Liars and Saints

 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...

  A spooky story beloved by my family is "The Night It Rained," by Alvin Schwartz. It's immediately unnerving. A man is driving in the night when he spots an underdressed boy in the rain. He offers a sweater to the boy (Jim), and Jim becomes a passenger in the car. The man drives Jim home and says, "I'll just stop by tomorrow for the sweater." But the next day, the man meets Jim's mother, who is confused. "My son is not alive," she says. "He died last year." The narrator then visits Jim's tombstone--and the borrowed sweater is draped over the lettering. I love this story because it demands that the reader make inferences. We can imagine that the man visits Jim's house during daylight hours because he is concerned about possible neglect (and the sweater is a helpful thing to pretend to focus on). We might also guess that Jim is spotted walking on the road because this is the region where the *living* Jim was once struck by a ca...

 Sharon Horgan is among my favorite TV writers. I really enjoyed "Catastrophe," "Divorce," and the first season of "Bad Sisters." (Horgan's apparently groundbreaking series--"Pulling"--seems to be unavailable in the US, though I've tried.) Horgan is so important to me, she has changed my reading choices. I don't really listen to anyone regarding book recommendations. But I'll listen to Sharon Horgan--she has directed me to "Rosemary's Baby" and to the Dolly Alderton novel "Good Material." One of my Mount Rushmore selections, in terms of serialized narrative, is Adam Goldman's "The Outs." Goldman was inspired to write this because of Sharon Horgan's "Pulling." So I was pleased by the arrival of "Youth." The pilot is standard Sharon Horgan: The Horgan character, Alex, turns sixty and gets arthritis in her jaw, meaning she can no longer give BJs. She hasn't had sex in ...

 Brad Pitt is so good in this movie. He is just acting opposite a dog--really, four dogs (taking turns). In sum, you are watching a two-hour monologue delivered by Brad Pitt. Pitt has survived a war (maybe the most recent war in Iraq?) His "battle dog," Odin, has also survived, but Odin has lost a leg and developed a now-lingering case of PTSD. The two friends travel to Alaska for rest and relaxation. Pitt has a heart attack while trying to pilot his little plane--this then becomes a survival/adventure story. There are three main antagonists: a rushing river, a bear, and a pack of wolves. Pitt, the actor, makes a smart choice; he will not "externalize" his despair. So he becomes something like Henry Fonda or Gregory Peck; it's just a joy to watch him. The trick about camera work is that viewers *want* to ascribe human feelings to dogs. You show an image of a suffering child--and then you show a dog's face--and the viewer *reads* empathy in the dog's eyes...

 I saw him at a party for "Zootopia 2." Our kids were involved. My frenemy's husband made no indication that he had been reading my autobiographical essays. My frenemy's husband works in real estate--but he wants to abandon that world in favor of a political career. He posts many angry short films about Trump and about ICE--I can tell that these gestures are gratifying for him. He met my husband for coffee--and for a chance to discuss how he can  really make a difference --and my husband listened in a polite way. This leads me to recall a favorite scene from a Lorrie Moore story. An undergrad, wearing a large leather bow, visits a history professor. "I just want my major to mean something," she says. And the professor says, "That's your FIRST problem. Have a great afternoon." The professor adds, "I really love your bow." I understand the issue of career fatigue. I'm grateful not to work in real estate. Even tutoring--which has the...