Liars and Saints

 My career coach is a sunny person, and she just wrote a piece called "Little Santas Everywhere," about Good Samaritans spreading the joy of the season. And I'd like to reply, with brief thoughts about people I loathe. *The couple behind me at the Jersey Gardens AMC. You talked all the way through the somber neo-Nazi drama, "The Order." This wasn't "Hairspray" or "Jumanji." It was a quiet, challenging film about obsession. What were you thinking? As Broadway star Laura Benanti recently said, in reference to her colleague, Zachary Levi: "Fuck off forever." *The woman in my neighborhood. My dog was pooping at the side of a sidewalk; no "poop-free" signs appeared anywhere nearby. I was clearly holding a poop bag, ready to clean up. You stopped, craned your neck to make eye contact with me, then gasped in a dramatic, stagy way. Then you walked off. I still have no idea what you wished to communicate. My comment, then, was ...

  My old writing teacher Amy Bloom has said, "I have a minor interest in gardening, but really my only interest is people. I study people. If I go to a museum, I look at the portraits; that's all I want to see." I get it. If someone at a party makes a weird remark about cheese puffs, I do a little inner dance, because I know I can poke and prod that remark for the next ten or twenty years. One of the great things that happened to novelist Elinor Lipman was the death of her husband, at sixty; it changed her writing, and it gave her new material. While others might retire to a convent, Lipman began dating, and she looked closely at various new forms of awkwardness and insecurity: Until my post-widowed dating life began at 60, I’d cooked nearly every night for my husband and son. I had dinner parties and folders full of recipes. I owned a fish poacher and a tortilla press. So why didn’t I cook for potential beau Jonathan after we met on Match.com? For months there was only a...

  I tend to read mystery novels, and Elinor Lipman is my exception.  Lipman writes romantic comedies about outrageous characters; you know that the story will move briskly; you know that sex will play a big role. In one novel, an IVF specialist goes to jail when it's revealed that he sometimes assisted clients through "an old-fashioned method" of conceiving life. In another novel, one-third of a love triangle is consumed with sexual jealousy, and then tries to murder the triangle's other two-thirds (as in the Betty Broderick story). A constant in a Lipman novel--as in a great deal of detective fiction--is that you have a smart, resourceful, passionate protagonist, someone you can easily root for. I don't sit around thinking about influences, but I know that Lipman's personal essays have had a tremendous impact on me. Lipman has a book, "I Can't Complain," where she simply talks about how she and her husband address the issue of snoring, or how sh...

 A novel of manners is just about how people talk to one another in cafes, on dates, in offices. For a certain reader, this is catnip; I am that certain reader. Elinor Lipman, queen of comic novelists, writes about manners. She considers how you might send a gentle reminder if your e-mail correspondent seems to have become a ghost. She memorizes the people who show up for a particular funeral -- then she notes how the act of "showing up" moves mountains. She sees the comedy in a cover letter, or a resume -- and she helps us see the comedy, too. A few years ago, Lipman's husband died, and Lipman didn't want to leave the house. So she mocked herself, in fiction; she invented a widow who is terrified of the world, and who wants to market a sex-free Match.com service called "Chaste Dates." When Lipman did find herself stepping out, she kept a journal close at hand; she later found a spot in her novel for "a blind date, a former baseball player who effective...

 The best essay I read this summer was "A Fine Nomance," by Elinor Lipman (you're correct that she invented a word), and it's about dating after your husband has died: At 59, I was a new widow writing a novel about a new widow who was socially maladroit. When her story started to stagnate, I knew I had to get her out of the house. Me, too. I signed us both up for Match.com. Dates followed. Not all were horrible, but the reporter in me liked the worst ones for their anecdotal value. There was the man who stuck his Nicorette gum under his seat, the 70-ish actor who had been among the six husbands of one of the “Golden Girls” and the guy who asked proudly if I had noticed that he stirred his coffee without the spoon touching the cup. I had not. I decided to drop out. Just before hitting the “remove” button of Match.com, I remembered I was mining comically bad biographical bits for fictional use and should stick with it. For the first time in weeks, I checked that day’s m...