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Kelly Blewett

NonfictionPop CultureBusiness & Finance

Zac Bissonnette

Interview by Kelly Blewett

Zac Bissonnette’s first book, Debt-Free U, was published in 2010 when he was a 20-year-old senior at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Since that very early start as a published author, he has gone on to write two more books (How to Be Richer, Smarter and Better-Looking Than Your Parents and Good Advice from Bad People) and served as a contributing writer for publications ranging from Time to The Wall Street Journal.

Bissonnette’s latest book, The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute, is a powerful cautionary tale about where a speculative craze can lead—and who gets hurt when the bubble pops.

 

Why did you decide to write this book?
I was in middle school when Beanie Babies were at their peak, and it was sort of my first introduction to the weirdness of speculative capitalism. My mother and I went to flea markets a lot and there was this one flea market that, overnight, became dominated by Beanie Baby dealers. I remember them wearing fanny packs and visors, talking excitedly about the rising values for the pieces they were hoarding.

That image stuck with me as I became more interested in business and the sort of behavioral side of things: why we make not-great decisions about money, which was very much at the core of my first two books (Debt-Free U and How to Be Richer. . .). Then, when I was in college, I saw a huge collection of perfectly preserved Beanie Babies sell for almost nothing at a local auction.

I went home and started to research Beanie Babies, and there were so many things about the craze that were immediately fascinating—mostly that it was so much bigger than I would have thought: 10 percent of eBay’s sales in the company’s early days came from Beanie Babies, and the creator of the animals, Ty Warner, became a billionaire and the richest man in the history of toys. Rare Beanie Babies sold for thousands of dollars, and a self-published book that predicted what each animal would be worth in the year 2008 sold more than three million copies. And then, in the early days of the millennium, the whole thing died and nearly all the Beanie Babies were instantly worthless. Ty Warner, meanwhile, celebrated by buying the Four Seasons Hotel in New York City, and by building a $150 million mansion in Montecito, California.

Everything about the story intrigued me and, much to the chagrin of everyone who knows me, Beanie Babies were pretty much the only thing I wanted to talk about for the two years I spent working on it.

 

"It began with a few extremely enthusiastic women in Chicago’s suburbs—smart, upper-middle-class women, including a doctor, a commodities trader and a teacher who, for strange reasons, just went absolutely nuts for Beanie Babies."

 

Can you briefly describe Ty Warner?
Brilliant, creative, meticulous, compulsive, devoted and charismatic, but also secretive and ruthless.

Almost everyone who knew him described him as paranoid and, while most people had tremendous respect for his gifts in terms of product design and marketing, his relationships, both personal and professional, tended to end badly. People who’ve worked there sometimes call him “The Steve Jobs of Plush”—and I think it’s a pretty good comparison. Unraveling the story of his strange life—including a lot of time talking with his sister, who is in her 60s and struggling with medical bills—was really interesting.

In your opinion, what was the secret to Warner’s success?
It really all started with the product. Beanie Babies happened without any advertising or distribution through big box stores. The craze took off through word of mouth—soccer moms seeing them in gift stores, and telling everyone about how incredible they were: thick fabrics and adorable designs at a five dollar price.

Talking to people who knew Warner in the early days, I was really impressed with his fanatical devotion to the product: the endless hours he’d spend poring through fabric samples, and the number of prototypes he’d go through for each animal before he got it to be exactly what he considered perfect. Even now, when he’s 70 years old and spectacularly rich, he’s still involved in the design of the animals—and spends a lot of time at the factories in China overseeing production.

For the first couple years of his company, back in the 1980s, he and his girlfriend personally trimmed and brushed every single animal before it was mailed to the retailer who’d ordered it. He was fanatical about the product; creating perfect stuffed animals was the driving force of his life. Everything that happened followed from that.

Where did the Beanie Baby craze begin?
As the song goes, they came in from the middle west and certainly impressed the population hereabouts.
 It began with a few extremely enthusiastic women in Chicago’s suburbs—smart, upper-middle-class women, including a doctor, a commodities trader and a teacher who, for strange reasons, just went  absolutely nuts for Beanie Babies.

As those first collectors tried to assemble complete collections, they started running up four-digit phone bills calling out-of-state gift shops in search of rare Beanie Babies. In the process, they became the force multipliers for the craze. When that small circle of early collectors had trouble finding the pieces that had been produced in really small quantities, they started to pay a lot of money for them—and the word of rising prices sparked further interest. Its viral spread began almost literally on a single cul-de-sac, but the early days of the Internet drove it into something unlike anything that had ever happened before. Ty was one of the first companies to use a website to really engage its consumers.

Which Beanie was worth the most money at the height of the craze? Why was it so desirable?
That would be Peanut the Royal Blue Elephant. She was desirable because she was so rare. Peanut was originally released in a royal blue color but after a few thousand had shipped, Ty changed the color to what he thought would be a more child-friendly baby blue; by 1998, the original Peanut was selling routinely for at least $4,000, and sometimes more for really mint condition examples.

The company changed the design of Beanie Babies pretty frequently and a lot of reporters and experts trying to understand the craze cited this as an example of Ty’s marketing genius. But, actually, it had nothing to do with that: It had to do with this insatiable quest for perfection. And so a piece would be out there and then he’d decide that he didn’t like the design and so he’d change it to try to make it cuter. That was the driving force of his life: creating the cutest stuffed animals. In a way that was entirely accidental, especially in the beginning, the changing of already released pieces made him the richest man in the history of toys.

 

“Do you think the ass on this one is too big?” Ty Warner asked a worker in his office.
“Ty, I’m an accountant,” the guy replied.

 

How many Beanie Babies do you think the serious collector had on hand in, say, 1997?
That’s the kind of information most large companies would have done extensive market research to find out about. But Ty never used focus groups or marketing consultants; his market research was to ask everyone he knew what they thought of the products—and then he’d assimilate that feedback from random people into his redesigns and new products. Someone who worked there described seeing Ty wandering the halls of the office with artist’s renderings of upcoming stuffed animals—and he once stopped one of his top finance executives and said “Do you think the ass on this one is too big?” “Ty, I’m an accountant,” the guy replied.

But from my own research, I would say that it was not at all uncommon for people to have hundreds of these animals—generally meticulously preserved. If you go on eBay and type in “Lot of Beanie Babies,” you can get a sense for how enormous the collections people built were.

What marked the beginning of the end of the Beanie Baby craze?
Really, it was inevitable: Speculative bubbles always end because they’re inherently irrational and they’re basically structured as pyramid schemes—even though they’re naturally occurring, and not necessarily the result of an evil scheme.

 In the case of Beanie Babies, the problems started when the production of the new pieces had increased by enough to satiate demand. At the end of 1998, Ty announced the retirement of a bunch of Beanie Babies—which was something that had always lend to a rush of buying and soaring values. Except that, for the first time with that December 1998 retirement, it didn’t happen. The Beanie Babies lingered on the shelves, retired but still available for five dollars each. It was the first crack in the notion that Beanie Babies were a good investment, and things got very painful for speculators pretty shortly thereafter.

What happened to most of the people who made it rich on the Beanie bubble?
It generally ended badly for them. Some of the early collectors who cashed in big because they’d hoarded the rarest pieces before they were worth a lot of money made hundreds of thousands of dollars—and then quickly lost the winnings in another big bubble that was happening right around the same time: Internet stocks.

A lot of the former salespeople at Ty—some of whom were making high-six figures per year in commissions after earning less than $30,000 per year two years earlier—remember having blown through the money pretty quickly because it never occurred to them that it wouldn’t last forever. Many of the dealers I talked to who made a ton of money in Beanie Babies ended up losing a lot of it on the inventory they got stuck with after the market fell apart in 1999 and early 2000. The big winner, of course, was Ty Warner.

What lessons do you hope readers will take away from this story?
It’s one of those things I never really thought about while writing the book—I really wanted to tell the story and capture this incredible thing that happened: how it happened and why it happened, and leave it to other people to ascertain what it all means.

To me though, the story of Beanie Babies and of Ty Warner is really about how wrong we can be about what has value.

Over 5,000 different Beanie animals exist today. Which one is your favorite?
It’s kind of like asking me to pick my favorite kid. But after several hours of thought and much prayer, I would say: Among the Beanie Babies, I think Kaleidoscope the Cat is one of the most exquisite and beautiful things I’ve ever seen. But for all of the plush animals Ty ever produced, Sugar, who is a big fluffy white cat, is my favorite. If you look up those two animals on eBay, I can almost guarantee you’ll find yourself buying them.

What was the strangest interview you did for this book and why?

There were so many. This was one of those projects where virtually everything about the reporting was at least tinged with weirdness—almost like the strangeness of the Beanie phenomenon had rubbed off at least a little on everyone involved in it.

But the strangest interview of all, I would have to say, was at a prison in West Virginia, where I spoke with a man who had, in 1999, murdered a coworker over a Beanie Baby debt. His first question to me before we got started: “So them Beanie Babies—are those still hot?”

 

Zac Bissonnette’s latest book, The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute, is a fascinating cautionary tale about where financial hysteria can lead—and who gets hurt when a bubble abruptly pops.
NonfictionSelf-Help

Jen Hatmaker

Interview by Kelly Blewett

Jen Hatmaker has earned a devoted following by writing with humor and heart about mothering five children in Austin, Texas, a city she calls the home of the hipsters. In her latest book, For the Love, the popular Christian writer and star of HGTV’s “My Big Family Renovation” encourages readers to embrace imperfection.

You write that as you look at young women today, you see a generation “on the hook.” What do you mean by this? 
We are tough on one another, starting with ourselves. Despite our culture of empowerment and freedom, most women feel really wobbly about how they are doing. Consequently, the self-critical person becomes others-critical. We “love” people the way we “love” ourselves, and if we are not good enough, then no one can be. We keep ourselves brutally on the hook, plus our husbands, our kids, our friends, our churches, our leaders, anyone “other.” I think we can do better than this.

What does radical grace look like for someone feeling the weight of impossible standards?
I think I spent too much time in my earlier days of leadership trying to “fix” us all. If we could simply focus on x, y and z, then we would discover that elusive peace. At this point in my life, and particularly in For the Love, I spend way less time pushing people toward change and far more time assuring them they are already OK. Life is not waiting for better-crafted people to step into some future place of significance. We already matter and we already count, and we have these beautiful lives in front of us waiting to be lived today.

People often talk about searching for their “calling” from God, but you write that this idea is limited and misleading. What do you think is a better approach?
“Calling” is such a loaded concept. It evokes images of world-changing purposes and complicated (but admirable) job descriptions. It diminishes what most of us will enjoy: simple, quiet lives where we work hard and love our people and do the very best with what we’ve been given. I believe every woman has access to full meaning and purpose exactly how and where she is today, because ultimately the building blocks of significance include everyday accessible treasures like love, connection, generosity and hospitality.

You care about loving others well. What are some ways to do that? 
In my faith, my primary marching orders are simple: Love God and love people. That’s basically it. So I take this super seriously because evidently it’s at least 50 percent of my whole life’s substance. I guess my basic definition of loving others involves practices that actually feel like love: affirmation, compassion, a cheese-based casserole when someone has a baby, a last-minute invite for chili and cornbread, a kind word, noticing someone. Super basic stuff, but it requires getting out of our own heads and sometimes out of our own houses for the glorious risk of connecting. Loneliness does not have to be a prison; we have too many keys.

Your love of food and the act of coming together with people and eating come through so clearly in For the Love. Why do you think food and friendship go together so well? 
A shared table is the most common expression of hospitality in every culture on earth. There is something timeless and universal about sharing a meal with friends and neighbors. In Spain, a perfect stranger we met in the market invited us to dinner at his house, as if it was the most natural, obvious response to a lovely conversation with visiting Americans. If we aren’t sure how to connect with folks, a burger on the grill and corn on the cob is a good starting place. I am obsessed with the goodness that begins around the table together. It is the starting place for almost every good memory I have.

You talk about the importance of listening to those whose stories are often ignored, like teenagers and those whose experiences are outside of the majority. Why is listening so powerful and necessary?
My basic approach is this: Whenever two people (or groups or cultures or tribes) combine, we should listen to whoever has the least power. The dominant majority usually has no concept of their privileges, preconceived ideas, inherent bias or emotional advantages. The powerless or minority voices are typically silenced because they can be, with little to no effect on the majority experience. The path through equality, justice and empowerment has always begun when someone with power began to humbly listen to the minority perspective.

How do we listen well?
There is an enormous difference between listening to understand and listening to craft a rebuttal. When we sit across from another human being, we let each other off the hook when our only objective is to connect and understand the other person. This is harder than it sounds because our instinct is to fix, advise, disprove or hijack the conversation, but most of us just want to be heard and loved. Full stop. It is quite powerful to look into someone’s eyes and bear witness to their story.

What do you hope readers take away from this book?
I hope readers close the last page and breathe an enormous sigh of relief. I hope they laugh out loud because they just got free. Then I hope they look with fresh, renewed eyes at all their people—the ones they married, those they birthed, the ones on their street and in church and at work and around the world—and they are released to love them as though it’s their job.
Maybe we can lay down our fear and criticism, self-directed and otherwise. We don’t have to be saviors and critics for each other; we’re probably better as loved people beside one another. We aren’t good gods, but we can be really, really good humans.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Jen Hatmaker has earned a devoted following by writing with humor and heart about mothering five children in Austin, Texas, a city she calls the home of the hipsters. In her latest book, For the Love, the popular Christian writer and star of HGTV’s “My Big Family Renovation” encourages readers to embrace imperfection.
NonfictionLiterature

Bruce Handy

Interview by Kelly Blewett

Wild Things takes a witty and singular look back at childhood literature through the eyes of Vanity Fair contributing editor Bruce Handy.

What inspired you to write this book?
It came out of reading to my children. I realized I was getting so much pleasure not just from the nighttime ritual but from the books themselves, books I had loved myself as a kid and enjoyed rediscovering, as well as the incredible wealth of kids’ books that have been published since I was a kid in the ’60s.

Why do you think children love the books they love?
I think mostly for the same reasons adults do: They love books that entertain them but that also speak to them on some deeper level, whether it’s in a comforting way or a challenging way.

“I think good children’s books, like good adult books, are written because the author has something he or she needs to express; they come from some kind of core inspiration.”

In your opinion, what’s the difference between good children’s literature and bad children’s literature?
I think good children’s books, like good adult books, are written because the author has something he or she needs to express; they come from some kind of core inspiration. The problem with a lot of kids’ books is that they feel as if they were written with some moral or pedagogical impulse in mind—all the books that read like someone sat down and said, I want to write a book that teaches kids that sharing is good, or that there’s nothing wrong with freckles. Those are noble impulses and important things for kids to be taught, but in and of themselves they don’t make for great literature; you can’t engineer art that way—or not very often.

The themes of many children’s books are much darker than readers might have realized the first time around. Did any examples of this darkness surprise you?
The Grimms’ versions of fairy tales are famously violent and bloody, but I was taken aback by how deeply dark some of the more obscure ones are, like “The Willful Child,” about a dead boy who won’t stay buried, and “The Juniper Tree,” where the proverbial evil stepmother not only kills her stepson but cooks him in a stew and serves him to the father. On a different note, I didn’t end up writing about Bridge to Terabithia in Wild Things, but I read it for the first time as an adult, knowing that one of the main characters famously dies, but I was surprised by the rawness of the surviving character’s grief. I really admire that Katherine Paterson didn’t sugarcoat that and let it be messy and even ugly, like in real life.

How did you arrive at the interpretation that the Cat in The Cat in the Hat may be a stand-in for Dr. Seuss?
Like the Cat, Seuss was someone who needed a lot of attention; even he always described himself as a big, overgrown child. He had a ritual, every time he finished a book, of flying across the country from La Jolla to New York and reading the new manuscript aloud to the assembled staff at Random House—which put me in mind of the Cat’s plea to “Look at me, look at me, look at me now!” Also, like the Cat, he was tall and lean, wore bow ties, loved pranks and collected funny hats. I never read an interview where he said he modeled the Cat on himself—and I don’t think he would have been shy about saying so if it was true—but I think maybe unconsciously there was some kind of identification, a special affinity. Maybe the Cat was Seuss’ spirit animal?

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Wild Things.

Author photo credit Denise Bosco.

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Wild Things takes a witty and singular look back at childhood literature through the eyes of Vanity Fair contributing editor Bruce Handy.

NonfictionBiography

Walter Isaacson

Interview by Kelly Blewett

In our November Nonfiction Top Pick, Leonardo da Vinci, Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs, Einstein) reveals the life of one of history's greatest minds. We asked Isaacson about Leonardo's unique genius and wide-ranging interests (woodpecker tongues, anyone?).

Why did you choose to focus your new book on Leonardo da Vinci?
I've always felt that true creativity came from people who could stand at the intersection of the arts and sciences.  That was the secret of Steve Jobs' innovation. Leonardo is history's ultimate example, and his drawing of the man in the circle and square (which I think is a self-portrait) is the icon of that. We can learn so much from Leonardo, especially the value of curiosity for its own sake. He wanted to know everything. So he dissected humans, built flying machines and made the world's two most amazing paintings, “The Mona Lisa" and "The Last Supper."

What does Leonardo have in common with Steve Jobs?
Steve Jobs knew that beauty mattered. Unlike other tech Innovators, he was passionate about connecting art to his engineering. That's why he admired Leonardo.

How did Leonardo's scientific studies inform his art?
He dissected human faces, drew every muscle and nerve that moved the lip, and then began his sketches for the world's most memorable smile, that of the Mona Lisa. He also showed how light strikes the retina, how details are sharper when you stare at something directly, and he used that knowledge to make Mona Lisa's smile seem to flicker on and off. More broadly, his science helped him see the patterns of natures, such as how water swirls. That  made his paintings into works of genius.

What was the weirdest of Leonardo's notebook scribbling that you read?
"Describe the tongue of the woodpecker."  Who on earth would wake up one morning and jot that on their to-do list??? How would you even find out? Catch a woodpecker and pry open its beak? Yet there it is, and as you will see in the last two paragraphs of my book, it's actually rather interesting. And it shows Leonardo's pure and passionate and playful curiosity.

What do you think motivated Leonardo?
He wanted to know everything that could possibly be known about our world, including how we fit into it.

Which is your favorite painting by Leonardo and why?
"The Mona Lisa." As the river in the picture flows from the ancient landscapes and seems to unite with the body of Lisa, it is the culmination of his science and his art. I also love a lesser-known work: "Lady with an Ermine." Both the lady and the ermine have a vivid expression of inner emotion.

What do you think was Leonardo's greatest personal flaw?
He didn't finish many things.

Was there a silver lining to this flaw?
Yes. It made him a true genius rather than a mere master craftsman.

What kinds of books did Leonardo like to read?
He read everything, from math texts to collections of bawdy poetry. He was fortunate to be born in the same year, 1452, in which Gutenberg began to sell printed books.

What's something about Leonardo that might surprise someone only familiar with his paintings?
His anatomy drawings are masterful, from his fetus in the womb to the ones showing how an aortic valve closes.  His ability to understand swirling water helped him to make a major discovery about heart valves.

What lessons does Leonardo offer the contemporary reader?
Leonardo offers us lessons for how to lead a meaningful and enriched life. He was not some genius like Einstein we could never hope to emulate. He was self-taught and willed his way to genius by being curious and observant.  My book ends with twenty lessons, such as valuing curiosity and learning to love both art and science. But here is a little one: keep a notebook. It's a delight that we have more than 7000 pages of his notebooks to delight us today. I used them as the basis for my book.

(Author photo by The Aspen Institute.)

In our November Nonfiction Top Pick, Leonardo da Vinci, Walter Isaacson reveals the life of one of history’s greatest minds. We asked Isaacson about Leonardo's unique genius and wide-ranging interests (woodpecker tongues, anyone?).
NonfictionHistory

Stacy Horn

Interview by Kelly Blewett

In Damnation Island, Stacy Horn explores the horrific past of a small island in New York City’s East River, where the “criminally insane” were imprisoned in the 19th century.

How did Blackwell’s Island capture your attention and inspire you to write this book?
I had a vague awareness that the island had a dark past—that something terrible had happened there—but I didn’t know the details. This is irresistible to me. A horrific but forgotten story? I had to recover it.

You researched so many individuals for this book—can you briefly share one story that you find the most affecting?
Adelaide Irving, a mixed-up, headstrong 15-year-old who was sent to the penitentiary for two years for her first offense: picking someone’s pocket. It was an outrageous sentence, and she never recovered. She was dead by the time she turned 23. They buried her in a convict-built coffin on a hill. I was once a mixed-up, headstrong 15-year-old, and I was acting out in all sorts of ways. But I come from a background of relative privilege. There are million safety nets for people like me, and people like me don’t usually go to jail. It was true in the 19th century, it was true in the 20th, and it’s still true now.

Blackwell’s Island was founded with very positive intentions. How and why did things go so far awry?
They wanted to save money. To reduce overhead, they starved the inmates, didn’t properly clothe or house them, and instead of hiring paid nurses and attendants, the administrators employed convicts from the workhouse to look after the inmates in the lunatic asylum and other institutions on the island. (The workhouse was a prison for people convicted of minor crimes.) It was not a secret. The abuses on Blackwell’s Island were regularly reported in the papers, and grand juries would visit and issue damning reports. Priests attending to the spiritual needs of the inmates would alert their superiors. But nothing ever happened. I recognize this paralysis. There isn’t a day that I don’t hear about some horrible miscarriage of justice in America. If I pay attention to the papers and my Twitter feed, I’m reading about fresh new cases every few minutes. We all are. And just what are most of us doing about it? Why is extreme injustice allowed to continue?

What did undercover reporters find when they visited the island?
To use an expression of Emma Goldman, an anarchist who was sent to the penitentiary, they found patients who were “legally murdered,” either by the lack of food, improper hygiene, careless attendants, murderous roommates or by succumbing to lethal epidemics. Police courts would continue to send people to the island even when they knew there was an active disease outbreak.

In what way does the history of Blackwell Island continue to haunt us—either in terms of contemporary New York City or in terms of misguided ideas about the relationship between mental illness and crime?
By throwing the poor, the mad and the convicted altogether on one narrow island they unwittingly reinforced a devastating association which persists to this day. That the mentally ill are dangerous and poor people are thieves in disguise. The priest featured in my book wrote, “The dark shadow of crime spreads right and left, from the Penitentiary and the Workhouse, over all the institutions, the Asylum, the Alms-House and Charity Hospital, so that, in the minds of the people at large, all suffer alike from an evil repute. . . .” Being poor had become a character trait that needed “correction,” like the impulse to steal or cheat. If they were poor it was due to their own moral failing and laziness. The Christian impulse to help the needy had been tamped down and replaced with an inclination to punish them.  

There were so many aspects of Blackwell’s Island that inspire disgust—the food, the shelter, the hygiene, the quickness with which disease spread. What do you think was the worst aspect for those living there?
I always go back to what could I have withstood. Have you ever had an anxiety or panic attack, or suffered from depression? Imagine that instead of kindness you’re thrown into a chair, strapped in so you can’t move or get up, and you have to stay there hour after hour, all day long, without talking, and if you go to the bathroom in your chair because no one will unstrap you, an attendant will likely come along and beat you or drag you to a tub of used bathwater and hold your head under until you’re near death. People could do whatever they wanted to these helpless inmates because they were out of the public eye on this now off-limits island. It’s the same today. Look how long it took people to acknowledge that what goes on in the facilities on Rikers Island is immoral, and to start talking about change. I cried reading a Justice Department report of what happened to teenagers on Rikers Island. What they describe has been going on for centuries. What took us so long?

Why did the people who suffered from the abuses of Blackwell’s Island so rarely have a chance to be heard by people in authority?
I read through a 900-page report from a Senate investigation of the conditions inside asylums in New York. In all those pages there was not one single testimony from an inmate. It’s hard for the poor, the mentally ill and the convicted to have a voice and to be heard and not dismissed today. It was almost impossible then.

Who are the heroes of Blackwell’s Island, if there are any? 
Even though most did not succeed in effecting change, I came across many wardens who tried. They showed up every week, day after day, doing what they could. I don’t know if I could have faced inmates crying to me for help, inmates dying, knowing that so much of their suffering was preventable. I think it would have destroyed me. But they showed up.  

What do you hope readers take away from this book?
I didn’t want to force it down anyone’s throats, but I hope people pick up on the fact that in many ways the same things, and worse, are taking place today. The idea that some people are unworthy and they have all these terrible things coming to them is still prevalent, as is the conviction that the poor are entirely responsible for their financial struggles and that we should not help them.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Damnation Island.

In Damnation Island, Stacy Horn explores the horrific past of a small island in New York City’s East River, where the “criminally insane” were imprisoned in the 19th century.

NonfictionBiography

Maxwell King

Interview by Kelly Blewett

Maxwell King’s The Good Neighbor explores the life and enormously influential work of Fred Rogers, the creator and star of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

You clearly did a lot of research for The Good Neighbor. What’s a fact about Rogers that most people wouldn’t know?
Most people wouldn’t know that, when Fred was about 10 years old, his maternal grandmother bought him an extraordinarily expensive piano. He loved music, and often played for his grandmother on his toy piano, and she told him how very good he was. Finally, she told him she would buy him a piano, expecting it to be a small, modest instrument suitable for a little boy. She gave Fred a ticket for the trolley, and he traveled to the Steinway store in downtown Pittsburgh. Fred spent almost three hours there; when he left, the salesmen chuckled among themselves that the little boy had picked an ebonized Steinway Concert Grand that could have cost as much as $60,000 in today’s dollars—they assumed his family could never buy it for him. When he told Nancy McFeely, his grandmother, she was shocked. But she had made a promise, and she kept it, trusting the child to be worthy of this faith and this investment. The little boy traveled back down to the Steinway store with a check. Fred Rogers kept this piano for the rest of his life, took it with him to New York, to Toronto and back to Pittsburgh, composed 200 songs and a dozen operas on it and played it joyfully for decades. And he let his grandmother know that her trust had changed his life.

What made Rogers such a genius at working with children?
Two things: authenticity and high standards. Children can tell a phony a mile away, and Fred Rogers was the opposite: an utterly genuine person. Rogers’ training under Dr. Margaret McFarland at the University of Pittsburgh gave him the background in child development and early childhood education to set the very highest standards for his programming. And his fierce commitment to excellence enabled him to sustain those standards for decades.

Can you tell us more about Rogers’ foray into programming for adults? Why did he want to do it, and how long did it go on?
After years of programming television for children, Rogers decided in the mid-1970s that he needed a break and that he might like producing issues programming for grown-ups to watch on television. But he never fully engaged or felt comfortable with it, and his technique—so extraordinarily powerful for children—wasn’t as successful with adults. He was relieved in 1980 to get back to his true calling.

What did your research reveal about how Rogers conducted himself as a friend?
Rogers was always concerned about treating everyone with great respect and being a good friend to whomever he was dealing with. In fact, he got up in the early morning each day to pray that he would be as good to the people he would encounter that day as he possibly could. And he readily gave his respect and kindness to everyone, whether they were homeless or the president of a large bank.

Why were puppets a part of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”? When did Rogers start developing those characters?
Rogers began developing his puppet characters as a little boy, performing his puppet theater in the attic of his parents’ home in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. And it was pure serendipity that led to his use of the puppets much later when he began producing children’s television. The night before his first program—”The Children’s Corner”—started on WQED in Pittsburgh, the station manager, Dorothy Daniels, gave Fred a small puppet as a gift. That puppet got used on the spur of the moment on the first program and then became Daniel Tiger, the first of many puppets Rogers would use on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

How did Rogers’ childhood in Latrobe shape his television program?
Everything on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”—the trolleys, the streets, the houses, the shops, the companies—all sprang from Rogers’ recollections of his childhood in Latrobe.

What did the number 143 mean to Fred Rogers?
Two things: his weight, all his life, and the expression “I love you.”

What’s one story you learned about Rogers that surprised you?
Fred got mad—not often, but sometimes. Once, he was so frustrated with a tape recorder—which he thought was going to erase an important consulting session with Dr. Margaret McFarland—that he swore at it and threatened to smash it. His secretary, Elaine Lynch, gently took it from his hands and got it fixed.

Why is Rogers’ legacy particularly valuable in our current cultural moment?
Because of all the stresses in modern life—rapid change, greater and greater complexity to society, the growing presence of technology, globalization—we live in a very tense, sometimes angry and hateful environment. Fred’s messages—there is nothing as important as human kindness, and there is nothing we cannot deal with if we just slow way down and talk to each other—are the most important, enduring truths of our time.

In what ways did Rogers’ faith inform his television program?
Rogers was always guided by his Christianity, and his strong values—human kindness, respect, caring, integrity, duty—all derived from his faith. But he was very careful, while emphasizing those values, never to preach or proselytize on the children’s program. And he became, as an adult, a great student of many of the world’s religions and philosophies. He was very happy to find that the same humanistic values showed up in all faiths.

What do you think Rogers would want to communicate to children today?
Be yourself, be full of love, and be full of the joy of life and learning.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Good Neighbor.

Author photo by Joshua Franzos for The Pittsburgh Foundation.

Maxwell King’s The Good Neighbor explores the life and enormously influential work of Fred Rogers, the creator and star of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

NonfictionMemoir

Sarah Ruhl

Interview by Kelly Blewett

“The great work of our lives is [figuring out] how to tell the story of our lives,” says Sarah Ruhl, speaking by phone from Chicago. Ruhl, a MacArthur Fellow and two-time Pulitzer finalist for drama, knows about stories. Her eye for detail is on full display in her memoir, Smile: The Story of a Face, which explores Ruhl’s experience with Bell’s palsy, a rare condition in which a part of the face becomes paralyzed. “The process of writing the book was cathartic,” Ruhl says, because for the first few years of her paralysis, “I wasn’t able to talk about my face. It was shoved deep under. But astonishingly, it was right on the surface.”

Quick, illuminating turns of phrase like that—shoved under but right on the surface—abound in Smile, which examines the paradoxes of illness, especially as experienced by women. The book historicizes the topic, recalling, for instance, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the short story that Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote after enduring bed rest as a medical treatment. The same doctor who prescribed this remedy for Gilman offered a different prescription for men: adventures on the Western frontier. “The 19th-century response is not as far away as we think,” says Ruhl, who was prescribed bed rest herself during her pregnancy, even though the treatment has had mixed results historically.

“I wasn’t able to talk about my face. It was shoved deep under. But astonishingly, it was right on the surface.”

Ruhl spent her time in bed reading the letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, thinking idly that they would make a good play (which she later wrote). She also dove unapologetically into the Twilight series. “We can’t predict how our minds will behave in extremis or when we are ill,” Ruhl says, remembering that when her father was sick with cancer, he read books about sea voyages. “Often you need something deeply plot-driven just to get through the stasis. You’re not able to look at the thing directly when you’re really scared about how your body is betraying you.” The epigraph in Smile, taken from Virginia Woolf, reiterates this point: “when the lights of health go down, undiscovered countries are then disclosed.”

Ruhl’s experience with Bell’s palsy began the morning after she gave birth to twins. A nurse entered her room and said, “Your eye looks droopy.” When Ruhl looked in the mirror, she writes, “I tried to move my face. Impossible. Puppet face, strings cut.” Bell’s palsy is typically a temporary facial paralysis that clears up completely in a matter of days or weeks—as opposed to Ruhl’s experience, which has lasted for over a decade, though the paralysis has lessened over time. Initially it impacted everything from chewing food to pronouncing words to conveying emotion. Writing about it required self-examination as she searched for ways to frame her experience. These framing lenses, which she calls “thinking lenses,” helped her “really feel what I was feeling about my face.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Smile.

For example, Ruhl drew strength from public figures who’ve had facial paralysis, including the poet Allen Ginsburg. The book features a photograph of Ginsburg staring into the camera, forcing viewers to engage what Ruhl describes as “the disturbance” of his asymmetry. She also turned to art history, looking at Mona Lisa’s famous half-smile, a mismatched expression that captured the world’s interest. And, because of her connection to the theater, she examined theories about the link between facial expressions and emotion. “Thank God I am not an actor,” she says. “To have that instrument taken away as an actor would be so demoralizing.”

As Ruhl wrote about her face, she found she had a surprising amount to say—about women caught in ambiguous medical problems, about the face as the part of the body where the soul resides (or not) and about the difficulties of mothering young children while pursuing passionate, consuming work. Often these stories overlap, as in one memorable instance when she chose to breastfeed her child while on a stage in front of 300 people. Gloria Steinem was speaking when the baby began to fuss. Mary Rodgers, who wrote Freaky Friday, was seated next to Ruhl, and as Ruhl began to nurse her infant, Rodgers patted Ruhl’s leg and said, “That’s right, that’s right.” Ruhl excels at exploring connections like these, both near and distant, that help pull us through trouble.

“Sometimes teaching is no more than saying, ‘You can be a writer. Welcome to this secret society.’”

For Ruhl, this includes her connection with her husband, Tony. “My editor always wanted more scenes with Tony,” she laughs. And, indeed, when I talk about Smile with my friends, it’s a story about Tony that comes to mind: how Ruhl coined the phrase “sexy-cozy” to describe her feeling when he cared for her. “Sexy-cozy,” she writes in the book, “is the opposite of dirty-sexy.” Clearly this is a word that should be in wider circulation, one that would probably resonate with many happily married women, which is how Ruhl gratefully regards herself. “There’s something about the narrative of a happy marriage that we don’t see that much,” she says.

Ruhl also credits her teacher, Pulitzer-winning playwright Paula Vogel, for her support. “I wouldn’t be writing plays without Paula,” she says. “I think that Paula tapping me on the head and saying, ‘You can do this,’ was profoundly important. Sometimes teaching is no more than saying, ‘You can be a writer. Welcome to this secret society.’”

Though Ruhl’s journey with Bell’s palsy is not entirely resolved—she says that she is still thinking through how to live in her body, such as deciding whether she is willing to smile at people with her teeth—this warm-hearted, brave and funny memoir is her way of tapping readers on the head, encouraging us. You can keep going. You are part of the club. You are not alone.

Author photo credit: Gregory Costanzo

A playwright with an incredible eye for detail and a searing voice shares her own story of motherhood and facial paralysis.

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