Liars and Saints

  As my dog gets older, I notice a difference between my spouse and me. My spouse is ready--even eager--to get sentimental. If you are five months late with a work assignment, you can say, "Sorry, my dog died," and my spouse will accept the excuse without question. Also, Marc likes to talk about Salvy's hips. "You know what they say about an aging lab and his hips." I *do* know what they say--but I don't see the value in worrying. My dog still happily makes it around the block. That's good enough for me. At my dog's petcare retreat, various "death announcements" are on display. Owners write in the voices of their dead dogs. "I was pleased to spend time on Earth with my Maplewood neighbors. I'm Peanut, and I'm signing off!" ....Like me, my own daughter is a bit more steely and clinical. She is speaking--quite often--about her desire for a cat. And I can't help but wonder if she has one eye on the ticking clock.... I mys...

 My other favorite essay ("One Hot Summer") is by Lorrie Moore; she is looking back at her wedding. She is writing from the perspective of a now-divorced person.  Marriage and divorce are such freighted subjects; people get so sentimental. The dryness and fearlessness in Moore's opening cannot be imitated: A bride on her summer honeymoon--what could be more beguiling? Well, a younger bride, to begin with. One less destined to wear an off-white suit at the ceremony. (And what's with that, anyway? The advertising of a lady's past--the beige and ivory taint of autobiography dyed like a scarlet A into the threads of the dress....Jane Austen's mother wore red; she later cut up her attire for outfits for the kids. Who wouldn't want something actually bright and cuttable?) The use of "cuttable" is interesting--it makes us wonder what other things Moore might want to "cut." I had always had a little trouble with anything called an institution. ...

  Alice McDermott says that an opening paragraph has to suggest something extraordinary; if there isn't a sense of magic within those first three or four sentences, the book is never going to take off. (Or, at least, takeoff is unlikely.) As an example, McDermott cites Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer's men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning--fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her...when she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the opening air... Through small, thoughtful choices, Woolf turns a British morning into an adventure. "Lark," "plunge," "burst." The day is like ice cream on the boardwalk--"fresh as if issued to children on a beach." Something similar happens in Lorrie Moore's ...

  There is a program offering respite care; if your baby has behavioral challenges, a helper will come to your house and manage bedtime, and you can sit silently and stare at a wall for one or two hours. I have a friend whose child is on an idiosyncratic path. I love this friend. She has a religious background, but she is salty. "When they try to deny your respite care, you need to use the word  crisis . Call them every day and say you are on the verge of a  crisis . Say,  I'm just hoping to avert a crisis here.... " We are sitting at an outdoor pizza party for four-year-olds....Olivia Rodrigo spills out from the speakers:  I'm so blue, know we're through....BUT I STILL FUCKING LOVE YOU, BABE!!!! "People are so lost," says my friend. "I'm walking with my son, and this bitch sees his leg brace, and she mumbles, audibly,  That just breaks my heart ....And I say: Would you care to elaborate? My child has a huge smile on his face. Can you tell me ab...

  I'm writing down my COVID experience, with the thought that it might be helpful to someone. My spouse and I went to Mexico last week. My parents were planning to look after the kids for four days. The kids would be in NJ; this would just be a short trip. Around halfway through our trip, Marc and I did a rapid test for COVID and discovered that we were both positive. We were told not to leave our room; food would travel to us; we would need to remain in quarantine and just keep testing (one test, per person, per day). This was alarming because we didn't know how long we would show up positive. Additionally, if one of us "switched" to negative, there was the chance that the "positive" spouse would be alone in a (semi-)strange land during a pandemic. The CDC said that you could leave after testing negative, or you could leave after five "self-quarantine" days, with "documentation of recovery," from a doctor. Marc's doctor offered to wr...

 My husband studies me. He says, "I'm surprised you're not writing about the occupational therapist." This makes me think of the writer Lorrie Moore--and the moment her husband said, "Write about our child's tumor?" Moore said: "I do zany holidays. I do wacky family outings with the dog. Child tumor? I don't cover that." The occupational therapist was wildly mediocre. I could empathize--because I've made friends with mediocrity, many times in life. The O.T. was named Emily, and she wanted to assess my child via Zoom. She suggested that she just park herself in her desk chair--and watch the clock, for sixty minutes.....and then she could e-mail a "visit log" to me, and this could help me to "procure services." When I insisted on an in-person visit, Emily began a week-long tug-of-war with many references to her own childcare burdens, then she lost my address, forgot the time she had committed to, and asked me to resear...

Lorrie Moore is sometimes accused of using too many jokes in her stories, but it seems to me LM knows what she is doing. Life is sometimes unbearable, and one way people repress or bury this fact is through laughter. Moore says that a joke occurs when there's a sudden, brief release of tension; you hear the release in the sound the laughing person makes. It's almost like an expulsion, or exorcism. In LM's work, a joke happens when "the politely unstated fact" suddenly becomes "the stated fact." A joke happens when the elephant in the room announces, "Hi! I am here!" For example, here is how an LM character responds when someone murmurs a platitude about *don't you just want your child to be happy* --? "Happy? Not a priority. We just want him to be rich." You laugh because many, if not all, parents really do have material comfort on their minds, even if just in a small way. LM has gone ahead and stated the unsayable. "...

My Top Five Literary Moments (1) Several small bits in Lorrie Moore's "You're Ugly, Too." This is likely my favorite short story, full stop. It's about a woman who leaves the midwest to visit her ostentatiously successful sister in Manhattan. We learn early on that the protagonist is maybe losing her mind. She is an academic; she is hard at work on a history of presidential jokes. I'm obsessed with the title of this work-in-progress, "Hearing the One About: Humor and the American Presidency." The protagonist has recently purchased her own house, and she is so startled to own property, she has wandered around the lot with a hammer and nails, affixing exuberant signs to various objects. Attached to a tree, a sign that says: "My Tree!" Her course evaluations indicate that her work has been slipping: "Professor X arrives late to class, skipping and humming GETTING TO KNOW YOU. She carries hot cocoa, which she offers us sips of. Is this...

It must be, Ruth thought, that she was going to die in the spring. She felt the season's mockery--such inexplicable desolation, such sludge in the heart. She could almost burst--could one burst with joylessness? What she was feeling was too strange, too contrary, too isolated for a mere emotion. It had to be a premonition--one of being finally whisked away after much boring flailing and flapping and the pained, purposeless work that constituted life. And in spring, no less: A premonition of death. A rehearsal. A secretary's call to remind of the appointment. Of course, it had always been in the spring that she'd discovered her husband's affairs. But the last one was years ago, and what did she care about all that now; there had been a parade of flings. In the end, they'd made her laugh:  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha !  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!...

“Tell one part of your problem.” This is one of the moments in “Someday” that I love most. James is sitting with his grandmother, Nanette, “the poor man’s Kitty Carlisle Hart.” Since James can’t articulate what occurred at work, Nanette suggests that he pick one corner of the problem, and focus on that. Writers everywhere know this is the right approach. It’s the entire thesis of Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird.” It’s also Curtis Sittenfeld’s advice for trying times: Just attempt to do 500 words per day. The side entry. When I think of Cameron’s approach to 9/11, I think of front and side doors. Many writers chose to address 9/11 head-on: For example, there was Jonathan Safran Foer’s clumsy image of a man “falling up.” There was Susan Sontag in “The New Yorker”—opining awkwardly about courage. There was “United 93.” Cameron chooses, instead, to write from the point of view of a teenager who seems to have lost no one in the catastrophe. And yet he has been forced ...