While researching the book, I spoke to artists, and to people about their experiences with art. I watched movies. I visited galleries and museums. And of course, I read: art criticism and history, biographies and memoirs. But increasingly I found myself drawn to another kind of writing, one in which the writer engages so deeply with art that they’re driven to create a book in conversation with that experience. These books were subjective, defiant, joyous, skeptical. Some were fiction, some nonfiction, some an amalgam of the two. All of them spoke to the complexities of creation, and the complicated relationship between artist and audience.
Sclair was obsessed with death. She displayed caskets at her house and had a skull-and-crossbones motif on her personal checks — but she never attempted to communicate with the dead. That just wasn’t her thing.
“I never discuss ghosts,” Sclair said in 1999. “I have no interest in the subject.”
However, her afterlife was just beginning.
Professor Caroline de Costa is awaiting feedback. Several months ago the editor of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology requested an editorial from a world-renowned Melbourne urologist to address what she saw as a lack of research and, more concerningly, a persistent lack of knowledge about an essential part of the female reproductive system.
The urologist, Professor Helen O’Connell, agreed. But a week after the editorial was published, De Costa’s inbox remains suspiciously silent. She suspects her colleagues, used though they are to dispassionate discussion of female genitalia, may be too embarrassed to write in.
Not everything turns out OK. If you have not read all of Sedaris, then I will not spoil the grief, or the joy, of his family’s arc. And if you have read all of Sedaris, well, then you have probably spent the intervening years entering the cartoon contests in the back of The New Yorker and baking prune challahs and pickling your children in adoration and rage and have therefore forgotten everything. Time to start again. You must read “The Best of Me.” It will be a new experience, knowing that enough time has passed to find humor in the hardest parts of life. More than ever — we’re allowed to laugh.
The Australian-American writer Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) wrote her first short story when she was 28. She sent it to The New Yorker, where it fell into the hands of William Maxwell, who would go on to publish nearly all her stories. She’d bring one in and he’d read it in her presence while repeating the word “Yes.”
There was much to say yes about. Hazzard’s stories are shrewd, formal and epigrammatic. One feels smarter and more pulled together after reading them. You drop into one as if you were a wet cell phone and it were a jar of uncooked rice.
A lot of people will find "Just Like You" an underwhelming and unambitious book because it's just a love story about two vulnerable, viable people from different backgrounds who find comfort in each other. But there are others who might insist that's not just the most important story — it's the only story that matters.
The end of the world was a song most of us found
too painful to sing. The chorus cut through us