This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from My Heart Radio. My guest today is uniquely blessed with intellectual curiosity, air udition, and an insightful wit. He's also been called one of the greatest thinkers and wordsmiths of our age, and is rumored to read up to four books a day. He's also a true New Yorkers New Yorker, the brilliant Adam Gopnick. Gopnik has been a writer at The New Yorker for over three decades, first as an art critic and then as their Paris correspondent. He's written fiction, non fiction, humor, memoir, and criticism for the famed magazine, covering everything from sports to spirituality with equal aplom He's the international best selling author of ten books and an accomplished lecture and storyteller. He has appeared regularly on the Moth Radio Hour the CBC and created a series of one man shows, including The Gates, an Evening of Stories with Adam Gopnik. For someone with such a prolific and varied body of work, I was curious to learn about his writing process. I'm right in the kind of the back room. We think of it as the engine room of the Titanic, right where Daddy has stripped to the waist shoveling coal into the furnace while to keep the boat going for another day. We hit the iceberg long ago, and we're listening, but we're gonna keep moving forward. And I always have my door open. The kids always know seven days a week, six hours a day too, Yes, and they were always aware. Someone teach you that, to someone lends you that. Yeah, Actually someone did teach me that. I had a great teacher and inspiring teacher who I wrote an essay about called Last of the metro Zoids, when he died tragically and stupidly young of cancers. Name was Kirk Varnetot, and he ended his life as the director of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. But he had been my professor in graduate school, and he was someone of impeccable talent, the greatest lecture I've ever heard, an inspired curator. But he had a work effort like no one I've ever known, which he had derived, as he would tell you himself and did tell you often, from playing football and coaching football. That had been his passion In college, played defensive line, though he was wildly undersized then and going out to Stanford, and couldn't decide whether to continue coaching for Bill Walsh, who was at Stanford then here, or to become an art historian. And he said to me a memorable line, He said, the thing about being a football coach is you have to be smart enough to do it well and dumb enough to think it matters. My father was a football coach, was he really? My father coach high school where he played at SU and then he went to They caught high school football where we grew up, and my memories of that mentality. There was a sign above the entrance to the coach office as you walked out the door, and the sign said if you score, you may win. If they never score, you will never lose. And the boulder letters said defense wins championships. Well, that was very much. Though Kirk was the most sophisticated of intellectuals, he was at heart a football coach. And when I arrived in graduate school in New York in nineteen eighty, I was something of a wise guy. I grew up in an academic family, but in a very contentious, smart when the argument at the dinner table kind of family, what'd your dad do? My dad was a professor? No, no, when when you when you left Philadelphia? How old were you when you went to Levin? When we left Philadelphia? And then I and then grew spent the next nine years in Montreal, really kind of grew up in exactly. And my mother to my mother was a professor too, And actually I should add them in many ways a more distinguished scientist and scholar than my dad was. My dad spent a lot of time as a dean, was extremely good at it. My mom is famous in her field for having discovered the first identifiable chromosome linked to grammar, linked to language, which is called if I used to know my heart show f XP you forgotten? Yes, exactly twops. Anyway, So I came I came of age very much in that kind of Jewish intellectual family, with elements of the Glass family of Salinger and of the Corleone family of Mary Open leaving at eleven, I wonder, I mean, I always identified that period as a huge transition childhood. It's very sent you to say that it was hugely tough, hugely tough, because I had just sort of begun for the first time to have a circle of friends. And we smoked. We couldn't get marijuana, we smoked marigold cigarettes and all that. It was hugely tough moving to a strange city, and it took me quite a while to adjust. As in Philadelphia, where I spent my childhood, really I had actually been a kid actor, and I had been the kind of the Jackie Coogan of Andre Gregory's avant garde theater. You know Andrew Gregory, it's still to this day a very dear friend, my oldest friend in the world. And he had an avant garde theater in Philadelphia. Oh do you really yes? Yeah, Well that was that that family. And so I had played countless parts for Andre and as I say, we're still intimate friends. And so I had a very uh incandescent and some always a blessed child. And so that transition was extremely, extremely difficult for me. And you went undergrad to McGill. I went undergrad to McGill. I've got many friends because mcgils such a great school. I have many friends whose children have gone there. And my neighbor in my first home and I m Aganson was skip Sheldon Huntington's Sheldon who was on the medical staff there or the hospital staff. That he was a medical doctor who also I think his family him or his mother's family were heirs to the merc drug and he was my guy. And I'm McGill such a great school when you were there growing up. Was it a feder company you were going to go to McGill, Yes, there was no, There was no question. It was the It was the family tavern. Really, not only I tell my kids. In fact, they ended up because I got a discount because my both my parents were professors, and then I did well and I got various fellowships and ended up paying me to go to college, so which was in this day as unusual. My friend Malcolm Bladwell, who's also a Canadian of the same generation, points out accurately that that's the Canadian model, that you go to the nearest good school to your home. And the whole insane American rigmarole which we have gone through is I'm sure you have gone through and will go through of college visits and the insane competitive overdrive that takes places essentially unknown in Canada. My nieces and nephews live in Edmonton and they went to the University of Alberta, which is a terrific school and is nearby. But yeah, I went to McGill and art history. I did art history. I did our history because I was torn between doing psychology and art history. My older sister, with whom i'm extremely close intellectually did psychology and it's the psychologist to this day. But I have four sisters. I should add, you're one of how many six? I'm one of six, so it's positive science, right, one of six I had. This is a whole other subject, but we I had an extraordinary childhood, which I hope to write about it in my next book after this one. But I had seen an incredibly pretty girl going into the art history department and I thought, that looks interesting. We're interested in psychology, which tended to study what is she studying? And I've found out and I followed her in and forty two years later we're still married, so that worked out all right. But it was also nice because I was talking. I was you know how it is when you know that age, you're agonized about everything. Everything is in agony. And I said to my psychology advice, but what should I do Should I do art history of psychology? It seemed hugely important at the time. And he said, is this a difficult decision? And I said yes, And he said, then it's unimportant. He said, all difficult decisions in life are unimportant because if they're difficult, that means there's a lot to be said on both sides, so you can't really take a wrong turn. My wife has a degree in art history from n y U. And when I said to her at one point, why that in a menu of things you might have said, I said, why that? And she goes cool. It's because it's the history of the world of humanity, history of humanity and the history, and it has this magical element, and that is that you look at ill fixed pictures, at things that don't move, that don't dramatize, that don't have you know, attached them, and suddenly they seemed to sum up a period and epoch, a mood of meaning you understand the Italian Renaissance better by looking at Leonardo than you do by reading six volumes on the period. So I loved it and still do. I came to New York with, as I've written about in my book, at the Stranger's Gate. We got on a bus leaving Montreal like kids out of a nineteen forties musical, and came to New York. The building where we are right now we're writing, was where Martha had her first job. She was a film editor at that time, studying to be a film editor. Was was actually a film editor. She was with eventually too, the Masals, but she had trained with her parents were founding filmmakers for the National Film Board of Canada. I don't know if that means anything in American now, but it was the great documentary are familiar and this was her first job, and it is a sign of how different New York is now. And then that this building on Ninth Aven and was so isolated that I would come, I would take her down on the subway in the morning and pick her up again at night because they routinely found dead bodies in the dumpster. And there was truly on this block where now there's ah. You have your choice between a great French, great restaurant of the south of France and a fine bistro from Alsace. There was nothing. There was absolutely nothing. So when you leave and you come to New York, what motivated that decision. Why did you want to come to go to graduate school at n y U and not remain in Canada, go somewhere else because it was a period of your life for your fairly peripateticus. Yes, absolutely, but because we had fallen in love with New York and it was I had fallen crazy New York. Oh no, No, she was Icelandic girl from Montreal. She was. It couldn't have been more Canadian in background and temperament is to this day. But we had been to New York and we had fallen crazy in love with it the way you do, or people have done historically. And then even then, even in the seventies, and and my you know, my folks thought we were a little bit crazy because there was the Tali into the seventies in New York was still taxi driving New York, you know, with steam coming out of the manholes and psychos driving the cabs. But we had fallen crazy in love with it, and I as I am to this day, it's not. That's an emotion that's never changed for me. And it seemed like a time of possibility. And when you're twenty years old, you don't it's hard to keep anybody away from anything. My father came with me when we got on the bus going down to Manhattan, and he said to me, you know, it's like, you know d'artagnan's father and the three musketeers seize him off from Gascony, if you remember, and says, when you get to Paris, fight duels with everyone you meet, which he then does and becomes a musketeer. My father said to me when I was getting on the bus, he said, when you get to New York, remember never underestimate the other person's insecurity. And those turned out to be the wisest words anyone has ever given me. And every mistake I've made subsequently was because I underestimated someone else's insecurity. And every time I've had an empathetic insight into a situation, professionally or or personally, it's because I remembered that. Remember my uncle, my father's youngest brother, who was a bit of a for lack of a better way of putting, was kind of a Karawackian figure like around the road, very bohemian and very never had a job, lived off of his Korean War pension, and you know, a very strange guy, but super bright, super intellectual guy. You're reading books, consult he said. Remember one thing, he said, even if you really are one in a million, there's seven other people like you in this city. So you can form a little club with that. Then you can hang out with your mind. People absolutely make a you make a cohort instantly. In New York and my dad, though it was the tail into the seventies, there was still it was still in some ways a more if I made attractive city than it is now because exactly because there was so much that was decrepit and there was so much that was despairing, there were these wonderful little islands of light and poetry and music. When we first came to New York, we used to go and here the G eight jazz pianist Ellis Larkins play at the Carnegie Tavern, which was this little bar right behind Carnegie Hall, and there was this amazing jazz poet who just played it sets a night. For the price we weren't even we didn't even know enough to drink in those days. For the price of a perier, you could be in this cool dark room where this genius was, this artatum level pianist was playing for free, reflectively, with melancholy elegance night after night. That was part of the magic of New York in that period before Uber and so forth, mid to late eighties. I would get into a cave only calves or the subway back then I would say to the driver, how's the driving business. That would strike a conversation with them. And the one guy that I think he was Russian, he said that, he said, New York is not the same in the more. He says, all the artists are gone, he said, because of the rent is so high. He said, all the artists are leaving the city. He said. Now it's only these bankers who get up in the morning and go running along the reservoir, then go downtown and try to kill each other, you know. And I remember there was I felt much more romantic about New York. And then I think that's true and the only um antidote I have to I mean, we were lucky enough to come of age in a rat infested loft in Soho at a time when Soho was still an art village, and you would wake up in the morning and you would see Richard Sarah walking along Brent Street, scowling as he envisioned another monstrous wall of cortense steel or uh. Donald Judd, the great minimalist, was still occupying his house, which is now a little museum, So you had a sense of those very specific energies of art. I remember there was even a couple who were literally manacled together for a year as a conceptual art exercise, and you would see them going up and down West Broadway in a state of total bliss and equanimity. And so we were lucky enough to see that last frontier. And it's true that one of the tragedies of New York in my lifetime is is that those frontiers of bohemia that had persisted since the Civil War really have vanished. And yet when I say that, I recognized the limitations of my own vision, because for my kids didn't experience it that way. They experienced bed Sty, and they experienced Williamsburg, and they experienced Brooklyn. You know, it was one of the great transformations of our time. You know, I'm sure you've read because it's a favorite book of all of us who love the theater, Moss Hearts, Act One, which is a story about the subway. Basically, it's about getting on the Subway in Brooklyn and being brought into the wonders of Manhattan, and generations of imaginative New York pilgrims made that trip from the Bronx of Brooklyn into town. And then suddenly it was like the suction on a vacuum. It suddenly turned the other way around right, and everyone was departing Manhattan for Brooklyn and the Bronx. Remember my son, Luke said to me at one point, very seriously, he said, Dad, he said, you know, I know you like this neighborhood, the Upper East Side, which you know I had mortgaged every atom of carbon in my body in order to provide for them as an abode. He said, but you know, the food is so much better than Williamsburg. He said, I really wanted to come out with me for my generation. I I joke, I said, oh my god, Brooklyn was where you would go to buy like serious hardcore drugs or a gun. But there's two things when I look at your your facts and so forth in your CD that stand out to me that I'm always kind of fascinated by. One is expatriotism. And you go live in Paris for five years now? Was that the only long term stay you had outside the United State. That was the one and only. That was the one and only. I mean we've gone, you know, likes, we visited London, and we've been kind of you know, regular habituaies of Paris since, but that was the only extended time was you know, what was it like for you to, like, I'm assuming what was the Paris idea? Your idea someone sent you because of you were you were, you were commissioned because you were going to write these journals if you will know you keep journals. It was our idea. Martha and I had fallen in love with Paris and with the idea of Paris. I guess we're sort of constantly just loyal love is fall in love with New York and fall in love with Paris and go on, and we're not cheating on New York Paris exactly exactly. It was our that was our lover. New York. New York is our our spouse, and Paris our mistress. Someone wrote a book with that title. By the way, Paris was our mistress. But in any case, we had fallen in love with it. And when our son Luke was born in knew that if we didn't go now, then we would be entrapped, if not entombed by New York necessities preschool exactly. And so we decided to do it. And I threw my cap over the wall. You know a beautiful story of Frank O'Connor's, you know, when they growing up as a poor Irish kitten cork and whenever they came to a wall that was too high to scale, all the little Irish ways threw their caps over the wall. Because once your cap was on the other side of the wall, you had no choice but defined a way over. You couldn't go home without your cap. And I've always thought that's a lovely image of the key moments we have in life. So threw my cap over the wall, said to the wonderful Tina Brown, who was then the editor of The New Yorker, Listen, I really really want to go to Paris. And bless her, she said, all right, go go to Paris. Right to us from right for us from Paris, And so we off, off we went. And it was I don't think I had this fully formed as a thought, but it was some kind of intuition. I knew Paris would be a more interesting place to write about than London exactly because it threatened to become a bit of a backwater. You know, it was a time I loved the nineties. I thought the nineties were great. They were as good as the nine nineties, were as good as the eighteen nineties, and lots of ways. But there was this encircling girdle of American life, in American influence, which you felt very strongly in London. In those days it was kind of triumphant Anglo Saxism, and France and Paris were the last place to resist that, so you were actually witnessing the alternative, like the little Gaulish village in the Asteris comics. This was the last place that was going on. So I knew would be a more interesting place to write about, because losers, so to speak, are always more interesting to write about than winners. And and we settled in and those were five amazing years. They were also, you know, there's a moment I think in every from nine till two thousand and one really came home to nine eleven. Also, I think in every writer's life, and this may be true of every artist's life, I think it is true of every artist's life there's a moment when you sort of know you've hit it, when you find your voice, you find your stance, and you sort of know, even if you don't like me, you have to admit that this is good. And I felt that way writing in Paris for the first time. I've been writing for a decade for The New Yorker already, but I sort of knew when I wrote my first piece, I said, Oh, this voice is mine. This voice is appealing. There's something about the way I can write here with a certain kind of ride attachment, but also with a certain kind of lyrical enthusiasm. I felt, I knew that it was working. And there's just there's no feeling as good in a writer's life as that moment when you when you know inside there's literally a kind of physical vibration, a hum when you sit down to your typewriter or computer when you feel that. And I felt that so strongly in Paris, author Adam Gopnik. If you're enjoying insights into the inner workings of The New Yorker, listen to my conversation with an author formerly at the helm of the publication, Editor in Chief Extraordinaire, Tina brown Well I think I'm a compulsive reporter. Actually, I mean I have what I think of as observation greed. Right most of the time, I'm propelled to go out, not because I actually want to go out, but I think I got to see that, you know, I need to see that. Curious. I'm really curious, and I have a great desire to report on the action. Here the rest of my conversation with Tina Brown in our archives at Here's the Thing dot org. After the Break, Adam got Nick shares the secret to a perfect marriage. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing writer Adam got Nick. This family spent five years living in France. In his time there, he composed the Paris Journal for the New Yorker magazine, as well as a collection of essays the New York Times best selling Paris to the Moon. I was curious why he decided to leave the City of Lights after what seemed to be such a charmed and eventful time there. That was our decision as well, Martha. We had just had our new baby, Olivia, and which was sort of the climactic, the culminating episode, and what I knew would be the book that I had organized, and Martha said to me, you know, in New York we have a full life, but an unbeautiful existence, and in Paris we have a beautiful existence, but not a full life. And we had to make that choice. It's a choice I've often regretted. Frankly, Alex and I still love Paris deeply and have thought of it, but it Our son Luke was about to start serious school, and he had been to preschool, in kindergarten and first grade in Paris. And I love France and I love French culture, but the worst side of French culture is French education. It's brutal, it's very effective, and you know, the kids emerge being able to recite Ruscine and give you the square root of sixty in a way kids in our schools, yes, exactly. You know, you don't necessarily, but it's a hard life. You know, you're there from eight in the morning till four and in the afternoon. A good thing about it is that French kids tend to be sensitive in a way that American kids are often spoiled, because they're aware from a very early age that existence is unappeasable, authority is unappeasable. We don't teach our kids that authority is unappeasable until it smacks them on the side of the head when their nineteen or twenty and they start working or joined the army or whatever. I often think, Luke, my, my wonderful son was a philosopher. Now, on his first day at school, went in New York. And I came home and said, how was it? And he said, Dad, the teachers are too nice. And I said, what do you mean, teachers? Everything you do they say is good. He said, I drew a picture of myself. It wasn't good, Dad. The nose was too big in the ears were wrong, and they said it's wonderful. We're going to put it right up on the Picasso. Hello. Yes, And I said, what would they have said in Paris? Oh, in Paris they would say, no, it does it's nothing. It's it's it's nothing. And he spotted instantly the profound insincerity of American education, the superficiality of the encouragement that we often give to kids. It's unearned, you know, he just as you've done it, so it's good. I find that for me. Well, I mean, I'm sixty four years old, and I got remarried and I have six children. The oldest is eight. I have I have six children, eight, six, five, three about to before one and a half and one because the sixth one is a surrogate and my wife is pregnant again with our seven child. So, and I have an older daughter, SO who's twenty seven this year, she's twenty seven. But my point is is that you know, in school with them now, the thing that we're navigating not in some overwhelming way or some you know, it's it's sporadic. Is this me two time up thing where people's behavior which is like, you know, innocent boys will be boys and people say off handed things as kids just shock each other. Now it's like people are marched down to an office and a report is filled out and filed, and you know, it's like a zero tolerance, zero tolerance for some acts of childhood. Y. Yeah, you know, we didn't experience that directly because our kids kind of just missed it. Right we're in college, but by that time. But I certainly, and it's the subject of the book I'm working on I'm trying to finish for tomorrow, literally for tomorrow right now, is that American life is attuned to achievement. Past the next test, get into the next grade, get into the right college. And there's something very empty about that hamster wheel of achievement that we put kids on. And your kids are aware now they're how old and there are there beyond college? Luke, No, they're both still in University Lucas twenty six and he's getting his PhD in philosophy at University of Texas at Austin. And Olivia is uh twenty one, and she's five years younger to the day, which tells you, I'm thinking the same birthday, the same birthday, and and they and she's at Harvard, she's in her third year at Heart. She's switched. She was in government originally. You know, they only have really one subject at Harvard that they teach world domination, and so she switched from the government side of world domination to the history side of world domination. Now I'm told by friends who know you and I know a bit about you, they told me that you have the perfect marriage. Well, you know, I hope that's true. We have been married for a very long time and have been through every twist and turn that life can offer. From migration to New York at the age of twenty on a bus, to children, raising children, watching children leave home, which is a big one. And through it all we've been remarkably harmonious and happy. I give Martha all the credit in the world for that. It's not I'm the difficult, jumpy, moody one. And she's a woman of incredible equanimity and insight and general steve spirit. And she's the caregiver to the kids, to the dog, to me, and she's an extraordinary woman. So I feel that that's, you know, the most profound blessing in my life. Certainly in your writing career where you go from g Q onto the New Yorker was writing? I mean, you're making these observations about art to fantastic schools, and you go on to do it at the graduate level. And is the soul of the writer always there and you're writing during your college career, or when do you you become the guy that gets hired by the GQ magazine. I never wanted to be anything else but a writer from the age of ten, I can I can locate it to a particular moment. First of all, I was a crazy reader as a kid. I love to read. I read The Therber Carnival literally till the pages came off in my hands in bed when I was six and seven. But at the age of ten, I wanted to go see a spy movie, very bad spy movie, a Man from Uncle movie. And my parents had said, yes, you could go on Saturday, then on Friday the way parents will as I'm sure you do, as I have done. So oh, no, it's not gonna work, because we have to do this. And I was so hurt and indignant. I went back to my room and I a ten page letter of protests, which I slipped under their door, and my dad's sweet good manity is and was came and said, oh, I didn't realize you felt this strongly about You really have expressed yourself here. Of course you can go. And I said, oh, that's interesting. You can put words down on paper in ways to change the inner workings of someone else's mind. And I felt an enormous power that was implicit and inherent in that activity. Never wanted to me anything but a writer. And though I did do art history, and I was blessed, as I said at the at the beginning of our conversation to have worked with a genuinely inspired and great teacher. I never really wanted to do art history. Art history was just an excuse. I mean, I never wanted to do it professionally. It was an excuse for getting to New York and being able to tell my parents I was going to study, not to walk the streets and try and sell my songs, which was the reality of what we're going to get to music in the world of magazines and that publishing world. I grew up and you took about reading as a child. I devoured everything from when I was ten to twelve years old. I was reading The Godfather when I was ten, yars or all or whatever. And and my point is that g Q, you know, the Nick Poleeggie era New York magazine, when Felker was running all the that bike on era. I mean, I feel like magazines were very, very different. Obviously then all magazines were the heart of American culture in in that period, even when I mean there had been since the nineteen twenties at least, and they still were in the nineteen eighties. And you know, Condemnast was a kind of temple. It was a strange mysterious os run by the remote figure of signed new house. With all of these glamorous magazines, everyone had a car. So when I went to work, you know, I just wanted a job. I really just wanted a job that involved putting words on paper and seeing them in print. I would have taken any job that there was, and I was lucky enough to get a job as the at first the fashion copy editor of GQ magazine. That was my first grown up job, and that meant, you know, fashion copy of the little blocks of type that appear next to close in fashion magazines, you know, where they have little kind of illiterateti tags. They're called, you know, summer shirts, and then there's a like ten line description of the of the summer shirts. And my job was to edit and rewrite those things. And I thought I was at the heart of show business. I thought it was the greatest job anybody had ever given. And as I tell in at the Stranger's Gate, I came up with a two line and a literative tag to word, a literative tag so potent it was simply Kiara scoro chic for a group of glowing linen shirts. Kiara scorer cheek that they promoted me on the strength of those two to become the grooming editor. And then I was responsible for all of the copy about lotions and moisturizers, and they're in shampoo's except for fragrances, which was specially because basically those magazines depend on Yes, there's another floor and another thing and the thing I can't convey adequately. I loved it. I loved every minute of it. I never thought for a moment, why am I wasting my talent splitting words and hairs and coming up nodly? Did I give it a go? But I else it's and it's very difficult to recreate this time for our kids. You know, Now you write something and you posted online and a million people can see it. Right at that period, it was sort of I said to my kids. It was there were like two hundred computers and all of New York, and you wanted to get your hands on one of them, and it kind of didn't matter which one you got your hands on. The village voice of the Soho News obviously not to be disingenuous, The golden machine was the New Yorker, and that's very much where I wanted to go and where I dreamt of going. But I was just delighted to be in this business of turning words on paper into words in print. It just filled me with joy, and so I had to I had terrific, a terrific couple of years doing that, and my kids is still astounded because in a couple of occasions I crept into a fashion story as a haircut story once. That's how I met the wonderful photographer Brigitte Lacombe. She came in it did my portrait, and that wonderful French woman. It gets more French with every succeeding year that she's in America, and she came into my picture, and the kids, having a a glimpse of that moment of improbable glamour, are still impressed. Martha actually, who had modeled in Canada and was extraordinarily beautiful woman still is, had a whole story about her and Mademoiselle, and the kids still think that this is, you know, just unreal. This is not your parents, This is the two other people. What other magazines do you think are holding their own in the world today. Oh, it's a it's a good question. I read the New York Review of Books which I think is still a thriving enterprise. I read specific people a lot, and that's one of the things that for good or ill, that the digital areas and it's disaggregated magazines a lot. So I read John Chait in the in New York, for instance, not that I don't read New York Magazine, but I read that specifically. Or I read David Frum in The Atlantic, and not to the exclusion of other Atlantic right, not to the exclusion of other people. Yeah, it's you know, it comes more naturally that you you're online and you're you see that someone's tweeted something interesting. I try and read our magazine and New Yorker, of course, but I do think we've done a pretty good job of staying I hate the word relevant. I hope we've done a good job of staying irrelevant in the sense that I that you when you open the magazine, I would hope that you don't know what you're going to read about, and that the basic gambit of The New Yorker has always been well, it was not unlike when I was in Paris. As you say, Paris, I'm not interested in Paris. Why should I be interested in Paris. What's this guy? Oh, this is kind of interesting, This is kind of funny. Okay, I'll stick with this. No, we're in your wheelhouse. Do you see a place or did you ever contemplate a place for a film? Oh? I always kind of played a place for film and that. And Martha, my wife, is a filmmaker and all of that, and like every she's still doing that totally. Yes, indeed, she's she's producing and writing screenplays now gone on from editing. So it's very much a presence in our house and has been for forty some years. I've tried my hand a couple of times at screenplace and never really, you know, never quite felt at home doing that. I've collaborated with her, and I think we've done some nice things, but I've never really I love movies, you know, in my life. In fact, I will be honest with you, you know, I would have been delighted and had my life taken a slightly different turn, and that had been a bigger part of it. I love I love him. I truly love the theater, and so writing for the theater is at the center of my my feelings and something I've I've been able to do. But there was an, if I can tell a funny story, that was a moment because all you know, like every writer, your stuff gets optioned for the movies and then bought for the movies, and then the script has developed and so on. And there was a moment in our history when I had written a story called Bumping into Charlie Ravioli about my daughter Olivia's imaginary friend, which had become a well known and anthologized and the studio wanted to option it for a movie. And then they looked into the contract and discovered that Harvey Weinstein had bought outright Paris the Moon for another movie, and he had bought the characters in that book in perpetuity, and the leading characters. So since the leading characters in that book where me and our son Luke, we couldn't be in the movie of Charlie Ravioli. So there was a moment, Man, how's this for a twenty one century moment when half of our family was owned by Mirramax and the other half were owned by Sony Pictures, right, and they would have to negotiate like the gopnic cinematic universe to have us all in in one movie. But no, I've never I've never written a movie. I was telling that my producers that in my lifetime there were two names that would vex me because I was around super sophisticated people who would pronounce their names differently. They called him Richard Avden. Yes, Brits would call him Richard Avedon, and I thought, that's not how I learned it. And a woman I worked with, who was a very famous and internationally famous model, pronounced the designs named Balanchanga but described to me you being I guess adopted by Avedon. Dick Avedon was with Kirk Varnett of the great influence on my life, and when I think about everything that I wear, eat, look at, was very much still under his influence and spiritual agis. He was an extraordinary man, obviously a great photographer, but also a man, an incandescent force in the world, a man of limitless energy and and mischief and fun, but also a very serious artist. And one of the things that he wanted to implant in me, and as I say, he really adopted Martin me as as kind of surrogad kids, was that it was possible to live a very rich and good and pleasure enhanced life, pleasure, affirming life, and at the same time be a serious artist author Adam Gopneck. If you're enjoying this conversation, be sure to subscribe to Hear is the Thing on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Adam Gopnick tells us the most audacious thing he's ever written. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing from my Heart Radio. From art criticism to children's literature to food writing, no genre is off limits for Adam Gopnik. Recently, he expanded his resume even further into musical theater as a book writer and lyricist. When I first came to New York, it was to be a songwriter. I had a cassette of my songs, and I had written The College Show, which was based on the life of Vladimir Tatlin, the Russian constructivist architect. And I assumed I was three weeks from Broadway, when are we gonna get our hands on that on that musical? So I I actually have promised our friends Marcy Hysler and seen a good rich that I would do one of the songs from the show at one of their four Below evenings. So that was my ambition, and I wasn't able to push it forward. I was going to be Stephen Sante, not not John Updyke, could have become either one, but I've you know. But my other ambition was to be an essayist from New York Is. So that did work out. And then it had always been very much part of my life, caring passionately about the musical theater and writing songs for all occasions and writing lyrics. And then um, the great American composer David Shire approached me about writing a musical with him. I didn't know it at the time, but he had said to his wonderful wife, d d Con why don't guys like this everyone to write for the musical theater. Indeed, he had said to well, you don't know, maybe he does. And she approached me at a theatrical thing and said, would you be interested in writing a show with my husband David Shire? And I said, I can't imagine anything in the world I would rather do. So David and I got to work and we wrote a show together called Our Table. We wrote more than sixties songs, I mean complete finished piano vocal songs about a little restaurant struggling to survive in New York, and Melissa Erico came in to play the lead of the female lead in a workshop and I was astounded by her gifts because my stuff is literary and it involves a lot of complicated puns and ambivalent emotions. She's super bright woman, and she was It was like in a fairy tale. She was the first musical theater performing edition. Very beautiful. I haven't an unbelievably voice like a Mozart flute, as someone once said. She understood everything that I was writing and could deliver all of those bitter sweet, ambivalent, complex emotions. So we did a full production of it, which unfortunately she couldn't be in out in New Haven. Like every musical goes to try out and often die. And it's still the thing. I'm proud of stuff. We have a very good live concert recording of it that we did at fifty four below with Melissa singing the lead along with Andy Taylor and Constantine Marules. Is that available? Yes, it is on Spotify with a beautiful cover by Brigitte Lacom. Actually Brigitte did us a wonderful cover image. You go on Spotify our table Adam Copnick, Melissa Erico. So we did that, and then Melissa and I enjoyed working together enormously, So I started writing all kinds, especially material for David. And I wrote a song which I love called Cry for Joy, this kind of a theme song for her swing show. Wrote a lot of parodies, and then she's just done a beautiful album of film noir inspired music, but no music. Oh no. On the tray, I was just about to say on the country, it's occupying an ever larger part of my life. I have two new shows underway with Andrew Lippap, who wrote The Adams Family and The Wild Party, and David Shayer and I are in the middle. Were about one acting to a new show for Melissa called Troubadour right now, about the invention of the love song at the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine in the in the thirteenth century. As I say, I love the theater nothing in life. There's a song in our table called It's Never Reigning in Seattle, which, of all the countless things I've done political books and family memoirs and and so on, is a single thing I probably proudest stuff because it's a song about the necessity of lying to your children. In the situation in the in the show is that the father that chef has been telling his beloved daughter, who was very much modeled on my Olivia for years, that they have an offer in Seattle, but never moved to Seattle because it rains all the time in Seattle. You have to bring the customers out like sponges before you see them never going to Seattle. Rains all the time. And finally they have to go to Seattle because they lose the restaurant. And then he's she says to him, you know, it rains all the time in Seattle, and then he sings to this song it's never raining in Seattle. And for me, that's what we do with our children, you know, we have to There never been a song about how we have to lie to our children sometimes to reassure them of the of the salubriousness of the world. That's the thing I'm proud of. Stiff. What are you working on now? I'm just I mean literally finishing four to send to my publisher tomorrow, a book called tentatively the Real Work on the mystery of mastery, and it's it's about the business of of learning to master things, particularly in middle age. You know, I learned to drive when I was in my fifties, got my driver's license only my fifties. I think I am the only New Yorker ever to get to pass his driver's test on the same day as his son. Luke was twenty and I was fifth, and we took our test on this on the same day. I learned to draw in the last few years, learned to write music and all of those things. So it's all of these essays about learning to do things, but it's not a collection of essays. It's a book about the ark of doing things. It ends, I think hope affectingly. It includes a chapter that is the I won't even try and describe. It is probably the most audacious thing I've ever written in deeply embarrassing in some ways, but essential. And then it ends with I've been taking boxing lessons for the last year and because I just I'm fascinated by mastery, something that's so alien to a little Jewish intellectual like me as boxing, being able to enter into it and learning the great perpetual lesson of all accomplishment, which is that you break it down into small parts. You learn the small parts, the little segments, and then over time, miraculously the little segments become a seamless whole and you find, oh my god, I'm actually throwing a sequence of punches. So I'm simultaneously was taking boxing lessons and I'm doing ballroom dancing with my daughter Olivia. And so the last chapter is just about the ways in which the steps of your feet in ballroom dancing and the jabs of your hand in boxing compliment each other. And it's the you know, the perpetual cycle. The other thing that fascinates me, Alec is the way that when you're being trained box, you're always made to be aware of the invisible opponent, the invisible enemy, right, because everything you do is in response to this person who you never actually see and you never do exactly And I find that a very powerful metaphor for life generally. Right, we construct ourselves in the eyes of an invisible other. Thank you so much, Just delighted to be here, My thanks to writer Adam Gopnick. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Zack McNeice and Maureen Hoban. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Daniel Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you by my Heart Radio. Who about the fun Time