A nice review of “How to Live,” just out in paperback, from the Chicago Tribune. Click here.
UPDATE: My publisher has just ordered a second printing of the paperback! There WILL be Christmas at the Alfords this year!
I’ve met someone who speaks exclusively in single entendre.
The paperback version of my book, “How to Live”: she has arrived! It comes with a reading guide for book groups–my publishers and I have had great responses from book clubs who have used “How to Live” as a springboard for juicy conversations about aging and the role of elders in society. Better yet, perhaps, the jacket of the paperback is sort of golden, or caramelly; as I told a friend recently, “You might not want to read this book, but you will definitely want to eat it.”
It’s freezing cold today. I’ve upgraded my wool scarf from chador to burka.
Too much wassailing can lead to wassault.
I had a fairly somber segment on “All Things Considered” on Tuesday–they’re doing a series of obituaries called “Lives of the Unnoticed,” and my team’s offering was about a beloved, if occasionally peevish, contributor to the travel website Fodors.com named Robespierre. (You can hear it here. It’s 4 minutes long. It didn’t air in NYC due to Chatty Cathy-ish pledge drivers.) (Another segment in the series– this one about animals who die on zoos–was really lovely; we learn that the Smithsonian National Zoo in Wash. DC brings in grief counselors for the zoo’s employees whenever an especially beloved animal dies. Great off-mic grunting.)
Robespierre’s fellow Fodorites read his posts on the site religiously, and were hugely saddened by his death of cancer this summer–even though they’d never met him, and even though some had tangled with His Robespierreness over the years. I’m embarrassed to say I’ve cried twice on hearing the piece of tape in the segment wherein one of the Fodorites tells about calling Robespierre’s wife to ask what’s up when Robespierre’s posts abruptly stopped in July. Wish I’d met him.
I got to work with the supergroovy producer Wendy Dorr, who’s done a lot of stuff for This American Life. All thanks to my former Next Big Thing colleague Emily Botein.
I had a story in the New York Times yesterday about the lies that we tell during the holidays. The story is here; maybe it will help you.
Because my mother is the de facto protagonist of my most recent book, some of you may be wondering how Ann is doing. Swimmingly. More specifically, though, you may be wondering how she is shouldering the burden of having been called by Oprah magazine, in their review of How to Live, ”a role model for the ages.” Shortly after the Oprah review was published in January, I reported, “It’s all muu-muu-wearing and elevated diction from Ann from here on in; don’t expect to be granted an audience unless you are bearing a tape recorder or honorarium. If you do happen upon her in the environs of a certain North Carolina retirement community or Costco and are unsure what the appropriate tone to take with her is, consider hushed awe.”
So here’s an update: Mom recently upgraded her room at her retirement community so that she could have a balcony. This balcony overlooks the reception area and parking lot. While many might hear this news and attach to it the word “busybody” or even “surveillance,” those of us who really know Ann and her Zen-like role-modeling have a more accurate term at hand. We call it omniscence.
“We have no excuse for self-satisfaction while we allow the atrocity of the Pina Colada to flourish unchecked in our midst.”
-Kingsley Amis, in Everyday Drinking
In an interview in Der Spiegel, The Name of the Rose novelist Umberto Eco talks about the show at the Louvre he’s been curating. The theme of the exhibition is lists (Eco has a new book out from Rizzoli called The Infinity of Lists: An Illustrated Essay.) When asked, Why lists, Eco first proves evasive, offering,
I can’t really say. I like lists for the same reason other people like football or pedophilia. People have their preferences.
But pressed further, Eco opines,
We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.
