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Jonathan + Death of an Artist · Heavyweight

• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hi there, this is Jonathan. We'll be bringing you
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: a brand new episode of Heavyweight next week. But in
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: the meantime, I wanted to share with you a new
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: and unusual series from Pushkin. Journalist Alice Gregory and Leon
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: Nafok are married. Alice usually does print and Leon does audio.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: But recently, they collaborated on a project for the first time.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: Their new podcast series, Death of an Artist, Season 3,
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: Petra Mathers and Her Michael, is about another married couple,
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: also artists, celebrated children's book author Petra Mathers and her husband,
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: photographer Michael Mathers. I'm going to talk to Alice and
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: Leon about their new podcast and the process of recording it.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: But first, I wanted to share the very beginning of
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: the first episode, which is unlike anything I've heard before. Also,
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: a warning that this conversation includes explicit depictions of suicide.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: So take care when listening.
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: Hello, you've reached Michael and Petra Mathers.
• 1:20
  Speaker 3: Leave us a message.
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: Thank you.
• 1:23
  Speaker 3: Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday,
• 1:29
  Speaker 3: dear Mikey. Happy birthday to you. Hope you are well.
• 1:37
  Speaker 3: Take care of yourself. Hope to talk to you soon. Bye-bye.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: Unless I'm misreading my calendar, I believe 2345 is your birthday,
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: and I'm calling to wish you a happy one. I'm
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: thinking of you, and just know that I love you both,
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: and that's it.
• 2:02
  Speaker 4: Bye-bye.
• 2:07
  Speaker 3: Michael, give me a call, please.
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: It's Goody.
• 2:12
  Speaker 3: We're worried about you. Hey, Mike, I just talked to Goody.
• 2:19
  Speaker 3: Would you please give me a call, please? I would
• 2:21
  Speaker 3: really appreciate it.
• 2:25
  Speaker 4: Mike, I got a flare.
• 2:28
  Speaker 3: It makes me cry. You can't be serious about this.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: What's happening?
• 2:32
  Speaker 3: Somebody's got to call me. Michael, it's Tom.
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: Hello.
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: Hello, who's this?
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: My name is.
• 2:41
  Speaker 4: Patty, and I'm a friend of the Mathers. The phone
• 2:45
  Speaker 4: has been ringing quite a bit, but I saw your name,
• 2:49
  Speaker 4: and I thought this person has called before, and I
• 2:52
  Speaker 4: will pick it up.
• 2:53
  Speaker 3: I'm so glad you did.
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: We're also friends of the Mathers.
• 3:00
  Speaker 3: We received a letter from them, and it's quite alarming.
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: I'm so sorry.
• 3:08
  Speaker 4: I'm so sorry for.
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: You.
• 3:16
  Speaker 3: Oh, no.
• 3:17
  Speaker 4: Yes, they took their life, and that's the way they
• 3:21
  Speaker 4: wanted to do it. They wanted to go together, and
• 3:26
  Speaker 4: that's what they did.
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: End of final message. When I first heard this, it
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: felt like, oh, this is the greatest opening to a
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: podcast I've ever heard. Like, there's no way you're going
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: to turn off. Leon and Alice, could you explain what
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: this is that we just listened to?
• 3:52
  Speaker 5: So this is the answering machine that belonged to Michael
• 3:57
  Speaker 5: and Petra Mathers, who were a couple in their late
• 4:00
  Speaker 5: 70s who lived in Astoria, Oregon. And about two and
• 4:05
  Speaker 5: a half years ago now, one day after Michael's birthday,
• 4:09
  Speaker 5: they took their own lives. And this happened after they
• 4:13
  Speaker 5: sent letters to a lot of their friends and family.
• 4:16
  Speaker 6: Dozens of letters.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: Dozens of letters. We think 40.
• 4:18
  Speaker 5: 40 or so. And what you hear in these messages
• 4:22
  Speaker 5: is people calling before they've heard that anything might be up,
• 4:26
  Speaker 5: wishing Michael a happy birthday. And then you're hearing messages
• 4:28
  Speaker 5: from people who have received a letter and they don't
• 4:32
  Speaker 5: know what to make of it.
• 4:33
  Speaker 6: And they're not sure it's real. They're calling, hoping it's not,
• 4:37
  Speaker 6: wanting to get through to a voice. And then the
• 4:39
  Speaker 6: very last message you hear is the executor of their estate,
• 4:43
  Speaker 6: an old friend of theirs named Patty, intercepting the last caller.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: And how did you first learn about Michael and Petra? Like,
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: how did you come to this whole story?
• 4:51
  Speaker 6: I'm a big reader of obituaries. I just really like
• 4:54
  Speaker 6: the form.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: It might be apparent by your voice. You're not an octogenarian.
• 4:59
  Speaker 2: No.
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: Not even a septogenarian.
• 5:01
  Speaker 4: Nope.
• 5:02
  Speaker 6: I'm a, what do you call that? What do you
• 5:03
  Speaker 6: call someone who's in their 30s?
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: Middle-aged, baby.
• 5:05
  Speaker 6: Yeah, middle-aged.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: I'm almost 40. And this is something you've always done?
• 5:09
  Speaker 6: Yeah, as an adult, at least. I just find it
• 5:11
  Speaker 6: to be a very beautiful, jewel-like form. Like, the premise
• 5:15
  Speaker 6: is that this person died, but actually it's about how
• 5:17
  Speaker 6: this person lived, and that's kind of where I come
• 5:19
  Speaker 6: to it. Like, I just like it as a mini-biography.
• 5:23
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 5:23
  Speaker 6: So I was reading the New York Times, and there
• 5:25
  Speaker 6: was an obituary of Petra Mathers, specifically, not Michael. It
• 5:28
  Speaker 6: was just of her. But it mentioned that she died
• 5:31
  Speaker 6: with her husband, that they.
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: Died by suicide.
• 5:34
  Speaker 5: And it mentioned the letters, too.
• 5:35
  Speaker 6: And they mentioned the letters, yeah. I mean, the obituary
• 5:37
  Speaker 6: created a sense of mystique, for sure. She was a
• 5:40
  Speaker 6: children's book author, and when I Googled her name, the
• 5:44
  Speaker 6: images from her books came up, which were suddenly familiar
• 5:46
  Speaker 6: to me because we had the books when I was
• 5:48
  Speaker 6: growing up. My curiosity was further piqued, I think, because
• 5:50
  Speaker 6: she seemed like someone I knew.
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: Leon, so Alice tells you about this, and what drew
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: you in?
• 5:58
  Speaker 5: Alice got in touch with... Patty Flynn, the executor of
• 6:01
  Speaker 5: the estate. And I think found out there was going
• 6:04
  Speaker 5: to be a memorial for Michael and Patriot in Rhode Island, uh,
• 6:08
  Speaker 5: hosted by one of his friends. And I think I
• 6:10
  Speaker 5: suggested that you might as well record it. And that
• 6:14
  Speaker 5: was when we kind of started working on it together
• 6:16
  Speaker 5: because we went to this memorial as a couple. Um,
• 6:19
  Speaker 5: and I think we both saw in this gathering, just the,
• 6:25
  Speaker 5: the range and depth of reactions that people had, uh,
• 6:29
  Speaker 5: The memorial kind of started out pretty conventional in that
• 6:33
  Speaker 5: people were sort of sharing sweet stories. And then something
• 6:38
  Speaker 5: kind of shifted at some point. I think it was
• 6:40
  Speaker 5: maybe someone vocalizing that they actually were not happy with
• 6:43
  Speaker 5: the letter they received. They found it glib.
• 6:45
  Speaker 6: Glib, unsatisfying, making light of something.
• 6:48
  Speaker 5: Didn't explain anything. In fact, someone brought up, interestingly, another couple.
• 6:52
  Speaker 5: And we don't get into this in the show, but
• 6:53
  Speaker 5: there's another couple from Maine who also killed themselves together.
• 6:59
  Speaker 5: And left a letter to their family. And it so
• 7:02
  Speaker 5: happened that someone at this memorial had read that letter,
• 7:06
  Speaker 5: had known them also.
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: It was like theirs was better.
• 7:08
  Speaker 5: And was like theirs was better. It explained much more
• 7:10
  Speaker 5: clearly and lucidly why this happened. Whereas Michael and Petra's
• 7:14
  Speaker 5: letters were a little bit jokey. They were a little
• 7:17
  Speaker 5: bit enigmatic.
• 7:19
  Speaker 6: They felt like artifacts from like a prank or something.
• 7:21
  Speaker 5: They felt prankish, yeah.
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: But was that in keeping with their personality? Totally.
• 7:25
  Speaker 6: So we learned, yes.
• 7:26
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: One of the things that is worth mentioning and I
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: find quite remarkable is that the entire series is non-narrated,
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: meaning everything exists in tape. Everything plays out in scenes.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: There's no guy doing the kind of thing that I do,
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: which is like, what this means or what you're supposed
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: to take from this. That's what I usually do too.
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: Was it always in the cards that you were going
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: to do it this way? Just let it unfold in
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: tape without the voice of a narrator.
• 7:58
  Speaker 6: That was my fantasy from the beginning, I think. That
• 8:00
  Speaker 6: was like my idealized form.
• 8:03
  Speaker 5: I also would say I have made probably a dozen
• 8:06
  Speaker 5: or something narrated podcasts. And in the past couple of years,
• 8:11
  Speaker 5: I've caught myself like watching movies in particular and realizing
• 8:15
  Speaker 5: that part of the pleasure of watching movies is you
• 8:18
  Speaker 5: often don't know what's going on for a while. And
• 8:22
  Speaker 5: I've always felt jealous of that in podcasting where there's
• 8:24
  Speaker 5: like whenever I write a script where there is narration.
• 8:27
  Speaker 6: You're like rushing to clarify.
• 8:29
  Speaker 5: Yes, because confusion is sort of poison, I think, in
• 8:32
  Speaker 5: audio because someone gets confused, they get bored and they
• 8:35
  Speaker 5: get bored, they turn it off and they listen to
• 8:37
  Speaker 5: something else. And so I had long sort of imagined
• 8:41
  Speaker 5: what it might be like to make something where you're,
• 8:43
  Speaker 5: where the audience is made to expect some confusion or
• 8:47
  Speaker 5: you signal to them, like, listen, like everything's not going
• 8:50
  Speaker 5: to be clear immediately, but just give it, trust us.
• 8:53
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: What were some of the questions that you set out
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: to answer in reporting this series?
• 9:01
  Speaker 5: I mean, I think the very basic one was, why
• 9:04
  Speaker 5: did they do this? They were not sick. They were
• 9:08
  Speaker 5: not broke. They were not in crisis.
• 9:12
  Speaker 6: They were happily in love, more in love than any
• 9:15
  Speaker 6: married couple I've ever witnessed.
• 9:17
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 9:17
  Speaker 5: And so there's this mystery, like, why did they decide
• 9:20
  Speaker 5: to Right, right. And, you know, it was stated semi-explicitly
• 9:24
  Speaker 5: in some of the letters, we're doing this because we
• 9:26
  Speaker 5: always wanted to leave this world together. We didn't want
• 9:28
  Speaker 5: to get old and frail. And I think all those
• 9:31
  Speaker 5: things were in play in their decision.
• 9:34
  Speaker 6: But it still doesn't, like, the actual choice in the
• 9:38
  Speaker 6: moment and the exact timing is not explained.
• 9:40
  Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and then also, you know, you know that they
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: arrived at a consensus, but then you must begin to
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: ponder who was the dominant gene.
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 9:51
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: Who's driving this conversation, you know?
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 9:54
  Speaker 5: Which I think was a subject of a lot of
• 9:56
  Speaker 5: speculation on the part of the people we interviewed.
• 9:58
  Speaker 6: I also think this is just kind of the story
• 10:00
  Speaker 6: of not necessarily marriage, but like a long term relationship
• 10:04
  Speaker 6: where you kind of never know what's you and what's
• 10:06
  Speaker 6: the other person after a certain point. You can't remember.
• 10:09
  Speaker 6: whose idea something was, and it doesn't really matter, and
• 10:13
  Speaker 6: eventually you agree, hopefully.
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: Were there things that you saw about your own relationship
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: that were reflected in Michael and Petra?
• 10:23
  Speaker 6: Hopefully not. No, I mean, no. I mean, they were
• 10:26
  Speaker 6: very much in love.
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: But they were also.
• 10:27
  Speaker 5: I think the reason you say hopefully not.
• 10:29
  Speaker 6: Is that they were quite cloistered and.
• 10:32
  Speaker 5: Shut off from the rest of the world. Even though
• 10:34
  Speaker 5: they had friends and they had family, they were described
• 10:37
  Speaker 5: to us almost universally as remote and unreachable.
• 10:41
  Speaker 6: Like a unit unto themselves, blinding in their kind of
• 10:46
  Speaker 6: joint charisma, but in a way that you kind of
• 10:48
  Speaker 6: have to look away from.
• 10:49
  Speaker 2: Huh.
• 10:50
  Speaker 5: I think a lot of people felt left out by
• 10:51
  Speaker 5: their relationship to begin with.
• 10:53
  Speaker 6: Yeah, like over the years.
• 10:54
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 10:54
  Speaker 5: And I think the people who felt that most acutely
• 10:56
  Speaker 5: felt most.
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: Betrayed, I think.
• 10:59
  Speaker 5: Betrayed, especially people who had talked to them in the
• 11:02
  Speaker 5: past few months and to whom they had not mentioned anything.
• 11:05
  Speaker 6: Like that feeling that they had a secret. And like
• 11:07
  Speaker 6: how dare we have these small conversations if this whole
• 11:09
  Speaker 6: time in the back of your mind you know you're
• 11:10
  Speaker 6: going to kill yourselves. Why are we talking about a movie?
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 11:13
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: Is that a definition of intimacy in a way or
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: like a kind of cruel aspect of intimacy between two people?
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: You know what I mean? That like you're a gang
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: of two and it's sort of like it means that
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: everybody else isn't in that gang.
• 11:27
  Speaker 6: Yeah, I think so.
• 11:28
  Speaker 5: I think that's exactly right. And Alice, you kind of
• 11:30
  Speaker 5: make a similar remark in the show that a marriage
• 11:33
  Speaker 5: is by definition two people choosing each other over everybody else.
• 11:37
  Speaker 5: And it can be exclusionary even to the people you love.
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: Check out Death of an Artist, Season 3, wherever you
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: get your podcasts. All six episodes are out now. And
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: as for Heavyweight, we'll be returning next week with a
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: brand new episode.