“People ask me, was writing Fun Home therapeutic? And I feel like, yes it was, but that’s kind of like asking somebody if swimming the English Channel was a good workout for them. That’s not why they did it — of course it was a good workout.” The great Alison Bechdel and I spoke on the phone a couple weeks . . .
“Almost all of the great books are regional books,” Ron Rash (Serena) has said. “Landscape is destiny.” We talked about his latest novel, The Cove, on April 25, at McNally Jackson.
Tuesday night I’m reading with Alexander Chee at the KGB Bar for the True Story Nonfiction Series. Both of our essays are about family mysteries, conversations across generations, and I promise you, Alex’s is gorgeous and you want to hear him read it.
In his fiction and in his life, Harry Crews empathized most with the people who needed it most: the freaks, the fuck-ups, people who’d been broken by loss of one kind or another. Crews died yesterday, at age 76. As his son Byron told The Daily’s Claire Howorth, “[he] put more miles on the Chevy than most of us.” Amended . . .