Fran Lebowitz - Interview magazine columnist - Interview

Interview, Oct, 1994 by Marc Balet

MB: Do you think your audience is the same now as it was back then?

FL: It's certainly not the same audience. It's different in a couple of ways. First of all, a lot of that natural audience of mine is not alive. I have no idea what the percentage is, but AIDS has made a lot of in-roads into that audience. Also, this sensibility has become diffuse in the culture. This was a kind of covert sensibility to some extent--or at least a marginal sensibility. The fact of its marginality made it a funnier, more intense sensibility. In becoming diffuse in the culture, there is a loss of that sensibility even among the survivors, the people that are still around--and there are some. Also, they are obviously older. Just the fact that the culture is so different makes the sensibility different.

So, no, there is no such audience anymore. There are still people like that, but it's not very cohesive as an audience, and there's not one place you can reach them. If Interview were still like that and still reached that audience, I would probably be interested in writing for it, just for my own pleasure. Now, I'm not saying that there is another magazine that has that audience. That audience is very few people. Just from a generational point of view, you're not going to find that sensibility in a twenty-year-old. It's a sensibility of a certain generation.

MB: Do you find people coming up to you and saying, "God, I remember finding Interview in this obscure bookstore, and it made this big difference in my life"? I get both that and people saying that they don't remember Interview back then.

FL: Part of the reason for these two reactions is because of this marginal quality that Interview had. I mean, if you were twenty-one years old then, and you lived in Seattle or St. Louis or Cleveland or some place like that, you were really on your own, and there was nothing around for you to relate to in that way. And Interview was probably, if not the only thing, one of the few things you could relate to. So, of course, that gave it a kind of attention and loyalty that you can only have in that type of situation. In other words, if you have people needing something as opposed to just wanting it, and then finding this thing that they couldn't have even imagined, it's like a fantasy come true. So, in that way, it had a lot of impact.

What I was saying before is that this kind of impact is no longer a possibility, because any sensibility today will become diffuse in two seconds. It took fifteen years for that to happen in Interview. Today, there is no misunderstood kid anyplace who can't find other people who share this notion or idea with them. To answer your question, people do come up to me, but as I said, basically that audience doesn't exist anymore.

MB: Do you feel nostalgic about that a little bit? Or do you feel that the past is the past?

FL: Well, I consider it to have been a more fun time in my life. Part of that is that it's always more fun to be twenty-three than forty-three, no matter which decade it is. New Yorkers will always say, "You know, New York was really the best back in--" and then will fill in the decade in which they were twenty-three. So I could say the same thing. Now, I will say that I do think, irrespective of the fact that I'm older, that New York was better back then, only because I think everything always gets worse. So if someone tells me New York was so much better before, I believe them. I'm sure it was. I know it was better in the '70s than it is now, and it is better now than it will be twenty years from now, because everything gets worse. Nothing gets better. That's nature.