When Taffy Brodesser-Akner, 48, was writing Long Island Compromise, the follow-up to her smash 2019 debut novel Fleishman Is in Trouble, which she adapted into a television series, she was haunted by what would happen if it bombed. “I’m fairly obsessed with money,” she says. “My career success is tied up with it. It was in my head all the time, this [book] will fail and it will lead to financial ruin for me.”
When she began receiving positive reactions to early preview copies she was so overcome with relief, “I couldn’t get out of bed for two weeks I was in such a state of shock.”
Brodesser-Akner was a celebrity profile writer for The New York Times (she still works there) who made her name with long interviews with Bradley Cooper, Gwyneth Paltrow and the like. Her parents divorced when she was six and she grew up with her mother and four sisters in Brooklyn in relative penury. “Now it’s a very fancy place to be but that’s not the Brooklyn I was raised in,” she says.
“We squarely believed we were middle class — my mother used to say: ‘We’re not poor, we’re broke.’ I remember everyone taking tennis lessons and not being able to, but I also remember being in an apartment where we had to keep the lights off so the landlord wouldn’t come and ask us for the rent. If I wanted something new I had to wait for my father on the weekend and hope he was in the mood to buy it for me. It was hard to grow up that way, not knowing are we rich, are we poor, are we middle class?”
A key theme in Fleishman (where the eponymous doctor is made to feel a pauper by his hedge fund neighbors for earning “only” $300,000 a year) and now Long Island Compromise, a family saga, is wealth and how those who were born without enough money will never feel secure. The Fleishman money enabled her to fulfill her dream of moving her family (she has two teenage sons with her journalist husband, Claude Brodesser-Akner — they double-barrelled their respective surnames) from Brooklyn to Manhattan.
“But even with plenty of money to pay my rent, when the landlord would leave a message every year about renegotiating the lease I could not sleep that night. There was something biological that took over my body.
“I could sit there and say to myself, ‘You have a job, you have money coming in, residuals and royalties,’ but nothing could calm me. I’m still up at night worrying about paying my mortgage, even though I don’t know if I should be. I don’t think you ever lose that.” She pauses: “Please do not punish me for being this honest and vulnerable.”
So is Brodesser-Akner rich now, or middle class? “Oh my God, there is no middle class!” she exclaims over Zoom from her home office. “I’m still trying to figure it out. I don’t know. I mean, you and I are both rich compared to most of the people in this world, but I’m poor on my island [of Manhattan].” She’s one of the few still making a decent living through her creativity.
“You can only truly be rich now in one of the money-making professions. I mean literal money-making, like figuring out how money makes money. Everyone [around her] is like, ‘Whoa. I would have loved to have done what you do, but I don’t have the risk tolerance and also I don’t want to live the way you live. I want to have a second home on a beach somewhere’, and that’s valid.”
“I’m still up at night worrying about paying my mortgage.”
Brodesser-Akner’s childhood wasn’t only scarred by money worries. The family were practising Jews, but when she was 12 her Israeli mother converted to “mega-Orthodox” Hasidism. “I’m still as shocked as I was that day,” she says.
Her sisters (three older, one younger) followed their mother happily. Only Brodesser-Akner — sent to study at a yeshiva, or Orthodox seminary — held out. “It restricted my life a lot. We suddenly had a lot of rules around the house. But on Tuesday nights I would sneak downstairs where we still kept the television, and would watch [the 1990s drama] Thirtysomething by myself, so I would know how a secular, normal adult would act once I was able to leave the house. That was my dream and I wanted to hit the ground running.”
She left to study film at New York University; her first job was at a soap opera magazine. Yet, despite their completely different lives, Brodesser-Akner still says her sisters “are my best friends in the whole world”.
“It’s just I can’t call them on a Friday night, no matter how badly I need to speak to one of them.” The differences, she adds, are “what made me into a journalist. It made me able to tolerate other people’s views, no matter how extreme, and reconcile that I still love them.”
It was partly to appease those sisters that her husband converted. “That was very indicative of who he is. He did not want to cause a rift in our family. And also he fell in love with Judaism. He’d seen a lot of failures in the Catholic church, and he got really into it.
“For a while after we married, he wanted to be Orthodox, I was like, ‘I can’t believe this happened to me.’ The warning they would give you when you’re younger is don’t date outside of Judaism because you don’t want to marry a convert because they’re the most religious and for a while it was kind of true.”
As we speak, on a Friday afternoon, he is preparing their Shabbat dinner. “We will light candles, and watch a movie afterwards, and we will not go to synagogue tomorrow. Every time I don’t go to synagogue I’m reminded of my freedom.”
The community is proud of Brodesser-Akner — the Jewish Chronicle fêted her for her Jewish-American protagonists (Long Island is particularly funny about the older generation’s ambivalence about their children assimilating), asking: “Is this the female Philip Roth?”
Yet since the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, and the subsequent war, the conversation has become more fraught. Promoting the book, she is continually asked for her views on such subjects as Hamas and their kidnappings.
She didn’t see this coming “because I think of Jews as Americans, although all signs point to that not necessarily being true. I did not think I had written a Jewish novel but I obviously did. I guess when people look at you they only see one thing.”
“Every time I don’t go to synagogue I’m reminded of my freedom.”
As a New York Times staffer she is not allowed to voice political views and she is fed up with people inferring what hers must be. “Especially since this war broke out, for a full half of the people in my life I’m a straw man for the kind of liberal Jew who doesn’t care about Israel’s safety, or I’m the kind of Israel-affiliated Jew who doesn’t care for the safety of the Gazans. It would be really interesting to watch people’s assumptions, if it weren’t so heartbreaking in its implications.”
Well before the war, she continues, she had noted, “a precipitous rise in antisemitism. I’ve always felt that people really don’t like Jews, but now it’s not even tacky to be an antisemite any more, it’s like, ‘I’m so glad we can all talk about it!’ I hear people being very careless with their speech. I see very aggressive signs — literal signs.”
She lives on the Upper West Side, very close to Columbia University, whose pro-Palestinian student encampments have attracted many antisemites. “There’s a synagogue that has woken up some mornings to find swastikas on its door,” she says. “There’s a Druze restaurant that sometimes gets a brick through the window because people think it’s Israeli — those people aren’t Jewish. It’s so bad!”
After her involvement in the television production of Fleishman (she chose its stars Jesse Eisenberg and Claire Danes) Brodesser-Akner stopped conducting interviews because of potential conflicts of interest. “It’s heartbreaking but tomorrow someone [I’d interviewed] could own Paramount, who also owns the rights to Fleishman.”
Then there’s the fact that, having been on the other side, “I sympathize with my captors [interview subjects] too much now.” Interviews, she says, would no longer be “a fair fight” because famous people now consider her as one of them and consequently it would feel a betrayal if she was less than flattering about them.
In any case, she thinks previously she didn’t give her subjects’ talents due respect. “Now I have become friends with the kinds of people who get a celebrity profile, and after making a TV show and thinking about what an actor is like I don’t think I displayed enough curiosity about why people went into acting or what’s involved in it. I didn’t care. I cared about fame and what that does to you, but I didn’t care about the other stuff.”
Brodesser-Akner is embarking on her next novel. “I always thought my third novel would be about men’s magazines in the late 1990s, as they were losing their relevance, but I’ve come to find maybe that will be my fourth novel, because [now] I want to write a genre mystery novel about infidelity,” she says.
She is over a wobble that there was no point writing books anymore because everyone she observes on trains today is glued to Instagram reels or TikTok. “I had to think, there is always one person reading a book on the train. I’m writing the book for that one person, and that’s how I army-crawled over the finish line of this one.”
Long Island has already been optioned by Apple TV+. Moneywise, I say, Brodesser-Akner can relax. “I don’t think I can ever relax,” she wails. “I could look at a balance sheet and say you’re probably right, but try telling my soul that.”
Julia Llewellyn Smith is a journalist for The Times of London
