Geraldine Brooks On the Art of Grieving and Spanning the Political Divide

On May 27, 2019, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, best-selling author (and Kara’s friend) Tony Horwitz was on book tour for his latest work, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide, when he died suddenly. He left behind two sons and his wife, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks, whose books include March and Horse. Dealing with Tony’s death, taking time to grieve his passing and remembering their life together are at the center of Brooks’ latest memoir, Memorial Days. Brooks and Kara reminisce about Tony’s life, reflect on the challenge of grieving in a culture that is “averse to sad,” and ponder how Tony would have continued his “barstool democracy” — an attempt to span the political divide already shaking the nation — under Trump 2.0. They also discuss her latest project, a chapter in Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service, edited by acclaimed author Michael Lewis, which will be released on March 18th. This interview was recorded live at Sixth & I, a center for arts, entertainment, ideas, and Jewish life in Washington, D. C., and hosted in partnership with Politics and Prose Bookstore, Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Kara Swisher?

  We're not going to talk about Elon Musk.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  He's such a moving target.

• 0:03Kara Swisher?

  Really?

• 0:04Speaker 01

  It must be hard to finish the Afterword.

• 0:06Kara Swisher?

  Yes, it is. The book is a lot about him, too.

• 0:08Speaker 01

  You can abuse him about anything every day.

• 0:10Kara Swisher?

  It's true. Just don't say I didn't warn you all.

• 0:24Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks. She's written six novels, including the bestsellers March and Horse, and she's just come out with a memoir about her late husband and my friend, Tony Horowitz. It's called Memorial Days. I've known Geraldine and Tony since forever. I don't even remember, but my son was just born when I recall first hanging out at their farm in rural Virginia. I don't know where we first met, but I do remember when he died here in Washington, when he was on a book tour of his latest book. And it was devastating to everybody.

• 1:04Kara Swisher?

  Tony was a bright light, not just as an author and a reporter and journalist, but he also was a person. He was always smiling, always happy to see you, always just a real inspiration to a lot of us. I think this memoir is absolutely beautiful, as difficult as it was, obviously, for Geraldine to write. And together, they were quite a pair, and that's the critical thing. I spoke with Geraldine at an event at Six and I, the Center for Arts, Entertainment and Ideas in Jewish Life in Washington, D.C., which is hosted in partnership with Politics and Prose Bookstore. Ironically, Politics and Prose was where Tony would have been the day he died. He was on a book tour for Spying on the South and Odyssey Across the American Divide.

• 1:45Kara Swisher?

  Very prescient, he was, to what was happening in this country well before everybody else. He called the research, quote, "a pub crawl across the old Confederacy," and wondered whether, quote, "barstool democracy could save America." It was his attempt to understand and bridge the widening gap that now feels like it's become a chasm. I do wonder today what he would have thought about everything. Geraldine and I spoke about her history with Tony. Tony from their early days as reporters at the Wall Street Journal when they were known together as Hobro, which sounds weird, covering everything from Cleveland to Canberra to Kuwait. We talked about how she dealt with losing him and grieving the life they had. We also discussed the political situation we're in now, how it compares to governmental

• 2:26Kara Swisher?

  crises she covered while she was reporter, and a new project she has in the works with Michael Lewis about government. Our question this week comes from journalist and author Martha Sherrill, who I worked with at the Washington Post for many years. Also, I'm excited to announce that On and Pivot will be returning to South by Southwest this year as part of the official Vox Media podcast stage presented by Smartsheet. On Saturday, March 8, we'll have a live episode of On with Senator Elizabeth Warren, and on Sunday, March 9, Scott and I will be doing Pivot in the morning, followed by another episode of On with guest Chelsea Handler in the afternoon. Visit voxmedia.com backslash S X S W to

• 3:08Kara Swisher?

  learn more and see everything else happening on the Vox Media podcast stage. That should be fun. In any case, the conversation with Geraldine is very moving and inspiring, so have a listen.

• 3:33Speaker 02

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• 4:14Speaker 03

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• 4:22Kara Swisher?

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• 4:39Speaker 04

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• 4:46Speaker 05

  I'm Anna Garten and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Chloe Mal. We talk all about her taking on the top job at Vogue, finding her personal style, and her favorite lunch order in the iconic Condi Ness cafeteria. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers.

• 5:26Kara Swisher?

  I'm so honored to be here with you tonight to talk about your memoir, Memorial Days, and also Tony, who I knew very well. I don't remember where I first met him, but he was a wonderful-spirited, astonishing reporter and just the loveliest of people. And I have a memory of bringing my son, after I had a baby, out to your beautiful house in... Waterford. Yes, exactly. And we sat, it was a hot, hot day, and you guys were having an astonishing party, and I sat and breastfed and talked to him, right outside there in this beautiful place. And you had already had kids and give me all kinds of advice, and I just have so many great memories of him.

• 6:10Kara Swisher?

  I didn't know you at the Wall Street Journal, though. When you were Hobro, I didn't know when you were Hobro, that was the name. Can you explain that? Explain Hobro to get to start, because it's not the bros you're thinking about, not the bad ones.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  So, we reported together in the Middle East. When I say together, it wasn't, it often wasn't literally together, but we reported from opposite sides of the various conflicts. So if I was in Tunisia waiting for Arafat to talk to me at 2 o'clock in the morning, Tony would be in Israel chatting up Rabin, and then we'd put the two together. And likewise, Iran and Iraq, or Iraq and Saudi Arabia, we would cover the conflicts from opposite sides. Sometimes we reported together. But we often had a joint byline, Geraldine Brooks and Tony Horowitz,

• 7:06Speaker 01

  or the other way around. And in news meetings, they just started referring to us as Hobro. And what's Hobro filing today? And we liked that because we felt like we were more than partners. We felt like we were almost one person.

• 7:26Kara Swisher?

  Right, but you met at journalism school. Explain.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  I had been working as a newspaper reporter in Sydney for a couple of years. And then I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to do a master's at Columbia. And this is, you know, Australians love to, you know, go overseas and have an adventure abroad. So this was going to be my adventure abroad. I was going to have a year in New York and hone my journalistic skills and then get back to Sydney and get on with my real life. That was the plan. But the first week of school, I went to a party on the Upper West Side. And on the balcony was this cute blonde guy who was telling an amusing story about, he was living down in Alphabet City, which in those days was a rough part of New York.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  It hadn't gentrified up yet.

• 8:14Kara Swisher?

  Yes, now you can get 12 kinds of kombucha.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, so he had learned that he couldn't figure out why his car battery was always being stolen, and then he realized that it was a scam and he could buy it back from the local auto parts dealer every day. So he realized that you have to take not only the key of your car, but also the battery when you left your car. So I thought that was quite amusing. And then the next day, there was the large group seminar in the world room, and I saw him across the hall, and I waved to him, and he didn't wave back. And I thought, you and the horse you rode in on? And I didn't think about him again for six months until we found ourselves in a seminar on business reporting that we

• 9:01Speaker 01

  had both taken on a whim because we thought if you're going to be a journalist who smashes capitalism, you should understand something about how it works. So we'd both been drawn to it. And once we were in class together, I was really impressed with his idealism. He'd come to journalism school from organizing poor black woodcutters in Mississippi, trying to get them fair pay for their pulpwood hauling. And as I got to know him, I realized that he told me that he hadn't waved back to me in the world room because the night before, he'd been out carousing with his brother at down Sutteria and dropped his glasses down the toilet, so he couldn't even see me.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Kismet. Kismet. And I said, yeah, but you know, after that, you saw me. And he said, yeah, but you were always sitting next to that guy called Bronstein, who was a very handsome, charming guy. And I said, we were seated alphabetically.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  So what got you together? It just was spending time? Well, it was partly his incredible insight and idealism in this class, and partly his beautifully tanned, sculpted forearms.

• 10:22Kara Swisher?

  Any other part?

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Well, that was your initial attraction. He was always borrowing money from me as well.

• 10:31Kara Swisher?

  Okay, all right, it sounds perfect.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  So I had to keep track of him.

• 10:35Kara Swisher?

  So, and then you were together since then and worked together as reporters, so worked-

• 10:39Speaker 01

  We got together very quickly. It was inconvenient because it was almost the end of the year and I'd already accepted a job with the Wall Street Journal, so-

• 10:52Kara Swisher?

  In Cleveland.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  So, yeah, the recruiter had come and they were interviewing me and my professor said, "Now, when you go to your interview, they're going to ask you the Cleveland question, which is, would you take this job if it meant relocating to Cleveland? Don't worry, it's just a test. They want to see how serious you are about working for the Wall Street Journal." So I went, they asked, I answered, and they sent me there. And he was, you know, he had an internship on the West Coast, but he came to see me on the way west and we had a fantastic weekend together. And lucky for me, the radio in his car conked out just as he was leaving the city limits,

• 11:37Speaker 01

  so he had the whole drive to Eugene, Oregon, to think about what a great weekend we'd had. And he turned around, came back, and got a job in Fort Wayne.

• 11:47Kara Swisher?

  So, the memoir itself oscillates between narrative threads, essentially. The first begins on May 27, 2019, with a phone call when you learned Tony had died. The second, recently, on your way to stay on this flinders island in Tasmania. I'm going to ask you why you chose that island, but, and the third is omnipresent Tony himself. I want you to talk about these three elements that seem to be in the book, processing death, allowing grief, and commemorating love, and also telling his story.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I didn't think about this time on the island as writing a book. I just needed to take some time to think about what had happened because it had been three years and I wasn't right in the head. I realized that I had, after the first crazy year of just panic and drama and dealing with the horrible crushing tasks of figuring out how your life works when the person who looked after half of it is not there.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  Then the second year, just trying to crawl back to my desk and do some work, thinking that work might be therapeutic, and trying to look after my sons and just realized at the three-year mark really, that I had been acting this role the whole time of a woman being normal. That was the part that I was playing. And it was just exhausting because I didn't really feel normal at all. It was a mask I put on when I went out to be the secretary of the PTO or sit on the Conservation Commission or whatever it was I was doing.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  Why did you choose that role? I was trying to be that person, but I wasn't getting there. And I realized it was time to do something about that. And then it was kind of this head-slapping moment, like, you're a writer. This is the most important thing that's ever happened in your life. Why don't you do what you do and write about it? But I wasn't thinking about, you know, the form of the book or how I was going to tell the story. I just needed to get away from my real life and that whole pretense of normalcy and be completely abnormal alone for a while. And why did you pick this place?

• 14:24Kara Swisher?

  Besides the fantastic name, Flanders Island, Tasmania.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Flanders Island is in the Bass Strait, which is the waterway between the mainland of Australia and the state of Tasmania. And it was a place that I loved. Tony and I had gone there together when I was thinking about my second novel and I was planning to write about a really interesting character from Australian history, but for various reasons, that book didn't work out. But we had this trip there and it was absolutely our kind of place. You know, it's just beautiful, natural forests and marshes and beaches and mountains and hardly any people. It's sort of, we ended up on Martha's Vineyard and this

• 15:13Speaker 01

  place is like Martha's Vineyard. If somebody looked at Martha's Vineyard and said, "All those beaches and woods and rolling fields are very nice, but it needs a couple of Transylvanian mountains to give it some drama." And then there's only 900 people live there year round.

• 15:31Kara Swisher?

  So it was a good place to get away. Now, one of the things you, you can't, I want you to talk about dealing with the death because you just mentioned it. There's a call and then all the bureaucracy. I did love that you wrote about the bureaucracy and you have a really terrible experience with the hospital itself here in DC. Can you talk about the bureaucracy part of it?

• 15:51Speaker 01

  I just think we don't deal with this very well, you know. And popular culture leads you to have an expectation about what would happen if something, you know, and I've since learned that that's, I'm not alone here. A lot of people get this news in a phone call. But it was unimaginable to me that you would just pick up the phone on any given day and somebody 500 miles away would just flatly tell you that your life as you knew it was over without even asking you, "Are you alone? Are you okay? Do you need, you know, do you need to call?" You know, no, I was just, it was a very brief

• 16:33Speaker 01

  conversation with a very tired young doctor who obviously was at the end of her, end of her long, hard-working day on a holiday weekend. I don't blame her. I blame the process that threw that job at her.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  It would be so easy to have a protocol in place where you call the local police who are used to dealing with this kind of bereavement and sudden, you know, who would and in our little town, I know all those guys because they coached the kids, the cross teams and whatnot, and they would have known who to call to be there to support me and it would take like 10 extra minutes to do that. I don't understand why nobody thinks that way.

• 17:23Kara Swisher?

  Right. So in chapter titled "May 31st, 2019", "Four Days Later", you give a nod to W. H. Auden's "Funeral Blues". Can you read this, this section?

• 17:34Speaker 01

  "All the clocks do not stop. No one silences the phone. The dogs continue to bark, the pianos to play. Old poet Wiston could not command the world to acknowledge his great loss. Neither can I. As much as I yearned to throw a black veil over my head and sit weeping under a yew tree, that was not possible. Modern life is a juggling act. And if you don't keep those flaming torches moving swiftly through the air, if you lose your focus and drop one, the whole stage might catch fire and collapse beneath you."

• 18:15Kara Swisher?

  So talk a little bit about that, the compartmentalization. Obviously, you're referencing the poem itself, but you had juggled a lot, a career in journalism, book writing, kids. You having to function through Tony's death sounds excruciating. It reads as excruciating. In the book, you also reflect on how various religions and cultures do allow for stop clocks. You didn't get a stop clock in those years.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, if, if we were Orthodox Jews, there would have been a very set formula that we would have followed and it's, it's interesting when you read about these other, you know, ways of dealing with grief. The Jewish way, one of the things that struck me is that the first period After a loss is annuit, which is where the bereaved, you don't even offer consolation because the person is in no state to be consoled. So you just go around them quietly, doing the necessary things. And then you move into shiva, which is the active grieving.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  And the idea that it takes you about 24 to 48 hours to be ready to actively grieve, because the state of shock is so great. And I didn't get that, because I'm on Martha's Vineyard on Memorial Day, and Tony's died in Washington, and my first instinct is I have to get there. I have to get there. So I'm calling the airport, and then I'm rushing to the boat, and I'm getting in Ubers. You know, and that's kind of a crazy way to deal with.

• 19:52Kara Swisher?

  Shock that happens. Sorry business in Australian Aboriginal culture.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  That's amazing. So Aboriginal grieving. So in Judaism, it's a very narrow band of people who have grief responsibilities. And for most people, the period of grieving is very finite. In Aboriginal culture, it's the whole community. Everybody has a notional relationship to everybody else in any given Aboriginal community. And so everybody is involved in this loss. And Aboriginal people travel vast distances to get back for what's called sorry business. And it can go on for weeks until everybody has come back.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  And every time a new person arrives, the grief starts up again in the same intensity.

• 20:46Kara Swisher?

  So if you could borrow from the cultures you were looking at, what would be? What would have been your ritual if you had decided?

• 20:53Speaker 01

  So, my ritual was what I ended up doing three years late, which was to just go into nature and get sustenance from that because that is something that I find very sustaining. And in the quiet of being taken out of the responsibilities of my ordinary life, even the loved responsibilities of walking the dog or feeding the horses, I didn't have anything between me and thinking about Tony. And that was what I needed to do, as it turns out.

• 21:26Kara Swisher?

  Do you have a notion why mourning is so difficult? Is it because the culture's coming at you at one time? Because I can occupy myself all day long, doing things. But talk about, why do you think we've lost our ability to mourn?

• 21:39Speaker 01

  I am not sure. Maybe because I think in Western societies, we're pretty lucky in that, you know, particularly in affluent parts of Western societies, we don't see a lot of untimely death. And so, it's usually, you know, people die when we expect them to and it's, you grieve them, but often it happens in a sanitized hospital situation. It's not at home like it used to be.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  And also, our lives are just so overwhelmingly busy, people can't drop everything the way in more traditional cultures, people do drop everything. And, you know, I realize I'm in an immense place of privilege here because for a lot of people, their whole life, their material life changes with a sudden death like this. And also, you know, to have somebody who was beloved and recognized what he did and had such a full life, and then to have the luxury of being able to take myself off and be alone. And, you know, I understand that if you're working two jobs to keep food on the table for your kids, you're not going to be able to do that.

• 23:18Speaker 03

  We just moved into our new house and I didn't realize just how close we were to the neighbors. That's when my friend told me about blinds.com.

• 23:26Kara Swisher?

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• 23:43Speaker 04

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• 23:49Kara Swisher?

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• 26:09Kara Swisher?

  So there's a passage in the book, I feel like a synthesis of your experience. Would you mind reading it?

• 26:16Speaker 01

  I certainly hadn't been afraid to be by myself, but I hadn't realized how much I would embrace it. Now it is beginning to feel like an addiction. I'm craving the absolute serenity of an unpeopleled landscape. And then I understand that I have not been alone. I'm reveling in this time because I'm with Tony. In this solitude, finally, I can think about him undistracted. I can read his journals and commune with his thoughts. I can even do what I believed his death had denied me, learn new things about him.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  There are no kids, no animals, no editors, publicists, neighbors, or friends. No one, no matter how beloved, is barging in on us here. I can be beside him all my conscious day and even beyond into my unconscious nights. Solitude has made this space for him.

• 27:18Kara Swisher?

  That's wonderful. When you talk about the culture of grieving, it seems like people think grief is only wallowing in sadness. There's nothing sad about that passage. You write, "Our culture is averse to sad." And one of the things you also write, "I merely wish for the bereaved some space and time, time and space, however long, however short, for melancholy," which Victor Hugo described as "the happiness of being sad."

• 27:44Kara Swisher?

  Talk about the adversity to being sad, melancholy, maybe, but also joyful, reverent.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  I think, you know, this was something I noticed when I was covering the siege of Sarajevo. I think optimistic Americans tend to think, you know, we've got our seat belts and we've got our FDA-approved foods, we might not have them for much longer. But there's this idea that you can make yourself safe, and it's almost an effrontery if something goes wrong with that. Like, what went wrong? You want to blame somebody for it, you know? And I fell into this trope as well, like, this should not have happened.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  Well, for a lot of the world, it happens all the time, but we are so removed from it. And then, I think, when people are distraught, we're very uncomfortable about it, you know? We want, you know, we're looking at the watch, like, it's been a year, why aren't you cheered up? We want you to be happy.

• 28:51Kara Swisher?

  Move along.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Let's see if we can make you happy, you know? Instead of just letting people take whatever it is they need to do.

• 28:59Kara Swisher?

  What did you do when people said, "Let's see if we can make you happy"?

• 29:02Speaker 01

  I let them try. That was the whole performance part of it.

• 29:06Kara Swisher?

  Right, with the woman being normal.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:09Kara Swisher?

  The memoir is about you, and it's about Tony, his life before you, your life together. You read his journals, some of which surprised you. So someone we both know sent in a question for you, and I'd like to play it.

• 29:21Speaker 05

  Hi, this is Martha Sherrill. Kara, you probably don't realize this, but Bill Powers, my husband and I met at your apartment at a New Year's Eve party in DC, and we were married on Tony and Geraldine's back porch about six years later. I have a question for Geraldine. Tony was just the most alive, vibrant person, and I've always wondered if he was like that most of the time, and if that's what you fell in love with when you fell in love

• 29:58Speaker 01

  In love with him, the way we all did. Thanks. Yes.

• 30:03Kara Swisher?

  You're welcome, Martha Sherrill, for both of us being married. Go ahead.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was. And that was a great boon to me because I was quite introverted and he was very extroverted. And I could, I could sort of, you know, follow in his bright wake while he did all the hard work of our friendships. And I just enjoyed, you know, the cruise. And he was mostly like that, although, you know, when I was reading his journals, I realized that that came hard one sometimes, that he had a lot of insecurities. And, and a lot of them were totally unfounded. I mean, I found this one line in the journal. I was

• 30:52Speaker 01

  off reporting somewhere, and this was before he'd been hired by the Wall Street Journal. And he was still waiting for this staff job to eventuate that he'd been sort of, kind of, promised. And it hadn't happened. And so he writes in his journal, "I've come to accept that I may never amount to something in journalism." And I read that and I just laughed out loud because like, one year later, he would be the star reporter in the London Bureau of the Wall Street Journal, covering the revolution in Romania, and then leading the coverage of the first Gulf War, and being the first Western reporter into liberated

• 31:34Speaker 01

  Kuwait. And then he'd have the Pulitzer Prize. So, it's so, it was, it was funny to me that he thought that. And then it was also sad that he'd been insecure at that time. And he had not verbalized that.

• 31:48Kara Swisher?

  Did you, when Martha's talking about the, the most alive, vibrant person, I don't recall a time when he wasn't smiling, even when he was talking about tough things. I think we were talking about one of the battles and he was talking about the racism that went on when he was covering it and how he dealt with it and I'm like, oh, I'd hit him. He's like, no, it was really interesting talking to him. I was like, okay, great, it sounds fantastic. What do you think drove that in him? What was the part that got him like that?

• 32:13Speaker 01

  You know, he had a high moral purpose. He was a reporter of great seriousness, but he loved people and he loved trying to find out what made people the way they were and what made them think the way they did. And he ran towards the people that other people back away from. And I have to say, when I watched the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, I looked at those guys and with their Confederate flags and their stringy hair and, you know, the strange, the strangeness of it. And I thought, Tony's probably had

• 32:53Speaker 01

  a beer with at least 10 to 20% of those guys. Because he really wanted to know why people embraced that ideology and what it meant for this society. And I think he was very prescient in seeing the fault lines forming way before other people noticed, the divisions, income inequality, the divisions between urban and rural, north and south, the whole, the whole nine yards of the things that we have seen pulling us further and further apart.

• 33:26Kara Swisher?

  Now, one of you, I have this passage here where you talked about this, the great American divide, north, south, urban, rural, rich, poor, had been his subject. It was a story he was made to cover and it made me sad he couldn't. He was touring on a book called Spying on the South when he died, a product which he called A Pub Crawl Across the Old Confederacy Conducting Barstool Democracy. It was a follow-up to his, the bestseller Confederacy Attic. Talk about that, because he was

• 33:54Kara Swisher?

  Very early, he's one of the first people I heard talking about this anger that was building within people.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, when he wrote Confederates in the Attic, I think he was reporting that in 96.

• 34:08Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not very good at dates, but I think it was 96 when he was on the road reporting that. And he would come back, you know, with these incredible stories of the people that he'd encountered for whom the Civil War was not finished. And then spying on the South was a kind of brilliant conceit. It was based on the fact that Frederick Law Olmsted, before he became the founder of landscape architecture and the creator of Central Park and Prospect Park and all the other great landscapes that he created, was a reporter for the New York Times.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  And he went south with an assignment to look at why the country was so divided right before the Civil War, and was there anything that could be done about it? So Tony decided to take Olmsted's journals and reporting from that time and recreate, redo the trip and ask the same question. And it turned out to be a brilliant book.

• 35:12Kara Swisher?

  So I highly recommend you going back and reading them because they were so prescient. He was a historian, a traveler, and he tried to really walk a mile in other people's shoes. He also, when he was reporting for the Wall Street Journal about the unlivable working conditions, and he talked about the economy that was a huge factor in getting President Trump elected. What do you think he would have made of the political situation we're in now? He obviously documented this divisiveness, but would he have been surprised?

• 35:39Speaker 01

  I think, you know, I think we really missed out on the fact that he wasn't around to keep doing what he had, you know, it was essentially his life's work of seeing how these historical rifts were playing out in contemporary society. And I think, you know, he would have... Probably embedded with those guys and followed their court cases. And I don't know, I don't know. But I think, you know, that was the story that he'd really devoted himself to.

• 36:16Kara Swisher?

  What did he think of it at the time? Was he worried?

• 36:19Speaker 01

  At the time, he was extremely worried. He was extremely worried that we were losing the ability to talk to each other. That there wasn't a shared community of facts that we all agreed on. I think that that was troubling to him, but it's only just got so much worse in the five years since he died. I don't know what, you know, he would make of it now.

• 36:42Kara Swisher?

  I want to go back to the journals. And you wrote, you were inclined to believe he would prefer his papers to leave here uncensored. But you wanted some private time with his thoughts before you shipped them away, which you did. You said, "I want whatever they might reveal," is what you said. Were you worried before the start of reading them that whatever could be? Did you hesitate?

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Did I hesitate? No, no. Our relationship was, you know, it was solid and built on great trust. So I didn't think that there was going to be anything that I would learn that would rattle me.

• 37:22Kara Swisher?

  Except the surprise of possible despondency. And you write, "These journals in general are not happy reading. My sunny, funny lover is rarely found in these passages. I began to see that he turned to his journals when he was not that guy, that guy that didn't need them." You wanted to meet him again in some way that you didn't know him, correct? Through reading through them?

• 37:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I should add that he stopped journaling once he started writing the books, because then he was really content in his work. I think he realized that that... He didn't like working for editors.

• 38:01Kara Swisher?

  Nobody does.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Lots of us don't particularly like it, but he really didn't like it.

• 38:08Kara Swisher?

  I married one, but go ahead.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  I think, you know, so when he, when he had control over his product in the way that you do, when it's a book, I mean, it, you know, he, he was a bit of a control freak in that regard. And once he had that, and, and, you know, the astonishing good luck that we had to both be able to make a living writing books, which is, you know, by no means a given, but that worked out for us. He became a very contented man and, and blown me down. There are no journals.

• 38:43Kara Swisher?

  Later. Talk about the margin notes, though.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  The margin notes, okay, yeah.

• 38:47Kara Swisher?

  I love a margin note.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  We, we had a, we disagreed on very few things, but one of them was how you treat your books. I would no sooner write in pen on a book than get a knife out and just gouge this piece of furniture. You know, I get a book and I take the dust jacket off it while I read it. And I, you know, clean hands, don't read it while I'm eating. I want my books to, you know, last and, and he was the opposite. He turned down pages, he scribbled all over them in pen. And, and I thought that was just terrible.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  But now I'm really glad because if I pick up a book that he had read and I haven't read it yet, it's like I'm reading along with him and I can learn what he thought of it.

• 39:40Kara Swisher?

  And what's the funniest thing he wrote on a

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Okay, so I, with me to Flinders Island, I finally took a few of the books that kind people had gifted me about grief and loss. And, and then I pulled off the shelf this tattered galley of Year of Magical Thinking.

• 39:57Kara Swisher?

  Joan Didion.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  And we had a tattered galley of Joan Didion's book because Tony had been judging the National Book Award that year, and so he got an early galley. And of course, it was really messed up, like most of his books were. And I'm in, on Flinders Island and I start reading this heartbreaking account of how she lost John Gregory Dunn so suddenly. And Tony has scrawled, "Name dropping, padded."

• 40:28Speaker 01

  And Didion won the National Book Award, but no thanks to Judge Tony, apparently.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Of Joan Didion, he was correct, by the way. I'm sorry, I love Joan Didion, but I would agree with him on that one. Speaking of Joan Didion, Joyce Carol Oates, did you think about how the book would fit into the, what is it, grief memoir? Again, I was writing this for me, and I wrote it because I needed to write it, and I'm still surprised that anybody needs to read it. But it's only been out a couple of weeks, and I'm just getting a deluge of incoming from people who are reading it and who are relating to it, because, oh, well, it's another head-slapping moment, we're all gonna lose everyone we love, that's the human condition.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  And people have been incredibly warm in their response to it. So it turns out that I wasn't just writing it for me, but that was what I was thinking of. So, when you're in this process of reading journals and private papers to get close to a character, you've done this in your fiction writing for many years, many of your novels have real historic characters, you noted one before, like March, a fictional character that was based on a real person. Did you ever start thinking of him like a character in one of your books? And talk a little about this process for you, of reading people's journals to create characters. Oh, you mean for the fiction? Mm-hmm. Well, you're always looking for the voice, you're looking for the voice. I like to write with a first-person narrator in the fiction, because I think it gives an immediacy to it.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  And so, I can't really start until I can hear that voice. So to hear voices from the past, you try and read everything that was written by people of that time and place. And that's so much easier with men, because they had the luxury of writing about their lives, they'd had time to write their journals and their extensive correspondences with each other. And the poor women, if they were literate at all...

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Were, you know, working their tail off. And also enslaved people were not allowed to become literate for the most part. It was against the law to teach enslaved people to read and write. So if you want to find their voices, you end up having to go to court. That's where you find women. That's where you find the enslaved because their testimony was often taken verbatim. You can hear them speaking in their own voice.

• 42:59Kara Swisher?

  You wrote in the book about Tony. We had no deathbed conversation. I will never know what wisdom Tony would have wanted to impart if he'd been given the chance. Talk about that.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  Well, so my sons and I have talked about this a lot. And it's very sad for us that we didn't get to say goodbye. But I think maybe for Tony it was better because he was a guy who was very averse to talking about death. He would never, like, if I wanted to raise the subject, I watched my mother go downhill with Alzheimer's, which is this just cruel theft of her personality. And I'm really into advance directives and specifying the kinds of interventions I don't want. I could never get Tony to engage on this.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  And our oldest son tried to give him Atul Gawande's book, Being Mortal. It's the one book that my son gave him that he refused to read. He just did not want to think about his mortality at all. And as it turned out, he didn't have to.

• 44:09Kara Swisher?

  Right. Do you, did you think about what he might have wanted to impart? Imagine it for yourself?

• 44:14Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Well, you know, in dreams, that happens all the time. He comes back in dreams and we have, we have lots of conversations, but I don't know how, whether my subconscious and his actual intentions are aligned or not. And I never will.

• 44:32Kara Swisher?

  What's the last dream you had?

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Oh, the last dream I had was because I was really worried about talking about this book in public.

• 44:39Kara Swisher?

  You were?

• 44:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 44:41Kara Swisher?

  You wanted only to talk to people who knew Tony? You wanted to only talk to people?

• 44:46Speaker 01

  That's... Thank you for being here. Yeah, well, I wanted... I didn't want it to be a judge. I wanted it to be somebody who knew Tony, who would bring his light and humor into the conversation. So, but I was very nervous, like, right before the first event. So I had this dream in which we had a terrible fight.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  And we had hardly any fights in real life. But I've had a lot of dreams where I'm fighting with him. And of course, it's not with him. It's with the fact that he's dead.

• 45:20Kara Swisher?

  Why didn't you have any fights? How did you do that?

• 45:24Speaker 01

  But we agreed on most things apart from the books and the fact that I-

• 45:29Kara Swisher?

  And Australia.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  And Australia, you know. He didn't want to live in Australia. So he won that argument. And now I've got these two inconvenient American children. Very careless of me.

• 45:46Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 46:00Kara Swisher?

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• 46:45Kara Swisher?

  to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need the right hire fast? Then this is the job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

• 47:10Speaker 04

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• 47:18Kara Swisher?

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• 47:35Speaker 04

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• 47:41Kara Swisher?

  I'm Kara Swisher and I like people who say the quiet part out loud. In fact, I love it. That's Tiger Sisters, a new podcast that recently joined the Vox Media Podcast Network. Cherie Brooke Lu and Jean Lu are real sisters who built their careers at LinkedIn and Goldman Sachs. On their weekly podcast, they're giving the next generation practical tips on how to get ahead, how to write emails people actually answer, how to make your LinkedIn profile stand out, and how to keep learning as an adult. It's straight talk about money, career and relationships every Monday. Follow Tiger Sisters wherever you get your podcasts.

• 48:18Kara Swisher?

  You reported on conflicts in Bosnia and Somalia. You were jailed in Nigeria, so you've been up close to what happens when a government breaks down, when the rule of law disappears. Apropos of nothing, um, big picture, what's your take on what's happening now? I've been talking to people on whether we're on the brink of, or already in the middle of a constitutional crisis. People have different, differing opinions, but we're talking about it. It's, it's a topic of discussion. I don't think it's media hysteria in any way. Talk a little bit about how you see our current moment.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  So I was in Oxford, uh, and I, I did an absentee ballot and I had that ballot on my lap. I'm sitting in this medieval cloister, filling in my bubbles and I fill in, of course, Kamala Harris. And I looked at the next bubble and I thought, nobody is going to fill in the bubble for that flaming asshole.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  And now I realize I don't understand anything about this country because more than half of the electorate chose him, after all we know about him. And now we're reaping that harvest. And my instinct is to not be on the streets, not be loudly resisting, just let people see what they voted for. But at what cost, you know?

• 49:42Kara Swisher?

  And how does it compare to things you cover? Those are, obviously, some of them are war complex.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  But this is the United States of America. It's not Somalia. You know, you don't expect this place to be run by an unelected billionaire with his snout in every trough, and that's your subject. Who anticipated Elon Musk would be running our government? And how is that okay?

• 50:16Kara Swisher?

  And you're...

• 50:18Speaker 01

  Baffled, baffled of West Tisbury.

• 50:20Kara Swisher?

  Baffled, that's your new name? Is that your new profile online? Baffled of West Tisbury. So where you are, though, in the midst of a timely project, a book with Michael Lewis and other journalists that's coming out in March about civil servants working in the US government. It's called Who Is Government: The Untold Story of Public Service. Can you talk a little bit about this project and why it's important at a time of, I'm gonna call it doggy. Sorry, I'm not calling it Doge, it's too elegant a word.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  It's not fair to doggies.

• 50:49Kara Swisher?

  I think bad doggy works. That doggy's gonna bite everyone's ass, etc. So why is it important this time of doggy? Doggy, bad doggy.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  It was, you know, so...

• 50:59Kara Swisher?

  Down doggy.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  We started this project in the hopes that this would not occur, and the expectation that it would not occur, you know, because we didn't understand this country very well. But all the attacks on government, like, "Public servants are lazy and wasteful and they're not doing anything worthwhile." And that is so fundamentally not true. And Michael Lewis had already written one book about this called The Fifth Risk, in which he, basically, during the early days of the first Trump debacle...

• 51:41Speaker 01

  Realized that the beautiful transition that Obama's team had planned for, where every government department had prepared briefing papers for the incoming new administration, explaining how everything worked. Nobody had turned up from the Trump team to take those briefings. So Michael turned up and got the briefings and said he found this opportunity of all these great stories of the things that government was doing, these problems that they were working on, that only this country could possibly have the ambition and the resources to solve. And so he wrote about several of the key people in the fifth risk.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  And then he wanted to revisit that. So he assembled a bunch of his writer friends that he knew and basically set us loose to find somebody in the bureaucracy who was solving a big problem. And he wrote a beautiful piece about the guy who had figured out how to stop coal mine roofs collapsing and saved thousands of lives because he dedicated his working life to the physics of why coal mine roofs collapse and how to stop that. And I thought, okay, if you're going to defend government, let's defend the most unpopular branch. So I looked for somebody in the IRS.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  And I found Jared Koopman, who is involved in the cybercrime unit. And his team had liberated 23 kids who were being sexually abused by pedophiles. He cracked down on fentanyl dealers. He figured out how to hijack the websites of Al Qaeda and Hamas. And so anytime people were contributing cryptocurrency to fund terrorism, it was actually going to the United States Treasury for the Victims of Terror Fund.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  And while they had the website, they decided to have a bit of fun with it. So if you clicked on the emblem for Hamas, you got Rick rolled, which I thought was... And so they did that for about a month while the indictments were being prepared to shut down the people who were laundering the crypto for the terrorists.

• 54:10Kara Swisher?

  No, critically important jobs.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Great. And returned billions of dollars to the US Treasury.

• 54:16Kara Swisher?

  Correct. So, do you think this idea of the pushing every day, we're putting it in the woodchipper, it's fraud and waste everywhere. Just today, there was a story, I think it was in The Times, where they said they saved $8 billion, but it really was 8 million.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  As you said, math is hard.

• 54:32Kara Swisher?

  Because math is hard, is what I said. These are not the smartest people. I know you think they are, but they're not, trust me. But, do you think that's gonna stick? Why is, do you think it's resonant in working on that?

• 54:46Speaker 01

  I'm not sure if that half of the electorate is even hearing about this. You know, I do occasionally change the channel and listen to what they're presenting. And they are still putting up these total lies about what USAID was doing. This has been proven to be false. Several of these cases that they make a big deal of, of, you know, funding, you know, trans plays in Ireland or whatever it is, it didn't happen. But, half of the electorate who's watching that doesn't know. And I don't know how we fix that.

• 55:28Kara Swisher?

  So, getting these stories out is important?

• 55:30Speaker 01

  It's getting, yes, but are they being received? Because we're all in our silos now.

• 55:36Kara Swisher?

  Correct.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  And it's just an echo chamber, you only hear what you want to hear. And for the longest time, I had a texting relationship with a nice guy on the island that I knew because our kids were in school together. And he just got on the Trump train. And for a while, we could have a discussion, but after a while, we couldn't. Because I would send him factual material, and he said, "I'm not gonna read that, it's probably written by a Democrat." And then he would just, he just started then getting incredibly mean and...

• 56:15Speaker 01

  hateful and I had to give it up because you know he wasn't the nice dad of the third grader that I'd known.

• 56:25Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 56:25Speaker 01

  He'd become this crazy guy.

• 56:27Kara Swisher?

  It is difficult. I run into them here. They followed me to Washington, the Silicon Valley people. So last question. What's next for you? You wrote at the end of the book, "This story of a death is a story that dominates my life. Here I have retold it, rethought it, but I can't change it. Tony is dead, present tense. He will be dead in the present, in my present, for as long as I'm alive. I cannot change that story. I can only change myself." I would love to know what change looks like for you and what you're going to be doing next.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  Just working more. I realized that I've kind of filled the void in my life where we used to sit around, drink wine, and tell jokes at night by just working. So, you know, I used to think I worked a lot, but now I'm really a machine.

• 57:14Kara Swisher?

  So work is what you've done. But is there a goal for your life now?

• 57:18Speaker 01

  Just to make it as vivid and worthwhile as I can for as long as I've got and love my kids.

• 57:25Kara Swisher?

  So the last part of the book, I'd like you to read it. I hope you don't mind. There's a scene where you go out swimming, out in the ocean, and you start to wail for Tony. And you say, "I wail for him for the life he no longer has, for the life we no longer have together." I'd like you to read and then we'll just, I have one short question when you finish that, from "When I turn back" to the end, if you can do that, because it'll make me cry.

• 57:55Speaker 01

  I'm not sure.

• 57:56Kara Swisher?

  You can't read it? I can read it, but you wrote it.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  From where?

• 58:01Kara Swisher?

  From here.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  When I turn back towards the shack. No, I can't.

• 58:10Kara Swisher?

  Okay. You can't see it, okay. "When I turn back towards the shack, there's nothing left. I am spent at last. All that remains is a long..." Exhalation, a sustained sigh. When I started to write fiction, I came across a piece of advice on the craft of novel writing. Your task as a novelist is to keep pushing your protagonist's head under the water throughout the narrative. But when you get to the end, you must decide, will you sink them or let them swim? I put my face in the clear, briny water. I stretch out my body. I swim.

• 58:45Kara Swisher?

  I thought for a second, why didn't you sink it? But what is swimming, then?

• 58:51Speaker 01

  Swimming is being grateful. Thirty-five years of happy marriage, not everybody gets that. In fact, hardly anybody gets it, to the extent that we did, where we were so up in each other's business and, you know, worked together, lived together, had two healthy children. I mean, so much to be grateful for. And grateful for his books, because we can always turn to those and find him there, which is wonderful.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  And, um, yeah, and just trying to live with the enthusiasm that he had about living and do that and kind of dedicate it to him.

• 59:41Kara Swisher?

  So do you have to be more outgoing now?

• 59:43Speaker 01

  I try.

• 59:44Kara Swisher?

  You're much better at it. When I met you, actually, I'm recalling, he was so bubbly and then you were not. And you weren't glum or anything, but I remember telling someone, I'm like, huh, that's interesting. But then I got it pretty quickly. Geraldine Brooks.

• 1:00:07Kara Swisher?

  On With Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Catherine Rosell, Kateri Yokum, Megan Burney, Dave Shaw, and Kalen Lynch. Nishat Kurwaz is Vox Media's executive producer of audio. Special thanks to Claire Hyman and Maura Fox. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Aruto, and our theme music is by Track academics. If you're already following the show, you're on a pub crawl practicing. Barstool Democracy. If not, go read one of Tony Horowitz's books, Confederates in the Attic, or Spying on the South, and take notes. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit Follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.

• 1:00:52Speaker 03

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• 1:01:00Kara Swisher?

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• 1:01:17Speaker 04

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