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Stuff I'm Reading

 "Impossible People," by Julia Wertz. The writer Kate DiCamillo said, "It doesn't matter how fancy your sentences are. Good writing happens after you study and listen to people. Good writing is a product of listening, and telling the truth."


Julia Wertz confesses to us that she spent her twenties in a drunken haze, in an illegal basement apartment in Greenpoint. She couldn't fall asleep before downing two or three bottles of wine. On Christmas, she found the one non-Christian liquor store in her neighborhood, and she congratulated herself on having taken a healthful walk to arrive at the store. Once, she stripped naked in the street and passed out; somehow, hours later, she found herself awake in her own apartment, next to a neatly folded stack of her discarded clothing.

Wertz pushes back against AA, even as she appreciates the ritual. "I couldn't tolerate the God stuff, so I just thought of God as a Group of Drunks." "AA says you're permanently an alcoholic, if you have an alcoholic phase, and actually I don't believe that." "AA says it's not enough to wish for sobriety just to please the people in your life--and, actually, I think that that's not true." Ferociously contrarian, funny, honest, incisive: Wertz is my new hero. This book deserves its hype.


"Pierre," by Maurice Sendak. In "Wild Things," Sendak observed that kids really can be awful; at the same time, Sendak showed this curious ability to empathize with kids. Pierre is like a proto-Max: terrible and exasperating, and also plausible and human and worthy of anyone's attention.


"Twist and Shout," by Katherine Heiny. This story--in Heiny's new collection--takes its inspiration from real life. Heiny shuttled her dad to various hearing-aid appointments, and her dad actually received the device, but then he swallowed it, because he thought it was a cashew.

Heiny uses this event to begin an investigation of aging and families. The narrator rages against her father, as her father berates the live-in nurse for carrying a flowery NPR tote bag. The topic of climate change--something Dad would put in "scare quotes"--becomes a radioactive object, in this one particular house. A therapeutic and surprising story, in a great book.





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