My very wise and politically savvy 17-year-old daughter says I get too emotional about political issues. I think she’s right. She knows that if she sees me race across a room, I have just read something about Trump. Turning ideas into feelings is the thing an essayist is supposed to do, but political punditry should probably be more detached.
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Adam Gopnik
Staff writer at The New Yorker; essayist
United States
Arts and letters
9 answers
I’ve been devoting a lot of my time in the last five years to musical theater. It’s been my new passion. I’d love to write a musical comedy about Eleanor of Aquitaine and the troubadours. I’ve always thought that would make a wonderful musical, about a troubadour who falls in love with a beautiful queen.
I wrote it because it was so. Because it was the force of my experience that pushed the book out of me, like a baby is pushed out of its mother. The mother doesn’t say, “I’ll push this one out for my friends.” You push the book out because you’ve got to – as you push out the baby.
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