WHEN Fran Lebowitz was a child, she was told her opinions were not welcome. This was the 1950s, she says, when “children were not supposed to comment on the things adults were saying. It was called talking back, and you were not allowed to do that. Even as a small child, this seemed unfair to me. In school I would get sent out of the classroom even though the other kids made it clear they wanted to hear what I had to say. So it did amuse me, when I got much older, that the thing I got punished for I was now getting paid for.”
At 72, Lebowitz’s opinions – acerbic, unfiltered, nearly always right – have rarely been more in demand. After publishing two bestselling books, Metropolitan Life (1978) and Social Studies (1981) early in her career, she developed writer’s block – she prefers to call it “writer’s blockade” – and reinvented herself as a public speaker. In the 2021 Netflix series Pretend It’s a City, directed by her friend Martin Scorsese (it’s his second Lebowitz documentary; the first was 2010’s Public Speaking), you can find her holding forth about her home of New York, from the smoking ban to the subway to the lawn chairs dotted about on Times Square. With its lingering shots of her walking the streets in her signature get-up – Anderson & Sheppard coat, white shirt, jeans, chunky boots – the series cemented Lebowitz’s status as a style icon and introduced her to a new generation of fans, many of whom now accost her on the street. “They say: ‘I came to New York because I thought I’d see you and now I did.’ I say: ‘Well, of course, because it’s a very small place and I walk around a lot. So naturally you saw me.’”
