Joan Didion has long been the most glamorous writer in America. Her attitude–skeptical, curious, singular, and cool–hangs on her simple, angular sentences like a Chanel coat. It does not ruffle. But in the early 2000s, Didion became glamorous for another reason: her suffering. In 2003, her husband of almost four decades, John Gregory Dunne, died of a heart attack, shortly after their daughter, Quintana Roo, had entered the hospital in septic shock. “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Didion’s profoundly moving memoir of this time, won the National Book Award. It became the book one gave a friend blind-sided by loss. Read the rest of this entry »

What promises to be an interesting merger of critical theory, popular biography and memoir turns out to be little more than an expression of un-self-conscious, occasionally creepy fandom in Lila Azam Zanganeh’s “The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness”—a debut that feels three times as long as its 189 pages.

Nabokov—one of the most towering figures of twentieth-century literature—wrote profoundly complex, wildly smart novels. They were packed with human characters, treated by their creator humanely. In classics like “Lolita” and “Pale Fire,” he wove deeply felt stories into the complicated lattice of his structures and systems. And did so with an obsessive attention to detail, the kind that can only be achieved through a deep love of one’s craft.

It’s that love—of writing, of life—that Zanganeh sets out to document in her book. Unfortunately, she spends more time saying things like this: “Some days earlier, I had, in fact, had a dream. He was there. So close I could almost touch him.” Or this: “As I again sit at my desk, I realize that, for a while now, I’ve been ignoring a slight swerving. Like the onset of something; a mild vertigo, not altogether unpleasant.” Or, most cringe-inducing, this: “You’re about to begin the twelfth chapter of ‘The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness.’ Contentedly, you stack two pillows behind your head, curl up in your quilt and switch off the TV.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

It’s been twenty-one years since Oscar Hijuelos became the first Latino recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and if his new memoir, “Thoughts Without Cigarettes,” is any indication, he still has issues with owning that distinction. Hijuelos’ story begins in Manhattan, in Morningside Heights, where his parents settled after leaving a pre-Castro Cuba, and where young Oscarito and his brother cut their teeth in a neighborhood that sounds a lot like Humboldt Park, rife with whities, Latinos and the occasional junkie thug. When he contracts nephritis, a kidney disease, as a young boy on his first visit to Cuba, Hijuelos’ childhood takes a turn that ultimately throws his whole identity into a spiral; he loses the ability to speak Spanish. His brain creates a link between his long, isolated hospital stay and the simple fact that he caught the illness in Cuba, and though he retains the ability to comprehend Spanish, he never speaks it with the aplomb of his family, or neighbors, or even his schoolmates in Spanish class. This, combined with his blond hair and fair complexion (owing to his Castilian heritage), makes for an identity struggle that dominates the pages of Hijuelos’ memoir. Read the rest of this entry »

By Martin Northway

Write about what you know: It is both what Professor X preaches to his students of college English and composition, and what he practices in his new memoir based on a noteworthy essay in the Atlantic. And writing about what he knows is both the strength and weakness of “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower.”

Based on his reports from teaching as an adjunct instructor in both a pseudonymous small college and a junior college somewhere in middle America, he makes a convincing case that higher education is not for everyone. In fact, one begins to wonder if it really is for almost anyone he has to teach, where his role, largely, has been trying to repair woefully students’ inadequate preparation in written English at the secondary—and even lower—levels of education.

The author cites the great failure rates of entering college and junior-college students, at the same time—whether they graduate or not, they saddle themselves with heavy debts they may not be able to repay. Meanwhile, businesses and institutions raise the educational-credential requirements for their employees, and politicians—including the President of the United States—stump the country arguing that any American who wants a college education should be able to get one.

Sadly, as a society we are not examining the fitness or the adequacy of college education to specific opportunities. Professor X argues that not only is higher education not for everyone, our wasteful system may actually be inflicting damage on individuals who are not prepared to meet its challenges. Read the rest of this entry »

By Hugh Iglarsh

“Welcome to Colored School,” says the back cover of “Black Cracker,” Josh Alan Friedman’s account of his strange, split childhood. In the early 1960s, Friedman—the son of noted humorist Bruce Jay Friedman—attended South School in Glen Cove, New York, as pretty much the only white kid in “the last segregated colored school on Long Island.” From first through fourth grades, Friedman would leave his comfortable suburban home in the morning and spend his days in an ancient schoolhouse, located hard by the Third World-style shantytown that contained Glen Cove’s African-American population. It was an impoverished neighborhood “that could have been transplanted from the Carolinas,” long since razed and replaced by public housing.

The book is Friedman’s search for “my old Black self, the inner nigger of my youth.” His choice of language and title is revealing, suggesting the ongoing conflict—not to say warfare—between the two sides of his identity. In addition, Friedman is a Jew, characterized by one of the local greasers as “nothin’ but a nigger turned inside out.”

No wonder the very young Josh Friedman pictured on the cover has such a deer-in-the-headlights look to him.

I had a chance to converse with the grown-up Friedman recently. He came to Chicago to attend the annual birthday party of his hero, the late local novelist Nelson Algren, who had spent a week with Friedman’s family in the mid-sixties. “My dad said, a great writer is coming to stay with us,” recalls Friedman of the long-ago visit. He remembers a scruffy, middle-aged man who got up early every morning to chat with the housekeeper.

“My parents were crazy about him,” says Friedman. “They threw a wild party in his honor on Fire Island that resulted in about ten divorces. I woke up to a half-naked woman in my room. Nelson thought it was too much—he said, ‘why do people have to be like that?’” Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Gretchen Clemens

By Monica Westin

Chicago journalist Brenda Wilhelmson is a onetime high-functioning alcoholic who seemed to have it all as a  wife and mother with a hip social life in a wealthy suburb and now author of a deceptively straightforward diary documenting her first years getting sober. What distinguishes “Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife” from the rest of the genre is Wilhelmson’s clear-eyed, non-maudlin prose, which is strongly reminiscent of that other journalist-turned-memoirist Joan Didion. Except that Wilhelmson is far warmer and more open than the cool customer of Didion—she conducts our interview while walking on her horse. “I’ve always wanted one,” she recounts breathlessly, in between ruminating about the culture of alcohol and the difficulty of writing hard truths. A writer this open and honest with zero tendency to solipsism is rare indeed. Read the rest of this entry »

By Hugh Iglarsh

“For the most part I had become an actor so as to hide, to find my identity through pretending to be other people,” confesses Alan Arkin early on in “An Improvised Life.” Over the course of his half-century-long stage and film career, he has created a memorable gallery of outsiders, underdogs, oddballs and everymen, portrayals charged with intelligence and a barely contained manic edge. Unfortunately, little of that energy finds its way into his writing. It is as though the author lacked either interest in or access to his subject—which is to say, himself.

“Outside my life as an actor I had no life at all,” he tells us. “There was no possibility of my playing myself on the stage because I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t have a clue. I only knew myself as other people.” Theater for Arkin was not so much a journey of self-discovery and connection with others as it was a way to fill an aching inner void. He seems to have remained as he began, a bemused spectator of his own life and times, fully awake only when embodying and gazed at by others.

At age five he decided to become an actor: “At school my main activity was staring out the window and daydreaming about being other people in other times, other places.” One day, little Alan was playing on the floor of the family’s Brooklyn apartment while his mother comforted a sobbing friend. “I watched the woman pouring her heart out to my mother and found myself slightly revolted. ‘I’m not moved by her performance,’ I thought. ‘What is she doing wrong?’ … If she wanted to interest me, I thought, she’d better cut back on the tears a little and leave some room for my feelings.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering,” insists one entry in “Mourning Diary,” but there’s invaluable universal truth about suffering and loss to be found in the private journal (never intended for publication) following the last few years of the life of Roland Barthes, French post-structural theorist and exquisite close reader of texts. Barthes began the diary the night of his adored mother’s death, jotting down his feelings and thoughts on index-sized slips of paper. He kept the diary for years, writing in it almost daily while producing his final theoretical books; and it’s exciting for the Barthes enthusiast to track ideas from and references to the author’s concurrent academic work in “Mourning Diary” (you can follow the composition of “Camera Lucida,” for example). But even for the reader with no intellectual investment in the end of Barthes’ career, this fragmentary, delicately skeletal account of grief—more of a “hypothesis of a book” than a full-bodied text, as the book’s annotator calls it, feels truthful about the disorienting capriciousness of the pain of absence. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

It’s marathon week in Chicago and tens of thousands of runners are vexed. At no time in the year do we think more about the sport, yet we’ve just cut our runs down to a minimum, in the rest-and-recovery strategy called tapering, so we’re restless. It’s too late to study strategy in running magazines about how to increase your speed, or how to prepare for the long run: the training is over, the wait is on. Books might be our only solace.

Running is the most primal of sports. Stand up and put one foot in front of the other, again and again and again. Racing, too, is elegant in its simplicity: do the same, but in a group, and see who finishes first. And yet, many writers are attracted to running, perhaps for its very simplicity. It affords time for contemplation, the kind that produces thoughtful prose and ideas, the time that our culture conspires to otherwise steal at every moment.

Running is also an inherently selfish sport. Sure there are relays, but for the most part we run for and inside ourselves. This combination of primal simplicity and self-absorption produces dull cocktail-party conversations but graceful, almost meditative books. Writing about running is writing about the self in a nakedly aware manner. (You can read my clumsy attempts in my daily marathon countdown blog at brianhey.newcity.com.) Rare is the work like Christopher McDougall’s best-selling “Born to Run,” which not only chronicled the narrator’s personal journey but did so with an epic narrative worthy of Hollywood. More typical is the runner’s memoir, like Haruki Murakami’s “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running,” or, just out in its paperback reissue, Rachel Toor’s “Personal Record: A Love Affair WIth Running.” Read the rest of this entry »

In this self-regarding collection of personal essays, filmmaker John Waters, who’s responsible for the equally provocative and repulsive “Pink Flamingos” and “Cry Baby,” among others, hails his mostly unorthodox role models. Among them are Leslie Van Houten, the incarcerated former Charles Manson follower and murderer, a lesbian stripper named Miss Zorro, and fashion designer Rei Kawakubo, whose line of clothing, Comme des Garçons, has been called “unwearable,” and “hopeless.” As a writer and director whose films are often watched for the opportunity to be grossed out, (in an infamous scene in “Pink Flamingos,” the lead character actually consumes dog shit), John Waters’s choice of idols is not surprising. What is surprising is his choice of a few mainstream role models, and why—Johnny Mathis because he’s popular and “un-ironic,” Tennessee Williams because of his class, Little Richard because of his voice and hairstyle.

Read the rest of this entry »