Taffy Brodesser-Akner Might Be Done With Celebrity Profiles. Now She Faces What's Next.

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This story could have had a terrible ending.

The author Taffy Brodesser-Akner begins her sophomore novel, Long Island Compromise, with a nearly equivalent sentiment: "Do you want to hear a story with a terrible ending?" It's a classic Brodesser-Akner line—sharp, multi-layered, a little funny, a little not. From there, the cel ebrated New York Times Magazine writer introduces the Fletchers of Long Island, who've each found ways to cushion themselves in the seemingly bottomless wealth of their patriarch's styrofoam factory. But no amount of insulation can erase what happened to Carl Fletcher in 1980, when he was kidnapped in his own driveway, beaten, and held for ransom. Although he was safely returned only days later, his three now-adult children are barely functioning. Nathan is an anxious mess, addicted to buying insurance. Beamer is a drug-addled screenwriter who can't stop writing about kidnapping s. Jenny is a listless campus union organizer, still at school long after she's collected multiple diplomas. Everyone is suffering; everyone is stuck. How much can the money really save them?

That's a question Brodesser-Akner mentions when we meet over Zoom in July, her laptop balanced on her hotel bed in Washington, D.C., where she's awaiting the evening's book-tour event. That night, thanks to some unforeseen scheduling conflicts on behalf of her would-be moderators, she tells me she'll interview herself on stage. "I interview people all the time," she says with a shrug. "It can't be that hard."

She knows the audience might ask about the power and the promise of the Fletchers' money. That's what she thought she was asking when she sat down to write Long Island Compromise. But she realizes now that, in doing so, she'd "hid the ball" from herself. "I thought this was a book about money," she tells me, "and when the book came out, I realized from other people's reactions that it was a book about trauma. I cannot believe how much I didn't know what I was actually doing in [the book]."

Trauma is unwieldy baggage to unpack in years of therapy, let alone in one hour-long interview. But we come closer to grasping it in a moment of life-meets-art absurdity, when a stranger enters Brodesser-Akner's hotel room unannounced, startling her halfway through our interview. The intruder turns out to be a delivery person, thinking the room was unoccupied. But when the author returns to her Zoom screen safely, we both burst into hysterics—jumpy from the irony and the spook of the moment. (A little bit funny, a little bit not.) "That would've been your Pulitzer, if you were witness to my hotel murder," she tells me, still laughing. I assure her I had my finger hovering over 9-1-1, Pulitzer be damned.

Such irreverent humor characterizes Long Island Compromise, and pops up in Akner's other work as well: in her first novel, Fleishman Is in Trouble, but also in the celebrity profiles that earned her early attention and acclaim as a freelance journalist. Now a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine, Brodesser-Akner tells me she's had to leave the celebrity profiles behind, having since embedded herself in the same rooms as those she once might have interviewed. (She recently adapted Fleishman into an Emmy-nominate d TV series, for which she worked alongside actors Claire Danes and Jesse Eisenberg.)

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But she continues to write for the Times about fame, influence, money, and—she's since realized—about trauma. Her latest piece lays out the real-life kidnapping that inspired Long Island Compromise, as well as her own harrowing experience during the birth of her first child. "Something terrible happens, beyond what is in our own personal capacity to cope with, and the details don't matter as much as the state we're thrown into," she writes. "Our bodies and brains have not evolved to reliably differentiate a rape at knife point from a job loss that t hreatens us with financial ruin or from the dismantling of our world by our parents' divorce. It's wrong, but explain that to your poor, battered autonomic nervous system." Writing her second book forced Brodesser-Akner to face this reality in her own life, no matter how she struggled with "feeling bad about [her] trauma." She's learned to give herself grace. She's learned to write her way through the fear. And that's as good an ending as she can hope for.

Below, the author discusses the impact of Long Island Compromise; how her thoughts on trauma have evolved; why she's written her last celebrity profile; and the importance of writers maintaining their focus on "the document."

Sophomore novels are notoriously tricky. When in the writing of Long Island Compromise did you feel satisfied you had something worthy of being Fleishman's successor?

I handed in the ninth draft of Long Island Compromise to my agent, and I said, "This is a disease. This is no longer a book. It's a disease." I'm not kidding. I was so broken by the process, I said to him, "The story of my second book will be that it wasn't successful, and that will be its own interesting thing because I don't think that an artistic career is supposed to only be filled with success. Whatever happens next will be born of this." And then he got back to me in a couple of days and he said, "No, I really like this." And I said, "No, we're both delirious because we've read it so many times."

And then other people started reading it, and then it leaked through a book scout, and people started bidding on it for Hollywood. This is not an exaggeration: I didn't get out of bed for two weeks. I couldn't believe it. After any good review, I think, "So it happened?" And as a writer, the most troubling thing about it is that I don't know what it means that [the process] was so awful, that I'm this experienced as a writer in general that I should know by the time I send something in if it's good or not.

There's this wider cultural fascination with, as some put it, "rich people behaving badly." Do you think that fascination comes from a place of jealousy, or is it from a sense of fear that—were we in these people's shoes—we'd behave the same way?

I think it's changed over generations. My mother used to watch Dynasty, and she did it because she felt like her life... That we were so broke, she just wanted to see beauty and luxury.

Now, I think—especially pre-pandemic, post-'90s greed, the middle class was disappearing, and we became too annoyed by it to want to watch [rich people behaving badly]. And now there's this phenomenon: There's Succession; eat-the-rich stuff like Triangle of Sadness; or The Undoing or Big Little Lies. I noticed that the only way you're really allowed to watch rich people without feeling bad about it is if one of them dies.

And I think it's both the people who make those shows are very, very wealthy, and they're very self-conscious about what the people want and the people—they just don't want to feel bad. I think the headline of everybody's life right now is: What happened to the opportunity I was promised?

When I was young, I was told that if I worked very hard at something and was successful, I would eventually have money from it. And I don't think that's true anymore. I think you have to go into one of the money-making professions in order for [that] to be true. And I'm talking about real money, not like being a doctor. That doesn't make money anymore, like actual making-money-into-money professions. There's a crisis around it, and nobody really knows how to address it. This book is a bit about addressing [that] head-on without avoiding it.

Which character in this book did you find most effortless to sympathize with?

When I was interviewing authors, one of the questions I always had [for them] was, "Which character are you?" And they always looked at me with pity. I thought they were being defensive, but now I really know it doesn't work that way. Actually, it's worse. They're all you.

All these characters: Nathan, the lawyer, is my anxiety; Beamer is the appetite that I have; and Jenny is the apathy and the anger that I have. Ruth, the mother, is the disgust; and Carl, the father, is me just wanting to run away.

I want to mention your most recent Times story, specifically the section in which you detail how "trauma is trauma." Do you feel as though the Fletcher children question the legitimacy of their trauma?

[Jenny] thinks if everything is trauma, then nothing is trauma. That's a point of view in the book. It is not my point of view. My point of view is that if you are in pain, you are in pain. Feeling your pain and asking yourself if you should be feeling that pain seems like an exquisite nightmare.

There's this idea that your generation overuses the word "trauma." I would argue that, when you were growing up, you had lockdown drills; you were given a phone too early; and you knew that at any minute information can come through that phone that would change your life. I think that your generation is totally on fair ground in saying, "This is an impossible way to live. We are not just in pain, but we are afraid of further pain, and we don't know where it's going to come from."

I wrote that story, I filed it, and a week before it came out, I went with my best friend to a spa. I met someone [there] and told her about the story, and she said, "I think the word 'trauma' is overused." And I thought about that. I felt bad that I was writing a story that equated my trauma with the trauma of a kidnapping victim. If I were [the victim], I would've been like, "No, no, no. I was kidnapped," but...People are more generous with me than I am with myself.

Within an hour of the story going up at 5 a.m. on a Sunday, I had like 50 emails. By the end of the day, I had hundreds. I read them, and they were all the testimony of the thing a person couldn't get over. I was so astounded by it that I think back to that woman's question: "Is trauma overused?" And I wonder, "Is it underused?"

Can you write a good story about someone if you also want them to like you?

No. You can have them like you, or you could write a good story. But also a good story doesn't mean a mean story. They shouldn't dislike you. No one ever read my story and disliked me. What happened was: Those stories I wrote had such a big impact, because of the publications they were in, that they changed people's lives a little bit. And they had feelings about that. So when I write about someone, I have to step away from them.

But also, maybe I can't do it anymore. Because now I'm on the other side [working in Hollywood], and I see the impact these things have, and it's like you really need distance to do it. I don't have distance anymore.

Has that created an identity crisis for you?

It's sad. You know what? I'm sad. Writing a magazine profile was my favorite thing in the world. If I'd known that making the television show version of Fleishman Is in Trouble would make it so I couldn't anymore, I think I would've at least done a couple more that I always wanted to do, or I would've known that my last one was my last one. Val Kilmer, I didn't know that was my last one.

Do you feel that it is your last one?

It has to be. The reader does not want someone in my position to be writing celebrity profiles. This isn't like the society pages. And also, I'm very mercenary. I will always try to write the best story I can and forget the reader. The [interview subject] might think that I'm their friend, because I'm also in this business in some way. I'm not. I will do my best to write a good story. I can't help it. I love it. Attention and the admiration of my colleagues and bosses, that's all I look for. I'm like a rat with a pellet.

When people ask you for writing advice, how has your response changed in recent years?

Someone recently asked if I could sit down with his nephew who wants to be a celebrity profiler, and I guess I don't know how many of those opportunities are left.

Celebrity profiling is not the same as when I was doing it in volume. Every generation has its own version of the celebrity profile. That's the most wonderful thing about the celebrity profile. It's like a roast chicken, and every chef makes it a little differently. And now I'm seeing younger people who have these cozier profiles, which are born of two things. No. 1, the internet is already such a mean place, and you don't want to [make it] meaner or harsher. No. 2, celebrities now can communicate with their audiences directly through Instagram and TikTok. You have to make it a little easier for them to want to talk to you. And I think some people do.

I'm not critical of [that]. I think that everyone does what they have to do. But in terms of advice, I don't know. There are a million kinds of writing advice, and I don't even know if I'm the right person to be giving out writing advice. I never remember to say, "Huh, you should ask someone better at this than I am." It's because I like to be liked. [Laughs.]

You recently said in another interview that, "If you think about your career too much, then you're not thinking about the document, the work that you're doing." As journalists, especially younger ones, we're constantly being asked to think about our careers—our brands, our social media, how to make ourselves stand out in a floundering industry. But the strategizing isn't the real thing that will carry you through, right? It's the words on the page. How do you maintain your focus on the document?

I am not one to dismiss [branding], because I do know that those are the demands on people younger than I am. But I'll also say that thinking about branding is thinking about what people think of you. And the only way I can control what people think of me is by putting what I put in that document.

The thing that's actually being asked of [younger writers] is too much. It's to be a celebrity, and also to write like nobody knows who you are. And that's not fair.

What I would say is to have a private mode between you and your document, and anything else you have to do in order to be able to keep producing your document is worth it unless it hurts you. Keep it between you and your document, and when you see the things that start to threaten that relationship, run from them. When I do too much media, I get scared of it. After my book tour, I'm going on an emotional private island for a while. I know what story at the magazine I'm working on as soon as I'm done [with the book tour], so that I don't become ridiculous.

You should always know what you're doing next before [any story] is published, because the act of publishing changes it. And it changes you.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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