NPR’s Ari Shapiro Discusses New Memoir, ‘The Best Strangers in the World’

After a career spent listening to others, NPR’s All Things Considered co-host and former White House correspondent Ari Shapiro is finally opening up and telling his own story. His debut memoir, The Best Strangers in the World: Stories from a Life Spent Listening, was released March 21.

In the book, Shapiro takes readers around the globe to reveal the stories behind narratives that are sometimes heartwarming, sometimes heartbreaking, but always poignant. From detailing his time traveling on Air Force One with President Obama and reporting on Syrian refugees fleeing war, to performing with the band Pink Martini and doing a cabaret act with acclaimed entertainer Alan Cumming, Shapiro offers an inside, but personal look into his adventurous spirit and insatiable curiosity.

The award-winning journalist caught up with OFM to talk more about the book, certain excerpts, and how he hopes to continue challenging himself.

Let me begin by asking, how excited are you for the release of your debut book, The Best Strangers in the World?

It’s such a strange feeling because this thing has sat in my head and on my laptop for three years now, and it’s very vulnerable and personal. So, to share it with people I’ve never met feels like a leap of faith, and to see people in the early days connecting and resonating with it, saying that it’s meaningful to them, that it makes them laugh, that it moves them, and it helped them see things in a different way is so meaningful to me. Of course, that’s a piece of the stories that I tell on the radio through NPR, but those stories are not about me. They’re not stories about my life, but this is. It’s been very gratifying to see it resonating with people, and I’m excited that it is finally out in the world.

What initially inspired you to write this memoir?

It’s funny because, in hindsight, I realized that I started writing it in the fall of 2020 when we had all been isolated and locked down. What I wound up writing about really was connection and the things we have in common, the things we share, and the ways we relate to one another. I can see in hindsight that, in some ways, was a reaction to what we were all living through at the time. However, I hope that it’s universal and applicable to any time, particularly because the world we live in right now has so many powerful, well-funded forces that are trying to convince us to see other people as enemies.

Whether it’s a corporation that says, view yourself as somebody who consumes this soda rather than that soda, or a political party that says, somebody who votes for a different candidate is a threat to your existence. What we share is so much greater than what divides us. I wanted to write a book that sort of illuminates, underscores, and reminds people of that.

Opening that box, being vulnerable, and telling your story, what is something you learned about yourself throughout the writing process?

I had always seen the various projects I do as different from one another. I’m a journalist on NPR and I host All Things Considered, but also, I’ve been singing with a band called Pink Martini that’s from my hometown of Portland, Oregon for about 12-13 years now. I’ve toured the world with them, using my vacation time to go join them on stage and perform live, and I’ve recorded on their albums. Also, I’ve made this cabaret show with Alan Cumming that he and I still tour with.

For a long time, those felt like very different muscle groups, very different activities, and different types of my personality, but to answer your question, in writing the book, I realized that these activities share so much more than you might initially think looking at them on the surface. In all these scenarios, I’m telling a story. I’m connecting with an audience, and hopefully, I’m helping people see the world in a slightly different way.

Was it at all difficult for you to find a balance of storytelling between your work life and your personal life?

I always knew that I wanted this to have a mix of the two. I set out to kind of tell a story about how the stories I’ve told have shaped the person I am, but on the flip side of that, the way my identity, history, and life experiences help shape the stories that I tell. To do both those things, I’m going to take readers aboard Air Force One, and I’m going to take readers into war zones to meet fighters who are battling ISIS. I’m also going to take readers backstage at the Hollywood Bowl with me to sing with Pink Martini.

I think All Things Considered on its best days gives you the full spectrum of human experience, and it’s not just politics and war. It’s also joy, surprise, and uplift. It’s business, science, arts, and sports. Maybe those boxes aren’t all checked in this book, but I wanted this book to have the same feeling of you never quite know what’s going to be around the corner, and you’ll get the full range of human emotion because that’s what life is.

Life isn’t just talking to people on their worst days, as I sometimes do in a natural disaster or a mass shooting. Life is not just birthday parties and weddings, but those are all part of the texture of what makes living so rich and what makes being a human such an extraordinary experience. So, I wanted to try to get that full texture.

Is that balance and full texture what you ultimately hope readers take away from the book?

What I want readers to take away from the book, honestly, is a sense of optimism. People, and even friends of mine, often ask, “How do you stay optimistic in the face of everything terrible that’s happening in the world?” Particularly as a journalist when we’re chronicling many of those things. For years, I have given them an answer, and you can think of this memoir almost as that answer in book form.

Over the course of these chapters, readers, and listeners, if they get the audiobook, which I narrated, are going to meet the people who give me hope, who keep me feeling good about the world and humanity, and who keep me optimistic. I hope that even though this book goes to some difficult places and has some stories that may be challenging, that it ultimately leaves people feeling good about the world that we all share.

Is there a part or chapter that you are most eager for us to read?

Given to who I’m speaking to right now, I think the chapter about getting married to my husband in 2004 is going to be interesting for people. It’s a side of me that I don’t often talk about on NPR. I’ve been out my entire professional life, and I’ve mentioned my husband once or twice on the radio.

Actually, the first time I mentioned him was in a disclosure because I was interviewing an author of a book about the legal national security policies of the Obama administration. I said by way of disclosure, my husband worked on some of these issues when he was in the White House Counsel’s Office, and that was the first time I said husband on the radio.

Anyway, the point is, I think the story about when he and I went to San Francisco in 2004 and got married at city hall when it was a huge national controversy. It was the forefront of the culture wars, and we unwittingly became a part of the story. I’m excited for people to read that, hear how they respond to it, and what they think of it.

After your marriage was annulled by the state of California, didn’t you accidentally become the poster child for gay marriage?

Exactly! When we were getting married, we tried to keep a low profile because I was a young reporter just beginning my career, and I felt like I shouldn’t be a part of this thing that everybody was debating because it was my job to narrate the debates, not to participate in them. But I wanted to marry my college boyfriend! So, when we got married, I told my boss I would leave my NPR tote bag at home, and it was such an emotional moment as we were exchanging our vows and rings that we didn’t see the TV camera over our shoulder.

It was only when we got home that night that somebody pointed out we were on the local NBC affiliates news story that day about the same-sex marriage controversy. They didn’t interview us, it was just a beautiful background video footage, but then that footage made its way to the NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, and CNBC. So, basically, anytime any NBC affiliate or network did a story about same-sex marriage, this went on for maybe five years, ours faces were the ones representing that story.

It wasn’t until I was the Justice Correspondent for NPR covering legal affairs, and I got a call from the Justice Correspondent for NBC, Pete Williams who said, “I think you’re in the B-roll for the same-sex marriage story I’m doing tonight.” I explained the situation to him and said, “Look, I have had a long and glorious reign as the face of same-sex marriage, but I’m ready to pass the tiara to someone else.” So, he said he would have me removed from the NBC video library, and that was the end of my reign.

You and your husband never officially got remarried, did you?

No. That first time we got married, it was annulled by the state of California, and then, a year later, we went and had a wedding that we actually took time to plan because that first one was three days notice. We invited family and friends, and his family rabbi and my family Rabbi jointly officiated that ceremony. It was in Napa Valley, but at that point, same-sex marriage still wasn’t legal in California. So, it was a religious ceremony, but it was not a legal one. As I reveal in the book, I’ve now been married twice to the same man, and we’re still not legally married. But we call each other husband, have dogs and a house, so we’re basically married (laughs).

What are your thoughts about the future of gay marriage? Do you think it’s in major jeopardy like some people fear?

Right now, I think LGBTQ people are under assault in various ways that are an immediate and real threat to people’s lives and livelihoods. I don’t know whether same-sex marriage will be the next shoe to drop, but I think right now, there’s enough for people to focus on. Not potential threats, but real threats, and I take solace in knowing that this is not the first time LGBTQ people have had to fight for the right to exist.

The people who came before us developed a toolkit, developed skills, and learned how to not just exist, but thrive in the face of adversity. Queer people have to seek out our history because we, for the most part, are generally not raised by queer people who teach it to us from an early age, and I certainly wasn’t taught it in school, but I think that by seeking out that history, we can see the continuity and learn from those who came before us.

Was there a part of the book or chapter that you were most nervous to write about?

For me, it was just the act of writing about myself broadly. The stories that I tell on the radio are never supposed to be about me. It’s a central tenet of journalism that if the story is about you, you’re doing it wrong, and this is the most personal kind of writing that I’ve ever done. In some ways, it felt like a betrayal of what I’m supposed to be doing as a journalist, even though of course, tons of other journalists have written memoirs. So, there was a learning curve to that.

Also, this nagging voice in the back of my head saying that’s not the kind of storytelling that you do, but one of the things I learned from Alan Cumming is that when something is scary, challenging, or uncomfortable, that’s a reason to lean into it and to try to get comfortable with it. Push yourself, and risk failure. Those are all things that I feel like I tried to do with this book. Now that it’s sort of out of my hands, I get to sit back, watch, and see how it lands with people as it unfolds.

Speaking of Alan Cumming, I’ve interviewed him a couple times, and he is fantastic. I’m curious, how did your cabaret act, Och & Oy, come about?

Alan is the greatest and not only has he become a dear friend, but sort of an older brother figure. A mentor. I’ve learned so much from him and have such a good time with him, and yes, he and I created this cabaret together called Och & Oy. He’s the Scottish one; I’m the Jewish one, and it’s basically 90 minutes of us making each other laugh, hopefully making the audience laugh, singing a bunch of songs, and telling a bunch of stories.

It started because he and I had done a few live events together on stage. After one of them, we were walking off stage, and he said, “We always have such a good rapport during these things. We should make the cabaret show together.” I said, “Don’t joke about that because I will absolutely take you up on it,” and he said, “I’m not joking.”

The next morning, he texted me basically saying he meant what he said, so we spent one weekend in New York at his house figuring out what this thing could possibly be, then one weekend in D.C. at my house figuring it out. Then the next time we saw each other was our opening night in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where, for just those performances, we gave it a different name. We called it Alan Cumming and Ari Shapiro: A Soft Opening.

A large chunk of this book talks about your career as a journalist, which you say was an unlikely ascent. What was the deciding factor behind going full force into this field?

I never planned to be a journalist, and I certainly never aspired to be a host on All Things Considered, even though I’ve listened to NPR from the time I was born. I was just always curious, and I was always somebody who liked asking questions. When I graduated from college, I applied for a million things including an NPR internship, which I got rejected for, but then I found out that NPR’s legendary Legal Affairs Correspondent, Nina Totenberg, hires her own interns separate from the NPR internship program.

So, I applied to her, and when she gave me an internship, I still didn’t know if I was going to stay in journalism. Then I got an opportunity after that to be a temporary editorial assistant on Morning Edition, which became a permanent job, and then I started doing some freelance stories on the side, which led to temporary contracts as a reporter. One thing led to another, and I kept thinking, as long as the next thing is interesting, challenging, and I have an opportunity to do something that’ll keep stretching my skillset and abilities, I’ll stick around. Now, it’s been more than 20 years.

I must ask, what was it really like traveling on Air Force One with President Obama?

It’s a weird experience because you have no autonomy. On one hand, you’re sort of in the center of global power, and on the other hand, you’re kind of cloistered in the press cabin, waiting for somebody to throw you crumbs like ducks in a petting zoo (laughs). However, you really bond with the other members of the press corps because you spend more time with each other than you do with your own spouse. It can be incredibly intense, but you get access to seeing people, places, and things that no tourist would ever have access to. It can be very thrilling in that respect.

As a co-host on All Things Considered, what is your absolute favorite part about doing that show?

It’s the totality of the range of things that I get to talk about on any given day. Just to give you an example, on the day we’re recording this, I have an interview with these two high school choir kids who sang backup for Bono & The Edge from U2 for Tiny Desk Concerts, and I’m also interviewing an abortion activist in Poland to be sentenced for the crime of helping people get abortion pills. Those two ends of the spectrum kind of give you a sense of what a typical day for me is like, and the best part of hosting All Things Considered is that I get to embrace that full range of human experience and have that wide variety of conversations.

Moving forward, how are you going to continue to help people listen to one another and find connection and commonality with others who seem different?

I don’t think there’s any one answer to that question. I try to do that on NPR; I try to do that through Pink Martini, Alan Cumming, and now through this book. I like finding lots of different ways to connect with people and lots of different ways to tell stories, and I think that through line is the one you put your finger on. Kind of drawing connections.

What are some future goals you hope to accomplish with your career and platform?

I want to keep challenging myself, doing things that are scary, and highlighting the stories that people who we would never otherwise hear from. I am perfectly happy to interview a senator, a member of Congress, or a member of the cabinet, but frankly, those people have no shortage of outlets, platforms, or opportunities to make their voices heard. What really inspires me every day is the chance to elevate the voices of people who are not heard nearly as often.

Before we wrap up, are there any other upcoming projects or anything else you would like to mention or plug?

Alan and I are going to be doing our show, Och & Oy, at the Café Carlyle in New York City from April 5-15, and this is going to be the first time we’ve done the show in New York. It’s such an iconic venue, so we are looking forward to that!

Stay up-to-date and connect with Shapiro by following him on Twitter and Instagram @arishapiro, or visit his official website, arishapiro.work. The Best Strangers in the World is available to purchase at all major book retailers.

Photos courtesy of JJ Geiger, Victor Jeffreys, Ryan Kellman, Emilio Madrid, and Ari Shapiro