The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Philip Roth: The Biography by Blake Bailey

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

Philip Roth: The Biography by Blake Bailey Named one of the Most Anticipated Books of 2021 by Oprah Magazine, Chicago Tribune, the Guardian, Literary Hub, The Times (UK), Financial Times, and more. The renowned biographer’s definitive portrait of a literary titan. Appointed by Philip Roth and granted independence and complete access, Blake Bailey spent years poring over Roth’s personal archive, interviewing his friends, lovers, and colleagues, and engaging Roth himself in breathtakingly candid conversations. The result is an indelible portrait of an American master and of the postwar literary scene. Bailey shows how Roth emerged from a lower-middle-class Jewish milieu to achieve the heights of literary fame, how his career was nearly derailed by his catastrophic first marriage, and how he championed the work of dissident novelists behind the Iron Curtain. Bailey examines Roth’s rivalrous friendships with Saul Bellow, John Updike, and William Styron, and reveals the truths of his florid love life, culminating in his almost-twenty-year relationship with actress Claire Bloom, who pilloried Roth in her 1996 memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House. Tracing Roth’s path from realism to farce to metafiction to the tragic masterpieces of the American Trilogy, Bailey explores Roth’s engagement with nearly every aspect of postwar American culture. 100 photographs

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks chris voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with a great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in we got a got a most exciting guest on. He is the brilliant author of a multitude of books, like a whole multitude. We just put in the Google machine, authors with multitudes of brilliant books.

And his name was top of the list that came up. His name is Blake Bailey. He will be on the show today, and he'll be telling us about his latest book, about another brilliant author. It's like one of those russian things where there's like the doll inside of the doll and you keep opening them up he's like the great author who did the biography of another great author so there you go i don't know what i'm talking about clearly but anyway we'll be talking about him and his new book that just came out you want to check it out and order it up it It's available now for April 6, 2021. So you want

to get your pre-order in so you can be the first one on your block, your little book club to read about it. To see the books we're reading, go to goodreads.com. Fortunately, that's Chris Voss. To see the brilliant video interview, you're going to want to see the interview on youtube.com. Hit the bell notification so you can get all the wonderful notifications of everything we did. And also go to all the groups we have on facebook linkedin instagram as well and all that good stuff so let me give you the rundown the book is philip roth the biography blake bailey is the author of the acclaimed biographies of john cheever richard yates and charles jack. And his biography of Philip Roth is now being published here in April. He is the recipient of the Guttgenheim Fellowship and Award in Literature from the American Academy

of Arts and Letters, a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. And he's a finalist for, or he was a finalist for the Pulitzer and James Tate Black Prizes. His most recent books, The Splendid Things We Planned, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography. And he lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter. Welcome to the show, Blake. How are thou?

I'm good. Thank you, Chris. Happy to be here. I think we got some of your extraordinary career. I read your bio on your website, which is even more lengthy and extraordinary. So congratulations, and congratulations on the launch of this new book coming out soon. Thank you. Thank you.

It's been kind of bouncy. bouncy well let's get to it then do we get your dot coms for people to look you up on the interwebs uh it is blake bailey online dot com there you go there you go and uh and order that up go to your local booksellers you can pre order it now and be the first one on your block to get it. That way you get those bragging rights. You're like, I read it first. What motivated you want to write this book? Okay. Philip is a figure of enormous international cultural importance. How important is he? I'll tell you. Back in 2006, the New York Times canvassed something like 200 literary critics, professors, etc., and said, name the best American novel of the last 25 years. And on the final list of 22 novels, six were by Philip Roth. Wow. that that was just 25 years between 1981 and 2006. But two of Phillips' most famous novels had been written long before 1981.

Portnoy's Complaint, which made him a millionaire and internationally notorious, it's all about masturbation, was 1969. And that's on the modern library list of the 100 greatest English language novels of the 20th century. Ten years before Portnoy was Goodbye Columbus, which made Philip the, to this day, youngest ever winner of the National Book Award. And beyond 2006, on the other side of that, he continued to write novels, profound novels about human mortality and fate, because Roth was very old by then. Published 31 books, won every prize but the Nobel. Wow. And was very controversial.

So should he have won a Nobel or shouldn't he have won a Nobel? What's your judgment on that? The Swedes are surprisingly, perhaps counterintuitively enough, they're a bit on the puritanical side. The Swedes, of all people. The Nobel is given by the Swedish Academy. And they thought that, again, his most famous novel, arguably, is Portnoy's Complaint. It's about a guy who masturbates with his family's liver. Okay.

I'm sorry. That's what it's about, among other things. There you go. And also, his second wife was the actress Claire Bloom, and she wrote a memoir after their relationship broke up called Leaving a Doll's House, and it paints an extremely damning portrait of Philip Roth. Oh, no.

That sounds like something, what happened to me someday, but I am following a, an only fans account that does that liver thing anyway. Moving on. So give us an overarching story of what you've laid out in the book. And then was this an, was this an approved biography? Did you,

were you able to work with his estate or I worked with Philip? He was still alive while I was working for six years while I was working on the book. Philip was my first living subject. My three previous subjects were all safely dead. And I just had to deal with the estate, with the children, the widow, which is dicey enough in itself. But Philip was alive and very formidable. He had read my Cheever biography. He and Cheever had been pleasant acquaintances. And what he liked about it, and this is mentioned, there is a profile of me in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine. You might want to check it out. There you go. Anyway, what he liked about my Cheever biography, according to his best friend, Ben Taylor, was that there was a sort of moral neutrality to it. In other words, I report the bad and the good, and there was plenty of bad and good for Cheever

and for Philip, and let the chips fall where they may. I collect the evidence and present things in terms of their relative importance. And so he knew that I would give the whole story and that some of it wouldn't be flattering, but he thought that was probably the right way to go. That's brave of him. I would have trouble, especially if I was still alive, offering someone to do my biography and be able to dig through my life. But maybe it is better if you do it while someone's alive, because then you can lean

on them a little bit. Be like... Right. It's unsettling. And some people, the book has been, we haven't even published yet. We publish on the 6th and already there's been about 25 reviews and they take a variety of opinions. But some think that I was Philip's patsy and that he successfully manipulated me and so on. I don't know where they get that idea.

In fact, they, on the one hand, say that I'm Philip's patsy and on the other hand, say that he comes across as a complete monster in my book. If I was his patsy, why does he come across as a monster? I don't get it. Does that make sense to you? Maybe he wanted to come across as a monster? I don't get it. Does that make sense to you? Maybe he wanted to come across as a monster. That's a, I would have mine read. Well, look, one of his most famous novels is Sabbath Theater, won him his second National Book Award.

And he said that was the most autobiographical protagonist he ever wrote. And Mickey Sabbath is a very dirty old man. Sounds like me. No, it's interesting because from all the research I was doing on him, he wrote a lot of books. He gave a lot of speeches. He talked about a lot of his opinions on things, pretty unabashed, it seemed, and probably made some people didn't like him maybe so much. Maybe some other people did like him. And then of course, you come and you write the autobiography and you're going to take all the arrows i'm taking a few arrows yeah there's a movement afoot to cancel philip because certain revelations in my book and certainly around in

in the academic milieu as it currently stands philip is not terribly popular. He's the last great white male American writer. And he had this reputation for misogyny, which does him no favors. Yeah. Yeah. And again, nor did Claire Bloom's book, Leaving a Doll's House, do Philip any favors. So give us an overarching view of the book and the man. Let's play like there's a lot of people who don't know who this gentleman was. And so that we can open up that audience for you to pick up the book as well.

But what would be the best way to describe him or some of his work or what you laid out in the book? He's a man of vast contradictions. As far as his work, I've tried to suggest to you his importance. Again, his career spanned 55 years. His first book out of the gate when he was 26 won the National Book Award. Goodbye Columbus, who was made into a very good movie with Ali McGraw and Richard Benjamin. If you haven't seen it, you should, but you should read the book first and so on. Again,

he won every literary award internationally going. He was the only living author in the Library of America, which is sort of the canonical library. He was the only living non-French author in the Bibliothèque de Pliade in France. And this is a figure of monumental cultural importance. Yeah. Yeah. Dealing with Philip on a face-to-face basis was pretty intimidating. Did he give you a layout of what he wanted you to do, or did he pretty much give you carte blanche and say, all right, whatever you will? The epigraph to my book is, don't try to rehabilitate me, just make me interesting. Philip said those very words to me. Now, did he mean them is the question you should be asking yourself, and which I often had cause to ask myself. On the one hand,

Philip affected a kind of Olympian detachment to how the public perceived him one way or the other. He never publicly answered the very damning portrait in his ex-wife Claire Bloom's book. Never. However, he gave me a 300 page typescript called Notes for My Biographer, which answered Claire Bloom's book practically paragraph by paragraph. Philip knew that he wasn't going to live much longer when I came on board, which was 2012. And his legacy was very much on his mind, despite the Olympian indifference to public perception that he affected. And so he was very enthusiastic, especially in the early years before

he got tired of me constantly digging into his life and bothering his privacy and his health was going south and so on. But he gave me thousands of pages of personal papers and made himself available for many, maybe a hundred hours of interviews. I interviewed all his surviving friends, his family, his lovers, his enemies, and so on. And Philip was quite aware that I was talking to people who were unsympathetic, and it made him very nervous. But it would make me nervous, too. It would be, too. It's quite the brave move.

I think Steve Jobs went through that with, I forget the brilliant author of Steve Jobs' autobiography, but I think Steve Jobs knew he was a real jerk, so he kind of knew it was going to come out. Walter Isaacson, I think. Walter Isaacson, yes. We've been trying to get him on for the new book he's got coming out, or he has out. So this response that he gives to his ex-wife's book, does this make it in this book? Yes, of course it does. I've been called everything from, what did, yeah, what was it? Hold on for a second. I'm going to just, I'm just going to pull this up

and look at this. Yeah, I love this. So the Wall Street Journal review, it's the front pager. It's going to run tomorrow by Sam Sachs, calls me heroically fair-minded, heroically fair-minded. Heroically fair-minded. I like that. Because some people out there say that I am Roth's apologist, even that I am his wingman, that again, I was his patsy, that he played me like a fiddle. I don't know how they pick a, they need to pick a rail or something. There you go. And I don't know, again, how they possibly reached that conclusion, especially since they do think that Philip's side of the story should be known. And in every case, I know what Philip's side of the story was. Do you feel like you're presenting the story as objectively as possible, putting these arrows and barbs aside from you're always going to have the haters?

Do you feel that you really, what did you put in to try and portray the story in the best way that you wanted to? What was the work you put in there try and portray the story in the best way that you wanted to do what was the work you put in there let's get that on the well-known editor at a well-known magazine tweeted yesterday that she doesn't know why people accept implicitly roth's version of his first wife maggie who is dead he portrayed her in an autobiography titled The Facts and in a thinly fictionalized novel called My Life as a Man. And she is a monster in those books. I mean, a monster. She tricks him into marriage. He's this young man about to publish his first book and about to become famous. And he's brilliant and he's handsome and so on. And she's this divorced mother of two troubled, illiterate children. And she won't go away.

And finally, when she pawns his typewriter, he says, you have to go. And she says, I can't. She says, I can't. I'm pregnant. And so Philip, I think reasonably enough, says, prove it. And gives her an empty herring jar, which she pees into and is directed to take it to Estroff's pharmacy around the corner. Instead, she went to Tompkins Square Park. This was in the East Village, New York, and found an obviously pregnant woman and paid her two or three dollars to pee into the jar.

Wow. And so she fooled Philip into thinking she was pregnant and he obligingly, he married her and it was a complete catastrophe and a nightmare. So this person said, this editor thinking that Roth is a monster and why should we believe him about this horrible first wife and it's mean to portray women as aggressive and hysterical and so forth. Here's why you should believe Philip's version of Maggie. Her children are still alive. They're in their 60s. I interviewed both of them. They both essentially said that Maggie was a monster, especially the son. They both said that Philip Roth saved our lives. He was sweet and decent to us. He arranged for us to be properly educated and so on.

I talked to the husband, the first husband, who is now 90-something, and he certainly had hard things to say about Maggie. I had her diary. I had her diary. Oh, you had her diary too? Oh. Okay. So she says, Maggie says about herself, this is just one, a couple of lines from her own

diary. Are you ready? Yeah. Maggie wrote, I have the mind to reason what is right and wrong, but I have no moral repugnance to keep me from anything. But I have a huge amount of self-pity where my wickedness keeps me from having the good things that life gives to good girls. Wow. So she's basically admitting that she's a sociopath. Yeah, that's insightful for a sociopath. There you go. So that's why maybe you should allow in that just particular case that Maggie was an imperfect human being.

Yeah. At least she was insightful. I'm like in complete denial of my sociopathy but uh collecting p at local public parks we just call that fridays at my house there you go so your book was named the most anticipated books of 2021 by oprah magazine so she might like you a bit uh chicago tribune the guardian literary hub the times financial times etc yeah it's you've written a lot of other books about other people is this one getting you the most spears arrows and oh there there is no american writer that that certainly i can think of it was more controversial

and more hated let's face it loved by many because he was a great writer than Philip Roth. So yeah, this is, it's been a pretty bouncy ride. And again, we haven't even published the book yet. Yeah, it's not even out yet. Just wait till later. There's some different values in those areas and definitely with the advent of women's rights and more civil rights and different things have changed. That is very much in line with how Philip explains his own behavior. When he married his first wife, Maggie, in 1959, he said, I was a typical mid-century American male who was taught to value himself based on how many crippling obligations he was willing to assume.

The job, children, wife, children wife etc you did your duty yeah you did what was expected of you and plus he was a nice he was a nice jewish boy that's his term that's his term he was born in the the jewish section of we quake in newark new jersey and he was a coddled child and a gifted child and And until Maggie came into his life, he was extremely highly sexed always, but extremely well-behaved young man. But Maggie so completely ravaged his life and then suddenly died violently in the neck, died violently in 1968. Had she lived, they were still in divorce proceedings. She would have taken the millions of dollars he made from Portnoy's complaint. Anyway, after the Maggie disaster, he said, Chekhov has this thing. Chekhov said, I had to squeeze the surf out of me drop by drop.

Chekhov came from surf, from the lower orders. And Philip said, I had to squeeze the nice Jewish boy out of me drop by drop. Let the repellent in. Don't try to be more virtuous than it is in your nature to be. And so the Philip of the second half of his life was fundamentally different from the young man. This is what authors go through. They write from their experience. They write through the life experience. It's part of the whole art of it,

the journey and how it shapes you through life. And there was certainly a journey in Philip's case. If you look at the difference between Portnoy's Complaint and Sabbath Theater, Portnoy was published in 69, and Sabbath Theater was published almost 30 years later. Okay?

And Portnoy's complaint is a clinical disorder coined by Philip Roth. And it is defined as follows. A disorder in which strongly felt altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature

okay so here is a divided soul here is a person who behaves badly as a sexual being and then feels very guilty about it because he had this jewish mother who expected him to be a nice Jewish boy and punished him when he was not. Mickey Sabbath. So that's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Mickey Sabbath 30 years later is all Mr. Hyde. There is no guilt at all. He's fuck it all. I was watching some video interviews of his late in life and he seemed very, I'm trying to think of the right word, but he seemed very aware that he was aging. I'm 53. I'm starting to become very aware. I just realized the other day that in two more years, I can move into a senior citizen community.

And I'm like, what? When did this happen? But I was watching some interviews with him, and he seemed very aware that he was getting. And I think his writing picked up at that time, didn't it? Yes and no most writers of the first rank do their best work in midlife in their 40s and in their 50s when they're still vigorous enough to have the energy for it because it takes a lot of energy but and have lived long enough to cultivate their gift and and to life experience. In Philip's case, arguably, his greatest work was achieved in the 90s when he was in his 60s. He wrote his American Trilogy,

the first volume of which, American Pastoral, won the Pulitzer and so on. And yeah, so Philip had this wonderful late life resurgence where he wrote his greatest books. But by the time I came along in 2012, he had stopped writing for two years and was in very compromised health. And I think in the interview I saw, he said he averaged about two to three years to write a book on average. I'd say he published 31 books. His career was 55 years. So that's about a book every other year or so. There you go. There you go. But when he was really clicking, it was once a year. Boom, boom. Yeah. There you go. I think I saw his, I think he was pretty late in his career in the interview I saw.

I think he might've been in his seventies or eighties. How long did he live to be? He lived to be 85, which is nothing short of miraculous, he was diagnosed in 1982 when he was 49 with coronary artery disease. Seven years later, he had a quintuple bypass. And for the rest of it, he didn't want to take beta blockers because they compromised his potency. Oh, wow. And potency was very important to Philip. So he had to contain it with diet and exercise. So, Philip, people who have a hard time with Philip's disreputable private behavior as they perceive it need to bear in mind that much of Philip's waking life was positively monkish.

Most of it was spent alone in a room at a desk. And when he wasn't at the desk, he couldn't eat any red meat or any eggs or salt or chicken with skin on it and so on. And he exercised and he had the terrible back. So Philip was tough. He was tough. And that wasn't the only admirable things about him either. Yeah. So what was the last thing that you, the last conversation maybe you had, and is it in the book with him? The last conversation I had with Philip, I recall it was a difficult conversation because Philip had just had a trans aortic valve replacement. He had just had his aortic valve replaced with cow tissue. That will take it out of you. Okay. So he was so exhausted. He could barely leave his Eames chair and go to the bathroom. He was just completely wiped out. And he had nurses taking care of him

and so on. I had that day been in his agent's office and looking through some files. And I had seen some things that I wanted to talk with him about of a rather compromising nature. So I was asking him questions and he was in a surly mood, which he's entitled to. He felt bad. He was sick and he was answering saying, it's not in my interest to answer these questions. You need to change the subject. And I kept persisting. And so at one point, he's getting more and more agitated. And he goes, this is the best I've felt in weeks, fucker. There you go. That was very Philip. And how was it, Philip? I will tell you. Philip could be very imperious and stern. He was the maestroestro he was our greatest living novelist etc but if he if he was in that kind of browbeating mood you could always appeal to his humor there you know

and if you were yeah you could always crack that maestro facade so out of all of his books which is your personal favorite i'm glad you asked that ch. I had to provide a list of five out of 31 to Kirkus, and they are as follows. His first book, Goodbye Columbus, which that would really piss Philip off because he detested that book. It won him the National Book Award at age 20. He thought it was kid stuff, and he was deeply embarrassed by it. So Goodbye Columbus, it's charming. Everyone should read Goodbye Columbus. If you're out there and you haven't read it yet, it's short, it's funny, it's sexy.

So first book, Goodbye Columbus, then Portnoy's Complaint, which is hilariously funny, and one of the filthiest books ever written to this day. A book of enormous cultural importance. Obscenity laws in Australia were completely abolished as a result of Portnoy's complaint because everyone wanted to read it and they wouldn't let them. Okay, so Portnoy's complaint, hilarious, filthy. The Ghost Rider, which was 10 years after Portnoy's Complaint, 1979. It's the first volume in the Zuckerman cycle. Zuckerman is Philip's alter ego.

It's a Jewish writer like Philip. Ghost Rider's terrific, probably my favorite. And then American Pastoral, which was the Pulitzer-winning first volume of his American trilogy. And just let me say, the incredibly protean nature of Philip's work, you go from Portnoy's Complaint, which is farcical and filthy, to American Pastoral, which is essentially tragic, very somber book about a virtuous man who was blindsided by the 60s, by history. His daughter blows up the general store and kills a man wow okay completely tonally different those two books and that was philip he had many sides to

him and so that's my fourth and the fifth would be every man which was published in 2006 and it's all about death as philip would say this book is about death you'll love it you'll love it those those are five books that's that that will get you launched on philip roth so it sounds like he was a very complex man especially those maybe you haven't read his books or didn't know him and but he was funny witty brilliant but complex he was very complex and those who say that that philip was not nice to women, as Clara Bloom certainly said in her memoir, at his deathbed, I was there, New York Presbyterian, there were seven or eight former lovers. One of them was 86 years old. She'd come with a helper, Ann Mudge. And if you have seven

or eight former girlfriends visit you when you're dying, you've done something right. Yeah. Wouldn't you agree? I would agree that. I would agree that. And he was a person, you know, to his friends, enormously generous and enormously loyal. If you were sick, if you were in the hospital, Philip would visit you every other day. He would help cover your medical expenses.

He would call your friends and help try to get them to help out, et cetera. And this didn't happen once or twice. This was his M.O. This was how he rolled. And I could go on. He did a lot of admirable things, but he could behave swinishly, and he did that too. And is this in the book, and then is this maybe something that's important that the critics of both you and him with the book now should really take a deeper look at the good things the man did as well that is the hope that is the hope for every subject that i write about my theory of biography

is if you tell the whole story both the bad and the good it will come out in the wash a person's humanity comes through and i think i've succeeded in my book about Philip, and some agree and some don't. There you go. Likely this is the sort of thing that would turn into a movie. Has it been optioned yet? And who do you see playing Philip? That's a good question. Liev Schreiber.

Am I saying that right? Horrible. You don't know who Liev? I am a face guy. I'm not a name guy. Okay. Well, Liev Schreiber, he's a terrific actor. He looks a little bit like Philip, but he's got the edgy, I don't know if he's Jewish or not,

but he's got the edgy, voluble Philip vibe to him. And, yeah, if Ron Silver were still alive, he did some of the audio books. Ron Silver? Yeah, I know Ron. I'm looking at Leave. Yeah. Ron Silver. Let me pull up Ron. Ron Silver. Yeah, I know Ron. I'm looking at Leave. Yeah. Ron Silver. Let me pull up Ron. Ron Silver. What's the book that he, the movie he made about the Klaus von Bulow murder? He played

Henry Kissinger and Alan Dershowitz in Angelo Dundee. Alan Dershowitz. Okay. And that was the most fun. But he also did the audio book for Portnoy's Complaint. And he did the audio book for American Pastoral. And he's got, again, he does a Philip persona very well. But he's dead. He died young. So offhand, I don't know who would play Philip. It would be interesting to see. It would have to be someone young enough that Philip is a brilliant young man.

And then get old. Yeah. Yeah. You might have to do three or four of those. So basically Denzel Washington is out. Is that what you're saying? A true story. One of my subjects, Charles Jackson, he wrote the famous alcoholism novel, The Lost Week. And my agent is a Hollywood guy, Shane Salerno. He produced The Comey Rule for Showtime, and he also does agenting. He did a documentary on J.D. Salinger, etc. Anyway, he told me that Denzel was interested at one time in optioning my Charles Jackson book.

Oh. And I'm wondering if he knew that it was, maybe he was thinking of another Charles Jackson. I don't know. I don't know. He didn't end up optioning it. So what are some teasers that maybe you want to touch on that people will be surprised about in the book that maybe they don't know about? Philip cut a pretty wide erotic squat. Browser history and stuff? He was, of course, married to the actress Claire Bloom, but he also had Tris with Ava Gardner.

He dated Jackie Kennedy in 65 when she was probably the most famous woman in the world. No one knows what happened between him and Nicole Kidman, but they had a friendship. I inherited, Philip had, because they were good for his back, he had three Eames chairs. They're very low slung and form fit in a very modern furniture. It's great, great, very comfortable. Anyway, he had an Eames ottoman, and I inherited that. It's downstairs in my front room, But the ottoman, he called Nicole's seat. Because when Nicole Kidman would visit him at his Upper West there was never just one woman in the picture, even when he was, perhaps especially when he was married. What broke up his first marriage was a tryst with a playboy playmate of July 1956, Alice Denham. So, you know, it's a racy read.

What can I tell you? There you go. So it's going to be salacious too and everything i love that the if i have eight lovers show up to my hospital bed when i'm on my deathbed they're going to be there to pull the plug out of the wall that's what they're going to be there for that's that'll be they'll be all scrambling that's that's what philip's detractors would say they were there to hasten the process. But no, I was present, and I can assure them that's not the case.

So anything more as we go out? Anything you may want to touch on or entice people with to order up the book? Again, it's Cynthia Ozick, who is one of the towering figures in American literature. She's going to be 93, I think, in a couple of weeks. She wrote the review of my book for the New York Times Book Review, which is the most important review you're going to get. And it's going to be on the cover of, not this Sunday, but next Sunday, April 11th, New York Times Book Review.

And it calls it a narrative masterwork. Okay. So that's my plug. If you want to read what Cynthia Ozick has called a narrative masterwork and one with plenty of spicy bits to it, then you could do worse than Philip Roth, the biography. There you go. This sounds like a wonderful read. And of course, hopefully we'll expose more people to his work and get more people to read it. Is there leftover content that you see coming in a second book with this?

You mean write more about Philip Roth? Yeah, like a book two? It's funny you should say that. He wanted my biography of him to be two or three volumes. And even then, I don't think he would have thought it covered his sheer majestic importance. I would have thought it covered his sheer majestic importance. Wow. I would have demanded ten. There you go, ten volumes. For my browser history, I'm just kidding. But it's a long book, but it's one volume.

And I like to think it's a pretty tight 800-page read. I have actually thought about writing a kind of memoir, and I have written that book, actually actually about my collaboration with Philip, which was very interesting, though I say it myself, but I don't know if I'm going to publish that book because it's been pretty challenging to write this one out. So at the very least, I'm going to wait a few years, let the smoke clear a little bit. Yeah. You'll be a porcupine maybe a little bit after this with all the arrows. One question I'm curious about, did he ever ask to read any of what you were writing, or was he in the dark the whole time? No, because I had really just, that wasn't part of our deal.

If he had lived, he would have been able to vet my manuscript for factual accuracy, not for interpretive content. He couldn't have said, I am not a misogynist, but he could say this never happened and I can prove it. But he didn't live to do that, which meant that the right to vet my manuscript reverted to his executors, which was a former girlfriend, a psychiatrist, Julia Goliar, and his agent, Andrew Wiley. And they were very conscientious and fair-minded about it.

That's awesome. That's awesome. That's awesome. So this is pretty cool. As we go out to Blake, give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs, order up the book and all that good stuff. Again, my website is blakebaileyonline.com. And I have to buy tabs. They're very easily found there. I have an events page. I may be doing a lot of virtual stuff with Peter Sagal of NPR, Don Winslow, a great crime writer, the cartel and such like people. So I hope your listeners will join us. It's going to be fun.

There you go. Do you have your next project lined up or is this a, you're going to run this? Oh my God. Do the book tour and stuff. I really just want to turn my toes up. Hey, next week's going to be fun. This writing thing.

I don't know. There you go. We hope you survive. So we wish you the best. Thank you. I'm just kidding. Blake, it's been wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you very much.

Congratulations on your new book. And thank you for spending some time with us today. And thanks for having me. you go guys go ahead order up the book philip roth the biography you can get it it'll be available you can pre-order it now of course it'll be available on april 6 2021 and yeah named most anticipated books of 2021 by oprah magazine chicago trib the guardian literary hub the times financial times and more so you definitely want to do that of 2021 by Oprah Magazine, Chicago Trib, The Guardian, Literary Hub, The Times, Financial, Times, and more. So you definitely want to do that and learn more about the works and all that good stuff.

Check it out and be the first in your block. Go to goodreads.com, Fortuness Chris Voss. See what we're reading and reviewing over there. Go to youtube.com, Fortuness Chris Voss. We teach you with the good-looking Blake Bailey today to get people to go to the YouTube channel and subscribe. So we used him as bait for that. And also go to all of our groups on Facebook,

LinkedIn, and Instagram. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for being here. Wear your mask, stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.