Original subtitles

I first met Jacob Appel, it was the early 2000s,

and he came to Gotham Writers Workshop

because he was interested in teaching fiction.

And so I was the person interviewing teachers

at the time, so I interviewed him.

Then I saw something on his resume

that made me do a double take.

I noticed that he was in Harvard Law School at the time.

He wasn't about to finish it.

He was right in the middle of Harvard Law School.

And this confused me, and so I said,

OK, you're in Harvard Law School right now.

He said that's right.

And I said, but you want to teach a fiction writing

class in New York City at the same time?

He said, yeah, that's right.

And I said, so you'll commute back and forth?

It's a fairly long commute.

He goes, that's no problem.

OK.

And then I said, but correct me if I'm wrong.

Isn't Harvard Law School hard?

Isn't there a lot of studying that needs to be done?

And he said, no, it's really not that hard.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I thought he was a professor at Brown.

That's not a bad thing to be.

It really wasn't until a bit later I found out,

Jacob Appel is a lot of things at a lot of places.

I didn't know that.

Probably the most prolific fiction writer I know,

and I know a lot of fiction writers.

I had been teaching playwriting at Hunter College,

and Jacob shows up outside the door

as I'm admitting the class, and he says,

I want to take your class.

And I say, are you a Hunter student?

And he says, no, I'm not.

I'm in medical school and I'm preparing to be a doctor,

but I want to take your class because more than anything

in the world, I want to be a playwright.

I think he gets it that he's smarter than most people

and has more degrees than most people,

but he's not a jerk about it, you know?

Jacob and I have stayed in touch since high school.

And each time I talk to him, it's

like he had a different degree or had done something else.

Wait, you're a lawyer now also?

Oh wait, now you're a doctor?

Oh cool, so now you got a PhD?

I mean, I can't keep up with it, but it's really good for me.

He's very resourceful.

He's giving me psychiatric advice.

He's giving me legal advice.

So I mean, he's a good friend to have.

How he balances all these things, why

he would want to balance all these things, I have no idea,

but I think that's Jacob Appel.

Oh, this is my clapper.

You know in the films, they have the little clap?

Oh yeah.

So I'm going to announce the take--

You're fine.

--and I'm going to slap it.

And it will be near your faces .

Good.

Great.

OK.

Yeah.

Great.

OK.

Doctors Appel, early childhood.

I want to ask you, what did you think when you first

heard that I was making a documentary about your son?

I thought, why are you doing it?

That's exactly what I thought.

Who would want to see this?

You know, maybe you could promote it among my family,

but I doubt that.

You don't have to answer that.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I do like being in school.

School is interesting.

If you think work is more fun than school,

you have to go back to school again to learn otherwise.

So I graduated from Brown, which I

have to tell people is a four-year college,

with a BA in English and History and also

with an MA in European History.

And then I got an MA in American History in '98

and an MPhil in 2000 in American History

from Columbia University.

I have an MFA in Fiction Creative Writing from NYU.

I have a medical degree from Columbia's College

of Physicians and Surgeons.

I have a law degree from the Harvard Law School.

I have a degree in playwriting from Queens College, CUNY.

I have a degree in Bioethics and MS

from the Alden March Bioethics Institute,

which is part of Albany Medical School and Union College.

It's Union University now.

And I have an MPH from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

All in all, do you know how many degrees that is?

I think it is nine plus the BA.

Well, my grandmother would have been very proud of that.

My grandfather would have pointed out

there were still five Ivy League schools left.

Do you know of anyone who has more degrees?

Yes, there is a gentleman in Virginia.

I don't know these people personally.

It's not like we have a little club of people

with many degrees and we hang out at weekends

and brag to each other, but a gentleman in Virginia

who has more than a dozen, maybe 13, 14.

And then a gentleman in Michigan,

who is married to an administrator at a community

college or a small college, who has more than 20 degrees

because he could take courses for free

and he's been doing it his entire life.

I suppose my next step is to marry a college administrator.

And one can never tell what will happen.

I mean, the fact that he's a doctor and a psychiatrist

now, who would ever have thought of that?

I mean, that would have been--

He might become a rabbi next year.

We don't know.

All I can say is--

Oh, please, I don't know.

--he could become whatever he wants,

but I'm not paying for it.

I met Jacob first year, first semester at Harvard Law School

back in 1996.

He always just seemed to have a lot of projects going on.

Yeah, I always did wonder where he sort of got the time

to do all the things that he did,

and not to mention the mental capacity

which is, I think, in a different universe

from most of us.

I figured that the guy just didn't sleep,

which I later found out to be pretty much true.

We all like to toot our own horn a bit.

If we have accomplishments, we like

to make them known in a subtle way or an obvious way.

Jacob Appel is perhaps the most accomplished person I know

and perhaps the most modest person you will meet.

When you're in conversation with him,

he won't slip these things in.

You have to find them out on your own.

But you're going to have a good conversation because he

is a fascinating person.

He's collected all these degrees, which I don't even

know all of them, but underneath all those things,

he's not just stacking them up.

He's kind of crossing them over and creating

this interdisciplinary way of life for himself.

As an adult, it seems like he's trying

to synthesize this massive worldview that encompasses

everything that he's learned, and it's

complicated and hard and messy.

And in a way, being a creative writer

and being such a prolific writer,

it allows him to take all of these issues

and sort of dump them out into his stories.

This looks promising.

Is it fan mail?

Yeah.

This is a journal.

Since they sent me two copies, I imagined I published it.

Oh, how do you like that?

I actually published a poem.

And you just found out by getting the book in the mail?

They didn't email you or send you a letter?

Oh no, I'm sure I had a contract and an agreement

and all of that.

I just don't remember it anymore.

That's great.

What is the poem?

How do you like that?

I have three poems.

That's very exciting.

What is the name of the journal?

The name of the journal is the Delmarva Review.

OK.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Give me some numbers of rejection letters and numbers

of submissions.

My estimate is I've gotten about 21,000 rejection letters

from literary publications.

That does not include people I wanted to date and employer.

One of my favorites is this rejection letter

from a magazine called City Primeval that

says do not submit any more of your work to City Primeval.

The editor clearly did not like the story

that went on to be published in another journal rather

successfully.

So 21,000 rejection letters.

And how many acceptance?

Well, I've published-- and this is a very rough figure.

I published roughly 215 stories.

I've had a dozen plays produced, maybe a couple of times each.

I have 11 books published now and I

guess four more under contract.

So that gives you some sense of the ratio.

It's hard to remember a time before I

was interested in writing.

So when I was a little kid, I was interested in writing.

I wrote a novel in fifth grade.

We had watched the musical 1776 as part of Ed Grossman's class,

so I wrote a novel, 1777.

I picked up where the musical ended.

But it was only about 80 pages long and probably

not very good, though somebody may discover it

someday and discover this with my masterpiece

and it's been all downhill from there.

Jacob has published in every prestigious literary journal

there is, just about, and in many of them, more than once.

He's won all sorts of prizes and fellowships.

So to most of us who are writers,

he's very accomplished.

Hello.

I'm Alicia, and today, I have another review for you.

Today, we're talking about The Topless Widow of Herkimer

Street by Jacob M. Appel.

I'm pretty sure it's not apple.

It's spelled appel, I think.

Now, this book is actually a collection of short stories,

and I didn't really think they were going to be good.

I didn't really have high expectations for this,

but every now and then, you get a gem.

And this is definitely a gem.

And the way that they all ended made you just sit and go

Buh buh buh!

Jacob, he looks under rocks and finds characters

that most of us either don't know,

or if we meet them on a daily basis, we walk right by them.

He writes more about those quirky kind of characters--

the locksmith from Turkey who's living in Queens

and who's trying to protect his locksmith shop

from eminent domain to build a hockey

rink for a semi-professional hockey league.

So I have a story about an alien who

is sent by his planet to study the ways of life on Earth.

So he describes himself as a Latvian restaurateur

in a small town in Alabama.

And then an abortion clinic opens up next door,

and suddenly, he gets this very skewed view on American life.

My goal is to use unusual things to shed an unusual light

on the way we live.

Jacob wrote a play about three young women

who inherited a house from their parents when they died.

And so one woman, to make it clear that she owned her third,

she walled off her own little third of the house

and wouldn't let anybody into it and built

these platforms and these ladders

where only she would have access.

And we were all totally charmed by the originality of his idea.

Nobody else had anything sort of to compete

with what he had on his mind.

And I said, Jacob, this could be put on.

And it was put on a number of years later.

So my initial reading of Jacob's story

was that these are stories that are quirky for quirky sake.

And I had trouble sort of reading them

at the level of sophistication they really had.

I had to learn how to read a Jacob Appel story.

And he said to me a long time ago,

when we had these kinds of discussions,

he would say, look, sometimes it's not about how deep you go

but how far out you wade from the shore.

When is an idea you have--

how do you distinguish whether it's a short story, a novel,

or a play?

I read it, and if there are characters

talking without scenes then I know it's a play.

And if it's longer than a certain length,

I assume it's a novel.

I mean as you formulate an idea.

You know what I meant.

I know exactly what you meant, but it's a hard question

so I tried to deflect it.

I'd like to say there's an easy answer to that,

but again, that's usually a materialist explanation.

It's not that I sit here with all these sorts of ideas

floating through my head and decide,

I'm going to write that one, and then realize it's a novel.

It's I decide, I'm going to write a novel,

and then I have all these ideas floating through my head

about characters that might work in a novel or scenes

that might work in a novel and I harvest all of them.

In Jacob's best work--

and there's a lot of great work by Jacob--

in that best work, what you see poking

through the surface of that quirkiness,

of those strange premises and outlandish characters,

you find that he's talking about unrequited love.

That happens a lot in his stories.

A character who wants to love another character

or who wants that character to love him back.

A character who has a longing for another character and they

can't quite connect.

A character who struggles to express a kind of love

or affection they have for another character.

And the bizarre circumstances maybe get in the way.

And then Rosalie.

I love all of these dedications to Rosalie.

He talks about her so fondly, and I

think, oh, I guess for his entire life,

he will dedicate all of his books to Rosalie.

And I think, how wonderful.

I've been married to the same man for 56 years.

I've dedicated a few things to him but also to my children.

But Jacob and Rosalie.

Constancy!

Rosalie Purvis, take one.

Sorry.

I remember meeting him at this party and we wound up talking.

And you know, he was just so funny

and we were getting along really well.

And we had this sort of intellectual connection

and spark.

It just seemed so organic.

Like, all of a sudden, we were expressing

that we loved each other and that we were--

or cared for-- you know, had feelings for each other.

And so then we had like a young teenage version

of a relationship.

But then very quickly, I had to go back to Amsterdam.

How do we understand who we are?

We understand ourselves in a lot of different ways.

One of the ways we do is by the people that are close to us.

That how we interact with them and how they interact with us.

They give us a window into who we are.

Rosie is that person for Jacob.

It's so obvious to me.

Like, obviously, my relationship with Rosie

is closer than my relationship with other people

for various complex reasons.

The truth is, Rosie and I have a very healthy

non-romantic co-dependent relationship.

Ah.

How is it co-dependent?

It is co-dependent in that many things in my life

don't become real until I discuss them with her.

And I imagine the same is similar in many ways to me,

and she is someone who, when I need wisdom on something,

I turn to.

And she knows me so well that she's not going to surprise me.

I often even know what she's going to say.

But it's good to have someone reflect that back to you.

I feel like we are each other's best friends.

Even though the kind of romantic part of the relationship ended,

revolved, we became really close friends after that.

And in some ways, had a deeper relationship

than we'd had even before.

But in some ways, I feel like we don't

have a romantic relationship.

We didn't get married.

But we did wind up together.

We just wound up together in a different way.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

The company I run, One Day University,

is based on the idea that people would like to go back

to college but just for a day.

No homework, no exams, no studying.

Just listening to college professors

who were renowned on their campuses

to be really fascinating teachers.

Please welcome Professor Jacob Appel.

So I heard through the grapevine--

Can you all hear me?

--that Jacob Appel was one of the most popular professors

at Brown University.

So we contacted him to see if he might want to teach a class.

It turns out, he's also a well-known writer.

He's also a doctor.

He's also a lawyer.

On and on and on.

Bioethics is the study of morality

and ethical issues at the nexus of law and medicine or law

and health care.

I don't remember when he first mentioned, perhaps,

going to medical school.

You know, I went to medical school

and I knew I was the math science nerd

and he was the literary genius, and that's

how I thought we existed.

And I thought, well, I don't really see him in my realm.

But I could tell that, for this particular pursuit,

that he thought that he really needed a medical degree.

What do I mean by medical exceptionalism?

I want you to compare this with barbery.

Let us say I walk down the street one day.

The barber looks out his window and he sees my haircut.

And he says, nobody should walk around

with a haircut like that.

And he charges out with his shears and he starts snipping.

My mother, by the way, this is her dream in life.

We don't let barbers do that, ever.

You cannot be a beneficent barber.

There are laws against that.

In contrast, sometimes, you can be a beneficent physician.

Bioethicists do two very distinct things.

On the one hand, they serve a role

in the health care system in a hospital,

doing consults, offering recommendations.

I've been involved in that sort of work in the past.

And the other thing they do, which

is much more of what I do now, is offering commentary

on social issues out in the world.

Writing articles, being interviewed, publishing op eds.

I think there's a difference between saying

I would do something personally and thinking

one should be able to do it.

I have no particular qualms with designer babies.

Parents to be able to choose whether they

want to have male children or female children.

I am fairly radical in my views in the sense

that I would permit abortion up to the point of birth.

I always favor the right to physician-assisted suicide.

Under limited circumstances, I favor euthanasia.

I think there should be a financial mechanism

for allowing people to sell their organs.

While I think bestiality, per se, should be legal,

I think there may be forms of bestiality that

transcend into animal cruelty.

And there, the government might want to step in.

Well, I think on a whole, I am fairly

libertarian-minded in my bioethical thinking.

I think the goal should be to let

people do what they want to do unless there

is a compelling reason not to.

At its best, science is all about humanism.

Jacob is a scientist, but one could also

say he's a scientist of the human soul.

And that's where his artistry comes in.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

You cannot board non-psychiatric patients on psychiatric units.

You've got to have a psychiatric diagnosis.

And the other thing I do is I'm the director of ethics,

education, and psychiatry.

I teach the ethics curriculum in a residency program.

And there, my role is a very different one.

It's not to advocate for particular positions,

but instead, it's to make sure people

think logically and clearly about various complex issues.

Pediatrics.

In pediatrics, what standard do we use?

Parents would have wanted?

No.

Oh, no.

Definitely not.

Standard of care?

What's in the child's best interest?

The best interests for the child.

The goal is to make the students aware of ethical issues

and develop some interesting ethics, because you're not

going to teach them all of psychiatry

or all of psychoethics in the course of an hour.

Then I wanted to plant a couple of ideas in their head

about the kinds of situations in the hospital that raise

legal issues or ethical issues.

Because they're not going to know the answer,

but they may know enough to step back and call someone

when they come up.

Jacob will teach students who tend to be more

on the progressive spectrum.

And Jacob will not allow those students to be

complacent in their ideas.

He won't let his students be self-satisfied.

Just as it seems that students are

coming to a certain consensus, he

will always find a way to puncture that consensus.

So I really feel that in some ways,

that's a centerpiece of who Jacob is.

He will write op ed pieces on the question of medical ethics,

on euthanasia, things like that, and he

will get a lot of negative feedback

from people around the country because he

is testing boundaries.

This individual, bioethicist Jacob M. Appel,

calling for putting lithium in the water

to make you behave yourself.

And they're talking about it like it's

good they're getting the public ready for lithium

in the water, which is an antipsychotic.

I can't even continue.

And the guys have found a video of this bioethicist.

In areas where lithium in trace amounts

is in the drinking water, there seems

to be a lower level of suicidality,

and in the Texas counties that were studied,

there's actually a lower crime rate.

I just can't believe it.

They are drugging your water.

Lithium is a toxic heavy metal that's also deadly and has

serious health side effects.

It's a hardcore chemical lobotomizer.

[SIGH]

Would you say he was a smart baby?

That's tough and I hope I don't get in trouble for this,

but he went to preschool in Branford, Connecticut

where everybody in Branford has an average IQ of 12.

No.

No.

And the kids were having trouble--

That's wrong.

--putting together one-piece puzzles.

President Trump, you're going to get into trouble

if you say things about Branford like that.

OK.

You need somebody to restrain you.

Branford is a place where people live.

And that was such a long time ago.

Who knows who lives in Branford now?

Anyway, yes.

OK, so let's say he was smarter than the other kids

in his preschool.

Yes.

OK.

That's clearly true.

I have known Jacob since kindergarten.

We both went to the same elementary school.

And he was always different.

And I think he probably got less credit for it

when he was in elementary school and more credit for it

as he's grown up.

He was always smart.

Everybody always knew he was really, really smart.

And he wasn't smart necessarily like math smart or multiply

all these numbers together in your head or something,

and now that I'm an adult, I see it in other kids.

He was just, like, odd smart.

But you don't really gain a lot of points

for being kind of a weird kid when you're seven or eight

or being really super smart.

His first sentence was "There's a plate

of creatinine in the backyard."

Yes, that's true.

That's a substance in nephrology and kidney disease

and that was his first full sentence.

I sometimes think his parents did a phenomenal job,

because I think it would be hard to have a kid as smart as Jacob

and yet out of the norm in a time of kids life

where it's very important to be the norm.

Jacob wasn't the norm, and yet, he navigated in his own way

and in a successful way through all those times.

He was pretty young at this time,

but he would come home and say, I corrected the teacher

on so-and-so.

And I can think of examples, like--

now, this doesn't say great things

for some of his teachers, but one of his teachers

thought there was, I don't know, 365--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

--degrees in a circle.

And he said he corrected it.

And I don't know if he may have been in third grade.

He said, no, there's 360 degrees.

Like, she said an alligator was an amphibian.

He said, no, no.

They're reptiles.

I think a lot of the teachers learn that most of the things,

he was usually pretty right on.

Because again, he had read a lot at that point.

There were five elementary schools in our hometown,

and we went to this one called Heathcote.

And I think when we got to middle school

and we started mixing with the other kids

in the other schools, it wasn't like there

was a Jacob at each of the other middle schools

or each of the other elementary schools.

He was the only Jacob in the whole town.

And he's the only Jacob that I know in the world.

So it's not like, oh, he's a quirky kid.

Like, he redefines quirky.

When we got into high school, Jacob's, I think,

intelligence and width really definitely stood out.

Again, because I think when you're in high school,

you do get points for being really smart.

It was almost like a trick.

Like, Jacob, say the names of all the presidents.

And he would, in like 11 seconds or something,

he'd go Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe,

Adams-- and then, like, he would just rip through it.

I can probably do it still.

Let's try.

Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Adams, Van

Buren, Jackson, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce,

Buchanan, Lincoln, Johnson, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur,

Cleveland, Harrison, Cleveland, McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft,

Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman,

Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan,

Bush, Clinton, Obama, and Trump.

So where are we now?

We are opposite Grant's tomb.

We're walking up Riverside Drive.

So to our right is the Sekura Park,

which was donated by the Japanese government

in the early 20th century.

I believe 1912.

Tour guiding.

I do it-- I did a lot more of it a long time ago.

I do it for special events.

I usually custom-design the tours when people want them.

A lot of people want a literary tour.

In the old days, getting your touring license

was actually fairly challenging.

It was a very hard test.

There was this giant map of New York that filled half a room.

And the administrator, who was this elderly woman

with this battle ax who clearly had been doing this for a very

long time, would point out different spots on the map

and ask you what was located there

and you needed to tell her.

You really had to know New York City very well in order

to pass this exam.

And how did you learn what you needed to know?

Well, one of the challenges is there was really no guidance

on what you needed to know.

You just needed to know everything.

So I read the blue guide to New York City from cover to cover

and learned as much of it as I could, and I still

barely passed.

We are now jaywalking, which makes us true New Yorkers.

They redid Grant's tombs, accouterments.

If you're interested in seeing coffins, it has two of them.

So if anybody ever asks you who's buried in Grant's tomb,

the answer is--

Let's see.

I mean, obviously, Grant.

That's good.

And Mrs. Grant?

And Mrs. Grant.

Very good.

Grant and Mrs. Grant are both buried in Grant's tomb.

But not Julia Grant's pet cow.

That is an urban myth.

Although Julia Grant did have a pet cow,

but he's not buried in the tomb, to our knowledge.

And Grant was the what president?

Grant was the 18th president.

All right.

Do you know the dates or approximate dates of his--?

So I can figure it out pretty quickly.

So Lincoln was assassinated in 1865,

and then Johnson took over and served till '68,

so Grant would have served from 1868 to 1876.

But I believe one of the reasons the presidents get

pensions is because Grant died in poverty,

and Congress was determined that no other president would

die in such a way because it looked

really bad to have the president begging for money.

So I taught Jacob in AP European History.

And Jacob being who he is immediately

became a person in the class who everyone

expected great thoughts from.

He would often listen and then the pearl would come out.

Some observation about whoever it was or whatever activity

that we were doing, Jacob would come through

and he would be able to say something that we'd all go,

oh yeah, that's really good.

I wish I came up with that.

The debating.

The debating team.

Where he was very good in debating.

I mean, came in--

it was one-on-one debate.

I think he was very good because--

Because he won New York State?

Yeah, well that.

He eventually was number one in New York State.

The number one debater.

I mean, I remember that because he came home so late that I

was getting really angry and angrier,

but apparently, if you keep winning,

you keep staying longer and longer

and going against as it narrows down.

And he was the last one standing.

But it's hard to have a dinner conversation with somebody

who's number one in debating in New York State one-on-one.

Let me put it this way.

At the top of my resume, I do not

have listed 1988 New York State Debate Champion.

Had you not mentioned this, I might never

have thought about it again in my adult life.

And one of the things that I loved about Jacob

was that he totally beat to his own drum

but really didn't care.

I mean, sort of in an age where I

think people are really self-conscious and trying

to fit in, Jacob really stood out as his own person

and I think was super confident about that.

Like, I don't know if you've ever seen Jacob dance before.

Jacob is a phenomenal dancer.

He has his own style of dance.

I mean rocking out dancing.

Dancing with all his heart and soul.

And I think a lot of people would be super self-conscious,

but he was just having the time of his life.

And that was Jacob.

He really just was really always comfortable in his own skin,

and I loved that about him.

Still love that about him.

I'm actually glad that we grew up

when we did because I think if Jacob grew up now,

they would have medicated him.

They would have tried to evaluate him

where on the autism spectrum or something he might be.

And I honestly don't think he is because he can be

quite social if he wants to be.

And somebody would have tried to mess

with what was going on there in some way,

and so I'm glad that nobody did because I don't think we need

a toned down version of Jacob.

I like the full-fledged one that we have.

He has a strange mix of being super confident but extremely

humble at the same time.

He must know what a genius he is, but I don't think he

sort of looks at himself or sees himself that way,

which is incredible because he totally is a genius.

No matter what the topic, Jacob knows stuff about it

and has insights about it.

And I just love the fact that he is somebody

who, while having all of this knowledge and being so smart,

never makes anyone else feel like they're beneath him.

He always treats people in a very equal way.

And it makes Jacob somebody who I could easily say, God,

I love this guy.

Well, knowledge and smart two very different things because--

I wouldn't say anybody-- most people,

you can cram a lot of knowledge into them

and then it can evaporate fairly quickly.

And if we choose the right topic, I can know an awful lot.

If we choose quantum physics, I can know very, very little

very, very quickly.

I'm not very talented at music.

I probably could not put together your carburetor.

So it's a very arbitrary mix, and I'm

good at some of those things.

Most of the things I do are not things that

require a great deal of genius.

They are things that require a fair amount of hard work

and a lot of blind perseverance.

How did this place help shape you?

I think I've met some very special people who

influenced me.

I had some teachers who really took me under their wing

and cared for me more than they should have.

There were lots of rules that I've learned to transgress,

and I think I got my rule transgressing education here

and then my rule following experience later

on in medicine.

So it's a nice balance.

Would you ever consider moving to a Scarsdale

or a Scarsdale-type community?

I would never move to Scarsdale.

You don't want to be prisoner to who you were

when you were 15 years old.

And more importantly, you don't want your kids

to be a prisoner to who you were when you were 15 years old.

Expand on that.

What do you mean?

Why?

Who's a prisoner of anything?

So, if my kids went to Scarsdale high school, all it would take

is one older teacher who remembers me

to reconceptualize them as me.

And whether I was a great student or a bad student,

I would be me, and I would want them to be them.

So I don't really understand the people

who move back to their hometowns in this context.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

How long have you lived here?

Roughly 20 years.

Is there any way that these books are arranged?

I know sort of where different things are.

It's like, I'm renting an apartment, not a library.

OK.

The pennies and the change over here.

I'm just too lazy to take them to the bank.

Eventually, I will take them to the bank,

or the ceiling in the apartment below me will fall through.

Most of the perceptions about psychiatrists

are accurate and unfortunate.

It's that stereotype where you start

talking to your psychiatrist while you're lying on the couch

and he leaves the room.

And when an hour comes back, he shows up again

and takes your check.

So on the one hand, psychiatrists

are viewed as unwilling to share their personal experience

and passive.

I think there are many psychiatrists

out there like that.

I try not to be like that.

You don't want to share too much to undermine

the therapeutic relationship, but you also

don't want to not be a human being relating to people.

I think another concern about psychiatrists is many of them

go into the field because they want

to solve their own psychological problems

or deal with their own trauma.

Whether or not I have my own psychological problems,

I'm confident it's not why I went into psychiatry.

I think Jacob's a wonderful doctor.

In a psychiatric emergency room, which is his full-time job now,

your decision is essentially, do you

admit somebody or discharge them to the hospital?

Any time you discharge someone, presumably, you're

taking a risk that something bad might happen.

And even a lot of the times when you

admit somebody, if you're admitting them involuntarily,

you're temporarily taking away their civil liberties.

So it's a kind of high-intensity job.

And he has a comfort, I think, in his own decisions.

I like the ER because on the one hand, it's very discreet.

It's shift work.

So you work, you help people, and then you leave.

And on the other hand, most of the people we see

are very different from me.

So they're unlikely to influence my writing.

They're unlikely to create the kind of emotional baggage

that I'm going to take home with me.

Jacob is a terrific fiction writing teacher.

I've watched him teach a few times.

He's really interesting too.

He makes interesting points that I

don't see other teachers make.

I remember, one time, I was watching him teach

and he was talking about first lines.

And he read a few first lines, and he explained,

the first line of a story tells the whole story

if it's done well.

It's all concentrated in that first line.

And he went through some examples.

And it was fascinating.

I had never heard that before.

Realistically, you submit to workplaces, and whether

or not they read the second line depends on what

they think of the first line.

So when I teach my classes, I emphasize that to the students.

Not just first lines but opening pages, opening paragraphs.

It's not like your third grade teacher necessarily

said you have to have a hook, but there

has to be some reason for somebody to keep on reading.

And if nothing interesting happens at the beginning,

most people assume nothing interesting

is going to happen in the middle or the end either.

At the same time, you don't want to start your tension

all the way up here at some uneclipsable moment.

Basically, if your story begins, I died on Thursday,

Friday is going to be really hard to write.

So it's a balance.

I thought what might be interesting

for the viewer is for me to read the opening line from some

of his short stories, these being

some of his short stories.

"Scouting for the Reaper.

Nothing sells tombstones like a Girl Scout in uniform."

"Exposure.

Wednesdays and Saturdays are my day off at the pharmacy,

but Saturdays my wife is off too,

so I do my flashing on Wednesday afternoons."

"Rods and Cones.

Another family crisis-- the rabbit goes blind."

"Coulrophobia."

This is wonderful.

This is a wonderful story.

"My father fancied himself a shrewd landlord--

he refused to rent to lawyers, the children of lawyers, even

a college girl who had law school written all over her,

but he bit off too much when he sublet to the mime."

He's really able to put into his creative writing

a lot of these thoughts and areas of knowledge

that he has from the other elements of his life.

So it's almost like that's why he's studied

all these things so much.

He's able to put them into his creative writing.

I think Jacob writes about the sublime human comedy,

but also, I think he's a superb craftsman

and that his writing is very beautiful.

And from time to time, I embarrass him

and I say, oh Jacob, you write like a real writer.

I mean, your sentences and your paragraphs

are so beautifully wrought.

And he sort of looks embarrassed,

and you know, and I know he is a writer,

but there's that part of me that is dazzled by his craft

because he handles language so well.

I think there are certainly people out there

who really enjoy my books.

There may be more that don't, but they don't write me notes.

But no, I think there's a small but devoted following of people

who really, for one reason or another, like my stories.

And I like doing events.

I do book clubs, I do book festivals, I do new stores.

I think I went on about 30 trips this fall.

So I'm really thrilled to introduce Jacob Appel.

So I have written 215 stories, 15 books.

Everywhere I go, I am known for one very short piece

of writing.

We've been living together for eight months

when we adopted the hedgehog.

I want-- I write perfectly competent short stories

that people enjoy reading.

[APPLAUSE]

Thank you.

Should I make it after someone?

Karen.

K-A-R-E-N?

K-A-R-E-N.

But I can't imagine any author out there

who wouldn't say they would like a larger readership.

Free copy?

Fantastic.

Of course.

Great.

Great.

You can't go wrong.

Thank you.

And when I listen to the things you're talking about,

it inspires things in my mind.

That means a lot.

Yeah.

Yeah.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Have you been in therapy yourself?

No.

You never have?

No.

Why not?

It's like, there are some people who

are really interested in psychoanalysis

and learning more about themselves.

I have no interest in psychoanalysis.

I have no idea why anybody would want

to know more about themselves, unless you're

pathologically ill, which I'm trusting I'm not.

For some people, knowing more about themselves

can be beneficial.

For other people, it simply is narcissistic indulgence.

If you keep peeling an onion, eventually, you

don't end up with anything left.

What makes Jacob M. Appel tick?

I think it's what makes--

I wouldn't say everybody tick, but most reflective people

and certainly most reflective educated creative people tick,

is deep sense of insecurity.

The need to fill the holes in one's

childhood even if one doesn't know exactly what they are.

I think we are all driven by a great sense of inadequacy.

I don't think my parents think that I'm a failure in life,

but I doubt they think that I'm as successful as I could be.

I mean, if you ask me what my younger son

[Jacob's brother] does, I say, he does law.

He's a lawyer and attorney and--

And that's what he is.

But if you ask me what Jacob does,

I have to pause and say, well, who am I speaking to?

Is this somebody that I can easily say he's a psychiatrist,

or do I say he's an ethicist--

Or a writer.

--or do I say he's a writer?

For many people, they don't know him as a psychiatrist,

they know him as a writer.

So I mean, all three of those come into play here.

We don't say he's a lawyer.

We don't.

Oh, we do not say he's a lawyer.

So you had a date the other night and--

And I-- I didn't tell a joke, I just made a remark

that I thought was rather amusing

and my date didn't think it was rather amusing.

Do you remember the remark?

Yeah.

So my date was talking about how she's

at an age where she's worried that she may have passed

through that window of an opportunity to find a partner

and have kids and all.

And to reassure her, I told her that there's

a woman in India who just had children--

this is true-- had children at the age of, I believe, 72.

I said that with modern technology,

anything is possible.

And then I added.

I said, this woman had the child at 72

but she wanted to wait till 80.

But you know, she got knocked up.

And I thought I was amusing.

My date did not.

This may be the one thing that Jacob Appel is not good at--

women.

He has no talent there whatsoever.

It's not that he's so wrapped up in all of his life of the mind

that he's not interested in having relationships,

but he has no aptitude for it.

None whatsoever.

I'm sorry to say.

Well, there are two ways of viewing it.

One way of viewing it is unsuccessful

because I'm single.

The other way of viewing it is successful because I'm single.

He's so busy and he keeps himself so busy

that maybe he just doesn't need it.

He just doesn't need someone to sit down and talk

with at the end of the day or whatever.

I normally wouldn't get this, but we'll

make this an exception.

You could get the fruit.

I could, but in the movie, I want

to be remembered for my indulgences.

You got what you want?

There you go.

No problem.

No problem.

Jake is very self-sufficient and independent

and that doesn't mean that I don't

think that if he meets the right person,

he wouldn't maybe also have a relationship with that person.

He's not the kind of person who are

like they need to live with someone in order to be happy.

OK, we're all looking for love.

I mean, maybe there are a few people who are not,

but I think most people either are looking for love

or have found it.

And I guess there are people out there who have found

it who were still looking.

I don't want to be the only person alone

in the corner in the old age home

when everybody else is playing cards in couples.

That would be very disturbing.

Now, the problem that is Jacob's hours and his craziness

is unique to him.

It might be difficult to sort of arrange

for a person to be fully in that kind of world that he lives in.

You know, he writes all the time,

and he goes out to places where there's

going to be productions of his plays,

and he comes up to visit his grandmother

and he has lunches with former teachers.

Part of his uniqueness is that he is so focused in areas

that he wants to be in.

And there's an isolation in that.

Are you happy?

I mean, happy is a strange word because it sort of suggests

a uniformity of sentiment.

I am probably happy more than I'm unhappy,

which I guess is a good sign.

I mean, anybody who's happy all the time is an idiot,

and anybody who's happy none of the time

really needs to be treated.

So I'm somewhere in the middle.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Part of me doesn't believe that Jacob exists.

And in fact, when I ran into Rosalie, his dear,

dear friend who he dedicates all of his books to, when I ran

into her in a restaurant-- because I'd met her a few

times--

and she was dining by herself.

And I said, Rosalie, come on.

Fess up.

Jacob isn't real, is he?

And she sort of said, no, he isn't real.

And I said, I knew it.

I knew it.

That it's all this incredible sort of Houdini act.

Now you see him, now you don't.

And I bet you anything, when you try

to look at the footage of this video you're making,

nothing will be there.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Now that you've been interviewed,

do you have a different take on why I might be

making this film about Jacob?

Well, I'm absolutely convinced you're not

going to make money on it.