Geraldine Brooks On the Art of Grieving and Spanning the Political Divide

Speaker 1 We're not going to talk about Elon Musk.

Speaker 2 He's such a moving target. It must be hard to finish the afterword.

Speaker 1 Yes, it is. The book is a lot about him.

Speaker 2 Abuse him about a new thing every day.

Speaker 1 It's true. Just don't say I didn't warn you all.

Speaker 1 Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is on with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher.
My guest today is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks.

Speaker 1 She's written six novels including the bestsellers March and Horse and she's just come out with a memoir about her late husband and my friend Tony Horowitz. It's called Memorial Days.

Speaker 1 I've known Geraldine and Tony since forever. I don't even remember, but my son was just born when I recall first hanging out at their farm in rural Virginia.

Speaker 1 I don't know where we first met, but I do remember when he died here in Washington when he was on a book book tour of his latest book.

Speaker 1 And it was devastating to everybody. Tony was a bright light, not just as an author and

Speaker 1 a reporter and journalist, but he also was a person. He was always smiling, always happy to see you, always just

Speaker 1 a real inspiration to a lot of us. I think this memoir is absolutely beautiful, as difficult as it was, obviously, for Geraldine to write.

Speaker 1 And together, they were quite a pair, and that's the critical thing.

Speaker 1 I spoke with Geraldine at an event at Six and I, the Center for Arts, Entertainment, and Ideas, and Jewish Life in Washington, D.C., which is hosted in partnership with Politics and Prose Bookstore.

Speaker 1 Ironically, Politics and Prose was where Tony would have been the day he died. He was on a book tour for Spying on the South, an Odyssey Across the American Divide.

Speaker 1 Very prescient he was to what was happening in this country well before everybody else.

Speaker 1 He called the research, quote, a pub crawl across the old Confederacy and wondered whether, quote, barstool democracy could save America.

Speaker 1 It was his attempt to understand and bridge the widening gap that now feels like it's become a chasm. I do wonder today what he would have thought about everything.

Speaker 1 Geraldine and I spoke about her history with Tony from their early days as reporters at the Wall Street Journal when they were known together as Hobro, which sounds weird, covering everything from Cleveland to Canberra to Kuwait.

Speaker 1 We talked about how she dealt with losing him and grieving the life they had.

Speaker 1 We also discussed the political situation we're in now, how it compares to governmental crises she covered while she was a reporter, and a new project she has in the works with Michael Lewis about government.

Speaker 1 Our question this week comes from journalist and author Martha Sherrill, who I worked with at the Washington Post for many years.

Speaker 1 Also, I'm excited to announce that On and Pivot will be returning to South by Southwest this year as part of the official Vox Media podcast stage presented by Smartsheet.

Speaker 1 On Saturday, March 8th, we'll have a live episode of On with Senator Elizabeth Warren, and on Sunday, March 9th, Scott and I will be doing Pivot in the morning, followed by another episode of On with guest Chelsea Handler in the afternoon.

Speaker 1 Visit voxmedia.com backslash SXSW to learn more and see everything else happening on the Vox Media podcast stage. That should be fun.

Speaker 1 In any case, the conversation with Geraldine is very moving and inspiring. So have a listen.

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Speaker 1 I'm so honored to be here with you tonight to talk about your memoir, Memorial Days, and also Tony, who I knew very well.

Speaker 1 I don't remember where I first met him, but he was a wonderful, spirited, astonishing reporter and just the loveliest of people.

Speaker 1 And I have a memory of bringing my son after I had a baby out to your beautiful house in

Speaker 1 Waterford. Yes, exactly.
And we sat, it was a hot, hot day, and you guys were having an astonishing party, and I sat and breastfed and talked to him

Speaker 1 right outside there in this beautiful place. And you had already had kids, and give me all kinds of advice.
And I just have so many great memories of him.

Speaker 1 I didn't know you at the Wall Street Journal, though, when you were Hobro. I didn't know when you were Hobro.
That was the name. Can you explain that? Explain Hobro to get to start.

Speaker 1 Because it's not the bros you're thinking about, not the bad ones.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 2 we

Speaker 2 reported together in the Middle East. When I say together, it wasn't, it often wasn't literally together, but we reported from opposite sides of the various conflicts.

Speaker 2 So if I was in Tunisia waiting waiting for Arafat to talk to me at two o'clock in the morning, Tony would be in Israel chatting up Rabin and then we'd put the two together and likewise Iran and Iraq or Iraq and Saudi Arabia, we would cover the conflicts from opposite sides.

Speaker 2 Sometimes we reported together, but we often had a joint byline, Geraldine Brooks and Tony Horwitz or the other way around. and

Speaker 2 in news meetings they just started referring to us as Hobro

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 what's Hobro filing today and we liked that because we felt like we were more than partners. We felt like we were almost one person.

Speaker 1 Right, but you met at journalism school. Explain.

Speaker 2 I had been working as a newspaper reporter in Sydney for a couple of years and then I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to do a master's at Columbia.

Speaker 2 And this is, you know, Australians love to, you know, go overseas and have an adventure abroad. So this was going to be my adventure abroad.

Speaker 2 I was going to have a year in New York and hone my journalistic skills and then get back to Sydney and get on with my real life. That was the plan.

Speaker 2 But the first week of school, I went to a party on the Upper West Side and on the balcony was this cute blonde guy who was telling an amusing story about how he was living down in Alphabet City, which in those days was a rough part of New York.

Speaker 2 It hadn't gentrified up yet.

Speaker 1 Yes, now you can get 12 kinds of kombucha, but go ahead.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so

Speaker 2 he had learned that

Speaker 2 he couldn't figure out why his car battery was always being stolen. And then he realized that it was a scam and he could buy it back from the local auto parts dealer every day.

Speaker 2 So he realized that you have to take not only the key of your car, but also the battery when you left your car.

Speaker 2 So I thought that was quite amusing and then the next day there was the large group seminar in the world room and I saw him across the hall and I waved to him and he didn't wave back.

Speaker 2 And I thought,

Speaker 2 you and the horse you rode in on.

Speaker 2 And I didn't think about him again for six months until we found ourselves in a seminar on business reporting that we had both taken on a whim because we thought if you're going to be a journalist who smashes capitalism, you should understand something about how it works.

Speaker 2 So we'd both been drawn to it. And once we were in class together, I was really impressed with his idealism.

Speaker 2 He'd come to journalism school from organizing poor black woodcutters in Mississippi, trying to get them fair pay for their pulp wood hauling.

Speaker 2 And as I got to know him, I realized that He told me that he hadn't waved back to me in the world room because the night before he'd been out carousing with his brother at Dance Eteria and dropped his glasses down the toilet so he couldn't even see me.

Speaker 1 Kismet.

Speaker 2 Kismet.

Speaker 2 And I said, Yeah, but you know, after that, you saw me. And he said, Yeah, but you were always sitting next to that guy called Bronstein, who is a very handsome, charming guy.

Speaker 2 And I said, We were seated alphabetically.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 what got you together? It just was spending time.

Speaker 2 Well, it was partly his incredible insight and idealism in this class, and partly his beautifully tanned, sculpted forearms.

Speaker 1 Any other part?

Speaker 2 Well, that was the initial attraction.

Speaker 2 He was always borrowing money from me as well. Okay.

Speaker 1 All right. Sounds perfect.

Speaker 2 So I had to keep track of him.

Speaker 1 So, and then you were together since then and worked together as reporters. So worked together.
We got together.

Speaker 2 We got together very quickly.

Speaker 2 It was inconvenient because it was almost the end of the year and I'd already accepted a job with the Wall Street Journal.

Speaker 1 In Cleveland.

Speaker 2 So yeah, the recruiter had come and

Speaker 2 they were interviewing me and

Speaker 2 My professor said now when you go to your interview, they're going to ask you the Cleveland question, which is would you take this job if it meant relocating to Cleveland? Don't worry.

Speaker 2 It's just a test. They want to see how serious you are about working for the Wall Street Journal.
So I went, they asked, I answered, and they sent me there.

Speaker 2 And he was, you know, he had an internship on the West Coast, but he came to see me on the way west, and we had a fantastic weekend together.

Speaker 2 And lucky for me, the radio in his car conked out just as he was leaving the city limits. So he had the whole drive to Eugene, Oregon, to think about what a great weekend we'd had.

Speaker 2 And he turned around, came back, and got a job in Fort Wayne.

Speaker 1 So the memoir itself oscillates between narrative threads, essentially. The first begins on May 27th, 2019, when a phone call when you learned Tony had died.

Speaker 1 The second recently, on your way to stay on this Flinders Island in Tasmania.

Speaker 1 I'm going to ask you why you chose that island.

Speaker 1 And the third is omnipresent Tony himself.

Speaker 1 I want you to talk about these three elements that seem to be in the book, processing death, allowing grief, and commemorating love. And also telling his story.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you know, I didn't think about

Speaker 2 this

Speaker 2 time on the island as writing a book. I just needed

Speaker 2 to take some time to think about what had happened because it had been three years

Speaker 2 and I wasn't right in the head.

Speaker 2 I realized that I had after the first crazy year of just panic and drama and dealing with the horrible crushing tasks of figuring out how your life works when the person who looked after half of it is not there.

Speaker 2 Then the second year, just trying to crawl back to my desk and do some work, thinking that work might be therapeutic and trying to look after my sons and

Speaker 2 just realized at the three-year mark really that I had been acting this role the whole time of a woman being normal. That was the part that I was playing.

Speaker 2 And it was just exhausting because I didn't really feel normal at all.

Speaker 2 It was a mask I put on when I went out to be the secretary of the PTO or sit on the Conservation Commission or whatever it was I was doing.

Speaker 1 Why did you choose that role?

Speaker 2 I was trying to be that person, but I wasn't getting there.

Speaker 2 And I realized it was time to do something about that. And then it was kind of this head-slapping moment, like you're a writer.
This is the most important thing that's ever happened in your life.

Speaker 2 Why don't you do what you do and write about it? But I wasn't thinking about, you know, the form of the book or how I was going to tell the story.

Speaker 2 I just needed to get away from my real life and that whole pretense of normalcy and be completely abnormal alone for a while.

Speaker 1 And why did you pick this place?

Speaker 1 Besides the fantastic name, Flanders Island, Tasmania.

Speaker 2 Flinders Island is in the Bass Strait, which is the waterway between the mainland of Australia and the state of Tasmania. And it was a place that I loved.
loved.

Speaker 2 Tony and I had gone there together when I was thinking about my second novel, and I was planning to write about a really interesting character from Australian history, but for various reasons, that book didn't work out.

Speaker 2 But we had this trip there, and

Speaker 2 it was absolutely our kind of place. You know, it's just...
beautiful natural forests and marshes and beaches and mountains and hardly any people.

Speaker 2 It's sort of if you we ended up on Martha's Vineyard and this place is like Martha's Vineyard.

Speaker 2 If somebody looked at Martha's Vineyard and said all those beaches and woods and rolling fields are very nice, but it needs a couple of Transylvanian mountains to give it some drama.

Speaker 2 And then there's only 900 people live there year-round.

Speaker 1 So it was a good place to get away. Now, one of the things you, you can't, I want you to talk about dealing with the death, because you just mentioned it.
There's a call and then all the bureaucracy.

Speaker 1 I did love that you wrote about the bureaucracy, and you have a really terrible experience with the hospital itself here in D.C. Can you talk about the bureaucracy part of it?

Speaker 2 I just think we don't deal with this very well. You know, and popular culture leads you to have an expectation about what would happen.

Speaker 2 If something, you know, and I've since learned that that's, I'm not alone here. A lot of people get this news in a phone call.

Speaker 2 But it was unimaginable to me that you would just pick up the phone on any given day and somebody 500 miles away would just flatly tell you

Speaker 2 that your life as you knew it was over without even asking you, are you alone? Are you okay?

Speaker 2 Do you need, you know, do you need to call, you know, no. I was just, it was a very brief conversation with a very tired young doctor who obviously was at the

Speaker 2 end of her long, hard-working day on a holiday weekend. I don't blame her, I blame the process

Speaker 2 that threw that job at her.

Speaker 2 It would be so easy to have a protocol in place where you call the local police who are used to dealing with this kind of

Speaker 2 bereavement and sudden, you know, who would, and in our little town, I know all those guys because they coached the kids lacrosse teams and whatnot, and they would have known who to call to be there to support me.

Speaker 2 And it would take like 10 extra minutes to do that. I don't understand why nobody thinks that way.

Speaker 1 Right. So, in chapter titled May 31st, 2019, four days later, you give a nod to W.H.
Auden's funeral blues. Can you read this section?

Speaker 2 All the clocks do not stop. No one silences the phone the dogs continue to bark the pianos to play

Speaker 2 old poet whiston could not command the world to acknowledge his great loss neither can i as much as i yearned to throw a black veil over my head and sit weeping under a yew tree that was not possible modern life is a juggling act And if you don't keep those flaming torches moving swiftly through the air, if you lose your focus and drop one, the whole stage might catch fire and collapse beneath you.

Speaker 1 So talk a little bit about that, the compartmentalization. Obviously you're referencing the poem itself, but you had juggled a lot, a career in journalism, book writing, kids.

Speaker 1 You having to function through Tony's death

Speaker 1 sounds excruciating. It reads as excruciating.
In the book, you also reflect on how various religions and cultures do allow for stop clocks. You didn't get a stop clock in those years.

Speaker 2 Yeah, if we were Orthodox Jews, there would have been a very set formula that we would have followed. And

Speaker 2 it's interesting when you read about these other

Speaker 2 ways of dealing with grief. The Jewish way, one of the things that struck me is that the first period

Speaker 2 after a loss is An Nuit, which is where the bereaved, you don't even offer consolation because because the person is in no state to be consoled.

Speaker 2 So you just go around them quietly doing the necessary things. And then you move into Shiva, which is the active grieving.

Speaker 2 And the idea that it takes you about 24 to 48 hours to be ready to actively grieve because the state of shock is so great.

Speaker 2 And I didn't get that because I'm on Martha's Vineyard on Memorial Day and Tony's died in Washington and my first instinct is I have to get there, I have to get there.

Speaker 2 So I'm calling the airport and then I'm rushing to the boat and I'm getting

Speaker 2 in Ubers and

Speaker 2 you know and that that's kind of a crazy way to deal with shock that happens.

Speaker 1 Sorry business in Australian Aboriginal culture.

Speaker 2 That's amazing. So Aboriginal grieving

Speaker 2 So in Judaism, it's a very narrow band of people who have grief responsibilities

Speaker 2 and for most people the period of grieving is very finite. In Aboriginal culture it's the whole community.

Speaker 2 Everybody has a notional relationship to everybody else in any given Aboriginal community

Speaker 2 and so everybody is involved in this loss and Aboriginal people travel vast distances to get back for what's called sorry business and it can go on for weeks until everybody has come back and every time a new person arrives the grief starts up again

Speaker 2 in the same intensity.

Speaker 1 So if you could borrow from the cultures you were looking at,

Speaker 1 what would have been your ritual if you had just

Speaker 2 my ritual was what I ended up doing three years late

Speaker 2 which was to just go into nature and

Speaker 2 get sustenance from that because that is something that I find very sustaining and in the quiet of being taken out of the responsibilities of my ordinary life, even the loved responsibilities of walking the dog or feeding the horses, I didn't have anything between me and thinking about Tony.

Speaker 2 And that was what I needed to do as it turns out.

Speaker 1 Do you have a notion why mourning is so difficult? Is it because the culture is coming at you at one time? Because I can occupy myself all day long doing things.

Speaker 1 But talk about why do you think we've lost our ability to mourn?

Speaker 2 I am not sure. Maybe because

Speaker 2 I think in Western societies we're pretty lucky in that, you know, particularly in affluent parts of Western societies, we don't see a lot of untimely death.

Speaker 2 And so it's usually, you know, people

Speaker 2 die when we expect them to, and it's you grieve them, but

Speaker 2 often it happens in a sanitized hospital situation. It's not at home like it used to be.

Speaker 2 And also our lives are just so overwhelmingly busy. People can't drop everything

Speaker 2 the way in more traditional cultures people do drop everything.

Speaker 2 And you know, I realize I'm in an immense place of privilege here because for a lot of people their whole life, their material life changes with a sudden death like this. And

Speaker 2 also, you know, to have

Speaker 2 somebody who was beloved and recognized for what he did and had had such a full life.

Speaker 2 And then to have the luxury of being able to take myself off and be alone.

Speaker 2 And, you know, I understand that if you're working two jobs to keep food on the table for your kids, you're not going to be able to do that.

Speaker 1 We'll be back in a minute.

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Speaker 1 So there's a passage in the book, I feel like, a synthesis of your experience. Would you mind reading it?

Speaker 2 I certainly hadn't been afraid to be by myself, but I hadn't realized how much I would embrace it.

Speaker 2 Now it is beginning to feel like an addiction. I'm craving the absolute serenity of an unpeopled landscape.

Speaker 2 And then I understand that I have not been alone.

Speaker 2 I'm reveling in this time because I'm with Tony.

Speaker 2 In this solitude, finally, I can think about him undistracted.

Speaker 2 I can read his journals and commune with his thoughts. I can even do what I believed his death had denied me, learn new things about him.

Speaker 2 There are no kids, no animals, no editors, publicists, neighbors, or friends. No one, no matter how beloved, is barging in on us here.

Speaker 2 I can be beside him all my conscious day and even beyond, into into my unconscious nights.

Speaker 2 Solitude has made this space for him.

Speaker 1 It's wonderful.

Speaker 1 When you talk about the culture of grieving, it seems like people think grief is only wallowing in sadness. There's nothing sad about that passage.

Speaker 1 You write, our culture is averse to sad, and one of the things you also write, I merely wish for the bereaved some space and time, time and space, however long, however short, for melancholy, what Victor Hugo described as the happiness of being sad.

Speaker 1 Talk about the aversity to being sad, melancholy, maybe, but also joyful, reverent.

Speaker 2 I think, you know, this was something I noticed when I was covering the siege of Sarajevo.

Speaker 2 I think

Speaker 2 optimistic Americans tend to think, you know, we've got our seat belts and we've got our

Speaker 2 FDA-approved foods. We might not have them for much longer.

Speaker 2 But there's this idea that you can make yourself safe,

Speaker 2 and it's almost an effrontery if something goes wrong with that. Like, what went wrong? You want to blame somebody for it, you know, and I fell into this trope as well.

Speaker 2 Like, this should not have happened. Well, for a lot of the world, it happens all the time, but we are so removed from it.
And then, I think when people are

Speaker 2 distraught, we're very uncomfortable about it. You know, we want, you know, we're looking at the watch like, it's been a year, why aren't you cheered up? We want you to be happy.
Move along.

Speaker 2 Let's see if we can make you happy, you know, instead of just letting people take whatever it is they need to do.

Speaker 1 What did you do when people said, let's see if we can make you happy?

Speaker 2 I let them try. That was the whole performance part of it.

Speaker 1 Right, the woman being normal.

Speaker 1 The memoir is about you, and it's about Tony. his life before you, your life together.
You read his journals, which some of which surprised you.

Speaker 1 So, someone we both know sent in a question for you, and I'd like to play it.

Speaker 1 Hi, this is Martha Sherrill. Kara, you probably don't realize this, but Bill Powers, my husband, and I met at your apartment at a New Year's Eve party in DC,

Speaker 1 and we were married on Tony and Geraldine's back porch

Speaker 1 about six years later.

Speaker 1 I have a question for Geraldine.

Speaker 1 Tony was just the most alive, vibrant person.

Speaker 1 And I've always wondered if he was like that most of the time, and if that's what you fell in love with when you fell in love with him, the way we all did.

Speaker 5 Thanks.

Speaker 1 Yes, you're welcome, Martha Cheryl, for both of us being married. Go ahead.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 he was.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 that was a great boon to me because I was quite introverted and he was very extroverted. And

Speaker 2 I could sort of,

Speaker 2 you know, follow in his bright wake while he did all the hard work of our friendships. And I just enjoyed, you know, the cruise.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 he was mostly like that, although, you know, when I was reading his journals, I realized that that came hard won sometimes, that he had a lot of insecurities and

Speaker 2 a lot of them were totally unfounded. I mean, I found this one line in the journal.
I was off reporting somewhere, and this was before he'd been hired by the Wall Street Journal, and

Speaker 2 he was still waiting for this staff job to eventuate that he'd been sort of kind of promised. And it hadn't happened.

Speaker 2 And so he writes in his journal, I've come to accept that I may may never amount to something in journalism

Speaker 2 and I read that and I just laughed out loud because like one year later he would be the star reporter in the London Bureau of the Wall Street Journal covering the revolution in Romania and then leading the coverage of the first Gulf War and being the first Western reporter into liberated Kuwait and then he'd have the Pulitzer Prize.

Speaker 2 So it's so it was

Speaker 2 funny to me that he thought that and then it was also sad that he'd been insecure at that time, and he had not verbalized that.

Speaker 1 Did you, when Martha's talking about the most alive Byron person, I don't recall a time when he wasn't smiling, even when he was talking about tough things.

Speaker 1 I think we were talking about one of the battles, and he was talking about the racism that went on. when he was covering it and how he dealt with it.
And I'm like, oh, I'd hit him.

Speaker 1 He's like, no, it was really interesting talking to him. And I was like, okay, great.
Sounds fantastic. What do you think drove that in him? What was the part that got him like that?

Speaker 2 You know, he had a high moral purpose.

Speaker 2 He was a reporter of great seriousness, but

Speaker 1 he

Speaker 2 loved people and he loved trying to find out what made people the way they were and what... made them think the way they did.
And he ran towards the people that other people back away from.

Speaker 2 And I have to say, when I watched the invasion of the Capitol on January 6th, I looked at those guys

Speaker 2 and with their Confederate flags and their stringy hair and you know the strange

Speaker 2 the strangeness of it and I thought Tony's probably had a beer with at least 10 to 20 percent of those guys because he really wanted to know why people embraced that ideology and what it meant.

Speaker 2 for this society. And I think he was very prescient in seeing the fault lines forming way before other people noticed the divisions,

Speaker 2 income inequality, the divisions between urban and rural, north and south,

Speaker 2 the whole nine yards of the things that we have seen pulling us further and further apart.

Speaker 1 Now, one of you, I have this passage here where you talked about this, the Great American Divide, North, South, Urban, Rural, Rich, Poor, had been his subject.

Speaker 1 It was a story he was made to cover, and it made me sad he couldn't.

Speaker 1 He was touring on a book called Spying on the South when he died, a product which he called a pub crawl across the old Confederacy conducting barstool democracy.

Speaker 1 It was a follow-up to his bestseller Confederates in the Attic.

Speaker 1 Talk about that because he was very early to, he's one of the first people I heard talking about this anger that was building within people.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, when he wrote Confederates in the Attic, I think he was reporting that

Speaker 2 in 96. Yeah.
Yeah, I'm not very good at dates, but I think it was 96 when he was

Speaker 2 on the road reporting that and he would come back, you know, with these incredible stories of the people that he'd encountered for whom the Civil War was not finished.

Speaker 2 And then Spying on the South was a kind of brilliant conceit.

Speaker 2 It was based on the fact that Frederick Law Olmsted, before he became the founder of landscape architecture and the creator of Central Park and Prospect Park and all the other other great landscapes that he created was a reporter for the New York Times.

Speaker 2 And he went south with an assignment to look at why the country was so divided right before the Civil War and was there anything that could be done about it.

Speaker 2 So Tony decided to take Olmsted's journals and reporting from that time and recreate, redo the trip and ask the same question. And it turned out to be a brilliant book.

Speaker 1 So I highly recommend you going back and reading them because they were so prescient. He was a historian, a traveler,

Speaker 1 and he tried to really walk a mile in other people's shoes.

Speaker 1 He also, when he was reporting for the Wall Street Journal about the unlivable working conditions, and he talked about the economy that was a huge factor in getting President Trump elected.

Speaker 1 What do you think he would have made of the political situation we're in now? He obviously documented this divisiveness, but would have been surprised.

Speaker 2 I think, you know, I I think we really missed out on the fact that he wasn't around to keep doing what he had, you know, it was

Speaker 2 essentially his life's work of seeing how these historical rifts were playing out in contemporary society. And I think, you know, he would have probably embedded with those guys

Speaker 2 and followed their court cases and I don't know. I don't know.

Speaker 2 But I think, you know, that was the story that he'd really devoted himself to what did he think of it at the time was he worried at the time he was extremely worried he was extremely worried that we were losing the ability to talk to each other

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 there wasn't a shared community of facts that we all agreed on. I think that that was troubling to him, but it's only just got so much worse in the five years since he died.

Speaker 2 I don't know what he would make of it now.

Speaker 1 I want to go back to the journals, and you wrote you were inclined to believe he would prefer his papers to leave here uncensored,

Speaker 1 but you wanted some private time with his thoughts before you shipped them away, which you did.

Speaker 1 You said, I want

Speaker 1 whatever they might reveal, is what you said. Were you worried before the start of reading him up that whatever could be? Did you hesitate?

Speaker 2 Did I hesitate? No, no. Our relationship was, you know, it was solid and built on great trust.
So I didn't think that there was going to be anything

Speaker 2 that I would learn that would rattle me.

Speaker 1 Except a surprise of possible despondency. And you're right, these journals in general are not happy reading.
My sunny, funny lover is rarely found in these passages.

Speaker 1 I began to see that he turned to his journals when he was not that guy, that guy that didn't need them.

Speaker 1 You wanted to meet him again in some way that you didn't know him, correct? Through reading through them.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and I should add that he stopped journaling once he started writing the books because then he was

Speaker 2 really content in his work.

Speaker 2 I think he realized that

Speaker 2 he didn't like working for editors.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 lots of us don't particularly like it, but he really didn't like it.

Speaker 1 I married one, but go ahead.

Speaker 2 I think, you know, so when

Speaker 2 he had control over his product in the way that you do when it's a book, I mean, you know,

Speaker 2 he was a bit of a control freak in that regard. And once he had that and,

Speaker 2 you know, the astonishing good luck that we had to both be able to make a living writing books, which is, you know. by no means a given, that that worked out for us.

Speaker 2 He became a very contented man and blow me down, there are no journals

Speaker 2 later talk about the margin notes though the margin notes okay yeah I love a margin note we we had a we disagreed on very few things but one of them was how you treat your books

Speaker 2 I would no sooner write in pen on a book than get a knife out and just gouge this piece of furniture. You know, I get a book and I take the dust jacket off it while I read it.

Speaker 2 And I, you know clean hands don't read it while I'm eating I want my books to you know

Speaker 2 last and and

Speaker 2 he was the opposite he turned down pages he scribbled all over them in pen and and I thought that was just terrible but now I'm really glad because if I pick up a book that he had read and I haven't read it yet, it's like I'm reading along with him and I can learn what he thought of it.

Speaker 1 And what's the funniest thing he wrote on this?

Speaker 2 Okay, so

Speaker 2 with me to Flinders Island, I finally took a few of the books that kind people had gifted me about grief and loss and

Speaker 2 then I pulled off the shelf this tattered galley of Year of Magical Thinking and he had a tattered galley of Joan Didion's book because Tony had been judging the National Book Award that year and so he got an early galley and of course it was really messed up like most of his books were and I'm in on Flinders Island and I start reading this heartbreaking account of how she lost John Gregory Dunn so suddenly and Turney has scrawled name-dropping padded

Speaker 2 and Didion won the National Book Award but no thanks to Judge Turney apparently.

Speaker 1 Well speaking of Joan Didion, he was correct by the way. Sorry, I love Joan Didion, but I would agree with him on that one.

Speaker 1 Speaking of Joan Didian and Joyce Keller Oates, did you think about how the book would fit into the, what is it, grief memoir?

Speaker 2 Yeah, again, I was writing this for me, and

Speaker 2 I wrote it because I needed to write it, and I'm still

Speaker 2 surprised that anybody needs to read it. But it's only been out a couple of weeks, and I'm just getting a deluge of incoming from people.

Speaker 2 who are reading it and who are relating to it because, oh, well, it's another head-slapping moment. we're all gonna lose everyone we love that's the human condition and

Speaker 2 people have been incredibly warm in their response to it so it turns out that I wasn't just writing it for me but that was what I was thinking of.

Speaker 1 So when you're in this process of reading journals and private papers to get close to a character, you've done this in your fiction writing for many years.

Speaker 1 Many of your novels have real historic characters that you noted one before, like March, a fictional character that was based on a real person.

Speaker 1 Did you ever start thinking him like a character in one of your books? And talk a little bit about this process for you of reading people's journals to create characters.

Speaker 2 Oh, you mean for the fiction?

Speaker 2 Well, you're always looking for the voice. You're looking for the voice.
I like to write with a first-person narrator in the fiction because I think it gives an immediacy to it.

Speaker 2 And so I can't really start until I can hear that voice. So to hear voices from the past, you try and read everything that was written by people of that time and place.

Speaker 2 And that's so much easier with men because they had the luxury of writing about their lives. They had time to write their journals and their extensive correspondences with each other.

Speaker 2 And the poor women, if they were literate at all,

Speaker 2 were

Speaker 2 working their tail off.

Speaker 2 And also enslaved people were not allowed to become literate for the most part. It was against the law to teach enslaved people to read and write.
So, if you want to find their voices,

Speaker 2 you end up having to go to court. That's where you find women, that's where you find the enslaved, because their testimony was often taken verbatim.
You can hear them speaking in their own voice.

Speaker 1 You wrote in the book about Tony, we had no deathbed conversation. I will never know what wisdom Tony would have wanted to impart if he'd been given the chance.

Speaker 1 Talk about that.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 2 so my sons and I have talked about this a lot and it's very sad for us that we didn't get to say goodbye but I think maybe for Tony it was

Speaker 2 better

Speaker 2 because he was a guy who was very averse to talking about death. He would never like if I wanted to raise the subject I watched my mother

Speaker 2 go downhill with Alzheimer's, which is this just cruel theft of her personality. And

Speaker 2 I'm really into advanced directives and specifying the kinds of interventions I don't want.

Speaker 2 I could never get Tony to engage on this and our older son tried to give him Atul Gawandi's book, Being Mortal, it's the one book that my son gave him that he refused to read.

Speaker 2 He just did not want. to think about his mortality at all and as it turned out he didn't have to.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 Did you think about what he might have wanted to impart? Imagine it for yourself?

Speaker 2 Oh yeah, well, you know, in dreams that happens all the time.

Speaker 2 He comes back in dreams and we have we have lots of conversations, but I don't know how whether my subconscious and his actual intentions are aligned or not. And I never thought about it.

Speaker 1 What's the last dream you had?

Speaker 2 Oh, the last dream I had was because I was really worried about talking about this book in public.

Speaker 1 You were.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 You wanted wanted only to talk to people who knew Tony. What? You wanted to only talk to people who knew Tony.

Speaker 2 Thank you for being here. Yeah.
Well, I wanted, I didn't want it to be a dirge. I wanted it to be somebody who knew Tony who would bring his light and humor into the conversation.

Speaker 2 But I was very nervous, like right before the first event. So I had this dream in which we had a terrible fight.

Speaker 2 And we had hardly any fights in real life. But I've had a lot of dreams where I'm fighting with him.
And of course, it's not with him, it's with the fact that he's dead.

Speaker 1 Why didn't you have any fights? How did you do that?

Speaker 2 We agreed on most things apart from the books and the fact that. And Australia.

Speaker 2 And Australia, you know, he didn't want to live in Australia, so he won that argument.

Speaker 2 And now I've got these two inconvenient American children.

Speaker 2 Very careless of me.

Speaker 1 We'll be back in a minute.

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Speaker 1 You reported on conflicts in Bosnia, Somalia. You were jailed in Nigeria, so you've been up close to what happens when a government breaks down, when the rule of law disappears.
Apropos of nothing,

Speaker 1 big picture. What's your take on what's happening now? I've been talking to people on whether we're on the brink of or already in the middle of a constitutional crisis.

Speaker 1 People have different, differing opinions, but we're talking about it. It's a topic of discussion.
I don't think it's media hysteria in any way. Talk a little bit about how you see our current moment.

Speaker 2 So I was in Oxford

Speaker 2 and I did an absentee ballot. And I had that ballot on my lap.
I'm sitting in this medieval cloister filling in my bubbles. And I fill in, of course, Kamal Harris.

Speaker 2 And I looked at the next bubble and I thought, nobody is going to fill in the bubble for that flaming asshole.

Speaker 2 And now I realize I don't understand anything about this country because more than half of the electorate chose him after all we know

Speaker 2 about him.

Speaker 2 And now we're reaping that harvest and my instinct is to not be on the streets, not be loudly resisting, just let people see what they voted for.

Speaker 2 But at what cost, you know, I mean...

Speaker 1 And how does it compare to things you covered? Those are obviously some of them are more complex.

Speaker 2 But this is the United States of America. It's not Somalia.
You know, you don't expect this place

Speaker 1 to

Speaker 2 be run by

Speaker 2 an unelected billionaire with his snout in every trough, and that's your subject.

Speaker 2 Who anticipated Elon Musk would be running our government? And how is that okay?

Speaker 1 And you're...

Speaker 2 Baffled. Baffled of West Tisbury.

Speaker 1 That's your new name.

Speaker 1 Is that your new profile online?

Speaker 16 Baffled and Western.

Speaker 1 So where you are, though, in the midst of a timely project, a book with Michael Lewis and other journalists

Speaker 1 that's coming out in March about civil servants working in the U.S. government.
It's called Who is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service.

Speaker 1 Can you talk a little bit about this project and why it's important a time of... I'm going to call it doggy.
Sorry. I'm not calling it doge.
It's too elegant a word.

Speaker 2 It's not fed in doggies.

Speaker 1 I think bad doggy works. That doggy's going to bite everyone's ass, et cetera.

Speaker 1 So why is it important this time of dogie? Doggy.

Speaker 2 Bad doggy.

Speaker 1 Down doggy.

Speaker 2 We started this project

Speaker 2 in the hopes that

Speaker 2 this would not occur and the expectation that it would not occur, you know, because we didn't understand this country very well. But all the attacks on government, like

Speaker 2 public servants are lazy and wasteful and they're not doing anything worthwhile. And this is so fundamentally not true.

Speaker 2 And Michael Lewis had already written one book about this called The Fifth Risk, in which he

Speaker 2 basically, during the early days of the first Trump debacle,

Speaker 2 realized that the beautiful transition that Obama's team had planned for, where every government department had prepared briefing papers for the incoming new administration explaining how everything worked.

Speaker 2 Nobody had turned up from the Trump team to take those briefings. So Michael turned up and got the briefings and said he found

Speaker 2 this opportunity of all these great stories of the things that government was doing, these problems that they were working on that only this country could possibly have the ambition and the resources to solve.

Speaker 2 And so he wrote about several of the key people in the fifth risk and then he wanted to revisit that.

Speaker 2 So he assembled a bunch of his writer friends that he knew and basically set us loose to find somebody in the bureaucracy who was solving a big problem.

Speaker 2 And he wrote a beautiful piece about the guy who had figured out how to stop coal mine roofs collapsing and saved thousands of lives because he

Speaker 2 dedicated his working life to the physics of why coal mine roofs collapse

Speaker 2 and and how to stop that. And I thought, okay, if you're going to defend government, let's defend the most unpopular branch.
So I looked for somebody in the IRS.

Speaker 2 And I found Jared Koopman, who is involved in the cyber crime unit. And his team had liberated

Speaker 2 23 kids who were being sexually abused by pedophiles. He

Speaker 2 cracked down on

Speaker 2 fentanyl dealers. He figured out how to hijack the websites of Al-Qaeda and Hamas.

Speaker 2 And so any time people were contributing cryptocurrency to

Speaker 2 fund terrorism, it was actually going to the United States Treasury for the Victims of Terror Fund.

Speaker 2 And while they had the website,

Speaker 2 they decided to have a bit of fun with it. So if you clicked on the emblem for Hamas, you got Rick Rawled, which I thought was.

Speaker 2 And so they did that for about a month while the indictments were being prepared to shut down the people who were laundering the crypto for the terrorists.

Speaker 1 It's critically important jobs. Great.

Speaker 2 And return billions of dollars to the U.S.

Speaker 1 Treasury. So do you think this idea of the pushing every day, we're putting it in the wood chipper, it's fraud and waste everywhere.

Speaker 1 Just today there was a story, I think it was in the Times, where they said they saved $8 billion, but it really was $8 million.

Speaker 1 As you said, Matt. Because half is hard, is what I said.

Speaker 1 These are not the smartest people. I know you think they are, but they're not, trust me.

Speaker 1 But do you think that's going to stick? Why is it do you think it's resonant in working on that?

Speaker 2 I'm not sure if that half of the electorate is even hearing about this.

Speaker 2 You know, I do occasionally

Speaker 2 change the channel and listen to what they're presenting and they are still putting up these total lies about what USAID was doing. This has been proven to be false.

Speaker 2 Several of these cases that they make a big deal of of

Speaker 2 funding

Speaker 2 trans plays in Ireland or whatever it is, it didn't happen. But half of the electorate who's watching that doesn't know.

Speaker 2 And I don't know how we fix that.

Speaker 1 So getting these stories out is important.

Speaker 2 It's getting, yes, but are they being received? Because we're all in our silos now. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And it's just an echo chamber. You only hear what you want to hear.
And for the longest time, I had a texting relationship with a

Speaker 2 nice guy on the island that I knew because our kids were in school together and he just got on the Trump train and for a while we could have a discussion but after a while we couldn't because I would send him factual material and he said I'm not going to read that it's probably written by a Democrat and then he would just he just started then getting incredibly mean and

Speaker 2 hateful and I had to give it up because you know he he wasn't the nice dad of the third grader that I'd known he'd become crazy.

Speaker 1 It's difficult. I run into them here.
They followed me to Washington, the Silicon Valley people.

Speaker 1 So, last question.

Speaker 1 What's next for you? You wrote at the end of the book, this story of a death is a story that dominates my life. Here I have retold it, rethought it, but I can't change it.

Speaker 1 Tony is dead, present tense, he will be dead in the present, in my present, for as long as I am alive.

Speaker 1 I cannot change that story. I can only change myself.

Speaker 1 I would love to know what change looks like for you and and what you're going to be doing next.

Speaker 2 Just working more.

Speaker 2 I realize that I've kind of filled the void in my life where we used to sit around, drink wine, and tell jokes at night by just working.

Speaker 2 So, you know, I used to think I worked a lot, but now I'm really a machine.

Speaker 1 So work is what you've done. Is there a goal for your life now?

Speaker 2 Just to make it as vivid and worthwhile as I can for as long as I've got and love my kids.

Speaker 1 So the last part of the book, I'd like you to read it. I hope you don't mind.

Speaker 1 There's a scene where

Speaker 1 you go out swimming

Speaker 1 out in the ocean and you start to wail for Tony.

Speaker 1 And you say, I wail for him for the life he no longer has, for the life we no longer have together. I'd like you to read, and then we'll just,

Speaker 1 I have one short question when you finish that from when I turn back to the end, if you can do that. Because it'll make me cry.

Speaker 1 You can't read it?

Speaker 1 I can read it, but

Speaker 1 you wrote it.

Speaker 2 From where?

Speaker 1 From here.

Speaker 2 When I turn back

Speaker 2 towards the shack. No, I can't.

Speaker 1 Okay. Okay.
You can't see it. Okay.
When I turn back towards the shack, there's nothing left. I am spent at last.
All that remains is a long exhalation, a sustained sigh.

Speaker 1 When I started to write fiction, I came across a piece of advice on the craft of novel writing.

Speaker 1 Your task as a novel is to keep pushing your protagonist's head under the water throughout the narrative. But when you get to the end, you must decide: will you sink them or let them swim?

Speaker 1 I put my face in the clear, briny water, I stretch out my body, I swim.

Speaker 1 I thought for a second, why didn't you sink it?

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 1 what is swimming then?

Speaker 2 Swimming is

Speaker 2 being grateful. 35 years of happy marriage, not everybody gets that.

Speaker 2 In fact, hardly anybody gets it to the extent that we did, where we were so up in each other's business and, you know, worked together, lived together, had two healthy children.

Speaker 2 I mean, so much to be grateful for

Speaker 2 and grateful for his books because we can always turn to those and find him there, which is wonderful. And

Speaker 2 yeah, and just

Speaker 2 trying

Speaker 2 to

Speaker 2 live

Speaker 2 with the enthusiasm that he had about living and do that and kind of dedicate it to him.

Speaker 1 So do you have to be more outgoing now?

Speaker 2 I try.

Speaker 1 You're much better at it. When I met you, actually, I'm recalling, he was so bubbly and then you were not.
And you weren't glum or anything.

Speaker 1 And I remember telling someone, I'm like, huh, that's interesting.

Speaker 1 But then I got it pretty quickly. Geraldine Brooks.

Speaker 1 On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro Roussell, Kateri Yoakum, Megan Burney, Dave Shaw, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio.

Speaker 1 Special thanks to Claire Hyman and Maura Fox. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Arudo, and our theme music is by Trackademics.

Speaker 1 If you're already following the show, you're on a pub crawl practicing bar stool democracy.

Speaker 1 If not, go read one of Tony Horowitz's books, Confederates in the Attic or Spying on the South, and take notes. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow.

Speaker 1 Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.

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