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- [00:08]
A
This is all of it. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I'm really grateful that you are here. On today's show, we'll mark the 50th anniversaries of two great New York institutions, MoMA, PS1 and the New York Transit Museum. And we'll hear a live performance from Tank and the Bengas. That's our plan. So let's get this started with the new novel Go Gentle. Okay. Have you ever walked by a book and thought I should read that? That's what happened to me. This past weekend, I had Maria Semple's book Go Gentle on my nightstand. I loved her book where did you'd go, Bernadette? And had been meaning to read this new one, her first in 10 years. It was already a bestseller and an Oprah's. But this job, well, it has a lot of reading. But something made me pick up this book on my own time, and I was so glad I did. Here's the premise. Adora is a single mom living in the Ansonia on the Upper west side. She has friends she shares things with. She calls it a coven. She has a doctorate in philosophy and has written an improbable bestseller on stoicism. She uses those teachings as a tutor for a pair of rich kids of the uber wealthy. One day she falls in love with a man she meets at the ballet. That is when she finds herself involved with a crime. Now, I don't know what happens yet because I'm still reading, but someone else on the team, Kate, finished the book and she says I'm in for a wild ride. I'm also in for a treat because the author of Go Gentle is joining us now, Maria Semple. Welcome to all of it.
- [01:53]
B
Thank you so much for having me.
- [01:55]
A
And by the way, Maria has an event at the Athena Bookstore in Old Greenwich, Connecticut on Monday, May 18, at at 6:30pm it's been a long time since you released a novel. Was this novel sort of 10 years in the making or were you working on something else?
- [02:11]
B
I was working on different things. I was in what's known as development hell in Hollywood, working on several projects that didn't go anywhere. And it really ate up my time. And when I finally got an idea for a novel, I struggled with how to kind of get into it and how to find the voice. But once I found the voice, it coincided with when I moved to New York, recently divorced. And that really opened a lot of possibilities. Up for me for the character and her surroundings and her kind of approach to life. And so the novel just kind of flew out of me pretty quickly.
- [02:51]
A
Was the original novel. Was this the original novel you intended to write, or is it close to the original idea?
- [02:58]
B
Yes, very close. I kind of knew the big story twists that you haven't gotten to yet. And I knew that I wanted my character to be a philosopher and a stoic, because I study stoicism, and I'm very into it, and so I knew that part, but it was really just her voice and her general good cheer and optimism and contentment that I discovered, and that's what unlocked it for me.
- [03:25]
A
You're a big believer in stoicism, as you mentioned, as is your main character, Adora. Where did you get into stoicism?
- [03:32]
B
I got into stoicism during my development hell, I will say in Hollywood. I needed some strategy to deal with the constant bewilderment and disappointment and wanting to control outcomes that I had no control over. And so I went to the ancient Greeks and discovered stoicism. And it really did help me. And so I very devoted to it still as kind of a strategy for managing life's inevitable disappointments and frustrations. And so I really wanted to somehow factor that into my new novel.
- [04:07]
A
My guest is Maria Semple, the author of the bestselling novel Go Gentle, about a New York City woman, a philosopher, who gets caught up in a crazy crime. So this woman is named Adora Hazard. What is happening when we first meet her?
- [04:20]
B
We first meet her, she is very happily single. She has moved into the Ansonia, and. And she has several other single women divorced of a certain age, who live on the same floor. And she is single. She is very happily single and kind of wildly contented because one of the principles of stoicism is to desire only what you have. And she is putting it into really good use. And so she has this kind of optimistic, contented existence. So unfortunately for her, that only lasts for about 20 pages, because then she meets a handsome stranger.
- [05:01]
A
I want to ask about the principle of Amor Fatih. She has a tattoo. What does that mean?
- [05:08]
B
It means to love fate. It's a Latin term, love fate, that the Stoics really liked, which basically means it's kind of a step beyond acceptance. It's perhaps radical acceptance. It's saying that anything that happens to you, you don't just accept it and say, oh, this is part of life. You love it, you're grateful for it. You use it as fodder to make Yourself a better person and a stronger person, a more resilient person. So it really is greeting all that life throws at you as kind of fodder for your imagination of how to make yourself a more positive and strong person.
- [05:50]
A
So when we meet Adore, is she struggling with anything or does she have it relatively together?
- [05:55]
B
Well, she has it together. It's first person, so we're hearing it from her point of view. And to hear her tell the story, she really has it together. But of course, usually first person narrators are somewhat unreliable. And that could be. Maybe the course of the novel is her discovering for herself as we discover, that perhaps she's not as contented as she believed herself to be.
- [06:20]
A
We learn that she works as sort of a moral tutor to these extremely wealthy children, and she applies stoic philosophy to them. Could you give us the example that is in the first part of the book? It's really funny.
- [06:32]
B
Yes. So she does moral tutoring for them every day after school. And the mother calls them in and explains that there's been a huge drama, which is that one of the sons, they've just returned from Paris, where one of the twin boys woke up early and got in line on the Champs Elysees, too, for a Louis Vuitton sneaker drop, you know, and he stood in line and bought the $2,000 sneakers while the other one slept through it. And so in jealousy, the. The second son went in, ordered a knife from room service, and cut out all the beading and embellishments of the sneakers. And so the boys are just really fighting. The mother is at her wit's end. And so Adora comes in to save the day to give them a philosophical lesson.
- [07:26]
A
What's her lesson? It's smart. It's interesting.
- [07:28]
B
Yeah. So. So the lesson is that. Is that what the stoics called externals, which is things that are outside of your. Your kind of your character, anything that's not your own personal virtue that they are in the world, that they are inevitably gonna cause you unhappiness if you chase them. And so she uses this example of much suffering these sneakers caused. And she says, why now? Why don't we want externals? And the boy says, oh, because you might not get them? And she says, no, it's even more intense than that. It's. If we. Even. If we get them, they cause us suffering because we want to hang on to them, we want to keep them. And if we invest all of our happiness into these externals, we are living in a state of anxiety like look what happened to these sneakers. You know, they got destroyed. And if they didn't get destroyed, maybe there'd be a new cooler drop that happens. And then you'd have last year's sneakers, or they could get dirty or you could lose them. And so they put you in this state of kind of anxiety that you're going to lose this external thing that you believe is responsible for your happiness.
- [08:37]
A
How did you come up with a sneaker drop to explain that?
- [08:42]
B
Oh, you know, I think that I just. I think I just read somewhere about Pharrell, had these sneakers that were beaded. I think I saw a picture of them, and I think I like the idea of these beaded sneakers being so garish to look at. You kind of had to avert your eyes and they're sitting on the coffee table as the center of this philosophical discussion, you know, about character and what life means. I thought it just seemed like a very funny visual for someone, you know, for the readers to imagine these awful looking sneakers in the middle of. Or delightful looking sneakers, I suppose. But just these garish objects, you know, as the cause of suffering seemed funny to me.
- [09:22]
A
This wealthy family that Adora works for, the Lockwoods, they're sort of a caricature of old money. The architecture, they collect art, the staff they recruit from the Mossad, but at the same time, you make them sympathetic. How did you approach creating this family?
- [09:40]
B
I knew I wanted them to be unbelievably wealthy for, you know, for reasons that will, you know, factor in in the book later, as you'll see. And. And I also really wanted to symbolize people who believe that money will buy them happiness. You know, when I'm putting my. My kind of chessboard together, that seems like a very important kind of value to. To include. And so I think that in terms of sympathy, you know, I. I really always try to find a comic hook in myself. Maybe something that's shameful or something that I'm trying to hide from the world or something I'm not proud of. And so usually my kind of satirical characters, let's say that I will assign them something that I really relate to. And so I can't really hate on it that much. You know, I have, like, a way in where at least I understand it, you know, and so I think that's why, even though they're, you know, they're kind of extreme in the way the mother dresses is kind of funny and the way she talks and the values, I think that there is humanity to all of them. And what I will also say is that if I do start out being a little tough on characters, I kind of get bored with that as I write. And I always know that there's gonna be a big kind of twist of humanity that we didn't see coming, you know, because otherwise it's not interesting to read and it's not interesting to write.
- [11:13]
A
My guest is Maria Semple, the author of the best selling novel Go Gentle, about a New York City woman, a philosopher, who gets caught up in a crazy crime. Okay. She lives in the Ansonia. How would you describe the Ansonia in your book?
- [11:30]
B
The Ansonia is a grand former hotel, residential hotel that has enormous history in it. It was where the. It was. Babe Ruth lived there. Enrico Caruso lived there. Florence Ziegfeld lived there. It is the home of the. It was the home of the Continental Baths, the first gay bath house where Bette Midler got her start with Barry Manilow on the pianos. That then turned into Plato's retreat, the famous 70s swinging place where couples would come in from the suburbs. So it's this beautiful building that you can't. When you mention it, everyone knows what it is. It's this striking building in New York, a Beaux Art gigantic building that takes up the whole block and it's now condominiums and very kind of mix of high and low, of rent control. And then someone who's not rent control will have bought up seven apartments and built this like, massive palace to art. And so it's just a fun, very New York building, I thought. And so I wanted to inhabit it with Adora and her single women friends who've put together what they describe as the coven, which is women who are all single and gonna kind of take care of each other as they get older.
- [12:54]
A
Well, we're gonna ask you to read a little bit from your book about the Ansonia, about the coven. Would you set this up for us?
- [13:01]
B
Yes. Thank you. So Adora on the first day at work and the inciting incident of the book is that a new apartment has become available on her floor. And so she goes to work that day and there's a landscape architect who she has seen around the Lockwood mansion. And she's always been intrigued by her. And so it occurs to her that maybe she should be the one to join the coven. So this is the scene when Adora approaches Blanche, the landscape architect. An apartment just came up on my floor. And you're thinking of buying it? Blanche said, no, I'm thinking of you buying it. Gee, said Blanche, are you single? I asked. I am. Well, so am I. Two of my friends, single women, have bought apartments on the same floor. The idea is to grow old in curated company. How lesbian are we talking? Blanche asked. Not lesbian at all. It could be, I suppose, but it's never come up. Blanche gave me a hard look. This seems like a big move, asking me to come live with you. True, I said. And I could make a spreadsheet listing your pros and cons, comparing them to everyone else's pros and cons, but that would be an illusion. I've learned the hard way that when life leaves you for dead, it's always the thing you never saw coming. You're fun, blanche said. When did you decide I was the one? This morning when I saw your badge. Spontaneous you, Blanche said. Must be nice. It is, I had to admit. Every morning I open my eyes and say to the universe, surprise me. So literally, Blanche said. If it was someone else's badge, you'd have asked her. No, no, no. Intuition tells me you'd be perfect. We want women like us. Women who present as scary but have good hearts. Women who know how to get stuff done. Women who, despite our age, share a dirty little secret. We're just getting started.
- [15:16]
A
That was Maria Semple, reading from her new novel, Go Gentle Adora encounters Digby. What characteristics did you want Digby to have when we first meet him?
- [15:31]
B
I wanted. I wanted to really bring out the flirt in Adora, I feel. I once read that flirtation was enjoying yourself in the company of another, and I thought that was so beautiful and tender that I knew that I was starting with stoic, who kind of by definition is guided by reason and perhaps a little cold. And we learn kind of why she got this way over the course of the book. But I thought that it would be really lovely for an older single woman to just kind of fall in love with herself in the company of another. So Digby is a man of mystery, is totally locked in on Adora, and is completely delighted by her. And they have a very quick repartee that picks up instantly and that kind of reveals sides of herself that are joyful and kind of sexy that she didn't know she had anymore at first.
- [16:41]
A
And I understand this will change a little bit, but he does seem a little sketchy.
- [16:46]
B
Yes, yes. Well, he goes from sketchy to sketchier. I will say. It's definitely of the sketch scale of this guy. It just keeps changing. But so. Yes, exactly. And I think that he's certainly irresistible in the beginning, just in terms of just how much fun they have together. But I did want to kind of push the sketchiness factor to show kind of how thirsty it turns out that she is for love. That this is a woman who claims that she desires only what she has. But then when love crosses her path, she really eschews reason, you know, which is what her whole existence is based on, to go chasing after the chaos of love. And I thought that that would be a really fun story, you know, for the reader to be following in.
- [17:38]
A
Go gentle. There are flashbacks to when Adora was a TV writer for shows and she has a very difficult time. How did her experience change her? It was a very difficult experience she had.
- [17:54]
B
Yes. Is I flashback to a time when she's in her 20s and I wrote her during this flashback as someone who's completely motivated by bad values, which is, I think we all kind of are in our 20s. You know, she's seeking status, she's seeking. She just wants to be thin at all costs. She is like a lot of food, noise and she is really an internalized misogynist. And she throws women under the bus just to get in with the power center, which at the time was always men. She was, you know, wanting to get in with them. And so this was something that she's kind of blindly chasing and then a sexual assault happens and this, it really devastates her and has just really big consequences. And this drives her to find something else and something deeper that's going to get her out of the shame, the paralysis, the. The hopelessness that she feels. And so she kind of grasps onto this philosophy of self reliance and resilience. And we learn that when we meet her in the beginning of the book. It's really that this is who we now understand Adora to be as someone who's kind of perhaps overcorrected in embracing reason as a way of life because the passion had burned her so badly.
- [19:37]
A
I have two more questions for you. The first thing is, do you usually have the whole plot figured out when you sit down to write the story?
- [19:46]
B
No, I usually know the end of the story. I know the end. Even if it's the emotional arc of it. I know. I know where I want to get to. So the whole thing is this kind of elaborate reverse engineering project, but within that I have no idea where it's going to go. I didn't know that there would be this flashback. I didn't know of a lot of the plot twists, but I know where I want to get to on an emotional level. So it lands in a really satisfying place.
- [20:14]
A
And what does the title of the book mean? Go Gentle.
- [20:18]
B
Oh, go gentle. Well, it's a Dylan Thomas poem. Do not go gentle into that good night. Old age should burn and rave at close of day. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. And it's a poem that Dylan Thomas wrote for his father on his deathbed. And it's basically saying, don't give up. Like, rage at the end of day, at close of day. And as a woman who. When I started this book, I was in my late 50s, and I feel like I'd kind of lost my status as a child bearer in society, that I'd already kind of served my purpose for this species. I was this kind of invisible older woman, you know, who it really felt like society is telling you in not so subtle ways, like, go away. We don't want to look at you anymore, you know, but at the same time, I felt at the top of my game. I felt happier than I've ever been. I felt smarter and. And more clear than I've ever been. Just more loving. So much more to give. And I really felt like that was. I wanted to write and explore in this book is that women of a certain age that. That they are kind of told to go gentle into that good night, but in fact, they want to burn and rave at close of day, you know, and that's really what. What I see. My friends and the women, I feel like, are just peak, you know, they just keep peaking the older they get. So that really is what it's about. It's also a little bit about that Adora's journey is from being going hard on herself to going gentle on herself. And it's about forgiving herself.
- [22:02]
A
I'm with you on that one. The name of the book is Go Gentle. It's by Maria Semple. Thank you so much for joining us.
- [22:09]
B
Thank you for having me. I really had fun. And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go
- [22:16]
A
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