Renata Adler On The Longform Podcast

“Yeah, it’s not that early, Max,” is the second thing Renata Adler says to the host of the Longform podcast, when he remarks that they’re meeting at 11 a.m. as per her preference for working early in the morning. “I don’t know why I said that. It was true for years but right now it doesn’t seem to be so true.”

I have a very complicated set of feelings about Renata Adler — I deal almost exclusively in the medium of “complicated feelings” — but her greatest skill as a writer, I think, is her ability to say when she’s wrong, when she doesn’t know something, when she’s showing you everything she has and nothing more. Her Longform interview is the perfect mix of what, according to her, she does and doesn’t know. It’s still early in the day; take the time to listen to it here.