Courtesy of St. Louis Jewish Book Festival and the author
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Jamie Bernstein
Jamie Bernstein, a writer and the daughter of the brilliant late composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein, has documented long stretches of her life through journaling. So when an agent asked her if she’d like to write a memoir (Famous Father Girl, published earlier this summer) pegged to the centennial of her dad’s birthday, she says, she knew just where to turn—her stacks of journals. “I ran home from the meeting and started writing the book that very day. I was galvanized. It was like you shot me out of a cannon.” On Tuesday, November 6, Bernstein will bring that energy to the Jewish Book Festival for a talk beginning at 1 p.m.
Bernstein had multiple goals for her book. First, to write about what it was like growing up in her family—and with her larger-than-life dad—honestly. Second, she wanted to paint a portrait of what it was like to grow up as a woman in New York City in the 1960s and ’70s. To the first point, she says, “I’m hoping that my readers get a more multifaceted picture of who my father was.” Not just some stuffy conductor, as people who have that perception of classical music might have viewed him to be. “I wanted to disabuse people of that assumption if they have it. My dad was so many different things.” Here, she tells St. Louis Magazine about what it was like to write her memoir, and the modern invention she thinks her dad would have loved.
Was it hard to revisit those journals while writing the book?
It was brutal. For one thing, I was so loquacious. I just went on and on and on about things, and what I mostly was going on and on and on about was my boyfriends, boyfriends, boyfriends, boyfriends. It was a lot of that. And that was so not what I was looking for—I was looking for the stuff about my family. So it was like hacking through the jungle. Hacking away all the extraneous flora so that I could find the little goodies I was looking for. And I did find them. But it just meant I had to slog through all of it. And it took a long time—it took months to get through that stuff.
How much did you journal?
For a while there, it was completely out of control. I don’t know how I had time to live because I spent so much time writing. … This didn’t last more than a few years, thank god, but I used to… remember those week-at-a-glance calendars? I still use them, but I used to use them to write down every single thing I did every day—just the facts. Every day was filled with microscopic handwriting. Dentist, and then walk through the park, and I mean everything I did, so the journal could be freed up for thoughts and feelings. The processing of it all. I just got the facts squared away at the week-in-a-glance. It was so much writing it was a miracle I had time to do anything else. How did I manage to live?
Was there one particular memory that you had forgotten about or that was hard to revisit?
One of the incidents I had forgotten all about until I read it was when we went to see Sondheim’s new show Sweeney Todd. My father and I were squabbling in the limo, and when we got out, I told him he was being a pain in the ass, and then he kicked me in my butt. And that was so rude, I couldn’t believe it. And the next day, he called me up to apologize. That was funny to re-read and also painful.
How does it feel to celebrate the centennial of your dad’s birth?
There was something about the way my father was as a musician and as a communicator—he communicated so much emotionality. This year, when I go around to the centennial events and all the concerts, all the emotional connection people felt when they went to his concerts or when they met him, it’s all bouncing back on us this year. We’ve been just so moved by how moved all these people were in one way or another—musicians who worked with him. People who met him backstage for five minutes. All these people say the same thing, which is "I felt such a connection with your dad."
Your dad was a curious person, always learning and teaching. Sometimes it feels like those traits aren’t as … appreciated today. Do you ever think about that?
It is true that my father had an insatiable curiosity, and that is why he was such a good teacher. Anything he learned about, he had to turn right around and share it. … You could sense his excitement and his need to communicate it. So everything he did was a kind of teaching, whether he was rehearsing a new orchestra … or reciting Lewis Carroll—it all had that same quality of reaching out and tugging you on this lead and saying “Listen, I have to share this with you because I’m so excited about it.” Everything was like that with him. Although there are some ways in which we may have lost these modes of communication, I was recently thinking there is something that we have in the world today that my father would have loved, and that is Wikipedia, and the way you can look things up on the Internet. I think he would have gone nuts.
That’s true—it wasn’t as easy back then to look things up.
Something would come up at dinner, and we would have some sort of discussion or argument over some quotation, and so we were running to Shakespeare, running to Lewis Carroll, running to the dictionary, running to the book of quotations. And now we do it on our phones. He would have loved that, I’m convinced. He would have loved going into that rabbit hole where you look up one thing, and it leads you to another thing, and to a third thing, and pretty soon you’ve become an expert on Eskimo wood carving.
And hours have passed.
It would have been perfect for him because he was an insomniac.
Did you learn anything about writing from your father?
I read a quotation of my dad’s—I never heard him say this, but I read it somewhere, and he said if you have a problem with writing, then you’re probably a writer. What he meant was, people who really care about words and language and struggle over their sentences are writers. The minute you are preoccupied with it, it means you’re caring about it, and you’re a writer.
