Liars and Saints

 Maurice Bailey was a man who tried to take a sailing trip with his wife. The trip went off course, and the two amateurs were stranded in the ocean (on a tiny raft) for many weeks. Bailey came home and published the story of the disaster--and sales went through the roof. Unfortunately, Bailey's *subsequent* voyage went very well--so the subsequent account (a *new* book) did not sell well. No one wants to read about a tediously successful voyage. I thought about Bailey while I made my way through "Notes on Being a Man," perhaps the worst book I've ever read. I planned to stop reading around page 80. But my hatred for the book was so strong, it pushed me forward. I felt an intense pleasure in my loathing for the writer, Scott Galloway. Do you know how, if you follow the political spectrum way, way far left, eventually the radical libertarians actually begin to seem like radical conservatives? My disdain for Galloway became so powerful, it began to resemble enjoyment. Re...

 I once knew a "child of suicide." This young man had not yet finished high school; however, his father had opted to jump ship. When we talk about suicide, we're not supposed to choose verbs that imply a sense of agency. Not "commit" suicide. Instead: "die by suicide." The idea is that you're in a burning room at the top of a skyscraper--and the options are sealing themselves off--and so, at a certain point, it would seem insane *not* to plunge to your death. In "Whalefall," Josh Brolin is troubled. One critic says the Brolin character suffers from "toxic masculinity," but there is nothing notably masculine about the Brolin character. It might be better to say that he is just toxic. Austin Abrams, Brolin's son, tries not to upset the sleeping dragon. But battles are inevitable. In one scene I like, Brolin has issued a sloppy half-invitation, and Abrams has replied with a sloppy half-deferral. The problem of non-communication...

  My world is Kelly Clarkson. Everything is Kelly Clarkson. To re-cap, Clarkson went into a store in Brooklyn and understood the vendor's tone to be snotty. She then posted on social media about the rudeness. But--being a celebrity--she unwittingly activated a mob of millions of people who subsequently attacked the Brooklyn store. And now the Brooklyn store is attempting to play the role of victim (and not the other way around). I love this story. We're not supposed to make assumptions--but I'm going to make assumptions. The Brooklyn vendor was, in fact, rude (and we can't tell in the video because the sound is off, obviously so much in life is about tone, intonation). Clarkson was also having an iffy day--and, having grown up in Fort Worth, she was feeling particularly impatient with the default semi-rudeness that you are likely to find at *more than one* tiny Brooklyn shop counter. Having grown up in Buffalo, I personally feel something like rage whenever a New York C...

Amy Bloom writes about Karen Pirie, Poirot, and Peter Wimsey, and these characters would be ideal "college essay" narrators: What all of these people have in common is curiosity and intelligence and an impressive, sometimes awkward, perseverance. Some of them are self-aware (to make any monster no longer a monster, give him or her some self-awareness), and some are not, and some pretend not to be, but we see that they know who they are or, at least, what they have done, in the quiet moments and the musing after the event, whether the event is homicidal or sexual. Many high-school seniors shy away from self-awareness in their essays; the writers believe that conceding a flaw would be an unappealing choice (when, in fact, it is a *very* appealing choice). Some people might wish for the perfect protagonist, but it’d be hard to get any of those people to agree on what the perfect protagonist should be. Do we all want beautiful or genius? Beauty or extreme handsomeness can be off-...

  My favorite music video is for the Whitney Houston "Higher Love" remix. A few things it does right: *It is pure sex. It would be difficult to imagine a hotter, more joyful music video. *It is not thuddingly literal. Too often, music video directors feel a need to underline each and every lyric. If there is a metaphor involving a sunrise, we see an actual sunrise. "Higher Love" avoids this trap. *It's a thoughtful tribute to Whitney. The costumes are an allusion to "I Wanna Dance With Somebody"--and we in fact see that video on a small TV screen for approximately three seconds. This feels appropriate--not sappy or overly reverent. A light touch. Five stars, no notes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR49dyo-y0E&list=RDJR49dyo-y0E&start_radio=1

 Yes, it's a bad movie. But it's not terrible. In a way, it *profits* from the negative reviews--you see the film and anticipate a trainwreck. And it's just a car wreck, so you're pleasantly surprised. A grand tradition of storytelling involves children attempting to piece together the truth from various fragments that adults provide. The main text is Henry James's "What Maisie Knew" (with a strong film adaptation featuring Julianne Moore). You also have the Culkin character in "You Can Count on Me." You have Maile Meloy's excellent story "Red From Green." Mona Simpson's "Casebook" belongs in this discussion. Plus Jesse Eisenberg's galvanizing performance in "The Squid and the Whale." "Other Mommy" features a little girl--a young actor asked to do a bit too much. As others have noted, it's hard to spend so much time with a child actor when you know Jessica Chastain and Arian Moayed are in th...

 In Lorrie Moore's famous story about pediatric oncology, Moore encourages the other parents (people she finds in a hospital waiting room) to tell *their* own worst stories. "Hit me--hit your hardest." My group, Autism Moms, has a standout. She recently had a ruptured aneurysm; she believes that stress didn't help the situation. In her account of her life, her ex-husband refuses to read about autism; he believes that the daughter in question will "learn" if the stakes feel threatening and punitive. He uses corporal punishment; the family judge says it's OK, because "it's not like he is beating anyone senseless." The dad has made noises about weaponizing Child Protective Services; if the mom isn't compliant with certain wishes, CPS might need to get involved. The mom is frightened when the daughter gets violent--it's difficult to manage this if you're alone in the house with the child. As I listen, I have two strong reactions. On...

  The extraordinary paragraph featured here is from Donald Hall's essay "Out the Window." Hall--having spied his ninetieth birthday on the horizon--had committed himself to writing prose. We don't get many books from octogenarians. In fact, Lorrie Moore has specifically said that she thinks a writer's career ends at the eightieth birthday; "I have turf until I turn eighty, and then I need to cede my spot." This is nonsense--and Donald Hall enjoys taking on the contrarian role. It's clear throughout the essay that he is writing  as an act of service --he knows there are not many literary reports from the pen of a "post-post-retirement" man, and he is filling a gap. I'm especially moved by his descriptions of his mother. The subtext is evident: "This, now, is what it was like for her. This is what she couldn't find words for. This is what she couldn't tell me." A writer has to recognize shame as an opportunity. Most of u...

 I'm always drawn to "The Thankful Poor," by Henry Ossawa Tanner, at the Met. No one will advertise the fact that this painting briefly belonged to Bill Cosby. The family dinner table is a dramatic setting; as a dad, I can't help but wonder if the child in the painting is about to knock his little cup on the floor. I also think of the climactic dinner scene from "Kimberly Akimbo": Isn't this nice? Everybody's being so nice. Nothing is wrong-- Troubles have passed. Everybody civil and getting along-- Will it last? I'm guessing that the grandfather will quickly run out of topics to discuss--and will wish that the child could be a bit more like Barbara Walters. The child is agitated because the library hour was cancelled--without explanation--at school today. A final thing I love is the unbalanced nature of the sleeves on the boy's shirt. I can imagine the grandfather saying, "Check yourself in the mirror and tidy up--Henry Ossawa Tanner is...

 Wightman is a farm that gracefully does its job. You get a scenic tractor tour, a pumpkin patch, a hay "gym," a corn maze, a donut stand. The patches of wildflowers are the highlight of the tractor event; these patches are saved for the end, in the same way that you don't get "Rose's Turn" until the final minutes of "Gypsy." I especially like the country music soundtrack, which always catches me by surprise. At home, my family's sonic landscape tends to feature Ariana Grande or the most famous numbers from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical "Cats." Suddenly, at Wightman, I'm plunged into a melodic world of Jesus stories and descriptions of pickup trucks. It's like I've entered another universe. My daughter struggles with the idea of apple-picking; impetuously, she grabs the half-rotten apple corpses from the soil. I don't mind; I secretly think apples are overrated. There is a website that has a damning observation about...

 The new  "SVU" caused some discord in my house yesterday. As I watched, I involuntarily said, "This writing is so bad." And my husband made me take it back. Let me clarify. The episode had ideas. The central concern is that the system is broken. When the country is so unfair to women, it makes sense to bend the rules. (It's sort of like civil disobedience.) A nurse suggests to a victim that it's wise to say, "I was *forced* to drink." When it's clear that a misogynistic jury will sympathize with an attacker, Olivia wins leverage by putting the attacker's mother in jail. ("If you want Mom to be freed, you'll need to give me something....") My problem is the issue of continuity. Olivia Benson has done her job for thirty years. This week's episode suggests a large rupture in Olivia's own system of ethics--but the abruptness is not plausible. The tension between Olivia and Carisi is interesting--but these are not characte...

  Curtis Sittenfeld writes beautifully, and her recent NYT piece has a shrewd opening: I’ll offer it up right away, the part that, depending on your perspective, might seem ironic or juicy or enviable or tragic: I’m now divorced. It would be difficult to stop reading at this point. What makes the sentence "pop" is the absence of self-pity. Sittenfeld has a healthy sense of perspective. (She *consistently* has this.) Also, Sittenfeld has an imagination: she can anticipate her news "landing" in several different ways, and she lists these ways. I find it hard to know how long I was married. My former husband and I considered ourselves separated by fall 2024, but maybe it was before that? He didn’t move out until fall 2025, and the divorce was legal in January 2026. There is an impression of chattiness--but I believe Sittenfeld works to select the insights that really seem (potentially) universal. Also, she is writing from the gut. Now I welcome advice from other divor...

  "Hadestown" succeeds because of its ending. Writers struggle with endings. If you see the crazy new film "Verity," you'll notice that it doesn't even have a conclusion! It's as if the storyteller just tossed her pen out the window and shrugged. But "Hadestown" has a surprising, effective, layered finale. We revisit lines from the first ten minutes of the show. Once again, we're told that Orpheus can see how the world *could* be -- "in spite of the way that it is." The sentence has acquired a new punchiness, because we've just seen "the way that it is." People die, people lose faith. That's the way the world is. "It's a sad song -- but we're gonna sing it again." Often, and particularly on Broadway, producers feel a need to pander -- an ending needs to be "happy" if it's going to be palatable. By contrast, Hermes looks directly at the audience and names what has happened in *his* ...

  "To me, autism can be a superpower. What does it mean in your case? It means your child is sensitive, and he doesn't have time for bullshit. How can that be a bad thing?" The family counselor is remarkably professional. She always apologizes for being late -- though she is never actually late. She dresses in neutral tones. She has a way of radiating positive energy -- if it's an act, it's a very persuasive act. In her view, my daughter is headed for the Presidency of the United States. That would be great -- also, no one else actually has this suggestion for my daughter. The "plan" seems to come from nowhere. I say, "I just want to know that my son can eventually date, meet someone, be paired off." The counselor shrugs. "Maybe, and maybe not. Who says there is just one way to be happy?" We meet once per week; I send a weekly agenda. The agenda sounds like a "found object" poem -- the counselor says it could be printed on t...

 Taylor Swift is activated by the idea of triangles. Several of her best songs feature threeway battles. I'm thinking of "Daddy, I Love Him," "Love Story," "Fifteen," "You Belong With Me," "Betty," "Illicit Affairs." "Babe." "Getaway Car." Someone cheats, or someone has an overbearing parent. Someone uses the promise of a bad relationship as an excuse to get out of an *extant* bad relationship. So I can appreciate "Patient Zero." It's a way of rewriting "Fifteen." What I admire in "Patient Zero" is how the two women try to negotiate the terms of *their* connection. "It's not a bad time at all...." "It's not for me to say...." These bits of throat-clearing are more interesting than the sexual drama in the song. By contrast, Taylor Swift has not figured out a way to write about bliss. It's not within her range. But she keeps trying. As othe...

 Frontotemporal dementia is a terrifying condition that tends to strike when you are in your forties. It's not Alzheimer's. With Alzheimer's, initially you lose some short-term memory while your personality remains intact. With FTD, your short-term memory is initially fine, but your personality starts to evaporate. What does it mean to lose your personality? You become scarily disinhibited. (You might start to have multiple affairs--or throw yourself from the window of a moving train.) You lose an awareness of yourself; though you are clearly failing at your job, you believe you're doing fine. You cannot connect with other people. In one story, a woman becomes annoyed with her teen son's loud soup-slurping behavior, so she locks him out of the house, in the cold, for several hours. A doctor with FTD once performed a C-section. "I did that so well," he said, "I deserve to carve my initials into the mother's flesh." And the nurses watched--horr...

 The best Barnes and Noble is just north of Grand Central; it's at Fifth Avenue and 46th. It has a functional bathroom, it has proximity to Broadway, and it has a well-organized flow of traffic by the cash register. (If you go up to the Upper East Side, it's *chaos* at *that* particular cash register.) I strongly recommend getting yourself a cup of tea and sitting with an unpurchased copy of "Changing My Mind," by Julian Barnes. No one will care if you don't spend money on that book. The stockholders within Barnes and Noble are *not* suffering. The book is a short account of how Julian Barnes once disliked the works of E.M. Forster--until he grew older and changed his mind. He realized that Forster was sort of saucy and naughty. (Barnes had missed this fact for several years.) For whatever reason, I think this essay is charming. Barnes especially likes "Where Angels Fear to Tread." There was one unfortunate scene from my own life at the midtown Barnes an...

  A spooky story beloved by my family is "The Night It Rained," by Alvin Schwartz. It's immediately unnerving. A man is driving in the night when he spots an underdressed boy in the rain. He offers a sweater to the boy (Jim), and Jim becomes a passenger in the car. The man drives Jim home and says, "I'll just stop by tomorrow for the sweater." But the next day, the man meets Jim's mother, who is confused. "My son is not alive," she says. "He died last year." The narrator then visits Jim's tombstone--and the borrowed sweater is draped over the lettering. I love this story because it demands that the reader make inferences. We can imagine that the man visits Jim's house during daylight hours because he is concerned about possible neglect (and the sweater is a helpful thing to pretend to focus on). We might also guess that Jim is spotted walking on the road because this is the region where the *living* Jim was once struck by a ca...

 Sharon Horgan is among my favorite TV writers. I really enjoyed "Catastrophe," "Divorce," and the first season of "Bad Sisters." (Horgan's apparently groundbreaking series--"Pulling"--seems to be unavailable in the US, though I've tried.) Horgan is so important to me, she has changed my reading choices. I don't really listen to anyone regarding book recommendations. But I'll listen to Sharon Horgan--she has directed me to "Rosemary's Baby" and to the Dolly Alderton novel "Good Material." One of my Mount Rushmore selections, in terms of serialized narrative, is Adam Goldman's "The Outs." Goldman was inspired to write this because of Sharon Horgan's "Pulling." So I was pleased by the arrival of "Youth." The pilot is standard Sharon Horgan: The Horgan character, Alex, turns sixty and gets arthritis in her jaw, meaning she can no longer give BJs. She hasn't had sex in ...

 Brad Pitt is so good in this movie. He is just acting opposite a dog--really, four dogs (taking turns). In sum, you are watching a two-hour monologue delivered by Brad Pitt. Pitt has survived a war (maybe the most recent war in Iraq?) His "battle dog," Odin, has also survived, but Odin has lost a leg and developed a now-lingering case of PTSD. The two friends travel to Alaska for rest and relaxation. Pitt has a heart attack while trying to pilot his little plane--this then becomes a survival/adventure story. There are three main antagonists: a rushing river, a bear, and a pack of wolves. Pitt, the actor, makes a smart choice; he will not "externalize" his despair. So he becomes something like Henry Fonda or Gregory Peck; it's just a joy to watch him. The trick about camera work is that viewers *want* to ascribe human feelings to dogs. You show an image of a suffering child--and then you show a dog's face--and the viewer *reads* empathy in the dog's eyes...

 I saw him at a party for "Zootopia 2." Our kids were involved. My frenemy's husband made no indication that he had been reading my autobiographical essays. My frenemy's husband works in real estate--but he wants to abandon that world in favor of a political career. He posts many angry short films about Trump and about ICE--I can tell that these gestures are gratifying for him. He met my husband for coffee--and for a chance to discuss how he can  really make a difference --and my husband listened in a polite way. This leads me to recall a favorite scene from a Lorrie Moore story. An undergrad, wearing a large leather bow, visits a history professor. "I just want my major to mean something," she says. And the professor says, "That's your FIRST problem. Have a great afternoon." The professor adds, "I really love your bow." I understand the issue of career fatigue. I'm grateful not to work in real estate. Even tutoring--which has the...