Best Of: Actor Amanda Peet / Re-examining Toni Morrison

Summary

Fresh Air Weekend: Best Of - Amanda Peet & Re-examining Toni Morrison
Date: April 18, 2026
Host: Terry Gross, Tonya Mosley

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Episode Overview

This "Best Of" episode of Fresh Air features in-depth interviews with actor/writer Amanda Peet and Harvard professor/author Namwali Serpell. The show first delves into Peet’s new film Fantasy Life, her struggles with aging in Hollywood, and the intense personal challenges she faced navigating a cancer diagnosis alongside the terminal illness of both her parents. In the second half, Serpell offers a fresh scholarly perspective on the acclaimed novelist Toni Morrison, exploring the legacy, critical misreadings, and the enduring power and “difficulty” of Morrison’s work.

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Amanda Peet: Career, Aging, and Personal Resilience

Amanda Peet on “Fantasy Life” and Hollywood Ageism

Timestamps: 01:29 – 13:21

• Peet’s Recent Roles:

  • Lead in the award-winning film Fantasy Life and co-star of Apple TV’s You, Friends and Neighbors.
  • Former co-creator/showrunner for Netflix’s The Chair, highlighting her transition to writing and producing.

• Scene from Fantasy Life

  • Peet plays Diane, a once-successful actress wrestling with career decline and depression.
  • Notable moment:
    • Diane (Peet): “I won an Obie.”
      Kim (Agent): “He has Alzheimer’s, Diane.”
      [05:03]

• On Aging and the Pressure for Cosmetic Surgery

  • Peet addresses the near-constant internal debate about cosmetic procedures:
    • “I probably think about getting a facelift or something every other day, if not more. ... It goes straight to thoughts about death.” [07:56]
  • Shares a fable connecting elective surgery to existential anxieties (the "Appointment in Samarra" story) [08:55].

• Authenticity vs. Hollywood Standards

  • Peet recounts a premiere encounter:
    • “An older, quite beautiful woman … said, I love your wrinkles. And I found that to be really depressing, actually.” [10:44]
  • Terry Gross reinterprets the encounter as a celebration of authenticity.

• Navigating Depression and Mental Health

  • Peet on depression’s everyday presence:
    • “I’m no stranger to depression and no stranger to anxiety. … These notions and labels have been batted around in my head and in my household all my life.” [12:03]
  • Appreciates Fantasy Life’s nuanced portrayal of “average, expectable” mental illness, as opposed to extreme cinematic depictions.

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“You, Friends and Neighbors” & Family Dynamics

Timestamps: 13:21 – 18:32

• On Middle-aged Female Representation

  • The Apple TV series addresses perimenopause, changing sexuality, and maternal anxieties:
    • “Your character is dealing with perimenopause, anxiety, rage, sexual changes. … TV movies are starting to catch up with real life.” [16:30]

• Art Imitating Life

  • Peet draws direct parallels between her screen character’s challenges and her own family:
    • “Some of those scenes with my adolescent daughter Isabel were really way too close to home as well. … I definitely put too much pressure on [my daughter].” [17:04]

• Her Path vs. Her Parents’ Wishes

  • Peet recalls her parents were deeply skeptical of her acting ambitions:
    • "No, they were concerned and they didn't want to pay for anything ... it just wasn't a part of the conversation." [18:04]

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Cancer, Loss, and Writing Through Grief

Timestamps: 18:32 – 22:47

• Overlapping Crises

  • Peet was diagnosed with stage 1 luminal B breast cancer while both her parents were in hospice—on opposite U.S. coasts, divorced and dying simultaneously.

  • Her response:

    • “I didn’t really have that why me? thing. Maybe it’s because I’m Jewish. I’m just sort of always waiting for the other shoe to drop. So in this case, it was three shoes.” [04:44, repeated at 03:05 and 19:26]

• Family Support and Finding Beauty Amidst Pain

  • “There were really beautiful things that came out of it. Even my mom’s death … there’s no way to describe. It was very scary, but it was also very beautiful.” [20:54]

• Coping Through Writing and Ritual

  • Peet used writing, family time, and Jewish rituals to process grief, emphasizing the catharsis and connection found in sitting shiva with her sister:
    • “We looked at pictures of her and read things that she’d written. I was writing a lot and we were laughing a lot.” [22:47]

• Closing Gratitude:

  • “Thank you so much, Terry. This is a dream come true.” [23:00]

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TV Review: “Margot’s Got Money Troubles” by David Bianculli

Timestamps: 23:33 – 29:50

(Key highlights for context; segment focuses on the adaptation process, central performances (Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer, Nick Offerman), and the series’ balance of realism and melodrama in its depiction of family and financial adversity.)

• Memorable quote:
  • "Fanning throws herself into this role in a way that's both vulnerable and empowering, and it's an enthralling performance to witness." [29:10]

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Namwali Serpell: Rethinking Toni Morrison’s Legacy

Timestamps: 30:02 – 47:21

The Burden and Freedom of Morrison’s “Difficulty”

• On Morrison’s Critical Reception

  • Serpell re-examines the notion that Morrison is “difficult” — as a writer and a person.
    • “I have been called difficult more times in my life than I can count. But I only began to…discover the meanings and uses of my own difficulty because of Toni Morrison.” [31:37]
  • Examines how this label is often a projection or a misreading by critics unwilling to meet Morrison’s work on its own terms.

• Writing for Black Readers: Literary Centrality and Misreadings

  • Morrison’s artistic independence was inspired by African writers who did not explain their culture to presumed white audiences:
    • “I don’t actually have to translate all the elements of my culture.” [36:53]
  • The American literary tradition’s origins meant Black writers often had to address external audiences; Morrison’s liberation came through centering Black experience for Black readers.

• Endemic Racism in Criticism

  • Serpell discusses a shocking New York Times profile:
    • “She will often put on an act, suddenly get down and be very chicken and ribs, sucking her teeth, poking a finger into her scalp and scratching. A strange primitive gesture...” [37:41]
    • Serpell: “I just thought, how could you possibly talk about anyone in terms like that? A Black woman...of Toni Morrison’s stature and genius. … Incredibly racist.” [37:41]

Morrison’s Monumentality & Literary Versus Personal Legacy

• On “Making a Saint” of Morrison
  • Current reverence risks fossilizing Morrison, making her “too far away to actually read.” [45:29]
  • Morrison herself preferred a living legacy, such as a library room for reading, rather than statues or memorials:
    • “What Morrison wanted most of all was for people to read and to read her…” [47:16]

Sula, Blackness and Friendship

• Distinctiveness Within Blackness

  • Morrison illuminated not just the boundaries between white and Black, but the diversity within Black experience:
    • “Pilate says, ‘Black may as well be a rainbow.’” [42:12]

• On Sula’s Devastating Last Line

  • Serpell describes how the book’s ending — Nell’s epiphany about losing her friend — never fails to move her:
    • “When that sentence comes into my life…tears always spring to my eyes. It’s just such an incredible evocation of what it feels like to lose the love of your life, which is your friend.” [44:54]

• Serpell on Her Own Identity

  • Navigates race and Blackness from a Zambian and African-American perspective, relating deeply to Morrison’s sense of “centrality”:
    • “I have a kind of awareness that black and brown people are the majority of the world. And Morrison somehow managed to have that same powerful sense of centrality and black as the default.” [39:45]

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Notable Quotes

• Amanda Peet on Fate and Cancer:
  “I didn’t really have that why me? Thing. Maybe it’s because I’m Jewish. I’m just sort of always waiting for the other shoe to drop. So in this case, it was three shoes.” [04:44]
• Namwali Serpell on Morrison’s Critical Reception:
  “It’s almost as though her personality or her Persona or the projections that we put on a black woman writer, a black woman genius, were getting in the way of people actually thinking about the work.” [31:54]
• Serpell on Sula’s Last Line:
  “When that sentence comes into my life … tears always spring to my eyes.” [43:57]
• Amanda Peet on Surgery and Mortality:
  “If I were to actually do an elective surgery to look younger, … my cancer would come back, or I would get Parkinson's… it’s almost like… if you lack gratitude for having health…something bad happens.” [07:56]
• David Bianculli on Elle Fanning in Margot’s Got Money Troubles:
  “Fanning throws herself into this role in a way that's both vulnerable and empowering, and it's an enthralling performance to witness.” [29:10]

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Segment Guide with Timestamps

| Segment | Timestamp | | ------------------------ | ------------------ | | Amanda Peet Interview | 01:29 – 22:47 | | “Margot’s Got Money Troubles” Review | 23:33 – 29:50 | | Namwali Serpell Interview (Toni Morrison) | 30:02 – 47:21 |

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Tone and Highlights

The episode is marked by the signature intimacy and candor of Fresh Air. Peet’s discussion is personal, honest, and often wry, punctuated by vulnerability and humor about aging, anxiety, and grief. Serpell’s interview is incisive and deeply thoughtful, challenging received wisdom about Morrison and inviting listeners to come to Morrison’s writing anew, with openness and curiosity rather than reverence. Throughout, Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley guide the conversations with empathy, wit, and intellectual depth.

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This episode is essential listening for those interested in contemporary discussions around art, gender, race, grief, and creativity. Both interviews provide profound insight into living authentically through adversity and the power of art to remake how we see ourselves and each other.

Transcript

[Unknown Speaker 1]

What happens when our political party becomes the prism through which we see every other aspect of our identities?

[Unknown Speaker 2]

What we're living through, I think, is really the two parties taking opposite sides on whether we want to keep making this type of social progress or whether we want to go back in time.

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Listen to NPR's Code Switch podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts

[Unknown Speaker 2]

from.

[Tonya Moseley]

WHYY in Philadelphia, this is FRESH AIR weekend. I'm Tonya Moseley. Today, Amanda Peet, she's in the new film Fantasy Life and the series you, Friends and Neighbors. Peet is also a writer. In a recent piece in the New Yorker, she writes about being diagnosed with breast cancer while both of her parents were near death.

[Amanda Peet]

I didn't really have that why me? Thing. Maybe it's because I'm Jewish. I'm just sort of always waiting for the other shoe to drop. So in this case, it was three shoes.

[Tonya Moseley]

Also, we'll talk about Toni Morrison with Harvard professor Namwali Serpell. She says no matter how many times she returns to Morrison's work, she finds something new. She's still haunted by the last sentence of the novel Sula.

[Namwali Serpell]

When that sentence comes into my life, tears always spring to my eyes.

[Tonya Moseley]

And David Biancooli reviews the new Apple TV series, Margot's Got Money Troubles, that's coming up on FRESH AIR weekend. This is FRESH AIR weekend. I'm Tonya Mosley. Terry Gross has our first interview, and here she is.

[Terry Gross]

My guest is actor and writer Amanda Peet. She first became known for her roles in the 2000s in films like the Whole Nine Yards, Igbee goes Down, Syriana and the Nancy Myers film Something's Gotta Give, always bringing intelligence and wit to her performances. She also co starred on television in shows like Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, the HBO series Togetherness, the recent reboot of Fatal Attraction, and now the Apple TV series yous Friends and Neighbors, which recently started its second season. The show is about Coop, played by John Hamm, a hedge fund manager who was pushed out and now makes his money by stealing from his neighbors in a rich suburb of Manhattan. Amanda Peet plays Mel, his ex wife, a former therapist who's struggling with aging, the loss of her career and her deteriorating relationship with her teenage kids. Pete also stars in the new film Fantasy Life, which won the Audience Award at the south by Southwest Film Festival. Amanda Peet won the special jury prize for acting. She plays a formerly successful New York actress who starts a relationship with the 20 something former paralegal who who's babysitting her children. Amanda Peet is also a great writer. She was co creator and showrunner of the Netflix series the Chair starring Sandra oh. And she recently wrote an essay in the New Yorker about how she was diagnosed with breast cancer at the same time both of her parents were dying. They were divorced and living on opposite coasts under home hospice care. Amanda Peet, welcome to FRESH air.

[Amanda Peet]

Thank you so much, Terry. It's an honor to talk to you.

[Terry Gross]

It's an honor to talk to you, and I'm glad to hear that you're doing okay. Just so listeners aren't like, in suspense, even though you had a second lump that was found that was benign and your diagnosis turned out to be, was it like stage zero?

[Amanda Peet]

I have stage one, stage one, luminal B, high risk, one lobular breast cancer. Or had it?

[Terry Gross]

I should say yes. And most importantly, you are cancer free now.

[Amanda Peet]

Cancer free and extremely lucky.

[Terry Gross]

Congratulations. I'm really happy for you and I'm really sorry about your parents.

[Amanda Peet]

Thank you very much.

[Terry Gross]

So we'll talk about that New Yorker

essay and your parents and your breast cancer all coinciding later. Okay.

But I want to start with your work. So I want to play a scene

from Fantasy Life, and you play Diane Cohn, an actor who used to be,

you know, used to have some success,

but you haven't worked in a few years and you feel like a has been. You're so depressed, you're having trouble getting out of bed and participating in life. And in this scene, you're having lunch with, with your agent to talk about your career. So you speak first.

[Amanda Peet]

I've just, I'm feeling a little discouraged.

[Kim (Agent character in Fantasy Life)]

Oh, you mean acting wise. Yeah. Let's process.

[Amanda Peet]

Thank you.

[Kim (Agent character in Fantasy Life)]

Sure.

[Amanda Peet]

Basically, I feel like nothing's happening

[Kim (Agent character in Fantasy Life)]

and nothing's gonna happen. Well, I mean, can you say more?

[Amanda Peet]

Cause I ran into Bob Hempel at the gym the other day, and he

[Kim (Agent character in Fantasy Life)]

didn't even recognize me. Kim, how is that possible?

[Amanda Peet]

I won an Obie.

[Kim (Agent character in Fantasy Life)]

He has Alzheimer's, Diane. What? Heartbreaking.

[Namwali Serpell]

Oh, God.

[Kim (Agent character in Fantasy Life)]

Family's having a hard time.

[Namwali Serpell]

Jesus.

[Amanda Peet]

I'm so sorry.

[Kim (Agent character in Fantasy Life)]

I mean, all right, what else?

[Amanda Peet]

Ah, I don't know.

[Kim (Agent character in Fantasy Life)]

Listen, it's gonna take a little time. Babe, we're reintroducing you to everyone.

[Amanda Peet]

Just thought it would move a little faster.

[Kim (Agent character in Fantasy Life)]

No, I know. I still think creating content is a great idea. You know, a podcast or a pilot, it's just, it's good to have something.

[Amanda Peet]

I think I just want auditions.

[Kim (Agent character in Fantasy Life)]

If I could say, hey, check out this hilarious pilot Diane wrote.

[Amanda Peet]

Kim, Am I too old?

[Kim (Agent character in Fantasy Life)]

What? Absolutely not.

[Amanda Peet]

I look in the mirror, and I just. It doesn't. It doesn't seem right. And yet I look at other women who did stuff, you know, a decade ago, and it doesn't seem right. But I just.

[Kim (Agent character in Fantasy Life)]

Okay, here's what's not gonna happen. You're not gonna touch your face. You are gorgeous, Diane. You're a real woman. Stunning. Could you just give me one second? Yeah, yeah, of course.

[Interviewer (Namwali Serpell's interviewer)]

Put him on.

[Terry Gross]

That's a great scene.

I love the suggestion.

[Amanda Peet]

Wait, you can create content. Podcasts. Way too close to home.

[Terry Gross]

Is it.

[Amanda Peet]

Oh, my God. I mean, listening to it, it's really just triggering.

[Terry Gross]

What was the period in your life

where you were feeling like, Diane, that you were, like, over the hill, that you looked too old, you weren't getting roles?

[Amanda Peet]

I mean, definitely when Togetherness was canceled, at that point, I thought, okay, well, that's. That's. That. That's it. But, you know, actors think that a lot, so it just has a new. A whole new level of doom, I think when you're older and wrinkly.

[Terry Gross]

You know what kills me about that? There are so many people who are older. It's one of the biggest demographics in the country. Considerably older than you are. But if you want to live a life, you're gonna be older, even if you're not yet. And, like, you're, what, in your early 50s? I mean, there's 54. There's so many people that age. It's a demographic. You can sell your movies to those people.

Why would you. Why would you leave them out?

It just makes no sense. Make movies they want to go to.

[Amanda Peet]

Yeah. Which I thought when I read the script was one of those.

[Terry Gross]

It was, for sure. Yeah.

And do you also relate to the

whole idea of, like, does this mean I need facework done?

[Amanda Peet]

I mean, I probably think about getting a facelift or something, you know, every other day, if not more. It's on my mind constantly because a lot of my friends have done it. A lot of them haven't, but a lot of them have. And I know we were supposed to talk about death later, but I can't seem to just think about a facelift and changing my face. It goes straight to thoughts about death. And what's the connection? I have almost, like, this superstitious thing that if I were to actually do an elective surgery to look younger, I would immediately get my cancer, would come back, or I would get Parkinson's or. It's almost like recently I was thinking about. My dad loved that ancient fable, Appointment in Samarra. Do you know that?

[Terry Gross]

I don't.

I know the title.

[Amanda Peet]

It's a merchant servant in Baghdad. And he goes to the market and he sees Death and gets spooked. And so he runs back to his master and says, I need your horse. I need to run off to Samara because I just saw Death and I'm so scared. And later, the merchant goes back to the marketplace and says to Death, why did you scare my servant like that? You shouldn't have done that. And Death says, no, I didn't mean to scare him. I was just startled. Cause I have an appointment with him tonight in Samarra. Oh, sorry. That was a really long winded answer to your face.

[Terry Gross]

Oh, no, but that's a good answer.

[Amanda Peet]

Something like that. Even if it's just in a spiritual way, not a literal way, that you would get ill from having somehow lacked gratitude for having health at this point.

[Terry Gross]

Yeah, no, I understand. Tell me what you think of this.

Here's my fear. With actors who have face work done,

your face is such an important tool,

and you have such really nuanced facial expressions in your acting.

And you can really see that in

Fantasy Life, your new movie.

And you have limited movement once you've

had facial surgery because your skin is pulled so tight.

[Amanda Peet]

Well, but let me tell you this. Yes, we had a little premiere for Fantasy Life. And afterwards, there was a little party. And as I was leaving, an older, quite beautiful woman stood up from across the room and yelled, amanda. She made a beeline for me and sort of opened her arms and said, I love. And I thought she was gonna say, your performance, because, you know, we were at the premiere party, and instead she said, I love your wrinkles.

[Terry Gross]

Oh.

[Amanda Peet]

And I found that to be really depressing, actually.

[Terry Gross]

No.

[Amanda Peet]

Like, in the car going back to the hotel, I was like, wow, is it getting to the point where not taking away my wrinkles is as distracting as if I got a weird pull or lift or whatever?

[Terry Gross]

Can I reinterpret that for you?

[Amanda Peet]

Okay. Please do.

[Terry Gross]

I love the idea that you haven't had a facelift.

I love the idea that you've kept your face, that you look like somebody who hasn't had work done. So where are you now? Just asking over and over what to do.

[Amanda Peet]

I just don't know where the line is because, you know, I get facials and I've, you know, I dye my hair, I go to the gym. I guess that's not the same. But I, you know, I do other things. So it's really it just exists on a continuum. And I hate a continuum because it's so messy. And I want to just be able to be purist because it seems like it would be much more relaxing. That's sort of my rant.

[Terry Gross]

In terms of relating to the character

that you play in fantasy life, do you relate to the depression?

[Amanda Peet]

Yeah, I do. I sometimes don't know what to call it, but I'm no stranger to depression and no stranger to anxiety. And I'm the daughter of a shrink. So these notions and labels have been batted around in my head and in my household all my life.

[Kim (Agent character in Fantasy Life)]

Yeah.

[Amanda Peet]

And I really loved the part of fantasy life that dealt with mental illness, but sort of more average expectable mental illness. Like usually we see, as Matthew Shearer always points out, like the Joker with all his pills or Girl Interrupted or, you know, people who are stark raving mad. But in this movie, these are just regular folks who sometimes get taken down. And I found that to be really beautiful and sort of rare. So that also spoke to me separately from the fact that she feels she's a has been, which also spoke to me.

[Tonya Moseley]

We're listening to Terry's conversation with Amanda Peet. She stars in the new movie Fantasy Life, which won the Audience Award at the south by Southwest Film Festival. She's also one of the stars of the Apple TV series you, Friends and Neighbors. We'll hear more of their conversation after a short break. I'm Tanya Moseley, and this is FRESH AIR weekend.

[Terry Gross]

Let me move on to youo Friends

and Neighbors, which is the Apple TV series that you star in with Jon Hamm. You play a divorced couple, and he, as I mentioned earlier, was a hedge fund manager but was pushed out. So he's basically stealing from wealthy neighbors who he feels like they have enough stuff. They won't miss this. They might not even notice that it's gone. And you're the mother of two children

and you still really care about each

other, but you've had a partner, he's had another partner. Things aren't really working out great on that end.

So in this scene, you're on the

steps of the family house that you used to share before you got divorced. Your daughter is a senior in high school who's gotten into Princeton, but she doesn't want to go. And you think that's crazy.

You got into Princeton and you're not gonna go.

You have to go.

So you've gotten her like readmitted to

Princeton after she rejected it. And so she's really angry with you and decides to move out and move in with her father, the Jon Hamm character. So here is your character and Jon Hamm's character talking about your daughter, who's just moved in with him.

[Amanda Peet]

How's your new roommate?

[Jon Hamm (Character in You, Friends and Neighbors)]

I'll let you know when she starts talking to me. How are you?

[Terry Gross]

You know, I've been better.

[Amanda Peet]

You know why she came to you, right?

[Jon Hamm (Character in You, Friends and Neighbors)]

Because I'm her father?

[Amanda Peet]

Because you're the vacation parent.

[Namwali Serpell]

The fun one.

[Jon Hamm (Character in You, Friends and Neighbors)]

Okay, are you mad because she's pissed at you or because she came to me?

[Amanda Peet]

Seriously, you were always at work. I was the one who had to hold the line. You'd maybe emerge for a couple of hours on weekends, but all bets were off. You never said no to her.

[Jon Hamm (Character in You, Friends and Neighbors)]

She was always so good.

[Amanda Peet]

She was good because I was on it. Brush your teeth, drink your milk, do your homework. Be home by 11. Get off your screens. You can't leave the house wearing that outfit. Whenever they came to you for permission, for something, you'd be like, what did mom say?

[Jon Hamm (Character in You, Friends and Neighbors)]

Yeah, because I was backing you up.

[Amanda Peet]

You were passing the buck.

[Jon Hamm (Character in You, Friends and Neighbors)]

Oh, please.

[Amanda Peet]

I gave everything I had to those kids, and somehow I'm the.

[Jon Hamm (Character in You, Friends and Neighbors)]

Well, if the shoe fits. Come on, girls push back against their mothers. It's a thing. It'll pass.

[Amanda Peet]

I guess you're just thrilled you get her all to yourself.

[Jon Hamm (Character in You, Friends and Neighbors)]

Well, it's not the worst. If I'm being honest, my house can be a little lonely. I mean, I lived with you guys for 18 years. It's honestly kind of nice to have her slamming doors and rolling her eyes

[Unknown Speaker]

at me, ain't it?

[Terry Gross]

The scene from youm Friends and Neighbors, Season two, Episode three, and you'd. Friends and Neighbors is streaming on Apple tv, so, you know, we were talking about available roles for women who are middle aged or older. And in this series, I mean, your character is dealing with perimenopause, anxiety, rage, sexual changes.

So I think TV movies are starting

to catch up with real life.

[Amanda Peet]

Yeah, I agree. And I feel very lucky that Jonathan Tropper, I have a male boss showrunner who's interested in bringing this to the foreground this season. So I was kind of blown away by that.

[Terry Gross]

So in terms of, like, relating to

your characters, like, your children are teenagers now, are you going through crises with them where they, like, fight back?

[Amanda Peet]

Oh, yeah. Some of those scenes with my adolescent daughter Isabel were really way too close to home as well. I think when we shot those scenes about Princeton, Frankie was applying to colleges. So I hope I wasn't as brutal with Frankie as I was with my TV daughter. But I definitely had a lot of anxiety around that. And she's my firstborn, so I definitely put too much pressure on her. But I could really relate to it. I could really relate to Mel's desperation and her this feeling that there is no other pathway. There's no other algorithm. If you're not doing Princeton, it's this or nothing. You know, that kind of absurd attachment to that status stuff, the name.

[Terry Gross]

And you took a different path than your parents. They weren't overjoyed that you wanted to be an actor?

[Amanda Peet]

No, they were concerned and they didn't want to pay for anything. You know, I wanted to have pictures taken, and I wanted to, you know, start going out looking for an agent. And they just basically said, like, when you're done with college, you can do what you want, but for now, you have to go to college. So it never occurred to me even to try to go to conservatory. Like, it just wasn't a part of the conversation.

[Terry Gross]

I want to get to the really

beautiful essay that you wrote in the New Yorker about how you were diagnosed with breast cancer. At the same time, your parents, who were divorced, were each in hospice. Home hospice on separate coasts. And the title was My Season of Ativan. I can understand why you were on Ativan. So as I said earlier, it turned out to be treatable with a lumpectomy and radiation, even though it's a very dangerous kind of cancer that you have. And so you're cancer free right now, which is beautiful.

[Amanda Peet]

Yes.

[Terry Gross]

A lot of people go through the

why me Scenario, and I'm wondering if you went through a version of how could it possibly be that both your parents were dying in hospice, and before all the tests came back, you thought you might be dying too, because it's a very aggressive form of cancer.

[Amanda Peet]

Well, to be honest, I was extremely lucky that I was hormone receptor positive and HER2 negative. So my cancer is luminal B, high risk 1 cancer, but it's not as aggressive as some other forms of breast cancer. So once I knew that, I knew that my cancer was going to be treatable. I just want to be clear about that. But I didn't really have that why me? Thing. Maybe it's because I'm Jewish. I'm just sort of always waiting for the other shoe to drop. So in this case, it was three shoes, but. But it was more just like. I mean, obviously I had a lot of meltdowns, but I was like, okay, roll our sleeves up. All hands on deck. You know, my sister was incredible. Who's a doctor. My sister's a doctor in Philly, actually, and her husband, who's at CHOP in Philly, they were sort of like. We had, like, almost like a team, I felt like, and a team around me. And it was. There were really beautiful things that came out of it. Even my mom's death with my sister and my mom's caregiver was just like. It's just. There's no way to describe. It was very scary, but it was also very beautiful.

[Terry Gross]

And your mother was living in a cottage just like, what, 20ft away from. From your home, so you could see her very frequently.

Yeah, but I was thinking not so

much of, like, why me? But how is it possible that these two deaths and, you know, and your cancer could coincide like that?

[Amanda Peet]

Yes, it was crazy. I mean, it was crazy. I think that's why I started writing initially, because I probably needed a way to organize or, like, harness all of the feelings, the bewilderment.

[Terry Gross]

You're Jewish, but you don't practice, right?

[Amanda Peet]

Well, we do Shabbat, and the kids were bat mitzvahed and Henry Louis bar mitzvahed, but I think it's not a religious affiliation as much as a cultural one. And, you know, we love the rituals. But my parents were both. My dad was a staunch atheist, and my mom, I don't think, believed in the afterlife. And so, yeah, we. I think just my sister being together with me for 12 days up until my mom died, I think that was our. We sort of felt like we had sat shiva. That was our shiva. I hope that's not blasphemous to say, but we kind of. We sat together for 12 days. We had never spent that much time together since before she left for college, we realized. And it was very beautiful. And we looked at pictures of her and read things that she'd written. And I was writing a lot and we were laughing a lot, and

[Terry Gross]

that

[Amanda Peet]

was our way of honoring her, I think.

[Terry Gross]

Well, I want to thank you so much for coming on our show.

It's just really been delightful to talk with you.

[Amanda Peet]

Thank you so much, Terry. This is a dream come true.

[Tonya Moseley]

Amanda Peetz stars in the new movie Fantasy Life. She spoke with Terry Gross. The new Apple TV series, Margot's Got Money Troubles, is Based on the 2024 novel by Rufi Thorpe. The show stars Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer and Nick Offerman. Our TV critic David Biancooli has this review.

[David Biancooli]

Margot's Gotten Money Troubles is created for television by David E. Kelly, who wrote or co wrote several of the eight episodes. Kelly's impressive TV career goes all the way back to LA Law, Ally McBeal, picket fences and Boston Legal. But more recently he's made a specialty of adapting other writers novels for tv. Those include Margot's Got Money Troubles by Roofie Thorpe, but also Kelly's adaptations of the novels Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers, both of which starred Nicole Kidman. She's in Margot too, playing a lawyer with a colorful background. But she's only one of many talented jewels in this show's crown. Others include Kelly's wife, Michelle Pfeiffer, currently starring in the Madison, Nick Offerman from Parks and Recreation, Devs and the Last of Us, and veteran stars Greg Kinnear and Marcia Gay Harden. Appearing with all of them in the title role is Elle Fanning, who was so great as a comic. Catherine the Great in the TV series called the Great Here she plays Margot Millett, a promising first year student at a California community college. Her eventually odious literature professor praises her writing, has an affair with her, gets her pregnant, then ghosts her. All within the show's opening episode, Margot decides she wants to have the baby anyway, which upsets her mother, Cheyenne, a flamboyant woman played by Michelle Pfeiffer.

[Kim (Agent character in Fantasy Life)]

You know me well enough when I get scared. God, when I got pregnant with you, I was terrified.

[Margot (Character in Margot's Got Money Troubles)]

You kept me a one night stand from a guy who picked you up at Hooters. I mean, what would possess you?

[Kim (Agent character in Fantasy Life)]

I thought he was the one. Your dad.

[Margot (Character in Margot's Got Money Troubles)]

You didn't even know his name. I guess I'm gonna have to tell dad. By the way, if I decide to keep it, promise that I keep him in the loop on the big stuff.

[Amanda Peet]

Yeah.

[Kim (Agent character in Fantasy Life)]

When was the last time you talked to him?

[Margot (Character in Margot's Got Money Troubles)]

Not in a while. Closer to never than recently.

[David Biancooli]

The dad, played by Nick Offerman, eventually shows up on Margot's doorstep. He's a former pro wrestler named Jinx, and his exploits inside the ring might sound like comic relief or a broad caricature, but like Margot's mother and Margot herself, these characters have depth and darkness and can be serious as well as amusing. When Jinx returns to reunite with Margot after hearing of her pregnancy, he confesses that he's come straight from rehab after years of drug abuse.

[Margot (Character in Margot's Got Money Troubles)]

How bad did it get?

[Unknown Speaker]

You know, I've had multiple surgeries on my spine over the years. Not taking the pain pills wasn't an option. Taking them as prescribed wasn't an option. Hoarding them, abusing them, taking a lot at once and then it was heroin. But I am determined. I'm desperate not to go back to that place.

[Margot (Character in Margot's Got Money Troubles)]

You know I love you.

[Amanda Peet]

Do you know that dad?

[David Biancooli]

The money troubles in the title mount up for Margot after her baby is born, and her unusual solution for paying the bills is to open an OnlyFans account. Some of the offerings and interactions on that site can be quite sexual and quite lucrative. Margot keeps it PG rated, first by writing playful prose, then by appearing in still photos, and finally by producing and starring in saucy sci fi themed videos. Her goal is to keep her source of income secret and completely apart from her private life. But that goal fails. And because Margot's Got Money Troubles is as realistic as it is fanciful, the ramifications of her actions are real and sometimes painful. She experiences shaming, regret, even legal troubles, which I mention only because in a single courtroom scene playing an eccentric judge, actor Paul McCrane almost steals the show from all these other powerful players. As a judge in a David Kelly drama, he's as much fun as Ray Walston was in Picket Fences. Even the characters you expect to be peripheral or one dimensional end up surprising you in this miniseries, and the dynamics of friends and family are equally complicated. Margot and Cheyenne yell at each other a lot, but they also demonstrate a delightful mother daughter bond during a road trip to Vegas in a convertible. They sing along with abandon as the car stereo blares a vintage song, a song that somewhat poignantly describes them both.

[Kim (Agent character in Fantasy Life)]

Okay, here comes our part

[Amanda Peet]

and if

[Terry Gross]

we're victims of the night

[Nicole Kidman (mentioned)]

I won't be blinded by the light Just call me angel of the morning angel just touch your teeth before you leave.

[David Biancooli]

Margot's Got Money Troubles includes instances of casual nudity, but they never seem gratuitous. Fanning throws herself into this role in a way that's both vulnerable and empowering, and it's an enthralling performance to witness. Nicole Kidman doesn't show up until halfway through, but wow, is she worth the wait. And when she and Pfeiffer finally get to share the screen, Margot's Got Money Troubles is pure gold. There are so many strong performances here and so many rich characters that it's riveting from start to finish. And in between those two points is one wild and brazen emotional ride.

[Tonya Moseley]

David Biancooli is Fresh Airs TV critic Coming up, Harvard professor Namwali Serpell on Toni Morrison. She spent 30 years within Morrison's prose and says, what if we've been missing

[Interviewer (Namwali Serpell's interviewer)]

the point of her work all along

[Tonya Moseley]

this is FRESH AIR. Weekend writer Toni Morrison died in 2019, and something interesting has happened since. The tributes haven't slowed down. They've accelerated. Publishers have reissued her novels. I come across her quotes on social media almost every day, and there's a real conversation happening right now about her legacy, what it means, and whether the reverence around her has gotten so massive that that it's actually getting in the

[Interviewer (Namwali Serpell's interviewer)]

way of the work itself.

[Tonya Moseley]

My next guest today, author and Harvard professor Namwali Serpell, has been reading Morrison since she was a teenager and teaching her for nearly two decades. And she's watched the critical conversations circle the same territory, Morrison's identity, her biography, her iconic status, while the genius of what Morrison was actually doing on the page hasn't really been examined.

[Interviewer (Namwali Serpell's interviewer)]

That gap is what has become her new book on Morrison, which moves through all 11 of her novels, from the Bluest Eye to God Help the Child, as well as Morrison's criticism, plays and poetry. Nawwali Serpell is a professor of English at Harvard University, and her own novels, the Old Drift and the Furrows, have won the Clark Award and been finalists for the National Book Critics Circle. Namwali, welcome to FRESH air.

[Namwali Serpell]

Thank you so much.

[Interviewer (Namwali Serpell's interviewer)]

Namwali, the word difficult, it has been used to describe both Morrison as a person and as a writer.

[Tonya Moseley]

And you write early in this book

[Interviewer (Namwali Serpell's interviewer)]

that, quote, I have been called difficult more times in my life than I can count. But I only began to understand, to discover the meanings and uses of my own difficulty because of Toni Morrison. What did Morrison show you?

[Namwali Serpell]

It's very interesting to look back at the way that an author was received at their time from the perspective of the 21st century, when we are surrounded by this kind of sense of Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate when you look at the earlier articles and interviews and reviews of her work, you find this notion of her difficulty appearing in all kinds of ways. It's sort of cropping up often in personal ways, describing her as a difficult personality. She's someone who is impatient with others. And it's actually come back into the contemporary discourse recently with some social media posts about her supposed meanness, quote, unquote. And I really was very curious about this because I felt I also have experienced this double personal, political and literary difficulty as a kind of accusation. And what I found is that Morrison had a similar kind of surprise, that there were moments in her career where she would be described as difficult or be kind of confronted with the difficulty of her works, and she sort of felt like she had been misread or misunderstood. Because what was really happening was a refusal of the reader to be open to what she was presenting. It's almost as though her personality or her Persona or the projections that we put on a black woman writer, a black woman genius, were getting in the way of people actually thinking about the work. So there's this wonderful moment in a Vogue profile where someone complains about the difficulty of understanding her work because he's just not familiar with African American culture. And she remembers saying, well, you must have had a hell of a time with Beowulf then.

[Interviewer (Namwali Serpell's interviewer)]

Right?

[Namwali Serpell]

Right. And there's a sense like, well, you know, difficulty in art is supposed to be there. So why does it keep being translated as this personality flawless?

[Interviewer (Namwali Serpell's interviewer)]

Well, I wanted to interrogate that a little bit more because, I mean, we know that Morrison was fully credentialed. She was a Random House editor, a Princeton professor. I mean, she's a Nobel laureate. But she's also talks about how African writers freed her because in reading them, they didn't have to explain anything to white people in their writing. And so when you talk about this difficulty that people have with her writing, it made me think, what does it mean to write from that place where blackness is assumed as the center? And what does a reader have to bring to access that.

[Terry Gross]

That's exactly right.

[Namwali Serpell]

I think there's an assumption of what needs to be explained or what needs to be translated, Even what sorts of ideas or messages are comforting to an audience that is very particular to being a black writer, to being an African writer. To being an African American writer. When she first starts working at Random House, one of her first projects was an anthology of contemporary African literature. And she's reading a lot of African literature, really for the first time, which is interesting, given the fact that one of her credentials is that she went to Howard University. But she went to Howard in the late 40s, early 50s. Right. So the syllabus then was still being decolonized, as we like to say now. And she really wasn't encountering African literature until she was living in New York, working in publishing. And she said that reading someone like Chinua Achebe, reading Bessie Head, reading Kamar Lai, she encountered writing by Africans that did not assume that you needed to explain your culture to. To the white audience that you were writing for. And this was something that felt very different to her from African American literature, which, if you think about just the birth of the tradition and the slave narrative, was pitched to white audiences. And because literacy had been denied to black readers, there weren't really black readers to read those slave narratives. So the tradition starts in a very different place. And she felt that reading African literature and seeing this new frame, it kind of gave her this sense of freedom. I don't actually have to explain. I don't actually have to translate all the elements of my culture.

[Interviewer (Namwali Serpell's interviewer)]

I want to ask you a little bit more about this misreading, though, from maybe just from the larger. From larger literary circles or media. So sometimes it just felt like the misreading felt like resentment. You Write about a 1979 New York Times profile, and Morrison had just won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon. And I want to read directly from that article. They described her as a big, handsome woman, often breathless, often late. She will often put on an act, suddenly get down and be very chicken and ribs, sucking her teeth, poking a finger into her scalp and scratching. A strange primitive gesture. What do you take from that?

[Namwali Serpell]

Oh, goodness. I mean, it's like a punch in the stomach. Whenever I read that, the first time I read it, my jaw dropped. I just. Or my mouth fell open. I just thought, how could you possibly talk about anyone in terms like that? A black woman in terms like that, and a black woman of Toni Morrison's stature and genius. It just felt. I mean, it just feels. I don't know how to put it, except just incredibly racist when I read that sort of thing and I show it to my students because I think there is an assumption that for Morrison to win the Nobel Prize, to be this widely acclaimed canonized author, means that she would have escaped this kind of racist rhetoric. And I think it's very important for people to understand what she actually had to confront, what she actually had to deal with, and how much more difficult it would have been for her to achieve what she did, given those obstacles, given that this is the voice of the New York Times, the liberal minded New York Times, doing this big profile of the. This black woman writer who's just won a major award is on her third novel. And this is the kind of rhetoric that's being used. Right. It's kind of remarkable.

[Interviewer (Namwali Serpell's interviewer)]

I want to talk about you a little bit as a writer and what brought you to this work.

[Tonya Moseley]

You describe yourself in this book as

[Interviewer (Namwali Serpell's interviewer)]

mixed race, born in Zambia, African American in the most hyphenated sense. And you note that you and Morrison share something, what you call the strange privilege of zooming out from or boomeranging around race. What does that mean?

[Tonya Moseley]

And how do you think it's kind

[Interviewer (Namwali Serpell's interviewer)]

of shaped the way you Read her.

[Namwali Serpell]

So when I was thinking about why I feel so drawn to Morrison in terms of the way she talks about racial politics, I was struck by the fact that we have very, very different upbringings. And my blackness as Zambian, my blackness as an American, we very different from hers. Growing up in Lorain, Ohio, and being someone who, as it turns out, never actually went to Africa, even though Africa is invoked a lot in her work. And what I realized is that as she perceived in the work of someone like Chinhua Che Bin, blackness is so central to the way that I conceive of the world, that there is a kind of. It's my default position. Because growing up in Zambia, you know, this is a majority black country. I'm surrounded by black people. I have a kind of awareness that black and brown people are the majority of the world. And so the sense that we are somehow a minority, which is very much the rhetoric in the United States, was really strange to me. And Morrison somehow managed to have that same powerful sense of centrality and black centrality and black as the default. She says, when I say people, I mean black people. And some people, when they hear that, feel rejected or that she's marginalizing non black people. But it's just. I think it's just like that's her default mode.

[Interviewer (Namwali Serpell's interviewer)]

She returns to this again and again in her writing. But what is distinctive is that it's not the border between black and white, but the differences within blackness itself. There's a moment in Song of Solomon where the character Pilates says, you think dark is just one color, but it ain't. There are five or six kinds of black. So Morrison seemed to be very interested in those distinctions within blackness. Which brings us to Sula, which was published in 1973. And so, for listeners who haven't read it in. Can you tell us what this novel is about, briefly? And then how Sula herself kind of embodies that insider, outsider idea.

[Namwali Serpell]

Yes. So Pilate says, black may as well be a rainbow. Which is a beautiful way of talking about the many internal varieties and differences within blackness. Not just the color, but also the culture. Sula is a beautiful story of friendship. It's really about the relationship between Nell Wright and Sula Mae Peace, who meet as young girls and fallen friends, is the phrase I like to use about it. And as they grow up in this fictional community, the bottom in the fictional town of Medallion, Ohio, you find them negotiating their relationships with the community, but also their relationship with each other as very different kinds of people. Right. Nell Wright is very she comes from a very orderly household, a very respectable household, whereas Sula comes from a kind of wayward, ramshackle environment.

[Interviewer (Namwali Serpell's interviewer)]

This novel ends in one of the most devastating lines Morrison has ever written. I mean, I guess it depends on your perspective, but from my perspective, Nell finally understands decades later as an old woman that what she has been mourning all of this time was not her late husband. It was her friendship with Sula. And I actually want you to read from your book a revelation that you had about this.

[Namwali Serpell]

There's this kind of incredible building in the last chapter of the novel toward this moment of revelation where Nell finally realizes, as she says, we was girls together. Oh, Lord, Sula. Girl, girl, girl, girl, girl. And the cry that she releases rises up in these circles of sorrow. And when that sentence comes into my life, whether I'm reading it to teach, whether I'm re reading it to write, whether I'm reading it out loud, even just now, tears always spring to my eyes. It's just such an incredible evocation of what it feels like to lose the love of your life, which is your friend

[Interviewer (Namwali Serpell's interviewer)]

Nimwali. Around the time that your book has come out, there's just been lots of discourse and discussion about Toni Morrison and her work. The New York Times produced a podcast and a piece of called Don't Make a Saint out of Toni Morrison, Wesley Morris. Their argument was that sanctification puts her too far away to touch, too far away to actually read. Which is also what you are saying, that she's being misread.

[Tonya Moseley]

But at the same time, does a

[Interviewer (Namwali Serpell's interviewer)]

book called Unmorrison risk becoming part of that problem?

[Namwali Serpell]

That's a really good question. I, in my book, make a similar argument to the discussion that was on the New York Times podcast. But rather than thinking about her as a saint, I am thinking about her and the way she's been turned into a monument. And I find it helpful to think about Morrison's relationship to monuments as a way of reframing how we think about her, because she was very skeptical of monuments in certain kinds of ways. And there's, for example, I visited Ohio, and I had the wonderful opportunity to go to Lorraine, where Morrison was born and grew up. And in Lorraine, the public library has a room dedicated to her. This was how Morrison wanted to be honored, by a room in a library filled with books where people could come and read, which isn't the same as having a statue or having, you know, a plaque attached to it, to a building they renamed a building at Princeton, Morrison Hall. And she sort of very wryly said that there's a kind of inevitability to that. She really liked the fact of this. But at the same time, I think it's very clear to me that what Morrison wanted most of all was for people to read and to read her, that that's actually what was so important.

[Interviewer (Namwali Serpell's interviewer)]

Namwali Serpell, thank you so much for this conversation and thank you for this book.

[Namwali Serpell]

Thank you so much for having me and thank you for these wonderful questions.

[Tonya Moseley]

Namwali Serpell is a professor of English at Harvard University. Her own novels, the Old Drift and the Furrows, have won the Clark Award and been finalists for the National Book Critics Circle. FRESH AIR Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. FRESH air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shurrock, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nakunde, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly CV Nesper with Terry Gross. I'm Tonya Moseley.