Liars and Saints

 My son seems to know, now, that passivity is not always "the only option." At bedtime, he walks to the stairs, nods at the safety gate, and looks at me until I press the "unlock" button. Then he hurls himself up the stairs, while cradling his elephant, and he throws himself into his bedroom. Sometimes, he seems to chant, "Bed, bed, bed, bed." If I need to ring a doorbell, and I'm not doing my job, my son will widen his eyes and point at the doorbell. Finally, for entertainment, he'll try to gnaw on a shoe. These seem like small steps -- but, to a parent, it's like your son has crossed the Rubicon. We're reading a great deal of William Steig stuff--"Doctor De Soto," "Sylvester," "Amos and Boris." Steig celebrates small creatures--often mice--who use their brains to triumph over brute forces (and the brute forces might be a fox, an ocean wave, a large ape). Although Steig likes to write warmly about love and tog...

 I know I'm not alone in feeling moved and wistful about the final season of Issa Rae's "Insecure." Tributes are popping up. Walking with my co-fan, Marc, last night, I was floored to consider the changes our leads have gone through. Issa began the show in a bad relationship with a guy who was clinically depressed, and Issa was working for a white-savior group called "We Got Y'all." Meanwhile, Issa's friend Molly was working with lawyers who didn't value her, offering unsolicited advice, dropping a boyfriend because he said he had once hooked up with a guy. Now, in Season Five, both Issa and Molly seem to enjoy their work, neither is entangled in an intense secretive extracurricular affair (though, yes, Molly is withholding info from colleagues) ..... neither seems to be on the verge of administering a best-friend "stab in the back" ...... I love a story that shows emotional change over time--and this is what "Insecure" has be...

  Anthony Horowitz has been a sensation for many years -- with "Magpie Murders," "The Word Is Murder," "The Sentence Is Death," and so on. These books generate buzz, and they fly from store shelves. Finally, I've found my way to Horowitz -- because his new book, "A Line to Kill," is among the Top Ten Thrillers of the Year, in the NYT. "A Line to Kill" is a title with a funny meaning: The villain, and victim, in this novel, is so unpopular that there might actually be a "long line" of people hoping to kill him. The villain is Charles, a wealthy resident of a remote island, and he hosts various writers at his mansion for a second-rate literary festival. Charles is unloved basically because he wants to "turf" the island; he thinks removing various beautiful natural sites will make the island into a technological powerhouse. Also, Charles's wife is having many affairs and (maybe) hoping to profit from a life-insu...

  Gift-giving is such a tricky endeavor, and so likely to result in awkward comic misunderstandings. George the hippo gives a large cuckoo clock to Martha, and she must pretend that she likes it. Martha cooks special pea soup for George, and George must stash it in his loafers, because an honest conversation seems so difficult. Gifts are a great source of interest among the Maplewood Moms, because the moms* have cash and some time on their hands, and because an especially tacky gift can be such a useful vehicle for drama. The mother who gives her maternity-ward daughter a thigh-master for Christmas. The husband who hands his wife an unwrapped Hanukkah cheese-grater.... Recently, the moms* listed the worst gifts their kids had ever received, and these are the three stories I liked most: * Mom gave a small, delicate Rodin knock-off sculpture to my toddler. Later, she asked if this had been a nice addition to playtime. I said: "Are you referring to the fragile, priceless statue that ...

 My husband studies me. He says, "I'm surprised you're not writing about the occupational therapist." This makes me think of the writer Lorrie Moore--and the moment her husband said, "Write about our child's tumor?" Moore said: "I do zany holidays. I do wacky family outings with the dog. Child tumor? I don't cover that." The occupational therapist was wildly mediocre. I could empathize--because I've made friends with mediocrity, many times in life. The O.T. was named Emily, and she wanted to assess my child via Zoom. She suggested that she just park herself in her desk chair--and watch the clock, for sixty minutes.....and then she could e-mail a "visit log" to me, and this could help me to "procure services." When I insisted on an in-person visit, Emily began a week-long tug-of-war with many references to her own childcare burdens, then she lost my address, forgot the time she had committed to, and asked me to resear...

 A new book that seems to have slipped under the radar--Sutton Foster's memoir--deserves some attention this year. Foster writes about her "crafting" hobby -- stitching, sculpting, sketching -- and this part doesn't interest me at all. If she needed this "hook" to get into her life stories, fine. But I don't think anyone needs to dwell on the paragraphs about collage, crochet tools, etc. Here's the meat of the story. Foster had a difficult mom who suffered from some combination of agoraphobia and borderline personality disorder. As the years went by, the mental illness grew stronger. Despite being often impossible, Mama Foster had ambitions and sometimes-weirdly-clear thoughts about the future. She recognized that her small child had an extraordinary talent--and she found ways to cultivate the talent. Also, when Patti LuPone appeared on PBS to do her now-famous version of Stephen Sondheim's "Being Alive," Mama Foster looked at her adole...

  Oliver and Ciara meet at a fancy bodega. One is wearing a NASA bag on the shoulder; the other happens to love NASA. Discussions about famous launches ensue. The two decide to meet--again and again--and soon a romance is brewing. But this is Dublin, in the recent past, and COVID wants to rear its head. As the restrictions get tighter, Ciara and Oliver have a joint brainstorm. What if they use the lockdown to live together in secret? What if they really pursue this romance--but without interference from the world? What if they have fun in an apartment, and they make a point of withholding their news from prying relatives, prying friends? Flash forward 56 days. A cop finds a rotting body in a shower. We know the body is Oliver--or it's Ciara. This is the setup for "56 Days," a novel by Catherine Ryan Howard. It's on at least two "10 Best 2021 Thrillers" lists (in the Times and in the Washington Post). Howard notes, in a letter to the reader, that many writers...

  My husband is a source of amazement because, when an installation inevitably goes wrong, he shows patience and kindness. My default mode is "enraged Karen." I'm stunned--in a weirdly gratifying way--when a house project gets derailed. The new dishwasher needs more space: My eyes turn yellow like sulfur, and I feel myself wanting to hiss like a snake. The replacement dryer *can* squeeze itself down the stairs, but the old dryer is actually too fat to come back *up* the stairs, so it must stay in its spot, in a kind of dryer graveyard, and we're all led to wonder.... How did it enter the house in the first place? "Repair" is a funny verb. The little gas fireplace was "repaired" for a handsome price--and then it waved its middle finger and screamed FUCK YOU, and it died. The washing machine was "repaired," or someone asserted this, and that someone wore a badge. You write a check, and the dude disappears, and the appliance breaks again. Th...

 Great writing is about memorable characters -- and though I understand the objections to "And Just Like That," I'd just encourage you to notice the funeral scene, and notice everything that is going on. Miranda may or may not have a drinking problem. We see her wandering into bars before they are open. At Big's funeral, Miranda actually has to pressure a young server to pop open the wine before the eulogies are delivered. Meanwhile, an older guest makes the event about her *own* life: "No one understands your suffering, Carrie, but I do. And *my* suffering was worse, because *my* husband died in the early days of the pandemic, before we had mastered even the Zoom shiva...." Stanford gets in a fight with an aging secretary about seating assignments; Stanford's bullishness is tacky, but, also, he surely *does* help Carrie by sitting next to her. People applaud Carrie's stoicism, but one lone skeptic asks: "Is that really a good thing?" A shr...

 My frenemy is back. Yesterday, at the "Back Road Holiday Party," I mentioned that my family is losing its nanny. "Of course," said my frenemy, "I myself use day care. I have the kids enrolled at the Goddard School. You actually have to get the child in at the three-month mark, or else there is a long, long wait list. Basically, you get your son in at three months, or it could be freshman year at Harvard before the day-care service calls you back!" I regretted having opened my mouth. "Well," said my frenemy, "the evenings are hard, so we've contacted a neighbor with a college-age daughter. And she just arrives each night to do one bath while I tackle our older kid. This twentysomething is fabulous, and she just has a very, very short walk to work each night, so everyone wins." I breathed deeply. I felt my ribcage separating from my sternum. My frenemy emitted a false laugh. "We made it to six months, right?" he said, as if...

  This is a full rave for the fourth and final season of "Goliath," on Prime. "Goliath" is a TV version of film noir; it borrows from "Rear Window," "Vertigo," "Chinatown," and "The Birds," among other films, and it's not subtle in tipping a hat to its influences. For example, in the fourth season, we see an injured, crabby man spying on the apartment across the street. An icy blonde appears behind him. In the third season, a tragic femme fatale, involved in a weird incestuous relationship, ends up prematurely dead; we know she is dead because her head hits the car horn, and the horn just screams and screams and screams. The fourth season asks this question: How would Alfred Hitchcock approach the opioid crisis? We have a powerful family--modeled on the Sacklers--and we know they have been aware, for years, that their product is deadly. One slice of evidence: The family began work on a non-addictive version of an opioid, w...

  I think the holidays can be brutal -- and I think the enforced cheeriness, or faux-cheeriness, can be especially brutal. That's why I am grateful to one particular Maplewood Mom -- who just wrote one of my all-time favorite personal essays, then pasted it on Facebook, for the world to see. I'm going to paraphrase the story here. It's Night Eight of Hanukkah, and my husband just gave me my gift. He gave me a cheese-grater. Last night, Night Seven, he gave me a single cookie sheet. He was gone for Nights Two to Six, and I chose and presented appropriate gifts to the children, and I also selected thoughtful "spousal" gifts. I'm going to put my grater away now, then I will ugly-cry in the shower. This isn't about materialism. It's about being seen and known by my spouse. I believe that this is a perfect piece of writing--immediately connecting with an entire world of readers--and I love the cool blast of truthfulness in each sentence. I tip my hat to thi...

 Tomie dePaola hit a homerun when he discussed his grandmothers -- but he had great success with grandfather stories, as well.  "Tom" shows us dePaola's Irish grandfather, who works as a butcher. "We were named after each other," says Grandpa (bizarrely). "So you will call me Tom, and I will call you Tommy." This is a symbiotic relationship. Tom gets noisy--this is easy to imagine--and his wife becomes exasperated. "Tom Downey, you are louder than all the Irish," she says, and this is Tom's cue to retreat to his man-cave, a room in the cellar. Little Tommy offers him admiring company. In turn, Tom teaches Tommy how to sift ashes in an old-fashioned furnace. Tom also teaches Tommy about patience: "If you bury this chicken head in your garden, then wait three days without looking, you'll get a full chicken." Tom knows that the three-day part will be impossible for Tommy, and so.....lessons learned. The gentle story builds unti...

 The Tudor era spawned the "Wolf Hall" novels (and plays and TV episodes), as well as the musical "Six."  You have an increasingly loony king (altered by a jousting accident?) -- and he almost continuously discarded (and sometimes murdered) his wives. One of the wives, Anne Boleyn, produced a spunky daughter, and it seems Henry VIII had little interest in the daughter. But she grew up to be one of the most powerful people in history -- Elizabeth I -- and her adult years have spawned their *own* series of literary works ("Elizabeth," "Elizabeth I," "Mary Queen of Scots," "Elizabeth: The Golden Age"). One big part of the Elizabeth story is her rivalry with Mary -- who lived up in Scotland and who seemed to be plotting (at times) to be the Catholic challenger to Elizabeth's throne. But Mary also had her own craziness up in Scotland. She had an advisor (and lover?) named Rizzio, and various court figures wanted Rizzio out of t...

  My family has reached its maximum size. My spouse and I have shipped our frozen embryos off to some special spot -- some spot they visit when they're no longer in cryostorage. The process was a human process, so it was comical. At one point, we discovered that we had been paying for a little vault of frozen sperm -- in addition to the frozen embryos. Frozen sperm? We were dismayed. Fifty dollars a month for that stuff? Those cells are truly a dime a dozen.  (I'm not always great at reading fine print.) We also needed participation from a notary public, so we trekked over to my local librarian, a friendly older South Orange resident, and we hummed nervously as she read about our little swimmers. Throughout the whole big process, certain questions were lobbed my way. Why have children? Why have two children so close together? If you must have children, why not adopt? I've read other people who take on these questions--and I'm seeing that the best answer is this.  It...

  David Sedaris once wrote an essay called "Peach Pearapy," and it was about how his elementary school leaders wanted to reform his speaking. The therapy was really a coded effort to make David sound "less gay." Of course, the therapy didn't work, and the humor of the story comes from all the bells and whistles surrounding a basically useless endeavor. I think of this, sometimes, as I drive my child to speech therapy. The work involves a notebook; I am to ingest helpful suggestions at the end of each session, then I'm to practice with Josh in the living room and jot down my observations. Encourage imaginative play with puppets. Use a "fence" with your child, so he can really focus. Have snacks available at all times, just to encourage positive non-bottle feeding experiences. Practice simple commands. Drill the body-part terms. Encourage "sensory play" with yogurt, apple sauce, lotion, Play-Doh, shampoo. Get out the flashcards. I'm pre...

 Thinking--and thinking--and thinking......about Sondheim this week......I put together my three favorite clips. They certainly aren't heretical choices. Here they are. (3) Bernadette Peters, "Move On." Sondheim himself said that Peters's work here was among the five most-wonderful inventions he'd seen in a theater. (Other winners: Alfred Drake, in "Kismet," John McMartin, in "Follies," Ethel Merman, in "Gypsy," Angela Lansbury, in "Sweeney Todd.") So: you have Peters's charisma. You have Mandy Patinkin's perfect voice. And you have a series of smart lines: "I chose and my world was shaken. So what? The choice may have been mistaken....The choosing was not....." And: "Stop wondering if your vision is new. Let others make that decision. They *usually* do...." And: "Stop worrying where you're going. Move on." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVC4MrUEBRo (2) Patti LuPone, "Gypsy...

Part of the fun of a Big Name memoir is seeing the crazy celebrities who surround the crazy-celebrity-storyteller. Like Katie Couric, Patti LuPone wants to "go there": She doesn't really hold back. She says, after Juilliard, she went into development hell with "The Baker's Wife," a "bad" musical. She says Zero Mostel was on the producers' wish list, but Mostel said no. "Mostel must have known, or sensed, something." The producers then went with Topol -- who "certainly wasn't in the same league as Zero Mostel." Next, LuPone makes her way to "Evita," and she speculates that New York didn't embrace the show right away because -- well -- Eva herself was a fascist. But people came around. Also, LuPone recalls a backstage visit from Lana Turner. "When I was in Argentina," said Turner, "the police took my passport from me. I couldn't understand why. Eventually, I was shown into a private room fo...

 Do you know that application question that often pops up: Which fictional character do you relate to, and why? I tend to answer Toad , from "Frog and Toad," but really the answer is Larry David , from "Curb Your Enthusiasm." Last night, my family watched just ten minutes, and in that time: (1) Larry felt some misguided chivalry about seeing a female driver carry his bag, and the awkwardness led to an extremely inappropriate customer "complaint." (2) Larry tried to order anchovies at lunch, but canceled the wish because his friends were "food-shaming" the order. (3) Larry saw Dr. Josh Gad, who bragged about maybe (maybe) once having treated Harrison Ford, and who accidentally showed off his own ratty pair of underwear. (4) A dispute about a communal phone-charger led to espionage and a possible rupture between two friends. Here is my own week. A language specialist came to assess my son, but spent at least thirty minutes complaining to me that he...

 Over break, I had the treat of reading Michael Connelly's "The Burning Room," which is a well-loved late-career book about Harry Bosch. (Janet Maslin said that "Burning Room" was a kind of renaissance for Michael Connelly.) The thing I love most about Connelly is his plots; it would be hard to outpace his imagination. In "The Burning Room," a man carries a bullet in his body for ten years, then finally dies from long-festering infections. There is a race to solve the ten-year slow-motion murder -- and it's soon clear that the bullet had a different target's name attached to it. (It's also clear that the mayor understood -- and hid -- certain facts about the wayward bullet. What a treat to piece together the puzzle of one mayor's cover-up.) "The Burning Room" also has nine children dying in a horrific act of arson. The act seems not to have any kind of linked motivation -- but of course, in Connelly, the appearance isn't t...