Could more money fix your life? I’m talking about obscene levels of wealth—the real fuck you money that affords seemingly endless advantages. Or is one’s proximity to capital actually a curse? The closer you are to it, the more it pains and threatens.
As a non-rich person with zero prospect of receiving generational wealth, the answer seems obvious: I could spit out a long list of reasons why extra cash eases the mind. But ask the Fletchers, the family at the center of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s new novel, Long Island Compromise, and they’re likely to insist that their fortune is a ruinous “dybbuk” at the root of the family’s relentless traumas. It’s an attitude that prompts righteous scorn, with Brodesser-Akner using the Fletchers to lament everything from the erosion of the middle class to rampant plastic surgery.
But Long Island Compromise is much more than a darkly humorous satire of the uberwealthy (though it is that, and deliciously so). The novel succeeds best when its protagonists grapple with the more universal, the hard stuff that even we plebs can relate to: Can one ever really escape their family? What if I can’t control what happens next?
Such questions loomed over me as Brodesser-Akner’s novel takes us through the stories of the Fletcher kids—Bernard (or Beamer), Nathan, and Jenny—three siblings bordering on early middle age. Each of them is a disaster, with various reasons to trace the blame for their screwed-up lives to their family’s extreme wealth and father’s misfortunes. Schadenfreude arrives many times. But my favorite moments always found me returning to those questions, refracting the Fletchers’ saga against my own messy corners, family trauma, and all that pathos-inducing stuff we relegate to therapy.
I caught up with Brodesser-Akner, coincidentally as she was driving on the Long Island Expressway on the final day of her book tour. What transpired was a generous conversation that spanned everything from shared trauma to Jimmy Buffett to the plague of private equity—and ended up landing on the joys of bearing witness.
The central arc of your new book takes inspiration from the real-life kidnapping of Jack Teich, a man you’ve known personally for most of your life. What about his story felt close to the central ideas of the novel? When did you realize his story could be the basis of a novel?
The impetus for this story was not a kidnapping. I wanted to tell the story about rich kids, and I wanted to figure out two things. The first is a question I’ve always had: Are you better off being from money and never feeling afraid? Or are you better off not being from money, figuring out how to survive on your own knowing that you can, but always knowing what it feels like for the bottom to fall out? The other question I had was: Can money actually buy you security? If the same money that brought you security also puts you in enough danger that you get kidnapped, but then you’re saved by ransom, which is money, what is the lesson? Can the money buy you security or not? These were the questions that were vexing me. When you’re writing, the bench you pull from—to use a sports metaphor—is the bench of your life. I knew someone who was kidnapped and that’s the thing that kept entering the story because all writers are horrible thieves of what they’ve seen in the world. At some point, I realized that I cannot pretend that I was someone who doesn’t know somebody who was kidnapped. So I reached out to my family friend, Jack Teich, and he very generously gave me his blessing to use the kidnapping.
That was a big question for me as I read this novel. Because we tend to see money as one of the quickest paths to freedom. But the Fletcher family, according to them at least, are so trapped by it. Should we see money as a curse or protection?
The answer is—yes.
I always have this fantasy that if I had money, I would be calm and living my best life. But I also ask myself where my own ambition came from, my own ability to do the thing I do, writing, which often involves taking risks. Because when anyone writes, they are being vulnerable. And I think if you don’t need to survive, meaning if you don’t need money, it is so much easier to not do that. So I began to wonder if my relative lack of money was a blessing. Because I know a lot of wealthy people who function and are ambitious. But I know more people without money who have those skills in droves.
“Every generation deals with trauma the best way that they know how, right?”
Oh, that makes me feel a lot better about life. Not that I have talent but hearing that is comforting.
I don’t even know if talent is real! Talent is not a thing I can quantify. What I keep wondering about lately is if talent is real—or is there a combination of willingness and humility that will get you the same results? I don’t like terms like “talent” the same way I don’t like terms like “inspiration” because they take out of your hands the ability to do the thing you need to do; they put it in someone else’s hand. And I gotta tell you, I can’t rely on those things. I have bills to pay.
Same! So, I actually read this book while in the process of writing up my will, which is a new experience for me—and I hate it. I come from a super middle-class family, immigrant parents. My dad worked in a sheet metal union for 40 years. Without giving away the ending of this book, I’m wondering: Is there some backup financial plan I should include in my will?
I was once interviewing Jimmy Buffett and we were talking about money, and the money that came out of him being this character sitting on a beach, writing the song “Margaritaville,” and smoking pot. And I said to him, “I am not sitting on a beach. I’m not smoking pot. I am working really, really hard. And I don’t have any money.” I had just started at the New York Times, I had success in my journalism career. And he said to me, “Do you have any children who are going to support you in your old age?” And I said, “Well, I just have these two small sons, and I don’t know what their futures will be.” He said, “No, no, I don’t mean that. I mean ‘Margaritaville’ is the child that supports me at my old age.” This was a long time ago, so I’m just paraphrasing here. That’s when I started thinking about things differently.
Back when I started this, there were a million magazines to write for. Now, freelance writers are getting 10 cents a word, if that, and they have basically no rights. It’s obscene.
What has happened is the disappearance of the middle class. It used to be in this country that you and I could be journalists. And if we’re good at it, and we work hard and we show up every day, we will get some money, and there will be something. There will be an apartment to give our kids. There will be something to write into your will. That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.
I started this book, which talks about all this in particular, both to process these ideas myself and somewhat as a bid: a new aspect of my writing career that won’t make me afraid for my solvency. Now, all these questions are a matter of both risk tolerance and what an individual decides they need in the world. But we were one catastrophic illness away from ruin—and that’s what kept me up at night.
The Fletchers, the main family in your novel, are obsessed with the question of how their lives would have been different had Carl, the father, not been kidnapped. Why was that a theme that mattered to you?
I love this question. Because the book also asks the question, Who are the Fletchers without their money? One of the tricks our brains give us when we are troubled or traumatized is to indulge in the fantasy of: Who would I be if this didn’t happen to me? What would I have been like if I had money? What would you have been without the traumatic experiences?
The answer is you’ll never know that. The better answer is it doesn’t matter because that’s not one of the options.
I thought it was perfect that private equity (spoiler alert) is what destroys the Fletcher family’s main source of wealth. It comes for the middle class and even the richest of the rich. Are you trying to say that even the rich, despite all their winning, are doomed in America?
Private equity is so unstoppable that, yes, everyone is doomed. There’s always somebody richer, and when you get to the top, the richest person will be the most doomed because of how he destroyed everyone. (I was going to say he or she but who are we kidding?)
We are at the end of anybody caring about anybody but their own welfare. It’s been made clear to the working class that nobody cares about them, and the wealthy are so divorced from interacting with people who aren’t like them.
One of the book’s observations about the suburbs is that Middle Rock, the suburb that the Fletchers live in, used to be a place where people worked out of a common value that they had together, and now it would be so impossible. There were very, very wealthy people, and there were some middle-class people, and there were people on the lower end of the middle class who you might even be described as working class.
Now, you can’t even get into one of those suburbs unless you’re already extremely rich. It’s a depressing note on the economy, but it was very interesting to look at where we are—interesting and depressing to look at where we are.
I couldn’t help but wonder how things would have been different had Carl simply been allowed to talk about what happened to him. Could repression—not family wealth—be what really screwed up the Fletchers?
Every generation deals with trauma the best way that they know how, right? Carl is kidnapped before the DSM even had a post-traumatic stress diagnosis. So what I would say about the advice that Carl’s mother gives him after he’s returned from the kidnapping—“This didn’t happen to you. It happened to your body. Don’t let it in.”—is that she was doing the best she possibly could. Because what would someone who had seen the horrors of the Holocaust say? There were things that that generation had seen that were so horrific, there was no way to make sense of them. You just have to put them away. I grew up with Holocaust survivors who did not see the sense in talking about it. They didn’t see the sense in trying to understand; they only made sense of moving forward. By the time you get to the generation of the kids in the book, we have a better understanding, although a cynical one, of the way trauma works.
While I’ve been on this book tour, people have been asking a lot of questions about trauma. Some people, and they’re mostly my age, have asked what to do about young people they say overuse the word “trauma.” And I think that’s wrong. It’s really wrong to be dismissive of a younger generation, because those people have access, not just to all of our information but to seeing how we turned out, and they make different decisions based on what they see. And historically, this bears out, over and over.
We are all absolutely trying our best. Every single person I know is trying their best, but every person in this book is also trying their best. I think a certain amount of grace comes when everybody can look around and see that.
“In the end, when you live long enough to stop fighting where you’re from and you are just grateful that there have been other people to bear witness …There is no better solace for what you’ve been through than that.”
Both your first novel (Fleishman Is in Trouble) and Long Island Compromise appear to be occupied by the trauma of a missing parent, both in the kidnapping sense, and when parents are in the throes of depression, losing their sense of time and space to the point that their whereabouts are unknown. Do you feel like that is the theme you’ll keep coming back to in your writing?
That’s a great observation, and it’s a great question because I’ll tell you that I had no idea I was doing that. One of the most wonderful things about writing a book is that you think you know your writing, and then you hand in the book, and the machine begins. The marketing department starts writing descriptions, publicists start writing announcements. When you read those, that’s when you find out in a big way the things you wrote that you didn’t know that you were writing. I’m very interested in that.
The greatest thing about a book tour is that, at every stop, there’s someone there who tells me what my book is about. And number one, they were all right. Number two, I had no idea. And number three, what a joy, because books, once you write one, the minute it’s out there, it’s open for interpretation. It is not yours anymore. It’s someone else’s story to metabolize.
The unexpected joy of my life is to find out what I conveyed to them. [When I started writing Long Island Compromise] I thought I was writing about money. At the end, I was like, “Oh, this has a lot about trauma in it.” And the thing I sort of didn’t know until the end was that it would also have so much about what it means to be in a family. I thought that I was conveying, hopefully conveying accurately, what it’s like to be in a family. But actually, in the end, when you live long enough to stop fighting where you’re from and you are just grateful that there have been other people to bear witness with you as to what you’ve been through. There is no better solace for what you’ve been through than that.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
