Shownotes Transcript
When Malcolm Gladwell presented NPR's ThruLine podcast with a Peabody Award, he praised it for its historical and moral clarity. On ThruLine, we take you back in time to the origins of what's in the news, like presidential power, aging, and evangelicalism. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. From the outside, my guest today, Daria Burke's life.
It seems pretty great. A big career in marketing, amazing friends, a resume filled with accolades. For two decades, she perfected the art of image, not just her own, but brands like Estee Lauder and Facebook. But underneath was a story she has spent most of her life trying to outrun.
Burke grew up in Detroit in the 80s and 90s, when jobs were disappearing, crime was up, and the crack cocaine epidemic was ravaging communities and families. And her home life mirrored the city. Both of her parents struggled with addiction. She didn't grow up hearing bedtime stories or celebrating birthdays. She has no snapshots of her childhood, just memories of her and her sister basically raising themselves—
Beneath her perfect exterior, Burke says she moved through the world in shame. Until one day, a few years ago, when she discovered a photograph of the car crash that killed her grandmother when she herself was seven. Her grandmother was the one person from her childhood who made her feel safe.
And that image unearthed a well of buried grief and set her on a four-year journey into brain science, trauma research, even epigenetics, which is the study of how our genes are influenced by our environment. At one point, Daria Burke even had a 3D scan of her brain to see how trauma had shaped it. She's written about all of this in her new memoir, Of My Own Making. Daria Burke, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you so much for having me. It's such an honor. Well, Daria, I want to start our conversation with the day that you discovered the details of your grandmother's car accident and death. This was around 2017. And as you write about it, you say that it was just a regular workday evening. You were having dinner and watching TV. And then all of a sudden you decided to just Google your grandmother's name.
The article you found said that your grandmother's car had stalled on the freeway and she was rammed from behind from another car and she was on her way to your house. You were around seven years old at that time. She was on her way to come pick you guys up for church.
Yes, she picked us up for church every Sunday. And so it was very routine for us to get dressed and to wait for her. What was interesting about that particular day was that she had actually passed the exit to our house. And so when her car was found, she was already beyond where she would have turned off to come pick us up and then, you know, get back on the freeway to go to church.
Why do you think that was? Had she been pushed past the exit in the accident? I've thought about this in two different ways. It's sort of the sliding doors moments that we all have in our lives. And
On the one hand, I've wondered if she had some sense that she should just go to church without us. This was before cell phone, so she wouldn't have been calling to let us know that she wasn't coming. It's unlike her, so that scenario feels a little strange, but it's definitely crossed my mind. The other thought that I've had is that perhaps...
as we do when we're driving somewhere we've driven hundreds of times, we're sort of on an autopilot and you're just going. And that maybe that she had sort of turned off or tuned out in just this moment that in that route that she had taken so many times that she forgot that she was coming to get us. What did your grandma represent to you that not just what she represented to you being this loving person, but
What she represents in the way that forced you to confront the other parts of your childhood, the stuff that you kind of had been running from all of your adult life. I think she represented a before time when things were good, even if I couldn't fully remember all of that.
She represented a safety and a stability and a level of care and attention and intention that was markedly absent after she passed away. And I think it was easy to tell myself a story that that was the shift, that her death was the end of these before times that were secure and safe and loving and nurturing, very much driven by her presence.
Because the after times, those are the times when then your mother began to fall into addiction. Yes.
Yes. I have memories that have come back to me. I write about one of them in the book that suggests that perhaps she was using before my grandmother died. And I imagine that grandma was probably a bit of a buffer for us as kids. In some way, her presence was so formidable and consistent that I think it would have been quite difficult to actually have her.
the same kind of proximity to my mother's addiction that I had after my grandma died. And so it's when I was around age seven or eight that my earliest memories of my mother's addiction emerged and where I have great clarity on that shift in her behavior and in the ways in which we related to her and could rely on her.
Is there a memory that comes to mind for you when it was strikingly clear that your mother had a problem? It's interesting. I don't know that I would call it, I would have called it a problem because I was so young. I knew pretty early on that my mother was not like other mothers in that we weren't having snacks made for us when we got home from school. She wasn't hovering to make sure that our homework was getting done.
Dinner could be a bit of a scavenger hunt at times. And so I even then started to get the sense that something was different. I think my...
Fear around people learning about how things were at home began probably between eight and nine when we wouldn't really want our neighbors to go beyond our front porch and we didn't want them to come into the house because they might find that we didn't have our electricity have been turned off or we didn't have running water. The gas had been turned off. We often didn't have a working telephone, so I didn't give my phone number out.
to people generally really until high school. But it was really clear to me that there was something that should be hidden from people. And that was, I would say, my first instinct. Did you ever feel ostracized from the kids? You were hiding this big secret from them. You were trying to avoid them by not letting them come visit your house. And you didn't have a phone many times, so you didn't give out your number. But
And for those who did know, was there ever a moment where people, you knew people knew and maybe you felt ostracized?
Not at that age. I don't know what anyone knew. If they knew anything, they never said anything. And so my earliest, you know, if I think about it now in reflection, I think the first people who probably had instincts were probably folks in my life when I was in high school. And I think I had a different kind of freedom and could therefore...
be in places with friends and with their parents that maybe created more points of exposure. I think as small children, there wasn't a lot of investigation or interrogation necessarily. And to be fair, one of the boys who lived next door, his mom had four children. Each of the children had a different father. They had their own kind of chaos, for lack of a better word.
And so everyone had their own story that they were living in. And I imagine it's easy to get lost in the details of your own life when you're also working really hard to put food on the table and keep the bills paid and take care of yourself.
aging parents or whatever the case may be, I will say that there was one moment that there was a song that came out in the 90s about, it was children taunting another child that the child's mother was on crack. Your mama's on crack. That's right. Yeah, that song. And I do remember when that song came out, just wondering if anybody would figure out
Somehow, that was my story, that that was true for me. And I hated that song because it felt like I was being taunted through the radio. Were you ever with friends or with others and that song came on?
I mean, kids would sing it at school. And so it was there. And I think I just tried to pretend like, you know, nothing was wrong. And I would just sort of ignore it and wait for it to go off or wait for people to stop singing it. No one ever sang it at me, but it always felt very much like I was at risk of being exposed. What did the kind of poverty you lived under look like?
Well, my mother didn't work, and we typically weren't getting child support from my dad. And so we lived on public assistance. My mother got food stamps, and there was a small check payment, cash payment, essentially, that we got every month.
And so it summed together maybe around $500 or so, $300 or so of that was food stamps. And then the rest of it came in cash that was really just enough to cover the mortgage payment and maybe the electric bill or the utilities. They were often off. And so those bills were going unpaid.
We would generally do like one big grocery store trip at the top of the month, which was like Christmas. It was always so fun. But my mom, generally, she was getting food that we could kind of fix ourselves. A lot of like ready-made and heat to eat or just bread and cheese and hot dogs, that kind of stuff, cereal, milk. You know, she'd get eggs and things that she'd make us for breakfast from time to time and
But when it ran out, there was no second big trip to the store. She usually would do that first big trip and then sell the food stamps, the rest of them, for money that she could then use to buy drugs. So we grew up without a lot. I write about a time when I actually went to the grocery store to steal food because we didn't have any in the house. It was quite scarce. And...
We often sort of scavenged, whether it was through meals at school, certainly. I was a free lunch kid, but then if there was an opportunity to go over to somebody's house after school. You kind of just nicely glided over that, that you went into a store and stole food. This is a very vivid story. You got on your bike with a bag, and you went in there and went...
full-on grocery shopping. I did. How old were you about? Nine. I was nine years old and I rode my bike to the nearest grocery store, which was maybe a mile, a mile and a half away. And I was like,
And I had a duffel bag that I wore cross-body, and I went into the store and proceeded to take anything that would fit in there that wasn't too heavy. So I tried not to get too much canned food, or I couldn't get milk, I couldn't really get a loaf of bread, but I would get sausage links, I got...
Gosh, small cans of like fruit cocktail. I mean, anything, snacks that I could fit in there. And I did it twice. And the first time I got away without getting caught. And it was quite a victory, actually, because I felt very proud that I was able to like put food on the table, so to speak. And the next time I did it, I got caught.
And the man at the store was sort of a security guard, I suppose, plainclothes, but security guard. And I said to him, I said, well, we just, I didn't, I didn't have anything to eat and I wanted to get food. And, you know, I tried to explain my way out of it. There's really no explaining it. It was very obvious what I was doing. And, and he let me go. And he said, don't do it again.
Did you ever feel in denial about your parents' struggles? Your father wasn't around, but you knew he was. He would come by sporadically. You later found out that he also had an addiction problem. But for your mother, was there ever moments where you were in denial for what you were seeing? No, there were moments I think I was hopeful that if she had a good week or two that maybe she was clean. And it didn't take much for me to have hope anymore.
that she was okay. And I looked for any glimmer of a positive trajectory for her recovery. For example, generally she didn't work when we were growing up. She collected welfare. And so we survived on public assistance.
But she got a grocery store job, I remember, maybe three weeks or so. And just in that brief period and then another time where she had gotten a job at Rite Aid. And so I remember having those moments where it felt like she was trying and that she was moving towards something better and healthier. And so I don't know that I was necessarily in denial so much as I was just really hopeful. But rarely was I shocked.
When there was a relapse, but it was always devastating when it happened. So much of your childhood, as you write, was about getting out of Detroit. Like you daydreamed about that a lot. And you write about knowing, just intrinsically knowing that there was another life waiting for you. How did you know that as a kid without being exposed to these other ways of living? Yeah.
In some ways, I think it was just this act of faith and not a religious faith, but like an inner knowing that there was another way to live that was possible beyond what I had witnessed.
Certainly, it helps when you have media around. And so TV and books played a role in that for me as well. I suppose it was a blessing to have grown up as a Cosby kid, you know, to be able to grow up and witness a family that was so different from mine. And parents who were not only present, but they were successful. And you had a mother who was a lawyer and a father who was a doctor. And
there was conversation about art and about school and education, and we saw loving discipline. And so I think I could...
grasp onto some of the images that I saw on TV. And I was such a reader that I think it fed my escapism as well in that way. And every chance we got in school to do anything different, whether it was a field trip to a museum or to a farm or the zoo, it just...
All felt so expansive for me, and I really held so tightly to the possibility that there was another way to live, even though I didn't have a lot of evidence that it was real. What books were you reading? Was there a specific...
I know what I was reading during that time. I'm just curious, what were you reading that took you to other worlds that really opened that up for you? Okay, so by the time I was 10 years old, I was reading Danielle Steele. Oh, really? And I don't know where I got these books from. Someone in my mother's life
Yeah.
And it was like a salmon pink cover. And that was what I was reading. I was not reading Sweet Valley High and Judy Blume. I was reading Danielle Steele. You're down the romance novel. Girl. And then Terry McMillan. Yes. Terry McMillan. Yeah. Which offered, I assume that kind of offered you an entryway into what a successful Black woman's life could be like. But I want to talk about presentation. Yes.
You've got a very polished, camera-ready presence. It's like a news anchor. I think you've even said people ask you if you're on TV all the time. Yes. It's my most frequently asked question, and it never ceases to make me laugh.
Well, I think it's really fascinating that you are in marketing for a living because you help brands make meaning of their stories. But when did you begin to learn how to do that image making for yourself? Did you begin doing that when you were very young in Detroit? Definitely. It started really young. In fact, it started so young, I don't remember. I think my ability to...
put myself together in a way that would eliminate doubt about what kind of care I was receiving at home.
was really a bit of a gift. I think I had that natural instinct to do it. And I think the fear that my mother instilled in us that we would be separated and perhaps put in foster care or some other, you know, child protective care, that if we were to make it known,
that we felt unsafe at home or that we thought that there were problems at home, that we would be separated. And so my reaction to that was to look cared for and to make sure that I went to school with my hair just so and my clothes were pressed and my behavior was pristine. Everything was as pristine as I could make it. And we didn't have particularly nice things, but they were always looked good.
Well, tended to and laundered. I used a wash tub where I would wash my clothes by hand. If we didn't have running water or the electricity was out, we couldn't run the washing machine. And I would do it by hand and I'd hang my clothes. I had seen my grandmother do laundry this way. So I was really, really careful about that. Certainly,
Yeah.
Our guest today is author Daria Burke. We'll be right back after a short break. On the Indicator from Planet Money podcast, we're here to help you make sense of the economic news from Trump's tariffs. It's called in game theory a trigger strategy or sometimes called grim trigger, which sort of has a cowboy-esque ring to it. To what exactly a sovereign wealth fund is. For insight every weekday, listen to NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money.
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley, and my guest today is author and marketing executive Daria Burke. Her new memoir, Of My Own Making, recounts her childhood in the 1980s and 90s in Detroit, where she grew up amid the crack cocaine epidemic, with an absent father and a mother struggling with addiction.
Often left to fend for herself, Daria went on to build a successful, outwardly polished life in the corporate world, which appeared to be the ultimate comeback story. But when she came across an old photo tied to a traumatic childhood car accident, it cracked open the past she thought she had left behind. And that moment launched her into a four-year journey exploring the science of healing, neuroplasticity, epigenetics,
and how early trauma reshapes the brain. Daria, I want to talk with you about your turn to science and research. So after you had this clarifying moment and this moment where you could mourn your grandmother's death all of the years later after it happened,
You then turned to science for answers, learning about different modes of therapeutic modalities and reading about neuroplasticity as a gateway to personal healing. What was it that made you go that route to actually try to understand the impacts of your childhood on your brain? When I learned about neuroplasticity first, I was just floored. And I suppose that
It started to answer some questions for me just in understanding this idea that the brain and the ways in which it adapts is not fixed or finite. I think the meme up to that point for me had been that by the age of 25, 26, our brains are formed, we are who we are, and good luck. Right. And...
The brain is plastic. The plasticity in neuroplasticity is about the brain's ability to adapt and to change and to evolve in response to experiences, to things that we learn, to the stories that we tell ourselves. And that, for me, was such an aha moment in that, one, I wanted to just know more about the concept because my instinct there was,
Well, what else don't I know about this? How else might this articulate some of what I had been feeling? Because as you mentioned, people have this reaction when they meet me. And when I say they have this reaction, I get this two to three times a week sometimes where people walk up to me and ask some version of, do I report the news or are you on TV? So
But I could often never really explain when I was telling someone about my family background and they couldn't make sense of this person. They said, well, you don't look like what you've been through, so to speak. And I could never fully explain how I had come to be this other person. And this idea with neuroplasticity that...
Every new piece of information, every new stimulus, every new story we tell ourselves, all of that helps inform the way we see the world and the way in which our brain will adjust and move beyond its tendency to recreate what it knows or to hinge on what it knows. And from there, my appetite to learn more just became voracious again.
Thinking about inherited traits, you know, we often hear that addiction can be an inherited trait. Did you ever fear that you'd become an addict knowing that your mother and your father were both addicts? I did. That maybe you had a gene or predisposition? Absolutely, I did. Because I also knew that both of my grandfathers had addiction. And so I didn't drink in college. I was such a goody two shoes. I didn't touch anything.
I was just so afraid that this monster would emerge if I had given it just a taste of what it was looking for.
And eventually allowed myself to relax a little bit more around that and feel a little bit less concerned. But that fear stayed with me for many, many years. And by the way, I think that the conditions under which any one of us who may have a propensity towards addiction or the ways in which that gene may get expressed are
It is still real. And so I try to be very mindful about that and be so self-aware about that. I also just don't have the instinct to do drugs. And so that helps. Tell me about your relationship with your parents. I'll start with your mother. I know after you graduated from high school, you went to a very high performing high school in Detroit, Renaissance High School. And then you went on to college at the University of Michigan. You did that virtually all on your own.
Yes, I did. And by then, I felt so clear. I had a different kind of agency when you're a teenager. And I suppose typically it's the time where you're wrestling a bit with or rumbling with your parents for agency and claiming more independence. I already had it. So the decision to test into and attend Renaissance was mine alone. And the decision to
Where I went to college was mine. I certainly got advice and guidance that led me away from going to college in Los Angeles, where I was planning to attend the University of Southern California, and to go closer to home at Michigan because I had a younger sister who was still in high school at that time. But other than that, the decisions were mine, and I felt very clear that that was the pathway through college.
But your relationship with your mother, are you all in contact? We're not. Our relationship really, I would say, was deeply challenged when I was in high school and then going into college. She disappeared from our lives for long stints, twice in a four-and-a-half-year period of time.
And so by the time I graduated from college, I think I had one more go in me then to attempt to have a relationship with her. She had been away for two and a half years. We didn't know where she was. At one point, I thought maybe she had died. And we just had no word of her whereabouts.
And I learned after naively wanting to believe that perhaps she was better, she had gotten married again, and she was living in what seemed like a much more stable environment. I thought she was doing well. And I learned when I was 22 years old that she was still using drugs. And it was then that I made the very conscious decision to walk away from our relationship. And we've been estranged since then.
I would say. That's over 20 years. Over 20 years. It's been since 2002. Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, I'm talking with author Daria Burke about her new memoir of my own making. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is Fresh Air.
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley, and today I'm talking with Daria Burke about her new memoir of my own making, which is a raw account of growing up in the 1980s and 90s in Detroit amid the crack cocaine epidemic. She writes about being raised in a home shaped by instability. Her father was absent, and her mother struggled with a severe drug addiction. The
The memoir traces her journey from that painful beginning through the years she spent trying to escape her past by building a carefully controlled, outwardly successful life as a marketing executive. Underneath the accomplishments and the appearances was a woman still carrying the weight of what she'd been through.
I want to ask you a little bit about your father because you did not grow up with him, but he does serve as a presence. You write about this moment when you're an adult and you're living your life and he has a health issue and you all have a phone conversation. That was one of the first real conversations you had ever had with him.
The conversation I had when he, well, he suffered a stroke and my sister was the one who had called me about it. When that happened, he was incapacitated. He was in the ICU. It took me back to the last conversation that we had had years prior where he had reached out to me and his outreach was always so random. And so I could never reach him.
understand what prompted a phone call or anything. But in this instance, he had called me to wish me a happy birthday. And he didn't know that I lived in New York at that point in time, that I had enrolled in business school at NYU. And it just set me into a rage. I was so angry when he said that he was proud of me. And I couldn't believe that he had the audacity to have pride for something that he couldn't take credit for.
And as he was in the ICU and there was a question of his recovery at all from the stroke that had placed him there, I just remembered that conversation and that event and thought,
It was such a difficult moment. I wrestled with what to do. Do I try to go be by his bedside? Do I continue to keep the distance that I've had all of these years? What would that even look like? Yeah, it's a complicated relationship, absolutely. Are you in contact with him? Do you all talk? We don't. We don't. I have...
He has done a drive-by visit once when I was visiting my sister during Thanksgiving a number of years ago. And I think he had heard that I was in town and he drove by. I don't write this in the book. I can't believe I'm telling this story. I hid in the bathroom because I didn't want to see him the entire time he was there. And I asked my nephew or one of my nieces to bring my wine in the bathroom with me. So I was sitting in the bathroom drinking.
you know, the toilet seat down on the toilet, drinking wine, waiting for him to leave. And I think it became clear to him that I was not going to come out to see him. I didn't want to have an interaction with him. And so eventually he left, but I probably was in the bathroom for about a half an hour. Daria, what was it? Why was that strong feeling in you that like you did not want to face him? You didn't want to have that conversation? I was just so angry. He would have this way of making me so angry because he
He could act like nothing had happened. He could always act like everything was normal, like it was normal to not be in your children's lives and to only see them a couple of times a year and everything.
that it was normal to go years without speaking and then to just want to fall into casual conversation, it was maddening to me. And it was ultimately why I'd asked him not to call me again back when I did. I was about 26 at the time, so I'd been estranged from my mom for four years by then, and frankly, technically, my father as well, because he was so intermittent in our lives anyway.
And so it was just always this rage that I would find. I could sum it up very quickly because all I wanted to do was shout him and tell him, you know, this isn't normal, but that's not the relationship that we have. Why did you want to write a book? Because now everything about you is out there or these particular things about you are out there in a way that kind of leaves you exposed. These are things that for so long you didn't, you tried to hide. Yeah.
There are a couple of reasons. I think the first one is that there was something specific about the telling of my story in this way that was a knitting together all of these selves that I had shed along the way towards survival and a reclaiming of them and an honoring of them. That felt really important to me.
And I suffered in silence for years because my story was a secret and I only told very few people along the way that I didn't want that for other people. I wanted the little kid who felt comfortable.
Like they were escaping in books and looking at stories that felt so far and away from their lives to maybe find this book, the teenage version of myself, to find it in a library or having been gifted it and to see themselves in a story that also affirmed that their reality didn't have to be their destiny, that everything that they had inherited, they didn't have to carry.
And that was so deeply important to me just personally. And I think had I allowed myself to share my story with more people, I wouldn't have been so alone in that journey for as long as I was. I got so much out of stories as a young person. So this is certainly my offering in that regard. The other reason, though, that I wanted to tell my story was because when I learned about post-traumatic growth,
That was such a revelatory moment, but it also felt like a mission. I had this mission suddenly that I wanted to tell people about this phenomenon that occurs for people who experience adversity as well. And can you slow down there? Because we know about post-traumatic stress. We often hear like stress at the end of post-traumatic stress.
What you're talking about is post-traumatic growth. Yes. Yes. It's a phenomenon that was discovered, gosh, maybe 30 years ago now. It still hasn't made its way into the zeitgeist, and I'm now on a mission to change that. But it's a phenomenon that occurs where amidst or on the heels of an adverse event or traumatic event,
Some people actually report experiencing a greater sense of personal strength or stronger relationships, deeper spiritual values, a greater sense of possibility in their lives. And I was, first of all, fascinated by this idea. That alone felt great.
I understood that. That spoke to what I saw and what I thought about my own life and my own experience. And I wanted to understand more. And what I learned, there's two things about post-traumatic growth that I think are phenomenal that everyone must know. The first are the conditions under which we tend to experience it. And there are three things that are common with people who've reported experiencing PTG after a traumatic event.
One is that they have a supportive community around them, so they know that they've got a loving environment of people who are there for them. The second is that they find a way to make meaning with what happened and make meaning of what occurred in their lives in whatever way, great or small. The third, which is really hard to do but important, is that they find the benefit of what happened.
And I think in so many ways I saw my own story, the benefits of my story, such that I could be a witness for someone else, that I could share this with someone else. And then it's the who. Who is most likely to experience post-traumatic growth? And that really blew my mind. It's people from impoverished backgrounds. Why is that? Is it the grit? It's the grit. It's the...
capacity to sort of make a way out of no way, what it takes to create something from what feels like nothing. There's a different kind of fortitude and generally a different kind of faith. Again, not a religious faith, but a sense that there is something here that is, I'm a part of something and I have a role in this something. So it's people from impoverished backgrounds. It's
non-white people, typically, and women. And when I look at all three of those populations or identities, experiences, they're all groups that have been forged despite conditions that weren't always favorable to them, to us, right? As a girl who was born poor and black and female, I
I was consistently consuming messages, right, even subliminally that I shouldn't want very much. I shouldn't have very much.
that I wouldn't have the wherewithal or the intelligence or the strength to create the kind of life that I've made. And so in learning that these populations are actually most likely to experience growth and a sense of strength and greater sense of relationships after trauma was really revelatory for me.
Daria, thank you so much for this conversation. This was such a pleasure. And thank you for this book. Wow. Thank you so much. This was incredible. Daria Burke's memoir is of my own making. Coming up, Critic at Large John Powers reviews The Golden Hour, a book about how the movies and America have changed since the 1950s. This is The Golden Hour.
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This is Fresh Air. Writer Matthew Spector grew up the son of a famous Hollywood agent. In his new book, The Golden Hour, a story of family and power in Hollywood, he uses his parents' lives, and his own, to explore how the movies and America have changed since the 1950s. Our critic-at-large, John Powers, found that the book reveals something fresh about Hollywood.
I was raised by sensible Midwesterners who believed that no good could come of psychology or introspection. That may be why I get impatient with memoirs that dwell on their writers' inner lives. What I want are memoirs that go beyond the personal, to offer a portrait of something larger, a culture, a historical period, a whole way of living.
You find that in The Golden Hour, a story of family and power in Hollywood. A new book by Matthew Spector, a child of the movies who happens to be a really terrific writer. Spanning more than half a century and speckled with the caviar of famous names, this isn't a tell-all, pity party, or diatribe.
Mixing things up with the brio of an expert bartender, Spector serves an invigorating cocktail of family saga, cultural criticism, fictionalized biography, Hollywood history, and lament for a vanishing world. The main action begins in the mid-1960s when his parents meet. His father, Fred Spector, is a low-level agent, eager to make it, but devoted to his clients.
His mother, Catherine McGaffey, is one of those beautiful L.A. women who might have been a successful actress or model. But she's short on drive. What she has is high literary taste. When she and Fred meet, a book by James Joyce spills from her purse. Obviously mismatched, the two could be a metaphor for Hollywood's collision between commerce and art.
But like so many others, they get carried away by the intoxications of the movie biz and a 60s culture that's cracking the industry wide open. Early in his career, Hollywood was so square that Fred can't find work for even Jack Nicholson. Too weird, casting directors thought. But after the groundbreaking success of Bonnie and Clyde, the industry suddenly wants the off-center actors that Fred champions. His career takes off.
"'Matthew is born. Catherine thinks of doing screenplays. "'The golden future shimmers before them. "'And yet, it's an insidious thing, this industry of theirs,' Spector writes. "'Its illusions are too quick to become one's own. "'Fred's last girlfriend was Stella Stevens, who'd co-starred with Elvis. "'Once you've watched your partner kiss the king on screen "'and then come home to kiss you, it changes things, "'redraws the boundaries of your reality.'
It deforms you and renders you vulnerable to boredom, makes you impatient with a life that is merely human-sized. As Fred rides the crest of 70s movies, the family flounders. Catherine is a lost soul, struggling with her identity and sliding under the bottle. Fred, predictably enough, finds a new woman and moves out. As for Matthew, he has long periods of estrangement from a father whose shallowness he can never quite grasp.
and from the alcoholic mother whose sensibility he shares, but finds himself forced to look after. Eventually, he heads east to college, where he takes a writing class from James Baldwin, the book's implicit hero, of whom he writes wonderfully, and he finds work in a corporate-owned movie business that's a far cry from the one that launched his dad.
Now, like any good Hollywood book, The Golden Hour has its share of movie star stories, from being mooned by Bruce Dern to a hilarious phone message from Marlon Brando. David Lynch pops in to do a nifty cameo. Yet much of Spectre's best writing deals with two super agents turned power brokers, MCA's Lou Wasserman and CAA's Mike Ovitz, whose mere names made other industry big shots quake. Fred worked for both.
Taking us fictionally inside their heads, Spectre captures how their near-visionary brilliance serves soulless values, transforming Hollywood into a place about making deals rather than about making movies. Still, my favorite parts of the book have to do with Fred and Catherine. He finds in them a mythic dimension we often feel in thinking about our own parents. Even as we can grasp the shape of their lives, there remains some sort of irreducible mystery.
Fred and Catherine feel larger than life, like characters in an old Hollywood movie. By comparison, Spector's chapters about himself, though well-written, feel a tad prosaic, like a low-budget indie. And in a way, this is fitting. You see, for all of Spector's verve, The Golden Hour tells a story of diminution, about the loss of youthful hopes, the corporatization of Hollywood, the movie's dwindling ability to feed our dreams.
and the decline of the egalitarian America, imperfect but promising, that so many of us grew up with. It's a book about how the soft golden light of magic hour, which makes everything look so beautiful, eventually makes way for the darkness.
John Powers reviewed The Golden Hour by Matthew Spector. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, David Graham explains the political playbook guiding many of Donald Trump's policies, Project 2025. Graham says one goal is restoring the family as the centerpiece of American life, an effort that could be undermined by the administration's attacks on federal programs. Graham's new book is The Project. I hope you'll join us.
To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nakundi, and Anna Bauman.
Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley. On Trump's terms, we have followed the first hundred days of this administration. Tariffs very strongly work. Trade war. Get ready. Elon Musk and Doge. We will make mistakes. Deportations. Litigation. I don't know who the judge is. He's radical left. Those first hundred days are coming to a close, but the pace of the news will likely continue.
Follow NPR's coverage of President Trump trying to do things no other president has on Trump's terms from NPR. Do you think you have ADHD? You're not alone. After the pandemic hit, there was a huge jump in ADHD diagnoses among adults. And at the same time, the Internet is more and more obsessed with saying everything is a sign of it. To identify the red flags when a diagnosis goes viral, listen to the It's Been a Minute podcast today.