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

Summary

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso: Writer Hilton Als on Prince and ‘What Joan Didion Means’

Podcast Information:

• Title: Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso
• Host: Sam Fragoso
• Guest: Hilton Als
• Release Date: December 22, 2024
• Description: An intimate conversation with Hilton Als, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, exploring his works, experiences with Prince, and his new exhibition on Joan Didion.

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1. Introduction to Hilton Als

Sam Fragoso welcomes Hilton Als, highlighting his illustrious career at The New Yorker since 1994, his Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2017, and his influential profiles of notable figures like Toni Morrison and Maggie Nelson. Als's recent works include his novella My Pinup, which delves into themes of desire, sexuality, race, and his experiences with Prince, as well as his curated exhibition at the Hammer Museum titled Joan Didion: What She Means.

Notable Quote:

“My Pinup... explores desire, sexuality, race, and Prince.” – Sam Fragoso [00:21]

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2. Hilton Als’s Journey and Career Beginnings

Hilton Als shares anecdotes about preparing for his appearance on the show, revealing his tendency to arrive early due to anxiety about commitments. He discusses his longstanding relationship with writing, influenced greatly by his mother's unwavering support and encouragement.

Notable Quote:

“You walk into the situation listening and watching, and you don't interrupt the emotional panorama of what's happening.” – Hilton Als [05:07]

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3. Experiences with Prince

The conversation delves into Als's time on tour with Prince in 2004, as detailed in his novella My Pinup. Als describes Prince’s deep desire for approval and his vulnerability, contrasting the public persona with his private need for connection.

Notable Quotes:

“He really wanted our approval... that he did need other people.” – Hilton Als [06:32]

“He was so sweet... delightful to be with him.” – Hilton Als [08:17]

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4. Early Life and Upbringing in Brownsville, Brooklyn

Als reflects on his childhood in Brownsville, Brooklyn during the early '70s, growing up with his mother who was a member of the National Council of Negro Women and attended the March on Washington. He discusses the complexities of his relationship with his father and the early instances of expressing his identity through costume parties.

Notable Quote:

“There was no language and there was permission.” – Hilton Als [10:40]

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5. The Impact of Tragedy and Racial Violence

The discussion shifts to the September 1967 incident involving the death of Richard Ross, a 14-year-old black teenager. Als reads an excerpt from his essay Homecoming, published in The New Yorker in 2020, illustrating the cyclical nature of racial violence and its enduring impact on communities.

Notable Quote:

“The pattern, the circularity of history, it's unnerving.” – Hilton Als [15:29]

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6. Literary Influences and Joan Didion Exhibition

Hilton Als elaborates on his admiration for Adrienne Kennedy and Joan Didion, discussing how their works influenced his own writing. He explains the conception of his exhibition Joan Didion: What She Means at the Hammer Museum, emphasizing Didion’s honesty and her ability to articulate societal fractures through her writing.

Notable Quote:

“She was very interested in how what did this vulnerability mean? What did this life mean without the...” – Hilton Als [28:57]

“She articulates destabilization... How do we live through it? With language.” – Hilton Als [29:53]

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7. The Power and Elusiveness of Memory in Writing

Als and Fragoso discuss the role of memory in Hilton’s writing process. Als shares insights from his commencement speech at Columbia, emphasizing memory as both a dangerous and necessary tool for artists. He explains how his ability to control and select memories has evolved, enhancing his storytelling capabilities.

Notable Quote:

“Never disavow what you see and remember. It's your brilliant stock and trade.” – Hilton Als [39:20]

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8. Legacy and Hope

In the latter part of the conversation, Als contemplates his legacy and the ongoing search for hope amidst personal and societal challenges. He reflects on the impact of his mother’s unwavering hope and expresses optimism about his ability to create a meaningful legacy through his writing.

Notable Quotes:

“I feel like I'm just beginning.” – Hilton Als [45:30]

“Because every day that's given to me is the hope that I'll be able to tell the truth on the page.” – Hilton Als [45:35]

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9. Concluding Thoughts and Final Readings

Towards the end, Als shares excerpts from his works and Jean Reese's unfinished autobiography Smile, Please, emphasizing the struggle and necessity of writing as a means of personal and artistic expression. The conversation concludes with reflections on moving forward while honoring the past.

Notable Quote:

“If you stop writing, my life will have been an abject failure.” – Jean Reese (read by Hilton Als) [48:36]

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Key Takeaways:

• Authentic Observation: Hilton Als emphasizes immersing oneself fully in the subject matter, allowing genuine emotions and experiences to shape the narrative.
• Memory as a Tool: Memory plays a crucial role in Als’s storytelling, serving both as a source of inspiration and a mechanism for selective storytelling.
• Influence of Mentors: The support and influence of his mother and literary figures like Adrienne Kennedy and Joan Didion have been instrumental in shaping Als’s writing style and thematic focus.
• Legacy and Hope: Despite grappling with societal and personal challenges, Als maintains a hopeful outlook, believing in the power of truth-telling through his art.

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For More Information:

• Book: My Pinup by Hilton Als
• Exhibition: Joan Didion: What She Means at the Hammer Museum
• Listen to More Episodes: Talk Easy Podcast

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Note: This summary excludes all advertisements, intros, outros, and non-content sections as per the request.

Transcript

[Hilton Als]

Lemonade.

[Sam Fragoso]

This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fragoso. Welcome to the show. Today I am joined by writer Hilton Ailes. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2017 for his work at the New Yorker, where he's been on staff since 1994. In his three decades at the magazine, he's written seminal profiles of Toni Morrison, Maggie Nelson, and the late Andre leon Talley. Since 2012, he's been the magazine's lead theater critic. When he's not writing for the New Yorker, he's writing for himself. He's authored a handful of books, including the Women, White Girls, and his latest, My Pinup, an exploration of desire, sexuality, race, and Prince. He does all that in less than 50 pages in this new novella. And it's fairly characteristic of Hilton's work, which is marked by a kind of expansiveness, entwining memoir with literary criticism. Hilton has taken these qualities usually reserved for the page and recently brought them to the Hammer Museum, where he's organized a new exhibition titled Joan Didion what she Means. It's a stirring portrait of the late author, featuring more than 200 works of painting, photography, sculpture, video, and footage from a number of films for which Didion authored screenplays. For today, Hilton and I, of course, unpack these new projects around Didion and Prince, but we also discuss his upbringing in Brownsville, Brooklyn, where he grew up with his mother in the early 70s and quickly found writing. In fact, this episode is really the makings of Hilton owls and all the people that have shaped and formed the writer we know today. I hope you enjoy this talk as much as we did.

[Hilton Als]

Do you wanna. Are you too low?

No, I'm fine. Are you sure? Yeah, yeah, I'm fine.

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

It's okay.

Okay, I'm happy then if you're happy, I'm happy.

Good.

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

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

It's almost three years in the making.

I know. It better be good.

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

Yes.

A day before the taping?

Yes.

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

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

Call them a producer.

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

She said that? You said, oh, my God, this always happens.

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

You know. You took the circuitous path.

Yes, but it was the righteous one.

And with that, I think we can properly begin. Okay, why don't we start with this new two part memoir, My Pinup A Pian to Prince, which partly details your time with Prince on Tour back in 2004. When it comes to writing profiles, you've often looked to the words of photographer Diane Arbus for instruction.

Yes.

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

Yes. Isn't that brilliant?

It's just like everything she did.

Yeah.

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

You have to allow whatever is happening to happen. So years ago, the jazz great Cecil Taylor was doing a recording in San Francisco. One of the musicians came with his child and the child was running around and making a little noise and the musician was upset and Cecil said, don't stop him. It's what's happening. And I think that what Arbus meant is you walk into the situation not as a self, but as a person who is going to give yourself over to the situation and to the subject. And so by giving myself over to the subject, that means that I listened constructively. I had a brilliant mother who was a constructive listener. So you walk into the situation listening and watching, and you don't interrupt the emotional panorama of what's happening. You don't interrupt it with the eye. You sort of take on the story that the person is telling you. And so you morph with the storyteller. You are listening and you are engaged on a level where your eye disappears and you become part of their consciousness.

So inside Prince's dressing room.

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

But anyway, yeah, I mean, I think we've all had that. Yes, but once you're inside, what was the story he was trying to tell you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes.

And I wondered if you first understood that difference inside yourself around 1968. By then, you're eight years old in Brownsville, Brooklyn, with a family, as you write of West Indian women who raised their children in what social workers used to call socio isolation. And within that isolation, you began at age 8 to write in doing so was that your earliest instance of understanding that difference within yourself?

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

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

She would say, excellent, love mommy, or very good mommy.

Very generous editor.

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

How would you do that?

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

What were these costumes?

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

You know, did you find it acceptable? Did you have any complications around that later?

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

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

I think it would be fairer to say that I was pushing the limits of his capability, of his imagination. Yeah. That he wasn't really capable of love really on that level.

How do you mean?

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

And so they were on the most wanted list.

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

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

Yes. Which I refuse to look at again. I just couldn't look at it once more. Do you want to describe it to me or do you want to let me.

No, I don't.

Okay, good.

No, I don't want to.

Yeah, exactly. That's a human response.

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

Sure.

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

Marches, protests and the like were, we knew, a prelude to the racially motivated violence that had already cropped up in nearby Newark and other places such as Detroit. For sure, Brownsville would get more messed up if the cops were involved. That was how demonstrations became riots. I remember that night. Or was it late afternoon? Our mother walking us swiftly into the house and shutting all the doors and windows inside. It was lights out. The air was close. We could hear our hearts beating. Peeking from behind one of the living room curtains, I watched as the protesters started flinging bottles and stones at the cops. And our real world turned into a movie, a horror film in which everything we'd built together, home, hope, the illusion of citizenship, was torn to the ground. Black people, mostly men, were roaming the streets, periodically smashing car windows or overturning ash cans and torching rubbish. They were claiming what they felt to be a kind of freedom. As refugees, we knew that none of it belonged to us. Not that shop, not that newly built pigeon coop. Even as we knew that it did belong to us. Emotionally speaking, it was all part of our community. Still, why not trash a universe that has trashed you? I haven't read that in a long time. It's pretty good.

I think you should stick with it.

Thank you. Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

You used to be able to.

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

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

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

Your mother, for context, was a member of the National Council of Negro Women and had attended the march on Washington. Yes, you said that she always maintained hope. And here's the quote. Ma always had hope. But she knew that it helped change the world, her black world. But I had no clear examples growing up of what might make a difference in mine. Guns, death, poetry. Would any of it dismantle the economic discrepancies for instance, that defined our de facto underclass. That kept us scavenging for a lifeline, even if it was just a pair of sneakers snatched through a pane of broken glass. And I wondered if writing and then reading was that lifeline for you.

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

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

Oh, yes.

Written by the great Adrienne Kennedy.

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

You haven't seen the Matrix?

Mm, mm. I know.

I mean, you're not missing that much.

But okay, I'll try. I like the lady who's in it too. Carrie Moss. Yes, she's beautiful.

I like that. I'll try to watch the Matrix like it's a new dish or something.

I know. And in any case, she wrote this piece and it was performed at the Public Theater with her and a wonderful woman, both of whom are dead now. But Robbie McCauley was a great dancer, actress. And Adrienne Kennedy's work is about the convergence of fantasy and reality. The fantasy of movie stars, movie life, movie romance, and the reality of blackness, particularly for female characters. And often in her early plays, there's a lot to be said about where does that reality and that fantasy meet for her characters. So this is a wonderful, deeply brilliant play that I had adapted actually for the screen once, and it's called the Movie Star has to Star in Black and White. Bette Davis is one of the primary characters and she's played by a black woman, Bette Davis, to Paul, June, 1955. When I have the baby, I wonder, will I turn into a river of blood and die? My mother almost died when I was born. I've always felt sad that I couldn't have been an angel of mercy to my father and mother and saved them from their torment. I used to hope when I was a little girl that one day I would rise above them, an angel with glowing wings, and cover them with peace. But I failed. When I came among them, it seems to me I did not bring them peace, but made them more disconsolate. The crosses they bore always made me sad. That one reality I wanted never came true. To be their angel of mercy, to unite them. I keep remembering the time my mother threatened to kill my father with the shotgun. I keep remembering my father's going away to marry a girl who talked to willow trees. It's Adrian really speaking through this character about her family. And it's the projection of her soul and sensibility through Bette Davis that is so remarkable. Aside from the writing itself, which is very beautiful.

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

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

Dr. Freud says the session's up. We're good.

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

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

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

The power she had to not let the world validate her first. Were you inspired by that?

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

Ultimately, this seems tied to this sort of ongoing conversation about seeing yourself in the work. Would you seem to reject some of that notion that you need to explicitly see yourself?

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

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

Oh, yes.

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

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

This is Didion.

Mm. And then she goes to New York and she's working for Vogue, and she's having a pretty bourgeois. She's doing everything that's expected of her. And then she stops doing everything that's expected of her as she becomes a more serious writer and then moves back to Los Angeles during a time of great social upheaval. And I think it was that moment in her life that she became Joan Didion because she allowed for the fracture to be part of the story. She was no longer holding it together and writing the perfectly constructed novel like Run river, her first book. She understood that her voice and her feelings and her thought and her ethos was really kind of in sync with the times that she was living in. And I think she had such an incredible facility to not only chart the times that she was involved with, but to understand that her body was not separate from this fracture. Her thinking, everything that she had been raised to think and presuppose as a kind of bourgeois girl had to be jettisoned in order for her to be alive in the moment of her life.

In this life, Didion, more than just about any writer from the 20th century, is returned to again and again. Certainly one of the most. I wondered, why do you think that is?

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

She was someone that came of age as a Goldwater Republican.

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

And the Republicans have carried that tradition proudly.

Exactly.

Maybe my theory then is as someone who came from this Republican household in Sacramento, she had these very firm ideas and understandings of the world that were passed down to her by her parents. And then life does what it does, and she has this kind of lifelong ongoing public reckoning with herself. And the world around her.

Yes.

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

I think they also found the necessity of her voice. Right. I think that what she was brilliant at was articulating destabilization. How you become one thing based on assumed notions of the past. And this destabilization is a remarkable thing to live through. How do we live through it? With language, or how do we make language? To talk about this experience, it's impossible.

To pick a single passage.

I know she's so great, that captures.

All her abilities and interests. But I know this one piece which comes at the beginning of her novel, A Book of Common Prayer, means a whole lot to you.

Yeah, it does. Happy to read it. Chapter one, I will be her witness. That would translate Sere su testigo and will not appear in your traveler's phrasebook because it is not a useful phrase for the prudent traveler. Here's what happened. She left one man. She left a second man. She traveled again with the first. She let him die alone. She lost one child, to quote, unquote history, and another to quote unquote complications. I offer in each instance the evaluation of others. She imagined herself capable of shedding that baggage and came to Boca Grande a tourist. Una tourista. So she said. In fact, she came here less as a tourist than a sojourner. But she did not make that distinction. She made not enough distinctions. She dreamed her life. She died hopeful. In summary. So you know the story. Of course, the story had extenuating circumstances. Weather, cracked sidewalks and parago arena. But only for the living. I think that's such a remarkable piece of writing. And it says so much about how life is for those of us who are reading the book that she's writing. You know, it's a beautiful piece.

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

Yes, I don't think I was technically influenced by her, but I was certainly influenced by her interest in writing about women in fiction. Well, she. I mean, a lot of people don't read her later stuff, which is unfortunate. But if you look at novels like the last thing he wanted, democracy. These are all kind of romances about women who don't fit, who are away or outside of the status quo. Despite money or fame or whatever. And I think that one of the things that I love about her writing is this search for continuity, even though she knows it doesn't exist, and particularly in the fiction and her essays. Of course. I loved finding out that James Baldwin was one of her favorite writers, and they do stand side by side on the bookcase for me because of not only their voices, which are extraordinary, but their ability to take the political and to make it not only just personal, but a narrative.

[Sam Fragoso]

After the break, more from writer Hilton.

[Hilton Als]

Elsa Foreign.

[Julia Louis-Dreyfus]

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[Hilton Als]

I think it's clear by now with the show that I'm not exactly into chasing trends. But I am about stuff that fits right, feels good, and actually lasts. That's why I keep coming back to quints. Their lightweight layers and high quality staples have become part of my everyday essentials. Quint has the kind of stuff that you'll actually wear on repeat, like breathable flow knit polos, comfortable lightweight pants that somehow work for both weekend hangs and dress up dinners. The best part? Everything with Quince is half the cost of similar brands. I didn't exactly understand how they got to those prices when I went on the website, but then it became clear by working directly with top artisans and cutting out the middlemen. Quince is able to give you luxury products without the markups, and most notably, Quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices, not to mention premium fabrics and finishes. Stick to the staples that last with elevated essentials from quince. Go to quints.comtalkeasy for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Quinn's Q U I N C E.com Talkeasy to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quinn's.comTalkeasy and now back to the show. At what point, maybe it was becoming a staff writer at the Village Voice or a staffer at The New Yorker in 94. At what point did you feel like you found your voice?

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

I think we should probably read from that.

Sure. This is from an essay I wrote in 1990 called It Will Soon Be Here. The wall surrounding memory misremembered is clean and wide and high, similar in effect to the wall one finds in certain airports in other countries, clean and wide and high like that, banking in or letting go, those who want to remember clearly or don't. Passengers coming or going in the field of memory are a tangle of arms and legs, hands, hearts, hair and minds that if you do not stand too close or listen too carefully, speak a shared language remarkable in its oppressive loneliness, its denial. What a horrible memory. And so forth, regardless of where many of us believe we land in that field, encumbered by not too much baggage or entirely too much, we all come from the same place, which is a road rutted by experience so banal, nearly remarkable, that memory tricks us into remembrance of it again and again, as if experience alone were not enough. What are we to do with such a life, one in which we are not left alone to events, love, shopping and so forth, but to the holocaust of feeling that memory, misremembered or not, imposes on us?

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

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

As opposed to what?

Boring, you know, Laborious? Not interested? No, you're great.

We can't do that.

You're fantastic at this.

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

It becomes more and more handy in terms of telling stories. And your capability becomes stronger because your muscle becomes stronger in terms of control. And so I was talking about in that piece a kind of barrage of memory. But you become more selective in terms of what is useful to you as an artist, I think. And when I wrote that, I was sort of. I remember it was like the end of a love affair. And it was. I was very sad. And I was also trying really hard to understand what kind of writing I wanted to do or what kind of writing I was capable of, really. So that piece grew out of that idea of capability of loving this thing so much writing. I wanted to do the best I could by it. You know that it was an honor to be published. It was an honor to have an audience of any kind. It was and remains a deep mystery to me that I'm involved in and that I love, you know.

What do you mean by mystery?

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

When you wake up to write, you have a ritual, or you did, and.

It was to Wendy Williams. Wendy Williams, I love her, but she's not there anymore.

So how do you write?

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

Do you miss Wendy?

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

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

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

You'll find new inspiration.

Yeah. Yeah. But hopefully she'll come back. I'll be there to greet Her. If she comes back.

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

No. Never? Never. I wouldn't be interested if it got easier.

Why is that?

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

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

Yes. And that's the freedom, is that you're going to wake up and go to places that you couldn't anticipate.

You know, when you're not writing. What are you guilty about?

Our collective lack of humanity. Our lack of care for one another. Our lack of belief in one another as a species. Loneliness. People trying to connect and not connecting. Violence, anger. Isolation. A whole world of feelings to feel guilty about and not being able to make it better.

Somehow you feel like you need to.

Make it better, or. I would want to. I would like to. I think that's more accurate.

And you don't think you have?

I'm hoping so. I think that I'd live in. When I meet someone like you and you give me hope, I run with it because it's hope. It's a gift.

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

Sure.

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

Okay.

You said I never believed, not for one second, that art is created out of avoiding the world and its various realities. If you avoid that, you avoid life, which is your source material. You dishonor all your ghosts in the sunlight, including the person you were when I began this speech. The Columbia boys I knew and loved long ago. The politically oppressed poet who changed a face. And you dancing with my former self before we part. And you walk proudly into that sunlit hope, ghosts and all. And there's so much in that that I'd love to unpack. But I can't help but shake those last few words. Walking proudly into your sunlit hope, ghosts and all. And it dawned on me, one of those ghosts, at least now, must be your mother. She passed away back in 1989.

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

I think that was Kevin.

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

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

Yes.

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

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

So then, at the tender age of 62.

Yes. I feel like I'm just beginning.

Are you able to find hope on the page?

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

If you can do that, I'll get a boyfriend. Are you single?

Yeah.

You're single?

Yeah.

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

His OnlyFans account is.

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

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

I mean, we're making an OnlyFans joke, but is that something that's been on your mind, partner?

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

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

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

Know, like you have a chance at it. Seems so. It's not Asking for much?

No, no. Beautiful.

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

Yes. Just to hear what you're saying. To really be with your question.

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

To conclude, I'll be reading from Jean Reese's unfinished autobiography called Smile, Please.

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

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

At the end of her life.

At the end of her life, and she's writing a dialogue, talking about earning your death. Defense. It is untrue that you are cold and withdrawn. It is not true. Defense. Did you make great efforts to, shall we say, establish contacts with other people? I mean, friendships, love affairs and so on? Yes. Not friendships. Very much. Did you succeed? Sometimes. For a time. It didn't last? No. Whose fault was that? Mine, I suppose. You suppose? Silence. Better answer. I am tired. I learned everything too late. Everything was always one jump ahead of me. The phrase is not, I do not know, but I have nothing to say. The trouble is, I have plenty to say. Not only that, but I am bound to say it. Bound. I must. Why? Why? Why? I must write. If I stop writing, my life will have been an abject failure. It is that already to other people. But it could be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned death. Earned death. Sometimes, not often, a phrase will sound in my ear clearly, as if spoken aloud by someone else. That was one phrase. You must earn death. Death. A reward. Yes. Any other phrase? Yes. You will be helped.

Wow.

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

You really feel that?

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

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

Up today and thank you for the opportunity.

Actually, thank you for showing up both days. Hilton Ales Take care, Be safe. Sam.

Sa.

[Sam Fragoso]

And that's our show. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to give us five stars on Spotify, Apple, wherever you listen. I want to give a special thanks today to Stephen Barclay, Tucker Smith, New Directions Publishing, the Hammer Museum, and of course, Hilton Als. To learn more about his new book, My Pinup, or his new exhibition around Joan Didion at the Hammer Museum, be sure to visit our show [e-mail] if you enjoy today's conversation, I'd recommend our episodes with Margo Jefferson, Kehinde Wiley, Ocean Wong, Marina Abramovic, Antoine Sargent, George Saunders and Jennifer Egan. To hear those and more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever, wherever you like to listen. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, talkeasypod. If you want to support our show by purchasing one of our mugs, they come in cream or navy or our vinyl record with the inimitable Fran Leibowitz. You can do [e-mail] shop as always, a big thanks to our team. Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Janiksa Bryan Bravo. Our associate producer is Caitlin Dryden. Today's Talk was edited by Clarice Guevara and mixed by Andrew Vastola. Our assistant editor is Lindsay Ellis. Photographs today are by Emil Ravello, music by Dylan Peck, illustrations by Trisha Shenoy, video and graphics by Ian Chang, Derek Gabrizak, Ian Jones, Ethan Sineca and Layla Register. Special thanks to Patrice Lee, Kalyn Ung and Paul Lee, Alena Suarez. I'd also like to thank our team at Pushkin Industries. Justin Richmond, Julia Barton, John Schnars, Kerry Brody, David Glover, Heather Fane, Mia Labelle, Eric Sandler, Nicole Marano, Morgan Ratner, Jordan McMillan, Isabella Navares, Maya Koenig, Carly Migliori, Jason Gambrell, Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next week with another episode. Episode until then, stay safe and so long.