137: The Book That Changed Your Life
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When she was seven, when she would visit her grandmother, Alexa would look through the books that her grandfather would own, back when he was alive. What she liked especially was finding the books where he'd made little notes in the margins. So that was the part that was really, you know, compelling. Because they were hints about who he was. Exactly. And they were, a lot of times they were really critical. He would just like, he would write, I steadfastly disagree or something like that or, or he would, he would write, ah, if you really liked something. As a kid, over the course of about a year, she systematically divided the books into two piles, the ones with markings and the ones without. And then, she tried to read all the ones with markings. Her grandfather was a playwright and a teacher, and the books were creepy old books from the 1930s about theater and about how to write plays. It was thrilling. And when she was 11, she wrote her very first play using the rules in the books. Rules from another generation. These were archaic rules. Like, start your play with lots of exposition, which was really, you know, in vogue at the time. So I started mine with a butler whose name, I believe, was Manson picking up a phone saying stuff like, no, the lady and gentlemen are not home right now. Why at a fancy charity ball? Yes, he's still drinking too much. And she's having an affair with a gardener. Whom shall I say? It's calling. I'm not kidding. You were 11. By the time I got to college, and I started actually take writing classes, it was brought to my attention that, you know, stage directions shouldn't be things like, there follows a mighty howling of wind. And one of the things my teacher, who was not a young man, by any means said, was he was like, sweetheart, we don't use soda voche anymore to mean he whispers. He just write whispers. But if all the books on her grandfather's shelves, there was one book that affected her more than the others. It had lots of her grandfather's writing in the margins. And he was very critical. So there was very rare that he would write, ah, exclamation point. And there were more Oz in Mosshart's autobiography, which is called act one, then I think almost any of the other books that he had. Mosshart was a Broadway playwright. The man who directed My Fair Lady with Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison, who's married to another then-woman-ery named Kitty Carlisle, who people these days mostly remember as a game show panelist back in the 1960s. The book details how he started as a kid in the Bronx found something he just loved to do, which was to make plays. Reading it as a child Alexa had that experience that you have sometimes as a kid. She did not understand everything in the book, but she understood enough to know that she really, really liked it. Like I knew what was going on in this book was fun. It drove him so powerfully, and it made it seem to make him so happy. She read act one by Mosshart over and over. She memorized long stretches. She tried to memorize the entire book. Even today, she recalls where specific Oz, were penciled into her grandfather's copy. Because it felt like I was recognizing an old friend. It felt like a familiarity of, oh, I found a home. This guy likes the same home I want. Yeah, so these are my people. Yeah, yeah. You don't mean many people who tell you that a book changed your lives. It's an appealing notion, I think, because it's nice to think that our lives could be changed, just by an idea, by the vision of the world that happens in a book.
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