You’ll Never Write About Me Again

I know you may not care, but I do. I care about how to tell a personal story like the one I’m about to write, without falling into a million traps laid out in front of you. I’m thinking of the issues of trust and betrayal that come across between a writer and his or her subject. The transfiguration that inevitably takes place in writing. And my friendship with Philip Roth: in which trust was the fundamental condition, despite ambiguity playing a subtler, if ever-present, role.

I should start by saying that the Philip Roth I first encountered, fourteen years ago, is not the same person who called yesterday from the isolation of his snowbound country house in Connecticut to tell me, “I’m a happy man. Want to know the secret of happiness? I don’t do anything I don’t want to do and I’m unburdened from the task of writing. Why I wasted my time with books and women is a mystery.” And then burst out laughing.

Those two powerful driving forces—the writing life and the life of eros—played their parts in the story of our relationship, too. When people ask me how I managed to convince Philip Roth to work with me on a documentary film about him, I tell them that he volunteered. Many wonder how this famously reclusive and fiercely diffident writer said yes to me, a journalist, a woman, and not even an American.

The truth is that while we danced around each other for years, our way of relating to one another changed to a remarkable extent. Due, in part, to time and circumstances, there were two major shifts. The first is when our professional relationship turned increasingly personal. And the other, when Roth decided it was time to stop writing fiction and live a more civilized life.

I should start by making it clear that our relationship had a bad start. In 2000, Roth accorded a single interview to the Italian press about The Human Stain, and I’d crossed the Atlantic to conduct it for my newspaper, the Italian daily Corriere della Sera. But when I called his agent, Jeff Posternak, to arrange the details, he told me, “Mr. Roth has changed his mind and will only do a telephone interview.”

I was outraged. I turned the offer down and for two weeks held out, refusing to come to terms with this arrogant and capricious man who evidently thought nothing of humiliating a journalist. But in the end I had to give in. The paper had paid for my trip and I couldn’t go back empty-handed. My two weeks in the United States were almost over when I reluctantly gave his agent my phone number in order for Roth to call me, as...