How To Charm Anyone
If you want to light up a room (and who doesn’t?), remember this cardinal rule: The most interesting talkers know how to listen. (Photo: Herbert Matter)
When I was a child in Indiana in the Carter era, my mother and her best friend, Linda, would sit at my family’s kitchen table smoking, talking, and laughing in the afternoons after my mom got back from her office. I hung on their every word. Both of them were born in 1943, both were college professors’ wives, and both had three kids. An outsider might have seen them as a pair of boring Midwestern ladies—one with a job (but not quite a career); the other, Linda, a stay-at-home mom who wrote romance novels. But even taking into consideration the fact that I was an impressionable insider, I knew these women were not just interesting, they were exceptionally interesting.
I wasn’t the only one captivated by them; by the age of eight, I could see their impact on others at the parties they threw. Both of them had a sense of occasion—and if there was no occasion, they created one. Eavesdropping on their chats about their friends, their travels, and their youthful adventures on the storied East Coast, I was filled with anxiety that I would grow up to be incredibly dull compared with them. Determined to decode the secret to their charisma, I treated their conversations as a kind of master class in how to be interesting. Pulling that off, they showed me, did not necessarily mean being unconventional, outrageous, or famous. It was a way of interacting with the world, and anybody could do it.
Reduced to two core principles, their knack comes down to 1) having a broad repertoire of insights and anecdotes and 2) being engaging: gauging the tastes and temperaments of the people around you and adjusting your conversation to suit them. You can’t just passively acquire adventures, friendships, and epiphanies; it requires initiative. If you live in L.A. or London but spend every day going to the gym, then to the office, then returning home to order in dinner and binge-watch Netflix, you might as well be living in a remote woodland hut. My mother and her pals, however, were constantly coming up with engrossing activities—volunteering for a mayoral campaign, organizing a canoe regatta, driving en masse to the Indy 500, and once, dressing up as Roller-Derby queens in satin shorts and hauling our fathers off for a night at a roller rink.
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In New York City, back at the dawn of the new millennium, weary of the repetitive cycle of museum visits, movies, and expensive restaurant dinners, I took a page from suburban Indiana and founded a book club that doubles as a gourmet club. More than a dozen of us have met every six weeks for 14 years. If I ever move away from Manhattan, I won’t miss MoMA, but I will miss the warm evenings of literary talk, friendship, and feasting.
During these wine-tinged evenings, many of the women share stories of their particular obsessions, just as my mother and Linda did back in that Indiana kitchen. As a child, I was ashamed of my unimaginative passion for swimming (my mother hated all sports) and embarrassed by my budding Francophilia, thinking it was hopelessly trite to love the land of baguettes, berets, and Pepé Le Pew. I yearned to develop more-exotic interests, which I thought would qualify me to chip in during their mesmerizing reminiscences. But as I grew up and started taking cheap flights to explore Africa, South America, and Japan and catch up with my well-traveled role models, I slowly came to see that, well, I truly did love France, not to mention northern Michigan (where my family gathers for an annual reunion) and even Indiana. And I also still loved swimming. Belatedly, I realized that my mom’s and Linda’s passions had grown naturally out of their experiences. It was the sincerity of these attachments that made it compelling to talk about them—and to hear about them.
Nonetheless, I had far to go before I would reach this epiphany. Once, convinced that I at last had something valuable to contribute to my mother’s tête-à-têtes with her friend, I read aloud a poem I’d written, called “The Stagecoach.” They listened indulgently, their eyes tearing up with mirth, until they finally burst out laughing. This was not the effect I’d hoped for. Even now, my mother, who is 71, sometimes breaks out the line “The stagecoach brown and cracked with age” and cackles. But even at such times, she says, as she did then, “Go for it. Nobody cares if you look foolish but you.” Everyone strikes out socially from time to time; the key lies in not letting insecurity discourage you from trying again. Linda also chimed in reassuringly that afternoon, telling me an unflattering anecdote about herself as a girl trying to commandeer the attention of a table of adults with a long-winded tale about her day’s activities. Her uncle interrupted her after five minutes and said, affectionately but firmly, “This is not of general interest, my dear.”
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So once you are no longer a child, how do you figure out what is interesting to others? The first thing to do is take the time to read the room and then calibrate your conversation accordingly. Often enough, when you first encounter a new circle of people, someone will abruptly ask the daunting question “What do you do?” If you’re lucky enough to have a fabulous career, your occupation may be enough to satisfy their curiosity, but if you don’t have a job or don’t love the job you have, you don’t have to clam up. The entire time I knew Linda, she had no day job, but I saw her as a glorious, heroic career woman because when the conversation turned to workplaces, she would describe the job she’d had for a couple of years before I was born, when she worked at the publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux, zipping around New York City in a convertible with her famous boss, Roger Straus. Similarly, although my mother now paints basset hounds, she can regale new acquaintances with her adventures in Moscow, where she ran an office for two years in the ’90s, and soon the conversation starts to hum as her new friends rival her stories with their own career highlights. When people ask, “What do you do?” they really mean, “Tell me a story. If you tell it right, I’ll tell you one, too.”
All of this leads to the cardinal rule of the whole undertaking: Be interested in others. The person who hopes to be interesting does not struggle to draw everyone’s eyes to her; she keeps her eyes on everyone else. She reins in her vanity, exercises her intuition, and doles out her conversation judiciously. If her powers of observation are good, she will know how to enliven any group—not by buttering them up, but by anticipating what they care about. If she guesses wrong, she steps back, listens a bit, then tries again.
So, to recap: Get off the sofa. Listen, talk, read, and travel. Make creative social plans, and dare to entertain at home. Nurture your friends and your passions, and develop hobbies. Find joy in your work, and if you can’t find joy, find anecdotes. Date, marry, divorce (if you must), remarry (if you can), and have children (if possible). Do not assume you have to be Truman Capote to fascinate others, but accept that you can’t win over everyone. Do not show off, but don’t be afraid, every now and then, to make a grand gesture. Always respect your audience, and be grateful that you’re performing not on a stage under spotlights but in the normal human fray, which will only ever be as exciting as you and your friends can make it. And relax: Even if you mess up, chances are you’re your own worst critic. Then take a bow for trying.
By Liesl Schillinger
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