Best Of: Harrison Ford / Novelist Francis Spufford

From WQXR and Carnegie Hall comes Classical Music Happy Hour, a new podcast hosted by me, Pianist Maniacs. Each episode, we'll speak with a special guest, listen to musical gems, play music-inspired games, and answer questions from our listeners. The first episode drops March 4th. Listen on the NPR app. From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Sam Brigger. Today, Harrison Ford. The star of Star Wars and Indiana Jones is now in his 80s and starring in the series Shrinking as a therapist who has Parkinson's. So far, the show's writers haven't shared with him the progression of his character's disease. So like a true Parkinson's patient, I don't really know what's coming. Also, we'll hear from British novelist Frances Spufford. His new novel follows a young woman in World War II London trying to survive the Blitz, navigate romance, and fight time-traveling fascists. I knew that I wanted to write a fantasy which very deliberately had as its protagonist somebody who was really strongly in favor of nylons, lipsticks, and invitations. And David Bianculli reviews the new film Peaky Blinders, which is a follow-up to the hit British TV show of the same name. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. This message comes from Sports in America with David Green. The world of sports is filled with stories that go beyond the highlights of the game. Join former Morning Edition host David Green for Sports in America from WHYY and PRX, a weekly show featuring in-depth conversations with star athletes, coaches, parents, and the millions of fans whose lives are touched by the game. Hear about the personal and transformative moments that make fans want to stand up and cheer each week on Sports in America with David Green. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Sam Brigger. Terry has today's first interview. Is there anyone who doesn't know who Harrison Ford is? Probably not. Not after starring in the original and the sequels of Star Wars, the Indiana Jones movies, and Blade Runner. He's in his 80s, but in the last three years, you might have seen him in the final Indiana Jones film The Dial of Destiny, the prequel to Yellowstone called 1923, and his current series, Shrinking. Three seasons of Shrinking are streaming on Apple TV, and it's been renewed for a fourth. He plays a therapist, Paul, who heads a practice that includes two other therapists, Jimmy, played by Jason Segel, and Gabby, played by Jessica Williams. Paul is at an age where most people have retired, but he doesn't want to. At the same time, he thinks maybe he needs to. He has Parkinson's disease. At first, the symptoms were relatively minor, but they've progressed. His hands shake so much it's difficult to put the toothpaste onto the toothbrush. Even more problematic because it affects his work, his shaky hands are making it difficult to take notes when he's talking with patients. Michael J. Fox is in a couple of episodes playing a man who has a more advanced case of Parkinson's and is very depressed. They first meet at a doctor's office where they're both patients. Paul is a gifted therapist, but it's hard for him to express emotion, and he has a dark and cynical sense of humor. In this scene from the current season, season three, Paul has returned to work after taking some time off because a UTI was causing hallucinations. So this scene is from his first day back at work. He's telling Jimmy he thinks it might be time to retire. In the past, Paul had asked Jimmy to tell him when he thought it was time. Now Jason Segel's character, Jimmy, speaks first. Hey, how was your first day back? Really great. I think it's time for me to stop being a therapist. Do you, Paul? I'm not going to fall for that one twice. No, I'm serious. I took going away and coming back to see it. But it's time, Jimmy. I'm supposed to tell you that it's time. Well, you can do that if you want. It's time for you to retire, Paul. Okay. Not the way I saw this going in my head. I'm going to miss you. You mean so, so much to me. I've always wanted to tell you this one thing, Oh, Jesus, Jimmy, please. I'm not leaving now. I've got patients to notify. I've got referrals to make. It'll take months to wind down this practice. You only get to say goodbye once, and it's not today. Come on, I want pizza on the way home. Let's go. Let's go! Harrison Ford, welcome to Fresh Air. It's such an honor to speak with you. Thank you for being here. Oh, how kind of you. Thank you for having me. Some people are surprised that you're continuing to act, you know, in your 80s. And Paul says, after his Parkinson's has gotten worse, and he's thinking of retiring, he says, I love my job more than anything, and I don't know who I am without it. Do you relate to that, or do you know who you are without your work? Yeah, I guess I do. But without my work, I really wouldn't know what to do with myself, really. With your time? Well, I suppose I could fill my time, but I don't know what else I might do that would give me the kind of satisfaction and the kind of challenge that the work I'm doing does give me. I really do love the work. I don't blame you. It seems like it would be so fulfilling. Well, it constantly changes and the people change and the mission and the opportunity change. And it just makes for an interesting way to live your life. And I love that you play your age because it's frustrating when like a beautiful woman plays somebody who's ugly by just not wearing as much makeup, but she's never ugly. Or a younger person has to play an older person by putting on prosthetics. Like, we have talented people who look like they're supposed to look. Can we cast them, please? Well, I felt that way when I was de-aged in Indiana Jones. Sometimes it works, and I thought it worked in Indiana Jones, that de-aging part. But I'm happy to be the age I am, and I have no impulse to hide it. Well, speaking of Indiana Jones, so Dial of Destiny was like 2023 it was released. And, you know, you're still like super strong and agile in that. And then you had to go from that to not long after doing shrinking. and so in shrinking you're physically compromised because of the Parkinson's disease. What was it like for you and your body to be action hero strong and then your hand is shaking too much to take notes? Well, I mean, it starts with the head of the character, what's in his head, what's in his mind, And I'm always aware of the physicalization of a character. And the Parkinson's or the various symptoms of Parkinson's do help characterize Paul. So it's an opportunity to use another means to create the character. Michael J. Fox is in the series, and you meet at a doctor's office. He's really depressed. Did he give you advice about how to play the role? Nope. Really? You didn't ask him for advice? No, because every case is different, and my case is not yet described to me fully. My writers present symptomology and characteristics as they are writing. And so I'm sort of living with the symptoms I have been last described as having. Yeah, I mean, the thing about Parkinson's is that it affects everything, but it affects different parts of it. There's a whole long list of things it affects, but everybody gets a different number of them and a different variation of them. Right, right. Tremors everybody gets, yeah. So like a true Parkinson's patient, I don't really know what's coming. Oh, that's interesting. You mean like what the writers have in store for you in terms of your symptoms? Yeah. I have a general sense of how far it goes this season, but nothing specific yet. And that's just the way our show works. We get a script probably, if we're lucky, a couple weeks ahead of time, but normally maybe just a couple of days or a week ahead of time. Did playing the role make you think about your body in a new way and think of what it would be like to not be able to control your movements? Not specifically. To be honest, no. There's parts of it I haven't thought through yet, really. And I think that might be similar to how I might react if I did have Parkinson's. I would want to know certain things and other things I would just not want to know. So as to not obsess on them? So as to not be looking for them. Just be happy enough with what you got. Paul, your character has a very cynical sense of humor. He's really funny, very dark retorts. And you have a very funny sense of humor. I heard you on Conan's podcast, and you make Conan and the whole team laugh so much and so hard. Do you ever punch up your lines or add funny lines because, honestly, your sense of humor is so good? Sure, stuff comes up, and we have really good writers, and I love what they have to offer. But, you know, it's a collaborative atmosphere, and I feel free to bring up any idea I have. Can you think of a line that you added in one of your movies? I guess the most famous, the one most well-known and perhaps illustrative of where it comes from is the line in Star Wars where Princess Leia tells me that she loves me and I say, I know, I know, instead of saying I love you too, which is the scripted line. Simply the impulse was to be more in character. And George Lucas, who had written the line, was not so happy that I didn give him the original version But I really felt strongly about it So he made me sit next to him when he previewed the film in a public movie theater in San Francisco And it got a laugh but it got a good laugh. And so he accepted it and left it in. So Juan has to play another scene from Shrinking, and this is from the first season. I think it's the pilot, actually. So Jimmy, who's one of the therapists in Paul's office, and he's played by Jason Segel, he's really annoyed with his patients for not changing when he's told them they have to change and stop doing the thing that's making them miserable. But this is just an expression of his disorientation and grief because his wife died a year or two ago in a car crash, and he hasn't recovered. He hasn't been himself since her death. So this is the scene where he's talking to your character, Paul, and explaining why he's so angry. And also you'll hear Jessica Williams as therapist Gabby and Harrison Ford, you speak first. Hey, kid. How are you doing? I'm normal, you know. It's a normal day. Normal day. Doing it, doing it normal style. Hey, you know what I was thinking, Paul? Is it about how you're just doing it normal style? What? What are you thinking? You guys ever get so mad at your patients that all of a sudden you just, well, shake them? Well, we don't shake them. No, I know, I know. I'm rooting for them. I am. I'm like, come on, you up person. You can change. And then they just never do. Compassion fatigue. We all hit those walls. Yeah. You ask questions, you listen, you stay non-judgmental, and you don't make that face. Sorry. It's just... Look, we know what they should do. You know why? Because it's pretty simple. I get sad when I do this thing. Maybe don't do that thing. We know the answer. Don't you ever want to just make them do it? Great idea. We just rob them of their autonomy any chance they have to help themselves, right? And we become what? Psychological vigilantes? Vigilantes? Oh, my God. I'm, like, sensing the sarcasm, but that sounds kind of badass. I like that scene a lot. So you haven't experienced, like, the body symptoms of Parkinson's, even though you have to portray them in your role. But you have experienced a whole lot of injuries that you sustained making movies, including on your last Indiana Jones film in 2023. So I'll run through a list of things that I've read. And you can confirm that you've had this. You ruptured a disc in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. You tore a ligament in The Fugitive. In Star Wars, The Force Awakens, a hydraulic door closed on you and you broke your leg and injured your ankle. In Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, you injured your shoulder while you were rehearsing. So how are you dealing with pain? Pretty good. It sounds like I'm accident prone. Not to me. It sounds like you're in movies where you do dangerous things and of course you'd get some injuries. Yeah, it's running, jumping, falling down. Yeah, there you go. And I gave it the office. Let's put it that way. Because they made you do it? No, nobody makes me do it. I make the choices of whether I want to do something. They'll often tell me, no, you can't do it. Like don't do the stunt? Yeah, well, it's not a stunt. If I'm doing it, it's by definition not a stunt. But that doesn't mean it's not risky. Well, what it means is that I want the audience to be with the character through the activity that we're talking about. I don't want to have to hide the face of the character because it's a stunt guy. I want them to feel the blow. I want them to see the anxiety. I want them to be there when the decision is made or when the decision is missed. I just want them to be there. And it takes me being there to bring them along, I think. We're listening to Terry's interview with Harrison Ford. He's now starring in the series Shrinking on Apple TV. We'll hear more of their conversation after a break. I'm Sam Brigger, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. So after being an episodic TV like Gunsmoke and The Virginian, anything like the FBI? Was that one of them? Oh, there were a lot. Yeah, yeah. So then you've got the part in American Graffiti where you're somebody who loves to race cars. And it's not a big part, but it's a significant part. and American Graffiti kind of tangentially led to Star Wars. You were a carpenter in between because you weren't getting enough work. So you were working for Coppola as a carpenter doing something in his home or his office. Well, actually, I was working for Dean Tavalaris, who was Francis's art director. And Francis had moved into new offices at Goldman Studios and Dean had designed an entrance to the offices and Dean needed somebody to install it. And so he asked me if I would do him a favor because he couldn't find a carpenter to get it installed. I said that I would do the job. I'd be happy to do the job. But I only wanted to work at night because I didn't want to confuse the people in the office about whether I was a carpenter or an actor. You went to carpentry to be your side gig. You were an actor. Yeah. Well, I wanted them to think of me as an actor, not to think of me as a carpenter. So I was there sweeping up. I was just finishing the job when George Lucas walked in with Richard Dreyfuss, who had been in American Graffiti. We had all of us who had been in American Graffiti had been told that we would not be considered for Star Wars because George wanted new faces. And here he is having the first interview with Richard Dreyfuss. And I'm standing there in my carpenter's work belt sweeping up the floor. But it turned out to be a fortuitous occasion because weeks later I would end up being asked if I would do them a favor and read with the other actors who were being considered for the parts. So you'd just be feeding them the lines. That's right. But he was auditioning your partner, not you. That's correct. I never was told that I was ever to be considered. And then at the end of the process, I guess they ended up with two groups of three people that were in the final consideration. And I've always been amused that in the second group, the character of Han Solo would have been played by Chris Walken. Oh. I would have loved to see that. Oh, God. That's so interesting. He's one of my favorite actors. He's so great. His lines readings are so unusual. Yeah. So you were surprised you got the part? Yeah. Thrilled. So I'm going to play a clip just so we get in the moment. So this is a scene from Star Wars, the first one, in which Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker and you as Han Solo, along with Chewbacca, are on the Death Star. And R2-D2 and C-3PO are there with you as well. And where you find out that Princess Leia is being held in detention and is likely to be killed. And the person, the android, breaking the news to you is C-3PO, who is portrayed by Anthony Daniels. They're gonna execute her. Look, a few minutes ago you said you didn't want to just wait here to be captured. Now all you want to do is stay? Marching into the detention area is not what I had in mind. But they're gonna kill her! Better her than me. She's rich. Rich. Rich. Powerful. Listen, if you were to rescue her, the reward would be... What? Well, more wealth than you can imagine. I don't know. I can imagine quite a bit. You'll get it. All right. So what's your reaction to hearing that? It seems like a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Right. Did the script make sense to you without being able to visualize Chewbacca or R2-D2 or C-3PO or the special effects? You just got what's called the sides, like your part, and you didn't have a larger context, so it was probably hard to actually have an idea of what the film was like. But when you saw the film for the first time with the special effects and with the androids and with the stirring music behind it, what did you think? I was blown away. I mean, I was really shocked by the power of the film when I saw it. You know, we shot in England, and our English crew were not used to something like Star Wars. And so they were pretty sure that it was going to be a disaster. and we weren't far from that opinion ourselves, the actors. But it, you know... It did okay. It did well. Yeah, it did okay. Elton John once asked you if you were going to write a memoir. I think that was after he wrote his. And you, I've read that what you told him was that you didn't want to tell the truth but you don't want to lie. And I thought that was an interesting position to take, especially in a time when a lot of people share absolutely everything. Yeah. Can you say more about that? Well, I don't think Elton thought I had the best answer because he is brutally honest about himself, and I'm not prepared to be brutally honest about myself. Is it out of self-protection or protecting other people or both? Probably both, yeah. It's just, I just don't think it's anybody's business. Anyway. So is it awkward for you to be interviewed all the time, like in this interview, and have things that are like really private? I tried to like not invade your privacy You know you been very gracious and it always a struggle I think to know how to control this volume of information about yourself Well, it's been great to talk with you. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you coming back on our show. Thank you. Harrison Ford co-stars in the series Shrinking. It's streaming on Apple TV. He spoke with Terry Gross. Peaky Blinders was a British series that premiered in 2013 and ran for nearly 10 years. It starred Cillian Murphy long before he won an Oscar for starring in the movie Oppenheimer, as Tommy Shelby, an urban youth gang leader in Birmingham who rose to political power in the early 20th century despite a poor background. The series, created by Stephen Knight, developed a strong following and now is back with a movie-length sequel with Murphy returning to star. Our TV critic David Bianculli has this review. During his decade on the BBC period drama Peaky Blinders, Cillian Murphy matured visibly as a man and also as an actor. Stephen Knight wrote such a challenging and nuanced role for him as gangster Tommy Shelby that it wasn't surprising at all that when the series concluded, Murphy was tapped to star as J. Robert Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan. It also wasn't surprising, if you'd devoured all six seasons of Peaky Blinders, that Murphy would be not only willing but eager to revisit the character of Tommy Shelby one last time, especially when the script is written by night and brings the story to a dramatic conclusion. The drama in The Immortal Man is provided by both personal and historical challenges. We last saw Tommy Shelby in the final episode of Peaky Blinders in the 1930s. Prohibition had been repealed in the U.S., the Nazi Party was rising in Germany, and Tommy's volatile brother, Arthur, was about to die. The movie Peaky Blinders' The Immortal Man jumps ahead to November 1940, when England already is at war with Germany. A munitions factory staffed by women in Birmingham, Tommy's hometown, is bombed by aerial strikes from the Nazis and claims more than 100 victims. Tommy has long since secluded himself far away, isolated in a remote farmhouse, haunted by wartime memories and what he fears are family ghosts. But the bombing brings a visit from his sister Ada, played by Sophie Rundle. She informs him not only of the devastation to Birmingham, but the fact that his estranged son has taken control of his old gang, the Peaky Blinders, and is making new and dangerous moves and alliances. Tommy, you've got to come back with me. Speak some words over the graves of the dead and speak to your son before he gets himself hung by the law or lynched by the people. Ada, I see things. Yeah, you always did. But since Arthur died... Since Arthur died... Since Arthur died, it's like a door on me head. It's blown open. I can't close it. Tommy would prefer to stay distant and uninvolved. But the recklessness of his son Duke, played by Barry Keoghan, leaves him little choice. Duke meets with Beckett, a British Nazi sympathizer played by Tim Roth, who finds in Duke an important and agreeable collaborator. Their meeting begins with Beckett handing Duke a British pound note. Yeah. You can keep that. Freshly printed, counterfeit, five-pound note. There's plenty more where that came from. How much more? 350 million pounds more. It's my job to introduce the money into the British economy using organized criminal gangs. So Peaky Blinders gets a 20% cut. That's 70 million pounds to use as you see fit. But be ready for the anarchy that comes after. I'm ready. Yep. obviously Berlin would much prefer it if I was talking to your father. Once that's in play, very early on, Tommy Shelby finds himself having to take sides and do battle, either defending or betraying his own country and either saving or opposing his own son. The stakes couldn't be much higher, or, in writer Stephen Knight's hands, more unpredictable or gripping. He always populates his dramas with terrific actors and vibrant characters, and in The Immortal Man, we get delightful return visits from, among others, Peaky Blinders series players Rebecca Ferguson, Stephen Graham, and Paki Lee. And most of all, we get Knight's brilliant approach to his period dramas, the way he folds the fictional and the factual. He's done it so well so many times for so many outstanding TV series, and I've given rave reviews to most of them. A Thousand Blows, The Veil, House of Guinness, All the Light We Cannot See, and some that eluded me at the time, but which I've caught up with and have been delighted by. Like Taboo from 2017, which featured great early performances by both Tom Hardy and Jesse Buckley, who just won a Best Actress Oscar for Hamnet. You can watch The Immortal Man all by itself, but if you're uninitiated in what's come before, you shouldn't. All six seasons of Peaky Blinders are available on Netflix, and there are only six episodes per season. So even if you start from the beginning, you'll get to this new movie sequel before you know it. Like any good Stephen Knight drama, and they're all good, Peaky Blinders is addictive, easy to consume, and impossible to forget. David Bianculli reviewed the film Peaky Blinders, The Immortal Man. Coming up, novelist Francis Spufford talks about his new book, Nonesuch, about a young woman in World War II London trying to survive the Blitz and defeat time-traveling fascists. This is Fresh Air Weekend. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan is a fan of British author Francis Spufford's novels, and so am I. Two of my most enjoyable reading experiences over the last 10 years were reading Cahokia Jazz, a 1920s noir crime novel set in an alternate American history where a sovereign majority indigenous nation-state thrives in the middle of the United States, and Golden Hill, a novel set in 18th century New York. If I had to make a list of my top five great American novels, Golden Hill would be high on that list, despite the fact that it takes place before the country was founded, and its author is a Brit. Now that author, my guest Frances Spufford, has written another incredibly entertaining book. It's called Nonesuch. It takes place in London during the war as a city must try to survive the Blitz, the eight-month bombing campaign led by the Nazis that killed over 40,000 British. Iris Hawkins, a young independent woman, is trying to survive the nightly attacks while push against society's constraints that would keep her in a secretarial pool until she was safely married off. Her ambitions seek something much more expansive. While her independent side fights against it, she finds herself falling in love with Jeff, a young man working in an even younger broadcast format, television. Oh, and did I mention she has to fight off magic time-traveling fascists who want to travel in the past and kill Winston Churchill? Yes, that's there too. And a magical land called Nonesuch and Angels and a lot more. Francis Buffer got to novel writing on the late side, in his 50s, after writing nonfiction. He's also written Light Perpetual, a novel that imagines the lives of five real-life people if they had not died as children in the Blitz, and an unauthorized book in the Narnia series, which were officially written by C.S. Lewis. He also wrote a memoir called The Child That Books Built, about his early escape into reading, and unapologetic, why despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense. Francis Buffard, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you for having me. So I'm clearly not British, but I understand to some degree the foundational importance of the Blitz on modern British identity. But can you illuminate just how important that history is, especially for Londoners? It's the epic moment in the history of London as a city. It comes in a heavily mythicized form with politicians invoking something called the blitz spirit over the decades since, which is a kind of rather misleading image of total social consensus and kind of spontaneous mass virtue, which, of course, is very flattering if you're British. It's nice to think that amidst the complications and bits of shame and horror in our history, especially the imperial side of it, there should be one moment where we did the right thing. You've professed your love for the C.S. Lewis Narnia books. And in those books, the children discover the land of Narnia because they're sent out of London in the country for safety during the war. Iris, your hero, will discover Nonesuch, this fantasy land, because of the war too. Did you think of your book Nonesuch as in conversation with the Narnia books? Exactly that. I was wanting to have a conversation with Lewis and with the other members of the Inklings, his writing circle, who through the period of the war were writing these cosmic thrillers motivated by, I think, a very similar sense that there was something unearthly about the ruined city, a way in which it seemed quite natural for people to be pushed to the familiar edges of their experience and then beyond it into something unearthly or magical. But also I had a specific loving argument I wanted to have with C.S. Lewis because I am a devotee of the Narnia books. I have been since I was a child, but because I love him, I'm allowed to be annoyed with him as well. And I wanted to pick up specifically the notoriously unfair bit at the end of the last Narnia book in which the character Susan is not allowed to join in with the happy ending because, as it says, she's interested in nothing nowadays but nylons, lipsticks and invitations. And ever since, people have been trying to find a kind of spiritual meaning for what Lewis had done there. And maybe there is one, but there's also, I think, very clearly a kind of bachelor incomprehension or even distaste for the lives of young women. So I knew that I wanted to write a fantasy set then, which very deliberately had, as its protagonist finding her way into wonder, somebody who was really strongly in favour of nylons, lipsticks and invitations and everything they represent. although my protagonist Iris would prefer silk if she can get her hands on it. In your book, and this is your phrase, magical time-traveling fascists, want to go back in time and murder Winston Churchill before he shores up Britain's will to fight the Nazis. Iris even walks by this house in Chelsea where she lives. It's the headquarters of the British fascists, which was actually a place. Can you talk a bit about the sympathies that the upper class of Britain had for the Nazis during that time? There was a distinct kind of vein of pro sentiment in the British upper classes partly because as in other bits of Europe Germany Italy the Great Depression had shook people's faith that kind of liberal democracy could do the business and cure the ills of the present day. But also because they liked order and hierarchy and they could see those things disappearing in the modern world. Again, one of the strange things to get your head around is that for the first nine months of the Second World War, British fascists were operating completely unimpeded. They were running candidates in special elections on a peace platform. They thought the war was a terrible misunderstanding of Hitler's good intentions and that it was probably caused by evil Jewish plutocrats. And they were there offering what seemed to them and to defeated and disheartened people beyond the actual fascist organization as the future, the inevitable thing that would happen when Europe went fascist. And I give Iris a sense of visceral horror, which I think is completely deserved, watching these people with their big sign saying fascism is practical patriotism and fascism for king and empire and peace now. Active at the very moment where a fascist army are kind of rolling westwards and look very much as if they're going to conquer Britain too. It is local evil to go with global evil. You know, this is a time of rising authoritarianism in many countries. Was that on your mind when you were writing Nonesuch? Yes, I did become very aware the moment of this book aligns itself, overlaps with the moment we're having now and that the dangers of that time are kind of a warning about the dangers of this time. and that there should be something really sobering about what a close thing it was that the world did in the end decide to resist fascism, that there was just the right balance of opinion in Britain to just push it over to going, actually, stuff the British Empire, this is too important, we'll bankrupt ourselves to fight fascism. Let's talk about your hero Iris Hawkins. Like other female characters in your books, Iris is coming up against the social constraints for the women of her time. And at this period, working women like her are relegated to the secretarial pools of London brokerages, even though she wants to be like a player in the world of finance. She also enjoys casual sex, but has to be careful not to have that tarnish her reputation. There's an obvious double standard there. In order to rent an apartment, she has to pretend to be married to a soldier serving abroad because no one will rent to a, quote, tart. she's a really great character you dedicated none such to your grandmother Nancy and under the dedication you wrote quote not entirely a good girl and in your afterward you said that like Iris she quote came from Watford and she was as Iris would say of an adventurous disposition but Iris isn't her unquote of course you are pointing out the connections between Iris and your grandmother we didn't need to know any of those So how was she an inspiration for Iris? My intentions here are celebratory. And she is safely dead. She died at 99 and a half 15 years ago. There was a particular moment. My grandmother was a resilient person who was on the whole hopeless at storytelling about her life. So you only ever got very small glimpses of what she had done in the past. And there was a moment at the beginning of this century when she was in her vigorous early 90s when she and I went to the oldest Indian restaurant in England. And we sat down. She looked around and she said, I was last here in about 1935. It hasn't changed much. And then she said with no prompting at all, I always preferred going out with married men because they always spent so much more money on you. And then she clammed up instantly. This door opened on the other side of it, this clearly completely unregretted kind of good time she'd had being a bad girl. And then it slammed shut again. And I could not get her to talk any more about it. She just smiled and looked mysterious. So Iris is in some ways my attempt to imagine my way into that world. But I didn't have much to go on. So Iris is a creation, not a copy. Were you able to discover anything more about your grandmother's adventures? Hers happened in the early 30s. She was busy being a parent, having run off with Mr. Spufford, who all her brothers hated. But later on, she worked for a medical charity, which brought distinguished and rather attractive doctors from all over the world. And at her funeral, my father, who loved his mother and was very proud of her, had to be prevented from reading aloud a list of the distinguished lovers that he deduced she had. That's too bad. I know, I know. But, you know, it was a funeral. Maybe the mood would have been wrong. So I didn't have much to go on. And I am aware of the difficulties of doing this as a male writer. And it seems to me that the way to cross the distance between me and someone like Iris is to really commit to her viewpoint. So the book never, ever lets you know what she looks like, for example. So she is never the object of the book's attention. She is always the subject, the person who is looking at the world and liking what she sees. There are a number of detailed descriptions of the male bodies she looks at, but none of her own. And I wanted somebody who genuinely had the freedom to be unlikable at times and complicated and genuinely self-centered, not a secretly kind-hearted person merely posing as assertive, but somebody who was determined enough to get what they want that they could be quite manipulative. Right. Francis, you grew up in a university town. Both of your parents were historians, and I think both taught at the University of Kiel. You had a younger sister who was born with a genetic disorder, cystinosis, that she died from at the age of 22. And it sounds like your parents, unsurprisingly, were very occupied in your childhood with her care and really trying to save her. But as her sibling, I'm guessing you were perhaps benignly neglected, understandably so. I wouldn't put it quite like that. They tried their damnedest. They were very aware of exactly the danger of me being benignly neglected. But it had the perverse consequence that I think I spent my childhood feeling I needed to reassure them that I was fine, which was emotionally laborious in itself. So I was very glad to head off into books as a series of doors out from emotional intensity. Right. You said that reading was your escape. You actually have a memoir called The Child that Books Built. And you especially enjoyed fantasy by Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. So what was your reading behavior like? Were you the kind of reader that would read over everything else, like doing your schoolwork, seeing friends, eating? Yeah, and remained so for some time, although the existence of the iPhone has kind of sabotaged that deep immersion now. I was the kind of reader as a child where people had to shout in my ears when it was mealtime to get me to come back and pay attention to the soundtrack of the real world. Very deep immersion with something I think a bit driven about it. I'm not sorry that I've lost the capacity to go that far away, though I wish I could swim in whole reservoirs of novels rather than coming up to check my email every half an hour or so. In that memoir, you write, still, when I reach for a book, I am reaching for an equilibrium. I am reading to banish pity and brittle bones. I am reading to evade guilt and avoid consequences. That made me think of your sister. And I was wondering if you feel survivor's guilt over her death or even when she was living, did you feel some guilt because of your healthiness? yes i did is the short answer um the way i dealt with it was to was to behave as if it was a kind of law of the universe that i was fine so i didn't let myself think um it's not fair that i should live um and she shouldn't but at the same time i felt overwhelmed by by the scale of of of what would have been the right kind of order of compassion. So I think I showed less of it than I should have done. And yeah, there's guilt in that now. And I didn't know her as well as I could have because I was so aware of her as a kind of potentially pitiable person, whereas in fact, she was a funny and rather peppery and witty person as described by other people. And I kind Missed that because I was in Narnia and because I was going, no, no, I can't look. It's too awful. I miss her very much. I wish now at 61 I had a 58-year-old sister who had passed through all of these decades with me and who I could compare notes with. But I don't. I haven't seen her for, oh, Lord, it's 35 years now. But I think of her often. We haven't spoken about your novel Light Perpetual, but that imagines what would have been the lives of five children who were actually killed by a bomb during the Blitz. And I was wondering if in that book, although she's not a character, whether you were also imagining what your sister's life would have been like if she had lived. In an indirect way, yes, absolutely. Someone can be a presence without being a character. And once the shock of somebody dying young is over, I think the sorrow of it settles in around all of the things that they're then missing and all of the stages of life that they don't get to go through. there were some reviews of like perpetual saying you know the children who die in the first chapter and then get given a kind of ambiguous literary resurrection people were complaining that they didn't have remarkable lives and they grew old and died anyway and I thought yes but that's the prize what you want is to grow old and die anyway going back to what I said in the memoir about reading to banish pity that changes and I don't read to banish pity anymore. I didn't write to banish pity either. I write to try and find concrete and fully felt ways to give pity a place to live and endure. In some ways, I suppose I'm trying to make up for looking away in those early years. I'm trying to look straight at these days. Well, Francis Buffett, I want to thank you so much for talking with me today. Thank you for having me. Francis Buffett's new book is called Nonesuch. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Schorrock, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nikundi, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzalez-Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Sam Brigger.