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Chapter 1: 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.
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Chapter 2: 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.
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Chapter 3: 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.
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Chapter 4: 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.
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Chapter 5: How does a small town celebrate its literary history?
You know, dumb luck, tragedies, coincidences. Today on our radio program, we have stories of people whose lives were changed by books, really changed. From WBEZ Chicago, this is American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in four acts.
Act one is called, well, Act One, where somebody gets clues about how to live their life from notes scribbled by their dead grandfather in the margins of a book. Act two, the family that reads together. In that act, the story of how when David Sedaris was a boy, he stumbled upon a dirty book in the woods. He made his sisters view all adults with newfound suspicion and sent him to the dictionary.
Act three, Roger and Me and Lewis and Clark. The story of a construction worker. And this question, can your life be changed by a book that you have never seen and have not read? Act four, Little Sod Houses for You and Me. This one is the old, old story of my friend. New York girl leaves the big city, heads out to a small town on the prairie with a dream and a bonnet.
Chapter 6: What is the significance of the Ingalls family in American literature?
Stay with us. Today's show is a rerun. Act One, Act One. So Alexa Young says that she never meant for Moss Hart's autobiography, Act One, to be a blueprint for her life. But looking back on the events of what happened over decades, that seems to have been the case.
Basically what I did was, like he did in his life story, I moved to New York. I think I kind of followed him there.
Really, you consciously followed him there.
I don't think it was conscious, but there are so many things that I did that he did. I wasn't as good of... I mean, he was more sort of... He could fake it better than I can, but, you know, he wrote... He had to get money at a certain point. He was like, I need money. So he thought, who's the richest person I know?
And he wrote a letter to this woman, I think, and then showed up on her doorstep and said... I'm Moss Hart, and I have a play, and if you give me money, we'll put it on. And she did.
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Chapter 7: How do personal experiences shape our connection to literature?
Wow. Isn't that amazing? And I wrote letters to strangers and said, I'm Alexa, and I have a play, and if you fund my play, you can be part of the theater.
And did that work?
It did one time, yeah.
At some point, did you start to get a crush on him?
Yeah, it definitely turned from kind of a mentor, a make-believe mentor to a pretend husband-to-be kind of situation. Yeah, somehow I think I decided that time had completely screwed up and sent Moss to Key Carlisle and that if he hadn't, if he just hadn't died two years before I was born, then me and Moss might really have had a chance.
How would this thought manifest itself in daily life? You'd be out on dates and just think, hmm, not Moss. Yeah. Really?
Yeah, yeah. Well, it would be like there'd be something missing, you know?
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Chapter 8: What legacy did Roger Wendler leave as a Lewis and Clark book collector?
It just wasn't quite what you'd want, and it's like... Why can't I find some guy and we'll work on this play together and we'll be like in out-of-town tryouts in Philadelphia and we'll be up for 48 hours trying to fix our play and then we'll crack it and then we'll order room service.
So how far did the whole thing go?
Well... I think maybe right before the end of college, Kitty Carlyle spoke one evening. At your college? That's right. She was very active in the New York art scene. She was extremely a huge advocate of the arts in our country. And so she was talking about that, I think, and I stood in line after she spoke saying,
to meet her and there were all these people around me and they were like, you were really good on that game show. And I was just like disgusted, like oh please, she was in A Night at the Opera, she's like a singer, she's not just a game show lady. Um, and, but by the time I got to the front of the line, um, I, and I went up to talk to her.
I said what I wanted to say, sort of, which was, you know, Moss changed my life and I moved to New York to be a playwright like him. And I think I said something along the lines of, your husband meant so much to me and, um, She just looked at me, and she was so elegant and so classy, and she just said, I don't understand, darling. Did you know him? She was just terrified.
She looked terrified.
Yeah, because I think she probably heard some kind of ownership or possessiveness in the way I said, your husband meant so much to me, as if I knew him. So I think it was confusing since she probably could figure out that he probably was dead before I was born. But it was disturbing and I felt terrible and it made me realize how, you know, just far from reality this thing had taken me.
And, you know, it was just scary to scare her because, you know, she's the person that he loved. But my friend that was with me was really nice because we walked home afterward and he was like, ah, don't worry about her. You're much better for Moss than she was. He knew the whole story, too.
And Moss was just spending time with her because she happened to be alive. You know, you talked about how you felt fated. For him in some way and drawn to him in some way. Have you thought about what is the line that divides that kind of dreamy, healthy feeling, I think, from a scary, stocky feeling?
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