The New Yorker Radio Hour - Maya Hawke on the Fear of “Missing Out,” and Jen Silverman on “There’s Going to Be Trouble”

Episode Date: April 16, 2024

At a band rehearsal in Brooklyn, Rachel Syme talks to Maya Hawke about switching gears between acting and music. In “Stranger Things,” Hawke plays Robin Buckley, a band geek who cracks a Russian code in her spare time; she also recently appeared in films including “Asteroid City” and “Maestro.” “When I’m acting, I inhabit the character that I’m playing,” Hawke says, whereas when fronting a band, “I feel like I’m me… But sometimes I have to screw my courage to the sticking place, and that’s a bit of a character. It’s me, [but] willing to stand up onstage.” Hawke discusses the inspiration for her single “Missing Out”: a visit to her brother at college, where she came to terms with some of her own choices. Plus, the playwright and novelist Jen Silverman, whose new book “There’s Going to Be Trouble” deals with the excitement and uncertainty of getting caught up in a protest.   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, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Lucy, is that right? Yeah. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Revnik. Lucy wants to write the next great American novel. She can't even read the bottle. Maya Hawk broke out as an actor five years ago in the cast of Stranger Things.

And since then, she seems to be everywhere, including last year's Asteroid City and Maestro. But she's also a musician, and that's no little side project for her. Her debut was praised in Pitchfork, and Maya Hawke is about to release her third album. It's called Chaos Angel.

Staff writer Rachel Seim caught up with her at rehearsal. Lucy wants to write the next great American novel. She can't even read the bottle. I wanted to talk to Maya because I think she is one of the most interesting young performers working today and a true kind of artistic polymath.

It's been a huge chunk of her life being on Stranger Things, especially, well, the pandemic took a chunk out of it. But she has been on that show since she was 19 years old and she's now 25. And at the same time, she is a musician on her third record. So she's doing so many different things on so many different levels that I find that really interesting as a model for a young person's career right now in Hollywood. Missing out, missing out, missing out now I know it's me who's missing out. So you're here rehearsing and then the day after you fly back down to Atlanta?

I was supposed to be the day after, but their schedule is constantly changing. So now I'm going to fly back on Friday. But either way, you're going back to the set of Stranger Things. I am going back to the set of Stranger Things. Is that a little bit of whiplash for you to sort of code switch between the music and the acting? or do you find there's a fluidity between the two things? Or how do you sort of put your different hats on? Yeah.

Is it whiplash? No, not for me. Because I really feel like it all comes from the same place in me. Like my desire to be a good team player is huge in me. And I feel like I'm on a team here in this room working on this song. And I feel like I'm on a team when I'm on the set of stranger things. And the part I'm playing is different. But the energy to which I go into.

that is really similar. So I don't feel whiplash. The only thing it feels like whiplash is like after we do this rehearsal and everyone's ready, it's like, ooh, I just want to go on tour. Like it's almost more of a letdown than a whiplash. It's like, ooh, oh, I feel ready to like cook something up and express this thing. And I want to go do it. And now I'm not and I'm going to go back and like put that on pause and refrigerate it for a while. But I felt the same thing leaving stranger things. I was like, wait, oh no, I don't want to go back to the city now. I've got a good hit on this monologue for next week, and I want to get it right. You know, it's always, you know, interruptions are hard.

So now you're a front woman. You have been for some time, but you're about to, you know, go on tour soon. I mean, soon. I mean, soon. In the year. Do you feel like you inhabit a character as the musician, Maya? Like when you're doing this, you feel like you're like, now I'm McJagger. Now I'm rock star me.

No. I feel like I'm me. And when I'm acting, I inhabit the team. character that I'm playing. But sometimes I have to, like, screw my courage to the sticking place, and that's a bit of a character, which, like, in that it's me who is willing to stand up on stage and try to make small talk with strangers and try to sing songs, which is me a little bit more courageous than I feel.

But it's still just me. It's, like, just me being like, okay, let's go into battle, you know? What is your take on sort of performing as a musician in front of a crowd? Is there a certain kind of character that you inhabit when you do it? Do you have to get yourself in a certain mental state to sort of be up there? I'm still learning. I feel like partly why I played guitar at Carnegie last night and that I've been practicing a lot and I want to play more of my songs on stage, even though I work with some of the best guitar players, I think, in the world.

But even if it's not actually contributing, it's inspiring for young girls to see a girl stand on stage and hold an instrument. And even if I'm playing badly, it's like, I don't know, that feels like it matters. It mattered to me when I saw it. Matter to me a lot. And so there's that. And then there's also, it saves you a lot of trouble with figuring out. what to do with your body. Finding my own relationship to my body on stage has been a real journey. I've generally not been a person who's that comfortable in their body. I think I used to exercise

and eat only to get smaller, like so many women. And then I started understanding that actually I could exercise and eat to raise my capacity, my capacity for movement, my flexibility, my strength, my energy. So I'm a late to the game of getting to know my body, but actually weirdly, I performed on Fallon in 2023, and that, the tour I went on that led up to that performance was the tour where I figured out how I want to move my body. So it's like very hands forward and a little bit like, I'm crazy, but in a sort of, I don't know, my own way. But yeah, so you could see it in that performance, I think, is like where I'm working from and what I'm working towards. Can we talk about a couple specific songs on the record? Duh. So missing out,

you're going to be singing. Can you tell me about the story of that song? Yeah, I was unemployed, and I went to go, started really wanting to hang out with my brother at college, because I never went to college. And I kind of wanted, I missed him, and I wanted to see what the vibe was. And it was a really emotional experience for me because I had a real chip on my shoulder about having not gone into any colleges and not really wanting to have gone, but then kind of missing out on the connection to your generation that you have, which there is where the title comes from. Yeah. Like kind of missing out on your own generation, basically. And instead kind of skipping into this adult world that is great and that I love, but was sort of like, oh, did I skip a step?

Did I skip a big step? And so I put it in a little time, and I snuck into some classes, and I went to some parties, and I don't know. I think it healed whatever that thing was in me and made me see what it was that was great, what it was that I actually liked about my own life, and that was really interesting and cool. Did it make you feel in the end? Like you're like, yeah, I'm good. I feel like I didn't. It's good that I didn't do this. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Or not good that I didn't, but I'm okay with my path. What are a few lines from the song that are sort of your favorites or that you feel like are emblematic of that the process, the writing process? So I like those lines a lot. I also, I'm extremely proud of the first line. Lucy wants to write the next great American novel. Because when I was in high school, I really feel like I felt that way. Like, I want to do something great. I want to do something amazing. but kind of how I got to the point where I was like, oh, I'm actually happy with my life is by hearing someone like at, you know, in this social circle that I was visiting say that. I want to write the next great American novel and me being like, that's not what you want.

You want to write a novel. Start with a novel. Maybe a novel about fill in the blank. Like a novel about my relationship with scissors, like whatever, you know, fill in the blank. And get specific, get personal, like get to work and don't worry about how it will be received. Like the word great is like that's what other people think. That's not what you think. And so that was a big epiphany for me where I was like, oh, cool, yes, that's what I want.

Okay, let's get back on the road, you know? I know. I know. Cut us, Betty. One, two, one, two, geez. Maya Hawke's album, Chaos Angel comes out later this spring. She spoke to the New Yorker's Rachel Sign. Lucy wants to write the next great American novel.

Read the bottle. She says I might be a genius. Well, she could be a model. Didn't think I'd get in so I didn't apply. Now I'm a drunk hangar on hitting on a younger guy Baboos for the Ivy League with my television salary Think they look up to me, huh The hours left like holes and leaves

And I sparked up in winter's breezing Now I'm missing out Missing out missing out missing out Missing out missing out Missing out missing out Now I know it's leas I gotta get in But for your and my mind in the gutter and my guts on the floor

Holding the party line Embarrassed potential Before I skip the fundamentals Before I ran from safety Hoping someone would chase me I was left like holes in leaves And I sparked up in wind Missing out missing out

Missing out, missing out, missing out, missing out. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We're joined now by Vincent Cunningham, staff writer at The New Yorker. And Vincent, if you want to know what's interesting to read or what plays to see, what to watch,

he's somebody you want to hear from. Here's Vincent Cunningham. I wanted to talk to Jen Silverman because, you know, in my capacity as a theater critic, I encountered this lovely play of theirs. It's called Spain. And it's about two filmmakers who are sort of covertly Russian propagandists. And I thought it was so interesting and politically astute and funny in a way that I just kind of wanted to check out anything they had done.

And I was so excited because in addition to being a playwright, Jen also writes novels. And they've just written a new novel. It's called There's Going to Be Trouble. And there's going to be trouble, takes place on two timelines. One is closer to the president. It's 2018, and a teacher finds herself sort of in the middle of the Gilles-Jean protests in France. You may remember the truck drivers and the yellow vests upset about oil prices and cost of living, economic inequality in France. It is one of the simplest and here in France commonest items of clothing to be.

found, the high visibility jacket or gillet-gé-gé-gonne in French, yellow vest, obligatory here in France to have in your car in case you break down or have an accident. And yet it became, well, a real symbol of defiance against the authorities and presidents. And then, in 1968, we have a group of students who are leading protests at Harvard University. These are members of students for a democratic society, SDS. They demand an end to reserve officer training on the Harvard campus, and an end to Harvard expansion in the surrounding neighborhoods in Cambridge. This is the beginning of a crisis at Harvard, and this is the battle cry.

How do you place human drama, things like romance and desire and personal hopes? How do you set that against history that we all remember? How do you set that against the backdrop of politics? And Jen has so closely intermingled these things, made one thing sort of, sort of, flow out of the other, and I knew that we had to talk. Here's staff writer Vincent Cunningham, talking with playwright and novelist, Jen Silverman. Jen, it's so cool to have you here to talk about your book.

There's going to be trouble, which is, like, to me, that's, like, a title that every novel should kind of have. Like, the promise of the novel, of anything narrative is, like, there's going to be some trouble here. I love the sort of eventuality in the rhythm of that title. But the fact is the trouble starts like immediately in this book. And more precisely, it starts in 2018, the Gilles-Leges-Germ moment in Paris. Could you talk a little bit about just that setting and then also the sort of the challenges of writing about moments of protest?

Yes. I was actually in Paris in 2018 at the beginning of the Gilles-Lé-Jon protests, which then, of course, continued and have changed and evolved. And I sort of stumbled into a protest by accident before I really understood what was going on. And I will say it took me a long time and research for this novel to even have a slightly better sense of what was going on. That's right. And then to my fascination, there were so many different kinds of people around me. there were professors and there were truck drivers or so many women. And I had not at that point, and again, this is 2018 and a lot changed in America after that as well.

But I had not at that point been at a protest that felt so full of people from different class backgrounds, different, you know, trades, different approaches. And they all sort of wanted the same thing. And then my question was, well, what is it that people are here for? You know, and then, of course, there's a moment where things turned and it started to get, you know, the police showed up looking like an army. And there were sort of vehicles rolling down the street that were military-looking. Military-looking. And there was a moment where the energy changed, and it suddenly started feeling quite dangerous. And it was out of that that I had been thinking about these questions of protest and revolution.

And what do we do when we find ourselves in a moment where you start to ask, are things changing? Could they change? Is this just a different point in the endless cycle of non-change? Right. That experience of being there. And then my curiosity about it started to feed what became the book. Yeah. One of your lead characters, I like her so much, her name is Minow.

And she at a dinner party, and she's talking about the brilliance of the protest, is its openness to all sort of different kinds of interpretations. But, of course, the problem with that is a kind of legibility, right? That, like, and I think this was a befuddling from America. Yes. You know, is this a sort of progressive anti-Mocrinism? Is this something that seems a bit more like what we are experiencing with Trump? How did you, Jen, in real life, sort of parsed through that? Yes.

It is, well, it is the multifaceted nature of it, the sort of shapefishing quality that was so mesmerizing to me. And I should say, I think the question of how people who think of themselves as apolitical people get pulled into a vibrant political context. When we talk about politics, it's so easy to think that we're talking about ideologies and strategies and intellectual analysis. And often we are. But the part that fascinates me most is what's under that, that we get pulled into political contexts because we have desire. We have ambition. We have fear. we fall in love with someone, you know, like Minow, who is in every way an outsider and who up until recently, I mean, she flees to Paris because she gets sort of unwittingly pulled into this political upheaval in her small town in America.

That's right. Like, she has thought of herself for so long, I think, as a bystander. And then she's at this dinner party because she has started to conduct an affair with this younger man who is an activist. and it is through that context that she's trying to understand what the invitation is. And so when you say that there is, when I say invitation, I mean the sort of invitation that the Gilles Jean are offering with their lack of legibility. That's right. And so that was the invitation for Minow that I really wanted to explore is how she chooses

what she wants to hear and then moves toward that thing. Yeah. There's a great passage in this book very early on that just, Honestly, just reminds me of the past. I thought a lot about 2020 and the Black Lives Matter protests and COVID and the upheavals then. Minow gets caught up in a protest. She doesn't totally know what it is. She sees a guy from work, Charles.

Somehow things get more physical and violent than she realized a protest like this would. And Charles and his friend come and they run away. It's just like this awesome passage of action. They like sort of are running through side streets getting away from. from all this. And Minow is like breathing super hard. And she realizes that amid like all the fear and everything else that she's feeling, there's also a kind of like ecstasy that she's feeling. And this to me seems such a, such a generous admission and also like dangerous material. Usually when we talk about activism, we don't talk about the pure pleasure that you get

from something that is, of course, so like adrenaline-inducing. Later on, there's, You know, in the 1969, 1968 timeline, there's, you know, a young man who gets behind a bullhorn for the first time and realizes his sort of rhetorical power. I think it's what some of us fear about protest. Yes. Where does that sit with you? On some level, the book is about many things, but it's on some level about the gratifications of being part of a crowd. Yeah. And so how did you think your way into that?

I find crowds terrifying and fascinating. Yeah. I love people. I love individual people. I love strangers and talking to strangers. The minute there are more than four people present in any space, it's like this often like a single organism starts to function in a way that is atavistic and instinctual. And we become often different people inside those spaces than we would be when we're alone. And so I think I have a deep, deep distrust of large groups of people.

And at the same time, I work in the theater. You work in the theater. I think of often, not always. I think of protests or sort of staged activist events as inherently theatrical. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think theater isn't, I've used the word before, but it's an invitation to an audience to enter space, to sit together, to breathe together, to receive together, to get some kind of spiritual electric charge and then to leave the. that space, those who have received it, not everyone well, of course, you know. And so when I think about protests through that lens, it makes an inherent sense to me. And when I have been at protests, both in the States and then ultimately in Paris, there is a way in which I feel it hit my body like a piece of theater, which is not to say it's false or fake, but rather there's an intellectual thing happening. And then there is also, as you said, a deeply visceral, emotional, embodied thing. Yeah, that's happening. Well, I mean, the part of me that was combing your fiction for ideas about your theater making laughed when at an early protest in this book, there's like puppets.

It's like that. Okay, yeah. Yeah. There were four to five paragraphs about those puppets, and my editor was like, we need one. She was like, I know you're really interested in puppets, but I guarantee nobody else is. But she said it nicely. Can I ask a craft question in terms of? Of course.

Of all this, what we've been talking about. In this book, there are many great parties, you know, house party ragers in 68, genteel, bourgeois, dinner party arguments in 2018. How much is a party like a protest and how you write it? I had not thought about that until you said it. And I love that comparison because I actually think it's very true. Again, it's that constant tension between the group and the individual. Yeah. And those tensions fascinate me.

And the question also in both a protest and a party of how we present ourselves, how we perform ourselves, a kind of a persona. And so at the moment that you mentioned from 68 where the character Keene speaks into a bullhorn for the first time and the whole crowd loves him. Yeah. It changes for him the way he sees himself and what he thinks he is capable of. And then when later that night he goes to the party that essentially becomes a celebration of him and what he did at this protest. crowd event, he has a different way of manifesting who he is in that group of people, a different way of being seen because he's now able to see himself slightly differently. And then I should also say both my parents were at Harvard during that time. Okay. My dad was a physics grad student. He's a physicist.

My mom was a chemistry grad student. Okay. And the experiment that we meet Keene trying to solve, that was my mom's experiment. I made her explain it to me. Because I am not, I am raised by two scientists. I do not have a brain for science and numbers in any way. But both my parents, they've always, they have this real passion for science. And when they describe what any experiment is or what it is meant to do, there's a narrative to it. And so I've always found it fascinating to listen to them, talk about, you know, this field for which they have the kind of passion that I have for the arts. One of your scientist's character is, again, this young guy keen who I think is so, not to, like, pun, but so keenly drawn.

He is a scientist whose father is a preacher. Yes. He's talking about the sort of structure of his father's worldview. And I think this is the worldview is like on some level also the problem in this book. Because it's like that's the thing that you cannot change. That's the thing that will follow you across the ocean or whatever, follow you from religion to science. It will just like stay with you. So he's talking about his father and he says, quote,

And when you receive the world as a masterpiece, you see what's beautiful first and what's horrifying afterwards. And everything that's horrifying can feel like an aberration. The devil at work disrupting God's plan, end quote. So this thing of like, the world is beautiful and therefore anything that marrs this sort of composition by God, this divine painting, is something that we can sort of hammer out in the same way that one hammers, out of a personality or something like that. I read that and I felt like, I felt attacked. I think that's how I actually kind of see the world.

And I was thinking that people that tell stories have to decide on how they actually see the world, where they think the source of trouble is, whether they think trouble is fundamental or goodness is fundamental. Does writing this, like, reveal some of that about yourself to you? Yes. Well, it made me confront the real dichotomy that I think I'm constantly trying to navigate, which is intellectually, the trouble is fundamental. But then every time I'm always sort of emotionally surprised when I encounter how terrible things can be or how cruel an individual can be to another individual. There's a way in which my brain says I knew it, but everything in my body is surprised.

Yeah. One similarity that struck me between this book and your last book, we play ourselves, is that the protagonists have secrets or incidents in their past that not only belong to, like, chronologically, the past, but to another place. Yes. You know? I just wondered how you think about, like, how our past, maybe this is just a question about storytelling. How our past, how our recent past conditions how we live in the present. It's a question that I really wrestle with a lot.

Yeah. And I think in my 20s, I had this idea, probably because of the way that I first was raised and then raised myself moving from place to place. I had this idea that you can switch countries. You can switch cities. You can. And when you do that, you get to switch lives. You just start over. You get to change.

Yeah, change. That's so easy. That's the promise. Of travel, of relocation, of migration, right? Yes. This is the big thing is you can be new. And it's seductive, the transformation, you know, that is just waiting for you around the corner. And then, of course, you get a little bit older and you realize, like, everywhere you go, you just bring yourself.

You know, I'm not the first person who said that. And what became, I think, narratively, and what is now narratively really interesting to me is, I almost want to say the failure of transformation, except that I'm never quite sure if it is a fact. failure, but the promise that is just out of reach, like, I haven't changed yet, but what would it take for me to change? And I'm fascinated by this, the ways in which individuals seek to change, and all of the ways in which we try to escape ourselves, and then, of course, the ways in which communities try to change and the many, many failures and attempts and small successes inherent in that.

I can't even realize my, like, easiest dude. Like, I just, like, want to be a guy who drinks green juices or whatever. And I can't accomplish that. So it's like, I'm also going to change the world. Right. Now I'm going to move. I'm going to jet us back to this text. Some of the most interesting arguments in this book are about, like, how to see Emmanuel Macron.

I don't know how to see him. He's such an interesting world leader. And most of the time, I'm irritated at the things he does, to put it most of the long. lightly. But I don't know. There's something about him. Did you develop a theory of Macron? I did not. But what fascinates me about him and what I think contributes to the polarization is his charisma. When you have that kind of charisma in a political leader, in a religious leader, in an activist, there's a way in which people respond to the charisma before they even respond to what the person is saying. And I think that has worked for him and that it has, of course, worked against him. But again, when we were talking about sort of the ambiguities of the Gilles-Légesne movement

and how we read ourselves into those ambiguities, what interests me most about McClans is how people are reading themselves into and against him. Yeah. Because he's hard to pin down. I don't know how to pin him down. Yeah. You know, he's far, far in the background of this novel. It's not like it's a sort of any sort of excavation into him personally.

But your sort of almost like sociological description of the many possible ways into this movement It made me think about how a charismatic leader, the same way they can form great coalitions on their behalf, can form interesting coalitions against them or something like that. Yes. And then the other, the tension there, of course, this is 2018. Trump is our president at that time. And Minow is sort of coming into this context with like, your president is well-dressed and articulate and seems to be a bit of a humanist. Like, what are you all so mad about? Yeah. And I think the book itself is really invested in these characters who are in contexts that they don't understand, come to understand, perhaps misunderstand, without necessarily trying to tell the audience, this is the political ideology that you should embrace. This is the answer.

Right. This is what will give us change. This is who these political people are. Like that, that sort of escapes me. Yeah. And I didn't want to lie, which is a funny thing to say in fiction. That's right. Jen, this has been so wonderful. Thank you so much for this book. And thank you so much for coming in to talk to me. This has been great. Thank you so much for having me. I've really enjoyed it.

Jen Silverman's new novel, Is There's Going to Be Trouble? Vincent Cunningham is a staff writer, and you can hear him talking with his colleagues every week about what's happening in the culture on our podcast, Critics at Large. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today. Thanks for listening. 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 Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Alicia Zuckerman,

with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Parrish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deket. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.