Books Diary

 When I write about my life, I'm on the look-out for odd characters; strange behavior is a gift. I often think of Kristen Wiig, who has described a run-in with an eccentric Target lady. ("I knew, right then, that this would be my ticket to a paycheck--over and over...")

It's easy to write about my kids because they are frequently making such odd choices (throwing crowded rooms into pitch-black darkness, standing silently and appearing unmoved through a Hanukkah concert "debut," flirting blatantly with the gastroenterologist). The greatest gift to me was a shitty contractor, who would text me about his prolonged bouts with diarrhea, his tiredness and sadness, his unfortunate failure to avoid sticking a large nail into his own eye.

For me, the gold mine is a sense of ambivalence; you must be able to feel compassion for the person you are describing, but if you also have a "counter-narrative" of pure exasperation, this is fine material. Grace Paley said, "There is a long time in me between the knowing and the telling." If the emotions called up by a particular memory are too lively, too white-hot, the story will seem flat and implausible.

All these thoughts come to mind when I read "Drawn Testimony," a court artist's memories of several decades of sketching. Jane Rosenberg sits near Bill Cosby, near John Gotti, with her pastels, and she tries to make art. She is happiest when a subject has exaggerated features; Woody Allen is particularly easy to sketch. She notices how iconic hair seems to be a standard feature of financial termites (Bernie Madoff, Sam Bankman-Fried). She has a special interest in clothing--how the red of Trump's necktie is more garish, more shocking, than the red of the American flag.

Rosenberg describes how sudden emotion, and fortuitous accidents, can alter her work. For example, at one point, she sketches a mother who has lost two of her three kids; the mother is directly attacking the nanny, who has admitted to having committed the murders. Rosenberg says that the act of narrating the discovery of two bodies seems like a physical endeavor, for the mom; it's as if the mom, with her words, is resetting the clock and stumbling on the corpses once again. As Rosenberg watches, she sketches the mother clutching at her heart, at her chest, but the arm becomes too large. The arm in the drawing seems almost larger than the rest of the body--but the detail "works." It conveys what really happened in the room; it's a better job than a "realistic" portrait may have been.

Not every visual artist is also a writer, but Rosenberg has a way with words. I really like this book.