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      In ‘Joyce’s Women,’ 2 Great Irish Writers Square Up

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      Edna O’Brien’s latest stage work, at the Abbey Theater in Dublin, imagines the inner lives of important female figures around James Joyce.DUBLIN — Toward the end of “Joyce’s Women,” the Irish writer Edna O’Brien’s ninth work for the stage, handwritten letters rain down from the ceiling and the scene is interrupted by anonymous voices. One calls James Joyce’s writing “beyond human comprehension.” Another labels it “ejaculatory smut.” Finally a man’s voice, unseen, disembodied, asks a question: “Who owns James Joyce?”Running through Oct. 15 at the Abbey Theater in Dublin, the play addresses the personal life of an author banned in his time but celebrated today, whose works are synonymous with Dublin, but who fled the city as a young man. It’s the product of O’Brien’s lifelong fascination with Joyce, her “ultimate hero” and the subject of her 1999 biography, “James Joyce.”In “Joyce’s Women,” we see the author through the eyes of the women who were his inspiration and his support network, including his lifelong partner, Nora Barnacle; his daughter, Lucia; and his patron, Harriet Weaver. They wait for news of Joyce from a hospital in Zurich; with the writer on his deathbed, the play weaves together scenes from a life marked by ambition and poverty, creativity and madness, attempting to capture what O’Brien called “the enormity of James Joyce’s personal and imaginative life.”Hulme-Beaman on top of Brid Ni Neachtain, who plays Joyce’s wife, Nora Barnacle, in rehearsal.Ellius Grace for The New York TimesRegarded as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, Joyce’s works continue to be widely read (“Dubliners,” his 1914 short story collection), widely attempted (“Ulysses,” his 700-plus-page epic of Dublin life) and widely speculated-upon (“Finnegans Wake,” the cryptic behemoth that was his final novel). The play brings Joycean language to life with music as well as the spoken word.“What I felt with Joyce, as I had never felt with another writer,” O’Brien said in an interview, was that “for all the boundaries he has broken, through language, he also speaks very truly, at least to me. There is always, without it being too demonstrative, an emotional pulse, an emotional engine behind what he says.”This year is the centennial of “Ulysses,” and many events, in Ireland and abroad, were clustered around Bloomsday, June 16, the date on which the novel unfolds. Nearing the end of this Joyce year, O’Brien’s dreamlike, reflective play is like a theatrical wake after the festivities. “This is one great writer squaring up to another,” said Conall Morrison, the director of “Joyce’s Women,” after a day of rehearsals at the Abbey Theater. “It is also, to a lesser extent, self-referential. It’s Edna’s meditation on the creative process, and the cost involved — the cost to the writer, and everyone around the writer.”Like Joyce, O’Brien has lived in literary exile. Her debut novel, “The Country Girls,” was the subject of a national scandal when it was published in 1960. It was banned in Ireland for its depictions of sex and female sexuality, as were its sequels, “The Lonely Girl” and “Girls in Their Married Bliss.” In 2015, President Michael D. Higgins issued a formal apology to O’Brien on behalf of the nation, and O’Brien was made a Saoi of Aosdana, the highest honor for an Irish artist.Left to right: Caitríona McLaughlin, the Abbey Theater’s artistic director; Edna O’Brien, who wrote “Joyce’s Women”; and Mark O’Brien, the theater’s executive director.Ste Murray“I think the fact that Edna O’Brien has chosen to write this, and that she’s someone whose genius has cost her throughout her life, makes for a fascinating prism to view this play through,” said Ali White, who plays Harriet Weaver. “What has been her own experience with success, failure, fame, notoriety and being banned?”In recent decades, plays, films, fiction and graphic novels have explored the lives of Joyce’s female family members, occasionally positioning them as each other’s rivals. Annabel Abbs’s novel “The Joyce Girl” (2016) is a fictionalized account of the life of Lucia, in which she is cast as Joyce’s muse and Nora’s adversary; Nuala O’Connor’s novel “Nora” (2021) is more sympathetic to its heroine.“There is this cottage industry of plays and novels and so on about Joyce’s family members,” said Sam Slote, a professor of Irish literature at Trinity College Dublin who has edited five books on Joyce. “What’s interesting is that the works are sacrosanct, but the contemporary imagination of artists is on the life of Joyce and his family members.”Little has survived of Lucia’s own voice; her nephew, Stephen Joyce, announced in 1988 that he had destroyed the letters she wrote to her family. Joyce’s famously pornographic “dirty letters” to Nora were published in 1975, but her side of the correspondence has never surfaced. Faced with these blank patches, “Joyce’s Women” imagines each character’s point of view, and allows them to narrate different sides of the same story. Nora is embattled, but resolute. Lucia drifts between fact and fiction. Later they are joined by Miss Weaver, the tireless activist and financial backer who funded Joyce’s lifestyle and helped secure his legacy.“While their allegiances, claims and counter claims differed,” O’Brien said, “I did not want to write a wrangling, bitter play, a relentless toll of enmity, accusation and intrigue. These women were crucial both in his life and in his work.”Sabine Dargent’s set design of “Joyce’s Women,” under construction in September.Ellius Grace for The New York TimesOne scene, incorporating dance, captures the rapport between Joyce (Stephen Hogan) and Lucia (Genevieve Hulme-Beaman). Then a screen unfurls across the stage, and a film is projected onto it that shows Lucia’s descent into psychosis. “She crept into her father’s work and her father’s psyche,” O’Brien said. “She adopted some of his more idiosyncratic words and, though doctors warned of alarming schisms in her behavior, Joyce believed that she was a genius, both of them being only a transparent leaf away from madness.”Another scene features May Joyce, the writer’s mother. An early supporter of his writing, May is believed to have had 15 pregnancies — 10 children survived — before her early death at the age of 44. Summoned home from Paris by telegram as she was dying, Joyce refused to pray at her bedside alongside other family members and wrote, in a letter to Nora, that when he saw her in her coffin, “I understood that I was looking on the face of a victim and I cursed the system which had made her a victim.”Joyce abandoned the Catholic church as a teenager; he wrote to Nora that his aim was to “make open war on it in what I write and say and do,” and they eloped in defiance of Ireland’s religious culture. Yet his work is haunted by a distinctly Catholic sense of guilt. “Catholic religion was embedded in Joyce’s thinking, not only by the church but by the long-suffering May,” O’Brien said. “His mother’s effect on him was deep but remained unfinished.” This early bond inspired a lifelong relationship to women split between reverence and torment: Joyce visited brothels from age 14, but found, in Nora, a partner who was as much a mother figure as a free spirit. “It was carnal love,” O’Brien said, “but also he saw within her a melancholy and an ancient knowledge that answered his deeper needs.”Stephen Hogan as James Joyce. The production features projected visuals and incorporates dance.Ros KavanaghIn a rehearsal in September, White (as Weaver) and Hogan (as Joyce) ran through a scene depicting the writer’s final hours. Joyce, wearing his familiar waistcoat and circular glasses, lay on a hospital bed and drifted in and out of lucidity. He sang an Irish rebel song, “The Sean-Bhean Bhocht,” then raged at Weaver, his patron, who had told him that he was wasting his genius on “Finnegans Wake,” the enigmatic dream-novel that took Joyce 17 years to complete. Weaver knelt at his bedside and asked for forgiveness.Weaver, who was raised a Quaker, and who later joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, bankrolled Joyce with an estimated equivalent of over $1.7 million today. “It became almost like her religion to support these people,” White said later of Weaver, who also quietly funded writers including T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis. Joyce’s charisma was “such that he entranced people, even if they weren’t getting much in return,” she added.“Joyce’s Women” dismisses present-day debate about separating art from the artist, arguing that to draw a line between Joyce’s life and his works would be impossible. Slote, the professor, quoted a line from “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” in which Joyce says a writer is “a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.” Slote said this was “a good capsule description; the artist takes their experience and refracts it, and turns it into something else.”The play explores that process in all its complexity. “He loved these women, not as muses but as beings who answered to the longings and anguish of his inner life,” O’Brien said. Yet Joyce’s greatest loyalty was to his work. “That’s where the writer really lives, and belongs,” O’Brien said. “With their words.” More

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       ’1776’ Musical Returns to Broadway With a Diverse Twist

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      A revival of the classic musical offers a fresh twist on the founding for the post-“Hamilton” era.“Our contribution to the history of the production is our bodies, our physical selves,” Crystal Lucas-Perry said of the Broadway revival of “1776,” and its cast of female, nonbinary and trans actors. Clockwise from top left: Sav Souza, Lucas-Perry, Elizabeth A. Davis, Carolee Carmello, Patrena Murray and Oneika Phillips.Camila Falquez for The New York TimesHow do you solve a problem like America?For the creators of the musical “1776,” the answer was to wrap it in jaunty tunes, 18th-century double entendres and enough twisty dialogue to make a dramatization of the debate over the Declaration of Independence feel like a thriller.Premiering on Broadway in 1969, the musical ran for 1,217 performances, won the Tony Award for best musical and, over the last 50-plus years, has left more than a few critics scratching their heads over how such a resolutely square show won over Vietnam-era America.But 1776 isn’t what it used to be. In 2022, a touchstone of national identity has become a culture-war hot potato. And “1776,” which arrives this month on Broadway in a new revival for Roundabout Theater Company, isn’t the same either.The revival, directed by Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus, has the familiar rousing melodies (in new, rock-infused arrangements), star-spangled color scheme and corny dad jokes. But they’re delivered by a racially diverse cast of women, nonbinary and trans actors, whose embodiment, Paulus said, wakes the language up.“I want the audience to hold that dual reality, of what the founders were, but also a company of actors in 2022, who never would have been allowed inside Independence Hall,” Paulus said in a video interview last month, after the show concluded its pre-Broadway run at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., where she is artistic director.The idea, she said, using a phrase that has become something of a mantra for the show, “is to hold history as a predicament, rather than an affirming myth.”Announced in 2019, the revival may initially have seemed to be riding the post-“Hamilton” vogue for all things Founders, while doing that show’s inclusive casting one better. But the two-year pandemic delay — which saw nationwide racial-justice protests, a bitterly contested presidential election and the Jan. 6 insurrection — have only heightened the stakes.“The deeper you get into it, the more poetry, the more stuff, exists inside of it,” Page said, in a separate video interview.At bottom, “1776,” he said, is “about a clandestine meeting of people who desperately want to change the world.”Then again, “1776” was never the whitewashed retro-patriotic celebration it is often remembered as. For all its traditionalist guys-in-powdered-wigs look, the show — with songs by Sherman Edwards, a history teacher turned Brill Building tunesmith, and a book by the playwright Peter Stone — was as politically pointed in its time as “Hamilton” (and perhaps, some argue, more so).Written ahead of the Bicentennial, it was meant to humanize the founders — “Demigods? We’re men, no more, no less,” Benjamin Franklin declares — while also challenging what the authors described as the “jingoistic” history they had learned in school.Sara Porkalob, center left, Lucas-Perry and Davis in the production during its pre-Broadway run at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.Evan Zimmerman for Murphy MadeThere was the bite of songs like “Momma, Look Sharp,” a denunciation of the carnage of war that might have been sung by a G.I. on Hamburger Hill. And there was “Molasses to Rum,” a chilling call-out of freedom-espousing New England’s complicity in the profits of slavery.The production even stirred its own mini-controversy: When cast members were invited to perform the show at the Nixon White House, they were asked to cut “Cool, Cool Considerate Men,” a satirical minuet of money-loving conservatives who move “ever to the right, never to the left.” (They refused.)“I continue to be surprised when I meet people who say, ‘Oh, 1776! It’s my favorite musical. It’s just what our country needs!” Paulus said. “I keep thinking, what are they talking about?”But then, when the touring production company NETworks first suggested the show to her in February 2019 as a possible revival, she knew little about it, except that it had beaten out “Hair” (which she had directed a Broadway revival of in 2009) for the Tony. “I had a vague assumption it was a kind of a celebratory look at American history,” she said.When she read the book, on a long plane ride, she said, she “almost fell out of the airplane.”In particular, she was struck by the dramatic climax: the debate over Thomas Jefferson’s fiery denunciation of the slave trade, which was ultimately cut from the Declaration, to secure unanimous approval.Even talking about it now, Paulus still sounds incredulous. “I was unaware of that crossing out,” she said. “How could I not know?”“That began my journey into the show,” she continued. “I had to reckon with my own experience of American history.”A 2016 Encores! concert staging in New York had already used some racially diverse casting. Paulus said she was told off the bat that the estate would be open to an all-female cast, but she emphasized that the production takes a less “binary” view of gender.There was a first reading in New York in August 2019, with the principal actors, including Crystal Lucas-Perry as the irascible and obstinate John Adams, leader of the “independency” faction. By early March 2020, the show was fully cast, with an opening in Cambridge set for that May, to be followed by a national tour and then a Broadway run.Instead, they retreated to Zoom, like the rest of American theater. Without the pressure to stage the show, Paulus said, they could go deep in American history, including meetings with various scholars like the political theorist Danielle Allen and the historians Vincent Brown, Jane Kamensky and Annette Gordon-Reed.With the approval of the creators’ estates, the show includes a (wordless) depiction of a 14-year-old Robert Hemings, Jefferson’s enslaved bodyservant (and brother to Sally Hemings), inspired by Gordon-Reed’s scholarship. It also adds a long excerpt from Abigail Adams’s famous letter advising John to “remember the ladies.”While the gender-flipped casting may be the show’s claim to “firstness,” the core of the production is a grappling with race.Even before the murder of George Floyd, Paulus said, discussions around race within the company were “very raw.” Then came the protests, and the roiling conversation on racism, representation and hierarchy in the theater set off by the “We See You, White American Theater” open letter.In September 2020, the American Repertory Theater announced a set of initial antiracism commitments. When it came to “1776,” she said, the conversations prompted by the protests “impacted everything about our process.”Paulus said she first met Page (whose long résumé as a choreographer includes extensive collaborations with Beyoncé) in 2017, when he was starting the M.F.A. program in directing at Columbia. He was initially hired as the show’s choreographer, in 2019. In the summer of 2020, he also became co-director.“I felt that the most powerful and honest reflection of our collaboration,” Paulus said, was to be “coequals.”Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus directed the production, which starts previews at the American Airlines Theater on Sept. 16 and opens Oct. 6.Matthew MurphyThe George Floyd moment, Page agreed, “changed everything” about the show. The team, including the set designer Scott Pask, had already started moving away from the original scenic designs, which Page described as attempting to land the show too much “in the world of realism.”“We came together and said, this doesn’t feel right anymore,” he said. “We started asking, when you break it all the way down to the core, what is this piece about?“These were men who were attempting to make a change inside the world,” he continued. “Who cares about the chair they sat in, and are we getting it right?”The production, with its spare, Brecht-influenced design, is set not in Independence Hall in 1776, but onstage in 2022, where it’s performed by a company of actors from the present who arrive in street clothes, with no fanfare, before putting on their 18th-century(ish) waistcoats and period-appropriate shoes.(One performer also puts on a beaded necklace — seemingly a nod at the fact, mentioned in Stone and Edward’s original authors note, that Native American leaders would often appear before the Continental Congress, as leaders of independent nations.)Page, whose other recent directing credits include this summer’s revival of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” at Barrington Stage Company, also cited the importance of an “affinity space” for Black cast members, which helped guide the show’s exploration of race.“With the other cast members, the main thing we communicated was, ‘You’re going to feel some things,’” Page said. “What the Black cast members asked was to leave your fragility at the door.”In a group interview with four of the show’s founding “fathers,” Elizabeth A. Davis, who plays Jefferson, recalled a video meeting in which cast members presented their family trees, as part of an exploration of how personal and national history intersect. She said she could still remember exactly where she was sitting — “in my grandmother’s old room, in the middle of Texas” — as Black colleagues described hitting the so-called slavery wall, beyond which ancestry can be hard to trace.“It was a profound moment for me,” she said. “It was understanding something not just intellectually, but viscerally and cellularly.”Lucas-Perry nodded. “I remember saying, ‘I feel a little without,’” she said.The 2020 protests, Lucas-Perry said, contributed to a “hyper-awareness” of the way the casting altered the meaning of the text, and the importance of a production using diverse bodies “just because it can.”“Our contribution to the history of the production is our bodies, our physical selves,” she said. “We were looking for ways of taking advantage of moments where you can dig deeper into what it means to be other.”“Momma, Look Sharp” lands differently sung by a Black woman (the big-voiced Salome B. Smith, as a courier bringing news from the front) to another Black woman, after the founding “fathers” have left the room. (The courier’s piercing “Momma!,” Page said, echoes Floyd’s cry as he gasped for air.)But the show’s dark heart is the silky and sinister “Molasses to Rum.” Traditionally, it’s presented as a vocal tour de force (see John Cullum’s stentorian baritone in the 1972 movie), and critics have often paid more attention to the singing than the chilling substance of the song.In their staging of the song (sung by Sara Porkalob), Page and Paulus force the audience to consider the enslaved people who form one corner of the Triangle Trade not as abstractions, but as real bodies, massed in a wordless chorus that includes the Black actors who play Adams, Franklin and John Hancock. (The sometimes defiant choreography, Page said, reprises some gestures from “Cool, Cool, Considerate Men.”)Carolee Carmello, who is joining the Broadway production as John Dickinson of Pennsylvania (one of the cool, conservative men), played Abigail Adams in the 1997 Broadway revival, which had a white cast. She had heard “Molasses” hundreds of times, but wasn’t prepared for seeing it in the new production.“The understanding of what they’re actually arguing about is extremely powerful,” she said.Lucas-Perry said the song “feels like it goes on forever” — “and it did go on forever,” she added, referring to slavery. “I’m not going to lie,” she said of the scene. “There’s not a night where it doesn’t hit me.”“Hamilton” was fundamentally celebratory, reflective of the liberal optimism of Obama-era America, and the feeling that the arc of history was bending its way. Page and Paulus’s “1776,” for all its humor and exuberance, is darker and more uncertain.But neither show is the last word on the founding, or on the Declaration, a document that might be seen as the ultimate American classic: time-bound and flawed, but also profound and visionary — and requiring continual revival and reinterpretation, by a perpetually changing cast of Americans, to stay alive.Page summed up the heart of 1776, and “1776,” crisply: “How do we self-proclaim our presence in the world?” More

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      New Yorker Festival, which runs Will Host Bono and Rep Jamie Raskin

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      The three day-festival beginning on Oct. 7 will also include conversations with stars like Ben Stiller, Chloe Bailey and Sandra Oh.The New Yorker Festival returns for its 23rd edition, featuring conversations with Bono, Quinta Brunson, Ben Stiller, Chloe Bailey, United States Representative Jamie Raskin and more, and will run from Oct. 7-9.Bono, the Irish rock star and more recently the motorbike-riding lion in “Sing 2,” will be in conversation with The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, about his new memoir and his decades as an activist and musician. The book, “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story,” will be released in November.“Like so many memoirs that I’ve read, the most intriguing part is how someone becomes himself or herself,” Remnick said in an interview.Quinta Brunson, who plays the chirpy yet clumsy elementary school teacher in “Abbott Elementary,” will speak with the magazine’s television critic, Doreen St. Félix. And Chloe Bailey (of the R&B sister duo Chloe x Halle) will perform live at the festival after a conversation.Remnick said that politically driven conversations can be had by artists, authors and actors, as well as lawmakers. Raskin, a Democrat of Maryland and a member of the Jan. 6 House select committee, along with three of the magazine’s writers, will join a live taping of The New Yorker’s “The Political Scene” podcast.The political conversation will continue with a talk about Asian American culture and representation, with the chef David Chang, the filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung, the writer Min Jin Lee and the actor Sandra Oh. And the climate activists Sara Blazevic and Molly Burhans, and the climate expert Leah Stokes, will delve into the future of the environment.“All of these people in cultural life are also in many ways connected to the political,” Remnick said.The writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie will return to the festival, where Hari Kunzru, Elif Batuman, Gary Shteyngart, Rachel Kushner and Ottessa Moshfegh will also appear.As for comedy, Molly Shannon and Vanessa Bayer, the actresses and comedians who star in the Showtime series “I Love That for You,” will chat with Susan Morrison, an editor at the magazine. And the comedians Hasan Minhaj, Phoebe Robinson, Billy Eichner and Jerrod Carmichael will also participate in festival conversations, along with the directors Stiller, the duo Daniels, Sharon Horgan and Maggie Gyllenhaal.Remnick said that with the return to theaters and the arrival of vaccine boosters, he feels confident sharing a room with readers, thinkers and performers, and the festival will hold select events virtually.“Part of cultural lifestyle was taken from us, and now it’s bounced back,” he said. More

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      in Television

      Betty Gilpin Is a Vivid Talker

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      It was 2020, and like pretty much everyone else on planet Earth, the actress Betty Gilpin was having a strange year: Her first leading role in a movie, Craig Zobel’s “The Hunt,” had already stirred a manic level of controversy and drawn the ire of President Trump, before it came out on March 13.Shortly after, filming for the fourth and final season of her television show, Netflix’s critically adored “GLOW,” was paused. That June, Ms. Gilpin received her third subsequent Emmy nomination for her performance as harried new mom turned wrestling warrior queen Debbie “Liberty Belle” Eagan. And yet, that October, Netflix announced the show was canceled, and the fourth season would be scrapped due to ongoing pandemic uncertainty.Then in November 2020, Ms. Gilpin gave birth. And five weeks after her daughter Mary came into the world, Ms. Gilpin started writing what would become her first book, “All the Women in My Brain: And Other Concerns,” which will be released on Sept. 6.“I became an actor because I felt like I was the strange girl with split ends on the sidelines in a saliva-soaked hoodie, taking notes on human behavior,” Ms. Gilpin said.Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times“I wanted to use the fact that people probably don’t know who I am, and to have my book be a comedic allegory for what it feels like to be a woman in the world,” said Ms. Gilpin, 36, over a Zoom call from Los Angeles on a recent Saturday.In a collection of 20 essays, Ms. Gilpin explores the sweeping questions of “Who am I?” “Who am I supposed to be?” and “How does the world see me?” showing how they ripple out into other arenas: the built-in identity crises of acting; the thunderdome of girlhood; her family life with charming, working-actor parents; female friendship; treading the boards off-off-Broadway; the love of a dog; and more.The book felt like a natural progression for a woman known to her friends to be a vivid talker, though Ms. Gilpin is wary of how she comes across in print interviews, at least. (“When I read them, I’m like, ‘Oh, I said that in a funny accent with fake vocal fry and a shrug,’ but it’s in print. It looks like I’m saying it teary-eyed on the steps of Congress,” she said.) The book presented an opportunity to put her own voice on the page.Theatricality is in Ms. Gilpin’s bones. As the oldest of three children, she lived in New York City until she was 9, when the family moved to rural Connecticut, but continued to live a “carny lifestyle,” as she writes in the book, thanks to her parents’ itinerant work lives. (Her father Jack Gilpin and mother Ann McDonough have had careers spanning stage, film and television; Mr. Gilpin plays Church the butler in “The Gilded Age” while Ms. McDonough was in “The Ferryman” on Broadway.)Ms. Gilpin eventually attended the Loomis Chaffee School, a private boarding school in Windsor, Conn., before studying theater at Fordham University in Manhattan, a place she knew she could “harvest weirdness.”“I became an actor because I felt like I was the strange girl with split ends on the sidelines in a saliva-soaked hoodie, taking notes on human behavior,” she said. “And now my job is to present said notes on human behavior while wearing a costume with ringlets.”After graduation, Ms. Gilpin found rather steady work in theater (“This Face,” “I’m Gonna Pray For You So Hard” and “We Live Here”) and eventually regular television roles (“Nurse Betty,” “Masters of Sex,” “Elementary”) before landing her breakout role in “GLOW.” It was during this time that she started publishing essays, including in this newspaper.For Ms. Gilpin, the process of writing this book began in the terrifying, pre-vaccine days of the pandemic, which for her was also that psychedelic gulf of time after giving birth.“I think that combination of society shutting down, and the hormones of feeling like there are no bad ideas, you just lifted a Mack truck and threw it across the universe,” she said, referring, of course, to childbirth, served as inspiration. “Now you can do your secret goal and write the damn book.”Flatiron BooksMs. Gilpin’s friends are not surprised by this development. As the actress Cristin Milioti described it, “She’s always excavating. She deep dives, and the way that she’s able to put things in perspective, there are metaphors that she’s using, that I still use to this day to navigate the way I approach things in the world.”The book came out in one draft, writing on her computer, hunched in a “self-isolating gargoyle position” on the living room floor “between semi unsuccessful breastfeeding sessions, and whatever hours I could get between terrible naps,” Ms. Gilpin said. By the time the new baby high had worn off, the book was in motion.“I knew she could write, having read her essays and having been the recipient of texts,” said the actress Zoe Kazan, also a friend of Ms. Gilpin’s. She describes the writing as “if David Rakoff and David Sedaris had a baby and that baby was Betty.”It’s hard to quantify Ms. Gilpin’s inventiveness as a speaker in conversation and writing: She uses extravagant, original metaphors, dropping dense citations like a lost Gilmore Girl (“Michael Bay going to Wesleyan — that’s like Stanley Kowalski going to Montessori,” she said at one point in the interview), creating great, grand spindly images off the top of her head, and suddenly it’s perfectly clear that yes, a subject like giving birth is absolute witchcraft cauldron business, something that stood in stark difference to her expectations.“I’d been told that my body was a Tamagotchi, and it’s a NASA supercomputer. And I could have been using it as a NASA supercomputer this entire time?” she said, using an expletive for emphasis. “What a heartbreak. What a waste.”“I really only relate to people who are so passionate about what they love and want to do and how they see the world — and also are truly embarrassed to be alive,” Ms. Gilpin said.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesFor people who first saw Ms. Gilpin in “GLOW,” the idea that she has never been a starry blonde bombshell is surprising (for one, in real life her hair is naturally brown), but in her book, she explains her self-perception as that of a beta woman, an outsider, on the sidelines. She even refers to her acting career as something that she deliberately pursued with beta expectations — not to be the leading ingénue, but the funny girl whose jokes hit.Yet she crossed the line at some point, and she’s found that with some success, she now has “this alpha schedule for this beta marketing.”There is something Sphinx-like about Ms. Gilpin, where she can tell you a great story but she knows the game of talking to a reporter. She muttered at some point that she was Zooming from a friend’s house, the sort of detail that means I can’t read too much into the interior design of the place. Her metaphors are splashy, but they serve as the comic guide to where she’s most honest as a writer, and the themes that come up through her book are dark, from ‌ ‌depression to the absolute grind of Hollywood’s sexism.Regarding the latter, she writes about auditioning for a high school student on the original “Gossip Girl” and being called back for a role of an older teacher; the fact that you have to smile and claim you were born under George W. Bush to be considered sexy and marketable; the whiplash of performing the right version of yourself at a meeting, especially when they’re expecting no insight, just a shiny and vacuous shape of a woman.Ms. Gilpin’s self-deprecation can be credited to her mother. “My humor is just complete counterfeit from Ann McDonough,” she said. “Even in the most funereal list of circumstances, she was a winking elf, making fun of herself and you and everything and made every day so goddamn funny.”It’s a quality, she clarified, of being both passionate and embarrassed. “I really only relate to people who are so passionate about what they love and want to do and how they see the world — and also are truly embarrassed to be alive.”While “GLOW” is still mourned by its stars, Ms. Gilpin has been able to bring her specific, salty and surprising presence to new projects. In the past year, she appeared in Apple TV’s “Roar” and played Mo Dean on Starz’s “Gaslit.”Last year, she filmed “Three Women” — set to premiere in November 2022 on Showtime — an adaptation of Lisa Taddeo’s best-selling nonfiction book, which “just totally changed me as a person,” Ms. Gilpin said. “And I chased that role so embarrassingly hard.”Ms. Gilpin has been waking up at 5 a.m. every day this summer to begin another day of filming on her current project, “Mrs. Davis,” for Peacock, in which she plays “a nun who goes to battle against an all-powerful artificial intelligence.” She has been working 14-hour days, appearing in every scene — and doing this while wearing a wool habit.Returning to acting after the nesting of new family life with her husband Cosmo, a nurse with whom she lives in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, has given her whiplash. “I went right from this bubble of terror, protecting my tiny baby, to a set, which sort of feels like a fake Orwellian society where the pandemic hasn’t touched anything. It’s a big corporation society, where I dance around in a habit, sometimes sob in a habit, or pratfall in a habit,” she said.At one point in the book, Ms. Gilpin writes that with success comes loneliness. One year of work took her on 50 plane rides. But, when she’s done with “Mrs. Davis,” she is planning on a different approach. “I’m trying to find the balance of working enough to still barrel toward this weird dream and passion while also seeing my daughter and touching a leaf and understanding that being an actor in the grand scheme of things is meaningless and silly,” she said, “while also loving the meaningless and silly thing.” More

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      George R.R. Martin Is Finally Getting the Show He Wanted

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      “House of the Dragon,” the “Game of Thrones” author’s preferred spinoff, premieres on Sunday night. “It had everything that I thought we needed for a successful successor show,” he said.In the five years that HBO programming executives have been carefully considering a worthy successor to “Game of Thrones,” there was one idea that George R.R. Martin kept pushing: his rise-and-fall tale of the dragon-riding Targaryen family, set nearly 200 years before the events of “Game of Thrones.”There was some reluctance within HBO’s ranks about creating a series that, like the original, was about a battle for the Iron Throne. A pair of writers assigned to work on the Targaryen concept came and went, but Martin would not give it up. Then, after HBO shot — and canceled — a separate “Thrones” prequel pilot, Martin’s persistence prevailed. “House of the Dragon” was ordered straight to series in late 2019. Martin is the creator of the show along with Ryan Condal.“House of the Dragon,” the first “Thrones” spinoff series, premieres on Sunday night, and the stakes are high for HBO. A hit could prove the viability of the Thrones Cinematic Universe. A middling performance (or worse) will prompt broader questions about whether millions of viewers are craving more “Thrones” series.In a conversation late last month, Martin, the man who over the past three decades meticulously constructed the “Thrones” universe in his various books, discussed why he felt strongly about this idea; his ambitions for future spinoffs; and how his work-in-progress books will diverge from the controversial ending of “Game of Thrones,” the TV series.These are edited excerpts from our conversation.Two writers worked on the development of your Targaryen story and it didn’t go anywhere. What made you keep pushing for it?I did not want to drop it. There was a lot of material already written on it, and it had everything that I thought we needed for a successful successor show. It had all of the intrigue around the Iron Throne. It had the great houses contending. It had dragons — a lot of dragons — and battles and betrayals.“House of the Dragon” has thematic overlaps with “Game of Thrones” — family rivalry, the battle for the throne. In what ways is it different?“Game of Thrones” and my book version of it, “A Song of Ice and Fire,” is, in some ways, a classic high fantasy in the mode of Tolkien and many, many writers who followed. Now, yes, it is true that in a sense, I’m deconstructing those tropes, those myths, the things that were hallmarks. But I’m also following them to some extent. “House of the Dragon” is more like historical fiction with some dragons thrown in. It’s like a Shakespearean tragedy.The conclusion of “Game of Thrones” disappointed many fans, but “my ending will be very different,” Martin said.HBOIt’s been just over three years since “Game of Thrones” ended in a way that disappointed many fans. What did you make of the ending?One of the things in the later seasons of the show was, How many seasons was it going to be? And [the “Game of Thrones” creators David Benioff and Dan Weiss] for years were saying they wanted to wrap it up in seven seasons. Well, seven became eight because the eighth season is really the second half of the seventh season — it’s kind of one long season.But I never felt that seven or eight seasons was enough. I campaigned for 10 seasons, and we could have gone to 12. There’s enough material — and there certainly will be enough material once I finish these last two books — to sustain 12 seasons.But I lost that battle, and we went with eight. I think one of the big complaints about those last seasons is not only what happened — although there are complaints about that — but also that it happened too suddenly, and it was not set up. And if we had 10 seasons or 12 seasons, I think that would have worked better.Considering the backlash, what’s your level of concern, for the new show, that people are either going to be too fatigued to return to the “Thrones” universe, or will relish in bringing the knives out, no matter what?I do see comments online from people, and sometimes they email me directly. I’m also concerned about a similar thing with my book. As you know, “The Winds of Winter” is very, very late — the last book was 11 years ago, and people are very angry about that. But how many people?“House of the Dragon” and any other spinoffs that are coming, and “The Winds of Winter” when it comes, are going to face some immediate backlash, and some resistance from people who don’t even want to give it a chance.Let’s say “House of the Dragon” is a hit. What would be your ideal ambition here? An entire fleet of “Thrones” TV series?Well, we are developing a number of other spinoffs. There’s the Jon Snow sequel show, and the rest are all prequels. There’s “Ten Thousand Ships” about Nymeria — that’s like a thousand years before and about how the Rhoynar came to Dorne. That’s an “Odyssey”-like epic. There’s the nine voyages of Corlys Velaryon, the Sea Snake. That would take us to places in the world that we’ve never seen.We have some animated shows going, one of which was set in Yi Ti, which is basically the fantasy version of Imperial China or the Far East. We got a terrific script on that. Obviously, not all these shows we’re developing are going to make it to air, but I hope that several of them do.Rhys Ifans and Emily Carey in “House of the Dragon,” which involves an earlier battle for the Iron Throne.Ollie Upton/HBOIs there a model you admire? Something like Marvel?I do like what Marvel is doing because I like the variety of the shows. Another model that I think was interesting was the old “Mary Tyler Moore Show.” That show generated a number of spinoffs: There was “Rhoda,” about her friend. Phyllis got her own show. And the one that really excited me was “Lou Grant.” They took this character from a sitcom and they made him the hero of a serious journalism show. That’s pretty amazing to take a character who is a comic foil and make him the center of a serious show. I’d like to see a range in our shows.Before “House of the Dragon” was given a green light, HBO shot an entire pilot for a show that takes place 1,000 years before the events of “Game of Thrones.” It was eventually canceled. What went wrong with it?Well, I have not seen the pilot. For whatever reason they won’t show it to me, so I don’t know. It was, in some ways, more challenging because on that one, they’re really, really going back into the past. The Long Night is mentioned in my books here and there, but it’s an ancient event that people tell stories about — it’s like the Garden of Eden or a biblical flood. I remember when we were first developing it, I said, “You’re going back so far — if you decided to do a ‘Sopranos’ prequel, then you would be talking about the Etruscans, the ancestors of Tony Soprano. You might be talking about cave men.”Tell me about your level of involvement in “House of the Dragon” versus your level of involvement with “Game of Thrones,” the original series.I am a lot more involved in “House of the Dragon” than I was in the later seasons of “Game of Thrones.” Now, mind you, I was very involved in the early seasons of “Game of Thrones.” Seasons 1 through 4, I mean, not only did I write a script, but especially like Seasons 1 or 2, I was giving a verdict on all the castings. I was reading the scripts. I was talking to Dan and David. I visited the set. But as the years went by, that involvement became less and less.Will your upcoming books diverge from “Thrones,” the TV series?A lot of this story comes to me as I write it. I always knew once the show got beyond my books — which honestly I did not anticipate — they would start going in directions that the books are not going to go in. Now, as I’m writing the books and I’m making more and more progress and it’s getting longer, ideas are coming to me and characters are taking me in directions that are even further from where the show went.So I think what you’re going to find is, when “Winds of Winter” and then, hopefully, “Dream of Spring” come out, that my ending will be very different. And there will be some similarities, some big moments that I told David and Dan about many years ago, when they visited me in Santa Fe. But we only had like two, three days there, so I didn’t tell them everything. And even some of the things I told them are changing as I do the writing. So they will be different. And then it’ll be up to the readers and the viewers to decide which one they like better, and argue about it.When will the books be done?No comment. No comment. No comment. I get in trouble every time I do that. I mean, going back like 10 years, I said, “Oh, I should be done next year.” And then it’s not done next year. And then: “George lied to us.” I’m no good at predicting these things. And some of it depends on how many other interruptions there are and all that. I’m in a pretty good place now, so I’m optimistic. But I’m not going to make any predictions. More

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      Meet the ‘Better Call Saul’ Staffers Who Kept Its Story Straight

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      Ariel Levine and Kathleen Williams-Foshee, members of the show’s “brain trust,” tracked every minor character trait and historical reference.If there’s one takeaway from the moral and ideological universe of “Better Call Saul” — and its similarly meditative parent series “Breaking Bad” — it might be that details matter. Small decisions and non-decisions tend to accumulate until, to paraphrase the character Mike, who appeared in both series, we find ourselves at the end of a road, not necessarily conscious of where it began.The force of accumulated history was baked into the premise of “Better Call Saul,” which ended after six seasons on Monday. But the creators of the show, which began its story — following the exploits of the morally-challenged lawyer Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), the taciturn and principled fixer Mike (Jonathan Banks) and his fastidious drug lord boss Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) — six years before the famous events of “Breaking Bad,” went out of their way to reinforce notions of predestination within the narrative. To an unusual degree, it spun a kind of clockwork ecosystem, teeming with portentous allusions, callbacks and foreshadowing that encouraged the most passionate viewers to scrutinize its every frame.Behind the scenes, members of the show’s writing staff were no less obsessive. Ariel Levine, a staff writer on “Saul,” and Kathleen Williams-Foshee, the script coordinator, were part of what was known internally as “the brain trust” — a group of staffers who functioned as the show’s institutional memory. Working closely with a team of writers, assistants and producers — led by the showrunner and co-creator Peter Gould — Levine and Williams-Foshee maintained detailed notes on virtually every person, place, thing or event ever mentioned or implied on either the show or its predecessor.Speaking with The Times on Tuesday, the day after the “Better Call Saul” finale, they discussed solving hard story problems (whatever happened to Saul’s ex-wives?), making the choice to contradict “Breaking Bad” and staying ahead of Reddit sleuths. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How long did you each work on the show and in what roles?KATHLEEN WILLIAMS-FOSHEE I’ve been the script coordinator since Season 3 and also worked briefly as a writer’s assistant in Seasons 5 and 6.The End of ‘Better Call Saul’The “Breaking Bad” spinoff has concluded its run after six seasons.Series Finale: If the ending of “Better Call Saul” surprised you, take comfort in this fact: It surprised Saul Goodman, too. Here’s our recap.More Than ‘Breaking Bad 2’: Both prequel and sequel, the show was a time machine that asked how we become who we are, our critic writes.Bob Odenkirk: After receiving a fifth Emmy nomination in July, the star discussed bringing some measure of self-awareness to the character of Saul for his final bow.Stealing the Show: Kim Wexler’s long slide toward perdition has become arguably the narrative keystone of the series, thanks to Rhea Seehorn’s performance.ARIEL LEVINE And I started in Season 1 as a postproduction assistant, worked as writer’s production assistant in Season 2, a writer’s assistant in Seasons 3 through 5 and then staff writer for 6.In the writers’ room, how did you keep track of all the history in play as you were trying to generate new stories?LEVINE In the room, figuring out what we could and couldn’t do, or what we should and shouldn’t do, was primarily the writers’ assistants’ job. When I was a writers’ assistant, Kathleen and I would use this living document I made with every established fact or character on both “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul.” So if Saul said in “Breaking Bad,” “I’ve been divorced three times,” that would be in there. Or if Gale [a meth cook in “Breaking Bad” played by David Costabile] had a résumé that appeared in one shot in one episode that said he went to a certain college, that would be in there, as well. Whenever the writers were discussing a particular character or event, we would speak up in the moment and tell everyone what is known about it.How long is this document?LEVINE [Checking her computer.] The final version was 52 pages.WILLIAMS-FOSHEE It was beautiful.LEVINE We expanded it into a spreadsheet that we called the Gillaverse Mega Timeline [after Vince Gilligan, the creator of “Breaking Bad” and co-creator of “Better Call Saul”] and then had smaller individual documents for all of the recurring characters.In “Breaking Bad,” Saul was the attorney for that show’s hero/villain, Walter White (Bryan Cranston).Ursula Coyote/AMCHow many times have you both watched “Breaking Bad”?LEVINE All the way through? Seven. But there are individual episodes, like the one that introduces Saul, or the one that gets into the relationship between Gus and the Salamancas [collaborators in a cross-border drug cartel] that I’ve easily seen 20, 25 times or more.WILLIAMS-FOSHEE I’ve watched it at least five times, all the way through, but probably more. When [“Saul”] was in production, we were looking at scenes from “Breaking Bad” every day.How did you deal with story decisions that might contradict something that was established on “Breaking Bad”?LEVINE We always wanted to be as consistent as possible, but we reserved the right to decide that something you saw on “Breaking Bad” might have been wrong. Ultimately, we chose to do what we felt would serve this story. Saul’s diploma on “Breaking Bad” said that he graduated from the University of American Samoa in 1986. But that didn’t work for the timeline of our show, so we changed it to 1998. Similarly, on “Breaking Bad,” Saul mentions a second ex-wife, and there’s a deleted scene from the show where he says he has three ex-wives, total. We actually talked about including a flashback scene to one of his previous marriages, but it seemed like too much to introduce an entirely new character. So we just had him present two previous dissolution of marriage certificates in the scene where he and Kim [Saul’s true love, played by Rhea Seehorn] get married at the courthouse.WILLIAMS-FOSHEE It helps that Saul talks out of his ass a lot, because in a way it makes sense that not everything is going to add up. He’s just riffing constantly; that’s part of who he is.What was the hardest needle to thread between the two shows?WILLIAMS-FOSHEE I think the thing that took the most time and reasoning was Gus and the super lab [a giant underground meth operation that figured heavily into the plot of “Breaking Bad”]. We wanted to show how Gus and Mike came together to pull that off, but it’s clear that the lab has only recently been completed in the timeline of “Breaking Bad.” We decided that not only did we have to explain just how much time and effort went into building the lab, but that something would have to interrupt them at a certain point and essentially force them to start over.Fans on Reddit never let any detail or perceived misstep go unnoticed. Were there any oversights that came back to haunt you?LEVINE I think the thing that usually haunted us was stuff that was shot that we didn’t know about, or weren’t around for. Dates were a big issue. We were always shouting at production, “Please, don’t show any calendars!” More

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      Dolly Alderton’s ‘Everything I Know About Love’ Is Adapted for TV

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      The writer has turned her memoir, “Everything I Know About Love,” into a TV show, which plots its central friendship like a grand love story.LONDON — Dolly Alderton peered through the window of her old house in Camden Town, squinting to see inside the kitchen. She had last visited the tree-lined street in London the year before, “with my mates when we were drunk,” she said. When she asked the current tenants if she could look inside, “they said, ‘Did you write a book about living here?’” she recalled. It was, apparently, the first thing the landlord mentioned when advertising the property.On that visit, the 33-year-old writer had been in the midst of turning that memoir, “Everything I Know About Love,” into a TV show, which premieres in the United States on Peacock on Aug. 25. Both iterations are set in this area of North London — known for its rich rock ’n’ roll history and graffitied canal — where Alderton lived for almost 10 years, and which she jokingly described as “the second-most visited tourist destination in London after Buckingham Palace.”During that decade, Alderton worked as a story producer on the British reality TV show “Made in Chelsea,” wrote a dating column and created a hit podcast, “The High Low,” with the journalist Pandora Sykes. But what defined the period for Alderton was being single, in her 20s and living with friends.When it came to adapting her memoir for the screen, Alderton realized that readers connected with how she had framed her relationship with Farly Kleiner, her childhood best friend, as “epic and grand and romantic” — a love story. In the series, the two are fictionalized as Maggie (Emma Appleton) and Birdy (Bel Powley). With the show’s “ups and downs, tensions and silliness, surprise and excitement,” Alderton said, the seven episodes plot the narrative arc of their relationship like a romantic comedy.Alderton said that she saw Maggie, played by Emma Appleton in the show, “as someone who is 10 tracing paper copies away from me.”Matt Squire/PeacockMaggie’s more sensible best friend, C is based on Farly Kleiner, Alderton’s own childhood best friend.Matt Squire/PeacockWorking Title Films, which made rom-coms like “Notting Hill,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary” and “Love Actually” — acquired the film and TV rights for the memoir in 2017, when the book was still at the proposal stage.Eric Fellner, the production company’s co-chairman, also optioned “Bridget Jones” from Helen Fielding’s book. When he read “Everything I Know About Love,” he “thought, this writer has got a similar connection to an audience that Helen Fielding had all those years ago,” he said in a recent phone interview, “and maybe this is the millennial version.” Both writers, he added, “can look at their generation in a brilliantly humorous way.”At a cafe in Primrose Hill, Alderton said that for her generation, “sincerity has become unfashionable” and that coming of age in the 2010s meant growing up in “a very cynical time.” It is against this backdrop that “Everything I Know About Love” is set, in 2012 — “literally the year Camden stopped being cool,” Alderton added. ‌Rebecca Lucy Taylor, better known as the pop star Self Esteem, was in an indie band at that time. She contributed three songs to the show’s soundtrack, and said the episodes were “so evocative of the ever-competitive alt scene, where everyone is trying to seem like they’re not trying.”Birdy, Maggie and their two housemates, Amara (Aliyah Odoffin) and Nell (Marli Siu), are all “provincial or suburban” and “on the fringes of everything — in not a good way,” Alderton said. When they arrive in Camden, all four are ravenous for some big city experience.This lack of urban initiation is what distinguishes Alderton’s characters from their more aspirational forebears in shows like “Sex and the City” and even “Girls.” Alderton once pined for the glamour of the big city, too, she said. She grew up in Stanmore, a “comfortable” and “beige-carpeted” suburb of North London, she said, where “the buses are slow and infrequent.” As children, she and Kleiner would circle a single cul-de-sac on their scooters, and wander around the shopping mall without ever buying anything. “All we did was talk and dream,” Alderton said, adding that the lack of stimuli gave her brain “an Olympic workout for imagination.”Alderton spent nearly a decade living in the Camden area of London, a period she turned into a best-selling memoir.Ellie Smith for The New York TimesNow, Alderton is one of Britain’s best-known millennial writers. Between her memoir, podcast, a recent novel and her gig as an agony aunt for a British newspaper, many young British women see her as the trusted voice of a close friend.“There’s always women running up to her wanting to talk to her,” said Cherish Shirley, a writer and story consultant on “Everything I Know About Love.” Most days, Alderton said, she meets “amazing, generous, lovely girls” in bars, bookstores or bathrooms who want to talk. “Because I opened up a channel of communication,” she said, “they speak very intimately back to me.”But after the paperback edition of “Everything I Know About Love” came out in 2019, the amount of attention began to feel “unmanageable,” she said. Alderton moved back to her parents’ house for six weeks to spend some time being “really small and really quiet and really hidden away,” she said.For the first time in her career, she also began putting more distance between herself and her work. In adapting her memoir for television, she said she chiseled the show’s protagonist into a character who was less self-aware, and less precocious, than herself.“I see Maggie as someone who is 10 tracing paper copies away from me,” Alderton said. Another divergence from the book is the addition of characters of color, including Amara, a Black British dancer. “Criticism of the book — that I fully accept — is that it was very white,” she said. This was another reason she made the show “semi-fictional,” she said, and Shirley added that Alderton was intentional in bringing together “a mixed group of women from all sorts of backgrounds” to form the show’s writers room, and fill out its world with authentic, diverse characters.Clockwise from left, Birdy (Powley), Amara (Aliyah Odoffin), Nell (Marli Siu) and Maggie (Appleton) in their shared kitchen during a scene from the show.Matt Squire/PeacockIn March, three months before the show premiered on the BBC in Britain, Alderton had “a big wobble” about being thrust into the spotlight again, she said. Surian Fletcher-Jones, an executive producer on the show, instructed her to get “match fit.” Alderton said she stopped drinking for a while, and also started a course of cognitive behavioral therapy, billing the sessions to the production.Simon Maloney, a producer who also worked on Michaela Coel’s “I May Destroy You,” emphasized the importance of providing support for female showrunners who draw heavily from their personal experiences, Alderton said. “You can’t drag the story out of a woman like that, and then leave her alone,” she remembered him saying.Alderton described herself as “an oversharer,” but these days, she thinks carefully about how that sharing should take place, and posts less on social media. ‌“What I now realize,” she said, “is people don’t need to go into forensic detail of their emotional lives to get people to like, and then relate, to them.”Fellner revealed Alderton had a studio deal for a film adaptation of her fiction debut, “Ghosts.” She is also researching a novel about heartbreak and loss. “The work I do in fiction is still very exposing,” Alderton said, because it continues to reference her life, even if she is no longer the main character.“That’s enough of my heart, and soul, and brain and life spilled out everywhere,” she said.“What I now realize,” Alderton said, “is people don’t need to go into forensic detail of their emotional lives to get people to like, and then relate, to them.”Ellie Smith for The New York Times More

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      Mary Ellin Barrett, Daughter and Defender of Irving Berlin, Dies at 95

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      When the great American songwriter’s character came under attack after his death, Ms. Barrett sought to correct the record with a candid but tender memoir.The songwriter Irving Berlin defined a very American style of sunniness. “Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better)” delighted in competition. “Puttin’ On the Ritz” made social mobility silly. “White Christmas” exalted innocence. With “God Bless America,” Berlin, an immigrant from Russia, wrote the unofficial second national anthem of his adopted home.Yet by the time he died at 101 in 1989, after years of avoiding the spotlight and restricting the use of his music, many puzzled over an apparent gap between Berlin’s art and his character.“The man who wrote such wonderfully romantic songs as ‘Cheek to Cheek,’ ‘Always’ and ‘What’ll I Do?’ appears to have been an egotist and a boor,” the book critic Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times wrote in 1990 in a review of a biography. In a news article the same year, the paper reported that people in the theater and music businesses described Berlin as a “recluse” and “miser.”Then, in 1994, Mary Ellin Barrett, one of Berlin’s three daughters, disputed the criticisms of her father in an interview with The Times and announced a mission: “Presenting the father I knew to the world.” She said she was writing a book.“Irving Berlin: A Daughter’s Memoir” was published later that year. In it, Ms. Barrett offered a new portrait of her father: droll, self-effacing, with an unspoken perfectionism that would doom him to bitterness in old age but that for four decades of maturity pushed him to dazzling artistic achievements, along with attentiveness to his family.That has become a definitive insider’s view of Irving Berlin. The Times critic Stephen Holden credited Ms. Barrett with the ability to balance affection for her father with awareness of his flaws, and he called her book a “touching, wise, gracefully written memoir.”Ms. Barrett died on July 16 in Manhattan at 95, her daughter Katherine Swett said.Ms. Barrett’s account of family life helped reconcile Irving Berlin the artist and Irving Berlin the man.Ms. Barrett did not take the position of a biographer, giving a full account of Berlin’s life, or the position of a critic, translating to prose the power of his music and the sources of his creativity. (She instead called him an “inexplicable genius.”)But her account of family life helped reconcile Berlin the artist and Berlin the man.She recalled her father making head-spinning comparisons between their childhoods. Young Mary Ellin got a scar from falling off a swing; young Israel Beilin, as he was then known, got a scar in the berth of the ship he took to America when someone dropped a penknife on him, almost hitting his eye.In the East River, near Mary Ellin’s penthouse home, her father had once, at 8 years old, nearly drowned; when rescued, he was found still clutching the pennies he had earned that day selling newspapers.He often seemed a “shaky, uncertain man,” Ms. Barrett wrote — drumming his fingers, molding the inside of dinner rolls into compact balls, smoking too many cigarettes, chewing too much gum, jumping when the telephone rang, fiddling with his piano.Yet out came hit after hit after hit; between his 20s and his 60s, he wrote about 1,500 songs.Ms. Barrett came to see her father’s drive as the product of anxiety and toughness that lingered from a ghetto childhood. He was “the street fighter,” she wrote, “not noisy and brawling but quiet, dogged,” never shaking the sense that he acted “with his back against the wall, writing, composing, negotiating his way out of a corner.”Mary Ellin Berlin, who was born on Nov. 25, 1926, in Manhattan, grew up in a different universe. Her girlhood memories included dinner parties with the Astaires, the Goldwyns, the Capras and Somerset Maugham, who once lay on the floor, balanced a glass of water on his forehead and stood up without spilling a drop.Though she sometimes had to chase her father for attention and felt alienated by the fame of her parents — her mother, Ellin Mackay, was an heiress and a popular novelist — Mary Ellin felt less resentment than enchantment with her good fortune. When she relentlessly invited people to the family’s theater house seats for her father’s 1946 Broadway megahit, “Annie Get Your Gun,” one annoyed friend told her to knock it off.She graduated from Barnard College in 1949 with a degree in music and worked as an editorial trainee at Time magazine, where she met the author and journalist Marvin Barrett. They married in 1952; he died in 2006. Later in her career, Ms. Barrett worked at Glamour and Vogue magazines and wrote book reviews for Cosmopolitan. She published three novels in addition to the book about her father.Ms. Barrett, right, with her sisters Elizabeth Peters, left, and Linda Emmet at Town Hall in New York in 2016, attending a performance of the one-man show “Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin.”Eugene Gologursky/Getty ImagesMs. Barrett’s sister Elizabeth Peters died in 2017. In addition to her daughter Ms. Swett, Ms. Barrett is survived by another sister, Linda Emmet; two other daughters, Elizabeth Matson and Mary Ellin Lerner; a son, Irving Barrett; five grandsons; and a great-grandson.When Ms. Barrett was 2 years old, her infant brother, Irving Jr., died on Christmas Day. Although her father, who was Jewish, would later write one of the nation’s best-loved Christmas tunes (her mother was Irish Catholic), her parents came to “hate” the holiday, her mother told her when Ms. Barrett was an adult.As a girl, Mary Ellin did not know that she had ever had a brother. At the time, she considered Christmas “the single most beautiful and exciting day of the year,” she wrote. She saw a revealing parallel looking back at the celebrations of her youth.“The tree was trimmed behind closed doors and revealed to the children in full splendor, with all the presents beneath it, on Christmas morning,” she wrote. “So it was with a show.” More