Meet Me in the Bathroom Writer on How to Know You’re Living in a Special Moment

Writer and executive producer Lizzy Goodman calls her book and its corresponding documentary “ultimately a story about kids being young and trying to find themselves and coming of age in New York in the context of these larger cultural forces that were going on at the same time.”

In the spring of 2011, months before the 10th anniversary of 9/11, Lizzy Goodman had just turned 30. In the same week, she saw the Strokes and what was supposed to be LCD Soundsystem’s final show at Madison Square Garden. She could sense the end of an era creeping in. That was when she first had the idea for what would become her 2017 best-selling oral history, Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City, which chronicles the booming music scene of downtown New York from 2001 to 2011 and the rise of era-defining bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, the Moldy Peaches, the Strokes, and LCD Soundsystem. “I felt this sense of wistfulness for what was no longer. It was a clear moment—no sadness, but wistfulness,” Goodman tells Vanity Fair. “I had that feeling of being like, Wow, we’ve kind of grown up.”

Simultaneously, directors Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern were making a documentary, Shut Up and Play the Hits, about that very same LCD Soundsystem show at Madison Square Garden. A few years later, an advance copy of Meet Me in the Bathroom landed in front of them.

In a full circle turn of events, Goodman soon received a text from Interpol frontman Paul Banks about someone wanting to turn her book into a documentary. After a series of meetings, Lovelace and Southern took on the project and adapted Goodman’s book into a sort of visual time capsule of the same name, Meet Me in the Bathroom. The documentary weaves together gritty archival footage and raw, reflective interviews with key figures to retell the story of a bygone era of New York City.

Vanity Fair met with Goodman, who is an executive producer on the documentary, over Zoom to discuss the early-aughts origins of her book, coming of age in New York, and the rampant indie-sleaze revival.

Vanity Fair: Your oral history, Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City, which came out in 2017, was a dose of nostalgia for those who lived it and a sort of education for a younger generation. But it also ended up being a snapshot of a crucial piece of recent American history unfolding. How did you balance telling the story of this specific scene within the larger cultural context of the political, technological, and cultural shifts happening at the time?

Lizzy Goodman: I felt like I do when I’m pitching any magazine story: the urge to put my skills to use, setting the stage for what is ultimately a story about kids being young and trying to find themselves and coming of age in New York in the context of these larger cultural forces that were going on at the same time. I worked on it for six years and interviewed over 200 people. It was this huge monster. I eventually reached a point in the middle of writing it when I started to try to assemble all those narratives, and there was this moment of realizing that I would need to solve the exact problem you just addressed: Am I writing a book about those things, those big think themes, or am I writing a book using this cast of characters, the bands, to talk about that? Or am I writing a book about these people and weaving those themes into the story? The answer very, very, very, much was the latter. I think of it very much as a story about young people coming to the city in this myth-of-New York way, something that has been happening for generations. This is the time capsule of that, and then there are all these themes that had to come through the narratives of these individual people.