Soon after my son Benjamin was born, the chief neonatologist had to swear all the physicians and nurses in the intensive care unit to secrecy as they were about to commit a crime. I was forcing them to break the law and risk their professional credentials alongside my own unfathomable risk as we prepared for my son to become the first baby in the world to receive an experimental, illegal treatment that was not yet approved by the FDA. This was the moment that I had dreaded, but it was also the moment that filled me with hope for my son’s life.
New York City boasts a number of signature sandwiches, from the Katz’s Deli pastrami to the bacon, egg and cheese offerings across the five boroughs. Another bodega staple that’s in the spotlight right now? The chopped cheese.
For the uninitiated, a chopped cheese or “chop cheese” is a sandwich consisting of ground beef, melted cheese, onions, lettuce, tomato and condiments on a hero roll. It’s often compared (somewhat controversially) to a cheeseburger, sloppy Joe or cheesesteak.
Calvino’s love for fantastical literature gets its own section, and the reviews of science books that make up the final part are unfailingly stimulating. These elements are aspects of Calvino’s curiosity about ways of seeing things. In the title essay, he reflects on his unease in the “real” world outside books, and asks himself, “Why do you want to venture into this vast world that you are unable to master?” The answer, of course, was to put it on the page, to aid the rest of us helpless readers in seeing it and understanding it too.
Making a living as a writer has always been an elusive pursuit. The competition is fierce. The measures of success are subjective. Even many people at the top of the profession can’t wholeheartedly recommend it. The critic Elizabeth Hardwick, Darryl Pinckney recalls in his evocative new memoir, “told us that there were really only two reasons to write: desperation or revenge. She told us that if we couldn’t take rejection, if we couldn’t be told no, then we could not be writers.”
In spite of these red flags, countless people set out on this path. One lifeline, if you’re lucky enough to find it, is mentorship. Literary mentors offer the conventional benefits: perspective, direction, connections. But the partnerships that result are less transactional and more messy and serendipitous than those that tend to exist in other industries. While many people might think of such arrangements as altruistic or at least utilitarian, Pinckney’s book, which chronicles his tutelage under Hardwick, shows that artistic mentorships, especially literary ones, are far more fraught. Together, he and Hardwick weathered two intersecting careers, each with fallow periods and moments of success. This can be a challenge for creative, fragile egos—leading to a fair amount of projection, blame, and tension. And yet, the mentorships that endure allow for unpredictability and evolution.
The failures of this book are what give it its weight. “Memory does not narrate or render character,” she writes. “Memory has no regard for the reader.” It is sadly and ultimately true. Readers looking for the cutting and flinty Malcolm of earlier books will not find her here. There is something else, more subtle but perhaps more important, about our inability to capture our own “still pictures” of our lives, even with the chronicling tools of photography or writing. They cling to us in a way that makes them impossible to render accurately.
Suddenly, my mother
couldn’t call up the noun reverend
this forgetful moment unlike the time
I wracked my brain for the adjective decadent—