137: The Book That Changed Your Life
This American Life
This American Life
4.5 • 91.3K Ratings
🗓️ 31 May 2026
⏱️ 59 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
We want to believe our lives can be changed by the ideas contained in a book.
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- Prologue: When Alexa was seven, she started going through her grandfather's books. Her grandfather was a playwright and teacher, and through the books—and especially through his notes in the margins—she entered the world of 1930's American theater. And she found a book that changed her life: writer Moss Hart's autobiography Act One. (5 minutes)
- Act One: More of Alexa Junge and how Moss Hart's autobiography changed her life. She followed his path, learned specific lessons, and had a vision of him that was absolutely clear—until she met his widow. (10 minutes)
- Act Two: A book that changed a family's life—temporarily, and not for the better. David Sedaris on what happened when he found a dirty book in the woods and passed it along to his sisters. (9 minutes)
- Act Three: Reporter Jeremy Goldstein tells the story of a man who had many books change his life, even though he'd never read them. (14 minutes)
- Act Four: Writer Meghan Daum travels to De Smet, South Dakota—where Laura Ingalls Wilder lived and set most of her Little House books. What surprises her is how much it matches what she'd imagined. The people there seem to be genuinely living by the values Laura wrote about. (15 minutes)
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| 0:00.0 | When she was seven, when she would visit her grandmother, |
| 0:02.9 | Alexa would look through the books that her grandfather had owned, back when he was alive. |
| 0:07.0 | What she liked especially was finding the books where he'd made little notes in the margins. |
| 0:11.4 | So that was the part that was really, you know, compelling. |
| 0:15.1 | Because they were hints about who he was. |
| 0:16.9 | Exactly. |
| 0:18.8 | And a lot of times they were really critical. He would just like, he would write, I steadfastly disagree or something like that. |
| 0:27.6 | Wow. |
| 0:28.5 | Or he would write, ah, if he really liked something. |
| 0:33.9 | As a kid, over the course of about a year, she systematically divided the books into two piles, |
| 0:39.4 | the ones with markings and the ones without. |
| 0:42.3 | And then she tried to read all the ones with markings. |
| 0:45.6 | Her grandfather was a playwright and a teacher, and the books were creaky old books from the 1930s about theater and about how to write plays. |
| 0:53.8 | It was thrilling. |
| 0:55.1 | And when she was 11, she wrote her very first play, using the rules in the books, rules |
| 0:59.1 | from another generation. |
| 1:00.5 | These were archaic rules, like start your play with lots of exposition, which was really |
| 1:07.9 | in vogue at the time. |
| 1:09.2 | So I started mine with a butler whose name, I believe, was Manson, |
| 1:13.8 | picking up a phone saying stuff like, |
| 1:16.4 | no, the lady and gentlemen are not home right now. |
| 1:19.4 | Why at a fancy charity ball? |
... |
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