137: The Book That Changed Your Life
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How did a childhood book influence Alexa Junge's life?
Brazil used to have one of the fastest growing economies in the world. People called it the country of the future.
There are songs. O Brasil é o país do futuro. Because it seems like we have it all, man.
But then the music stopped. On the Planet Money podcast, a lot of countries these days aren't rich. They aren't poor. They're just kind of stuck in the middle. Why is that? Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
When she was seven, when she would visit her grandmother, Alexa would look through the books that her grandfather had owned, back when he was alive. What she liked especially was finding the books where he'd made little notes in the margins.
So that was the part that was really, you know, compelling.
Because there were hints about who he was.
What unexpected lessons did David Sedaris learn from a dirty book?
Exactly. Exactly. And a lot of times they were really critical. He would write, I steadfastly disagree, or something like that.
Wow.
Or he would write, ah, if he really liked something.
As a kid, over the course of about a year, she systematically divided the books into two piles, the ones with markings and the ones without. And then she tried to read all the ones with markings. Her grandfather was a playwright and a teacher, and the books were creaky old books from the 1930s about theater and about how to write plays. It was thrilling. And when she was 11, she wrote her very first play using the rules in the books, Rules from Another Generation.
These were archaic roles, like start your play with lots of exposition, which was really in vogue at the time. So I started mine with a butler whose name I believe was Manson picking up a phone saying stuff like, no, the lady and gentleman are not home right now. Why at a fancy charity ball? Yes, he's still drinking too much and she's having an affair with a gardener.
Can a book change your life if you've never read it?
Whom shall I say is calling? LAUGHTER I'm not kidding.
You were 11.
By the time I got to college, and I started to actually take writing classes, it was brought to my attention that, you know, stage directions shouldn't be things like, there follows a mighty howling of wind. And one of the things my teacher, who was not a young man by any means, said was, he was like, sweetheart, we don't use sotto voce anymore to mean he whispers. We just write whispers.
But of all the books on her grandfather's shelves, there was one book that affected her more than the others. It had lots of her grandfather's writing in the margins.
And he was very critical, so it was very rare that he would write ah! And there were more ahs in Moss Hart's autobiography, which is called Act I, than I think almost any of the other books that he had written.
Moss Hart was a Broadway playwright, the man who directed My Fair Lady with Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison. He was married to another then luminary named Kitty Carlisle, who people these days mostly remember as a game show panelist back in the 1960s. The book details how he started as a kid in the Bronx, found something he just loved to do, which was to make plays. Reading it as a child, Alexa had that experience that you have sometimes as a kid.
What parallels exist between Laura Ingalls Wilder's life and her books?
She did not understand everything in the book, but she understood enough to know that she really, really liked it.
Like, I knew what was going on in this book was fun. It drove him so powerfully, and it seemed to make him so happy.
She read Act I by Moss Hart over and over. She memorized long stretches. She tried to memorize the entire book. Even today, she recalls where specific ahs were penciled into her grandfather's copy.
Because it felt like I was recognizing an old friend. It felt like a familiarity of, oh, I found a home. This guy likes the same home I want.
Yeah. So... These are my people.
Yeah, yeah.
You don't meet many people who tell you that a book changed their lives. The idea of that is appealing, I think, because it's nice to think that our lives could be changed by the vision of the world that happens between the pages of a book instead of what our lives are usually changed by.
How does a small town celebrate its literary history?
You know, dumb luck, tragedies, coincidences.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How did a childhood book influence Alexa Junge's life?
0:00–0:41
2
What unexpected lessons did David Sedaris learn from a dirty book?
0:41–1:50
3
Can a book change your life if you've never read it?
1:50–3:21
4
What parallels exist between Laura Ingalls Wilder's life and her books?
3:21–4:17
5
How does a small town celebrate its literary history?
4:17–5:24
6
What is the significance of the Ingalls family in American literature?
5:24–6:36
7
How do personal experiences shape our connection to literature?
6:36–7:47
8
What legacy did Roger Wendler leave as a Lewis and Clark book collector?
7:47–59:39