I Wish I Made That: Kurt Andersen, author of 'The Breakup'

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Support for NPR and the following message come from 20th Century Studios' The Dog Stars. Director Ridley Scott returns with a gripping post-apocalyptic thriller starring Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley and Guy Pearce, only in theaters and IMAX August 28th.

**Jesse Thorn** (0:17)
Hey Bullseye listeners, it's Jesse. I'm so excited that Bullseye and I are going to be part of the Friend of the Fest Film Festival that American Cinematheque here in Los Angeles is putting on. On August 21st, there is going to be a 35mm screening film projection, real film projection of my favorite film, A Thousand Clowns. It's going to be Friday, August 21st, in the afternoon at the Los Feliz 3 in Los Feliz in Los Angeles. I'm going to introduce the film and we can talk about it a little bit, say hi and then watch one of the great films of the 1960s, one of the great films of the pre-counterculture counterculture, one of the best movies, probably the best movie ever made about comedy and one of the great comedies ever made. I really love the movie. If you haven't seen it, I hope you will come and see it with me. You can find that information at maximumfun.org/events.
It's Bullseye. I'm Jesse Thorn. So, every now and then, you have probably had the feeling. You see something or you hear something or you read something that is so inspiring and so life-changing, you think, oh, why couldn't that be me? Why couldn't I be the person who made that great thing? And I mean, of course, you did not. But that's okay.
It's a common phenomenon.
And you know what? Even people who make amazing things have other amazing things that they wish they'd made. So much so that we decided to turn it into a regular segment on Bullseye. It's called I Wish I Made That. Guests on Bullseye, guests who have made great things themselves, talk about the work that they wish they'd made. On deck is Kurt Andersen. Kurt is a writer and editor. In 1986, he and Graydon Carter co-founded Spy Magazine. It was, of course, a brilliant satirical magazine that may have done more to impact the culture of 1980s and 90s New York than any other publication. For years, Kurt was my colleague on public radio as the host of PRI's Studio 360, and he has also written about a dozen books, both fiction and nonfiction. His latest is a novel called The Breakup. It's set about 20 years into the future. After two decades of marriage, protagonists Natalie and Asher are separated. Only in this future, the United States is separated too. He lives in San Francisco. She lives in the Free American Republic.
And their kid is 17, so it's time for a college tour. What could possibly go wrong? When we asked Kurt Andersen about what he wishes he'd made, he picked a book. Not a big shock for a writer.
And boy, did he pick a banger.
Here's Kurt Andersen.

**Kurt Andersen** (3:10)
I'm Kurt Andersen. I'm a writer. And my thing is The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe.
I chose it because it was, in my little life, a seminal read. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which is Tom Wolfe's first full-length book, is the story of the early hippie days in the Bay Area, in San Francisco and surroundings. Its central figure is Ken Kesey, who had become already a famous young novelist voice of his generation. Really well known for one, Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and had done a second novel. He was a big deal, but he was also the wise man center leader of a certain large fraction of the counterculture in this epicenter of the counterculture. So it's a story of these people and his merry pranksters who he takes around on adventures. And what that world in those early days of 64, 65, 66, 67, Friends of the Grateful Dead, Friends of the Hell's Angels, what that felt like then to an audience who had no clue, really, I mean, who had children who were whatever, but really had no clue of what that world was like. And it was as good a definitive introduction to the rest of the world, the straight world of that culture that became obviously mass and gigantic and enduringly influential as there has been.
I'm giving you all the context. I had an older brother who was kind of a perfectly wonderful hippie who had a psychedelic band in Omaha called Naked Afternoon. I was 14, almost 15, a kid in Omaha. My favorite writer was Kurt Vonnegut. It was 1969 The book had come out a year earlier. I had started smoking, as we then called it pot, about a year earlier, and I was on my school newspaper. So all of those are relevant contexts for why I was attracted to the idea of this book. I'd heard of Tom Wolfe. I'd heard of his previous book, How One Heard of Things back in 1969 I had no idea, but you know, I had. And so I checked it out at the Omaha Public Library down the street, and it blew my little mind. And I'd never read anything like it. I'd certainly never read non-fiction like it, you know. It reminded me of Kurt Vonnegut and its sensibility. It reminded me of the only important, well, the only old important novel I'd read at that point, which was Huckleberry Finn. It reminded me of Mark Twain. So I just, I thought, man, this is great. By that point, I had started reading Rolling Stone magazine. So I was, you know, I had my gateway media drug to that world and my brother and everything else. But it's an extraordinarily rigorous book, and I didn't think, oh, this is rigorous. But what I thought, and what I thought soon after is I thought, why did I like this? What is so great about this? It's hard to distinguish that from what I think now was so great about it, but I know I felt it then as well, which was it didn't make me want to be a hippie. I was, you know, I was, as one did, you know, growing my hair long and trying to be cool. And, you know, look, I'm counter-cultural too despite being a nerd. But it did make me want to be a writer. I could tell that it was different than like the underground paper writing that I read or the Rolling Stone, it was so much more ambitious and not just, you know, stoned out, far out, cool man, the language spoken and written of the time, you know. I guess I was enough of a, you know, junior elitist at age 15 that that all really appealed to me. In fact, I could read a passage for you if you'd like.