Tag: writers
Searching for Coherence in Asian America
Near the beginning of his new book, “The Loneliest Americans,” the journalist Jay Caspian Kang imagines the memoir he could have written. It would begin with his parents arriving at the airport in Los Angeles, or unpacking boxes in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Kang’s father completed his postdoctoral research in the eighties. If brevity were of no concern, he could start even earlier, with “General Douglas MacArthur’s liberation of Seoul,”and with “some line like ‘On the day my mother was born,
Laurie Colwin’s Recipe for Being Yourself in the Kitchen
In “Home Cooking,” a collection of essays first published in 1988, Laurie Colwin states one opinion after another, as plainly as boiled potatoes. “Grilling is like sunbathing,” she announces. “Everyone knows it is bad for you but no one ever stops doing it.” Along with outdoor cooking, outdoor dining is out, too: “I do not like to eat al fresco. No sane person does, I feel.” During Colwin’s brief career, and then well beyond it, countless readers and cooks have
The Myth of Oscar Wilde’s Martyrdom
Oscar Wilde was in the dock when he observed himself becoming two people. It was a Saturday in May, 1895, the final day of his trial for “gross indecency,” and the solicitor general, Frank Lockwood, was in the midst of a closing address for the prosecution. His catalogue of accusations, shot through with moral disgust, struck Wilde as an “appalling denunciation”—“like a thing out of Tacitus, like a passage in Dante,” as he wrote two years later. He was “sickened
How Colm Tóibín Burrowed Inside Thomas Mann’s Head
After “The South,” more Tóibín novels arrived in rapid succession. He told me that he has never experienced writer’s block. Initially, the novels offered variations on his Irish heritage, on the interplay between secrets and lies. In 1996, he published “The Story of the Night,” about a young man pinned down by his secret homosexuality and by the societal corruption of Argentina in the years of the junta. It was Tóibín’s first novel with a gay character. Three years later,
Most of Hollywood’s Writers’ Rooms Look Nothing Like America
I. “You Can Hear a Pin Drop”
Carl Winslow, the protagonist of the ’90s sitcom Family Matters, wore his badge with honor. On the show, about a middle-class Black household in Chicago, Winslow (played by Reginald VelJohnson) loved being a police officer almost as much as he hated seeing the family’s pesky neighbor, Steve Urkel (Jaleel White), popping up in his home. Carl was a quintessential TV-sitcom cop, doughnut clichés and all. In one scene, he announces that he’s
Virginia Woolf’s Art of Character-Reading
I read “Mrs. Dalloway” for the first time when I was ten or eleven, too young to make much sense of it. It was summer. I was away from home, though I cannot recall where or why exactly—only that the mornings spread upon a countryside very green and bright, and that the days were hot, and longer than one felt they had any right to be. What I do remember, with a clarity that startles me, is a letter I
Who Jason Reynolds Writes His Best-sellers For
“When I Was the Greatest” does not draw directly on Reynolds’s relationship with his own father. (“It’s not that he was absent—it’s that I did not want him around when I was young,” he said.) But their cycles of intimacy and estrangement provide some of the emotional groundwater of the book and its portrayal of a fatherless household. In all of his novels, Reynolds borrows liberally from reality, fictionalizing his own life and the lives of friends and family. “This
The New Deal Program That Rewrote America
For a long time now, the New Deal has been our best—sometimes it seems like our only—model for an American government that sets aside obeisance to unfettered capitalism and comes to the aid of its people. Franklin Delano Roosevelt made no apologies for this approach, but he did try to explain it. “Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity,” he said in 1936, accepting his party’s renomination, “than the consistent omissions of a
Janet Malcolm, Remembered by Writers
When I started out as a magazine writer, Janet Malcolm was my idol. She still is.
The writer’s job is, in the immortal words of Howard Cosell, to “tell it like it is.” In her writing, Janet is always completely focussed on understanding what is really going on. She is also completely unsentimental. She is uninterested in flattering her subjects or her readers. She pulls the cover off. Even when she is describing, she is dissecting. I feel that this