KCM Picked Frank Bruni’s Brain About Politics, Positivity, and Celebrity

The longtime New York Times columnist Frank Bruni stopped by Katie Couric Media this week to discuss his new memoir, The Beauty of Dusk. Bruni wrote the book after a rare kind of stroke suddenly blinded him in one eye, and his doctors told him he may one day lose his vision in the other. 

The KCM community was lucky enough to pick Bruni’s brain for words of wisdom and commentary on current events. In this conversation, Bruni reflects on the themes that run through his book, like empathy, resilience, and finding a way forward. He spoke about his view on how we handle hardship, our growing embrace of self-pity, what that moment at this year’s Oscars says about our culture at large — and a whole lot more. 

After the conversation, we realized the world would benefit from hearing more from Bruni, so we wanted to share the highlights with the WUC community. 

Katie Couric Media: Can you tell us about some of the encounters that you’ve had with readers that have really resonated with you?

Frank Bruni: I get a lot of people saying that they take inspiration from and agree with my message that our response to struggle is much more consequential than the struggle itself. But a lot of them ask, “how do you find that sweet spot where you’re not engaging in a life of delusion or denial and where you’re taking an appropriate measure of time to grieve what’s been lost and accept a new altered and not preferable reality? How do you balance that with the fact that the only way to live the rest of your life is to look for the silver lining?”

A lot of questions boil down to that, which has really stuck with me because I think it’s the challenge of being human. But there have been discrete moments, too. I got a beautiful email from a woman who had found her way to my book and read it, and she said the thing that she’s struggling to get past was her son’s suicide. And she just couldn’t stop feeling responsible. She couldn’t stop feeling like she’d missed things. She couldn’t quit feeling that if she moved on and enjoyed her life, it would be a betrayal of his memory. We got into an exchange about it. 

That one just sticks with me because it’s such an intense, intimate reaction. I’ve gotten some emails like that in response to the book — not exactly like that one, but of the same tenor or pitch.

You write about this concept of appreciating that everyone is struggling and how we should be more empathetic. Do you think this can bring us closer as a country so sharply divided politically?

Part of what I’m saying in the subject matter of the book does apply to our political discussions and our public life. In both cases, we are too often seeing each other as abstractions. In the book, I’m talking about seeing people as the abstraction of “he or she has it made,” “he or she is fully confident,” and “I wish I had his or her life.” That’s something that feeds a lot of the kinds of self-pity that I’m trying to provide a map away from in the book. 

But those sorts of abstractions or assumptions fuel our tribalism. When we see someone, we immediately assign them a category — friend or foe, ally or enemy. We put a label on them, and that’s it. We don’t ask, “how did that person arrive there?” 

One issue that has been a big part of my writing life is marriage equality. Until mid-to-late 2012, Barack Obama was technically on the record as being opposed to marriage equality. Until January 2013, Hillary Clinton was. Yet there were these seismic events over the course of a couple of years that, by 2015 in liberal circles, somebody who was against marriage equality was essentially a Neanderthal who belonged in a basket of deplorables. How do you do that when you could be talking about a 68-year-old Baptist woman in Alabama, who if she’s not there yet, is only trailing Hillary and Barack by two or three years? But we’re so quick to say, friend or foe, good or bad, right or wrong. 

So I just think taking a more accurate, truthful, nuanced view of people — whether you’re trying to avoid the trap of self-pity in terms of some malady or bad circumstance that’s befallen you or whether you’re trying to avoid political tribalism — is a really good idea and a potentially productive strategy.

You mention that “we live in the age of grievance.” Can you expand on that and how it’s become infused into our politics and culture?

I think an enormous dimension of the Trump presidency and Trump appeal is that Donald Trump was the nation’s victim-in-chief. It was crazy that a billionaire (though his net worth has been long disputed) was modeling “woe is me,” “everything’s rigged against me.” I think one of the reasons Donald Trump connected with so many Americans and his words resonated with them is because he distilled this sense of being buffeted by these sinister forces beyond his control and anything that goes wrong for him — like bad media coverage — is an example of ways he is aggrieved. 

But in terms of grievance infusing everything, probably the most dissected event of the last month, outside the context of the Ukraine-Russia war, was Will Smith’s Oscar moment. There’s been a fine-grained analysis of his acceptance speech. But one of the weird things that hasn’t gotten much attention is that part of the speech where he essentially asks you to feel sorry for him as a celebrity. He talks about how so many lies are told about us, and so many attacks come our way. 

Are you really with your riches, your influences, and now your gold statuesque, trying to tell me that I should feel sorry for you? That is an enormous reflection of our culture right now. 

What’s your outlook on the state of journalism now versus when you started your career?

What I have noticed is, in having to distill and talk to my students about the peculiarity of the news ecosystem of today versus 10 years ago, versus when I got into the business, is having to describe some of the huge challenges in the economic models for journalism and the fracturing of the information universe and people’s ability to curate and filter their own information in a way that has led them into more partisan postures. 

This is terrible, but I find myself more desperately concerned about the future of journalism as a constructive force in democracy than I’ve ever been. And it’s not because I don’t believe in journalism. It’s because I think the nature of the internet and social media is conspiring to make creating the best journalism with the best consequences harder than ever before.

Want more from Frank Bruni? Watch Molner’s interview with the author.