“You can keep the oysters and the snails,” says Rob on All-Stars, as he eats his daily allotment out of a broken coconut shell. He laughs. “This is what Survivor is all about. Rice, baby, rice.” Most of the time, tribes are given enough rice at the beginning of the game for each person to eat a half cup per day. People lose a lot of weight on Survivor. The hunger is made more peculiar by the fact that elaborate crew tents with plenty of food are nearby. (During season 16, players supposedly broke into the crew quarters and stole food. Security is tighter now.)
Such hunger is a new experience for most people playing the game. On Tocantins, when a few people start eating termites, one of the women says, “I’ll eat one at a challenge if I have to, but not in real life.” After two weeks, a player on season 24 shouts, “I haven’t had soda in, like, forever!” On season 35, when his tribe is completely out of food, Devon says, “This is a lot more real than I thought.”
I imagine Elizabeth Strout scrawling out her novels longhand in some serene room in coastal Maine, a party of white pines standing tall outside her window. There is a quietude to her prose — even with scowly, persnickety characters like Olive Kitteridge — that exudes calm devotion. Even in her novels’ darkest moments, there’s a soft, periwinkle feeling.
Books about a sibling’s mental illness proliferate in many genres — there are novels, such as Mira T. Lee’s family drama “Everything Here Is Beautiful,” and nonfiction books, including Robert Kolker’s medical mystery “Hidden Valley Road.” One of the latest is the moving and discursive experimental novel from Lucy Corin, “The Swank Hotel,” about a young woman named Em whose dull, stable life cannot withstand her anxiety about her sister Ad’s schizophrenia-induced peregrinations.
In Her Stories, as in her other work, Levine does not shy away from the high stakes of her history, forging an argument that proponents of prestige television are rarely compelled (or able) to make: that soap operas are the history of television, and television is the history of America, so, by extension, soap operas index the conflicts and character of American culture from mid-century to the present day. As Levine herself writes, “For soap opera, the past always matters, bearing upon the present and shaping the future.” And who better than soap opera’s biggest fans to safeguard the past, relish in the present, and place — angry — calls regarding the future?
But in the hands of a skilled novelist or essayist like Solnit [...] a biography becomes something else entirely. It begins in the middle. It skips the boring bits. It possesses a voice, and a point of view. It is unapologetically incomplete, and trusts the readers to go elsewhere to find out whatever else they might like to know.