Liars and Saints

Taylor Swift's "Red." Her masterwork! I can tell my husband wants me in a good mood if he consents to listen to this in the car. My favorite song is "Treacherous," where Taylor worries that Jake Gyllenhaal is "a dangerous slope." But "nothing safe is worth the drive," right? So I will "follow you, follow you home." Sometimes, my husband can't help himself; he has to ask, "Isn't her subject matter a little bit limited? Couldn't she write about politics?" And I get irritated. As if love and sex were not the basis of almost all of Western literary history! And is there something just slightly sexist in the implication that someone who writes constantly about love is less profound than--say--Bruce Springsteen? Do we really want Taylor Swift producing some tedious "Starvation and hatred are bad" anthem, along the lines of Katy Perry's "Chained to the Rhythm"? I don't say any of this. Inst...

"Some Hope" tells two stories. Both concern a character's moral growth. In the "A" Plot, Patrick resolves never to tell anyone about what happened to him in childhood. He hates his sober life; "it's fucking hell being lucid." But his friend Johnny requires him to attend an NA meeting. There, he hears a stranger describing things that he (Patrick) knows all too well: "When I drop sugar on the counter, I pretend it's cocaine, a line of cocaine. I sometimes think the TV is talking to me, directly." Patrick watches as Johnny confesses his fears: "I'm going to a party, and there will be alcohol, and I'm worried for me and for my friend." A turning point comes when an elderly acquaintance speaks to Patrick: "If you're just treading water, then you're guilty of the gravest sin. You are wasting time." With that, Patrick runs to Johnny and describes the rapes. He is forced to reflect on his own past, to find...

"Merrily" will return to New York City next year. It will get a major off-Broadway production; it recently had a very "buzzy" production in Chicago. In another musical, "Title of Show," young writers say, "I'd rather be nine people's favorite thing than a hundred people's ninth-favorite thing." If you're not a Sondheim addict, stop here. Some thoughts on "Merrily." -This is a reworking of "Follies." I don't know if Sondheim has said that explicitly. But: It's a story of unrequited love. In both "Follies" and "Merrily," a woman is in love, and the chilly, successful man center-stage doesn't love her back. "Suffer into truth": Unrequited love is still love. It still changes people. Both Mary, in "Merrily," and Sally, in "Follies," have their illusions shattered. They are wide-eyed, at first; they become sadder-but-wiser. Both shows also have a ghos...

Some Things You Might Not Know about Stephen King (1) At least one major critic argues that King's most beloved novels are overrated. We're talking about "The Shining," "It," "The Stand." The critic says these novels are billious; they seem unedited. They are sloppy and rely on a deus ex machine for an ending. The critic says King's best work came early in his career, and it tended not to involve the supernatural. One example he gives is "The Running Man"; another is a story about a school shooting, pulled from the shelves, by King himself, I think, when actual school shootings actually became so ubiquitous. This critic does argue that, in recent years, King has shown signs of an interest in writing with more discipline; some of the bagginess has gone away. (It's interesting to note that the first two-thirds of the "Mr. Mercedes" trilogy don't, in any way, involve the supernatural, and then, like a kid near candy, ...

Once you choose an egg donor, you then have to choose a surrogate. The steps are different. There are many, many egg donors to choose from--because donating an egg is remunerative, and it's not a massive inconvenience, in the grand scheme of things. But being a surrogate *is* a massive inconvenience. And so surrogates are harder to find. They might live fully one continent apart from where you live. It's an advantage--if you're a gay male couple--according to some people. It's an advantage because some women are happier to work with a gay male couple than to work with another woman. There's this idea that there will be less potential for irrational competitiveness, less emotional "stew," if you're talking about one woman and two gay dudes. This is wrong and unfair to women, obviously. It's also something I was eager to profit from. Surrogate "profiles" are a bit like on-line dating profiles. Well, they're more thorough. You hear abo...

Jeffrey Tambor suffered severe emotional abuse throughout childhood. His mother was mentally ill. At least one of Tambor's siblings went off the rails--in a dramatic way. Like Edward St. Aubyn, like many others, Tambor found that creative talent was something like a fire ladder; talent helped him to escape the burning building that was his own life. That's what I took from Tambor's memoir, "Are You Anybody?" when I read it several months ago. Meanwhile, Jill Soloway had a parent come out, in a dramatic way, late in life. This change sent Soloway's career in a genuinely shocking new direction. Watch Soloway's work on "Six Feet Under": You might not think, this person is going to go on and create 'Transparent'. Like Molly Haskell, Soloway used one person's coming out to explore the connectedness within a family. One person makes an announcement; every other member of the family finds himself (or herself) changing, often with much gnas...

The first time I kissed a man, I was living in New York. Straight people--many straight people, at least--go through this awkwardness in adolescence. They take their baby steps when they are still in high school. That's a big part of what was moving about the film "Beginners"--seeing the gay Christopher Plummer character start to become an actual person in his late seventies. His seventies! Another thing about many gay people: They have these shadow-lives, former lives, that get re-cast, re-appraised, after the big coming-out. Today's liberal Manhattan kids--proudly un-closeted before they finish middle school--may not understand this. It's like studying the dinosaurs, or the Big Bang. (Or maybe that's an exaggeration.) Anyway, I was not an intrepid explorer, in my early twenties. You would have to say to me, gently: "The light is green. We can cross the street now." And then you would need to hold my hand. I would arrange dates with men, then ...

Should you watch “Evil Genius,” on Netflix? Sure, but it’s fairly shallow. Spoilers ahead. Several years ago, a guy robbed a bank. He had a bomb locked, by collar, around his neck. He came out of the bank, was apprehended, and had to sit on the sidewalk for hours. He warned cops that the bomb was real. The cops seemed not to believe him. Eventually, the bomb exploded, and the guy died. All of this was caught on tape. You see a burst of flames, and the guy collapses. The case seems not-too-difficult to unravel. A disturbed man (different from the bomber) calls the police and claims his girlfriend should be trailed. It turns out the girlfriend is a crazed murderess (she kills many folks!), and she has engineered a plot to obtain money to have her father murdered. (She is angry at the father because he won’t give her her inheritance.) The “evil genius”--Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong--dies in jail, and people feel fairly certain that the guy who died in the bombing was simply a victim. Peop...

It's a trite thing to say about a rom-com: "New York City is almost like a third protagonist! New York City is a character in this story !" But, for "Never Mind," in "Patrick Melrose," the setting really does feel like a character. The setting is Lacoste, in France. So many non-living things seem to become enchanted; it's like we're watching a perverse version of Disney's "Beauty and the Beast." In the early moments, we see Yvette, the earthy domestic servant, stopped in her tracks by David Melrose. (David stands on a perch, a little balcony high above; we see him here, over and over, and we think of the shooter in Las Vegas; eventually, David makes the comparison explicit. "If I had a machine gun, I could stand here and decimate the valley.") David studies Yvette and understands that she is uncomfortable, talking to a monster, holding a heavy tray. (The novels will return a few times to the problem of the complicit st...

(1) "The Queen." On this weekend, of all weekends, it's important to celebrate Elizabeth II. Let's be clear. "The Crown" is sometimes overly-schematic, lost in glacial pacing, a little bit textbook-ish. But "The Queen" is different from "The Crown." ("The Queen" is very schematic, as well, but Helen Mirren, like a really great contestant on "Project Runway," consistently "makes it work.") The second season of "The Crown" suffered because Elizabeth II did not have an excellent foe; there was her whiny husband, but he wasn't a really worthy match. (And her wonderful pile-of-turds sister disappeared for large stretches of the story.) "The Queen" gives us Tony Blair--and both Blair and Elizabeth II are intelligent fools, and their foolishness is fun to watch. Also, it's nice to see Mirren being a badass; she has a shitty husband, an idiot son, and a spectral nemesis in the form of that...

I keep thinking about Strega Nona. Recently, I spotted a title in the kids' section of Barnes and Noble. "Strega Nona's Magic Ring." My heart stopped. A new Strega Nona installment? But then I realized what had happened. Corporate types somewhere had realized that "Strega Nona" had more branding potential than the name "Big Anthony." "Strega Nona," in a title, would sell more books. So they took "Big Anthony and the Magic Ring" and rechristened it: "Strega Nona's Magic Ring." So gross. This is like Broadway, when someone decides to call "Porgy and Bess" "The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess." (As opposed--says Sondheim--to "Amy Schumer's Porgy and Bess.") When John Cheever wrote "Goodbye, My Brother," he wasn't really writing about two warring brothers, but about two warring halves of himself. Something similar is happening in "Strega Nona," I'm certain. ...

Things I Learned in New York: (1) Don't trust a writer without a sense of humor . Life is short, so why spend it in the company of someone who can't make you laugh? (There's an exception: Ruth Rendell. She isn't very funny, but her use of murder and suspense is entertaining in its own way. If the writer is sort of humorless, she can at least supply you with blood, guts, and mounting dread, in my opinion.) Also, when you read, you're meant to take on the roles of each character you encounter. You're actually meant to play these characters, in your mind. If you're doing this, and the book still isn't grabbing you, then abandon it and move on. People are so weirdly reluctant to do this, as if it were a moral failing. (2) Dan Savage is your ally . Savage is a seriously undervalued writer. My education in gay sex was laughable. It wasn't mentioned--at all--in my public school years, and then, when I arrived at Catholic school, it was described as a si...

Why did he muzzle new feelings with old habits of speech? It might not have been obvious to anyone else, but he longed to stop thinking about himself, to stop strip-mining his memories, to stop the introspective and retrospective drift of his thoughts. He wanted to break into a wider world, to learn something, to make a difference. Above all, he wanted to stop being a child without using the cheap disguise of becoming a parent. "Not that there's much danger of that," muttered Patrick, finally getting out of bed and putting on a pair of trousers. The days when he was drawn to the sort of girl who whispered, "Be careful, I'm not wearing any contraception," as you came inside her, were almost completely over. He could remember one of them speaking warmly of abortion clinics. "It's quite luxurious while you're there. A comfortable bed, good food, and you can tell all your secrets to the other girls because you know you're not going to meet the...

"Hamilton" is useful if you're a writer, or an aspiring writer, and here are some things to notice: (1) This is a show that makes use of shifting perspectives. When Aaron Burr describes the put-the-capital-in-DC compromise, he's not actually in "the room where it happens." Skepticism is written into the lyrics. "Thomas claims, Thomas claims..." There's tension between Thomas's version and Hamilton's version, and the idea of self-serving exaggeration becomes its own story; it's a story over and above the actual events narrated in the song. Very smart. The same thing happens with "Say No to This": We aren't actually getting a straightforward story, and LMM takes pains to have Burr loudly pass the narration to Hamilton. ("I'll let him tell it.") In both stories, we have someone on a doorstep, in distress and disarray. (Thus the narrators--Jefferson and Hamilton--seem to have *almost no choice* but to act i...

(1) "Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer. This absurdly beautiful book reminds me a bit of "In Cold Blood." (Maybe the title is a deliberate echo. Certainly, Krakauer was reusing his own successful formula when he came up with the title for "Into Thin Air.") What is the similarity? When Truman Capote wrote "In Cold Blood," he allowed himself to digress. The digressions are mesmerizing. In one chapter, he recalls, at length, the various brutal murders Perry's cell mates committed. He also goes on for a bit about Mrs. Clutter's apparent mental illness. And he shares long-winded, poetic thoughts on "the land." In the same way, Krakauer's "Into the Wild" isn't really just about McCandless. There's a startling chapter that tells the tale of other loonies who have wandered into the woods (or the brutal desert) and never returned. There's a gripping and painful account of Young Krakaeur's own flirtation with de...

-"The Silent Woman" by Janet Malcolm. This was a book that led me to ask, What if Sylvia Plath was sort of obnoxious, and Ted Hughes wasn't all that bad? Malcolm looks at several biographies. Her point is that biographies are basically novels; they are full of lies, despite a writer's best intentions. (Note the fun and bitchy twitter messages that a new "memoir," "Chasing Hillary," have provoked from Chelsea Clinton!) Malcolm is so good at exposing various "facts" as fictions: She does this over and over, with regard to the legal system, in "Iphigenia in Forest Hills" and "The Crime of Sheila McGough." She takes the same approach to the practice of "journalism," in "Journalist and the Murderer." (Malcolm's skepticism was so bracing, in that one book, that it inspired the great filmmaker Errol Morris, a Malcolm acolyte, to write an entire, lengthy tome, "A Wilderness of Error," disputin...

What makes a Sondheim song a Sondheim song? “Less is more.” “Form dictates content.” “God is in the details.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5n-o80EX30 We see the stripped-down trend in the opening of “Sooner or Later,” for which Sondheim won his Oscar: Sooner or later you’re gonna be mine Sooner or later you’re gonna be fine Baby, it’s time that you faced it I always get my man These simple declarations might make us think of Sondheim’s gold standard, “Porgy and Bess.” “Summertime, and the livin’s easy. Fish are jumpin’, and the cotton is high.” “Bess, you is my woman now. You is. You is.” We also spot smart details, which are sprinkled throughout and unostentatious; the writer is not letting you see his sweat. Though he is writing in 1990, he wants you to think of an earlier era, so he borrows language (and an idea) from “Whatever Lola Wants” (“Damn Yankees”). The female lead as femme fatale--stalking her “man” as a hunter stalks prey. The casualness of “gonna,” “sooner ...