Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old
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Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old
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Overview
A New York Times Bestseller!
An extraordinary look at what it means to grow old and a heartening guide to well-being, Happiness Is a Choice You Make weaves together the stories and wisdom of six New Yorkers who number among the “oldest old”— those eighty-five and up.
In 2015, when the award-winning journalist John Leland set out on behalf of The New York Times to meet members of America’s fastest-growing age group, he anticipated learning of challenges, of loneliness, and of the deterioration of body, mind, and quality of life. But the elders he met took him in an entirely different direction. Despite disparate backgrounds and circumstances, they each lived with a surprising lightness and contentment. The reality Leland encountered upended contemporary notions of aging, revealing the late stages of life as unexpectedly rich and the elderly as incomparably wise.
Happiness Is a Choice You Make is an enduring collection of lessons that emphasizes, above all, the extraordinary influence we wield over the quality of our lives. With humility, heart, and wit, Leland has crafted a sophisticated and necessary reflection on how to “live better”—informed by those who have mastered the art.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374717056 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 01/23/2018 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 581,148 |
| File size: | 12 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Surprise of a Lifetime
"Get me a gin!"
"Do you know what you want to do when you get old?"
After a year of answering questions, John Sorensen asked one of his own. We were in the kitchen of his apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side, where he had lived for forty-eight years, the last six of them alone, since the death of his longtime partner. Around him was a mural of trees he had painted years earlier, with branches stretching up to the ceiling. Thanksgiving was approaching, John's favorite day of the year, when he left the apartment to be among friends. But this year, 2015, he didn't think he would be well enough to go. The kitchen looked exactly as it had on my last visit and the one before, because John made sure nothing was ever changed — he was losing his eyesight, and he feared that if anything was moved he wouldn't be able to find it. On the small TV and VCR by the refrigerator he was getting ready to watch Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, which always cheered him up. He knew the movie so well that he didn't need to see the screen.
We were talking about the things in John's life that gave him pleasure. It took a little prompting, because John always began on the dark side, and it wasn't a visit unless he said he wanted to die. Yet once he got going, his mood always brightened.
"I played the second act of Parsifal recently, with Jonas Kaufmann," he said, wrapping himself in the memory. "The most beautiful tenor I've ever heard. Very romantic-looking. The first time I saw him was after Walter died. He was singing and my God he was good."
John, who was ninety-one at the time, was one of six strangers I began visiting at the start of 2015 who unexpectedly changed my life. I'm sure none of them intended to play that role. I met them while reporting a newspaper series called "85 & Up," in which I set out to follow six older New Yorkers for a year.
It began, as all stories do, with a search for characters. I met them at senior centers and in nursing homes, through home care agencies or their personal web pages. Some were still working; some never left the house. I met abiding Communists and mah-jongg players and Holocaust survivors and working artists and a ninety-six-year-old lesbian metalworker who still organized tea dances. All had lost something: mobility, vision, hearing, spouses, children, peers, memory. But few had lost everything. They belonged to one of the fastest-growing age groups in America, now so populous that they had their own name: the oldest old.
I, too, had lost some things. My marriage had come apart after nearly three decades, and I was living alone for the first time. I was fifty-five years old, with a new girlfriend and new questions about my place in the world: about age, about love and sex and fatherhood, about work and satisfaction.
I was also the main caregiver for my eighty-six-year-old mother, who moved from her ranch house in New Jersey to an apartment building for seniors in Lower Manhattan after my father's death. It was not a role I performed with much distinction. I did my best to have dinner with her every couple of weeks and accompanied her on the occasional night in the ER. I pretended not to notice that she might want more than that — best to honor her independence, I told myself — and so did she. Neither of us was well equipped for the stage of life we had stumbled into together: she, at eighty-six, without an idea of where to find meaning, and me without an idea of how to help. But there we were.
One of the first people I interviewed for the series was a woman named Jean Goldberg, 101, a former secretary at Crayola, who began our conversation by shouting "Get me a gin!" and then proceeded to tell the story of the man who did her wrong — seventy years in the past, but still as near as anything in her life. She was in a wheelchair in a nursing home, but she had lived in her own apartment until she was 100, when she had a series of falls and no longer felt safe on her own. After a great first meeting, she asked to postpone our second interview because she was not feeling well; by the time the new date arrived, she was gone. Whatever strategies she had devised to take her to age 101 — humor, I think, but also a stubborn refusal to yield, even when it cost her — were gone with her.
Each person had a story to tell — about their family lives during the Great Depression or their sex lives during the Second World War, about participating in the civil rights movement or being told by their parents that they weren't "college material." But mainly I was interested in what their lives were like now, from the moment they got up until they went to bed. How did they get through the day, and what were their hopes for the morrow? How did they manage their medications, their children, and their changing bodies, which were now reversing the trajectory of childhood, losing capabilities as fast as they had once gained them? Was there a threshold at which life was no longer worth living?
Their qualifications as experts were simply that they were living it. As the British novelist Penelope Lively, then eighty, put it, "One of the few advantages of age is that you can report on it with a certain authority; you are a native now, and know what goes on here. ... Our experience is one unknown to most of humanity, over time. We are the pioneers." I joined them in their homes, on trips to the doctor, in the hospital, in jazz clubs and bars and a beach house on the Jersey shore. I met their children, their lovers, doctors, home attendants, friends, and a former district attorney who had prosecuted one for obscenity long ago, and who now wanted to apologize. When one suddenly disappeared, his phone disconnected, I tracked him through Brooklyn's hospital system, where he was having parts of two toes amputated. I listened and learned.
Gradually I noticed something quite unexpected happening. Every visit, no matter how dark the conversation got — and some days it got quite morbid — raised my spirits like no other work I have ever done. I expected the year to bring great changes in them. I didn't expect it to change me.
The six became my surrogate elders: warm, cranky, demanding, forgetful, funny, sage, repetitive, and sometimes just too weary to talk. They chided me for not visiting enough and fed me chocolates or sent me clippings to read. I changed lightbulbs in their apartments and nodded sympathetically about Israel and told them about my relationship with my mother. Often they were admirable. They held grudges and devised Rube Goldberg–type systems for remembering to take their medications — foolproof as long as they didn't drop the little white heart pills, which were too small for their fingers and invisible on the floor.
With them I had to give up the idea that I knew about life. It was a humbling experience, but also an energizing one. I didn't have to be the expert or critic, challenging the things they told me. Instead I let them guide me through the world as they saw it. I gained the most from accepting ideas that my instincts told me to reject. My instincts thought they knew what it was like to be ninety, but they didn't, and as soon as I quieted them, the learning got a lot easier. Being an expert is exhausting. Being a student — letting go of your ego — is like sitting for a banquet at the best restaurant you'll ever visit.
Like all good literary characters, each of the elders wanted something — as did I, even if I didn't know it at first.
* * *
The six I finally chose came from different backgrounds and social strata. Frederick Jones, who was eighty-seven when I met him, was a World War II vet and retired civil servant with a dirty mind and a weak heart, which had kept him in a hospital or rehab center for much of the previous year. The first time we met, he told me about picking up a woman thirty years younger than he in a department store; he couldn't remember which. Fred was a player, no less so now that the equipment was in retirement. Old photos in his apartment showed him in sharp suits and with a burly mustache, but by the time I met him he was embarrassed to go to church in his orthopedic shoes, so he spent most of his days in an unkempt apartment atop three flights of stairs that he could barely manage. Fred had his own ideas about what it meant to be old. He asked God for 110 years, and he never doubted that he would get them. He started every day, he said, by giving thanks for another sunrise. When I asked him what was the happiest period of his life, he did not hesitate. "Right now," he said. He was the first to cheer me up.
Helen Moses, age ninety, found the second love of her life in a Bronx nursing home, against gale-force resistance from her daughter. The romance had been going for six years by the time I met them.
"I love Howie," she said, gazing at Howie Zeimer, who lived down the hall.
"Same goes for me, too," Howie said. He was in a wheelchair by the side of her bed, holding her hand. "You're the one woman in my lifetime, I mean it."
"I can't hear you," she said, "but it better be good."
John Sorensen lost most of his interest in life after the death of his lover of sixty years, a bookseller named Walter Caron. "You won't get much wisdom from me," John said the first time we met. "I know a little bit about a lot of things." We talked about opera and Fire Island (price of his beach house in 1960: ten grand), and about John's frustration that he couldn't do the things he used to. He had gladly nursed Walter in his decline, but now he couldn't forgive his own failing body. He refused to use a walker or wheelchair, because he found them unsightly, so he never went out. His knuckles, swollen from gout, resembled mismatched drawer knobs, and were about as pliant. Yet talking always cheered him up, even talking about his wish to die. He exercised every day and seemed to take morbid pride that his body insisted on keeping on. "Honey, I'm so much better off than so many people, I know it," he said. "Still, I've had it. I'm not unhappy, but I'll be glad when it's over." The only bad thing about dying, John said, "is that I won't be alive long enough to enjoy the fact that I finally died."
Ping Wong, eighty-nine, had lucked into the sweet spot in the social safety net: she paid two hundred dollars a month for a subsidized apartment near Gramercy Park, and had a home attendant seven days a week, for seven hours a day, paid for by Medicaid. Old age, she said, was less stressful than working or caring for her husband, which had worn her out. Yet she missed her late husband and the son who was murdered in China. "I try not to think about bad things," she said. "It's not good for old people to complain."
Ruth Willig, by contrast, was quick to say she was unhappy with her life, but then upset to read that characterization in the paper — that wasn't her. Over the year, I came to see Ruth's complaints as a way of asserting some leverage on her life, rather than passively accepting what came her way. Shortly before I met her, she had been forced to move from her high-priced assisted living facility in Park Slope, Brooklyn, when the owner decided to sell it for higher-priced condos. She had given up her car, her privacy, her ability to keep her own schedule just to move there. Now, five years older and less mobile, she had lost that home as well, and the friends she had made there. So at ninety-one she was starting over at another assisted living center in a more remote part of Brooklyn, Sheepshead Bay. She was among strangers, in an unfamiliar neighborhood far from her nearest daughter.
"Someone here called me a feisty old lady," she said one morning. "She didn't say 'old lady.' She said 'feisty lady.' I'm putting in the 'old.' I don't give up easily. Maybe that's what it is. I really push."
A March snow had blanketed the streets outside, which meant another day she wouldn't be going out. "I know what I am, I'm ninety- one, I tell everyone," she said. "I'm not afraid of it. I'm kind of proud of it, compared to some of the others who have so many disabilities. I'm very lucky. I try to be healthy. I think about how I'll die. But I just keep myself busy with reading books and reading the paper. Try to make myself happy, but that's not so easy. I wish I'd be happier."
And Jonas Mekas, the filmmaker and writer, at ninety-two had the energy and urgency of three thirty-year-olds. He was still making movies, compiling memoirs and scrapbooks, raising money for his nonprofit organization, and running his website.
One day he sent me an unpublished poem he had written in 2005.
I worked all my life to become young no, you can't persuade me to get old I will die twenty-seven
His friends were younger than I. Far from slowing down, he was speeding up, he said, because now he could work exclusively on his own projects.
Those were my six teachers for a year. They were dying, of course, as we all are, and they were close enough to the end to consider not just the fact of death but the form it would take. Death had lost its abstraction. Would they keep their cognitive faculties? Would their last days drag out? Tomorrow might bring a fall, a broken hip, a stroke, a black hole where they once stored the name of the person they were talking to. Every time a phone call went unanswered I worried. Within eighteen months, two of them had died.
* * *
Discussions about the elderly tend to focus on the very real problems of old age, like the declines in the body and mind, or the billions of dollars spent on end-of-life medical care. Or else they single out that remarkable old lady who seems to defy aging altogether, drinking martinis and running marathons in her nineties. This vision is particularly seductive to baby boomers, with its promise that you, too, can master the secrets of "successful aging." All you have to do is basically extend late middle age — join a club, volunteer, exercise, fall in love, learn Italian, don't get sick. Did I mention don't get sick? Good luck with that, hope it works out for you.
The elders I spent time with, like the vast majority of older people, didn't fit either of these story lines. They lived with loss and disability but did not define themselves by it, and got up each morning with wants and needs, no less so because their knees hurt or they couldn't do the crossword puzzle like they used to. Old age wasn't something that hit them one day when they weren't careful. It also wasn't a problem to be fixed. It was a stage of life like any other, one in which they were still making decisions about how they wanted to live, still learning about themselves and the world.
Until recently, relatively few people experienced this stage, and even fewer reached it in good health. But that has changed. More people are living past age eighty-five than at any time in human history (nearly six million in America, up from under a million in 1960), and they are living longer once they get there. Which means that your parents are the vanguard that your kids think they are. An American who turns eighty- five in 2018 was born with a life expectancy of less than sixty years. That's a lot of time not planned for, and a lot of old people who know something about living long.
Mostly we think of this as a cause for worry rather than a resource to be tapped. So much loneliness and isolation, so many wrinkles. In movies, beauty is always young, and amorous elders are dirty old men. We like people to ride into the sunset when their mission is complete. How much more exciting if Thelma and Louise, instead of driving off a cliff, got old and started a mentoring program in downtown Denver, sometimes taking male companions, raising heck along with their home attendants? But old people don't get to tell these stories. As May Sarton wrote, in her novel As We Are Now, published when she was sixty-one, "The trouble is, old age is not interesting until one gets there. It's a foreign country with an unknown language to the young and even to the middle-aged." Pretty smart for someone only sixty-one.
Consider how we address old people: sweetie, dear, good girl, young man. Aren't they cute? And how are we today, Mrs. Johnson? Ninety-two years young? Bless your heart. A wise old person is someone who uses Instagram like a teenager. For most of history, societies turned to their oldest members for wisdom. Children watched their grandparents get old and die in the family home. But the same technology that made it possible for more people to survive to old age has also devalued their knowledge of the world. Old people often inhabit a world of their own, not particularly pleasant to visit. In one study, people over sixty said fewer than one-quarter of the people with whom they discussed "important matters" were under thirty-six; if you exclude relatives, it dropped to 6 percent. An analysis by the gerontologist Karl Pillemer of Cornell found that Americans are more likely to have friends of another race than friends who are more than ten years apart from them in age.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Happiness Is a Choice You Make"
by .
Copyright © 2018 John Leland.
Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Epigraph,
Part I: Meet the Elders,
1. Surprise of a Lifetime,
2. The Paradox of Old Age,
3. Why Older Means Wiser,
4. Love in the Time of Lipitor,
5. On the Other Hand ...,
6. More Years, Less Life?,
Part II: The Lessons,
7. The Lessons of Fred,
8. The Lessons of Ping,
9. The Lessons of John,
10. The Lessons of Helen,
11. The Lessons of Ruth,
12. The Lessons of Jonas,
Epilogue,
Notes,
Acknowledgments,
Also by John Leland,
A Note About the Author,
Copyright,
Reading Group Guide
1. Is there one character you related to more strongly than the others?
2. Did the book change the way you think about old age?
3. The author said he envied the closeness of the Willigs, and wished his mother approached her life with Fred’s positive outlook. Are there traits among the elders you’d like to model in your life? What part of Ping’s character do you wish you had more of? How about John’s?
4. Love and sex are of widely different levels of concern to the various elders. Why do you think Helen puts such a premium on her attractiveness and her relationship with Howie, while some of the others are content to put that behind them?
5. Did the book make you reconsider at what point a life is no longer worth living?
6. The “paradox of aging”—that older people are more content than younger ones—seems contrary to our cultural assumptions. How do you explain this contentment? Why do you think it isn’t more widely recognized?
7. Did Fred’s example inspire you to practice gratitude in a more concentrated way? If so, what were the results? If not, why not?
8. Did you find the author’s personal story relevant to the account of the six elders?
9. How much influence do you think we have over our levels of satisfaction as we age? Are some people just born to be happy, others not?
10. What do you think about the idea of “gerotranscendence”—that as people get older, they give up less important concerns and focus on what really matters?
11. The book cites research showing that people with negative attitudes toward aging die earlier than people with positive views. Yet negative views of aging are all around us. What examples have you observed in the last week? How can people resist absorbing these views?
12. The book talks about the value of accepting our mortality. Do you think it’s really possible to do this?
13. Is there someone in your life who you think needs this book?
Interviews
Barnes & Noble Review Interview with John Leland
On the surface, it's complicated to discern the connective threads that link Happiness Is a Choice You Make with New York Times reporter John Leland's previous book-length subjects -- the history of the concept of "hip" (Hip: The History) and an exegesis of the Ur-Beat writer Jack Kerouac (Why Kerouac Matters). It's an extension of Leland's much-remarked-upon Times series, "The Oldest Old," in which he tracked three men and three women, aged eighty-eight to ninety-two, all New Yorkers, over the course of 2016. The book-length version fleshes out the quotidian experiences of his subjects and attempts to capture and distill the experience Leland cites of learning to "quiet" his instincts -- which told him he had nothing to learn about being older -- and open himself to what his subjects had to teach him.
A devotee of the Greek and Roman classics as a Columbia undergraduate and a "pretty bad" drummer on New York's cusp-of- the-'80s "No Wave" scene, Leland -- a self-described "recovering rock critic" on Twitter -- developed his journalistic chops as a chronicler of rock, punk, and hip-hop at alternative and mainstream music magazines, before reaching the summit of that pyramid with positions as an editor and columnist at Spin magazine and as a music critic at Newsday. From these jobs he leapfrogged to a senior editor's position at Newsweek and a yearlong tenure as editor-in-chief of Details magazine.
You can trace a line of influence from the Greek and Roman authors Leland studied to the almost, not quite, homiletic quality of portions of the book's second, "lessons" section. But, to paraphrase the title of a song by bebop tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley, "Don't be too hip," or you might skim over the wisdom Leland drops throughout the pages of this cliché-free, empathic, glass-half-full treatment of the aging process. --Ted Panken The Barnes & Noble Review: I searched your archived Times articles, and Happiness Is a Choice You Make seems to be the culmination of about ten years of reporting -- I found your first pieces on retirement in 2006; you started reporting on it in earnest in 2008 and 2009.
John Leland: A few years ago, I noticed this little blip, that people over eighty-five are one of the fastest-growing populations. I'd reported on older people in the past and found it rewarding work, because it quickly got to the emotional core of life. Your mother's old; that's emotional for you. It's emotional for her or your father or brother. So this interested me, and I thought: Well, why don't I do a story about what happens when you lose your mobility? Or what happens when you lose your eyesight? I'd set out to do the challenges of getting older. It was predictable. I could have talked to doctors and written these stories. But I didn't think it really got at what life would be like for people. Finally, I came up with this idea, and my editor approved it: Why don't we follow six people for a year and let the stories be whatever they give us? I started casting around for people to be part of it.
BNR: How did you cull your cast of six from the enormous pool of elderly people in New York?
JL: My partner is a former actress, and she says that casting is 90 percent of directing. I wanted a diverse group and figured six would be manageable. I wanted three men, three women, people from different walks of life, different levels of mobility, living in different situations, from nursing home to independent home. I wanted to find a couple.
BNR: You wrote in the Times about a gay male couple in 2013.
JL: Yes. That was before I started this project. I'd written about two men in my mother's building, Ken Leedom and Peter Cott, who had been together at that point for fifty-five years, I think it was. I wanted them to tell me what gay life was like in New York fifty years ago. They were lovely, fascinating guys, and I think they whetted the appetite within the Times.
BNR: Certainly, the template of the tone and focus of the later articles seems present in that piece.
JL: I think that's true, although I think I learned to write the series as I went along. The first piece is like, "Boy, it's tough being eighty-six," and "Boy, it's tough being eighty-seven" -- for everybody but Jonas Mekas, who is having a wonderful time. I came to the project with a lot of preconceptions, which I think shone through more in the first article than in the second, and more in the second than in the third. I really learned some of the lessons by the time I was through with the series and was closer to thinking about writing the book.
BNR: How many people did you select from?
JL: Dozens. I don't know exactly how many dozens.
BNR: How did you meet them?
JL: Some people I met on my own. Jonas Mekas I knew about. And I thought, well, I could use somebody who's a ringer . . .
BNR: Well, hipsters and artists are part of your beat also.
JL: Jonas certainly runs in hipster circles. I knew him and was interested in him, and I thought at the very least I'll go into this with one person who is really good at talking to the press. I wanted an immigrant, so I went to a bunch of elder immigrant organizations. I went to Chinese and Korean senior centers, some groups that dealt with Latin seniors. I met with a lawyer who does elder law, to see if there was somebody in a suit with their children over housing -- that's a big issue in New York. I didn't get anything useful out of that, but as I was leaving, someone from there said: Oh, by the way, I volunteer for this organization that delivers meals-on-wheels to home-bound seniors in Brooklyn. Through them, I met an African-American man named Fred Jones, a military veteran who had his own great story and was very funny. Also, the mother of the woman who ran the organization had just been kicked out of her home in an assisted living center in Brooklyn. I thought: Homeless at ninety; that's a fascinating story. That was Ruth Willig.
I met a lot of people who didn't quite make it. One of the first things I did was to interview a bunch of centenarians, and I met a fantastic woman -- but she died. "Get me a gin," she said. Her name was Jean Goldberg, and I think she was 101. She lived on her own until 100, and then she started to fall, and she worried that she was going to become a burden to her son, who would have to come every time she fell. So she checked herself into a nursing home and died a year later.
BNR: After reading your various Times pieces on aging, it seems reasonable to assume that your reporting on Happiness Is a Choice You Make piggybacked on the information you'd assimilated between 2008 and 2015.
JL: A lot of books like this will begin with the data or the experts and look for examples of people to fill in and support the data. I tried to do this the other way around. I wanted the stories of the subjects to drive the direction that I was going in, and then afterward look to see if there was data to support this, or what the psychologists or geriatricians or gerontologists made of what I was seeing. I wanted to make sure that what I was seeing wasn't wholly anecdotal, but I was never trying just to illustrate the data.
BNR: When did it become apparent that you had a book?
JL: I didn't really start thinking about a book until about six months after I'd finished the series. It was partly selfish. I loved the story. I missed the people and I wanted to stay in touch with them. These people had a profound effect on me emotionally. They changed my life. I realized that the story was not about what it's like to be older, which the Times newspaper stories were really about, or what eighty-five looks like to an eighty-five -year- old, or what ninety-two looks like to a ninety-two -year-old. This was more: What did I learn about life from these people that is valuable at any age? I wish I'd known a lot of this stuff earlier.
BNR: You incorporate your personal narrative into the text, and your mother plays a consequential role. Was your experience with her aging process also driving your interest in reporting this subject?
JL: My mother was always a presence in my reporting. I found that dealing with somebody else's elderly people made me much more . . . I don't know . . . compassionate with my mother. I didn't go to those relationships thinking I had to fix anybody. I didn't have any past experience with them. I no longer thought, Gosh, I wish my mother exercised, because I didn't wish any of these people exercised -- I was just willing to accept them as they were. "I wish they had a better attitude." No, I didn't wish they'd have a better attitude. So it really helped me understand, become more patient, and enjoy my time with my mother more. When I'd go to see these people, I didn't think of myself as doing something for them. I wasn't performing an obligation. It was something that was of value to me. So then I could think about visiting my mother as: What am I getting out of this? I'm learning from this. I'm getting so much out of it. That instantly warmed up my relationship with my mother, which was never bad, but was always . . . We're not that super-close a family.
BNR: How many visits on average did you make to each of your protagonists?
JL: I usually visited a couple of times a month for a year. I have to say, it was always fun.
BNR: You don't delve too much into their pasts. Had you initially thought to create more fleshed-out biographies of each of these people?
JL: I hadn't thought about that, because I was most interested in who they were now. Really, it was just: How do you get up every morning and face it? What do you face? And what has that taught you about life? I think to do full bios of them would be fascinating. I love them, and I would love sitting around talking to them about their pasts. But the story I wanted to tell is: You've been in this journey so long; you've lived so long; you've learned so many things -- what is it you know now?
BNR: How did you work out the structure? The text is two equal parts. The second half is lessons, in which you elucidate what you learned from each person in one way or another, while the first half is . . . well, also lessons, I guess.
JL: The lessons in this book, I should say, are not terribly complicated. We're all capable of learning them. You don't have to be a Mensa person to live a happy life. People who got better SAT scores aren't happier than people who didn't. So the lessons are there for us, but we need to be taught them, we need to get them in a way that's going to be meaningful. These lessons are in our literature. They're all in the Bible, the Koran, the Torah. They're all in self-help shelves as well. But to absorb them, you have to get them from the source. So the first half of the book is really introducing you to the characters. You need to know Ruth Willig as a person if you're going to learn anything from her. Same thing with Jonas Mekas or Ping Wong. So that's what the first half is; the second half is the things that made my life so much better.
BNR: The Times pieces generated quite a bit of commentary, and the woulda-shoulda remarks in the Comments section were interesting.
JL: I loved the comments on this. It's one of the great things about writing for the Times. Most comments on websites now are "drop dead, libtard." But the Times has a thoughtful body of readers, and a lot of people wanted to tell me the story of their grandmother, or their mother, or their own story. Some people said, "You're missing this point." All of that was welcome. It did what I hoped it would do. It's become a large body of people who are having a conversation with one another, and I was a part of it, but I wasn't necessarily directing it.
BNR: You've been working on several other files of activity with the Times over the last couple of years as well -- the "Sunday Routine" series, pieces on photographers, more recently, the "Lions of New York" series with people like the late Sam Shepard and Hal Wilner. Do you get to shape your own agenda, or are these subjects happy accidents? You seem to have one of the more enviable beats at the Times.
JL: No doubt about it -- I have the best job at the paper. I get to shape it to an extent, but I work with great editors, and they'll have suggestions, too. Jan Benzel, who was the editor of the Sunday Metropolitan section, suggested "Lions of New York" as a column. It's people who have been part of the fabric of the city for decades, through its ups and downs -- what did they see? Some of the other stuff, "Album" and the "Sunday Routine," I love doing because they're fast. The "Oldest Old" series that the book began with . . . those stories take a long time to develop. I might be two months out of the paper with those.
BNR: You started out in music journalism.
JL: I did. There's people in that realm who come from the journalism side, and people who come from the "Gee, I like music, and what do I do about it?" side. That's who I was.
BNR: You attended Columbia, but not the journalism school.
JL: No. That's a graduate program. I was an undergrad. But I was writing for the Columbia Spectator, the school paper, and I just loved music, and there was so much going on. I came to New York in 1977, the early days of punk and hip-hop and the loft jazz scene. It was an incredible time. You never knew what you'd hear next. You'd hear stuff that was just awful, and then go around the corner and hear something that knocked your socks off -- like nothing you'd ever heard before. And it was cheap!
I lived on West Ninety-ninth Street. There was a handball court at the end of the block that was big with graffiti writers -- and if there were graffiti writers, there were break dancers, and if there were break dancers, there were rappers and DJs. So I remember this scene: One time they were practically in front of our building, and I go out, and there's guys spinning o their heads, and guys talking about their zodiac signs. It was a shock, like that's the new thing; that's what's going to happen. Not that many people were as interested in it as I was. To me, that was the beginning of my experience of real empathy as a journalist. The people who were making this music were really different from me. They came out of a different world. They lived different lives. I don't know what it's like to live like that. I was going to learn from them. I didn't have anything that I could tell them. I think it became this great training in letting other people tell you about their lives, learning about the world from them.
BNR: Were you writing about it for the Spectator? JL: At the Spectator I mostly wrote about albums that were out. I don't think I wrote about anything in hip-hop at the time. And I wasn't that smart at the time. I started to really understand this was important music a little later. You're talking about, by then, sort of early to mid '80s.
BNR: How did it become your profession?
JL: Well, I knew I liked to write, and I knew I liked music. One of my editors at the Spectator became the typesetter at Trouser Press magazine, and then editor of a spinoff from Trouser Press, which he asked me to write for. That folded, and I started writing for the regular Trouser Press. Music magazines were unstable. You would get in a music magazine, then it would fold, and the people from that magazine who were good would go to three different magazines, and then suddenly you had an in at three different places, and you could write for them. The money was negligible. I started off writing for about $35 a story, but now you could make that at three outlets instead of just one.
BNR: Your first book, Hip, generated a fair amount of discussion at the time it came out.
JL: It came out of conversations with my editor, who was really interested in the topic of Hip. I was really interested in the ways we process race in America and the fantasies we have about one another -- that we love and embrace our popular culture, which is so integrated, and yet we are so segregated as people. So our ideas gelled together to become the Hip book. Where did Hip come from? Well, it seems to come from these West African words, hipi or hepi, "to see" or "to open your eyes." What does that mean? How does a West African word make it into general parlance? Well, it's got to go from black people to white people, and there's got to be some interplay there. John Kouwenhoven writes, "What's American about America?" What's as American about America as that path of that word hipi or hepi into our idea of Hip? You can learn almost half of what you need to know about America in that.
BNR: Your second book, Why Kerouac Matters, would seem a logical follow-up.
JL: Yes. It was the fiftieth anniversary of On the Road. The Beats were such a fascinating part of the Hip narrative. And I loved the idea of delving deep into one work of literature that not everybody has read, but a lot of people have read. And it didn't have an embodied criticism around it that, say, Moby-Dick has.
BNR: Do you see a connection between the lessons you learned from writing Hip and the elders who are the subject of your new book?
JL: I guess I don't. The idea of "hip" often glamorizes depression, unhappiness, existential angst, and I think the people in Happiness Is a Choice You Make have learned to cast off that romance.
BNR: Two of your subjects passed away in 2016 -- Fred Jones and John Sorenson. Are the others still with us?
JL: Everybody else is still alive. I'm happy to say they're still doing well.
BNR: You're fifty-eight. How might you apply these lessons to your own aging process? Is it purely a matter of consciousness? Are there more practical measures that you can draw from your reporting?
JL: Well, there are practical measures you should take. We all believe we're going to live for a long time. We certainly have that opportunity. For you, it might be eighty-three; for the person at the next table, it might be ninety-two; for the person at the next table, it might be 110. But we have possibilities in front of us in ways that didn't exist when our ancestors were being chased by saber tooth tigers. Most of us haven't been doing grueling physical labor all our lives, so our bodies aren't broken down from that. So we do ourselves a favor if we eat well and take care of ourselves.
More than that, I think what I've taken away is not to be afraid of old age. It's going to be different. There's going to be changes. I won't be able to do certain things that I can do now, and I will look differently upon other parts of my life. So I want to recognize that that's exactly the same as now. I can't do things I did when I was seventeen. I'm limited by my physical abilities, the money I have, the personal and physical attractiveness or lack of same. I have limitations. But we all have limitations wherever we are in our lives. Limitations don't start when you're eighty-five. Before you lost your eyesight, you lost something else. And you made the most of it. Your life is still complete.
So I don't look at it as a diminishing of my life. Maybe certain things I can't do. But my life will still be my life. I will still occupy 100 percent of my life.
--January 18, 2018
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