Illustration by Krishna Bala Shenoi.

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso is a weekly series of intimate conversations with artists, authors, and politicians. It’s a podcast where people sound like people. New episodes air every Sunday, distributed by Pushkin Industries. 

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To celebrate the release of her new story collection Roman Stories, we’re flashing back to when Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jhumpa Lahiri joined us in 2021. In vivid, writerly detail Lahiri describes being raised in a family “spread out in various places” , her late mother’s recurring presence in her writing, the comfort (and pain) of being an observer, and the vibrancy she found in Rome, which inspired her novel Whereabouts. On the back-half of our talk, Jhumpa reflects on the metamorphosis that occurred in her mother’s final days, how her familial ties (from Calcutta to Rhode Island) informed her early stories, and, finally, an exhortation on why she writes.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode: 

Sam Fragoso: I get the sense that the driving force of so much of your writing is a desire to feel untethered.

Jhumpa Lahiri: That’s the ideal state for the writer. It’s to be able to write from purely one’s own perspective, and not feel that one needs to tell other people’s stories. Maybe one wants to tell other people’s stories, but how much of it is a want, and how much of it is a sense of obligation? Even if the obligation is coming from within yourself.

To come back to this earlier question about my parents at the center of four of my books, I think it is critical to move to the point where I don’t feel that I have to speak for other people. Part of what drove me to write those early stories was that impulse that I had, as a child as well, to be able to speak for my parents— to defend them, to protect them, to explain them in a world in which they weren’t being completely understood or respected or heard. I had access to both realities, so I was constantly going back and forth, and understanding, and reading; reading the ways they were being read. I was both their child and their protector. When I started to write, it was the first time I felt that I had an instrument, a voice, a perception, a way of protecting them and explaining them, through my stories largely about them and about their experiences.

SF: But it generated a kind of expectation, that obligation you’re talking about.

JL: Not from them particularly, but I think once you begin to write about, say—Bengali immigrants—then there’s that, “Oh, aren’t you going to write more stories about that?” That is what happened. I think that can become problematic because one writes to be free. One writes to feel free. We’re actually not free, but writing is a form of freedom. It’s a way to feel free.

SF: You wrote a beautiful description of why you write in your book In Other Words. Would you be open to reading some of that?

JL:

Why do I write? To investigate the mystery of existence. To tolerate myself. To get closer to everything that is outside of me.

If I want to understand what moves me, what confuses me, what pains me—everything that makes me react, in short—I have to put it into words. Writing is my only way of absorbing and organizing life. Otherwise it would terrify me, it would upset me too much.

What passes without being put into words, without being transformed and, in a certain sense, purified by the crucible of writing, has no meaning for me. Only words that endure seem real. They have a power, a value superior to us.

Given that I try to decipher everything through writing, maybe writing in Italian is simply my way of learning the language in a more profound, more stimulating way.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve belonged only to my words. I don’t have a country, a specific culture. If I didn’t write, if I didn’t work with words, I wouldn’t feel that I’m present on the earth.

What does a word mean? And a life? In the end, it seems to me, the same thing. Just as a word can have many dimensions, many nuances, great complexity, so, too, can a person, a life. Language is the mirror, the principal metaphor. Because ultimately the meaning of a word, like that of a person, is boundless, ineffable.

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Jhumpa Lahiri, a bilingual writer and translator, is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College, Columbia University. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies and is also the author of The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland. Since 2015, Lahiri has been writing fiction, essays, and poetry in Italian: In Altre Parole (In Other Words), Il Vestito dei libri (The Clothing of Books), Dove mi trovo (self-translated as Whereabouts), Il quaderno di Nerina, and Racconti romani. She received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2014, and in 2019 was named Commendatore of the Italian Republic by President Sergio Mattarella. Her most recent non-fiction book in English, Translating Myself and Others, was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

Sam Fragoso is the host of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, a weekly series of conversations with artists, activists, and politicians. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and NPR. After conducting seminal interviews with icons like Spike Lee, Werner Herzog, and Noam Chomsky, he independently founded Talk Easy in 2016.

Illustration by Krishna Bala Shenoi.

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso is a weekly series of intimate conversations with artists, authors, and politicians. It’s a podcast where people sound like people. New episodes air every Sunday, distributed by Pushkin Industries. 

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Last fall, George Saunders published Liberation Day, his first short-story collection in nine years. This week, we return to our conversation with the beloved author to celebrate the paperback release.

At the top, we discuss his process creating the book, the influence of Chekhov and Gogol, and a timely passage on democracy from “Love Letter”. Then, we unpack how he builds stories, a guiding philosophy from our first talk, and an excerpt from the titular story, “Liberation Day”.

On the back-half, we talk about the power of revision through “Elliott Spencer”, the seeds of the book’s moving final story, “My House”, the ‘failures in compassion’ it reveals, Saunders’ enduring relationship with his wife, and how he hopes to continue surprising himself as a writer, at 63.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode: 

Sam Fragoso: On the subject of writing, I was going to ask you– at 63, what compels you to keep doing this? To sit there and try to produce something on a blank page. Then, I remembered, you and I discussed this very thing at the beginning of 2021. You said:

When you ask why someone would read a short story, or write one, it’s all about the microfluctuations of the mind. You start a story with nothing in mind, you pick it up and suddenly there’s Scrooge or whoever, and then when you come out the other end of it, you’re in a different state. The same is true of a song. If you think that different state is preferable, then that’s proof of concept. It doesn’t last forever— maybe half an hour, but I feel at this stage of my life that’s better than nothing. It’s better than not feeling that way.

George Saunders: I like the idea of alteration. You come in in one state, and you go out in another. It occurs to me that the reason I’m still interested in it is— to have written a book and surprised yourself in the process is so fun. To say, ‘Oh I wasn’t done after all. There are still other selves to come forward.’ When I was younger, I had a more complicated matrix of motivation. There was ambition, for sure. Earning a living. Now it feels like the form is taunting me. I realize how little I’ve done in writing, and how vast it is. There are new places to go. Just the idea of spending the next year popping out new kinds of stories makes me really happy.

SF: Is that what you see when you look ahead?

GS: Yeah. On one level, that’s kind of both good and bad. Fast forward and I’m 96, hey he had eighteen more stories, whoops he’s dead. There’s another level for me which also has to do with alteration. Can I actually become a more relaxed, generous, loving person? I always had this idea that someday I’ll do a big retreat, or I’ll get back to meditating more regularly. But– I tend to not. So, I don’t know. It’s on my mind. Left to my own devices, I’m a pretty productive, pretty anxious, semi-loving person. That’s not probably going to be good enough. At some point that’s going to wear thin.

SF: You’re all these people at once.

GS: A certain person is dominating in a given moment. To me, it’s a thrilling idea that you could change that. You could somehow do certain things, and a different aspect of yourself would be dominant. Just thinking back on the time I was the biggest mess, versus the time I felt the very best, the thing is— the world changes around that person. And because the state of your mind is different, the world coming in is actually processed differently. It’s an incredible opportunity.

SF: You’ve talked about the power of art being that, if it works, you leave it on the other side just slightly different. You enter a different kind of state. And, I have to say, having read every page of Liberation Day, I left it feeling just like that: in a different state.

GS: How would you characterize a different state?

SF: I’d characterize it the same way we characterized it earlier. Which was— when something horrible happens, like a death, or something great happens, like a job promotion, these big things sort of snap you out of the quotidian. Like a snow globe, it jostles you around a little, and it makes you actually look around with a fresh set of eyes, the same way you do walking out of a movie theater when the movie is good. You go into the theater in a certain way, you walk out and think, wow, even the not-so-interesting restaurant that is in front of me has a glimmer to it.

GS: I always think after a good work of art, the birds matter more, like story birds. Something like that. Yeah, that’s beautiful.

SF: Everything else that’s not me… that falls away, and then it doesn’t. I have felt the same way in this conversation, now as we have to leave it.

GS: We have to leave? We can stay another couple hours [Laughs]. I really loved being with you. You’ve got an incredible mind.

SF: George Saunders, the pleasure has been all mine.

GS: Thank you so much.

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George Saunders is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of eleven books, including A Swim in a Pond in the Rain; Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize; Congratulations, by the Way; Tenth of December, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the inaugural Folio Award; The Braindead Megaphone; and the critically acclaimed collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, and In Persuasion Nation. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.

Sam Fragoso is the host of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, a weekly series of conversations with artists, activists, and politicians. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and NPR. After conducting seminal interviews with icons like Spike Lee, Werner Herzog, and Noam Chomsky, he independently founded Talk Easy in 2016.

Illustration by Krishna Bala Shenoi.

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso is a weekly series of intimate conversations with artists, authors, and politicians. It’s a podcast where people sound like people. New episodes air every Sunday, distributed by Pushkin Industries. 

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One year ago, The New Yorker staff writer and critic Hua Hsu published his singular memoir entitled Stay True. Earlier this May, the autobiography won a Pulitzer Prize.

Upon its paperback release, Hsu joins us to discuss the epigraph that frames the book and his nomadic upbringing, scored by mixtapes, created by his Taiwanese father. Hsu then reflects on his arrival at UC Berkeley in the mid-90s and how he formed an unexpected bond with a schoolmate named Ken.

On the back-half, Hsu describes the horrific night that Ken’s life was taken, the aftermath of this tragedy, his attempts to make sense of the past twenty-four years in Stay True, his complicated relationship to memory and music, and how he’s held onto hope through telling this enduring story of friendship.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode: 

Sam Fragoso: When you won the Pulitzer Prize, you said, “[Stay True] is not about the past, it’s about memory. For a long while I only remembered the terrible things; or maybe I chose to.” When it comes to the night of July 18th, 1998, what are those memories that play in your head?

Hua Hsu: That was the night Ken threw a housewarming party. It’s the last time any of us saw him alive. I played that night out in my memory so much in the days following — and the years since — that it now does feel like I’m watching a movie. I’ve thought about what it was like to be on the balcony talking to him, what it would have looked like from across the street to see us talking. His death was a senseless, freak thing. There was no way to return to the past. I ended up realizing that the reason I was writing this book wasn’t to make sense of the past, but it was to understand the future.

SF: It’s my understanding that you didn’t ask friends for their version of events. It almost seems like you were more interested in interrogating the objects from the past, than the people in it.

HH: Yes, it wasn’t a group biography. It wasn’t a history of the late 1990s. It was more a book about my own relationship to my own memories. As far as its reverberations through my life, I’ve never left campus… I still teach college students. I never really processed why I’m so drawn to campuses, to mentoring college students. The fascination with writing, the fascination with the past, the fascination with the impossibility of ever conjuring the past — I realized that a lot of these things are due to this absence.

SF: In the years that followed your friend’s passing, most of your work was about the future. You’ve said, “All of my work is about the future and about how artists who don’t have encumbrances like the rest of us imagine the future.” Do you think you gravitated to those stories and those artists because their ability to imagine the future was something you yourself wanted?

HH: I do. I think one of the reasons I’ve been drawn to records and movies and things that I’m interested in is because… it’s people drawing on things they’ve learned, their own things they’ve loved. They’re turning it into something else. There’s a forward propulsion to culture that stays rooted in the past, that stays rooted in these traditions and legacies, but it allows us to turn the past into something else.

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Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a professor of Literature at Bard College. Hsu serves on the executive board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. He was formerly a fellow at the New America Foundation and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his family.

Sam Fragoso is the host of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, a weekly series of conversations with artists, activists, and politicians. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and NPR. After conducting seminal interviews with icons like Spike Lee, Werner Herzog, and Noam Chomsky, he independently founded Talk Easy in 2016.

Illustration by Krishna Bala Shenoi.

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso is a weekly series of intimate conversations with artists, authors, and politicians. It’s a podcast where people sound like people. New episodes air every Sunday, distributed by Pushkin Industries. 

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Novelist Zadie Smith is one of the most acclaimed and beloved writers of her generation. Editor David Remnick has called her “a blessing not merely to The New Yorker but to language itself.” Author George Saunders has praised Smith’s work for its “heart and moral ambition.” I, too, think she’s quite good.

And so today we’re joined by Smith to discuss her prescient historical novel The Fraud, her instinctive writing process, and the role of projection in her work. Then, Zadie reflects on her upbringing in Northwest London, the art that influenced her growing up, and the media circus that followed the publication of her debut novel, White Teeth.

On the back-half, we discuss her desire to frequently reinvent herself as an artist as a writer, why she prioritized pleasure after her book On Beauty, the nuanced politics of her work, her evolving relationship to humanism, a striking passage from Intimations, and what she sees in this next generation of novelists.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode: 

Sam Fragoso: Beyond the personal reasons of making art, you’ve written pretty extensively about the perceived political power and “necessity of storytelling.” Because throughout the pandemic—and lockdown—many folks were making the case for art’s nobility; its capacity to change, to enlighten. And yet in an essay from your book Intimations, which was written in the throes of the pandemic, you seemed to have a very different view of the work you’ve been making for the past 26 years. Can we take a look at that?

Zadie Smith: Sure.

The more utilitarian-minded defenders of art justify its existence by insisting upon its potential political efficacy, which is usually overstated. (Artists themselves are especially fond of overstating it.) But even if you believe in the potential political efficacy of art—as I do—few artists would dare count on its timeliness. It’s a delusional painter who finishes a canvas at two o’clock and expects radical societal transformation by four. Even when artists write manifestos, they are (hopefully) aware that their exigent tone is, finally, borrowed, only echoing and mimicking the urgency of the guerrilla’s demands, or the activist’s protests, rather than truly enacting it. The people sometimes demand change. They almost never demand art. As a consequence, art stands in a dubious relation to necessity—and to time itself. It is something to do, yes, but when it is done, and whether it is done at all, is generally considered a question for artists alone. An attempt to connect the artist’s labor with the work of truly laboring people is frequently made but always strikes me as tenuous, with the fundamental dividing line being this question of the clock. Labor is work done by the clock (and paid by it, too). Art takes time and divides it up as art sees fit. It is something to do.

You know, it has occurred to me on this tour recently that, when I listen to other artists talk, they use the word ‘radical’ every other word, they’re constantly stating these apparently progressive arguments. But then I know their kids are in private school, and it just really blows my mind that people have literally no shame about this rhetoric that has no relation to their lives— particularly in America. They continue to live these hot, bourgeois lives. So, I never speak like that because, embarrassingly, I realize my life is actually in the commons. I have a case.

SF: What do you mean by that?

ZS: My parents had their moments of activism when I was a kid, so I connect that activism to actually going out and doing it. They went out and marched, and they were involved at a grassroots level. So, that’s the thing I take seriously. I just cannot take seriously people speaking as if their very existence is radical. They’re just radical because they’re alive and willing to give you their art. I find that really hard to take seriously

SF: It sounds like the part that’s rubbing you the wrong way is that you have contemporary writers that are acting like politicians.

ZS: I realize that, in the age of the algorithm, politics are something that has to be legible. Because I haven’t said, I am this, and this is what I believe, I think I’ve allowed people to assume politics that I really do not engage with.

SF: Does that bother you?

ZS: No, it doesn’t really. The lesson I took from my parents is— do you want to label yourself endlessly in your armchair, or do you want to get on the streets and actually change people’s minds? To me, the arguments in my books are open enough that people can enter. Hopefully they enter and something happens.

SF: The thing I love most about your work is that it does feel inviting, and that it’s not particularly dogmatic. And perhaps in the absence of clear definition, others—especially on the internet—have tried to define you and your work for you.

ZS: I realize they have no idea where I come from, or the people I come from, because I’ve never said it. That’s because I believe in privacy. I just don’t understand this kind of public-facing person who’s a series of statements. I can’t engage with it. It surprises me that people think making radical work is saying, my work is radical. That’s not what I think radical work is. I think radical work is radical work. It does something radical to you as you’re reading it… to the way you think, and to the formation of your ideas.

SF: I can’t help but shake that headline that came about from a recent Vulture review, How Zadie Smith Lost Her Teeth, which did take issue with your politics— or how you think about politics, in relation to your work. What did you make of that?

ZS: I mean, I do slightly take issue with being judged on the level of my Black radicalism by someone who isn’t in that tradition. I think it’s about the principle of hospitality. When I was a kid, we used to hand out socialist work, and there was always this idea when you’re dealing with upper-middle class intellectuals, they have this idealized proletariat figure in their mind. And of course… we were the people. Watching the way they would talk to my father, there’s this disappointment that the proletariat, when you meet them, isn’t using the same language that you’re using. He doesn’t fully embrace the Marxist discourse in his language, is worried about his rent and his food, maybe doesn’t have the same aesthetics as you. I was always struck by that.

Even when I got to college, it was more intense. There’s this kind of leftist movement, and it’s inconvenient that the people they speak to, they don’t really like or understand. So, I come from somewhere else, and I do think I both like and understand the people I grew up amongst. I’m not ever willing to shut the door on them because their language isn’t correct, or they’re not thinking in quite the way I wish they would think. I’m trying to find common ground. To me, common ground is not a middling space; it’s like a radical space. It’s a space you can share in common. The commons is the thing that concerns me.

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Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia; three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free and Intimations; a collection of short stories, Grand Union; and the play, The Wife of Willesden, adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie Smith was born in north-west London, where she still lives.

Sam Fragoso is the host of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, a weekly series of conversations with artists, activists, and politicians. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and NPR. After conducting seminal interviews with icons like Spike Lee, Werner Herzog, and Noam Chomsky, he independently founded Talk Easy in 2016.

Illustration by Krishna Bala Shenoi.

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso is a weekly series of intimate conversations with artists, authors, and politicians. It’s a podcast where people sound like people. New episodes air every Sunday, distributed by Pushkin Industries. 

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To celebrate this summer’s release of his third novel, All the Demons are Here, we revisit our 2021 conversation with anchorman and author Jake Tapper (CNN)! We discuss his approach to challenging politicians on air, the danger of “both sides-ism”, the mental instability he’s come across in Washington, and why all politicians think of themselves as the “hero” of the story.

In his second novel, The Devil May Dance, Tapper candidly reflects on the power dynamics between journalists and elected officials, CNN’s role in generating the Trump phenomenon, the mistakes made in the past four years, and why he believes the new media can (and will) “rise to the challenge” of better coverage in future elections. Then, before we go, we return to Tapper’s guiding journalistic principles, a passage from the late Walter Cronkite, and why he continues doing the work he’s doing.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode: 

Sam Fragoso: I wanted to go back to a diagnosis of D.C. that you wrote in 1998 for the Washington City Paper.

Jake Tapper: Uh oh.

SF: You were in your late twenties at the time, and you wrote—

Power does weird things to people. More than once, I have found myself laughing my ass off and nodding in agreement while some fading star has held forth on something I could care less about. Offended me, even. Does that make me a nitwit, a himbo waiting to happen? I think it just makes me toweringly average in Washington, just another creature who is here because this is where the national vat of power lies, and I’m sitting here waiting for my bowlful.

JT: Yeah, I mean, that was an observation about what it was like to be in my twenties in Washington D.C. When you go to parties, and you’re trying to make connections. At that point, I was very early on in my journalism career [laughs]. Like days into my full-time journalism career. I was talking about when you’re trying to climb in a very competitive industry.

SF: I offer that response purely because of that first line: “Power does weird things to people.”

JT: That is one of the subjects that I talk about in my novel. The idea of, what do people do to get close to power? In the first book, The Hellfire Club, which came out in ‘18, the theme is really, what kinds of compromises are you willing to make in order to do good?

The thing that most people need to understand about Washington D.C. is that everyone here thinks they’re a good guy. Stephen Miller, Sebastian Gorka… I’m not comparing these people, but just everyone. Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Matt Gaetz, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Kevin McCarthy. Every one of them thinks that they are the hero of the narrative.

The theme of my first book was— what compromises are you willing to make in order to achieve the good that you want to achieve, and at what point do those compromises start overtaking your life so much so you can’t even remember the good that you wanted to achieve?

The theme of the second book, The Devil May Dance, is— who are you willing to get in bed with? When you dance with the devil, what does that do to you? The core of it is about the JFK-Sinatra relationship. What did it do to JFK to be allied with Sinatra, what did it do to Sinatra to be allied with mobsters?

Part of what I have witnessed in my decades in Washington are these phenomenons of… they all come here thinking they’re going to do good. They’re all the heroes of their own narrative.

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Jake Tapper has written two New York Times bestselling novels, The Hellfire Club and The Devil May Dance, as well as the bestselling nonfiction book The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor, which was turned into a critically acclaimed film in 2020. He is the lead DC anchor and chief Washington correspondent for CNN. A Dartmouth graduate and Philly native, he lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, daughter, and son.

Sam Fragoso is the host of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, a weekly series of conversations with artists, activists, and politicians. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and NPR. After conducting seminal interviews with icons like Spike Lee, Werner Herzog, and Noam Chomsky, he independently founded Talk Easy in 2016.

Illustration by Krishna Bala Shenoi.

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso is a weekly series of intimate conversations with artists, authors, and politicians. It’s a podcast where people sound like people. New episodes air every Sunday, distributed by Pushkin Industries. 

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To celebrate the release of her book’s paperback edition, we revisit our sit-down with actor Betty Gilpin! We talk about her role in the prescient new Peacock series Mrs. Davis, her relationship to technology and social media, and growing up around actor parents. Then, we discuss her early years studying acting under the legendary Dianne Wiest, and her path from college to off-Broadway theater.

In the back half, we walk through her rapid ascent from Nurse Jackie to GLOW, the ‘seesaw of acting’ she experienced, and the weight of her work. To close, Betty honors the next generation of performers and shares a formative passage from her book, All the Women in My Brain.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode: 

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Sam Fragoso is the host of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, a weekly series of conversations with artists, activists, and politicians. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and NPR. After conducting seminal interviews with icons like Spike Lee, Werner Herzog, and Noam Chomsky, he independently founded Talk Easy in 2016.

Illustration by Krishna Bala Shenoi.

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso is a weekly series of intimate conversations with artists, authors, and politicians. It’s a podcast where people sound like people. New episodes air every Sunday, distributed by Pushkin Industries. 

*

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode: 

Sam Fragoso: What I was struck by in all of your writing is the boundless passion and energy you have, and I want to go back a bit. In 1936, your grandfather got a job as an animator for Disney. He worked on Fantasia and Snow White and Pinocchio. He was a political man, but he mostly kept his politics to himself— until bonuses that were promised for Snow White failed to materialize. In response, your grandfather led a strike on behalf of the union. To demonstrate, he along with your grandmother lived in a tent across the street from the studio, cooking over an open fire and manning the picket line. Now that we’re about eighty years removed from this moment, do you think that’s where your passion and activism comes from?

Naomi Klein: [Laughs] That’s so interesting to hear all of those details, my god. My grandfather had a big influence on me because he was fired for helping to lead that strike, and he was never able to work as an animator again. He did a little bit of animation work under a pseudonym because he was blacklisted. He worked in the shipyards during the war. He continued to be an artist because, in some ways, it freed him to do his own art. And he loved Disney, but not the man. Maybe this comes back to this question we were talking about earlier about polarization and good guys and bad guys. He really loathed the company and the way they had treated him, but he still loved the films. He was proud of his work. He didn’t see it all as evil— he just wanted it to be fair.

One of the things I learned from him was, if you want to be a critic, you have to make room for people’s complexity and the fact that we have these contradictions. We’re drawn to this shiny world, we want things, we feel bad that the people who made the things weren’t treated well. We’re pulled in lots of different directions, and if all you do is shake your finger at people and make them feel bad, they are just going to run in the opposite direction. Because none of us function that way. We are all filled with contradictions.

SF: What I’m mainly getting at is something both human and journalistic. I’m thinking about in 2002 when you and your partner decided to move to Argentina to make a documentary called The Take. It’s a film about a group of laid-off workers who broke into their shutter factory and started it up again as a collective. In this time of turmoil, there were protests that turned violent. There were shoot-offs between police and citizens. Your partner said to your crew, just be safe. It’s not the time to die. In response, you said, if something is happening, and we’re the only ones witnessing it, we have a responsibility to posterity. Where does that responsibility in you come from?

NK: I mean, we went to Argentina after the economy there went into crisis. They went through five presidents in three weeks. The whole economy shut down, the banks closed. I think I am a journalist first and foremost, and I do have this desire to go to extreme places. I’ll be honest about that. Journalists are weird, like we do run towards burning buildings. It takes a certain kind of personality type to go into a war zone and a disaster zone where everybody else is going in the opposite direction.

__________________

Sam Fragoso is the host of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, a weekly series of conversations with artists, activists, and politicians. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and NPR. After conducting seminal interviews with icons like Spike Lee, Werner Herzog, and Noam Chomsky, he independently founded Talk Easy in 2016.

Illustration by Krishna Bala Shenoi.

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso is a weekly series of intimate conversations with artists, authors, and politicians. It’s a podcast where people sound like people. New episodes air every Sunday, distributed by Pushkin Industries. 

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This week, we flash back to when best-selling author Anne Lamott joined us for the release of her last book Dusk, Night, Dawn. We discuss how to move forward from the pain of the pandemic, a life-changing night in a Miami hotel, and what her sobriety can teach us about healing. Wise as her writing suggests, Lamott champions “the ordinary life” and the power of forgiveness. At age 66, she shares her love of service, her impulse to write it all down, and the grace of getting older.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode: 

Sam Fragoso: I wanted to jump into the prologue of your new book, Dusk Night Dawn. You write at the top:

“Where on earth do we start to get our world and joy and hope and our faith in life itself back? Where can we again find belief in redemption and confidence that our new grandchildren will have breathable air and dry land on which to thrive and raise their own families?”

What does this book mean to you in this moment?

Anne Lamott: Well, my last book was called Almost Everything: Notes on Hope. I had originally called it Doomed: Thoughts on Hope, but my publisher wouldn’t go for it. At any rate, a few years ago, I was traveling around the country giving talks at bookstores and churches and mosques on this hope book, but everywhere I went, people were just so discouraged and defeated by the four years of Trump. And the UN climate change reports were just coming out, and those are just devastating— really end of the world. People just felt like, where do we even start? Will our kids wear gas masks? Just so many heartbreaking things were going on. We were all a little tenser than the average bear, and I wanted to answer that question of, where do we even start?

Sam Fragoso: After writing this book, what do you think that answer looks like?

Anne Lamott: Well, the answer to where do we start — whether it’s with getting sober, or starting a new book, or a new relationship, or getting over one — is you start where you are. You don’t start in the fantasy of what you hope it will turn out to be, or in a grudge and resentment about how difficult it’s been. You don’t start in the fear of how hard it’s going to be. You start where you are; you start where your bud is. You breathe. Breathing consciously or intentionally connects you umbilically to something greater than your own pinball brain. And then you do a little bit at a time, and you let yourself do it badly. You let yourself flail or fall or get stuck. You do it afraid. You do it kind of cluelessly.

With my writing students, with Bird by Bird, I always had them put a one inch picture frame on their desk and kind of squint through the empty picture frame and see a passage or a memory or a possible opening section. And then, of course, write a really god awful first draft of it. Everything good springs from really terrible first drafts. You figure out one small thing you could do today that would be helpful, rather than more defeating, and you see how it goes. I don’t want to sound like a Nike ad, but you just stick with it.

Sam Fragoso: I think you’re at no risk of sounding like a Nike ad.

Anne Lamott: [laughs] Thank you.

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Anne Lamott is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Hallelujah Anyway; Help, Thanks, Wow; Small Victories; Stitches; Some Assembly Required; Grace (Eventually); Plan B; Traveling Mercies; Bird by Bird; and Operating Instructions. She is also the author of seven novels, including Imperfect Birds and Rosie. A past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an inductee to the California Hall of Fame, she lives in Northern California.

Sam Fragoso is the host of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, a weekly series of conversations with artists, activists, and politicians. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and NPR. After conducting seminal interviews with icons like Spike Lee, Werner Herzog, and Noam Chomsky, he independently founded Talk Easy in 2016.

Illustration by Krishna Bala Shenoi.

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso is a weekly series of intimate conversations with artists, authors, and politicians. It’s a podcast where people sound like people. New episodes air every Sunday, distributed by Pushkin Industries. 

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This week, we revisit our conversation with beloved author Sandra Cisneros! We discuss her first poetry collection in 28 years, Woman Without Shame, why she chooses to write ‘dangerous’ pieces, and the significance of her poem, “My Mother and Sex.” Then, we walk through Sandra’s coming of age between Mexico and Chicago, the sixth-grade teacher that guided her entry into art, her epiphanies on class in graduate school, the “Pilsen Bario” that shaped her seminal novel, The House on Mango Street, and how Studs Terkel informed her lifelong approach to story.

On the back-half, we discuss the loves and losses that inspired Sandra’s early sensual poems, how she documented her power through “Neither Señorita nor Señora,” a painful period captured in “Year of my Death,” the day her mother visited her writer’s office in San Antonio, and why she still has more to say (and write) at age 67.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode: 

Sam Fragoso: The schooling your mother found came in the form of Studs Terkel.

Sandra Cisneros: Yeah, she listened to Studs Terkel religiously. Whatever Studs said, any book he mentioned, she would ask us to go get it for her. She was reading all these college textbooks and she’d say, “Hey, you know, I heard about this poet from Chile that Studs was talking about. Do you know who he is?” And I’d say, “Oh yeah, that’s Pablo Neruda.” And she goes, “Yeah, yeah. Get that book from me.” At the end of her life, her favorite writer was Noam Chomsky. She would take a yellow marker and highlight whole pages. She knew so much that she was the most well-read person in the barrio.

Sam Fragoso: God bless her.

Sandra Cisneros: I got my mother to meet Studs Terkel. I was on Studs’ show more than once. Studs was very intrigued by the story of my mom. He wanted to meet her to interview her for one of his books, but my mom was too embarrassed by the idea of him coming to her kitchen table. So instead, I took my mother to the studio, and there’s a photo of Studs and me and my mom together. It was a big moment that my mother got to meet her mentor.

Sam Fragoso: So, Studs became her mentor, and I’m trying to think about the ways in which he informed your writing. You have this quote where you said:

The kind of work I do isn’t just about writing what one hears. You have to do some research. And to me, everybody’s a walking library as valuable as the Library of Alexandria. I write about people I know who aren’t history, and they won’t be in a history book—or they won’t get in a museum.

Sandra Cisneros: Yeah, to me, history books look at people of poverty, women, and people of color as not counting. I interviewed a lot of people for Caramelo to get moments of history that are included in that book. To me, it’s a history book. It’s a history of immigration. There’s even a timeline at the back of the book, so you can see what U.S. attitude toward immigration has been and why it was created.

I just feel like I want to document the people I love— because if I don’t, they don’t count; they’re not history. Lots of people come across my life. I want to write about the Japanese people I worked with when I was fifteen. Many of them were deported to concentration camps during WWII, but I wasn’t aware of that, and they had no bitterness, or maybe they had bitterness but didn’t express it to me. There are parts of my past I haven’t written about. I hope I live long enough to sketch, with love, the people that I’ve been lucky enough to cross paths with.

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Sam Fragoso is the host of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, a weekly series of conversations with artists, activists, and politicians. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and NPR. After conducting seminal interviews with icons like Spike Lee, Werner Herzog, and Noam Chomsky, he independently founded Talk Easy in 2016.

Illustration by Krishna Bala Shenoi.

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso is a weekly series of intimate conversations with artists, authors, and politicians. It’s a podcast where people sound like people. New episodes air every Sunday, distributed by Pushkin Industries. 

*

As a fourth generation border resident in El Paso, politician Beto O’Rourke has long been making the case for immigration reform. He’s continued to do so this summer, as the humanitarian crisis at the Texas-Mexico border has accelerated under Gov. Greg Abbott.

After a check-in with Dad Fragoso, we sit with O’Rourke to unpack the severe anti-migrant tactics carried out under Operation Lone Star, the dangerous rhetoric that delivered this crisis, and the checkered history of immigration reform in Texas. We also walk through the focus of Beto’s new book, We’ve Got to Try: How the Fight for Voting Rights Makes Everything Else Possible, the four-year aftermath of the El Paso shooting, and why he continues fighting for change in the state.

On the back-half, O’Rourke reflects on his recent Gubernatorial campaign, how the Texas electorate has shifted since 2018 Senate run, his unwavering belief in people, how he hopes President Biden mitigates the cruelty at the border, and to close, a story about fatherhood.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode: 

Sam Fragoso: On August 2nd, 2019, Texas Governor Abbott sent out a fundraising email accusing Democrats like yourself of, “plotting to transform Texas and our entire country through illegal immigration.” The email continues, “if we’re going to defend Texas, we’ll need to take matters into our own hands.” The next day, in a Walmart in your hometown of El Paso, a 21 year old gunman drove 600 miles across Texas. He went into that Walmart, took matters into his own hands, and killed 23 people. Those people were children, mothers, fathers, grandparents. He did this according to his own manifesto, as a response to the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” Citing the Great Replacement Theory, the gunman claimed to be “defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.” Those words that we’ve been batting around, on that day, they produced real action, and they produced real lives lost. I wonder, as a father and a resident of El Paso, how you hold the weight of all this four years later?

Beto O’Rourke: I think the connection you draw between the rhetoric and language used by people in positions of power—and the actions that that rhetoric inspires—is so important because you just made the case that the massacre on the 3rd of August 2019 would not have happened otherwise.

As an El Pasoan who’s lived here my entire life, I’ve known that long before Donald Trump, the border was the focus of so many of our fears of people who did not look like or speak like the majority of Americans coming into this country and changing this country as they came, much as the Irish did in the 19th century and southern Europeans and people from all over different parts of the world at different times, inspiring that kind of fear and anxiety.
But for much of my life, it has been here, literally in El Paso, where we meet the rest of the world. Where the rest of our country is supposed to be afraid. Donald Trump would routinely talk about El Paso as a dangerous place, literally lying. No basis in truth whatsoever, but those lies were able to take hold because people had been conditioned for so long to think about immigrants in this way and think about the border in this way. So, I just knew that it’s really important that we understand the power of that language and that rhetoric, and we don’t just say that what those guys are telling you is wrong, but that we also share our own stories— because if we don’t tell our stories, somebody else will tell it for us. That was what Trump and Abbott and others were so successful at doing.

The things you and I have been talking about today can seem intractable or impossible. Like, we haven’t had immigration reform since 1986; we’ll never get it. We had school shootings, and they only seem to increase; it will never get better. The planet is warming, we’re incapable of mounting a political response; we might as well give up. But in this book, I tell the story of people, including those from El Paso, who were denied the ability to vote because they were Black and fought for decades to win voting integration in Texas. By 1944 inspired LBJ to pass the Voting Rights Act in 1965. That took generations to get done. So, when it comes to this question of rhetoric and the damage it does to very real human lives in places like El Paso, we can’t give into this, and we can’t allow that massacre in 2019 to be the end of the story. It must push us to do better, to do more, to engage with our fellow Americans, offer them the truth about who we are, what we mean, and what we contribute to the rest of this country. I think that has to be part of the conditioning that sets the stage for whoever the President is that ultimately leads on immigration reform and ending the tragedy and the needless death that we’re seeing on the border today.

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Beto O’Rourke is a fourth-generation Texan, born and raised in El Paso where he has served as a small business owner, a city council representative and a member of Congress. He founded and currently leads Powered by People, a Texas-based organization that works to expand democracy and produce Democratic victories through voter registration and direct voter engagement. Beto is married to Amy O’Rourke and together they are raising Ulysses, Molly and Henry in El Paso’s historic Sunset Heights.

Sam Fragoso is the host of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, a weekly series of conversations with artists, activists, and politicians. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and NPR. After conducting seminal interviews with icons like Spike Lee, Werner Herzog, and Noam Chomsky, he independently founded Talk Easy in 2016.