April 25, 2011 At Work Meghan O’Rourke on ‘The Long Goodbye’ By Thessaly La Force Photograph by Sarah Shatz. In 2008, on Christmas Day, Meghan O’Rourke’s mother, Barbara, died after a two-and-a-half-year battle with advanced colorectal cancer. O’Rourke was lost in her grief, which she found overwhelming and unlike anything she had ever experienced. Her book, The Long Goodbye, is her attempt to understand her grief, documenting the years before and after her mother’s passing. In reading The Long Goodbye, I braced myself for the tears (which, yes, did come) but, by its end, discovered that O’Rourke had written a beautiful memoir about a daughter’s love for her mother. We spoke recently about her book; an edited version of our conversation appears below. How did this book come about? I started writing things down, for myself, before my mother died. It was a private recording of what was happening. Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world. My mother was going through this really intense experience: she had been sick, she had been diagnosed with advanced cancer two years before she died, and she went into a remission that was unusual. Then the cancer came back—it went to her brain, which again was not common for the cancer that she had. It was bizarre to see someone change so radically and so quickly; I had to write it down in order to not go crazy with the strangeness of it all. After my mother died, I was supposed to be writing my column at Slate, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t focus, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t read. I couldn’t understand what was happening. I had thought of grief as being sad, but instead it was like being suddenly aware of all the luminous, fragile elements of existence. It was also lonely in its way. My editor at Slate said, “Why don’t you write about what you are going through.” I didn’t think what happened to me was extraordinary. But it was what I was obsessed with, and so I started to shape what I was experiencing into a piece. I was very unprepared for grief. It was isolating. There was no language for it, and no language around it—but I felt that I was in contact with all of these deeper realities; even the sky seemed strangely bluer. But there is a discomfort that surrounds grief. It makes even the most well-intentioned people unsure of what to say. And so many of the freshly bereaved end up feeling even more alone. I came across a quote of Iris Murdoch’s: “The bereaved have no language with which to speak with the unbereaved.” I thought, What if you could find a language that would describe the experience, with all its mysteries? Read More
April 22, 2011 Look The Speed of Motion By Harold Edgerton Moving Skip Rope, 1952, black-and-white photograph, 6 1/4 x 9 3/4 inches. Credit: Harold Edgerton: The Anatomy of Movement, by Gus Kayafas and José Gómez Isla.
April 22, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Nathan Zuckerman; Soon-to-be Shiksa By Lorin Stein My girlfriend insisted that I read some Philip Roth and gave me a copy of Portnoy’s Complaint. I can’t decide if I should keel over laughing because of its impeccable comedic timing or froth at the mouth because of its meticulous rendering of nearly every stereotype I’ve ever seen of neurotic sixties Jews. But perhaps more importantly: do I need to read something different by Roth, or do I need to tell this wonderful woman that our relationship is simply not going to work? —A neurotic twenty-first-century schlemiel Your wonderful girlfriend gave you Portnoy’s Complaint, you almost plotzed laughing … so you want to end it? Something tells me I’ve missed a step—but that Philip Roth would understand. So, perhaps, would Nathan Zuckerman, the novelist pilloried for his handling of Jewish stereotypes in his comic masterpiece Carnovsky—and the hero of some of Roth’s best books. Start with The Ghost Writer, in which Zuckerman goes to visit an elder statesman of Jewish letters named Lonoff and finds himself powerfully attracted to Lonoff’s amanuensis, who bears a striking resemblance to … well, I won’t spoil it. You might also consider analysis, if you haven’t already. I think of myself as a semi-Jew: I celebrate holy holidays when I want to, I’m victim to eating bacon regularly, and I wear dresses so short that all my babushka can do is mutter words under her breath at me in Yiddish. I want to get more in touch with my roots. Not in the let’s-all-go-to-synagogue kind of way, but in a contemporary, fun, reading-of-the-Jewish-writer kind of way. Can you recommend anything for this soon-to-be shiksa? —Anna Kogan Now just a second. Thessaly, are you making the goyisch interns impersonate Jews for Pesach? Have you got them downloading The Jazz Singer on Torrent? Reading Howard Jacobsen on their iPhones? In the age of Google, anyone can spell schlemiel. Go read Lee Siegel for your sins, and don’t let this happen again! Have a question for The Paris Review? E-mail us.
April 22, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Franzen’s Pot Stash, Fire Season By The Paris Review Elif Batuman describes life after writing a best-selling book and tells how she asked Jonathan Frazen if he had any weed. “There’s some in my freezer,” Franzen replies. “But it’s all the way uptown.” —Thessaly La Force Having stretched Philip Connors’s Fire Season out over two weeks of late nights, for the pleasure of coming home to it, I tore through Samuel R. Delany’s The Motion of Light in Water in a day. I can’t stop talking about it, because I can’t stop thinking about it. It evokes bohemian New York in the fifties and sixties—gay, straight, and other—more vividly than anything I’ve read. —Lorin Stein When I saw that Maurice Manning was a finalist for a Pulitzer this year, I went and reread much of his poetry—psalms and pastorals, a philosophical ode to Daniel Boone. If you don’t know his work, you now have no excuse. —Nicole Rudick What got me about Martin Amis’s The Information were the quick, declarative sentences that suddenly appear in otherwise bleak and descriptive paragraphs. At the start of the novel, Amis skirts around our main character until tying everything together with “He was forty tomorrow, and reviewed books.” The economy of language here is divine. —Rosalind Parry Jennifer Egan, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this week, discusses her early hopes of becoming a doctor, life as a struggling writer in New York, and the importance of self-criticism and perseverance in a candid interview with The Days of Yore. —Elianna Kan This letter from Sebastian Junger to Tim Hetherington, the photographer who was killed in Libya this week, is heartbreaking. —T. L.
April 22, 2011 Events Join us at the Norwood By Thessaly La Force Next Tuesday, the Norwood Club, that mysterious brownstone on 14th Street devoted to the arts, is throwing open its doors to friends of The Paris Review. Sam Lipsyte, Alexandra Kleeman, and Lorin Stein will stage a mini retrospective of the last three issues. This event is open to the public, but non-members of the Norwood Club must make a reservation by calling (212) 255–9300 or e-mailing the front desk of the Norwood Club.
April 21, 2011 Arts & Culture Nan Goldin By Miranda Popkey Nan Goldin is running late. On a Thursday evening in the Theresa Lang Center, in a New School building on West 13th Street, the crowd—close to a hundred people—is growing restless. At the front of the room at a long plastic table, the other panelists have assembled: Benjamin Walker, the moderator and host of WFMU’s “Too Much Information”; author Lynne Tillman, whose petite frame is overwhelmed by an explosion of dark curls; French philosopher Ruwen Ogien, whose wisps of gray hair are messy and front-swept; French professor of aesthetics Carole Talon-Hugon, whose jet-black hair is combed back and secured with a leopard-print scarf; and a neatly dressed woman who is later revealed to be Talon-Hugon’s translator. A laptop on the table is connected to a large projection screen hanging above the stage. A folder is open on the computer, and file names are visible; the JPEGs have titles like “skinheadshavingsex.” Goldin is probably best know for The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a collection of her photographs documenting her life and the lives of her friends—homosexuals and junkies, the poor and the marginalized—in the New York of the late seventies and early eighties. In one, titled “Nan one month after being battered,” Goldin faces the camera straight on; she’s wearing bright red lipstick, and her left eye is filled with blood, the area below it bruised a sickening brown. When Goldin arrives around 6:40 P.M., I find myself checking the face of the woman now walking toward the front of the room against my memory of the photograph. Her career is both remarkable and frightening for having provided everyone in the audience with that image as a point of comparison. She sits down and is immediately, endearingly apologetic. Read More