Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing.
Speaker 1: Of all the staff writers at the New Yorker magazine,
Speaker 1: Susan Orlean covers perhaps the most ground thematically and geographically.
Speaker 1: She's been embedded with fertility, shamans and Bhutan, and orchid
Speaker 1: thieves in Louisiana. She's profiled a dog, a boxer named Biff,
Speaker 1: and the entire city of Midland, Texas. She combines a
Speaker 1: deep emotional understanding of her subjects with rigorous reporting, and
Speaker 1: she spends pretty much as long as she likes on
Speaker 1: each project. If that weren't enough, her book The Orchid
Speaker 1: Thief inspired adaptation one of the more successful art house
Speaker 1: movies of the past twenty years. Her most recent book
Speaker 1: takes as its heroes the librarians and archivists of Los
Speaker 1: Angeles County. Her entree to this story was her shock
Speaker 1: upon hearing for the first time just three years ago
Speaker 1: about the six arson at l A's Central Library. The
Speaker 1: fire is mostly unknown outside southern California, overshadowed by the
Speaker 1: Chernobyl event, but it's our Alexandria, the most devastating library
Speaker 1: fire in American history. So we have four hundred thousand gone,
Speaker 1: just gone. The whole collections. The l A Library had
Speaker 1: the largest cookbook collection in the US. They're out of print.
Speaker 1: They're gone. I mean, they had car manuals for every
Speaker 1: make and model of cars, starting at the model t irrecoverable.
Speaker 1: It had been developed. Librarians developed these collections over the years,
Speaker 1: finding these books, putting them together. So each library is
Speaker 1: also unique in that way. What's in the New York
Speaker 1: Public Library is not the same as what's in the
Speaker 1: l A Public Library, but the core stuff. And while
Speaker 1: you can quantify it, you can say four hundred thousand books.
Speaker 1: The library was founded at the turn of the century.
Speaker 1: Many of these collections had been built from that time,
Speaker 1: and that can't be fixed by money. And it's like Fantasia.
Speaker 1: It's an incredibly beautiful building that is a sort of
Speaker 1: combination Art Deco Egyptian downtown, right in the center of downtown.
Speaker 1: And this was the central library of the entire l
Speaker 1: A Library system in it was in bad shape. It
Speaker 1: was a time when downtown l A was in bad shape.
Speaker 1: People weren't even sure that it was important to have
Speaker 1: a library. Downtown Los Angeles has changed. It's unrecognizable from
Speaker 1: when I first came here. No one lived inland that
Speaker 1: what Nola Wood lived in Silver Lake in Los VELAs.
Speaker 1: The air quality was so poor that everybody lived as
Speaker 1: far west as they could afford, and nobody lived downtown.
Speaker 1: Describe what happened um April. A fire alarm went off
Speaker 1: and everybody thought it was a false alarm. The library
Speaker 1: had a lot of false alarms, and lo and behold,
Speaker 1: firefighters found smoke in the fiction section. Suddenly it absolutely erupted.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can imagine a fire in the library,
Speaker 1: that's the perfect environment. More than that, it wasn't only
Speaker 1: that it was books. It was in the stacks, which
Speaker 1: are almost like chimneys. They were thick, concrete walled tubes
Speaker 1: filled with books. Biggest library fire in the history of
Speaker 1: the US, which at the time I heard about it,
Speaker 1: which was very recently, I am shocked. You would assume
Speaker 1: there would be coverage in the New York papers. So
Speaker 1: I went back to look at what was going on
Speaker 1: that somehow obscure. You're this news. There's a little story
Speaker 1: on the front page in the New York Times saying
Speaker 1: radiation detected in Scandinavia was the Chernobyl meltdown, and I
Speaker 1: had kind of forgotten how terrifying that had been. Nobody
Speaker 1: knew what was going to happen, and it really was
Speaker 1: days of the New York Times being wall to wall
Speaker 1: Chernobyl coverage because we none of us knew if this
Speaker 1: fallout was going to end up traveling around the world.
Speaker 1: In fact it did, but the Chernobyl I don't want
Speaker 1: to digress on this, but I had lived in Los
Speaker 1: Angeles pretty much full time, the only time of my
Speaker 1: life that I lived only in l A. And in
Speaker 1: December eighty five and moved back to New York. So
Speaker 1: you just missed and well, I and I commuted back
Speaker 1: and forth forever, but I was mostly in New York
Speaker 1: and Chernobyl was six and I was living in New
Speaker 1: York at the time, and remember that never heard a
Speaker 1: word about this fire. Yeah, so how do you first
Speaker 1: become familiar? How did this cross your desks? I had
Speaker 1: just moved to l A. And I was offered a
Speaker 1: tour of Central Library by the head of the Library
Speaker 1: Foundation because I had done a little fundraising thing for them,
Speaker 1: and I thought, well, I've never actually been to Central
Speaker 1: Library in l A. And libraries had really come back
Speaker 1: into my consciousness when I had a kid and started
Speaker 1: taking my son to the library and was reminded so
Speaker 1: powerfully of what it is like as a child to
Speaker 1: go to a library. And it was really vivid and
Speaker 1: very poignant for me because my mom had just developed
Speaker 1: Alzheimer's and I was thinking a lot about our trips
Speaker 1: together to the library, so libraries were on my mind.
Speaker 1: When I was offered this tour of Central Library, I thought,
Speaker 1: oh great, so I went down there was really struck
Speaker 1: by the building because it's so beautiful. And as we
Speaker 1: were walking through on this tour, Ken Brecker, who is
Speaker 1: the head of the foundation, pulled a library book off
Speaker 1: the shelf and he took a deep whiff of it
Speaker 1: and I thought, I guess I'm new to l a.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's the way people do it here. What do
Speaker 1: I know books? Actually, it's a nice thought. And he said,
Speaker 1: you can still smell the smoke and some of them.
Speaker 1: And I said, oh, did they used to allow smoking
Speaker 1: in the library And he looked at me like I
Speaker 1: was crazy. Of course, he said no, the fire And
Speaker 1: I said what fire And he said the big fire,
Speaker 1: the fire in six that shut the library down for
Speaker 1: seven years. And my jaw just dropped and I said,
Speaker 1: what tell me about this? And how did I never
Speaker 1: hear about it? Because the more I learned, more I
Speaker 1: learned the scope of the fire, the more amazed I was.
Speaker 1: That was one of those stories that was kind of
Speaker 1: hiding in plain sight. So my interest in writing about
Speaker 1: libraries then had this hook because besides just being a
Speaker 1: chance to write about my feelings about libraries, it was
Speaker 1: a chance to write about this event that was fascinating.
Speaker 1: I mean both the investigation into it, the reason that
Speaker 1: I didn't know about it, the libraries recovery from it,
Speaker 1: and all of the emotions around it, which we're really
Speaker 1: powerful because obviously people in l A knew about this,
Speaker 1: and for seven years that library was closed, the main library,
Speaker 1: the library still around. He just passed away. We spent many,
Speaker 1: many many hours on the phone. He's he was an
Speaker 1: amazing care during His name was Wyman Jones and he's irascible, um, arrogant, fascinating,
Speaker 1: multi talented guy who was an amateur magician, very talented
Speaker 1: magician and jazz pianist who's also this head of libraries.
Speaker 1: He had come from running the libraries in Fort Worth,
Speaker 1: Texas and was the head of the library system in
Speaker 1: l A for twenty years. Very opinionated. He actually believed
Speaker 1: that central Library should be torn down and that the
Speaker 1: land should be sold and there should be a new
Speaker 1: library built somewhere else. But he conceded the point when
Speaker 1: public opinion rose up to preserve the building. So why
Speaker 1: if back then, when the fire happened and it was
Speaker 1: closed for seven years in that area isn't favorites, why
Speaker 1: did they bother resurrecting the library. Well, there were a
Speaker 1: lot of people who made the argument that there was
Speaker 1: no need for a central downtown library and that the
Speaker 1: city could function very well just having branch library. And
Speaker 1: those people who wanted to resurrect it, how did they
Speaker 1: win the day. I can't say that people had the
Speaker 1: ability to see twenty years into the future and realized
Speaker 1: downtown would be renovated um the way it's been, because
Speaker 1: I was downtown in that period of time here as
Speaker 1: a visitor and no one lived down here. It was
Speaker 1: desolate at night. So the idea that the library would
Speaker 1: be a centerpiece in a revitalized downtown sounded ridiculous. But
Speaker 1: these people really had the hope that downtown would turn
Speaker 1: into a thriving part of the city. But there were
Speaker 1: also people saying the building is too small, we should
Speaker 1: tear it down, sell the land, will get all sorts
Speaker 1: of money for the land, and we'll build another central
Speaker 1: library somewhere else. Yeah, and that there was a very
Speaker 1: strong um kind of movements supporting that. Now, looking back,
Speaker 1: I would say, we're really lucky that that didn't happen.
Speaker 1: Is there a hero of the preservation cause absolutely there
Speaker 1: was a woman named Margaret Bach and another architect named
Speaker 1: Barton Phelps. A number of architects got together and said
Speaker 1: we have to preserve the library. And that actually was
Speaker 1: the first organized group doing any kind of historical preservation
Speaker 1: in l A. So we have them to thank that
Speaker 1: that grew into being the l A Conservancy, which has
Speaker 1: preserved all these Loutner houses, all these Schindler houses that
Speaker 1: wouldn't have happened if the library hadn't been threatened. Now,
Speaker 1: described the devastation of losing that volume of these things
Speaker 1: to them, precious volumes of beautiful books. Who did you
Speaker 1: talk to about that? I spend time with a lot
Speaker 1: of the librarians who many of whom are now retired,
Speaker 1: who were here at the time the librarians were devastated.
Speaker 1: I mean they had spent their entire professional lives developing
Speaker 1: the collections in their departments also, and I found this
Speaker 1: really touching. They were absolutely frantic over the prospect of
Speaker 1: the patrons not having the library to come to. And
Speaker 1: the city of l A hired a psychologist to work
Speaker 1: with the librarians because a lot of them really were
Speaker 1: suffering kind of PTSD and they had seen their life's
Speaker 1: work go up and smoke. They care. They care about
Speaker 1: books in a way that you probably you do on
Speaker 1: the park as your this is your stock and trade.
Speaker 1: But uh, you know similar, I guess to art, where
Speaker 1: there's an inventory of material that exists purely for a
Speaker 1: humanistic reason. People who work there are horrifically underpaid. I
Speaker 1: was guided recently by a New York Time writer, uh,
Speaker 1: to the plight of libraries in Iowa, and we were
Speaker 1: my wife and I have a charitable foundation, my family,
Speaker 1: and we were pointed towards this group of people. And
Speaker 1: there's three libraries she's been in touch with who are
Speaker 1: struggling too. I spoke to I said to one of them,
Speaker 1: I said, what do you need? I don't want to
Speaker 1: assume anything. I said, what do you need and how
Speaker 1: much money? She said, the budget for the library is
Speaker 1: five thousand dollars. I said, I said, wait a second.
Speaker 1: I said, you mean like a day or a week
Speaker 1: or and she said no, no, She said everybody's volunteers
Speaker 1: and part time people, and no one's getting paid. And
Speaker 1: she's books are given to us. She said, books we
Speaker 1: don't need. She said, what I need in this library,
Speaker 1: it's food. I need money for food because the kids
Speaker 1: are coming here and asking for food and they want
Speaker 1: to eat. They come from poor homes. And I thought
Speaker 1: the average person just can't appreciate how much they must
Speaker 1: have suffered. Yeah. A number of librarians um marriages fell
Speaker 1: apart in the wake of this. They were really pressed
Speaker 1: and out of a job, yeah, and felt useless, felt
Speaker 1: they didn't know what to do with themselves. One woman
Speaker 1: librarian told me she didn't get her period for for
Speaker 1: four months after the fire. She was under so much
Speaker 1: stress and she was so dismayed. I think it's very difficult.
Speaker 1: I think it would be the only analog I can
Speaker 1: think of is if your house burned down. When Dick
Speaker 1: Cavitt's house, one of the Seven Sisters houses in Montalk,
Speaker 1: the Stanford White Houses on the bluff there in Montalk.
Speaker 1: The house burned down. A good deal of what was
Speaker 1: his on the personal level was destroyed in the fire.
Speaker 1: The house was ruined, and for that reason, I keep
Speaker 1: nothing of any value like that in my Long Island home.
Speaker 1: It's in storage in the city because I'm terrified of
Speaker 1: a fire. It's terrifying. And interestingly, the insurance coverage that
Speaker 1: a library has covers the building and not the contents,
Speaker 1: so the insurance did not cover the cost of the
Speaker 1: lost books. It's like two million dollars worth of books.
Speaker 1: The money had to be raised. It was raised by
Speaker 1: tiny donations from school kids, big donations from the Getty Foundation,
Speaker 1: from some of the studios George Lucas, Sydney Sheldon Um.
Speaker 1: There was a real rallying in the city, and I
Speaker 1: suspect it was a lot of people who had never
Speaker 1: really before given the library much thought. Well, of course,
Speaker 1: all books now in the world we live in existed digitally.
Speaker 1: Everything is on a file somewhere and backed up, and
Speaker 1: there's no fear that that's going to be raised forever.
Speaker 1: This fire, because it was so epic, did it launch
Speaker 1: some kind of program where people could preserve these books
Speaker 1: better and in case this happens and these fabled collections
Speaker 1: aren't lost. It's interesting because, um, the fire occurred right
Speaker 1: at the moment when technology was first entering library management.
Speaker 1: The l A library at that point switched to an
Speaker 1: electronic catalog because even losing the card catalog was devastating. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean they had to read catalog two million books
Speaker 1: they didn't even know. And that was actually one of
Speaker 1: those odd pieces of timing that electronic cataloging was just
Speaker 1: becoming widely available. So l A had to read catalog
Speaker 1: all of its books. Anyway, it was purchasing all of
Speaker 1: these new books to replace the ones that were lost,
Speaker 1: but the books themselves all new books. Digital copy exists,
Speaker 1: but of old books they Google has a huge project
Speaker 1: where they are digitally scanning old but they don't exist
Speaker 1: on a file that that book is it. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: they're gonna make a file. I mean for an individual
Speaker 1: library to do that, it's probably Google. Yeah. And so
Speaker 1: we are putting more safeguards in place so that if
Speaker 1: you had a devastating fire and you lost these rare
Speaker 1: in many cases, now I think there is a backup
Speaker 1: on the other hand, the l A Public Library has
Speaker 1: the largest or one of the very largest collections of
Speaker 1: maps and atlas is of any library in the country.
Speaker 1: They have over two thousand. It would take a very
Speaker 1: long time and a lot of money for them to
Speaker 1: digitize all of them. That's the goal, because that would
Speaker 1: be fantastic to have all those maps, a digital copy
Speaker 1: of all of them. But it's it's an enormous amount
Speaker 1: of work for a library to do. For me, what
Speaker 1: I find interesting with a book like this, You don't
Speaker 1: make it into a detective story. You don't build this
Speaker 1: book in that way. This book is a lot of history.
Speaker 1: How does the book begin to emerge? And how do
Speaker 1: you piece together? I guess what I'm asking is, how
Speaker 1: does Susan Lean write a book? What do you do?
Speaker 1: I'm still trying to answer that question, actually for myself.
Speaker 1: But what I do I have a My approach is
Speaker 1: to throw my net as wide as possible in the beginning,
Speaker 1: to have no preconceived idea of what the book has,
Speaker 1: show me everything, just I want to learn everything. The
Speaker 1: way I look at it is in the beginning, I'm
Speaker 1: a student. I'm I'm doing a graduate course in the library.
Speaker 1: Library history, the history of this particular incident with the fire,
Speaker 1: the people who work there. The people who work there
Speaker 1: now what the day to day life is of a library,
Speaker 1: and in the course of it, you know, and the
Speaker 1: history of arson and the history burning books, in the
Speaker 1: course of world of events, which sadly has been a
Speaker 1: theme since the beginning of time. As I'm doing all
Speaker 1: of this and gathering so much material, themes begin emerging
Speaker 1: to me. And what this was about was storytelling. We
Speaker 1: are creatures who tell stories, We preserve stories, and we
Speaker 1: make stories up about yourselves. And I feel like this
Speaker 1: was about the story of the library, and the library
Speaker 1: is the repository of stories. The people who became very
Speaker 1: interesting to me in the book, like Harry Peak, the
Speaker 1: person who is accused of starting the fire, of Charles
Speaker 1: lammis one of the really fascinating characters who ran the library.
Speaker 1: These were people who were who made up stories about themselves,
Speaker 1: who created stories around the who they were in the world,
Speaker 1: even more than the average person. So as that theme
Speaker 1: began to emerge, it helped me organize this material and
Speaker 1: begin pruning away at what was important for me to
Speaker 1: know but wasn't important to put in the book. I
Speaker 1: chose to start the book with Harry Peak because I
Speaker 1: think people are more interested in people than they are
Speaker 1: in places or events that a book that invites you
Speaker 1: in through a character is often one that you're willing
Speaker 1: to keep reading. And he as a person who was
Speaker 1: a compulsive storyteller otherwise known as a liar, he symbolized
Speaker 1: so much of what the book was. He's a kind
Speaker 1: of classic creature of l A, a want to be actor, dreamer,
Speaker 1: a drifter, how old at the time of the event
Speaker 1: he is in his to Ennis, And he also kind
Speaker 1: of intersected with l A history in a very interesting way. Um,
Speaker 1: and I won't necessarily tell you the de nument of
Speaker 1: his story, so that will leave a little bit of mystery.
Speaker 1: But even the way he left this earth was very
Speaker 1: much a part of what was going on historically in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles. Yeah, but my challenges. I like writing about
Speaker 1: things I don't know anything about. So I begin as
Speaker 1: a student and then I become a teacher, and I
Speaker 1: try to turn to readers and say, let me teach
Speaker 1: you about this amazing thing I learned about, And like
Speaker 1: a teacher, I have to figure out how can I
Speaker 1: tell you this story in the most compelling way that
Speaker 1: keeps you engaged. And I don't have to include every
Speaker 1: single thing that I learned, because there's just too much,
Speaker 1: but instead create a narrative that will bring you into
Speaker 1: the story and you can follow the journey of learning
Speaker 1: about why this topic interested me. Susan or Leave New
Speaker 1: Yorker writer and the author of the library book about
Speaker 1: l a Library Fire. If you're as fascinated as I
Speaker 1: am by all things New Yorker, you should listen to
Speaker 1: my interview with the intrepid Tina Brown coming from Vanity Fair.
Speaker 1: She was greeted with skepticism when she took over The
Speaker 1: New Yorker. It was much more open warfare against me
Speaker 1: at the New Yorker at the beginning, you know, because
Speaker 1: we had this huge kind of pushback from the old
Speaker 1: guard expecting that this was going to be me putting
Speaker 1: Demi Moore and in the magazine. I mean, first of
Speaker 1: the cartoonist Bob Mankoff. He thought that I was going
Speaker 1: to cancel all of cartoons and just put pictures in here.
Speaker 1: The full interview with Tina Brown in our archive at
Speaker 1: Here's the Thing dot org. This is Alec Baldwin, and
Speaker 1: you're listening to Here's the Thing Now, more of my
Speaker 1: conversation with New Yorker writer Susan or Lean. In February,
Speaker 1: ten months after the worst library fire in American history,
Speaker 1: the l a p D arrested a man named Harry Peak.
Speaker 1: He confessed to starting the fire, and then he recanted.
Speaker 1: He confessed multiple times, actually and recanted multiple times with
Speaker 1: different alibis each time. It assumed that that was coached
Speaker 1: by an attorney. Did a lawyer coach He didn't even
Speaker 1: have a lawyer for the first several times that he
Speaker 1: confessed and recanted. This was he confessed to friends, and
Speaker 1: friends turned him in as one's friends do. There was
Speaker 1: a reward. He had confessed multiple times two friends. He
Speaker 1: confess to the police in a casual interview where they
Speaker 1: were simply saying, what were you doing that day? Where
Speaker 1: were you? What happens in days prior to no video
Speaker 1: cameras that are getting people in and out. There were
Speaker 1: simply security keeping people from coming into early There was
Speaker 1: no there's no record. Take your feet off the table exactly,
Speaker 1: and don't eat potato chips on the rarebus quiet and
Speaker 1: even today libraries are open to anybody, anyone can come in.
Speaker 1: That is both their greatest strength and sometimes their greatest challenge.
Speaker 1: I did this movie with Emilio Estefays. He did this
Speaker 1: movie The Public and it's about a guy who's on
Speaker 1: the staff of the Cincinnati Public Library who joins a
Speaker 1: protest by homeless people who are denizens of the library,
Speaker 1: and a bane to the board of the library stage
Speaker 1: a demonstration and they seal off a section of the library,
Speaker 1: takeover and have a protest of a demonstration. And the
Speaker 1: movie just screened at the Toronto Film Festival did quite
Speaker 1: well with great We all went up there, Michael Michael,
Speaker 1: Kay Williams and Taylor Shilling and all these wonderful actress
Speaker 1: who working film and m and Amelia plays the lead role.
Speaker 1: And the support he's gotten from the library community is really,
Speaker 1: really wonderful. They are a warm, friendly, welcoming place, full
Speaker 1: of interesting stuff costing nothing, and there aren't that many
Speaker 1: places in our world that exists like that. So there
Speaker 1: was no record of Harry Pea coming into the library,
Speaker 1: as there was no record of anybody coming into the library.
Speaker 1: And in regards to him confessing and becanting, did he
Speaker 1: indicate any motive? Why did he do it? Once he
Speaker 1: confessed to the next question is why he never he
Speaker 1: never said. The library opens for employees or elier than
Speaker 1: it does to the public. So a door is open,
Speaker 1: a security guard sits there to make sure you have
Speaker 1: an employee badge to get in. On that morning, a
Speaker 1: young man started walking in. The security guards stopped him
Speaker 1: and said the library is not open, and the young
Speaker 1: man apparently was annoyed by being stopped and left. The
Speaker 1: city's final explanation for why they believed Harry Peake did
Speaker 1: it on top of the fact that he had confessed,
Speaker 1: was that he was angry that the guard had turned
Speaker 1: him away. I want to get into the apple store
Speaker 1: early too. But did anybody venture what was wrong with him?
Speaker 1: Did they get into his mental health? And that's part
Speaker 1: of what the mystery is because usually people who are
Speaker 1: pyromaniacs generally display that behavior fairly early in life. It's
Speaker 1: very rare for someone in their twenties who has no
Speaker 1: history ever and has never been to torch the l
Speaker 1: a central library. Did uh? Did experts determine how the
Speaker 1: fire was set? It's a big question. Arson is the
Speaker 1: one of the most difficult crimes to analyze and investigate
Speaker 1: and In fact, it's the least successfully prosecuted felony for
Speaker 1: that very reason. Usually the means of starting a fire
Speaker 1: get destroyed in the fire. And believe it or not,
Speaker 1: libraries until the late eighties did not have sprinkler systems. Librarians, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty shock library they didn't have sprinkler systems because
Speaker 1: the worry was water is as damaging. Someone set them right,
Speaker 1: someone lights a match to you know, and and sneaking
Speaker 1: a cigarette back in the set and then boom, you've
Speaker 1: got your sprinkler systems going off in your books are
Speaker 1: going to be ruined. So the American Library Association until
Speaker 1: the late eighties advised against sprinkler systems. And this was
Speaker 1: before they had systems that use gas. And yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean this was not basically fired prevention at that time
Speaker 1: was a sprinkler that would get triggered and sent. In fact,
Speaker 1: a great number of the books that were ruined in
Speaker 1: the fire were ruined by water that firefighters were. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now you grew up in Cleveland, yes, and what did
Speaker 1: your dad do. He was a real estate developer, mostly
Speaker 1: a mom and part time worked in a bank. When
Speaker 1: you were growing up in that household, what were books
Speaker 1: and your childhood and what was yourn was a big reader.
Speaker 1: My parents were great library goers, and they grew up
Speaker 1: in the depression. I think they felt, as many people
Speaker 1: who grew up in the depression felt, if you could
Speaker 1: borrow something, why would you buy it. They were not
Speaker 1: big on buying books. It was to them a luxury
Speaker 1: that was didn't make sense you could borrow a book.
Speaker 1: So we would go to the library all the time.
Speaker 1: I grew up going at least once a week, if
Speaker 1: not twice a week, taking books out. I didn't start
Speaker 1: buying books till I was in college, and I think
Speaker 1: I was buying textbooks and suddenly became obsessed with owning books.
Speaker 1: My parents, to the day they died, they had the
Speaker 1: money to buy books. They lived through the depression and
Speaker 1: they had were very comfortable and could have afforded any
Speaker 1: books they wanted. They it was something that was embedded
Speaker 1: in them that you borrowed books from the library, you
Speaker 1: didn't buy them. So we didn't have a lot of
Speaker 1: books in my house. Even when I go to Barnes
Speaker 1: and Noble, I love it, and I just said, I
Speaker 1: get the same feeling. I mean, I'm in a room
Speaker 1: full of books. It doesn't matter whose name is on
Speaker 1: the door by Lincoln Center, the one by now and
Speaker 1: when it closed, I was that was my Barnes and Noble.
Speaker 1: I was devastated. Not even the big one on Broadway
Speaker 1: in the old Shakespeare. I didn't. I didn't. I didn't
Speaker 1: go to that one. I didn't like that as much
Speaker 1: as that one by Lincoln Center. I loved that bookstore.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna close. I was so sad. Oh it's it's
Speaker 1: a heartbreak. Now. I want to ask you, because we
Speaker 1: are going to run out of time, how does writing
Speaker 1: congeal in your life? Like when do you decide that's
Speaker 1: what you're going to do with your life? And it's
Speaker 1: a big commitment. I started writing when I learned to read,
Speaker 1: and I never thought I would be anything other than
Speaker 1: a writer. I wrote little books for my family when
Speaker 1: I was really young. I'm not trying to say it
Speaker 1: was a prodigy. I just writing always seemed to me
Speaker 1: to be the filter through which experience made sense to me.
Speaker 1: Communicating telling stories seemed like a natural transaction between me
Speaker 1: and the world. Just it was just what I wanted
Speaker 1: to do. When I was probably in college, I realized
Speaker 1: what I really wanted to do was tell true stories.
Speaker 1: I didn't want to write fiction. I wanted to learn
Speaker 1: about the world, and particularly learn about things that they
Speaker 1: hadn't noticed or hadn't thought about before. And trying to
Speaker 1: figure out how you do that for a living was
Speaker 1: of course a bit of a challenge. But when I
Speaker 1: discovered the New Yorker, I thought, ah, I get it now.
Speaker 1: This is where you write those kinds of stories where
Speaker 1: you examine life and tell their stories. So it was
Speaker 1: my dream to work there. And I'm lucky enough too.
Speaker 1: And I've never done any waitress but other than that,
Speaker 1: I've never done any other jobs. Do you think that
Speaker 1: Orchid Thief was your most cinematic book, Well, the funny
Speaker 1: thing is I think none of them are. And yet
Speaker 1: what surprised you but that when they mean they made
Speaker 1: this into a very famous movie, we did that. Surprise
Speaker 1: you when we want to make it real. Surprise me.
Speaker 1: In fact, when it was optioned, and it was optioned
Speaker 1: immediately before I had even finished the book, I thought,
Speaker 1: I have no idea what these people think they're doing.
Speaker 1: It's a very um, discursive, sort of reflective internal book.
Speaker 1: I cannot imagine how you're going to make a movie
Speaker 1: out of this. But that's not my problem, that's your problem.
Speaker 1: And I remember saying to a friend, They're gonna have
Speaker 1: to make the crime be a murder or something more
Speaker 1: dramatic than just stealing orchids is just impossible, and there's
Speaker 1: going to have to be some sex in it some how,
Speaker 1: and lo and behold, there you go. I mean, when
Speaker 1: I got the script for adaptation, I read it and thought,
Speaker 1: you people are crazy. I don't know what you're doing,
Speaker 1: but at least I'm right you did have to put
Speaker 1: in a murderer and a car crash. I've had this
Speaker 1: funny relationship with Hollywood that I write things that I
Speaker 1: want to write, and I they are not conventional in
Speaker 1: any way in terms of Hollywood sense of a story,
Speaker 1: and yet they come knocking and I'm delighted. Well, I've
Speaker 1: never particularly been interested in it, but we are adapting
Speaker 1: this book for television, and I thought, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna give it a shot. I think
Speaker 1: it would be fun to try a different kind of writing. Um,
Speaker 1: but there's so many things I want to write about
Speaker 1: out in the world that um, I've never at. I
Speaker 1: want to be the one to adapt my work. I've
Speaker 1: always found it mostly people option my work, and I
Speaker 1: think I have no idea what you are going to
Speaker 1: do with this. So just call me when it's done
Speaker 1: and I'll come to the premiere. I'm very happy. Give
Speaker 1: me a few days notice so I can get my
Speaker 1: dress to the drive. I feel about movies i'm in.
Speaker 1: I don't want to see the movie. They'll say, you
Speaker 1: want to see a kind of the movie. I'm like, no,
Speaker 1: welcome to the premiere. I suppose now that I live
Speaker 1: in l A, my interest in working on the adaptation
Speaker 1: of this book is more than it was when I
Speaker 1: lived in New York because I'm going to work on
Speaker 1: it with a friend who's a wonderful writer. Yeah. What
Speaker 1: do you think living in LA is going to do
Speaker 1: to your writing? Boy? I wonder about it, except, um,
Speaker 1: you know, there are the stories that I'm interested in writing.
Speaker 1: I think are the same that they've always been, and
Speaker 1: I don't see a big change in that. I've lived
Speaker 1: in a lot of different places since I began writing.
Speaker 1: I lived in Boston and New York, in Upstate New York,
Speaker 1: um in Boston again, now in l A. And I
Speaker 1: my writing has remained really consistent. I think there are
Speaker 1: stories that I'll find out about because I live here
Speaker 1: that I might not have seen otherwise. But in the
Speaker 1: heart of the writing, I feel that that's such an
Speaker 1: internal thing that where you're living doesn't affect it as much.
Speaker 1: You're married to John Gillespie. Last time I checked worked
Speaker 1: at the Lampoon. He did, and it is a very
Speaker 1: He's very funny. He's very funny. But he also says
Speaker 1: to me that the classic lampoon response to someone else
Speaker 1: making a joke is to simply, with a very straight face,
Speaker 1: say uh huh, yeah, that's that's funny. I co wrote
Speaker 1: a book with Kurt Anderson, the Writing and Hurt and
Speaker 1: I did the Trump Parody book. Wrote a book called
Speaker 1: you Can't Spell America Without Me. It's a parody. And
Speaker 1: what was so riveting it was truly just overwhelming to
Speaker 1: me and just mesmerizing was how fast the book came
Speaker 1: out of it. He wrote it just like like weeks
Speaker 1: just came. He'd sent me, you know, chapters, and I
Speaker 1: was overwhelmed by how I give him notes. He's so
Speaker 1: productive yet and he's so funny. So he and my
Speaker 1: husband were together and there were a lot of people
Speaker 1: who emerged from that couple of years. Um, well, the
Speaker 1: lampoon has always turned out amazingly clever, smart people, but
Speaker 1: that particular year there were a lot of people who
Speaker 1: have gone on to have quite illustrious careers. Is he
Speaker 1: still writing now? My husband, he wrote a book about
Speaker 1: corporate boards and how bad they are. Um, but mostly
Speaker 1: he's been in the financial world, which is funny. He
Speaker 1: finds the funny. He exactly. Well, I want to say,
Speaker 1: because we're pretty much at a time, and I just
Speaker 1: want to say, in my town, Massapequa, Long Island, the
Speaker 1: Massapequa Public Library and very nice library, and it was
Speaker 1: centrally located. It wasn't like on some outpost where they
Speaker 1: could have got cheap land, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: They just was right in the heart of town. You
Speaker 1: just got that special feeling of going to the library.
Speaker 1: You went to the library and you were groomed almost
Speaker 1: Because my father was a teacher, I guess this is
Speaker 1: a part of it. Oh, there's an opportunity for me here.
Speaker 1: Something's gonna happen here. This is a sacred a place
Speaker 1: of real deliberation. We're gonna sit and we're gonna learn
Speaker 1: about the research for school, obviously, and looking up, you
Speaker 1: know about our var new Neez Kabata Devaka and the Explorers.
Speaker 1: We would study when we were in the sixth grade,
Speaker 1: and they had two of the old style bookmobiles. They
Speaker 1: would be taken on the trailer hitch and it was
Speaker 1: it was parked in the parking lot the nine whole
Speaker 1: public golf course that existed in my neighborhood, and the
Speaker 1: and the parking lot of the golf course was across
Speaker 1: the street from my house, and we would walk across
Speaker 1: the street and go into this funky, weird bubble. It
Speaker 1: was like a little trailer and the woman was sitting
Speaker 1: at the desk. It was almost like it was like
Speaker 1: doll furniture was like a little little desk she was at.
Speaker 1: And the books had all the little wooden slats to
Speaker 1: keep them from flying off the shelf. Uh. They had
Speaker 1: like these little guard rails they snapped on them when
Speaker 1: they traveled so they wouldn't come flying when the thing
Speaker 1: was driving. And I get a phone call from the
Speaker 1: Massive People Public Library and they say, you know this
Speaker 1: is over. You know we're gonna take these things. We're
Speaker 1: gonna junk them. Would you like to buy one. I
Speaker 1: bought it kid, and I stuck it, and I stuck
Speaker 1: it in a little corner of my property on Long Island,
Speaker 1: and I put trees around it because my neighbors complained.
Speaker 1: My neighbors said to me, why do you have these
Speaker 1: decrepit structures? They said, what is this? These are real
Speaker 1: hamp the knights? Shall we say? One woman said to me,
Speaker 1: she was I didn't realize we were living in Appalachia. God,
Speaker 1: she said, but I remember that feeling, you know, of
Speaker 1: going to that and getting those books, and you knew
Speaker 1: the value the plastic coating on them to protect the
Speaker 1: coverers and everything. And I remember the sacred experience and
Speaker 1: handling that material, And I think that you know, I
Speaker 1: love bookstores too, and I love owning books. Like libraries,
Speaker 1: there is something special and sacred about the idea of
Speaker 1: it being a shared space with shared things, that we
Speaker 1: as a society have created this entity and we all
Speaker 1: sharing it together, and it works almost all the time.
Speaker 1: You take a book home, you read it, you bring
Speaker 1: it back, someone else takes it. It is democratic, small
Speaker 1: d experience in the most really beautiful way. And going
Speaker 1: into a library and seeing a scholar and a teenager
Speaker 1: and a homeless person and a wealth person, and everyone
Speaker 1: has the same right to take the books. It feels great.
Speaker 1: It's like how I assume some people feel when they
Speaker 1: go to church. It feels right, it feels good. It
Speaker 1: makes me feel I get very emotional about it. I mean,
Speaker 1: and I'm going into a bookstore I love and it
Speaker 1: feels amazing and I want everything, and I love walking around.
Speaker 1: That element of thinking, wow, we can really do things
Speaker 1: together as a society and have it work is particular
Speaker 1: to a library, and it feels so gratifying. I'm really
Speaker 1: looking forward to seeing a movie of this because that
Speaker 1: something tells me, like Orchid Thief, it's an unlikely subject
Speaker 1: into something that could become a very very engaging film.
Speaker 1: Thank you, I hope, but I hope. I hope it
Speaker 1: makes it to the screen in some fashion. Yeah, thank
Speaker 1: you so much. I'm I'm excited about it, and I think, um,
Speaker 1: it will be a pleasure to highlight this world of
Speaker 1: libraries in some way. UM, because they really, especially at
Speaker 1: this moment in time when so much else feels so
Speaker 1: dark and trouble risk, they are real beacons in the
Speaker 1: world at the moment, and there's something about being in
Speaker 1: a room full of books. There's nothing else like it.
Speaker 1: You I do that now. I know it's completely acceptable
Speaker 1: in l A. To snorted book. I'm gonna Susan Orleans latest,
Speaker 1: The Library, book about the devastation of the l A
Speaker 1: Central Library, is in stores now from Simon and Schuster.
Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing.