Liars and Saints

 One night, in 1970, an eighteen-year-old in Cedar Rapids received a call. This woman, Paula Oberbroeckling, hung up pretty quickly and asked to borrow her roommate's keys. She needed to go somewhere--fast. She was wearing a light summery dress, and she was barefoot. She drove off, and she was never seen alive again. Months later, people discovered Paula's body by a culvert. The wrists were bound. Stories circulated. Paula had been involved in a triangle with an unstable white guy and a black guy. Did the white guy kill Paula because he was jealous? Had Paula become pregnant--and had one of the two guys, uncertain about paternity, lashed out? Had Paula arranged to have an abortion from a back-alley figure? Had the procedure gone wrong? Was the crime scene staged so that the abortionist could run away? A new book, "What Happened to Paula," suggests that the abortion scenario *might* be accurate, and that police incompetence and misogyny helped the abortionist to escape...

  A part of me dies when the carpenter stops by to talk about my baby. This is because I dislike the carpenter, and yet he himself seems to have invented a scenario in which the presence of the baby papers over all the tension we've had these past few months. The carpenter has one speech, and I've heard it often: "She's so little! She's so tiny! Can't get over that.....Gosh, I get winded on your stairs!" In these moments, I try to remember Tami Taylor, from "Friday Night Lights." I smile broadly and say, "Hey, y'all!" I say: "I appreciate you. I appreciate your time." *** I have nothing to teach you about the Graco Ready 2 Grow two-child stroller. I will say this: I like the use of "2." It means: "TO." It also means the number "two," as in "two children." It makes me think of certain Prince songs. "I Would Die 4 U." "Nothing Compares 2 U." Have you stood, sweating...

  Jerry Pinkney likes to make flawed characters "sympathetic" -- where possible. The troll learns from his mistakes -- in "Billy Goats Gruff." The once-arrogant hare ("Tortoise and Hare") accepts defeat at the hands of the tortoise -- and the hare's actions even seem graceful. But another part of Pinkney really enjoys a villain, a monster who cannot be redeemed. I'm ranking my three favorites from Pinkney's work: (3) The cobra, Nag, from "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi": open mouth, flared hood, thick and whip-like tail. (2) The wolf, "Little Red." I love that the wolf seems so lifelike; this makes the old-lady wardrobe seem even more jarring. Once again, a mouth wide open -- a sign of hunger, greed. A dripping tongue; yellow eyes behind eyeglasses. I also enjoy the side-eye shiftiness. (1) Sea-Witch, "Little Mermaid." The witch steals the show. Part-Octopus, part-Medusa, part-alien, with fangs. Once again, we have an open mouth...

  If we paint and draw what we love, then James Marshall's illustrations must tell us a bit about James Marshall. A recurring Marshall image is the reader in a fluffy chair, by the fireplace, with the open book. Sometimes, a teapot and cup of tea are visible. (Tea also becomes a form of medicine, in "The Tooth," and a tea-crate becomes Martha's important furniture in "The Trip," in a kind of reference to the Boston Tea Party. We see the crate on a raft, just before the raft flips over.) You may spot a warm fire near the reader's chair, and you may spot cats. (Marshall returned, again and again, to the image of the cat.) Crucially, in "Goldilocks," the protagonist is surrounded by books--but we don't see her reading them. This is because she is foolish. The books belong to the virtuous bears. Finally, the classic Marshall image has a "summer" variation: In "Cinderella," the shoeless daydreaming bachelor prince is glimpsed...

 For the record, my sense is that the book of the summer is Katherine Heiny's "Early Morning Riser." In the past couple of months, I haven't read a better new novel. Heiny's book helped me lose my sense of time passing, for a while, and I still think about it. It's a book in which things actually happen: someone is jilted at the altar, thefts occur, a random death occurs, adultery is contemplated. The characters--including a carping, damaged retiree, a new version of John Steinbeck's "Lenny," a grifter, an anxious second grader--stay with you. I especially like the music teacher, who brings her mandolin to all social events, and weaves passive-aggressive real-time commentary into the songs she improvises (quietly, on the margins). But I'm also excited about: *"Dream Girl" (Laura Lippman) *"What Happened to Paula" (Dykstra) *"Billy Summers" (Stephen King) *"The Turnout" (Megan Abbott) *"Perversion o...

 First, the argument around casting, for "In the Heights," makes me think about "The Silence of the Lambs." Mark Harris writes about the issue with "Lambs"--the director exploits some ignorant and fearful responses to transgender people, in his portrait of "Buffalo Bill"--and Harris goes on to say that  a movie can be both problematic *and* worthwhile . Acknowledging missteps that the creative team made.....is not the same thing as saying that a movie needs to be tossed aside. (I do wonder if Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jon Chu are being just *slightly* disingenuous in the way they have replied to criticism over the past couple of weeks.) Second, a big feeling I had while watching the "Heights" movie was this: What happened to "Everything I Know"--? In a show of earnest and expository solos, "Everything I Know" is among the *most* earnest, and the *most* expository. Nina is mourning the death of Abuela. She is sifting thr...

My son is a bit clingier than normal. He will literally cling to your pant-legs. He now enjoys being held for long periods like a newborn--and I don't need Sherlockian powers to guess why.... Websites say that a parent-of-two should "tolerate mess." I'm seeing how objects can be re-purposed: Othello chips become little frisbees for Josh, and our printer becomes a stepping-stool. Josh throws himself on top of the printer (which has been dumped on the floor), and then Josh puts one arm on my elbow, in a proprietary way. He is saying: "You've got a newborn in your lap, but please recall your other obligations." An old computer has become a kind of buddy to Josh. I can buy myself time by plopping Josh in front of that glowing screen; he likes to open one million new windows, and leave them open, and walk away. We're reading: *"We Found a Hat," a strange, ambiguous story that might (and might not?) teach a lesson about sharing. *"The Experi...

 I can't let Pride Month finish without putting a spotlight on Stephen McCauley. McCauley writes comedies; his protagonists tend to be gay men with problems. One loses his lover and finds his waist thickening in middle age; he is also on the verge of losing a little carriage house in San Francisco. Another McCauley protagonist works with wealthy pre-K students at a school like Collegiate; the entitled parents pose problems. One claims to have talked with his estranged wife; "we switched our days around, and you can release little Oliver to me." This is a kidnapping plot--but how do you say no to a power broker who owns a townhouse in the East Seventies? (I, for one, enjoy this kind of story.) McCauley invents a private "college applications counselor." This guy recalls a favorite statement from a teen: "My primary educational goal is to move far away from my parents." Also, the counselor has learned that the way to sell anything in America is to attach...

 We are working with a carpenter, and he is like someone invented by Kristen Wiig. He generally doesn't come to work, and he offers the best reasons. These are my favorites, in ranked order: (7) "At the hospital. Don't worry, it's not COVID." (6) "Couldn't come this morning -- I'm at the post office." (5) "Diarrhea. Up since 1 AM. I'm so frustrated!" (4) "I actually stumbled and fell at a work site, and I have a nail sticking out of my eyeball." (3) "Just a really bad day. I can't talk about it." (2) "I get tired on your staircase." (1) "I actually *was* at your house today, and I did what I could. You must have been walking the dog." I love this man, and I find him inspiring. He's still around -- and yet I *already* miss his colorful role in my life.

Lightning can strike twice.  Years ago, Jon Klassen wrote "I Want My Hat Back." This story concerns a bear who has lost his hat. He interviews various forest creatures .... who deny any knowledge of the missing hat. One creature--a rabbit, in a hat--seems unusually chatty. "I don't know anything about a hat," he says quickly. "Why would you ask? I'm not a thief. Please don't speak to me again." We can glide through our days on autopilot, without thinking, and this is what the bear does. (Understandable. The rabbit was so emphatic!) But, eventually, the bear meets a deer, who says, "Can you describe your hat?" In painting a verbal picture, the bear has an important thought. He *has* seen his hat today. The hat was on the chatty rabbit. We all slide around on a spectrum from good to bad; no one is purely heroic. The bear surprises us by eating the rabbit, reclaiming his hat, then denying he has ever had any "rabbit encounters"...

 First, RIP, Janet Malcolm, one of my all-time favorite writers. You can re-read a Malcolm book several times and not get bored. It's a little bit shocking how many now-classic books she wrote. My favorites are: "Psychoanalysis," "The Journalist and the Murderer," "The Silent Woman," "In the Freud Archives," and "Iphigenia in Forest Hills." I also loved Malcolm's short piece, "Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography": https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2010/03/25/thoughts-on-autobiography-from-an-abandoned/ ....And, lastly, Malcolm's thoughts on email: "Pandora's Click," https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2007/09/27/pandoras-click/ OK, that aside, just an idea here about kids' books. "This Is Not My Hat," by Jon Klassen, won the Caldecott a few years ago. It's about a scheming fish. The little fish came upon a sleeping, giant fish, and admired the hat on that fish. So a th...

 Well, here's our surrogacy story, because I haven't really read anything like this, and it seems like it might be helpful to have something like this on paper. In TV shows, the pregnancy always reaches its climax when the couple is at dinner or at work or in the middle of a big unrelated argument (usually in the finale of any given season). The surprise ups the drama quotient, and then there is a frantic car ride, and if we're talking about "SVU," the car will surely crash. Marc and I had thought Susie would come on July 7, and then on June 23. I received the call about June 23 while wheeling my son around some giraffes at the Turtle Back Zoo, and I'll always recall the surreal feeling of staring at exotic wildlife while attempting to memorize the terms "hypertension," "protein readings," "preeclampsia." Many additional phone calls followed. One required the presence of a jovial Wisconsin doctor, who made jokes about the baby...

Today, for Pride Month, I'm putting a spotlight on Nan Goldin, a photographer who has changed the world. Goldin grew up within a mendacious family--possibly no more mendacious than your average family--and yet Goldin decided that she herself would attempt a life without bullshit. No lies. In her teens, she picked up a camera and began taking photos, and she was good at it. Suddenly, she had a career. Goldin has many gay friends, and during the early days of AIDS, she took photos of various difficult stories she was living through. You can see one here: "Cookie at Vittorio's Casket, 1989." There is a sense of fearlessness; you can detect the strength and intelligence of the artist, even though she is actually not in the image. Possibly Goldin's most famous image is a self-portrait, "Nan, One Month after Being Battered" (also included here). When the opioid crisis became overwhelming, Goldin recalled her AIDS activist friends, and she herself became an act...

 Amy Jellicoe, my favorite character in all of TV history, and the focus of "Enlightened," works for a careless, wealthy corporation called "Abaddonn" (which sounds just a bit like "Amazon"). Amy is a "buyer" for "Health and Wellness," and this is a coveted position, but Amy has made some unwise choices recently. She is shtupping her boss, Damon (and this is a name that means "to tame, to subdue")....To save his marriage, Damon has brutally detached himself from Amy. Workplace conduct has suffered; Amy is now on her way out, for some kind of rehabilitation. The series opens with one of the most viscerally thrilling moments in TV Land. Amy is weeping on a corporate toilet; while weeping, she overhears "friends" gossiping about her. ("Shit where you eat, and what do you think will happen?") Enraged, Amy throws herself out of the stall, screams at her colleagues, then struts down a warpath, a corporate hallway...

 I've started "Empire of Pain," a history of the Sackler family, by Patrick Radden Keefe. The Sacklers launched their USA lives in Brooklyn in the early 1900s. The patriarch said, if you can't leave money to your children, then you can at least leave your good name. These words were meaningful: The Great Depression meant that the Sacklers lost basically everything. But an enterprising son, Arthur, was undeterred. Arthur was inventing side-hustles while still a high-school student at Erasmus; he considered a career in medicine, but wondered if a doctor's life would limit his stunning creative potential. At some point, Arthur began to work with mentally-ill patients, and he felt uncomfortable with ECT, and with lobotomies. So intrusive! Couldn't mental health grow out of a commitment to some new kind of drug? From here, I skipped forward to the present day, or something close to the present day. The Sacklers, today, are drug lords. A good portion of their money ...

For Pride Month, I'll spotlight an LGBT writer whose work has meant the world to me. He is Mike White, the brain behind "Enlightened," "Brad's Status," and "Beatriz at Dinner." White writes in a comedy-of-manners tradition, although his stories can veer toward tragedy. He has a special gift for lightly mocking the pretentiousness of well-intentioned well-off white liberals. Maybe my favorite moment in his "corpus" is when Ben Stiller, in "Brad's Status," awaits his son's Harvard admissions interview. Ben would like to humble-brag. "My son has many options...." he says, to another waiting parent, "but it seems like he will definitely give Harvard some consideration."  The woman smirks. "Aha," she says. "So you're saying Harvard really has a shot....at scoring your son?" I admire Mr. White -- and I look forward to his new TV show, which will begin on HBO very soon.....

 I knew I needed "The Other Black Girl" because my first job was in publishing; I worked a few floors below Zakiya Dalilah Harris's eventual home (ZDH worked at Knopf/Doubleday). What is the setup here? A young woman, Nella, finds herself at a publishing house. She is the only Black person on her floor. Life in New York presents challenges for a young person; you need a scarf that is appropriately thin for the overbearing subway air-conditioning, but also appropriately thick for the stunning heat on any given subway platform. You don't get an office if you're an editorial assistant; you get a cube, so you're intensely aware of the smells and phone-sounds of every person within a three-cube radius. One obnoxious "cube-floater" will work for the ninety-year-old editor who never comes to the office anymore; because the cube-floater has no actual tasks, she will just wander the floor and bother you when you're trying to complete a call. My favorite t...

 A nice surprise this week was to find Anne Lamott's "Grace (Eventually)" in a used bookstore in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Lamott wrote this in the Late Dubyah Years, and Dubyah hovers around in the background. Lamott worries about the war in Iraq, and various cuts to libraries, and John Bolton wielding power within the UN. On a smaller scale, Lamott worries about her son and his friends; their den sometimes smells like a "gathering of elks." Lamott worries about her difficult mother, who is "floating off on a sea of dementia, leaving us kids waving in confusion on the shore." And Lamott worries about one disastrous lesson plan. ("Sometimes, you reach the students, and sometimes, you could be Lady Gaga juggling flaming torches, and this wouldn't matter; you wouldn't grab a child's attention. You do what you can, and move on.") Lamott has helped me through this week; even though I have minimal interest in faith and God, I'm enterta...

 Today, I'm celebrating the actress Frances Conroy. Why? It's the twentieth anniversary of the premier of HBO's "Six Feet Under." I half-watched most of this series, years ago, and in my view, Conroy was the standout. (She won a Golden Globe for her work as Ruth.) I know this show had a prominent gay male character, but mostly I didn't care about him. I cared about Ruth. We should let gay men invent TV series--regardless of a gay man's creative limitations--because this move means that we may see Conroy, Kathy Bates, Lili Taylor, Patricia Clarkson, Lauren Ambrose, and Rachel Griffiths on-screen. All of these women had opportunities to chew scenery on "Six Feet Under." (Bates and Conroy then went on to work with another gay power broker, Ryan Murphy, on "American Horror Story.") In "Six Feet Under," Conroy sometimes seemed to be reinventing another iconic Alan Ball figure--Annette Bening's tightly-wound "Carolyn,"...

 My role model for this week is my daughter Susannah, who seems quite tough and determined. She arrived on her own schedule; the world had hoped that she might adjust herself to be headfirst, but she had other plans. She is generally calm, despite the presence of things that resemble IV drips, oxygen masks, heart monitors. She seems to like show tunes and passages from Joyce Carol Oates. It's a treat to sit next to her for a long while, even in an oppressive room. She will turn one week old tomorrow. (Happy Birthday, Susannah!)

 SVU. First, let's see where we are. A concerned citizen arrives at the station. Her neighbor, Rosa, is involved in weird business. Rosa won a palatial subsidized-housing spot through a lottery--a really tough lottery--but where is the record of her application? And why are strange men entering and exiting her home at all hours, throughout the week? Olivia understands pretty quickly that she is looking at a sex-trafficking situation. The main question is: which powerful people are involved? Meaningful eye contact and gentle vocal tones ensure that Olivia wins Rosa's cooperation; Rosa wears a wire and brings down a charismatic "wolf," a corrupt broker who is a bit like Boss Tweed or like Ghislaine Maxwell. And several senators also fall, as a result. Not the most gripping SVU. The title ("Wolves in Sheep's Clothing") pretty much tells us where we're going. But I liked the coda, which was like something from Shakespeare, or the end of "A Little Ni...

 The critic Michael Koresky has a memoir out--"Films of Endearment." It's a fun concept. Koresky is mainly telling the story of his mother, but his own story also works its way into various paragraphs. The "frame" is this: Koresky and his mom rent one Hollywood movie for each of the ten years of the eighties, and each rental features a woman in the lead role. Koresky says that Hollywood seems designed for straight men; many blockbuster films of the eighties, such as "Terminator," "Lethal Weapon," "Die Hard," and "Predator," left Koresky cold. But, in the eighties, a little experimentation could still occur. Audiences would still pay to see adults working together on adult problems--in front of the camera. (Today, your main option is superhero movies.) In the eighties, you could still occasionally see big literary gifts in the possession of Jessica Lange, Whoopi Goldberg, Sissy Spacek, Sigourney Weaver, Kathy Bates, Michell...

 In this house, we talk a fair amount about "Mare of Easttown." Spoilers ahead. The series wasn't perfect. The weird bits of "comedy" bugged me. A slapstick-y interlude where one young lesbian's ex-girlfriend accidentally witnesses a clandestine hook-up.....felt especially half-baked. And we never learn much about a serial kidnapper's life or motives. Why was this guy locking women to large pipes in a hidden back room? I, at least, would be interested to explore that question. All that said, I admire "Mare" for giving a female character quite a bit to do and think about--and I especially admire this when the series "Younger" is falling really flat at the same time. I liked the unpredictable chats between Winslet and Jean Smart; I also liked Smart hiding ice cream in an empty bag of frozen peas. (Over seven seasons, "Younger" doesn't bother to tell us anything about Liza's mother, if Liza has, or ever had, one.) I lik...

 Yes, we had baby two; all's well; I can't write too much about everything right now. Meanwhile, for summer reading, may I recommend Jerry Pinkney's "The Tortoise and the Hare"? Pinkney wrote this after "The Lion and the Mouse"; feeling a special kinship with Aesop, Pinkney tackled both "Tortoise" and "Grasshopper and Ants." In Pinkney's version of "The Tortoise and the Hare," the tortoise is determined, and the hare is maybe a bit tuned-out. But the hare doesn't disgrace himself; when he loses, he loses with dignity. Pinkney wanted to give the hare the chance to "teach something"; the story doesn't need to be concerned solely with the greatness of the tortoise. Because he was working with an arid Southwestern landscape, Pinkney gave colorful costumes to his critters. The costumes mean that your brain doesn't get tired. I especially like the cover, with the tortoise and hare locking eyes; I'm no...

 The world has great heaping helpings of advice -- for parents-of-two. *Make use of the baby bjorn. You can strap your mostly-dormant infant to your chest while freeing up your two arms to manage your toddler. So you are like a bleary-eyed puppetmaster; you have two hands free to control the toddler-marionette (or to try to). *Keep one foot in the working world. During nap-times, just send out that resume! Check in with ex-colleagues. This way, when your spouse loses his or her job, in a shocking twist, you can don your cape and just keep rolling, rolling, rolling along. *Brace yourself for Year Five. This is my favorite "tip," and one I hadn't even considered. When your toddler is especially difficult, just push your mind forward to Year Five. Imagine: You think it's challenging now? In Year Five, you will have *two* continuously-mobile creatures, and neither will be anywhere close to anything that resembles self-control. I'm not complaining. I'm really not.