Writer Hilton Als on Prince and ‘What Joan Didion Means’

For the holiday week, we’re revisiting one of our favorite conversations with Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and critic Hilton Als. At the top, we unpack his approach to writing profiles (5:50), inspired by the words of photographer Diane Arbus (6:10), and how he captured Prince in a new, two-part memoir entitled My Pinup (7:55). Then, Als reflects on his upbringing in Brownsville, Brooklyn (10:25), a timely passage from his 2020 essay "Homecoming" (14:40), and formative works by writers Adrienne Kennedy (20:58) and the late Joan Didion (27:05). On the back-half, we discuss the interplay of memory and writing (36:38), Hilton’s writing routine (40:55), his sources of hope today (44:30), and to close, a dialogue from Jean Rhys’ unfinished autobiography Smile Please (48:25). Thoughts or future guest ideas? Email us at [email protected] mailto:[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.

• 0:21Sam Fragoso?

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

• 0:38Sam Fragoso?

  Today, I am joined by writer Hilton Ailes. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2017 for his work at The New Yorker, where he's been on staff since 1994. In his three decades at the magazine, he's written seminal profiles of Toni Morrison, Maggie Nelson, and the late Andre Leon Tally. Since 2012, he's been the magazine's lead theater critic. When he's not writing for The New Yorker, he's writing for himself. He's authored a handful of books, including The Women, White Girls, and his latest, My Pinup: An Exploration of Desire,

• 1:18Sam Fragoso?

  Sexuality, Race, and Prince. He does all that in less than 50 pages in this new novella, and it's fairly characteristic of Hilton's work, which is marked by a kind of expansiveness, entwining memoir with literary criticism. Hilton has taken these qualities, usually reserved for the page, and recently brought them to the Hammer Museum, where he's organized a new exhibition titled Joan Didion: What She Means. It's a stirring portrait of the late author, featuring more than 200 works of painting, photography, sculpture, video, and footage from a number of films for which Didion authored screenplays. For today,

• 2:03Sam Fragoso?

  Hilton and I, of course, unpack these new projects around Didion and Prince, but we also discuss his upbringing in Brownsville, Brooklyn, where he grew up with his mother in the early 70s and quickly found writing. In fact, this episode is really the makings of Hilton Ailes and all the people that have shaped and formed the writer we know today. I hope you enjoy this talk as much as we did.

• 2:39Sam Fragoso?

  Do you want to, are you too low?

• 2:41Speaker 01

  No, I'm fine.

• 2:41Sam Fragoso?

  Are you sure?

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I'm fine.

• 2:42Sam Fragoso?

  I feel higher than you, and I don't like that.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  It's okay.

• 2:45Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  I'm happy.

• 2:46Sam Fragoso?

  You are?

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47Sam Fragoso?

  And if you're happy, I'm happy.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Good.

• 2:49Sam Fragoso?

  Um, let's jump in. Hilton, it's a pleasure to have you here.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm thrilled to be here. And, uh, this is a long time in coming. We've been planning since COVID, right?

• 2:59Sam Fragoso?

  It's almost three years in the making.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  I know. It better be good.

• 3:02Sam Fragoso?

  I think it's gonna be pretty good. Thanks for being, I, I, I said it was a pleasure to have you here, but I actually heard from my producers that this is actually not your first time here. You came here yesterday.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:15Sam Fragoso?

  A day before the taping.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:17Sam Fragoso?

  Were you just like excited to see me? What was going on?

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Well, I was beside myself on that level. But what happens generally is if I'm afraid of missing something that I've committed to, I will show up a day early or an hour late because I think the time is different or I won't be there. It's sort of like a dream, actually. You know, in those dreams where you can't catch up? And so I arrived yesterday and your adorable person, I called her and-

• 3:50Sam Fragoso?

  We call them a producer.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  Producer. I called her and she said, uh, it's tomorrow.

• 3:55Sam Fragoso?

  She said that you said, oh, my God, this always happens.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Yes. What had happened was that in the car, I was going to a gallery. And then I realized suddenly that I had to be with you. And it turned out not to be true. So I went to the gallery and had my evening. So I'm happy to be here.

• 4:17Sam Fragoso?

  You know, you took the circuitous path.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Yes, but it was the righteous one.

• 4:21Sam Fragoso?

  And with that, I think we can properly begin.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 4:25Sam Fragoso?

  Why don't we start with this new two-part memoir, My Pen Up: A Pian to Prince, which partly details your time with Prince-

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:35Sam Fragoso?

  -on tour-

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:37Sam Fragoso?

  -back in 2004. When it comes to writing profiles, you've often looked to the words of photographer Diane Arbus for instruction.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:46Sam Fragoso?

  Who said, "I work from awkwardness. By that, I mean, I don't like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself."

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Yes. Isn't that brilliant?

• 4:58Sam Fragoso?

  It's just like everything she did.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:01Sam Fragoso?

  How did you go about arranging yourself in front of someone like Prince?

• 5:07Speaker 01

  You have to allow whatever is happening to happen. So years ago, the jazz great Cecil Taylor was doing a recording in San Francisco. One of the musicians came with his child, and the child was running around and making a little noise. And the musician was upset, and Cecil said, "Don't stop him. It's what's happening." And I think that what Arbus meant is you walk into the situation not as a self, but as a person who is going to give yourself over to the situation and to the subject. And so by giving myself over to the subject, that means that I listen constructively. I had a brilliant mother who was a constructive listener.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  So you walk into the situation, listening and watching, and you don't interrupt the emotional panorama of what's happening. You don't interrupt it with the "I." You sort of take on the story that the person is telling you. And so you morph with the storyteller. You are listening and you are engaged on a level where your "I" disappears and you become part of their consciousness.

• 6:18Sam Fragoso?

  So inside Prince's dressing room.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  I thought you were gonna say inside Prince. That was a dream, but anyway.

• 6:24Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, I mean, I think we've all had that.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 6:28Sam Fragoso?

  But once you're inside, what was the story he was trying to tell you?

• 6:32Speaker 01

  I think that one of the things that was so incredible for me to observe was how much he desired blackmail approval. So that when Macio came in, or when Larry Johnson, me, other people, I could tell. That he really wanted our approval. And it was so touching to me because you never expect someone who is mega famous or mega watt personalities, et cetera, to really need other people. And it was such an incredibly moving instance of how much he did need other people that he was, you know, looking collectively or individually for a sort of father figure, I think.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  And that was really what was completely astonishing.

• 7:18Sam Fragoso?

  What's fascinating is the kind of baggage you brought to that dressing room. Because by 2004, it seems like your relationship to him and his work had changed by the passage of time.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Yes. I had sort of stuck with him, but I was less enthralled by the sort of Purple Rain era stuff. And I was becoming interested again in the things that he was putting out as a producer, like Black Album. But, you know, that's the sort of beauty and injury of any kind of pop person, which is that they go in and out of favor according to where your life is. It's a kind of weird martyrdom, right? That they exist and don't exist with you.

• 8:02Sam Fragoso?

  I guess the distinction I'm trying to make, or I'm fascinated by, is in thinking about that Arbus quote, your ability to observe him fully while kind of leaving that baggage at the door. Were you able to do that?

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Absolutely, because he was so sweet. I mean, one of the things that was so moving about his person, I think, was his defenselessness, but also his being a kind of, how would I put it? He knew where his feet were on the ground. And at the same time, he was, I think, available to people. If they came to him and he intuited that he could trust you, it was a delight to be with him.

• 8:44Sam Fragoso?

  We're talking about the way you observe people. But I love this line that you have around the late Joan Didion, in which you said, "In order to understand the difference in others, you first have to understand it within yourself."

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:59Sam Fragoso?

  And I wondered if you first understood that difference inside yourself around 1968. By then, you're eight years old in Brownsville, Brooklyn, with the family, as you write, of West Indian women who raised their children in what social workers used to call socio-isolation.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:18Sam Fragoso?

  And within that isolation, you began at age eight to write. In doing so, was that your earliest instance of understanding that difference within yourself?

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Oh, that's such an interesting question. Well, I think that when something is natural to you, it doesn't occur to you that it's a different thing. It's natural to you. So, and also, I was very fortunate in that I had a mother who was very interested in what I was doing. She loved art and artists. And I would show her my work. I would show her my stories. She was my first editor.

• 9:52Sam Fragoso?

  Didn't she write her comments at the top of the page?

• 9:55Speaker 01

  She would say, "Excellent, love mommy," or "Very good mommy."

• 9:59Sam Fragoso?

  Very generous editor.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  As time went on, she would make sort of trenchant editorial suggestions. But, you know, it takes one person, right, to give you that enthusiasm, but also to make you feel that it's not separate from your primary person, which is what she was. I just never felt judged by her, even as I sort of tested the boundaries of what was acceptable with my father.

• 10:27Sam Fragoso?

  How would you do that?

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Costume parties where he was not approving of a particular costume or things that she would make me to wear to school that were very non-gender.

• 10:38Sam Fragoso?

  What were these costumes?

• 10:40Speaker 01

  I went once as a bearded lady. I went once as Pearl Bailey. Like, you know, sort of the expression of my gay self was not something that she even really remarked upon. She just kind of did it. And I love her to bits for it still, that there was no language and there was permission. These are moments that I will cherish to the grave because they make you, they make you understand that you're doing something that's acceptable to someone you love, you know?

• 11:08Sam Fragoso?

  Did you find it acceptable to yourself? Did you have any complications around that?

• 11:14Speaker 01

  Later, I think, when you start to feel sexual, you don't know how to do that because you're in a very, very, very tiny minority at that, or self-admitted minority. So that was when it sort of started to change and become more difficult and complex, for sure.

• 11:33Sam Fragoso?

  You said that you were pushing the limits of your father's patience or something or another.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  I think it would be fairer to say that I was pushing the limits of his capability.

• 11:44Sam Fragoso?

  Of his imagination.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, that he wasn't really capable of love, really, on that level.

• 11:51Sam Fragoso?

  How do you mean?

• 11:52Speaker 01

  My father had, I would say, a real edible relationship to his sons, me and my brother. And he would rather not have other boys exist around him. He claims a lot of attention. And I think he was exceedingly uncomfortable around other men.

• 12:11Sam Fragoso?

  Including his sons.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  First and foremost. And so-

• 12:15Sam Fragoso?

  They're on the most wanted list.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Exactly. We won it in 50 states. And I didn't grow up really with a lot of taboos, but the ones that I had were pretty specific and large.

• 12:27Sam Fragoso?

  It was around this time, maybe just a year before, where in September of 1967, the neighborhood that you're in catches wind of a 14-year-old black teenager named Richard Ross, who'd been killed by a detective named John Ratley. And I have to say, with the just painful, infuriating footage that has come out this past week.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Yes, which I refused to look at again. I just couldn't look at it once more. Do you want to describe it to me? Or do you want to let me?

• 12:57Sam Fragoso?

  No, I don't.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  OK, good.

• 13:00Sam Fragoso?

  No, I don't want to.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. That's a human response.

• 13:03Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, I don't think it's necessary. But in watching it, I couldn't help but think of this passage that you wrote around the 1967 incident that perhaps you would be open to reading.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 13:19Sam Fragoso?

  This is from Homecoming, which was originally published in The New Yorker back in 2020.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Marches, protests and the like, where we knew, are prelude to the racially motivated violence that had already cropped up in nearby Newark and other places such as Detroit. For sure, Brownsville would get more messed up if the cops were involved. That was how demonstrations became riots. I remember that night, or was it late afternoon, our mother walking us swiftly into the house and shutting all the doors and windows. Inside, it was lights out, the air was closed. We could hear our hearts beating. Peeking from behind one of the living room curtains, I watched as the protesters started flinging bottles and stones at the cops, and our real world turned into a movie, a horror film in which

• 14:09Speaker 01

  everything we'd built together, home, hope, the illusion of citizenship, was torn to the ground. Black people, mostly men, were roaming the streets, periodically smashing car windows or overturning ash cans and torching rubbish. They were claiming what they felt to be a kind of freedom. As refugees, we knew that none of it belonged to us, not that shop, not that newly-built pigeon coop, even as we knew that it did belong to us, emotionally speaking. It was all part of our community. Still, why not trash a universe that has trashed you?

• 14:48Speaker 01

  I haven't read that in a long time. It's pretty good.

• 14:52Sam Fragoso?

  I think you should stick with it.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you.

• 14:56Sam Fragoso?

  You know, hearing you read that piece, what's most disconcerting is that you're describing events from 56 years ago, and yet, give or take a few nouns, you could be writing about Tyree Nichols in 2023, which is not to say that these stories are the same, because these lives, that of Ross and Nichols, must be considered one by one. But after processing each individually, the pattern, the circularity of history, it's unnerving.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  And also, I was sitting here trying to think of a word that would be okay. Circularity, for sure, and also repetition, right? Political and historical repetition that keeps being the same thing, even though each instance of horror is each instance of horror. Cumulatively, it feels like a very long time.

• 15:52Sam Fragoso?

  And the response to it seems to follow in lockstep again and again that we can't break the circle.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I remember around the time of the Black Lives Matter movement, all of a sudden on TV, there would be like black films and somebody's going to make some money off of it always, you know, dissension pays on some level.

• 16:17Sam Fragoso?

  In that same piece you wrote, "We all hurt, but some of us want to continue to be paid."

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:23Sam Fragoso?

  Three years later, do you feel we've changed at all as a culture? Do we feel we're making the same mistake again?

• 16:31Speaker 01

  I think it's a person by person basis. I, you know, I'm happy to meet you. That gives me hope. I can't say collectively what we are anymore.

• 16:43Sam Fragoso?

  You used to be able to?

• 16:44Speaker 01

  I used to be able to generalize more freely and say, you know, the human or the humane impulse or the humane aspect of something. And I don't feel that I can say that with any great degree of certainty anymore. I would probably reserve it for a much more person by person basis.

• 17:04Sam Fragoso?

  It's interesting you say that because the part of that passage you read, the thing that really struck with me beyond the larger cultural implications is what is at the center of it, which is discussing community, which your family had been searching for since leaving Barbados for America. But as the man of the house, albeit as a young boy at that time, you often wrestled with this desire to protect.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  To protect my mother and my little brother and my sister, they were everything to me. And so I still have that impulse very strongly that when I perceive that someone is whom I love is an underdog or going to be harmed in some way, it's a visceral response to vulnerability.

• 17:51Sam Fragoso?

  Your mother, for context, was a member of the National Council Negro Women and had attended the March on Washington.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:58Sam Fragoso?

  You said that she always maintained hope. And here's a quote. Ma always had hope, but she knew that it helped change the world, her black world. But I had no clear examples, growing up, of what might make a difference in mine. Guns, death, poetry, would any of it dismantle the economic discrepancies, for instance, that defined our de facto underclass, that kept us scavenging for a lifeline, even if it was just a pair of sneakers snatched through a pane of broken glass?

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 18:31Sam Fragoso?

  And I wondered if, if writing and then reading was that lifeline for you?

• 18:37Speaker 01

  Absolutely. My mother was a reader. She would make our dinner and lock herself in the bathroom and read and eat her dinner until, you know, it was time for them to go to sleep. I was inspired by her example, but my father was also a reader. You know, as Elizabeth Hardwicke says, it's really, reading is companionable, it's cheap, it could go in your pocket, you know, it was always something that I really loved to do in terms of what was available to me. You know, you find the things that are nourishing and consistent when you're a kid. You just really want something to be consistent. And reading, in my imagination, were fantastic companions.

• 19:16Sam Fragoso?

  Well, I think it's only fitting then that we go to a piece that was nourishing for you. An example of that lifeline, which you read as a young man, comes in the form of a one-act play from 1976 called "A Movie Star Has to Be in Black and White."

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 19:34Sam Fragoso?

  Written by the great Adrian Kennedy.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  This is a play that Adrian Kennedy wrote, and it starred Gloria Foster, the great Gloria Foster. You'll remember her as the, I've never seen the movies, but The Matrix, the first Matrix, things of ladies making cookies and smoking.

• 19:51Sam Fragoso?

  You, you haven't seen The Matrix?

• 19:53Speaker 01

  Mm-mm. I know.

• 19:55Sam Fragoso?

  I mean, you're not missing that much, but...

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Okay. I'll, I'll try. I, I like the lady who's, I like the lady who's in it, too. Carrie Moss?

• 20:04Sam Fragoso?

  Yes.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  She's beautiful.

• 20:06Sam Fragoso?

  I like that, "I'll try to watch The Matrix."

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 20:09Sam Fragoso?

  Like it's a new dish or something.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  I know. And in any case, she wrote this piece, and it was performed at the Public Theater with her and a wonderful woman, both of whom are dead now, but Robbie McCauley was a great dancer, actress, and...

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Adrienne Kennedy's work is about the convergence of fantasy and reality, the fantasy of movie stars, movie life, movie romance, and the reality of blackness, particularly for female characters. And often, in her early plays, there's a lot to be said about where does that reality and that fantasy meet for her characters? So this is a wonderful, deeply brilliant play that I had adapted, actually, for the screen once. And it's called The Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White. Betty Davis is one of the primary characters, and she's played by a black woman. Betty Davis, "To Paul," June 1955.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  "When I have the baby, I wonder, will I turn into a river of blood and die? My mother almost died when I was born. I've always felt sad that I couldn't have been an angel of mercy to my father and mother and saved them from their torment. I used to hope, when I was a little girl, that one day I would rise above them, an angel with glowing wings and cover them with peace. But I failed. When I came among them, it seems to me I did not bring them peace, but made them more disconsolate. The crosses they bore always made me sad. That one reality I wanted never came true, to be their angel of mercy, to unite them. I keep remembering the time my mother threatened

• 21:52Speaker 01

  to kill my father with the shotgun. I keep remembering my father's going away to marry a girl who talked to willow trees." It's Adrienne really speaking through this character about her family, and it's the projection of her soul and sensibility through Betty Davis that is so remarkable, aside from the writing itself, which is very beautiful.

• 22:18Sam Fragoso?

  Hearing you read that just now, I couldn't help but think of where you saw yourself in that passage, especially the line, "I've always felt sad that I couldn't have been an angel of mercy to my father and mother and save them from their torment."

• 22:36Speaker 01

  That's a very good question, Dr. Freud. I think that it would be a wish that I had for my mother, that I would want to make her life better for her. I think it's a driving force in my life. And I think that the other thing that I identify within the piece, that what I just read is the poetry of it. And how do you make language move and lyrical and speak?

• 23:00Sam Fragoso?

  Dr. Freud says, "The session's up. We're good."

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Oh, good. Dr. Lacan. It's 15 minutes. Yeah, that's great.

• 23:08Sam Fragoso?

  As that teenager in the late 70s, hanging out with the alt crowd in downtown Manhattan, and then as a young man at Columbia University, how instructive was both the writing of Adrienne Kennedy, and then perhaps more specifically, her ability to take artifacts from the culture, like Betty Davis, and make it her own?

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Well, I didn't know her work until I was working at The Village Voice. And there was a galley of her memoir, People Who Led to My Plays. And I remember picking it up and just sitting there and reading it straight through. Structurally, it was such a liberating book for me, because she used photographs and she used memory in a proper way, which was that it wasn't necessarily linear, and it wasn't something that she could be certain of, but was certain about the feeling of something. So that's how I started reading her. And then I found a book of her plays that came out around the same time. And I was just blown away by the intimacy. And emotionally, everything that she wrote made sense to me.

• 24:16Sam Fragoso?

  The power she had to not let the world validate her first.

• 24:22Sam Fragoso?

  Were you inspired by that?

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I'm very inspired by that. Free voices. They not only bolster you, but they give you the encouragement that's required to be yourself, too. In ways that, you know, were not necessarily familiar before, liberating ultimately.

• 24:43Sam Fragoso?

  This seems tied to this sort of ongoing conversation about seeing yourself.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 24:48Sam Fragoso?

  In the work. Would you seem to reject some of that notion that you need to explicitly see yourself?

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Exactly. I don't, I don't think it has to be you all the time. I think that one of the wonderful parts of being involved with language is that it's liberating and that you can be anything that you want to be that you're describing. You're testing the limits of your own thinking all the time, and that's very important.

• 25:13Sam Fragoso?

  I guess I'm trying to get this point down because, like Kennedy, you did not wait for the world to validate. You found metaphors in work that you love to describe yourself to you. And then you used what you read to move the conversation forward and talk about your own experience.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:32Sam Fragoso?

  And one source of inspiration, both back then and now, is in the work of the late Joan Didion.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 25:40Sam Fragoso?

  And I thought we could talk about her in this new exhibition you curated at the Hammer Museum called What She Means. Now, back in 2006, you interviewed Didion for The Paris Review in which she explains that, and I quote, "Although a novel takes place in the larger world, there's always some drive in it that is entirely personal, even if you don't know it while you're doing it." Now that this exhibition is for everyone to see, I'm curious, what was that drive for you as you said about creating? What she means.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a wonderful question. Thank you. I think that one of the real sort of salient points for me to make the show was to show a life evolving and that the life was so much about the development of a character, right? So there's this very smart person from Sacramento who goes to college and she starts to write or feel that it's all been said before, but she's continuing.

• 26:41Sam Fragoso?

  This is Didion.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. And then she goes to New York and she's working for Vogue and she's having a pretty bourgeois. She's doing everything that's expected of her. And then she stops doing everything that's expected of her as she becomes a more serious writer and then moves back to Los Angeles during a time of great social upheaval. And I think it was that moment in her life that she became Joan Didion because she allowed for the fracture to be part of the story. She was no longer holding it together and writing the perfectly constructed novel like Run River, her first book. She understood that her voice and her feelings and her thought and her ethos was really kind

• 27:24Speaker 01

  of in sync with the times that she was living in. And I think she had such an incredible facility to not only chart the times that she was involved with, but to understand that her body was not separate from this fracture. Her thinking, everything that she had been raised to think and presuppose as a kind of bourgeois girl had to be jettisoned in order for her to be alive in the moment of her life, in this life.

• 27:56Sam Fragoso?

  Didion, more than just about any writer from the 20th century is returned to again and again, certainly one of the most.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 28:07Sam Fragoso?

  I wondered, why do you think that is?

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Because of the honesty of the voice, I think that when you, as she would say, put cards on the table, I'm just paraphrasing, but you're risking the humiliation of seeing your name in print, is what she wrote. But I would say it's the humiliation of seeing yourself. And when you risk that, it takes your chances, right? You're not the kind of person who's going to keep your cards close to the chest. It's an act of freedom, as much as anything else, is to tell people who you are. They can't tell you, you've told them. It's a form of control, too. But I think she was very interested in how, what did this vulnerability mean? What did this life mean without that self-exposure?

• 28:56Sam Fragoso?

  She was someone that came of age as a gold-water Republican.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  And I think you have to know that that definition is very different now than what it was then. Then it was Republicans meant, you know, limited government interference in the life of citizens. That's really what it meant. And yes, there was conservatism, but there was also that aspect of it.

• 29:18Sam Fragoso?

  And the Republicans have carried that tradition proudly.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 29:23Sam Fragoso?

  Maybe my theory then is, as someone who came from this Republican household in Sacramento, she had these very firm ideas and understandings of the world that were passed down to her.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:36Sam Fragoso?

  By her parents.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:38Sam Fragoso?

  And then, life does what it does.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:41Sam Fragoso?

  And she has this kind of lifelong, ongoing, public reckoning with herself and the world around her.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:49Sam Fragoso?

  And perhaps in those increasingly fractured times, people ran to it.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  I think they also found the necessity of her voice, right? I think that what she was brilliant at was articulating destabilization. How you become one thing based on assumed notions of the past, and this destabilization is a remarkable thing to live through. How do we live through it with language? Or how do we make language to talk about this experience?

• 30:20Sam Fragoso?

  It's impossible to pick a single passage.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  I know. She's so great.

• 30:25Sam Fragoso?

  That captures all her abilities and interests.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:28Sam Fragoso?

  But I know this one piece, which comes at the beginning of her novel, A Book of Common Prayer, means a whole lot, too.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does. Happy to read it.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Chapter one, "I will be her witness." That would translate "seré su testigo" and will not appear in your traveler's phrasebook because it is not a useful phrase for the prudent traveler. Here's what happened. She left one man. She left a second man. She traveled again with the first. She let him die alone. She lost one child to "history" and another to "complications." I offer in each instance the evaluation of others. She imagined herself capable of shedding that baggage and came to Boca Grande, a tourist. Una turista, so she said.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  In fact, she came here less as a tourist than a sojourner, but she did not make that distinction. She made not enough distinctions. She dreamed her life. She died hopeful. In summary, so you know the story. Of course, the story had extenuating circumstances, weather, cracked sidewalks, and paragorina, but only for the living.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  I think that's such a remarkable piece of writing and it says so much about how life is for those of us who are reading the book that she's writing. You know, it's a beautiful piece.

• 31:59Sam Fragoso?

  It's also a piece about self-delusion and how this country produces dreamers. And incidentally, Didi, in both on the page and in your time with her, seemed to make a dreamer out of you. And yet, the greater irony is that, as inspiring as she was, I imagine you had to, like all writers, unlearn her voice in order to find your own.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Yes, I don't think I was technically influenced by her, but I was certainly influenced by her interest in writing about women.

• 32:38Sam Fragoso?

  How do you mean?

• 32:38Speaker 01

  And fiction. Well, she, I mean, a lot of people don't read her later stuff, which is unfortunate, but... If you look at novels like Last, The Last Thing He Wanted, Democracy, these are all kind of romances about women who don't fit, who are away or outside of the status quo, despite money or fame or whatever. And I think that one of the things that I love about her writing is this search for continuity, even though she knows it doesn't exist, and particularly in the fiction. And her essays, of course. I loved finding out that James Baldwin was one of her favorite writers, and they do stand side by side on the bookcase for me

• 33:23Speaker 01

  because of not only their voices, which are extraordinary, but their ability to take the political and to make it not only just personal, but a narrative.

• 33:38Sam Fragoso?

  After the break, more from writer Hilton Els.

• 33:46Sam Fragoso?

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• 34:32Sam Fragoso?

  so you can find something for just about everyone on your list. By working directly with ethical factories and cutting out the middlemen, Quince prices everything 50% to 80% less than similar brands. Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Talk Easy. It's the best way to support the show.

• 35:19Sam Fragoso?

  At what point, maybe it was becoming a staff writer at The Village Voice, or a staffer at The New Yorker in 94, at what point did you feel like you found your voice?

• 35:30Speaker 01

  I think it was in 1990, and I was 30, and I wrote an essay that I read. It was like a tiny conference, and I think that's when I could feel it in my bones, when I could feel it in my body, that I was speaking from a very real place. And the piece is the last piece that's in my book, White Girls. It was a piece about memory, and I wrote that when I was 30. And that's the first piece I wrote, and I put it at the end of the book.

• 36:04Sam Fragoso?

  I think we should probably read from that.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  This is from an essay I wrote in 1990 called "It Will Soon Be Here." "The wall surrounding memory misremembered is clean and wide and high, similar in effect to the wall one finds in certain airports in other countries. Clean and wide and high like that, banking in or letting go those who want to remember clearly or don't. Passengers coming or going in the field of memory are a tangle of arms and legs, hands, hearts, hair and minds that, if you do not stand too close or listen too carefully, speak a shared language remarkable in its oppressive loneliness, its denial, what a horrible memory, and so forth.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  Regardless of where many of us believe we land in that field encumbered by not too much baggage or entirely too much, we all come from the same place, which is a road rutted by experience, so banal, nearly remarkable, that memory tricks us into remembrance of it again and again, as if experience alone were not enough. What are we to do with such a life, one in which we are not left alone to events, love, shopping, and so forth, but to the holocaust of feeling that memory, misremembered or not, imposes on us?"

• 37:28Sam Fragoso?

  You know, I keep coming back to the same feeling every time you read, which is to follow your work is really not fair. And I think I shouldn't have to talk for like five minutes after each reading.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Well, you're very sweet, but we're in conversation. You're being very generous. Thank you.

• 37:50Sam Fragoso?

  As opposed to what?

• 37:51Speaker 01

  Um, boring, you know, laborious, not interested. No, you're great.

• 37:57Sam Fragoso?

  We can't, we can't do that.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  You're fantastic at this.

• 37:59Sam Fragoso?

  On the subject of conversation, you seem to often be discussing the power of and the elusiveness of memory. You wrote in a commencement speech for Columbia, "The artist's memory is a dangerous, necessary thing. Never disavow what you see and remember it's your brilliant stock in trade, remembering and making something out of it." The older you get, the more you write. What is that interplay of memory like?

• 38:30Speaker 01

  It becomes more and more handy in terms of telling stories and your capability becomes stronger because your muscle becomes stronger in terms of control. And so I was talking about in that piece, a kind of barrage of memory, but you become more selective in terms of what is useful to you as an artist, I think. And when I wrote that, I was sort of, I remember it was like the end of a love affair and it was, I was very sad and I was also trying really hard to understand what kind of writing I wanted to do or what kind of writing I was capable of, really. So that piece grew out of that idea of capability, of loving this thing so much, writing.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  I wanted to do the best I could by it, you know, that it was a... An honor to be published. It was an honor to have an audience of any kind. It was and remains a deep mystery to me that I'm involved in and that I love, you know?

• 39:31Sam Fragoso?

  What do you mean by mystery?

• 39:33Speaker 01

  Because I don't think you wake up thinking, oh, I know how to write. I think you wake up saying, I want to write and I hope I can write.

• 39:40Sam Fragoso?

  When you wake up to write, you have a ritual, or you did, and it was to-

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Wendy Williams.

• 39:46Sam Fragoso?

  Wendy Williams.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  I love her, but she's not there anymore.

• 39:48Sam Fragoso?

  So how do you write?

• 39:50Speaker 01

  I just get up and do it. I don't-

• 39:52Sam Fragoso?

  Do you miss Wendy?

• 39:53Speaker 01

  I miss her deeply, but one of the things that I do is I still sort of clean. Like, I still sweep the floor and make the bed and all that stuff gets you prepared to sit down to it.

• 40:04Sam Fragoso?

  But you're still kind of missing the special ingredient.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Yes, I know, but it will come in another form at some point.

• 40:11Sam Fragoso?

  You'll find new inspiration?

• 40:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but hopefully she'll come back. I'll be there to greet her if she comes back.

• 40:17Sam Fragoso?

  I would love for her to come back. This mysterious process of writing, as if it's been waiting for you to show up. Does it get easier?

• 40:26Speaker 01

  No, never, never. I wouldn't be interested if it got easier.

• 40:31Sam Fragoso?

  Why is that?

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Because it's such a gift to wake up and not know what you're doing, but also that you love doing it and that it will be completely different the next day and that you'll feel differently. It's a gift. You know, there's no physical or ethical pleasure in the difficulty of it, but there is immense spiritual pleasure and release.

• 40:53Sam Fragoso?

  You said once, "I'm a guilty person. I just go around the world feeling guilty, but when I'm working on something, I can feel the energy shift in a piece of writing where I'm not in control of it anymore."

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Yes, and that's the freedom, is that you're gonna wake up and go to places that you couldn't anticipate, you know?

• 41:12Sam Fragoso?

  When you're not writing, what are you guilty about?

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Our collective lack of humanity, our lack of care for one another, our lack of belief in one another as a species, loneliness, people trying to connect and not connecting, violence, anger, isolation, a whole world of feelings to feel guilty about and not being able to make it better somehow.

• 41:44Sam Fragoso?

  You feel like you need to make it better.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Or I would want to. I would like to. I think that's more accurate.

• 41:51Sam Fragoso?

  And you don't think you have?

• 41:54Speaker 01

  I'm hoping so. I think that I live in, when I meet someone like you and you give me hope, I run with it because it's, it's the hope. You know, it's a gift.

• 42:04Sam Fragoso?

  Well, on the subject of hope, before we leave, I have a couple of things for you.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 42:09Sam Fragoso?

  I quoted that commencement speech you gave back in 2014. I'm going to read the end of it now.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 42:16Sam Fragoso?

  You said, "I never believed, not for one second, that art is created out of avoiding the world and its various realities. If you avoid that, you avoid life, which is your source material. You dishonor all your ghosts in the sunlight, including the person you were when I began this speech, the Columbia boys I knew and loved long ago, the politically oppressed poet who changed a face, and you, dancing with my former self before we part, and you walk proudly into that sunlit hope, ghosts and all."

• 42:52Sam Fragoso?

  And there's so much in that that I love to unpack, but I can't help but shake those last few words, "walking proudly into your sunlit hope, ghosts and all."

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 43:05Sam Fragoso?

  And it dawned on me, one of those ghosts, at least now, must be your mother. She passed away back in 1989.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Mm hmm, mm hmm. And I was thinking also of my best friend who died of AIDS in 1991, and I met him at Columbia. He's a primary person in that text, I think.

• 43:24Sam Fragoso?

  That was Kevin?

• 43:25Speaker 01

  Kevin, that's right. I think I'm referring more to him in that instance. So the past is the past. You can't return. But how do you not leave something behind as you move forward? I think it's part of who we are, that we take it with us.

• 43:43Sam Fragoso?

  And that hope you mentioned, which we talked about earlier, that was so elusive to you as a child.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:51Sam Fragoso?

  That same hope that your mother seemed to be able to maintain.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, it would be disrespectful for me not to recognize hope when it's staring me in the face, given what she gave me, you know? It would be just disrespectful.

• 44:05Sam Fragoso?

  So then, at the tender age of 62.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  Yes, I feel like I'm just beginning.

• 44:11Sam Fragoso?

  Are you able to find hope on the page?

• 44:13Speaker 01

  Yes, every day, every day. Because every day that's given to me, I mean, is the hope that I'll be able to tell the truth on the page.

• 44:25Sam Fragoso?

  If you can do that.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  I'll get a boyfriend.

• 44:29Sam Fragoso?

  Are you single?

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:30Sam Fragoso?

  You're single?

• 44:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:32Sam Fragoso?

  Okay. If you are interested, Hilton's email is.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  His OnlyFans account is.

• 44:43Sam Fragoso?

  I wasn't gonna go there, but now I'm thinking, would Prince be in part of your OnlyFans account?

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Oh, wouldn't that be the best? It would be a dream.

• 44:52Sam Fragoso?

  I mean, we're making an OnlyFans joke, but.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:56Sam Fragoso?

  Is that something that's been on your mind?

• 44:57Speaker 01

  Partner? Yes. I would like to have that experience again of, above and beyond, it's someone that you can talk to and trust and laugh with. Really essential is humor. And you know that. It's someone that you trust in an intimate way and whom you can laugh with in an intimate way. I miss that, yes.

• 45:20Sam Fragoso?

  Well, I guess part and parcel with that is this question I have around what we leave behind and legacy, which you previously said were horrified by as a queer person, as a person of color, and because of my family. But has that changed for you now? Do you think about legacy differently?

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Now I would think of it as I have more of a chance to have a legacy than before, for sure. I'm feeling very optimistic these days about my capabilities and still guilty about how we treat each other as humans.

• 45:57Sam Fragoso?

  You know, like, you have a chance at it seems so, it's not asking for much.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  No, no. Beautiful.

• 46:04Sam Fragoso?

  I like how when I am posing a question and you are answering it and dipping and diving back into the past that you close your eyes.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just to hear what you're saying to, to really be with your question.

• 46:19Sam Fragoso?

  Well, then, on the subject of posterity and those ghosts forcing your hand, whether it's Didion or Kennedy or Kevin or your mother, I thought we'd end with the piece that you want us, the listener, the reader, to hold.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. I think to conclude, I'll be reading from Jean Rhys's unfinished autobiography called Smile, Please.

• 46:43Sam Fragoso?

  Just to be clear, you want to end with writing that's not your own?

• 46:49Speaker 01

  Yes, because it evokes and says much more beautifully something that I feel about writing and not, not the way that she felt about human beings. I don't necessarily agree here, but I do agree with her assessment about what writing means. So this is a mock imaginary trial.

• 47:14Sam Fragoso?

  At the end of her life.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  At the end of her life, and she's writing a dialogue, talking about earning your death.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  "Defense: It is untrue that you are cold and withdrawn? It is not true." "Defense: Did you make great efforts to, shall we say, establish contacts with other people? I mean friendships, love affairs, and so on." "Yes, not friendships very much." "Did you succeed?" "Sometimes, for a time." "It didn't last?" "No." "Whose fault was that?" "Mine, I suppose." "You suppose?" Silence. "Better answer: I am tired. I learnt everything too late. Everything was always one jump ahead of me." The phrase is not, "I do not know, but I have nothing to say."

• 48:05Speaker 01

  The trouble is, I have plenty to say, not only that, but I am bound to say it. Bound? I must. Why? Why? Why? I must write. If I stop writing, my life will have been an abject failure. It is that already to other people, but it could be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned death. Earned death? Sometimes, not often, a phrase will sound in my ear clearly, as if spoken aloud by someone else. That was one phrase, "You must earn death." A reward? Yes. Any other phrase? Yes. You will be helped.

• 48:50Sam Fragoso?

  Wow.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Thank you for this opportunity to talk about these great people and who really made me to some degree, you know?

• 49:03Sam Fragoso?

  You really feel that passage?

• 49:05Speaker 01

  I do, I did. It's just such a, it's just so crystal clear about possibility and the artist's hope, you know, that life will allow you to finish your work.

• 49:20Sam Fragoso?

  To end on your writing, I'll do it for you. You wrote, "I can feel the energy shift in a piece of writing when I'm not in control of it anymore. You're controlling the form, but you're not controlling, for want of a better word, your subconsciousness. And those are the moments that you live for, because then the pages just happen. They've just been waiting for you to show up. And I so thank you for showing up today."

• 49:45Speaker 01

  And thank you for the opportunity.

• 49:47Sam Fragoso?

  Actually, thank you for showing up both days. Hilt the nails.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  Take care.

• 49:52Sam Fragoso?

  Be safe.

• 50:54Sam Fragoso?

  And that's our show. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to give us five stars on Spotify, Apple, wherever you listen. I want to give a special thanks today to Stephen Barclay, Tucker Smith, New Directions Publishing, The Hammer Museum, and of course, Hilton Als. To learn more about his new book, My Pinup, or his new exhibition around Joan Didion at The Hammer Museum, be sure to visit our show notes at talkeasypod.com. If you enjoyed today's conversation, I'd recommend our episodes with Margot Jefferson, Kehinde Wiley, Ocean Wong, Marina Abramovich, Antoine Sargent, George Saunders, and Jennifer Egan.

• 51:38Sam Fragoso?

  To hear those and more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram at Talk Easy Pod. If you want to support our show by purchasing one of our mugs, they come in cream or navy, or our vinyl record with the inimitable Fran Lebowitz, you can do so at talkeasypod.com/shop. As always, a big Thanks to our team. Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Janix Bravo. Our associate producer is Caitlin Dryden. Today's talk was edited by Clarice Guevara and mixed by Andrew Vastola. Our assistant editor is Lindsay Ellis.

• 52:22Sam Fragoso?

  Photographs today are by Emil Ravello. Music by Dylan Peck. Illustrations by Kusha Shenoy. Video and graphics by Ian Chang, Derek Gabrizak, Ian Jones, Ethan Seneca, and Leila Rutter. Special thanks to Patrice Lee, Kalen Ung, and Paulina Suarez. I'd also like to thank our team at Pushkin Industries. Justin Richmond, Julie Barton, John Schnars, Carrie Brody, David Glover, Heather Fain, Mia Labelle, Eric Sandler, Nicole Marano, Morgan Ratner, Jordan McMillan, Isabella Navarez, Maya Kene, Carly Migliore, Jason Gambrell, Malcolm Gladwell, and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next week with another episode. Until then, stay safe and so long.

• 53:20Speaker 02

  History gets written, then rewritten, sometimes by scholars correcting the record, sometimes by committees deciding what a generation of kids will and won't learn. The version that makes it into the textbook isn't always the only story. It's the one that won out. That's the kind of thing ground news was built for. It shows you how outlets across the spectrum tell the same story, side by side, so you can spot the shading for yourself. Ground news gives each outlet a factuality rating, so you know how much weight to give the source, and shows you who owns it, so you know what's behind it. The Nobel Peace Center called it "an excellent way to stay informed, avoid echo chambers, and expand your worldview."

• 54:07Speaker 02

  So go to groundnews.com/rz. That's G R O U N D N E W S dot com slash R C for 40% off unlimited access vantage plan. Get it yourself or gift it to someone who'd rather know than not. Use my link, groundnews.com/rz, so you get the discount and they know I sent you. If you're a fan of learning all sides of history, then Ground News is for you. One more time, groundnews.com/rz.

• 54:41Speaker 03

  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.

• 54:49Speaker 04

  We backed up and they loaded fresh dead rats.

• 54:52Speaker 03

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

• 54:55Speaker 04

  There were 32,000 pounds of them.

• 54:57Speaker 03

  32,000 pounds of frozen dead rats.

• 55:01Speaker 04

  That's it.

• 55:03Speaker 03

  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.