Pamela Paul and I met twice, in the same Times conference room, and on both occasions she wore a black biker jacket. She paired it with soft skirts in floral print or pink stripes: a look to suit a provocateur temperamentally averse to provocation. “A kind of writing that I don’t like to do myself is deliberately contrarian writing—like, people who are just pushing buttons and testing waters,” she told me. “That’s not my way. To my mind, the role and responsibility of a columnist is to always write what you think.”
Yet, since stepping down as editor of the Times Book Review to become an opinion columnist, early last year, Paul has produced a body of work—deliberately contrarian or not—that reliably results in buttons being pushed. Her inaugural column, “The Limits of ‘Lived Experience,’ ” took up the question of who has “the right” to address culturally specific subject matter. For example: “Am I, as a new columnist for the Times, allowed to weigh in on anything other than a narrow sliver of Gen X white woman concerns?” Paul wrote. “Not according to many of those who wish to regulate our culture—docents of academia, school curriculum dictators, aspiring Gen Z storytellers and, increasingly, establishment gatekeepers in Hollywood, book publishing and the arts.” One representative response, by the press critic Dan Froomkin, read, “Wow. New @nytopinion columnist comes out of the gates with a straw-man panic attack on wokeism. Just what the place didn’t need.”
On our very first date, my now wife, Debbie, told me that when she turned 60, she was traveling to Antarctica to see a total eclipse of the sun. My first thought was that this was a very Caucasian ambition. Then I thought it was strange she was planning a trip 20 years in advance. I wished her well on her future adventure because I surely was not going to Antarctica, under any circumstances. Later that evening, she revealed that she was 57.
I demanded proof, and she proffered her driver’s license, which indicated that she was, indeed, telling the truth. Her unique birthday celebration was closer than I assumed, but it was still not my concern, however lovely our date was. Three years later, in June 2021, Debbie and I eloped. Because of the pandemic, the big wedding we had been planning would not be possible for the foreseeable future. Instead, our wedding was an impromptu but romantic affair in an office building in Encino, California. Five months later, near midnight on November 27, we were on a flight to Santiago, Chile, to begin a very long journey to the bottom of the world.
I made my way down there on a clear winter day. Without a soul in sight, the place felt a world away from the highway that ferries thousands between Los Angeles and Las Vegas every day.
The most striking sight at Zzyzx is Lake Tuendae, a body of water the size of a football field. Beyond, through the palm trees, the vast, ancient, crusty white lakebed reaches to the Devils Playground mountains.
Any story about identity is really a story about more than one identity—and more than one time. For example: a time before and a time after. I have written about my adoption, and the moment I realized I wasn’t white, and my marriage, and parenthood. Not long after my wife died, I wrote about carrying another time with me, the time in which she is still alive, even as I live in a time in which she is dead. I dream again and again that she is dying, instead, that we still have time left, and when I wake, it is with the sense that the only way for me to exist is if there are two of me.
No one in my family can agree on the exact moment Kraft infiltrated our Balkan home. My mother insists she never bought it, and Baba suspects my uncle was at fault somehow. Despite this unremarkable entrance, I started asking for it––even begging for it. Traditional Balkan food takes a lot of time and care to get right. Pita (a dish of phyllo dough, spinach, and feta all baked together) must be gently layered. The phyllo is handled like thousand-year-old lace in order to avoid ripping it apart. Baklava (a dessert of phyllo dough and walnut filling) involves hand-grinding walnuts, layering phyllo once again, and then soaking it all overnight in a vat of sugar syrup. Unlike these Slavic dishes, Kraft Mac and Cheese takes nine minutes, tops. While my family ran around trying to keep up multiple jobs and dealing with trauma upon trauma, the short cooking time became all the more alluring. My mother was especially gifted in the kitchen, but the task of daily feedings usually fell to my grandmother, who was often in charge of taking care of me and keeping me full.
Thinking of our pets as family occludes the deep tensions that are present throughout our lives with them. Reflecting on Pixel’s passing brought these to the fore. It made it clearer than ever that, although we can have incredibly strong bonds with animals, they are not our friends. We can value their lives intensely but when their number is up, no matter how hard it hits us, I don’t think it is the awful event the death of a fellow human is. Thinking about my relationship with Pixel shed light on our relationship to nature more widely, as well as the difficulty of seeing it for what it is, in all its splendour and cruelty.
If I start by calling Laurent Mauvignier’s “The Birthday Party” a psychological thriller, understand that this means what you probably think it means, but also something else. It means a nail-biter plot, but also a focus on characters’ interior worlds so detailed that at times I forgot there was a plot at all. It is psychological, on the one hand, and a thriller, on the other, as if the book were two books at once.
You need optimism to become an immigrant in America. Frankly, you need a lot of other things too: money, luck, employment, maybe a family connection. The protagonist in Kathryn Ma’s latest novel, “The Chinese Groove,” however, has only a few of these essentials when he leaves China and lands at his distant cousin Ted’s doorstep in San Francisco at just 18. Zheng Xue Li, or Shelley as he becomes known in the United States, has no plan, no cash and no place to stay after his two weeks at his cousin’s are up. But you’ve got to give him this: He believes in his own American dream, that anyone can get lucky if they just work hard enough.
Janet Malcolm famously despised biography. While she found journalism, with its mandate “to notice small things”, deliciously congenial, she thought biographical research led only to an “insufferable familiarity”, the fat volumes resulting from it being little more than processing plants in which “experience is converted into information the way fresh produce is converted into canned vegetables”. As for autobiography, that great literary craze of the late 20th century, it is misnamed. As she notes in Still Pictures, the slim book that is her last, it is a novelistic enterprise, and not to be trusted. Memory is patchy and partial. What does this or that story prove? The answer is: almost nothing, in the end. The gold is “dross”.