Salon.com > Memoirs

Salon.com > Memoirs http://www.salon.com Sun, 27 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Is Nikki Haley’s book full of lies? http://www.salon.com/2012/04/16/is_nikki_haleys_book_full_of_lies/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/16/is_nikki_haleys_book_full_of_lies/#comments Mon, 16 Apr 2012 19:20:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12874091 Hm. As Mitt Romney begins to seriously consider running mates, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley again finds herself under fire. This time, the State newspaper has taken her to task for twisting the truth in her memoir, "Can't Is Not an Option." (That is for real the title of her memoir.)

Every politician's memoir, especially if written while the author is still in office, is a series of self-serving half-truths. There's really not much benefit to total and complete honesty, and most politicians are convinced enough of their own righteousness that they probably don't even think of their omissions and distortions as dishonest. So, everyone Haley trashes in her book says she is lying. That is not that surprising!

Among the points of contention:

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/16/is_nikki_haleys_book_full_of_lies/feed/ 26 “Drop Dead Healthy”: A failed addition to “shtick lit” http://www.salon.com/2012/04/16/drop_dead_healthy_a_failed_addition_to_shtick_lit/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/16/drop_dead_healthy_a_failed_addition_to_shtick_lit/#comments Mon, 16 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12865671 In "Memoir: A History," Ben Yagoda defines "shtick lit" as "[b]ooks perpetrated by people who undertook an unusual project with the express purpose of writing about it." He identifies "Walden" as the earliest example of the genre, which would seem to establish a respectable pedigree, but the word perpetrated leaves little doubt as to Yagoda's opinion of more recent efforts. He can't be alone in casting a skeptical eye on shtick-lit superstar A. J. Jacobs, the Esquire writer responsible for "The Know-It-All" (shtick: reading the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" in its entirety), "The Year of Living Biblically" (shtick: following every biblical injunction to the letter for 12 lushly bearded, annoying months), and now "Drop Dead Healthy," evidently a reboot of Remar Sutton's out-of-print "Body Worry."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/16/drop_dead_healthy_a_failed_addition_to_shtick_lit/feed/ 13 “The Patagonian Hare”: The man behind “Shoah” http://www.salon.com/2012/04/14/the_patagonian_hare_the_man_behind_shoah/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/14/the_patagonian_hare_the_man_behind_shoah/#comments Sat, 14 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12860791 Those Americans who are familiar with the name Claude Lanzmann most likely know him as the director of "Shoah," his monumental 1985 documentary about the extermination of the European Jews in the Nazi gas chambers. As it turns out, though, the story of Lanzmann's eventful life would have been well worth telling even if he had never come to direct "Shoah." In addition to film director, Lanzmann's roles have included those of journalist, editor, public intellectual, member of the French Resistance, long-term lover of Simone de Beauvoir and close friend of Jean-Paul Sartre, world traveler, political activist, ghostwriter for Jacques Cousteau -- I could go on, but it's a good deal more entertaining to hear Lanzmann himself go on, and thanks to the publication in English of his memoir, "The Patagonian Hare," we now have the opportunity to do so.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/14/the_patagonian_hare_the_man_behind_shoah/feed/ 0 Recovery’s new poster boy http://www.salon.com/2012/04/07/recoverys_new_poster_boy/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/07/recoverys_new_poster_boy/#comments Sat, 07 Apr 2012 22:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12815001 Two years ago, Bill Clegg's first memoir dropped like a bombshell on the New York media world. "Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man" chronicled the handsome and hugely successful book agent's descent into a harrowing crack addiction that cost him his career, his boyfriend and his savings -- and left him broke and in rehab. In one harrowing part of the book (excerpted in New York magazine) Clegg decides to blow off a first-class flight to Berlin after a week without sleep for a crack binge and sex with the cabbie driving him to his airport hotel. Staring at his pile of drugs, he wrote, "I wonder if somewhere in that pile is the crumb that will bring on a heart attack or stroke or seizure. The cardiac event that will deliver all this to an abrupt and welcome halt."

In the years since the events of the first book, Clegg has rebuilt his career as an agent and become one of the best-known faces of addiction recovery. (He is also the rumored muse for "Left-handed," a recent book of poetry by Jonathan Galassi, and the supposed inspiration for one of the lead characters in "Keep the Lights On," Ira Sachs' well-reviewed new film about a troubled gay relationship).

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/07/recoverys_new_poster_boy/feed/ 26 Men “experiment,” women “experience” http://www.salon.com/2012/03/19/men_experiment_women_experience/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/19/men_experiment_women_experience/#comments Mon, 19 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12683101 In 1985, 25-year-old Jeanette Winterson published "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit," a semi-autobiographical novel about a girl named Jeanette, adopted and raised in northern industrial England by Pentecostals, whose plans to become a missionary are derailed when she falls in love with girls (prompting her parents to hold an exorcism) and goes off to Oxford and becomes a writer instead.

Although the rough outlines of Winterson's biography follow more or less the same as those sketched above, she has always resisted the idea that "Oranges" should be taken as a literal account of her childhood. "I was trying to get away from the received idea that women always write about 'experience' -- the compass of what they know -- while men write wide and bold, the big canvas, the experiment with form," she writes in her new book, "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?," released last year in England and published in the United States last week.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/19/men_experiment_women_experience/feed/ 6 An elegy to a lost friend http://www.salon.com/2012/03/04/the_guardians_sarah_manguso/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/04/the_guardians_sarah_manguso/#comments Sun, 04 Mar 2012 13:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12468781 Henry James' famous exhortation to "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost" clearly hasn't been lost on Sarah Manguso. In "The Two Kinds of Decay," her fiercely observant, wrenching 2008 memoir of her struggle with a rare, life-threatening autoimmune disease that struck in her early 20s, Manguso wrote: "This is suffering's lesson: pay attention. The important part might come in a form you do not recognize."

Exquisite focus is also key to Manguso's new book, "The Guardians," a bittersweet elegy to a friend who "eloped" from a locked psychiatric ward on a torrential July day in 2008 and, some ten hours later, threw himself in front of a Metro-North train in Riverdale. Although they were never lovers, Harris Wulfson was one of Manguso's closest friends for ten years. A brilliant musician and composer, Harris, as she refers to him, had suffered three psychotic breaks in the three years prior to his death.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/04/the_guardians_sarah_manguso/feed/ 2 “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?”: Portrait of the artist as a young Pentecostal http://www.salon.com/2012/02/26/why_be_happy_when_you_could_be_normal_portrait_of_the_artist_as_a_young_pentecostal/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/26/why_be_happy_when_you_could_be_normal_portrait_of_the_artist_as_a_young_pentecostal/#comments Sun, 26 Feb 2012 22:01:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12426381 When Jeanette Winterson was a child -- a redheaded scrap of a thing, as fierce and self-willed as Jane Eyre but readier with her fists -- she went to a school concert at Christmastime with her parents. "Is that your mum?" someone asked her. "Mostly," was her reply.

Winterson was adopted, raised by evangelical Pentecostals in a working-class town in northern England in the 1960s and '70s. Her family's house had no phone, no indoor toilet, intermittent heat and electricity and not quite enough food. Of the six books allowed on the premises, three were either the Bible or Bible commentaries. To the dismay of her mother, Winterson turned out to be brilliant, literary, defiant and gay.

As a young writer, winning the Whitbread Prize for First Novel in 1985, making Granta's 1993 list of the best young British novelists (along with Kazuo Ishiguro and Alan Hollinghurst), Winterson burned bright, using her childhood and her rebellious sexuality as fuel. "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit" was her autobiographical coming-of-age novel, funny and harrowing. The two books that followed, "The Passion" and "Sexing the Cherry," retained much of the escape velocity that got Winterson out of Accrington, Lancashire, and into Oxford and the London literary world. The ones after that were less successful, thematically diffuse grab bags of big ideas with story lines that tend to wander off into the tall grass and stall. Many fans lost interest. As badly as Winterson needed to break free of her youth, its constraints gave form and focus to her intensity.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/26/why_be_happy_when_you_could_be_normal_portrait_of_the_artist_as_a_young_pentecostal/feed/ 7 My tryst with Spencer Tracy http://www.salon.com/2012/02/16/my_gay_affair_with_spencer_tracy/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/16/my_gay_affair_with_spencer_tracy/#comments Thu, 16 Feb 2012 04:59:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12306971 By the mid-fifties, Los Angeles was changing. Its population had reached two million, making it the fourth largest city in the nation after New York, Chicago, and Detroit. Mike Romanoff had opened his fancy new Romanoff ’s restaurant on Rodeo Drive. Robinsons had launched its flagship department store at the corner of Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards. The gigantic new CBS Television City was under construction in Hollywood, intended primarily for the development and production of color television programming. After being temporarily closed down for financial reasons, the Hollywood Bowl reopened and celebrated its thirty-third season of music and entertainment under the stars.

My daughter Donna had grown into a beautiful little girl with sparkling blue eyes and long brown hair. She was a good student, attending a grammar school on the corner of Beachwood Drive and Tamarind Avenue in Hollywood, not too far from our small apartment. Even though I did not see much of her due to my vagabond lifestyle, I adored her.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/16/my_gay_affair_with_spencer_tracy/feed/ 106 Grief that doesn’t heal http://www.salon.com/2012/01/12/kayak_morning_roger_rosenblatt/ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/12/kayak_morning_roger_rosenblatt/#comments Thu, 12 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12085061 When Roger Rosenblatt's 38-year-old daughter, Amy, a pediatrician, died unexpectedly of an undetected heart condition in 2007, he and his wife of nearly 50 years moved from their home in Quogue, on the southern shore of Long Island, down to their daughter's house in Bethesda, Maryland, to help their son-in-law, a hand surgeon, take care of their three small grandchildren, then ages six, five and one. In his beautiful memoir "Making Toast," Rosenblatt chronicled how pulling together to create a hectic, multigenerational household saved them all. Despite its heart-rending subject matter, "Making Toast" was ultimately a hopeful, heartwarming book.

"Kayak Morning," which deals with the tenaciousness of grief, is a more melancholy read, less cathartic and reassuring. It is a bereaved father's meditation on unacceptable loss. What it has going for it is searing honesty, exquisitely expressed. Discussing his earlier volume, Rosenblatt writes, "In it, I tried to suggest that the best one can do in a situation such as ours is to get on with it. I believe that still. What I failed to calculate is the pain that increases even as one gets on with it." A therapist friend tells him, "Grief comes to you all at once, so you think it will be over all at once. But it is your guest for a lifetime." The challenge, Rosenblatt comes to understand, is to transform grief into a positive force.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/01/12/kayak_morning_roger_rosenblatt/feed/ 4 The death of the celebrity memoir http://www.salon.com/2012/01/06/the_death_of_the_celebrity_memoir/ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/06/the_death_of_the_celebrity_memoir/#comments Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=11911031 In a recent essay for the Daily Beast, Michael Korda, the storied former editor in chief of Simon & Schuster, warned the public to stay away from celebrity memoirs, decrying the majority of these books as "dull, homogenized, bland and sanitized." He ought to know, for as he goes on to explain, he spent much of his professional life trying to persuade movie stars to write their autobiographies. (One of the ironies here is that Korda, while a celebrity only in the book world -- which means not much of a celebrity at all -- is famous for writing divertingly about almost any topic, including himself. This piece is no exception.)

A growing awareness of this truth might explain why sales of celebrity memoirs have fallen off of late. According to the Guardian newspaper in Britain, a whole raft of celebrity-authored books tanked in the U.K. last year. In the U.S., as well, there have been several notable failures, particularly by cast members from the reality TV show "Jersey Shore." Could the public finally be wising up?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/01/06/the_death_of_the_celebrity_memoir/feed/ 21 Inside the “Boston Miracle” http://www.salon.com/2011/11/19/inside_the_boston_miracle/ http://www.salon.com/2011/11/19/inside_the_boston_miracle/#comments Sat, 19 Nov 2011 18:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10230784 In the mid-1990s, David M. Kennedy spearheaded Operation Ceasefire, a series of interventions aimed at bringing down the high youth homicide rate in Boston. The project worked so well that it became widely known by another name: the Boston Miracle. In his new book, Kennedy, now a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College, writes, "I always hated that name, it wasn't a miracle, it was hard damned work."

"Don't Shoot: One Man, a Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America" is Kennedy's passionate account of that work, which has seen striking results not just in the roughest sections of Boston but in many of the bleakest neighborhoods of the United States. While his goals were lofty -- healing toxic relationships between the police and blighted communities, rewriting the conventional wisdom on gangs, drugs and violent crime -- Kennedy proposed solutions so simple that cops often laughed him out of the room.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/11/19/inside_the_boston_miracle/feed/ 5 A journalist’s take on his absentee dad http://www.salon.com/2011/11/18/my_long_trip_home_mark_whitaker/ http://www.salon.com/2011/11/18/my_long_trip_home_mark_whitaker/#comments Fri, 18 Nov 2011 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10230753 Mark Whitaker, the first black editor of Newsweek and current managing editor of CNN Worldwide, explains that it was the memoir of another prominent biracial man, "Dreams of My Father" by Barack Obama, that inspired him to write his own father's story in "My Long Trip Home." He goes on to clarify that his memoir will be very different because, unlike President Obama, he knew his father "for half a century, for better or, as was so often the case, for worse."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/11/18/my_long_trip_home_mark_whitaker/feed/ 2 Joan Didion’s most beautiful book yet http://www.salon.com/2011/11/05/joan_didion_blue_nights/ http://www.salon.com/2011/11/05/joan_didion_blue_nights/#comments Sat, 05 Nov 2011 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10162111 In 2003's "Where I Was From," Joan Didion tells of a long wagon journey on which her great-great-grandmother buried a child, gave birth to another, contracted mountain fever twice, and sewed a quilt, "a blinding and pointless compaction of stitches," that she must have finished en route, "somewhere in the wilderness of her own grief and illness, and just kept on stitching." Throughout the book, Didion ruminates on her female forebears, women "pragmatic and in their deepest instincts clinically radical, given to breaking clean with everyone and everything they knew," even their own dead babies.

It was Didion's adopted daughter, Quintana, at age 5 or 6, who first made all this heredity start to seem remote. And if the author harbored any lingering doubt about whether she shared her ancestors' breaking-clean tendencies, the shattering effect of Quintana's death in 2005, at age 39, must have swept it away. In her new memoir, "Blue Nights," about life before and after the loss of her daughter, Didion writes, "When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/11/05/joan_didion_blue_nights/feed/ 9 I do not fear death http://www.salon.com/2011/09/15/roger_ebert/ http://www.salon.com/2011/09/15/roger_ebert/#comments Thu, 15 Sep 2011 15:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/2011/09/15/roger_ebert I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

I don't expect to die anytime soon. But it could happen this moment, while I am writing. I was talking the other day with Jim Toback, a friend of 35 years, and the conversation turned to our deaths, as it always does. "Ask someone how they feel about death," he said, "and they'll tell you everyone's gonna die. Ask them, In the next 30 seconds? No, no, no, that's not gonna happen. How about this afternoon? No. What you're really asking them to admit is, Oh my God, I don't really exist. I might be gone at any given second."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/09/15/roger_ebert/feed/ 131 Witnesses to the end of white African sovereighty http://www.salon.com/2011/09/01/cocktail_hour/ http://www.salon.com/2011/09/01/cocktail_hour/#comments Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:22:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2011/08/31/cocktail_hour Alexandra Fuller's 2001 memoir, "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight," was a funny, moving, tragedy-strewn account of growing up in a white settler family in Rhodesia, later Zimbabwe, and of her parents' continuing lives in Malawi and Zambia. Now, in "Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness," Fuller takes up the story again to fill in her parents' early years and family backgrounds, and goes on to bring them forward into the present, to their fish-and-banana farm in Zambia. She also revisits episodes she described in the first book: the hardships and accomplishments of their drought-plagued, war-blighted farming ventures; the deaths of three of their children; and her mother's mental breakdowns.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/09/01/cocktail_hour/feed/ 10 The Cheney Regency http://www.salon.com/2011/08/30/dick_cheney_in_my_time/ http://www.salon.com/2011/08/30/dick_cheney_in_my_time/#comments Tue, 30 Aug 2011 04:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2011/08/29/dick_cheney_in_my_time Give the old vizier his due. Richard Cheney is the most influential and radical political leader of his times. The former vice president's new autobiography, assertively titled "In My Time," tells at least part of the story. The fuller telling of his biography will have to come from guilty aides, declassification of key documents, and possibly a future war crimes tribunal. In the meantime, what the man wants to tell us in the here and now is interesting enough.

Cheney's memoir -- by turns implacable, misleading and frank -- presents strong evidence that he served as de facto co-president of the United States from the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, until late 2006. Certainly, the book demonstrates that no vice president in American history has ever wielded such influence -- some would say control -- of the levers of power in Washington.

His radicalism is served proudly. "I wanted to make sure the governor understood my record was not moderate," he writes about an early meeting with Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

The Cheney Regency featured a canny bureaucratic mandarin waging war in tandem with a passive chief executive, who shared his views but his not skills. There is nothing comparable in the history of the American presidency. Some sympathizers have discerned the hand of God in Bush's presidency. Cheney, a less sentimental observer, gives more credit to himself.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/08/30/dick_cheney_in_my_time/feed/ 118 When my mother started to forget http://www.salon.com/2011/08/28/dementia_excerpt/ http://www.salon.com/2011/08/28/dementia_excerpt/#comments Sun, 28 Aug 2011 20:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2011/08/28/dementia_excerpt "Try to imagine what it would be like to wake up in the morning without your memory."

Suzanne gives me a moment to conjure up my bedroom -- the way the morning light peeks through the blinds, the weight of the covers on me as I wake -- where I'm warm, and most likely needing to pee. As I place my cat Bix -- purring -- next to me in my imaginary morning, I stumble on the paradox: in the act of imagining the loss of my memory, I am using my unlost memory like crazy. That's Suzanne's point. We depend on our memories to guide us through every moment of every day. We spend our infanthood learning the basics -- how to suck and swallow, how to chew, how to walk, how to recognize hunger or pain, and how to communicate our needs to others. What we learn -- and what we remember -- gains sophistication, subtlety, as we progress from infant to toddler to child to young adult.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/08/28/dementia_excerpt/feed/ 1 “A Book of Secrets”: A biographical trilogy concludes http://www.salon.com/2011/08/16/a_book_of_secrets_michael_holroyd/ http://www.salon.com/2011/08/16/a_book_of_secrets_michael_holroyd/#comments Tue, 16 Aug 2011 00:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/2011/08/15/a_book_of_secrets_michael_holroyd Michael Holroyd sees the biographer's art, his art, as combining the discipline and factual concreteness of history with the creativity and psychological insight of the novel. What is more, and most congenial to me, he would like to restore comedy to its proper place in the humanities. Humor, he has argued, quoting Hugh Kingsmill, is "an illumination of reality, not a refuge from it," and he has further proposed that "perhaps the next step forward for biography is to accommodate this spirit of humor and reveal the conflict between illusion and reality." If you wish to see what that might mean, you need look no further than his own trilogy, the series that began with "Basil Street Blues," continued with "Mosaic," and now concludes with "A Book of Secrets" -- his last book, we are told, though I never believe that sort of talk.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/08/16/a_book_of_secrets_michael_holroyd/feed/ 1 A firsthand account of Capone’s Mob http://www.salon.com/2011/08/09/al_capone_and_his_american_boys_william_helmer/ http://www.salon.com/2011/08/09/al_capone_and_his_american_boys_william_helmer/#comments Tue, 09 Aug 2011 00:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/2011/08/08/al_capone_and_his_american_boys_william_helmer If the gang-moll heroines played by Judy Holliday in "Born Yesterday" and Virginia Mayo in "White Heat" sat down to collaborate on a memoir, the result would read a lot like "Al Capone and His American Boys: Memoirs of a Mobster's Wife." Though you wouldn't necessarily know it from the confusing title and cover, this volume presents the autobiography of Georgette Winkeler, the wife of Gus Winkeler, a leading henchman in Capone's Chicago "Syndicate." In 1934, months after Gus was murdered by his erstwhile colleagues, Georgette decided to write about their life together, hoping to cash in on the public appetite for gangster lore. Her publisher, however, had second thoughts about bringing out a book so full of revelations about the Syndicate -- sensibly enough, given the number of times Georgette herself writes about indiscreet mobsters getting rubbed out. Thwarted, she decided to turn her manuscript, "A Voice From the Grave," over to the FBI, before going on to make a new life for herself as the wife of a preacher. And there it lay for decades, forgotten in the archives, until Mob historian William J. Helmer brought out this edition. (Credited as the author, Helmer really serves as Winkeler's editor.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/08/09/al_capone_and_his_american_boys_william_helmer/feed/ 5 The music business’s real shady history http://www.salon.com/2011/08/02/music_histories_rock_memoirs/ http://www.salon.com/2011/08/02/music_histories_rock_memoirs/#comments Tue, 02 Aug 2011 01:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/2011/08/01/music_histories_rock_memoirs Although it's long accommodated a few idealists and loads of fans, the music industry is not for the faint of heart. On the contrary, it's always been long on tough guys and worse, for reasons that are not hard to figure out. Cash businesses conducted at night in places where alcohol is served would have their shady side even in nations where the liquor trade wasn't illegal for 14 crucial years, and although jukeboxes didn't catch on until well after Prohibition, the Mob was positioned to take them over, and get its mitts on record distribution into the bargain. Nor is it all about the Benjamins. If by popular music you mean domestic palliatives from "Home Sweet Home" to Celine Dion, OK, that's another realm. But most of what's now played in concert halls and honored at the Kennedy Center has its roots in antisocial impulses -- in a carpe diem hedonism that is a way of life for violent men with money to burn who know damn well they're destined for prison or the morgue.

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