Biography Year
Twelve individuals were born in my mind last year. My project went like this: I read one biography each month—some from my pile of the unread, and some that I heard about during that year. The subjects of these biographies, living and dead, mingled in my mind and became defined by the people, places, and ideas that were important to them. They went from being two-dimensional faces with names attached, to characters with three-dimensional personalities. As I got to know them, they seemed to get to know each other, connecting on places and interests they shared. I mind-mapped each, and...
Read MoreAutomne Memoires en Provence
He disappeared in the dead of winter… the brooks all frozen and the airports almost deserted… W.H. Auden float across chilly October mornings in St. Remy, singing your friendship out across the fields where last summer’s Lavender and Sunflower blooms chased the sun from horizon to horizon. Like Gypsy singers they sing their bright sadness into stillness coaxing leaves to desert their holy attachment to another season on the branches of Van Gogh’s delicate Olive trees and Avignon’s white Sycamores, and join the great loneliness of orange moons...
Read MoreI’m Psycho for this Book
Next year marks the 20th anniversary of its publication. I think it’s just about the greatest book to come out the last half of the century, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. It was published in 1991, but I didn’t read it until ’94. I was a junior in high school when this divine novel graced my naughty, sweaty palms. I recall opening my new paperback at the start of my first and only Saturday detention, for skipping a class too much called Early Childhood Development, basically free daycare for parents in a certain network of...
Read MoreJoan Didion, the Memoir, and the Second Great Depression
Let me begin by stating that Joan Didion’s 2005 memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, is almost unbearably brilliant. It won the National Book Award in November 2005 and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. In clipped, precise sentences, Didion describes the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the harrowing grief she endured in the following year — during much of which the couple’s only daughter was hospitalized with what would prove to be her own fatal illness. Intertwined with Didion’s own experience is a line attributed to Sir Gawain of King...
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