The Book That Changed Your Life
5/31/20261 hr 1 min
We want to believe our lives can be changed by the ideas contained in a book.
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Prologue: When Alexa was seven, she started going through her grandfather's books. Her grandfather was a playwright and teacher, and through the books—and especially through his notes in the margins—she entered the world of 1930's American theater. And she found a book that changed her life: writer Moss Hart's autobiography Act One. (5 minutes)Act One: More of Alexa Junge and how Moss Hart's autobiography changed her life. She...
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:01
Support for This American Life comes from Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which, uh, means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home. Redfin agents close twice as many deals as other agents. So when you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started at redfin.com. Own the dream. When she was seven, when she would visit her grandmother, Alexa would look through the books that her grandfather had owned back when he was alive. What she liked especially was finding the books where he'd made little notes in the margins.
Alexa Junge· Guest0:41
So that was the part that was really, you know, compelling.
Speaker 00:44
Because they were hints about who he was.
Alexa Junge· Guest0:46
Exactly. And they were, a lot of times they were really critical. They, he would just like, he would write, "I, I, uh, I steadfastly disagree," or [laughs] something like that, or- Wow ... um, or he would, he would write, "Ah," if he really liked something.
Speaker 01:02
As a kid, over the course of about a year, she systematically divided the books into two piles, the ones with markings and the ones without. And then she tried to read all the ones with markings. Her grandfather was a playwright and a teacher, and the books were creaky old books from the 1930s about theater and about how to write plays. It was thrilling. And when she was 11, she wrote her very first play using the rules in the books, rules from another generation.