Name: Late Show Book Club with “The Rest of Our Lives” Author Ben Markovits
Uploaded: 2026-01-24T17:00:00.000Z
Duration: 11 min 27 s
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Past simple

Hi, I'm ben markovitz and I wrote a novel called the rest of our lives.

Gerund

your latest, the Rest of Our Lives, was a finalist for this year's Booker Prize.

How would you describe it in one sentence?

So it's a novel about what happens to a marriage after the kids leave home.

How would you compare going to college and becoming an empty nester in terms of transitional moments in life and how much freedom they bring?

I think there's a tendency when you get older to think that you're not having life experiences and life changes.

But my daughter, who actually just went to university after I published the book, seemed in the thick of all kinds of experiences.

And I realized I was too, not just vicariously, but by the fact that she was leaving.

So it seemed almost equivalent, the change in life that we were going through.

Do you think that one is more kind of disruptive in a life?

She also has the potential of becoming a slightly different person.

And at some point you hope that isn't happening to you anymore.

You'd like to have some kind of consistency, though.

There's a line that meant a lot to me from a Wordsworth poem called the Child that goes, the child is father of the man, and

I could wish my days to be bound each to each by natural piety.

And I think that probably meant too much to me as a kid, I really hated the thought of becoming somebody that my younger self would disapprove of.

So even when I went to college, I felt this pull towards continuity.

Early in the book, your main character says that marriage is like, I quote, being a Knicks fan.

We are talking right now at the Ed Sullivan Theatre in the heart of New York City.

I mean, it's changed a little bit the past two years, but

when I wrote it, the Knicks had not had any success, I think, in about 20 years.

They're doing a little bit better now, actually

though, as we speak, I think they've lost four straight games, I suppose.

So I had in mind a little bit that marriage is alike being a Josh Hart fan in that he's an amazing basketball player.

If you want a loose ball, he's the guy to go to.

But you also realize at a certain point with NBA players that there are things they can do and there are things they can't do.

And at some point in a marriage, you get a sense of what those limits are in your partner, and

you learn to accept them, but you also get the sense of what those limits are in you.

Another chilling line from a Philip Larkin interview.

But he said, you reach a point in your life when you realize there's a limit to what other people's personalities can offer you, and

there's a limit to what your own personality can offer you in itself.

And that seems a line that is both amazingly perceptive about what it's like to be an athlete, but

Looking back at what you wrote, which is a line that stuck with me, if one part of your life is a C minus, you can't really achieve more in the rest of your life, you know, in terms of happiness or, you know.

I think that's at the end of the first section of the book, the first two pages.

And I wrote those long before I wrote the rest of the novel.

I just sat down one day and wrote that opening.

And then I came back to it to see what I had, and I ended with that line.

And what I liked about it is that on the one hand, it struck me as kind of reasonable.

If you're in a bad marriage, it's hard to be that happy with the rest of your life.

But it also struck me as a crazy way of measuring your existence.

And part of what I was pointing at is that Tom is a law professor.

He has grown up, like lots of us do, measuring his existence by the grades that you get for how you're doing.

That really seeps deep into your sense of the world and can poison your ability to appreciate things as they are.

And actually, there's a very small line towards the end of the novel.

I don't want to give anything away where he says about something he has to do.

And that seems like a healthier way of looking at your life and your accomplishments.

Would you say that this is a book about happiness?

I mean, I feel like one of the reasons I like to read is to get a sense of how I should live my life.

And there are books that have meant a lot to me, that have pointed the way at certain times.

And I hope that there's something in the book that will.

I don't know what I want to Say here, I mean, I hope there's something in the book that can.

That those who read it might think there's more love in their lives than more loves in my characters lives than they thought there was.

Starting out the real life health scare that you have been dealing with, or you were dealing with, you wrote an essay for the New York Times about how this experience gave your novel higher stakes.

And throughout the novel the main character is dealing with symptoms that point to this undisclosed health problem, you know, through.

Why did you decide to write such a personal experience into.

So when I started putting these symptoms into the book, I really didn't know what I had.

I was suddenly getting tired when running.

I woke up with a bloated face in the morning.

And I was writing a novel about a middle aged guy whose life was going off the rails.

And it seems to me one of the things that happens to you in middle age is that your health starts to fail you in ways that you can't quite understand.

And so I gave him the symptoms, thinking it was part of the overall picture I was trying to paint.

And then by the end of the novel, both Tom and I knew what we had, which was a kind of cancer.

And I hadn't anticipated that that's where it was headed.

I just gave him these symptoms because it seemed part of the kind of the general malaise of life and not this very specific thing that he was about to go through.

There's some boring technical reasons that explain why I did it.

And part of the problem of a road trip novel is that you have a character who is often driving away from the source of the plot, which was his wife.

And I thought that having an ongoing medical issue might be a way of building a kind of narrative that wasn't just episodic.

And then the sickness also changed the way I wanted to write the book because I had a different view of the world after I went through what I went through than I did at the beginning.

There's a lot of discourse right now about male loneliness.

And your main character Tom seems to fit into that club.

Why do you think it's such a common thing for men to feel disconnected and isolated, I wonder?

I mean, do you think maybe the discourse doesn't include it, but

there must be lots of middle aged female loneliness too?

And so I hesitate to say anything that just applies to him.

I think he has gotten to a point in his life where he spends a Lot of time talking to his kids about his life, and

he realizes they're not very interested in his sexual thoughts because why should they be?

They're not particularly interested in his political views because he's behind the times.

And they also, from the point of view of their generation, want to hear much about his privileged complaints about the way his life has turned out.

And I sympathize with the kids on all those fronts.

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Late Show Book Club with “The Rest of Our Lives” Author Ben Markovits

potential

privilege

routine

crisis