Liars and Saints

James Marshall is known for his hippo books, and his fairy tales, but in the late seventies he also produced a story called "Portly McSwine." Tomi Ungerer has said that, if you're going to write a picture book, you should do your own illustrations. This is something James Marshall has paid attention to; Kevin Henkes, as well. In "Portly McSwine," we are immediately taken to another world. Portly, a pig who dons a suit and bowtie to work for a business simply called "Truffles," wants to throw a party. He wants to celebrate National Snout Day. But he has a crippling case of social anxiety. What if the appetizers are inadequate? And the pastries? And the dancing? What if his stories are a bore? As Portly tortures himself, he encounters friends. Emily Pig, exiting a Chinese restaurant (the "Wok Right In"), demands to know about a party menu. Esther the Secretary says--and this isn't helpful--"worrying will make you sick....

Some things to know about the new Colin Jost memoir: * There is actually nothing on Scarlett Johansson . This seems unconscionable. If you're to-be-married to Scarlett--who just netted two Oscar nominations in one year, who ranks as one of the most powerful people in Hollywood, who regularly wades into scandals involving Woody Allen, race, gender--then you have to talk about Scarlett. * Some essays don't work . There's a piece on Google, for example--wholly free of insight, character development, plot--that ought to have been left on the floor in the editor's office. * Jost--like Amy Schumer and Tina Fey, among others--sometimes feels excessive pressure to be funny . There is a desperate urge to end on a "cute" button, at the end of each essay. This seems like a shame. I wonder what might have happened if Jost didn't feel such intense pressure to "perform." * All that said, I admired the honesty with which Jost looked at his early li...

Some parts of fatherhood are unexpected: *When you visit the doctor, the bumbling assistant attempts to measure the circumference of the baby's head. These measurements are always wrong. You hear little bits of Kafka: How could the baby's head be *smaller* than last time? No one ever explains the significance of the numbers, and the measuring process never gets easier. *Sometimes, your dog will growl at your baby. Your peacemaker husband will say, That growl means nothing. It's a *fake* growl . And how do you respond? Your dog will become silent. He will guard his secrets carefully. *You will become a major picture-book snob. If it's not by Tomi Ungerer, should we really even bother? *You will attend music class in intense heat. At some point, your baby will begin to drum on a foam block, in a half-interested way, and you will see flashes of future Carnegie Hall openings, there in your crazed mind's eye. *You'll develop a love for celebrity m...

If you're not a TS obsessive, stop here. Otherwise, read on. To me--and to many others--the new highlight is "Betty." This is a song from the perspective of an adolescent boy, James, who has cheated on his girlfriend. But he wants the girl--Betty--back. So he tries to explain himself. All the drama went down at a dance. James saw Betty dancing with some other guy. Walking home, on cobblestones, distraught, James found himself ensnared by a nameless seductress. Conversation happened. More conversation. "Those days turned into nights." But it was "just a summer thing." James misses Betty. There are many things I love in this song. The rhyming of "Inez" with "she says." The intrigue surrounding a class change: "I'm pretty sure you switched your homeroom because of me." The strange focus on the verb "to know": "I don't know anything but I know I miss you." I also like the nostalgic feel-...

I don't have many clear opinions on Taylor Swift's "folklore," yet, but thank you to the friends who have asked! Instead, some snapshots from a major Swift Weekend: *Novelist Curtis Sittenfeld listens to the melodramatic story song "Exile" and retweets: "I'm glad I'm not the only one who googled Did Taylor and Joe break up...." *Smash Mouth causes a stir by rechristening the album "borelore" (an opinion shared by the NYTimes) ....and the star of "Teen Wolf" valiantly responds: "Fuck Smash Mouth." Meanwhile, in her Covid bubble, the songstress Halsey writes, "I would die for Taylor Swift...." *My own newest piece of Taylor merch arrives. (Good timing!) It's a black ball cap with the word "Swiftie" stitched across the front. My husband--who purchased this--insists that I won't be confused with a Swift Boat Veteran. He seems to find my worry comical. Before the album came ou...

I’ve enjoyed writing about writing this week, and I thought I’d wrap up the series with some reading recommendations (books on the topic of setting pen to paper). Some of these are well-loved; some are less obvious. * Bird by Bird , by Anne Lamott. The gold standard, the book Lamott was born to write. The title is from advice Lamott’s writer-dad gave to a child: “You’re writing a report on birds? Easy enough. Just take it bird by bird.” * On Writing , by Stephen King. Book snobs tend to say—with a hint of condescension—that “this is the best book King has written.” I don’t know about that. I’m fond of “Joyland,” “Elevation,” and “Mr. Mercedes.” But “On Writing” is practical, passionate, and smart. * To Show and to Tell , by Phillip Lopate. I’m not certain anyone reads this, but it’s about making art, and it is itself a work of art. * I Can’t Complain,  by Elinor Lipman. OK, many of these essays don’t concern the act of writing, but the ones about writing (choosing charac...

The actor Larry Owens has posted "Sondheim Bad Bitches: Definitive Ranking," and it's earning the attention it deserves. https://twitter.com/larryowenslive/status/1283759355507150851 What's funny is that this deranged man is seeing these characters in the most absurdly "glowing" light: It's not at all clear that Mrs. Lovett is a "hopeless romantic," or that Madame Armfeldt is a "great mom." I'm also not certain that Gussie, in "Merrily," will "do what it takes to get a young upstart composing duo their due ...." In any case, I'm happy to watch this clip, because it sends me back to my college years, and to all those important cast albums: Angela Lansbury in the "Sweeney" cover art, the stars and moon around the words "Night Music," the Wolf in the logo for "Into the Woods." Also, I would add Dot to the Bad Bitch list. Dot--barely able to read--finds herself enme...

In September, Kevin Henkes will collect all nine of his mice books in one volume. This has never happened before. The mice are varied: Lilly, who can't control herself; Wemberly, fighting OCD; Chrysanthemum, painfully vulnerable to the opinions of others. There are more. I've written about Chrysanthemum before. She is the mouse burdened by an unconventional name; when she arrives in Pre-K, other mice cruelly call attention to that name. Gradually, Chrysanthemum becomes unhinged. All is salvaged when a cool new music teacher appears--and it emerges that this teacher is called "Delphinium." Suddenly, "Chrysanthemum" becomes an enviable name. What distinguishes this book--as usual--is the level of detail. Chrysanthemum begins school in fancy clothes, but when she comes to understand that school is a hellish experience, she starts wearing comfy sack-like outfits, with extra pockets for good luck charms. She cannot help but trace her name in the sand as s...

Three other tips I've picked up on writing, occasional sources of help for me: * The thing you Googled repeatedly yesterday? That's the thing to write about . Sometimes I *believe* I want to make somber points about "Fun Home," but I have spent twelve hours Googling "show tunes with Gavin Creel." That's telling me the point I have to make is really about Gavin Creel. I could want reality to be "otherwise," but trust me, Creel is the topic you want to read about, if you're looking in my brain on that particular morning. * Aim for a well-stocked cupboard. The reader wants to feel that the writer's mind is "well-stocked," at least on the topic in question. So if you're going to write about Idina Menzel, check to see if you have six or seven points to make about Menzel. You can even jot down the points. Then you won't get lost as you write. If you don't have those points at your fingertips, maybe choose a diffe...

I rented "Collateral" for around four dollars -- to watch yesterday, as a treat. "Collateral" was well-liked when it came out--despite Second Act problems--and people especially valued Jamie Foxx, who went on to a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. (He won Lead Actor in the same year, for "Ray.") In "Collateral," Foxx is a man in his mid-thirties, thoroughly "stalled." He wants to own a business but instead drives a cab. He can't even propose a date when he meets someone he likes. It's his great luck that a charismatic psycho-killer--Tom Cruise--winds up in his backseat; by fighting the psycho-killer, Foxx finds his voice and starts to dream up a way to correct his own poor life decisions. (Only in the movies.) This is a bit like "Training Day," and the two scripts are rather suspiciously close together in history. But "Training Day" doesn't have Jamie Foxx. As Foxx begins to develop a spine,...

I have no gift for writing fiction; I don't think I'll ever get great joy from inventing scenarios from thin air (although I like telling my son some stories about princes and princesses and castles). I do very much like essays, both personal essays and critical essays. I think I won't ever run out of interest in these forms, which is a comforting thought. I'm always on the lookout for advice in this realm, and here are some of the things I've stolen: * Take a well-loved thing and tear it apart . Some of the most famous essays are "Against Nature," "Against Love," "Against Joie de Vivre," George Orwell's thoughts on Gandhi, some contrarian thoughts on Mother Teresa. People have a tendency just to accept various bits of conventional "wisdom." It's inspiring to look at closely at the wisdom and to show when the emperor actually has no clothes. * Force yourself to draw lessons from experience. Writers are some...

Roz Chast wrote a harrowing and very funny account of her parents' final years. When her mom and dad hit ninety, they began to deteriorate. Mom wrote strange, formal poetry from her hospital bed; Dad began falling--and falling--at regular intervals. Mom told bizarre stories about her dead-in-laws coming back from hell. Dad became obsessed with various missing "bank slips." Chast paid a woman to do the maintenance work, then reflected on how she was just another white person employing a non-white person to do unpleasant tasks. (One cartoon has Roz shrugging and saying, Guess I'll go home now and DRAW.... ) This book has a great deal of gallows humor, and I think my favorite panel shows us a certain shopping area, the "aisle of doom." You can see a box of "Liqui-Food," for when you're "done with food." Plus a box of "Bed-Bath," for when you're "done with bathing." Chast never felt anything like undiluted ...

I borrowed Jerry Pinkney's "Noah's Ark" from the library and really loved it. (Full disclosure: Joshua has the Hebrew name "Noah," because his dads are obsessed with animals and various zoos.) Noah's Ark is a terrifying and somewhat ghastly tale, and when it's used as a heartwarming interlude (say, in Christian Bible Camp, or in a session of Tot Shabbat), I'm a bit stunned. This is a tale of a homicidal father. God is so irritated with his bratty humans, he decides to abdicate his parenting duties. He'll just destroy most of terrestrial life, except for one favored son, Noah, and except for the animals Noah's family can herd onto an ark. I do like how sudden and horrifying and irrational all of this is; it does seem to "gel" with actual experience. But Joshua and I skip over the implications. There is the iconic moment when the animals march onto the ark, and the genius Jerry Pinkney milks this for all it is worth. L...

Jason Adam Katzenstein's account of his struggle with OCD ("Everything Is an Emergency") is brave and touching, and has many memorable scenes: *JAK worries intensely that, having finished his business in a laundromat, he will inflict an overheated dryer on an unsuspecting victim. So he stays by the dryer and repeatedly checks the inside, until he is 100-percent certain that its cool-down is adequate. *JAK cannot toss a penny on the sidewalk, because he believes a child will ingest the penny and die. *Therapy involves forcing oneself to touch one's sneaker, then one's face--and to take note of how Act-Three spontaneous combustion does NOT occur. *A panic attack can happen on a stalled L train--"We plan to remain here in this tunnel for the next eight to nine hours"--but a panic attack can also happen in a much "safer" setting, e.g. when you're alone in bed. *Being a friend of someone with OCD may mean feeling useless....standing ...

Like many others, I have been fascinated by the storm surrounding "Hamilton" right now. I have read debates about minute details, and as (maybe?) a public service, I'm compiling what I know: *One camp says it's wrong to elide questions of slavery, make people seem more heroic than they are, etc. Another camp says, This is fan fiction. It's a fantasy. It's not a work of history. Distortions are permissible. * Maya Phillips, of the NYT, had one of the more-interesting questions: If Miranda doesn't need to follow the rules of history, then why can't he make the women more active and more compelling? If George Washington can be re-cast as a saint, then why can't Angelica have a role in one of the rap battles? (I liked this.) * Very few people enjoy the Sally Hemings moment. A counterargument: Miranda knew he was showing Jefferson's ugliness, and he wanted to have that awkwardness at the top of Act II as further evidence of Jefferson's v...

Kevin Henkes won one of his (many) awards for "Kitten's First Full Moon," and it's easy enough to see why. This is a mic-drop book. It's elegant, and it "looks effortless." Kitten has never seen a full moon, and, reasonably, she concludes that the thing she views is a large milk dish in the sky. She must have that milk. She chases it through valleys, by ponds, down hills. She climbs a tree to reach the milk. No dice. In the book's climax, Kitten sees the moon reflected on the surface of a lake, and--excited--she believes that the dish of milk is somehow "within" that lake. She hurls herself at the lake and gets drenched, gets very cold. She gives up. It's only upon returning home that she discovers an actual bowl of milk awaiting her. Lucky Kitten! These are the simplest ingredients. (Like Henkes, the children's-lit icon Tomi Ungerer also had a deep interest in the moon.) By keeping things very "pared-down," Hen...

We were once on a plane to Arizona. My husband was going to watch the Kansas City Royals in spring training; I was going to sit by the hotel pool with an Anita Brookner novel. Audra McDonald was on our plane. I knew this; I'm not sure anyone else knew this. In my memory, she is just in an up-front row; it's not first-class. My husband recalls things in a different way. In any case, if you've heard Audra's on-stage banter, you know she is often in the role of a beleaguered mom. "My daughter doesn't like my singing!" "My daughter said I was weak in The Sound of Music !" I find the act slightly grating, and I did note, while on the plane, that Daughter and Mom seemed to be co-existing in peace. After we landed, my husband said, "We need to say something." Marc has many verbal and political skills I myself lack, and so I opted out. I stood in the lounging area like a wallflower. Audra waited for her child's nanny, by the re...

The Times recently polled writers on Your Favorite Summer Blockbuster. (Given the lack of blockbusters right now, this question is poignant.) Answers included: "Wall-E," "The Avengers," "Roger Rabbit." My own answer--highlighted in the artwork for the Times piece, but, oddly, not in the text--is "Jurassic Park." Some people say this was Spielberg's last great movie. It gave fun cartoonish lines to Richard Attenborough, who had once famously defeated Spielberg for a "Best Director" prize at the Oscars. "Jurassic Park" had Laura Dern selling a feminist message--and selling it fairly impressively, for Hollywood in the 1990s. "Jurassic Park" also had "Seinfeld"'s Newman, yearning strings, and a punchy, evocative title. (I think some of the creatures weren't actually from the Jurassic, but no matter!) Are these reasons different from the standard "love-letter reasons"? Have I n...

This is a tiny collection of essays about being a father. Chabon is smart, lively, and subversive, and he finds small moments of absurdity all over the place: *A grave Richard Ford corners a young Chabon at a party and says, "Whatever you do, don't have kids. They will ruin your writing career." (Chabon thinks, Maybe Richard Ford has a point. Or maybe not.) *An essay on euphemism. What word do you use when you're reading "Huck Finn," and someone says the N-word for the ten-thousandth time? Chabon congratulates himself on his own sensitivity, until one of his kids points out he had no problem saying "Injun Joe," over and over again, while reading "Tom Sawyer." *An essay on what to do when your son becomes a dick. Chabon candidly acknowledges dickishness in his own past, then describes puncturing his son's ego in a breathtaking way. It's strange to see a parent writing with such a frosty, unapologetic tone about a struggle w...

"Snow White in New York" turns Snow White into a flapper. She is living in Manhattan, and all's well until her wealthy father marries an evil lady. The evil lady enjoys scrutinizing herself--not in the mirror, but in "The New York Mirror"--but one day she discovers, on Page Six, that Snow White is now the fairest maiden of all. Enraged, the stepmother sends a thug to find Snow White; the two are to travel, not to the woods, but to "the downtown area," and an "accident" is to occur. It's here that Snow White escapes, meets seven plucky "jazz-men," becomes a chanteuse, and reboots her life. But the stepmother has one final move: She attempts to "off" Snow White with a poisoned cherry in a cosmopolitan. When someone accidentally drops SW's coffin, the poisonous cherry bit slides up out of SW's throat, and all's well once again. The apparently dead maiden comes back to life. I have loved this book for y...

Salvy breaks down walls. Literally. There is a gate between my house and the neighbor's house, and Salvy has sort of destroyed the gate. He hurls himself at the neighbors, who seem OK with this. In fact, this couple recently lost their own dog, and they don't want to buy another one for their daughter--so Salvy creates a win-win scenario. (He invents a little break for the Barrett-Solomons, and a little canine love for the girl-in-mourning one door down.) Other neighbors--mean, emotionally-constipated neighbors--are charmed by Salvy. These neighbors--not next-door, but kitty corner--can be tight-lipped. But Salvy doesn't care. Recently, he found a way into their yard, and then into their actual house. He was not dissuaded by various gossipy stories he had heard about these neighbors. I admire that. My life has changed in drastic ways over the past several months. At times, I feel like I exist mainly to shovel food into small beings, then scoop up the poop that...

"Madeline" is really just this: A little girl feels pain in her gut. She needs to have her appendix out. The End. But look at the "how": The little girl is a troublemaker in Paris, walking along high ledges, flirting with a possible dive into the Seine. Thrown into a hospital, having complained about inner pain, Madeline is of course enchanted by the toys and the candy, and by the crack in the ceiling ("which sometimes had the habit....of resembling a rabbit"). When Madeline's friends visit, they don't care so much about the toys. They really want to study the fascinating scar on Madeline's stomach. And when the friends return to their little convent/orphanage/school, they can't sleep because they're too jealous; they want appendicitis, so they can "compete" with Madeline. This is a smart, bizarre story about the gulf between children and adults. The teacher thinks art and architecture are interesting. The children...

People sometimes get upset about works of nonfiction that address painful matters. "Can't we talk about something more pleasant?" This is--especially--a response to true crime. There is always a NYT reader, sniffing, opining in the comments section: "What is wrong with people who would buy that sort of book?" As if an interest in human behavior is a bad thing. "Hidden Valley Road" is--maybe--a "tough sell." Here's the story. A Catholic family has twelve children. Twelve! Six of the children become schizophrenic. One attempts suicide at the age of twelve, then again, then, later, again, as part of a marital "murder-suicide." Another tries murder-suicide only once, and succeeds. The family has not one, but two, sons who commit incest-pedophilia-rape. Daughters are shipped far away. One son strips nude in polite company. Cats are killed. Dinner plates are smashed against walls. The book begins with an Anne Tyler qu...

1972. A brother and sister walk out of their house together...into their backyard...They're a strange pair. Donald is twenty-seven...with a shaved head...and a biblically scruffy beard....Mary is seven, half his height, with white-blond hair.... I have no idea where "Hidden Valley Road" is headed; I know it will be great, because of its critical reception, and because Robert Kolker seems like a genius. I just want to say how floored I am by the opening scene. We're launched on a journey. Something seems ominous. Why has Donald shaved his head bald? Why does he have a biblical beard? Why are the two siblings walking out "together" .....why isn't the adult leading the child? You can't imagine where this scene is headed. It's revealed that Donald has schizophrenia. He can be exhausting; he claims to have a direct connection to a deceased saint, he dresses in a bizarre way, he once slaughtered a cat. Imagine being seven years old and lack...