How do you follow a novel like Fleishman Is in Trouble? If Taffy Brodesser-Akner knew what people loved so much about her debut she would have replicated it, she says. The story of a newly divorced hepatologist discovering the joys of dating apps while trying to look after his two kids when his ex-wife goes missing on a yoga retreat, Fleishman Is in Trouble was one of the smartest, funniest novels of recent years. It was made into a hit TV series with a starry cast, for which Brodesser-Akner wrote the screenplay. But writing her second novel almost drove her “insane”. Long Island Compromise might be described as a Jewish take on The Corrections (Brodesser-Akner has read Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 novel four times); a whopping family saga about money and the American Dream, following three generations of the Fletcher family as they find, and then lose, their fortune. A TV version is already under way. “Writing for me is not generally hard,” Brodesser-Akner admits, “and every sentence in this book was a hard one.”
Before Fleishman, Brodesser-Akner had already made a name for herself as a New York Times profile writer, with a string of high-profile celebrity interviews including Britney Spears, Nicki Minaj (who fell asleep) and Gwyneth Paltrow, who she practically moved in with for a while. While she never lets her subjects off the hook, she brings to her journalism the same understanding of human absurdity and vanity that makes Fleishman so appealing. In 2018 she went to Santa Cruz to interview Franzen : “His sentences, wow!” she says now. “You don’t really get who he is unless you’re sitting around with him.” Her description of him not so much sitting on a couch but dripping off it, “like a Dali painting”, has been imprinted on my memory. That evening she wrote the final pages of Fleishman in her hotel room. “Bad profiles are written by people who get charmed into thinking they’re friends,” she has said, which is a pity because I would really like to be her friend.
