Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs of Magazine.

Returning to the program today is Tara Isabella Barton, she is a novelist and a non-fiction writer.

She is the author of the novels, Social Creature. World Cannot Give and the forthcoming book here in Avalon

available next year. She's also the author of the nonfiction books, Strange Rights, New Religions

for a Godless World, which we discussed during her last appearance on the program. And most

recently, self-made, creating our identities from Da Vinci to

the Kardashians, which was previewed a little bit a couple of years ago in Kurt Affairs,

the wonderful article that Tara contributed called The Making of the Self-Made Man. So Tara

Isabella Burton, thank you for returning to current affairs.

Welcome.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm delighted to be back.

Your new book profiles many eclectic figures from the guy who painted himself looking like Jesus

during the Renaissance to the Andy Warhol

superstars to, as he say, the Kardashians and the guy who made the whole Earth

catalog and Oscar Wild and, you know, dandies and Thomas Edison.

Let me ask you first, you know, what is it that unites all of the figures that you profile

from chapter to chapter under this single unifying framework? So it's not just that they're

successful self-makers, which is to say either that they are people who come from

situations of economic, either deprivation or mediocrity and

become wealthy, nor is it exclusively that they live their lives as a work of art, although many

do.

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