Liars and Saints

  Curtis Sittenfeld writes beautifully, and her recent NYT piece has a shrewd opening: I’ll offer it up right away, the part that, depending on your perspective, might seem ironic or juicy or enviable or tragic: I’m now divorced. It would be difficult to stop reading at this point. What makes the sentence "pop" is the absence of self-pity. Sittenfeld has a healthy sense of perspective. (She *consistently* has this.) Also, Sittenfeld has an imagination: she can anticipate her news "landing" in several different ways, and she lists these ways. I find it hard to know how long I was married. My former husband and I considered ourselves separated by fall 2024, but maybe it was before that? He didn’t move out until fall 2025, and the divorce was legal in January 2026. There is an impression of chattiness--but I believe Sittenfeld works to select the insights that really seem (potentially) universal. Also, she is writing from the gut. Now I welcome advice from other divor...

  "Hadestown" succeeds because of its ending. Writers struggle with endings. If you see the crazy new film "Verity," you'll notice that it doesn't even have a conclusion! It's as if the storyteller just tossed her pen out the window and shrugged. But "Hadestown" has a surprising, effective, layered finale. We revisit lines from the first ten minutes of the show. Once again, we're told that Orpheus can see how the world *could* be -- "in spite of the way that it is." The sentence has acquired a new punchiness, because we've just seen "the way that it is." People die, people lose faith. That's the way the world is. "It's a sad song -- but we're gonna sing it again." Often, and particularly on Broadway, producers feel a need to pander -- an ending needs to be "happy" if it's going to be palatable. By contrast, Hermes looks directly at the audience and names what has happened in *his* ...

  "To me, autism can be a superpower. What does it mean in your case? It means your child is sensitive, and he doesn't have time for bullshit. How can that be a bad thing?" The family counselor is remarkably professional. She always apologizes for being late -- though she is never actually late. She dresses in neutral tones. She has a way of radiating positive energy -- if it's an act, it's a very persuasive act. In her view, my daughter is headed for the Presidency of the United States. That would be great -- also, no one else actually has this suggestion for my daughter. The "plan" seems to come from nowhere. I say, "I just want to know that my son can eventually date, meet someone, be paired off." The counselor shrugs. "Maybe, and maybe not. Who says there is just one way to be happy?" We meet once per week. I send a weekly agenda. The agenda sounds like a "found object" poem -- the counselor says it could be printed on t...

 Taylor Swift is activated by the idea of triangles. Several of her best songs feature threeway battles. I'm thinking of "Daddy, I Love Him," "Love Story," "Fifteen," "You Belong With Me," "Betty," "Illicit Affairs." "Babe." "Getaway Car." Someone cheats, or someone has an overbearing parent. Someone uses the promise of a bad relationship as an excuse to get out of an *extant* bad relationship. So I can appreciate "Patient Zero." It's a way of rewriting "Fifteen." What I admire in "Patient Zero" is how the two women try to negotiate the terms of *their* connection. "It's not a bad time at all...." "It's not for me to say...." These bits of throat-clearing are more interesting than the sexual drama in the song. By contrast, Taylor Swift has not figured out a way to write about bliss. It's not within her range. But she keeps trying. As othe...

 Frontotemporal dementia is a terrifying condition that tends to strike when you are in your forties. It's not Alzheimer's. With Alzheimer's, initially you lose some short-term memory while your personality remains intact. With FTD, your short-term memory is initially fine, but your personality starts to evaporate. What does it mean to lose your personality? You become scarily disinhibited. (You might start to have multiple affairs--or throw yourself from the window of a moving train.) You lose an awareness of yourself; though you are clearly failing at your job, you believe you're doing fine. You cannot connect with other people. In one story, a woman becomes annoyed with her teen son's loud soup-slurping behavior, so she locks him out of the house, in the cold, for several hours. A doctor with FTD once performed a C-section. "I did that so well," he said, "I deserve to carve my initials into the mother's flesh." And the nurses watched--horr...

 The best Barnes and Noble is just north of Grand Central; it's at Fifth Avenue and 46th. It has a functional bathroom, it has proximity to Broadway, and it has a well-organized flow of traffic by the cash register. (If you go up to the Upper East Side, it's *chaos* at *that* particular cash register.) I strongly recommend getting yourself a cup of tea and sitting with an unpurchased copy of "Changing My Mind," by Julian Barnes. No one will care if you don't spend money on that book. The stockholders within Barnes and Noble are *not* suffering. The book is a short account of how Julian Barnes once disliked the works of E.M. Forster--until he grew older and changed his mind. He realized that Forster was sort of saucy and naughty. (Barnes had missed this fact for several years.) For whatever reason, I think this essay is charming. Barnes especially likes "Where Angels Fear to Tread." There was one unfortunate scene from my own life at the midtown Barnes an...