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The power of the talking cure. The podcaster and fashion designer Bella Freud, a great-granddaughter of Sigmund—and daughter of Lucian—has had a lot to unpack. Plus:
Rebecca Mead
A staff writer who has contributed reporting and criticism since 1997.
Sometimes when interviewing a subject, particularly a well-known one who has a new project to promote, I’m aware that I’m hearing a narrative that person has told many times before. My transcripts even occasionally contain word-for-word recapitulations of lines delivered in other, earlier interviews that I’ve read in preparation. No surprise there: we all curate versions of ourselves and anecdotes we retail for effect—even those of us who don’t have something to publicize.
But sometimes a much more interesting thing happens: an interview subject really engages, so that their conversation seems to become a genuine form of self-reflection. Bella Freud knows the difference. As the host of “Fashion Neurosis,” a mesmerizing podcast that launched about a year ago, she is experienced in the asking-questions side of the equation. She is a curious and captivating interviewer, eliciting revealing disclosures from her subjects, who have ranged from Karl Ove Knausgaard to Courtney Love. In the course of several extended conversations with Freud this past spring, I discovered that, as an interview subject, she is equally curious and captivating—frank, funny, thoughtful, and open to the possibility of discovering something that she hadn’t quite formulated before. (Our conversation ranged from the moral valence of Birkenstocks to the pros and cons of age-gap love affairs.) Being the great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud and the daughter of the great artist Lucian Freud—for whom she sat repeatedly as a subject—Freud has a substantial inheritance both when it comes to observing herself, and to being observed. Those of us who write New Yorker profiles aspire, in our way, both to understand and to portray the people who agree to converse with us. It’s a privilege and a joy when a subject puts down her talking points, and just talks.
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