Salon.com > Memoir http://www.salon.com Fri, 03 May 2013 22:55:11 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Beastie Boys to write memoir http://www.salon.com/2013/04/29/beastie_boys_to_write_memoir/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/29/beastie_boys_to_write_memoir/#comments Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:50:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13284668 The surviving members of the Beastie Boys, Michael Diamond (Mike D) and Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock), are writing a high-concept memoir, reports the New York Times.

The band has been toying with the idea for years -- even before third member Adam Yauch (MCA) died at 47 from cancer in 2012. “After Yauch died, I didn’t push them,” said agent Luke Janklow. “But I think that Adam and Mike ended up realizing that it was the right time for them.”

From the Times:

The Beastie Boys are “interested in challenging the form and making the book a multidimensional experience,” [publisher Julie] Grau said in an interview. “There is a kaleidoscopic frame of reference, and it asks a reader to keep up.”

The book, to be edited by the hip-hop journalist Sacha Jenkins, will be loosely structured as an oral history. It will also have contributions by other writers, as well as a strong visual component. Ms. Grau and Luke Janklow, the group’s agent, both compared it to Grand Royal, the Beastie Boys’ acclaimed but short-lived magazine in the 1990s, which explored some of its wide-ranging pop-culture interests with curiosity and snark.

Random House imprint Spiegel & Grau, which published Jay-Z's "Decoded," has taken on the project and is targeting a fall 2015 release.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/29/beastie_boys_to_write_memoir/feed/ 0 Must do’s: What we like this week http://www.salon.com/2013/04/27/must_dos_what_we_like_this_week_8/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/27/must_dos_what_we_like_this_week_8/#comments Sat, 27 Apr 2013 14:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13283273 BOOKS

Laura Miller, who generally does not have “patience for the touchstones of foodie literature,” was pleasantly surprised by Michael Pollan’s “Cooked,” written from the perspective of a journalist and gardener rather than a celebrity chef:

His effort to deepen his understanding of the process of turning food into meals is the subject of his latest book, “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation.” I wish I could say “Cooked” is entirely free of moments of flabby philosophizing (“Isn’t it always precisely when we are most at risk of floating away on the sea of our own inventions and conceits that we seem to row our way back to the firm shore that is nature?”), but they are rare. Admittedly, the book’s thematic structure is also a shade precious. It’s divided into four sections according to what the ancients perceived to be the four elements — fire, water, air and earth — each attributed to a different cooking method — grilling, braising and other forms of cooking in liquids, baking and fermentation. As ever, Pollan makes each of these themes the occasion for real thought as well as some energetic reporting.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/27/must_dos_what_we_like_this_week_8/feed/ 1 “The Astor Orphan”: Rich little poor girl http://www.salon.com/2013/04/14/the_astor_orphan_rich_little_poor_girl/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/14/the_astor_orphan_rich_little_poor_girl/#comments Sun, 14 Apr 2013 22:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13268632 Alexandra Aldrich grew up being told that she lived in a "child's paradise": a largely deserted, 43-room, 200-year-old house on 420 acres in the Hudson River Valley, complete with woods, animals, interesting outbuildings and bohemian tenants who made giant puppets and staged elaborate pageants. A twig on a branch of the fabled and wealthy Astor and Livingstone family trees, Aldrich played dress-up in evening gowns her grandmother had worn to high-society events and wound a hand-cranked gramophone that was a personal gift from Thomas Edison.

She hated it. As Aldrich recounts in her new memoir, "The Astor Orphan," "I had always wished I could have grown up in a three-bedroom ranch house with employed parents, siblings, cable TV and functional cars." She might also have added "regular meals," since the pantry in her family's section of Rokeby, the ancestral mansion where her people have lived for almost two centuries, was often bare. If her father couldn't snag a free batch of rejected TV dinners from a nearby pie factory, he'd have to borrow money from the local gas station proprietor for groceries. Her mother, a solitary (and, by all signs, depressed) Polish fiber artist -- who had thought she was marrying into a wealthy urban clan -- would only shout from the kitchen, "You'll have to eat shit for dinner if you can't dig up any cash!"

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/14/the_astor_orphan_rich_little_poor_girl/feed/ 7 David Axelrod to write a memoir http://www.salon.com/2013/04/09/david_axelrod_to_write_a_memoir/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/09/david_axelrod_to_write_a_memoir/#comments Tue, 09 Apr 2013 16:35:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13265885 David Axelrod, former political adviser to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama's chief strategist in 2008 and 2012, is writing a memoir.

From the New York Times:

Mr. Axelrod is looking to write more than a dishy White House tell-all. Penguin says that the book will cover his entire career from his early years as journalist in Chicago, through his decades as a political strategist. Mr. Axelrod has had close relationships with controversial figures like John Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina, and Rod R. Blagojevich, the former governor of Illinois, who will make appearances in the book.

The book is due out by Penguin Press in 2014.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/09/david_axelrod_to_write_a_memoir/feed/ 0 Even a Mets fan can be optimistic on Opening Day http://www.salon.com/2013/04/04/the_kings_of_queens_on_the_mets_opening_day_at_shea_stadium_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/04/the_kings_of_queens_on_the_mets_opening_day_at_shea_stadium_partner/#comments Thu, 04 Apr 2013 16:12:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13261532 The ClassicalIt was sunny and clear on Monday for Mets Opening Day, with no noisy planes overhead, so we could hear every bit of the conversations around us. The lulling pitter-patter of “fucks” in row 3 bemused our whole group—not just my father, who was new to Mets baseball, but the veterans of the trip to Flushing. I was there with my old roommate; we used to live in Flushing and walk to games along Roosevelt Avenue, through the carbon monoxide haze above the Whitestone Expressway and past the Iron Triangle's auto repair shops and psychotic guard dogs, restrained from tearing you to pieces by chain-link fences that also allow you to look into their eyes and see the contempt you’ve earned. Getting to the game in this way can be loud and gray and windy and sticky and dirty all at once and altogether disorienting, which is why almost nobody does it. Arriving at the park doesn’t seem like you’ve reached paradise, or that you’re free of any of this filth and misery—these are the Mets we’re talking about, after all. In terms of misery and pride, it’s hard to know where the team ends and the rest of Queens begins, except on Opening Day; then, for three hours, people are happy. On Opening Day, Flushing is a place transformed, all smiles and radiance in a generally fraught place just across the way from where your stolen car’s radials are being hawked at a chop shop.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/04/the_kings_of_queens_on_the_mets_opening_day_at_shea_stadium_partner/feed/ 0 Aleksandar Hemon: “I cannot stand that whole game of confession. I have nothing to confess and I do not ask for redemption” http://www.salon.com/2013/03/23/aleksandar_hemon_i_cannot_stand_that_whole_game_of_confession_i_have_nothing_to_confess_and_i_do_not_ask_for_redemption/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/23/aleksandar_hemon_i_cannot_stand_that_whole_game_of_confession_i_have_nothing_to_confess_and_i_do_not_ask_for_redemption/#comments Sat, 23 Mar 2013 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13249338 Though I've known Aleksandar Hemon over the years — we first met at the book party for his second work of fiction, "Nowhere Man," at his publisher's house in New York — I've only had a chance to really sit and talk with him in Chicago, my native city and his adopted hometown. I interviewed him in 2009 for Bookforum, about "Love and Obstacles," his last collection of stories, when he told me he hated memoir — which made me laugh, especially since his editor published James Frey, whose loose interpretation of the form landed the "memoirist" in hot water with the formidable Oprah Winfrey. But I remember thinking, as we parted ways, if anyone should be writing memoir, it should be Hemon, a man who has led at least two distinct lives: one in Sarajevo just before the siege, and then his life as an accidental, now naturalized citizen of Chicago, after a junket to the States left him stranded here, unable to return to his war-torn home. And while he has expertly mined this bisected existence for his fiction, I was eager as a reader and as an acquaintance, to learn the "true stories," as they call them in Bosnia (Hemon explains there are no words in Bosnian for "fiction" or "nonfiction," per se).

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/03/23/aleksandar_hemon_i_cannot_stand_that_whole_game_of_confession_i_have_nothing_to_confess_and_i_do_not_ask_for_redemption/feed/ 0 Must Do’s: What we like this week http://www.salon.com/2013/03/23/must_dos_what_we_like_this_week_3/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/23/must_dos_what_we_like_this_week_3/#comments Sat, 23 Mar 2013 14:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13247777 BOOKS

Laura Miller, a Yankee, was enlightened by former newspaper reporter Tracy Thompson's deeply personal account of the transformation of Georgia, titled "The New Mind of the South":

Thompson gives "The New Mind of the South" a muscular tension that a merely nostalgic memoir or a self-effacing work of reportage could never achieve. She vividly recalls the embracing evangelical church life of her 1960s youth, when the religion was "otherworldly and apolitical" and therefore a marked contrast to the activist fundamentalism that arose in the 1970s or the show-bizzy extravaganza of a megachurch she visits in suburban Atlanta. Yet the latter, an outpost of the "prosperity gospel," turns out to be more multiracial and feminist than she expected. Such churches can’t provide her with the comfort she once found in the small church where her family used to worship, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t doing some good.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/03/23/must_dos_what_we_like_this_week_3/feed/ 0 “Wave”: A family vacation turns into the worst kind of nightmare http://www.salon.com/2013/03/03/wave_a_family_vacation_turns_into_the_worst_kind_of_nightmare/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/03/wave_a_family_vacation_turns_into_the_worst_kind_of_nightmare/#comments Sun, 03 Mar 2013 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13216145 The first time Sonali Deraniyagala heard the word "tsunami," she was shut up in a darkened bedroom in her aunt's house in Colombo, Sri Lanka. It was 2004, and the wave had just taken her parents, her husband and her two young sons.

Deraniyagala had been vacationing with her family in a seaside hotel near a national park when, through a terrace window, she saw the sea rising rapidly past its familiar bounds. With her husband, Steve, she grabbed Vikram, 8, and Malli, 5, and rushed out the door and up the drive. They jumped in a passing jeep, but soon the wave overwhelmed even that. The last time Deraniyagala saw her husband's face, he was looking in horror at something over her shoulder. Then the jeep overturned, and for Deraniyagala the next few hours were chaos, violence and filthy water, the tsunami tossing her miles inland and then sucking her out again. Just before she would have been swept out to sea, she grabbed an overhanging branch and felt the ground materialize under her feet. She never saw her family again.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/03/03/wave_a_family_vacation_turns_into_the_worst_kind_of_nightmare/feed/ 1 National Book Critics Circle’s 2013 awards announced http://www.salon.com/2013/03/01/national_book_critics_circles_2013_awards_announced/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/01/national_book_critics_circles_2013_awards_announced/#comments Fri, 01 Mar 2013 03:40:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13215390 The 2013 winners of the National Book Critics Circle were announced on Thursday night at the New School in New York's West Village. Two of the recipients were National Book Award finalists — fiction winner and debut novelist Ben Fountain, for his novel "Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk" (read Laura Miller's review — one of Salon's top 10 books of the year) about the Iraq war, and veteran writer Robert A. Caro, for the fourth installment of his LBJ biographical series, "The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson" (read Erik Nelson's review). Below, the full list of award recipients.

Recipients of the National Book Critic Circle Awards for 2013

Poetry
D. A. Powell, "Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys" (Graywolf Press)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/03/01/national_book_critics_circles_2013_awards_announced/feed/ 0 My awful past keeps me from writing http://www.salon.com/2013/02/25/my_awful_past_keeps_me_from_writing/ http://www.salon.com/2013/02/25/my_awful_past_keeps_me_from_writing/#comments Mon, 25 Feb 2013 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13208761 Dear Reader,

This letter is super-long even by my standards. In comparison, the reply is not actually so very long but it is all sort of one long uninterrupted piece, which I hope you will examine structurally and see how I am connecting clauses with semicolons and looping recursions and looping recursions and looping recursions, trying to create an unbroken thread even as it meanders and loops and recurs and recurs and loops and recurs.

Hi Cary.

I'm a big fan of your work. I read all your new advice pieces because, regardless of how I relate to the letter-writer, I always find a ubiquitous nugget of beauty and hope in your responses. When I saw your call for more creativity-related letters, I felt like this was my moment to try and write to you myself.

I'm 28 years old. I've been reading since age 2 and began writing not long after that. I love it with all my heart; it is the craft that defines me. I was determined to be the youngest novelist and be published at age 13, and while I did indeed finish a murder mystery novel (I use the term loosely) by then, of course it was not in any condition to be published. But ambitions for my writing have been high since I can remember. And more than that, no matter what trouble I've faced in my life — and I've faced quite a bit — writing has always been there for me, to save me. But suddenly it's becoming difficult in a new and frankly traumatic way.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/02/25/my_awful_past_keeps_me_from_writing/feed/ 13 Julia Scheeres was losing her religion http://www.salon.com/2013/02/14/losing_her_religion/ http://www.salon.com/2013/02/14/losing_her_religion/#comments Thu, 14 Feb 2013 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13194815 When I first began to read literature seriously, in my early 20s, I was in thrall to the literary and intellectual tradition that Catholic and Jewish writers could draw upon and push against. I found that I had much in common with believers and apostates such as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Andre Dubus, Cynthia Ozick, Nathan Englander and Philip Roth. They were Americans, but they were also somehow other, owing to childhoods that claimed allegiances that transcended the merely national. Like those writers, I had belonged as a child to a group that claimed a high otherness, but unlike those writers, I belonged to a group that so distrusted the culture itself that it had never bothered to cultivate much in the way of a literary tradition. I have waited until the fourth sentence to use the phrase "Evangelical Christianity," because the people from whom I came have been partially responsible, as a political power block, for so many of the abuses of the late 20th and early 21st century. Literature aims to complicate, or it ought to, and Evangelical Christianity too often aims to reduce, to say, "There are two ways of looking at every problem, the right way, and the wrong way," and there are consequently two kinds of people, the right people and the wrong people.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/02/14/losing_her_religion/feed/ 8 “Give Me Everything You Have”: Stalked! http://www.salon.com/2013/02/10/give_me_everything_you_have_stalked/ http://www.salon.com/2013/02/10/give_me_everything_you_have_stalked/#comments Sun, 10 Feb 2013 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13196442 With its eerie, pristine prose, James Lasdun's fiction distills the anxieties of contemporary life to their mythic core. In his remarkable 2002 novel, "The Horned Man," an academic estranged from his wife goes quietly mad while serving on his college's sexual harassment committee, imagining that the department's most legendary womanizer is secretly living in his office and sabotaging his life. Take a writer like this, one who specializes in the surreal, inward spiraling of paranoia, and make him the target of a clever stalker: It sounds like the premise of a James Lasdun novel, right? However, "Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked," Lasdun's new book, is not a novel, but a memoir.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/02/10/give_me_everything_you_have_stalked/feed/ 21 “I don’t take pleasure in things I’m not good at. I’m good at sitting in a bar” http://www.salon.com/2013/01/24/i_don%e2%80%99t_take_pleasure_in_things_i%e2%80%99m_not_good_at_i%e2%80%99m_good_at_sitting_in_a_bar/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/24/i_don%e2%80%99t_take_pleasure_in_things_i%e2%80%99m_not_good_at_i%e2%80%99m_good_at_sitting_in_a_bar/#comments Thu, 24 Jan 2013 00:59:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13179470 At 42, Rosie Schaap has already led a number of lives, all over this country and across the Atlantic, as an erudite high-school dropout and touring Deadhead,  a fortuneteller, an aspiring Irishwoman (she's Jewish), an esoteric librarian, a grad student, a community activist, a teacher, a bartender, a writer. But no matter where she was living, or how unmoored she might have been feeling, Schaap always managed to anchor herself — on a bar stool, among the men at the local pub. You might say she has a rather Irish or English approach to the bar, viewing it as a kind of community center where neighbors can convene and bring their families — Americans still see it as a den of debauchery, especially when a single woman enters its doors. Schaap is something of an expert, though, having clocked an estimated 13,000 hours in pubs, bars and taverns, she admits outright in her funny, smart-as-hell, moving memoir "Drinking With Men," not one of them wasted. Because it has been inside of these establishments that she has found camaraderie, witty banter and intellectual discourse, great jokes and moving stories, and even occasional romance — forging not just fleeting pub friendships but bonds with patrons and proprietors that endure to this day. Schaap, whom I've known for several years, through mutual close friends as well as through the ethereal Facebook universe (and ongoing Lexulous matches — she is a Scrabble master, be warned), came over to my apartment in Brooklyn to invent a new cocktail for Salon, the Gerry Mandarin, to inaugurate both her memoir and our president's second term, and to talk about the allure of the corner pub, the feminist act of walking into a very male space,  and how she fell in and out — and ultimately made peace — with Jack Daniel's.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/01/24/i_don%e2%80%99t_take_pleasure_in_things_i%e2%80%99m_not_good_at_i%e2%80%99m_good_at_sitting_in_a_bar/feed/ 6 Salon’s guide to writing a memoir http://www.salon.com/2013/01/20/salons_guide_to_writing_a_memoir/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/20/salons_guide_to_writing_a_memoir/#comments Sun, 20 Jan 2013 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13175930 It’s a genre that critics love to bag on, and readers love to devour. But we like to think that it’s not bad to write a memoir, it’s just very hard to write a good one. So we asked 10 of our favorite first-person authors for their best advice on the form. Get ready to take notes, gaze at your navel -- and learn from the masters.

 


Anne Lamott (“Operating Instructions,” “Grace, Eventually,” “Help, Thanks, Wow”):

The most important advice I could give to aspiring memoir writers is that it's pretty much all hopeless. There is very little chance that you will get your memoir published by a mainstream publisher (or, for that matter, your novel). Also, if you do get published, the process will make you way more mental than you already are. Plus, almost no one makes a great living as a writer. You have to be willing to take a real job, to finance your writing life. I cleaned houses and taught tennis lessons on the one court in Bolinas, Calif., for most of my 20s. Before that, I worked as a clerk typist at Bechtel, and as an assistant at a magazine.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/01/20/salons_guide_to_writing_a_memoir/feed/ 7 Julie Klausner dated horrible men so that you don’t have to http://www.salon.com/2013/01/17/julie_klausner_dated_horrible_men_so_that_you_dont_have_to/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/17/julie_klausner_dated_horrible_men_so_that_you_dont_have_to/#comments Thu, 17 Jan 2013 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13173760 Julie Klausner is very funny, and although it’s possible to escape into the things she’s made (her work writing for high cotton venues such as the New York Times and McSweeney’s, her work for television and the stage, and, notably, her “How Was Your Week?” podcast), there’s no need to check your brain at the door. Every comic inflation, every easy sex joke, every wry understatement is animated by a restless intelligence and a writerly instinct that wrings new life from the old tropes.

As a straight married man who has never spent any time as a straight single woman looking for love, I approached “I Don’t Care About Your Band,” Klausner’s darkly comic memoir of dating, as a kind of dispatch from a secret and enticing land.

Among the things I learned while listening:

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/01/17/julie_klausner_dated_horrible_men_so_that_you_dont_have_to/feed/ 2 Why’s everyone so down on the memoir? http://www.salon.com/2013/01/14/whys_everyone_so_down_on_the_memoir/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/14/whys_everyone_so_down_on_the_memoir/#comments Mon, 14 Jan 2013 21:37:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13170934 Los
Angeles Review of Books THE FIRST CREATIVE WRITING CLASS I ever took, on the second floor of a mousy old building on Piano Row off Boston Common, was an introduction to Creative Nonfiction. The teacher, a young MFA grad, I found to be a lovely and warm resource who handed out copies of meaningful essays by famous essayists and encouraged us to read aloud our god-awful in-class exercises — maintaining her composure as one-by-one we read (or shyly passed on reading) about our first memories or a physical description of someone we loved.

She was a good teacher, but a curious quirk was her pronunciation of a word that came up frequently. I should have paid more attention to the graceful generosity she extended to her students because I am sure that I made a face or cocked a theatrically subtle head tilt whenever discussion turned to "mem-wah," which, as you might imagine, was often. This pronunciation seemed not to fit with the rest of her general down-to-earthness. It was a baffling and bizarre affectation that I could in no way account for. What's more, nobody else seemed affected by this affectation. Or maybe they were, but were polite enough to keep their eyebrow-raising and lip-pursing to themselves. As the weeks passed, I took the serious things she had to say about writing less seriously.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/01/14/whys_everyone_so_down_on_the_memoir/feed/ 4 Do memoirs have to be so unhappy? http://www.salon.com/2013/01/14/do_memoirs_have_to_be_so_unhappy/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/14/do_memoirs_have_to_be_so_unhappy/#comments Mon, 14 Jan 2013 12:45:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13169429 The Browser So your first pick is The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr. Why did you choose that to start with?

It’s one of my favourite memoirs. I think she manages to capture the city that she lived in, and its surroundings, beautifully – you can almost smell the oil refineries. I don’t believe she names the city, but it’s in that east Texas, Gulf Coast area where there are a lot of people who work on the rigs. So she captures that, and I felt it was an honest book. I give people a little leeway on memoirs. On regular non-fiction, I have orthodox views (or somewhere between Orthodox and Hasidic probably) – but when it comes to memoirs, I don’t really expect that the sentence that is being quoted from when the person was four years old, you can go to the bank with, but I feel it is their story. And I found hers essentially believable.

One of the reviews of Mary Karr’s book claimed it was the book that really kicked off the current vogue in memoirs…

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/01/14/do_memoirs_have_to_be_so_unhappy/feed/ 1 Alisa Valdes: Anti-feminist romance not so romantic http://www.salon.com/2013/01/11/alisa_valdes_anti_feminist_romance_not_so_romantic/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/11/alisa_valdes_anti_feminist_romance_not_so_romantic/#comments Fri, 11 Jan 2013 00:10:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13167470 It's a romance-memoir about a hardcore feminist who falls in love with a cowboy who teaches her to reconnect with her "femininity" — and to never talk back, open her own car door or walk on the street side of the sidewalk. The book, which features a cover image of a woman's bare legs tossed high with a cowboy hat perched atop one foot, has been heavily marketed to the anti-feminist crowd, even earning a plug from Christina Hoff Sommers, who called it a "riveting tale about how a brilliant, strong-minded woman liberated herself from a dreary, male-bashing, reality-denying feminism."

But now the author, Alisa Valdes, a prolific romance novelist, alleges that the man who taught her to "submit," and to enjoy it, turned out — after she wrote this love letter of a book about him — to be an abuser.

Yesterday, Valdes published a blog post claiming that after she turned in the manuscript for "The Feminist and the Cowboy: An Unlikely Love Story," said cowboy became emotionally and physically abusive, and during one fight "simply dragged me down the hall to the bedroom, bent me over, and took me, telling me as he did so that I must never forget who was in charge."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/01/11/alisa_valdes_anti_feminist_romance_not_so_romantic/feed/ 51 “The Lost Carving”: Meditations on the creative life http://www.salon.com/2012/12/24/the_lost_carving_meditations_on_the_creative_life/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/24/the_lost_carving_meditations_on_the_creative_life/#comments Mon, 24 Dec 2012 02:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13153393 There's a booming and rather dubious genre of inspirational book aimed at people who want to do something creative -- usually writing. (Rule of thumb: If you spend way more energy and time psyching yourself up to work than you do actually working, there's a serious problem with your approach.) Much rarer are those books written by and about the working artist; perhaps the best-known and most-cherished is Annie Dillard's "The Writing Life." To this select company we can now add David Esterly's profound and wondrous "The Lost Carving: A Journey into the Heart of Making."

Esterly is that uncommon thing, a visual artist who can coax as much beauty from words as he can from his primary medium. The medium is wood, specifically limewood, a "charismatic" material noted for its creamy pallor and, among woodcarvers, for its "crisp and firm" texture and reticent grain. The great master of limewood carving was a 17th-century Dutch-born Englishman named Grinling Gibbons. His works adorn several London churches and stately homes, among them Hampton Court Palace, a royal residence in Richmond upon Thames.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/24/the_lost_carving_meditations_on_the_creative_life/feed/ 1 “The $60,000 Dog”: Animal attraction http://www.salon.com/2012/11/18/the_60000_dog_animal_attraction/ http://www.salon.com/2012/11/18/the_60000_dog_animal_attraction/#comments Sun, 18 Nov 2012 22:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13101276 To judge by recent publishing trends, the great proliferation of authors these days can be attributed to the animals — sometimes cats, occasionally the odd duck, but mostly dogs, and badly behaved ones at that — who go around saving their lives. These rescues, alas, consist of nothing so exciting as pulling the writer from a burning building or arriving in the midst of a blizzard carrying a little wooden barrel of brandy. Instead, the wayward pooches and mischievous felines stick to figurative life-saving — in the form of teaching the author to open his heart to love again or to embrace familial responsibility or to appreciate the beauties of the imperfect.

A desire to avoid this tedious (but by no means flagging) genre might keep some readers from Lauren Slater's new book, a linked collection of autobiographical essays about the relationship between people and animals. Two signals that this one is something different: the title, "The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals," which (rightly) suggests that Slater will be getting at some of the more difficult and ambiguous aspects of America's pet fixation, and Slater's track record. She has published six books, all but one of them nonfiction, and in each one she excavates the prickliest roots of subjects such as anti-depressants, pregnancy, psychological experiments, mental illness and the unreliability of the memoir form itself. "Okay, girls," says a drill-sergeant-like riding instructor at a camp she attended as a girl, "Slater has one of her typical profound and provocative questions." Yes she does; she always does.

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