You're listening to an English edition of the Herczeg Podcast, from Budapest FM. In this episode the host, Zoltán Herczeg, sits down with Bridget Wagner, a Hungarian writer he first knew in the Budapest club scene of the 1990s and reconnected with, years later, in Mallorca. It's the warmest and most freewheeling conversation in the series, about reinvention, writing, and a childhood under communism, and it touches in places on crime, hardship, and the abuse of children. One narrator will carry both voices, and tell you who is speaking.
They begin, fittingly for a show about change, with her name. She was born Brigitta Géci, and Géci is a surname that, abroad, sounds like an obscenity, so on divorcing she didn't want it back. She reached instead for Wagner, her grandfather's birth name, a name oddly free of attachment for her, since that grandfather, a judge in the communist era, had himself changed it. And Brigitta became Bridget, partly for life abroad, partly because when her books went international, Brigitta Wagner sounded, she says, too German, and not like her. She'd already written under the name Bridget Felber. So the new name is both a break and a root.
How does a person become a writer? For her, she says, it happened the moment she learned to read and write, when she began thinking in the written word. The fourth child, she was the first her mother could stay home with, and her mother walled her in with books, planting a hunger she traces almost to mother's milk. She rhymed in kindergarten, and as soon as she could read she went at the adult shelf every household had on the wall, Zola, Victor Hugo, not understanding but devouring. By fourteen or fifteen she was imitating Villon, in the samizdat Faludy translations her mother loved. She grew up in Székesfehérvár, born in 1975.
The real path opened in 2005, on an early-internet site called Magyar Virtus, a blog platform full of brilliant writers behind pen names. There a mentor who went by Lektor, the writer László Verő, noticed her, saw that there was something more behind the texts, and began to guide her. He built a literary portal, and she wrote short stories; she'd written a psychothriller at sixteen, a devoted Stephen King reader. After Lektor's sudden death, she moved to the Népszabadság blog, and from there, she says, it was a straight road.
Her first book was a work of reportage, Gays and People, five portraits from across what we now call the LGBTQ community. It grew out of a nightspot in her home town that had quietly become a gay bar, full of characters she felt she had to sit down and talk to. She built it as an arc, from an eighteen-year-old selling himself, fresh out of an institution and utterly lost, to an older friend wholly at peace with himself. She's self-critical about it now, too partial, she says, too swept up in the dramatic lives to keep a reporter's distance, but the stories are strong, and there is, she thinks, far more appetite for them now than when it appeared. She self-published five hundred copies; it's long out of print.
Then the conversation loops back to Mallorca, and to how their lives got tangled again. Through a mutual friend, a pilot named Zsolti, Bridget had written a book, and Herczeg was asked to design its cover, on one firm condition: that he read it first. That sparks the running joke of the whole episode, that in Hungary everyone does everything except the thing they're actually competent at, a twenty-something with no experience made a deputy minister, and so on, whereas he refuses to make a cover for a book he hasn't read. And once he read it, he was floored.
The book was called The Pilot, and its language, Herczeg says, was so raw, so new, so unflinching, that he couldn't put it down, every page building to some blow he knew was coming. The bookseller Libri turned it down as unpublishable, the story too hard, not remotely PC. So they serialized it online, chapter by chapter, and readers devoured it by the thousand, a working pilot even filmed himself reading it in the cockpit. The owner of a Los Angeles film school wrote to her at half past one in the morning, unable to tear himself from the story, and offered her a screenwriting scholarship. Herczeg compares the book to a classic album with no filler, a record you can play fifty times over, because it was truly made, crafted by someone who knew exactly what they were doing.
That world, the world of the small-time hustler, is one Bridget knows first-hand, and here the episode earns its subtitle. Herczeg admits a fondness for these streetwise operators, though not for the thieving, and recalls his own years dressing musicians in the Budapest night, when a hustler might drop a wad of cash on his table and say, we don't count, and he wouldn't count the money and the man wouldn't count the clothes he carried out. But Bridget's sharper claim, offered as her own view, is that this hustler's ethic didn't fade, it went up to government level, the same rhythms and attitudes she saw in the nightlife of the 2010s, only more sophisticated and on a far larger scale. Reality and her fiction, she says, are not far apart, and where they meet, the fiction turns out to be simply true.
Her second novel, Longing, is the one they linger on, and it is the darkest. Its narrator is a girl of thirteen and a half in 1980s Hungary, and the book refuses to soften anything, the poverty, the neglect, the abuse. Herczeg reads the opening aloud, a mother sobbing at a shuddering washing machine in a hipo-smelling flat, and says he could see it, that this is what literature is. Bridget wrote it, she says, precisely against the fashionable nostalgia for that era, the last analog childhood, the key on a string; she was, as a child, drowning in that system, and the novel gives back that suffocation, the shallow, excluding way people connected, or failed to. She braced for the book to get her, as she puts it, filleted, for daring to depict a child's sexuality and the abuse around it, but the statistics on how many under-eighteen girls in Hungary still marry and give birth, she says, make it not a period piece but an ever more current one.
The craft of it is the last thing they turn to. Bridget says a writer is someone with a merciless memory, who thinks in images; a single old pop song can flood her with complete pictures in seconds, and the work is just pouring them into form. The child narrator, she insists, never editorializes; she only reports, walks into the room, sees the wallpaper, feels the hand on her, and it is the reader who supplies the wisdom, the meaning, the moral weight. Her closest friends, who happen to be psychologists, read it as she wrote it, chapter by chapter, so the human truth of it would hold. And though it isn't autobiography, she's woven her own life all through the frame, the school conflicts, the sadistic lunch lady everyone remembers, because, as she puts it, every fiction is a true story somewhere, passed through the author to become what it is.
They end on freedom, and on the frame that shaped them both. Everyone who reads the novel recognizes themselves in it, Bridget says, because a whole generation was pressed into the same narrow mold, a system called communism that squeezed everyone it could into one shape. And, she adds, we are still pressed into a system that doesn't work. She can tell herself she's free, out on the plain under the open sky, but in front of a gun barrel, when the law and the police and the ministry decide she's the criminal, that freedom has limits. And her answer to that, the note this whole warm, unruly conversation goes out on, is to turn it around: no, she says, you are the criminals. That's where they leave it.
