FRAN LEBOWITZ
Manhattan Malcontent

FRAN LEBOWITZ was born in Morristown, New Jersey, in 1950. In 1968, after attending a series of secondary schools without actually graduating, she moved to New York and took a succession of what she calls “cutesy,” jobs—waitress, usher, cab driver—and began writing poetry and book and movie reviews. In 1978, after writing columns in Mademoiselle and Andy Warhol’s Interview, she published Metropolitan Life, an anthology of biting, aphoristic commentary whose immediate success made her an overnight celebrity. Her second book, Social Studies, was published in 1981. Both are collected with a new introduction in The Fran Lebowitz Reader.

JW: Do you get to Los Angeles often?

FL: Four, maybe five times a year.

JW: I gather you’re not crazy about it.

FL: Actually, I like it much better than I used to, probably because I like New York much less. As New York has gotten duller and duller, L.A. seems less awful. I doubt very much that L.A. has become less awful, it’s just that in contrast to New York it seems less awful. You never have to have human contact here; there are very few actual humans to have contact with.

But New York has become so dull. Ed Koch and his Sinclair Lewis boosterism, his “I Love New York” campaign attracted droves of people who don’t deserve to live there, people who should live in Atlanta, and it drove out the people who deserve to live there. New York is like Atlanta with very high rents.

JW: Do you ever try to work while you’re out here?

FL: I hardly try to work anywhere, and by now I have it down to where I cannot work no matter where I am. In my opinion most writers should do less work and not more, and many of them should move here and not work at all. It would be an advantage to the literary world if most writers stopped writing entirely.

JW: If it’s not too personal, how have you been sleeping lately?

FL: I sleep so poorly. I only sleep in the daytime. It’s always been that way, even when I was little. I was sent to bed at 7:30 until I was 10 and thought it was normal. I finally asked my mother why she made me go to bed so early and she said, “By 7:30 I couldn’t listen to you anymore.” My mother was in the house all the time and I followed her around; she was the person I talked at. That was when I was still asking questions instead of giving answers.

JW: Do you remember the point when you stopped asking and started answering?

FL: I had opinions from a young age but mixed them with questions. The only time I ever ask questions now is if I happen to meet a doctor, because I’m a hypochondriac. Other than that I rarely ask questions.

JW: Tell me about your hypochondria.

FL: I never worry about things I could actually get, like from smoking, but I’ll be watching TV and they’ll be talking about a disease that only 75-year-old Turkish men get and I’ll have every symptom.

JW: Do you exercise?

FL: I walk a lot in New York, not for exercise but to get from place to place, and because its the way of having the least contact with human beings. You have to have a death wish to get in a cab. I take the subway when I’m really late, but I prefer to walk because I don’t have to put myself at the mercy of that faceless lunatic who drives the subway or the obviously insane man who’s driving the taxicab.

JW: Who doesn’t speak English.

FL: Who doesn’t speak any known language at all. Every single cab driver in New York has their name spelled in an alphabet that has an “o” with a slash through it. This is not a language I’ve ever come in contact with. And now they don’t let you smoke in cabs. I’m not going to pay all that money so I cannot smoke.

JW: Do you watch much television?

FL: I watch game shows. I was a big fan of “Family Feud.” In fact the high point of my career was having an episode of “Family Feud” dedicated to me on the air. The producer called my agent and said they had noticed how often I said I liked the show and they were going to dedicate a show to me on the air. They did and I watched it and to me it was the Nobel Prize.

JW: What did you like about the show?

FL: They had teams of families with five people on each team. The most you could win was $5,000 on the daytime version and $10,000 on the nighttime version. So say you won $10,000; you had to pay your own way to California and you had to pay taxes on the money. I figure it cost the average family about $7,500 to win, and I loved watching them jump up and down before they realized they had only won about $500 apiece. I also liked the answers to the questions. It was like going to a mall without having to leave the house. One of my favorite questions they ever had was, “Name five famous American intellectuals” and the first answer from the winning team was “John Kennedy,” a well-known intellectual, and it was on the board! In answer to the question, “Name a famous Rudolph,” a guy jumped up and yelled, “Rudolph Hitler!”

JW: You once said that to you the ultimate activity was autographing your own book. Do you still enjoy it?

FL: Yes, it’s endlessly rewarding. It’s a great feeling of accomplishment to have a book in your hand that you wrote. And second of all you’re selling it. Getting money is always a gratifying experience.

JW: What about celebrity in general—does it bother you to be recognized in public, to have your privacy invaded?

FL: Writers don’t get that famous; the people who have their privacy invaded are mostly movie stars. Writers get exactly the right amount of fame: just enough to get a good table in a restaurant but not enough so that people are constantly interrupting you while you’re eating dinner.

JW: You’ve been accused of being a snob.

FL: I’m not a snob in the usual sense. I’m not a money snob, I’m not a family snob, I’m a snob in other ways. I’m an elitist. I do not think everyone is created equal. In fact I know they’re not. The Constitution doesn’t mean that everyone is as good as everyone else, it means that everyone should have the same laws as everyone else. It doesn’t mean that everyone’s as smart or as cute or as lucky as everyone else. People have distorted the idea of democracy.

JW: Are you a feminist?

FL: No. I’m not opposed to most of the goals or beliefs of feminism, but it doesn’t interest me. Not that the things feminists say aren’t true, they seem to me to be not only true but so obvious that why would you devote your life to worrying about them? It seems to me the sort of thing that a civilized person wouldn’t even bother to mention.

JW: Do you feel that feminism has accomplished anything?

FL: What has changed? Six people have bigger jobs than they would have had. Life has not changed for the average woman except for the worse. Now women have to do not only the jobs that they always had to do because men won’t do them—I don’t care how many episodes of Phil Donahue you watch, men will not do these jobs—they have to do the men’s jobs too. The women who fell for this must be in a fury because they used to have boring lives and now they still have boring lives but on top of that they have to work 40 hours a week. It seems to me you were better off when you only had half these problems.

Probably the salient feature of modern life is the idea that everything can be fixed. It’s a fear of bad luck. I call it “the bad facts.” These are the bad facts: Men have much easier lives than women. Men have the advantage. So do white people. So do rich people. So do beautiful people. These are the bad facts. You’re born, you take a look at yourself; if you’re a black woman instead of a white man your life is ten times harder.

I was recently on the Long Island Expressway going to the airport, surrounded by 11 million people who do this every day. They do this twice a day! And you think to yourself, well, these people obviously feel they’re going to live 65,000 years and they figure they might as well spend 30 years sitting in a car. That’s how I feel about someone who’s an active feminist: you are not going to change anything; if you feel like devoting the little time you have to what I consider a really hopeless cause, you’re welcome to do it, but I have no interest in doing it.

JW: You’ve said that you don’t take drugs.

FL: I don’t take drugs because I don’t feel like dying instantaneously. I stopped when I was 19. I never took an hallucinogenic because I never wanted my consciousness expanded one unnecessary iota. I’m sure that being sober all these years accounts for my ill humor.

JW: You’re also on record about romantic love.

FL: Romantic love is mental illness. But it’s a pleasurable one. It’s a drug. It distorts reality, and that’s the point of it. It would be impossible to fall in love with someone that you really saw. The second you meet someone that you’re going to fall in love with you deliberately become a moron. You do this in order to fall in love, because it would be impossible to fall in love with any human being if you actually saw them for what they are.

People who get married because they’re in love make a ridiculous mistake. It makes much more sense to marry your best friend. You like your best friend more than anyone you’re ever going to be in love with. You don’t choose your best friend because they have a cute nose, but that’s all you’re doing when you get married; you’re saying, “I will spend the rest of my life with you because of your lower lip.” It’s amazing that all marriages don’t end in divorce. If you can stay in love for more than two years, you’re on something.