Jonathan Goldstein
Jonathan Goldstein is the host and creator of the podcast Heavyweight. In 2016, the Atlantic named it the number one podcast of the year; in 2017 it received a Third…
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Jonathan talks with married journalists Alice Gregory and Leon Neyfakh, hosts of the new Pushkin series Death of an Artist, Season 3. The series tells the story of another married couple: artists Petra and Michael Mathers, who took their lives together, leaving dozens of enigmatic letters behind.
Pushkin. Hi there, this is Jonathan. We'll be bringing you a brand new episode of Heavyweight next week. But in the meantime, I wanted to share with you a new and unusual series from Pushkin. Journalist Alice Gregory and Leon Nafok are married. Alice usually does print and Leon does audio. But recently, they collaborated on a project for the first time. Their new podcast series, Death of an Artist, Season 3, Petra Mathers and Her Michael, is about another married couple, also artists, celebrated children's book author Petra Mathers and her husband, photographer Michael Mathers. I'm going to talk to Alice and Leon about their new podcast and the process of recording it. But first, I wanted to share the very beginning of the first episode, which is unlike anything I've heard before. Also, a warning that this conversation includes explicit depictions of suicide. So take care when listening.
01:05
Speaker 2
Hello, you've reached Michael and Petra Mathers.
01:11
Speaker 3
Leave us a message.
01:12
Speaker 2
Thank you.
01:14
Speaker 3
Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Mikey. Happy birthday to you. Hope you are well. Take care of yourself. Hope to talk to you soon. Bye-bye.
01:34
Speaker 2
Unless I'm misreading my calendar, I believe 2345 is your birthday, and I'm calling to wish you a happy one. I'm thinking of you, and just know that I love you both, and that's it.
01:53
Speaker 4
Bye-bye.
01:58
Speaker 3
Michael, give me a call, please.
02:01
Speaker 2
It's Goody.
02:03
Speaker 3
We're worried about you. Hey, Mike, I just talked to Goody. Would you please give me a call, please? I would really appreciate it.
02:16
Speaker 4
Mike, I got a flare.
02:19
Speaker 3
It makes me cry. You can't be serious about this.
02:22
Speaker 1
What's happening?
02:23
Speaker 3
Somebody's got to call me. Michael, it's Tom.
02:28
Speaker 2
Hello.
02:30
Speaker 1
Hello, who's this?
02:31
Speaker 2
My name is.
02:32
Speaker 4
Patty, and I'm a friend of the Mathers. The phone has been ringing quite a bit, but I saw your name, and I thought this person has called before, and I will pick it up.
02:44
Speaker 3
I'm so glad you did.
02:48
Speaker 2
We're also friends of the Mathers.
02:51
Speaker 3
We received a letter from them, and it's quite alarming.
02:57
Speaker 2
I'm so sorry.
02:59
Speaker 4
I'm so sorry for.
03:04
Speaker 2
You.
03:07
Speaker 3
Oh, no.
03:08
Speaker 4
Yes, they took their life, and that's the way they wanted to do it. They wanted to go together, and that's what they did.
03:21
Speaker 1
End of final message. When I first heard this, it felt like, oh, this is the greatest opening to a podcast I've ever heard. Like, there's no way you're going to turn off. Leon and Alice, could you explain what this is that we just listened to?
03:43
Speaker 5
So this is the answering machine that belonged to Michael and Petra Mathers, who were a couple in their late 70s who lived in Astoria, Oregon. And about two and a half years ago now, one day after Michael's birthday, they took their own lives. And this happened after they sent letters to a lot of their friends and family.
04:06
Speaker 6
Dozens of letters.
04:08
Speaker 1
Dozens of letters. We think 40.
04:09
Speaker 5
40 or so. And what you hear in these messages is people calling before they've heard that anything might be up, wishing Michael a happy birthday. And then you're hearing messages from people who have received a letter and they don't know what to make of it.
04:24
Speaker 6
And they're not sure it's real. They're calling, hoping it's not, wanting to get through to a voice. And then the very last message you hear is the executor of their estate, an old friend of theirs named Patty, intercepting the last caller.
04:38
Speaker 1
And how did you first learn about Michael and Petra? Like, how did you come to this whole story?
04:42
Speaker 6
I'm a big reader of obituaries. I just really like the form.
04:46
Speaker 1
It might be apparent by your voice. You're not an octogenarian.
04:50
Speaker 2
No.
04:50
Speaker 1
Not even a septogenarian.
04:52
Speaker 4
Nope.
04:52
Speaker 6
I'm a, what do you call that? What do you call someone who's in their 30s?
04:55
Speaker 1
Middle-aged, baby.
04:56
Speaker 6
Yeah, middle-aged.
04:57
Speaker 1
I'm almost 40. And this is something you've always done?
05:00
Speaker 6
Yeah, as an adult, at least. I just find it to be a very beautiful, jewel-like form. Like, the premise is that this person died, but actually it's about how this person lived, and that's kind of where I come to it. Like, I just like it as a mini-biography.
05:14
Speaker 4
Right.
05:14
Speaker 6
So I was reading the New York Times, and there was an obituary of Petra Mathers, specifically, not Michael. It was just of her. But it mentioned that she died with her husband, that they.
05:24
Speaker 1
Died by suicide.
05:25
Speaker 5
And it mentioned the letters, too.
05:26
Speaker 6
And they mentioned the letters, yeah. I mean, the obituary created a sense of mystique, for sure. She was a children's book author, and when I Googled her name, the images from her books came up, which were suddenly familiar to me because we had the books when I was growing up. My curiosity was further piqued, I think, because she seemed like someone I knew.
05:43
Speaker 1
Leon, so Alice tells you about this, and what drew you in?
05:48
Speaker 5
Alice got in touch with... Patty Flynn, the executor of the estate. And I think found out there was going to be a memorial for Michael and Patriot in Rhode Island, uh, hosted by one of his friends. And I think I suggested that you might as well record it. And that was when we kind of started working on it together because we went to this memorial as a couple. Um, and I think we both saw in this gathering, just the, the range and depth of reactions that people had, uh, The memorial kind of started out pretty conventional in that people were sort of sharing sweet stories. And then something kind of shifted at some point. I think it was maybe someone vocalizing that they actually were not happy with the letter they received. They found it glib.
06:36
Speaker 6
Glib, unsatisfying, making light of something.
06:39
Speaker 5
Didn't explain anything. In fact, someone brought up, interestingly, another couple. And we don't get into this in the show, but there's another couple from Maine who also killed themselves together. And left a letter to their family. And it so happened that someone at this memorial had read that letter, had known them also.
06:58
Speaker 1
It was like theirs was better.
06:59
Speaker 5
And was like theirs was better. It explained much more clearly and lucidly why this happened. Whereas Michael and Petra's letters were a little bit jokey. They were a little bit enigmatic.
07:10
Speaker 6
They felt like artifacts from like a prank or something.
07:12
Speaker 5
They felt prankish, yeah.
07:13
Speaker 1
But was that in keeping with their personality? Totally.
07:16
Speaker 6
So we learned, yes.
07:16
Speaker 4
Yeah.
07:18
Speaker 1
One of the things that is worth mentioning and I find quite remarkable is that the entire series is non-narrated, meaning everything exists in tape. Everything plays out in scenes. There's no guy doing the kind of thing that I do, which is like, what this means or what you're supposed to take from this. That's what I usually do too. Was it always in the cards that you were going to do it this way? Just let it unfold in tape without the voice of a narrator.
07:49
Speaker 6
That was my fantasy from the beginning, I think. That was like my idealized form.
07:53
Speaker 5
I also would say I have made probably a dozen or something narrated podcasts. And in the past couple of years, I've caught myself like watching movies in particular and realizing that part of the pleasure of watching movies is you often don't know what's going on for a while. And I've always felt jealous of that in podcasting where there's like whenever I write a script where there is narration.
08:18
Speaker 6
You're like rushing to clarify.
08:20
Speaker 5
Yes, because confusion is sort of poison, I think, in audio because someone gets confused, they get bored and they get bored, they turn it off and they listen to something else. And so I had long sort of imagined what it might be like to make something where you're, where the audience is made to expect some confusion or you signal to them, like, listen, like everything's not going to be clear immediately, but just give it, trust us.
08:44
Speaker 4
Yeah.
08:46
Speaker 1
What were some of the questions that you set out to answer in reporting this series?
08:52
Speaker 5
I mean, I think the very basic one was, why did they do this? They were not sick. They were not broke. They were not in crisis.
09:03
Speaker 6
They were happily in love, more in love than any married couple I've ever witnessed.
09:08
Speaker 4
Yeah.
09:08
Speaker 5
And so there's this mystery, like, why did they decide to Right, right. And, you know, it was stated semi-explicitly in some of the letters, we're doing this because we always wanted to leave this world together. We didn't want to get old and frail. And I think all those things were in play in their decision.
09:25
Speaker 6
But it still doesn't, like, the actual choice in the moment and the exact timing is not explained.
09:31
Speaker 5
Yeah, exactly.
09:32
Speaker 1
Yeah, and then also, you know, you know that they arrived at a consensus, but then you must begin to ponder who was the dominant gene.
09:41
Speaker 2
Right.
09:42
Speaker 3
Yeah.
09:42
Speaker 1
Who's driving this conversation, you know?
09:44
Speaker 2
Yeah.
09:45
Speaker 5
Which I think was a subject of a lot of speculation on the part of the people we interviewed.
09:49
Speaker 6
I also think this is just kind of the story of not necessarily marriage, but like a long term relationship where you kind of never know what's you and what's the other person after a certain point. You can't remember. whose idea something was, and it doesn't really matter, and eventually you agree, hopefully.
10:07
Speaker 1
Were there things that you saw about your own relationship that were reflected in Michael and Petra?
10:14
Speaker 6
Hopefully not. No, I mean, no. I mean, they were very much in love.
10:17
Speaker 1
But they were also.
10:18
Speaker 5
I think the reason you say hopefully not.
10:20
Speaker 6
Is that they were quite cloistered and.
10:23
Speaker 5
Shut off from the rest of the world. Even though they had friends and they had family, they were described to us almost universally as remote and unreachable.
10:32
Speaker 6
Like a unit unto themselves, blinding in their kind of joint charisma, but in a way that you kind of have to look away from.
10:40
Speaker 2
Huh.
10:41
Speaker 5
I think a lot of people felt left out by their relationship to begin with.
10:44
Speaker 6
Yeah, like over the years.
10:45
Speaker 3
Yes.
10:45
Speaker 5
And I think the people who felt that most acutely felt most.
10:49
Speaker 1
Betrayed, I think.
10:50
Speaker 5
Betrayed, especially people who had talked to them in the past few months and to whom they had not mentioned anything.
10:56
Speaker 6
Like that feeling that they had a secret. And like how dare we have these small conversations if this whole time in the back of your mind you know you're going to kill yourselves. Why are we talking about a movie?
11:04
Speaker 1
Yeah.
11:04
Speaker 4
Yeah.
11:05
Speaker 1
Is that a definition of intimacy in a way or like a kind of cruel aspect of intimacy between two people? You know what I mean? That like you're a gang of two and it's sort of like it means that everybody else isn't in that gang.
11:18
Speaker 6
Yeah, I think so.
11:19
Speaker 5
I think that's exactly right. And Alice, you kind of make a similar remark in the show that a marriage is by definition two people choosing each other over everybody else. And it can be exclusionary even to the people you love.
11:35
Speaker 1
Check out Death of an Artist, Season 3, wherever you get your podcasts. All six episodes are out now. And as for Heavyweight, we'll be returning next week with a brand new episode.
The Host
