Liars and Saints

  In one of my favorite stories, by Amy Bloom, a little girl struggles with trauma. The source of the trauma is her parents' separation. The little girl has no sense of perspective--given that she is a child--so she expresses her sadness by staging events from a genocide. She uses her dolls. My daughter's favorite game is Holocaust. She's been playing it for two years, since fourth grade, and she is unbelievably inventive. She found her old American Girl doll, Samantha from Park Avenue, cut her hair off with kid scissors for that ragged, doomed look, took the poor doll out of her plaid dress, wrapped her bottom in a dirty dish towel, and laid her in a pile of leaves. She crumpled soil into a cup and brewed it with boiling water. She came into the house... "It must have been like this--for THEM," Abby said. "Where'd they get the hot water?" I said. That's what I had been reduced to.... My son is not dealing with trauma, but he is dealing with sens...

  It's a cliche about university professors that they tend to show signs of arrested development--they can behave in dramatic, adolescent ways, and that's fun to observe. At Yale, I had a professor whose Chaucer-expert spouse had recently started a high-profile affair with a grad student. So my professor began wearing thigh-high leather boots and speaking publicly about the dalliance she was enjoying with her new house-painter. (She also began teaching a course called "Doomed Love.") One of my other teachers was Amy Bloom, who has just now released an academic satire disguised as a murder mystery. Bloom's protagonist is Dell, a failed scholar. (Dell's work deteriorated after her mother died. "I did all the things you're not supposed to do. I yelled at students. I arrived late. Cried for most of the ninety minutes." Then, she adds proudly, "I did NOT have sex with undergraduates...only because depression made it unappealing and Prozac made it...

  A third essay I admire is by Amy Bloom; it's about coping. It starts with a bang. “I cannot take all of these losses,” I said to my therapist, The Great Wayne, as I lay down, sniffling on his absurdly proto-Freudian Peruvian rug-covered couch. Bloom immediately "recruits" you to her team via self-mockery. Sniffling, hyperbole. She is not going to flatter herself. I had a list of large and small losses: my parents (whom I miss every day, but orphaned at 55 does not feel like someone has done me wrong); my old house (which I miss only at the holidays when my new house is an exploding clown car of children and grandkids); my perfect, helpful and unintrusive nextdoor neighbour who moved away suddenly, replaced by someone who is none of the above; my older sister, hospitalised twice; and, more than all of these, my husband, Brian, my constant companion and best beloved, who had been gone from me and from this world for a month. Brian was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease at...

 Amy Bloom writes about the sea of bad therapists. The worst we ever had sat in a pale green room with us. He watched, in alarm, as my sister began crooning and slowly massaging her own breasts. My mother and I started to laugh. This was Rose's standard opening salvo.  Mr. Walker said, "I wonder why it is that everyone is so entertained by Rose behaving inappropriately." Rose burped and then we all laughed. Mr. Walker, unfortunately, was determined to do right by us. "What do you think of Rose's behavior, Violet?" They did this sometimes. In their manual, it must say, "If the parents are too weird, try talking to the sister." "I don't know. Maybe she's trying to get you to stop talking about her in the third person.... " Then Bloom writes about the one *good* therapist. Dr. Thorne moved mountains. Rose set up shop in a halfway house, whose director kept Rose even when Rose went through a period of having sex with everyone who pass...

Amy Bloom's new novel is about a young woman, Lily, who finds herself married to a much older man. This isn't about love; the older man is lonely, and he wants to feel younger. Lily thinks this can work--until it really can't. She becomes intoxicated with rage. She begins to anticipate the man's next move, almost with eagerness, just so she can have something new to feel enraged about. One day, Lily sets a tupperware container next to the leftovers. The man looks helpless, and he feebly pushes the tupperware halfway toward the ceramic plate. He looks at Lily with imploring eyes, and Lily says, "You are capable of dumping the food into the tupperware container." And the husband says, "This just isn't working." And he disappears from her life forever. Later, Lily has a dizzying romance at an academic conference. But--like Simon in the story "Simon's Luck"--the man has a terrible accident. He dies on the road. Lily, now besieged with g...

  My former teacher, Amy Bloom, described her particular childhood; she disliked "feminine" clothing, and she often chose to stay home, reading memoirs by prostitutes. (Her favorite was "A House Is Not a Home," by Polly Adler.) She also read abridged versions of Shakespeare stories, and she would wander around, refashioning herself as Henry V. ("I curse thee, knave!") Imagine my sense of thrill when my daughter announced that she wanted to be a tropical bird for Halloween. At last, a break from the tyranny of the princess narrative. Susie found an outfit that she liked--and I liked it, too. With its odd, semi-abstract headpiece, it made me think of something a flapper would wear, in the Roaring Twenties. Susie's costume kicked ass. Fast forward to 3pm. At the end of the day, Susie was no longer a bird, but a princess. She had persuaded her teacher to trash the bird costume and dig out a pink gown. Attached to this utterly unremarkable gown were two sma...

 For a long while, I lived in Fort Greene; now, almost everything that existed then no longer exists.  An exception is the Greenlight Bookstore, which seems to get more and more popular. I put a great deal of trust in clever branding, and "Greenlight" is an ideal name for a bookstore. It echoes "City Lights" and the "light of knowledge"; it alludes to its neighborhood, with its first syllable. Almost anytime I visit Greenlight (or one of its competitors), I am reminded of my old teacher Amy Bloom, who was emphatic when arguing that reading should be a pleasure. There is no shame in "genre" fiction; Bloom was especially outspoken about Val McDermid, PD James, and Donna Leon. She also demanded a sense of humor--whether on the surface, or lower down, "among the weeds." With Bloom's thoughts in mind, I recently chose "The Examiner," which is a silly (and smart) tale of murder in an academic setting. I'm so pleased that Gre...

  In college, the teacher who shaped me the most was Amy Bloom, and her "blockbuster" story was "Silver Water." Bloom made fiction slightly less mysterious by explaining, "A story is just an account of a stranger coming to town." For example, that stranger could be: psychosis.  As an undergrad, I thought "Silver Water" was sort of bizarre, but now its events seem almost "normal" to me. Where is the family whose members haven't endured something like this (maybe something in a milder form)? A girl, Rose, has a talent for singing. But, also, she has issues. At fifteen, she becomes moody and tearful, then she stops coming home. This leads to a tense exchange between her parents, something for the Dialogue Hall of Fame: After three weeks, my mother said to my father, "She's going off." "What is that, your professional opinion?" He picked up the newspaper and put it down again, sighing. "I'm sorry. I didn...

  One thing I hadn't known is that, if your child has sensory issues, storytime can be a challenge. (Maybe that's true with or without the sensory issues.) For many months, Josh would sit still for a story -- but, after his body grew stronger, he learned to throw himself from my lap and yell loudly until the storybook went away. This was painful, but we reached a detente. Now, if I give him the story first thing in the day, he will listen, or half-listen. And the stories need to be short: "Dear Zoo," "Barnyard Dance," "Kitten's First Full Moon." When Josh is "locked in," I'm reminded how great reading can be. I especially see this with "Dear Zoo." A crazed zookeeper sends wildly inappropriate gifts to a kid. A lion, a camel, an elephant. With each gift, you get a "pop-out" page: The child slides a paper cover off a basket, and reveals the animal underneath. This is a full-body sport for Josh. He cannot wait for...

“In Love” (Random House):  One job of a writer is to go where others are unwilling to go -- and it seems to me that Amy Bloom has done this, and she has now written the book she was born to write. Around fifteen years ago, Bloom was unhappy in her relationship, and she met a guy in the local chapter of the Connecticut Democrats. He liked fiction and poetry, liked Planned Parenthood, and he designed housing for people who couldn't afford housing. Of course, the two had an illicit kiss, then avoided each other for a year, then began dating in earnest. This guy--Brian--proposed, and the proposal took this form: "You need someone who is content to be the less-smart partner, who knows that you will pretty much always be the main event. You need someone who recognizes how hard you work, and who will make you coffee in the middle of the night. I don't know if I can be that guy, but I'd like to try." And a wedding ensued. What is it like to be married, on a day-by-day bas...

My favorite short story is "Between Here and Here," by Amy Bloom. Bloom borrows a fair amount from Jane Austen, who was interested in the struggles of a sensible person in the company of a lunatic. (See Elizabeth in "Pride and Prejudice," or Elinor in "Sense and Sensibility.") "Between Here and Here" has Alison, a tough, reasonable human being, who struggles in the presence of her boorish father, Alvin. It's not that Alvin ever physically attacks anyone. But he is unhappy and unpleasant; he makes mess after mess after mess. Moments I love: Alvin's son tentatively comes out of the closet. Alvin's wife cries and says something appropriate. Alvin, by contrast, pokes his son's large stomach and says, "Fat fag....No fun in that." (And so Alvin has insulted both his son's sexual orientation and his son's girth, in one breath. Makes my jaw drop!) Alvin gets irritated at the dinner table, and throws the c...

My favorite book is (possibly) "Where the God of Love Hangs Out," by Amy Bloom. I bought it at the Borders next to the Kips Bay AMC, in an era when Borders outposts still existed, and the cover features a vaginal peach and a penis-stem--a stem jutting out from a cherry, meant to evoke thoughts of the human penis. A story is nothing without great characters. Bloom's book--her third and most recent story collection--has characters who "speak to me": *The crabby middle-aged woman in the middle of an affair. Her boyfriend can't accept the watch she just bought; "I already have one, and my wife will connect the dots." So our heroine calmly takes the old watch, drops it on the road, and runs it over with her SUV. "So sorry," she says. "Terrible accident. Enjoy your new watch." *The woman who can't stand her own father, and sometimes doodles an image of his gravestone, as a form of therapy. She also sends him cigars, in the h...

(5) Book lovers: Anne Tyler's new novel, "Redhead by the Side of the Road," has some of the strongest reviews of her career. Something strange happens when a novelist is prolific and getting old. Many critics decide that she ought to write about something else. "Maybe Anne Tyler's Baltimore should resemble the world of THE WIRE more." I find this tiresome, and I'm glad most reviewers stayed away from that trap, this go 'round. (4) Curtis Sittenfeld's "Rodham" will be a big event this spring. Sittenfeld hasn't written a novel since "Eligible," a Jane Austen update beloved by many, but famously savaged by both Ursula Le Guin and Michiko Kakutani. (Sittenfeld on Twitter: "Is it weird that Le Guin trashed my book and I'm sort of flattered?") (3) Also: a new book by Ottessa Moshfegh. I'm not hearing much about this. Moshfegh last appeared with the audacious experiment "My Year of Rest and Relaxati...

My favorite Twitter account is Amy Bloom's. Ms. Bloom is very salty and droll in person; she was my teacher, in college. She uses Twitter as an art form. Her tone is restrained. She generally waits until she has something funny to say. A bitchy conservative columnist posted, recently, a covertly sexist observation about Elizabeth Warren: "My youngest says she is like the kind of grandma who doesn't bake you cookies. He is saying she is cold, but I like his phrasing better." Amy Bloom replied in the only way possible, surprising but inevitable: "My youngest says Trump is the kind of grandpa who punches you, leaves a bruise, and doesn't know your name." Also, Bloom is especially lively when Tweeting about her arch-nemesis, the "Vichy Republican" Susan Collins. Recently, Collins announced her intention to run for reelection. "Collins believes she is the centrist candidate, able to compromise, that Maine so badly needs....: Bloom, ...

This was the second book of stories from Amy Bloom, and I had fun rereading parts of it over spring break. Not everything works. The triangle in "Rowing to Eden" doesn't fully hold my attention. And the woman who adopts a badly disfigured child as a way of coping with grief? This feels a bit "on the nose." But I like the shocking last story, "The Story," and the fun of being inside the mind of a crafty anti-heroine. I like the woman who sleeps with the husband of the president of her local synagogue, and contemplates helping him to commit suicide. (He is slowly dying of a disease.) I like the girl who stops speaking because her mom is really ill. People are in dire straits, in these stories. That's often a source of black humor. Then, the title story, about Jane, whose daughter wants gender confirmation surgery. A story that came out before people knew much about the experiences of transgender men and women (and it surely uses dated languag...

My reading tastes were shaped, in a major way, by Amy Bloom. It seems to me Bloom understands that reading should be for pleasure; though she has a "literary sensibility," she also enjoys plot. She enjoys well-written stories in which things actually happen. As opposed to stylish stories in which nothing happens (Rachel Cusk). Or awkwardly-written, lumpy stories in which *everything* happens. (e.g. "I Am Pilgrim.") I *like* this Amy Bloom-ish way of operating. So, for example, asked by the New York Times what she should choose for the beach, Bloom chooses thrillers written with style. Val McDermid, P.D. James, Alan Furst, Ed McBain, Benjamin Black. She says, "Death, suffering, resolution, and a well-shaped sentence seem to go so well with sun and sand." Notice that inclusion of well-shaped sentence . Without that, you have nothing. The more-"literary" writers Bloom names in this piece are writers who enjoy telling an old-fashioned story. Th...

Lionel Sampson reads to his brother from the flight magazine. "'The Seeing Eye dog was invented by a blind American.'" Buster laughs. "Really. Invented . Man must have gone through a hell of a lot of dogs." Julia's sons, Buster and Lionel, are flying from Paris to Boston, to be picked up and driven to their mother's house for Thanksgiving. Their driver will be an old Russian guy they've had before, big belly, a few missing teeth, with cold bottled water and The New York Times in the backseat. The two men are as happy as clams not to be driving in Buster's wife's minivan with all the kids and their laptops and iPods and duffel bags and Jewelle's gallon containers of creamed spinach and mashed sweet potatoes, which Jewelle now brings rather than making them at her mother-in-law's, because now that Julia's getting on, although the house is clean and Jewelle is not saying it's *not* clean, you do have to tidy up a little b...