Off On a Tangent

One of Those Weekly Updates

Tue, 14 May 2013 17:55:17 -0400

First off, my newest Crimewave column ran in the National Post last weekend, featuring reviews of new novels by Barbara Fradkin, Robin Spano, and my colleague in crime reviewing, the Toronto Star’s Jack Batten, bringing back his wisecracking detective Crang after more than twenty years away.

Also this past weekend, I wrote about my high school experience with THE GREAT GATSBY, involving a vivid dream and 19th Century Italian Opera, for Medium.

Finally, I am spending more time building up Domestic Suspense, the companion website to the anthology, and expect to post even less here as a result. (Then again…) The response to TROUBLED DAUGHTERS, TWISTED WIVES was already amazing but then this arrived in my editor’s email inbox Monday morning:

“This fascinating collection of stories represents a long-overdue tribute to mystery writers who laid the foundation for those of us working in the field today. The remarkable range and complexity of these tales is a humbling reminder of the importance of the trailblazers whose work established psychological suspense as the backbone of crime writing both then and now.” -= Sue Grafton

If I didn’t already think Grafton was cool — and I have, for a long time — now it’s moved into a whole new stratosphere.

Domestic Suspense: the Companion Website to TROUBLED DAUGHTERS, TWISTED WIVES

Tue, 07 May 2013 14:12:00 -0400

It’s finally here, a little later than expected with a few loose strands: the companion website to my forthcoming anthology TROUBLED DAUGHTERS, TWISTED WIVES. Check out DomesticSuspense.com for regular anecdotes, links, images, features, and eventually, longer-form pieces on the fourteen authors in the anthology, as well as their peers and more contemporary practitioners of the genre. Please let me know what you think — and if anyone can track down a good photo of Helen Nielsen, I’d be ever grateful. Apparently, that’s something of a holy grail.

It will be awfully hard to top this photo of...

Mon, 06 May 2013 10:24:00 -0400

It will be awfully hard to top this photo of @faustfatale’s beloved Boston Terrier, Butch, reading an advance copy of TROUBLED DAUGHTERS, TWISTED WIVES.

New Adult Books Yet to Be Classified As Such

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 09:36:00 -0400

On Twitter yesterday I went on about how New Adult is a bona fide category now — so much so that there’s a way to report them specifically at Publishers Marketplace — but that it won’t be “real” to me unless literary novels by men that qualify actually get classified that way. And since everyone loves lists, here’s my working tally of recent or forthcoming novels by men that absolutely, positively, fit the New Adult bill, which revolves around college-age and twenty-somethings (basically, 26ish and under) trying to make sense of life, romance, identity, etc.

Chad Harbach, THE ART OF FIELDING (it’s a campus novel)
Brian Kimberling, SNAPPER (bildungsroman with birdwatching)
Kristopher Jansma, THE UNCHANGEABLE SPOTS OF LEOPARDS and the just-sold THE MURPHYS’ ODYSSEY (the latter book described as “about a group of twenty-something friends in New York, known collectively as “The Murphys,” whose lives are forever altered by a tragic and unexpected event” — of course it’s NA)
Tao Lin, pretty much everything including the forthcoming TAIPEI
Lev Grossman, THE MAGICIANS, THE MAGICIAN KING, and the final book in the trilogy (Harry Potter for grownups is so obviously New Adult)
Benjamin Nugent, GOOD KIDS
Benjamin Kunkel, INDECISION
Ben Lerner, LEAVING THE ATOCHA STATION
Ben Dolnick, ZOOLOGY and the forthcoming AT THE BOTTOM OF EVERYTHING (wait, what’s with the New Adult Bens?!)
Keith Gessen, ALL THE SAD YOUNG LITERARY MEN (maybe n+1 should really be called NA+1?)
Gabriel Roth, THE UNKNOWNS
Robin Sloan, MR. PENUMBRA’S 24-HOUR BOOKSTORE
Matt Ruff, THE FOOL ON THE HILL
Adam Thirwell, POLITICS
Michael Dahlie, THE END OF YOUTH

I know I am forgetting a bunch, but I can always add other suggestions.

ETA: I see there’s some confusion here. The point is that New Adult, as it’s used now, is decidedly *not* male - it’s books by women, largely for women, that mix young adult and romance. Current exemplar authors: Jamie McGuire, Cara Cammack, Abbi Glines, Colleen Hoover, Jennfer Armentrout writing as J. Lynn. So that creates needless ghetto-ization the same way that women who wrote “chick lit” were marginalized but men who essentially wrote “boy lit” were held up as literary bastions. It’s a double standard that needs to be demolished.

On EL Konigsburg's ABOUT THE B'NAI BAGELS

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 11:00:16 -0400

E.L. Konigsburg died on April 19, a week after suffering a serious stroke, at the age of 83. Most people, rightly, point to FROM THE MIXED UP FILES OF MRS. BASIL E. FRANKWEILER as a major turning point in their reading lives. But the book of hers I keep thinking about, since I read it about two dozen times as a kid, was ABOUT THE B’NAI BAGELS, published two years after MIXED UP FILES (which won the Newbery, while the other book Konigsburg published in 1967, JENNIFER, HECATE, MACBETH, WILLIAM MCKINLEY, AND ME, ELIZABETH, was awarded the Newbery Honor, a pretty stunning feat for any children’s novelist, let alone a debut one.)

Then I remembered that years ago I wrote a piece about B’NAI BAGELS that made the rounds of a few places but never really found a home, so I’ll reprint it here. Keep in mind I wrote the first draft in 2006, revised again in 2007, and as such some of the references are dated to those years. But the points about the book still stand.

If you belong to my generation or a later one, chances are the spiritual aspect of bar or bat mitzvah – a ritual that’s only about a century old as we know it — has become muffled in the move towards increasingly elaborate, ostentatious, and style-conscious celebrations. One need only to leaf through the pages of the coffee-table smash Bar Mitzvah Disco, saturated with photo after photo of hair horrors, fashion disasters, cheesy DJs and other examples of conspicuous consumption ramped up beyond control. Or check out the movie Keeping up with the Steins, where a high-powered Hollywood agent is determined to do absolutely everything to give his awkward nephew the best bar mitzvah ever – even though the kid might actually want anything but.

But even if bar mitzvah culture has become less about what it means to become an adult in the eyes of God and more about keeping up with the Jewish Joneses, as Andrew Oppenheimer argues in his recent book Thirteen and a Day, the quest to stay au courant has become marked by an overwhelming sense of sameness. I saw this myself last fall when I attended the bat mitzvah of my cousin Miriam. And while her recitation of the Haftorah was marked with meaning and her speech contained a surprising number of original thoughts, once the party began, it was as if I’d time-warped back to the early 90s. The tweeners were hoofing it up on the dance floor to Michael Jackson and Dee-lite, completely oblivious to the fact that these had been the songs of my own simcha-going youth.

A few months later I brought this dichotomy up to my cousin (who seemed to get it) then asked her how all the other bar and bat mitzvahs she’d attended since – almost thirty – had been like. “They all kind of blend into each other,” she said, and I nodded in recognition, because I’d gone through the same thing when I’d been her age. Saturday after Saturday, I’d attend what was officially a different bar or bat mitzvah, but when the same shul, the same caterers and the same format was involved for each one, it was difficult to separate them out individually. They all became a blur.

But that sense of blurring and sameness could be flipped around. If there are commonalities to each simcha, surely there must be a universality that exists from one age group to another? This idea, as well as my cousin’s experiences, was uppermost in my mind upon rereading E.L Konigsburg’s About the B’Nai Bagels, the novel she wrote immediately after the Newbery Award-winning From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Because the book was written over thirty-five years ago, it would have been reasonable to expect it to date quickly, to be completely out of touch with how current twelve and thirteen-year-olds think today. But it didn’t take long to be proven wrong, to find that the book’s protagonist, Mark Setzer, went through almost the same experiences as my cousin had, and that B’Nai Bagels’s 1960s perspective is still relevant in a world where glitz and glamour, technology and popularity contests have become an almost integral part of this particular rite of passage.

From the get-go, Konigsburg establishes Mark as a fairly nice kid growing up in the suburbs of Long Island with his family. His mother, Bessie, seems to be a stereotypic Jewish mother, but Mark’s attitude towards her is a more three-dimensional mixture of love and slight befuddlement. His brother, Spencer, is almost of another generation, as he commutes to NYU every day and revels in his proto-slackerdom, fighting with Bessie, and alternating between leaving his younger brother alone and giving him advice. But Mark’s family becomes especially pivotal in this, the summer of his thirteenth year, when his mother ends up as manager and his brother the coach of his Little League baseball team (nicknamed the B’Nai Bagels as a riff on B’Nai Brith.) That spells bad news for Mark, because how much more embarrassing can it get to have half your family run your baseball team?

It’s only one of several reasonably heavy conflicts Mark faces over the course of the book, including the loss of his best friend Herschel Miller to the obsequious mama’s boy Barry Jacobs, a taste of the forbidden when a copy of Playgirl (a stand-in for Playboy, not the real magazine introduced in the 1970s), a mild flirtation with the irrepressible (and non-Jewish) Cookie, sister to two of Mark’s teammates, and a brush with casual anti-Semitic slurs hurled by a different teammate. But key to the heart of About the B’nai Bagels is how all such events ultimately center on Mark’s preparations for his bar-mitzvah in the fall, and what the event ultimately means to him. While others might be borderline neurotic or sweat bullets, Mark has a rather matter-of-fact take on the proceedings:

…last year, I was seriously in the business of being Hebrew, being that I was twelve years old and preparing for my Bar Mitzvah. Bar Mitzvah marks the time you become thirteen years old and can participate as an adult in all the religious services at the synagogue. Preparing for it starts when a guy is eight years old, but the volume is kept soft and low and part-time. Then, BLAST – the commercial comes on when you reach the age of twelve. And in your twelfth year you become devoted. Devoted to lessons on Sunday morning until it becomes Sunday afternoon, and afternoon lessons on Mondays and Wednesdays. Afternoons until 7:00 at night. According to my mother I was always about to be late for one or the other of those devotions.

It’s a revealing quote on several levels, most importantly because it offers insight into Mark’s personality. Unlike the other kids around him, who seem to hold bar mitzvah lessons in contempt, Mark actually takes them fairly seriously. He jokes around some, and occasionally irritates his teacher, but much of the time he treats Rabbi Hershfeld with respect and is given it back in return. And it’s the sort of attitude that’s been devalued, or at least de-emphasized, in favor of the flashy presentations that dot Bar Mitzvah Disco and its ilk.

Though Mark isn’t a do-gooder, like Barry, or a prankster, like some of the other kids on the team, he’s not averse to testing the boundaries of his Jewish faith and practice. Though Konigsburg isn’t explicit about the Setzers’ level of religiosity, Mark’s expected to attend synagogue every Saturday and be traditional. So his desire to keep pace with his non-Jewish baseball teammates induces him to cut Saturday morning services in favor of the neighborhood baseball diamond, where he gets a crash course in multiculturalism and interfaith conflicts. When the slur is invoked, Mark’s first reaction is to sweep it under the rug and keep the peace, but his growing feeling that this is too incendiary to be ignored incites him to make an important decision about his own level of involvement with Judaism – and make his bar mitzvah summer that much more meaningful.

As it turns out, the summer’s growing pains and coming-of-age ingredients leads to a fall bar mitzvah that proceeds smoothly and without a hitch. Mark does not become a man in the literal sense, or become one overnight, but his experiences with the B’Nai Bagels taught him a lot about fending for himself and forging his own individual path:

[being a man] is a becoming; becoming more yourself, your own kind of tone deaf, center-fielder, son, brother, friend, Bagel. And only some of it happens on official time plus family time. A lot of it happens being alone. And it doesn’t happen overnight. Sometimes it takes a guy a whole Little League Season.

That sense of evolution, coming to terms with the outside world and the one existing inside, is what gives About the B’Nai Bagels its power and its ability to resonate with future generations. The stylistic trappings may differ, the social pressures may be more increased, but there’s enough honest emotion and real motivation to appeal to even the most jaded bar or bar mitzvah student.

I profiled Caldecott-winning author and illustrator Jon Klassen...

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 17:57:29 -0400

I profiled Caldecott-winning author and illustrator Jon Klassen for Maclean’s in last week’s issue, since he is Canadian, and his newest project is illustrating Lemony Snicket’s new picture book THE DARK. Since it was a short piece there was, as is habitual, a lot that was left out, which is kind of a shame since Klassen was very enjoyable to talk with and we touched on a number of different subjects, including illustration technique, the differences between solo projects like THIS IS NOT MY HAT (which won the Caldecott in January) and THE DARK or Mac Barnett’s EXTRA YARN (which got the silver medal at the same ceremony.)

But one thing I knew I had to ask Klassen about was this particular image, which is his depiction of Cormac McCarthy’s THE ROAD. He laughed when I brought it up, as it was his one and only attempt at fan art. It’s not one of these things I’m generally good at, and I’m not sure why I felt the need, ” Klassen said. “The book doesn’t need illustration. But when I was done reading [THE ROAD] I wanted to spend more time with it. I hadn’t read anything quite like that before. The book meant so much to me because it was so graphically done. [McCarthy] did the same thing I try to do, which is to show emotion and not describe it. That was such a big deal. With illustration it’s held that the more graphic, the less emotionally impactful you can be. But the book works because of the graphic-ness.”

Ingeborg Day in 1962, age 21. Two decades later, after...

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 17:43:19 -0400

Ingeborg Day in 1962, age 21. Two decades later, after publishing NINE AND A HALF WEEKS (as Elizabeth McNeill) and GHOST WALTZ (under her real name) she looked more like this.

“At 26, she already is a sought-after spokesman for...

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 16:58:42 -0400

“At 26, she already is a sought-after spokesman for symposia on the state of American literature.”

— the Bridgeport Post, January 1965. A pretty stellar group of women, too.

Stuff I've Written Lately, March Edition

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 19:08:08 -0400

My newest Crimewave column appeared in the National Post this Easter Weekend, with an accidental focus on second books in series by Robert Rotenberg, Stephen Legault, and Owen Laukkanen. His thriller CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE, which brings back his duo of Minnesota state police detective Kirk Stevens and FBI special agent Carla Windermere, was the standout. (I also profiled Laukkanen for Maclean’s in advance of his debut a year or so ago.)

Speaking of Maclean’s, I reviewed three books for them in March: Becky Masterman’s first crime novel RAGE AGAINST THE DYING, and the memoirs WITH OR WITHOUT YOU by Domenica Ruta and WAVE by Sonali Deraniyagala. All of them are well worth reading for wildly divergent reasons.

1. How did you learn about the Melville House covers of Renata Adler's two novels? 2. Where do the answers to these "ask me anything" questions appear?

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 19:01:20 -0400

2. The answers appear here, but I don’t answer every message that’s submitted (largely because some aren’t meant for public consumption, or it’s promotional business that is better suited for my email inbox, etc.)

1. I first learned about Melville House’s reissue plans when, concurrently, I received the publisher’s Spring 2012 catalog in the fall of 2011 — which included the covers that are now posted on the Tumblr — and saw a notice about the upcoming reissues on Bookforum’s Paper Trail blog. And then I learned Melville House *wasn’t* reissuing the books when, about a month before the scheduled pub date, NYRB Classics announced they would reissue the books in early 2013. I’m not at liberty to reveal what I learned about the publisher switch, except to say that certain t’s and i’s weren’t crossed and dotted as were hoped and expected.

(Plus, it looks like Melville’s going to do just fine with the Mary MacLane reissues, which I need to get a hold of very soon.)

Originally, Renata Adler’s SPEEDBOAT and PITCH DARK were...

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 12:15:00 -0400

Originally, Renata Adler’s SPEEDBOAT and PITCH DARK were supposed to be reissued in February 2012 by Melville House (which had published Adler’s book about the Bush/Gore Supreme Court ruling, IRREPARABLE HARM in 2004, a publishing relationship that likely came about after Dennis Loy Johnson interviewed her sympathetically for Salon in 2000, before he moved away from journalism into book publishing.) These are the covers Melville House art director Christopher Brian King designed for the books. What a contrast from what ended up on the covers of the NYRB Classics editions!

And as for why Adler switched publishing houses after the reissues were so far along in production, that’s shrouded in some mystery, too. But as the Bilderberg book cancellation and the complicated publishing history of her 2001 essay collection CANARIES IN THE MINESHAFT — originally titled POLITICS, originally set for publication in the late 1980s, with galleys circulating, before Adler backed out at the last possible moment — she had the last word on deciding when her books would appear in public.

Renata Adler and the Mysterious, Never-Published Bilderberg Expose

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 15:25:13 -0400

Now that her novels SPEEDBOAT and PITCH DARK are set to be republished by NYRB Classics on Tuesday, interest around Renata Adler hasn’t been this high since her 1999 book GONE dropped a veritable nuclear bomb on the New Yorker and the city’s literary scene. At some point soon I’ll be writing about one of Adler’s more recent, lesser-known career chapters, but in the meantime, here is a rerun — with revisions — of part of a piece I wrote for (now-defunct) The Daily in March 2011 on the book Adler was supposed to produce next — but, for reasons that still remain murky — never got published.

Renata Adler has been a silent figure for nearly a decade, and many believe it has to do with the vociferous reaction to her 1999 book Gone, the scorched-earth epic burn of The New Yorker, which employed her from 1963 until that year. What’s less known is that Adler had her next project set: an expose of the annual Bilderberg Conference, where the world’s elite meet in a manner so secret the location changes – and is kept undisclosed until after the fact. Adler even signed a contract with non-fiction publisher PublicAffairs, which planned a 2002 publication date, the catalog copy promising a book based on a “cache of Bilderberg archives, secretly turned over to the author by a few senior leaders of the Bilderberg, the book describes the organization, and discusses who has been involved and when.”

But Private Capacity was never published (though the Amazon.com page still exists). A spokesperson for the company said at the time that a “mutual agreement” between Adler and PublicAffairs led to the book’s cancellation, adding that “while both the author and the publisher agree that the subject matter of the proposed book is fascinating, both parties also agree that a full length book treatment of the subject is probably not necessary.” PublicAffairs remained stayed mum upon our inquiries.

Two years later and no one really knows much more than that. I was, shall we say, surprised the Bilderberg business didn’t come up in Boris Kachka’s “Adler at a party” piece*, seeing as he was talking to her at Edward Jay Epstein’s book launch — and Epstein, of course, is well-versed in all things conspiracy, murky, and unsolved. Something tells me, though, there will be answers forthcoming in the next few weeks.

*and now I see some smart-ass commenter called Adler “the Lena Dunham of her day. (That’s not a compliment.)” to which I say…uh, way to miss the point entirely, by thousands of miles.

Another Reason I Will Have a Busy Fall Season

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 10:13:52 -0400

Abiding by my unofficial adage that “if it’s listed on Amazon, the book exists”, I can finally announce this: On October 8, Touchstone will publish INHERIT THE DEAD, a suspense novel written serially by a number of excellent crime writers. People like Mark Billingham, Lawrence Block, Ken Bruen, Alafair Burke, Marcia Clark, Mary Higgins Clark, Stephen L. Carter, Lee Child, Max Allan Collins, Linda Fairstein, James Grady, Heather Graham, Charlaine Harris, Bryan Gruley, Sara Paretsky, SJ Rozan, Dana Stabenow and Lisa Unger. And also, me.

When I got the email invite last summer from Jonathan Santlofer, who conceived of and edited the project, I had to stare at it a few times. You want me for this? To keep company with this great roster of writers? The apprehension probably lasted about six seconds before I said yes. And as it turns out, the chapter was a total, absolute blast to write. I can’t wait to read the rest of the book and see what everyone else involved did to start, move along, and end the story, which is a private detective tale very much in the hardboiled tradition. All royalties from INHERIT THE DEAD will be donated to Safe Horizons. And there will be much more information, including a launch party date, closer to publication time.

Needless to say, between the serial novel and the anthology, there’s a lot going on this fall…

New Column, New Essay

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 09:47:10 -0500

The second year of my Crimewave column for the National Post began over the weekend, and it seemed fitting to spotlight ongoing series — fifth entries by Ian Hamilton and Alan Bradley — and the sophomore effort by Peggy Blair. (Interestingly, THE POISONED PAWN is published in Canada a month before her first book, THE BEGGAR’S OPERA, is released in the US through Penguin’s new Pintail imprint for worthy Canadian exports.)

Earlier in the week, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine’s blog Something Is Going to Happen featured an essay of mine, on spending an afternoon at the now-sadly-defunct Partners & Crime bookstore sifting through vintage EQMM issues to find worthy stories for my upcoming anthology.

Buzz Books 2013 Shares Pre-Publication Excerpts from Big Spring and Summer Releases | Publishers Lunch

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 11:46:00 -0500

Buzz Books 2013 Shares Pre-Publication Excerpts from Big Spring and Summer Releases | Publishers Lunch:

To say I am RIDICULOUSLY EXCITED about our newest project is understating matters. Full details at the linked post, but here’s the entire list of 28 books we’re featuring meaty excerpts of:

Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being (Viking)
Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Decisive (Crown Archetype)
Therese Fowler, Z (St. Martin’s)
Kate Atkinson, Life After Life (Little, Brown)
Daniel Post Senning, Emily Post’s Manners in a Digital Age (Open Road)
Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings (Riverhead)
Wendy Moore, How to Create the Perfect Wife (Basic Books)
Laura Lee Smith, Heart of Palm (Grove Press)
Michael Pollan, Cooked (Penguin)
Helene Wecker, The Golem and the Jinni (HarperCollins)
Laura Bates, Shakespeare Saved My Life (Sourcebooks)
Joe Hill, NOS4A2 (William Morrow)
Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (Hogarth)
Cathie Pelletier, The One-Way Bridge (Sourcebooks)
Rory Freedman, Beg (Running Press)
NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names (Little, Brown)
Benjamin Percy, Red Moon (Grand Central)
Derek Miller, Norwegian By Night (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Philipp Meyer, The Son (Ecco)
Anton DiSclafani, The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls (Riverhead)
Joelle Charbonneau, The Testing (Houghton Mifflin Children’s)
Kent Wascom, The Blood of Heaven (Grove Press)
Lily Koppel, The Astronaut Wives Club (Grand Central)
Sarah Dessen, The Moon and More (Viking Juvenile)
Callie Wright, Love All (Holt)
Tom McNeal, Far Far Away (Knopf Books for Young Readers)
Adelle Waldman, Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (Henry Holt)
Alexander Maksik, A Marker to Measure Drift (Knopf)

Who was the cover artist?

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 08:17:28 -0500

I don’t know, unfortunately! Penguin is still trying to get some clarity there. But whoever painted the original art did an amazing job (as did Lynne Buckley, who oversees art direction for Penguin Books, in pulling every element together.)

And lo, the anthology has a title and a cover! Get ready for...

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 17:06:00 -0500

And lo, the anthology has a title and a cover!

Get ready for TROUBLED DAUGHTERS, TWISTED WIVES: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense, edited by Sarah Weinman, coming from Penguin Books on August 27.

On Friday, February 1, and Sunday, February 3, the Brooklyn...

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 12:19:00 -0500

On Friday, February 1, and Sunday, February 3, the Brooklyn Conservatory Chorale will present its winter concert program, Great Music, Great Poetry. We’ll be singing selections from works by Charles Ives, Eric Whitacre, Alice Parker, Benjamin Britten, Matthew Harris, Samuel Barber, and premiere Mary Lloyd-Butler’s setting of the Lydia Davis poem Head, Heart. I am a soloist in that piece, as well as one other. Which one? Well, you’ll have to come to one of the concerts to find out! It’s been challenging and rewarding to work on this material for the past few months and I’m pretty excited to be a part of it.

Tickets are available online at this link, or contact me privately by Wednesday, January 30 if you want to get discounted tickets.

Last fall I interviewed Grace Coddington in her office at Vogue,...

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 20:34:00 -0500

Last fall I interviewed Grace Coddington in her office at Vogue, and the result ran in the January issue of Chatelaine. A few impressions: Coddington is really dynamic and attractive in person, and for some reason this is never reflected well in photographs. Her assistant, Stella Greenspan, sits at a desk next to Grace, and even though I’m normally irritated when people tag along while I conduct interviews, the setup here was pretty chill and relaxed. And having spent a good twenty-odd minutes in Vogue’s lobby watching all manner of fashion plates totter around in heels while I made do with “journo-dress”, it was great to be in the company of someone who had earned the right not to give a shit about what anyone thought she did, wore, or said. I wish that attitude had been there a smidgen more in the memoir, but it was a fun read, and a fun conversation.

A couple of outttakes:

In the acknowledgments to GRACE, you say you’ve “barely read two books in my life that aren’t picture books.” What were the books?

There was a book on perfume that a friend gave me as a gift. And Tina [Chai, my former assistant] gave me the novel Memoirs of a Geisha. But I’m a slow reader, and slightly dyslexic. It can take me a whole evening to get through a page. I’m a visual person. Though I did get more excited about reading after writing this book.

On the memoir, how was it working with Michael Roberts instead of Jay Fielding? Were there a lot of extended conversations or were you working together on the written page?

It was great working with Michael. I’ve known him since the 70s, and we’ve been very close friends. Jay, I absolutely adore, and I started off hoping to work with him. At that point [I sold the memoir] he was in between jobs and this was perfect. But then he was offered this really good job, as editor at Town & Country, and he couldn’t refuse. He couldn’t do both. He’s got a job and family and my book was a one-off thing.

Michael knows my life inside and out. We’ve worked together on two books, though the memoir is the first fully written out one. He wrote some and I wrote some. It was a seamless coordination. I could remind him of things he couldn’t remember and he could surprise me with things that I couldn’t remember. We think very much the same way. He made the format for us to work around. He’s both a visual and word person. I’m more a visual person.

It took about nine months which I think is quite quick for a book. Michael works really fast and works through the night. He lives in London which is not ideal but he spent the summer with me and we got most of it done together.

So in your research, did you conclude the story of 9 1/2 Weeks is real? You refer to both of Day's books as memoirs, which implies that you believe the affair is not entirely fiction, but there's nothing in your thoughtful piece that gives evidence that the story of 9 1/2 Weeks was real. You refer to Ms. Day's literary agent's confirmation of the authorship of the book, and "several other sources" - did any of them have the confidence of Ms. Day on this point, and pass that on to you?

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 23:19:05 -0500

This is an astute question. No one I talked to — including Ingeborg Day’s literary agent — disputed the veracity of NINE AND A HALF WEEKS, but there’s a reason I used the phrase “presented as memoir” in my piece. In an earlier draft there was an entire section comparing “Elizabeth McNeill” to her namesake of sorts, Elizabeth Smart, as her 1945 prose poem BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I SAT DOWN AND WEPT is a) one of my favorite works ever b) a fairly obvious influence on Day/McNeill, to my mind, in terms of how to present a love affair in heightened, even hyperbolic fashion, though the two women went in opposite directions on style (Smart more towards rapture, Day/McNeill more towards flat affect.) The point being, I assume both women took liberties with the truth in the pursuit of literature, and I can’t say I really mind overmuch.