Liars and Saints

In my twenties, I could eat more or less with impunity--quantity did not matter--and though I knew a rude awakening would happen in my thirties, I nevertheless didn't *know* a rude awakening would happen in my thirties. *One of my wisest friends had advice. She was discussing the problem of eating-while-you-are-cooking. This is a problem because, as you cook, you have many delicious foods laid out before you. And you sample--and sample--and sample--over a forty, fifty-minute span, so that, by the time dinner is ready, you've actually consumed one dinner. You've had a dinner, and now you're sitting down to a second dinner. My friend listened to this complaint, and said: "Chew gum while you cook." And my mind exploded. *Sometimes, my shrink interrupts my dieting stories with horror. "Butter? Don't cook with butter!" And: "Red peppers will do strange things to your stomach, especially as you age." And: "Remove the skin from th...

There are three memoirs out, all exploring mental illness: "The Scar," "The Edge of Every Day," and "Little Panic." This genre is like candy to me, and I very much appreciate writers who acknowledge that mental illness generally isn't something you recover from. A favorite craziness memoir of mine is "Monkey Mind," where the writer admits that he sometimes wears thick pads in his armpits to control his sweating at work, and also where the writer says that repeated viewings of "Singing in the Rain" sometimes (sort of) help. My own response to intense social anxiety--which visits me pretty regularly--is this: *Search, on your phone, "how to handle social anxiety." You'd think reading this kind of article once would solve the problem, but as I'm nervously awaiting an innocuous encounter, I forget all the tips. Also, just doing the search gives you something to do, and this allows your monkey mind to be (br...

The NYT listed 50 great memoirs yesterday. Fine. But some light (or light-ish) celebrity memoirs were omitted: *"Too Much Is Not Enough" (Andrew Rannells) *"The Kid" (Dan Savage) *"Why Not Me?" (Mindy Kaling) *"I Feel Bad about My Neck" (Nora Ephron) *"Bossypants" (Tina Fey) *"The Girl with the Lower-Back Tattoo" (Amy Schumer) All of these deserve consideration, if you ask me. Food for thought. P.S. Not a celebrity memoir....but...Richard Russo's "Elsewhere" is also terrific.

Your boss is from another era. "I don't like science," he says, breezily. "I'm just not a science guy." He is an academic dean. Having recently seen an indie film, he has thoughts: "I just don't understand why those people use the N word with one another. Doesn't that seem offensive?" Consider white-splaining: Consider a speech in which you speculate about minority groups, and about how sometimes a word is "re-claimed." All of this seems unwise. Stay silent. You have a convenient fund of cowardice whenever people say something offensive. Just recently, the nanny you're hiring muttered something about "other cultures" and about how "some people" feel it's "acceptable" to keep the house temperature at "like, 900 degrees all the time." And did you say anything? You did not. Leave unstamped mail in a mailbox, accidentally. Nervously bend your metro card, so that it ceases to func...

Considering a move to New Jersey? Here are some aspects of the interstate commute that you can anticipate loathing: *The man (or woman, I actually don't see gender patterns here) who feels entitled, before 7 AM, to have a lengthy phone call on an otherwise-silent train car. This man (or woman) will almost certainly end the call by reaching for his (or her) headphones, which will be turned up too loud, so that you can hear just a fraction of, say, Rihanna's "Please Don't Stop the Music," but not an appealing fraction, just, like, a small insect whine that doesn't end and doesn't end and doesn't end. *The man (this is usually a man) who feels entitled to interrupt the flow of foot traffic out of the train car at Hoboken, but who then does not extend the same courtesy to other passengers. *The poster advertising "the Felician Way": Felician is apparently a small college in New Jersey, and the poster features an older white man pontificatin...

*I very much want "The CONJURING Universe" to be a "thing," and I will happily shell out this weekend for "Annabelle Comes Home." Here are some things to know: *The very first "Conjuring" is an exalted film. It features Oscar nominee Vera Farmiga in a tour de force performance. But it also has screen legend Lili Taylor giving a monster-sized performance--grief, terror, hope, etc. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Big-budget movies generally will not give a person like Lili Taylor a chance to shine. There's one exception--and it's the horror genre. If you want to see Vera and Lili sinking their teeth into thick, bloody actor-meat--if you don't want them, say, in a hushed indie drama about how your aging, mildly-deranged parents seem to be your enemies but really they are not your enemies--then you need to turn to horror. *The "Conjuring" universe gives us a married couple who have devoted their lives to ...

"The Shrink Next Door" concerns a man, Marty, with boundary issues. Marty has just ended things with a girlfriend, and she wants reparations. Specifically, she wants a Mexico vacation once promised to her. Marty is so "at sea" that he believes he still owes this person a trip to Mexico. The Mexico discussion seems to be the "inciting event" -- the thing that gets Marty into therapy. But he hasn't just chosen any old therapist; he has chosen Ike, a charismatic licensed psychiatrist and con man who basically takes over his life. Ike seems to make Marty fire his own sister. (The sister is problematic in her own ways, inventing her own hours, using work time to chat on the phone, but the podcast doesn't fully get into that.) As a juvenile form of retaliation, the sister goes to Zurich and robs a bank--takes, from Marty, possessions that an ancestor had left behind. Here, Marty does something even more shocking: He severs relations with both his...