On Fran Lebowitz Hating Me

“‘Why would I want to meet him?’ he told me that Fran told him."

Art: Austin Blake Mays

December 18, 2019

New York, New York

I was 26 years old

Putting on my most competent-looking outfit but still feeling just as blue, just as “coming-down” as I’d felt all week, I tried reminding myself of Austin’s sweeter-than-I-deserved encouragement from last night. How he told me that the following day? On the Upper East Side? At Eleanor Roosevelt High School? At the personal invitation of two high school English teachers who read my Modern Love essay in The New York Times? I would be meeting Fran Lebowitz. 

Little did we know.

So, I’m wearing that long camel overcoat that I never wear. My teal turtleneck. Feeling cute and adult and suitable to meet Fran. And, to be honest, I wasn’t nervous. On the J, transferring onto the 4, the whole time, I swear: a total cool customer. Got to the Upper East Side with too much time to kill on a too-cold day. Lingered in a Starbucks without buying anything before walking over to the school’s front doors. Tony—the teacher who organizes this event with Fran the past couple years, the teacher who found me on Twitter and extended the invite—told me to arrive at 1:00 so that I’d have some time to chat with Fran before the 1:15 start time of the event. It was 12:55. I text Tony—and nothing. No response. Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock.

At 12:59, having observed by then that the front doors to this New York City high school were, inexplicably, unlocked, I let myself inside and checked in with the security guard when, from the corner of my eye, I sense someone approaching me. Thirtysomething years old and a dead ringer for David Rakoff, Tony nicely—though not warmly—greets me, introduces himself, and tells me to follow him. He leads me into the main office. I swear I’d completely forgotten that high school secretaries exist. A dreamy job, I thought in the moment. And he’s leading me into a smaller room, where I anticipate Fran Lebowitz to be waiting for me, when he quickly side-steps into the threshold of the doorway and looks at me.

Tony whispers, “So, Fran didn’t like your piece.”

Feeling certain that life is nothing but a series of unique humiliations, I responded, cordially, cheerily even, “Oh!”

Tony said that Fran essentially tore him a new one after he suggested introducing the two of us. That she apparently didn’t appreciate how she came across in my essay, specifically how “money-grubbing” I made her seem—charging people extra to interact with her at the meet-and-greet I write about. The fact that she did charge extra money for that meet-and-greet? An issue for another day.

“‘Why would I want to meet him?’” Tony told me that Fran told him.

And I think Tony was being so frank with me because the offer was still kind of on the table. And, in a rare instance of me correctly picking up on a subtle cue, I said, “I don’t need to meet her.” Which he agreed was probably for the best. I appreciate the way he sheltered me, honestly, having had some time now to think about how poorly I would have coped with Fran Lebowitz yelling at me. And, even in that moment, I was laughing, fully aware of just how Fran it was for her to hate the column. The cosmic punchline of me coming all this way, dressed in my finest New York Sophisticate drag, bearing in tow the accomplishment of my publication, only to get cut at the knees by someone who made a career out of knee-cutting. After all, when I first shared my column with the world, I tweeted, and I quote, “My only hope is that Fran reads this and SCOFFS.” One would think that, by now, I’d have learned my lesson. That sometimes people...the universe...God above actually takes my word at face value.

Nevertheless, Tony said I could still stay for his conversation with Fran. I wasn’t about to go all the way home so, of course, I stayed. He led me into the auditorium which was just about empty, save for the last three rows. Tony’s partner is also an English teacher at a different high school and he’d brought his senior students. Tony introduces me to his partner and then to the kids, saying aloud, “This is Brian, the writer of the essay about Fran we read last week.” Some of them nodded, sweetly. And earlier, on our walk from the office to the auditorium, Tony got the attention of some of his own students in the hallway and—unsolicited!—they said to me, “We read your story, it was great!” Praise from deeply hip New York City teens meaning, obviously, quite a lot to me in that moment.

I took a seat in the very back row, happy to stay but not especially eager to chat with anybody. And so, of course, a middle-aged lady who was about halfway across that same row immediately stands up as soon as I sit down and approaches me, holding out her hand, and introducing herself by first and last name. Red flag! She’d approached me with this intense kind of knowingness so I figured she was about to tell me she’d read my column. Nope. Instead proceeding to tell me that her daughter is in Tony’s partner’s English class and that she’d volunteered to chaperone this event.

“For the first time since, Jesus, elementary school,” she tells me.

This mother is an architect. Has a lot of friends on boards for places she mentioned by name though none of which I can remember. I was being polite but my mind was elsewhere. Amazed that this lady was being just as elbow-rubbing as Fran felt I’d made her seem. And, usually, I’d be so tickled by this scenario, being talked at by some Whit Stillman-y caricature of bourgeois Manhattan. But, alas, was too preoccupied with my own wound-licking.

And I just further sunk into my seat once we were approached from behind by a woman who introduced herself not only as a “friend of Fran’s” but, once again, by first and last name. A Wendy Goodman-esque woman with a charm school affect. She told us about the radio show she hosts and produces. The architect’s daughter is “very interested in journalism” so the mother gets her attention and introduces the two to one another. A beautifully banal exchange that showcased the daughter not being much interested in journalism at all. The girl walks away and the Friend of Fran says, “She’s very polite, very outgoing. For her age? Very polite.”

Fran was Fran. I was able to finish in my head some of her stories and one-liners word for word. Was more fun to observe all the 17-year-olds around me, honestly. Two boys directly in front of me were sharing a pair of headphones. They were listening to “Cherry-Coloured Funk” as it played from one boy’s phone—and on Apple Music! A small crumb of mercy for me, an Apple Music user, on a day such as this.

The Q&A was the best part. Kids proving to be so thoroughly charming compared to most adults, as my school groups at the museum have fully confirmed for me. Fran hates Bernie, loathes Bloomberg, and detested Warhol. But it was her gags about cigarettes that were best received. So shocking to them, I’d imagine, to hear an adult talk so matter-of-factly, so positively, even, about smoking. Somebody asked whether or not she was “environmentally conscious” and properly trashed her cigarette butts.

Fran shook her head, “I eat them.”

January 19, 2021

Brooklyn, New York

I’m 27 years old

My best impression of Fran Lebowitz. Here goes. “Fran Lebowitz, the name on everybody’s lips? Until about, I don’t know, five minutes ago, we called that herpes. Okay? That was herpes.” Thank you. With the debut of Pretend It’s a City, there’s been a lot of talk about her lately. Purely online, as far as I can tell, but still. I haven’t finished the series yet, still two more episodes left for me to watch. Including the one where she expresses her contempt for the Tenement Museum. My previous employer.

“What’s in there?” she says, per the screenshots I received from a one-time coworker. “You know...like, a tuberculosis epidemic? You know? What do you put in there? You know what I mean? The Tenement Museum. Are people longing for this? I don’t think so.”

And just like that, Brian Burns remains, I’m sure, top-billing on Fran Lebowitz’s Shit List.

Too much of my personality has been shaped by her. I mean it. Fran Lebowitz has played too formative a role in the adult I’ve become. I was first exposed to her in high school, appearing on Letterman to promote her first Scorsese-directed tirade documentary, and immediately I was smitten. Feeling truly understood, vindicated even as I watched Fran’s misery make Dave and his audience and me at home laugh. I am a person whose fourth grade teacher called the house one day to tell my mother, “Brian is a pessimistic influence on the classroom.” My angst not some product of puberty so much as a mark from birth.

Because what’s crazy is that I see all these tweets from all these New Yorkers who someone else might consider my contemporaries and the general sentiment is that Fran is this insufferable, miserable complainer. Pathologically negative. Unfun and out-of-touch. And I don’t disagree. Yet all I want to do is come to her defense. Fran who hated my writing, who resented my characterization of her, who refused to play nice and meet a young homosexual who, clearly, admired her. And still does. And why?

I’m not going to pity Fran Lebowitz. She hates me enough already. But when I see New York Twitterati dismissing her as nothing more than “negative,” I feel for her. Through some faults of her own, I’ve fashioned myself into someone similarly, yes, negative. But the times I’ve deservedly had my friends and family and boyfriend call me out on that pessimism, I swear it feels like getting told my nose is all wrong for being in the center of my face. Because what is that urge, our urge, to criticize if nothing but some desperate, primal measure to avoid getting criticized. Dig your heels into the ground long enough and suddenly you’re at the bottom of a too-deep hole, someone else’s plea to “lighten up!” echoing its way down to you, pointlessly. And though Fran would, obviously, disagree with my changing feelings here—perfectly satisfied to stay at the bottom of that hole—I’ll repeat a sentiment she’s so willingly shared all her life when I say, “I hate it.”