The New Yorker Radio Hour - Miranda July’s Uncomfortable Comedies, and a Toast to Roger Angell

Episode Date: September 22, 2020

Miranda July’s third feature film is “Kajillionaire,” a heist movie centered on a dysfunctional family, and her first with a Hollywood star like Evan Rachel Wood. Like most of her work, it can be classified as a comedy, but just barely. “There’s some kind of icky, heartbreaking, subterranean feelings about family that I would not willingly have gone towards if it weren’t for the silly heist stuff,” July tells Deborah Treisman, The New Yorker’s fiction editor. July acknowledges that billing her work as comedy allows her the budget to do things that straight drama might not get: “I knew I wanted to make a bigger movie. It changes the medium, it changes the kinds of things you can think up.” Tresiman, who has edited July’s short stories and other writings for the magazine, talks with her about the thread of discomfort and embarrassment that runs through her work in every medium. Plus, David Remnick toasts the centennial of Roger Angell, who has contributed to The New Yorker since the Second World War with writings on baseball and every other topic under the sun. 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. Some years back, The Onion, the satirical website, ran a piece about Miranda July under the headline, Miranda July, called before Congress to explain exactly what her whole thing is. Miranda July's whole thing is a lot of things. She's a writer, a performance artist, a filmmaker. Me and you and everyone we know, her first big movie remains a cult favorite. July played a performance artist trying to catch a break, a role that seemed like it might have been autobiographical. That's a limited access floor. You need a swipe card. Oh, I'll just get off on too, then. You want the offices? Actually, are you Nancy Harrington? Yes.

Okay, because I wanted to show you my art. I brought this tape. I thought we could watch. Okay, why don't you send it to this address? But that's here. Can I just hand it to you? It'll get lost. It's better if you send it. But I'm so close. Since then, July's fiction and other writing

has appeared many times in The New Yorker, and now Miranda July's new film is coming out and it's called Cagillionaire. It stars Evan Rachel Wood and Gina Rodriguez. The New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, recently spoke with Miranda July, who lives in L.A. The story of Cagillionaire is it's about a dysfunctional family of con artists, small-time grifters. How did this family group, these three people, parents and daughter, come to you?

I mean, they did literally come to me. Like, it was, I woke up. I was kind of wedged between my husband and child and unhappily so. like I felt trapped. And these three characters, the two women with their long hair and this man, it was like they came walking towards me. And I remember thinking I can fall back asleep and just have this as a dream. I'm halfway there already.

Or I can reach across Mike for my phone and start taking dictation, basically. And I kind of stayed in that mode for the better part of a, you know, you know, year just then just writing the first draft. Because I had had other ideas for this next third movie that were good ideas, but they didn't really have the characters. But they circle some of the same themes. Like I was definitely a mother and a daughter for the first time trying to write a movie. And there was something new there I was trying to get at. It's interesting that the movie was inspired by by thinking about motherhood because the mother in the movie is is sort of the farthest thing imaginable from a mother she she won't touch her daughter she's never touched

her daughter they never gave her birthday presents um so i don't know maybe it emerges from a perspective of thinking about what motherhood should not be yeah i mean to be honest like as i was writing it, I didn't think, you know, this is coming from me as a mother. In fact, I was like, what is all this silly heist stuff? This just seems ridiculous. And it was only when I got to the end and read it back that I had this kind of punched in the gut feeling. And I realized, like, oh, there's some kind of icky, heartbreaking subterranean feeling. And I realized, like, oh, there's some kind of icky, heartbreaking subterranean feelings about family that I would not have willingly gone towards if it weren't for the silly heist stuff.

Okay, so we all fly to New York together on Wednesday, and then we fly right back as strangers. Like one of the first images that came to me is this scene where the... they're at a baggage claim, baggage carousel, and for reasons to do with a heist, a scam that they're polling, the parents and daughter have agreed that they're going to pretend to be strangers. Then you accidentally take my bags and go home. I'll stay at the airport and report my loss. Luckily, I have travelers insurance,

so they'll issue us a check for 1,575. which we can just sign right over to Stovic the next day and be more than a full week early. And this is a real scam. Don't ask me how I know that. It is. And it always had struck me as such an interesting thing about it that you would pretend to be strange, that that that would be essential to the scam, that you'd be very close enough to these people to pull off a heist like this, but that you would pretend to be strangers, that everything would depend on that. And the idea of what if in the midst of that your parents actually became strange? You suddenly saw them as strangers for the first time.

That always has kind of worried me that that idea haunts me of someone very familiar of looking at their face and they've become almost like they don't know you anymore. And so when I say maternal, I don't mean in our, you know, I think it's pretty narrow, to be honest, what a woman talking of using the word maternal, like what that conjures is like one or two things. And what I'm talking about is as vast as anything else. And that potential strangeness was at the heart of it. And then I kind of built from there. Yeah. There's a kind of, well, more than kind of heartbreaking scene later in the movie where this family that's not really a family goes to an old man's house and he, I don't want to give too much away, but he wants them to give him the soothing sounds of a real family. So this group tries to enact what a real family would do and how they would talk to each other. And it's just sort of devastating as they pretend to be so-called normal.

How was school, hon? It was fine. But I'm starving. Me too. Would you like some leftover cake? And they don't really know what to say, except maybe I'll go mow the lawn, you know. Would you like a snack?

Do you think I could have some of them? Would you like some milk? Please. And I suppose when I was watching it, I was going with the kind of, as you said, the silliness of the heists and the kind of slapstick comedy of haplessness. And then at some point you feel it switch to more, it's more like a tragedy of kind of helplessness on the daughter, Oldolio's part. Do you see this movie as darker than the ones you did before?

I think I was trying to walk a line. I think I thought just as I wouldn't have willingly gone straight towards what's heartbreaking about this. I didn't think anyone else would either. And that to some degree sets the scale of the movie. I mean, it sets your budget. Like if you know there's no reality in which someone can say a new comedy by Miranda July, then you're, you know, you're committing to a certain path. And I knew I wanted to make a bigger movie.

And that's not for the sake of it. It changes the medium. It changes your materials and what kinds of things you can think up. So, you know, I'm not going to waste my time on something that doesn't churn for me personally. I mean, there's a reason why I write all my own stuff. I mean, it's a, I need to be at the mercy of my work, you know, for it to be worth all the trouble. And so when I was starting to look at the marketing materials for the movie and saw again and again a new comedy if I ran to July, I paused. And then I was like, people like comedies.

They actually go to see them. They stream them. They, you know, go with this. This is only a good thing. Yeah, I think you can view it as a comedy and you can view it as a tragedy and you can probably encompass both of those things at the same time. You know, I feel as though whether you're writing or making films or performing, there's one constant for me in most of your work, which is that you are drawn again and again to things that are uncomfortable or awkward or embarrassing. or to make people vulnerable and that you focus in on those moments in a way that may make your audience uncomfortable too, but also forces us to sort of explore that discomfort.

I'm just wondering what it is about those kinds of moments that keeps you coming back. Right. I never think of it that way. And then afterwards, I'm having to like account. for why would you do such a thing? And I'm thinking, well, I think in the moment when I'm writing it, I feel sort of an opening. You know, I think, well, I'm not sure I've seen this before. And so it feels like new space. And I'm, and I get kind of excited and curious. And I think, like, well, how would you show that? And then I'm in. I'm doing, I'm writing dialogue and I'm picturing it.

And so I guess to some degree, it's just like there's energy there. There's ideas to be had. There's a way to move forward. And I guess the way in which people are laid bare when they don't know what to do next, when they're sort of in just a little, not a particularly dramatic way, but they're facing the unknown. I was thinking about your last story in the magazine. the metal bowl, which revolves around something from the narrator's past, but she, in order to

earn money at a desperate time, she appeared in a porn movie. And she's so uncomfortable with it that she can't tell her husband about it. And yet her whole life revolves around this moment of sort of self-exposure and unanswered questions about it. And, and it kind of culminates in the story to this point of such awkward discomfort for everyone involved that it becomes comfortable. I don't know how better to put it, you'd have to read the story, but when you're working on a story like that, is it uncomfortable to write or is it just, or are you just diving deep into it and experiencing it?

Well, you know, I mean, looking back that particular story, I was uncomfortable with the idea that it seemed like this woman could be me. And I hadn't generally written like that in my fiction and I hadn't felt set free by characters who seemed like they could be me. So, I mean, even when I submitted it, I wasn't, hadn't yet really made peace. with that. It's interesting to me because I feel as though one of the things you are comfortable with, at least as a performer, is kind of a form of self-exposure of vulnerability on film or on stage. So it's interesting to me that maybe you would feel more vulnerable in that way when it's on the page.

Right. So I acted in my first movie, me and you and ever. and we know and the second one the future. But I never, you know, I had 10 years of writing and making work before that first feature and I never played anyone remotely like me. And I remember even like my best friend at the time thought it was kind of funny of me. Like I was sort of tricking people into thinking I was this sweet normal girl kind of. Like she's like, oh, you're like pretty in this movie instead of just weird. And I was like, yeah, yeah, I just had some sense that I had to be. And then that fully sort of took over. I mean, that movie kind of broke out.

And that wasn't that comfortable. And I think I was actually hell bent on getting my short stories out there because in a way those felt more like me than this, this avatar me that had gone ahead. Anyways, I mean, not like anyone needs to know the ins and else. So this is like the point in the conversation when you're talking to a friend where you're like, oh, right, never talk about writing. Like it's just not interesting. But I was going to say, I'm probably one person in your life who is interested in talking about writing. Right, right. True, fiction editor. But that leads me into, I read recently, that you spend one night a week away from your family, away from your husband and your child, and that that's a necessary thing for you. What happens in the times that you're alone? Is it a different creative space for you? Is it just mental health?

Yeah, I mean, that started initially. My friend Isabelle and I would meet once a week. in her studio. She's a sculptor. And I remember saying to her, what if, you know, we both have beds in our studios, there's no reason we couldn't spend the night. And that just seemed so radical. Like, I mean, ridiculous,

so ridiculous that that would be a radical thought. But that just shows you how locked in this. I mean, she doesn't even have a child. So, you know, it's like marriage, as if you made some agreement and as if both people, you know, really care that much. I mean, Mike didn't really care at all. Like, on those nights, he and our child, like, eat food that I wouldn't like to eat

and they have a whole thing that they do. They're free. That they're excited about. Yeah, yeah. And at that point, I didn't know there'd be a pandemic. And since March, I've, I actually spend most of those Wednesday nights just recovering. just properly be the zombie that I couldn't be in my daytime life being like mother, keeping things going, teaching school, doing press.

Does the new book have anything to do with isolation and being alone? I mean, you know, as you can tell, it was conceived of before all this. And there is a way it could sort of neatly connect and take place. But I decided not to do that. I don't understand now. I don't understand our future selves. You know, like, I don't know what's going on. So I'm just, you know, doing what I always do,

which is some of my feelings from now can go into this fiction. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. I've talked to some fiction writers who say, like, it's sort of impossible. now to write, unless what you're writing is set pre-pandemic, and then it's sort of like historical fiction. Right. Or unless it's set during the pandemic, and then, you know, it's very topical,

but we're still, we're still, we haven't quite digested this time. Yeah, there's all kind, is there like it's weird? It's like what quarantine and what a pandemic makes. It's like a different, it's a different brain. It has a different calibration. I mean, I found that, I wrote something really short for the New Yorker. But I remember thinking, like, wow, I can really slam out these short pieces. And I think there is something about forms where you're making something now for people now. Now, that, that I can do. Thank you for doing this.

Yeah, thank you. Take care. Miranda July is the writer and director of the new movie Cagillionaire. She spoke with Deborah Treesman, fiction editor of The New Yorker. You can read the story The Metal Bowl and a lot more work by Miranda July at New Yorker.com. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Some years ago, when I was an intern at The Washington Post,

I was sent off to do a feature story on a writer who might always loved and still do. His name is Roger Angel. Roger is to baseball writing what Willie Mays was to baseball playing, fleet, elegant, and everyday player who never fails to astonish you, which is why he was elected as a writer to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. At the New Yorker, Roger Angel is nothing short of royalty. He's been publishing in the magazine since the Second World War. His mother was Catherine White, the magazine's fiction editor, and one day Roger would take her chair, editing the likes of John Updike, Anne Beattie, and William Trevor. 20 years ago, I sat with Roger one night in the left-field

seats of Shea Stadium, eating popcorn, drinking beer, and biting my nails. It was a glorious night. Yankees' Mets, a subway series. It was game five, and as it turned out, the clincher for the Yankees. And in the locker room afterward, awash in champagne, the Yankee manager Joe Torrey greeted Roger as a visiting eminence, a peer. We left the locker room soaked in Dom Perignon. Now I'd like us to lift a glass to celebrate Roger Angel one more time. Pretend you've got some bubbly at home because he's turning 100. Roger joined me on the radio hour a few years ago, and he was just 95 at the time, and a collection of his work called This Old Man, All in Pieces, had just been published. Roger, you practiced nonfiction, as it were by night and fiction by day. For years and years,

you were a fiction editor of the New Yorker to this day. You read short stories for us and in the fiction department. Was this bread in the bone with you? I think some of our listeners will know. that your mother really had singular responsibility for introducing serious fiction to the New Yorker, Catherine White, and you must have grown up hearing about this process and knowing this process. My stepfather was E.B. White, who was E.B. White and writing for the magazine every week.

And my mother and stepfather's house was full of galleys and pencils and racer rubbings and conversation about the magazine and about Harold Ross and about the writers of the day. And sure, I paid close attention. But I wasn't planning to be a New Yorker editor or to be a New Yorker writer.

What were you planning on? I was hoping to be maybe a boy naturalist, a herpetologist with my first day. But I did pay attention. Tell me about this old man by Roger Angel, all in pieces. This old man, Roger Angel, all in pieces. Well, I'm a little tired of the joke on the title already.

But tell me about the book itself. You've got in here some obituaries that were published in the New Yorker online. You've got a couple of long sustained essays, some baseball writing. Well, I wrote the piece this old man. I started the piece in 2013, I think, late in the year, and I think handed it to you long about February, something like that. It came as a complete surprise to me. You just plopped it on my desk, done.

I wrote it in different pieces, I didn't quite know what I was doing, and it was about physical debility, and it starts up with the description of my arthritic hands. Which you say the tips of your fingers look like they've been the subject of torture by the KGB. Yeah, if I point my forefinger at you like a pistol and fire, and for your nose, I hit you in the knee. But I describe some of the, every day.

debilities of age. And I didn't quite know what I was doing, but I knew that loss was at the middle of this, that I'd lost my wife of 48 years. I'd lost a daughter, and a beloved dog of Carol's and mine, went out the fifth floor window in the middle of a panic, jumped out the window on the fifth floor and was killed.

Losses for people my age are common. Ed Hirsch, the wonderful poet, lost his son, wrote a great book about it last year. And he says that anybody over the age of 65 has a 100-pound bag of cement of loss on his shoulders. So I didn't know how to touch on these subjects. And I didn't know if I wanted to even. And I did so actually through the loss of the dog.

I described the death of Harry, this dog, and then threw in that Carol and I wept, we couldn't get over weeping for him. And he lay in our bathroom between us. the floor and we threw Kleenex back and forth and I said we were also weeping for my daughter Callie who'd committed suicide a couple years earlier and events that knew we couldn't just get their minds around in any way but it was for both but I don't want to dwell on this I didn't want to make much of this because everybody's experienced loss and there are many changes of moods through this piece I patched the thing together and a lot of some of the

sadder or paragraphs that are hard to take are often followed by a joke or a lighter moment. There's some actual jokes in there and it's okay because I like to take jokes. I count on jokes myself. I'm known to tell jokes. And there's also the opposite of loss. There's new love. Yes. And this was happening. I was finding someone new in my life, my present wife, Peggy. And time was going by and I was still engaged in life. And I said that old people are like everyone else. We need.

We need connection. We need love. We need intimate love. I mean, there's sex. The peace ends with life against all other things. Against all odds. Against all odds, yes. But I wanted to say what was happening with me,

which happens with other old people. Old people fall in love. All people have love life, have intimate connections, have sex lives, and people don't like to admit this. Mostly their children. Because they're somehow revolted by it. But I think people are getting over this because it's now known.

It means it's not something to be repelled by, it's something to be grateful for. This brings up something else, which I've noticed with writers that I've dealt with. Now and then, a writer lives long enough.

This didn't do not just happen much with American writers, which was the famous thing about American writers. There are no second acts in American lives. Writers that go on and on often go back,

as update did, go back to the same subjects again, and again. And again, him went back to his mother. to the Sandstone Farmhouse, to his father, to his teenage courting years, and did the same story really again and again, but much better each time with increased feeling.

Some of the very best stories he wrote for us were at the very end. And the same thing happened with another writer of mine that I edited over a period of 40 years, V.S. Pritchett, the great British writer. in his middle 80s, suddenly got in this amazing hot street writing some of the greatest stories of his life, full of life, full of sex, full of amor, and adventures and comedy and childhood things, all rushing out of them. And I think that all of us do this at any age because we basically go over the same material in our minds again and again, the stories that really mean a lot to us. And psychologists and experts on the subject say that this is what the memory is. It is a trying out of a scenario again and again because it may be of use. That's what memory is.

And this is why the same scenes recur. After I wrote scenes, a lot of this personal stuff, I used to have dreams about or think about over. And once I put them down and got them published, I don't think about them anymore. It's very strange. it goes away. When you go back and read your earlier stuff, do you recognize it? Does it feel like you?

Not the very early stuff. No, it feels like Hemingway. And can you relate it all to a decision like Philip Roth's to stop writing? Well, I haven't got there yet. I'm extremely lucky. I'm 95 and still writing my goodness.

Roger Angel from our interview in 2015. He's turning 100. Well... Hey, Roger, it's David. David, how about? I'm great. How are you doing? I'm calling to wish you and, well, happy birthday. Thank you, thank you. I'm okay. I had a tooth pull this morning, but I'm over it. You had a tooth pulled? Oh, my God. Happy birthday there.

Thank you. God. How are you feeling about this birthday? Well, it seems so since we had this big celebration in Maine, once in advance, just goes on forever. But there's another thing that's come up, which is on my birthday, is on Rosh Hashanah. And... Believe me, I know. Friends of one, Jewish friends of mine, good friends.

We celebrate this every year without Jewish friends. But some of them called the other day and said that they were thinking of me that brought on the birthday. And for this year, they're going to call Rajasana. Rajahshana. Fair enough. Look, the greatest hero of my childhood was Sandy Kofax, and the great thing about him is that he wouldn't pitch on Yom Kippur.

I remember that. Yeah. And then everybody's saying that I knew was saying, what is Yom Kippur? The Day of Forgiveness. And repentance. So have you been looking forward to this birthday or dreading it? Well, sure, I've been looking forward to it,

but as I say, it keeps on, keeps going on and I'm going to do a bunch of different Zooms and meetings and gatherings. And it's been very sweet. I've had wonderful messages from people from old, old friends and colleagues and people I barely know and from strangers as well. So I'm very touched. It's really very extraordinary to me. Well, we're gathering the staff on Friday afternoon and we're going to all Zoom toast you.

I wish it were at my place in a big party with lots of... Champagne, but as they terribly say all the time, now it is what it is. I know. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, Roger, I just have to tell you, I'm sending love from everybody at WNYC, everybody from the New Yorker. We, you know, we love you. What can I say? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Happy Rosh Hashana. Hugsamea. Thank you. Bye. Take care, my friend.

I'm David Remnick, and that's our show for today. Thanks for joining us. 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, Ave Carrillo, Riannon, Riannon-Corpi, Cala Leah, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Meng Faye Chen, and Emily Mann.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part, by the Cherina Endowment Fund.