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Genre bender (continued)


Q: You wrote a profile of David Friedman, who was a very successful children’s-party clown, and that was before the film Capturing the Friedmans revealed that his father was a convicted pedophile. Did that experience change how you approach interviewing people? Did it make you more wary?

A: No. I mean, that was revelatory, obviously. It was a piece that I set out to do because I was in a little binge for a while of being interested in writing profiles of people with weird jobs, so my focus was less on his inner life than it was on his outer life. I really have to confess: I love that piece and feel really strongly about it. It achieved what I had set out to do. It was the reason [director] Andrew Jarecki started working on that movie, and in the amount of time he spent with David, this slowly emerged. I asked David about his family because I thought, well, I wonder if his parents are proud of him or ashamed. And he was very offhanded about them, and I didn’t pursue it any further. It wasn’t really germane to the piece I was working on. So I don’t feel uncomfortable about how it evolved. The piece that I did was complete unto itself. The fact that there was more there, I’m glad someone found it, although I still would make the point that David isn’t a convicted pedophile. I mean, yeah, his family life is very odd and tortured, but sometimes I think people get a little mixed up about missing this big story about him being a pedophile. There’s absolutely no implication of that.

Q: Do you have a favorite piece that you wrote for the Boston Phoenix?

A: I really loved doing my column. I did, if I am not mistaken, a story about the people who wrote the advertising for Ginsu knives, and it was really fun. But doing the column was a great experience, and for me it was the first time that I regularly was doing pieces that I feel built directly to the kind of stuff I’m doing now. It satisfied my sense of adventure and curiosity. It was very funny; I wrote a story about a place called the Revolving Museum, in Fort Point Channel, which coincidentally is where I live now. That was kind of funny, the full circle. I’m looking right now at where the Revolving Museum had been.

Q: You’ve split your time between New York and Boston for a long time. Do you root for the Red Sox or the Yankees?

A: The Cleveland Indians. Although I have to say, my husband is such a hard-core Red Sox fan ... in fact, the other day we went to see the Tampa Bay game, and Tino Martinez, who used to be a Yankee, is now playing for Tampa Bay, and I said to my husband, "Oh my God, it’s so exciting, because I used to have a huge crush on Tino Martinez; he’s kind of handsome." And my husband sat there sullenly, and I thought, well, excuse me. I know he was a Yankee; it had nothing to do with that. He was just kind of cute.

Q: So you’re pregnant, and you’re 48, and this is your first child?

A: Yes. Except for my dog. But he’s adopted.

Q: Do you think the pregnancy is something you’ll write about?

A: I don’t, actually. I haven’t made a habit of writing about my personal life because I feel like, well, that’s why it’s called a personal life. I can see why people write about their own experiences. I certainly have plenty of first-person in my writing, but I really am not writing about myself explicitly. I also think that there’s this syndrome where everybody who has their first baby thinks they’re the first person in the world to have experienced it, so there’s a little bit of a fear where you think, I have a feeling all the stuff I think is so amazingly interesting has occurred to every single other woman who’s ever had a child.

Q: If someday this child comes to you and says, "Mom, I want to be a writer," what will you say?

A: It’s so funny, you know what? I haven’t even thought of that! I love what I do; I also think it’s really hard, and I do now understand why my parents were so alarmed when I told them that I was going to become a writer. It’s necessary to have the desire, but it’s not sufficient. It’s not an easy life, and there’s no safety in it. Their concern was that I have some skill and some experience that would save me for when I completely washed out as a writer. The fact is, the percentage of people who end up being happily employed and comfortably compensated as a writer is probably pretty small. So my guess is that if I thought that my kid had what it took, I’d be thrilled, but I’d probably be very worried. I teach a little here and there, and I get worried when students of mine say, "I’m going to go for it." I go, "Oh my God, are you sure?" It’s an incredibly wonderful life, and it can be phenomenally satisfying. But I think it’s really tough. I guess all sorts of creative work, it’s the same thing. I’m sure if your kid said, "I want to be an actor," or a musician, you’d have all those same anxieties. It’s not just the performing of the task itself; it’s conducting a life and making it happen. That was something I certainly didn’t understand until I was actually doing it. You have to figure out, how do you get a job in a world in which there aren’t jobs per se? And how do you make sure you get paid well for what you do? Actually, I have a stepson who said the other day that he was thinking of being a writer, and I thought, oh God, no. You’re joking. At the same time, I thought, just don’t say anything.

Q: Do you have any suggestions for we New Yorker subscribers who can’t keep up with the weekly magazine and start to panic when a new issue arrives?

A: I do. First of all, take many, many long-distance airplane flights. Bring your New Yorkers with you, and just plow through them. Secondly, and this is the truth, one of the things about the magazine, one of its great strengths, is that while much of the material in it is timely and there’s a certain urgency, they’re meant to last. I am always behind, my God. Someone said to me one day, "So you read it every week?" And I thought, you’re joking. I mean, you are joking, right? This is not possible. I read issues that are months old. Literally months old. And in some cases, years old. I keep them, and the fact is they age really well. And also, people often will go through, read the stuff that’s sort of of-the-moment, and save them to read later. They really make fine reading down the line.

Q: It’s just a matter of having enough space for them, I guess.

A: Right. Exactly. I have a hard time throwing them out, because even when the issue’s really old, there are stories in them that are still worth reading. It’s really tough to throw them out, so I often don’t, and then once in a while I think, this is a fire hazard.

Susan Orlean reads from My Kind of Place on October 19, at 6:30 p.m., at the Harvard Book Store, 1256 Mass Ave, in Cambridge. Call (617) 661-1424. Tamara Wieder can be reached at twieder[a]phx.com.

page 3 

Issue Date: October 1 - 7, 2004
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