Best Of: Why Do We Itch? / Writer Richard Price
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From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Terry Gross with Fresh Air Weekend. Today, itching, the kind that scratching only makes worse, the kind that can take over your brain. Itching, it's just a little bit like disrespected. You look like a dog with fleas. It's like embarrassing to scratch yourself in public. It's inappropriate to scratch yourself in public.

I think people just kind of don't take it very seriously. Our guest Annie Lowry, a staff writer for The Atlantic, has written an article called Why People Itch and How to Stop It. She has severe chronic itch. Also, we hear from screenwriter and author of one of the most anticipated novels of the season, Richard Price. He wrote for HBO's The Wire and co-created HBO's The Night Of and The Outsider. Several of his novels, including Clockers, were adapted into films. He has a new novel.

And Maureen Corrigan recommends two books if you're looking for inspiration, beauty, and humor. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.

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This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Terry Gross. Stress and anxiety can lead to itch. So I would imagine a lot of Americans have done a lot of scratching over the past few months. There's the kind of itch that you scratch and poof, no more itch. But sometimes, the more you scratch, the more you itch. And then there's the kind of itch that is so alive, explosive, persistent, and all-encompassing that nothing seems to help. And it hijacks your brain.

That's the kind of itch that my guest Annie Lowry writes about in her Atlantic Magazine article titled Why People Itch and How to Stop It. It's about what researchers are learning about itch and how that's opening the door to new treatments.

Lowry suffers from itch so intense she's dug holes in her skin and scalp and once asked a surgeon to amputate her limbs. Her issue is related to a rare and degenerative liver disease. Part of her article is about her own itch and the extremes it's led her to. Lowry is a staff writer at The Atlantic, focusing on the economy and politics. She's a former staff writer at The New York Times and New York Magazine.

Annie Lowry, welcome to Fresh Air. Is today an itchy day for you? It is. I have been itchy for about four days now. So we're talking during the daytime, so I'm not terribly itchy. But my feet are itchy, my scalp is itchy, and my hands are itchy. But it's a two out of ten. It's manageable. So people are very dismissive of itch. And I want you to describe what your kind of itch feels like. At its worst...

It was like having poison ivy in the acute phase of poison ivy, although my skin didn't show anything. There was no rash or anything like that.

And it was completely maddening. It was impossible to do anything other than focus on scratching or trying to find relief from the itching. And the type of itching that I have is not sensitive to the medications that we have that normally turn the itching dial down. So the two big ones being steroids and antihistamines.

And it just became all-encompassing. I would spend hours in cold baths. I would walk to try to get rid of the itch. It was most intense. I've been pregnant twice. I have two kids. And...

At the end of one pregnancy, I asked my surgeons, I was like, if this doesn't stop, I don't want these limbs on my body anymore. It was really debilitating. And I'm not like that all the time. And in fact, the itching has never been quite as severe as it was in my pregnancies. Now the itching is much calmer, although it is persistent. But it comes and goes. At its worst, it's really, you know, just like pain is debilitating, itch is debilitating. Right.

Okay, so you mentioned that you were especially itchy on the bottom of your feet, your hands, and your scalp. Are those, if I use the word, popular sites for itch? And if so, why? I mean, a lot of people go around scratching their scalp.

The amount that you might itch and the place that you might itch has to do with the network of nerves inside your body and the messages that those nerves are receiving from chemical irritants from outside your body or the chemical messengers within your body.

And my understanding, and I'll just note that I am not a scientist, I am not a doctor, I am a lay person who knows a lot about this, unfortunately, from experience, is that when you have a lot of basically itchy receptors, nerve fibers that accept itch, and you have a lot of chemicals that engender itch, like histamine and others, in those sites, you'll feel itchy.

And one thing that happens to me and I know happens to other people with chronic illness who get itching is that it actually you'll feel itchy on the inside of your body, like, you know, in your guts, right? Like part of your body that hasn't, you know, you're not itchy on your skin and you can't get to it. So there's no way to scratch it. And I remember talking with a number of dermatologists who are like, well, you don't really have the nerves for itching on the inside of your body. And, you know, I would talk to other doctors or

patients, people who itched, and they'd be like, no, no, no. And I felt this way too. I was like, no, I swear that I feel it. And I finally found this one neuroscientist who was like, oh, no, no, some of those fibers exist inside your body. So yeah, anywhere where you have those, there's probably a little bit of itching possible. And I felt very, very good knowing that. But yeah, so I think that your hands are just enormously sensitive, right? Like so many of these touch receptors and

I'm going to quote you. You write,

Describe what it means to you to be constantly reminded that you're in a body. Why don't you want that kind of reminder? And does it make your body feel like an opponent?

Absolutely. I've tried to come up with a lot of metaphors for itching, and I feel like we have a lot of metaphors for pain, right? Unfortunately, all of us in human bodies experience pain and often really severe pain, and itching is basically a universal phenomenon also. But itching feels kind of qualitatively different to pain, at least to me in some ways. It can be really hard to tune out. I always describe it as being like a car alarm, right?

Right.

it has this kind of hallucinatorially strange quality for me sometimes. You're feeling things that aren't there. And sometimes I even get that sense, I will feel things on my skin when I'm looking at the skin and there's nothing there. And it can be spooky in a way. And notably, there's lots of different ways to feel itchy. There's burning itch. There's kind of electric itch. There's sunburn itch. Our brain is amazing at sensing things

in unbelievably refined ways. And so, yeah, you know, sometimes it's just a bug bite. And sometimes I'm like, I could write a book trying to describe this. Well, let me ask you if you experience this. Sometimes when I get the kind of itch that if you scratch it, it just gets worse. Like, so the first time you scratch it, it's like it explodes. It's almost like it bloomed, it blossomed, it's climactic.

But at the same time, you know, the climax and then it ends. Right. But with itch, it's like it explodes and then it kind of keeps up at that like high level. It doesn't stop. Absolutely. Yeah. So that's that's a strange thing about itch. I just realized I'm scratching my scalp as we talk. I think everybody who listens to this is going to do that. We can talk about why that is. Why is that? Tell me why that is.

So just to go back to one thing that you said, and then I'll answer that question. But yeah, scratching, it engenders pain in the skin, which interrupts the sensation of itch. And it gives you the sense of relief that actually feels really good. It's really pleasurable to scratch.

And then when you stop scratching, the itch comes back. And the problem is that when you scratch or you damage your skin in order to stop the itch, to interrupt the itch, you actually damage the skin in a way that then makes the skin more itchy because you end up with histamine in the skin. And histamine is one of the hormones that generates itch within the body. But to go back to what you were saying, there's actual studies that show that itching is contagious. So why?

watching somebody scratch will make a person scratch. There's this interesting question. Are people scratching empathetically in the way that we will mirror the movements of people around us, in the way that yawning is contagious or crying can be contagious?

But it turns out that no, it's probably a self-protective thing. If you see somebody scratching, there's some ancient part of your body that says that person might have scabies. That person might have some other infestation. I'm going to start scratching to get this off of myself because scratching is in part a self-protective mechanism. We want to get irritants off of the body and that's in part why we scratch. Right.

So, you know, in the itch-scratch cycle, if you scratch and itch, it releases histamine to that site, and histamine makes you itch more. Is there any logic behind that?

Yes. So histamine is an amazing chemical that does many, many, many things in our body. And it's part of our immune response. It leads to swelling so the body can come in to heal. And the scratching is meant to get, you know, whatever irritant was there off the

And the itch-scratch cycle ends when the body heals. So I think that that's all part of a natural and proper cycle that's part of our body being amazing at sensing what's around it and then healing it. But we have some itch that's caused...

by substances other than histamine, we've only started to understand that kind of itch recently. Similarly, we didn't really understand, science did not understand chronic itch very well until recently. And we're in a period, I'd say in the last 20 years, of just tremendous scientific advancement in our understanding of itch. So you're not supposed to scratch an itch because it can release histamine and amplify the itch instead of quieting it.

But the doctor who's called the godfather of itch, Gil Yastupovich, you say he doesn't even suggest to patients that they shouldn't scratch their itch because if you're seeing him, you have pretty severe chronic itch. So why did he explain to you why he doesn't even suggest it?

I think the patients that he often sees, and he does a lot of things. He studies itch as a doctor, as he does medical research, and I believe that he also sees patients. I've talked to other dermatologists who've told me not to itch, who've tried to hand me cold packs and try to get my hands off of my body and explained the itch scratch cycle and sort of said, okay, we might not be able to treat your underlying itch, but at least we can break the itch

scratch cycle and stop that kind of secondary itch that's coming on top of it. And when I talk to him, he sees people that are so miserable and they know, they know that scratching is not going to help them. But at some point it's reflexive. And I think that he felt like it was cruel to tell people to stop doing this thing.

Yeah.

I would say that all of the dermatologists I've ever seen have been very, very sympathetic. And, you know, itch is something that they deal with on a daily basis. It's enormously common. And they mean well. I'm certainly not trying to get on dermatologist's case for that. My guest is Annie Lowry. We're talking about her Atlantic Magazine article, Why People Itch and How to Stop It. We'll hear more of our conversation after a break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.

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This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Annie Lowry about her Atlantic Magazine article, Why People Itch and How to Stop It. It's about what researchers are learning about the causes of chronic itch. Lowry suffers from severe chronic itch resulting from a rare liver disease. I would like you to describe the chronic progressive illness that you have that's responsible for the severe itch that you experience.

Absolutely. So I have a poorly understood degenerative disease called primary biliary cholangitis. It's autoimmune in nature. It seems to be partially genetically, you know, you perhaps have a genetic predisposition, but then perhaps environmentally triggered. They don't really know why people get it, right?

Right now, I believe that it's roughly 80,000 people in the United States total who have it. About nine in 10 of those people are women. And the disease is most common in adult women, somewhat, you know, 40 and older.

And it is a disease in which the body mistakenly attacks some of the cells in your bile ducts, in the lining of your bile ducts. It causes them to inflame. It hurts your liver's ability to secrete bile into your digestive system, into your body.

And ultimately, if the disease is allowed to progress, will slowly progress towards cirrhosis. Disease used to be considered or was often considered fatal. They found a drug, an actually really old drug that dissolves gallstones, works really well to slow its progression. And

And so, yeah, so that's the condition that I had. I was diagnosed with it during my second pregnancy, though I clearly had it in my first. And I was young, although not unheard of, young to get it. And my OBGYNs had never had a patient with it. It took a while to get to a hepatologist who recognized it. But it, like a lot of liver and kidney conditions, for reasons that are not understood at all,

causes really, really bad itching that does not respond to antihistamines and does not respond to steroids. You write that scientists are thinking that it is sometimes a disease in and of itself. What is meant by that?

When scientists said that itching is a disease in and of itself, what they meant was that chronic itching changes the body's own circuitry in a way that begets more chronic itching. That implies that itching is not just a side effect, it's a body process in and of itself.

And so instead of just being a symptom, instead of being something where if you fix the underlying issue, you might fix the itch, itch itself can kind of rewire the body and can be treated as a condition unto itself. And a lot of dermatologists see itch that way. It's often a symptom, often a side effect, but sometimes it's really its own thing in the body.

You point out that if you're in pain, there's so many pain clinics and pain medications and pain experts and pain support groups. If chronic severe itch is one of your problems, you can see a dermatologist, but there aren't a lot of centers that specialize in itch. And you couldn't even find a lot of support groups that deal with itch. And I think a lot of people have issues with itch. Why do you think...

Not as many as pain, but why do you think so little attention is being paid to itch and why comparatively little research has been done about itch when compared to pain? It's a great question. And I think that the answer is multilayered. So one is that doctors didn't understand itch, even just that basic histaminergic itch, very well until recently. There's not a lot of drugs to treat itch.

And there didn't seem to be a lot of money in treating itch. There's a lot of money in treating pain, right? An upsetting amount of money that has led to a tremendous social crisis. Right.

due to our treatment of pain. But it is also true that, you know, there's a lot of chronic pain and we have a lot of ways to treat it. And, you know, I think there's now a lot more emphasis on non-opiate medications to treat pain while also acknowledging that a lot of people require appropriately opiate medications to treat pain. So there just wasn't like a lot of optionality for treating itch. It wasn't the sort of thing that medical centers were going to make a lot of money by treating people with chronic itch because they didn't have options to give them.

I also think that there's a social aspect. Pain is so awful. And I would never say that there's something ennobling about pain. But I think that there's a certain amount of social respect to people who are going through it.

And itching, you kind of sound like a Muppet, right? Do you think that like itching, it's just a little bit like disrespected. You look like a dog with fleas. It's like embarrassing to scratch yourself in public. It's inappropriate to scratch yourself in public. I think people just kind of don't take it very seriously. I'd also thought a lot about how like, you know, if you had a chronic itching support group, everybody would come into it and then just start scratching themselves and then make everybody else itchier by being in the...

simple presence of people who were itchy. So I don't know. But it's something that, you know, people suffer through alone. It's kind of embarrassing. And it's been so nice since the piece came out to get, I got a lot of emails from people suggesting lotion. And I was like, okay, thank you. Thank you for that. Um,

But then I got a lot of emails from people who were like, people don't believe me, but I've been itchy and they don't know what it is. And I feel so alone. Or I have this cancer and it makes me itchy and it drives me completely nuts. And so it was really nice to get responses from people who didn't want to be alone and do have some trouble conveying to folks just how hard it can be. And this is not to, you know, there's no misery Olympics here. I'm not saying like pain is awful. Itching is awful. It's just that sometimes I think itch is not respected.

Your husband made a T-shirt for you. Describe what was written on the T-shirt. It says, yes, I have tried lotions. So people, when you say that you're itchy, I think they kindly assume it's a dermatologic thing. And they're like, oh, yeah, I was itchy, too. And I tried this lotion and you should try this lotion.

And I try not to get short with those people because they are trying to be helpful. But I'm like, I'm not saying I've tried everything, but I've tried a lot of things. Like I'm an expert in my own itch at this point. And if Userin fixed it, I can assure you that I wouldn't be experiencing it. But people are trying to be nice. And so I try to be nice back. I don't know that I succeed at that all the time.

Do you ever like enter into a conversation with somebody and you're itching really badly and you're not going to say anything about it and you think the person I'm talking to only knew what's going on inside. This conversation might be very different.

Yeah, I try not to talk to people when that happens. I guess in some ways it's nice that usually when I'm really itchy, it's at night, like in the middle of the night, because, you know, during the daytime, it would be pretty unusual for me to be severely itchy now. That was not true when I was pregnant so much. But now it's like the sun starts to go down. I'm leaving the office so I can go hide in my house if I'm itchy. You know, so for the past week that I've been itchy, it's mostly it's been at night. And I

Like, I just excuse myself because it's just like sometimes I'll subtly try to scratch my head or scratch my feet or something. But it's noticeable. People kind of pick up on it. It's like not a cool thing to do socially. I think it leads to a sense of disquiet in the person that you're talking to. And then they end up scratching themselves. You've just you've allowed your itch to become contagious. Yeah.

Your article ends with this, I'm here, my body tells me, I'm here, I'm alive, I'm dying, I'm here. It sounds like a meditation. Is this something that you repeat to yourself a lot?

I often sort of tell it to shut up. I'm often like, I know, I know I'm itchy. You can stop it. I know. I don't need to itch. I don't need to be scratching. I don't know why it's happening, but it could stop and we'd be fine. There's no point to my itching. It's not helping me get something off of my skin. It's just interrupting.

And I do think that even if I can't quite come to terms with the itch, I have come to much better terms of just, you know, the gift of being in a body that is getting sick, the gift of being in a body at all. And I have really tried over, you know, the kind of six months that I was working on the piece to come to better terms with that. And again, I think so many people come to better terms with that. And I always want to be careful to note, like, it's

You know, I don't think that illness is any kind of gift and I don't think that there needs to be upsides to bad things happening to people at all. But I do appreciate the insight that I've had into myself, even if I wish that I never had occasion to have it. What kind of insight?

Just like you can endure a lot. Your body is going to fail you. You know, it can feel completely crazy making and obsessive and miserable and you can survive it. You can just keep on breathing through it. You can do really amazing, wonderful things.

And again, that's not to say I think that it's worth it or that I'm taking the right lesson away from it. I really often just try to be like, not everything needs to be a lesson. You don't need to respond to things that are unfair and difficult in this fashion. But writing the piece led me to a much greater place of acceptance, and I really appreciated that. So before we go, should we apologize to our listeners for making them itch in case we've done that?

I'm so sorry. Especially the people who are always itchy. I'm really sorry. I hope you turned this off the second you heard it. You're like, nope, not me, not today. I'm going to make the counter argument. I think this is very helpful to anyone who has itch. I hope so. I hope so. And it is all of us. All of us. It's yeah, it's not as common as chronic pain, but chronic itch is really common and everybody is itchy at some point.

Annie Lowry, thank you so much for talking with us. This interview has really been a pleasure, even though we've been talking about chronic itch and rare disease. You've brought a sense of understanding and a sense of humor to it all, and I greatly appreciate that. Thank you so much for having me. Annie Lowry is a staff writer at The Atlantic. We've been talking about her article, Why People Itch and How to Stop It.

If you're in search of some inspiration, beauty, and leavening humor in what you read in the coming weeks, our book critic, Maureen Corrigan, thinks she may have just what you're looking for. Sometimes I do believe there is a book god who sends the book I need when I need it. This week, the book god sent a special delivery of not one, but two much-needed books.

For years, Billy Collins has been both blessed and burdened with the tagline that identifies him as one of America's favorite poets. I say burdened because if a poet is popular, the suspicion arises that they're a mere rhymester, a step or two up from a hallmark assembly line troubadour.

Even at this late stage in Colin's career, he's in his early 80s now, has served as poet laureate, and has published 12 earlier collections of poetry. His simplicity of language invites cynics to regard him as simplistic. Those of us who've long read his work know better.

Water, Water, Collins' collection of 60 new poems, takes its title from the romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge's ballad, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, and its often misquoted lines, Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.

Coleridge is also the guy who talked about making the familiar strange and the strange familiar, which is an apt description of what Collins has always done in his own work. If anything has shifted in Collins' poems over the years, it's that the theme of aging is more prevalent, specifically the way aging makes a person estranged from their former selves and others.

Take the poem called When a Man Loves Something. Like most of Collins' work, it appears to be autobiographical, narrated in what Collins himself drolly calls the first-person selfish point of view. Collins starts out remembering a night when he heard the blues singer Percy Sledge perform in a roadhouse on the edge of a California desert.

A loopy interlude follows. Years later, Collins says, when I lived in Florida, we had a plumber whose name was Lynn Hammer. I like to introduce people to one another, but Lynn Hammer said he had never heard of Percy Sledge and put his head back under the sink. So many miscues like that these days.

Near the poem's end, Collins imagines there's a planet called the past, and he's on it, orbiting the sun. Collins is his own most eloquent critic. In a poem bearing the stripped-down title of Your Poem, he suggests that one of the go-to emotions in his work is buoyant ease in the shadow of mortality.

This whole collection is filled with poems that strike that rare attitude, and some of them, like Emily Dickinson in Space, which unfortunately is too long to read here, are among the best poems that Collins has ever written. Now for something completely different.

I usually hesitate to review graphic novels and illustrated books because it's hard to do justice to their visual power. But James Norbury's illustrated adult fable called The Dog Who Followed the Moon fell into my hands a few weeks ago, and I've been under its spell ever since.

Norbury, who's the best-selling author and illustrator of the philosophical Big Panda and Tiny Dragon books, is a practicing Buddhist. His books are not meant to comfort as much as they're meant to accompany readers on their own hard journeys.

The dog who followed the moon opens on a winter dawn in the mountains. Norbury's blue, white, and brown watercolors on the opening pages are influenced by Zen art. They make readers feel the stillness of this imaginary world. A puppy named Amaya, who's become separated from her parents, wanders into the snowy landscape.

starving and lonely she mistakes a wolf pack for friendly dogs the wolves circle her and attack just as amaya is about to be torn apart she's rescued by an old wolf the former leader of the pack

Together they set off through a fantastic landscape of ancient ruins and despair and loss, always looking for the moon to lead them and struggling to keep the faith when it disappears behind clouds.

Norbury says in his afterword that his moon was his art and that he spent 25 years with very little money, depressed, anxious, defeated, addicted, before coming out the other side.

inspirational is a word that's become cheapened, but it's a fitting word for the dog who followed the moon, an inspirational and gorgeous book about not giving up. Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed Water, Water, the latest collection of poems by Billy Collins, and the illustrated adult fable, The Dog Who Followed the Moon by James Norbury.

Coming up, we'll hear from screenwriter and novelist Richard Price. His new novel, Lazarus Man, is one of the most anticipated books of the season. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. The following message comes from NPR sponsor, Ameriprise Financial. Chief Market Strategist Anthony Saglin-Benny shares how his team supports Ameriprise clients. It can be scary for a client trying to figure out what's happening in the economy or

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This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Terry Gross. I always look forward to a new Richard Price novel, and after nearly 10 years of waiting, he has a new one called Lazarus Man. During those 10 years, he co-created and wrote for the HBO series The Night Of and The Outsider, and wrote for the HBO series The Deuce. Before that, he wrote for The Wire, one of the best TV series ever.

Several of his earlier novels were adapted into films, including Clockers, Freedomland, and The Wanderers. He also wrote the screenplay for the film Al Pacino considers his comeback film, Sea of Love.

Price is considered one of the best writers of urban fiction and one of the best writers of dialogue, and I think that's true of his new novel, which is set in Harlem, where Price has lived since 2008, the same year that the novel is set. The story revolves around the collapse of a five-story building whose impact is like a very small-scale 9-11. It's devastating for the people in the neighborhood, including the survivors and the people grieving for loved ones who've died.

The collapse changes the lives of each of the main characters, including a young street photographer, a police community affairs officer, a funeral director who can't keep up with the quota of bodies he needs to stay in business, and a 42-year-old man who has been feeling like he's lost everything and has little to live for and is found buried in the rubble. It's remarkable that he's still alive, which is why the novel's called Lazarus Man.

Reviewing the novel in the Washington Post, Ron Charles wrote, Richard Price, welcome back to Fresh Air. Because I love your writing, I want to start with a reading from the very beginning of the book. All righty.

It was one of those nights for Anthony Carter, 42, two years unemployed, two years separated from his wife and stepdaughter, six months into cocaine sobriety, and recently moved into his late parents' apartment on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, when to be alone with his thoughts, alone with his losses.

was not survivable. So he did what he always did, hit the streets, meaning hit the bars on Lenox, one after the other, finding this one too ghetto, that one too Scandinavian tourist, this one too loud, that one too quiet, on and on, taking just a few sips of his drink in each one, dropping dollars and heading out for the next establishment, like an 80-proof Goldilocks.

thinking maybe this next place, this next random conversation would be the trigger for some kind of epiphany that would show him a new way to be. But it was all part of a routine that never led him anywhere but back to the apartment. This he knew, this he had learned over and over, but maybe this time is a drug. You never know is a drug. So out the door he went.

When we spoke in 1986 after your novel, The Breaks, you said something that reminds me of something that you wrote in the paragraph that you read, this whole kind of like maybe this time, that the whole idea of maybe this time can be a drug. You were talking about your feeling of discontent when you were younger and feeling like,

You're over here, but it's over there. And the minute you're over there, it's over here. This feeling of restlessness and discontent and maybe wanting to be someone else. Well, you know, it's just some people have like this constant state of low-key agitation that the thing, the very thing that's going to make you whole is like one micro dot outside your fingertips. And then you can't find it at all and repeat if necessary. Right.

It was a level of dissatisfaction I felt, but I don't feel that anymore. I grew out of it. And now I'm kind of, I wouldn't say chill. I'll never be chill. But, you know, at least I'm, you know, more relaxed and settled than I've ever been.

You wrote this novel during the COVID shutdown, at least part of it during the COVID shutdown. And I'm wondering if you were feeling more vulnerable at that time. I mean, you live in Manhattan, which was a city that had like trucks that had been turned into morgues. Were you thinking a lot about mortality and the unpredictability of life? Well, everybody was, you know, the first wave. But on a writing level,

Level, what happened to me is I love to go out on the street, talk to people. It's a lot more fun than writing. And I couldn't do that. I couldn't get fed. And it's called fiction. You know, you make things up. But I'm so addicted to that type of interaction in the service of a novel. You know, just because it happened doesn't make it art. But the trick is to go home and make it art. And I couldn't go out for years.

I mean, I could, but not to, like, meet people. Hi, how you doing? What's your name? Shake my hand. And that sort of messed me up. So you go out and talk to strangers? Just being on the street, just the random things that you overhear or the conversations you get into because so many people...

Harlem is like a little different than the rest of New York in terms of people make eye contact, people nod, even if they don't know you. If you say something, they're going to say something back. And next thing you know, you're standing there on a corner and you're talking. And I've never met a person who hasn't come up at least with one thunderbolt of offhand observation or commentary.

You know, the book is called Lazarus Man. I'm wondering what the role of religion was in your life growing up. I knew not to curse on Yom Kippur, so God wouldn't put me in the book of death. Did you fast? I don't know. I went to Hebrew school until I was bar mitzvahed. And then after that, my relationship with being Jewish was pretty much perfect.

The only time I really felt Jewish is, besides Sandy Koufax not pitching, is when there was an anti-Semitic moment, an incident. Then I felt very, you know, tight with my religion. Other than that, I was pretty much a humanist. I didn't raise my children to be—I made a deal with my wife. I won't circumcise them if you don't christen them. I mean, it was sort of like a humanistic relationship.

Did you both keep that deal? Yeah, I think. How would I know? Oh, I'm taking the kids out for a walk. I'll be back. Why are they all dressed up in white? Oh, it's a nice day. White looks good in April. Who knows? But I imagined that we kept to that. Yes. Your character of Anthony says this later. When things go good, we say God is good. But when things go south, that's apparently on us. Do you find a lot of truth in that? It was just my feeling.

But it's a very complicated thing that he's setting up here, which is to say, you know, it'd be easiest for me if I could find in the book what he says. Sure, yeah. No, absolutely. Yeah. He's a little bit of a celebrity because he is the Lazarus man. He has survived death.

36 hours in the rubble when no one detected any kind of sign of life. And yet he was miraculously found. This is what he's saying to people to give them hope, you know, at this funeral for a young kid who was shot trying to get in between two gangs to calm people down.

As I said before, I've never been a deeply religious individual, and I still don't consider myself one. But I feel guided now, and my purpose in being here today is to deliver to you a message that just might make it possible to accept your aching hearts and continue to live the life that he has given you. For a brief moment, he stood there speechless, amazed at what he was about to say.

What I have learned since that day in the rubble is that whatever befalls you in life, whatever appears to you as an impossible burden, an unbearable weight, in the end, if you persevere, if you hold fast, will turn out to be a gift. Whatever befalls you, no matter how heartbreaking or onerous, will turn out to be the best thing, the perfect thing, because of what is to come out of it.

In fact, it will be the best thing that could possibly happen to you. There is a fair amount of gratitude in the novel. And I think, you know, gratitude and a gratitude practice has sometimes come to seem like a cliche. On the other hand, gratitude is a really important thing to have in your life and to be able to find gratitude in life. And I'm wondering for you as a writer, how do you take something that could be a cliche and turn it into something that's not?

When I read my reviews and they say what has resonated with them, they'll use words like gratitude. But I wasn't thinking, oh, I'm going to really use gratitude as a theme. I mean, the guy just survived a miraculous thing.

And you got to be grateful for that. And all of a sudden, in that gratefulness, you see how precious life is because you almost were not here anymore. And if you're inspired, you want to spread that message, the getting of grace. He just says at some point, every minute of every day, everything is precious. When I was pulled out of that rubble and I could take my first breath,

undirt caked breath. All I wanted to do was to live and live and live. It just happened to me in a way that very low key. I feel like I am the person I was when I talked to you the last time, but I'm not the person I was when I talked to you the last time. And I'm not religious, believe me. It's happiness. I just somehow discovered peace in my life.

Like my earlier books, there was always this propelling anxiety in me that I have to make it like dazzling and spectacular and blow people away. And it was very high pitched in me and not healthy. But I've settled down. You know, my heart has lowered the volume and deepened the base, it feels like. And so I write a book like this where I'm

Other than this calamitous event of a five-story tenement pancaking on itself, everything else is people's lives with that in the background of their experience on that day. That's all I need now.

I want to talk with you a little bit about race, writing about race and race in this novel. Anthony, the character who was found under the rubble after the five-story building collapsed, he's biracial. His white father was kind of a race man. He taught African-American history. And you're right. What his father could never understand was how all of his righteous defiance in the end had cost him nothing because—

because he could come and go in his angry white skin as he pleased. Despite marrying a black woman and having mixed-race kids, there was no such thing as an honorary brother, no matter how many times you raised your fist in solidarity or how many prison writing workshops you conducted or how many times you got up in some cop's face. And I'm wondering, like, when you write about biracial or black characters,

or Latino characters, as you've done, like, throughout your career, have you faced any pushback by people saying you're appropriating other people's stories and you have no right to tell them? No, I haven't. But even with Clockers, which I wrote in 1990, 89, 91, I was really aware of the whole notion of cultural piracy.

And like, how dare I write about someone who, quote unquote, you have no idea what it's like to be me. And my responsibility is to create a character that is as fully three-dimensional as I can make that character. And in terms of racial sensitivity, well, listen, if you're writing to the stereotype

of a person of that race, then you deserve to be pilloried. You've always, to my knowledge, lived in multi-ethnic, multi-racial communities, including when you were growing up in the projects in the Bronx. I did, yeah. So that must be helpful in writing. No, you know, I said that to somebody, well, somebody, when I was writing Clockers, and I

And somebody said, well, how can you write about African-Americans when you're not African-American yourself? And when I said, well, I grew up in, you know, like a housing project that was very mixed, schools that were very mixed. She said, you sound like a southerner, you know, who's saying I was very close to those people, you know, trying to say like, I know those people.

And that struck me. I mean, the fact that you grow up with somebody, just because it happens, like I said, doesn't make it art. Just because someone exists doesn't make them an artist. And it just all comes back to just do the best you can. Do the best you can. You're not just hatched from an egg. You know, make everybody equally human and then let it go. In your acknowledgments, you thank your children who raised you. What do you mean by that?

I just feel having children molded me, remolded me. It wasn't all about myself. To finally have people in your life that you're more scared for than you're scared of anything for yourself. To finally have people in your life that you just surrender to and just educate you by just being who they are and evolving from year to year to year.

They made me. Before my kids, I was just a guy. And it just reawakened something in me that I didn't really know. This profound keenness and tenderness towards them where it wasn't all about me anymore. In fact, I'm not saying I became like not, I surrendered to them. But it was such a rich and profound experience.

thing that they pulled up in me. That was just so different. They raised me. They changed me. Did it relieve the burden of being trapped in yourself since you were responsible for others? Yeah, I love that. Not because it helped me escape from myself, because it was just natural.

I mean, it's like Anthony comes out and, you know, he just wants to be of service. You know, I've never made these connections to my life in the book before this interview. But, I mean, the joy of thinking about somebody and they come out, they drop into your arms and God says, go, you know, and you go. And it's a lifetime thing. And I mean, before that, I think I was my own baby.

Richard Price, it's always great to talk with you. Thank you so much, and congratulations on the novel. You're welcome. Richard Price's new novel is called Lazarus Man.

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