Fran Lebowitz on Olivia Nuzzi, Driverless Cars and Voting for Zohran Mamdani Because He Caused ‘Hysteria’ Among ‘Old Democrats’

If you want to get in touch with Fran Lebowitz, you’ll have to jump through a few hoops.

Even inquiring if the sharp-tongued writer and flaneur would entertain an interview required three intermediaries and instructions delivered over the phone: “Dial her number at 4 p.m. Talk to the answering machine, and she’ll screen your call.” 

That’s because Lebowitz famously doesn’t have an email address — or a cellphone, a computer or Wi-Fi.

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“I’ve always had an antipathy to machines. The extent to which it angers people is really surprising to me,” Lebowitz says. “People often say to me, ‘I can’t find you.’ So what? ‘I can’t reach you.’ So what?”

On Dec. 12, Lebowitz, a patron saint of New York candor and Jewish sardonicism, will take the stage at Carnegie Hall to field audience questions. But first, Variety has some of our own.

Do you recommend that other people take on a no-tech lifestyle?

No. Unlike apparently every single one of my fellow Americans, I don’t care what other people do. 

With my generation, there’s a feeling that if you don’t have a grasp on AI, you’ll fall behind.

I don’t understand AI, to tell you the truth. It seems to me like stealing. I’m not going to have to use it. If I was 25, I would have all these things, of course. But I’m not young. 

In New York, you see zillions of children in strollers, despite the fact that some of them are 10 years old. The kids are all on an iPad or iPhone. I heard a little boy looking at this thing say to his mother, “No, no, we shouldn’t go this way.” If you are giving directions, maybe get up and walk.

The iPads are at restaurants too, propped up on the table for the kids.

Luckily I do not go to that kind of restaurant. If I walked into a restaurant and saw that, I’d walk right out, because that means there are too many children in the restaurant. Too many children in a restaurant is one.

How do you feel about driverless cars?

I won’t go in one. Not that I think human beings are wonderful drivers — I know they’re not. First of all, you need a phone to get in them, so I couldn’t get in one myself. Second of all, apparently the doors lock and will not open until you arrive at the destination. I do not want to be a hostage of a driverless car.

At what point in your career did you start having fans stop you on the street?

I started out writing for magazines, and people didn’t know what I looked like. Being stopped on the street came when I started being on TV. But I got letters right away, and they’re not all fan letters. I still get hate mail, by which I mean paper letters in the mail, which is very disturbing because it means they know where you live.

What do people send you hate mail about?

Apparently it surprises you that I’m not America’s sweetheart, but it never surprised me. You can’t imagine what people get angry about. It’s gotten worse, and people seem to have the same level of fury over little things and gigantic things.

Are people angrier now than they’ve ever been?

Yes, and I understand that. I’ve been angry since birth, so I consider myself to be an expert on fury. But I’m not angry about every little thing, and I’m not angry about people’s preferences. Everything now is kind of one-note. There’s no sense that this is important, this is not important.

How do you feel about Zohran Mamdani? Will he be able to accomplish making New York more affordable?

No. I mean, I voted for him. I like him. The thing I like about him the most is how upset he made the old Democrats. And I’m an old Democrat. I’m sick of these guys — and they’re almost all guys. It’s been really bad for the country. This country was never meant to have politicians in lifetime roles. So, the hysteria… I like that about him. He seems earnest, by which I mean he believes the things he says. People keep saying how young he is. He’s 34. I think he’s too old to believe these things, frankly. When I was 34, I was long past believing this kind of stuff. But I think it’s adorable.

He’s not going to do almost any of these things. He can’t make buses free, which is a horrible idea, but he can’t make them free because he doesn’t control the transit system; the governor does. I don’t think the governor should, but she does. So there’s nothing he can do about that unless she agrees with him, which I doubt, because the MTA needs the money.

He’s not going to make buses faster. That would be great, but I don’t see how he could do it. Maybe he’ll have city-owned grocery stores. I don’t know why that would be better. He’s not going to freeze rents. Where on Earth has anyone ever seen landlords get beaten? I’ve never seen that. I’d love to see it, but we’re not going to see it.

You came up during a golden age for magazines. There’s a lot of negativity around the media industry from people with jobs like mine. Should we be optimistic?

No, don’t be optimistic. You should have gone to medical school. Someone should have told you that. Magazines… I hate to say something so extreme like “are over,” but, basically, they are. There are still some magazines, but these are not businesses. People always send me this stuff — they’re 55 pounds, printed on linen, created by some rich kid. You can’t run a magazine as a business now. Magazines were very important from the point of view of news and culture, but they’re not now. Whatever they call magazines, people read on their phones. That’s not a magazine. Everything is online. And the problem is, when they first invented the internet, they thought it should be free. I don’t know why they thought that. Nothing else is free.

What advice would you have for someone graduating college who says, “I want to be a writer”?

They can be a writer. It doesn’t mean anyone is going to read what they write. Everyone thinks they’re a writer now. All these things that used to be professions, now everyone does them. Everyone spends all day writing for free. Everyone takes photographs. Photographers for big magazines used to be rich. They made much more money than writers ever made, which I always thought was incredibly unfair, because it’s much easier to take a photograph.

You used to write for Vanity Fair. What do you make of Olivia Nuzzi landing there after her scandal with RFK Jr.?

She worked for New York Magazine, right?

Yes.

She was a political reporter, right?

Yes.

I thought she was good at that job. She has horrible taste in men. She was writing a story about him at the time, right?

Yes, she was covering the campaign.

You can’t do that. But “you can’t do that” doesn’t mean anything anymore, apparently, because Vanity Fair hired her. They used to have rules in journalism. To me, that seems like a very basic rule.

Have you seen any films this year that you like?

The only movie I saw in a theater this year was Spike [Lee]’s movie. But I’m old, I like to see movies on a big screen. That’s not true of young people. They think a movie is one square inch. Marty Scorsese hates this, that people don’t watch movies in movie theaters. But that’s not going to come back. 

The tech giants have infiltrated Hollywood and courted directors like Scorsese. Their goal with streaming is to keep people watching movies from home.

If there is any aspect of culture still alive, their goal is to kill it.

Has anyone ever approached you to make a scripted project based on your life?

Starting in 1970, I was approached by many movie companies. I would never sell my books to movies. It’s too collaborative. When people sell their books to movies and then they complain about [the changes], I say, “That’s what ‘sell’ means.” A friend of mine once sold a wonderful novel to the movies many years ago, and I went to the premiere and sat behind him. The movie was so unbelievably horrible that, when the lights came on, I was afraid of what I was going to say. He turned around and I said, “What do you think?” And he said, “I think I have an apartment in New York and a house on the beach.” That’s a good attitude.

Do you ever get stage fright?

No.

This interview has been edited and condensed.