In 'Five-Star Stranger,' a man gets hired on an app to pretend to be a girl's father

NPR's Book of the Day

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Books, Arts

4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 13 August 2024

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

There's an app for everything. In Kat Tang's debut novel Five-Star Stranger, there's even one that allows you to hire someone you've never met to play a role in your life, like to be best man at a wedding or pretend to be the father of a child. In today's episode, Tang speaks with NPR's Scott Simon about the titular stranger at the heart of her story, who is going around New York taking on a number of roles, and how he starts to crack as he reexamines his relationship to a woman who's hired him to pretend to be her husband – and to the girl who believes she's his daughter.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. There's a show I used to watch on
0:06.4	HBO called Taxi Cab Confessions. It was this hidden camera reality TV show that taped
0:11.6	conversations a cab driver would have with his passengers. And it's interesting how much the
0:17.1	passengers opened up, you know, how we talk to strangers in ways we would never
0:21.4	think about talking to the people closest to us. And yet, by definition, there's always some
0:26.8	distance between you and a stranger. That's part of the conceit of today's novel,
0:31.8	Five Star Stranger by Kat Tang, who was inspired by the real-life phenomenon of programs in
0:37.0	Japan where you can hire strangers
0:39.1	to fill in roles in your life, whether that be friend or family. And in this conversation
0:43.9	with NPR Scott Simon, she talks about how we as readers never really get to know the main
0:49.4	character of her book, a stranger, because he never really figures it out himself.
0:55.2	That's ahead.
0:56.8	In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.
1:01.6	Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show, sources and methods.
1:08.1	NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people
1:11.4	helping you understand why distant events matter here at home. Listen to sources and methods on the NPR
1:17.7	app or wherever you get your podcasts. On any given day, the stranger might play a mourner,
1:24.6	a celebrant, a boyfriend, a drunk, a friend, a best man at a wedding, or
1:29.0	the father-do young girl, all for a fee, and for a rating on an app called Rental Stranger.
1:37.2	A five-star rating, he hoax.
1:39.9	Five-star Stranger is the debut novel from Kat Tang, a former lawyer who's written for the New Yorker, Pigeon Pages, and other publications.
1:48.1	She joins us now from our studios in New York.
	...

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