The New Yorker Radio Hour - A Novel About a Secret Family, and Adam Gopnik on Being Old

Episode Date: November 24, 2020

Sanaë Lemoine’s début novel, “The Margot Affair,” is about a seventeen-year-old high-school student whose father, a high-ranking official, does not acknowledge her or her mother publicly. In telling Margot’s story, Lemoine drew upon her own complex family history: when she was twenty-one, she discovered that her father had a secret second family. In an act of literary justice, Margot decides to take action to force her father’s public acknowledgement, in a way that Lemoine herself did not. Plus, Adam Gopnik explores the predicament of an aging population. People of retirement age will outnumber children in the U.S. in about fifteen years, but they are poorly served by the field of design. Gopnik sets out to experience their difficulties firsthand. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Alexandra Schwartz writes for the New Yorker about theater, books, art, and much more. And recently, she's been raving about a debut novel by a writer named Sinai Lemoine. Le Mouin was born in Paris, but she lives in the U.S. and she wrote her novel in English. Le Mouin's book is called The Margo Affair. And it draws on her life in a very particular way. Here's Alexander Schwartz. So the Margot Affair is narrated by Margo, who is a 17-year-old high school student in Paris.

She lives with her mother Anouk, who is a famous stage actress, a very dramatic figure and a dominant figure in her own life. And her father is the French minister of culture. The catch is that Margot's parents are not together. She and her mother are her father's secret family. He lives with his wife, who is a woman named Madame LaPierre, and their two sons. and they don't know anything about Margot's existence. And that is what starts to make Margo very uncomfortable the older she gets. On any given day, ours could feel like an ordinary life.

Like most families, we sometimes ate our meals in silence. We had been sick and torn up in each other's presence. I was often in a bad mood around father, wanting more of him, but then I would disappear after we had finished eating, preferring to read or be alone. And then there was the banality of waiting. Weeks going by, waiting for him, hating him for being gone, wondering if he loved us, missing him,

believing he was better than everyone else because time with him was precious. That is how we lived in a constant state of anticipation. On mornings when Anuk slept in, I stood on our balcony and looked down at the street. The pavement was so far away. that I could no longer see any cracks. I watched people trotting down our street without ever raising their heads. I imagined hundreds of men and women who shared their lives with two partners. There were so many of us, children of these double families who dreamed of the other

side. That night, like all the others since seeing Madame LaPierre, I awoke with the skin of my body chilled and wet and a strong desire to tumble to the other side, to have the separate spheres of our lives collide. I lay paralyzed in bed with the desire to break free from this routine. I felt it pumping through me, wild and exciting. So you discovered when you were a teenager, I believe, that your father also had a second family. What was it like to discover that? It was really surprising. I discovered that my father had a second family, a woman he'd been seen for several years, and two sons when I was 21. So I had just graduated from college, and I was in Paris for the summer, and I was living with my father. It was just the two of us.

I truly did not suspect that there was another family, and so when he told me at first, I remember here, hearing his voice saying the words and they didn't really register. And then all of a sudden he had pulled out photos of them. And it happened kind of like in a dream. And I think because it was just the two of us at home and I wasn't really telling anyone else about this other family at that stage, I often obsessed and thought about the other side. and what their lives might be like.

And did you realize pretty early on that you were going to turn to fiction as a way of exploring that idea of the other side? Because the novel is told from the perspective of a narrator who had the opposite experience from you. She always knew that she was not her father's primary family. She understood that she was being kept a secret. Yes. No, that's a great question.

And no, I had no idea. So at that point, I was writing a lot, and I moved to New York after that summer to start my MFA at Columbia. I started writing this story that circled around a character named Margo who was the hidden daughter of the Minister of Culture in France. And it took a while for me to see how, you know, that maybe there was this active, now that I look at it, maybe an act of empathy or like me trying to understand the psychology of what it would have been

like for a hidden child. And also, what if she chose to break free from that secret, her father's secret. Yeah, it's very interesting what you say about the secrecy element of it. In your novel, the plot is really set into motion when Margot decides that she's had enough of the secrecy. In what is a bit of an act of touching naivete, but also a very powerful act. She contacts a journalist and decides to reveal her father's identity. Your own father, I believe, asked you to keep his second family's secret from your mother. So was that aspect of secrecy, something that was on your mind as you were working through the novel? Yes, it really was. And even that plot point took a long time for me to come to.

And I think it's because it was so wrapped up with maybe that was the most personal element of the story in a sense. Because for I think it was maybe about two months, I didn't talk to my mother about what I'd learned from my father, which two months isn't that long, but it feels like a lifetime in the moment. And so it took maybe four years of writing this novel to realize that Margot should be the one who breaks a secret. Early on I had other characters or it just appeared in the news. And I wonder, you know, in a sense, it's kind of a rewriting of history of if I had maybe had more awareness at the time or a better sense of my agency or maybe a less complicated or challenging relationship with both my parents. It wouldn't have stayed a secret from my mother for as long as it did. Yeah, absolutely.

And there's more than just personal precedent for the story. In thinking about this, I thought, you know, people have second families everywhere. It's not just a French thing. But I think we in the United States tend to think of this tolerance for infidelity, for affairs, for other relationships as very French. And there is the major and probably most famous example of precedent in Francois Mitterrand's daughter Mazarin. who was his daughter with his longtime lover and who was kept secret from the public. I think her identity was revealed around her 20th birthday. Was that an event that you remember from your own childhood?

Yes. It's always been floating in the back of my mind. And around the time when I learned that my father had another family, I was working as a researcher for a journalist, an American journalist who lives in France and one of my assignments was to study Mazarin, Pangeau, and I read her autobiographical book. She's written several books, but one of her books, Bush Kuzhu, is about her father.

And I remember it was the first time that I really was discovering these very intimate details about their life behind closed doors, and I was so moved by it and how much love there was. And so I think it was more that I drew inspiration from there, perhaps, and thinking about my own relationship with my father and this sense of yearning that Margot has for her father in the novel. She really, what she's seeking for is not just his legal recognition as her daughter, but his love. So the Margo affair is a very French novel in both its subject. it takes place in France.

You have a minister of culture. You have the French lise. You wrote about this and this very French world in English. Why do you write in English? The short answer is that English is the language that I'm most comfortable in. It's a language that I learned to write and read in. Because we moved to Australia when I was four. So although I first learned to speak in French

and in Spanish with my mom, I fell in love with books in English. And French was really the language of writing essays for me and not so much creatively. So I just, I wrote it that way, not thinking too much about it during the process. Though as I got closer to completing the novel, I had, there, there were moments where I really worried that maybe this novel wouldn't be French enough or it would be, I don't know, there would be something that would be missing from it because it was a story being told in English. And so I would play around with dialogue and I would even translate the English dialogue into French in my head and think, okay, is that really the choice of word or is that the way that someone would have this conversation in French? And then I tried to find a middle ground

because I didn't want the novel to feel like a translation. I wanted it to feel fluid and true to the English language. I wasn't planning to ask this question, but now I actually really want to know it is a coming of age novel. It's an unusual coming of age, but there are other things that many of us will relate to, deciding, trying to form your own identity, going out into the world on your own, there is sex. What was it like to write sex? You are the first person to ask any question related to sex for this moment. How is that possible? It is a sexy novel.

There is, let's just say, for listeners, without giving anything away, that there's a lot of sexual tension that courses through the novel. You have a young girl who is talking to an older male journalist who she's putting her hopes and dreams. She's putting her hopes and dreams in his hands. I mean, sex is always difficult to write about. for this novel, it was kind of fun because Margo is 17, I wanted her experiences to be really heightened. And there was, there's one scene, I guess two-thirds of the way into the novel that I think of as a pivotal scene that is a sex scene. And that one was tough. I rewrote it several times. I wanted to convey that at 17, although Margot has had sexual experiences, she's thinking so much about the other person's pleasure and not about

her own as well. And it's something that several readers have privately commented on of this sense of recognition of, oh, I remember being at that stage where you are, this is so intimate, but you're not, you're still defining yourself. Like you don't have a strong sense of self and identity yet. But you're, you want to seem as though you do. So you're very much thinking about the other person and how and how you appear to them. Yeah, a desire to project a certain kind of sophistication, which actually in itself is paradoxically kind of naive. You know, it seems like one of the big challenges in writing about sex also is that the acts themselves could not be more common. I mean, this is universal experience we're dealing with. And yet, for every person

and for every character, the first time, these feelings are so new and explosive that you basically have to deal with something very familiar, but at the same time make it totally new from this person's perspective. That's so true. And how do you do that in a way that is also sexy? because I really wanted the sex to feel sexy, or not just the sex, but the moments of attraction, the moments of sensuality. And I think, you know, we see a lot of uncomfortable sex or painful sex. And that's not what I wanted in this novel. I wanted it to be kind of this, in a year that is so difficult for Margot, where there is grief and there are moments of like real upheaval, that it can be something that is a pleasurable moment for her.

The book is dedicated to your mother and to your father, which just reading it on the dedication page before opening the novel and starting to read seems a lot simpler than it does by the end of the novel. Have your parents read the book, and what have they thought, if so? Yeah, so they've both read the book. My father read it first, and he didn't say much aside from, oh, I really loved the detail of the fact that the father character wears an white apron,

the way that I do, or, you know, that was kind of like the thing that he fixated on. But then something funny happened where a couple of weeks after the book was published, I got a call from my dad and we were speaking on the phone and we started talking about his family and how it had been really painful to learn about their existence. And he apologized for the first time in 10 years. I had always been waiting for him to say that he was sorry. And I sometimes wonder if that conversation wouldn't have happened without this book. And I feel like I need to say that, you know, as much as this novel is so personal,

we've been talking about all the ways that it is, the parallels aren't necessarily clear. If you know my parents but don't know what happened, you would not necessarily recognize any of what is happening. There's a part of me that wondered, maybe my family won't see themselves in it, but of course they did see themselves. Well, Sinai, thank you so much, and congratulations on a wonderful novel. Thank you. Thank you, Alexandra, for this conversation. Sinai LeMont spoke with staff writer Alex Schwartz. LeMond's novel is called The Margo Affair. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Remember the election of 1980. Ronald Reagan's opponents made a lot of his age. At 69, Reagan ended up being the oldest president ever elected. This month, a 74-year-old incumbent was defeated by a 77-year-old challenger whose main opponent in the primaries had been 78. And yet the age of the candidates was certainly not the most remarkable thing about this election. That's true, at least in part, because the country as a whole is getting older. The median age has gone up by about eight years since Reagan's time, and in another 40 years,

it's estimated that nearly a quarter of all Americans will be of retirement age. Staff writer Adam Gopnik reported for the New Yorker in 2019 on how we're preparing or not preparing to live in an aging society. Here's Adam. Last August, two things happened to me. I turned 63, and so I decided to write something about aging. Now, I don't think of myself as old, but one of the things I discovered when I started reporting this piece is that no one thinks of himself or herself as old. We will all reject the label of being old no matter what it costs us in convenience. If you have a device that is especially helpful to the elderly, one thing you can be sure of

is that no elderly person will ever buy it. That's the paradox of aging, which governs the whole realm of geriatrics. A couple of months ago, I went to visit the group of people who, perhaps more than anyone else in America are spending all their time thinking about aging. They are software engineers, urban planners, public health researchers, just a whole slew of specialists who work together at this center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called the MIT Age Lab. The feel, the vibe of this place is very sort of, you know, George Jetson. Everyone's at their desk at their carol. There's the famous Japanese robotic seal. It's a wonderful help.

to Alzheimer's patients and so on. Hello. Hello. The Age Lab offers a whole range of products and ideas, but I was there to try a special suit that the lab has made. The suit mimics the physical conditions of aging. Samantha Brady bundled me into it. So to start the aging process, we're going to put a weighted vest on first.

All right. This is to feel what it would be like to gain. How many pounds is this? This is 10 pounds, but this is actually not that you're necessarily going to gain weight, but muscle loss. Oh, right. It's very common. Yes, absolutely. Everything at the age lab has a name.

It's part of its charm. And the suit is called Agnes, which in this amazing very MIT acronym stands for Age Gain Now Empathy System. It's a composite snarl of monkey cords and weights and restrictive clothing. It's got limitless amounts of Velcro and. and a good number of snaps, and it took me a full 15 minutes just to get it on. So the more muscle loss weights come on now. Yes, so now we're going to go with the ankle weights.

All right. So these are about four to five pounds each. And they wrap right around. One of the really startling things the Agnes suit provides are these kinds of numbing crocs that you put on your feet, which very skillfully imitate the loss of sensory feeling in your footpath. that can cause the slower shuffle many elders walk with. All right, let's go to Joe's office.

All right, now I can blame Joe. I may kill Joe at this point. Joe Coughlin, who's the creator of this monster's suit, is the head of the lab. Wow. Oh, my goodness. Looking a little different now. Yeah, I'll say.

He's a fellow boomer in significant good health still. I don't know if he's a particularly fast walker, But once I put on the Agnes suit, I did start to notice how goddamn sprightly he seemed by contrast. Moving a little slower, perhaps? Slower. And the really weird thing is that one's gait. It's the interface with the ground. I know that sounds like a weird thing to be troubled by.

We also make the mistake quite often that older adults are naturally slower. Sometimes they're not slower. It's that lack of flexibility and ability to take a wide step. that is making them slower. Right. But let's walk a bit. Let's do a test. I want to find out what this is like.

And oh, my goodness, this is so aggravating. Joe Kaufman springs down the hallway, and I follow an aging, leer-like figure, trudging along behind him. We get to this kind of faculty lounge, this is an area with a coffee machine. It's a very fancy coffee machine. It's got a touchscreen where you order the kind of coffee you want.

Kaufman wanted me to try working this touchscreen, on the coffee machine, because as the world we're living in becomes increasingly digital, touch screens abound, and they present certain challenges for the aging. Well, look at this. Here's the... No, actually, this is a fun thing to think about. So look at the coffee machine we've got here. I want you to navigate that coffee machine to pour yourself a cup of coffee.

And by the way, even your hands change as we age. With less moisture, the touch screens are, shall we say, less forgiving. Oh, is that right? Yes, I feel that already. So let's see. I'll hit small. I'll do regular. Joe Coughlin tells me that the problem isn't just my newly, if artificially, gnarled hands.

It's really about the way we design the entire world around us. Trying to grasp a hot beverage in your hand is worrying. Well, think about this. Now, that cup is thinner because we're trying to save on paper. Plastic bottles have gotten thinner because we're trying to be eco-friendly. Ironically, that very thing that is being more environmentally friendly is not very gray friendly. You've got to squeeze it to get a grip on it. So as a result, you often take a bath trying to open up the water or you may get the hot coffee all over you.

I can feel it. It's really difficult to do that. And it's actually because you worry, I could spill this and that would be it. So one of the things that often comes up with using Agnes with all kinds of companies around the world is that people say, well, why don't you just ask older people? Why don't you just watch? And the answer is we do and we do watch. But here's the difference. Older folks want to cope.

They also don't want to admit, if you will, that they are having difficulty. And the other thing is, an engineer, a designer, whatever, will know that that can be fixed easily rather than somebody saying, well, heck, I'm 80 years old. That's what it means to be 80 years old. There is much a victim of the story as the designer who's designing something they think is old age. They're chapter of the narrative, too, because they think, oh, well, I guess life is just like this now. 15 years from now, only 15, people of retirement age will outnumber children for the first time in American history. Wearing the Agnes suit makes me realize just how everything in our built environment is designed for the young. That's why Coughlin built the Agnes, the aging suit, so that we can empathize in our lived experience with what it's like to be old.

Maybe even more importantly, he also organized a focus group. of older people, all aged 85 or above, who come in every month to talk to researchers at the Age Lab about what the lived experience of age is like. Coughlin calls them, charmingly, the lifestyle leaders. My producer, Caroline Lester, went with two of the members on their way to a meeting at MIT. Jean lives independently in her own apartment. She's lived there for decades, and for the most part, it suits her needs. A few years ago, she fitted her ceilings with these kinds of thin, rectangular boxes that deaden all the ambient noise.

I'm almost 95, a few weeks, and I had these put in for soundproofing recently. My hearing is so bad lousy. I was just surrounded by what they call surround sound. Jean and her friend John, also a non-agiarian, are part of the lifestyle leaders group at the age lap. There he is. John did fantastic, accomplished. What are you?

I'm an artisan in wood. Ardison and wood. I am an 21-year retired physician that now plays in his workshop with wood. Now, Jean and John take ride shares to get around most days. But there's an element of anxiety attached to it. One of the positive discoveries that the Age Lab has made is that technologies that seem designed for millennials, like Rent the Runway and Uber, actually work extremely well for older people who need that kind of disposability and efficiency. Do you want to call Uber?

And I'll call on the way back. And then we go right away out there because they come fast. But where millennials tend to get extremely irritated if they have to wait more, than a couple of minutes for an Uber. For the elderly, a car showing up that quickly in less than five minutes, that's the stressful part. Is this ours? That's our man. Our kids don't want us driving anymore.

It's dangerous driving in Cambridge. So my kids don't like me driving, but we have no choice. We use Lyft and Uber, but for just little dittly things, it's not worth it. It's simpler to get in the car. And when seniors lose their independence of their cars, it is a major crisis. I'm at that critical stage. My kids would like me to stop. I have to renew my license in a few weeks.

What are you going to do? I'm going to try to pass it. If I pass it, fine. If I don't, I'm a different person. It will be a different life. We'll get off at that first building. Do you need a hand? Thank you. I think I'm all right.

We're a little later than I hoped. Doesn't it start at 12? Yeah, but everybody's sitting there eating before we get there. Each meeting has a different topic. This week, the elders were asked to bring in recipes. They broke into focus groups where they talked about how their relationship to food has changed as they've aged. My name is Gloria Jefferson, and I live in Natapan.

My name is Bob Horlick. Joe Coughlin later used some of the information gathered from this meeting to write an article. John Nelson, I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey. I'm a retired child psychiatrist. I've been retired 21 years. The discussion lasted about an hour, and then everyone dispersed, many to ride shares. This time, it was Jean's turn to order the Uber. Is our ride coming?

Yeah. Okay, I'll come out. Let me carry. You should have a hand free. Yeah. You're right. I wouldn't mind an arm. Until midlife, we think of ourselves as growing.

Suddenly, the same inexorable passage of time becomes aging. And as 20 minutes in the Agnes suit will remind you, aging is an insult to the human spirit, which is resilient, vibrant, forever 19 years. old. Growing is a gentle slope upwards. But aging isn't a gentle slope down. It's a series of lurches, and we just pretend it isn't happening for as long as we can until we lurch to a final end. So the idea, the concept we have of aging is perhaps as damaging as aging itself. Even when we admire an elderly person, we find ourselves speaking to them with a fake abulience, a strained

reassurance. So for my own sake, I want to be a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of wanted to reach out to someone who is a lot older than I am, but to whom I cannot possibly feel a smidgen or a spark of sympathy, much less condescension. And the first person who I thought of, who was like that, who refused to be diminished by age, was the great American painter Wayne Tebow, who I've known for 40 years.

I picked up my phone and called Wayne at his home in Sacramento. Wayne is 98 and still producing terrific work. I wanted to talk to him about how age, is affecting his art. Would you say it's true that in your 90s, you think more about your early years than about your middle years, more about childhood than about, you know, the long prime of your career? That's soon to be not in a very... You've had, like all of us, your share of sadness and grief in life, and yet whenever we've been together, you seem able to find resources of joy and renewal. I wonder what you do,

Is it in your work? Is it in your faith? Is it in life itself that you find that capacity for renewal even in the face of loss? It's been. I think teaching also was a very, very, see myself. Really an old art. So teaching and tennis are the two propellants for it. Well, we have to make a stretch for the tennis.

It's really more hit and giggle today. But you're still out there. Wonderful exercise. Still get out there two or three times a week. Suddenly, I felt how wrong it was to ask Wayne about how it felt to be aged. He was old, yes, but he was working, and that meant he was, above all, Wayne. I stopped asking about his age and asked about his art. Well, I've just finished a series of over the last 15 or 20 years of paintings of mountains,

And that's going to be a show in November at the Aquavella Gallery. That's Wayne Tebow, the great painter speaking in 2019. And last week, Wayne turned 100. Happy birthday, Wayne Tebow, who's done so many covers for The New Yorker. Mother Love, which is the idea of trying to paint clowns. Adam Gopnik is a staff writer at The New Yorker. I'm David Remnick, and you've been listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. This week, of course, it's Thanksgiving.

Let's make it a good one and a safe one. And please know that we at the Radio Hour are always thankful to you. All the best to you and your loved ones. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Avae Carrillo,

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