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Chapter 1: What significant events marked the beginning of the Book Review Podcast?
If you find yourself bewildered by this moment where there's so much reason for despair and so much reason to hope all at the same time, let me say I hear you. I'm Ezra Klein from New York Times Opinion, host of The Ezra Klein Show. And for me, the best way to beat back that bewildered feeling is to talk it out with the people who have ideas and frameworks for making sense of it.
There is going to be plenty to talk about. You can find The Ezra Klein Show wherever you get your podcasts. 20 years ago this month, the New York Times published its very first podcast.
This is Sam Tannenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review.
And welcome to our podcast, where we huddly tweak on the shores of light and curse the encroaching darkness. Yes, that was the very first episode of the show. Two decades later, hundreds of notable authors and literary personalities have passed through these metaphorical walls. Tony Morrison, Robert Caro, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Franzen, Judy Blume, Stephen King. I could go on and on and on.
Even Keith Richards came through, and I was sadly not here for that one. Today, to celebrate this august occasion, we're going to look back at the last 20 years in books. Literary hits... fan favorites, scandals, and scuttlebutt.
I'm Gilbert Cruz, and I have the ideal duo to mark the occasion with me, Tina Jordan, who has worked in and around books for 35 years and is now deputy editor of The Book Review. Tina, welcome. Hi, Gilbert. And Dwight Garner, longtime book critic here at The Times, and appropriately for this episode, the man who came up with the idea for this very podcast in the first place.
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Chapter 2: How did the Oprah-related controversy impact the publishing industry?
Dwight, it's so great to have you here. Great to be here, Gilbert. So let's go back 20 years to when this podcast first came out. It's 2006. G.W. Bush was president. Twitter had just launched. We did not know the joys that this platform would bring us in the ensuing decades. The iPhone had not been invented yet, thankfully.
And just as the year kicked off, the book world was consumed with a scandal.
I don't know what is true, and I don't know what isn't. So first of all, I wanted to start with the smoking gun report, titled The Man Who Conned Oprah. And I want to know where they write
I think most of what they wrote was pretty accurate, absolutely. In January of 2006, there was a controversy involving a book called A Million Little Pieces. This was a big deal. Do you remember this? Of course I do. You know, just coming through the door, you felt this book had a bit of electricity. It had this great cover, this hand covered with sort of like the sprinkles on an ice cream cone.
Chapter 3: What themes are explored in 'Eat, Pray, Love' and its cultural significance?
And they evoked drugs. It was a bright cover. And you just thought, this looks like something. This was a book by James Fry. It had come out in April 2003. And in September 2005, Oprah selected it as a selection for her book club, which had existed at that point for almost 10 years. It propelled it onto the bestseller list. And then, Tina, what happened?
What happened was Oprah had him on the show in October 2005, and something must have ticked off the people at the website called The Smoking Gun. Do you guys remember this website? I remember it only because of this book. Yes. So The Smoking Gun, I believe the last week in December, published a piece called A Million Little Lies. And they took the book apart, like they had found –
His arrest records, you know, basically everything he said had happened. You know, the girlfriend dying, the arrest, none of it had happened. And this was a memoir in which James Fry talked about his addiction to drugs and alcohol and his attempt to rehabilitate himself by going to a clinic. Correct. And interestingly, he had tried to sell this book as a novel, right?
And Doubleday, to whom he sold it, said, wait, did all this stuff happen to you?
Chapter 4: What made 'The Hunger Games' a defining moment in YA fiction?
Let's publish this as a memoir. So they did, and he actually told the Times later, and I quote, It was written exactly as it was published. So he didn't change a word. And unlike most memoirs at the time, which came with like a little paragraph at the beginning saying, you know, this is how I remember it. Obviously, I've had to make up quotes, blah, blah, blah. There was none of that.
This phenomenon of a memoir being written and then people finding out that some of it is not true or much of it is not true was not necessarily a new thing. Something that felt new to me at the time, and Dwight, correct me if I'm wrong, was the public shaming that James received on live television when he had to go on Oprah in early 2006 and sit there as Oprah sort of confronted him about this.
Yeah, it was ugly. There was something about James Fry that was a little bit confrontational, a little bit, you know, he was sort of mailer-like. He was sort of, you know, puffed up and was ready to take on the world. And then seeing him dragged low by Oprah was kind of every writer's worst nightmare, sort of your fear of being revealed.
And actually, this is every memoirist's worst nightmare because, you know, we all know by now that memoirs are at least slightly a species of fiction. I mean, you don't remember everything that happened to you in these conversations. And And we're aware of that.
But to have someone actually track down everyone who knew you and re-report your own memoir is, I don't think, something that any memoirist would want to go through. But this was an egregious case. Another book from that year that turned out to be a very big deal, and I'm going to turn to you, Tina, to talk about this one, was Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.
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Chapter 5: How did 'Twilight' influence the fantasy genre and its readership?
This was a memoir that was eventually published. In addition to being a best-selling book, it was made into a movie starring Julia Roberts. I looked this up. The title of the book has commas. The title of the movie does not have any punctuation. I didn't know that. It's just Eat, Pray, Love. No commas. Tell us about Eat, Pray, Love.
All right, so Elizabeth Gilbert was this glamorous New York City journalist who had come through, I think, a divorce and a rebound relationship and decided she was going to chuck it all and go find herself and figure out what made her happy. And she went on this year-long trip, which took her to India and Indonesia and Italy, and then she wrote a book about it.
And the book, if I were to summarize it in a few lines, would be, A woman always defined by her relationships learns how not to do that. And it was incredibly polarizing, of course, because here was this, you know, privileged woman who could take a year off to take this trip, right? But I think it touched a chord with people because at its heart, what the book was about was we have so much.
Why are we so unhappy? Yeah. She could also really write. I mean, the book is funny, you know, and it inspires you to get out. It inspired a lot of women to sort of, you know, go and try to find themselves.
Chapter 6: What role did celebrity book clubs play in promoting literature?
And some didn't have the experience she did or many didn't. Right. So it was, and remind me, because it's been a while since I've had to think about Eat, Pray, Love. Was it she went to one place and sort of like did a food thing? She went to another place, did a spiritual thing and... Yeah, that's roughly right. And then went to another place and met a man.
Would you say, Tina, that this is a self-helpy book? I would say this is a self-helpy book for a certain kind of woman. And did it signal something at the time or going forward about the type of self-help-y type book that there would be?
I think you saw certainly a lot of copycats and you saw a lot of books that were about women finding happiness for themselves, not through their jobs, not through their partners, none of that. Yeah. What is the closest you've done to an eat, pray, love situation? One time I left my husband and children and went to Morocco for three weeks. Wow. Really? Yes. And the Canary Islands.
And when I came home, my husband had gotten another dog. Three weeks.
Chapter 7: What controversies surrounded the publication of 'American Dirt'?
I'd had it. I was done. I was done. Good on you. We're going to jump ahead to a book or a series of books that continue to resonate in the culture all these years later. This is The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. The first book came out in 2008. She published a trilogy. And since then, two prequels have been published, the most recent being last year's Sunrise on the Reaping.
It was a big success last year. So we're almost 20 years on. From the first Hunger Games book, and it's still sort of a going concern. There's a movie version of Sunrise and the Reaping coming out later this year. What do you recall about this phenomenon, when it happened, and sort of what it said about dystopian fiction, YA fiction?
I think it's the moment where YA fiction started to get really, really dark. I mean, the premise of the book, Let's Don't Forget, is about teenage kids who fight to the death in a televised show. That's what the book is about. Yeah. And it... inspired the same kind of fandoms that we saw with Twilight.
Chapter 8: How does the quiz at the end reflect on the past 20 years in literature?
The first Twilight book was 2005, and with Harry Potter, for that matter. Right. Harry Potter, if I'm recalling correctly, the last... The seventh book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, had come out the year before?
Yes, 2007.
And I looked this up, so I am going to say this because this is a crazy fact, but at least according to the Guinness Book of World Records... It was the fastest-selling book in its first 24 hours of all time, that seventh Harry Potter book. So that series had just finished, and Hunger Games comes in a year later, and it kicks off its own... I don't want to...
call them copycats necessarily because it's derogatory, but its own set of books that sort of followed in its wake. You had the Divergent books, which came out in 2011, the Maze Runner books, which came out in 2009, and these are essentially all trilogies or thereabouts, dark trilogies, dark YA trilogies about kids who are in dystopian societies. Right.
But more than that, what all of these books had were a lot of adult readers. They weren't just books for kids. I mean, when you look back at the sales of YA during that time, they weren't just driven by, you know, middle school and high school kids. I mean, there was a whole group of Twilight fans, the moms, I forget what they called themselves. Right. Twi-Moms? Twi-Moms? No. Twi-Hearts?
I don't know. Whatever it was. That was a big part of why these books were so successful. Yeah. Dwight, what do you remember about dystopian fiction around this time? Because two years before The Hunger Games in 2006... Cormac McCarthy's The Road came out, and that was this moment where this sort of literary titan dipped into genre in a way by writing this dystopian book.
Right.
And now, of course, you know, dystopia, dystopias are the morsel at the end of every fork in terms of every novel you pick up. Even the most, I mean, we're living in this world that writers feel like they need to respond to.
And the only way they can, I'm not speaking about every writer, but so many, even our best literary writers just feel like in order to respond to this moment, they also almost have to go beyond it, almost to imagine where we might be in 10 years or so. And Hunger Games books were so – I remember my kids being so enveloped in them. I mean, just obsessive.
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