The Gospel According to Fran Lebowitz

To stay young, I don’t just need a healthy body—I need a mind that isn’t turning into attic storage. My role model in this department is Fran Lebowitz, the humorist who travels the world armed with nothing but her brutally honest intelligence. Her worldview is diamond-cut: she adores New York and despises technology. She refuses to drive a car, touch a smartphone, or even acknowledge a laptop’s existence. Writer’s block? She treats it like a houseguest who overstays for a few decades. Talking is her chosen weapon, so potent that publishing books has become optional.

Fran is an atheist—not the timid, hedging kind, but a certifiably confident one. She has no worries about the soul, no anxieties about the afterlife, no guilt about her misanthropy. Her biggest spiritual concern is locating a decent bagel.

Her lack of religiosity hasn’t hindered her friendship with Martin Scorsese, the Catholic titan of cinema. They linger in New York together, trading stories about the old city and reveling in their shared devotion to art—and to complaining eloquently about everything else.

My mind would be far less cluttered if I possessed Fran’s secular serenity, but I’m built more like Scorsese. I’m a tormented soul, forever plunging into questions about sacrifice, guilt, depravity, and redemption. I couldn’t live like Fran even with a decade of training. I’m hopelessly Marty. But at least I can imagine that if I ever met Fran, she wouldn’t dismiss me for my melancholic leanings. She might dismiss me for my mediocrity or any bland remark that escaped my mouth, but at least her reasons would be earthly.

To spend an hour at dinner listening to Fran Lebowitz would be a balm—more philosophically satisfying than any bestselling thinker’s 700-page tome. It will never happen, of course. But fortunately, I can find Fran Lebowitz on YouTube.