Our Approach to These Interviews

ARI: What is your purpose in doing these interviews?
MARY ANN: We want to preserve our recollections of Ayn Rand and our evaluation of her. Few people knew her for as long as we did—I for twenty-eight years and Charles for almost twenty. She was an extraordinary thinker and person, and we knew her in both capacities. In the years to come, people will be asking the same question they ask about her today: what was Ayn Rand like as a person, in her private life? We can answer that question.
ARI: Is part of your reason to pay a debt of gratitude to her?
CHARLES: That’s part of it. What we, and many, many others, owe to her is incalculable. But, in addition to that, we have read things about her that give a distorted picture of what she was like. We want to correct the record. It should be said here that we are not referring to Leonard Peikoff’s essay, “My Thirty Years with Ayn Rand—An Intellectual Memoir.”¹ That is a brilliant analysis of her thinking methods, and it captures the spirit of Ayn Rand the philosopher and person.
ARI: Why do you think people are so interested in knowing about Ayn Rand the person?
MARY ANN: I think it’s akin to falling in love with someone. When you do, everything about that person becomes important to you. From his basic outlook on life to small details. For the same reason, but not with the same intensity, people who have come to value Ayn Rand through her writings want to know more about her. That’s a legitimate interest, motivated by the desire to give reality to the person they admire but know only as an abstraction—as “philosopher” and “fiction writer.”
CHARLES: I should add that this is not what motivates today’s tabloid mentalities. They look for flaws and shortcomings, for weaknesses. They debunk greatness, to get at what they claim is the “real” person. This is a miserable outlook on man and life; it reflects the medieval view that man is imperfect by nature.
MARY ANN: We are concerned with the woman who defined the philosophy of Objectivism, who let us enter the bright, shining worlds she created in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, who straightened our intellectual spines and made it possible for us to lift our heads and look up and out, and to step forward into great distances with certainty and conviction. That’s the woman we are going to talk about. That is the “real” Ayn Rand.
CHARLES: Ayn Rand was a rare, one-of-a-kind, multi-faceted jewel. We want to hold some of those facets up to the light.

Leonard Peikoff, Epilogue, The Voice of Reason by Ayn Rand, New American Library, 1988 ↩

HOME BUY THE BOOK