To call Fran Lebowitz a New York icon and literary legend is to state the patently obvious.
She has been revered for her comic bite and sharp observations since the publication of Metropolitan Life and Social Studies in the late ‘70s, whereupon she was widely hailed as a “young curmudgeon.” Both volumes were extraordinarily successful, reviving the comic essay as a popular art form. With the precision of a diamond cutter, she has a distinct way of shooting straight through to the heart of the matter with wit as dry as a crisp martini.
Much has changed since the ‘70s, especially about New York — something she often points out with rueful chagrin — but not Lebowitz herself. Like the Chrysler Building or Lady Liberty, she remains a towering figure and comforting constant.
Whether you can credibly call yourself a New Yorker is debatable if you have not spotted her at least once walking the avenues and boulevards in her signature tortoiseshell glasses, cuffed Levi’s and tailored blazers. (Notorious for eschewing modern technology, she’s quick to point out the rest of us have surrendered our experience of the city to glowing cell phone screens, ceding it all to her.)
Infamous for her writer’s block — or, as she puts it, “writer’s blockade” — she has remained in the public eye due to scores of appearances on late-night television, where she still looms as a popular fixture on the likes of Real Time with Bill Maher and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. One popular YouTube video stretching well over two hours compiles all of her appearances with David Letterman, spanning two networks and three decades.
In a world with an ever-diminishing attention span, Lebowitz compels people to stop and listen.
She has reached a new zenith of popularity thanks to Pretend It’s a City, a miniseries her longtime friend Martin Scorsese shot for Netflix. Timing was on their side, with it debuting during the height of lockdown. Gen Z quickly warmed to Lebowitz’s frank, no-nonsense approach to modern life, which Scorsese captures with pitch-perfect precision. In an increasingly disingenuous world brimming with gaslighting and uncertainty, Lebowitz provides an antidote simply by reporting on it as she sees it, unfettered and unbowed.
The Morristown native returns to her home state for “An Evening With Fran Lebowitz” at McCarter Theatre on April 24, where she’ll be in conversation with Princeton University professor Eliza Griswold, as part of the Arts & Ideas collaboration between McCarter and the university’s Humanities Council. Lebowitz spoke with Out In Jersey about changing mores, American politics and more.
Hello, Fran. How are you today?
Fran Lebowitz: I’d say I’m no better than most sane Americans.
I feel the same way. More than ever before, people consistently come out to theaters to hear your views and ask you questions. What’s your view on that?
FL: Well, I’m not an heiress, so my view is that I’m very happy for it because that’s how I make a living.
You have said that people are increasingly in a “world of one.” I myself have uttered the precise phrase “pretend it’s a city” under my breath for about a decade now because people dilly-dally and seem unaware of their surroundings. Do you have any theory as to why people are more self-centered than perhaps they were previously?
FL: Bad upbringing. People are not raised to have manners anymore. That’s the only obvious answer. For decades and decades, I have heard people telling their children, “You’re great, you can do anything you want.” That kind of stuff gives children this immense self-esteem — although I keep reading and hearing about how teenagers in particular are very anxious, so that’s a pretty bad combination. Anxious and arrogant is a terrible combination. So that must be the only reason. They just don’t think that there are other people in the world. They seem startled by the fact. There are other people they may encounter, you know, on 10th Street, or in a hotel lobby. There are other people! You’re not in your living room.
I can’t think of any other reason. I mean, a lot of people think it’s the phone. The phones have not improved it, of course, but it predated the phones. I used to think, “How is it possible that you don’t see me?” I finally realized — I believe I’ve hit upon the truth — is it’s not that they don’t see me. They don’t care. Like the bike riders, who I really believe I’m going to be killed by…
Yes, me too.
FL: Bike riders are only looking for cars. They’re only looking for things that can harm them. They’re not thinking of themselves as someone who could harm you. They’re not thinking about it. They don’t care. I mean, a cab is bigger than a bike, but a bike is bigger than a person. They’re just not thinking about it. I mean, when I say think, I don’t mean deeply think — they don’t care.
Sometimes, truthfully — and I know this does not look very good for me — if the person walking right toward me is not going to move a little bit, so we can both get by, and I see they’re not, and I’m not afraid of them — by which I mean, they’re not like a bunch of teenage boys – I’ll bang right into them. And they seem so startled! Really, why? Am I the designated mover on the New York City sidewalks? People used to just move. They just automatically did. Everyone just moved a little bit, because everyone had the same idea: Let’s not bang into anyone.
And it worked out well.
FL: It worked out perfectly. I know people think it’s because of the phones, but it’s not. It started long before.
Speaking of things that aren’t working so well in New York, I distinctly remember you told Bill Maher two years ago that Eric Adams seemed patently untrustworthy and “Trumpy.” How does it feel to be right yet again?
FL: First of all, I can’t imagine how anyone didn’t see this. I can tell you that numerous people have said to me in the last few weeks, “How did you know he was a crook?” How did you not know he was a crook?
I had an argument — not started by me — with a guy in a diner who said to me, “How could you care so much about his clothes?” Because what I said [on Maher’s Club Random podcast] was that these suits he wears, of which he seems to have dozens, are made for him. I mean, they’re awful, but it’s very expensive to have suits made for you.
So if you are a so-called public servant for your whole life — he never had a regular job in the interim where, you know, he was a hedge fund guy or something — you shouldn’t be able to buy these suits. And he’s probably not buying them. Someone’s giving them to him because, if he’s buying them, where’s the money from? Right? Having clothes made for you is very expensive no matter how horrible they are.
Also, I don’t know if you remember or noticed this, but he was not unknown in New York. He was known because he was the Brooklyn Borough President, and he started something called [100 Blacks in Law Enforcement]. He’s always been a publicity hound, so I’ve always known his name even though I don’t live in Brooklyn — well, maybe not always because he’s probably younger than me, like everyone is.
There [has also] been some doubt as to whether he lives in New York City. There seem to be no other requirements to be mayor of New York, but you must live in New York City! [When he was questioned about this] he said “I live in Brooklyn” and invited a bunch of reporters from the Times to what he said was his apartment.
Now, first of all, only a lunatic would invite a bunch of reporters to their apartment. This should be your first clue it’s not their apartment. I’d be happy to invite a bunch of reporters to your apartment, but not to mine.
And they were, of course, nosing around because reporters are nosy — that’s their profession — and someone opened the refrigerator, and there was bacon in the refrigerator. And he’s a very, like, loudmouth vegan — so, you know, I’m not an expert on vegans, but I’m pretty sure no bacon!
So it was apparently his son’s apartment. Now, I didn’t know he had a son, because we know nothing about his personal life. [It later came to light] that he is apparently part owner of a condominium in Fort Lee, which is in New Jersey. Well, there’s not a law against living in New Jersey — unless you’re the mayor of New York! Then you cannot live in New Jersey!
Then he said, apparently, that no, the apartment which was his son’s is “my primary residence.” And I thought, your primary residence? Who are you, Barry Diller? How could someone who’s in public service have even one residence, by the way? If you work for the city in any way, it’s amazing you could afford to live in New York City, period. But to live in New York City and also have a condominium in Fort Lee, New Jersey?
It should not be a surprise to anyone that he’s a crook. And he still says he’s going to run again — he’s not. He has zero chance of winning.
And he seems to be sanctioned by Trump now, just like you said.
FL: That is the most disgusting thing because surely… I mean, it’s not like New York City politics have never been corrupt. But Trump? I mean, that is inexcusable — so inexcusable, that to me, if you are having that kind of relationship with Trump, which is so clear….
One of the amazing things about Trump is he doesn’t hide anything he does, you know? I mean, he’s not smart enough!
As far as I could tell, they hate Americans. They really want to make America in their own image.
So many LGBT Americans are, of course, very scared now for reasons well known to all of us. You’ve been traveling the country and abroad taking the temperature. Do you have a sense of the importance of what’s happening now for our community? Could some of this bigotry be a smoke screen for something bigger to distract us?
What could be bigger? I mean, there’s no group of people other than white Christian heterosexual men that they’re not after in some way, so it’s hard to understand what could be bigger. I mean, yeah, naturally, people think about themselves. So, you know, if you’re an immigrant or you’re without papers or you’re gay, or you’re trans, or one of the millions of things they hate, you’re thinking about that, right? Truthfully, they just hate everybody.
As far as I could tell, they hate Americans. They really want to make America in their own image, to turn back time to what they think the country is.
A few weeks ago, I drove through lots and lots of places in Northern California. And a lot of those places is where there are farms.
Not that I’m an expert on agriculture, but apparently, like, 50 percent of the food in this country comes from these farms in California. [Now] there’s no one in the fields. Usually, you do see tons of people in these fields. And I don’t know whether they’re like planting or harvesting because I don’t know — when it comes to food, I shop or I go to restaurants — but there’s no one there. So, there’s not going to be food because no one’s planting it or reaping it or whatever. And [meanwhile, Trump] eats that junk from McDonald’s — I’m not sure [any of that food] even comes at all from out of the ground.
It seems to be preserving him somehow.
FL: It’s like it’s made in a plastic factory. So, I worry that there’s not going to be food, or that it’s going to be psychotically expensive, which already it is.
Yes. And it will get worse.
FL: Right. And now there’s this tremendous negative concentration, as I’m sure you are aware, on trans people, because this is a thing that works for them politically. You know, it works for them. It gets out the vote. You’re probably too young to remember, but I mean, they used to use gay marriage for this.
Yes.
FL: And it works. I’m in New York — I don’t know about New Jersey — but it wasn’t a thing we voted on here. But there were states where they did vote on gay marriage, and Republicans would put it on the ballot deliberately to turn out their vote, because people who wouldn’t vote otherwise would come out to vote against that. And now they use [anti-Trans rhetoric].
I saw Trump on the news, you know, stating, like this grand statement — it might have been the same day where he announced that English was the official language of the United States. [Scoffs.] But it was a similar announcement, which was ‘I am here to announce, like, officially that there are only two genders in the United States, male and female…’ And I thought to myself, what country has an official statement about gender? And what difference does it make? And then so I discovered that on your passport where it asks you to put if you’re male or female — I had never even noticed it said that on your passport — you can also, in this country, say ‘X’ – which does not apparently mean Twitter, but some other gender. And passports expire every 10 years.
So, what difference does it make, besides that it’s on there for a long time? Well, because, what if you can’t get back into the country? What if you have that on your passport, you leave the country, you go to a more civilized one where they don’t care [how you identify] and then you can’t get back here?
I don’t know if this has actually happened or is going to happen, but you have to really wonder at people. When I say people, I mean the people in this administration who are concentrating on this.
You know what? A lot of these problems come from the left.
One other thing you’ve said along these same lines which I thought was very shrewd is that one thing that the left got wrong is pushing this idea that everyone has to love another — like it’s not enough to just respect one another, but we have to ‘love’ another as well.
FL: Yes. You know what? A lot of these problems come from the left. When I say problems, I’m not saying, you know, the problem with Trump, okay. But it’s exactly right — and this has been going on probably since the ’70s. This is not new, okay.
I think New York City is the perfect example for what actually works, you know, and what really, really works is when you don’t pay attention to other people and leave everyone alone. You see it in New York all the time because in New York people are really crowded around each other.
I take the subway all the time, on the subway, every kind of person on the planet earth is there in one car, okay. And, yes, there’s some crime on the subway, but I mean, it’s usually people stealing or stuff like that.
Numerous times [something like this will happen] — I will sit on the subway and look across the car and sitting across from me is a young girl that’s in a scarf and standing next to her is a Hasidic Jew. Now, I know they hate each other, okay. If I asked them and they were truthful, they would tell you that. However, I also know because I’ve seen this a zillion times — they’re going to get off the train fine.
Right.
FL: They might think [hateful things about each other], but there’s not going to be bloodshed over this. There’s not going to be anything. There’s not going to be yelling, nothing. They’re going to stand there, they’re going to wait for their stops, they’re going to get off the train and perhaps go back, you know, to quite cloistered worlds, which I don’t really think is a good idea, but you know, I don’t really care that much… But you don’t see that outside of New York that much. I see every kind of person crowded into one car on the subway in New York, and there’s rarely a problem about what kind of person people are. You know, you’re wearing a headscarf, you’re wearing a yarmulka… [conflict] happens, but it’s really rare, and that is the way to go. You know, that used to be called tolerance, and that’s all you need. It doesn’t matter if people love each other.
I mean, truthfully, the average person really just wants to be with people who are like them. That’s what average means! That’s really what the ordinary person cares about. And I don’t really care, but leave everyone else alone. There’s so little of that kind of problem in New York. There’s some, but it’s really little. Where you do see that is in places where most people are one thing, and then suddenly there’s a few other people added in, and they go crazy. I mean, that’s what all this anti-immigration stuff is about.
I wonder if you have any thoughts about what it says about the state we’re in now that there’s a romanticization of the United Healthcare CEO assailant.
FL: Well, what that is…first of all, obviously, lying in wait and shooting someone in the back is a horrible crime, period. Okay? So, you know, people seem not to be able to contain their fantasies.
You know, how many times have you said to yourself or to some other people, ‘I could kill that guy?!’ Okay, but that’s it! That’s all you get to do.
Listen, I [understand] about health insurance. It’s very expensive. It pays for nothing. The anger at healthcare systems in this country could not be more justifiable. But shooting someone in the back is not.
Everyone I know — except me, for some reason — thinks this guy is very good looking. If this guy was just like an ordinary looking little guy, I honestly don’t think he’d have all the support. I think the way he looks is a lot of it. I’ve had arguments with everyone about it. So, apparently, yes, to most people he’s very good looking.
But, you know, it’s a horrible crime. You can’t let people go around shooting people. He was lying in wait. It was a horrible crime. He should not be applauded as a hero. But [that doesn’t change the fact that] the health care system is terrible.
Yes. Absolutely terrible.
FL:: I wouldn’t even call it a health care system. And wait till [the current administration and Republicans in power] get their hands on it, because one of the ways [we’re] going to pay for this — and, first of all, I don’t know how there can be a tax cut for billionaires, because as far as I can tell, they don’t pay any taxes at all, zero taxes — but they’re going to cut into Medicaid, which is apparently the only health care that, like, half the country has.
Right.
FL: And certainly in some rural areas where most of these Trump voters are, it’s the only health care. So, you know, I expect these people might be — I mean, why do these people vote for Trump to begin with? Apparently they vote for him because they may have no money — most of them don’t — but they have plenty of bigotry. And, apparently, it’s so delightful to be able to express this bigotry that it’s worth giving up your health care.
Now we’ll see how that works for them in the long term. Meanwhile — you were somewhat alluding to this before — it seems like there’s more homelessness now in the city. People need psychiatric help. Where’s the health care for them?
FL:: I don’t know. Obviously, I’m not a psychiatrist. But, you know, when you see people in the street — if you see a guy talking to himself, you know, you move away from him.
But I always say he’s not talking to himself. He’s answering the voice he hears in his head.
So, you know, schizophrenia — which is what causes that — is an actual disease. Not every single kind of psychological problem is a real disease, but schizophrenia is a disease like tuberculosis.
The problem is that Ronald Reagan — I’m the only person who remembers Ronald Reagan, apparently — unfortunately, he became President just when they invented these drugs for this. So, there are drugs for this, but apparently [there were] side effects so awful that people wouldn’t continue to take them. There used to be mental hospitals in this country, public mental hospitals, and he closed them all down because, of course, [taxpayers] had to pay for them. I’m sure they were horrible — I’m not saying they were delightful — but you can’t fix these people any other way. This really is a disease.
[Those closures] came from the right, and from the left came the idea that you cannot take anyone off the street [without their consent], and this is a terrible combination which results in lots of people in the street yelling. Some are dangerous. Some are not. [I just worry about] the one who has a voice in his head that says to throw Fran into the traffic — so I move to the other side of the street.
But a lot of homelessness is caused by lack of money, lack of housing.
Yes, with a middle class that keeps shrinking.
FL: You know, lots of times kids will say to me, ‘I really love New York, I wish I could live there, but I can’t afford it.’ What I always say to these kids is ‘Don’t worry, come anyway — no one can afford to live here. No one can. [But] you’ll figure it out.’
Right.
FL: But, yes, it is really, really hard to live here. And that’s true of almost every major city in the country. And the places where it’s cheap to live, there’s also no work. So, you know, it’s very expensive. It’s too expensive. And one of the reasons it’s so expensive here, by the way, is because all the laws here, you know, about taxes and things like that are made by the real estate industry. The real estate interests have run New York City since the Dutch!
Before COVID, I was walking up Madison Avenue one night with this woman who was married to a guy who owns, you know, hundreds of these small buildings in New York that have, like, a hotel downstairs and then some apartments upstairs.
I said, “I don’t understand. Look at all these empty stores. Why don’t they lower the rent?” She said, “Because it doesn’t matter to them.” Apparently, that’s just as good for them, you know, as renting it. So who made those laws? They did.
There are certain things we can’t change with laws but there are others we can change, like whether or not it’s just as profitable for you to not rent out your building as it is to actually rent it.
So it’s a larger problem than what we see right on the surface.
FL: Yes. It’s because, basically, in a way — I will tell you this as someone born in 1950 — there are no competing values in the culture with money anymore. Zero. And there used to be. I’m not saying it was perfect, but it’s better if there are other values.
Of course, it’s the United States. Americans love a buck. I’m not saying they don’t. I’m simply saying that people used to care about other things too, and they don’t anymore.
There’s a man I know who I would describe as stupidly rich, incredibly rich. He made all his own money. I asked him what he would do if he lost all his money, and he said, “I’d make it again.” And you know what? He was right! The kind of person who makes that kind of money is the kind of person who cares about money in a way that most people do not. So he doesn’t care about anything else, this guy.
They’re not the smartest people who ever lived, by the way. If I made a list of the ten richest people I’ve ever known and the ten smartest, there wouldn’t be one crossover, okay? Now, the richest people — they’re not stupid. You have to be smart. But you don’t have to be brilliant. And you have to be focused on money in a way that doesn’t interest most people.
The single-mindedness.
FL: I mean, what is money? It’s math. The overvaluation of it is bad. It’s bad for the country.
Of course, this spread throughout the West. Nothing is more contagious than a bad idea. I mean, bad ideas spread with incredible rapidity, whereas good ideas take centuries to catch on!
If only it were the opposite.
FL: Most people don’t know these people, so they don’t understand them, you know? There are tons and tons of sayings in the United States that have to do with the combination of being rich and being smart, but it just isn’t true.
It’s what we value, even though it’s not accurate.
FL: They’ll say, ‘If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?’ That’s an old-fashioned saying. No one would ever say, you know, maybe the accumulation of money beyond your needs or luxurious desires is stupid.
Right. Pathological, perhaps. And dangerous.
FL: It is dangerous, because you see what happens. You know, they make a huge, stupid amount of money — which they shouldn’t be allowed to make — and then people say, ‘Well, how could you stop it?’ You stop it by taxing it! That’s how you stop it.
I mean, 50 percent of the money I earn, I pay in taxes, okay? Billionaires pay nothing. Nothing! I pay more taxes than billionaires. I don’t mean more percentage — I mean more in actual dollars! That just seems unfair to Fran.
It seems unfair to Rudy, too.
FL: I mean, people who make minimum wage pay taxes. They shouldn’t. If I were in charge, they wouldn’t. If you make — the minimum wage in New York City is $15 an hour, but in [most of] the country it’s $7.20 an hour. There’s no place you can live on that.
One thing you have remarked upon on is the loss of a discerning gay audience to AIDS and what that’s done to affect the culture — how it moved a less discerning audience to the forefront, to the front row seats, how the audience itself — as you said — is just as critical to the art as the art itself being presented. I think we’re seeing it play out now, the effects of that loss. What do you wish perhaps young people who didn’t live through that time understood about this?
FL: They can’t understand it because it doesn’t exist. In order to explain even the simplest thing, you know, to people who are, say, in their 20s — they have no context for it. And that’s partially because of, you know, people dying en masse, but it also comes from the Internet, which gives you facts out of context.
Someone asked me recently if I knew Edward Gorey — he was an artist, a wonderful artist who also did set designs, and a lot for The New Yorker — and I said I didn’t really know him, but I met him several times because I used to see him at the New York City Ballet all the time in the 1970s and ’80s. The New York City Ballet, in the 1970s and ’80s, was probably the most important cultural institution in the world. It certainly was in the United States. Well, that audience died en masse — and the New York City Ballet profited tremendously from that audience — and I don’t mean financially.
This audience was so harsh and hard on this group of brilliant people. I mean, at the same time Baryshnikov was dancing, [Rudolf] Nureyev was dancing, Suzanne Farrell was dancing, Jerry Robbins was a choreographer, [George] Balanchine was a choreographer — all at once! Everyone in that audience — well, not everyone — for instance, not me — was such an incredible expert on the ballet. And I used to think, these dancers, when they come out, they know these people are out there! This, I’m sure, is very stressful, but I’m sure it made them better dancers.
Right. It gave them a bar to rise to.
FL: That’s probably true in some way of sports, because there are so many sports fans who are fanatics: ‘You should have done this, you should have done that…’ And the reason this [gay audience] was like this, I thought, was because they loved this form so much. And the feeling was, basically, ‘I can’t do this, you are so lucky that you can do this, so you should do it perfectly.’ And that made the ballet even better.
I mean, sometimes you have these things where’s there’s kind of a density of talent all at once in a certain place — Renaissance Italy, 19th century British writing. But you have to have an audience that understands it.
And that seems to be missing now.
FL: I see that in the Philharmonic and stuff. I don’t have that kind of ear [for classical music] so I don’t notice if something is off. Someone will ask me if I noticed something, and I’ll say I didn’t because I don’t have that ability to hear that.
But there are people who do hear it, and there are people in the orchestra who know that there are people out there who know that, and it makes them better.
I don’t know how to explain this to people who don’t know it. And so naturally, if you went to the ballet now, you know, you might think ‘Ah, who cares? ‘ [We can attribute that attitude] to the disappearance of that audience for everything, really. For clothes, too. If you go to fashion shows, the fashion shows used to be people who really knew about clothes, okay? I mean, it’s a business, obviously.
Sometimes I’ll go with my friend to the Garden to see the Knicks because my best friend is a basketball lunatic, and she’ll say that this player should have done this, or that player should have done that. Now, do I know this? No. But lots more people know about basketball than ever knew about ballet, I can tell you that.
And you’ve talked about how the culture has become so steeped in nostalgia and there’s very little originality left. I suppose that’s part of this as well.
FL: Well, because they don’t know. For example, there’s a writer who’s really popular — I don’t mean, like, mass popular, but quite popular — and someone said, “Oh, here, this book is great.” I read the book, and she asked what I thought of it and I said, “I can tell you who he read. I could tell you that. I don’t think he’s very great.” But if you don’t know that, then you think this guy invented it.
That’s right. You have no context.
FL: So, this is not good news. Also, you know, much to my shock, I have to tell you, it used to be called, you know, the gay rights movement or whatever — gay liberation — succeeded, which I never thought it would, to such an extent that it caused gay people to not know about these things.
In other words, it was very good, obviously, for human life, but very bad for culture. It depends what you think is more important.
Right, like you have the privilege of not having to care because of the work that was done before, except you really should care because that’s what affords you the privilege.
FL: Well, they don’t really care because a lot of these things were escapes for people. You know, it was a way to not have the world on you all the time because the world was horrible to you. So if the world is more welcoming to you, then you could be just as stupid as straight people.
I don’t know if that’s a good thing. Speaking of art, though, I did want to ask if you had any remarks on David Johansen, as I know that you saw the New York Dolls quite often during a time in your life.
FL: You know, David was a good friend of mine when I was young. I actually happened to have seen David within the last couple of months, and I knew he was very sick.
But he was the last — you know, the other people in the Dolls, most of them died pretty young, so I have to say, for a New York Doll, he lived to be very old. He was 75, one year older than me. So, you know, I think it’s very sad that he died, but when I saw him a month or two ago, it wasn’t surprising to me.
I mean, I think all the other Dolls died of drugs, [except one of the bandmates] who had leukemia or something at a pretty young ago. So, you know, in Doll years, he was like 300 years old. That’s one way of looking at it.
As we sort of sift through the soil and look to what the hell we’re going to do next as a country, there are a lot of questions. One other person I looked to a lot for answers and wisdom, as I do to you, was George Carlin. And he said something that I did not agree with, which was that he called voting “an illusion of choice.” He did not vote. What do you think about that?
FL: Well, he was wrong. I mean, look at who didn’t vote in the last election. Many, many people in their 20s — Democrats — did not vote because of Biden’s Israel policy, okay? And look what they got — they got exactly what you knew they were going to get.
So, here’s what you should never look for in the voting booth — perfection. All right?
Right. Exactly.
FL: So, you know, like Kamala Harris — people kept saying to me, “Do you think she’s all right? Do you think she’s all right?” I said, “She’s fine. Do I think she’s Abraham Lincoln? I don’t. I would prefer Abraham Lincoln, too — but he’s not running.”
I’m an excellent voter, by which I mean I always vote, not that I always vote for the person who wins. I almost never do – but I usually [make my decision by] who’s worse. And who’s worse? Well, if Trump’s in the election, he’s so much worse than anyone you can imagine — any Democrat, any Republican.
Biden for sure should have not said he was going to run a second time. And there probably would have been a better candidate. I kept saying before Biden did that, I kept saying to everyone, “Here’s who we have to run — a straight, white, Gentile man.” Why? Because no one else can win!
Right.
FL: Do I think that’s good? No, I don’t.
So many said that it was so great that she could be the first Black woman President. I thought, if they’re going to have a Black woman President, I would prefer Angela Davis. Guess when she’s going to win? Never.
You know — and I haven’t seen many remark on this — but [Harris] lost because she’s a woman. She didn’t lose because she was black, or South Asian. She lost because she’s a woman. Trump won twice, both times against women. He would never win against a man. A lot of that vote was misogyny, pure and simple.
And so many white women voting for him, too, in remarkable numbers. That’s what shocked me. So many women voting for him — still!
FL: There are a lot of stupid women in the world. When the culture so looks down on a group of people, so do the people themselves. There are a lot of self-hating women. There are self-hating Jews, self-hating blacks, and self-hating gay people. Because you’re immersed in this. So, there are a lot of women who really vote consistently against women.
Still, any man would have won against him. I really believe that. Any white man.
I agree with you.
FL: I mean, he only won because she ran and because of the shape we saw Biden in. Any white man would have won against him. He lost to Biden the first time because Biden is a man. He should have been thrilled that she ran.
So, you know, that was a big mistake. And we cannot run women again. You know, we just can’t do it. We would like it to happen. I would like it to happen. But it’s not going to happen — not in my lifetime. Maybe in someone else’s lifetime — someone who is now, like, two years old.
But, you know, I kept saying to people, “I don’t care if you don’t like this and you don’t like that, or that she did this or she did that.” You have to vote. You have to vote for her because she’s not Donald Trump.
Easiest choice.
FL: She was never going to be a great President if she were elected. She just wasn’t going to be Donald Trump! Which is not nothing.
Yes. It’s something.
Finally, I want to ask you, if you had to choose one word to define yourself, Fran Lebowitz, what would that be?
FL: Angry. But this has always been true of me, frankly. Someone said to me, “You never seem depressed.” I said, “No, because I’m angry.” Depression is just anger repressed. I’m not talking about that kind of clinical depression where people, you know, can’t get out of bed. But when people say they’re depressed, usually they mean they’re sad, okay, or kind of like, disgruntled or whatever.
But I’ve truly been in a fury since I was born.
Well, I like that quality in you.
FL: Well, thank you.
For tickets and further information about Fran’s appearance in Princeton visit McCarter.org.
