I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

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January Pure Wit by Francesca Peacock [NF] I first learned about the life and work of seventeenth-century writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish in Regan Penaluna's stellar study of women thinkers, and I've been dying to read a biography of Cavendish ever since. And I'm in luck (all of us are) thanks to biographer Peacock. A proto-feminist, science-fiction pioneer, and divisive public figure, Cavendish is endlessly fascinating, and Peacock's debut gives her the rigorous, in-depth treatment that she deserves. —Sophia M. Stewart Nonfiction by Julie Myerson [F] A blurb from Rachel Cusk is just about all it takes to get me excited about a book, so when I saw that Cusk called Myerson's latest novel "glitteringly painful," "steady and clear," and "the book [Myerson] was intended to write," I was sold. A tale of art, addiction, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters, Nonfiction promises to devastate. —SMS Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh [NF] Did the pandemic kill postmodernism? And what comes after the end of history? University of Illinois–Chicago professor Kornbluh dubs our contemporary style “immediacy,” characterized by same-day delivery, bingeable multimedia, and real-time news updates that spin the economic flywheel ever faster. Kornbluh names this state of emergence and emergency, and suggests potential off-ramps in the direction of calm reflection, measured art-making, and, just maybe, collective wisdom. —Nathalie op de Beeck Slow Down by Kōhei Saitō, tr. Brian Bergstrom [NF] In this internationally-bestselling treatise, Japanese philosopher Saitō argues against "sustainable growth" in favor of degrowth—the slowing of economic activity—which he sees at the only way to address the twinned crises of inequality and climate change. Saitō's proposal is simple, salient, and adapts Marx for the modern day. —SMS Relic by Ed Simon [NF] From Millions alum Simon comes a slim study of the objects we imbue with religious (or quasi-religious) meaning, from the bone of a Catholic martyr to Jimi Hendrix's guitar pick. Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series never misses, and Relic is one of the series' most unconventional—and compelling—entries yet. —SMS Filterworld by Kyle Chayka [NF] The outline of reality has become increasingly blurry as the real world melds with the digital one, becoming what Chayka, staff writer at the New Yorker, calls “Filterworld,” a society built on a foundation of ever-evolving algorithms. In his book of the same name, Chayka calls out the all-powerful algorithm, which he argues is the driving force behind current and accelerating trends in art, consumption, and ethics. —Daniella Fishman Portrait of a Body by Julie Delporte, tr. Helge Dascher and Karen Houle [NF] A gripping narrative of coming to terms with her queer identity, Canadian cartoonist Delporte's latest graphic memoir—praised by Eileen Myles and Fariha Róisín—sees Delporte learning to embrace herself in both physical and metaphysical ways. Dreamy colored pencil illustrations and gently flowing storytelling capture the beauty, trauma, and ultimate tranquility that comes with learning to exist on your own terms. —DF Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino [F] In Bertino’s latest novel, following 2020's Parakeet, the launch of Voyager 1 into space coincides with the birth of Adina Giorno, who, much like the solitary satellite, is in search of something she can't yet see. As a child, she senses that she is not of this world and struggles to make a life for herself amid the drudgery of human existence. Playing on Adina's alienness as both a metaphor and a reality, Bertino asks, “Are we really alone?” —DF The Last Fire Season by Manjula Martin [NF] Martin returns ablaze in her latest memoir, pitched as "H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene." Following an anguishing chronic pain diagnosis, Martin attempts to reconnect with her beloved Northern California wilderness in order to escape not only her deteriorating health but a deteriorating world, which has ignited around her in the worst fire season California has ever seen. Devastating and ambivalent, The Last Fire Season tries to sift through the ashes of climate change. —DF The Furies by Elizabeth Flock [NF] Violence by women—its role, its potential righteousness—is the focus of Flock's latest. Following the real-life cases of a young rape survivor in Alabama, a predator-punishing gang leader in India, and an anti-ISIS militia fighter in Syria, Flock considers how women have used lethal force as a means to power, safety, and freedom amid misogynistic threats and oppression. Is violence ever the answer? Flock looks to three parallel lives for guidance. —SMS Imagining the Method by Justin Owen Rawlins [NF] University of Tulsa professor Rawlins demystifies that most celebrated (and controversial) acting school, challenging our contemporary conceptions of screen performance. I was sold the moment I saw Rawlins received the ultimate stamp of approval from Isaac Butler, author of the definitive account of method acting: "If you care about the evolution of twentieth-century screen performance, you should read this book." —SMS We Are Free to Change the World by Lyndsey Stonebridge [NF] Famed twentieth-century philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote passionately about power, freedom, and inequality against the backdrop of fascism—a project as relevant today as it ever was. Stonebridge, a professor of humanities and human rights, revisits the lessons of Arendt's writings and applies them to the twenty-first century, creating a dialogue between past, present, and future. —DF Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C.D. Rose [F] In these 19 short stories, Rose meditates on philosophy, photography, and literature. Blending erudition and entertainment, Rose's fables follow writers, teachers, and artists through various situations—and in a standout story, imagines how St. Augustine would fare on Twitter. —DF Black Women Taught Us by Jenn M. Jackson [NF] Jackson's debut book foregrounds the work of Black feminist writers and leaders—from Ida B. Wells and Harriet Jacobs to Shirley Chisholm and bell hooks—throughout American history, revealing the centuries-long role that Black women have played in imagining and fighting for a more just society. Imani Perry calls Jackson "a beautiful writer and excellent scholar." —SMS The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James [F] Pitched as Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez (yeesh!), The Bullet Swallower is the second novel (after Mona at Sea) from Elizabeth Gonzalez James, who also wrote the weird and wonderful essay/play Five Conversations About Peter Sellers. Infusing the spaghetti western with magical realism, the novel follows a Mexican bandito on a cosmic journey generations in the making. —SMS Last Acts by Alexander Sammartino [F] In Sammartino's debut novel, the owner of a gun store hatches a plan to resurrect his struggling business following his son's near-death experience. George Saunders, Mary Karr, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah have all heaped on praise, and Jenny Offill finds it "hard to believe Last Acts is a first novel." —SMS I Sing to Use the Waiting by Zachary Pace [NF] Pace fuses memoir and criticism (my favorite combination) to explore the emotional and cultural impacts of women singers across time, from Cat Power and Rihanna to Kim Gordon and Whitney Houston. A queer coming-of-age story that centers the power of music and the legacies of women artists. —SMS Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn [F] Blackburn, the author of the stellar story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl, delivers a debut novel about storytelling and unreality, centering on a successful novelist who gets hold of her dead brother's phone—and starts answering texts as him. Kristen Arnett calls this one "a bonafide knockout" that "rewired my brain." —SMS Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer [N] New Yorker staff writer Blitzer traces the harrowing history of the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, foregrounding the stories of Central American migrants whose lives have been threatened and upended by political tumult. A nuanced, layered, and rigorously reported portrait that Patrick Radden Keefe hails as "extraordinary." —SMS The Survivors of the Clotilda by Hannah Durkin [NF] Durkin, a British historian, explores the lives of 103 Africans who were kidnapped and transported on the last slave ship to dock in the U.S., shortly before the Civil War began in 1861. Many of these captives were children, and thus lived their lives against a dramatic backdrop, from the Civil War all the way up to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. What these people experienced and how they prevailed should intrigue anybody interested in learning more about our nation’s darkest chapter. —Claire Kirch Your Utopia by Bora Chung, tr. Anton Hur [F] Following her acclaimed sophomore novel The Cursed Bunny, Chung returns with more tales from the realm of the uncanny. Covering everything from unruly AI to the quest for immortality to the environmental destruction caused by capitalism, Chung’s story collection promises more of the mystifying, horror-filled goodness that has become her calling card. —DF The Rebel's Clinic by Adam Shatz [NF] Frantz Fanon—political philosopher, psychiatrist, and author of the trailblazing Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth—is one of the most important writers and thinkers of the postcolonial era, and his work continues to inform contemporary thinking on race, capitalism, and power. In this sprawling biography, Shatz affirms Fanon's place as a towering intellect and groundbreaking activist. —SMS You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, tr. Natasha Wimmer [F] Enrigue's latest novel, following Sudden Death, reimagines the fateful 1519 invasion of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. With exuberant style, and in a lively translation by Wimmer, Enrigue brings the Aztec capital and the emperor Moctezuma to vibrant life—and rewrites their destinies. —SMS February Love Novel by Ivana Sajko, tr. by Mima Simić [F] Croatian literature may lag behind its Russian, Hungarian, Polish, and Ukrainian counterparts—roughly in that order—as far as stateside recognition goes, but we all make mistakes. Just like couples do in love and under capitalism. “A war between kitchen and bedroom,” as the liner notes read, would have been enough to sell me, but that war’s combatants, “an unemployed Dante scholar” and “a passable actress,” really sealed the deal. —John H. Maher The Unforgivable by Cristina Campo, tr. Alex Andriesse [NF] This new NYRB edition, introduced by Kathryn Davis, brings together all of the essays Campo published in her lifetime, plus a selection of additional essays and autofiction. The result is a robust introduction to a stylish—but largely forgotten—Italian writer whose "creativity was a vocation in the truest sense," per Jhumpa Lahiri. —SMS Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti [NF] Last year, I was enraptured by Heti's limited-run New York Times newsletter in which she alphabetized sentences from 10 years' worth of her diary entries—and this year, we can finally enjoy the sublime results of that experiment in book form. This is my favorite work of Heti's, full stop. —SMS Dinner on Monster Island by Tania De Rozario [NF] Blending film criticism, social commentary, and personal narrative, De Rozario (most recently the author of the Lambda Literary Award–nominated And the Walls Came Crumbling Down) explores her experience growing up queer, brown, and fat in Singapore, from suffering through a "gay-exorcism" to finding solace in horror films like Carrie. —SMS Wrong Norma by Anne Carson [NF] Everyone shut up—Anne Carson is speaking! This glistening new collection of drawings and musings from Carson is her first original work since the 2016 poetry collection Float. In Carson's own words, the collection touches on such disparate topics (she stresses they are "not linked") as Joseph Conrad, Roget's Thesaurus, snow, Guantánamo, and "my Dad." —DF Self-Portraits: Stories by Osamu Dazai, tr. Ralph McCarthy [F] Japanese writer Dazai had quite the moment in 2023, and that moment looks likely to continue into the new year. Self-Portraits is a collection of short autofiction in the signature melancholic cadence which so many Anglophone readers have come to love. Meditating on themes of hypocrisy, irony, nihilism—all with a touch of self-deprecating humor—Dazai’s work will either pull you out of a deep depression or crack your rose-colored glasses; there is no in-between. —DF Imagination by Ruha Benjamin [NF] Visionary imagination is essential for justice and a sustainable future, argues Benjamin, a Princeton professor of African American studies and founder of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. In her treatise, she reminds readers of the human capacity for creativity, and she believes failures of imagination that lead to inequity can be remedied. In place of quasi-utopian gambles that widen wealth gaps and prop up the surveillance state, Benjamin recommends dreaming collective and anti-racist social arrangements into being—a message to galvanize readers of adrienne marie brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. —SMS Literary Theory for Robots by Dennis Yi Tenen [NF] Artificial intelligence and machine-generated writing are nothing new, and perhaps nothing to fear, argues Tenen, a Columbia English professor and former software engineer. Traveling through time and across the world, Tenen reveals the labor and collaboration behind AI, complicating the knee-jerk (and, frankly, well-founded!) reactions many of us have to programs like ChatGPT. —SMS A Sign of Her Own by Sarah Marsh [F] Alexander Graham Bell is best known as the inventor of the telephone, but what he considered his life's work was the education of deaf children—specifically, the harmful practice of oralism, or the suppression of sign language. Marsh's wonderful debut novel unearths this little-known history and follows a deaf pupil of Bell's as she questions his teachings and reclaims her voice. —SMS Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker [NF] Journalist Bosker, who took readers behind the scenes with oenophiles in her 2017 Cork Dork, turns to avid artists, collectors, and curators for this sensory deep dive. Bosker relies on experiential reporting, and her quest to understand the human passion for visual art finds her apprenticing with creators, schmoozing with galleristas, and minding canonical pieces as a museum guard. —NodB Columbo by Amelie Hastie [NF] Columbo experienced something of a renaissance during the pandemic, with a new generation falling for the rugged, irresistible charms of Peter Falk. Hastie revisits the series, a staple of 70s-era TV, with refreshing rigor and appreciation, tackling questions of stardom, authorship, and the role of television in the process. —SMS Acts of Forgiveness by Maura Cheeks [F] Cheeks's debut novel sounds amazing and so au courant. A woman is elected U.S. president and promises Black Americans that they will receive reparations if they can prove they are descended from slaves. You’d think people would jump on achieving some social justice in the form of cold cash, right? Not Willie Revel’s family, who’d rather she not delve into the family history. This promises to be a provocative read on how the past really isn’t past, no matter how much you run from it. —CK The Sentence by Matthew Baker [F] I minored in Spanish linguistics in college and, as a result, came to love that most useless and rewarding of syntactic exercises, diagramming sentences. So I'm very excited to read Baker's The Sentence, a graphic novel set in an alternate America and comprising single, 6,732-word sentence, diagrammed in full. Syntax wonks, assemble! —SMS Neighbors by Diane Oliver [F] Before her untimely death in 1966 at the age of 22, Oliver wrote stories of race and racism in Jim Crow America characterized by what Dawnie Walton calls "audacity, wit, and wisdom beyond her years." Only four of the 14 stories in Neighbors were published in Oliver's lifetime, and Jamel Brinkley calls the publication of her posthumous debut collection "an important event in African American and American letters." —SMS The Weird Sister Collection by Marisa Crawford [NF] Essayist, poet, and All Our Pretty Songs podcaster Crawford founded the Weird Sister blog in 2014, covering books and pop culture from contemporary young feminists’ and queer perspectives. The now-defunct blog offered literary reviews, Q&As with indie authors, and think pieces on film and music. For this collection, whose foreword comes from Michelle Tea, Crawford gathers favorite pieces from contributors, plus original work with a Weird Sister edge. —NodB Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh [NF] As research for his Ibis trilogy, Ghosh mapped the opium trade around the world and across centuries. This global and personal history revisits the British Empire’s dependence on Indian opium as a trade good, and how the cultivation of and profits from opium shaped today’s global economy. In his nonfiction The Great Derangement, Ghosh employs personal anecdotes to make sense of larger-scale developments, and Smoke and Ashes promises to connect his own family and identity to today’s corporate, institutional, and environmental realities. —NodB Private Equity by Carrie Sun [NF] In her debut memoir, Sun recounts her time on Wall Street, where she worked as an assistant to a billionaire hedge-fund founder and was forced to rethink everything she thought she knew about work, money, sacrifice, and living a meaningful life. This one sounds like a great read for fans of Anna Wiener's Uncanny Valley (e.g. me). —SMS I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both by Mariah Stovall [F] When Khaki Oliver receives a letter from her estranged former best friend, she isn’t ready for the onslaught of memories that soon cause her to unravel. A Black Bildungsroman about friendship, fandom, and sanity, I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is an unflinching look at "what it means to be young in a hard, and nonetheless beautiful, world," per Vauhini Vara. —Liv Albright Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit by Aisha Sabatini Sloan [NF] I know from personal experience that anything published by Graywolf Press is going to open my eyes and make me look at the world in a completely different way, so I have high expectations for Sloan’s essays. In this clever collection, a Black creative reflects upon race, art, and pedagogy, and how they relate to one’s life in this crazy country of ours during the time period between the 2016 election and the onset of the pandemic. —CK Language City by Ross Perlin [NF] Perlin travels throughout the most linguistically diverse city on the planet—New York—to chronicle the sounds and speakers of six endangered languages before they die out. A linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, Perlin argues for the importance of little-known languages and celebrates the panoply of languages that exists in New York City. —SMS Monkey Grip by Helen Garner [F] A tale as old as time and/or patriarchal sociocultural constructs: a debut novel by a woman is published and the critics don't appreciate it—until later, at least. This proto-autofictional 1977 novel is now considered a classic of Australian "grunge lit," but at the time, it divided critics, probably because it had depictions of drug addiction and sex in it. But Lauren Groff liked it enough to write a foreword, so perhaps the second time really is the charm. —JHM Ours by Phillip B. Williams [F] A conjuror wreaks magical havoc across plantations in antebellum Arkansas and sets up a Brigadoon for the enslaved people she frees before finding that even a mystic haven isn't truly safe from the horrors of the world. What a concept! And a flexible one to boot: if this isn't adapted as a TV series, it would work just as well as an RPG. —JHM Violent Faculties by Charlotte Elsby [F] A philosophy professor influenced by the Marquis de Sade designs a series of experiments to prove its relevance as a discipline, specifically with regard to life and death, a.k.a. Philip Zimbardo (Chopped and Screwed Remix): The Novel. If you ever trusted a philosophy professor with your inner self before—and you probably shouldn't have?—you probably won't after reading this. —JHM American Abductions by Mauro Javier Cárdenas [F] Plagued by data harvesting, constant surveillance, mass deportation, and incarceration, the society at the heart of Cárdenas's new novel is less speculative dystopia than realist reflection. Channeling Philp K. Dick and Samuel Delaney, Cárdenas imagines a society where Latin Americans are systematically expunged. Following the lives of two Columbian-American sisters, one who was deported and one who stayed in the U.S., American Abduction tells a new kind of immigrant story, suffused with mysticism and philosophical rigor. —DF Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom by Grace Lavery [NF] I took Lavery's class on heterosexuality and sitcoms as an undergrad, and I'm thrilled to see the course's teachings collected in book form. Lavery argues that since its inception the sitcom has depicted heterosexuality as constantly on the verge of collapse, only to be reconstituted at the end of each half-hour episode. A fascinating argument about the cultural project of straightness. —SMS Whiskey Tender by Deborah Taffa [NF] Almost a decade in the making, this memoir from Taffa details generations of Southwest Native history and the legacies of assimilationist efforts. Taffa—a citizen of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe, and director of the MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts—was born on the California Yuma reservation and grew up in Navajo territory in New Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. She reflects on tribal identity and attitudes toward off-reservation education she learned from her parents’ and grandparents’ fraught formative experiences. —NodB Normal Women by Philippa Gregory [NF] This is exciting news for Anglophiles and history nerds like me: Philippa Gregory is moving from historical fiction (my guilty pleasure) about royal women and aristocrats in medieval and early modern England to focus on the lives of common women during that same time period, as gleaned from the scraps of information on them she has unearthed in various archives. I love history “from the bottom up” that puts women at the center, and Gregory is a compelling storyteller, so my expectations are high. —CK Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin, tr. Max Lawton [F] Upon its publication in 1999, Sorokin's sci-fi satire Blue Lard sparked protests across Russia. One aspect of it particularly rankled: the torrid, sexual affair it depicts between Stalin and Khruschev. All to say, the novel is bizarre, biting, and utterly irreverent. Translated into English for the first time by Lawton, Sorokin's masterwork is a must-read for anyone with an iconoclastic streak. —SMS Piglet by Lottie Hazell [F] Hazell's debut novel follows the eponymous Piglet, a successful cookbook editor identified only by her unfortunate childhood nickname, as she rethinks questions of ambition and appetite following her fiancé's betrayal. Per Marlowe Granados, Hazell writes the kind of "prose Nora Ephron would be proud of." —SMS Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley [NF] Crosley enlivens the grief memoir genre with the signature sense of humor that helped put her on the literary map. In Grief Is for People, she eulogizes the quirks and complexities of her friendship with Russell Perreault, former publicity director at Vintage Books, who died by suicide in 2019. Dani Shapiro hails Crosley’s memoir—her first full-length book of nonfiction—as “both a provocation and a balm to the soul.” —LA The Freaks Came Out to Write by Tricia Romano [NF] The freaks came out to write, and you better believe the freaks will come out in droves to read! In this history of the legendary alt-weekly the Village Voice, Romano (a former writer for the Voice) interviews some 200 members the paper’s most esteemed staff and subjects. A sweeping chronicle of the most exciting era in New York City journalism promises to galvanize burgeoning writers in the deflating age of digital media. —DF Burn Book by Kara Swisher [NF] Swisher has been reporting on the tech industry for 30 years, tracing its explosive growth from the dawn of the internet to the advent of AI. She's interviewed every tech titan alive and has chronicled their foibles and failures in excruciating detail. Her new book combines memoir and reportage to tell a comprehensive history of a troubled industry and its shortsighted leaders. —SMS Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange [F] Orange returns with a poignant multi-generational tale that follows the Bear Shield-Red Feather family as they struggle to combat racist violence. Picking up where Orange's hit debut novel, There There, left off, Wandering Stars explores memory, inheritance, and identity through the lens of Native American life and history. Per Louise Erdrich, “No one knows how to express tenderness and yearning like Tommy Orange." —LA March The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan [F] Callahan's debut novel follows a young artist as she faces sudden hearing loss, forcing to reevaluate her orientation to her senses, her art, and the world around her. Amina Cain, Moyra Davey, and Kate Zambreno are all fans (also a dream blunt rotation), with the latter recommending this one be "read alongside the novels of W.G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and Maria Gainza." —SMS The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft [F] When a group of translators arrive at the home of renowned novelist Irena Rey, they expect to get to work translating her latest book—instead, they get caught up in an all-consuming mystery. Irena vanishes shortly after the translators arrive, and as they search for clues to the author's disappearance, the group is swept up by isolation-fueled psychosis and obsession. A “mischievous and intellectually provocative” debut novel, per Megha Majumdar. —LA Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, tr. Heather Cleary [F] This isn’t your typical meet-cute. When two women—one grieving, the other a vampire, both of them alienated and yearning for more—cross paths in a Buenos Aires cemetery, romance blooms. Channelling Carmen Maria Machado and Anne Rice, Yuszczuk reimagines the vampire novel, with a distinctly Latin American feminist Gothic twist. —LA The Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez [F] I'm a sucker for meticulously researched and well-written historical fiction, and this one—a sweeping story about the interconnected lives of the unsung people who lived and labored at the site of the Panama Canal—fits the bill. I heard Henríquez speak about this novel and her writing processes at a booksellers conference, and, like the 300 booksellers present, was impressed by her presentation and fascinated at the idea of such a sweeping tale set against a backdrop so larger-than-life and dramatic as the construction of the Panama Canal. —CK Bite Your Friends by Fernanda Eberstadt [NF] Melding memoir and history, Eberstadt's Bite Your Friends looks at the lives of saints, philosophers, and artists—including the author and her mother—whose abberant bodies became sites of subversion and rebellion. From Diogenes to Pussy Riot, Eberstadt asks what it means to put our bodies on the line, and how our bodies can liberate us. —SMS Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez [F] When Raquel Toro, an art history student, stumbles on the story of Anita de Monte, a once prominent artist from the '80s whose mysterious death cut short her meteoric rise, her world is turned upside down. Gonzalez's sophomore novel (after her hit debut Olga Dies Dreaming) toggles between the perspectives of Raquel and Anita (who is based on the late Ana Mendieta) to explore questions of power, justice, race, beauty, and art. Robert Jones, Jr. calls this one "rollicking, melodic, tender, and true—and oh so very wise." —LA My Heavenly Favorite by Lucas Rijneveld, tr. Michele Hutchison [F] Rijneveld, author of the International Booker Prize-winning novel The Discomfort of Evening, returns with a new take on the Lolita story, transpiring between a veterinarian and a farmer's daughter on the verge of adolescence. "This book unsettled me even as it made me laugh and gasp," gushes Brandon Taylor. "I'm in awe." Radiant by Brad Gooch [NF] Lauded biographer Gooch propels us through Keith Haring’s early days as an anonymous sidewalk chalk artist to his ascent as a vigilante muralist, pop-art savant, AIDS activist, and pop-culture icon. Fans of Haring's will not want to miss this definitive account of the artist's life, which Pulitzer-winner biographer Stacy Schiff calls "a keen-eyed, beautifully written biography, atmospheric, exuberant, and as radiant as they come." —DF The Riddles of the Sphinx by Anna Shechtman [NF] Sometimes you encounter a book that seems to have been written specifically for you; this was the feeling I had when I first saw the deal announcement for Shechtman's debut book back in January 2022. A feminist history of the crossword puzzle? Are you kidding me? I'm as passionate a cruciverbalist as I am a feminist, so you can imagine how ravenously I read this book. The Riddles of the Sphinx is one of the best books of 2024, hands down, and I can't wait for everyone else—puzzlers and laymen alike—to fall in love with it too. —SMS The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, tr. Boris Drayluk [F] Kurkov is one of Ukraine's most celebrated novelists, and his latest book is a murder mystery set against the backdrop of WWI-era Kyiv. I'll admit what particularly excites me about The Silver Bone, though, is that it is translated by Dralyuk, who's one of the best literary translators working today (not to mention a superb writer, editor, and poet). In Drayluk's hands, Kurkov's signature humor and sparkling style come alive. —SMS Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls [NF] This multigenerational graphic memoir follows Hull, alongside her mother and grandmother, both of whom hail from China, across time and space as the delicate line between nature and nurture is strained by the forces of trauma, duty, and mental illness. Manjula Martin calls Feeding Ghosts “one of the best stories I’ve read about the tension between family, history, and self.” —DF It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken [F] Haunting prose and a pithy crow guide readers through Marcken's novel of life after death. In a realm between reality and eternity, the undead traverse westward through their end-of-life highlight reel, dissecting memories, feelings, and devotions while slowly coming to terms with what it means to have lived once all that remains is love. Alexandra Kleeman admits that she "was absolute putty in this book's hands." —DF Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi [F] When I visited Prague, a year after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, the Czech capital struck me as a magical place, where anything is possible, and Oyeyemi captures the essence of Prague in Parasol Against the Axe, the story of a woman who attends her estranged friend's bachelorette weekend in the city. A tale in which reality constantly shifts for the characters and there is a thin line between the factual and the imagined in their relationships, this is definitely my kind of a read. —CK Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capó Crucet [F] Crucet's latest novel centers on a failed Pitbull impersonator who embarks on a quest to turn himself into a modern-day Tony Montana—a quest that leads him to cross paths with Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquariam. Winking at both Scarface and Moby-Dick, Say Hello to My Little Friend is "a masterclass in pace and precision," per Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. —SMS But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu [F] Girl, a Malaysian-Australian who leaves home for the U.K. to study Sylvia Plath and write a postcolonial novel, finds herself unable to shake home—or to figure out what a "postcolonial novel" even is. Blurbs are untrustworthy, but anything blurbed by Brandon Taylor is almost certainly worth checking out. —JHM Wrong Is Not My Name by Erica N. Cardwell [NF] Cardwell blends memoir, criticism, and theory to place her own Künstlerroman in conversation with the work of Black visual artists like Lorna Simpson, Lorraine O'Grady, and Kara Walker. In interconnected essays, Cardwell celebrates the brilliant Black women who use art and storytelling to claim their place in the world. —SMS Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham [F] A theater critic at the New Yorker, Cunningham is one of my favorite writers working today, so I was thrilled to learn of his debut novel, which cheekily steals its title from the Dickens classic. Following a young Black man as he works on a historic presidential campaign, Great Expectations tackles questions of politics, race, religion, and family with Cunningham's characteristic poise and insight. —SMS The Future of Songwriting by Kristin Hersh [NF] In this slim volume, Throwing Muses frontwoman and singer-songwriter Hersh considers the future of her craft. Talking to friends and colleagues, visiting museums and acupuncturists, Hersh threads together eclectic perspectives on how songs get made and how the music industry can (and should) change. —SMS You Get What You Pay For by Morgan Parker [NF] Parker, a brilliant poet and author of the stellar There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, debuts as an essayist with this candid, keen-eyed collection about life as a Black woman in America. Casting her gaze both inward and onto popular culture, Parker sees everything and holds back nothing. —SMS Mother Doll by Katya Apekina [F] Following up her debut novel, The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish, Apekina's Mother Doll follows Zhenia, an expectant mother adrift in Los Angeles whose world is rocked by a strange call from a psychic medium with a message from Zhenia's Russian Revolutionary great-grandmother. Elif Batuman calls this one "a rare achivement." —SMS Solidarity by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix [NF] What does "solidarity" mean in a stratified society and fractured world? Organizers and activists Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor look at the history of the concept—from its origins in Ancient Rome to its invocation during the Black Live Matter movement—to envision a future in which calls for solidarity can produce tangible political change. —SMS The Manicurist's Daughter by Susan Lieu [NF] After her mother, a refugee of the Vietnam war and the owner of two nail salons, dies from a botched cosmetic surgery, Lieu goes looking for answers about her mother's mysterious life and untimely death. Springing from her hit one-woman show 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother, Lieu's debut memoir explores immigration, beauty, and the American Dream. —SMS Through the Night Like a Snake ed. Sarah Coolidge [F] There's no horror quite like Latin American horror, as any revering reader of Cristina Rivera Garza—is there any other kind?—could tell you. Two Lines Press consistently puts out some of the best literature in translation that one can come by in the U.S., and this story collection looks like another banger. —JHM Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel [F] Bullwinkel's debut collection, Belly Up, was a canful of the uncanny. Her debut novel, on the other hand, sounds gritty and grounded, following the stories of eight teenage girls boxing in a tournament in Reno. Boxing stories often manage to punch above their weight (sorry) in pretty much any medium, even if you're not versed enough in the sport to know how hackneyed and clichéd that previous clause's idiomatic usage was. —JHM Choose This Now by Nicole Haroutunian [F] Haroutunian's novel-in-stories, part of Noemi Press's Prose Series, follows a pair of inseparable friends over the years as they embark on careers, make art, fall in and out of love, and become mothers. Lydia Kiesling calls this one "a sparkling, intimate look at women's lives" that makes "for a lovely reading experience." —SMS Death by Laughter by Maggie Hennefeld [NF] Hennefeld's scholarly study explores the forgotten history and politics of women's "hysterical laughter," drawing on silent films, affect theory, feminist film theory, and more. Hennefeld, a professor of cultural studies and comparative literature, offers a unique take on women's pleasure and repression—and how the advent of cinema allowed women to laugh as never before. —SMS James by Percival Everett [F] In James, the once-secondary character of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn narrates his version of life on the Mississippi. Jim, who escapes enslavement only to end up in adventures with white runaway Huck, gives his account of well-known events from Mark Twain’s 1880s novel (and departs from the record to say what happened next). Everett makes readers hyperaware of code-switching—his 2001 novel Erasure was about a Black novelist whose career skyrockets when he doubles down on cynical stereotypes of Blackness—and Jim, in James, will have readers talking about written vernacular, self-awareness, and autonomy. —NodB A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen [NF] Chronicling 36 fateful encounters among 30 writers and artists—from Henry James to Gertrude Stein, Mark Twain to Zora Neal Hurston—Cohen paints a vast and sparkling portrait of a century's worth of American culture. First published in 2004, and reissued by NYRB, A Chance Meeting captures the spark of artistic serendipity, and the revived edition features a new afterword by the author. —SMS Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler [NF] Butler has had an outsized impact on how we think and talk about gender and sexuality ever since the 1990 publication of Gender Trouble, which theorized the way gender is performed and constructed. Butler's latest is a polemic that takes on the advent of "anti-gender ideology movements," arguing that "gender" has become a bogeyman for authoritarian regimes. —SMS Green Frog by Gina Chung [F] Chung, author of the acclaimed debut novel Sea Change, returns with a story collection about daughters and ghosts, divorcees and demons, praying mantises and the titular verdant amphibians. Morgan Talty calls these 15 stories "remarkable." —SMS No Judgment by Lauren Oyler [NF] Oyler is one of our sharpest and most fearless cultural critics, and No Judgement is her first essay collection, following up her debut novel Fake Accounts. Opining on gossip and anxiety, autofiction and vulnerability, and much, much more, Oyler's caustic wit and penetrating voice shine through every essay. —SMS Memory Piece by Lisa Ko [F] Following up her National Book Award–nominated debut novel The Leavers, Ko's latest follows three lifelong friends from the 1990s to the 2040s. A meditation on the meaning of a "meaningful life" and how to adapt to an increasingly inhospitable world, Memory Piece has earned praise from Jacqueline Woodson and C Pam Zhang, who calls the novel "bright with defiance, intelligence, and stubborn love." —SMS On Giving Up by Adam Phillips [NF] Psychoanalyst Phillips—whose previous subjects include getting better, wanting to change, and missing out—takes a swing at what feels like a particularly timely impulse: giving up. Questioning our notions of sacrifice and agency, Phillips asks when giving up might be beneficial to us, and which parts of our lives might actually be worth giving up. —SMS There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib [NF] Abdurraqib returns (how lucky are we!) with a reflection on his lifelong love of basketball and how it's shaped him. While reconsidering his childhood, his relationship with his father, and the meaning of "making it," Abdurraqib delivers what Shea Serrano calls "the sharpest, most insightful, most poignant writing of his career." —SMS The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones [F] The final installment of Jones's trilogy picks up four years after Don't Fear the Reaper. Jade Daniels is back from prison, and upon her release, she encounters serial killer-worshipping cults, the devastating effects of gentrification, and—worst of all—the curse of the Lake Witch. Horror maestro Brian Keene calls Jones's grand finale "an easy contender for Best of the Year." —LA Worry by Alexandra Tanner [F] This deadpan debut novel from Tanner follows two sisters on the cusp of adulthood as they struggle to figure out what the hell to do with their lives. Heads butt, tempers flare, and existential dread creeps in as their paths diverge amid the backdrop of Brooklyn in 2019. Limning the absurdity of our internet-addled, dread-filled moment, Tanner establishes herself as a formidable novelist, with Kiley Reid calling Worry "the best thing I've read in a very long time." —DF [millions_email]

Nora and the Jews

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Last Thanksgiving, an older cousin of mine informed me that my mother, “in the tradition of a certain kind of Jewish woman,” had often” intentionally provoked debate.” Stupefied, I stared at him, unable to square this statement with the progressive, feminist father of two outspoken daughters I had always known him to be. “What do you mean?” I asked. “She liked to cause trouble,” he replied. “To disagree for the sake of it. She thrived on arguing.” Further explanation was not the antidote I had hoped it would be. Last summer, my uncle, who went to Beverly Hills High with one Nora Ephron and had the privilege of dating her for several months before she left town to attend Wellesley, informed me that Ephron’s wicked humor sprang from her “bitterness over not being pretty.” I said nothing. Pointing out the sexism of his claim, not to mention its antisemitic undertone, would, I knew, prove fruitless. He’d tell me I was nuts, that he could have said the same thing about a man, and that her being Jewish had nothing to do with her looks. Then I’d wish I’d never responded, doubt my intuition, and question my interpretation of the many previous personal experiences that had led to it. For a time in my childhood, we lived in a house in Coldwater Canyon, a winding mountain road that stretches between Beverly Hills and the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. My mother was an actress who had migrated from New York City to marry my father and pursue a career in television, and my dad, a graduate of Caltech, had a thriving medical practice. In my early years, they threw a lot of cocktail parties attended by various novelists-turned-screenwriters and performers, who, like my mother, desperately missed New York. One-liners flowed faster than the brandy at those parties, punctuated by bursts of garrulous laughter. At one such gathering, something happened that forever altered me. A porcelain-skinned actress with strawberry blond curls and piercing blue eyes—as upper-crust WASP in pedigree and appearance as they come—told a joke. It had a long setup, and alas, she flubbed the punchline. My father smiled at her and said the following words: “Don’t feel bad. Everyone knows that a beautiful woman can’t tell a joke.” I was five years old, still in pigtails, and seated at my father’s feet. I felt a flash of rage. At that moment, I hated my father, although I did not yet understand why. Childhood lessons come in fragments, like puzzle pieces, and it takes years to put the whole sordid picture together. All these years later, I understand that the comment was an assertion of male dominance: women who are not intellectually threatening are allowed to be considered attractive, but if they venture into the raucous boys’ club of comic jousting and win a round, they have to trade in their other trump card: their beauty. Maybe my father thought of quick wit as inherently masculine, a tool of courtship—and women are meant not to court but be courted. Humor is power, so too is beauty. Men can have both; women have to choose. * In 1947, my mother was a seven-year-old prodigy: a champion figure skater who performed regularly at Rockefeller Plaza, where even her practice sessions drew hundreds of onlookers. Despite her local fame—she was featured in a spread in Collier’s Magazine headlined “Skating Baby''—she was refused membership to the exclusive (and antisemitic) New York Skating Club. “Even as the camps were liberated and the full horrors of the war were exposed to the world,” she would remind me in a tone both wistful and haunted, “even then, the New York Skating Club refused me because I was a Jew.” (In a folder among my mother’s papers, I discovered a cache of letters exchanged by my grandfather and the New York Skating Club’s board, dancing around the “complications” of admitting his little girl.) Is it any wonder that my mother, like so many Jewish women of Ephron’s generation, and their mothers before them, prided themselves on cultural assimilation, on their ability to erase any trace of their origins or nationality—their otherness—and on melting into (white) gentile society? In her posthumous memoir Shy, Mary Rodgers, author of the Freaky Friday trilogy and daughter of composer Richard Rodgers, addresses the pathos inspired by early-twentieth-century distaste for Jewish women. Of her mother, she writes that she “was, or at least was promoted as, a rich East Side girl, a princess, an Edith Wharton character except Jewish—though… she tended to downplay that. She was, au fond, anti-Semitic, even though her mother had helped to create the Federation of Jewish Charities thrift shops. Her anti-Semitism was really a version of class paranoia, and we all had it.” My own mother loved to say that Irving Berlin, “née Bailin,” invented American Christmas by penning the holiday classic “White Christmas.” (He also wrote the song “Easter Parade.”) She loved stories of Jewish immigrants who outdid the gentiles at their own game. So was she praising these Jews for their artistic prowess or for their success at erasing their own Jewishness? Unable to resolve the cognitive dissonance of my mother’s conflicted value system, I absorbed it nonetheless. Being Jewish meant you had to hide in plain sight, but also be surpassingly excellent. It meant fiercely supporting your cultural kin while rejecting the origin of that kinship. Other experiences reinforced the dissonance. I began working as an actor in television when I was 11. My agent, the fabulous chain-smoking Arletta Proche, had an office on Sunset Boulevard, a block away from where I lived in seventh grade. One day I came in to pick up sides for an audition, and Arletta told me to sit down. “We need to change your name,” she began breezily, as she reached down to pet one of the shaggy wolfhounds napping under her desk. (My last name was my father’s: Engelberg.) “I’m very limited in what I can send you in for with that name, because you don’t look Jewish,” Arletta continued. That was 1987, an era when Hollywood funneled “ethnic types” into the category of “character actor,” while “white bread types” could audition for leading roles. Ironically, a character actor is defined as one skilled enough to transform entirely for each role, but the connotation was the opposite; “character actor” was slang for anyone “ethnic-looking.” Meanwhile, I occupied a grey zone: I didn’t look gentile, but I didn’t look like what Hollywood thought Jews looked like, either. At 11, I was cast in a true-crime miniseries that starred Lee Remick as the Mormon-turned-Manhattan socialite Francis Bradshaw, who infamously murdered her father before he had a chance to disown her. She then used her fortune to buy membership on the board of the New York City Ballet. Her daughter, whom I played, studied at the company’s training ground, the School of American Ballet. Lee Remick, for those too young to remember her, was a virtual cartoon of a “shiksa goddess,” and my mother expressed both surprise and delight that I had “squeaked through” the casting process. What tipped the balance was their need for a real ballet dancer—the opening credits for all three nights featured my character, Ariadne, dancing in The Nutcracker. The production did bleach my hair and even considered contact lenses before filming began. Interestingly, my mother had played Tab Hunter’s sister in a live television production of Hans Brinker and The Silver Skates in 1959, when she was 19. Tab Hunter was a blonde, square-jawed matinee idol, and my mother, whose dark hair was also bleached for her role, told me how awful she felt being photographed next to him. By 13, I believed to my core that not only was there such a thing as looking Jewish, but that Jews who didn’t conform to this physicality had escaped a curse. This luck came with a caveat: If you didn’t “look” Jewish, it was imperative that you didn’t seem Jewish. Keep it under your hat. Be quiet, you made it in. “Quiet” in general seemed to be a good thing. My mother was a feminist, but she was also pragmatic, and she took a dim view of most mens’ ability to tolerate intelligent, outspoken women. (Perhaps my father, whom she divorced when I was 10, had reinforced this belief in his pithy way.) My first crush was a young actor who was far more handsome than he was quick-witted. My heart stopped when he asked me to dance at a mutual friend’s sweet 16. Afterward, we chatted about a movie he liked. I didn’t like it as much, and I told him why. His face transformed and I knew our romance was over before it began. I cried to my mother that night, and she told me that if I ever wanted to date, I had to “tone down the brilliance.” I flashed back to my conversation with the boy, and suddenly imagined myself as a vulture picking over the remains of a  mouse, blood dripping from my witch-like talons. My mother suffered a brain hemorrhage when she was 69. Overnight, she transformed into a helpless child with no short term memory, and went downhill from there. My first and only child was born two years later, when I was 36. Needless to say, my mother was not available for advice and support. Despite being happily married, I was far from having a healthy sense of self worth. The myth of the unattractive, loud-mouthed Jewish woman still shadowed me; and I worked hard to suppress any behavior that might reveal that I was one. And then, at 42, I found Nora Ephron. It happened this way: Anxious about my first mammogram, I stopped beforehand at Barnes & Noble to ease my nerves. The shop had a display for I Feel Bad About My Neck, a collection of Ephron’s earlier essays mixed with more recent reflections on middle age. I’d never felt ready to read a book about middle age before, but now I plucked it from the shelf. I read the first few pages and plunked my money down. I did not feel lonely on the crosstown bus, nor in the dreary waiting room of the Weill Cornell Breast Imaging Center. By the time I left the office that drizzly spring evening, I had finished the book. I immediately moved on to the rest of Ephron’s books: Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble and Wallflower at the Orgy and Heartburn. In all these books I found sophistication, sagacity, confidence, wit: the jewels that made her prose sparkle. Ephron wrote unsentimental, tough-minded essays, several of which, such as “A Word About Breasts” and “On Having Never Been a Prom Queen,” address the topic of physical beauty. Ephron felt that beauty was a valuable commodity, and indeed, one that she envied, but if a sense that she was not Greta Garbo pervaded her with gloom, she never let it show in her writing. She wrote about political conventions, authors she adored, authors she despised, women’s periodicals, vaginal products, feminism, her enviable good fortune in finding a rent-controlled apartment in New York City. In her autobiographical novel Heartburn, she wrote about humiliation, about being dumped by your husband for another woman near the end of your second pregnancy, whale-like and bloated and waddling to group therapy. Ephron’s humor did not spring from bitterness, but from its opposite: a life-affirming determination to find the upside of a challenge. She also understood that nothing eases pain like laughter. Her essays are now de rigeur, as canonical as, well, “White Christmas” at Christmastime. Finding Ephron’s essays as I entered my forties was serendipitous, or maybe just the opposite: I had instinctively sought what I needed at that time in my life. As a person who had recently gestated, spent three years breastfeeding, and had at last delivered her four-year-old to her first day of preschool, I faced a vista. I now had six hours a day, between dropoff and pickup, in which I could do something other than visit playgrounds, make tiny lunches, and sing lullabies—well, not a vista so much as, say, a view from a decent-sized window. My top priority was earning money. I had begun to sell my own writing here and there, banging out essays while my daughter napped. I wrote on any topic I could snag a few dollars for. (Eight years ago, online periodicals swallowed personal essays the way a whale devours plankton: opening up its giant maw and collecting them en masse with no discrimination.) Anyway, those six free hours gave me some time to ponder my “next act.” Struggling as I was with the changes wrought by motherhood, I craved inspiration. Nora Ephron, who had written about womanhood with unique panache, fit the bill. There are a lot of fanciful qualities that mothers are associated with and saddled by. But our culture rarely sees mothers as glamorous, and at least for my generation and the ones before it, that goes triple for Jewish mothers. Here’s what Nora showed me: that not only could you be glamorous and Jewish, but it could be your very Jewishness—your cultural rhythms, gilded by trace amounts of Yiddish inflection and biting Jewish humor—that was the actual source of your glamor. Nora was the intersection of three identities: woman, Jew, mother. She was also seductively witty, elegantly to the point, and stylish even when discussing her darkest days. As a bonus, for me, she was the daughter of an alcoholic, and handled even this—perhaps especially this—with her characteristic light touch, providing a master class in revelation without maudlin excess. “One day,” Ephron writes in her 2010 essay “The Legend,” “my mother was not an alcoholic, and the next day she was a complete lush.” That’s not how it went down with my own mother, who was hooked on opiates from the time I was a toddler. Like Phoebe Ephron, my mother was a woman of great talent and accomplishment who knew how to throw a dinner party like nobody’s business. She was a competitive figure skater, a dancer on Broadway, and an actress on television, appearing on lots of shows, including Days of Our Lives and Bewitched. But in my youth, she became a speech-slurring, hollow-eyed, pathos-ridden addict. She had her reasons. I shy away from the narrative built on childhood trauma, at least trauma as mild as having a mom who was out of it on prescription drugs. It feels too easy, too undignified, and definitely too personal. Besides, as Mary Rodgers writes, again about her own mother, “You can’t stay angry at people when you understand that they couldn’t help being who they were.” My grandmother had been a stage mother for the ages, hitting my mother over the head with a hairbrush when she didn’t land her jumps and informing her that she was “rotten from the day she was born.” Now that’s the kind of trauma that can alter a life’s path. Later, my mother was torn by marriage from the only city she ever loved and plopped down in the only city she ever hated. Abused from a young age and therefore vulnerable to depression, she could not help who she became. In spite of this, my mother was funny, beautifully dressed, tough and feminine and ineffably, rhythmically Jewish. Like Nora Ephron: Jewish but glamorous. Jewish and glamorous. Glamorous, in part, because she was Jewish. I didn’t notice this in my youth, that my mother's humor and her twist on life were inextricably bound to an ancient tongue and culture she had all but renounced. But I realized it when I read Nora Ephron. Further, Nora had a mom she missed, a mom who was for long periods of her life not a good mother because addiction had stolen her away. Addiction (and then brain injury) stole my mother as well, and Nora’s essays provided the guidance I needed. She gave me a way of looking at the world that made things tolerable: if you laugh, it lifts some of the emotional burden of life. Also, it is possible to speak your mind—and write—without self-indulgence. Get over yourself, she seems to say. Have some perspective. Laugh and the world laughs with you. In her 2013 essay collection, Sister Mother Husband Dog, Nora’s sister Delia Ephron characterized their mother this way: “My mother believed in non-conformity. We, her daughters, were expected to be non-conformists, too.” In their house, she continues, “laughter was the point, not prayer.” There’s a lot to unpack in that sentence. It is a rejection of the religion that marks Jews as “other,” but also a declaration of humor as a cultural fingerprint. Ethnic shame and cultural pride have long tangoed in the bloodstreams of American Jews. Phoebe Ephron might have offered mixed lessons on being Jewish, but her belief in feminism was wholehearted. To get out of PTA meetings, Phoebe would say, “You’ll just have to tell them your mother can’t be there, she has to work.” Nora recalls Phoebe as a mother “who had it all, before there was such a thing.” My mother’s deepest regret was not returning to her career after she had her children. Whatever you do, she warned, don’t give up. My mother found other ways to assert her identity after she became a mother, however small and ineffectual. For example, she loved to tell people that two days after she gave birth to my sister, she was at Saks Fifth Avenue for the annual glove sale. It used to annoy my sister, our mother’s pride in her instant postpartum fitness and her rejection of such gooey things as breastfeeding and proximity to her newborn. But my mother, whether she knew it or not, was expressing something more significant: She was still a person. She was a person who had had a baby, but she could still leave the house for the sake of fashion or a bargain or whatever other errand she felt justified the departure. Meanwhile, when Heartburn was published, Ephron was pilloried by the press: “The infidelity of husband toward a wife is banal compared to the infidelity of a mother toward her children,” read the astonishingly misogynistic Vanity Fair review. “Here is Carl Bernstein and adultery; there is Nora Ephron and child abuse. It is no contest.” So Ephron was a terrible mother—nay, an abuser—for writing about her husband’s infidelity because writing about it would damage her sons. The mind boggles. Richard Cohen, a friend of Ephron’s who wrote about her in his 2017 book She Made Me Laugh, affirms that among their social circle, it was “a common refrain. What about the kids? What about Max and Jacob? When they grew up, what would they think of their father… They would be the talk of the Upper West Side sliding pond, the sandbox, the lox line at Zabar’s. They would be ruined.” To be clear: Heartburn is about a woman’s distress at the end of her marriage. It’s about feeling foolish and fat and forgotten, and about negotiating with life for a better narrative, a happier act two. Heartburn is not about Ephron’s sons; it does not reconstruct moments from their childhoods, such as their malapropisms, or their first crushes, or whether their favorite stuffed toys were elephants or teddy bears. (Meanwhile, male writers like Calvin Trillin built careers in part by writing about their kids’ quirks, to the tune of dollar signs and critical acclaim.) As for what the boys would think of their own father, is it incumbent upon spouses who’ve been cheated on to keep the treachery secret? Their dad did something dishonorable, but it falls to the mother to keep it hidden? Frankly, I’d rather my own mother have written a comic souffle about my father’s many infidelities than simply relay the bad news in dreary conversations. Still, her flaw in talking about it too much was nothing compared to his flaw in committing the offense. I loved and adored my father—he was a terrific dad in numerous ways and I miss him terribly—but my own dealings with him taught me that he was no saint, and certainly not the feminist he thought himself to be. If anyone thought Heartburn revealed anything that the boys and their social circles didn’t know about already, they had another think coming. * The German Jews who arrived on America’s shores in the first great wave considered themselves more cultivated than the second-wave Jews from Russia, who were mostly peasants. German Jews, who tended to come from cities, were more refined, less religious, and eager to become “American.” Many of them considered the Eastern European Jews who followed an embarrassment. “Ordinarily, the earlier Jewish immigrants tried to emulate the social graces of the old guard,” writes Michael Alexander in Jazz Age Jews. “Unlike children of the great Eastern European migrations, descendents of earlier immigrants tended more readily to adopt the social views of the American establishment…. That is to say, when earlier waves of immigrant Jews had come to America they identified up, not down.” Mary Rodgers writes in her memoir that her mother made sure that people knew she came from a higher class than her husband, the illustrious Richard Rodgers: “She claimed her people were German Jews, unlike my father’s, who were Russian.” As for my own mother, she was always inexplicably proud of her grandmother’s recipe for lentil soup. “It’s German lentil soup,” she would explain. Rye bread without caraway seeds? Not in my mother’s house! That was Russian rye. In The Follies of God, author James Grissom quotes Elia Kazan’s reflection on the psychological forces that drive people throughout their lives: ”Always go to the beginnings. The real person will always be found there.” Kazan was speaking of the actress Jessica Tandy, who carried the shame of childhood poverty into her adult life. She was careful to hide any trace of her origins, to compensate with acute attention to her demeanor in the public sphere. Kazan says that he cast Tandy as Blanche in “A Streetcar Named Desire” after seeing that “she understood the lies we tell in order to survive.” In at least one of her essays, I sense that Nora Ephron is telling one such lie. In "Journalism: A Love Story," Ephron writes that Condé Nast editor Jane Green served as a role model: “She was an older woman, about twenty-five, very stylish and sophisticated, and she knew everyone too.” Green, Ephron continues, also once asked her “what kind of Jew” she was. About which Ephron writes: “I had never heard of the concept of what kind of Jew you were. Jane was a German Jew, which was not to say she was from Germany but that her grandparents had been. She was extremely pleased about it. I had no idea it mattered.” I don’t believe that Nora Ephron had “never heard” of the concept of “what kind of Jew you were”—it was too common a refrain in Jewish households of the era. It was still common in households of my era. But claiming that she hadn’t heard of it implies indifference, and indifference implies confidence—that she was so carefree, so certain of herself that she was oblivious to social distinctions. I think this was Nora’s “lie.” It is a blink-and-you-miss-it kind of lie, one that only women particularly invested in this part of her identity—such as myself—might catch. But the lie fell apart later on. Nora’s cover was blown by what she later produced: her films. * In a recent essay for the New Yorker, Rachel Syme writes that “the great irony of Ephron’s afterlife is how quickly she’s been reduced to sentimental lore. Since her death… the romanticization of her work has swelled like a movie score. A writer of tart, acidic observation has been turned into an influencer: revered for her aesthetic, and for her arsenal of life-style tips. On TikTok, memes like ‘Meg Ryan Fall’—the actress starred in Ephron hits like When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and You’ve Got Mail—celebrate the prim oxford shirts, baggy khakis, and chunky knit sweaters that Ephron immortalized on screen. Syme goes on to blame her fans’ conflation of the writer “with the genre—romance—that she interrogated. I wish this were true. Instead, the fault lies not with Nora’s fans, but with Nora herself. Screenwriting was her second act, or maybe her third, depending on how you divide her career. The first film she both wrote and directed was autobiographical; it was called This Is My Life, and it starred Julie Kavner as a stand-in for Nora. The film bombed both critically and commercially. From this she seemed to learn the lesson that a Jewish actress with a Jewish sensibility was not something that could carry the box office. And I think she made a decision: never again. Even before she cast Meg Ryan as her journalist counterpart in When Harry Met Sally, she cast Meryl Streep as Rachel Stamsat in the film adaptation of Heartburn. Rarely does Streep fail to convey the essence of a character, but on more than one occasion, she has failed at believably playing a Jew. By the time we get to When Harry Met Sally, Meg Ryan plays Ephron’s stand-in. Ephron had written that she had “no idea” that it mattered “what kind of Jew” she was. “And by the way,” she continued, “it didn’t really. Those days were over.” Maybe she believed that when she wrote those words, but it’s hard to fathom that she still believed it when she was casting Meg Ryan as her movie counterpart. Let me start with a caveat: I love When Harry Met Sally as much as anyone of a certain age—by which I mean people old enough to have seen it for the first time in an actual movie theater. Still, it marks a transition: Ephron’s foot on the slippery slope to her own erasure. It is a Christmas card of a movie, featuring what is arguably the greatest montage of snowy New York City images ever. Yes, there is some biting dialogue, and even discernibly Jewish couples describing their youthful exploits, but overall, it is a gentile film in look and feel. And then we get to Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, films so treacly and poorly plotted one would never guess they were written by the same woman who penned Heartburn. The films are airbrushed of any trace of the real Nora Ephron, or at least who she was when she invented herself as a writer. It is the blandness that is the most disappointing, or maybe the way the camera lingers on Meg Ryan’s lustrous hair and sparkling blue eyes. Or it’s that the characters Ryan plays—still ostensibly stand-ins for Nora—have been knee-capped by sweetness. Where is the acerbic wit, the joy in iconoclasm, the confidence that made her essays distinct? If people love the films for the chunky knit sweaters, it’s because their visual aesthetic is all there is to love about them. The words are no longer the point. It makes me think about how Nora Ephron ultimately rejected her idol, Dorothy Parker. Syme writes that “once Ephron started reading deep into Parker’s work, she found much of it to be corny and maudlin and, to use Ephron’s withering words, so embarrassing.” But that’s because Ephron wasn’t looking in the right place. Had Ephron ever read, for example, Parker’s essay introducing James Thurber’s collection, Men, Women, and Dogs? The piece is written with a masterful mixture of delicacy and force. “The Telephone Call,” one of Parker’s short stories, remains a startlingly accurate and nuanced portrait of romantic heartache. Many years ago, my father asserted that a beautiful woman couldn’t tell a joke. Ephron seems to agree with him in her films, or is at least willing to play to this peculiar convention. Meg Ryan is mostly the straight man to Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally. True, Carrie Fisher gets a few terrific punchlines, but her character is the “unconventional” sidekick.  But Ephron’s essays (and one novel)  are another story: in those, Ephron is the leading lady and the funny one. Which is precisely what made her so beautiful to me. She had escaped the trap; she had been sharply assertive and intensely appealing at the same time. Men were charmed by her and women wanted to be her. She made bluntness an artform and made female confidence an aesthetic standard for other women to aspire to. She made a keen sense of humor as stylish as a vintage Chanel handbag. She was glamorous not despite her humor, but because of it. She sent my father to the naughty chair with her words, banished the rules about gender and humor with the swoop of her pen. At least she did for me. In response to a beautiful friend complaining that she was “losing her looks,” Ephron once wrote: “One of the few advantages to not being beautiful is that one usually gets better-looking as one gets older; I am, in fact, at this very moment, gaining my looks.” This is Ephron at her best; even as she reveals a hard-nosed acceptance of her own lack of traditional beauty, she spreads her lustrous feathers with a brilliant bon mot. And the sentiment expresses something I hope could be true for all women, whatever mythologies distort our self-images: we should all be gaining as we get older; gaining in self-worth by tossing out the beliefs that have made us fear raising our hands in school, being clever, or demanding credit for our work. Because wising up and claiming your spot in the world? Well, let’s just say it’s a very good look. [millions_email]