Posts tagged with: essay

How Muriel Spark revised her own history in Loitering With Intent, and why. 
There was a certain period in my life during which the only thing I could write about was my divorce.  Unfortunately, it coincided with a fruitful period in my book-reviewing career. After a decade of begging, I’d finally hit a sweet spot and editors were coming to me, instead of vice versa, to write about books. But because of my seething muted trauma, I essentially bombed every opportunity that came my way.

Linkblogging on its own can’t be a form of self-expression. Or can it? 

I was a late bloomer in life and on the internet. It wasn’t until my early twenties that I got a serious boyfriend and a home connection.

I was introduced to the idea of Monica Sarsini this way: My college boyfriend— from Florence, Italy—said, “You have to meet my mother’s friend. She’s a writer. She’s strange and beautiful.

“I’ve never actually applied for a traditional job,” my thesis advisor told me over lunch, explaining that she’d gone straight from undergrad to a PhD program. We were out at a vegetarian restaurant, celebrating my completed thesis essay, and the tables that surrounded us were mostly empty. Sparsely-populated storefronts were an ongoing theme of college life: On weekday afternoons, when people like us had the freedom to go out, most people were on the 9-to-5 grind.

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead was the first book I read by British novelist Barbara Comyns. I knew nothing about Comyns at the time: I picked up the novel exclusively because of the title, which struck me as promising and intriguing. In fact, the book turned out to be a great deal more than that: it was downright astonishing.