until November 1st. Just go to shop.com. There are so many ways to win, and that's shop.com. Shopping designed around you. No purchase necessary. Restrictions apply. Official rules available at shop.com.

• 37:50Sam Fragoso?

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

• 37:54Speaker 02

  Oh, 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? On trains, on skirts and stuff like that. 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.

• 38:27Sam Fragoso?

  We actually have a clip from that. Do you want to put it in here? I'm kidding. There's no clip.

• 38:31Speaker 02

  Thank God.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  You terrified me.

• 38:39Sam Fragoso?

  I appreciate that you think I could find that one.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  Well, you do so much research. If anybody could, you would.

• 38:43Sam Fragoso?

  In your Proust questionnaire,

• 38:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 38:45Sam Fragoso?

  you wrote, "Who would I be? Where would I be without the year of 1978?" What happened in 1978?

• 38:55Speaker 02

  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 know, I had like a partner and we shared very similar tastes 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

• 39:39Speaker 02

  he just ran and got some comedy records and brought them over because no one was gonna 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

• 40:20Speaker 02

  then we started seeing each other and that's how our relationship began. Then Bill Semring came. And Bill was basically the creator of All Things Considered. He was

• 40:33Sam Fragoso?

  The show that you used to host?

• 40:35Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. The show that I used to host and David Mamet's mine. Just to be clear, that was all in David Mamet's mind. So, yes, so Bill Semring was, I think, the vice, 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.

• 41:15Sam Fragoso?

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

• 41:22Speaker 02

  It's hard to say because there were, it was, 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. So-

• 41:33Sam Fragoso?

  Well, how do you mean?

• 41:34Speaker 02

  That was his passion. And we were talking about having a passion. He wasn't really writing much at the time.

• 41:42Sam Fragoso?

  He was working at the listening booth.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  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. You know, he started writing for Cadence magazine, in which, like, 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. And he started writing for them. And then he started writing for The Inquirer freelance. But he started developing a portfolio and really learning how to write a review for a newspaper.

• 42:20Sam Fragoso?

  Thinking about the two of you living these, 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.

• 42:40Speaker 02

  Great.

• 42:41Sam Fragoso?

  So with the help of Bill Seymouring, the show became national-

• 42:44Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:45Sam Fragoso?

  -in 1985.

• 42:46Speaker 02

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

• 42:51Sam Fragoso?

  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.

• 43:18Speaker 02

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

• 43:26Speaker 03

  No, and neither can the book banish, as they customarily haven't read them. And these are nice people that are, 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.

• 44:08Speaker 03

  And I think for 200 years, people have been perfectly free to censor school libraries, public libraries. Nobody's opposed them. And what is new is that suddenly they're being opposed.

• 44:24Sam Fragoso?

  The eerie timeliness of that.

• 44:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 44:26Sam Fragoso?

  The cyclical nature of his words in 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."

• 44:44Speaker 02

  Oh, I don't, I don't remember that at all.

• 44:45Sam Fragoso?

  Well, no, it wasn't told to you. It was told to a colleague. But it strikes me as like, wow, that, 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?

• 45:10Speaker 02

  Well, we needed to get on to stations. Because if you're not being carried, you're not going to last. You need, you need a certain amount of stations to, to carry you. So we had to come up with a format that was format friendly for stations. So instead of being like 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 like 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.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  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.

• 46:21Sam Fragoso?

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

• 46:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 46:24Sam Fragoso?

  That piece of mail.

• 46:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, in my mind.

• 46:27Sam Fragoso?

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

• 46:29Speaker 02

  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, this is in real time.

• 47:04Sam Fragoso?

  I guess what I'm trying to get at is that there were plenty of interview shows in the mid 80s and it was, 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?

• 47:16Speaker 02

  I don't think I thought about it that way. I thought, I'm just gonna do the best I can.

• 47:21Sam Fragoso?

  And tell me what the best you can look like.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  Well, my approach to interviewing tends to be when it's like in the arts of any sort, pop culture, music, to try to find the connection between somebody's life and their sensibility. Like, you know, some people are born with a gift, but the gift is shaped by their upbringing, their parents, the world around them, you know, 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 were exposed to, and your gift kind of forms around that. So what created the person whose work we love? And who is that person?

• 48:00Sam Fragoso?

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

• 48:09Speaker 02

  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'd probably like taught it 100 times. But I think in, 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, 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, you learn the difference. You

• 48:51Speaker 02

  get exposed to new words. I also always loved movies and music. So finding out who the people were, how that was created, all of that, I loved it.

• 49:00Sam Fragoso?

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

• 49:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 49:08Sam Fragoso?

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

• 49:17Speaker 04

  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're 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?

• 49:57Speaker 02

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

• 50:02Speaker 02

  Well said, John Updike.

• 50:04Sam Fragoso?

  He spoke in paragraphs.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  He did. He literally spoke in paragraphs.

• 50:09Sam Fragoso?

  He spoke as he wrote.

• 50:11Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. I loved his writing. Oh, well, I love his writing. I don't have to put it. He's not here anymore, but his books are. I love his writing.

• 50:19Sam Fragoso?

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

• 50:23Speaker 02

  Clarifying, giving people their lives.

• 50:25Sam Fragoso?

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

• 50:29Speaker 02

  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.

• 50:50Sam Fragoso?

  Do you still get that from interviews? For yourself?

• 50:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, my life is not perfectly clarified. And, you know, 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, you know, sustaining in some way.

• 51:18Sam Fragoso?

  You said the...

• 51:21Sam Fragoso?

  So many things here.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  No, but it's interesting. I'm seeing myself reflected in you. And what I mean by, I don't mean, 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.

• 51:42Sam Fragoso?

  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.

• 51:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:00Sam Fragoso?

  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.

• 52:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, we've gotten caught by the publicist.

• 52:20Sam Fragoso?

  Yes. And you 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.

• 52:31Speaker 02

  But in this case, it was literally about sex.

• 52:33Sam Fragoso?

  Yes, in this case, it was. And there's a section before she walks out that I thought we could hear together.

• 52:38Speaker 02

  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?

• 53:14Speaker 05

  Well, I think, first, let me just correct because

• 53:17Speaker 02

  Please.

• 53:17Speaker 05

  only in fairness to him, that he said he, I mean, my recollection of what he had said was that he had kept a record of the days he'd been good. And 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. It's not really fair to him or to Mrs. Clinton. And

• 53:42Speaker 05

  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, 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, there was an attraction there and it developed into a lot of other things that come from, from being intimate with someone, not just physically, but emotionally.

• 54:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 54:42Speaker 05

  I certainly am not going to go through and reenact for you verbally what, 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.

• 55:02Sam Fragoso?

  It's an interesting piece of tape.

• 55:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:07Sam Fragoso?

  How did you feel listening to it?

• 55:08Speaker 02

  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 that the questions were too intimate. They were. This is not a question, 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. If her book was ghostwritten, and I don't know when a book is ghostwritten,

• 55:53Speaker 02

  I'm never really sure how carefully the, you know, the author, you know, the subject has actually read it.

• 55:59Sam Fragoso?

  You had this problem with Nancy Reagan?

• 56:00Speaker 02

  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.

• 56:30Sam Fragoso?

  You put an end to it?

• 56:31Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, it's not what I wanted to do. I didn't, I didn't want to hurt her. When the interview was over and I later wrote the back announcement 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.

• 56:55Sam Fragoso?

  Do you think you hurt her?

• 56:58Speaker 02

  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.

• 57:28Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 57:29Speaker 02

  I can't imagine what it was like to go through what she went through. You know, and now I think she's like really managed to turn the worst thing that happened in her life into something that's really like productive and useful for other people, trying to help women who have been trolled. Because like she, 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.

• 58:03Speaker 02

  It's still, I can't think of anything more horrible.

• 58:06Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 58:07Speaker 02

  Experiencing what she did in the aftermath.

• 58:09Sam Fragoso?

  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. 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?

• 58:51Speaker 02

  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 adds through the lens of who I am. And she was, she was young and 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 I just, it really stood out to me and.

• 59:18Sam Fragoso?

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

• 59:26Speaker 02

  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 in and at an incredible level. Like, look at how she's evolved. So I think we were both living in a different time.

• 59:55Sam Fragoso?

  Yes.

• 59:56Speaker 02

  I don't think she would have written that if she was writing it today. The, the whole, the whole language was different. I'm not saying that to excuse myself, but like I said, as a journalist, I, I'm willing to still. Justify that if she was able to write that, that I'm able to ask about it.

• 1:00:16Sam Fragoso?

  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, you know, can hear and miss hear and not reach each other. It's good and it's okay that people change.

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  Oh, it's definitely good that people change.

• 1:00:38Sam Fragoso?

  And we ought to be tolerant of that.

• 1:00:41Speaker 02

  Oh, you mean in terms of cancellation?

• 1:00:43Sam Fragoso?

  I think so. I mean, the amount of guests you've had of people whose careers are were basically asked to ignore now. You had Louis on many times. Louis CK came on.

• 1:00:54Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:01:09Sam Fragoso?

  In the case of Louis.

• 1:01:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:11Sam Fragoso?

  Or even Monica, for that matter. How do you think about the limits of the autobiographical interview?

• 1:01:18Speaker 02

  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, you know, in addition to Louis CK now, I once had, like years ago, probably in the late eighties, a poet who seemed like a really sensitive poet to me and who seemed like nervous being on the air.

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  I was trying to be like really like 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

• 1:02:36Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  about the person you're interviewing, no matter how forthcoming they may seem.

• 1:02:40Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  You don't know what's happening underneath all that. And I don't delude myself about that.

• 1:02:48Sam Fragoso?

  No matter how much research you do.

• 1:02:50Speaker 02

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

• 1:02:56Sam Fragoso?

  A lot of times, people are hiding it from themselves, even.

• 1:02:59Speaker 02

  Well, that's true, too, yeah.

• 1:03:02Sam Fragoso?

  When people ask 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, that immediately comes to mind when I read that quote. And that's with the writer Joan Didion. You spoke with her in 2006 around the release of her book, "The Year of Magical Thinking", which was published shortly after her husband,

• 1:03:46Sam Fragoso?

  the writer John Gregory Dunn, passed away. Can we play a clip from that?

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  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,

• 1:04:33Speaker 02

  as opposed to a Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunn as a unit? Not really, no.

• 1:04:40Speaker 06

  The family was my unit, was kind of the way I that was actually the way I wanted it. So, no, I had, so it was kind of necessary to find my, you know, to refine myself. I hadn't particularly liked being single.

• 1:05:02Speaker 02

  When you were younger, you mean?

• 1:05:04Speaker 06

  When I was younger.

• 1:05:06Speaker 02

  Were there parts of yourself that you kind of relied on him to do? I mean, you know what I mean? All parts.

• 1:05:15Speaker 06

  I mean, 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, he was between me and the world. He not only answered the telephone, he finished my sentences. He was, he was, he was the baffle between me and the world at large.

• 1:05:42Speaker 02

  She was really good. And in the middle of the episode, one of our producers came and with something from the wire service that saying that she just won the National Book Award. So I broke the news to her.

• 1:05:52Sam Fragoso?

  I heard.

• 1:05:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:53Sam Fragoso?

  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?

• 1:06:14Speaker 02

  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 Frances? What if Frances suddenly died? I can't imagine anything worse. How do you endure that? But my experience and hers were really different. First of all, Frances was not my protection from the world and answering the phone for me and all of that.

• 1:06:54Sam Fragoso?

  Your baffle?

• 1:06:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it was nothing like that at all. I mean, I was the person who drove. He didn't know how to drive. Do you know, 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.

• 1:07:14Sam Fragoso?

  COPD and Parkinson's?

• 1:07:15Speaker 02

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

• 1:07:22Sam Fragoso?

  And the pandemic?

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  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. Another real big difference between what Joan Didion experienced and what I experienced is that when, when her husband died, she kept all the, 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, she was saving his clothes.

• 1:08:02Sam Fragoso?

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

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. And for me, it was like, I don't really need his clothes. He wasn't like a special dresser, like, 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 that, he wore it so often that I see that robe and I see Frances. I see this shirt and I see Frances. 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.

• 1:08:43Sam Fragoso?

  There was an archive in there.

• 1:08:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a, it was, we had more than, than your average record store did. It was like living in a combination of a used book and record store. It's kind of like, there's a huge, long wall of just vinyl albums and other walls of CDs. And that's like, that's my shrine to Francis now. I have his ashes, and his ashes are on one of the record shelves. So his ashes are in an urn, like a little wooden box, surrounded by the music that he loved. And I can think of no better place. And it's also at eye level when I have my meals. So I can see him, he's surrounded by his music, it's all good.

• 1:09:31Speaker 02

  It's hard for me to talk about.

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

  I usually don't get very far.

• 1:09:38Sam Fragoso?

  You've gotten pretty far.

• 1:09:40Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:10:09Sam Fragoso?

  And through it all, you really kept working. Was that hard, or was it in some ways helpful?

• 1:10:16Speaker 02

  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 him to the movies when there was something that Francis wanted to see.

• 1:10:59Speaker 02

  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...

• 1:11:17Speaker 02

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

• 1:11:39Sam Fragoso?

  Remember in the beginning, you said that with that Maurice Sendak tape?

• 1:11:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:44Sam Fragoso?

  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?

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

  I'm gonna need a minute. I'm sorry.

• 1:12:00Sam Fragoso?

  It's okay. No, it's okay.

• 1:12:02Speaker 02

  Does anyone in the control room have a tissue? I think, actually, I do. It's just, it's very soon for me.

• 1:12:09Sam Fragoso?

  We can talk about something else if you want, Terry.

• 1:12:15Speaker 02

  The answer was, I, I, I, I never really did quite have that conversation. I think it was very hard for Francis to talk emotionally about it.

• 1:12:27Sam Fragoso?

  It's hard for most people.

• 1:12:29Speaker 02

  I know. I know.

• 1:12:30Sam Fragoso?

  Even though it's something you often ask.

• 1:12:34Speaker 02

  I know.

• 1:12:34Sam Fragoso?

  And you're so good at asking about it.

• 1:12:35Speaker 02

  I know. I tried.

• 1:12:38Sam Fragoso?

  You tried with him?

• 1:12:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. But you know, there's a distance that you have with an interviewee where you can, 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. And when I'm asking something super personal, that I think might be crossing a line, I'll say, this is what I, this question is what I meant when I said, if I ask you anything too personal, and you're not, you're not going to offend me if you tell me it's too personal. So I'll ask the question, feel free not to ask it, or not to answer it. But I'm more cautious when asking people who I'm really close to about things like that.

• 1:13:25Speaker 02

  Because like it's, it's a, it's a different relationship.

• 1:13:30Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah. I think about this all the time.

• 1:13:33Speaker 02

  Do you really? What are your thoughts?

• 1:13:35Sam Fragoso?

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

• 1:13:46Speaker 02

  Do you need your t-?

• 1:13:46Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:52Sam Fragoso?

  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

• 1:14:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:03Sam Fragoso?

  25 years.

• 1:14:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:05Sam Fragoso?

  And so I, 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.

• 1:14:14Speaker 02

  What I meant though was something different. What I meant was I, I don't have time. I, 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.

• 1:14:37Sam Fragoso?

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

• 1:14:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:14:43Sam Fragoso?

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

• 1:14:50Speaker 02

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

• 1:14:58Sam Fragoso?

  Well, tell me what you mean by that.

• 1:15:01Speaker 02

  Because usually if I'm asking a, 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.

• 1:15:29Sam Fragoso?

  Or John Updike.

• 1:15:31Speaker 02

  Or John Updike. He was great about writing about it. Can I just quote you one line? So he, he, he said, what is the proper etiquette before having sex? Do you ask if the person needs to use the bathroom first?

• 1:15:47Speaker 02

  As if you were going on a long trip together. I just think that's so great.

• 1:15:51Sam Fragoso?

  It's amazing. He was a horny man, or at least the writing was.

• 1:15:56Speaker 02

  I'd have trouble with his relationships, probably, but, you know, but in terms of his ability to describe things, anyhow, it's not like I say to my parents when they're, 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." It's a very professional, thoughtful.

• 1:16:19Sam Fragoso?

  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."

• 1:16:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, I mean, I asked it very gently and backed off because I can intuit, I can intuit what my parents are thinking. I can, I can tell by the look on my husband's face what, what he's thinking and whether he really wants to, you know, talk about something. And, and I don't, I don't need to go any further if I see the not now.

• 1:16:53Sam Fragoso?

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

• 1:17:07Sam Fragoso?

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• 1:17:50Sam Fragoso?

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• 1:18:35Sam Fragoso?

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• 1:19:07Sam Fragoso?

  You mentioned this right, 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, 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.

• 1:19:49Sam Fragoso?

  And two, because at that point, you didn't have the words yet.

• 1:19:55Speaker 02

  I don't have the words. I mean, I'm not, 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 in 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 of all the things that he'd accomplished and how highly regarded he was.

• 1:20:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:20:54Sam Fragoso?

  You know, our theme music. So to me, I know what you're saying.

• 1:20:57Speaker 02

  And I like your theme music a lot.

• 1:20:59Sam Fragoso?

  I just don't understand, because to me, it's very important. I want to quote something he wrote.

• 1:21:03Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:21:04Sam Fragoso?

  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?

• 1:21:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do. And that's the kind of thing you keep in your mind.

• 1:21:21Sam Fragoso?

  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.

• 1:21:40Speaker 02

  I love that line so much. That's one of the things I read in the, 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 dense means.

• 1:21:58Sam Fragoso?

  You know, I was thinking about the shadows and dense 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?

• 1:22:17Speaker 02

  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. Like, 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.

• 1:23:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:23:31Sam Fragoso?

  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 1.1 billion dollars in funding for NPR and PBS, and stations across the country have been eliminated.

• 1:23:47Sam Fragoso?

  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 in life to this medium as just about anyone still doing it, how are you thinking about the future of public media?

• 1:24:13Speaker 02

  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 the... I think public radio will probably survive in some form. I think the form might really change. I don't know.

• 1:24:55Speaker 02

  I'm really not the right person to predict anything. I'm not good at that, and I don't know.

• 1:25:02Sam Fragoso?

  I'm not concerned about predictions. I'm more focused on the fact that you say, "I have no plans of retirement."

• 1:25:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:25:10Sam Fragoso?

  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?

• 1:25:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:25:46Speaker 02

  You know, 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 they've, you know, a lot of those communities have really relied on public radio for their cultural news. And not, not everybody even knows how to do podcasts, you know, how to, how to access them. I meet

• 1:26:29Speaker 02

  a lot of people who don't know. So when I started in public media, when I started in public radio, it was like 1973 or '74. 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

• 1:27:07Speaker 02

  without a very major CPB fund. The show World Cafe, same thing. It helped build WHYY with just a, a local grant that enabled us to create a newsroom when Bill Seymour 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. There's no, 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.

• 1:27:53Speaker 02

  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. Bill Maher's 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.

• 1:28:33Sam Fragoso?

  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."

• 1:28:49Speaker 02

  Oh, that's simply factually totally untrue. If you listen to NPR news shows, they have on 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, it's, it's, it's, it's not, it's not a political position. It's a sign of representing human beings

• 1:29:33Speaker 02

  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 knew, 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.

• 1:30:10Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 1:30:11Speaker 02

  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, you know, great artists who happen to be black or queer or Latino or feminists, and that's reflected in their work, because people's lives are always reflected in their work.

• 1:30:39Sam Fragoso?

  I think many people saw their lives reflected in the work of writer Maury Sendak. And he came on your show many, many times.

• 1:30:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:30:49Sam Fragoso?

  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.

• 1:31:02Speaker 07

  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. Four kids.

• 1:31:34Speaker 07

  And 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. I'm ready.

• 1:31:53Speaker 02

  Well, listen.

• 1:31:54Speaker 07

  You know, I have to tell you something.

• 1:31:55Speaker 02

  Go ahead.

• 1:31:56Speaker 07

  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, and you wanted to, I was really, really pleased.

• 1:32:18Speaker 02

  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 Maury Sendak and have a chat.

• 1:32:29Speaker 07

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

• 1:32:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:32Speaker 07

  It's what we've always done.

• 1:32:33Speaker 02

  It is.

• 1:32:34Speaker 07

  Thank God we're still around to do it.

• 1:32:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:32:37Speaker 07

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

• 1:32:44Speaker 02

  Oh, God, what a s-

• 1:32:47Speaker 07

  And I don't know whether I'll do another book or not. I might, it doesn't matter. I'm a happy old man. But I will cry my way, all the way to the grave.

• 1:32:59Speaker 02

  Well, I'm so glad you have a new book. I'm really glad we had a chance to talk.

• 1:33:03Speaker 07

  I am too.

• 1:33:04Speaker 02

  And I wish you all good things.

• 1:33:06Speaker 07

  I wish you all good things. Live your life, live your life, live your life.

• 1:33:17Speaker 02

  Need another tissue.

• 1:33:20Speaker 02

  So many times I play it back in my head, saying, "Live your life, live your life, live your life." Like when I get caught up in the negative thought cycle,

• 1:33:32Speaker 02

  I just, I play that.

• 1:33:35Speaker 02

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

• 1:33:39Sam Fragoso?

  Is that all right?

• 1:33:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, they should be, I mean, I shouldn't be feeling a lot. We lived our lives together for forty-seven years.

• 1:33:50Speaker 02

  It's okay.

• 1:33:53Sam Fragoso?

  Why are you saying that to me?

• 1:33:55Speaker 02

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

• 1:33:58Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, no, no. I'm just holding the space.

• 1:34:01Speaker 02

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

• 1:34:04Sam Fragoso?

  You don't have to reassure me anything.

• 1:34:09Sam Fragoso?

  That's not what, that's not what this is.

• 1:34:11Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:34:12Sam Fragoso?

  Are you?

• 1:34:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I really am.

• 1:34:16Speaker 02

  I know. There's still a wound. There's an absence. But, 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.

• 1:34:44Sam Fragoso?

  When you hear that tape now.

• 1:34:46Speaker 02

  It has new meaning. Yeah.

• 1:34:49Sam Fragoso?

  And what is that?

• 1:34:52Speaker 02

  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, you know, to still find, you know, 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,

• 1:35:34Speaker 02

  you know, pleasure and connection and meaning.

• 1:35:38Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:39Speaker 02

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

• 1:35:43Sam Fragoso?

  When he says, "Live your life, live your life, live your life," as we go, how do you, how do you want to go about living the rest of it?

• 1:35:55Speaker 02

  Um, I'm in a day by day right now. I mean, I know I'm not going to retire now.

• 1:36:02Sam Fragoso?

  Give me a good day.

• 1:36:04Speaker 02

  A good day?

• 1:36:05Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:06Speaker 02

  A good day, like at work is when an interview goes well. Uh, or just a day when, you know, I'm, 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, I'm not planning on any great physical adventures. I was never a physical adventurer. I've always been a physical coward.

• 1:36:32Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, me too.

• 1:36:33Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 1:36:33Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, 100%.

• 1:36:34Speaker 02

  And I, you know, 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.

• 1:37:15Sam Fragoso?

  And the positive value and negative thinking?

• 1:37:19Speaker 02

  Well, that I can't turn off. I'd like to turn that off. But but those times occur. You know, and that's when I say it like, I'm OK. Because I still have times like that, you know?

• 1:37:32Sam Fragoso?

  What did your dad say about pleasure again?

• 1:37:36Speaker 02

  No one said that life is all about pleasure.

• 1:37:41Speaker 02

  And and he's right, it isn't. But you shouldn't say that in a scolding way.

• 1:37:45Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 1:37:46Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:37:58Sam Fragoso?

  Studious.

• 1:37:59Speaker 02

  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 you wouldn't be saying that about me.

• 1:38:12Sam Fragoso?

  Here's 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 15,000 interviews, 50 years, that hearing other people's stories, trying to understand other people, has it helped you better understand yourself?

• 1:38:45Speaker 02

  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, you know, I tend to keep to myself because I think it would reflect badly on me or, you know, be embarrassing in some way. And so it's it's helped me feel more comfortable within myself and also helped me feel that there's value in sharing stories, even even maybe mine.

• 1:39:27Sam Fragoso?

  There's a lot of value in it.

• 1:39:28Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:40:04Sam Fragoso?

  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.

• 1:40:26Speaker 02

  Thank you, Sehun. It means a lot to me. It means a lot to me because I admire your work a lot. I think you're really good.

• 1:40:35Sam Fragoso?

  I learned from the best. Tara Gross, thank you for all the time and everything in between.

• 1:40:42Speaker 02

  Thank you. Can I give you a hug?

• 1:40:45Sam Fragoso?

  Yes.

• 1:41:47Sam Fragoso?

  And that's our show. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to share it on social media. Tag us at Talk Easy Pod. I want to give a very special thanks this week to the team at Fresh Air and WHYY, the incomparable Molly C. V. Nesper, Tom Grassler, Julian Herzfeld, Al Banks, and Tina Calacan. 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,

• 1:42:31Sam Fragoso?

  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 Janix Abraul. 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 Krishna Shaddai. Photographs today come from Sarah Schneider with research assistance from Ben Eisen and Corey Etad. This episode was made in partnership with the good people

• 1:43:10Sam Fragoso?

  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.

• 1:43:39Speaker 08

  I'm Dan Heath. On What It's Like to Be, I interview people about their jobs. Here's a married couple that drives a long haul truck together.

• 1:43:47Speaker 09

  We backed up and they loaded fresh dead rats.

• 1:43:50Speaker 08

  I mean, how many rats would you guess were back there?

• 1:43:52Speaker 09

  There were 32,000 pounds of them.

• 1:43:55Speaker 08

  32,000 pounds of frozen dead rats.

• 1:43:59Speaker 09

  That's it.

• 1:44:01Speaker 08

  Find out what it's like to be a long haul trucker, a couples therapist, or an FBI agent, all on the podcast What It's Like to Be.

• 1:44:09Speaker 10

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