Ira Glass, Grateful for ‘This American Life’

It was a moment of naked honesty--like one of the mini-epiphanies that drives his public-radio show, “This American Life.”

When host Ira Glass asked a series of rhetorical questions during a speaking engagement at Loyola University in October, contributing editor Sarah Vowell interrupted him. “Do you know what I just realized?” she said in her playfully childlike timbre. “Every question you ask, you are just dying to have someone ask you.”

So, before “This American Life” celebrated its fifth anniversary with its first live show Saturday in Chicago, I searched the show’s archives and then interviewed Glass using his own questions--adapted, when necessary, to this interrogation. (In Los Angeles, Glass hosts a touring edition of “This American Life” at UCLA’s Royce Hall tonight and Wednesday at 8 p.m.)

Each week, Glass’ show has a theme and invites a host of reporters, authors and performers to contribute a radio piece on that theme. The program, based in Chicago, airs nationally. For our purposes, the theme of this interview, in Glass’ own words, is: “These Are My Questions?”

Question: So, when you are [on the radio], do you feel like it’s one little intense seduction after another?

Answer: Well, any narrative is a seduction. Any story is a seduction, a series of baits and questions and teases pulling you to listen to the next moment. So, if any story is working at all, it’s a seduction. Hopefully, on a good day, every contributor is getting out the product in a good way. I sort of cringe when I say this because I feel like it makes the entire high-minded, service-oriented mission of public broadcasting seem like some grand lap-dancing scheme--which it definitely is not.

Q: As a reporter traveling around, do you carry a tape recorder?

A: Yes.

Q: And have you been on airplanes where you were frightened about it crashing and you looked at your tape recorder and thought, “What should I say here?”

A: Oh, no! [Embarrassed.] Yes, I have. I have never gone on a plane and not thought about it. Which, I have to say, is a rather humiliating thing to admit.

Well, there are different possibilities that go through my head. One is the simple documenting of what is going on around me. And one is saying to the people I love, and I feel like this is the corniest thing you could possibly say, but: “Everything has gone fine for me.”

I think I’d want to express my love for the people I’m close to. I’m 41, and if I were to die at 41 in a plane crash, I feel like: I got my shot, everything went fine, nothing to mourn about. Really. I feel like I got to do what I wanted. I got my wishes, as much as anybody ever does. Not all of them, but as much as people do.

Q: What does that say about you?

A: I wish I had something more profound to say. Yes, I work, like, 80 hours a week and am in a perpetual state of apology with family and friends for not having time for people outside of my job. But I spend most of my time with people I like, doing a job that interests me, and that’s something. It’s something that I wanted, and I have it. The more you interview people and the more lives you document, you realize where you fall on the scale of human suffering. And I realize, and it feels like a weird thing to say publicly and in an interview, but things are OK. I don’t feel like I have anything to complain about.

Q: When is hell a possibility?

A: Hell is a possibility in every day in every way. I feel like, minute by minute, over the course of a day, whether I’m succeeding with the people I’m close to, the people I work with . . . I feel like [the possibility of] messing things up badly is always present. And failing our responsibility to each other is always present.

This is how corny I am, I’ve been practicing this thing my girlfriend suggested. I’m sure this comes from some spiritual practice, but for the life of me, I can’t remember what that would be . . . but simply deciding you’re going to be happy, right here, right now. Over the course of a day, I have to remind myself of that over and over again: to be grateful.

Q: How do you make sense of events in which you only have yourself to blame?

A: These are hard questions.

I do what most people do and try not to think about it for as long as humanly possible, and then confront it bit by bit. Like the way the radio show runs, I feel like I can’t tell if I have a pathological need to always be working or if I simply got in over my head. My feeling about it is, I just got in over my head. I really didn’t understand how much work this was going to be. As a staff, we have talked about how long we see ourselves doing this. Three more years? One more year? Ten more years? I feel like the answer to that question hasn’t materialized. For now, it’s still a challenge to make the show happen. We’re still figuring out new things all the time that we want to do, that are exciting to us. As long as it feels like it’s worth doing.

Q: Do you view yourself as haunted by this time and by these tapes?

A: There’s this woman that we did this story about in our “Sentencing” show. . . . [Oct. 22, 1999, Episode 143: Dorothy Gaines, a former nurse, in federal prison in Alabama for a first-time drug offense]. Just because of the way the law works, even though there is no evidence against her, no physical evidence, she got convicted of drug possession based on the testimony of people--an ex-boyfriend and others, all of whom got reduced sentences because they testified against her.

And it just seems patently unfair, and she had really bad legal advice. I feel like we could have done more, but she’s still in prison on a 19-year sentence--more than the people who actually admitted they were running a drug ring. They all got reduced sentences because they fingered her, and she didn’t have anyone to finger--I think because she was innocent. That bothers me.

That’s a case of I feel like I should have done more. She’s this very articulate, very sympathetic African American lady, about my age. I feel like I should be getting her onto “Oprah.” . . . I feel so bad that we haven’t managed to communicate that to people who could help her more than we could, with our million listeners. I do feel haunted by that. I feel like a responsibility was handed to me and I haven’t dealt with it.

I’m haunted when I feel like we haven’t made [the show] as perfectly good as we could. I’m not haunted when we did literally the best that anyone could have done with this set of ideas and materials and the opportunities that came to us as a staff. It feels like you can never do enough sometimes. Sometimes, I feel like I could have done more. It’s like the last scene of “Schindler’s List”--I could have sold this watch and commissioned another writer!

* Ira Glass brings a touring edition of “This American Life” to UCLA’s Royce Hall tonight and Wednesday at 8 p.m. Tickets are $25. (310) 825-2101. The radio program can be heard Saturdays and Sundays at 3 p.m. on KPCC-FM (89.3) and Saturdays at 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. on KCRW-FM (89.9).