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Alison Stewart: This is All of It on WNYC, I'm Alison Stewart. When you first open a book by artist and writer Maira Kalman, you might be tricked into thinking it's just a work of whimsy. Her books, which include The Principles of Uncertainty and My Favorite Things, have a very specific style. The way she places words on the page, there are painted vignettes and anecdotes, poems throughout. There's a lot of color, but then you start reading and you realize she is wrestling with the big questions like family history and the grip memory has on us. Maira Coleman's latest book is called Still Life with Remorse, and she joins me in studio to discuss. Maira, welcome back.

Maira Kalman: Thanks so much.

Alison Stewart: You get to the before you even get to the table of contents, the book starts out with the words 'remorse' in all caps, and then it's followed by 'deep regret', 'implying shame', 'implying guilt', 'implying sorrow.' How did you come up with this definition?

Maira Kalman: I have to say, after bagels, talking about sorrow, bagels are the antidote. As we get older, we start to look at our lives and say, "What have we done? What have we done that makes us happy? What have we done that we're ashamed of? Were we unkind?" All of the questions that come up, could we have done anything differently or is this we did what we did? I look at all the stories that I have from my family, and I have other families, too, like the Tolstoy family or the Schumann family. I just wonder how does everybody look at their life and how much remorse do we have? Which is more than regret, by the way. Much more.

Alison Stewart: Oh, tell me more. Tell me about that.

Maira Kalman: Regret is "I regret I ruined the roast." Remorse is "I regret I ruined your life." Even though that's a kind of glib thing to say, there is a level of how much do I have to apologize for everything I've done in my life? A lot, obviously.

Alison Stewart: Did something happen in your life-

Maira Kalman: [laughs]

Alison Stewart: -[chuckles] that you sat down to write this book?

Maira Kalman: No, actually the opposite. I was thinking, "Oh, it's funny. I have no remorse." Then, two seconds later, I collapsed with a tremendous amount of guilt and more remorse. I know that some of the stories are funny and that's the counterpoint, to have humor and to have tragedy. They're woven together.

Alison Stewart: I'm going to ask you to read a first couple of pages to start us off. Let's start on page 12.

Maira Kalman: Okay. It's a good thing I paginate some of them. Happy families, unhappy families, all the same, right? Ah, ah, ah. To begin, you are born to a long line of ancestors who are long gone but still yell or whisper in your ear in the depths of night. A game of telephone played from one generation to the next, garbled and confused, glimmers of light, misunderstandings, errors. Now here you are with the ones you love or the ones you don't. The ones you cannot live without, the ones you would like to smite. Those who have disappointed you or betrayed you. Those who have been kinder than you deserve, and the kind ones who inevitably die and leave you feeling very much alone. They are what you have. If you think at any given point that you know what is going on, you are sorely mistaken, and yet.

There are many 'and yets' in the book.

Alison Stewart: 'And yets.' The game of telephone played from one generation to the next. Did that play out in your life?

Maira Kalman: Very much so. The stories, the women in my family and the men too, they live their lives and they tell their stories, and we glean what we do, and we have relationships with them, some troubled and some not. You always wonder, "Why does it have to be so difficult? Why can't everybody be completely happy and have a fabulous life?" It's just that's not the way it is. It's not easy.

Alison Stewart: What did you want the reader to take away from that passage, that description because it didn't have the word remorse in it?

Maira Kalman: That's true. I forgot to use remorse a lot. I think that in all my work, what I want to have is a sense of truth and a sense of joy in the beauty that's around us and gratitude for the beauty. Allowing the sorrow to be part of it and not to try to avoid it and not to try to say, "It cannot be part of my life because there's no such thing." At a certain point, you can say they're all intertwined and that's not only a good thing, it's essential. You can't live without that.

Alison Stewart: It also sounds like a healthy thing.

Maira Kalman: It should be.

Alison Stewart: It should be, but it isn't?

Maira Kalman: Most days. Well, some days, you're overwhelmed with things, of course. Also one of the things that I'm learning about life is that it's incredibly inconsistent. I can't say, "Oh, you should do this," or "You should do that," because 10 minutes later, you have to do something else. The disparity of all of the emotions that's a real thing, which I like now. I used to be embarrassed.

Alison Stewart: Why were you embarrassed by it?

Maira Kalman: Well, if I said something that I thought was stupid, I would mourn that fact for days. Now, I think it's hilarious. Of course, I'm gonna say something stupid, and then maybe later, I'll say something smart. One hopes. We'll see.

Alison Stewart: My guess is Maira Coleman. The name of the book is Still Life with Remorse. The book involves your family, but it also has families of Leo Tolstoy and his wife, Silvi Beers. They had 13 children and they loved each other madly at the beginning of their marriage and they hated each other at the end of their marriage. You close by saying, "When trying to understand why human beings do what they do, a fog descends." What's the fog?

Maira Kalman: The fog gets thicker and thicker. It's really amazing. Of course, it has something to do with getting older and having less certainty about how people are. The reasons that people do what they do are so varied and so intense that it's almost like you can't judge anymore. You shouldn't judge yourself too harshly, and you can't judge other people too harshly, but of course, we forget and we do.

Alison Stewart: Why do you think we do that?

Maira Kalman: The fog descends. I have no idea. It's impossible to know. I mean, that's the nature of why do we have wars? What is this thing that will never leave the human being? Here we are, we muddle along.

Alison Stewart: The next story after the Tolstoys involves your family. Your parents left Belarus and they emigrated to what was then Palestine before World War II. They both had traumatic experiences before leaving for New York. What stories did you want to tell about your parents?

Maira Kalman: Well, I've written a lot about my mother, and I've done books about her. The women really dominate the stories in my family, but my father, I thought, was neglected. I thought I owed him more of a story because he was an important person, even though a difficult one. I guess the stories that I'm trying to tell is that it's all inexplicable, it's all beautiful, it's all heartbreaking, and that's every single family's story. Can I read you Uncle?

Alison Stewart: Please, yes.

Maira Kalman: All these stories are true, by the way, though sometimes they seem fanciful.

Alison Stewart: What page is it on?

Maira Kalman: 35.

Alison Stewart: Okay. Thanks.

Maira Kalman: Uncle. Once our uncle sat in a gigantic black inner tube and floated in the sea. He fell asleep and drifted farther and farther from the shore. He was a tiny dot in the sea, and people went out in a boat to rescue him. He could have been swept out to sea, but he was not, but he could have. This is what we call the possible probable remorse tense. Suffering after the fact over a disaster that could possibly have happened but did not. This tense occurs very frequently in our household, daily, even hourly. That's another human condition is that maybe some people are more prone than others to this sense of what disaster could befall you, which clearly could be a legacy of my family from leaving Belarus. Having their families killed in the Holocaust, coming to Palestine, coming to New York, being outsiders, which I think is a wonderful thing, by the way. The sense of fragility, of everything is really quite present in the day, and that I made it here safe and sound. Didn't fall on the sidewalk, talking to you right now. That's a miracle almost.

Alison Stewart: I'm interested in the picture that's next to Uncle. Will you tell me what it is?

Maira Kalman: Well, all the paintings in this are either still lifes or interiors. One of the things I decided was that, of course, I wanted to paint, but I wasn't going to paint horrible scenes of misery every painting. Exactly to say that not only do objects that we have hold memories and emotions and the things in your room and the way that we live our lives, but also the sense of beauty and the sense of being able to sit and paint something and just mix colors and look at flowers. I thought that it would be a wonderful exercise because there's both emotion in the paintings and a certain sense of beauty and that's what I want to convey, that that's in everything.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Maira Kalman. The name of her book is Still Life with Remorse. It deals with family history and memory. You talked about writing about your dad, and your writing is very simple, in the best way. You talk about how your father got a telegram that his brother had killed himself. The sentence you write is, "I don't remember anyone going to comfort him, not at all." What did it feel like, first of all, to relive that moment?

Maira Kalman: I am stunned by how little compassion we had for each other. Rven though I was young and maybe not responsible for being compassionate the way children can be completely oblivious to what's going on on one level, but it goes in there. Something in our family was frozen in a way. There are other family members who were very warm, too, but something in the construction prevented us from being kind. I mean, I think that's the biggest thing about remorse, is the sense of, "What did I do that was unkind and what am I doing right now that's unkind?" for instance. We don't know. You'll tell me later.

Alison Stewart: Well, it's interesting in that same story is it describes him, I mean, he's hurt by it. He's walking around, he's feeling sad, and no one will say anything. I just thought that was sad in a way.

Maira Kalman: It is very sad. Though I have to say that, of course, the unreliability of a child. I might be telling you things that who knows? Maybe my mother was very compassionate. Maybe there were people around him who were compassionate. I've created this one vision from the lens of a child, but we know that sometimes that's not the whole story.

Alison Stewart: That's interesting because I wondered if you and your living relatives agree about your family history.

Maira Kalman: Probably not. I have to call them up now and ask them. Everybody has a different sense of what it is. We know who we like-

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Maira Kalman: -and we agree about who's an idiot, but I don't know if that's important.

Alison Stewart: Is there another section you want to read?

Maira Kalman: Sure. This is a section called Goulash. A husband and wife were planning a dinner party. They decided to make a delicious goulash. "Don't forget the potatoes," the man said. "I am not putting in potatoes," responded the woman. "We are going to have wonderful polenta instead." "But everyone knows it is not an authentic goulash without 50% potatoes," said the man. At this point, unable to contain myself because I was sitting with them, I yelled, "We don't want potatoes. We want polenta." Sometimes you just have to say what's on your mind, and to hell with the consequences. At the dinner, no one held a grudge, or so it seemed.

Alison Stewart: 'Or so it seemed,' over the potatoes perhaps.

Maira Kalman: I have to say that it brings me back to Tolstoy. Not necessarily for everyone, but that sense of the details of the day and how you navigate them. I'm really fascinated by the language of how people say things to each other. How you say when you don't want to do something, when you do want to do something. I can get really caught up in those moments. This is a story that happened in my kitchen. My cousin who-- this is a story- and her husband, who lives in Tel Aviv. We speak every morning and she tells me more stories than I could that could fill so many books. A lot of the stories come from the conversations that I have with my family. They have a keen sense of the absurd.

Alison Stewart: Do they offer up the stories?

Maira Kalman: Well, I take them.

Alison Stewart: Oh, you just take them? [laughs]

Maira Kalman: You have to be careful. Of course, everybody knows when you're a writer. Nobody wants to talk at all in front of you, and so I say, "Without any remorse, I take everything I hear and use it."

Alison Stewart: Interspersed between these stories of your family that you write down, there are well-known people from history like Brahms, Cleopatra, Kafka, Matisse, Virginia Woolf. How are their stories interconnected?

Maira Kalman: I live a rich fantasy life. That's all I can say. I'm making a series of short films with my son, Alex Kalman, who designs the books. I play Clara Schumann, Franz Kafka, Cicero, who's in the book. Everybody knows Cicero had a horrible relationship with Cleopatra, but he paid the price. Martha Graham, who's not in the book, but I decided "How hard could it be to dance Frontier?" one of her dances. I have a delusional state some of the time, but I think that's optimistic and why not try even if you fail?

Alison Stewart: What's your relationship to these people in your fantasy world? [laughs]

Maira Kalman: I am them. That's all I can say. Sometimes I become enamored of people, and I feel so connected and so understanding of who they are, or I think I do because, of course, I have no idea that I can imagine myself in different worlds, which is incredible fun.

Alison Stewart: Wow, that's really interesting. That's a good way to live life.

Maira Kalman: Delusionally, yes. That's what we don't want to do.

Alison Stewart: At one point in the book, you recount a story of your friend's mother-in-law who just couldn't stop giving unnecessary advice.

Maira Kalman: That's rampant, yes.

Alison Stewart: Eventually, the mother-in-law passes away, and the friend leaves her husband, You write "End of the problem, but only the beginning of remorse."

Maira Kalman: Yes, this is again a story from my family. You don't know what remorse is going to hit you next. I say that best not to worry about it because then you could get consumed. Then I would never speak again, which I say at the end of the book. Should I read the very end? Do we have time?

Alison Stewart: Sure.

Maira Kalman: Do we have time?

Alison Stewart: Yes, sure.

Maira Kalman: Okay, because I think that after talking a lot, I feel great remorse.

Alison Stewart: [chuckles] You just want to read just a little something?

Maira Kalman: No, I just want to not talk forever, which some people might wish would happen.Your family, my family. Your remorse, my remorse, all the same, right? Vast skies full of remorse, oceans of remorse, but enough. There should be merriment and good cheer, good tidings, well wishing, tables laden with food, children playing, gatherings of kinfolk. Seeing the best, forgiving the worst. If there is remorse, let there be a limit to remorse, a way to shake off the heavyweight, but how to do this.

Alison Stewart: Keeps going?

Maira Kalman: Perhaps for now, it is better not to talk. Perhaps it is better just to sing, to walk, to look at the trees, to talk to dogs, to inhale the scent of flowers, to read books, to listen to music, to drink pots of team and not talk, just sing.

Alison Stewart: I'm not going to ask you to sing, but do you have a song that you like to sing that puts you in this mood?

Maira Kalman: Oh, my God, there's so much. Well, there are two musical interludes in this book, because I listen to music all day long. If I had to pick a song right now, it would be Ombre Mai fu. Then Renee Fleming singing it perhaps, would be a beautiful thing. Can we have that? No, we're not.

Alison Stewart: Can we play?

Maira Kalman: As I leave?

Alison: She's gonna work on that-

Maira Kalman: -as I crawl out.

Alison Stewart: You have these extras in the book. You have the handle, Sheet Music, and then there's the index. You look on the back, and the first entry is Uck, and then the second one is Ach, Ach Ach. Then there's a section called Badly Cooked Food. Then there's a sand called Chopped Off Food, Hands, Head. Did you have fun making this index?

Maira Kalman: So much fun, tremendous fun. It's also wonderful to work on a book where you're really attending to every bit of it and nothing is taken for granted. It's great fun to design, to know that there's a book, which I think is a sacred object, and then to go on to the next. I'm going to say that the next booklet that I'm working on after this, after Remorse, has to be about joy. That's my next booklet that I'm doing with my son, but the next big book is Trees. There's a lot of wonderful, wonderful future.

Alison Stewart: There's a whole book about trees in your life? Wait, tell me more.

Maira Kalman: I'm going to spend the next year and a half going to gardens and sitting under trees and sitting in gardens and painting and writing. That's all I want to do. That's the antidote to what's going on, little escape.

Alison Stewart: Yes, it does sound like that. In our big picture finish question, what did you learn about remorse after publishing this book, having it out there, talking to people?

Maira Kalman: That it's endless and that everybody is filled with remorse. The minute you say the word, everybody faints away in a heap of remorse. Then everybody goes on living, so you learn that, hand in hand.

Alison Stewart: Maira Kalman, November 21st, we'll talk about the book with author Rumaan Alam at the New York Public Library. For more information, head to nypl.org events the name of the book is Still Life with Remorse. Thank you so much for coming to the studio. It's a real pleasure talking to you.

Maira Kalman: Thank you.

[00:19:56] [END OF AUDIO]