A Novel About a Secret Family, and Adam Gopnik on Being Old

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 24 November 2020

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sanaë Lemoine’s début novel, “The Margot Affair,” is about a seventeen-year-old high-school student whose father, a high-ranking official, does not acknowledge her or her mother publicly. In telling Margot’s story, Lemoine drew upon her own complex family history: when she was twenty-one, she discovered that her father had a secret second family. In an act of literary justice, Margot decides to take action to force her father’s public acknowledgement, in a way that Lemoine herself did not. Plus, Adam Gopnik explores the predicament of an aging population. People of retirement age will outnumber children in the U.S. in about fifteen years, but they are poorly served by the field of design. Gopnik sets out to experience their difficulties firsthand.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:11.1	Alexandra Schwartz writes for the New Yorker about theater, books, art, and much more.
0:16.3	And recently, she's been raving about a debut novel by a writer named Sinai Lemoine.
0:22.9	LeMuan was born in Paris, but she lives in the U.S., and she wrote her novel in English.
0:28.2	LeMoine's book is called The Margo Affair.
0:31.3	And it draws on her life in a very particular way.
0:34.9	Here's Alexandra Schwartz.
0:37.1	So the Margo Affair is narrated by Margo, who is a 17-year-old
0:41.3	high school student in Paris. She lives with her mother, Anouk, who is a famous stage actress, a very
0:47.3	dramatic figure and a dominant figure in her own life. And her father is the French Minister of Culture.
0:54.1	The catch is that Margot's parents are not together.
0:57.2	She and her mother are her father's secret family.
1:00.8	He lives with his wife, who is a woman named Madame LaPierre, and their two sons,
1:05.9	and they don't know anything about Margot's existence.
1:08.7	And that is what starts to make Margo very uncomfortable the older
1:12.3	she gets.
1:18.1	On any given day, ours could feel like an ordinary life. Like most families, we sometimes ate
1:26.1	our meals in silence.
1:28.2	We had been sick and torn up in each other's presence.
1:31.6	I was often in a bad mood around father, wanting more of him, but then I would disappear
1:36.7	after we had finished eating, preferring to read or be alone.
1:42.8	And then there was the banality of waiting. Weeks going by, waiting for him, hating
	...

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