Drew Jarrett for ES Magazine
(Picture: Drew Jarrett for ES Magazine)There are few things, or few people, more New York than Fran Lebowitz. For more than 50 years (she moved to the city from Morristown, New Jersey, in 1970), her astute observations and witty repartee, by way of books, public speaking and social commentary, have made her a Big Apple icon. Bullishly stubborn about protecting a city constantly under threat from gentrification and politics, Lebowitz is a believer in a New York that’s now extinct: one where you could smoke wherever you wanted and all restaurants served non-cooking New Yorkers like herself breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Famously since her releases of Metropolitan Life in 1978 and Social Studies in 1981, she has had an extreme form of writer’s block, self-dubbed ‘writer’s blockade’. But during the pandemic, as her beloved city ground to a halt, Lebowitz found a new, dedicated following thanks to her good friend Martin Scorsese casting her in Pretend it’s a City, the seven-part Netflix series that’s part documentary, part hot takes from two titans of New York who loosely follow the themes of money, books (she proudly has 12,000 and counting) and the city’s transit. The series connected her to a generation of young fans, not that she has technically seen the show. ‘I didn’t watch. I don’t have wi-fi connection,’ she says dryly. ‘Marty takes a thousand years to edit anything and there were 5,000 versions of it. He also thinks I have the same attention to detail as him, [asking] “Did you notice, I took two seconds of a ray of sunshine out of this version… NO!”’
