Fran Lebowitz: ‘Trans rights is affecting no one except the people involved. So why do you care?’

It’s rare that Fran Lebowitz is stuck for an answer. “It’s really pleasurable knowing everything,” the author, speaker and New York iconoclast said in Public Speaking, a 2010 documentary exploring her life and work directed by her close friend, Martin Scorsese. “Now, I’m sure that people think, she doesn’t know everything. But they’re wrong. I do.” Spend any amount of time listening to her speak, or reading her most replayed observations – “polite conversation is rarely either”, or “there is no such thing as inner peace, there is only nervousness and death” – and you’ll likely be convinced, too. So it comes as a surprise to find that, five minutes into our chat, we’ve stumbled across a phenomenon that has Lebowitz stumped.

“I have never, ever understood,” she begins. “Why do you – and I don’t mean you personally, but you as a member of your country – why do you keep voting the Tories in?”

Lebowitz, 73, now spends most of her time sharing her opinions on politics, or on why there’s too much writing in the world (“just because you can write a sentence or an essay, doesn’t mean it’s worth reading,” she tells me), why she loves living in New York, why she hates living in New York or the myriad things that annoy her. Her examinations of the world, delivered in fast-moving choleric comedy since she started out writing humorous columns for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine in 1971, have attracted legions of fans who queue up around the world to hear her speak. Since the 2021 release of Pretend It’s a City, a seven-part Netflix docuseries and sort-of sequel to Public Speaking, also directed by Scorsese, Gen Z have become the latest to idolise her. Still, Lebowitz thinks she’s often misunderstood.

“One wrong idea people have about me is that I’m mean. I am not. I am not – I am delightful!” she says, raising her voice to really hammer the point home. “I am, though, something that is out of fashion here – it has been for decades – I am very judgemental. Judging is how I know I’m awake. I judge every single thing. And everyone must do that because, to me, that’s how I observe the world.”

Right now, Lebowitz couldn’t be in a better trade – judgement and opinion are the online world’s most valuable and contentious commodity, though she has never been near a comments section. Before we begin speaking, I perform the process of reaching Lebowitz at home – dialling her landline phone number, hearing it ring, and waiting for her answer machine to click in before she picks up. Lebowitz has become a point of fascination in recent years for being perhaps the only person in the whole of Manhattan who has never owned a mobile phone, which she calls “a world of one”.

She has also never owned a computer or even a typewriter. When she writes, she writes slowly and with a Bic pen. But today a note from her publicist strictly forbids us from talking about that, or her lifelong love of smoking. I think it’s fair enough – Lebowitz was thrust into literary notoriety with her first book of essays, Metropolitan Life, in 1978, swiftly followed by her second, and latest, Social Studies, in 1981 (both were later combined into The Fran Lebowitz Reader). Since then, for more than 40 years, she’s been asked about her writer’s block – or “writer’s blockade” as she once called it – and when her next book will be released. Over the years she’s put it down to being “lazy”; in 2022, she told The Guardian that she’s a “psychotic perfectionist when it comes to writing, which makes it very hard”.

In the interim years, alongside her speaking gigs, Lebowitz, whom The New York Times compared to a modern-day Dorothy Parker, has worked as a contributing editor and occasional columnist for Vanity Fair, gracing their best-dressed lists from time to time, too. She’s perhaps just as well-known for her style, which renders her instantly spottable on her walks around New York City. Somehow, she’s the only living female customer of tailors Anderson and Sheppard on London’s Savile Row (the only other woman they dressed was Marlene Dietrich) and owns about 15 of her signature blazers, she tells me, which are consistently paired with a Brooks Brothers shirt, turned up Levi’s 501s, cowboy boots, her black, jaw-length bob and tortoiseshell specs. She’s also into “good furniture” – which is likely a necessity for someone who owns more than 12,000 books.

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It’s all a world away from her beginnings in New York’s now cult-like 1970s arts scene. Lebowitz moved to the city from Morristown, New Jersey, where she grew up the eldest daughter of Jewish furniture upholsterers. After being expelled from school for “nonspecific surliness”, she set her sights on New York, moving aged 19 in 1969, with hopes of becoming a poet. Instead, it was taxi driving, cleaning apartments and selling advertising space for politics and culture magazine Changes, founded by Sue Mingus, the wife of legendary jazz composer and bassist Charles, that paid the bills. When Lebowitz was 21, her Interview column “I Cover the Waterfront” – and her infamous dislike for Andy Warhol – began.

Lebowitz spent the rest of her twenties immersed in New York’s iconic club scene, where legendary nightspots like Max’s Kansas City and Studio 54 were a magnet for artists, musicians, poets – and really anyone with an appetite for ideas and excess. There, she hung out with jazz legends like Duke Ellington, photographer artists Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe, and the New York Dolls. One of her closest friends was the author Toni Morrison, whom she met in 1978 and would later describe in the Paris Review as “one of the most fun people I’ve ever known”.

“To me, friendships are my most important relationships,” she says. “Friendships are the only relationships that we choose. Certainly we don’t choose our families and people always talk about choice and romantic relationships but it’s just not true. Romantic attraction, erotic attraction is a chemical response, you’re not choosing that.” She sees younger people now “organising” their dating lives with lists of desired attributes and rules, which, Lebowitz says, is simply incompatible with the nature of falling in love. “Honey, that’s not the way it works,” Lebowitz says, adding that she is a self-professed “terrible girlfriend” on account of having “zero interest in domestic life and monogamy”. “If you’re choosing someone that way, it’s more like you’re hiring someone. So that’s my idea of romance. But friendships, you really choose those.” What’s it like to be friends with Fran Lebowitz? “I’m a really good friend. And I’m loyal and I expect friends to be loyal to me. Someone said, ‘You’re like someone in the mafia’; I said, ‘That’s right’.”

Lebowitz has also remained loyal to her political beliefs as “an old-fashioned, New Deal Democrat” with its implicit belief in economic reform to close the gap between the rich and the poor. In the past she’s described Republicans as “anarchists” and “destroyers of democracy” who cut services and scapegoat immigration, much like the Conservative Party which, as I found out earlier, she isn’t impressed with either. We’re speaking at a politically pungent time – it’s exactly one week since former president Donald Trump’s hush money trial began, and in the months ahead both the US and UK will once again stagger towards the presidential and general elections.

Does she think Trump could win again? “No, I don’t,” says Lebowitz. “But you know, the time that he did win I spent the year of that campaign going around the country, this country, telling thousands of people he has zero chance of winning. It never occurred to me that he would win. He was looked down upon by real estate developers. Can you imagine a level of moral squalor so profound? It was one of the most shocking things of my life.”

Four years on, Lebowitz is no more impressed by the current state of affairs. She’s audibly exasperated when speaking about the state of Arizona’s decision to reinstate a law made over 200 years ago prohibiting abortion for any other reason than the life of the mother. “Any other reason,” she repeats for emphasis. She gallops through income inequality as a political choice, and the hypocrisy of the Christian right’s demonisation of the poor – “I’m no expert on Jesus, but it seems to me that food stamps would have been an idea that Jesus would have had himself!” – rolling from one abomination to the next.

One topic joins Bic pens and smoking as officially off the table: Israel and Gaza. But on any other subject, there’s rarely a point that Lebowitz’s precise wit and timing aren’t lingering at the end of any given sentence. It’s only when we talk about Trump (she frequently returns to this subject and her ferocious opposition to the Republican Party) that her pace slows slightly. I ask if we should all be being a bit more opinionated, a bit more outspoken – like her. “Some people are afraid to say certain things and there are certain things you should be afraid to say,” she responds, adding more quietly: “There are Trump supporters who go to people’s houses. And threaten people. I live in a country where millions of people have millions of guns. So, if you say something in a place or in a way that might prompt some of these people to show up at your door, I would be afraid of doing that for sure. “If, by speaking up you’re afraid that people are going to like you, that’s stupid. If you’re afraid they’re going to shoot you, that makes sense. The thing is, everything is so extreme now. There’s no calm conversation.”

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Lebowitz’s New York has witnessed plenty of political upheaval during her 50-year stay. While the rest of us gush over the hedonism of 1970s bohemia, when Lebowitz arrived it was a pit of financial chaos and prevalent violence. By 1975 state union reps were handing out scaremongering pamphlets titled ‘Welcome to Fear City’, consisting of a list of nine tips to help you and your belongings survive, including not walking anywhere outside after 6pm in New York.

Elsewhere Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes were co-founding the Women’s Action Alliance, and in Lebowitz’s circles, the Aids pandemic was about to burst wide open. In the 1980s, Lebowitz lost many friends to HIV/Aids, leaving behind what she has previously described as a cultural void, where a generation of talented artists and intellectuals should have remained.

In 2018 Lebowitz told Inside Hook magazine that she grew up gay in a time when “it didn’t exist”, but she’s since become a queer icon, albeit sometimes reluctantly (she maintains she never fought for same-sex marriage, adding wryly, “my concern was that it would be mandatory”). She does take umbrage to the current enduring discourse around trans rights “driving politics”, though. “Actually, I don’t know why it’s such a big thing,” she says, “because really it affects such a small number of people.

“It’s not a dangerous thing. I care if people walk around with guns. But otherwise, do whatever you want. Tell me what to call you, I’ll call you that … if you’re not hurting other people I don’t understand [what it’s all about]. Again, it’s very extreme.”

She adds, “This is affecting really no one except the people involved. So why do you care? You know, it’d be much better if you pay attention to the unfair tax structure. Pay attention to that – pay attention to the illegal polluting and all the kinds of stuff that people get away with, that really affects everybody.”

Lebowitz compares the right’s political involvement in trans rights to deliberately putting gay marriage on the ballot in the States, “because it would drive Republican votes”. Now, she tells me, “they’ve moved on from that on to these trans rights things. Because this is a thing that riles up certain people.”

As we say goodbye, I ask Lebowitz what she has planned for the rest of her day. After more interviews, she’s going to sit down and pay her bills, she says. “I know everyone pays their bills by, er, what do you call it? Online. But I don’t do that. I like to sit down with a chequebook. I want to know exactly ‘how much was that?’, and ‘where’s that gone?’” Somehow, like the rest of her character and way of life, it’s kind of reassuring.

There are very few people you come across who have the kind of unbreakable self-certainty of Lebowitz, who decided in every decade not to do as she was told; there are fewer who speak entirely from true observation, not from a version of life curated for screens. Lebowitz is, of course, right – she’s not mean, she is delightful! But the way she lives is a confronting thing. She’s a Luddite, but her rejection of technology is more than that – it’s a refusal to conform, or contort herself to fit in, in any way. Are the rest of us meekly complacent in a world that doesn’t really serve us? Who knows. Fran Lebowitz probably does.

Fran Lebowitz is touring London, Ireland and Scotland from October – November. Tickets on sale now here