THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.101 - BOOK CLUB: 'THE CATCHER IN THE RYE' WITH SARA PASCOE & RICHARD AYOADE

Episode Date: July 21, 2019

Adam talks with Sara Pascoe and Richard Ayoade, (two British comedians who have also read and written, more than one book) about J.D. Salinger's classic 1951 novel 'The Catcher in the Rye'.SYNOPSIS: The story begins with 17 year old Holden Caulfield recuperating following a breakdown. The rest of the book is an account from Holden's point of view, of the events that lead to that breakdown, which took place the previous Winter in the days following his expulsion from Pencey Prep, a private school. Holden's roommate is a meathead called Stradlater who has sexy plans for Jean Gallagher, a childhood friend of Holdens who he feels protective of. A a fight ensues after which Holden spends two days killing time in New York before he has to face his parents and inform them of his expulsion. We learn that things have been difficult for Holden since the death of his younger brother Allie when Holden was 13. From time to time Holden dwells on the memory of Allie's old baseball glove on which his little brother had written poems to read during boring baseball games. Now Holden entertains hopes of moving in with his older brother DB, a WWII vet who has become a successful screenwriter in Hollywood. During his visit to New York, a lonely Holden visits a jazz club and spends much of his remaining cash buying drinks for three older women, after which he arranges an abortive liaison with Sunny, a teenage prostitute and falls foul of her thuggish pimp Maurice. Later Holden arranges a meeting with an old girlfriend, Sally Hayes, and is briefly looked after by a well meaning teacher Mr Antolini. But Mr Antolini's affections are interpreted as predatory by Holden who ends up, distraught and emotional, creeping into his parents house to see the only person in the world he feels he can really talk to - his little sister Phoebe.Thanks to Anneka Myson for additional editing and Seamus Murphy-Mitchel for production support on this episode.RELATED LINKS'SALINGER' (2013 DOCUMENTARY FEATURE)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JSFr7YdKLE'J.D. SALINGER DOESN'T WANT TO TALK' (1999 BBC DOCUMENTARY)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxVRPbhtxRg&t=529s'J.D. SALINGER’S WOMEN' (1998 NEW YORKER ARTICLE BY PAUL ALEXANDER)http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/features/2162/SARA PASCOE - SEX POWER AND MONEY (2019)https://www.waterstones.com/book/sex-power-money/sara-pascoe/9781785176838RICHARD AYOADE IN CONVERSATION WITH ADAM BUXTON AT SOUTHBANK CENTRE, 5th SEPTEMBER 2019https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/134531-richard-ayoade-ayoade-top-2019ORANGE JUICE - ALL THAT EVER MATTERED (1984)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egb1FVNIo38FLORENCE EASTON - 'COMIN' THRO' THE RYE' (1928)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byAvP_pIXO0ADAM BUXTON PODCAST RAMBLE CHAT MUGhttps://adam-buxton.backstreetmerch.com/ADAM BUXTON’S OLD BITS DVDhttps://www.gofasterstripe.com/THE ADAM BUXTON APP

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening I took my microphone and found some human folk Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan. Rosie, come on, shall we go for a walk? Come on, oh, it's a flypast.

Beautiful. Let's have a little bit of music for our walk love it i love a bit of florence easton singing robert burns I love a bit of Florence Easton singing Robert Burns on a summery morning walk. How are you doing, podcats? Adam Buxton here. Hey, thanks so much for joining me for podcast episode 101. This one features a rambly conversation with Sarah Pascoe and Richard Iawade, two comedians who are both avid readers and have both written books,

which is why I thought they might be well-suited to talk with me about The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. So this is a slightly unusual episode in that we just focus on that one theme for the whole conversation. It's kind of a book club, I suppose is what it is. It's by no means a definitive, critical analysis of The Catcher in the Rye.

It's just three friends bollocking on about it. I chose Catcher in the Rye because I discovered last year when I was talking to Richard that it was his favourite book when he was a young teen. And that made me go back and re-read it for the first time since school. And I thought it would be fun to talk to Richard and Sarah about the book's themes of grief and lost innocence and the pain of transitioning into the adult world and all its phoniness, as well as talking a bit about Catcher in the Rye's legendarily reclusive author, Jerome David Salinger, who died in 2010, aged 91.

Now, I certainly wouldn't recommend listening to this if you haven't read Catcher in the Rye, but if you have read it, but not for a while, here's a brief synopsis. Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951, begins with 17-year-old Holden Caulfield recuperating following a breakdown. The rest of the book is an account, from Holden's point of view, of the events that led to that breakdown,

which took place the previous winter in the days following his expulsion from Pensy Prep, a private school. Holden's roommate at Pensy is a meathead called Stradlater, who informs Holden of his sexy plans for Jean Gallagher, a childhood friend of Holden's who he feels particularly protective of. A fight ensues, after which Holden spends two days killing time in New York before he has to face his parents and inform them of his expulsion from Pensy. We learn that things have been difficult for Holden since the death of his younger brother, Ali. When Holden was just 13, Ali had a baseball glove on which he had written poems to read during boring baseball games.

Now Holden entertains hopes of moving in with his older brother, D.B., a World War II vet who's become a successful screenwriter in Hollywood. He probably wrote Long Shot, starring Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen. During his visit to New York, a lonely Holden visits a jazz club. I'm going for jazz club.

And spends much of his remaining cash buying drinks for three older women with whom he flirts half-heartedly. After which he arranges an abortive liaison with Sunny, a teenage prostitute, and falls foul of her thuggish pimp Maurice in a depressing hotel room. Later, Holden arranges a meeting with an old girlfriend, Sally Hayes, and is briefly looked after by a well-meaning teacher, Mr Antolini. But Mr Antolini's affections at one point are interpreted as predatory by Holden, who ends up distraught and emotional, creeping into his parents' house to see the only person in the world that he feels he can really talk to, his little sister Phoebe. So there you go, that's the sort of overview. I've missed out lots of bits, obviously, but I'm assuming that you've read it, and hopefully recently. hopefully recently. Obviously, there's an awful lot to be said about the book and its author,

and I've put a few links to a couple of documentaries and articles that I found particularly interesting in the description of this podcast. But right now, let's get into some Catcher in the Rye chat with Sarah Pascoe and Richard Iowati. Here we go.

Ramble chat, let's have a ramble chat. We'll focus first on this, Here we go. Thank you very much for coming along to In Our Time with me, Melvin Bragg. Yeah. That's what Richard was worried this was going to be like. Yeah, I know. I saw in the email. Or hopeful that it would be. Yeah. Secretly hopeful.

Richard was thinking this was going to be some sort of thorough dissection of Catcher in the Rye. Yes. Put in historical context. Historical context would be interesting. Have you re-read it in preparation for the book club yes yes so did i yes so already you've done quite a lot of work there's been many readings before it's always good to say that you've re-read something well sometimes it was a long time ago you forget you know especially with classics you just say yeah yeah yeah read that hamlet all over when did you read it first well I think I read it as a teenager, but then I think I did,

but I misremembered the ending, which now makes me doubt it. Okay, what did you remember the ending as being? I thought he died. Oh, you thought he killed himself? Yeah, I thought it was a suicide book. Oh. Were you made to read it at school originally, or did you just read it yourself? No, it wasn't on the syllabus.

I think someone else referenced it in a way that um kind of teenagers who are very rebellious loved this book and i thought i'm a teenager who's very rebellious i'll love this book and then i think how i remember it is that i read it didn't particularly enjoy it i thought i must be for boys then must be a boy's must be a boy's book which i did not feel this time oh okay yeah that's interesting i'm really glad I reread it. Yeah, yeah. We're going to come back to that, Sarah. And when did you first read it, Richard? Probably teens, early teens. A teacher gave it to me to read.

Oh, OK. Because he thought you were an intelligent young man and he wanted to cultivate your potential. I don't know. He had very long feet. He had his shoes specially made they were they were narrow and long he wasn't tall i'd say five four but size nine feet and i remember this was it the penguin yeah he was danny devito it was a bit like yes you might enjoy this but you obviously like the teacher sufficiently to take him up on it.

Yes. It was the first book I remember really liking, I think. And you liked it immediately or did it sort of grow on you? Yes, I liked it a lot immediately and then bought it. And I think I read it a fair bit. What was it about it that sucked you in? Well, it was funny. And I hadn't really read any book with language like that that was so personal.

So I guess just in an argo. Also, I think at that age, America was just the most exciting prospect. Nirvana, Bill Hicks, Tarantino. It just seemed very exciting, America american and that sort of romance of new york it is very grown up like he does kind of leave school and have like a little bit of money and go to a bar and even though there's all these restrictions to it he's kind of like in taxi cabs and going around the town even though he's a child yeah and his parents don't know where he is yeah so the book was published in 51 and so this is uh the new york of the late 40s early 50s and yeah there is just an atmosphere

of adults talking to younger people like their peers almost one of the many tragedies of the book is him misreading the teacher's affection when he stays around his house. I found that so sad. And you just feel all this kind of sadness because men have been boys and they reflect back on this kind of period of frustration on not knowing, on not being able to deal with the amount of emotion

that you can have in a body. And so that teacher kind of just stroking his head in the night and him assuming okay i need to leave there's something weird going on it just felt like a drunk man the fiction mr antolini when you read it originally because i was made to read it at school it was made to syllabus yeah you had to kind of write things about it or talk about it yeah write an essay in the style of holden caulfield that's so ironic because he writes essays for other people. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, in their style. When he's at boarding school. So I could sort of ape the style, but I didn't get beneath the surface at all. I didn't know what it was about. I didn't get it. It's such a clever thing that it does because it never ever tells you what's going on.

You have to know enough to understand two people's point of view and why they misunderstand each other at every instance. Because the narrator doesn't tell you. No. Or almost immediately says, I'm not going to tell you a load of things and then reveals them. You know, like it starts with him saying, you know, my parents would have, is it two heart attacks apiece or something if I told you anything too personal and the things he says are so personal and throughout and amazingly so it combines sadness and and funniness to such an extreme and an innocence and each chapter is like a short story it feels that everything has like a tremendous cliffhanger nothing seems to hugely happen it's just a it's a kind of lost weekend in a way yeah i found a lot of moments really painful which were the women in the bar who are kind of using him for drinks yeah i just

i found it excruciating i was so angry with everyone yeah that bit made an impression on me when i was reading it first time around i found the whole thing so depressing as a teenager yeah so his rant about actors is my favorite thing i mean obviously the repetition of phony about anything but the ultimate phoniness is people who are phony for a living it's just it's absolutely glorious and then being there with someone else who clearly likes another guy and her and this man are loving the play and loving and he's just standing there chain smoking hating everything that's the thing that got through to me as when I first read it was like oh yeah I get the concept of phonies I think I do what were the phonies to you though Richard when you read it well it was hard to know I just really liked him I just really like being in the company of this voice. And probably now I am aware more

reading it how young he is and damaged and but he still felt damaged and not right about things. But he just seemed very happy to give everything the absolute evisceration. And that just seemed funny. I mean, the phoniness of of it i guess it's the same things like assemblies and long assemblies about the dangers of acorns and you know being lost property and people having to go up to collect pants with skids in and that being shown in front of everyone and and saying how important this school was and these are all things that happened to you yeah i was that child no but i or just things like the christmas i remember the christmas um description in the book about them throwing

snowballs and i went to a catholic school and that they'd have a you know christmas mass and the feeling of that and people singing come all Ye Faithful and trying to get away with singing the last, Oh Come Let Us Adore Him as loudly and as aggressively as possible. Because you couldn't get in trouble because that's what you're meant to do. But everyone knows this isn't right, but they can't. How do they tell you off for it? Those sorts of things, which I feel it's really good on. And just, I don't know, just the hovering of boys

and just everyone's preening and things that happen. So I don't know, phoniness was just probably at that age, it's everyone who isn't you, really. It's so connected to pretension and status because phonies are never inferior. It's someone who behaves like they're better than you. An actor, that's what the whole thing, like the ultimate, just because they're on stage, they think they're better than you. And that's sometimes with the phoniness, there was an assumption on his behalf that they think they're better than me

because I'm in the audience watching them. Yeah. And also it feels like it's a preemptive strike on rejection so people are phony because there's a superficial attraction to that world he still go to the movies he loves pretending to be an actor and all the stuff of him pretending that his bleeding has just got shot and his tap dancing so it's a kind of you're by that world, feel that it may not quite accept you. So you dump them before they dump you by just going, I just don't even want to be involved with this. It's just so gross. But you're kind of fascinated by it as well. Yeah, which is the thing with the visiting the sex worker.

That's a pivotal scene. Huge. And all of this curiosity to the point of desperation about this adult world of sex and then the reality of it especially the reality of buying it so a situation without any intimacy and then having to try and back out of that and then the awful thing of just then you're a boy this now suddenly you're a little boy and they're going to steal from you and there's nothing you can do and like that again in terms of like cringing moments i was so angry on his behalf this is so infuriated because you can feel that anger you just explode the world is so unfair already and now this is happening had you started to have those kind of

moments of transitioning into the adult world and leaving behind innocence and that and that weird sleazy hotel on your own feeling that he so brilliantly encapsulates in that scene had you had those sort of experiences when you read the book i don't think i had that kind of segue into adulthood interestingly for myself he's was he's a very rich person so when i was 16 17 18 all of my desperation for freedom involved just wanting some money. And I did work, but I didn't ever have enough money to be able to make any choices. And then I started properly working when I was 18.

And then you do have a small amount of money. So I think I went straight from absolutely no freedom to now I have absolute freedom. So definitely read it the first side and didn't understand any of that. He seemed like a very rich boy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Priv, yeah. Yeah. Privileged. And were you playing at being a grown up at a certain point, Richard?

No. Smoking cigars and dressing in suits and going and hanging out in jazz clubs? I was dressing in suits, sure. I wasn't an animal. Yeah. But no, I was in no way in an adult world. Yeah, zero freedom. I guess maybe I was 13 when way in an adult world. Yeah, zero freedom. I guess maybe I was 13 when I read it.

Yeah. Oh, really? Very young. Yeah, I wasn't involved in anything. What did you make at that age of that scene with the prostitute then? Do you remember? Just thought, what the hell is this? It just felt like he's out of his depth all the way through.

Yeah, yeah. Because the language is so brilliantly simple, but, you know, also sophisticated. And just the repetition as well, which is so cleverly done of just saying the same things again, of just not worrying about using the word phony three times in the same paragraph, which you feel would be more rightly to not you know stack things with the same adjectives that it felt oh i can follow him doing anything because he's using a level of language that i can comprehend but the actual emotion of what that would feel like i couldn't go oh well if i were in a situation with it i don't think but yeah it's incredibly readable isn't it so easy to read

yeah it's just beautifully smooth and none of it jars and none of it is well that's what's amazing about jd salinger is actually that he isn't an author who's published lots and lots of books and i think that's why people get so obsessed with this book and him is that he was a hermit who didn't answer any questions or explain himself anything more than the text and then just stopped writing or did he or that's the thing yeah the vault there's supposed to be a vault with unpublished yeah manuscripts all labeled and waiting for publication although i also read that after one of his former lovers joyce maynard published a kind of tell-all memoir and then also one of his daughters margaret in 2000 published a book as well that was quite an evisceration dreamcatcher um that both of those encouraged him supposedly to just burn

everything really because that's the thing is it would be odd to want to be published but not while you were alive yeah because it's kind of one or the other isn't it you kind of think this is never for anyone or i don't want to be here although supposedly he left instructions of certain stories that can can be published this far after his death but they may be ones that were previously available yeah because the collection of nine stories doesn't collect a lot of his early stories which he didn't seem to think were up to much yeah or up to his standards yeah and then hatworth is it 24 that one hatworth 16 1924 that came out in the new yorker in 1965 you can't get and maybe that can come out later or

there's stipulations in his sort of will and things and did they not just exist online they're really hard to find online i think it's pretty well policed the salinger estate and who does run the estate do you know his son son and his last wife okay it's always a good phrase my last wife yeah my most recent wife one of good phrase. My last wife. Yeah. My most recent wife. One of the theories was that he was writing under a different name. Oh, Pynchon. Thomas Pynchon, yes.

Yeah, that Salinger was Pynchon. Yes. Really? Yeah. I hadn't heard that before. That was the first time I really read anything biographical about Salinger, was that someone had gone to interview Pynchon, and he ran out the window of the house. Right.

And they said, oh, it's J.D. Salinger. Well, the styles are not similar, but are they just similar kind of literary figures? I mean, Salinger's a sort of publicity kind of manga compared to Pynchon. It's maybe one picture of Pynchon or two. No interviews. Yeah. Yeah. It's fun going down the Catcher in the rice allinger rabbit hole because

there's so much there to think about and read about because he was such a mysterious figure and he now is you know with modern sensibilities he is a controversial figure he was involved almost exclusively in with young women he got into relationships when these women were in their teens pretty much all the women that he had long-term relationships with he met when they were very young what is i came across this article online that is illustrative of the attitude some people have about him yeah yeah it's very difficult that thing culturally because it's called hebophilia and it's an attraction to women who are um adolescent but at a very early stage and actually it's very common in men with high status like it happens a lot with music and that's the thing is that there's been such a cultural shift in understanding power and economic

dynamics and what a relationship ideally should be between equals and a 13 or 14 year old can't be the equal of an older man who's especially a rock star or an established writer but it is really common it's a very very common thing yeah and especially it's very difficult to look back on the past and then go well this is my diagnosis that person yes doing this or was abusing a power relationship. Right. Here's this article, just an example of the kind of thing. J.D. Salinger was a shockingly creepy womanizer

who took home underage girls into his 60s. And then series of... Into his 60s. Yeah. He had a 60s room. But that's the thing. Had to dress by cost and powers. This is why it's very connected to people who are artists and powerful,

is that quite often people don't stop who they're attracted to. And, of course, that makes perfect evolutionary sense. Men can continue to have children and to be attracted to very fertile women. There's a biological argument that makes complete sense and lots and lots of artists throughout history the people that we know about is exactly that story it is exactly that story well chaplin who married una o'neill who was one of salons's first girlfriends was 53 when they married she was 18 i think they married on her 18th birthday yeah and they had eight

children and you know that's meant to be one of the kind of armchair psychological analyses of salinger that he was continually trying to recreate this perfect prelapsarian relationship that he had with luna o'neill before he went to the war and could never get over it and then losing her to this yes to essentially the most famous man in the world, is enough to give you quite a distaste for movie phoniness and the power of that and, you know, your first love. Right.

And then coming back from World War II after spending almost like D-Day, he was out there until Armistice Day and liberating death camps at the end of it, having seen horrible things, terrible fighting, and presumably traumatized by that. And then coming out of it, found out while he was in France fighting

that Una had gone off with Charlie Chaplin, married Charlie Chaplin. So for all sorts of reasons, he finishes the Second World War absolutely heartbroken and very cynical about humanity. He was hospitalized for a breakdown. Right, okay. And also this very strange thing

where he marries a German, former member of the Nazi party, which is a, you know... He himself is Jewish. Half Jewish. Half Jewish. Well, his mother wasn't his mother was i think irish catholic his father was jewish yeah you could go to jail for marrying a former

nazi collaborator of that and she came to america and then it was annulled very soon it's still frowned upon to marry a nazi in some places please How do we have a royal family? Please. Stop it. Is this on? Please. I'm here all week. I think it's fine. I think we're cool with Nazis now, aren't we? We've got over that. Everyone's entitled to

their ideological structure. Flags and hats. Nazi's just a label. For me, it's a lifestyle. You want to call it nazi how i live that's cool i don't call it i just call it rigorous it's a thorough way of life for me but uh yeah so there's all sorts of things which are just begging to be analyzed and the most obvious theory seems to be that salenger is just trying to he's determined to preserve in everyone he sees some sort of concept of innocence so the reason i wanted to to have this conversation with you guys was

that i read the book again recently having not read it since i was 15 or something having kind of written it off i was like oh it's it's not that great people go on about this book but it's a sort of a cliche of a great book it's really yeah not all that i don't think my dad liked it i remember at the time when i was reading it i was saying oh we're reading catch in the rye and he's like what do you think of that i said no i don't really get it and he's like no it's rubbish so he didn't he wasn't into it and i thought okay that's fine if dad doesn't like it i'll just ignore it and you know he didn't get the fact obviously that i just didn't understand it really and then a few months ago i read it aged nearly 50 father of three with teenage sons uh my my eldest son is the same age as sort of the holden character

i can see him beginning to struggle with a lot of the same sort of things and obviously it's a totally different book yeah suddenly i i'm understanding on all sorts of levels and new levels that have come with with being older and also i'm remembering with shame cringing at lots of the scenes because i can see that i was sort of trying to do a lot of the same things that holden was that having this slightly self-pitying attitude towards relationships and romance instead of thinking oh i'm nice um it's a sort of thing of being sure that you know what's best for someone else yeah and the best way to keep them innocent and to preserve what's nice about them and to rail against anyone like well it's trying to control people yeah it's a it's a form of control i suppose yeah um this isn't related to you but more related to an extreme version of

Holden Caulfield and it's really interesting obviously the murderers that have really loved Catcher in the Rye and it's really spoken to them Chapman who killed John Lennon and then Reagan was Hinkley and then one other and he was obsessed with a

young actress who rejected him and he sent her lots and lots of letters that they found afterwards and then he followed obsessed with a young actress who rejected him. And he sent her lots and lots of letters that they found afterwards. And then he followed her onto a set in L.A. And again, and he he found out that Mark Chapman had the book and that's why he took it. Oh, yes. Robert John Bardo was carrying a copy of the book the night he murdered the actress Rebecca Schaffer. Sorry, I should remember her name. Yeah, Rebecca Schaffer. I'm trying to think what's one of their names. Elliot is one of them.

Elliot Rogers. Did you remember this killing? Well, it's mass murder. So maybe two years ago. And he recorded long YouTube videos. And basically he was saying, I'm such a nice guy. I am so handsome. I am so great.

I've got this car. And yet women continue to give their sex to other men. He felt so entitled entitled but there's this very subtle thing that's in the catcher in the rye that obviously hardens in certain men and actually you see it a lot in the worst parts of the internet whether the men who are very angry with certain women and again it's that assumed rejection or they've had other rejections and it's like i am one of the why do they continue to go out with these horrible men? Why do girls like bad guys?

And actually they don't really. It's one of those myths that guys who aren't very nice tell themselves they are not getting things because they're too great, which is a wonderful narrative. But like, that's what they've told themselves. But when you're a teenage boy and you're seeing the most beautiful girl.

What are you saying? Why are you looking at me when you say that? When you are still a teenage boy. When you're a boy, man. When you are a teenage boy, though, and the most beautiful girl in the school is definitely not ever going to give you the time of day and is going out with some guy who's five years older and has a car yeah you know it's hard to not make those assumptions that that's the way the world works i think what i should have stressed is i really understand that frustration in its beginning that the frustration of it and the unfairness of the world in a way

there's a reversal actually i think being a boy at school where the girls that you'd like to kiss are going with older guys with cars is then reversed when you're a slightly older woman and the guys you like are going for much younger women and picking them up with their cars there is a dissonance isn't there i think the thing i feel so sad about something i've only recently become interested in the last couple of years is actually um how that's a salinger estate i'm sorry this is the salinger estate you don't have permission for this podcast also it's very unfocused you're just drifting randomly through don't you have any questions like to give it some structure have you heard in our time with melvin brown that's more the approach that perhaps you should be taking i think it's richard's agent girl you did say you were nazi over and over again can you develop that but you were a little bit worried about the funny riff you went on about

the nazis um for a while you were sort of modeling yourself on holden caulfield i think i remember you telling me well i i got a hat i did get a hat and i got the baseball glove you got the hunting cap yes i couldn't find a red army hat um or hunting cap so i got a terrible army surplus cap and then i i got a baseball glove, which took forever. I asked for it for my birthday. No one played baseball. I was quite isolated. What's the significance of the baseball glove in the book?

He writes on it. It was his brother's. Yes, his brother Ali writes on the baseball glove poems, which he reads when there's nothing to do in the outfield, and he writes them in green ink. And so I had the baseball glove. I wrote poems on there. Of course.

Yeah. I saw it through. Original poetry? Oh, no. No. It was a bit of Shelley. Some Pam Ayres on the back. A bit of Pam Ayres.

And then just, you know, limericks. There was a young golfer. Yeah. No. I think it was. Oh, yeah. Oh, good grief. But it was. Yeah. I mean, I really went for it yeah no i think it was oh yeah oh good grief but it was yeah i mean i really went for it yeah but no it was really private it wasn't like i was going hey

everyone look at my catcher in the right glove uh-huh it was just i don't know i really got did you have any pals who are into it that you could uh i stopped you after pals um no the answer to that is no. No one who gets a catcher in the rye glove and writes on it in green ink is drowning in friends. I had some. The people who would like this book, they would love it because it resonates with isolation,

not because everyone in my gang feels exactly like this. Yeah. Me and the guys, whenever we went down the waffle house. Dude, let's get together and talk about Catcher in the Rye again tonight. Rye party. Yeah. Let's do shots and talk about Holden. So obviously this is a book that is still a set text for many students.

I wonder, is it? Yeah, I think it is. Well, do you know what? I'm completely unqualified. I'm going to stick my neck out and say that this is a book that is still a set text. I think it's still a GCSE text. For many students. I mean, that's is a book that is still a set text. I think it's still a GCSE text. It's doing well for many students. I mean, that's partly because it hasn't dated all that badly.

There's not too many overtly sexist, racist, otherwise offensive bits of, I mean, you know, there's stuff that skirts around those areas. Yes. But Holden himself seems like, broadly speaking, a good guy. I think also topic wise for such a perfect book, my sister's an English teacher, and that's the kind of book she's looking for. As an English teacher, you're teaching people about books, but you also, ideally, they're all very romantic, so you want to teach them about the world.

And I think because it circles around those things exactly as you said, and also you want a student to have a personal attachment when they do write their coursework and things. But I think that the unfortunate irony is that everyone hates the books they're made to read at school. That's the thing. I mean, it was really such a shame for me because now I'm thinking, gosh, I wish my teenage son would read it because I think he'd get so much out of it. But there's just no way he's not going to have it. Another parent, a mother, told me that if she wants her daughters to read something, says it's too grown up for them and they mustn't.

Yeah, the top shelf school of parenting so just says um when you're a bit older this you might but i think at the moment too young very adult themes in there yeah yeah yeah i mean the thing is it is a gamble because with the best will in the world you might just not like it i found it very depressing when i read it the first time around and I think the reason was that my parents were insulating me as much as they could from the adult world trying to preserve my bubble of innocence yeah and here was a book that was trampling all over that that was all about someone making the transition and being frightened at the prospect of joining the phoniness and the ludicrousness and and the you know nonsensical nature of the adult world

and i was rejecting it myself i was just thinking no this seems awful depressing hotel room on his own with the prostitutes and he's smoking and he's sad all the time and he's in the park and he's freezing and none of his relationships work out and what are his parents even doing why aren't they there looking after him and it was all just too much well i guess that's it actually it's a completely structureless life he leaves all of the structure doesn't have a definition of what he's going into you see i didn't find the fact that what was in it could potentially be seen as depressing or that he often talks about being depressed i always find it really depressing if something seems to me to be rubbish

or that no one cared in the making of this or writing it. And so I found it incredibly undepressing that it was so good. I find something that has an uplifting ending, which I don't like, incredibly depressing. For some reason, I always found the end of star wars the most depressing thing ever of the first movie yeah that they do all this stuff and then they're at this ridiculous ceremony they just suddenly look so neat like they can't be themselves that it just felt awful but like no who wants to film this scene this is like you have to give it this ending whereas you know empire strikes back felt great because it wasn't a happy ending and I found

myself far less depressed at the end of that than at the end of Star Wars well that seems to me here's a bit of Mickey Mouse psychology for you sure you were not protected in the same way that I was and so you were willing to embrace the fact that actually the big secret about life is that there isn't a big happy ending. It's all pretty messy, actually. And so you were OK embracing drama that reflected that in some way. And I just wasn't able to deal with it. I was very happy with the ceremony at the end of Star Wars. They're getting a met.

They're smiling at each other. Look at R2. He's delighted. I didn't believe it for a second they were plastered on smiles you could tell harrison ford was bored out of his head oh the ceremony it's very formal ceremony but later on they're gonna just relax in the cantina and have a laugh about it all this is the beginning of a wonderful friendship that i can't wait to see unfolding and then by stark contrast at the end of Empire Strikes Back,

I was like, what the shit is going on? Where's Han? He's just been encased in carbonite and they're finishing the film like that? Luke's just had his hand chopped off for crying out loud. Yes, the artificial replacement seems to be working well. Those rods are really shuffling around smoothly in his wrist there.

But this is just a nightmare. So it's totally different. And I think it was just the product of me not being emotionally ready to deal with the adult world, to deal with the reality of life after you're a child. It's heartbreaking. And the thing I was talking about before about being, I think, the kind of little control freak that holden is in some ways is that scene where he hooks up with um his old girlfriend yes what's her name old sally hayes

sally hayes and he's just he's kind of bottoming out feeling sorry for himself almost run out of money he calls sally hayes he thinks oh she'll she likes me she'll turn up he knows he sort of abuses her affection for him and she turns up and then he doesn't really have any real interest in what she has to contribute all he wants to do is dump on her this fantasy of them running off and starting a new life somewhere and then when she completely reasonably raises practical objections to the plan he gets all bent out of shape and says screw you you don't understand yeah all of his failure with women is because they're not real people to him yet they're just their names they're their face and they're his kind of fantasy and then they just disappoint him everything they say is phony or boring or wrong and so they're not

real yeah but it doesn't feel sort of unredeemable i suppose because well i guess there are two things that feel excuse him it's a bit like in the graduate you just go this behavior is not acceptable in someone older but his youth is such a lens through it that you know he's trying to be far too adult and it's impossible for him to do that but his brother died when he was 13 and it doesn't feel like anyone is taking that into account it doesn't feel that anyone around him apart from phoebe knows we never sort of see him talk directly to his parents. There's no, it feels like they sent him to a psychiatrist for a bit. So he's incredibly wounded and vulnerable.

Yeah, because he has a big meltdown after the brother dies. Yeah, and he smashes all these windows in the garage and gashes his hands. Yeah, and I suppose I feel it's important that that's a younger brother, that you'd feel somehow responsible for someone younger than you dying. It just feels against the laws of nature. But it does also feel there's such an absence of sibling rivalry in Salinger that I find quite interesting in that he didn't have any brothers. And I just can't imagine everyone I know with brothers, they have a lot of sibling rivalry. Whereas it feels that the brothers in Salinger are kind of earlier, more perfect incarnations of himself. just can't imagine everyone i know with brothers they have a lot of sibling rivalry whereas it

feels that the brothers in salinger are kind of earlier more perfect incarnations of himself pre being sullied by the world so he can love ali because he's small and red-haired rather than tall and sort of manly and preternaturally aged or something like him or even like just bullying him or all of those things that happen. Yeah. You're horrible to your siblings. Really horrible. Yeah. Whereas he never seen, these characters never seem to have done that

to one another. It makes you incredibly vulnerable trying to connect to someone. And especially if you feel completely disinterred and shattered, the risk of showing what a mess you are to people, especially in that post-war pull your socks up, he's about to go to military academy, is so terrifying that the threatened reality of rejection, of meeting a world that doesn't understand you, that just thinks you're

strange, is completely paralyzing, I'd say. So that's the thing that i felt reading it completely connected to that this is someone who is completely right emotionally he's completely honest in a certain way as well as obfuscating certain things but the things that he's obfuscating somehow feel less important than the truth is excavating i feel to me and that's why I feel you root for him in all of these situations where you go, why are you even agreeing to pay this? Why are you there? You're so flailing and no one's helping you. All people are doing is saying what's wrong with you effectively, really. And this is in the 40s, 50s in America.

I mean, I'm sure it was the same in the uk when people were not discussing their feelings no absolutely well i think that's what that book does so incredibly is there are situations where you see both people's perspective so you absolutely you're right holden caulfield makes complete sense and you have sympathy for him everything a to b the knock-on effect and so the example i would give is like so the bar where there's these three women who can drink alcohol and are allowing him to buy their drinks and so it's a horrible situation because you absolutely understand his frustration they're not being particularly nice to him he dances with them and it's kind of okay one of them's quite a good dancer but they're more interested in famous people but it's so deftly done that you also understand their perspective

is they're just having a drink with each other and this kid is annoying them sitting there oh one by one of course we'll go and have a dance with you kind of out of like begrudgingness he has bought us these drinks but of course they don't like him there's no reason they've got nothing in common exactly and he's he's sat himself down with them in a bar pretending this pretense of being an adult and drinking his coca-colas and i think that's what's so incredible is everyone seems very reasonable yeah like yeah he doesn't sell anyone out as a writer you know he argues for everyone and everyone has their own voice really distinctively and yeah as you say it's such a sleight of hand because it's first-person narration. I mean, it's such a miracle of the eliding from one to the other,

whereby this reporter's speech, which he's giving you, represents the other person in a way that shows him up. It's enough information for you to always... And it is incredible writing. Freud had this thing about the subconscious and how the human brain gets pleasure when it has to do a jump on its own he wrote about this with jokes people don't want to be told it they want to have to work it out for themselves from that information and they get a real satisfaction and that's what i think so incredible about this book is that even like yeah with the the grief

that word is never used there's some information like you say about the smashing up and the hands and the the glove and then the rest is omitted so you you inject it all yourself imagining empathizing yeah the realities of that life and that experience yeah and and at one point he talks fairly matter-of-factly about thinking about jumping out the window and just ending it all but not in a not in a sort of protracted self-pitying way no if you know he's on the precipice of you know at the end when he faints and he just blacks out each moment is so charged that they're kind of elevated from these small kind of cotidian little interactions into real tests of can i go on or not can i can i even live here i need to run away yeah there's something about him that feels that he does

care about people as well as having this almost i don't know kind of horndog thing of just always describing how good looking people are whether he wants to see them yeah there's also a disgust is it stradler so i can never know how to say it yeah strad later strad later just the fact that he just doesn't care about yeah anyone he's just a machine he's just a kind of seduction machine part of him slightly envies that ease but you feel he does want to connect to people of course i think that stradler to figure represents all stages in your life there are other people where it just life seems to be easy yeah that's right and stradley to and it's obviously things that are important to hold field at that point but at every point in your life there's people you go you just get up

and you live it and then you go to bed and it's there's none of this it's not neurotic yeah i like your contraction of the name there holdfield holdfield i like to call it holdfield to save time yeah i've just been shopping at holdfield they do a lot of grains and pulses i don't find it quite depressing at holdfield no i like it i always think about killing myself when i first go in yeah i don't know it just seems a very lonely place no one really connects there. It's full of phonies. There's a jazz floor.

There's a little jazz floor with a whiz round with a cola. It's true, isn't it? But those are presumably they're the phonies, aren't they? Is that a phony? Well, the phony is a casual term because it just means you agitate me. I don't like you. I'm jealous of you. Right.

Sometimes it is i see through you but i think it's more often that agitation i think is the right word something about it makes holden feel uncomfortable and thus you must be a phony that's it's evidential that way because it would be nice to be a phony don't you think like it would be nice to be untroubled by a lot of the things that holden is troubled by yeah and i think he knows that as well because everyone must think that at some stage. Do you really feel that though? Sometimes you do, don't you? Like if you're really in a pickle

and you're just overthinking everything so much in minute detail, relationships, tiny minutiae. I wonder if that's a cake and eat it one. I think so. You know, people just go, I'd love to be religious. I'd love it. Absolutely love it. Just love to have that comfort. And you no no no it's not like it's really hard to be religious

i think the key to the word phony and actually the phase of his life that holden is in is that when you're a teenager you don't realize that absolutely everyone is exactly like you you assume that other people are two-dimensional and it is easier. And then I think the really adult thing that happens is you realise, oh, everyone is having their own version of this. And I think that's when you have proper adult empathy. Yes. You realise I'm not special, I'm not alone.

You can be isolated in what you're going through, but you realise everyone has the same pain and joy and the whole spectrum of emotion. Whereas I think when you're a teenager you can't help but think it's just you everyone thinks they feel more than other people right and if something is not explained to you in terms that you can immediately understand you just dismiss it but i feel he says that at the end when he says you know don't start thinking about people because then you'll miss them he actually i think he does see that in everyone and i think that is why life's really painful for him there's a schopenhauer thing thou art that which is you seeing yourself

in other people and so and you know why do people try and lift the car off someone in the road and they don't know this person or risk their life is the immediate recognition that they're the same as you i guess like the catcher in the right thing he's just localizing it to children because he i think partly feels well how could i save an adult i'm not an adult so he can save people like him so explain the catcher in the right thing well what is the title about well in the book he's speaking to phoebe and phoebe saying you don't like anything his sister you don't want to do anything. You think everything's terrible. What do you want to do? And he says, he talks about the poem.

Is it Robert Burns poem, which he mishears because a child early was singing it. If a body capture someone. If a body met a body. Yeah. And the body met a body. Yeah. But, and the meta body is the right one. But he hears this kid say, catch a body, yeah. Yeah, and the meta body's the right one.

But he hears this kid say, catch a body. And so he says, oh, I'd like to be, that's what I'd like to be. I'd like to be someone who just lets the kids play in this big field of rye. And there are loads of children there. And then if anyone gets too near the edge, I'll just catch them and save them. Because there's a cliff edge. Yeah, which I guess is so connected to Ali and saving his brother and also saving himself. And it seems that the thing that really redeems him is the idea that, oh, now Phoebe's going to drop out. Because at the end, Phoebe comes with her suitcase and says, I'm going to run away with you and we'll go away.

I think in that moment he goes, no, I don't want to infect you with this. I think in that moment he goes, no, I don't want to infect you with this. And I think that's one of the great redeeming things about him, that he doesn't want his sister to get messed up like him and have this reaction. And so, yeah, I feel the phoniness is to do with a kind of lack of truthfulness, which I guess is self-delusion. And everyone's self-deluded. I think that's the main condition of existing. Or there's an element of stoicism isn't there about the condition of adulthood and the loss of innocence you have the option to go around bleating about it the whole time if you want to be saying to everyone why aren't you freaking out we're all gonna die it's horrible out there it's scary people are phony we're not getting on it's why is there so much or you have

the option to try and make the best of it and to to be stoical about it to a degree to assume that other people are struggling with those so if phony is not addressing the existential reality of being alive i think the problem is that no one does that 24 7 so you might be at one moment talking about something very real yeah but the next minute holden might hear you talking about sandwich filling and go oh these phonies at cocktail parties talking about a sandwich filling maybe that's the thing about being a teenager because everything is so raw that you think it has to be that constantly so we work this out that's right and then this is next bit we go we're not going to work it out it's a big mystery you see i feel he could you could be really sincere talking about sandwich fillings

and it's more just yeah he would talk he would like that he just wouldn't like someone trying to make themselves sound great about sandwich fillings like it's a new sandwich yeah like if someone goes i just really love cheese he wouldn't think that i think it's the idea of trying to impress people right doing it as a pose or coming from fear it's really difficult to not be self-deluded it's just impossible i mean you see it in certain people often when people are older and they've got less to lose or there's a certain if you know you're going to die in a week i think your self-delusion probably drops right in a certain way you worry less about being uh eviscerated on social media you don't worry about yeah you don't just go oh look at this tweet that someone sent about me um i guess it's trying to get to what is meaningful

which i suppose for someone coming out of a situation where you see the death camps first hand and just see something so terrible and hidden that why wouldn't you be obsessed with really the necessity for people to realize how messed up they are that people really need to engage with that and it being urgent and not just a kind of affectation that it's like life and death then selling just worst nightmare kind of comes true which is that the book is a runaway sensation right within a few years it's the biggest book in the world everyone loves it across the world it's gone crazy it's never been out of print since it was published it supposedly sells like a quarter of a million copies a year and continues to do so just soon after it was

published all sorts of people wanted to buy the film right and it's never been made into a film no and it can't it can't be yeah why is that he's stipulated against it in his will right billy wilder jerry lewis jerry lewis what the hell would he have did he want to play holden caulfield can you imagine jerry lewis no and uh leonardo dicaprio in more recent times wanted to play that part andrew ray winstone ray winston would have been wonderful uh david walliams i, would have made a superb Holden Caulfield. Salinger said the only person who could play it was him. That was supposedly the thing. Right.

That's the thing, is it seems like he's so inextricably connected to it and couldn't separate it. Yeah. It's difficult. Any book to a film is very, very difficult. But essentially you're widening out the amount of creatives who have a take on it and if it's that inherently personal and specific

you can't allow that without ruining it yes and he was burnt by there was an adaptation made of one of his books which he hated what was that one was it funny i'm the only one i've read i think it was one of his stories was it called my foolish heart he had a real uh they changed the title to blue melody and he freaked out he went fucking furious never spoke to the his friend who's meant to be safeguarding that the copy was perfect but he didn't have control over the title and he never spoke to that person again he's a control freak um but still the the the phenomenon just gets away from him yeah and immediately turns into this kind of thing where people are fascinated by him because it seems to be so clearly autobiographical they start wanting to find out about him and his uh relationships in his personal

life he gets fed up and moves out to the country to cornish in New Hampshire this little town where he lived until his death in 2010 aged 91 yeah and defended his privacy with a shotgun sometimes he would appear at the door when when nutters turned up which they would do regularly making a pilgrimage to him yeah so this is a thing that's interesting at university I did an english degree and the first term one of the things we studied alongside post-modernism was death of the author we were told at the beginning of university essentially don't get carried away about what is biographically true or where it comes from you take a piece of work as a piece of work and you'll be much better at analyzing it and i went to a university that specialized in cultural materialism and so the time that a piece was written is very, very relevant

but whether the author did go to that school or was gay isn't. And what do you feel about that? Well, the thing is it's intoxicating. The minute you say, oh, the war or young girlfriends, of course I want to know more because you want to analyse them like a therapist and go now, and that must be so frustrating. Don't try and make meaning of a person via something that was also of a moment. But there's something about it particularly,

there's a line in it when he says, if I really like a book, I just want to ring up the author and just talk to him. And he talks about maybe wanting to call up Isaac Dinesen, but not sunset morm and um there is something if you really connect to something i don't know if you have this if i really like something i just want to immediately get everything yeah which is a terrible um i think just urge of just possession as well you're an awful bad thing everyone knows terrible person but i'll just go okay now i've got to get everything um so i really like mike nichols i have

to read everything he's ever said watch every film and i don't know that i necessarily want to read biographies but i somehow want the detail everything they've done and it doesn't matter if something's not so good i just have to i't know, you just feel so connected to them. Sure. Yeah, it's tempting to sort of write it off, that urge to get behind the scenes as immaturity, I suppose. And I only say that because it's something that I'm definitely guilty of and always have been, of being quite literal minded and sort of wanting to know what stuff means. And now in the internet age, you can do that very easily. easily you just type in what does catcher in the rye mean and then

you get a whole list of stuff this is america video all right that was such an amazing thing to have an internet resource to go i know that there's so much symbolism here that i'm not qualified to read yeah and the fact that then you can some other people will show you this is that this is that that's enough of this but those are just sort of specific details that are hidden in the background of the thing it doesn't necessarily tell you what it means and of course ultimately those are things that you need to decide for yourself but it's a language where suddenly you've got levels of meaning so if i was to watch an opera which is in italian and i've never seen an opera any meaning i'll get out of it will be

arbitrary right yeah whereas i love that song so much in the video and then the more i understood the more i love the levels and the intelligence and so sometimes it's wonderful having things over yeah i mean i do like i'm someone who watches uh kind of documentaries about bands that i like yeah i like seeing how this and that song came together but then I'll talk to other people especially musicians who just think that that is the saddest thing in the world and why would you want to do that because if any medium really can stand on its own then it's music and that's all you need you've got the song yeah why would you want to find out about what they were doing in the studio

and how that who he was going out with at the time and all this kind of crap i'm like i yeah i love all that stuff so to bring it back to salinger though he is then in this position with people just being absolutely fascinated by the details of his personal life and then to actually have not one but three people commit murder in the name of or at least partly i guess that's it he became incredibly famous and so then had all of the terrible things that happen if you're famous and yeah embraced by the phone so many people read that but i mean it sold so many that's almost it's bound to be enjoyed by a couple of well look nut buckets yeah as an if you're a serial killer and you're looking for a book to read it's likely that's one of the ones enjoyed this try this yeah your amazon recommends yeah

like guns and ammo you may also like but it's so good that's the thing about captain right you know it's just so i didn't want to find out anything about the author yeah when i read captain right i just thought i want to read everything he's done as in someone capable of this magic you just would follow anything they wrote again because it's just so rare i haven't read his other books what what's your favorite of the others i really like uh franny franny and zoe yeah zoe's longer um and it's more to do with the brother the two yeah the glass family there's franny and zoe who are not the youngest but oh may they are the youngest, but Franny's the younger one, and Zooey's the slightly older brother,

and Zooey happens just after the end of the Franny story, and that's really beautiful, and I mean, all of it's good. Nine stories, Franny and Zooey, which is essentially two long short stories, not quite novellas, and then Seymour and Introduction, which was the last one,

last published in book form one, which is twinned with Ra's Haid, The Roofbeam Carpenters. I think they're all incredible. Have you read any of those, Sarah? I've read Franny and Zoe, but I think I might go and read some of the short... I'm very lazy with short stories

because actually I go, well, how good can they be? And then often it's a very, very good answer. I'd say these, yeah. Someone really had to twist my arm to read Raymond Carver. Oh, right, yeah, they're pretty great. Pretty great. Have you read No Comebacks by Geoffrey Archer?

Quite a few twists. Pretty good. Low your fucking mind in that one. Is that a short one, is is it i've read i've written much for this is he good what i used to work he's a solid workman i used to work in a hotel for older people it's called warner holidays and there's a book box and i couldn't afford any books at the time and so i only read what they left in the book box so i read a lot of football managers autobiographies and dean coons some dean co Dean Kuntz and some Geoffrey Archer.

He's got some page turners. Yeah. Yeah. There is an art to writing a book. Yes, suspenseful. Yeah. Writing books, yeah. Oh, come on.

There's no art to it. It's just this and this and this and this and this. How many have you written now, Richard? Oh, I wouldn't say what I've written in books. Oh, I see. Two things have been published. There's another one that's about to drop. How many have you written?

I'm just about to finish my second book. It's taken me ages. Is it? Not as long as Salinger. What kind of thing is it? I'm writing about men. It's a massive topic, but this is why I catch you in the rye reading it now,

having done the research I've been doing for three years and just being so fascinated about evolutionary pressures on men. So looking particularly at kind of social status and sexual selection. But what's very interesting in kind of current times, I just think teenage boys are getting a huge amount of conflicting information about what is expected of them. And that's what Catcher in the Rye is about. It's about you're supposed to be very strong, but not aggressive. You're supposed to be respected by people and like this effortlessness that other people just managed to do it.

You can be the most popular, sporty, attractive guy in the school without trying to be it yes and just how difficult it is i think it's a very difficult actually the male thing the idea that you have to provide and protect i think that in itself is a very odd position yeah people don't really think that too much anymore though and it's weird the program first dates makes such a song and dance about men paying for dinner in heterosexual public researching for my book there's a huge amount of news stories about um men who wanted money back after dates have you ever read any of these no way i'll send you some i think it's really interesting and that they felt they'd there's been an outlay and they ought to and often not a huge outlay so there's

right in Costa Coffee and it was in every paper Telegraph Times Daily Mail The Sun that's all and The Guardian all the papers a woman had written a blog with screen grabs of the messages she'd met up with a guy on an app they went to Costa Coffee he said you want to come back to my house I'm getting a waitress delivery she said no and then he the next day there's a waitress and he said i'll cook for you i'm having a waitress delivery and she said i don't feel comfortable she can't please them he messaged her to say well maybe we'll have dinner another time come on for dinner and she said i didn't really think there was a spark and he replied going well fair enough can i have the 380 back and she um said i can give it to charity and he said

i'll decide how i spend my money and but it's really interesting in terms of the investments of dating because there's this other thing um but that was a story because he's an outlier i mean that he's an outlier but the comments underneath there are lots of people saying why are men expected to pay on dates okay and if the expectation is an investment into a relationship you know my comedy wife joe cornish is as i speak promoting his film the kid who would be king and has done a lot of press and people occasionally sort of jokingly needle me with it on social media i look joe's got a film out it's a proper film what are you doing oh my gosh what are you doing

adam well i'm doing a podcast about catching the riot that just sort of meanders all over the place and they're gonna type this up and put it in sparks notes but um one of the comments i got was uh what what what is adam buxton doing anyway he seems to be content just to live his life out in the country with his brackets rich question mark wife. I, you know, he's not doing anything to earn money because he's never been on TV that I can remember. So presumably he's just a kept man. And how humiliating to be living, you know, with with his wife providing all the money is like that. be living you know with with his wife providing all the money he's like that that would be the most humiliating thing yeah to not only be uh inveterate and lazy and unsuccessful but also to be paid for by a woman exactly my dad was always ill when i was young so my mum was always

the person who bought everything i just didn't find it uh. Yeah. I'm more evolved is what I'm saying. Yeah. Well, I think, yeah. And better than other people. We've sorted everything, us three. My primary caregiver and my dad, who didn't live with us, was a jazz musician. Yeah. And who didn't have any of that macho status.

So I found it very surprising as an adult that anyone cares. Or anyone thinks you should do anything just because of your gender. Right. I'm very evolved as well. I think we've pretty realised that if Holden Caulfield were to like anyone, it would be these three guys sitting right here. Yeah. Right here.

Phony club, not in it. Had he not, we call ourselves phony club ironically. Yeah, exactly. Because we're so unfony. Holden gets such a bang out of us. If we'd actually managed to do this in 2009 before he died, I think he wouldn't have shot us. There'd be another 10 years. When we did the pilgrimage.

Yeah. I like the Phony Club. I'm also thinking of My Little Phony. Oh, My Little Phony's nice. Please, come on. Don't throw that away. Don't just toss that away like it's like a small thing. That's like a major discovery.

That's really great. What's Adam Buxton doing with his life? That's what. Wordplay. My little phony. Yes. Wait, this is an advert for Squarespace. Every time I visit your website, I see success.

Yes, success. The way that you look at the world makes the world want to say yes. It looks very professional. I love browsing your videos and pics and I don't want to stop. I love browsing your videos and pics and I don't want to stop. And I'd like to access your members area and spend in your shop. These are the kinds of comments people will say about your website if you build it with Squarespace. Just visit squarespace.com slash Buxton for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, because you will want to launch, use the offer code Buxton to save 10%

off your first purchase of a website or domain. So put the smile of success on your face with Squarespace. Yes. Continue. A body meets a body. Coming through the line. You see Hey, welcome back, podcats. That was Sarah Pascoe and Richard Iwade. I'm very grateful to them for their time.

That conversation was recorded in February of this year, 2019. And at the time time they were both busy writing those books which will be out later this year Sarah's book Sex Power and Money is published at the end of August and there's a link to the Waterstones site where you can pre-order it the site says it's a funny book with serious intent. Sex, Power and Money asks uncompromising questions about the sex industry, objectification and the erotic allure of immense wealth.

And in so doing, Pascoe offers a splenetic, incisive and frequently hilarious account of the modern condition. And actually, now that I think of it, it occurred to me that the thing I was talking about with Sarah at the end of that conversation, when I mentioned that person's comment about me having a rich wife, I perhaps took it the wrong way, and actually it wasn't intended to imply that having a rich wife would be humiliating. Maybe it was just innocent speculation. I don't know. As a matter of fact, I do have a rich wife.

Rich in kindness, rich in love, and rich in omega-6. Richard's latest book is called Richard Ayawade on Top it's out at the beginning of September 2019 and the blurb reads thus at last the definitive book about perhaps the best cabin crew dramedy ever filmed View from the Top starring

Gwyneth Paltrow Ayawade argues for the canonisation of this brutal masterpiece, a film that celebrates capitalism in all its victimless glory. One we might imagine Donald Trump himself, half-watching on his private jet's gold-plated flat screen

while his other puffy eye scans the cabin for fresh young prey. That sounds like a bit of blurb that Richard would have written himself. So, yeah, I haven't read the book, but I do know that Richard has got this weird obsession with View from the Top, this film starring Gwyneth Paltrow. And so that clearly is the central motif for his new book and I will be talking to Richard about that book and other things

in September, September the 5th, I think it's a Thursday at London's South Bank Centre you will find a link to book tickets in the description of this podcast. This is going to be the last episode of the podcast that I put out for a little while. We'll be back in October, that's the plan, with more semi-regular episodes to take you up to Christmas. Rosie, come on, let's head back. Oh oh this is a good fly past that's the wrong way though dog log we're not going down that way no not that way either we're going down that way we're going back home all right it's time for a

rest we're on our summer break now sort of a summer break I'm going to speaking of books I've still got a lot to do on my stupid book so I'm going to carry on trying to do that and then by the time

I speak with you podcats again everything in the world will be fine Trump they will have got rid of Trump because, I mean, send her back, send her back.

He's not going to survive that, is he? Of course he's not. No, it'll be fine. They'll get rid of him. I mean, it's beyond the pale. Him just standing there while the people at his rally are chanting send her back.

He's never going to survive it. Trust me, they'll get rid of him probably in a couple of weeks. Probably our great new prime minister will sort it out for us. So everything's looking up. Political. Okay. Thanks very much indeed to Annika Meson for her edit work on this episode thanks to seamus murphy mitchell for his production support hey listen i hope you get to enjoy

some summer fun if you miss the podcast while it's away then explore the Adam Buxton app, where you will find bonus episodes not available in the regular run, and links to some stupid videos, and I don't know, have a look around. The app is free. Okay, listen, tread carefully out there, and bear in mind, love you Byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeioioiooooooooooooooooooooo Bye. Thank you.