-Our next guest is a best-selling author
and a contributing opinion writer for "The New York Times."
His book, "The Beauty Of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found,"
is on sale now.
Please welcome back to the show, Frank Bruni, everyone!
♪♪ [ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪
Welcome back! -Thank you.
I feel a little self-conscious. -How so?
I don't have any eggs or farm products of any kind.
-Oh. -I'm sorry.
-Pretty bad form, Frank. -I know, I know.
If you have me back, I'll bring a whole cow.
-Alright. Well, you know, 'cause you could have also brought me
something from North Carolina.
You are now living in North Carolina.
-I am. -And, you know, like anybody who
writes for "The New York Times" as long as you have,
I associate you as a New Yorker, and I imagine a lot of
your friends who are New Yorkers do too.
Do they ask you all the time how you're liking North Carolina?
-They ask me if I've lost my mind.
-Yeah. -When you leave New York,
people feel like you must be exiled or punished. Right?
But I mean, I have woods near my house, I have a creek.
My dog now chases deer every day.
In Central Park, she was chasing smaller, different critters.
-Wow. -That weren't as attractive.
There are upsides to leaving New York.
-There are upsides. You're teaching at Duke.
You've written a lot about higher education over the years.
How are you finding life in it?
-Humbling. -Uh-huh.
-I mean, teaching, we know this,
but I think we too often forget it in this country.
Teaching is really important work, and it's really hard work.
And I think I'm getting better at it every week,
but I'm humbled by what a responsibility it is.
-Yeah, I would imagine.
And you did find time to write your second memoir.
-Yeah. Don't say it that way.
-Well, it's just a weird night, 'cause, you know,
Harvey was out here, and Harvey's, you know, older,
I think he would admit to that, than you are.
And yet he just wrote his first.
And here you are being like, "I've already had two in me."
-I know, and his life is much, much more interesting.
When people say "your second memoir,"
it's like they're saying, "Who do you think you are?"
[ Laughter ]
But in my defense, since my first memoir,
I had something really crazy happen.
-Yes. -And so this is about that.
-Right, because your first memoir
you were here talking about,
was about your relationship to food
and writing about food and loving food.
And then you had something very traumatic happen in 2017.
You woke up, and the vision in one of your eyes was gone.
-I woke up one morning, and there was a fog
over the right half of my field of vision.
And at first, I thought, "Okay, this is gonna be okay
in a couple of hours. I'm a boomer.
Everything is fixable, medicine --"
I figured, "I'll go to the doctor tomorrow.
I'll get a pill, or they'll tell me to do eye calisthenics,
you know, and then everything will be okay."
But it wasn't okay. And in a matter of days,
I was told that I'd had a kind of stroke,
that the vision in my right eye was gone forever,
and then, most terrifyingly, that I was initially told
there was a 40% chance it would happen in my left eye
and I'd go blind.
I've since been told, "No, that's wrong.
It's more like 20%."
But a 20% chance of losing your vision,
those stakes are big enough
that 20% doesn't feel that comforting.
You know? -I would imagine.
And which is very --
why, of course, that explains why you write a second book.
It's not really a memoir.
It's about this moment of time you're going through right now.
And I'm wondering, when you approached it,
was writing about it part of a way of processing
what you were going through? -100%.
Yeah, I mean, I feel really lucky because in being
a journalist and in having the tools of going out
to report and learn information and talk to people in the book,
we've been saying it's a memoir, but much of the book,
more of the book is really me profiling people
who've been through really difficult struggles,
especially before old age, as a sort of foretaste
of old age, and how they've dealt with those.
So, in the book, I'm more student than teacher,
and it was really helpful to take that journey,
I mean in terms of processing everything.
-And, you know, there is this thread of optimism
throughout the book and the people you talk to
and the stories of overcoming what you said,
the sort of hurdles we don't expect
at this point in our life. We would expect older.
You talked to a judge, who was pretty moving.
-The judge I talked to said something to me that
just really sticks with me and I think is central
to the book's message, which is, he said,
"Starfish can regrow limbs,
but that's nothing compared to what people can do."
And that's what I found as I talked to people,
and that's what I found in myself.
If you had told me five years ago, "You're gonna wake up
with half of your vision gone, and you're gonna be told
you might go blind," I would tell you that I'm gonna end up
in the fetal position for about a year.
-Sure. -Or forever.
-Yeah. -And that's not what happened,
and that's not because I'm the least bit extraordinary.
It's because I'm like everybody else.
We are stronger than we know, we are more resilient than we know,
and that's what I learned and what I want people to learn
about themselves or trust about themselves,
especially as they age and the chances of some sort of
physical thing happening increase.
-That's an incredible gift to give people,
and I'm so appreciative.
But, of course, you also got a great reward by writing it.
You found out you had a fan
that is a pretty cool fan to have when you write a book.
-Oh, yes. -Yeah.
-Yeah, last week, I was interviewed
on her website by Oprah Winfrey.
-By "the" Oprah.
-By Oprah, yeah. [ Cheers and applause ]
-And you'd never spoken to her.
-I had spoken to Oprah twice as a reporter
when I was profiling people whom she knew
and she would -- Each time, I arranged a phone interview
and the phone rang, because she was going to give me
five minutes about the person I was profiling.
And each time, when you picked up the phone and she said,
"It's Oprah," it's like it's God.
-Yeah. [ Laughter ]
-Oprah doesn't exist as a voice.
Well, I mean, this time, I'm there in my living room,
Zooming with her, and she comes on and she says,
"Frank Bruni doesn't know this,
but he's one of my favorite people in the world,
and I can't count the number of times I've wanted to
pick up the phone and call him."
And I'm thinking like, "Oprah, the line wasn't busy.
You could have called at any moment, and you still can.
Like, I'm here," you know?
-It's very funny to me that Oprah thought
she couldn't get your number.
-Well, she told me --
I've known Gayle King for a number of years.
Terrific, terrific person.
And she told me, "I'm always telling Gayle how jealous
I am that you two text and call."
And again, I'm thinking, "Oprah, we can do it, too.
It's like a done deal. It's fine."
-Has this process and the loss of half your vision,
has it changed the way you write, changed the way you read?
-It's made everything harder.
I read much more slowly than I used to.
I write much more slowly because there's something about the soup
of my vision that makes a gumbo of my thoughts.
-Sure, that's fascinating.
-Yeah, no, I'll write for half an hour and thinking I've done
really great work, and I'll go back and look at it,
and not only are there all these typos, but it is not as good
on first draft as it used to be.
So I budget extra time and I just adjust accordingly.
I mean, I'm lucky. I still get to write.
People still read my words.
You're talking to me about my book.
I choose to focus on that. -Well, let's all focus on that.
And thank you so much for making the time.
It is always so great to see you, Frank.
-Thank you. -Really appreciate it.
Frank Bruni, everybody.
"The Beauty of Dusk" is available now.