I don’t ordinarily link to my newsletters here nowadays, but I’m making an exception for the latest, “The Truth Will Set You Free.” It’s about how wrestling with wrongs of my ancestors, rather than being a miserly, judgmental, closed-off process, has been an incredible opening. I’m also giving away an advance copy of Ancestor Trouble. And there are some good links . . .
My friend Terry Teachout, a theater and arts critic, a biographer, playwright, and librettist in his own right, first known to me as a blogger, died suddenly last week. I’ve struggled to express what a shock and loss his absence is. Terry loved to laugh and was a delight to laugh with. He loathed pretension. He enjoyed wit. When we . . .
This year I abandoned the novel I worked on for ages. Fragments survive in the novel I’m working on now, but it’s a fundamentally different book, and that feels great. For years, I resisted writing a nonfiction book first, because I really didn’t want to write a memoir. But it turned out that (1) I really did need, as several . . .
I don’t idealize the blog era, but I do miss a few things about it. One is the inherent flexibility of the form. A blog allows for brevity (merciful brevity). When no extra words are needed, there’s no mandate to stretch an idea to fill a slot. On the other hand, if someone needs to say 10,000 words on a . . .
As a child, I wasn’t allowed to watch much television. Books were my main source of entertainment—and a relief and distraction from the conflict around me. I was embarrassed that I didn’t understand my friends’ conversations about the shows they watched, though I tried to pretend I did and I caught glimpses at their houses whenever I could. I often . . .