Who she was as a writer bore only one very specific relationship to who she was as a woman: They inhabited the same body. It was to this body that she was confined, actually and artistically — to its social and economic destiny, to its gendered limitations, to its geographical and temporal location. What had happened to and in this body, what it in turn had made happen in the years from its birth to the present moment, was the limit and extent of her material.
That censorship might actually enable the circulation of books rather than restrict it seems counterintuitive, but it’s a pattern we see again and again. As an addendum to the better known Index of Forbidden Books, the Vatican published an Index Expurgatorius: a list of the bits that could be cut from otherwise offensive books to make them acceptable. Of course this became the book equivalent of Barbra Streisand’s attempt to restrict the online circulation of images of her Malibu beach home: a move that inadvertently drew attention to the very things it was intended to suppress. The Protestant librarian Thomas Barlow wrote gleefully that the Catholic church had done his work for him, by pointing to what he himself wanted to read. Similarly in 1960s Oklahoma, when the moral crusading group Mothers United for Decency set up a “smutmobile” filled with objectionable books, surely some locals used this as a handily curated wishlist?
For decades, whispers have circulated among game show aficionados about a mysterious Jeopardy! contestant from 1986. She went by Barbara Lowe and won five games in a row, which at the time—in just the second season of the reboot hosted by Alex Trebek—was the upper limit for returning champions. Later that year, when the show aired its Tournament of Champions contest with the best recent players, for which five-day champs automatically qualified, Lowe was nowhere to be found. Then, bizarrely, her episodes seemed to be wiped from the face of the earth.
At some point in the future there will be somewhere in the universe where there will be a last sentient being. And a last thought. And that last word, no matter how profound or mundane, will vanish into silence along with the memory of Einstein and Elvis, Jesus, Buddha, Aretha and Eve, while the remaining bits of the physical universe go on sailing apart for billions upon billions upon billions of lonely, silent years.
Will that last thought be a profound pearl of wisdom? An expletive?
Some part of me thought, Stop. Let them rest, dead in their own way. Let us not create Frankenstein’s monsters out of the corpses of feminist intellectuals. Another part of me thought, This novel is almost like a spiritualist document, an effortful séance that grows increasingly heartbreaking and garbled. Perhaps all biography is built from that kind of earnest ventriloquism, that kind of clouded remembering. Ghosts appear in our mouths, confused and out of time. The widows stand vigil: writing, writing, writing.
Even if you didn’t spend your adolescence puking on your shoes in parking lots, flirting with calamity as distorted riffs thunder out of blown-out speakers or shutting your eyes while driving down the highway as you crank up to “Fade to Black,” “Gone to the Wolves” captures the feeling of loving something so intensely it just might kill you.
Hertog is no passive player in this story, having been a student and collaborator of Hawking. He is, instead, an active participant. Intriguingly, as Hertog explains, we are all active participants in Hawking’s final theory, shaping the universe by observing it.
In this new book, Hertog tells us that Hawking’s final theory tries to address one of the deep mysteries of the universe, something known as the problem of cosmological fine-tuning.
Look at the Lights doesn’t lay out a quasi-legal case against Auchan, nor is it a snarkily supercilious theoretical takedown of mall culture. Rather, Ernaux faces the harder emotional truth: you can hate everything the superstore stands for, and you can feel somewhere on the dull spectrum of bored to mildly uncomfortable when you enter, but ultimately, the superstore offers a real opportunity to feel the edges of your own anonymity, one you don’t get anywhere else. There is a certain vulnerability in admitting that you want to lose yourself and that you might find yourself among a collection of objects you didn’t realize you needed. There is an illicit pleasure in aimless browsing on this scale: like running, or swimming, or lying dead in corpse pose, there’s a relentless surrender to bodily experience. Caught in a list of endless stuff, you don’t have to choose, or think; you can just be.
It takes guts and a sense of humor to kick off your debut memoir with an insult from Andy Warhol. “Seeing Alexandra was sad — a big rug-rat hanging off Viva — she’ll probably turn out a mess.” But Alexandra Auder uses it as the epigraph for her impossible-to-put-down memoir, “Don’t Call Me Home,” a must-read for children of narcissistic parents.