The Daily

When I first read The Bhagavad Gita, which is the primary text that I reference in my books, ...

There's a beautiful statement in the Gita, which says attachment and aversion are two sides of the same coin.

That's the question at the heart of The Beginning Comes After the End, the new book by the prolific and critically acclaimed writer Rebecca Solnit.

That's Rebecca Solnit. Her new book, The Beginning Comes After the End, is available now.

It's based on a popular book called Once Upon a Time by Elizabeth Beller, which is a biography of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. And, you know, that title, it just evokes the fairy tale nature of the romance and sort of puts her in a category with another tragic figure, Princess Diana. It's sort of this idea of American royalty and an American princess who died before her time.

One of the reasons the book is called Fame Sick is because the two most corrosive forces in my relationships were celebrity, how it perverted the space around old relationships, how it colored my ability to understand new relationships and whether they were authentic.

My father said one of the most amazing things, which is he said, it's hard for me to understand why anyone would want to publish a book such as this. And he said, it's beautifully written. I'm very proud of you.

Just on the idea that some people will read it and understand it. You know, there's so much in the book about addiction, you know, traumatic physical things that have happened to you, chronic illness, you know, career ups and downs, personal relationships, like, coming together and falling apart.

it's a memoir that's not about revenge or saying 'kiss my ass', but about hoping other people will understand the complexity of my life.

There's a book about EDS, about EhlersDanlos Syndrome, my sort of kind of overriding diagnosis, which is called The Body Is a Doorway by Sophie Strand.

She said, I've always felt like I was a balloon floating above my body, and I had said that countless times and had no idea that anybody else in the world experienced that.

you, not long before the war began, told that story in what turned out to be a very welltimed book called King of Kings.

And what your book so powerfully recounts is that this relationship between the U.S. and Iran wasn't always filled with animus.

That's what I take from your book in this conversation.

The thing that is always fascinated by the story and why I wrote the book is that it just seemed it could have ended so many different ways and so many less tragic ways.

In my book, I write about one junior foreign service officer, Michael Matrinko, who spoke Farsi, unlike virtually everybody else in the American embassy.

Enter the Villa, the Unauthorized Reality Behind Love Island

When I was reporting Enter the Vela, somebody who used to be a field producer said, we are the manipulators.

She wrote a book called Life on the Bridge that just came out in March.

Francis Bacon famously said in his book, The Brutality of Fact, that it's impossible to record anything as a fact without causing some injury to the image.

But in my book, I focus first and foremost on economics.

He says increasingly the population of college grads is more female and less white. This is an argument that Eric Levitz of Vox made in his review of your book.

Noam Scheiber's book is called Mutiny, The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class.

In the Days of My Youth, I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man. And it's a powerful meditation on what we need from a father, what we inherit from a father, and how we somehow make peace with the gap in between those.

So, here's the disconnect that I have, having read your book. This intimidating guy, he sells purses.

Tom, thank you for being here, for talking about your dad and for the gift of this book.

There was a new deprescribing handbook, and it was selling a lot downstairs in the exhibition hall.

This podcast is supported by Simon and Schuster. What's really happening inside Donald Trump's White House? In Regime Change, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan deliver the explosive inside account of power, conflict, and decisions reshaping America. Regime Change, wherever books are sold.

I actually came up with ten plays. That would be August Wilson's Century Cycle.

In the Century Cycle, Wilson sets each of the ten plays in each of the ten decades of the 20th century among a group of very loosely related families in the Hill District in Pittsburgh.

You've written a number of brilliant books and short stories, including Circe, my personal favorite, which is about one of the goddesses that Odysseus encounters on his way home.

She helps them recover from the trauma that they've been going through. And then when they do decide to go, she doesn't hold them at all. She says, fine. And she gives them incredibly valuable advice for the journey ahead.

No, I mean, anytime I'm watching an adaptation of The Odyssey, I want more of the women. ... I'm just going to be yearning for more of their stories, as I always do.