Big Books: Part 3
Gift guide
By Nora Ankrum, Fri., Dec. 17, 2004
All I Did Was Ask: Conversations With Writers, Actors, Musicians, and Artists
by Terry GrossHyperion, 353 pp., $24.95
It's hard to imagine why you'd want to read Terry Gross' new book when you can listen to her show instead. Gross' voice alone, with its distinct combination of distance and intimacy and neutrality and curiosity, is half the joy of Fresh Air, while the other half is the pleasure of eavesdropping on someone else's seemingly candid conversation. Just hearing two voices without having to compute the facial features, gestures, hairdos, and outfits that normally accompany them makes you realize how much personality is packed into the sound of air passing through a larynx. But what the book loses in that sound it gains in access to the thoughts of the enigmatic Gross, in finely edited interviews simmered down to their very best, and in the privilege of getting to reread and mull over your favorite passages. While Fresh Air often features politicians or professionals addressing timely issues, the book focuses just on artists writers, actors, musicians, and such with the idea that the sharing of life experience and craft is timeless. It's surprising, in fact, how seamlessly Gross can transition from, say, an interview in 1990 to one in 2002. Rather than organizing the material chronologically or by themed sections, Gross follows a kind of instinctual, meandering path. An interview with memoirist Mary Karr touches on how she became a Catholic (prompted by her 5-year-old son's announcement, "I want to go to church"), while the following one with writer Andre Dubus focuses on how Catholicism helped him through the aftermath of the tragic accident that put him in a wheelchair. This organization creates a natural string of "aha" moments, as if Michael Caine or Isabella Rossellini are addressing something you've just recently had on your mind, and if you've already heard some of these interviews, you're still unlikely to want to skip around. The book provides the illusion of one long, satisfying conversation (with the likes of Johnny Cash, John Updike, Grandmaster Flash, and Conan O'Brien), and you'll probably feel much like Gross did when she began working on the book. "In reading the [interviews] gathered here," she writes, "I've learned things from them that went right by me in the studio."