This book wasn’t what I expected. It begins with the definition of the French word flâneur: a man with the money and time to wander aimlessly around the city, taking in the spectacle of it all. Women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were, of course, excluded from the activity of aimless wandering…although not all women submitted to this exclusion. Elkin’s book is about these women — writers, photographers, painters, directors — but it’s also about Elkins herself, a writer from the suburbs of […]
Scary Stories for Adults
When I was a kid, I was scared of my bathroom because I thought a monster lived behind the shower curtain. The movie “Tremors” made me believe that a giant mutant worm from outer space was going to come through the floor and eat me. I closed my door every night before I went to bed because I just knew something lurked in the hallway outside (it was the same thing that lived behind the shower curtain, incidentally). As an adult, I am scared that I […]
You Will Enjoy This Book Whether You’re Drunk or Not
Now that my husband has given up on the bottle of wine we were drinking and it’s up to me to take one for the team and get the rest of this Viognier down my gullet, I’m going to keep this short and sweet and say I LOVED Jessi Klein’s You’ll Grow Out of It and, if my buzzed recommendation isn’t enough to convince you to read the book, you should check out my (slightly less buzzed) book review on my blog. Cheers!
A Meh Grows in Brooklyn
When I was growing up, my mother always told me that, if I couldn’t think of something nice to say, I shouldn’t say anything at all. Good thing I thought of something nice to say about this book, or this review would’ve been a lot harder to write. August is a Tennessee girl who gets taken to Brooklyn after bad stuff goes down back home. After a lot of time spent staring out the window, she eventually makes friends with a trio of talented, intelligent, […]
At Least the Baby Doesn’t Die
It’s a darned good thing I have cold — the kind where your eyes water and your sinuses itch — because at least I can blame my now-puffy eyes on that instead of the fact that When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi, made me cry like a kid. Paul is — was — a talented neurosurgeon who found out he had cancer at the tail-end of his residency at Stanford. Because cutting on people eventually gets to be out of the question when you’re terminally […]