Janny Scott, THE BENEFICIARY
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[1:48]who don't have time to read. I'm here today with Jenny Scott, who's the author of The New York Times
[1:52]Best Selling Book, a singular woman at the untold story of Barack Obama's mother and her latest book,
[1:57]The Beneficiary, Fortune, Miss Fortune and the Story of My Father. The Beneficiary was chosen
[2:03]as one of the New York Times 100 notable books of 2019 and one of NPR's favorite books of 2019.
[2:09]A reporter for The New York Times from 1994 to 2008, she was a member of the Times reporting team
[2:14]that won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. She currently lives in New York.
[2:19]Welcome. Thanks for coming on the show, Jenny. Thank you. It's great to be here.
[2:23]Could you please tell us, near is what The Beneficiary is about.
[2:27]The Beneficiary is a family memoir spanning roughly three generations in my father's wealthy
[2:35]aristocratic Pennsylvania family. It's set almost entirely on a roughly 800 acre British-style
[2:42]country estate, a half-hour outside of Philadelphia, a place that has been compared to kind of an
[2:48]American downtown abbey, sort of plucked in the pages of Henry James or Jane Austen and floated
[2:54]across the Atlantic and wedged in among the swing pools of up-dike achiever. But it's also a kind of
[3:00]detective story. One child's attempt to understand a captivating but opaque parent and the family
[3:07]that produced them both. And the question that drives that is how did the seemingly charmed life
[3:15]of my appealing, accomplished, but enigmatic father arrive at its self-destructive and perplexing end?
[3:23]That was a great description. Good job. I've been thinking about it for a while. I'm sure this
[3:29]is your first time, but anyway, it sounded great. So what made you want to tell the story? What
[3:34]made you want to delve into your own family and approach it with your reporter's eyes?
[3:39]Well, I'd been a journalist for my whole career. And there are limitations to journalist at
[3:45]writing. And I had written a journalistic book, my previous book. And I was really interested in
[3:50]trying to force myself to learn to write in a different way. And I knew that one way possibly
[3:58]to challenge myself in that way was to take on something that had more emotional resonance for me
[4:03]than a lot of news stories do. I mean, it's good if a news story has emotional resonance,
[4:08]but you can't get too tied up in it. Whereas this was, A, I had wonderful material, just because
[4:14]the nature of my father's family and my own experience of growing up in the surrounded by them.
[4:20]But I was also, for that reason, fascinated by the enigma of my father. And felt quite,
[4:28]I think, devastated by his self-destruction. So it was a combination of a literary urge to
[4:36]learn to write in a different way, combined with an opportunistic response to wonderful material
[4:42]and a deeply emotional feeling about my father. Do you feel like you got answers? Do you feel like
[4:48]you got a sense of closure that you were looking for? I certainly learned all sorts of things I
[4:54]would never have known before. Most people don't have the luxury of spending years
[4:59]pouring over the papers and all the detritus that's left behind by in families. Because many of
[5:06]them get thrown out. We had the luxury that people had their space and so stuff was kept.
[5:11]So I did the laundry room. Yeah, exactly. And the ironing room, that's it. So I learned a lot.
[5:18]I don't have any illusion that you can finally understand anyone really in the round,
[5:25]completely. So sure, there are questions that remain for me about my father. And I'm quite
[5:30]conscious of the possibility that if I read the book in 10 years, I'll think, well, why did you
[5:35]come to that conclusion? And as for closure, of course, I don't know if there's ever really
[5:41]closure. But I do feel like the experience, anyone who's tried to do this, I think, has this
[5:47]experience that of taking all the sort of random colliding stuff in your head and in your past
[5:54]and piecing it together into a narrative is somehow therapeutic. Whether it's the
[5:59]narrative you would have produced 10 years ago or you'd produced in a 20 years from now, who knows.
[6:04]But there's a feeling of, yes, of getting things kind of under control.
[6:08]Oh, there are certainly no lack of information. I feel like, no, I mean, it was amazing. The
[6:13]depth and how much you could share with me about the reader with so many different things
[6:20]related to the time period and about which you were writing, wealth in America, how things have
[6:24]changed. I mean, it was great. Not just your family, but just, oh my gosh, it was amazing.
[6:29]So your father was mostly cared for by a French governess and you wrote, his parents were
[6:34]an intermittent presence and they were called distant and he said that they were unused to children.
[6:39]What effect do you think a child did like this had on him?
[6:43]Well, it wasn't just a French governess. I mean, she lasted a few years and then was hastily fired
[6:49]and then there was a series of Irish cooks and maids and butlers. My father used to claim
[6:55]only half joking that he spoke of an Irish accent to the age of nine because his parents were so
[7:01]absent a lot of the time. I think I'm not sufficiently well versed in psychology and psychiatry
[7:07]to be able to speak authoritatively on this, but I think the experience of not having a single
[7:13]close parental bond with a parent or some kind of substitute parent over an extended period
[7:19]of childhood does have an effect on the formation of personality, etc. So I think my father,
[7:25]not to go too far out on a limb here, was very good at presenting a kind of aversion of
[7:30]itself to the public, but the interior life was very much hidden and it turned out because I
[7:38]in the course of this process found his diaries and which he had promised to me, but then
[7:43]it not told me where they would be. It turned out that he was highly conscious of his interior
[7:47]life, but it was not something he ever shared with other people. So I think there's that, there
[7:53]there was a sort of inaccessible quality to him that came from a self protective thing that was
[7:59]related to his relationship is his complicated relationship with his mother in particular.
[8:04]Would you ever consider publishing in stories? I've been asked that. I feel like I've invaded his
[8:09]privacy sufficiently already. I feel like in today's day and age, like you need to leave a letter to
[8:15]your ancestors being like, do not publish these works or what to do and not to do.
[8:21]Yes, exactly. I think my father must have been ambivalent about it because he told me in my 20s
[8:25]that he would get to read that he wanted to give him to me when he died, but then he never
[8:30]told me where he was leaving them. So it's as though he didn't have the heart to burn them
[8:37]or destroy them or tell me that he changed his mind, but he also was not willing, certainly not
[8:42]willing to have me see them while he was alive. I mean, it's hard. I mean, that would be a hard
[8:46]I wouldn't want my to write. Yeah, I was just thinking that although my daughter did find my diaries
[8:51]from when I was a kid. So it's not like anything was really going on. But she's like,
[8:55]oh yeah, I read that whole cabinet of your stuff. Are you kidding me? Anyway,
[9:00]who taught you to read? Yeah, I mean, at least she was reading. I mean, that's great.
[9:04]So your parents then had a relationship where your father had some extracurricular activities
[9:11]and you said that they just didn't really make each other happy. And I was wondering this is
[9:16]like totally private and you don't have to answer this. Like when you grow up with a marriage
[9:19]like that is a model, how does that affect your choice of spouse? And did you replicate that or
[9:25]did you go the other direction or did it have no effect at all? I think it's unquestionable. It
[9:31]has an effect and I'm not entirely sure I can nail down all the ways. You know, their marriage was
[9:38]functional. They lasted for 42 years before splitting up quite late. My father was an alcoholic.
[9:44]So that was a sort of subtheme that was not even acknowledged or articulated as a problem until
[9:52]quite late. So there was a sort of passive aggressive quality to their interactions. I think I
[9:58]emerged from that with
[10:00]real weariness about the institution of marriage.
[10:02]I think I thought for many years
[10:04]that it wasn't something I was going to do.
[10:06]I eventually was in my, pretty much my late 30s, mid 30s.
[10:12]I was in love with someone who wanted very strongly
[10:14]to get married and have children.
[10:17]And I suspect that had I not encountered
[10:19]at that moment in my life a person that determined,
[10:23]not to mention charming enough.
[10:24]Feeling, I might not have gotten married.
[10:27]So I'm very glad that I did because, of course,
[10:30]having children is an extraordinary experience
[10:33]that I would have, I would probably have missed.
[10:36]So I was, I think it left me with a real weariness.
[10:40]And as for who I married, I was married to man for 14 years
[10:44]who I was totally different background for me.
[10:47]You know, a Southern California Jewish surfer.
[10:51]And then not tape, I've obviously
[10:53]that many other qualities as well,
[10:55]but that gives you some sense of the disparate nature
[10:58]of the two of us, but we got along wonderfully
[11:01]and still do.
[11:02]And then after that, I now live with someone
[11:04]who also comes from an entirely different background.
[11:07]So I think I wasn't consciously fleeing that world,
[11:11]but the fact is from the moment,
[11:12]from pretty early on, certainly by the time
[11:14]I got to college, the man who interested me
[11:17]were not people who came from the world that I came from.
[11:20]It's funny how we can't really control
[11:22]who appeals to us,
[11:24]even though we might want to.
[11:26]This is just something I've been like,
[11:28]I'm just like armed chair fascinated by, right?
[11:30]Who we're attracted to and even if it's self-destructive,
[11:34]why?
[11:34]And where did that come from?
[11:35]Absolutely.
[11:36]And the problem is that in the sort of period
[11:38]in your life where you're most open,
[11:42]you're say 20s and 30s,
[11:44]you don't maybe even know yourself
[11:46]or understand your background well enough
[11:48]to know how it's playing into those decisions.
[11:50]In other words, you're not yet in therapy.
[11:52]Exactly, yeah.
[11:53]Time hasn't revealed some important answers yet.
[11:57]Do you think if your family had confronted the alcoholism?
[12:02]Things would be completely different or it's hard to say,
[12:05]but yeah, it turns out I didn't fully understand this
[12:08]when I was starting to work on the book.
[12:10]I knew that there were a lot of people
[12:12]who drank too much in my family
[12:14]in all different sides of my family, actually,
[12:16]but I didn't fully understand how deep
[12:19]and how widespread and how far back it went.
[12:23]And one of the stories in the family
[12:24]that had been buried was the death of my father's
[12:27]paternal grandfather who was said
[12:29]to have died heroically in France
[12:31]and World War I turned out to have shot himself.
[12:33]And it seems from everything I've sort of pieced together
[12:36]that he had a very serious drinking problem
[12:39]that was perhaps tied up with some kind of bipolar disease,
[12:44]which may be all those things
[12:46]were sort of transmitted down the generations
[12:48]because there have been multiple suicides in the family
[12:50]and the presence of alcoholism is undeniable.
[12:54]So that was at a time
[12:56]when people didn't even really use the term alcoholism.
[12:59]So what would have happened?
[13:00]I mean, I now, of course, we're so conscious of it
[13:03]and guard against it, my children have been propagandized
[13:07]from an early age that you have to be very careful
[13:10]because there's an innate vulnerability.
[13:12]But even now, alcoholism, I would say,
[13:16]or it's connection to mental health issues
[13:19]is not fully explained at least to the point
[13:21]where a layperson can see how that applies to their life.
[13:24]So I don't know.
[13:25]I mean, I definitely now that it's much more in the open,
[13:29]there's less alcoholism in the family.
[13:31]I don't know what would have happened back then
[13:33]when it wasn't really articulated in the way that it is.
[13:36]So that was at this event yesterday speaking of bipolar
[13:38]and it's connection to things.
[13:40]Apparently, there's a group of boys in Southern California
[13:43]who have been smoking pot all the time.
[13:46]And this whole group, it's a friend.
[13:48]Somebody, with somebody's friends, kids
[13:50]and all his cohort of friends.
[13:52]And because of this, this entire group of boys
[13:55]is developed by polar.
[13:57]From this pot.
[13:58]He's smoking?
[13:58]I don't know.
[13:59]Anyway, just throwing it out.
[14:00]Wow.
[14:01]That's something interesting.
[14:01]I heard yesterday.
[14:02]To be investigated, go ahead and do a whole piece on that.
[14:06]So this message from your book really stuck with me.
[14:08]He wrote, land houses money.
[14:11]Wealth had tumbled into my father's family
[14:13]from one generation to the next.
[14:15]You had a right to enjoy it, an obligation to protect it,
[14:18]a duty to pass it on to your own unsuspecting children.
[14:21]It was a stroke of good fortune, of course.
[14:23]But what you could never know starting out
[14:25]was how those things would influence decisions
[14:27]you'd make over a lifetime.
[14:28]You might resolve to live as the wealth didn't exist.
[14:31]But sooner or later, it would probably insinuate itself
[14:33]into your thinking about jobs, profession, marriage, children.
[14:36]Some beneficiaries flourished, some didn't.
[14:39]For some, the impact of all that good fortune
[14:40]appeared to have been mixed.
[14:42]My father, I began to think, had sensed the conundrum
[14:44]early on.
[14:45]So what do you make about this?
[14:48]Well, it became, in my thinking, as I worked on the book,
[14:51]it became kind of the theme of the book.
[14:53]And it's why I called the book the beneficiary,
[14:56]because I thought that word, although it's
[14:58]a somewhat legalistic word, there was something
[15:01]wonderfully ambiguous about it.
[15:02]Like, is this good or bad?
[15:04]And that's what I began to think about inheritance.
[15:08]These things are passed along in wealth
[15:11]as accumulated at different moments in American history.
[15:14]And families want to endow their next generation,
[15:19]or for several generations, pass on money, land,
[15:22]and also other things, values, genes, et cetera,
[15:25]and all of those things are kind of double-edged.
[15:27]I began to think.
[15:28]It's not to say it's universally bad or good.
[15:31]It's just ambiguous.
[15:33]And as for who benefits, really, who
[15:38]comes out, who benefits from the things that are passed on
[15:41]and who is hurt by it, that's
[15:43]like a complicated mathematical equation involving things
[15:46]like personality, genes, birth order, all sorts of stuff.
[15:51]So I'm not making an argument that wealth
[15:53]shouldn't be passed on.
[15:54]I was struck by how all this attention
[15:58]goes into figuring out the tax ways of dealing with it
[16:02]so that the minimum amount is taken up by the government,
[16:04]and how to carry it on multi-generationally,
[16:08]and not so much thought is given to what effect
[16:11]does it have on the decisions that people make early
[16:14]in their life?
[16:15]Decisions you might make about, well, what kind of work
[16:17]do I want to undertake?
[16:18]Do I really need how seriously do I need
[16:21]to take the obligation to support myself and a family,
[16:24]or will I always be kind of buoyed by this?
[16:26]Decisions about what kind of a person to marry.
[16:29]And so I just think it was very striking to me in working
[16:34]on this to see how my father's family,
[16:37]going back to the first guild today,
[16:40]operated very much the way wealthy people are operating now
[16:43]in terms of figuring out ways to protect their wealth
[16:45]and carry it on.
[16:46]But I didn't see a lot of evidence that a lot of concern
[16:49]was devoted to how do you, in that context,
[16:53]lead a productive, happy life where you feel the satisfaction
[16:57]of having created that life for yourself.
[16:59]And where'd you come at?
[17:01]How do you do it?
[17:01]How do kids do it?
[17:03]Do you think it?
[17:03]Well, I think, again, that depends on the person.
[17:06]I mean, in my family, well, here's what,
[17:08]well, I can speak for myself.
[17:09]I never didn't go back there to live in that compound,
[17:13]which was not that common in my generation,
[17:16]but my father's generation, it was expected
[17:18]that you would come back and live there
[17:20]and that that was your duty to the family.
[17:22]I didn't choose to do that.
[17:24]And to my parents' credit, I was not encouraged to.
[17:26]It was like, go out and find out what you want to do
[17:28]that makes you happy.
[17:30]So I moved around the country and worked for newspapers
[17:33]and lived with completely different kind of world.
[17:36]And now I feel that the life I created was the life I wanted.
[17:42]But I don't know that that's the answer for everyone.
[17:44]My grandmother, my father's mother, who was in many ways
[17:48]became the sort of emblem of that place,
[17:50]well-known, admired.
[17:52]It worked really well for her.
[17:54]It had something to do with her personality.
[17:56]She was the first in her generation, her relationship
[17:58]with her father.
[18:00]So it's just all quite murky, but I think
[18:02]deserves more attention than it perhaps gets.
[18:05]And then the Philadelphia story was based on her.
[18:08]Well, yes.
[18:09]It's also perhaps, as you know, my grandfather,
[18:12]who married into the family, wanted to be a playwright,
[18:15]studied playwriting at Harvard and met Phillip Barry,
[18:18]who became one of the most successful playwrights
[18:20]in the 20th century and wrote the Philadelphia story.
[18:22]And when the Philadelphia story opened on Broadway in 1939,
[18:26]it was dedicated to my grandparents.
[18:28]Phillip Barry had gone many times to this compound
[18:32]and to the big house on the compound,
[18:34]which is called our drawson, named after a castle in Scotland.
[18:38]And Barry clearly selected, designed the setting
[18:42]and that world around a lot of things he
[18:45]deserved in that house.
[18:46]I mean, it's full of the small references
[18:48]to things that nobody else would notice,
[18:50]but that anyone who knows that world and that particular place
[18:53]would see were taken from that.
[18:55]As a result, it came to be said years later
[18:58]that my grandmother was the model for Tracy Lord.
[19:01]Whether or not she was is entirely clear
[19:03]they clearly were involved as influences
[19:06]in the creation of the play,
[19:08]but Tracy Lord was also heavily based on Catherine Hepburn.
[19:11]It's clear from Barry's papers,
[19:13]but my grandmother used it very successfully
[19:16]for her own purposes.
[19:17]And when she died at the age of 91,
[19:19]after being knocked down by her pet donkeys,
[19:22]her obituary was stripped across the top of the front page
[19:25]of the Philadelphia Enquirer in type,
[19:28]only slightly smaller than what was used a few years later
[19:31]for the death of the Pope.
[19:32]So she made it work for her.
[19:35]She made her mark.
[19:37]So tell me about the process of writing this book.
[19:39]How long did it take to write?
[19:40]How long did it take to research?
[19:42]I did a couple of years of research,
[19:45]like maybe two and a half years of research
[19:47]before I even tried to put together anything like a proposal.
[19:51]My agent who I admire enormously, Andrew Wiley said,
[19:55]this kind of book, you want to know exactly where you're going
[19:58]before you try to sell it.
[20:00]one in editor to determine that it ought to be something different.
[20:03]So I did what he suggested, and then I got to a point where I really, after a couple
[20:08]of years, I really felt I had to put something down.
[20:11]For one thing, I wanted to feel legitimate by having an advance, and so I, but I couldn't
[20:16]do what he said, which was sort of right a scene and give him an outline.
[20:20]I couldn't do that without just writing the beginning of the book, so I sat down and
[20:23]I spent six months writing the first chapter, which was just 9,000 words.
[20:28]And I sent it to him and he sold it, he then asked me for an outline, which was quite
[20:33]difficult.
[20:34]And then he sold it in a day, just because his idea of how you do this, what turned
[20:39]that to be absolutely true.
[20:40]So then I sold it and then I asked for a three-year contract, which is, as you know, relatively
[20:45]long contract.
[20:47]So I did get it in on time, and then I took it back up my own Instagram, I got it in
[20:52]an early summer and I said, can I have, after she, you know, I made my deadline, then I said,
[20:56]they're taking back, because there's a few things I wanted to discuss with my editor,
[21:00]and that, you know, I wanted to make some fixes.
[21:02]So I took it back for a few months and then gave it back and then the editing process
[21:05]and everything took, you know, a good year plus.
[21:08]So I'd say, all in all, I have to confess that it probably took six to seven years.
[21:13]That's okay.
[21:14]Yeah.
[21:15]Did you have a place you have a place you like to write?
[21:17]I like to write, if I had a padded cell, it would be a padded cell, I can't really work, working
[21:25]on a long project, like a book, I can't do it in my own apartment.
[21:28]There's too many virtuous diversions, like laundry and so my partner is also a writer
[21:34]and I rented, also a former journalist, rented an apartment near our apartment.
[21:40]It was a one bedroom.
[21:41]We called it the bureau and we would go over there every day and he had, I had the bedroom
[21:46]and he had the living room and we wrote there in really almost complete silence.
[21:51]He's even more focused than I am.
[21:53]So we really didn't speak much in the course of the entire day but it was great because
[21:57]there were no distractions, there are almost no, you know, pictures anywhere except stuff
[22:01]that related to the books we were working on.
[22:04]Wow.
[22:05]So that works for me.
[22:06]That's so nice.
[22:07]Yeah.
[22:08]That image.
[22:09]Do you have, what's coming next for you?
[22:11]Well at the moment, I'm just doing some journalism.
[22:13]I definitely want to do another book but I'm torn because I did learn a lot in doing
[22:19]this book in terms of writing and the value of being able to invest something personal
[22:25]and emotional in the storytelling in that the response of this book is so different from
[22:30]their response to my first book.
[22:32]I mean, just qualitatively different.
[22:34]So I'd like to be able to use that in a way and I don't certainly, I don't think I
[22:39]want to run another memoir but I'd like to be able to figure out how to use that and apply
[22:42]it to my journalistic skills and I haven't figured out the topic that will allow that yet
[22:48]but I hope to.
[22:49]Meanwhile, you're like, I'm just going to do some journalism.
[22:51]Meanwhile, you want to pull it's a prize in your time.
[22:54]So I feel like your idea of just a little journalism might be different than some other
[22:57]people's idea.
[22:58]I was part of a team.
[22:59]Okay.
[23:00]I'm part of a team.
[23:01]I mean, that's that cancer in my life for Pulitzer Prize winners.
[23:05]What advice would you have to aspiring authors?
[23:08]Read as much as you possibly can and read the great works of literature, I would say.
[23:15]I mean, that doesn't mean they're not contemporary.
[23:17]They're a wonderful contemporary great works but there's also the last 200 years of
[23:23]American and British literature.
[23:25]I would strongly recommend and I would say give yourself plenty of time.
[23:30]I think that the value of time mundane as it is, it seems like almost pedestrian but
[23:37]you just have to have time to go back and back and back over what you're writing.
[23:42]I think I read somewhere recently that everybody's first drafts are dreadful and I think
[23:46]there's a lot of truth to that.
[23:48]You know, you like to think that and occasionally you read about people who've whipped
[23:52]the thing off in seven months.
[23:53]I mean, I think you even heard about EM Forster in some cases but that does not, that's
[23:58]not something I'm capable of and I suspect that's a small class of genius that can do
[24:04]that.
[24:05]Great.
[24:06]Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.
[24:08]Thank you, Zippy.
[24:09]It was fun.
[24:10]I'm sharing your family history with us all.
[24:11]You're welcome.
[24:12]You've been listening to moms don't have time to read books with Zippy Owens.
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[24:23]Once again, today's episode has been sponsored by Audible.
[24:26]I'm so excited that Audible has been working with moms don't have time to read books.
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[24:34]Check it out.
[24:35]If you think you don't have time to read, listen.
[24:38]the way you're listening to me right now and try out a book that way, you might really
[24:43]love it.
[24:44]Audible.com slash Zippy.
[24:45]Thanks.
[24:46]You can follow me on Instagram at moms don't have time to read books.
[24:49]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the Sound Editing and thank you
[24:54]to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and out trim music.
[24:58]Thanks for listening.
[24:59]You can always email me at zippyatzippyowens.com.