State of the Art Survelience Fresh Air Terri Gross
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Terry Gross and the Art of Opening Up
The "Fresh Air" host'southward forty-year, xiii,000-interview master class in conversation.
Gross in her office at WHYY in August. Credit... Ryan McGinley for The New York Times
On a late-summer morning time, Terry Gross sat earlier a computer in her office — a boxy, glass-fronted room at WHYY in Philadelphia — composing interview questions. Gross, who wore a leopard-impress scarf knotted at her neck, was typing speedily, occasionally pausing to refer to a memoir open beside her. She swiveled in her chair to confront me. ''Information technology'southward interesting that she never had an orgasm,'' Gross began. ''I mean, not never, but non until later. I'd like to ask her nigh that, but it's tricky.''
Gross oftentimes talks almost sexual practice on her NPR show, ''Fresh Air.'' She frames it politically and socially, but she besides comes at the discipline with convincing specificity, uncovering details that seem non raw only quotidian. When she asked Lena Dunham virtually what information technology was similar for her sexual partners to run across her children's-volume tattoos, she elicited an answer that was almost poetic — Dunham described the tattoos every bit ''wearing a sleeve when you are naked.'' The exchange was also, in its way, just as boundary-pushing as the sex activity on ''Girls,'' Dunham's HBO prove. It's daring to talk virtually sexual practice on public radio in the middle of the day, and ''tricky'' considering Gross is mindful of the needs of more conservative stations. ''Sometimes in social media people human action similar I must be this prude," Gross said, ''and they recollect it's hilarious that I've used a sure discussion.'' But Gross talks about sexuality on the air ''non considering I want to be prurient'' only considering there is value in speaking honestly nearly something that is both essential and hidden. She uses the very public space of the interview to admission tenderly personal places.
This fall, Gross marks her 40th anniversary hosting ''Fresh Air.'' At 64, she is ''the most effective and beautiful interviewer of people on the planet,'' as Marc Maron said recently, while introducing an episode of his podcast, ''WTF,'' that featured a conversation with Gross. She's deft on news and subtle on history, sixth-sensey in probing personal biography and expert at examining the intricacies of artistic procedure. She is acutely attuned to the twin pulls of disclosure and privacy. ''You started writing memoirs earlier our culture got as confessional as information technology's become, before the word 'oversharing' was coined,'' Gross said to the writer Mary Karr last month. ''So has that afflicted your standards of what is meant to be written almost and what is meant to maintain silence almost?'' (''That's such a smart question,'' Karr responded. ''Damn information technology, now I'm going to accept to think.'') Gross says very little nigh her own life on the air. ''I try non to make it about me,'' Gross told me. ''I try to apply my experiences to help me understand my guests' experiences, but not to take annihilation away from them.'' Early in her career, she realized that remaining somewhat unknown allows ''radio listeners to exercise what they like to do, which is to create you.'' She added, ''Whatever you need me to be, I'll exist that.''
Over the years, Gross has washed some 13,000 interviews, and the sheer range of people she has spoken to, coupled with her intelligence and empathy, has given her the status of national interviewer. Retrieve of it equally a symbolic role, like the poet laureate — someone whose job it is to ask the questions, with a caste of fine art and honor. Barbara Walters was once our national interviewer, in a flashier style defined by a desire for spectacle. Gross is an interviewer defined by a longing for intimacy. In a civilization in which nosotros are all talking about ourselves more than ever, Gross is not only listening attentively; she'due south request just the correct questions.
Just before 10, Gross filled a compostable cup with half room-temperature h2o and one-half steaming water from a hissing automobile on her desk. She has brusk blond-gray pilus and heavy-framed glasses. She wears fitted jackets and mesomorphic black shoes, stud earrings and red lipstick. To movie theaters, she brings a bag of pillows; at iv feet 11 inches alpine, she has oftentimes described herself equally ''smaller than life.'' In her, a fragility — fair skin, narrow bones — is fused with a powerful sense of self-containment. She feels a periodic need to take a walk around the block.
This morning'south interview was with Sarah Hepola, the author of a memoir of alcoholism, ''Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget.'' I went into the control room to listen. ''Terry will exist with you in a second,'' an engineer told Hepola, who was waiting in a studio in Dallas. Equally a practicality, Gross performs most of her interviews long distance.
The control room had an anticipatory backstage feel. Moments before, a manager was gesturing similar a conductor, asking an engineer to ''Hit it!'' with an audio prune. In high school, Gross wanted to be a lyricist; 1 of the things she loves most radio is that it has ''just enough theater.'' ''Fresh Air'' is intensely collaborative, and many staff members have been there for years, including the executive producer Danny Miller, who started as an intern in 1978.
''How-do-you-do, is this Sarah? Hello, this is Terry Gross. I'll exist doing the interview with you today.'' Gross's voice is briskly warm, with a luster that conveys the pleasure she takes in it as an instrument. For years, she took singing lessons; she told her instructor that she wasn't trying to get good at singing — ''I just desire to be inside a song, to the extent that I tin be. To just have my body inside a song.'' The goal was raptness in a form she loves.
''If I ask you lot anything too personal — I know your volume is personal, but say I cross a line, just tell me, and we'll move on,'' she said to Hepola. ''And you can tell me anything on the tape or off the record. O.K.? Bully.''
I settled in to heed. Forth a long panel of buttons in the front end of the room was a white plastic square with a big red arrow under it and a characterization that said, TALK TO TERRY Push button.
''My No. 1 fantasy of all time is to be interviewed past Terry Gross.''
''I accept gone and then far as to rehearse answers to specific questions. … ''
''Every single fourth dimension I hear a Terry Gross interview, I wonder what information technology would be like for her to practice some enquiry on me and do an interview.''
When I started doing ''Terry Gross'' Google searches, I was struck past how often this wish is expressed. Hepola told Gross, ''This was just as wonderful as I'd dreamed it would be for x years,'' and I wondered what her interview dream had been like.
''I have this very specific memory of being in a coffee shop in the West Village and working on a section of my volume almost adolescence,'' Hepola said to me on the phone. ''And, bing! I heard Terry in my caput. She was similar: 'This is astonishing. No i has really ever talked almost adolescence in the way that you're talking nearly information technology right now.' '' At that point, Hepola was early in her sobriety. Through Gross, who was often in her earbuds, she was finding her way back to the kind of close conversations she had once drunkard her mode to.
Matthew Weiner, the creator of ''Mad Men,'' has been amidst the most frequent guests on ''Fresh Air.'' He imagined being interviewed by Gross years before information technology outset happened, and once it did, ''y'all're similar: Oh, this is my fantasy of a conversation,'' Weiner told me. ''I'chiliad non even talking about people hearing it. I'm talking about actually having the conversation.''
''Having the conversation'' — that'south what'southward compelling about the wish. It'south a wish not for recognition but for an experience. It's a wish for Gross to locate your genius, even if that genius has not notwithstanding been expressed. It's a wish to be seen as in a wish to be understood.
The interview wish is every bit old as the form itself. Journalistic interviews in the Us increasingly began to announced in the 1860s. Before that, when reporters talked to people, they typically didn't quote them. Once interviewing started, it became a craze. It had its own practitioners, often women, who were thought to be better at drawing people out. Henry James's journalists were near all ''interviewers,'' and his characters, like Selah Tarrant in ''The Bostonians,'' crave their scrutiny: ''The wish of his soul was that he might be interviewed,'' James wrote.
At start the interview was regarded as a particularly American phenomenon — pushy, but fair also, considering it involved the cooperation of the interviewee, not just a sneaky reporter. The practice shifted radically after World War Ii. Boob tube gained popularity — the historic period of the broadcast interviewer began. And psychoanalysis — that other corking innovation in opening people up — was being practiced more widely.
Gross'southward interviews have ofttimes been compared to therapy. That'south in part considering of her seemingly neutral stance, but besides because of the feeling of rubber she gives her interviewees. Once in a while, a invitee confesses to Gross that he's confiding something for the very first time. ''I don't know that I've said that to anyone,'' the ''Project Runway'' host Tim Gunn told Gross in 2014, of spending time in a psychiatric infirmary as an adolescent. Gross's response was as affecting as Gunn's story. She handles confessions quietly, acknowledging the weight of what's been said without drawing undue attention to it.
Gross herself started seeing a therapist several years ago. ''When she asks me a question that gets exactly to the heart of what I'one thousand trying to say, but maybe haven't articulated conspicuously, it just feels so adept,'' Gross told me. ''My ideal as an interviewer is to be the person who gets it. Like somebody tin tell you lot something really personal,'' she continued, and ''yous tin can ask them something that can aid them comfortably move to the next place and go deeper.'' She went on: ''Hearing someone speak really personally, and having that affirm your experience as a sexual person, or as a sick person, or just as a person trying to get through daily life, is really valuable. And I think that's why we turn to literature, I call back that's why we plow to film, beyond the amusement it gives us.''
She loves interviewing artists, she told me, considering they are ''the people nosotros designate to open up their lives for examination so nosotros can understand amend who we are.'' They offer up their own stories as ''what Updike called 'specimen lives,' '' she said. ''Examples of what it's like to be human.''
Gross was born in 1951 in Brooklyn. She grew up in Sheepshead Bay, between Avenues X and Y. It was a new neighborhood, with postwar apartment buildings that went up on the site of an one-time racetrack. As a piddling daughter, Gross loved realistic fiction (Beverly Cleary, the Betsy-Tacy series) and would retreat to the couch with a book when her family unit visited relatives.
Gross's father helped run a family unit business organization selling materials to hatmakers. Her mother had worked as a secretary but quit after Gross's older blood brother was born, and later Gross would seek the life outside the home that wasn't available to her mother.
As a freshman at SUNY Buffalo, Gross wanted to write. Only she was worried she wasn't expert plenty to be not bad, and she struggled to find a subject. At the same time, she was shedding her ''good girl'' identity. She tried being a hippie — ''I was too inhibited to be very convincing at it. And too Sheepshead Bay, probably'' — and she tried drugs. I of the first times she dropped LSD, she determinedly brought along paper and pen: ''I'm going to take a subject,'' she recalls thinking. ''All of my writerly inhibitions are going to open up, and my talent is going to be released!'' LSD didn't assistance her writing, but for Gross it was a beneficially ''immersive experience.''
In the first months subsequently she graduated in 1972, Gross floundered. She had married, but would shortly divorce; she was fired from a chore teaching eighth grade later only half dozen weeks (she couldn't control the class). Just then she discovered radio. One afternoon, nearly a twelvemonth after she finished school, she was sitting in her house in Buffalo listening to ''Womanpower,'' a feminist plan on WBFO, the academy station. One of her roommates was a guest, and she came out equally gay on the air. Gross was surprised by the revelation, merely more and so by the fashion her roommate had delivered it: sitting before a microphone in a radio studio.
Gross, who had wanted to do ''something in media'' just hadn't known how to begin, was intrigued. Through her roommate, she learned at that place was an opening on ''Womanpower,'' and Gross started on the evidence as a volunteer. Just over a year later, she moved to a program called ''This Is Radio.'' The show'south superpower was a phone line that allowed the staff to call anywhere in New York State toll-costless. Gross would scour the Village Vocalization classifieds for people who might be interesting — jazz musicians offering lessons, a tattoo artist — and phone call them up and interview them. During higher Gross had shed some of her innate reserve, but ''I even so was merely inhibitively shy,'' she said. ''With a microphone, I wasn't shy.''
Epitome 
In 1975, Gross moved to Philadelphia to take over ''Fresh Air,'' which was created by a onetime WBFO colleague (NPR began distributing it as a daily evidence in 1987). Gross says she was ''e'er inquisitive,'' and her marvel vibrates on the surface of sometime tape. In a 1980 conversation that was rebroadcast in September, Gross, yet in her 20s, called the horror-flick maker Wes Craven. Craven was not nonetheless famous — this was years before ''A Nightmare on Elm Street'' — merely Gross had recently seen his slasher film ''The Last House on the Left.'' She was and then disturbed by its sadism that she wanted to find out who made it. Craven told her he was bothered past a sense that America had become ''immune to violence,'' and he wanted to show the reality of it.
''I really understand what y'all're saying,'' Gross told him, ''and I know that the movies I grew up on, even, similar, the World War Ii and World War I movies, people were killed without whatever claret ever coming out.'' Her response indicated that she was not out to set on Craven merely to explore his motivations.
''You know, it went dorsum to something that happened to me when I was a kid,'' he ventured. ''I don't know whether yous'd be interested in hearing it—''
Of grade she'd be interested in hearing information technology! Nosotros all would. What emerged was a textured and totally creepy story of a mail-order bow-and-arrow prepare and a rat that took too long to dice.
Gross's impulse to explore what provokes her — the impulse that collection her to pick upwards the landline and call Craven — underlies her xl years of interviews. Ira Glass, who was my boss at ''This American Life,'' observes that Gross brings ''real questions she personally has been wondering well-nigh'' to the kind of interviews that tell us ''what should we make of the latest news from Iraq or Syrian arab republic'' — as well every bit the good editorial sense of when to allow an expert ''march off in unplanned directions.'' He adds: ''In that location've been times when I've relistened, just to hear the lodge of the questions and to effigy out what was planned and unplanned. Like a magician sitting in on some other guy's act for two nights so he tin can effigy out the fob, to steal information technology.'' Glass singles out Gross's ''slap-up improviser's performance chops. Non surprising that she loves jazz artists and stand up-up comedians and so much. She'southward their journalist peer.''
In June 2014, Gross interviewed Hillary Clinton, who was so promoting her memoir, ''Hard Choices.'' Gross interviews very few politicians because it is difficult to get them to speak candidly. When she does, she moves into a register that is authoritative only no less accurate. Gross noted that as a senator Clinton didn't support gay marriage, only as secretary of state she emerged as an advocate for L.G.B.T. rights. ''She's on the international stage, where gay people are still existence executed in some countries, or certainly imprisoned, and she'south coming out not only for lesbian and gay rights but she's adding the T,'' Gross said to me. ''I idea that was brave and remarkable. Simply I wanted her to bridge the gap.''
Gross framed the question by asking if there were things Clinton believed in personally but couldn't come out and support as a politician — like gay spousal relationship? ''And I think she totally misinterpreted it as me trying to say, 'You're such a hypocrite.' ''
The commutation became rivetingly uncomfortable, with Clinton growing increasingly defensive as Gross asked whether her views on gay marriage had evolved, or whether she was responding to changes in American public stance. Clinton was stubbornly evasive: ''I said I'k an American, and so we all evolved.'' The back and forth continued:
Gross: So, that's i for ''yous inverse your listen''?
Clinton: Yous know, I really — I take to say, I recollect you are very persistent, merely you lot are playing with my words and playing with what is such an of import issue.
When the interview ended, Gross and her producers asked themselves, ''Are nosotros going to go on that in the edit?'' Yes, they decided: ''Maybe there's not a really satisfactory, conclusive answer,'' merely ''it felt like a real moment.'' Gross went on: ''Even if the real moment isn't somebody existence really honest and forthcoming and introspective, a real moment of friction, a real moment of tension, is still a real moment.''
Occasionally the ''real moments'' can be bad-mannered for Gross. In July, in an interview with the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, Gross began laughing in response to a story he told virtually being yelled at by a teacher. ''See, it sounds like you're laughing because, similar, it's funny if you've never been in the surroundings,'' Coates said. Some on social media pegged Gross as a clueless white lady. Merely the exchange was constructive. Gross was simply reacting, and then listening equally Coates explained his perception of her reaction. In doing so, he illuminated an experience of growing up in a culture of fear and violence.
On ''Fresh Air,'' we listen to Gross grapple with the most complex questions of existence — racial prejudice, faith, family unit, disease, morality, betrayal, gratitude. In 2011, when Maurice Sendak was 83, Gross chosen him at his home in Connecticut. What was meant to be a short conversation about his new book, ''Bumble-Ardy,'' became a meditation on his nearness to death. You experience Sendak looking over into it from his living room.
Sendak: Oh, God, there are so many beautiful things in this earth which I will take to get out when I die, but I'm ready, I'yard ready, I'k ready. … You know, I have to tell you something.
Gross: Go ahead.
Sendak: You lot are the just person I have ever dealt with in terms of being interviewed or talking who brings this out in me. In that location's something very unique and special in y'all, which I so trust. When I heard that yous were going to interview me or that yous wanted to, I was really, really pleased.
Sendak is scratchy and emotional, and Gross is gentle with him. ''And almost certainly, I'll go earlier you become,'' he tells her. ''So I won't have to miss you.''
When Gross was growing upwardly, she and her mother would accept the subway to the department stores in Downtown Brooklyn twice a year, ''once for your fall wardrobe and once for your spring.'' Afterward they shopped, they would have two sandwiches at Junior's for lunch — corned beef and shrimp salad — and ''carve up them half and one-half.'' Years afterward, when Gross'southward mother was living in Florida and sick with lung cancer, ''I took her shopping, and I helped her on and off with her clothes. It might not sound like a big deal to other people, but it made me so distressing.'' She continued: ''It made me and then sad, the style the roles flipped.''
Somewhen her mother's mind started to go, in function because of the chemotherapy. ''As she lost some of her cognitive abilities, I thought of myself as having duets with her. I'd accept these conversations where I knew that she knew the answers to the questions. I knew we were on safe territory,'' she told me. ''I knew my role, she knew her office and nosotros could converse that way.''
Image
Gross and I were alone in the studio, a large room with sage light-green walls. Sunlight was filtered by screens, and the soundproofing sealed us off from the globe. It was as if we had zipped ourselves inside a tent. We were talking most the deaths of Gross'southward parents, and I asked nearly Sendak, in relation to something I'd been wondering about — the interplay between an interview and her private life. ''I didn't think of this until later,'' Gross said. ''But the interview that I had with him was in a way the conversation I never had with my parents.''
She went on: ''I attempt not to confuse the two. I endeavor not to equate the interview with real life. Only at the same fourth dimension, in that location'due south an intimacy in the interview — like, I'g telling you things that people I work with probably don't know, because information technology doesn't come up. I would tell them if they asked, only it's just not a function of what you talk about in day-to-mean solar day work life necessarily.''
We had plans for dinner, and down the hall, in her role, Gross collected her things. She wheeled a crate-size cart of books and papers out to the parking lot, and then transferred the contents to her trunk. The steering wheel was hot, and Gross put on puffy black winter gloves with leopard-impress lining to protect her hands. Then she drove unexpectedly fast down Old City'south narrow streets.
On a typical day, Gross is at the role from eight:45 to 5:45. She and her hubby, Francis Davis, who is a music critic, will go out for dinner (not fancy places: ''We like diners and delis''), and then Gross will continue working at home, preparing for the next day's interview in the living room. She clarifies her thoughts first thing in the morning time in the shower. That's when she asks herself: What exercise I intendance about? What in all of this research is meaningful? It's important to be away from her notes when she does this. She emerges from the shower with her ''major destination points.'' Then she goes to her office and refers back to her notes — sheafs of facts; dog-eared, marked-up books — for the details. And then she does the interview. And so she is inundated by the other daily tasks of running a radio show. The next day, she does it all once more. ''And that'south been my whole adult life,'' she told me. It'southward part grind and role devotion. Every bit a young adult female, Gross wanted to find ''a passion that could become my work.'' She decided not to have children. ''I practice feel similar I was office of the first generation that actually had a choice. Where we would not be seen as either tragic or lacking in some manner for non having children.''
The final time I visited Gross at the station, it was a Friday. She was wearing a loose denim jacket, and we were sitting beyond a table from each other, talking about weekend plans. ''Friday nights and Saturday nights Francis and I usually spend alone together considering the weeks are just so crazy and then hectic and then noisy, like I take so many people in my head'' — she cupped her easily next to her ears similar headphones. ''You know what I mean?''
''Like in your ears,'' I said, nodding. Sometimes, doing radio, your head falls to the pillow with someone's voice still nerveless at that place.
Gross and Davis met in 1976 at a record store well-nigh the station. ''As I was falling in beloved with him, I also barbarous in love with his writing,'' Gross told me on another day. Davis is besides devoted to his work — in the pre-laptop era, he would lug a huge typewriter on vacations. The two always effort to accept dinner together. When Gross was younger, and working late nights, ''I would call him, and we'd kind of have dinner together, because I'd talk to him the whole time I was eating dinner. And so we'd be having dinner together whether we were in the aforementioned room or not.''
That weekend Gross had plans to see a four-and-a-half-hour opera, Rossini's ''William Tell.'' She discovered opera but recently, and wishes she had plant it when she was still taking singing lessons with an instructor, who died a few years ago. From him she learned about caput tones and breast tones and how, when you're singing, your vox ''should resonate in the basic of your face.'' She added: ''When I was taking singing lessons, I felt like, No one'southward having more pleasure in singing than I am. I sound horrible, simply that doesn't affair. I'g enjoying it.''
Outside the window, Philadelphia tourists were gliding by on Segways. Across from me, Gross was serene. ''I don't know if information technology'due south a function of age or temperament,'' she said, ''merely I'yard no longer seeking those major exclamatory notes of pleasance. I want a life that has pleasure contained within it.''
After Gross and I talked, we went for her usual walk effectually the block. It was a hot evening, and the sun was blazing equally we passed the fortress of the Federal Reserve. And at that moment, the chat got very personal, for me. I wound upwardly telling Gross a secret. While I hadn't planned to practice this, afterward I wondered whether some subconscious part of me had orchestrated information technology — whether, in some pathetic way, I was enacting my ain interview wish.
As I was about to brand the confession, I said something like, ''O.K., I'll tell y'all, considering you're Terry Gross,'' which I immediately regretted. It was as if I was talking to Terry Gross the national interviewer. And perhaps I was. I've projected, the aforementioned as any listener. Only we had spent time together, and she was no longer just a character to me. I wanted to confide in her because I wanted to be close to her, even equally I was aware that this, also, could exist as reflective of the roles we were playing every bit of ''reality.''
Nosotros were on a walk of predetermined length, undertaken for professional person reasons. In that location were implicit boundaries. And on that sidewalk, I felt as if I was getting an answer to my question about whether, and how, the intimacy of such moments carried over into the globe outside the studio, for both Gross and her subjects. Because while I was here with Gross as a function of my work, I was speaking to her from the heart of my life. Information technology felt heightened, in the mode that reporting does, but also scary, in the way that vulnerability does.
All the time we walked, Gross was asking questions, and offering communication, which is different from on the radio. When we finished the walk, and I was leaving, I became nervously formal. When I reached to shake her paw, she very simply took mine in both of hers.
I felt so awkward for days afterward the commutation had happened. Was it going to ruin the ongoing interaction? What did she think of me? It spoke to something important in the piece, but information technology was cocky-indulgent. Was information technology even worth including?
Simply then I thought — real moment. Go out it in.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/terry-gross-and-the-art-of-opening-up.html
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