Posts From Author: Month: February 2016

Margo Jefferson’s “Negroland: A Memoir”

Negroland: A Memoir Margo Jefferson Pantheon Books, 2015; 256pp If an authentic life is what you seek, you’re basically doomed to phoniness: this is the paradox that makes “authenticity” one of those words that should only ever appear flanked by inverted commas. The desire to be “authentic” necessitates the sort of reflection that destabilizes both subject and object; neurosis, perhaps despair, that way lies. This is the inciting conundrum in Margo Jefferson’s excellent Negroland, a memoir in name but a project vastly more complex and ambitious in execution. Jefferson was raised in a well-to-do Chicago family in the 1950s and ’60s, the second daughter of a physician and a social worker-turned-socialite. She learned the piano, she took ballet lessons, she read Little Women and sang Gilbert & Sullivan. In the late ’60s and ’70s, she discovered Black Power and feminism. She became a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, writing for the New York Times, Newsweek, Vogue. She’s had a Guggenheim Fellowship, she teaches at Columbia, she’s widely revered. Her short book On Michael Jackson, published before the singer’s death, is a luminous, empathetic re-reading of the man and his work. Yet Jefferson’s also been troubled by doubt, self-hatred, and suicidal thoughts. She’s spent terrible minutes with her head in the oven pledging one day […]
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We’ll Always Have Paris

Bettyville: A Memoir George Hodgman Penguin Publishing Group, 2015; 288pp In the sub-genre of literature about the poisoned relationships between mothers and their gay sons, George Hodgman‘s Bettyville is an instant classic. Constantly funny, occasionally pointed, it is distinguished particularly by its warmth and its author’s uncommon empathy. At its heart, Bettyville is a carefully calibrated understanding of (rather than attack on) how other people live. George Hodgman was an editor at Simon & Schuster and Vanity Fair before he upped sticks from his New York City life and moved back to Paris, Missouri, to look after his ninety-year-old mother. Betty Hodgman had lived for many years in Paris in almost total ignorance of her son’s life, relationships, and struggles. Returning to Missouri unlocks all kinds of memories for George, which he sprinkles into accounts of his new daily life with his mother. Betty, despite retaining a sharp, reprimanding tongue, has begun to exhibit signs of dementia and becomes increasingly though reluctantly dependent on him (“Clearly I am, in her mind, the Joan Crawford of elder care”). Around the edges of this picture live the folks back home — Hodgman relations, high-school friends and foes, the congregation at Betty’s church — and a stray dog that George toys […]
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I Want To Believe

True Believers Kurt Andersen Random House, 2012; 464pp “My publishers signed me up a year ago to write a book, but not this book,” writes Karen Hollander at the start of Kurt Andersen‘s gripping True Believers. “Let me cut to the chase,” she goes on: “I once set out to commit a spectacular murder, and people died.” This “secret episode of 1960s berserkery and lost innocence” is the ostensible subject of Andersen’s novel and what gives it its compulsively thrillerish readability. Hollander, a famous lawyer and one-time Supreme Court shoo-in, was party to an act of radical violence in 1968 that has somehow remained a secret in the forty-six years since; as she reaches the end of her career, she feels compelled “to disinter the truth”, to let the sunshine in. But this is where Andersen’s secondary subject, which gives the book its philosophical heft, comes in: how structures of fantasy, the doubtfulness of memory, and the irreducible subjectivity of experience challenge, even efface, any stable notion of truth. Part satire, part social history, True Believers asks some big questions — what does it mean to be American? what role might utilitarianism play in political violence? — and reminds us that mania, however well motivated, is still madness. Karen is a […]
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