Hats & Eyeglasses
by Martha Frankel

List Price: $14.95
Pages: 256
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9781585426973
Publisher: Tarcher

Martha Frankel grew up in a warm and loving family of die-hard gamblers, where her father's poker games and her mother's mah jongg mingled with big pots of delicious food and endless gossip and storytelling. The kids did their own gambling: Martha, her sister Helene, and their cousins bet on which of their ever-dieting mothers would lose the most every week, which cousin could hold their breath longest underwater or who could eat the most matzo. She went with her father and uncles to the track most Tuesdays, carrying the daily Racing Form in her bookbag.

When she was eighteen, Martha left for to the University of Miami, looking to find a life that didn’t include detailed daily study of the sports section. She thought the gambling gene had passed her by. She studied English in hopes of becoming a writer, dropping out when her ill-advised advisor told her that English majors become English teachers, not writers.

Then Martha met editor Annie Flanders, who was just starting the original Details magazine. Annie gave Martha her start as Details’ book reviewer. Martha also wrote the magazine’s first “Knifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” a first-person column about plastic surgery, where she described her own breast reduction (this was in the 1980s, when such procedures were far less commonplace).

Her first celebrity interview was Aidan Quinn, and she started doing more entertainment pieces. She interviewed Elizabeth Taylor and director Nicholas Roeg, and toured the newly opened Tribeca Film Center with Robert De Niro. In 1990, she started writing for other magazines and traveled around the world to interview international entertainment personalities such as Roman Polanski, Juliette Binoche, Anthony Hopkins, Susan Sarandon, a 19-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio, and then-heavyweight champ Mike Tyson.

Her work has appeared in magazines as diverse as The New Yorker, Fashions of the New York Times, Japanese and German Men's Vogue, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, and Movieline's Hollywood Life. She has been an on-air contributor to VH1's Sexiest Movie Moments, Entertainment Tonight, and Inside Edition.

For the past fifteen years, she has co-hosted of the Woodstock Roundtable, a Sunday morning radio talk-show on WDST in Woodstock, NY. And since the inception of the Woodstock Film Festival in 2000, she has been the moderator of the Actor's Dialogue, a live interview which has featured, over the years, such noted actors as Lili Taylor, Stanley Tucci, Steve Buscemi, Liev Schreiber, Olympia Dukakis, David Strathairn, Marcia Gaye Hardin, and Peter Reigert.

She won a NYFFA Award in creative nonfiction, was the 1997 Philip Morris Fellow at The MacDowell Colony, and the 2003 Artist-in-Residence at SUNY Ulster, where she taught a class in memoir writing.

Martha Frankel lives near Woodstock, New York with her husband, woodworker and sculptor Steve Heller. Hats & Eyeglasses is her first book.

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Q: In your book you describe learning some of the unwritten rules and skills in poker --- for example the ability to not show emotion, to only show your “poker face.” What are some of the life lessons that you have learned from playing poker?

A: The reason I am a good interviewer is that I know how to listen, to watch, to understand that what is not being said is often more important than what is. People tell me things, they always have. Strangers confide in me, tell me about their marriages in the supermarket, admit to their addictions while waiting to get into the movies. It’s because I’m genuinely interested. I know how to be still and take in information. At the poker table, I just listen and watch really intently. So sometimes I think it’s the other way around --- that everything I learned in life makes me a better poker player. And the fact that I never forget a card that’s been played and that I have a great head for math doesn’t hurt!


Q: You have talked about the flood of letters you received following the hardcover publication of Hats & Eyeglasses, from readers who have also confronted addiction in their lives. What do some of these letters say?

A: This is the universal thing they say: thank you so much for writing your book. I know you think what you did is bad but what I did is worse. They tell me these wild tales of drugs, alcohol, sex --- the most unimaginable stories. The most interesting one I got was from a guy who told me he’s a surgeon, and that he stays up for three or four days straight, playing poker online. And then he goes directly into the operating room. He said he read about me in The New York Times, but he wasn’t ready to buy my book, because as much as it was screwing up his life, he wasn’t ready to stop playing online. That really got to me, because I remember feeling that way, and every addict I know tells me that there was a time they knew they had to stop and didn’t. The surgeon and I emailed back and forth, and I convinced him to give me his address so I could send him a copy of Hats & Eyeglasses. “That was so nice of you,” he wrote when he got it. I had to tell him the truth --- that I wanted his name and address so I could make sure that he never operated on me or anyone I love.

A few months ago I emailed him to ask how things were going, and he told me that he had just recently read my book and had stopped playing online. Just that week he had told his fiancé and his parents what he had been doing, and he was starting to feel like maybe, someday, he might be able to breathe again.

I think my story resonates with readers because I am a very lucky person --- I’m successful, have a great husband and family and friends, am surrounded by all the things people think they need to be happy. And then I did something that put all of that at risk. If it could happen to me...

What I know now is that self-sabotage is universal, and that it can come out of nowhere and ruin you.

Q: You describe in the book how difficult it was for you to tell your husband and other loved ones what was going on your life. Do you regret not telling them sooner or was presenting them with this book by way of explanation the right choice?

A: I don’t regret it because I’m not, by nature, a regretter. Do I wish I could have just told people the truth? I don’t even know how to answer that. It would have taken an act of courage that I was not capable of.

Even after I sold Hats & Eyeglasses, even after I wrote it, I could never really picture myself telling Steve and my friends and family. I just thought I would die before that happened. I put off finishing the book for so long that my editor threatened to cancel our contract. My agent called to tell me that I was going to have to find a new publisher and I freaked out. I begged my editor to give me 6 more months and then I went into hyperdrive. But I still thought, nah, this will never see the light of day. When it became clear to me that it was going to be published, and published soon, that’s when I gave everyone the manuscript. That was the hardest, darkest, scariest time in my life. I did not believe that anyone, especially my husband, Steve, and my sister, brother-in-law, and a couple of my friends would ever be able to look at me again.

And it turned out to be even more than a miracle, because no one has held it against me. That has taught me about the real nature of forgiveness, and how it can make any relationship stronger.

I am a totally different person now because of that experience. Every connection I have to other people is stronger. Am I embarrassed? Do I wish the first story I had to tell was a happy, snappy little tale? Maybe. But Hats & Eyeglasses was the hand I was dealt, so to speak.

Q: This is not your typical addiction story. You still enjoy live poker, but you know you can’t allow yourself to play online. How is that possible?

A: I think there is a difference between obsession and addiction. I was obsessed with poker – and I feel that it would have played itself out in the way most obsessions do. But then I started playing online, and it was like the difference between smoking a joint and doing crack cocaine. It was a completely other beast. I have been invited to a lot of gambling conferences and I’m told that since I’m still “an active” gambler that I’m in denial. But I don’t believe that. I think the whole thing about there being only one kind of recovery is ridiculous. I have a friend who is a recovered heroin addict who sometimes goes out and has a rum and coke. There are a lot of shades. The one-size-fits all mentality is losing a lot of steam.  

Q: Do you feel like you have the potential to become addicted to something again?

A: I would be an idiot to think I am above addiction. I think that’s what got me in trouble the first time, my hubris. But I hope I would be hard-pressed to put myself in that kind of position again --- and to put my family or myself at risk like that. I have always gotten engrossed in my passions and obsessions, be it knitting, poker, cooking. And I’m always waiting for the next one to come along and grab me. I look forward to it. But the slippery slope to addiction is hard to quantify. All I can say is, I hope not. And if you see me headed that way, just be kind and knock me unconscious.

Q: Throughout this book you describe men and women as often inhabiting very distinct and separate worlds exemplified by the descriptions in the beginning of the book of your mother and her friends playing maj jong in the kitchen while your father played poker with his friends in the living room. As a kid, and then later as an adult, you learned to move easily between both worlds. Which world are you most comfortable in?

A: Most of the strong friendships in my life are with women. They are the people I talk to every day, the ones I confide in. Yet I have had women tell me that I think like a man, and men tell me that I’m just like one of the boys. Nothing could be further from the truth. I think exactly like a woman, and I am definitely not one of the guys. The people who know me know that. But people want to stick you in a box, and to lots of people, the box they think describes me says MALE. That said, if I walk into a house with 20 people in it, and most of the women are in the kitchen and the men are in the basement watching sports, I’m heading right to the basement. I am drawn to things that men like --- sports, cards, horses, you name it. But I’m very much a nurturer, and that’s the driving force in my life.  

Q: Your mother and Tillie had an extremely close friendship. Have you had friendships like this in your life? In what ways, if any, have they been modeled on the friendship between these two women?

A: Yes, I have friendships that are really intense and close. I watched my mother and Tillie navigate some very hard times. For the last twenty-five years of their lives, they spoke to each other last thing at night and first thing in the morning. And then spent most of their days together. They fought like sisters, but it was them against the world as far as anyone else was concerned. The central lesson I learned from them was that their friendship was more important than being right. When Tillie did something my mother didn’t like and I asked her if she was mad, my mother used to say “Mad, schmad. She’s my best friend.”  Years ago I went into therapy, and one day I was complaining about my friends and the therapist said, “If you’re mad at one person, talk to them. If you’re mad at two people, take a deep breath. And if you’re mad at three or more people, take a look in the mirror.” I thought that was so profound. I couldn’t wait to tell my mother and Tillie. When I did they just nodded. They understood that instinctively. Boy, I could have saved myself a fortune.

Q: What inspired you to tell this story?

A: I got a new agent and she invited me to lunch to discuss what book ideas I had. I had four of them and they all had to do with the kind of celebrity journalism I had been writing. I watched her as I pitched each idea, and while she was smiling and nodding, her body language was kind of neutral. So then I leaned in and said the words I hadn’t told a soul: “I’ve been gambling on-line and nobody knows.” And she perked right up. I knew then that I had a book.
I always knew that I had to come clean about what happened to me in order to live a better life, a life without the paralyzing fear and guilt I was feeling. But I never thought I’d write a memoir about it. I just thought I would write it down on a scrap of paper that people could read when I died, like the papers you slip in the Wailing Wall.

Q: You're a successful entertainment journalist. Did that prepare you in any way to write Hats & Eyeglasses?

A: When I was writing stories for magazines, I cared very much that the reader read to the end of my piece. I didn’t worry whether I liked the person I was interviewing, or if their body of work was fascinating --- that was like an extra-added bonus. But I did care that my story was good enough to keep you engaged.