Linda Rosenkrantz is, perhaps most enduringly, the author of Talk (1968), the landmark experimental “novel-in-dialogue” carved from thousands of hours of real-life conversations between three best friends spending the summer together in an East Hampton vacation rental. Marsha, Emily, and Vincent—like a makeshift accountability committee with no clear mandate and too much shared history, huddled in the overheated breakroom of young adulthood’s frenzied final blush—rotate through the roles of fixer, witness, and the problem: drafting positions, rehearsing the truth, and hoping someone else sends it up the chain. Peter Hujar’s Day (2021), adapted for the screen by Ira Sachs and in theaters this fall, applies the same documentary method to a single conversation. The photographer, at Rosenkrantz’s indulgent prodding, recounts everything he saw, said, ate, and avoided on the previous day: December 18, 1974.

Together with then-Glamour fashion editor Pamela Redmond, Rosenkrantz published Beyond Jennifer & Jason: An Enlightened Guide to Naming Your Baby (1988), which became a minor empire—revised, retitled, and reissued over more than two decades. Alongside her late husband Christopher Finch, she co-authored the coffee-table compendium Gone Hollywood (1979) and the novel Soho (1983), a pulpy, maximalist, multi-generational saga of Jewish-American striving and sexual reinvention amid the drafty loftscape of 20th-century downtown Manhattan.

In the leadup to this interview, Rosenkrantz sent me a link to her Wikipedia several times: ensuring her own advance introduction, as if to make sure that I had the right girl. On the phone, she was self-effacing, evincing a clear preference for talking about others rather than herself. That might explain why, at some point, it started to feel like she was the one interviewing me. I found myself spilling about who I hated and whatever art gossip I had on hand. Our conversation gained considerable steam once we established that gossip is good, that we both loathed its use as a pejorative. Gossip, I offered, speeds up the social construction of reality. She agreed. It turns up the temperature on any conversation, she added. I agreed. And from there we were off.

“In the life I lead now,” Rosenkrantz said, “there's not much gossip going on, because I'm not surrounded by a big group of people in the same way. But when I talk to Emily, we get right back into talk—talk like Talk.”

Linda Rosenkrantz is very good on the phone.

—Karim Kazemi

Karim Kazemi: Let’s start by talking about the movie, and your book, which it was based on.

Linda Rosenkrantz: Peter Hujar’s Day was never meant to be a book. It was this huge ‘art tape’—part of a larger project that never came to be.

KK: You were meeting up with people and prompting them to relay to you everything that they had gotten up to the previous day. Besides Peter Hujar, who were your other subjects?

LR: The first, right after Peter, was Chuck Close—who was a friend as well as an artist. But then this weird thing happened. Some woman I knew who was an ardent feminist said to me that it had better be all women. Because some publisher was looking for books about women. Blah blah blah. So from there on, I did mostly wives of artists and they were really pretty boring. Most of them had babies, so their days were full of diapers. I sort of stopped after that.

KK: You’re portrayed by Rebecca Hall—

LR: The gorgeous Rebecca Hall.

KK: Did you have any contact with her as she prepared for the role?

LR: She called me a couple of times to hear my accent—but, at the same time, she said she didn’t want to do an imitation of me. Still, people have said that at the beginning of the film, it sounded like she had a very New York, very Bronx accent—which I don’t think she did. She had very little dialogue. Her job, really, was just to react to the Peter character. And she just perfectly captured the way I would’ve listened—which is a hard thing to do. I don’t think Rebecca Hall ever expected to be playing Linda Rosenkrantz. I think she did a terrific job.

KK: Because it’s mostly body language?

LR: Well—facial. More facial. Facial language.

KK: What was your experience of seeing the film?

LR: At first, it took a little bit of an adjustment because—you know—it wasn’t Peter. And I had to shut that off in my mind—that I wasn’t watching Peter, I was watching an actor.

KK: Ira Sachs says the film is about “what it is to be an artist among artists in a city where no one was making any money.”

LR: I can’t imagine Ira saying that—as a general thing. I mean, I certainly worked for money every day of my life. Maybe he said that about Peter. Peter wasn’t good about promoting himself or getting work. He never had any money. Everybody knew—if you wanted to have dinner with Peter, you had to pay. I was always buying him things: buying him sheets, buying him blankets, buying him clothes. He had no money. And toward the end of his life, I was running around trying to sell prints of his for, like, $200—to my friends. And I did sell some. But he had no money. None.

KK: He can’t believe a pack of cigarettes sets him back seventy cents, a block of cheese forty. But then he recounts how, at night, his friend comes over to take a shower and gives him money to buy them both dinner. And he goes down to the street with it, buying Chinese takeout for a whopping eight dollars.

LR: Yeah, you spend other people’s money.

KK: At the center of Peter Hujar’s Day is his telling of being dispatched by the New York Times to take Allen Ginsberg’s portrait. That part was, in a way, comforting to me—just reading that someone before you had to put up with the same kind of thing that neither of you, really, should’ve had to.

LR: What are you talking about?

KK: I had an experience earlier this year, in February. I have a friend who was doing PR for a gallery on the Lower East Side. And I tried really, really, really, hard to land a piece about the artist whose work they were showing: this decrepit French filmmaker.

LR: Let's not use words like decrepit.

KK: I’m only saying that because of how he acted. Like, what did Peter call Ginsberg after their photo session? He called him a “self-absorbed, self-important, slightly callous bore.” It’s, like, a character note that I feel like I earned. I love old people. I really do.

LR: How old was this person?

KK: About eighty. But he wasn’t like other old people, many of whom are very gracious, very peaceful and normal, and who I’ll always want to learn from, because they seem like they’ve figured out how to live. Instead, he was teeming with resentment, suspicious that anybody would be interested in him.

LR: Really? Why do you think that was?

KK: It was the same disposition—this petulant, performed disdain for “the establishment”—that Ginsberg wore when he learned what paper Peter had been working for. The guy I dealt with, similarly, handled himself like I’d been sent there to repossess his soul. He ranted at me about how much debt he was in and refused to answer questions about his work. It was so humiliating. For me, but mostly for him. Because the way to get out of debt, if you’re an artist, is to sell your work. And maybe that happens because some collector stumbles across an article in some magazine and decides to care. And I was the guy dumb enough to try to write it. And then you’re going to scream at him, “Fuck you, I’m a fucking genius. Fuck you.” And do everything in your power—

LR: To not look good?

KK: To not look good! Peter’s rundown of that encounter is so cool and musical and nonchalant. Did he take that hard or did he move past it?

LR: He moved past it. He could easily dismiss it—he knew Ginsberg’s bad attitude came through in the photograph. Ginsberg wasn’t happy with it, and that was all he really cared about. It was ridiculous, the way he treated Peter. Ginsberg, though—I think he was pretty terrible. Not just that day. Those guys were awful. I had an experience with Kerouac, when he came to my house—he was the most awful person I’ve ever met.

KK: What happened?

LR: This was when Gregory Corso was staying with me, briefly. There was a dinner—Emily, me, Emily’s boyfriend, Corso, and Kerouac. Emily was a very good cook, and he was flicking his cigarette ashes right into the food that she made. He just couldn’t have been more awful.

KK: Did you think he would be awful, or did you think he would be normal?

LR: I had no reason to believe he would be awful. I was excited. “Oh, Jack Kerouac’s coming for dinner!” I was telling everybody in the world. But no—it was shockingly bad behavior. He was drunk, of course, through the whole thing. He was very disrespectful to Gregory, putting him down. And he just completely ignored us—me and Emily. He was just a terrible guy. I just wrote a short thing—I don’t know if it’s book-length or not, called Name-Drops Are Falling on My Head, about well-known people I’ve known in my life. And the Kerouac story is in there.

KK: Are they mostly horror stories?

LR: It’s a mix. There are some very nice stories of people that I’ve known—Baryshnikov, for example. There’s a semi–horror story about Walter Matthau, who was also awful.

KK: Walter Matthau was—what, a newscaster?

LR: No, he was a movie star. There was a movie called The Odd Couple, and he was one of them. He was well-known. More of a character actor—but very well-known.

KK: What did he do?

LR: Well, he was very flirtatious in a very unappealing way. Hands under the table and stuff like that.

KK: Are you hoping to get even?

LR: I think the stakes are very low at this point. I mean—

KK: I don’t even know who he is.

LR: Yeah, although I think most people would. How old are you?

KK: I’m 29.

LR: I think he was active until a few years ago. He’s not from some long-ago period of movies. So I’m sorry to say you probably can’t pin it on that.

KK: I want to make sure I’m saying his last name right. “Hujar?”

LR: It’s Hujar like the word “huge,” not Hujar like the word “who.” Everyone is saying it wrong, which drives me crazy. HUGE-ar is how Peter would say it.

KK: Ok, well, we’re going to set the record straight.

LR: Yes, please. HUGE-ar is how Peter would say it. Even Ira Sachs was saying WHO-jar, and that’s—well, that’s just not it.

KK: We’re going to fix that.

LR: Okay. Good.

KK: Do you have an iPhone?

LR: I do.

KK: And does it ever do this thing to you where it, like, shows you what you were doing on the same day several years ago?

LR: Facebook does that. I barely look at Facebook, but they have all these “memory” features.

KK: I got one of those on my iPad the other day. When I was eighteen, I bought my mom’s old car from her for a symbolic sum of money and I tried and failed to drive from Colorado to Maine. I ended up just dicking around in Michigan. The picture was one that I took of myself, standing with my feet in Lake Superior, smoking a cigarette—like, it’s the fourth or fifth cigarette I’d ever had—and I’m holding Talk, your book.

LR: Yeah, you emailed me that.

KK: I remember being really taken by Marsha and Emily and Vincent, how bohemian they seemed. There’s this bit where Vincent goes off on a monologue, something about how the three of them are striking out on virgin, untrodden relational terrain—

LR: That they’re “pioneers.”

KK: At the time, I think I was, like, “No, totally.” But now, re-reading it yesterday, and I’m now the exact same age that they are in the novel, I feel like I’ve been party to some similar displays of high-flung gay guy grandiloquence. And I’m like—“take a sip of water, buddy! Chill!” What I’m trying to say is that, this second time around, they struck me as very normal people, having normal conversations, drunk on the beach.

LR: Well, we felt normal.

KK: That summer—1965—I’m curious where you were, or where most people were, in terms of the rollout of personal tape recorders. They were really big, no? I read that you had to transport it in a wagon.

LR: I don’t know of anybody else who owned one at that time. They were easy to get, at a record store or whatever, Sam Goody. They weren’t hard to find, but people wouldn’t have them, for any reason, in their daily lives. Maybe they left messages on the phone, you know, and that was sort of like tape-recording. Warhol was tape recording a novel at the same time, and I know that he was aware of what I was doing. People talked and he taped them, but he didn’t edit it in any way. So that was a completely different thing. When Talk was first published, it wasn’t presented as tapes. It was billed as a “novel”—that I had invented these conversations—much to my dismay. Still, many knew how it was made, and they thought it was cheating. Like they used to say about Kerouac: that he wasn’t writing, he was typing.

KK: A lot of people feel similarly about using artificial intelligence to write. That it’s a sort of cop-out.

LR: But don’t you think that’s gonna fade?

KK: I’m interested in purchasing this device—it’s a bracelet that records everything that goes on around you, and then it uses AI to summarize every conversation you had.

LR: I think that would drive me crazy.

KK: I want one. I think that it would drive me crazy, too. I mean, a lot has already been made of this, but Talk was way, way, way ahead of its time. I guess that’s a nice way of describing something probably pretty painful, which is that it was received in a way it took decades and decades to recover from.

LR: People couldn’t believe it. That was the issue. “People really talk this way about therapy? About sex?” They thought it was just crude, all the talk about gay sex. And also, you know, that these two women come off as quite promiscuous. People couldn’t believe that these two women could have a million different boyfriends. I must say, and I don’t know if it’s relevant or not, but I was quite terrified of what the reaction would be. I thought I would lose my job. I was aware that there was danger ahead. My father never read it. He would carry it around and show people the picture of me on the back cover, which was taken by Peter Hujar, and he was so proud of the fact that I wrote a book, and I think his friends would say to him, “You haven’t read this book? Do you realize what’s in this book?” It was shocking to a lot of people, including my mother, who went into therapy a week later.

KK: There’s a lot of gay male literature—

LR: There wasn’t at one point.

KK: And now there is. Still, even as so many taboos have been broken, or at least defanged, there’s this one thing that, paradoxically—

LR: I mean, don’t you think it’s mostly read by gay men? Gay male literature?

KK: I’m not sure. I was under the impression that only women read anymore, so maybe nobody is reading gay male literature. What I wanted to say is that something that still doesn’t show up on the page all that often is the sort of primacy, the intensity, of certain relationships between gay men and their straight women friends. Which seems like one of the not-so-salacious aspects of gay life. I mean, very often, it’s one that predates puberty.

LR: Yeah, that’s not—I agree. That doesn’t really show up.

KK: I think that being a gay man reroutes you, obviously, takes you off the standard circuit. But I also think that the same thing happens for heterosexual women who surround themselves with them. They’re set off from the normal life course in all of these equally extreme and complicated, but different, ways. So I guess my question is: Why do you think there are some women who form really intense, important bonds with gay men? And why do you think there are others who don’t?

LR: I guess it feels safe. It’s a way of keeping heterosexual men away. That was about to be gotten more into in Talk. I don’t know how much I would want to say, but a lot of people—a lot of straight men—would feel that, well, you don’t need anybody else because you have Vincent. When people would come to my apartment, for instance, in those days, the walls were covered with Vincent’s paintings and his presence was just very much there. And I think it did push other men away. And that was the one time I didn’t turn on the tape recorder, was at the very end. Somebody was there, I don’t remember what name I gave him. But he got into this whole thing about me and gay men. And somehow or other, I just didn’t turn it on.

KK: I think that’s in there? There’s this incident with Emily’s former lover, a controlling older intellectual named Nathan Fass? He berates Marsha, saying that she’ll never have a “real” romantic relationship as long as she’s close with Vincent, because he fulfills all of her emotional needs.

LR: I really feel like I should have read it in the last couple of days. I mean, I usually read the first part over and over. I don't get through to the end. I don't read all the things.

KK: You read the first part over and over?

LR: I don't know what I'm looking for when I do, but I do.

KK: So maybe there was more than one man who felt that way. Here’s your chance to get it out there…

LR: Well, it’s a little late. I mean, that was very much of that time, so it’s hard for me to go back to those feelings. I’ve never talked about this before. No, I’ve just never talked about this before. So it is interesting. But now, I mean, it’s so long ago. But I stayed very close to those two guys, Vincent and Peter. Vincent died about a year ago.

KK: Vincent and Peter were different people?

LR: Vincent was a fairly well-known artist. His name was Joseph Raffael. It’s odd—I’ve been talking to his daughter, and they were sort of estranged, and she didn’t know about Talk and she didn’t know about her father’s past as a gay man and she thought that Peter was like a relative of his—“Uncle Peter.” She didn’t know that he was an ex-boyfriend of his.

KK: Really?

LR: Yeah.

KK: So Vincent went on to lead a not-gay life?

LR: He got married. He was married twice, and he had two children.

KK: Wow.

LR: Well, remember? In the book he says something like he thinks that he could possibly have children someday. I was married for a long time and my life changed completely.

KK: How old were you when you got married?

LR: I was certainly in my 30s. I was always in my 30s when anything happened.

KK: You were always in your 30s when anything happened?

LR: No, I didn’t say that. I think I was about 38 when I got married. I thought I was too old to have a real wedding, so we just got married at City Hall. And Peter’s present to me was that he photographed the whole day, the whole wedding day.

KK: You should make a book out of those pictures called Linda Rosenkrantz’s Day—Linda Rosenkrantz’s WEDDING Day.

LR: They’re not very glamorous, I must say.

KK: But it sounds like he did the things for you that you did for him.

LR: He did a lot. Peter and me were the exact same age. He absolutely chronicled my whole life.

KK: You worked in very different mediums, but at the end of the day, you both worked in a similar mode: portraiture—which, being good at it, comes down to chemistry, giving people permission to be themselves.

LR: The difference is that I don’t record strangers. It’s always been people I know. Peter did do it for strangers—and he wasn’t the kind of photographer who would stage direct them. One of those photographers that says, “Turn this way, baby. Put your hand on your chin.”

KK: It’s such a particular ability. There’s no resource to consult about how to get better at making people feel at ease around you.

LR: You either have it or you don’t. Did you know that I’m supposedly the person that he photographed most? There’s something like a thousand shots of me.

KK: I didn’t know that. Does that feel good?

LR: It feels very, very good.

KK: Have you ever read this book by Joyce Maynard, At Home in The World, about her relationship with J. D. Salinger?

LR: No, but she’s been living off that for years.

KK: There’s a part in it about how she got her name—

LR: So it’s just kind of a memoir?

KK: It’s a memoir, yeah. And there’s this part where she’s talking about how, when she was born, her parents let her older sister pick out her name. They wanted to ward off jealousy, so that she wouldn’t feel like she’d suddenly been cut from the frame.

LR: The sister is, like, five years old?

KK: Young enough to be just on the cusp of understanding that if you really, truly treasure something, you can’t just give it away. The name she picks out is Daphne, because it’s her favorite, and then a few days after they all come home from the hospital, she wants it back.

LR: People can be very possessive when it comes to names.

KK: I was planning on asking you where you think your knack for baby-naming came from, but then I was reading the Linda Rosenkrantz deep cuts, a book called My Life as a List—

LR: My memoir.

KK: You write that, as a young girl, you had always gone by your Hebrew name, until you came home from the first day of school in tears because the teacher had called you by your legal name. And that, to soothe you, your parents let you pick out a brand new name, which was Linda.

LR: And I, also, coincidentally, picked out my sister’s name.

KK: And did you recall it?

LR: Do I know my sister’s name?

KK: I mean, did you let her have it? Or did you walk it back?

LR: I let her have it—Karen—and it turned out not to be such a great choice. Now, of course, Karen is not the most, you know, positive-sounding name. I thought it was this unusual Scandinavian name that I had discovered: Karen. That’s how much I knew at the time.

KK: Baby-naming is, unavoidably, a branding exercise. What I love about Beyond Jennifer and Jason is that it doesn’t pretend otherwise. There are names flagged as “sporty” or “mystical”—or, my favorite, “good on the phone”—all shorthand for what the parents want the kid to project.

LR: It really holds up, doesn’t it? Before, there was nothing that looked at names in terms of style. We completely revolutionized baby-naming. Of course it’s always aspirational, but people were completely unaware of it before.

KK: My stepsister named her daughter “Karsyn”—pronounced exactly like “Carson,” but with a “K.” It’s part of this whole genre of totally invented names—borrowing the phonemes of older, traditional ones, just rearranged. You know immediately what race someone named “Brylee” or “Brayden” is, in a way that you don’t necessarily with someone named “Isabella” or “John.” It’s a kind of, like, linguistic white flight. Maybe people are a little bit resistant to examining their intentions because it would mean sitting with something uncomfortable.

LR: Or maybe it was the Kardashian influence. I happen to love the Kardashians. I don’t care what anyone says.

KK: What do you love about them?

LR: They’re just fascinating. I would say that, individually, I do not “like” any of them. There’s so much fighting. They also seem to be sort of attracted to each other. The girls, they’re always climbing on each other and feeling each other up. I can’t stay away from the show.

KK: Which is your favorite?

LR: Believe it or not, it’s Kim. She’s the smartest of them by far. I can’t stand Khloé. The worst person, of course, is that guy—the Jewish guy.

KK: Scott?

LR: He’s a horrible person. He is disgusting. Also, I don’t like the mother very much.

KK: See, that’s where we differ. I happen to love Kris.

LR: I don’t hate her, but I feel sorry for her. She’s not treated well by anybody. She’s sort of living in a prison that she built herself. What do you think about Caitlyn?

KK: Caitlyn Jenner is in a bomb shelter in Tel Aviv right now.

LR: Are you serious?

KK: Completely. She was going to appear at Tel Aviv pride, even though she’s sort of a notorious homophobe—

LR: Well that’s really pathetic. How do you know this? I haven’t heard any of this! Where did you get this? This is really news to me.

KK: She posted a selfie. She’s in an underground bunker, hiding from Iranian missiles, fearfully chugging Cabernet.

LR: That is hysterical. You’ll have to send it to me.

KK: I will.

LR: While you’re at it, look up who Walter Matthau was, too.