“My Writing Time Is Sacred, but Please Don’t Ask Me What I Did All Day”
Brevity is a “non-fiction blog” that profits from giving wannabe writers a platform to write about how they wannabe writers.
It irks me (as an entrepreneur) because it’s such a clever idea. “For a modest subscription fee,” Brevity proclaims, “you can now consider yourself an actual writer by sending us the occasional note about your struggle to get published or simply to get some writing done.”
Its subscribers are mostly “memoirists” – i.e., people that believe they have “a book inside” them.
This is a large audience. In the US, I’m guessing it’s about 30 million.
So kudos to Brevity for pandering to this audience.
As someone that actually writes for a living, however, Brevity irks me in another way, which is humorously expressed in this essay, published in Brevity, but written by an actual writer.
The plot of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is almost a cliché of romance novels and high school movies – the neglected and sometimes shunned Plain Jane that blooms as she opens herself up to love.
That may be too harsh. It might be better to say that in writing Eleanor Oliphant Is CompletelyFine, Gail Honeyman works from a relatively recent sub-genre that is best exemplified by the “Bridget Jones” novels.
But I’m happy to say that there is a lot more going on than just that.
The main character, for one. The novel is written in the first person. Eleanor, the narrator, begins her story without any sense of how she sounds or appears. She is intelligent and well educated. She is also extremely judgmental. Her sheltered childhood has traumatized her to the point that she seems like a Victorian woman with Asperger’s transported into the 20th century. It is this perspective that makes her lovable and relatable and provides for a stream of laugh-out-loud interchanges throughout the book.
There is also quite a bit of satire throughout – targeting everything from office politics to wedding rituals to hipster clothing and bikini waxes. And there is a darker story that runs behind it – of childhood and other abuse. But to Honeyman’s credit, this is never overdone. It adds some depth, but no more than the plot could bear.
I wouldn’t call Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine a novel for the ages – but at the least, it is smartly funny entertainment, and at its best it reminded me of a Jane Austen novel. Which is about as good as novel writing gets.
Critical Reviews
“A charmer… satisfyingly quirky.” (Janet Maslin in The New York Times) “This wacky, charming novel… draws you in with humor, then turns out to contain both a suspenseful subplot and a sweet romance…. Hilarious and moving.” (People)
“Sweet and satisfying, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine will speak to introverts who have ever felt a little weird about their place in the world.” (Bustle)
“Debut author Honeyman expertly captures a woman whose inner pain is excruciating and whose face and heart are scarred, but who still holds the capacity to love and be loved. Eleanor’s story will move readers.” (Publishers Weekly)
You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation
By Deborah Tannen, PhD
Originally published in 1995 by Virago
The book’s thesis is that, from childhood, boys and girls learn different approaches to language that result in communication problems when they get older. She calls these different approaches “gender-lects.”
For most women, Tannen says, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport, a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships. For most men, it is primarily a means to preserve independence and negotiate and maintain status in a hierarchical social order.
So, for example, men often dominate conversations, even where they know less about a subject than a female interlocutor. And women often listen more because they have been socialized to be accommodating.
These patterns mean that men are far more likely to interrupt another speaker and not take it personally when they are themselves interrupted, while women are more likely to finish each other’s sentences.
I thought Tannen’s most interesting point was that these patterns have paradoxical effects. Men use the language of conflict to create connections. Conversely, women can use the language of connection to create conflict.
More takeaways:
* Women try to be equal to each other; men try to one-up each other.
* Women judge how something impacts relationship symmetry; men judge how something impacts relationship asymmetry and hierarchy.
* Women favor rapport talk, which is about sharing personal information to create connection; men favor report talk, which is about sharing impersonal information to create connection.
* By understanding certain differences in how we speak, we can learn to better understand the other person’s “gender-lect.”
Critical Reviews
“Deborah Tannen combines a novelist’s ear for the way people speak with a rare power of original analysis. It is this that makes her an extraordinary sociolinguist, and her book such a fascinating look at that crucial social cement, conversation.” (Oliver Sacks)
“[A] refreshing and readable account of the complexities of communication between men and women [with] vivid examples and lively prose.” (New York Times Book Review)
“Tannen has a marvelous ear for the way real people express themselves, and a scientist’s command of the inner structures of speech and human relationships…. A chatty, earnest, and endearing book that promises here-and-now rewards.” (Los Angeles Times)
Interviewing Matisse, or The Woman Who Died Standing Up
By Lily Tuck
148 pages
Published in 2006 by Harper Perennial
I decided to read Interviewing Matisse because it was a thin book, just 148 pages, and because George Plimpton, who knows a thing or two about fiction, called it a “tour de force.”
The author had an interesting background. She was born in Paris, earned a degree at Radcliffe and at the Sorbonne, and has lived in Switzerland, Thailand, and (during her childhood) Uruguay and Peru. That, and the title, promised some geographic nostalgia and thought-provoking literary references, which Tuck supplied.
What I was not prepared for was the way it was written. Basically, it’s a single, fractured, conversation by Lily, in the first person, and Molly, talking about their good old pal Inez, who has apparently turned up dead in her apartment, standing in her underwear and galoshes, as if she were welcoming the delivery boy who discovered her.
It’s part murder mystery and part social satire. It’s funny, but smiling funny. No guffaws. It does present a vivid picture of how out-of-touch and airheaded people of a certain privileged social class can be.
It’s not a tour de force, but at 148 pages, it’s worth a weekend afternoon.
Critical Reviews
“Most impressive…. Sharp, funny and strangely affecting…. Highly original…. Wonderful satire.” (Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times )
“Sophisticated and funny…. Tuck gives us… with the skill and technique of an unblinking juggler, a heart-stopping struggle.” (Washington Post Book World )
“What great fun this novel is!… A lovely and engaging tour de force. Hooray for Lily Tuck!” (George Plimpton)
About Lily Tuck…
Lily Tuck’s novel The News from Paraguay won the 2004 National Book Award for Fiction. Her novel Siam was nominated for the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and in her collection, Limbo and Other Places I Have Lived.
“Living in other countries has given me a different perspective as a writer. It has heightened my sense of dislocation and rootlessness…. I think this feeling is reflected in my characters, most of them women whose lives are changed by either a physical displacement or a loss of some kind.” – Lily Tuck
Originally published in 1985; reissued in 2019 by Ecco
Joyce Carol Oates is nothing if not a prolific writer. She published her first book in 1963 at age 25, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. She is noted not just for her immense literary output, but also for her range of genres and styles.
Solstice, first published in 1985, was her 16th novel. I found a copy of that edition in a box in the garage of our home in Nicaragua. It had an alluring cover. I had read only two other novels by Oates and didn’t love either of them. They were smartly written with a nod toward literary experimentation here and there, but I found the stories themselves very ordinary, almost banal. I don’t think I would have given Oates another try, except that some years ago I was in a museum in NYC and I bumped into her, literally bumped into her as we were each looking at the same painting. I apologized. She smiled and said something about the painting, as if we were sharing some little secret. She is a small, fragile-looking woman. I thought, “How can she hold a full-time teaching job and write so many novels?”
Solstice is a quick read. It’s the story of Sheila Trask, a reasonably successful painter (and local celebrity) and Monica Jensen, a beautiful, young, and recently divorced woman that has just come to a small New England town to get away from a short, ill-fated marriage. The two women are very different. Trask is willful, dark, and impulsive. Jensen is compliant, self-reflective, and careful. What begins as a very ordinary, teenage-type infatuation with an older, successful woman moves to something deeper and more exciting and then to something obsessive and nearly fatal in less than a single year.
Reading it, I was trying to figure out whether a story about a clandestine lesbian love affair could have been, in and of itself, a literary experiment. (Oates is known for experimental writing.) I don’t know. I didn’t bother to research that.
But it doesn’t matter. Solstice is about something more challenging that that – something that perhaps one could not writeabout today. I see it as an investigation into the possibilities of lesbian love: Can the conventional patterns and conflicts that are almost universal in heterosexual relationships be avoided in homosexual (in particular, lesbian) ones? To put it in more contemporary terms, it is a novel that explores the dynamics of intersectionality and hierarchy within a lesbian love affair. It is a story, as one critic put it, that puts Hemingway on his head. It is a story of Women Without Men.
Indeed, Sheila Trask has virtually all of the power in the relationship because she stands way above Monica in the power hierarchy. She is older, richer, more successful, and more self-confident. Monica comes into the relationship offering youth, fragility, availability, and remarkable physical – i.e., feminine – beauty.
There is much exchanged in the relationship, each giving the other and taking from the other what she can. In the beginning, Sheila is clearly dominant and uses that dominance to manipulate the relationship to go where she wants it to go. But eventually, Monica, by maintaining her feminine strengths and vulnerabilities, acquires the power.
That’s how it reads to me. You may have a different view. It’s a weekend’s read. If anything said above intrigues you, I can recommend it.
Critical Reviews
* “A powerful beam into the dark places of the soul.” (New York Times)
* “Oates’s novel is spellbinding, entrancing reading.” (West Coast Review of Books)
Interesting Facts:
* In addition to all the writing she’s done, Joyce Carol Oates was a teacher at Princeton for more than 40 years.
* She has won numerous literary awards, including the 1973 O. Henry Award (for “The Dead”), the 1996 Bram Stoker Award (for Zombie), the 1996 Penn/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story, and the 1970 National Book Award for Fiction (for them).
I’ve never read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, perhaps the most important environmental book published in the second half of the 20th century. After reading this heartbreaking letter that she wrote to a friend seven months before she died from cancer, I bought a copy.
September 10, 1963
Dear One,
This is a postscript to our morning at Newagen, something I think I can write better than say. For me it was one of the loveliest of the summer’s hours, and all the details will remain in my memory: that blue September sky, the sounds of the wind in the spruces and surf on the rocks, the gulls busy with their foraging, alighting with deliberate grace, the distant views of Griffiths Head and Todd Point, today so clearly etched, though once half seen in swirling fog. But most of all I shall remember the monarchs, that unhurried westward drift of one small winged form after another, each drawn by some invisible force. We talked a little about their migration, their life history. Did they return? We thought not; for most, at least, this was the closing journey of their lives.
But it occurred to me this afternoon, remembering, that it had been a happy spectacle, that we had felt no sadness when we spoke of the fact that there would be no return. And rightly – for when any living thing has come to the end of its life cycle we accept that end as natural.
For the monarch, that cycle is measured in a known span of months. For ourselves, the measure is something else, the span of which we cannot know. But the thought is the same: when that intangible cycle has run its course it is a natural and not unhappy thing that a life comes to an end.
That is what those brightly fluttering bits of life taught me this morning. I found a deep happiness in it – so I hope, may you. Thank you for this morning.
The Blue Streak was a book I selected randomly from the bookshelves of our home in Nicaragua. I decided to read it because (1) it was thin at 242 pages, (2) I liked the cover, and (3) the author’s name sounded familiar to me in a positive way.
Was Ellen Lesser that elderly British author whose stories I had once read in The NewYorker? I looked at the photo of her on the inside flap of the jacket.
The book was published in 1992 – but still, no, this woman was too young. Of whom was I thinking? Was it Dorothy Lesser? No. Doris Lessing? Yes, that was it.
So, it wasn’t a book by a British author I’ve always admired. But I still liked the cover. And it was still only 242 pages.
So I read it…
The Story: After a shoulder injury, Danny, a recent college graduate and once promising swimmer (his “blue streak”), is floundering – treading water, waiting for life to tell him what to do. When his hard-driving, type-A, successful father dies, Danny has to come home and face the unresolved conflicts in their relationship. The novel deals with Danny’s experience, internal and external, over the next few days.
I read a few reviews. They ranged from lukewarm to derogatory. The main objections were that the characters were conventional. Too stereotypically Jewish.
That’s not at all how it worked for me. I found the book delightful throughout. It’s not epic, but there is a journey – with an anagnorisis, a peripeteia… everything you’d want. The big reveal – moving from blaming one’s parents to understanding what a pain in the ass one was as a child – is as important as any we get in life.
If nothing more, The Blue Streak is a delightfully drawn portrait of a delightfully dysfunctional Jewish family, painted lovingly and with photographic detail by Ellen Lesser.
Critical Reviews
“Although this is pleasant reading, there is nothing sufficiently novel about either the story or the characters (some of whom seem to have come from Roth country) to make this an essential purchase.” (Library Journal)
“Predictable, with insights as stale as yesterday’s bread, but there’s enough to suggest that Lesser could be a better writer if she were less wed to the Zeitgeist.” (Kirkus Reviews)
“Lesser is a dexterous and sensitive writer. Unfortunately, her latest effort is essentially a long short story straining to be a novel.” (Publishers Weekly)
Red Notice was the March selection for the Mules. I was in Nicaragua (for the ceremony inaugurating the new facilities at FunLimon), so I wasn’t able to attend the meeting. But I sent this short review of the book to my fellow Mules:
As Bob S. predicted, this book changed the way I think about Putin and Putin’s Russia.
Browder made a convincing case that Russia operates as a kleptocracy, as he calls it. I also appreciated the insight he had into aspects of highly centralized governments, particularly Socialist/Communist governments. How it creates an insane level of bureaucracy and, more importantly, how it gradually changes the culture – deeply, including what becomes the national personality. Two thumbs up!
Browder’s journey started as the child of Communist parents on Chicago’s South Side, where, in order to rebel, he decided on a career as a Capitalist. He went to Stanford Business School… and from there to the world of US hedge funds… and from there to Moscow, where he made a fortune buying up super-underpriced companies that were being privatized.
The second part of the book is about how the early support he got from Putin disappeared after Putin became partners with the Russian oligarchy that controlled the cash flow from the privatization of those companies, and how that ended in his banishment (he was deported to the UK) and the imprisonment and murder of Sergei Magnitsky, one of the lawyers that worked for him in Russia.
[While in the UK, Browder’s Russia-based offices were raided. While investigating the purpose of the raids, Magnitsky discovered large-scale fraud and theft by Russian officials. After testifying against them, he was arrested. His death in prison in 2009, after 11 months in police custody, caused an international outcry (he was allegedly beaten to death) and led to the signing of the Magnitsky Act by President Obama. The act – formally known as the Russia and Moldova Jackson-Vanik Repeal and Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012 – authorizes the US government to impose sanctions against human rights offenders, freeze their assets, and ban them from the country.]
The third part of the book is about how, according to one reviewer, Browder, having “glimpsed the heart of darkness… embarked on an unrelenting quest for justice in Sergei’s name, exposing the towering cover-up that leads right up to Putin.”
Many readers, including some of my fellow Mules, objected to Browder’s view of himself as a crusader for justice. That’s a fair criticism. (You can decide for yourself.) But the book is a page-turner. (Browder claims that if you read just one page, you will not be able to put it down.) And it does provide convincing evidence of Putin as the leader, albeit a very popular leader, of a band of thieves.
Critical Reviews
* “Red Notice is a real-life political thriller about an American financier in the Wild East of Russia, the murder of his principled young tax attorney, and his dangerous mission to expose the Kremlin’s corruption.” (Goodreads)
* “Bill Browder, the unexpected hero and author of this suspenseful memoir, is no ordinary investment banker…. It is fascinating to follow him as he navigates the kleptocratic Russian economy.” (Boston Globe)
* “[A] riveting account of Browder’s journey through the early years of Russian Capitalism…. ‘Russian stories never have happy endings,’ Magnitsky tells Browder, in the book’s most memorable line. Perhaps not, but they do have inspiring ones.” (Washington Post)
* “[Browder’s] freewheeling, snappy book describes the meteoric rise, and disastrous fall, of a buccaneer Capitalist who crossed the wrong people and paid a steep price…. The high stakes make for a zesty tale.” (New York Times)
Interesting Facts
* There is a soon-to-be released movie starring Dwayne Johnson that is titled Red Notice. But though Browder had, and probably has, ambitions to make his book into a movie… this isn’t it.
* The term “red notice” refers to the system of color-coded notices that Interpol uses to share alerts and requests for information with law enforcement agencies worldwide. A red notice is a request to locate and provisionally arrest an individual pending extradition. An orange notice is a warning about an imminent threat to public safety. A green notice provides intelligence about individuals who have committed criminal offenses and are likely to repeat them in other countries. And so on…
* Among many other awards, Browder was recognized in 2017 by GQ as one of the magazine’s Men of the Year for his defiance of Vladimir Putin.
Here’s Browder in 2015 talking about this book to Russian Studies students at Oxford University…
Hamnet is, as the title suggests, a book about Shakespeare’s son and the plague that killed him. It is also a vivid depiction of England – its culture and its economy – during Elizabeth’s reign. It is, perhaps most of all, a compelling portrait of Agnes, Hamnet’s mother and Shakespeare’s wife.
And finally, it is a brilliantly imagined explanation of how Shakespeare came to write Hamlet, his greatest tragedy (with the possible exception of King Lear).
Shakespeare and family. Hamnet is standing on the left.
What historical fiction like Hamnet does is help fill in the factual blanks with inventive imaginings. And there is so much of that in this book.
If you are a student of Shakespeare, you will love it. If you are not, you may love it too, because of the prose and the storytelling. And if you don’t know anything about Shakespeare’s life, you will enhance your enjoyment of Hamnet by spending a little time reading a summary of it in Wikipedia.
Interesting Facts
* Hamlet and Hamnet were variations of the same name. In the 16th century, English orthography had not yet been formalized. One example: There are something like 6 authenticated signatures by Shakespeare, only 2 of which have the same spelling.
* Maggie O’Farrell won the London Women’s Prize for Fiction (along with £30,000) for Hamnet.
* Hamnet was one of The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2020.
Critical Reviews
* “Maggie O’Farrell’s writing is intensely detailed and descriptive, allowing the reader to become encapsulated into the world of Elizabethan England. Her extensive research is evidenced throughout and makes for a really absorbing and enjoyable read.” (Off The Record)
* “Of all the stories that argue and speculate about Shakespeare’s life… here is a novel… so gorgeously written that it transports you.” (Boston Globe)
* “O’Farrell brilliantly turns to historical fiction to confront a parent’s worst nightmare: the death of a child…. Hamnet vividly captures the life-changing intensity of maternity in its myriad stages – from the pain of childbirth to the unassuageable grief of loss.” (NPR)
MarkFord
