Podcast #130: Alan Cumming on Memory, Gore Vidal, and Monica Lewinsky
Alan Cumming is one of the great character actors alive today. He is also the author of Tommy's Tale: A Novel and Not my Father's Son: A Memoir. His newest book is called You Gotta Get Bigger Dreams, a collection of photographs and essays. For this week's episode of the New York Public Library Podcast, we're proud to present Alan Cumming on memory, Gore Vidal, and Monica Lewinsky.
Alan Cumming LIVE from the NYPL
Cumming spoke of the way in which, though he has now written two books that might be construed as memoir, he is slightly resistant to indulging in memory:
"I think when you are a person that when you are that person, especially now in the digital age we live in, the public have access to some many things of you, I feel like I just want to be going on to the next thing and I don't want to always be talking about the past. I like talking about the past, but I don't want to have to look at it all the day. I'd rather it's my memory of it. My book is a book of memories and it's snapshots. I wanted to give people literal and figurative snapshots of my life."
Cumming spoke about the writer Gore Vidal. He said that he even considered titling his book after Vidal:
"I have mixed feelings. I love him and I hate him, but I don't think that's ambivalent. I think ambivalent is like not sure. I'm totally sure. I'm not an ambivalent person actually. But I did love Gore [Vidal.] I really did, but I also felt. I was flattered that he liked me, but I was saddened. When I got to know him, I really was saddened. I didn't think he was a very nice person. I think he was witty and brilliant and all of those things and great fun to be with... I wanted to call my book I Am Writing This Because Gore Vidal Told Me To, but they wouldn't let me. My lovely publishers are here. I get it. It's too long a title to put on the thing."
Cumming spoke of a conversation he once had with Gore Vidal shortly after the Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton scandal:
"Monica is a very dear friend of mine. There's a picture of her in my book actually. I've always thought that one of the worst things about that—there's many things about that Monica-Clinton thing that I find so upsetting, the way that the most powerful man in the world and this twenty-three year old girl who was in love with him. This thing happened. This unfortunate thing happened. Yet she was the one, the 'weak one,' the one who—I think he was the one who abused his power. And she was the one who was chastised and denigrated and whose life was made a misery, and he was kind of reinvented. That I think is an interesting sort of template of what is wrong with the sexual relations or the gender relations in this country."
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