Patrick Radden Keefe, Author of London Falling

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0:41Powered by DoorDash. Just$35 a month with auto pay and a voice line. Plus taxes and fees. Same-day delivery for most internet-eligible customers. See if it's an option during checkout. Ruthie's Table 4. Presented by Sky. It's interesting, the idea of these kind of parallels between writing and cooking. I often use a kind of a culinary metaphor. So as I'm out meeting with people, interviewing them, reading through archives, trying to get hold of documents, I'm always thinking, what's the story that I'm telling here? But when I sit down to actually write, it's usually close to the end. And I have this roadmap in front of me where I've actually arranged everything.

1:22I've plugged in all of these in raw form, all the little bits. And everything's roughly where I want it to be. But I say it's like my mise en place. When I'm writing, I want the book to come together, the piece to come together for The New Yorker with a kind of velocity. I want the sort of creative act itself to just flow through me as quickly as possible.

1:47David Fine introducing me to Patrick Bradenkeith said, Ruthie, it's clear that you and Patrick have a lot in common. You're going to be good friends. And I think he was right. Growing up, we both remember ending every family meal with planning the next one. In our teens, we devoured the noir books by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain. We both cooked and ate our way through college, and we both have rejection letters from the New Yorker. Patrick became a journalist and an author, and I became a chef. But I still think we share the way we approach our work. In fact, writing a book might be like cooking a meal.

2:29I create a menu choosing the ingredients I'm drawn to. In the same way, I think he creates a book by choosing the people he's drawn to, most recently in his just published London Falling, A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City, and A Family's Search for Truth. Today, we're here together to talk about all of this. Food and family, food and writing, food and stories. a writer and a chef, much in common. And as David said, we are going to be good friends. Thank you for coming. It's so great to be with you. Yeah, so here we are. And how is it going in London? A little over stimulating and the book's about London.

3:11And even though I have lived in this city and I love it and I know it well, I'm not from here. I'm an interloper. And so... I've been 50 years and I'm an introvert. And you're an introvert too. Yeah, exactly. I suppose you always are. But so there was a question for me about how it would go down here. And then it's also a story about a family that's still alive and here and, you know, enmeshed in a community. And so there's a question of how's it feeling for them? You know, how are they doing? And I mean, the good news is they're doing well. We're all okay. Well, let's get specific on London falling.

3:47You know, it's this story of a family, really, Rochelle and Matthew. and they had two sons. Joe was the older boy and then Zach. And Zach was born in 2000. He was born with a shock of red hair and they didn't know where that came from. And I did, you know, the book in some ways sort of starts with that because it has a resonance, right? This idea that your own children can surprise you. I mean, the whole book in a way is about how strange it is to be a parent. And sometimes as you watch your child become an adolescent, they start to become someone you may not recognize and I think in some ways this can be thrilling.

4:26You know, there are moments where Justina and I have adolescent boys and there are moments where some trait will manifest and we'll kind of look at each other and it's like, did that come from you? Did that come from me? No, and it's actually, you realize, no, they're going to be their own person. You know, they're going to write their own story. And in this case, this boy, Zach, grew up in London at a certain time with the city becoming a destination for a lot of very, very wealthy people. And he came from a family that was actually relatively well off and lived in Maida Vale, a nice neighborhood in London, and was a very close, loving family.

5:03But he felt a sense of inadequacy. He would see the kind of supercars on London streets and some of the luxury real estate and found himself wanting more, wanting more than his family had. And I think that was quite destabilizing for an adolescent. And eventually what his parents come to discover after his death at 19 is that he had been pretending that he was the son of a Russian oligarch. And so, you know, it's a story about family and adolescence, but also what happens when somebody who's one of the people you love most in the world turns out to be a person you don't really understand. And how is your, tell us about the family, how you establish that trust with them.

5:56So I had, I was living in London in the summer of 2023. 23, a happy summer in which I ate at this wonderful restaurant on more than one occasion, producing a TV series, which is on effects in the States. What is it called? It's called Say Nothing, and it's based on my book of the same title. And so the production got us an apartment, my family an apartment in Notting Hill, and I was on set one day between setups, you know, like an executive producer, not doing much of anything, doing the wordle on my phone. a guy sat down next to me who was a visitor of the director and um we started chatting i told him that i write for the new yorker and he said i might have a story for you and he said i know this family here in london i'm very close with them and they had this terrible tragedy in 2019 they lost their 19 year old son in mysterious circumstances he went off the balcony of a luxury building overlooking the Thames just next to Vauxhall Bridge and after he died his parents made this shocking discovery which is that he had had this secret double life and he had been pretending that he was the son of a Russian oligarch so he told me that much and I knew I have to write this story but I didn't know if they would be ready to tell it and so he arranged a meeting how many years had it been since if this is so Zakat died in November 2019 and this was the summer of 2023 yeah four years yeah and um we met for coffee about a week later in bloomsbury just sitting outside at a cafe on a summer day near the british museum and the understanding was it was all off the record i try and be as kind of transparent as i can i understood they had been very it was quite a private family and it's a big step i mean this book, what became this book, um, it really reveals a great deal about, you know, their family's history, um, this very, uh, traumatic, awful loss that they've had.

8:01That's a big step to open yourself up in that way. And so I said, I'm not going to put any pressure on you. You guys have to decide. And, um, I think they did a bit of due diligence on me. I think they read some of my work And we met again about a week later at a bar in Soho. And at that point they said, okay, we're ready to do this. And, you know, that was several years ago. And we've been in almost constant touch ever since. Just hundreds of hours of conversations. Would you always do them together? Would you interview her? No, so sometimes together, sometimes separately. And interesting things came out when I was talking to them individually.

8:42and there were things I think it wasn't so much when they read the book but when we got into the fact checking process for the book there were things that Matthew and Rochelle learned that they hadn't necessarily known

8:57and they read the book before it was out I didn't show it to them until it was done I gave it to them and I said I can't change a word of this at this point but I do think that you, given how personal this story is you deserve to see it before the rest of the world does and you know there are things in the book that I think make them uncomfortable there are things that if they were in control probably wouldn't be in the book but they could see that this is partially a story about lying and that's what has to be I couldn't be holding things back you know so we launched the book about a month ago in New York at the 92nd Street Y and they came and they were there in the audience and I'm doing an event tonight in Marley Bonadant Books and they'll be there again and And that means the world to me.

9:40It must mean the world to me. It says a lot. They don't regret placing that trust in me. No. How do you feel having finished it? I feel good. You feel good? Yeah. I was nervous, I think, about because I'm so often the outsider. I wrote a book about the troubles in Northern Ireland, and I'm from the U.S. I, I, um, you never know how people are going to take it when you describe their place. And I try to do the work so that I can speak with a kind of authority. But also, I think it's helpful sometimes to be an outsider. I think you have a perspective. You can sort of see things from a slightly different angle.

10:20And, um, the reception has been amazingly warm to the book. Um, and.

10:31What if your soda actually did something for you? Introducing Sky Pop Protein Soda. Sky Pop Protein Soda has 10 grams of complete protein, zero sugar, and real delicious soda taste. Sky Pop Protein Soda. Reach for the sky. Get your Sky Pop Protein Soda now at Target, Walmart, or Kroger. The way you write a book and the way I cook a meal or think about food, What would be interesting to see is how that slight parallel of the way that I might talk about the ingredients and the quality of the ingredients. And David told me that you really think about the people in the story before you write the story.

11:09So, over to you. I mean, it's interesting, the idea of these kind of parallels between writing and cooking. It's funny because I often when I talk with, I mean, this gets a little bit kind of technical and into the craft of it. But when I talk to writers and journalists about how you assemble a book or an article or how I do, I often use a kind of a culinary metaphor, which is that I never sit down to write with a blank page. because I go out into the world, I try and stay curious. I always start conversations with strangers. It's a habit of mine, but a good one, I think, because you never know where an interesting story is going to come from.

12:00And then I'll slowly start kind of building out the story as I go, and I'm outlining as I go. So as I'm out meeting with people, interviewing them, reading through archives, trying to get hold of documents, I'm always thinking what's the story that I'm telling here? What's the beginning the middle and end? What are the what are the big moments along the way? And I have this outline that slowly populates and the Culinary metaphor is coming, but when I sit down to actually write it's usually close to the end And I have this roadmap in front of me where I've actually arranged everything I just haven't written it yet I've just sort of plugged in all of these in raw form, all the little bits, and everything's roughly where I want it to be.

12:46But I say it's like my mise en place. When I'm writing, I want the book to come together, the piece to come together for The New Yorker with a kind of velocity. I want the sort of creative act itself to just flow through me as quickly as possible, which means I can't have a situation where I get to a certain section and then suddenly I'm thinking, oh God, there's that one great quote and which notebook is it in? And I go off and I'm trying to find it. Everything needs to be sort of to hand. So I've had to have done all the prep beforehand in the way that you do here. It's all right there. And at the moment when you need it, it's in your hand.

13:28And I really think of it that way in terms of the kind of the assembly of a book, the way you would assemble a dish and what a nightmare it can be. if there's some step that you've forgotten in your prep and everything else is there and it completely takes you out of the flow and you have to kind of hit pause on the real fun of the thing, which is the alchemy of producing something beautiful. Well, the rigor of being prepared, you almost can relax while you're making it. Well, and also leave yourself open to... Yeah, to what? Well, to inspiration. I mean, it's not that you're... It's not, I guess it's interesting because there's an aspect of both activities that is mechanical.

14:14But then there's another side of it that's just kind of pure creative inspiration. And in a kind of strange way, I think you need to do the mechanical stuff in order to kind of put yourself into a position where inspiration can... Yeah. We've talked about the mise en place. I know that when it's summer, I go to a certain ingredient when I'm tired I might go to a certain ingredient I know there's ingredients like olive oil and salted anchovies and parmesan cheese that I always must have are there ingredients in that in that level that you think about when you're doing a book it's almost a reflex more than it's a conscious thought so I never have a list of ingredients in my mind when and I'm going out looking for a story.

15:00But what's bizarre is that I've learned to just listen to my own intuition. I try and be very, I mean, I've been doing this 20 years, and I try to really pay attention to my own impulses. And so a lot of the time what it is, is if you're telling me a story and I feel myself leaning forward, I feel myself wanting to know more, that's usually a good indication that I'm gonna have the kind of curiosity and the excitement to pursue this thing, but also that I can make it exciting for a reader. And none of that is like rational or even conscious really. It's more just that I feel it happening. In retrospect, if you look at the work that I've done, there are these ingredients that come up again and again and again.

15:43So it's not that I, I mean, so to give you an example, family. So it's not a situation where I kind of go out looking for a story that has to do with family or if you're telling me a story that I'm thinking, oh, there's got to be a family. angle in here because that's what I do. But if you look in retrospect at my book, Say Nothing about the Troubles, it's about a couple of different families in Northern Ireland. If you look at my book about the Sackler family, it's all about three generations of this dynasty. And then this book, London Falling, is very much a story of family. And so, and across, you know, New Yorker articles over 20 years, there's often some sense in which when I, you know when you say that every table has a story when I meet people and I hear their stories and I hear about them I'm always very interested in where do they come from how are they shaped, what's the family context in which they exist because I think that tends to illuminate character in interesting ways.

16:46What was food like in your house when you were growing up? Tell us about your parents and your siblings. So I grew up in Boston. Yeah. In the city of Boston in a fairly urban area called Dorchester. Yeah. And my parents, my mom's from Australia, my mom's from Melbourne, and my dad is from Boston. But they met at Oxford in the 60s. They loved it. I mean, it was a very, I think for both of my parents, my mom coming from University of Melbourne, One of my dad, he had gone to Fordham in the Bronx, in New York for college. And it was just a hugely eye-opening experience. They really fell in love with England.

17:27And have always come back, but also always been very into food. And it's funny because they both would often tell me stories growing up about how terrible the food in England had been. And their recollections of food in the late 60s. Yeah, there were no restaurants. And they didn't embrace. When I first came, you could either, all of us just ate Greek food, Indian food, or Chinese. I try not to be too hard on the British because they were coming straight out of rationing. Of course, yeah. I mean, you could say so with the French, but it's okay. We kind of, we forgive the British, I think. I think I do.

18:03Well, it's funny because, I mean, when I was doing research for this book, one of the things I was doing was sort of looking at the way in which London as a city has transformed. formed over the last 50 years because I actually think in some important ways if you want to understand why this kid Zach Bratler died you sort of have to understand these deeper changes in in in London but um I was looking at what was happening in the 80s and 90s and I initially almost had a section about the Ripper Cafe because there are these articles if you go back these kind of incredible articles when you first opened the restaurant where um there was like an intense novelty to the idea that you were you were doing fresh ingredients fresh preparations getting certain ingredients from Italy that the kind of emphasis on on everything being kind of authentic fresh yeah have you yeah it feels like something from a different era yeah that they're kind of remarking on like how astonishing that they that they serve fresh mozzarella you know whatever it Oh, yeah, or bread soups from Tuscany or, you know, not having a tomato in winter.

19:11People are outraged that we could be open and be a Thai restaurant and not have a tomato salad in January. You could eat good British food at home. But the concept of bringing British food into a restaurant was still challenging. And, yeah. And this is funny. We now live in this kind of, I don't know, it's obviously an unbelievably vibrant city and country now in terms of food. It's when my parents talk about those days. Oh, I know. It's hard for me to imagine what they're describing. But it's like a vanished world. I went to school. I went to an art college here. And I remember just being amazed that you could have potatoes, baked potatoes with chips.

19:49You know, it was just everything was carbs. But you have to also remember, you know, when I've done interviews with Michael Caine or people growing up in Ireland, it was food poverty to a lot. Yeah, of course. But even the grand houses, you know, the aristocrats kind of ate. Fairly starchy. Are you a fan of the movie Big Night, the Stanley Tush movie? Of course. For that moment when the kind of 1950s American who gets, I think they order risotto and then they ask for a side of spaghetti with meatballs or whatever it is, and the Tony Shalhoub character says, you cannot have starch with starch. So did your mother, who did cook in your house?

20:28Probably more so my mother. My dad was a big My dad who came from a big Irish-American family in Boston Was a big proponent of the kind of You know Meat and potatoes Sunday Dinner so a lot of big roasts And things that he would He would cook that He would I mean still makes phenomenal gravy Nothing makes him happier than like a big roast beef And roast potatoes and gravy And was Sunday lunch a big thing in your house? It was Yeah that's here as well And he grew up in Ireland? No, he grew up in Boston. In Boston with that. But with that kind of tradition. And the idea that you, it's crazy for me to think back to this, but we'd eat at about 2 p.m.

21:11on Sundays. And it seems so crazy to say it. My dad would make this big extravagant meal. My mother as well. And then my dad would put on a jacket and tie. And he'd change for that. And sit down. And when I was a kid, I found all this a little tough. But it's funny to think back. I mean, it's almost the way people used to get dressed up to get on an airplane or something. Did you have to be dressed as well as children? No, generally not. I mean, on special occasions we did. You know, Nancy Pelosi, who I interviewed up until the time when she probably went to college, never had a meal without a tablecloth.

21:50Is that right? Yeah. It was just her father was the mayor of Baltimore. And he was born in Italy. and that's what you did. So I think it means a lot. So you grew up, but you did have Sunday lunches and would you go to school, do your homework, come home and then all gather around the table? Yeah, we would gather around the table. When I was young, often my mother, it's so interesting thinking about these things now because this is so different from my life. But I had two siblings. My mom would often cook dinner for us early, for us three kids. Because she was working during the day. She was working as well.

22:26But she would, but my father would work later. And so we three kids would eat and then my poor mom would often then make dinner, make a separate dinner for her and my father. But it's interesting when you think about it because they would have, like this is not my experience as a parent and as a spouse right now. But my parents would then have this kind of separate time, just the two of them, to relate and have an adult conversation over a meal. So I think a lot of work for my mom, who was already busy working during the day. But it also created this kind of zone. My parents have a very happy marriage.

23:01They're still married, and very happily so in their 80s. Maybe this is a little advice. Maybe this is the secret. Yeah, yeah. Maybe my wife and I should stop eating dinner with our kids. So basically, they sit with you for your dinner, and then clear it away, and then you go to bed, and then they sit down. Yeah. That's pretty romantic. And then have a late meal and a glass of wine. and always... Do you know what they ate? It's always funny saying these things out loud. I don't think so. Candlelight. My parents always... I think it's really romantic. They never eat a meal without lighting candles.

23:32Really? Yeah, always. I think this is really cool. The fact that they had two dinners, that they were with you, and they preserved them. Maybe this is a secret to a happy marriage. I think it might be. And there was definitely a sense that... It's really cool. There was a sense that the table is where it all happens. Did you ever work in a restaurant? You wouldn't call it a restaurant. My first job ever was when I was 13 years old. During the summers. 13 is pretty young to start working. It was young. It was illegal. Yeah. We would go. What country were you in? I got five. I can tell you all about this job.

24:00I got, so we used to spend the summers in a place where my parents now live full time called Marion, Massachusetts. It's on Buzzards Bay before you get to Cape Cod in Massachusetts. And we would go down to the beach. And at the beach, there was a little kind of burger shack type snack bar run by this lovely guy who everybody called Uncle Dick. And he was a teacher at some other part of Massachusetts. And during the summers, he would come and he would make hot dogs and hamburgers and tuna rolls and sometimes lobster rolls and Greek salads. Just on his own. Just on his own. I was a very ardent patron of Uncle Dick's as a kid.

24:36Big eater, always into food. And at one point when I was 13, he said, he must have said it to my parents, he said, what if you came in and you worked two hours a day during the rush? I'll pay you$5 an hour and all you can eat. And so I would go in and I would work basically five days a week. So I worked like 10 hours a week flipping burgers. And he was a wonderful, avuncular guy. There was a point where he actually told me he had to amend the all you can eat thing because he said I was eating them out of business. Yeah, yeah. That's so good. I was a growing boy. It teaches you though, doesn't it?

25:15I think working, when I see it here, I think, you know, actually it's a really good place to be, as long as a good restaurant, that you understand how collaborative it is. There's a famous story in my family, a story my kids love, to your point. So Uncle Dick and I would be working in this. It was a really narrow kind of galley-style kitchen. And there was, I'm going to use my book here, there was a there was a freezer where the ice creams and so forth were and it had a lid that opened like this so the wall was here and here was the lid and there was this time where we had to there's a kind of ballet to it as you know in a kitchen especially a small kitchen where you're kind of you know it's a bit like being in a submarine and you sort of always kind of wending around each other and have to know who's coming around the corner and so forth and I I was not paying attention to the fact that, or I took an order for an Italian ice or some kind of little ice cream that would have been in that freezer.

26:18And I wasn't paying attention to the fact that Uncle Dick had taken an order for a cup of chili. We were both to blame. He put the bowl of chili here and then ladled the chili into it and he rested it down there for a second. And then I went to the other end of the freezer and went like that. and the chili would splat against the wall. And it was a disaster. I mean, imagine just a chili explosion. It was like a catapult of chili against this wall. I had to clean up the whole thing. We had to move the freezer. It was, I'll never live it down. Well, there you know. And then you have to bring it to the person who was waiting for it.

26:56Exactly. Yeah, right, right. You left this home where food was important, where your family meal was important. It reminded me so much of my family that you'd finish eating and then my mother would often say, well, what are we going to eat? What are we going to do next? And then leaving home to go to college was in New York. It was New York. Was that an explosion of kind of restaurants and eating out? Tell me about New York. I mean, I didn't have much money, so there was that side of it. But I cooked a lot in college. My friends, I had this group of kind of boisterous, quite nerdy, but sort of joyous.

27:34Like everybody, they all loved Italy and I was the last of my friends to start learning Italian. But we would go to, I mean this is in the early days. This was, you know, Mario Batali was opening his first restaurants in New York. So we'd get a Poe and then Baba when it opened. And these were special occasion kind of things. It wasn't something you would do with any regularity. But yeah, and the world of like great espresso and really good Thai food, which wasn't something, kind of wasn't a thing in Boston when I was growing up. I had Thai food, but I hadn't. Korean food, all of these kind of cuisines that I discovered for the first time.