[music]

Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The latest novel by author, journalist, and screenwriter Taffy Brodesser-Akner was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, the New Yorker, NPR, and many more. It's titled Long Island Compromise. The story follows the wealthy Fletcher family, a group of Jewish American multi-millionaires who made their fortune through polystyrene. That's Styrofoam.

Money hasn't insulated this family from trauma. They are still reeling from the fallout of one dramatic event that happened decades ago. The patriarch of the family, Carl Fletcher, was kidnapped and held for ransom for a few days before being returned. He has untreated PTSD and has never quite recovered. His wife, Ruth, dedicates more time to caring for him than she does for her three children.

It is those children, each a mess in their own way, who are the true focus of the novel. Nathan, the oldest, is a ball of anxiety and neuroses. He's stalled at work and has invested all of his money with an untrustworthy friend. Beamer, the middle son, is a Hollywood screenwriter who is riding on the coattails of his more brilliant writing partner. He's addicted to drugs, sex, and his dominatrix, and he's starting to really lose it.

Jenny, the youngest child, feels guilty about the money she deposits in her bank account each month. She gives it away and dedicates herself to union organizing, but is really closed off from the world around her. Each of these siblings is suffering from the legacy of their father's trauma. When it appears that the Fletcher money might not be unlimited after all, the siblings are forced to examine how extreme wealth has shaped who each of them have become.

Long Island Compromise was our November Get Lit with All Of It book club selection. Taffy Brodesser-Akner joined us last week for a sold out event at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library. Here's my conversation with Taffy.

[music]

Alison Stewart: You used to have a Post-it note on your computer that said, "Torture them."

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Why did you want to torture these characters?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I had this Post-it note on my computer. My kids always joke that it's about them, but it's not about them. It's about the characters. It's about the way you sort of don't want to hurt anybody, and the way the more you write about somebody, the more you're rooting for them, and how hard it is to take a character where they need to go in order for you to bring them back. It's just this reminder that it's the duty of the storyteller to do that, even though you don't want to.

Alison Stewart: Who do you think you tortured the most in this book?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Oh, my god. Me. I think that the most tortured-- I think it's like an oppression Olympics. I can't even think of who has it worse in this book, which is please read it, please buy it. It makes a great holiday gift. I always think of Ruth, the mother, who is the only one with enough self-awareness to truly understand how bad things are. I think she has it worst. That's what I'll say. That's my answer today.

Alison Stewart: You knew Jack Teich, who went through this in 1974. This really happened to someone you knew?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Yes. To be clear, the whole book didn't happen to somebody I knew, but I do know somebody who was kidnapped out of his driveway in 1974. It was recently the 50th anniversary of his kidnapping. He was a friend of my father's. My father grew up with him. I was born in 1975 and I grew up knowing that someone I knew, wasn't close with and saw occasionally, had been kidnapped. Which you think about it in various-- Like it's exciting, it's a little sexy, then it's crazy, and then it's sad.

As you go through the sort of normal stages of development, which I promise I went through on time, at the appropriate, like it means different things to you. One day, to imagine myself inside of that kidnapping was so devastating that I couldn't believe that this totally normal, nice guy who is functioning in the world. He travels, he knows wine, he collects things, and he was once kidnapped.

Alison Stewart: When did you decide that this would be a good story?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Never. I still have not decided that. What happened was I was trying to tell a story that answered the question; is it good or is it bad to be from money? I know it seems like there's an obvious answer. There kind of is, but just go with me here on a literature journey and I will tell you that if the question is does money corrupt you if you have too much of it, if you never have to work for survival?

I did not set out to write a story about a kidnapping. I set out to write that story and this kidnapping just kept coming into it. The vessel of a kidnapping for this question is too irresistible. If you are so safe, and if the question, by the way, is does money actually give you safety? Well, if you have enough money, that makes you safe, but if it put you in danger and you end up getting kidnapped, is it not safe to have money? Then you get ransomed, so you're safe again, so which is it? The answer just keeps going in a circle and eating its own tail, so I don't know.

Alison Stewart: Well, it's really interesting because that all kind of gets put away after like 26, 27 pages.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: You counted? [laughs]

Alison Stewart: I did count, but then you're into the generational trauma. That's when it really comes in.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What did you read or learn about generational trauma that was useful in writing this book?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I mean, I don't think I read anything in particular except that I read a lot of sort of old man Jewish authors. The way that a generation back from me, the Holocaust ripples throughout every point of view, even if you never mention it, is kind of astounding to me. In any Jewish story, and even in any American Jewish story, if you go far enough back, you hit this roadblock that is the Holocaust. It is this incredible thing.

My mother and I recently watched Enemies, A Love Story, the Isaac Bashevis Singer novel turned very, very great movie. It's about these people who left Auschwitz and then came to Coney Island. One day you're in Auschwitz, and the next day you're in Coney Island. How are you supposed to think about the world? You're at a bungalow colony upstate. How are you supposed to understand the breadth of the world if that could happen? I've always been interested in that.

Alison Stewart: Carl's father was a Holocaust survivor, and we learn in the book what he had to do to survive.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Right.

Alison Stewart: How did you think about the legacy of the Holocaust? How did it affect this family?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I think that the legacy of the Holocaust, in my family, nobody of that generation ever wanted to talk about the war very much, or maybe I didn't ask enough. I have one sister who asked very often and got some answers, but I sort of took the lead of-- I remember that there was a time, I was older than I should have been, when I understood that the thing that they obliquely refer to as the war was the Holocaust, the thing I was learning constantly in school. That's how sort of divorced in my life it was.

My grandmother had a friend who had numbers on her arm, who played cards with her. It was sort of everywhere. The question is how did I think about how it rippled?

Alison Stewart: The family, yes.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I guess I look at that as the difference between American Jews and American Americans. Right? I don't know anybody who is still replaying the Salem witch trials in their head, but I do know people who won't leave a scrap of food or who will leave all the scraps of food because their parents wouldn't let them leave a scrap of food. That's how I think of the difference.

Alison Stewart: Beamer, Nathan, and Jenny.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Those are the children.

Alison Stewart: Yes. How did you decide who we would hear from first?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I decided on Beamer because it was so fun to have--

[laughter]

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Oh, have you read the book?

Participant: Torture.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Yes, torture. What I liked was this setup of this kidnapping, that they move on and they're all thriving and everyone is doing great, and then the next page is a man on all fours in a hotel room. I don't know. We're at the library. I don't know what else I'm allowed to say. I don't know who's on the livestream. With people he has hired for the occasion of helping him reenact his father-- Thank you, whoever you are in the front. You're my favorite reader. [laughs] To reenact his father's kidnapping over and over, every Tuesday at 9:00 AM.

That seemed, to me, delightful. Even though people sometimes say, "Oh, I put the book down then," and I say, "That bothered you, not the kidnapping?" I don't judge, but I judge.

Alison Stewart: Was it always going to be three siblings?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: It was always going to be three siblings because two isn't enough, because two couldn't make the point, and because in the families that I know-- I'm one of four, but in the families that I know that are three, the three have this very, very typical birth order thing happening where the first is a high achiever, the second is a menace, and the third is just trying to survive. Right? Am I right? Can anyone hear that? I have sisters here who are choking on whatever they're having right now, so I got that right.

Alison Stewart: Which of the three children was the hardest to write?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Jenny. Jenny was the hardest to write. I don't even know if I got her that right. I have wondered if it's because she's the only girl, that it's hard-- I worked at GQ for a long time, and the world is very forgiving of wry writing about men and ridiculousness about men. Because it was Just this one girl, I felt more protective of her, and I wonder if I deprived her a little bit of her own ridiculousness in the name of that. I think I still have a ways to go.

Alison Stewart: How would you describe Middle Rock, Long Island?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Who here is from Long Island? There are a million of you. As will happen on the line outside, you'll say, "I'm from Long Island." There's a part of Long Island called, quite obnoxiously, the Gold Coast of Long Island. It's the waterfront area in Nassau County, and it is sort of the place that the Jews who did well on the Lower East Side emigrated-- I'll use the word emigrated because you do have to cross some water, and sort of set up shop in places like Great Neck and Roslyn and those areas.

Those were the first suburbs in America that reached a 50% Jewish population. It was the first-- and for a good 30 or 40-year period, the last time that Jews felt that they had integrated and assimilated into America. Then you hear the story over and over from people from that area, my father's from that area, that they leave and find out that the world isn't Jewish. They can't believe how few Jews there are. Everyone's gotta learn.

Alison Stewart: What did you want to capture about that kind of wealth on the Gold Coast?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: That it is its own prison. There's something about striving that is the only happy way to have money. That money, when it seems-- I mean, this is my theory because I have not been asked to test it out. That when you feel safe, when you feel financially able, when you have never had this sort of desire to-- If you've never burned with the fear that you won't survive, all your money could be taken away and you never will. There is no way to convince you that your survival is precarious, and the inverse is true.

I think that there are people who are from those areas, they all were wealthy, but the ones that weren't the wealthiest felt poor and are sort of vexed. I hear that a lot after this book. Like, "I now understand why, even though we were squarely middle class, I always felt very poor."

Alison Stewart: Some members of the Fletcher family weren't wealthy. Alyssa was one, Ruth was one.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Yes, the ones who married in.

Alison Stewart: What did they understand about money the other Fletchers do not?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I think they understand how not worth the psychobabble it is, like that it's such good luck to be solvent. It is so hard to find solvency in this world, and especially as we get further and further away from a solid middle class in this country. The idea of achieving the American dream, that if you could just sort of-- Like if you jump and you just can hang onto the ledge and pull yourself up into it, I think they would not have the same patience that they have for those questions, if that makes sense. I don't know if I said that correctly, did I? Okay, yes, maybe. I don't know.

Alison Stewart: Who in the Fletcher family would have traded their wealth for a more middle class upbringing?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Jenny thinks she would have.

Alison Stewart: She does.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Jenny tries to give away her money. Jenny is the daughter and she feels like her whole question in life is who would I be without this money? Who would I be? The question they all have is who would we be if this hadn't happened to us? The kidnapping, the wealth. An unanswerable question that we've all had about something in our lives. Like you can think right now when I say that of the thing you're thinking, "What if that had never happened to me? Who would I have turned out to be?"

Jenny, her family fortune is from a styrofoam factory. She first decides to be an environmentalist, but when that doesn't upset her mother enough, she decides to lead the union--

Alison Stewart: Pro union.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: She's leading a union at Yale where she was sent to become someone they could be proud of, but instead she leads a union which does finally upsets her parents because they have a non-unionized factory. She starts giving away the money just to see what it'll feel like, which is absurd. Like her mother, her sister in law, what they think of that. She gives away her money, and then finally what happens is the money actually disappears because a venture capitalist comes in and takes over the factory. Their dividends dry up, they have no money. When she realizes that she actually has no money, she is not free. She is paralyzed.

Alison Stewart: Beamer, the son.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Why did you decide to make him a screenwriter?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Oh, that's a good question. Beamer is what we call a screenwriter with a bright future behind him. He wrote a few of those, like a kind of Die Hard, like a problematic Die Hard about a guy who keeps getting kidnapped. It worked in the '90s and now he's been struggling and struggling. When I first started writing the book, he was a studio executive, but by the time I was revising the book, I was making a television show about my first novel. He became an excellent vessel for all of my insecurities about what a weird job that is and how terrible I was at doing it.

Alison Stewart: He's an addictive personality.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Oh, yes. He's addicted to everything.

Alison Stewart: Everything.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: He has like 25 different expired nicotine patches all over his body, and he stops at like 92 drive-throughs on the way home. I think at some point I say he's an addiction addict. He's not an addict. He's an addiction addict. He's not an anything addict. He'll take any addiction you have for him.

Alison Stewart: You're listening to my conversation with author Taffy Brodesser-Akner, author of the novel, Long Island Compromise. It was our November Get Lit with All Of It book club selection. We'll have more with Taffy after a quick break. This is All Of It.

[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We continue my conversation with author Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Her new novel, Long Island Compromise, was our November Get Lit with All Of It book club selection. We had a sold-out crowd at our live event, and thanks to our partners at the New York Public Library, 6,357 people were able to check out a copy of the novel and read along with us. As always, our audience members had really great questions for our author. We'll hear some of those in a moment, but first, here's more of my conversation with Taffy.

[music]

Alison Stewart: Poor Nathan.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Poor Nathan, the oldest brother.

Alison Stewart: He invests all his money with this sketchy friend who should have been obvious to him from the beginning that he was a scam.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Right.

Alison Stewart: So why wasn't it obvious to Nathan that this guy was scamming him?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Well, Allison, my therapist says that all of our choices are made in a tree of priority, and if your priority is to first get out of a horrible conversation and it's above stay solvent, then yes, I will invest my money with you, my lifelong friend-

Alison Stewart: Friend?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: -who may or may not have been just fired for real SEC investigative reasons from Goldman Sachs, that becomes the priority. Then your therapist or mine would say you made a decision.

Alison Stewart: We don't really hear from Carl more until the end of the book.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Right.

Alison Stewart: Why did you make that choice? We don't hear about him. We don't hear about his PTSD.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Because I think that the journey a child has with their parent is that you blame your parents for all the ways things go wrong, and then one day, you are asked to imagine what your parent went through. This thing that's the kidnapping is just tossed off. It's a kidnapping. It's actually a good story. He survived. That's how lucky they were. Then you're asked to think, actually, what happened to him? What did he not even tell his family about?

That's been my experience with the people I know, with my parents, with my grandparents, of suddenly saying, "Oh, my god, there was a war." "Oh, my god, there was a divorce." "Oh, my god. What was that like for you?" It's horrible to ask yourself that and to make your parents into real people.

Alison Stewart: Ruth.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Okay.

Alison Stewart: Is Ruth actually ashamed of her children?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Ruth is not ashamed-- Well, Ruth is ashamed. Ruth hates her children a little bit.

Alison Stewart: A little bit, right?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Ruth made this devil's bargain where she grew up poor in Brooklyn, and she never wanted her children to suffer the way she did. She marries this guy who has this big estate, and she goes off to live with him. She has these children, and like she wanted, they don't ever suffer, they don't ever want for anything. Then she turns it around and she realizes she cannot relate to these children. She doesn't even like them. They're just a bunch of spoiled rich kids. She can't believe that this is what she wanted. She says that a lot throughout the book. You wouldn't understand. You're a rich kid. That if you grow up poor enough, the dividing line between people is you're either a rich kid or you're like everyone else.

Alison Stewart: Let's go to the audience for questions.

Participant 1: Ruth, the zingers that come out of her mouth, the snarky comments, are they you? Where did those come from?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I guess they're all me, but I feel like Ruth gets to encompass this sort of, like, fourth wall. "Can you believe this guy?" When you're writing a book about very wealthy people, you have to make sure that the reader has someone to hold hands with.

Alison Stewart: Interesting.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Those zingers came very easily to me. I wonder if it is the voice in my head that knows I'm ridiculous. Constantly commenting on my ridiculousness and just letting her free. Thank you. That's a good question.

Participant 2: Can you just tell us about your process? Do you write daily, like two hours every day? Or you wait till you're finished, you stop, you start and so on?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I am asked that question so often, and sometimes it's from other writers, but mostly it's just a good question to ask a writer. I think that that is a chaos question because-- or it's a male question because I-- Which is not-- sure, men.

[laughter]

Participant 2: I'm not male.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: It's like I've never had the luxury of like being locked in a room or gazing out a window. I wrote Fleishman Is in Trouble at the Short Hills mall in New Jersey. The Nordstrom has a bathroom with a couch where you can't get a signal, and I wrote half of it there, and I wrote half of it in the pickup line at school. I wrote it while-- If I even try to answer that question, I'll start crying. I write probably five hours a day, and on a day I don't write, I feel like I died, which is not healthy so you shouldn't ask these questions.

Participant 2: Okay.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Okay, thank you. It is a good question, though. Thank you.

Participant 3: Hi, how are you?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Hi.

Participant 3: I just want to first compliment. As I started reading it, it reminded me so much of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Thank you.

Participant 3: Siblings, the dysfunction. There's also a tremendous amount of Inside Baseball, I feel like, for those of us who have been at a shiva house or those of us who have been with their siblings. I'm curious, with your three other siblings, how much have they looked to you to say, "Was that story about me?"

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I think not at all. I don't think there's anything in here that my sister would say-- They're here. You could ask them after, but they're in the front. They're still in the front row, so that must mean something good. It's funny, there are things that I write that are so autobiographical, and there are-- This was these people came to me whole as archetypes of people, but I don't know these people.

I think it's, at a certain point, especially when you've written about yourself as much as I have, not just in novel writing and a TV show, but in the New York Times, I think that you have to figure out how to write about other people or your career is over. I think that does happen, that there are people who can only write about themselves, and they have two or three books in them, and I'm afraid of that. I also made a career writing profiles. I write about other people all the time, so it's none of them, but maybe they'll say differently when you talk to them later.

Alison Stewart: We've got time for a few more.

Participant 4: I'm curious about Mandy Patinkin.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Yes, yes.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: That's my next question. I got you on that one, Mandy Patinkin. Beamer in his drug-addled state is convinced Mandy Patinkin would be perfect for his movie.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Which he would be. What is the actual-- May I challenge you to ask a specific question?

Participant 4: Did you need his permission to put him in the book?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: No.

Alison Stewart: I would think he would get a kick out of it.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: There's an excellent category that I have learned all about. I did not need his permission, but I did a sort of gentlemanly heads up to him. I wrote to him. When I had a gally, I wrote him a letter saying, "Hello, you don't know me, and I have some news. I've written you into this novel because I am your biggest fan. The other piece of good news is that it's going to be a TV show, and I think of any actor that we would cast, you can name your price."

I heard from him a couple of weeks later. I had the flu, and what was I doing? I was watching an old season of Homeland and the email came through and it said, "From Mandy Patinkin," and I thought I had gone into a wormhole. It was just a nice note saying, "I am in receipt of your lovely note and your book," and I have not heard if he's read it. I have heard more than 50 times of people who have seen him, overheard someone saying, "Hey, did you read Long Island Compromise?" It is the mystery of my life right now.

I hear he goes to Cafe Luxembourg a lot. I live near there. Every time I go, I think maybe today is the day. What will I do?

Alison Stewart: The Fletchers are mostly third generation, but we see the fourth generation is in the mix in the book.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Yes. The children.

Alison Stewart: Yes. What do you think's gonna happen to Beamer and Nathan's kids?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I don't think it's great. I think they grow up with this sort of non-specific inherited drama. I understand inheriting trauma. I would be annoyed if I inherited someone else's inherited trauma. Meaning like generation, generation. I think that they are kids who, just like their parents, but even are more afield from the people who-- They're further away from any sort of hardworking survivalist kind of person, and I think it's not great for them.

Alison Stewart: Where are you, I should say, in writing the screenplay for Long Island Compromise?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Oh, it's being written. It is being written the first. It's a very hard structure because the way the book is, it's like one kid's story, then another kid's story. The main challenge of it is that the kids don't interact very much until some crisis points. I think it'll be neater to see them interacting. I think that Long Island Compromise, the book, will be a sort of mood board of the show, but we'll see.

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with author Taffy Brodesser-Akner from our November Get Lit with All Of It book club event. We spent the month reading her novel, Long Island Compromise.

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.