I meet Taffy Brodesser-Akner in a hotel bar in London. She has flown in from New York City, her home, whose inhabitants she chronicles with dark wit. For several years the 48-year-old did celebrity profiles for magazines until, in 2019, she wrote Fleishman is in Trouble, a bestselling novel that was turned into a Disney+ show in 2022.
Taffy was the showrunner – she co-wrote the episodes and had creative control – with Claire Danes and Jesse Eisenberg playing the leads Rachel and Toby. It is about the end of their marriage (or is it?) – and it made Taffy famous.
After a bidding war, her new book, Long Island Compromise, will be an Apple TV show and, again, she will be showrunner. She has passed through the looking glass: not interviewing but interviewed.
Her profiles are famous – try the Gwyneth Paltrow or the Tom Hiddleston, or the Bradley Cooper – because they expose the famous interviewee with an empathy that burns much deeper than spite. Fleishman, which is about two unhappy people in their 40s, made me imagine she was writing about me, and, as I read her, and now speak with her, I feel as exposed as Hiddleston.
It’s not that Taffy isn’t nice: she is. I just feel she sees through me with an idle glance. She divides the world into two: ‘people who are afraid for their survival [Rachel] and people who don’t even understand the question [Toby]. Because that’s something that gets in on the ground floor. That kind of fear.’ She smiles and asks me which I am.
It’s a great question. I wish I’d thought of it. ‘The second,’ I say, and now she knows more about me than I do about her. And what kind are you? I don’t actually ask her that in the bar.
I had to email her afterwards. I asked if she was Rachel and her husband – Claude, a journalist retraining as a social worker – is Toby. She replied that Rachel and Toby are ‘the warring parts of me, not tension between my husband and me’. But, in Taffy, Rachel tends to win: ‘How I wish I could be a Toby,’ she wrote, ‘when I’m stuck being a Rachel.’
When Fleishman was published, she says, people asked Claude: ‘How do you feel about the fact that her first book is about divorce?’ He would say: ‘Oh, she’s obsessed with divorce.’ Her mother, she says, divorced twice. ‘My parents still don’t get along. It’s 42 years that they’re divorced.’
She adds a gag: her friend’s parents remarried, and sometimes go on holiday together with their new spouses.
‘I said: “What a waste of a divorce. They upended your life and really they’re fine with each other!” My parents at least can’t be in a room together, which [and this is the blackness of her wit] comforts me.’
She began writing Long Island Compromise ten years ago, long before Fleishman. She sent the pages to her agent, who said, ‘none of these characters are likeable’. So Taffy began Fleishman and sent the pages to her agent, who said ‘none of these characters are likeable’.
So she got a new agent, swiftly finished Fleishman and then returned to Long Island Compromise.
Though funny, the book is about trauma: ‘that if you have ever felt the wolf at the door, you never have the luxury of not feeling the wolf at the door. There is nothing I do where I am not still afraid for my survival. And there are people I know who were raised without these questions of survival.’
She grew up in a religious Jewish home and I ask her: is it Jewishness, the wolf? (I mean, of course – is it antisemitism, the wolf?) ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Because I haven’t tried being a Gentile.’
Her first non-Jewish friends to read it ‘could not believe the intensity of my questions about survival’. She wonders if she inherited ‘the anxieties of my parents and grandparents, the need to shore up reserves of whatever would protect me from what I was assured was going to eventually come’.
Perhaps this is why she is such a good profile writer: she meets actors who we treat as gods and exposes their unease. Under her hands, insiders become outsiders. ‘I never took a pot shot,’ she says.
‘And I was never mean. But I was personal. And perhaps they never saw that coming. I wonder now if there is such a way to write a celebrity profile that’s ethical. I don’t know. I had a lot of sympathy for the people I was writing about,’ she says. Actors ‘pretend all day to be somebody else. [But] having to sit there as themselves in front of you for the world? It’s torture.’
It is odd for her, too: ‘They meant something to you for so long before you met them. And then they became real. They talked back to you, which is always jarring. To see Tom Hanks respond to a question is not the way of the universe.’
After interviewing someone, she can never return to their work. ‘I feel too strange,’ she says, ‘I don’t want to think about the things I’ve written while I’m trying to be entertained.’
Just writing about famous people changes them, she says. ‘Once that happens, I guess if you’re a decent person, you feel kind of bad about it. Because every story I did, no matter how nice, altered their world just a little bit.’
And so, she says, ‘I could never watch a Bradley Cooper movie again. Once I was writing a story about Josh Brolin, and I had to go to a Marvel movie, and there were like seven people I’d interviewed in that movie. I have nightmares like this.’
My favourite thing in Long Island Compromise is the fact that she wrote Mandy Patinkin, the 71-year-old star of Homeland and The Princess Bride, into it as a character. She has asked Patinkin to be in the new TV show. ‘I sent him a copy with a note [saying], “You don’t know me. But I’ve written you as a real-life character into this novel. I hope you see this as the love letter it is. If you’d like to call me and talk about it here’s my phone number. If you would like to sue me, here’s my lawyer’s number.”’
Patinkin wrote back saying: ‘Thank you for the lovely letter. I’m a slow reader. But I’m looking forward to reading it.’
‘I haven’t heard since.’ We look at each other.
‘I can’t think of who else would play him,’ she says. There is a final giggle, and a final anxiety: ‘What if Mandy Patinkin says no?’
Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner is published on Tuesday by Headline, £20. To order a copy for £17 until 21 July, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25.
