What strikes you first is the phone itself. Not a mobile, not a video call with a blurred background carefully selected to suggest a life of tasteful minimalism. Just a landline, ringing in a New York City apartment, answered by a woman who has been making the world feel slightly ridiculous for half a century.
Fran Lebowitz, now 75, picks up on the second ring. Her voice is a little raspy, the cigarette already lit, the coffee already poured. She has been reading the newspapers. She is not happy about what she found there.
"I am angry," she says, with a directness that leaves no room for qualification, "but the truth is, I've been angry my whole life." She will be arriving in Australia this May for a national speaking tour, and the morning of this interview is providing her with fresh material. She is speaking ahead of An Evening with Fran Lebowitz, which visits Sydney on May 19 and Melbourne on May 25.
The news from the United States is, by her account, not calming. "I don't think I deal with the news very well at all these days," she says. She does not own a computer or a mobile phone, and she remains constitutionally opposed to online comment sections. But she reads the newspapers with something close to obsession. What she reads about immigration enforcement operations, about what she describes as masked agents grabbing people from the streets, has stripped away whatever detachment she once maintained. "This is the worst of America right now," she says. She is blunt about where she situates herself politically: a liberal democrat, she says, not a radical, but someone who feels the ground shifting beneath categories she once thought stable.
There is something deeply incongruous about the fact that this woman, who has not published a book since Social Studies in 1981, who refuses to carry a mobile phone, who communicates largely through dinner parties and the occasional landline call, has become an unlikely obsession for Gen Z. And yet here we are. There is an annual fan convention in New York held in her honour. Her Netflix documentary series Pretend It's a City, directed by her friend Martin Scorsese, introduced her withering observations about urban life to an entirely new audience when it was released in 2021. Her two bestselling books, Metropolitan Life (1978) and Social Studies, have found fresh readers who were not yet born when she stopped writing them.
The story of her appeal is, in many ways, the story of what younger people are looking for and not finding online. She is specific where the internet is vague, committed where it is ironic, and allergic to the performance of opinion that social media demands. Her style has not shifted in five decades: Levi's jeans, a Savile Row blazer, cowboy boots custom-made in Texas, a white or striped shirt cut by the same London tailor, Anderson and Sheppard, who also dresses King Charles. She admits she has enough clothes in her wardrobe to last the rest of her life and is considering giving up on new purchases entirely.
She grew up in New Jersey, the daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Her father was a furniture upholsterer; her mother, Ruth, a homemaker and former jitterbug dance champion. Lebowitz was expelled from high school at 17, an event her parents, for whom education represented everything their immigrant ambitions had built toward, never quite forgave. "My parents were first-generation immigrants," she says, "and the total focus was on college and setting yourself up for the rest of your life." She arrived in New York at 19, found her people in the East Village, drove a taxi to pay the rent, and eventually began writing a column for Interview magazine. Andy Warhol was part of that world, though she never warmed to him. Grace Jones and designer Betsey Johnson were closer to her circle.
Her mother Ruth lived long enough to watch Pretend It's a City. Lebowitz gave her an advance copy, a tape provided by Scorsese, so she could see it before its public release. Ruth's verdict was characteristically oblique. "I thought you were going to be in a Broadway show," she told her daughter, with the particular disappointment that only a mother can deploy. Lebowitz recounts the story with fond exasperation. "That's like saying to me, 'I thought you were going to be in the Olympics.'"
She reflects on ageing with similar candour, though without any of the performative wisdom the genre usually demands. Her fifties, she says, were the best years. "You still look all right. You aren't perfect, but everything is still working." She colours her hair, which has been white since high school, and finds the exercise genuinely restorative. She has noticed that she looks more like her grandmother now than her mother, and finds the observation startling rather than distressing. She is shorter than she used to be. The jeans are too long. She does not dwell on it.
With longevity running in her family, she has some ambivalence about the prospect of a very long life. "Nor, truthfully, could I afford to live that long," she says, and laughs. Being 75, she observes, is not something anyone actually aspires to, except in the sense that the alternative is worse.
If there is a lesson here, it is one that resists simple telling. She is not offering a philosophy. She is not selling a brand of self-improvement or a framework for thinking about the modern world. She is simply, stubbornly, precisely herself, and in a media environment saturated with performed authenticity, that turns out to be a rarer commodity than almost anything else on offer. Australian audiences will have the chance to hear it directly, in Sydney and Melbourne, this May.