Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/p><\/div>I fell in love with my best friend in high school because he was the first boy who could plausibly love me back. Angsty boys always had a way of catching my itty-bitty shoegaze heart. My love\u2014it was a crush, but my nostalgic instincts want to call this love\u2014blossomed to my awareness only after he came out, the summer before all our friends and I went off to different campuses in the University of California system.<\/p>\nHe was cooler than me. He shopped at Hot Topic. He had the look of a tortured artist without having to make any art. He was the first person who introduced me to the Postal Service, in his bedroom; he said it was a new genre called electronic music, which I had never heard of. He adored the Blood Brothers, which I pretended to like but couldn\u2019t stand. The Unicorns was about as far as I could get with the screaming-into-the-mic bit. The Blood Brothers, with their Satanic-sounding band name, were twitchy and manic on the vocals, bringing to mind some skeletal epileptic, screaming as he\u2019s strapped by his wrists and ankles to a gurney before electroshock therapy. Alone, when I listened to the album Crimes<\/em>, which came out my sophomore year, my mind would just flood with STOP, STOP, STOP. I couldn\u2019t last the two minutes and twenty-three seconds of the opening track.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s a good soundtrack if you think that high school was supposed to be the best four years of your life and everything was downhill after senior year. I almost want to say that high school was the worst years of my life, but that isn\u2019t true\u2014those were my Saturn return. When I listen to \u201cLove Rhymes with Hideous Car Wreck\u201d now, it isn\u2019t as intolerable as I remember it. I kind of like it. I seem to remember their songs as being devoid of melody, but this one has some discernable arpeggios amid the glossolalia, a sound that conflates the intensity of high school love with indie glamour. The song still smells like a white crew sock with last night\u2019s dried cum.<\/p>\n
\u2014Geoffrey Mak<\/strong><\/p>\nI have a copy of\u00a0Through the Looking-Glass<\/em>\u00a0that once belonged to my ex. I would like to have read it. But when I finally got around to cracking it open, a photograph slipped out from the pages. The image was of children\u2019s faces and a cake. I recognized a name written in icing on the cake and then my ex\u2019s ex in one of the children\u2019s faces. I don\u2019t remember what I did with the photo. It felt weird to have it but also weird to throw it out.<\/p>\nI saw the woman in the photo a few years ago, sitting a few rows ahead of me at a performance in a SoHo loft. Right before the performance started, someone else trickled in and chose the only empty chair, which was in the first row. Immediately, another smartly dressed woman approached to explain the seat wasn\u2019t available, then sat in it herself. It became apparent that this woman was the author of the work. She seemed to take herself very seriously. She watched the whole thing leaned forward, mouthing the actors\u2019 lines along with them. The performance took itself very seriously. My ex\u2019s ex, who also takes herself very seriously, seemed to enjoy it. My ex, on the other hand, has a sense of humor.<\/p>\n
It makes sense to me that\u00a0Through the Looking-Glass\u00a0<\/em>is a book that both a person who takes themselves very seriously and a person with a sense of humor would recommend. But what do I know; I\u2019ve never read it.<\/p>\n\u2014Whitney Mallett<\/strong><\/p>\nElizabeth Taylor, the great British novelist and short story writer, well knew the plot that recurs in any life, which is that one had planned on having one\u2019s dignity, but, alas, no. Suddenly, disaster. A great scramble ensues. Shame, failure, illness, pain, regret, death: so much effort expelled to prevent any and all of these from happening, as happen they will. If this isn\u2019t life, what do we mean, then?<\/p>\n
Taylor\u2019s last novel (but for the posthumous Blaming<\/em>) is Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont<\/em>. It is the story of Laura Palfrey, recent addition to a small cohort of elderly tenants at London\u2019s Claremont Hotel. My wife\u2014who was also for a very short time my ex-girlfriend\u2014recommended the book to me. I read it for the first time two years ago. At the time, I was getting over norovirus. I had fallen asleep on the couch, and when I woke up, I saw that the book was on the edge of the low coffee table, threatening to topple off. In the novel, Laura\u2019s husband is dead. His memory haunts her the way old lovers sometimes do. Laura often recalls the time they spent together in Myanmar, where they lived as agents of the empire. But now it\u2019s the sixties. When Laura\u2019s grandson, her only relative in London, fails to pay her a visit, she nurses a private shame at being forgotten. \u201cWe poor old women have lived too long,\u201d her pal Mrs. Arbuthnot informs her. On a walk one day, Laura falls down and hurts herself, and a young aspiring writer named Ludo Myers comes to her rescue. Ludo works at<\/em>, not\u00a0for<\/em>, Harrods, where he writes all day long in the banking hall. They become true friends. She helps him. He helps her. It\u2019s love and nothing more.<\/p>\nObviously, Elizabeth Taylor has the same name as the actor Elizabeth Taylor. The writer had one husband. The actor had seven. Who\u2019s to say who was happier? In Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont<\/em>, the writer Elizabeth Taylor does something rather mean that makes all the sense in the world. One of the first characters we meet in the novel is a Mrs. Burton (as in the wife of Richard, who married the film star Taylor twice). Mrs. Burton is an old alcoholic (\u201cThe drink has really taken its toll,\u201d says Mrs. Arbuthnot). She is also a snob (\u201cBefore this I was at the Astor. Do you know the Astor?\u201d). She is a lonely old woman who spends too much money at the hairdresser and sings to herself when she\u2019s drunk. All of that is a bad turn for the writer Elizabeth to give to this movie-Elizabeth stand-in, but in the end, it\u2019s Mrs. Burton who comes to Laura\u2019s aid the last time Laura falls. It must have been hard for Elizabeth to see the other Elizabeth on screens and in magazines and to hear her name dropped everywhere she went. But what could she do about it? People have the right to live and be called what they want.<\/p>\n\u2014Dan Bevacqua<\/strong><\/p>\nI have an ex who until recently had never met anyone I know. We had only dated long-distance, approximately a hundred years ago. Then, last year, I introduced him to a friend as a setup\u2014for a sublet (she was looking to temporarily fill her apartment; he was hoping to spend some time in New York).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe three of us had lunch together, and there at the restaurant, the friend referred to my ex aloud as that: \u201cNatasha\u2019s ex.\u201d Each of us froze: Is that what he is to me? \u201cEx\u201d is a useful shorthand for people I\u2019d rather anonymize, like the letter <\/span>x<\/span><\/i>, an unknown variable. He only has one \u201cex,\u201d though. He was married, and so he has an ex-wife; the rest of us are women he has known and may continue to know. To me, now, he is a person who encourages me to write and to read, as these activities are basically all he ever does himself.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nHe and my friend became close straightaway. They were first in touch over the apartment but then got to know each other by talking about the books she has there (and, presumably, me). During one of their phone calls, he recommended a book to her: <\/span>The Unprofessionals<\/span><\/i>, by Julie Hecht. She read it and, obsessed, proceeded to find every other work by the author.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI read it later and experienced the distinct joy of appreciating both the book itself and the fact that I had introduced such compatible people. Hecht speaks like her, and like him, and so I like her, them, a certain type of person: sometimes manic, demanding sophistication, and fascinated by the behaviors of others as if on safari. He should have recommended <\/span>The Unprofessionals<\/span><\/i> to me first, of course, but then maybe he did, and I ignored the suggestion because I was in the type of mood that doesn\u2019t respond well to recommendations from an ex.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u2014Natasha Stagg<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Recommendations from Geoffrey Mak\u2019s, Whitney Mallett\u2019s, Dan Bevacqua\u2019s, and Natasha Stagg\u2019s exes (and their exes\u2019 exes).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68386],"tags":[67827],"class_list":["post-169861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-reviews-review","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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![Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/p><\/div>I fell in love with my best friend in high school because he was the first boy who could plausibly love me back. Angsty boys always had a way of catching my itty-bitty shoegaze heart. My love\u2014it was a crush, but my nostalgic instincts want to call this love\u2014blossomed to my awareness only after he came out, the summer before all our friends and I went off to different campuses in the University of California system.<\/p>\nHe was cooler than me. He shopped at Hot Topic. He had the look of a tortured artist without having to make any art. He was the first person who introduced me to the Postal Service, in his bedroom; he said it was a new genre called electronic music, which I had never heard of. He adored the Blood Brothers, which I pretended to like but couldn\u2019t stand. The Unicorns was about as far as I could get with the screaming-into-the-mic bit. The Blood Brothers, with their Satanic-sounding band name, were twitchy and manic on the vocals, bringing to mind some skeletal epileptic, screaming as he\u2019s strapped by his wrists and ankles to a gurney before electroshock therapy. Alone, when I listened to the album Crimes<\/em>, which came out my sophomore year, my mind would just flood with STOP, STOP, STOP. I couldn\u2019t last the two minutes and twenty-three seconds of the opening track.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s a good soundtrack if you think that high school was supposed to be the best four years of your life and everything was downhill after senior year. I almost want to say that high school was the worst years of my life, but that isn\u2019t true\u2014those were my Saturn return. When I listen to \u201cLove Rhymes with Hideous Car Wreck\u201d now, it isn\u2019t as intolerable as I remember it. I kind of like it. I seem to remember their songs as being devoid of melody, but this one has some discernable arpeggios amid the glossolalia, a sound that conflates the intensity of high school love with indie glamour. The song still smells like a white crew sock with last night\u2019s dried cum.<\/p>\n\u2014Geoffrey Mak<\/strong><\/p>\nI have a copy of\u00a0Through the Looking-Glass<\/em>\u00a0that once belonged to my ex. I would like to have read it. But when I finally got around to cracking it open, a photograph slipped out from the pages. The image was of children\u2019s faces and a cake. I recognized a name written in icing on the cake and then my ex\u2019s ex in one of the children\u2019s faces. I don\u2019t remember what I did with the photo. It felt weird to have it but also weird to throw it out.<\/p>\nI saw the woman in the photo a few years ago, sitting a few rows ahead of me at a performance in a SoHo loft. Right before the performance started, someone else trickled in and chose the only empty chair, which was in the first row. Immediately, another smartly dressed woman approached to explain the seat wasn\u2019t available, then sat in it herself. It became apparent that this woman was the author of the work. She seemed to take herself very seriously. She watched the whole thing leaned forward, mouthing the actors\u2019 lines along with them. The performance took itself very seriously. My ex\u2019s ex, who also takes herself very seriously, seemed to enjoy it. My ex, on the other hand, has a sense of humor.<\/p>\nIt makes sense to me that\u00a0Through the Looking-Glass\u00a0<\/em>is a book that both a person who takes themselves very seriously and a person with a sense of humor would recommend. But what do I know; I\u2019ve never read it.<\/p>\n\u2014Whitney Mallett<\/strong><\/p>\nElizabeth Taylor, the great British novelist and short story writer, well knew the plot that recurs in any life, which is that one had planned on having one\u2019s dignity, but, alas, no. Suddenly, disaster. A great scramble ensues. Shame, failure, illness, pain, regret, death: so much effort expelled to prevent any and all of these from happening, as happen they will. If this isn\u2019t life, what do we mean, then?<\/p>\nTaylor\u2019s last novel (but for the posthumous Blaming<\/em>) is Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont<\/em>. It is the story of Laura Palfrey, recent addition to a small cohort of elderly tenants at London\u2019s Claremont Hotel. My wife\u2014who was also for a very short time my ex-girlfriend\u2014recommended the book to me. I read it for the first time two years ago. At the time, I was getting over norovirus. I had fallen asleep on the couch, and when I woke up, I saw that the book was on the edge of the low coffee table, threatening to topple off. In the novel, Laura\u2019s husband is dead. His memory haunts her the way old lovers sometimes do. Laura often recalls the time they spent together in Myanmar, where they lived as agents of the empire. But now it\u2019s the sixties. When Laura\u2019s grandson, her only relative in London, fails to pay her a visit, she nurses a private shame at being forgotten. \u201cWe poor old women have lived too long,\u201d her pal Mrs. Arbuthnot informs her. On a walk one day, Laura falls down and hurts herself, and a young aspiring writer named Ludo Myers comes to her rescue. Ludo works at<\/em>, not\u00a0for<\/em>, Harrods, where he writes all day long in the banking hall. They become true friends. She helps him. He helps her. It\u2019s love and nothing more.<\/p>\nObviously, Elizabeth Taylor has the same name as the actor Elizabeth Taylor. The writer had one husband. The actor had seven. Who\u2019s to say who was happier? In Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont<\/em>, the writer Elizabeth Taylor does something rather mean that makes all the sense in the world. One of the first characters we meet in the novel is a Mrs. Burton (as in the wife of Richard, who married the film star Taylor twice). Mrs. Burton is an old alcoholic (\u201cThe drink has really taken its toll,\u201d says Mrs. Arbuthnot). She is also a snob (\u201cBefore this I was at the Astor. Do you know the Astor?\u201d). She is a lonely old woman who spends too much money at the hairdresser and sings to herself when she\u2019s drunk. All of that is a bad turn for the writer Elizabeth to give to this movie-Elizabeth stand-in, but in the end, it\u2019s Mrs. Burton who comes to Laura\u2019s aid the last time Laura falls. It must have been hard for Elizabeth to see the other Elizabeth on screens and in magazines and to hear her name dropped everywhere she went. But what could she do about it? People have the right to live and be called what they want.<\/p>\n\u2014Dan Bevacqua<\/strong><\/p>\nI have an ex who until recently had never met anyone I know. We had only dated long-distance, approximately a hundred years ago. Then, last year, I introduced him to a friend as a setup\u2014for a sublet (she was looking to temporarily fill her apartment; he was hoping to spend some time in New York).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe three of us had lunch together, and there at the restaurant, the friend referred to my ex aloud as that: \u201cNatasha\u2019s ex.\u201d Each of us froze: Is that what he is to me? \u201cEx\u201d is a useful shorthand for people I\u2019d rather anonymize, like the letter <\/span>x<\/span><\/i>, an unknown variable. He only has one \u201cex,\u201d though. He was married, and so he has an ex-wife; the rest of us are women he has known and may continue to know. To me, now, he is a person who encourages me to write and to read, as these activities are basically all he ever does himself.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nHe and my friend became close straightaway. They were first in touch over the apartment but then got to know each other by talking about the books she has there (and, presumably, me). During one of their phone calls, he recommended a book to her: <\/span>The Unprofessionals<\/span><\/i>, by Julie Hecht. She read it and, obsessed, proceeded to find every other work by the author.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI read it later and experienced the distinct joy of appreciating both the book itself and the fact that I had introduced such compatible people. Hecht speaks like her, and like him, and so I like her, them, a certain type of person: sometimes manic, demanding sophistication, and fascinated by the behaviors of others as if on safari. He should have recommended <\/span>The Unprofessionals<\/span><\/i> to me first, of course, but then maybe he did, and I ignored the suggestion because I was in the type of mood that doesn\u2019t respond well to recommendations from an ex.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u2014Natasha Stagg<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Recommendations from Geoffrey Mak\u2019s, Whitney Mallett\u2019s, Dan Bevacqua\u2019s, and Natasha Stagg\u2019s exes (and their exes\u2019 exes).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68386],"tags":[67827],"class_list":["post-169861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-reviews-review","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMy Ex Recommends by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"February 14, 2025 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