Terry Gross

This is Fresh Air.

So when you were talking to Seymour Bernstein about the second half of your life and what do you want from it?

And you were saying like, if I don't have like a religious calling and yeah.

And I was wondering, why did you mention religious calling?

Did you ever think that is what you wanted?

You were raised as Episcopalian.

Your mother taught Sunday school.

And you actually went on missions over the summer.

And in an earlier interview we did, you described your missionary work not as proselytizing, but as like free labor.

helping people build latrines and build roofs.

And you did that in Kentucky and West Virginia and the back haulers.

And one summer you went to Haiti and worked with Mother Teresa's order in the House of the Dying.

Can you describe the House of the Dying?

What was that exactly?

I want to talk with you about the lowdown.

I'm really enjoying this.

And you play an investigative journalist for a kind of underground paper.

I can't remember whether you correct the person, whether he says it's a magazine.

Yeah, he calls it a paper, and you say, no, it's a long-form magazine.

And you are very, very eccentric.