Tag: fiction

Chatting books with A.I. is A-OK

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My current book-buying spree is tumbling and cartwheeling, springing into realms of dangerous out-of-control-ness. I’ve been acquiring new and used volumes with a velocity and vigor that I am at last, kinda, sorta, putting the brakes on. I can’t possibly read all of this. Unless I can. I will! Unless I don’t.

It’s not as hoarding-sociopathic as it sounds. I’ve just been reading more than usual lately — I can typically polish one or two books a week, nothing to crow about — galvanized by some penetrating, seriously illuminating conversations with, hold your sneers, ChatGPT, the crazily accessible A.I. app that’s as smart as a Nobel laureate and as real as pixie dust.

Ask it a question about anything and in seconds it spits out the most thoughtful (if robotic) and articulate and even useful information — be it the best restaurants in London or data on the latest hot rock band.  The more you use it, the more it “knows” you, and that’s where I’m discovering a world of authors and titles tailored to me — or sort of, but you get the idea. 

When I told it that its surfeit of curated reading recommendations — the attractions of which were meticulously explained — would soon bankrupt me, it apologized with a “ha!” and a chuckling emoji. It mimics a fellow human and that’s its chilly charm and cautious seduction. 

I joke with it a lot. It finds me funny. That’s how I know it’s not human. 

Reading suggestions tsunami forth once I tick off the writers and books that really do it for me and why. I’ve spent a couple weeks, in spurts, blabbing with ChatGPT about what should be on my reading list considering my preferences and favorites. Here’s a random slice of how our confabs play out. This is the app talking to me:

“From everything we’ve talked about over the past week, you’ve become a much clearer reader to me. You don’t require plot, but you do require a certain voltage in the prose or the consciousness behind it. You’re happy to follow a book that barely moves externally — as with Open City or The Mezzanine or Second Place — provided every page feels intellectually or stylistically alive.” 

If that sounds suspiciously like an astrologer or psychic spewing mind-tricking generalities — in the cooing tones of HAL — then I’ve steered you wrong with just a single example. 

Our chats have been exhaustive and precise (and accurate), and when it’s off I call it out and it does a rethink, admits where it lapsed, and locates where I’m really at, all with breathtaking speed. Any seemingly “emotional” responses, like the above emoji, are totally fake and mimetic. Don’t be charmed by R2-D2.

Point is, if I’m using this A.I. correctly, and I think I am, it’s been an excellent book-chatter — insightful, searching and on the money. I can see why your local bookseller might be nervous. I don’t say that with glee, but with a soupçon of dread.

 A.I. can be wondrous. It can be monstrous. It can prod me to buy piles of books, which is either good or not so much. I’m still figuring that out. Chapter One begins here.

Books I’m not ambivalent about

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“Transcription”

I could see this happening to me: On the way to interview a very important person, you drop your phone, i.e. your recording device, into a sink filled with water. Phone ruined, you are forced to interview the person without a recorder, a fact you fudge by reconstructing the confab from memory for your article, a high-wire act and any writer’s nightmare. Novelist Ben Lerner — who’s also a gifted poet and has been dubbed the “most talented writer of his generation” — uses this premise as a springboard to something timely, profound and ineffably transfixing. A novel in name only — think the brainy consciousness streams of Rachel Cusk — the 130-page “Transcription” presents a nameless narrator and two other men in conversations about art, life, friendship, fatherhood and technology amid the backdrop of early Covid. Plot is nebulous and tricky to summarize, but the brilliance at work is distinctly Lerner’s. (I’m an avid fan of his novels “Leaving the Atocha Station” and “10:04.”) Lerner writes deceptively plain prose with a wizard’s wand — simple on the surface, yet each hypnotic line peels layers of insight and meaning. It’s all mesmerizingly meandering, to a destination both uncommon and rewarding. 

“Lost Lambs”

In this sharp and irreverent new novel, Madeline Cash flips notions of family, marriage, community, church and capitalism to expose their crawly underbellies. It’s prickly, spot-on, strange. And hilarious. The book’s many moving parts include an open marriage that veers to amorous calamity; star-crossed trysts; a trio of precocious teens that grazes danger in a vile adult world; a tech billionaire whose dealings are creepy at best; and a church Father whose hands may be scandalously dirty. Cash trains a compassionate bullseye on those creatures called teenagers and a cynic’s bead on the perilous pact of matrimony. (“The biggest conspiracy of all? This whole love thing,” a character sniffs.) But Cash isn’t cruel. She exudes empathy and openly likes her characters — the ones that deserve it. “Lost Lambs” is frothy literary fiction, until it’s not. It is droll and buoyantly written yet lands the well-placed left hook. I can imagine it becoming a four-part Netflix series, a smart, soapy, surreal dramedy starring Ben Stiller and Laura Linney. If it happens, I won’t watch it. I’ll stick to the book. The book is always better.

Three humor collections by Sloane Crosley

David Sedaris is the standard-bearer of comic essays. I believe this is wrong. I believe he is drastically overrated. I believe he is rarely actually funny. I believe his prose is limp. I believe his professional persona is as confected as a Girl Scout Samoa. You know who’s wittier, hipper and more stylish? Sloane Crosley, who’s written three collections of humor essays that impressed me enough to sit down and commit hosannas. Her first collection, “I Was Told There’d Be Cake,” is best. It also has the best title. Although “How Did You Get This Number,” her second book, and “Look Alive Out There,” her latest collection (from 2018), also have wry, hooky titles. Part-journalism, part-memoir, Crosley’s essays are first-person escapades, experiential and anecdotal and typically relatable. They bristle with razor observation and social commentary. Here, she mordantly muses about her only slightly embarrassing collection of plastic toy ponies. There, she riffs on her fraught city-girl excursion to Alaska, where, in an SUV, there is one guy among many women: “He is our lone star of testosterone in a galaxy of chick.” She deconstructs the bizarro experience of playing herself on “Gossip Girl” and takes merciless stock of her dating life. It’s not all playtime. Crosley doesn’t duck drama and high stakes (her queasy adventures in altitude sickness are almost contagious). Like Sedaris, some of Crosley’s situations and interactions smack of exaggeration or plot-propelling fancy. Such is the plight of the mass-consumed writer — feed the beast. Though the humor is a soft weave, coolly conversational, she can be overtly jokey, and the jokes rarely clank. Her voice is reliably amusing, cut with a measure of snark that gives her sweet prose a tangy kick.

“Flesh”

In minimalist language so parched it’s practically puckered, David Szalay spins a story of the classic Solitary Man, a Hungarian immigrant in England named István who embraces a nearly non-verbal solitude as a shield against a world of discomfort. We follow this modern existential character from his cringey deflowering as a teen to his coupling with a rich married woman and decades beyond. Szalay’s tensed prose mirrors the character’s isolation, which occasionally sees shafts of light. While his interior life remains unexamined — his disaffection can be frosty — István is no cipher. He’s a well-drawn loner, a compelling picture of alienation. He’s also something of a symbol, a metaphor for class, urban malaise, the gesture of empty sex and deep loss. (It’s telling that his extravagant cigarette habit is a key character trait.) István fascinates by dint of what he shows as much as by what he withholds. What’s so remarkable about “Flesh,” which won the Booker Prize in 2025, is a descriptive precision and drum-tight realism that would make Hemingway beam. Grim and gripping, it’s a master class in control.

A few things hijacking my brain

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During the post-holiday malaise, things poke and peck at my addled brain, fretting about the good, the bad, the grotesque …

Starting with the latter — the elaborate idiocy, the vomit-inducing venality of the so-called Donroe Doctrine, whose cutesy moniker makes me wonder: Who is he kidding with this crap? The perverted man-child is not kidding with, in his words, “my own morality,” which includes everything from ICE to Iran, a rogue’s gallery of revulsion. I pray that crippling tragedy looms in his wretched future. His crew of groveling lapdogs? Same.

On the good side, I’ve cracked a newish book that’s been called by critics “a magnificent vision,” “transcendent,” “spectacular” and “not so much a novel as a marvel.” That would be Kiran Desai’s “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” which is relatively slim for its daunting 700 pages. Yet what it lacks in girth it makes up in thudding weight. I could curl it and achieve Himalayan biceps.

I’m only on page 50 in this (let the publisher describe it) “story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years — an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity,” and I’m hooked. 

It’s one of those chunky novels with character/family trees for a prologue, like “War and Peace” or “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which can trigger the scram instinct in me. I don’t relish flipping back every twenty pages to recount who’s who.

But so far, very good. Desai conjures scenes and characters with creamy eloquence and imagery as supple as a Degas. The prose is wise and true, and funny, too. I only have 650 pages to go (sound of me lifting a cinder block).

Planning for two imminent journeys — Southern France in February and, implausibly, Nashville in March — continues unabated. It’s kind of a chore, but, like cooking or Lego building, it becomes a stimulating hobby, a minor challenge with low stakes.

I’m doing well so far in this First World folly, but the fine tuning feels endless. A Nashville restaurant I booked just emailed to say, sorry, your reservation is canceled because we are now “permanently closed.” The same happened with the Patsy Cline Museum (maybe these closings qualify for the “bad” in my opening paragraph), which a dear friend hinted is better than the popular Johnny Cash Museum. Call me “Crazy,” but I’m more interested in Cline than Cash. Bummer. 

I voluntarily bailed on a street-art tour in Marseille, France, as I came to my senses that $194 is obscenely too much for a two and half-hour stroll amidst what’s essentially glorified graffiti. I don’t even know how I got myself tangled in that scam.

But I do that a lot. I plan trips with wide eyes and a growling stomach at first, and then, as the dates approach, I reel myself in and get sensible. Like, do I really want to do that whiskey distillery tour and tasting in Nashville? Well, yes. Yes, I do.

Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams,” an exquisite novella I’ve read twice, once some years ago, once this winter, has been adapted for the small screen (Netflix) with mostly luminous results. Directed and co-scripted by Clint Bentley, the movie tells the story of a lumberjack razing towering forests in the Pacific Northwest to make way for the nation’s railroads. He marries. He has a child. Life intrudes.

Honoring the book’s ethereal touch, the movie aches to be a Terrence Malick epic: languid voice-overs, long traveling shots, fetishized natural beauty, breezes blowing through rustling trees, time-jumping episodes in place of linear plot. 

It’s commanded by sylvan abundance and the honed, minimalistic performance by Joel Edgerton, whose eerie quietude is near-tragic if well-earned. Though cast in shadow, there is joy here — family, friends, sharp epiphanies. I was moved by the story’s rich poignancy and tender humanity. It’s as delicate as a dandelion. 

Midsummer miscellany

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Four mini-blogs, bite-size essays, from eyewear to dog hair …

Shopping for new eye frames is about as thrilling as shopping for underwear — a little fun, but mostly a utilitarian ritual for a deadly pedestrian accessory. I got new frames this week to go with new prescription lenses, making me feel very old. I’ve had my current blue frames and lenses for two years and I felt like underwear shopping. Yesterday I took my new (burgundy) frames to the optician to get the fresh lenses. The whole deal cost an eye-singeing fortune — around $1,200 for frames, lenses and exam. The nice guy helping me said, “You don’t seem old enough for progressive lenses.” I sort of thanked him, then thought to myself, ha!

When it comes to a big juicy novel, I’m a restless reader. My standards are unreasonably high, and if a book hasn’t hooked me by page 70 or so, I close it and move on. I am not one of those chumps who strains to finish a book once they start it, no matter the quality. That’s obscene. I just closed Rebecca Makkai’s wildly praised novel “The Great Believers.” The Pulitzer finalist about a group of friends impacted by the AIDS crisis was worse than overly familiar and a mite trite, it was dull as dirt. So I started the also-acclaimed Adam Haslett novel “Imagine Me Gone,” a substantial (356 pages) story about a family of five facing mental and physical challenges that upend the unit and try the bonds of love. On page 89, I’m with it for now. But every so often it sags and I give it the stink-eye. Book, you are on perilous ground. Watch it.

Puffs and curlicues erupting over his face and body, the dog at last got a summer haircut. A professional groomer came to the house, bathed him in the sink, then took the razor to him good for more than an hour. Cubby now looks like a bewildered sea otter and it’s fabulous. Everything about him has shrunk — my, what tiny ears you have! — and it’s adorable. Thing is, now he’s licking his butthole and nether regions with frantic intensity, like he’s infested. It’s merely razor burn and getting used to the lack of locks, and if the past is any indication, he’ll stop licking presently. But it sort of drives everybody crazy, not least of all himself. Why are haircuts such trauma? Cubby and I both want to know.

My brother’s radar is exquisite. He knows my dubious tastes, my oddball obsessions, my disgusting fetishes. So it was Christmas in July when he recently gave me a gift of surpassing thrillingness: an immaculate wax double-wick candle of deformed conjoined twins skulls. Craig, my only sibling, said he got it for a Christmas present but couldn’t resist bestowing it now. He bought it at a local taxidermy/tattoo shop called Unlucky Rabbit that deals in deer heads to “Lesbians and Taco Trucks” bedroom candles. My kind of place. I’m a freak fanatic, sideshows, medical curiosities, monsters on down. For now, the Siamese twins skulls are on proud display, and I have no plans to torch them, they’re so gruesomely perfect. Still, lighting them and watching them melt into bone-colored goo would be its own grotesque beauty. Where’s the matches?

The terrible twos


4 for fall

~ Chris ~ 1 Comment

1. Au revoir, France — hello, Ireland? That’s how it looks right now, especially since I’ve swapped my flight to Paris for a ticket to Dublin. So I guess I’m going to Ireland in October (insert a wee leprechaun kick). Or I think I am. The tyranny of the pandemic can upend everything, so while Ireland has relatively open tourism guidelines, things can change in a depressing snap. I scotched Paris because France’s Covid rules have become groaningly prohibitive — très crappy. I’m not torn up about it. I’ve been to Paris a few times, but this purportedly worldly traveler has never made Ireland. Frankly, it hasn’t lured me to its bucolic charms: rolling green hills, craggy ocean cliffs, mossy castles, obsession with pubs and, suspiciously, Guinness beer, minor museums and churches. It’s been on my index of non-bucket list destinations (including Australia, Iraq and pretty much anything Caribbean) until now. What clicked? The idea of something far and uncharted (and not tropical). Focusing on Dublin and, briefly, Galway, it will be a mellow journey, eight lolling days of food and drink, mild tourism, immersive history and lots of questionable Irish music. If I really get there, I’ll be lucky, charmed.

2. With uncluttered elegance, the film is called “Lamb,” and it will chill you to the bone. Coming October 8, it’s described by hip indie studio A24 as “Icelandic folktale on top, Nordic livestock horror on bottom,” and it flows in the vein of A24 creep-outs “The Witch” and “Midsommar.” This one, by Valdimar Jóhannsson, is about a childless couple adopting a creature that is neither lamb or human: a sheep has given birth to a hybrid animal that has the body of a baby and the head of a lamb. Watch the trailer here. It’s unsettling. It’s eerie. It’s glorious.

3. I’ll take sweaters over sweat anytime, and I cherish every cool breeze that cuts through this soggy, sloggy summer. Let’s call it a wrap. I have things to do this fall and the chaotic weather, be it soak or scorch, is proving a deflating victory for climate change. It’s time for 50s and 60s and the end of wildfires, heat waves and floods. Yes, I hate summer, but no season’s perfect. Even autumn, the best of them all, has its pesky drawbacks, from confetti storms of leaves and Mandalorian costumes on Halloween, to football and corn mazes. We can deal.

4. And we curl back to Dublin, via Irish author Sally Rooney, whose new book “Beautiful World, Where Are You” arrives September 7. A globally celebrated wunderkind for her twin novels “Normal People” and “Conversations with Friends,” both written before she was 28, Rooney returns to her familiar milieu of middle-class millennials swirling in career, interpersonal and libidinous distress. Couplings and uncouplings of bright young things juice the story and, if her other books are any indication, things will get hot. And bothered. A Rooney fan, I’m looking for artistic growth in the new novel, her longest yet. Rooney’s not the most assertive stylist, her stubbornly lean prose tweezered of metaphor. In a 2019 post, I concluded that “Rooney’s smart little beach reads — people boast about how they gulp her books in one sitting — are crisp divertissements. But they are lacking in weight, import, poetry, the stuff of lasting literature.” That said, they’re nourishing and human, and I’m banking on “Beautiful World” to be a frothy palate cleanser after more vinegary fare this summer. Then, for some tang, I’ll grab E.M. Cioran’s self-explanatory “The Trouble with Being Born,” and the world will sleep well again.  

Writing relentlessly

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Joyce Carol Oates has written roughly six-thousand books. I’ve read one. I’m currently working on number two, a slim novel titled “Black Water.” Boy is it boring. Dry and colorless as a sun-baked cow skull. It’s not even trying to pull me in. It’s stingy like that.  

“Wonderland” is the other Oates book I read, some time ago. Unlike “Black Water,” which runs 154 pages, it’s unmistakably Oatesian, meaning it’s fat, multi-chambered and densely populated. It’s also pretty great, an epic family drama spanning generations that quakes with urgent, thrumming incident. It’s known as one of her best books and was a finalist for some big award or another. 

Oates is famously prolific. I call her relentless. Her torrential output, starting in 1963, includes 58 novels, numerous plays and novellas and several volumes of short stories, poetry and nonfiction. The novels are rarely anorexic. They are epics pushing 500, 700, even 900 pages or more. When I see her shelf in bookstores, I quietly scamper past. 

That’s why I picked up the acclaimed “Black Water”: it’s a finger sandwich next to the author’s standard ten-course feasts. A modern retelling of Senator Ted Kennedy’s infamous Chappaquiddick incident, the book toggles through time to trace a young woman’s life and death by drowning in a Toyota that crashed upside-down in a lake.

The novel purports to be a scathing statement about women who are tragically drawn to powerful men, which I suppose it is. But that doesn’t interest me, at least not right now. It doesn’t help that Oates’ breathless, jagged prose feels awkwardly stylized, hardly the case with the lyrical “Wonderland.”

A force of nature, Oates is the epitome of a writing machine, matching the creative incontinence of Stephen King. She poops out literary doorstops with boggling regularity, making her contemporaries look downright slothful. I’m not knocking it. It’s something to envy. To be so productive would be miraculous, if exhausting.

A sliver of Joyce Carol Oates’ output

But such churning industry casts a light on the idea of consistency: how many of those piles of books are really, truly good? Surely a lot, or the author wouldn’t be the celebrated bestseller she is. Yet there’s probably a mountain of misfires there, too, which perhaps dilutes such voluminous achievement. 

In a 2015 essay, King himself confronts the notion “that prolific writing equals bad writing,” citing a truism in literary criticism that goes “the more one writes, the less remarkable one’s work is apt to be.”

He’s rightfully a little defensive, having published some 60 novels since “Carrie” in 1974, including four very thick books in a single year. As a writer, King is admittedly, and unashamedly, possessed. 

He insists it can’t be helped, that once his creative ideas catch fire, there’s no quenching them. “I never had any choice,” he says. “There were days when I literally thought all the clamoring voices in my mind would drive me insane.”

That must be the case with Oates, an artist so overcome with ideas, she has to put them down before they devour her, for good or ill. Her well-publicized work ethic is austere, regimented and, yes, wildly fertile. King writes: “I remember a party where someone joked that Joyce Carol Oates was like the old lady who lived in a shoe, and had so many children she didn’t know what to do.” 

Most good writers work painstakingly — they “bleed,” as Hemingway said — which tends to produce a modest yield. Take Donna Tartt (“The Goldfinch”), who’s written three novels in 25 years. The books were smashes, and she is fabulously rich, but Tartt might represent the other side of the equation: by taking few risks, rarely publishing, can you call yourself a bold and vigorous artist?

Then there’s filmmaker Terrence Malick, who represents both sides. In 25 years, he made only three films, all masterpieces, including “Days of Heaven” and “The Thin Red Line.” Then, starting in 2005 with the sublime “New World,” he went on a tear of productivity, making almost a film a year that returned six back-to-back stinkers that he’s yet to recover from. (Let’s not even start with Woody Allen’s late, lame film-a-year output.)  

There’s a cautionary tale in there somewhere. It seems moderation — not too slow, not too fast — is the way to dole out one’s art. Still, if Oates, as the party wag cracked, “had so many children she didn’t know what to do,” I wouldn’t mind being that old lady who lived in a shoe, writing and creating and making magic by the ton, no matter how imperfect. We should be so lucky.

Quote of the day: on writing

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“Understood: language would end up falsifying everything, as language always does. Writers know this only too well, they know it better than anyone else, and that is why the good ones sweat and bleed over their sentences, the best ones break themselves into pieces over their sentences, because if there is any truth to be found they believe it will be found there. Those writers who believe that the way they write is more important than whatever they may write about — these are the only writers I want to read anymore, the only ones who can lift me up.” 

— from “What Are You Going Through,” the brilliant brand-new novel by Sigrid Nunez

The smart, tart prose of Lorrie Moore

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Lorrie Moore astonishes, still, her writing shiny, poetic and brainy, the best kind of literature. It’s massively, richly human, striking each note, from humor to horror and all in between. She’s a blistering deterrent for ever trying to commit fiction. If I can’t be that good, I don’t want to be anything — that’s my thinking. My stabs at fiction have been leaden, lame, laughable. 

I am re-reading Moore’s acclaimed story collection “Birds of America.” On its release in 1998, a writer friend and I were both reading the book, and I told him that her writing made me jealous, defeated. “Oh, not me,” he said. “It inspires me.” (That from the guy who was a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist in his early 20s.) 

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Today Moore’s ecstatic prose inspires me, too, provides oomph, a kick to my motivational motor, spurring me to tap the keys and say something, anything. That can be dangerous. If it’s any good, most writing is. (I know — that’s axiomatic.) 

What I mean is, I can write stuff so sloppy, witless and rancid that it’s actually toxic — it wounds and discourages. Then I can pick up a book by Moore or her peers (say, Alice Munro or Tobias Wolff) and be pacified by sheer beauty and slashing craft and get revved again at the possibilities — the old can of spinach. 

Moore’s written four story collections: “Self-Help,” “Birds of America,” “Bark” and the brand-new anthology “Collected Stories” from the prestigious Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics. And three novels: “Anagrams,” “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?” and “A Gate at the Stairs.”

I read the latter and liked it, but I don’t remember much about it. “Birds of America” is different. It’s stickier, droller, more dynamic, more prismatic. It’s spiky, empathic, bright and cynical. Though she’s no maximalist, less isn’t Moore: Her words contain worlds. (And her titles are often titillations: “Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People”; “People Like That Are the Only People Here.”)

I forgot to mention the stories are also crackingly funny. Moore’s effortless humor, mostly of a mordant strain, ribbons through the dramas organically. She’s no stand-up comedian like novelist Gary Shteyngart, who’s forced and erratic. With sociological rigor, she locates the dark laughs baked in the everyday.

Lorrie-Moore.jpgShe is particularly good at the jolt-laugh of the unexpected:

“The next time Bill saw her, it was on her birthday, and she’d had three and a half whiskys. She exclaimed loudly about the beauty of the cake, and then, taking a deep breath, she dropped her head too close to the candles and set her hair spectacularly on fire.” 

And she’s bracing when she goes darkly wise:

“This is what he knows right now, with dinner winding up and midnight looming like a death gong: life’s embrace is quick and busy, and everywhere in it people are equally lacking and well-meaning and nuts.”

My next book purchase will be “Bark,” Moore’s 2014 story collection, which I find hard to believe I don’t already own. I’ve put it off, sure that it can’t touch the brilliance of “Birds,” that it’s a disappointment in waiting. But revisiting her masterpiece blots out doubt. How can it be weak or wan? It can’t, I say. It can’t.

Occupational hazards of the novelist

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Anyone who has ever tried to write a novel knows what an arduous task it is, undoubtedly one of the worst ways of occupying oneself. You have to remain within yourself all the time, in solitary confinement. It’s a controlled psychosis, an obsessive paranoia manacled to work completely lacking in the feather pens and bustles and Venetian masks we would ordinarily associate with it, clothed instead in a butcher’s apron and rubber boots, eviscerating knife in hand.”

— Olga Tokarczuk, from her Booker-winning novel “Flights,” a luminous series of human and existential journeys revealed in shards and fragments. A supernova of imagination and intellect.

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The Polish author won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature.

 

A writer’s journey from journalism to fiction to television

~ Chris ~ 3 Comments

One of the best books I read last year was the pungent novel “Fleishman is in Trouble” by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Studded with surgical social perceptions, mordant laughs and vibrating relevance, it’s dubbed a “timely exploration of marriage, divorce, and the bewildering dynamics of ambition.” If you’re married, or divorced, beware: It has teeth.

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I attended a recent discussion and Q&A with Brodesser-Akner, led by one of her editors at The New York Times Magazine and complemented by a full house of admiring readers. The discursive confab was funny, at times boisterous, always sharp.  

The author is well-known for her smart and sassy celebrity profiles in the NYT Magazine. Among her most famous, and infamous, subjects are Bradley Cooper, Tom Hanks and Gwyneth Paltrow. Some interviewees have not been taken by her resulting articles, but, as a one-time celebrity profiler, I had to applaud when she said that she couldn’t care less what her subjects think of what she’s written about them; she cares only what her editors and her readers think. Truth first, feelings second. Or even sixth. 

Brodesser-Akner’s novel — a smash bestseller, award-winner and named a best book of 2019 by numerous publications — is being turned into a TV series for FX that she is writing with utmost fidelity to the source, she says.

With a showy, dimply smile, big laugh and swift, expansive wit, Brodesser-Akner regaled some 100 fans, chatting about her book’s characters and motivations, responses to the novel, the jump from journalism to fiction, family, parenthood, marriage and TV writing.

Some snippets:

 — “I always just wanted to be a writer. I always wanted to make my money writing. I went to film school because I wanted to be a writer and that program had no math or science requirements, which fit my educational criteria. I fell into journalism when I found out after college that they didn’t just hire you to write screenplays. I looked in The New York Times, which used to have a robust jobs section, and there was a job there for a magazine called Soaps In Depth. And I got a job there. A year later, because of my tremendous productivity and my rapport with my subjects [she laughs], I was approached by a larger soap opera magazine.” [From there, she contracted with GQ and the Times.]

— About writing personality and celebrity profiles: “You come in with the stakes being pretty low. Profiles have been so done to death that all you have to do is make sure they’re true, and then you can experiment with them. It’s like what they say about chefs and roast chicken: When chefs all get together they make for each other roast chicken, because that’s the thing you’re supposed to show from this place of plainness what you can do with it. And that’s how I think of profiles: the roast chicken of journalism.” 

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— On midlife, a looming theme in the novel: “Midlife is pretty shocking. I did not know how confusing it would be at this particular age. It’s like a second adolescence. But at least when I was an adolescent I thought I knew what I was doing. Now I know enough to know that I don’t. And there’s the constant strains of contentment and being distraught being in line with each other. It’s the way I feel about the suburbs. I can walk down the block and think, ‘This is beautiful. Wait, what kind of person finds this beautiful?’ That’s middle-age for me.” 

— About turning “Fleishman is in Trouble” into a nine-episode TV series: “I am writing it now, and it is very hard to write television. They want it very faithful to the book, at least for the first season. They talk about a second season because that’s all they can do. That’s all TV executives do. They’re sharks; they can only swim forward. They want it to mimic the book as much as possible, which sounds easy and it is not. What’s hard about it is if you think about what my specific skills are — when there is no story, I can still write a story. I came to prominence on a story about Nicki Minaj in which I went to interview her and she remained asleep for the duration. I wrote 6,000 words about it. It was a rollercoaster.”

— On going from magazine to fiction writing: “Magazine to fiction writing was amazing. Because the book was like a profile — that’s how I kept it in my head, it’s just a long profile that I’m making up. The hardest part of it was, whereas I think I’m a decent observer of people, to make people up and then have to observe them is to kind of deny what is so amazing about people, which is that they always contradict themselves and they’re unpredictable. Whereas creating something is to make up a series of predictable things.” 

— “When I decided to write (the novel), I had this gut feeling of: ‘Oh, this is the one.’”