Travel Blog

Fran Lebowitz spoke at the Boca Festival of the Arts yesterday evening, answering questions posed by a host followed by questions posed by members of the audience. The former noted that Lebowitz sometimes takes her act abroad, and asked her what the rest of the world makes of us Americans. Lebowitz said that everyone in England asked her if we were going to have a Civil War. “No,” she told them, “we’re not that organized.”

After answering a question about what she was reading, she asked the host, “Are you still allowed to have books here?”

On her financial situation: “I have friends who say, ‘My father died and left me the house on the lake.’ Or ‘My father died and left me an apartment on West 63^rd Street.’ My father died and left me my mother.”

She grew up in Morristown, NJ, and had a very happy childhood. Kids back then – the 1950s – were allowed to run wild. She also had a library card. At the beginning, she didn’t realize that people wrote books. She thought that books were like trees. When she learned the truth, she decided immediately she wanted to be a writer. “Writing a book is one of the greatest things a human being can do.” Later, she said, “To me, a book is the closest thing to a human being. I know people think a dog is but I don’t. When I see a book in the trash, I want to call 911. ‘There’s a book in the trash!’”

She never liked Andy Warhol. But he had a magazine, Interview, that she wanted to write for. One day in February, 1987, a friend called her with the news that Warhol had died. “I sat up in bed and thought: ‘I just sold all my Warhols. For nothing. I think that’s why he died.” Of his work, she said, “The more you look at it the less there is to see.”

She said that people don’t read correctly these days, and blamed Oprah Winfrey, who, she admitted (obligingly), was wonderful, and had made a lot of money for authors. “Though not for me.” But Winfrey had taught people to identify with characters. “People say they love a book because they see themselves in it. A book is not a mirror. It is a window. You need to make your world bigger, not smaller. Reading is an escape – an escape from the smallness of being one person.”

Most of the people who lined up to ask questions were millennials, with a few perhaps from Generations X and Z, though, like Lebowitz, I have a hard time distinguishing among the three.