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Taffy Brodesser-Akner sits at a cloth-draped table in early June at the Upper West Side’s Cafe Luxembourg. She orders coffee, and then more coffee; the evening prior, she’d lost 1,000 words of a draft for The New York Times and stayed up until 4:30 a.m. rewriting it because her editor needed “proof of life.” Her youngest son is graduating from the eighth grade today, so she’s good-naturedly waiting for a phone call saying he’s wearing the wrong thing, which she anticipates will come “when it's too late.” And she has another meeting directly after this one to receive notes on a screenplay. Not the screenplay for the TV adaptation of her second book, which we are here to discuss, and whose Apple series she will write and executive-produce, but a separate project. This author—known for her scintillating celebrity profiles; best-selling debut novel, Fleischman Is in Trouble; and for writing and executive-producing the Emmy-nominated FX series of the same name—is remarkably cheerful considering how much she has going on.
Brodesser-Akner’s 464-page, multi-perspective second novel, Long Island Compromise, was clearly written by a masterful juggler. The book features the Fletchers, a Jewish-American family whose progenitor fled Poland during the Holocaust, and who have since become devastatingly rich off a code-violating polystyrene factory. We meet the family patriarch, Carl, in 1980, just as he is being kidnapped from his Long Island driveway. (If you think you have a horrific LaGuardia story, consider that of his wife, Ruth, who drives her emotionally dysregulated son and $250,000 in out-of-sequence bills to the airport in her Jaguar for a chaotic ransom drop.) Carl is returned home relatively unscathed—but when we are reacquainted with the Fletchers, nearly 40 years later, it’s evident that the family has been trying to escape the resulting waves of trauma ever since.
What ensues is a far-ranging story that contains a dominatrix with a missing tooth, a charlatan psychic, a broker who favors a kangaroo-based diet, and a side plot that centers on the absurd intricacies of land-use rights.
Vogue sat down with Brodesser-Ackner to discuss money, messiness, and the fragility of goldendoodles.
Vogue: In a 2015 Longform interview, you said that you experienced a traumatic first childbirth but didn't want to write about it for fear of being pigeonholed. A few years later, I read Fleishman Is in Trouble and thought it was brilliant how you Trojan Horse-d birth trauma into the center of the book.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner: You could look at it like that…I’ll take anything that’s misinterpreted as brilliant…[But] the nature of trauma is that I didn’t mean to write that…I didn’t want to write a pastel-colored book that would make me into—I think the phrase I used was “the sad birth lady”— because I was so at the beginning of my career…[But trauma] just keeps coming up. It comes up when you are walking down the street and it comes up when you see a stroller and it comes up when someone tells you their birth story and it comes up when you’re just typing. It’s so pernicious.…We work so hard to get over things and I don’t think we ever do.
As you were writing through the issue of trauma in Long Island Compromise, did your perspective on how we live with—or incorporate—it shift?
A thing I came to was the idea that your trauma isn’t just a thing that happens to you. It’s the thing you are primed for, combined with the thing that happens to you. I have a sister who's had seven kids. And I have a sister who's had three kids, and I have a sister who has one kid. My mother had four kids. And I kept wondering, Has this ever happened to anybody that I know? How could this only have happened to me? And I've come to the conclusion that it’s happened to a lot of people I know, but it doesn’t destroy them. And what are the ingredients in my life that led to that being my destruction? Your trauma is a disease of specificity. It comes for you in this moment and it knows where you live.
And there’s this idea in Long Island Compromise where [the characters] come to the end of their journey together and they realize they never stood a chance. And the healing only begins when they realize that, though part of the healing is realizing that you might never heal. That, after trauma, you could fight it or you could live with it. And I know that’s a grim view, but it’s actually also a little optimistic.…When you realize that it was your circumstances and not just the thing that happened to you, you’re set free in a way.
There’s this refrain in Long Island Compromise: “It happened to your body and not to you.” Where did that come from?
I knew someone who had been raped. I heard about it years later and I said to her, “How are you doing with it?...Why do you seem so okay?” She told me the story of it and it was horrific, as all rapes are, and this one extra. That night, someone told her, “This happened to your body. This didn't happen to you.” I couldn’t get that out of my head. What if I had thought that in my birthing room, for example? I wonder if that could have changed anything for me, I wonder if I would’ve believed it, I wonder if it’s possibly true. But the thing I land on is, what’s the difference? Where do you stop? And, if you’re not your body, what are you—your soul? I don’t know. I don’t know about the soul. I don’t have any sort of tangibles about the soul.
It seems very hard to parse.
Yeah. And also, how do you find out? You only find out once it’s too late. If you’re going to find out, it’s going to be too late; you won’t be able to write a novel about it. You won’t be able to call up your interviewer and change your answer. So what’s the point?
A lot of your work—from your Gwyneth Paltrow profile to your latest novel—feels like it's examining messiness versus a façade of order. Has your relationship with messiness changed during your career?
When I first started out freelancing, I worked very hard to pretend I didn’t have children and that if you knew about them, they wouldn’t be a problem. My hair was always blown out. And then I saw what people responded to in my writing and I realized no one needs even an attempt at cleanliness or perfection from me. That’s not what I have to offer.
So I think I had the same relationship [with messiness] that I hope you eventually will have…When you’ve gone through the degradations of school orientations with other school moms that you realize you’re trying to get to like you, even though you’re in your 40s; when you’ve given birth; when you’ve had a mole removed. Everything contributes to [the realization that] it is okay that things are this way. What a relief that is. That’s why I don’t understand why youth is marketed to us as this wonderful thing. My memories of my 20s, and even a lot of my 30s, is fear of rejection and fear of not being liked. And now I think I still have a fear of rejection, a fear of not being liked, but I find it interesting as opposed to devastating.
There are so many niche hobbies and careers in Long Island Compromise. What was the weirdest rabbit hole you found yourself in?
I have two very close friends who are land-use lawyers. And I’ve overheard enough of their jobs to be like, This is completely absurd. I’m going to use it. So I wrote a plot that, based on what I knew about land use, had to have been true. And they both read it and they're like, “Yes, this is close to true.” Which means it’s as absurd as I thought...So I’m excited to engage with the land-use lawyers of the world.
But I think the most interesting thing I learned about was from my friend Elisha Goldberg, who taught me enough about finance for me to start out with the question: How does money work? How could this family lose their money? And I came to understand that you can’t lose your money if you’re wealthy enough in 2024 or 2017, which is when the book takes place. It’s too diversified. Unless you are completely irresponsible, you can’t really lose your money. And when I figured that out, which was, like, nine drafts into the book, the book ended. The book was not a publishable book until I came to that conclusion. And then I realized, Oh, my God, the whole thing is that you can’t lose your money.
And here I thought we were going to discuss the merits of a kangaroo-based diet.
I mean, that stuff I did not need to research….I have a goldendoodle and he’s allergic to everything. And my sister, a veterinarian, said, “Try kangaroo.” So there’s a company in Brooklyn that delivers us kangaroo once every two weeks. It is perhaps the highest line item on my profit and loss sheet. But we love this dog.
Goldendoodles are fragile.
Goldendoodles probably shouldn’t exist.
Didn’t the person who first bred doodles regret it?
I don’t know. We should find him…My goldendoodle is very anxious and our apartment building faces the street and I can hear him bark as I’m walking away, like a child crying. It’s so sad. There’s nothing I could do to comfort him because I’m not an energetically calming person. My husband is. My husband, you just sort of want to climb onto him and just lean into him. But I’m not.
You’ve done so many different types of writing very successfully. Is there a project you have yet to do that would still give you that giddy feeling in your chest?
I think that that question is dangerous because it forces you to think about your career. And if you think about your career too much, then you’re not thinking about the moment that you’re in with…the document. I’m scared that if you ever face the document thinking, This is just another document, as opposed to, [This is] the most enormous, exciting challenge and privilege, then it will show. And there will go your energy and there will go your ebullience and your enthusiasm and the desperation in your head that forces you to fix problems. I don’t want that. So I’m not going to think about that.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.