Taffy Brodesser-Akner Is in Trouble

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is shouting at her son to do his laundry. He has not done his laundry. He leaves for camp tomorrow and the camp, which costs more than some adults earn in a season, has a packing list, and the packing list is not done, and the socks are in a pile on the floor of his room, a room in an apartment on the Upper West Side that her parents could not have afforded and that her grandparents might not have believed existed for Jews.
Her publicist has confirmed me for forty-five minutes. The forty-five minutes are scheduled around her deadline for the Magazine, around her son’s flight to camp, around the dog’s grooming appointment, around the call with the FX executive whose name I am asked to keep out of the piece. The publicist sends a follow-up email reminding me of the off-the-record portions of the conversation that have not yet occurred.
She is wearing a sweater that costs what a freelance writer charges for a feature. She does not know that this is what it costs. She also does, in the way that people in her tax bracket both know and do not know.
She grew up Orthodox in Brooklyn, watched Northern Exposure when permitted, was kicked out of more than one school, graduated NYU Tisch in 1997, took a job at Soap Opera Weekly because nobody else would pay her, freelanced for ESPN The Magazine and Texas Monthly and GQ and a dozen places that no longer exist or no longer pay, married a film journalist named Claude whom she describes as “my people” though her grandmother might have used a different phrase, joined The New York Times Magazine, wrote a novel on her phone in airports while waiting for celebrities, watched the novel become a defining text of upper-professional-class divorce discourse, watched it become a limited series with seven Emmy nominations, wrote a second novel about a wealthy Long Island family modeled on a family friend, and on the day I meet her she is fifty-one and yelling about laundry.
She converted nobody. Her husband converted toward her and then past her, which is a story she has told before, sometimes for money, sometimes not. B&H Dairy on Second Avenue is where she ate her first solid food. The first writer to mark her was Roth.
I notice that I am taking notes the way she takes notes. I notice that I have ordered the same drink she has ordered. I notice that I am performing for her the way I have read her subjects perform for her in the pieces she has written for fifteen years. The noticing is part of the technique. The technique is the subject. The subject is the technique.
Halfway through our conversation it becomes clear that something else has been going on. She has been profiling me. The questions she has asked under cover of small talk have established my age, my income bracket, my parents’ professions, my Jewish or non-Jewish status, the schools my children attend, my last therapist’s modality, the rent on my apartment. She has the file. I do not have hers.
Late in our conversation I ask her about the kidnapper. The one in the novel. The composite, the offstage, the unnamed party. I ask whether the real kidnapper, whose name was Richard Warren Williams, who was Black, who was radicalized inside the late-1960s convergence of Black Power and anti-Zionism, who berated his victim about Jewish slumlords and Yasser Arafat and bombs on African villages, has a place in the book. She tells me the novel is not about him. She tells me the novel is about the family. She tells me, looking at me directly, that this is the part of the answer I am supposed to write down. We both laugh. The laugh is the only off-the-record moment of the entire interview that I am going to put in the piece.
She wanted to be a successful writer. She is a successful writer. The wanting did not go away. The wanting is, in fact, the subject of every novel she has written and every novel she might still write, and the most honest sentence in either of her books is the one she did not put there, which is that the affluent professional Jewish American is haunted not by inherited trauma but by the gap between what she got and what she thought getting it might feel like. That gap is what funds the FX adaptation, the book advances, the camp tuition, the sweater, the housekeeper, the doorman, and the apartment whose square footage her father, a retired computer professor at NYU, can recite from memory.