Andy Warhol, 1967. New York World-Telegram and Sun photograph by Ed Palumbo, via Wikimedia Commons. Library of Congress collections, public domain.

“I keep having horrible nightmares that blood is coming out of my mouth,” Candace Bushnell confessed to the dream analyst Lauren Lawrence in the early 2000s. Bushnell’s column Sex and the City was then the basis for one of prime time’s most popular shows. Through her alter ego, Carrie Bradshaw, Bushnell and her lifestyle were adored by millions. Lawrence didn’t interpret that dream in the way you or I might; her reading may have been colored by her own adulation. Terrifying? No: the dream is “hot and gutsy.” The gore pouring out Bushnell’s mouth is a blessing that means her writing is “pure and true” and, happily for her career, its nightly recurrence implies she will “never be drained of her creative juices.” This is all fantastic news but there’s one issue: The dream is obviously a nightmare. Lawrence never addresses Bushnell’s subconscious horror. As far as she’s concerned it might as well not exist.

The dream is one of dozens collected in Lawrence’s 2002 coffee table book, Private Dreams of Public People. There’s a paradox here: once they are mass-published, of course, the dreams are no longer private, but the allure of the exposé is the compilation’s main selling point. Despite its origins in the phantasmagoric, Private Dreams follows a clear format. Each celebrity is placed into a category (“Society Dreamer,” “Beautiful Dreamer,” “Entrepreneurial Dreamer”). Each dream is followed by Lawrence’s analysis. Lawrence, who has a M.A. in psychology, built a career on public dream interpretation, as the dreams columnist for the New York Daily News and on an A&E show called Celebrity Nightmares Decoded.

Lawrence solicited the dream entries directly from stars like Paris Hilton, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Cyndi Lauper, Kate Moss, and the vice-presidential runner-up Joseph Lieberman. Donald Trump turned her down. (“I don’t have time to sleep let alone dream,” he says in the Declinations section. “I’m too busy building back my empire.”) To these she adds some dream descriptions clipped from Vogue, Elle, and, for Martin Luther King Jr., the History Channel. I was never quite clear on how Lawrence got close enough to America’s A-list to pull the book off, but a late, casual reference, in an analysis of one of her own dreams, to being “driven around town in my Rolls-Royce” and doing “substantive damage to my husband’s American Express card” fills in some of the blanks. In 2002, the list price of Private Dreams—now out of print—was thirty-five dollars, but in the introduction, Lawrence promises something priceless: The book will surpass the “paparazzi phallic lens … intent on mating with the intangible inner being of fame.” It will actually allow us to “get into bed with the celebrity mind and nestle with its glittery, klieg-lit unconsciousness.” Read More

Photograph by Alex Andriesse.

I used to live in a bungalow in Shattuckville, Massachusetts. It was a ramshackle bungalow, built during the Great Depression and renovated, desultorily, by hippies—the floorboards were stoppered with wine corks; a torn flannel shirt plugged a hole in the wall—and Shattuckville was a ramshackle town. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a town at all but a hamlet on a hill, home to about thirty people. At the bottom of this hill lay the North River, some houses and trailers, and a fluctuating troupe of cats and dogs. The road to the river had once had a bridge at the end of it, until about a hundred years ago a flood came and washed the bridge away. It was never rebuilt. In winter, when the leaves were down, you could see a remnant of it sitting on the far bank, over where a country store out of operation since Reagan’s first term still advertised Ice-Cold Coca-Cola.

That bungalow was where I first read Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place—a chorus of a novel about a small town in New England called Varennes. It features the voices of all kinds of creatures that live there: humans, yes, but also cats and dogs, beavers and moose, even lichen. You could call it ecofiction if you like the sound of that word, but I do not, so I will call it visionary, which is how I would describe pretty much everything that Kathryn Davis has written.

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Graham Greene. Unknown photographer, public domain. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Two moments in Graham Greene’s published life have often returned to me in the past twenty years. This may sound strange: an ideal reader should refrain from crossing the boundary between a writer’s work and his life. And yet it is inevitable: rarely does an author have the luxury of having no known biography. Greene, having written about his life and having had his life extensively written about by others, remains near when one reads his work—not insistently dominating or distracting, as some writers may prove to be, but as a presence often felt and at times caught by a side glance.

The first moment appears in Greene’s memoir Ways of Escape. In a chapter about Brighton Rock, which Greene called a labour of love, he explains the original inspiration for the novel with a reminiscence about the first film he saw at age six—a silent film about a kitchen maid turned queen, with live music played offscreen—he writes, “Her march was accompanied by an old lady on a piano, but the tock-tock-tock of untuned wires stayed in my memory when other melodies faded … That was the kind of book I always wanted to write: the high romantic tale, capturing us in youth with hopes that prove illusions, to which we return again in age in order to escape the sad reality.”

The second moment appears in Graham Greene: An Intimate Portrait by His Closest Friend and Confidant by Leopoldo Duran. In 1983, Father Duran accompanied Greene on a journey to Spain for the filming of his novel Monsignor Quixote. At a Trappist monastery, Father Duran noticed an elderly monk, Father Juan. “I saw him, standing discreetly apart, at the entrance to the porter’s lodge, learning on this walking stick, chin in both hands, and totally absorbed by these people and the strange things they were doing … With seventy years’ experience of Trappist rule behind him, Father Juan did not want to go to heaven without seeing how films were made.” Read More

C. E. Brock, illustration from Mansfield Park, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

“This is Goshen,” my mother and father would frequently say. The idea—that our home was the equivalent of the Biblical land of Goshen from Exodus—was simple, perhaps, but it said as much about my parents’ perceptions of the outside world as it did about their vision for our home. The world was unfeeling, unsparing, loud, chaotic—or, in their view, simply “evil.” It was in Goshen, after all, that the enslaved Israelites found refuge amid Egyptian brutality.

That pursuit of peace shaped their pivotal decision—when I was seven my Jamaican family left New York for Oklahoma. New York was, in some important sense, the world—its sophistication, its temptation, its unapologetic secularism. Oklahoma, by contrast, was in the world but not of it. It offered what my parents craved: stillness. Its flat plains, its grass more often brown than green, and the red-tinged soil of its western stretches conveyed a kind of geographic manifestation of sanctity. Its boringness was its spiritual appeal. Our neighbors prayed over their meals in public. Walmart greeters accompanied their smiles and hellos with unprovoked God bless yous. Oklahoma’s simplicity and relative silence wasn’t just a feature of the move—it was pitched as our family’s saving grace. Read More

Illustration by C. E. Brock, 1909, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

One of Jane Austen’s many mind-bending skills was her ability to wrest so much drama from a world that was, by present-day standards, almost unfathomably static. Austen’s novels are preindustrial time capsules from an era before even trains, gas lights, or telegraphs—the first in a stampede of inventions that transformed nineteenth-century life and are vividly present in the work of many novelists emblematic of that century. Born in 1775, a year before American Independence, Austen has preserved for us an epoch when indoor illumination required candles, remote communication took place by messenger or mail, and locomotion meant walking or engaging at least one horse—more if, like Emma’s protagonist and namesake (and indeed every woman in that novel), you didn’t ride, and needed a carriage to travel any distance.

Austen’s fourth published novel is the most physically constricted of her works, which makes it also the most virtuosic. Unlike Austen’s other protagonists, Emma Woodhouse never spends a night away from home. That home is in fictional Highbury, “a large and populous village almost amounting to a town,” whose sixteen-mile distance from London might as well be six hundred. There is no sense of change in Highbury—neither past nor immanent; sociological nor technological—but rather of generations quietly living out their lives. The action occurs mostly indoors except for two group outings—one to pick strawberries and another to picnic nearby. The men move about more freely, coming and going on horseback, but the women mostly stay put, and Emma is especially stationary. She seems never to have traveled in her life, and remarks at one point that she hasn’t seen the ocean. Read More

Illustration by C. E. Brock, 1908, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

 

Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor …

If I am a wild beast, I cannot help it. It is not my own fault.

—Jane Austen, from The Letters of Jane Austen

How does a woman writer make her own money? How does she find the time to write? As a young woman, I scoured every book-jacket biography trying to decipher this secret.

My mother, a Depression baby, gave me sound advice: “Make sure you earn your own money. Especially if you’re married, do you hear me?” I did indeed. Once you’ve been poor, you’re forever hounded by the fear you’ll be poor again. Read More