美国国家公共电台 NPR 'Fleishman Is In Trouble': A Debut About Divorce, Dating And Disappearance

 

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Taffy Brodesser-Akner's debut¹ novel is drawing praise as quite a debut. "Fleishman Is in Trouble" is the story of a man - Toby Fleishman, 41, a hepatologist, just recently divorced from his wife, Rachel, a high-powered talent agent who was the star earner of their family of four in Manhattan - with, of course, a place in the Hamptons. But Toby is bearing up under the rejection² and weekend visits with his children, Hannah and Solly because women on a dating app suddenly seem to find him urgently attractive. Then, one morning, Toby awakens³ to learn from a text message that Rachel's just dropped off Hannah and Solly before dawn. And day after day goes by - camp for the kids, care for Toby's patients, dating, anxiety, wondering all the while what's happened to Rachel. What's happened to their marriage? What will happen to all of us?

"Fleishman Is in Trouble" is by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, a staff writer at The New York Times magazine, whose work has appeared in publications from GQ to Cosmo to Texas Monthly. And she joins us in our studios in New York. Thanks so much for being with us.

TAFFY BRODESSER-AKNER: Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

SIMON: Toby has what they definitively⁵ call low self-esteem.

BRODESSER-AKNER: Yes (laughter).

SIMON: What makes him so urgently attractive?

BRODESSER-AKNER: What makes him so urgently attractive is his existence on a dating app and his sudden availability and the change in the culture that has evened things out to the point where you can appear how you want to in one of these apps and, suddenly, there are women who want him. And he has these questions. Maybe if he had not automatically assumed that people wouldn't want him, they would've wanted him more back then, too. He doesn't know. These are the questions that haunt him.

SIMON: I have a favorite little scene that I read in the book, and it gives you some idea of Dr. Fleishman's character. He has to tell a man that his wife has a liver disease and needs a transplant, and he finds news about an illness harder to deliver than news about a death.

BRODESSER-AKNER: Right. Death's reputation precedes itself, right?

SIMON: Yeah.

BRODESSER-AKNER: Like, it's easy to tell somebody definitive⁴ news, whereas when he's giving this particular diagnosis⁶ - which is about a disease called Wilson's disease, a liver disease that will not kill you, though, complications from it might but might destroy your life - that's the harder time he has, giving someone hope.

SIMON: In fact, he gets a little envious⁷ - doesn't he? - of seeing the closeness between the man and the wife as he's giving them the news.

BRODESSER-AKNER: He watches the man cry over her bed. And all he could think is that he, Toby, never wanted a spectacular marriage. He just wanted a regular one, and he feels that he's been deprived of that by the fact that his plan for his life, which - when he got married in his 20s - it just didn't work out.

SIMON: You wrote an essay, recently. You had a revelation that your parents' divorce might have been the creative spark in writing this novel. How did that happen?

BRODESSER-AKNER: Well, you know, I thought that I was being a good cultural reporter by noticing the friends of mine who were coming to me and telling me that they were getting divorced, had this whole new way of dating, that they - you know, when my mother got divorced in her early 40s, you know, she felt so old. And here they were showing me how much life they had in them left. And I thought I was doing the kind of responsible journalist thing, which is writing about the cultural moment. And, along the way, people would ask me questions. They would say, why are you writing a divorce book? And I thought, well, no. I'm writing a book about marriage...

BRODESSER-AKNER: Yeah.

BRODESSER-AKNER: ...Distilled⁸ through divorce. I only found out about it through my husband, who - when people would say to him, is it strange that your wife is writing - you know, most first novels are coming-of-age novels. Why is your wife writing a divorce novel? And his answer was so simple.

SIMON: Yeah.

BRODESSER-AKNER: He said she's obsessed⁹ with divorce. Everyone in her family's divorced. Some of them are divorced twice. Her parents got divorced when she was 6. I don't like to think that a divorce haunted me. And yet look at me. This somehow became my art. And then, I looked at the sort of evidence. And, this year, I've been married for 13 years, which is the year my parents got divorced. And now I feel like I'm in this sort of unknowable land. What are you supposed to do now?

SIMON: I must say - as the days roll by and Rachel doesn't return and sends no word, you find yourself - I found myself as a reader going from worry about where she was, what might have happened, to anger.

BRODESSER-AKNER: Right.

SIMON: Of course, without giving anything away, you find there's something going on.

BRODESSER-AKNER: Right.

SIMON: Let me put it that way. How do you keep from having people turn on Rachel too early?

BRODESSER-AKNER: Some of them do. But, more than that, what I'm hearing are the amount of people who are so disturbed because everything that Toby says about Rachel is something that they could be accused of. I always think of that, that the - sometimes, my behavior is forgivable in my marriage. And God forbid I should ever get a divorce. But if I did, that very same behavior would be looked at as completely reprehensible¹⁰. And I think the amount of people who are struggling to find their footing in this new world - where we are supposed to have these equitable¹¹ marriages and that women are supposed to be as successful as they want to be and that perhaps nobody told the men that we were given permission for that - I think, more and more, you're going to be hearing people who say, oh, my God, the things that Rachel says are things that I've said. It sounds like a miserable¹² book. But I do want to say that...

SIMON: No, it's not.

BRODESSER-AKNER: ...I think that there is - (laughter)...

SIMON: It made me laugh a lot. It bubbles with the insights and funny situations.

BRODESSER-AKNER: All right. Thank you.

SIMON: Sounds like I'm writing a blurb¹³, but it does make you wonder about the institution of marriage.

BRODESSER-AKNER: It does. I mean, I think it's also always time to ask ourselves - what are the partnerships¹⁴ that we're getting into? And are they as effective as they were supposed to be? Or do they just recall old depressions for us all the time?

SIMON: You, until you became a novelist, were known for writing terrific celebrity¹⁵ profiles.

BRODESSER-AKNER: Thank you.

SIMON: Bradley Cooper, Gwyneth Paltrow. What do you learn from writing celebrity profiles that transfers?

BRODESSER-AKNER: Oh, my gosh, everything. I was trying to write screenplays before I went into journalism¹⁶. And the reason I couldn't write these screenplays or I couldn't write them well is because I was writing them in a really cynical¹⁷ way - you know? - with these heroes and these villains¹⁸. And nobody had real humanity to them. And then, when I started writing about people, what I found out was that the more interesting story is people who contradict themselves, people who try to be good and aren't always. Once I was practiced at doing that through all of these profiles, then I feel like I was able to write an effective novel about a person who is a good father and still leaves his kids every night so that he could go have sex and still call himself a good father and still be called a good father. That's the main thing I think that translated.

SIMON: Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Her novel "Fleishman Is in Trouble." Thank you so much for being with us.

BRODESSER-AKNER: This is an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much.

1 debut   

n.首次演出，初次露面

参考例句：

• That same year he made his Broadway debut, playing a suave radio journalist.在那同一年里，他初次在百老汇登台，扮演一个温文而雅的电台记者。
• The actress made her debut in the new comedy.这位演员在那出新喜剧中首次登台演出。

2 rejection   

n.拒绝，被拒，抛弃，被弃

参考例句：

• He decided not to approach her for fear of rejection.他因怕遭拒绝决定不再去找她。
• The rejection plunged her into the dark depths of despair.遭到拒绝使她陷入了绝望的深渊。

3 awakens   

v.（使）醒( awaken的第三人称单数 )；（使）觉醒；弄醒；（使）意识到

参考例句：

• The scene awakens reminiscences of my youth. 这景象唤起我年轻时的往事。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》
• The child awakens early in the morning. 这个小孩早晨醒得早。 来自辞典例句

4 definitive   

adj.确切的，权威性的；最后的，决定性的

参考例句：

• This book is the definitive guide to world cuisine.这本书是世界美食的权威指南。
• No one has come up with a definitive answer as to why this should be so.至于为什么该这样，还没有人给出明确的答复。

5 definitively   

adv.决定性地，最后地

参考例句：

• None of the three super-states could be definitively conquered even by the other two in combination. 三个超级国家中的任何一国都不可能被任何两国的联盟所绝对打败。 来自英汉文学
• Therefore, nothing can ever be definitively proved with a photograph. 因此，没有什么可以明确了一张照片。 来自互联网

6 diagnosis   

n.诊断，诊断结果，调查分析，判断

参考例句：

• His symptoms gave no obvious pointer to a possible diagnosis.他的症状无法作出明确的诊断。
• The engineer made a complete diagnosis of the bridge's collapse.工程师对桥的倒塌做一次彻底的调查分析。

7 envious   

adj.嫉妒的，羡慕的

参考例句：

• I don't think I'm envious of your success.我想我并不嫉妒你的成功。
• She is envious of Jane's good looks and covetous of her car.她既忌妒简的美貌又垂涎她的汽车。

8 distilled   

adj.由蒸馏得来的v.蒸馏( distil的过去式和过去分词 )；从…提取精华

参考例句：

• The televised interview was distilled from 16 hours of film. 那次电视采访是从16个小时的影片中选出的精华。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Gasoline is distilled from crude oil. 汽油是从原油中提炼出来的。 来自《简明英汉词典》

9 obsessed   

adj.心神不宁的,鬼迷心窍的,沉迷的

参考例句：

• He's obsessed by computers. 他迷上了电脑。
• The fear of death obsessed him throughout his old life. 他晚年一直受着死亡恐惧的困扰。

10 reprehensible   

adj.该受责备的

参考例句：

• Lying is not seen as being morally reprehensible in any strong way.人们并不把撒谎当作一件应该大加谴责的事儿。
• It was reprehensible of him to be so disloyal.他如此不忠，应受谴责。

11 equitable   

adj.公平的；公正的

参考例句：

• This is an equitable solution to the dispute. 这是对该项争议的公正解决。
• Paying a person what he has earned is equitable. 酬其应得,乃公平之事。

12 miserable   

adj.悲惨的，痛苦的；可怜的，糟糕的

参考例句：

• It was miserable of you to make fun of him.你取笑他，这是可耻的。
• Her past life was miserable.她过去的生活很苦。

13 blurb   

n.简介，短评

参考例句：

• This book fails to give what the blurb describes.这本书不像该书护封上所描绘的那样好。
• In the blurb I couldn't see anything about thinking at all.在这本书的简介中，我根本找不到任何有关思想的东西。

14 partnerships   

n.伙伴关系( partnership的名词复数 )；合伙人身份；合作关系

参考例句：

• Partnerships suffer another major disadvantage: decision-making is shared. 合伙企业的另一主要缺点是决定要由大家来作。 来自英汉非文学 - 政府文件
• It involved selling off limited partnerships. 它涉及到售出有限的合伙权。 来自辞典例句

15 celebrity   

n.名人，名流；著名，名声，名望

参考例句：

• Tom found himself something of a celebrity. 汤姆意识到自己已小有名气了。
• He haunted famous men, hoping to get celebrity for himself. 他常和名人在一起, 希望借此使自己获得名气。

16 journalism   

n.新闻工作，报业

参考例句：

• He's a teacher but he does some journalism on the side.他是教师，可还兼职做一些新闻工作。
• He had an aptitude for journalism.他有从事新闻工作的才能。

17 cynical   

adj.(对人性或动机)怀疑的，不信世道向善的

参考例句：

• The enormous difficulty makes him cynical about the feasibility of the idea.由于困难很大，他对这个主意是否可行持怀疑态度。
• He was cynical that any good could come of democracy.他不相信民主会带来什么好处。

18 villains   

n.恶棍( villain的名词复数 )；罪犯；（小说、戏剧等中的）反面人物；淘气鬼

参考例句：

• The impression of villains was inescapable. 留下恶棍的印象是不可避免的。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Some villains robbed the widow of the savings. 有几个歹徒将寡妇的积蓄劫走了。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》