1,960 minutes with …Isaac Fitzgerald

A pilgrimage with the most gregarious member of the literary internet.

- By Robert Moor

The writer Isaac Fitzgerald was walking across a parking lot one day this summer when he looked up to find an airplane falling out of the sky. “Jesus fucking Christ!” he cried. (“Excuse my language,” he added primly.) It was a small blue propeller plane, but in that moment it most resembled a leaf tumbling end over end. After a sickening interval—that moment when vastly divergent futures have yet to fork—the stunt plane finally righted itself. It flew onward. Then it began a yet-more tortuous series of swoops and twists.

It was an apt metaphor for the year he, and many of us, had just lived through: unpredictable, surreal, plunging, soaring. As an essayist and editor, Fitzgerald had long served as a kind of genial barkeep of the literary internet— an avuncular, boozy presence with killer taste in books. In the past 18 months, that reputation had only grown: Fitzgerald had published a best-selling children’s book, finished an essay collection, and maintained a semi-regular book recommendation segment on the Today show. But he had also experienced a painful breakup with his fiancée, the writer Alice Sola Kim, and survived a plague.

Last summer, prompted by a health alert from his iPhone about how sedentary he was becoming, Fitzgerald set himself the goal of walking 20,000 steps, or roughly ten miles, a day. (Fitzgerald, who has no kids and has lowered his cost of living in order to be what he calls a “time millionaire,” could afford this luxury.) It worked wonders. His mind felt sharper. His body changed shape in ways that pleased him. His world widened, and the pall of the pandemic seemed to lift.