One of the first stories I’d published was about a highly dysfunctional family. After reading it, my mother called me. She was livid. “How could you?” she asked. “You’ve humiliated us.”
I was confused. The story bore no resemblance to our family, but my mother said, “I know it’s not us. You know it’s not us. But everyone else is going to think it’s us.”
Tommy Orange and Kaveh Akbar are on the road between events when I beam into their car via Zoom. They’re both in the back seat, their attitudes upbeat despite the sporadic rain pattering on the roof. It’s the beginning of a four-day rush through the wider San Francisco region, over the course of which they’ll be reading at bookstores, schools, and other gatherings, everywhere from Menlo Park to Sacramento. They’re talking about the high school they’ve just visited, with Orange—an Oakland local—breaking off now and again to give directions to their publicist in the driver’s seat.
But the novel is underscored by a lacerating humour, even in its bleakest passages, and offers a refreshingly uncompromising study of working-class life, with its calluses, oil burns and hypocrisies laid bare. The result is a terse, bracing whirlwind of a book.
Biographies – along with the passage of time – can soften negative impressions of cultural figures. By giving readers context, good biographers deliver a more nuanced portrait of their subject’s life and encourage greater empathy.
That conclusion is in keeping with the book’s sympathetic portrayal of Ono, a longtime friend of the author. As a young journalist, Sheff conducted the last joint interview with Lennon and Ono, for Playboy magazine, spending three weeks with them in New York City in August and September 1980. When Lennon was murdered months later, Sheff became, he writes, “one of the people who circled the wagons around [Ono] as she struggled to survive a period she would later describe as the season of glass, when she was as fragile as glass and almost shattered.”
Carol Leifer, the prolific sixty-eight-year-old comedian and television writer (“S.N.L.,” “Seinfeld,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “Hacks,” etc.), has many skills. One, perhaps unsurprisingly, is delivering funny speeches, a gift for which she’s now giving back, with a book titled “How to Write a Funny Speech . . . for a Wedding, Bar Mitzvah, Graduation & Every Other Event You Didn’t Want to Go to in the First Place,” co-written by Rick Mitchell. Another talent: dancing, which might come as a surprise to those who’ve heard the rumors that the rhythm-challenged “Seinfeld” character Elaine is based on Leifer, who dated Jerry Seinfeld in the late seventies.
Stripping divorce of practical and social baggage means that the focus of “No Fault” is internal by necessity: the book explores the end of a marriage primarily in terms of how it might change its central players’ feelings. Mlotek is, by her own admission, wary of discussing her feelings, and inclined to address painful episodes in her marriage with scrupulously evenhanded poise and diplomacy—as is her birthright, being the child of a divorce mediator. But, as the divorce gap implies, feelings among the divorced are not always so easily managed.
With hundreds of interviews from the musicians, promoters and others, Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour compiled a comprehensive and entertaining oral history of the festival that was crucial in the rise of alternative rock in the 1990s.