At home with Claire Messud and James Wood, and their dachshund Myshkin, who for some reason didn’t make into the lead photo for this intimate profile of the “First Couple of American Fiction.”
Kim Gordon prefers to listen to rap music when she’s feeling traumatized, as she (and possibly all of Generation X) did when her marriage to Thurston Moore broke down. Also, she’s still totally rad. Even eternal rebel girl Kathleen Hanna thinks Gordon is the queen of the neighbourhood: “Fucking Kim Gordon thought I was on the right track, haters be damned. It made the bullshit easier to take, knowing she was in my corner.” Speaking of Bikini Kill, I wonder if anyone’ll be keeping track of all the explicitly feminist ponytails being worn by the audiences for The Punk Singer at Toronto’s Hot Docs festival. (Documentaries, by the way, are very much a thing right now.)
The young people are making new words slash old words do new things, and it’s cool. Language, man!
“And it’s all this lawyering, so many lawyers doing lawyerly things, which makes the third thing obvious: how much being a lawyer is like being a writer.“
Tig Notaro’s on tour right now, and though I imagine most of the interviews she’s given since her now famous Live set—in which she candidly talks about her then-recent breast cancer diagnosis—are pretty candid, this one in Mother Jones is great. You might pair it with this Alicia Merchant’s epic essay for Little Brother Magazine (of which, full disclosure, I am the founding editor). Both are about what it means to make light of cancer, and Merchant even describes what it’s like to listen to Notaro’s set in the face of confronting her own malignancies. The full piece is only in the print mag, but there’s an excerpt up at Joyland.
“You can’t go around buying Cadillacs on what the small mags pay,” [J.D. Salinger] wrote, “but that doesn’t really matter, does it?”
Regular Hazlitt contributor Jowita Bydlowska’s book, Drunk Mom, came out this week to some mixed reactions. Is it a parenting memoir or an addiction memoir? The “mother of all addiction memoirs”? Or a reason for a seemingly legit human writing in the Globe and Mail to almost proudly describe herself as a metaphorical predator, and Jowita (and I guess her book, and kind of her marriage, I guess) as some kind of prey: “I am a wolf, sometimes (admittedly) in sheep’s clothing, but blood is blood, and the media, well, unfortunately that can often feel like the sport.”? Not having read it, I can’t say for myself. Memoir is tricky, parenthood is tricky, alcoholism is tricky as fuck, so I don’t know. But I will say I loved reading the conversation Jowita had with Dr. Gabor Maté about shame and guilt.
Though I’ll also say sometimes I find it easier to deal with that kind of heaviness in fiction. Wouldn’t it be great if all YA was as good and serious as this Roxane Gay story? Yes, yes it would.
Speak, Internet! is your weekend reading guide.
