Writers may be difficult in their private lives, but on the other side of the camera lens they tend to be nervous but sweet. At the point where they need to be photographed for a book jacket or a magazine article, the book they’ve been working on for years is finally done (and the reviews aren’t out yet). Unlike actors or “celebrities,” they are unaccustomed to being photographed. They have no physical “brand image” to project, or a “better side” for their profile. Almost all writers start the session by telling me that they are not photogenic. (I tell them to decide after they have seen the photos.)
I try to make the process relatively painless. When I’m shooting in my studio there’s no loud music or a hubbub of bustling assistants. I’ve usually read at least a few chapters of the forthcoming book—if I don’t already know the previous work—to get a sense of the person. We talk about the book or travels or families—anything except politics, which these days makes anyone look too depressed for a portrait.
Besides, I wanted to do something with writing. In my spare time, I was writing plays with the end goal of eventually transitioning to screenwriting. So it only made sense to try to align my part-time job with what I hoped would one day be my full-time job. After some very feeble internet sleuthing, I signed up for a handful of online freelancing sites. It became almost immediately evident that the biggest demand was for ghostwriters in the romance field, especially for young, female ghostwriters (which is kinda sexist, but OK). Essentially I would be paid for writing romance novels anonymously that would be credited to a best-selling author. Though I resisted the siren call of easy money for a week or so, I eventually caved and bid on my first romance writing job. I got the gig, and the rest, as they say, is literary history. Except of course it’s not, because romance writing is the most rote, formulaic type of writing out there. After all, there are only so many ways to describe a penis. A hero’s penis must be veiny, bulging, and little else. In my business there’s no room for a penile digression. Or at least, this was what I thought when I first began.
As I pondered the problem called my father that December, I had a eureka moment, a flash of inspiration: I would make something, uniquely from me. It would be something that would make my father feel treasured and draw him out of his shell. I would buy a cheap notepad and fill it with prompts that would cajole him into writing about his life. If I couldn’t get him to talk, perhaps I could get him to write.
Born and raised in Northern California, Mr. Gates has been organically farming tomatoes in the region for 25 years, working on small leased plots and introducing new varieties with cult followings, like the dark, meaty Black Beauty and the striped, rosy-pink Dragon’s Eye.
For most of that time, he sold his tomatoes to top restaurants, including Chez Panisse in Berkeley. But a few years ago he completely rethought his work. Galvanized by climate change, he joined a growing number of farmers who are trying to find a future for their threatened crops — in his case, the queen of the farmers’ market.
Mr. Gates now grows thousands of tomato plants each year, selling the young ones to local shops and the seeds all over the country through his website and catalogs, encouraging people to grow their own at home. He believes that the tomato’s survival and continued deliciousness depend on the plant’s diversity, and he considers breeding hardy, cold-tolerant and heat-tolerant varieties an essential part of his work — not just to provide food, but also to expand the number of places where the plant can flourish.
To laugh at home with a studio audience is to become a member of that audience; the fourth wall is whatever wall’s behind you. You become a witness, a participant, family. The Conners, the Cranes, the Bunkers, the Huxtables; Jerry and George and Elaine and Kramer; Sam and Diane and Norm and Cliff and Woody and Carla; Anne, Julie, Barbara and Schneider from the original “One Day at a Time” and Lydia, Elena, Alex, Penelope and Schneider from the recent one; Sheldon and Leonard and Penny and Raj and Howard and Bernadette and Amy, you are all one in virtual space and time. There has never been a sitcom title truer than “Friends.”
Saidiya Hartman’s new book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, is a radical, genre-defying examination of the lives of “ordinary” young Black women in this period — women who escaped to Northern cities, living on the great expectations of the Great Migration. Hartman deploys Black feminism as the framework with which to understand the tremendous shifts in political economy, culture, and resistance in this time, making an extraordinary comment on the centrality of Black women’s history and experience to the history and politics of the United States. By situating them as central agents, Hartman disables the notion that US history thrived on the momentum of progress in the Progressive Era. Instead, the lives of ordinary Black women hold the horrors of the American past as much as they represent the possibility of the future represented in their movement and rebellion.
Curiously, The Library Book is not at all a downer. Orlean, a staffer on the New Yorker since 1992, could write about paint drying and make it exciting. Come to think of it, she does just that here: she describes ink and other substances drying as experts patiently tend to charred volumes. And I swear it’s thrilling.
In short, The Library Book is non-fiction of the highest order – by turns informative, personal, philosophical, sad, funny.
The crime at the core of “Murder by the Book” by Claire Harman stunned London for months. Yet Harman’s book is not so much focused on the uncovering of a murderer as it is on dissecting the London not only of Queen Victoria, but the London of Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray as well.
Along the way, the book also becomes a subtle reminder that media-roused controversy is not as contemporary an “art form” as we might think it to be.
Now Smith has turned 20 of her Approaching Shakespeare podcasts into a book, expanding upon and weaving together her original lectures to create This Is Shakespeare, already burnished with glowing praise from Hilary Mantel and James Shapiro. In her epilogue, Smith imagines other books she might have written that are “present in the archaeology of this one”. She summons the beautiful image of the ghost buildings and settlements revealed by the “long, dry summer” of 2018 to trace these works buried within her own book. She might, she tells us, have composed a literary biography of Shakespeare (like we need another one of those), or a theatrical study of his work in performance, or a historical treatise exploring ideas of “Elizabethan succession politics, religion, social organisation and city life”. What she is doing by conjuring up these unwritten books is subtly reminding you that her book is all of these and more. This is the power of her central thesis: we find Shakespeare not in speculative biopics or the reductive quibbling of academic exegesis, but rather in the work itself. This, she is saying, is Shakespeare; he is his plays. “There’s nothing more to say about the facts of Shakespeare’s own life, and vitality is a property of the works, not their long-dead author.”