Stephen Fry On Depression And Loving Life

The living legend on Jewish ancestry, national identity, the UK election and more.

Stephen Fry is an actor, comedian, director, writer, and narrator. His TV shows include “A Bit of Fry & Laurie,” “Jeeves and Wooster,” and “Blackadder,” and his films include Wilde, Gosford Park, and Love & Friendship. His Broadway career includes “Me and My Girl” and “Twelfth Night.” He’s produced several documentary series, including “Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive,” and he’s the president of Mind, a mental health charity. He has written 17 books, including three autobiographies, and he narrated all seven of the Harry Potter books. You can find him on Substack at The Fry Corner — subscribe!

You can listen right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — on the profound pain of bipolar depression, and whether the EU diminishes Englishness — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: growing up in Norfolk; his mom’s Jewish ancestry in Central Europe; her dad facing anti-Semitism after fighting in WWI and coming to England to train farmers; embracing Englishness; family members lost to the Holocaust; Disraeli; the diversity of Tory PMs; Stephen’s wayward youth; wanting to become a priest as a teen; growing up gay in England; the profound influence of Oscar Wilde and his trials; Gore Vidal on puritanism; Cavafy; Auden; E.M. Forster; Orwell; Stephen’s bipolarism; the dark lows and manic highs; my mum’s lifelong struggle with that illness; dementia; her harrowing final days; transgenerational trauma; Larkin’s “This Be the Verse”; theodicy; the shame of mental illness; Gen Z’s version of trauma; the way Jesus spoke; St. Francis; the corruption and scandals of the Church; Hitchens; the disruption of Silicon Valley and the GOP; Chesterton’s hedge metaphor for conservatism; Burke and Hayek; Oakeshott; coastal elites and populist resentment; the Iraq War and the 2008 financial crisis; Stephen writing jokes for Tony Blair; Brexit and national identity; Boris Johnson; Corbyn and anti-Semitism; Starmer’s victory and his emphasis on stability; Labour’s new super-majority; and Sunak’s graceful concession.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Lionel Shriver on human limits and resentment, Anne Applebaum on autocrats, Eric Kaufmann on reversing woke extremism, and Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy on animal cruelty. (Van Jones’ PR team canceled his planned appearance.) Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

On last week’s episode on politicized faith, a rabbi writes:

I very much enjoyed and appreciated your conversation with Erick Erickson.

I confess to an annoyance that has gained more poignancy in an age of rising antisemitism. When Erickson speaks of “Christian principles of love your neighbor and seeing all human beings in God’s image,” I wish there was an acknowledgment that he is quoting the Hebrew Bible, twice, and that these are principles that Judaism gave to the world.

He is also quite obviously channeling the Gospels. From another listener:

In your episode with Erickson, you refer to Jesus as a “strange guy from Palestine.” It is, of course, de rigeur on the left to say that “Jesus was a Palestinian,” or similar ahistorical nonsense, as a way of garnering support for the present-day Palestinian cause. But it was only after the Romans destroyed the Jewish Temple in 70 CE, and likely after they put down the final Jewish revolt in 135 CE, that they renamed the Jewish state of Judea, choosing the name “Syria Palaestina” — likely drawing inspiration from the Philistines of the Bible. Of course the Palestinians of today are Arab, not Philistine or Canaanite. This all happened about a century after Jesus’ death, so suffice to say he would have thought of himself as Judean — certainly not Palestinian.

There are no Philistines or Canaanites anymore, though the Palestinians claim to be indigenous — which is to say, more indigenous than the Jews, whom they paint as European colonists. But we are the furthest thing from colonists. We are Jews, just like Jesus, and we once again live in Judea.

Can we not be quite so touchy? I wasn’t making an ideological or political point. Next up, a clip on the post-Christian right:

“An avid listener to your show” addresses another topic:

In your discussion with Erickson, you seemed to remain skeptical about the danger of scientism and defended the dominant global warming theory: that CO2 is responsible for the warming, and human emissions play a profound role. You said that you had not heard any other global warming theories. That does not surprise me; these theories are labeled by the scientific establishment as conspiracy theories and are not allowed to be published. I know of two of these theories supported by respected scientists, including a Nobel laureate in physics: (i) that water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas, (ii) that Milankovitch orbital cycles are responsible for climate change.

On Nov 1, 2021, Google started censoring “global warming skeptics.” The policy affects the monetization of “content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.” This includes content referring to climate change as a hoax or a scam, claims denying that long-term trends show the global climate is warming, and claims denying that greenhouse gas emissions or human activity contribute to climate change. It is unsettling how conspiracy theories are dumped together with scientific skepticism.

Humanity must play some role in global warming, but it is not clear how big. Why must we sacrifice our wellbeing for the goal to stop this warming process? Why now, when the climate is still way cooler than before the last Ice Age? Palm trees once grew in southern Canada and Siberia — that’s why we have oil in the ground. I am a physicist who worked on mathematical modeling of highly nonlinear systems (as our atmosphere is). We always have many adjustable parameters in our models, because we do not know their exact values. So, mathematical modelers like to say: simulation results usually confirm the modeler’s hypothesis.

I remain open to persuasion on empirical subjects. But I don’t think moving to post-carbon energy has that many downsides anyway, if not done too crudely.

On another episode:

I just listened to your conversation with Elizabeth Corey on Oakeshott, and loved his question about what it is, exactly, that people want to be saved from:

I immediately remembered Hitchens’ observation that many Christians’ idea of salvation is, in fact, a yearning to live in a celestial North Korea. I think Oakeshott would have agreed with him completely 🙂

I suspect he would have. A guest rec:

First, I am sending your mother, you, and your loved ones my prayers for her easy passing and comfort.

Secondly, please have David Bentley Hart on the podcast. He’s the author of many books, including The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. He is often described as a Christian apologist, but that book makes him more of an “atheism debunker.” It’s one of the most important books I’ve ever read. Hart is not an absolutist and does not pretend he’s figured it all out, but he puts in context how and why atheism exists, and how it’s as much of a “therapy” as it is a serious assessment of the world around us. It is a gloriously hopeful, humane book.

To be honest, I’m a little intimidated by Hart, but have always wanted to invite him on. I feel I need to read him more though, before I dive in. I have his New Testament translation.

Another writes, “It would be great to hear you chat with Yuval Levin about his latest book on the American Constitution.” A legal expert could help us answer questions like these on our new presidential immunity:

I’m writing to vent a little and ask a smart conservative how this Supreme Court is conservative. How can it, on the one hand, get rid of Chevron deference — an obvious blow to executive power — but then in the same breath give a president or former president absolute immunity for official acts — which appear to be pretty much everything a president does besides maybe sleep and eat? So the Court says the executive branch can’t interpret laws to make regulations, but the president can do whatever he likes, even if it breaks the law? The latter seems to make no sense for a “conservative” movement intent on dismantling the administrative state.

It seems as if this movement, led by the Court, doesn’t want to dismantle the administrative state so much as to put all its power into the hands of the chief executive. Again, that doesn’t strike me as conservative at all, but maybe I’m missing something.

Roberts strikes me as the only actual conservative on the court.

On to the presidential race, a reader writes:

First off, Andrew, condolences on your family situation. I can only hope your faith comforts you.

On Biden. The debate was the first time I saw what you and all the other Biden haters see. For the first time, he looked scared, and lost, and OLD.

At the same time, I’m willing to say that it might be just one bad day. (It’s been pointed out to me that Dukakis had a stronger lead than Trump does now, and we know how that turned out.) The question is, was it just one bad day?

I’m neutral on whether Biden should quit. But for one thing, it’s not as simple as you seem to think it is, largely because a new candidate would have to raise their own money. Kamala at least would not have to do that, and awful as she is, as the head of a ticket, that means that Trump is the only candidate who could be accused of being old and feeble-minded.

If Joe can ride this out, that’s fine with me. If he can’t, and we need someone else, that’s fine too. What matters is stopping Trump, and that should inform Joe’s decision.

I would ask two questions of Joe. One, was that debate brain-freeze just an acute thing or something we need to worry about in the near future, let alone the next four years? (And that question would also be asked of the people around Biden, like his Secret Service and the medical staff who need to be around a president for just such reason.)

Two, Joe: do you remember when Trump was president and you ran against him because you knew you were the only guy who could beat him? And you were RIGHT then? Now, can you look at your own polls — and compare that to polls of Democrats in down-ballot races, to the success of their efforts against state abortion bans after Dobbs, to their midterm victories and special election victories — and ask yourself, do you want to be the only reason Democrats lose elections that are theirs to lose?

In that regard, Andrew, here’s a quote from C.S. Lewis you should appreciate: “We all want progress. But … if you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.”

Another looks to the vice president:

In 1994, when Kamala Harris and Willie Brown — the Democratic speaker of the California State Assembly — became a public couple, she had been a deputy prosecutor at the DA’s office in Alameda County for four years. Little is known of her political activity before Brown, other than that at UC Berkeley Law School, she was president of the Black Student Association. Did he (60 years old and still married) pursue her, or did she (30 years old) chase him down because of her political aspirations? Check out this piece: “Kamala Harris launched political career with $120K ‘patronage’ job from boyfriend Willie Brown.”

I could take a 2×4 to all these idiots who say that Kamala has to be the presidential candidate because it would be an insult to all women of color is she weren’t. There are probably millions of people who would not vote for her, but would vote for Michelle Obama, or Oprah Winfrey, or Stacey Abrams.

Another huge problem is Kamala’s forced effusiveness, highly exaggerated mannerisms, and constant cackling. You don’t have to look long to realize that she’s someone who’s always performing a two-dimensional persona, unsure of who’s inside her skin.

She is extremely weird, and utterly unelectable as president of the US.

On the IVF thread, some final thoughts from readers. The first:

Your original IVF piece hit me pretty hard. It did feel cruel, and personal, and full of misunderstandings. It always hits me hard when people suggest that that my gorgeous 13-year-old boy — with his curly hair and blue eyes and brilliant mind — shouldn’t exist because we discarded some clumps of cells.

But then I read your thoughtful curation of responses, complete with links and images. (One reader wrote, “IVF isn’t about playing God or discarding life. It’s about creating life where it would otherwise be impossible.”) I felt a renewed sense of gratitude. Because the difference between you and so many people I know is that they wouldn’t use their platforms to share rebuttals to things they believed and said. They’re not interested in even hearing nuance, much less sharing ideas that contradict their own. So on balance, this whole experience has made me glad the Dish exists.

Thank you. It’s how this place has always operated — for nearly 25 years now. The immediate contribution of readers’ perspectives is unique to the web, and the Dish is webby in its core. I have to say though that I tried very hard not to be “cruel” or “personal” in my original piece. Another writes:

Wow, you really took a lot of flak from readers here, and I wanted to say kudos for, as always, being a person who can hold space for all opinions. It always feels like love and sanity when you do that.

Something that struck me among your reader stories was how many people see a life devoid of meaning and purpose without children.

I speak as a Greek Orthodox woman who wanted a family but it didn’t happen (as opposed to, say, a child-free influencer on TikTok selling workshops about how great it is to have a tidy apartment). My meaning and purpose is anchored on faith that first and foremost says love God and neighbor — and those things can be done with or without children. Being of service, putting one’s talents to use, being grateful, connecting to God. I find it frightful that a lack of children should lead to utter despair. It feels like fertility worship, rather than on transcendent spiritual faith that puts the Creator at the apex, not ourselves as creatures.

I agree. As a gay man, how could I not? The moral duty to raise and treasure the next generation is what makes parenthood a unique virtue, but it can also be practiced without personal reproduction. I think it is part of the charism of homosexuality that we operate as curators of the past and guides to the future to the next generation outside of parenthood: education, public service, religious experience, art, literature, theater. Another reader:

As always, these stories from Dishheads are incredibly moving. But is IVF the only route to becoming parents, if you cannot conceive naturally? Adoption is a more humane option, and definitely the one I’d rate as the “utmost expression of love.” To love someone else’s child and raise them as your own is the more “Christian” path. Must everyone’s child be biologically related to them? Of course it’s easy for me to say, but it’s our modern fallacy that everyone can have everything. Perhaps we cannot, and that should be ok.

Amen. There are so many children out there needing good parents. Another reader:

Thank you for posting so many reader responses to your column on IVF. Your ability to engage winsomely with so many people — especially on such a personal subject and during such a difficult time for your family — is one of the reasons I’m happy to subscribe.

Two unpersuasive points have been cited in your reader dissents: (1) implantation is a better logical place for the beginning of human life (or personhood, or moral significance?) than fertilization, and (2) plenty of embryos die naturally, so there’s little-to-no problem with destroying them. Concerning the first point, once fertilization happens — once the egg and sperm connect — cell division begins. The new, resulting zygote has all of the genetic information of the new human being — its own unique DNA. Sure, it soon needs to implant into the uterine wall to continue to live and grow. But it is already living, growing, and unique. Fertilization is the most reasonable place to locate human beginnings.

As for the second point, one of your readers suggested that creating extra embryos during IVF serves a similar purpose to having a large number of kids, as both address the risk of some offspring dying. True! And yet, no one would say killing one’s child was more permissible back when kids were more likely to die of natural causes. Childhood life may have been nasty, brutish, and short back in the day, but life before birth may remain so today. Still, taking willful actions to destroy human life has always been assessed on its own terms, not relative to the natural death rate. Our failure to do so in the IVF context is, as you argued, a failure of moral judgment.

Another voices unease with surrogacy:

I can see your points regarding IVF. It is unsettling to think there are jars of potential children frozen somewhere, waiting to live life. But I also see why the IVF families are disturbed by your column.

The true strangeness to me is surrogacy (not to be confused with gestational carriers). In surrogacy, a woman donates her own egg, which creates a child who is half-sibling to her own children. How do you explain to your child that you gave away their sibling?

In my state, surrogacy is a huge business. Don’t be fooled when they couch it as, “I want others to feel the joy I feel as a parent.” That warm and fuzzy shtick would disappear if the huge fees evaporated and women were reimbursed only for their medical expenses related to the birth. It’s an ugly business, no matter what they like to call it.

I think it should be a legal option in a free country. A final story for the thread:

After struggling to save my son from opioid addiction, he finally succumbed to fentanyl and died before finishing college. Serious reflection ensued: my wife was infertile (from cancer), and for all I knew, I was carrying some gene predisposing children to addiction. We are not young. In the end, we decided to have a child, of necessity, through donor conception and surrogacy.

There are three aspects of this experience that touch on the larger moral issues, some of which you addressed. First, I could not bear the thought of having another son, and the process made it possible for me to guarantee that my child would be female. Since donor conception was involved, there was also the question of selecting genes for desirable traits — initially just lack of mental illness, but ultimately, lack of anything undesirable. The process became inseparable from a eugenic intention, and that has certainly given me pause.

Second, our yearning for a child, and a child with (or without) certain characteristics, came to a head in choosing our daughter’s name — something we did well before we reached the last step of implantation. But at that point, there were six embryos: three male and three female. The purpose of the multiplicity was to improve the odds, but we knew that whichever of the three female embryos was the one to succeed, that would be the one to carry the name we had already chosen and be the object of the many fantasies we already harbored.

One of your readers talks about when a soul might enter an embryo. In a sense, we had already created that soul through our own imaginations, and that already-named person would either be identical to embryo #1, embryo #2, or embryo #3. This could not help but make me think that the personhood of the embryo was, in a very postmodern sense, our construction. This did not make it, or her, any less meaningful or real to us. It merely introduced an element of strangeness that extended the strangeness already implicit in the process of reproduction.

Third, despite our fervent pro-choice stance and conviction that embryos were not beings with rights, we knew that the option to keep them frozen, donate them to other intended parents, or discard them (or donate them to medical research) would be up to us. Initially they remained frozen because we were uncertain whether we would want more children, but the time came when we knew that was not going to be the case. If we placed so little value on embryos as to be pro-choice, why not discard?

But by then it felt impossible to do so. They were not persons in the sense that pro-lifers imagined, but they were not mere tissue either. They were some third thing: quasi-persons, precious but not limitlessly so. So we had to donate them, and because we did, we are now filled with joy to know that someday our daughter may want to seek out the genetic siblings we know were brought to term successfully.

One of the five did not succeed, but we do not grieve the loss. Two remain frozen.

A beautiful story. Another recalls the pain of losing a parent:

I’m terribly sorry to read of your mother’s last days. My dad died with dementia a few years back, in a care home, and it’s a terrible and sadly graceless way to end. Wishing profoundly that your mother and family find peace in the coming days, and if peace is beyond her, that you at least find some grace and meaning in enduring.

Fourteen years ago I discovered William Bronk’s poem “The Acts of the Apostles” through the Dish. Like you, I was blown away by it. “Some grief is stronger than any joy before or after it, and life survives.” Thinking of that, and your family, this morning.

Another reader just missed her mother’s death:

I’m so sorry for the ordeal you’ve all been enduring. May there be peace, comfort and blessed rest for all! My mother died nearly 50 years ago and spent her last days at home. Her disease — severe, non-remitting multiple sclerosis — had completely incapacitated her for nearly a decade prior, but we had no idea that it could also kill her prematurely. So my dad and I kept thinking she could recover from the recent symptom of fluid that filled her lungs to the point that she stopped breathing and required resuscitation (and numerous trips to emergency).

Her doctor never told us what her prognosis was at that time. Those days were so different than today. She stopped breathing many times in the last three months of her life and each time was brought back, usually by my dad with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until the ambulance arrived. The last couple of months my dad had to hire a nurse to be with her in the daytime while he was at work and I was taking classes at community college. The rest of the time it was just the two of us taking care of her, as it had been during the decade of her illness.

At the moment she died, my dad and I were at work and school, and the nurse was at home with my mother. However, it just so happened that my mother’s doctor, who lived a few blocks away, had stopped by to see her (which he’d only done on a few random occasions in those last three months). So it was the doctor and nurse who were there. This was especially a good thing because the nurse, who often said proudly that she had “never lost a patient,” would have, I think, been devastated to have been there alone when it happened. As would I.

My dad, whose work normally took him far and wide to a variety of different places each day, happened to be nearby because he had needed to take his car to be serviced that day. So he happened to arrive home a few minutes after my mom passed. (And in those pre-cell phone days, it could have been impossible to reach him for hours afterward.)

And I, who would normally have been arriving home at just about the time she died, happened to be delayed by an hour that day waiting for a friend to give me a ride, and so I arrived home about an hour after. Her body had already been taken away by then, and the doctor had left. The nurse couldn’t stand to be there when I learned of my mother’s death, so she quietly passed me in the entry hall going out as I came in, with my dad waiting inside to tell me.

I felt that the way all this happened to play out was an answer to prayer, because I had not wanted to be there when my mom died, and I had certainly been terrified of being alone with her when she stopped breathing. It was a terrible time in many ways but I, from a non-religious family, did feel rather strongly that God was there.

The events of the past two weeks are still very raw and it will take me some time to recount them in words on a screen. They were the most harrowing of my life, and I lived through the AIDS epidemic. I was there, as were my beloved brother and sister, who have borne by far the largest share of the burden these past few years. And my mother knew we were there, even as the dementia was having its way with her. She died in her sleep at 1 am. All I can say is that I am so glad she is now with God, and free finally of the intense suffering she endured throughout her life.

One more reader:

I’m so sorry to hear about your mother’s pain and how things are ending in such a distressing fashion. I lost my mother three days after Christmas in 2021. She had dementia and was under the care of a nurse. We used to feed her puree and thickened OJ because she couldn’t swallow properly anymore. When I’d sit with her and spoon it into her mouth, she’d look at me with vacant eyes and sometimes shriek open-mouthed. I knew she was gone, and I knew she was still there. It was so hard.

I’m gay, 53, son of an Irish father, obsessed with Thatcher so much that I interned at Central Office and sent her flowers and watched her greet the press on her doorstep post-resignation as an MP. I have all the PSB albums including the EPs (love Relentless), and for these reasons and more I’ve felt a connection to you for a long time. I really wish you peace and comfort as hellish winds swirl about you. You will get through this. Your mother will find peace. Love really is the answer.

It is the only answer.

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