Taffy Brodesser-Akner Speaks At IndyLit In Southampton

There are celebrity profiles, and then there are celebrity profiles written by Taffy Brodesser-Akner.

The New York Times Magazine staff writer has earned a reputation as one of the best in the business for her highly insightful, keenly observant long-form stories on some of the most culturally relevant and influential people in the celebrity ecosystem. She asks the tough questions and goes deeper than her subjects sometimes want her to go, but she does it with empathy, and the payoff is huge.

Ms. Brodesser-Akner brought those skills to bear in her debut novel, “Fleishman Is In Trouble,” which was released by Random House in June. Since then, it has become a New York Times best-seller, and has been hailed as one of the must-read books of the summer.

Ms. Brodesser-Akner’s book tour will bring her to Southampton on Saturday, July 27, where she will be part of the IndyLit Summer Reading Series, at 5 p.m. at the Southampton Inn. Earlier this month, she took time out of her press tour to talk about her novel and the philosophies and thought processes that inform her work, both as an author and journalist.

Ms. Brodesser-Akner has said that “Fleishman Is In Trouble” was born out of her desire to examine the world of modern dating, where men and women who, in their younger years, had been forced to, as she’s said in other interviews, “show up in their disgusting human form” on in-person dates. Now, divorced and in their 40s, they are engaging in an entirely new way of meeting people and forming relationships, thanks to the proliferation of dating apps.

When her efforts to pitch the concept as a long-form magazine story didn’t pan out, she decided to write it as a work of fiction. A book that began as an examination of modern dating became more about divorce. In an interview with Jennifer Lipman of the Jewish Chronicle, she described the novel as “the piddling thoughts of somebody one summer who had a question about whether marriage is really a viable institution if it keeps failing us, and how women are supposed to survive if the rules keep changing on us.”

She explores these questions through a cast of fictional characters, including Toby and Rachel Fleishman, who are going through a divorce. Toby Fleishman is a liver doctor in Manhattan, making more than $200,000 per year, which sounds great, except it’s not when you are surrounded by “finance bros,” and, more importantly, when your wife is making significantly more running her own high-powered talent agency, leaving you, as the husband, to assume primary caregiver duties for your two children.

The story is narrated by Libby, a college friend of Toby who is experiencing her own midlife crisis of sorts, after giving up her career as a staff writer for a men’s magazine and trying to adjust to life as a suburban mom. The initial focus is on Toby, whose new single world is thrown into disarray when Rachel drops the kids off early for his weekend and disappears for weeks, leaving Toby to deal with the fallout. While Toby’s perspective is the earlier focus of the novel, the points of view of Rachel and Libby come later.

Ms. Brodesser-Akner has freely admitted in interviews that her borderline obsession with interrogating and thinking about marriage and divorce probably springs, at least in part, from her own experience as a child of divorce. She wrote the first draft of the novel in roughly six months, mostly, she said, while she was on airplanes or waiting for someone to show up for an interview. Immersing herself in those big-picture questions didn’t really change her thoughts on marriage or divorce, and she said she didn’t expect it to.

“I really think that I’m able to see both sides of things in a way I used to feel was a weakness, but that has worked out for me,” she said. “I sold that book two years ago, which means I was writing it three years ago, and I think sometimes, oh my God, I must have been really trying to work through something at that time.

“That’s the tenor of how I look at it now,” she added. “Which means that everything I write, from writing about my flat feet to conversations about whether my job is legitimate, it’s not the writing that works them out, it’s the writing and seeing the reaction to the writing that works it out.

“There really is something powerful with people agreeing with you,” she said. “With people coming out in numbers and saying, I feel this too. Finding that you’ve moved people is nice, because that’s what a writer wants to do. Finding that you’ve spoken for people means you weren’t alone this whole time.”

Given the feedback she’s received from people telling her how deeply they related to the characters and their struggles and motivations—Ms. Brodesser-Akner feels she has achieved what she set out to achieve when she wrote the novel.

People have said “Fleishman Is In Trouble” is a novel about marriage; about divorce; about the particular struggles of people in mid-life, with all its attendant crises. That is all true. But it is also about the particular struggles women face, especially as they try to balance motherhood and careers.

Ms. Brodesser-Akner’s fashion of invoking her own humanity in her journalistic work elevates the art of that style of writing. In a profile of actor Bradley Cooper, where he was unwilling to engage with certain questions about his personal life, she reminded him that “people want to know the artists behind the art,” and that her job “hinges on that notion.”

It’s something she thinks about a lot, Ms. Brodesser-Akner said, and going on a book tour, where she has experienced the role reversal of being the interviewee rather than the interviewer has given her a new perspective on that topic.

“I never related that to my work,” she said. “I related that to the answers of the interviews. In this, I kind of see that I love that people find what they need. That’s the purpose of art.”