But Fox says that as he grappled with these recent losses and medical setbacks, he felt a “similar emptiness” to that dark time when doctors first delivered the Parkinson’s news. “I have aides around me quite a bit of the time in case I fall, and that lack of privacy is hard to deal with,” he says. “I lost family members, I lost my dog, I lost freedom, I lost health. I hesitate to use the term ‘depression,’ because I’m not qualified to diagnose myself, but all the signs were there.”
So how, I ask, was he able to shake it off? “My family,” he says. “My family pulled me out.”
There is no hard definition for what makes food authentic or traditional. Instead, food goes through a process of authentication. A dish once considered novel or adaptive can form a strong identity over time, eventually becoming traditional in its own right.
Chinese food is a perfect example of this. It has always been produced in ways that blur both national boundaries and the borders between ethnic cuisines.
The Bee Sting draws on Irish folklore about a traveller taken in by fairy folk to their great hall of riches under the hill, only to wake many years later in a cold, unfamiliar world where everything they knew and loved has passed away. He uses it as a figure for the unsustainable mania of the Celtic tiger, for the piercing nostalgia surrounding lost youth, for the vanishing of illusions and shared fairytales that allowed this particular family to function. Toward the book’s end, Imelda thinks back to the horrors of her chaotic childhood, the past she can never escape, all that has brought her, second by irrevocable second, to this present moment. “You would give anything to go back to it anything.” You won’t read a sadder, truer, funnier novel this year.
“A friend to me has no race, no class and belongs to no minority,” said Frank Sinatra. “My friendships are formed out of affection, mutual respect and a feeling of having something in common. These are eternal values that cannot be classified.” These words ran through my head as I read “Last Call at Coogan’s,” Jon Michaud’s book about the life and times of a venerated Washington Heights pub that shuttered in 2020. It might have been the motto of Coogan’s — a spot that may have resembled an Irish tavern of the sort found from Mumbai to Manhattan, but was a unique place, ecumenical in outlook and bighearted in practice.