Fran Lebowitz: ‘If people disagree with me, so what?’

Fran Lebowitz is a famous writer who famously doesn’t write. “I’m really lazy and writing is really hard and I don’t like to do hard things,” she says, and it’s the rare writer who would not have some sympathy with that. Yet, as all writers also know, writer’s block, which the 70-year-old has suffered from for four decades now, is never really about laziness. Lebowitz’s editor Erroll McDonald (“the man with the easiest job in New York”) has said she suffers from “excessive reverence for the written word”.

Given that Lebowitz has, at last count, more than 11,000 of them in her apartment, there is no question that she loves books. “I would never throw away a book – there are human beings I would rather throw out of the window,” she says. So is this talk of “excessive reverence” a euphemistic way of saying that she has low self-esteem and doesn’t think she can write anything good enough to commit to print?

“I don’t think I suffer from low self-esteem,” cackles Lebowitz. “I know a lot of people object to me because they think I’m too judgmental, although I think there’s no such thing. But as judgmental as I am about others, I am far more so about my own work. I think it’s a paralysing professionalism.”

Lebowitz and I are talking by phone, which means she is on her landline in her New York apartment, because as well as refusing to write, Lebowitz refuses to own for a public event by Zoom during lockdown, she had to go to ’s apartment to use his computer. And yet Lebowitz, 70, has always seemed like such a self-sufficient, independent person. Back in the 1970s when she did write, and wrote hilarious, elegant columns for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine as well as the bestselling books of collected essays, (1978) and (1981), she would hold her own on talkshows, against who demanded to know when she would get married and then offered to impregnate her. Lebowitz, a lesbian, just smiled and smoked her cigarettes.