Back when twitter was fun—and I mean way back, not just pre-Musk—I had three or four tweets that “did numbers”. Nothing you would call viral, but in the hundreds of retweets. And one of them was something like:
It’s a shame we’ll never get a Terry Gross interview of Terry Gross.
I wrote this, not really expecting any response, late one night when I was feeling things. And I meant it. Apparently a lot of people felt the same way.
Terry Gross is on my short-list of people who are singularly good at the thing they do. And she is so good.
What really gets me is she’s been doing it so well and so consistently my entire life. My very earliest radio memories are Terry Gross on the radio while I rode in the “back back” of my Mom’s station wagon picking my sisters up from school. I listened to her regularly (passively) as a child. Then a little more attentively as a teen. And then religiously in my 20s, 30s, 40s, and now going into my 50s.
I can’t think of anything else like that. Can you?
And so one night I found myself listening to Terry Gross as I drove somewhere. This time it happened to be one of my all time favorite interviews. It was the very famous final Maurice Sendak interview — an interview so unfathombly good I’ve re-listened to it a dozen times in the intervening years.
And after I finished, and after I caught my breath, and after I let my thoughts settle, I opened my twitter app and tapped out that tweet and meant every word. One thing that’s so fascinating about Terry Gross (I can’t bring myself to shorten her name; she is entirely Terry Gross) is that her interviews somehow have a compelling and very distinct voice—a brand even—but she herself is a blank slate. Terry Gross the brand is something precise and immediately recognizable. Terry Gross the person is something diffuse. Interesting yes. Insightful. Probing. But voiceless. And that night, still recovering from Sendak’s “Live your life, live your life, live your life…” I thought for the first time how I wished there was some way Terry Gross could herself be revealed in that very special way she helps reveal her subjects.
I say all this because the other day I pulled out my Podcasts app again to listen to Terry Gross and was met with this:
Terry Gross on 50 Years of Fresh Air
Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso
This month marks 50 years of Terry Gross as the host of Fresh Air. What began in 1975 as a local experiment at WHYY in Philadelphia has since grown into a national institution—one that not only transformed public radio, but laid the groundwork for the world of podcasting. To commemorate a half-century on the air, Terry Gross joins us for a rare appearance in the interview seat. (Apple Podcasts Link)
This interview of Terry Gross, by Sam Fragoso on his Talk Easy podcast, is an absolute gift. I listened to it straight through twice. I was honestly a little nervous at first. It felt somehow voyeuristic after all these years to hear Terry Gross answering the questions. But that feeling quickly passed. This interview is open, honest, insightful, and emotionally powerful.
I think what I liked best was this: It reinforces what I already knew, but never really thought about, which is that Terry Gross knows exactly what she’s doing and why. There is an intentionality to her process and her style that is reasoned and crafted. I love that. We have a tendency to think these singular artists (I will call her that) are simply born with a gift spilling out of them. Of course they are gifted. But art is a discipline, and craft is a handiwork. I loved hearing, in her own words, how Terry Gross thinks about her craft.