If you read it right (slowly, attentively), Errand Weather has a suffusive effect, creating an atmosphere and a mood that is enveloping and almost tactile. While there are writers I could name to give some sense of where this book might live (Robison, Beckett, Fosse, Walser), I want to liken it more to the very specific experience I have of watching certain movies and coming away with a heightened attunement and sensitivity to the world around me.

There are any number of filmmakers who achieve this effect, but it’s Bergman’s use of sound that I’m thinking of here: wooden chairs creaking when sat in, the soughing of floorboards and bedsprings, the ticking of clocks. And the importance, by contrast, of silence. Silence as an interruption, in a way. A means of accentuating the sound. After I watch a Bergman movie (Fanny and Alexander every Christmas as a ritual), I’m more aware of how I’m walking, opening the curtains, making the bed.

Sound and silence – each enables the other, makes it possible, like blinking and seeing. Nathan references, in an epigraph, The Accident of Art by Sylvère Lotringer and Paul Virilio: “If we didn’t blink, we wouldn’t be able to see . . . Interruption is what allows us to take our distance and reclaim our consciousness from the blindness of sight.” That may be the intellectual underpinning of this book, but Errand Weather enacts this in a nearly physical way. You might feel different after reading.

Errand Weather publishes on September 15th and it’s available to pre-order here. Nathan will be doing some events around the publication (which will be updated here), including a launch party in Chicago on Saturday October 3rd at the Whistler. You should come.

In other news . . .

I was on vacation last week in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. The weather was great and while I was running an errand, I bought this hat at a deli/market where they make excellent sandwiches and play shoegaze on the sound system. It struck me as funny that the merch in the shop was all Cape Cod customized with the exception of this trucker hat and one USA-themed cap, perhaps left over from the Fourth of July. Diet Coke and “America” getting equal, lower-tier billing just after the Outer Cape. Seems fair.

I have a history with Diet Coke. We go back.

There was a pizzeria my family would quasi-regularly go to. I don’t remember my exact age but I was definitely under 12 when I once took a can of Diet Coke from the refrigerator up to the register. I loved the taste and refreshing fizziness even then. The guy behind the counter admonished me. You shouldn’t be drinking that. All those chemicals. You’re a kid. His manner was kind, mock-concerned, as I recall. A way of making small talk, I guess, and he added the soda to our bill with no real protest or further hesitation. But it left me feeling shame (Am I doing something wrong? Are my parents negligent?) and defiance (Fuck you, I’ll drink as much Diet Coke as is available to me). Maybe 20 percent shame, 80 percent defiance.

In college I had a comparative literature professor who taught us aesthetics and literary theory. I recall cans of Diet Coke lining a shelf in her office, an open one with a straw on her desk during office hours, and I thought, if this brilliant woman is a Diet Coke fiend, then I certainly don’t need to cut back.

At some point, though, I did. Cut back. My caffeine intake shifted to a daily cup of coffee in the morning and I mostly limited my DC consumption to airplane beverage service and rest stops on road trips. A treat. It’s been this way for years now. Lately, though, I’ve been getting served Diet Coke content, welcomed into the Diet Coke community, if you will, and learned that people refer to cans of it as “fridge cigarettes.” (Love.) On this latest trip, which involved many hours in the car on the highway, I hit the Diet Coke hard. Let’s just chalk it up to 2026. We all need extra treats.

I got the hat as kind of a joke/souvenir but it became prophetic: I’ve been home for the better part of a week, no Diet Coke, and I’ve been dragging. Dragging. Dra. Gging.

But I’m still wondering who chooses the merch at that market, who is making one limp concession to patriotism coupled with an inspired pledge to beverage loyalty.

“Why don’t you report it out?” asks the part of me that once worked in magazines long ago. “Call them up and ask who the buyer is and how they make their decisions.”

“Well,” says current me, “that seems like a lot of work I don’t have the energy for.”

“You need a Diet Coke,” old me replies.

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A lot has changed and a lot hasn’t since then. I guess I’d just like to note the occasion.

Every book is made up of other books, however consciously or unconsciously—a record of influence—and I recall Nicholas Mosley’s Accident (1965) and Eleanor Bergstein’s Advancing Paul Newman (1973), among others, as companions when I was working on this one. Accident became the basis for the movie of the same name, written by Harold Pinter and directed by Joseph Losey.1 The novel involves a car crash and a lot of experimental prose about memory and identity. Advancing Paul Newman centers on two female friends campaigning for anti-war presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy in 1968. In its somewhat frenetic jumpcuts it’s possibly a bit like Renata Adler’s Speedboat but more maximalist and messy. (Bergstein would go on to write the screenplay for Dirty Dancing. No lie.)

The Sun in Your Eyes has both a car accident and a friendship between two women, as well as a lot of other stuff. Like many first novels, it’s probably trying to do too much. It’s the most plot-driven thing I’ve written. (Sigh. No more plot for me!) It tends to go for the joke more often than not.

One of the main characters has a musician father who died young—some impossible, imaginary figure inspired by a combo of Gram Parsons and Marc Bolan. Those two really liked to get dressed, didn’t they? There’s also a dash of Alex Chilton in there, sonically at least—though he didn’t die before age 30. What if someone like that were your father, your parental legacy? And your mom was like a Jewish Jane Birkin from Westchester who designed Eileen Fisher-type clothes. Would you be really fucked up? Maybe you’d be relatively even-keeled and circumspect, in reaction? Such people do exist.

By way of research back then, I read Hickory Wind: The Life and Times of Gram Parsons by Ben Fong-Torres. There’s a brief passage in this 1991 book that quotes a chapter in Eve’s Hollywood by Eve Babitz. In that story, “Rosewood Casket,” Babitz writes about James Byrns, a Parsons stand-in who lives with his wife in an exquisitely furnished house. Fong-Torres quotes Babitz on the decor (Persian carpets, silver-framed photographs, crystal glassware) but she goes on to write “There is a statue of Hermes that has all my life been my idea of masculine beauty . . . The face of this statue had been floated up through time, tempered by the South, and now James had it.”

The quick mention of Eve’s Hollywood in Hickory Wind was my introduction to Babitz and enough to send me in search of the then out-of-print book (the New York Public Library had a tattered yet still circulating copy from 1974 at the Mid-Manhattan branch) and soon thereafter everything else by her I could get my hands on. So Babitz’s work was also very much there, seeping into my own.

All these years later (years during which the Babitz revival occurred), I’ve been reading and enjoying the latest Babitz release from NYRB, Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (Though Some Were).

Instead of the dreamy take of “Rosewood Casket,” we get this about Parsons, from her journal:

We also get so much more, like an unsent letter to Joan Didion with the scathing rhetorical question: “Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?” Eve goes on:

It embarrasses me that you don’t read Virginia Woolf. I feel as though you think she’s a ‘woman’s novelist’ and that only foggy brains could like her and that you, sharp, accurate journalist, you would never join the ranks of people who sogged around in The Waves.

Somehow, Didion’s attitude “goes with Sacramento” (where Didion is from) for Babitz. I think I know what she means. And even if I don’t entirely, it still makes me laugh.2

Another kick of reading the letters and/or diaries of someone who moved in what would coalesce into a recognized scene: details about the people around them before all the mythologizing took shape (or as the mythologizing was underway).

This is one of the many pleasures to be had in 20th Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies by the late artist Duncan Hannah, which I just finished and adored. Both Babitz and Hannah are bon vivants who have a lot of sex and are way into music. But what they also share is a love of literature—they are voracious and fine-tuned readers (who often find themselves amidst people who rarely pick up a book)—which necessarily colors how they see things, how they perceive the world they are always venturing out into. (They both make multiple gestures to F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose doomed romanticism they clearly recognize—spiritually and thematically; each seems to be channeling participant-observer Nick Carraway, at times. It all connects. Like Fitzgerald, Hannah is a Minnesotan who comes to New York. And someone as attuned to the ghosts of L.A. as Babitz would have to know about Fitzgerald’s final years in Hollywood, how he resided for a time at the Garden of Allah on Sunset Boulevard, the old demolished hotel around which swirls the final chapter of Babitz’s Slow Days, Fast Company.)

Hannah moves through his twenties in ‘70s New York, one of the most mythologized eras of the city. A gorgeous young man, hit on by just about everybody he comes in contact with. So smart and so charming. Hannah knows he’s living through something as he’s writing it down. Even if it’s only his own increasingly dissolute youth (which it isn’t—it’s larger than that). There’s a kind of anticipatory retrospection to his tone, despite the diaries feeling so staunchly present tense. One day all of this will be long gone. This quality is inherent in journal keeping, the creation of a record to look back upon, but I’m not sure all diarists are quite so aware of it.

Here he is in 1974, at a downtown club where Television is performing:

Waiting in a short line to get in, I heard someone say, “Hello, David,” so I turned around to look at the back of a henna-haired Bowie cut, one of thousands the city over. But wait, this was no ordinary Ziggy do, this was the original! ‘Twas Aladdin Sane himself, standing right next to me. Dressed in a quilted lavender space top, white Levi’s, and flat dance shoes. My height! He turned, face too pale, black eyeliner, weary. He looked like he hadn’t eaten in months. I nodded, he nodded back. I caught a glimpse of one of his fangs as he and Ava Cherry were whisked in to a cordoned-off corner table. I checked on him later, and he was engrossed in conversation with a slightly chubby black-haired guy who had a Long Island look about him. Who dat? I wonder. Oh no—it’s the Electric Warrior, Marc Bolan! Already past his prime! Two former mods come to check out the New York underground. We have arrived!

How fleeting it all is, how quickly you get the look of Long Island about you.3 (The title of Hannah’s book, of course, references the T. Rex song written by Bolan). How ceaselessly the cycle starts again.

Toward the very end of these diaries is an entry from 1981. Hannah is newly sober, an elder at 28 years old, attending a group show at P.S. 1 that features his work: “A new generation is forming itself. I’m not down with it all, but I appreciate the energy.”

The arc of these diaries is roughly a decade. Hannah is about 10 years younger than Babitz, and a coast apart.4 Ten years. It’s nothing and everything at once.

To begin with, John McIntyre (who runs ), told me about a book he edited: Memorable Days: The Selected Letters of James Salter and Robert Phelps. An immediate buy for me, even without knowing much of anything about the critic Phelps. It arrived the other day and I dove right in, not expecting to be hit so hard by a sense of loss.

I’m about a fifth of the way through and reading these letters is almost painful. An exquisite pang—hurts so good, I guess. This correspondence, which runs from 1969 to 1980, reads as a kind of romance. In his introduction, Michael Dirda calls them “love letters,” though as McIntyre notes, they’re between “a married straight man [Salter] and a married gay or bisexual man [Phelps]” and are “not freighted with sexual implication.” Even as I’m swept along by their back and forth (or maybe because I’m swept along), a wave of mourning comes over me. For the excited but easy intimacy between these two writers. For the exchange of actual letters sent through the mail. For a long-gone glamour—Phelps often writes from his apartment on 12^th Street off Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, Salter from Aspen but also from Paris or Chamonix or London. But, in a broader sense, it’s a mourning for the care of the crystalline sentences in Salter’s literary work, the atmosphere of his fictional worlds and, seemingly, if we go by this epistolary record and his memoir Burning the Days, his life. A kind life that very few of us of live anymore. Can afford to live anymore, yes, but also one whose tempo and pace have all but disappeared. You could try to live your life like that, but you’d be so of step with most everyone else that you wouldn’t have that life, which was, in many respects, a social one: dinners, parties, gossip, the sensuous appreciation of things both fine and ordinary—an appreciation which requires time: to pay attention and to acquire knowledge.

For Vivian Gornick, who finds Salter “overrated,” this life never really was. In 2013, in a Bookforum review of Salter’s final novel All That Is, she wrote:

“Almost all of this work is drenched in an idealizing nostalgia for an elusive ‘good life’—invariably associated with taste, money, and mythic sex—that, from the beginning, was received with open arms by readers famous and obscure for whom Salter’s lush, evocative writing was experienced as haunting.”

And after quoting some Salter, she concluded that “Today, however, it is sad and confusing to read such sentences—so out of touch with the life we are actually living.”

I’m a Gornick fan as much as a Salter fan so this antagonism has a kind of “mom and dad are fighting again” feel. Maybe even more so because I don’t know how Salter viewed Gornick’s work; mom rails against dad, dad seethes internally but doesn’t outwardly respond.

Just prior to starting Memorable Days, I finished my first Gwendoline Riley novel, The Palm House, newly published by NYRB. There’s a sadness, too, of vanishing worlds in The Palm House. (I mean, nobody is writing about how great things are these days. Or are they? Let me know . . .) I’d put off reading Riley I think because I somehow had a sense that her writing might be too stringent and cold for me, but The Palm House is both very funny and very moving. I loved it. I must have based my misapprehension on reviews that characterized her work as sharp, dark, and wounding but made little mention of her humor (odd, because humor is often the ingredient that brings out the sharpness, the darkness, the woundedness). Maybe it also had to do with the Gaitskillian severity of her author photos. (Though Mary Gaitskill is another writer whose humor—I have laughed out loud at certain lines—gets downplayed). I should know better, and yet. . .

Riley’s style, wit, and powers of observation, along with the London setting of this book, reminded me, to some extent, of Anthony Powell and his alter-ego narrator Nick Jenkins in Powell’s 12-volume novel cycle, A Dance to the Music of Time. (Powell hive, activate! I’m looking at you ). Riley’s novel is slim and compressed while Powell’s work is roving, but I wouldn’t call it baggy. Riley is so good at dialogue and conversation (though it’s hard to extract a line here or there as examples) and what made me think of Powell is a certain deadpan quality in which characters say ridiculous things or act in preposterous ways and Jenkins just goes with it. He’s a chronicler. He is also a writer and a husband and a father—and everything in the books is seen through his lens, his sensibility and consciousness— but the meaningful events of his personal life tend to take up less space on the page than the people who come into and out of his orbit over the years.

So, I already had Powell on my mind when I recently watched Jacques Tourneur’s Berlin Express, an espionage movie which takes place just after World War II.1 It sent me back to The Military Philosophers, the ninth book in Dance, which covers the final years of the war. And while it’s not necessarily my favorite volume of the series, it does have one of my favorite throwaway lines. (It appears to be throwaway, though I have no idea if it actually is—which is the case with so much of the writing in Dance. It feels effortless, offhand.) The line is set off by em-dashes within a sentence: “one never feels older than in the middle thirties.” It rings so true to me, especially as I’ve been on the other side of my middle thirties for a while. And even if being in your middle thirties in the 1940s was likely very different than being in your middle thirties now. In my middle thirties, I remember feeling, for the first time, no longer young. Of course, you are young, relatively. So young. But that relatively is what’s so fraught.

In 1969, the New York Times ran a conversation with Powell. The Military Philosophers had been published the year before. (The first volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, A Question of Upbringing, came out in 1951 and the final volume, Hearing Secret Harmonies, appeared in 1975). Powell, 63 at the time of this conversation, talked about writing a roman-fleuve over such an extended period: “When I started writing it people of fifty seemed frightfully old; now they seem frightfully young.”

To bring it back to Salter, I heard someone criticize his work once on the grounds that women over a certain age (and not a very advanced one) come off hideously. And yeah, that may be true, but nobody over a certain age, regardless of gender, really fares well and I think that’s the point. Lost youth is one of his major fictional themes. Still, as a counterweight to that loss, almost a rebuke to it, Salter wrote into his old age, dying at 90 in 2015. What remains, and what one hopes will last, is the body of his work.

In search of something for Mother’s Day or Father’s Day? Consider Watching the Detective – moms and dads love Columbo (I say this as a Columbo-loving mom, though I’ve been hearing that twentysomethings are into the show, too). If you’re curious about the book, Oldster magazine recently ran an excerpt here.

For any soon-to-be graduates, or really, any existentially-minded perpetual students of life, Donato Loia’s 1095 Short Sentences is a lovely, contemplative, anti-motivational motivational guide.

Or how about an incisive and atmospheric portrait of three women, of different generations, whose paths intersect after a loss? Consolation explores the connections and echoes that exist among these women as it looks at those ambiguous yet affecting relationships we never quite know how to define.

“Written with elegance and wisdom . . . A serene, engrossing, powerful novel.”

–Aysegül Savas, author of The Anthropologists

And some news: We’ve got another book in the works. Errand Weather by Nathan Dragon will be publishing this September. Read more about it here.

“Dragon says in four lines what takes most 400 pages . . . Loneliness, humor, at some points so lovely it reads like poetry.”

–Madeline Cash, author of Lost Lambs

Happy spring, everybody!

Imagine a drumroll, imagine the curtain lifting:

This beautiful book is comprised of two linked novellas (novellae?) that are as atmospheric as they are quietly emotional. Here’s a description:

The narrators of Nathan Dragon’s Errand Weather have “big, big plans.” Among them: buying scratch-off lottery tickets, finding a regular spot on a park bench, walking a dog, eyeing out the right amount of spaghetti to cook (impossible), making a home. If the tone of these two linked novellas may sometimes be ironic, it’s never disingenuous. This is a book attuned to the ways seemingly minor things take on outsize importance, how the everyday turns strange. How a life composed of decision and drift, attention and distraction, routine and chance, is always revealing itself anew and accruing meaning.

These acutely perceptive fictions capture both a sense of place and a dreamy dislocation. Details observed and lived in, synesthetic sensations, highly specific yet universal feelings you can’t quite name—Errand Weather is ultimately about having the words for not having the words for it. Just as the surface stillness of a photograph evokes greater depths, Dragon’s economical, hypnotic prose draws you in. You may not quite know where you are, but it’s somewhere you want to be.

True!

A tagline, of sorts, that I came up with for B-Side Editions is: “Not the popular hits, just the enduring songs.” And reading Errand Weather reminds me of experiencing a Galaxie 500 album. I don’t know if Nathan (hi, ) would agree or even like that comparison, but I’ve been listening to their music for the better half (almost three fifths now) of my life and still haven’t tired of it.1 It endures. The mood, the deceptive simplicity. Does it matter that their songs frequently have to do with errands – those liminal space-time situations? A few lines from their song “Strange”:

I went alone down to the drug store
I went out back and took a Coke
I stood in line and ate my Twinkies
I stood in line, I had to wait

and

What do I want with all these things?

The imagery conjured in Errand Weather also puts me in mind of the photography of William Eggleston. The way he takes seemingly everyday moments and through his framing and eye and lens, transforms those moments into something more. Giving them a compelling depth and mystery.

I think of Eggleston as something of a magician. And you know who else is a magician (both figuratively and literally)? Designer Matthew Jacobson, who has been creating the covers for B-Side Editions. I interviewed him here about his incredible work on my latest book, Watching the Detective. He totally came through again with Errand Weather.

Having shared this, sometimes I wonder if I should write more, here, about the ins and outs of publishing. I know those posts “perform” well on Substack. (But, you know, a one-trick pony also performs their one trick really well). Who doesn’t want to see a rather opaque entity demystified? Who doesn’t want gossip? I certainly do. And even data is gossip in publishing – maybe because actual, reliable data in publishing seems hard to come by. Substitute advice for gossip and I suppose I’m in a position to dispense a bit of it, given my own experiences with the vagaries of the industry. My first novel was published with a Big Five house, my second with a billionaire-backed large indie, and then, when my agent and I couldn’t find a home for my third novel, Consolation, I started B-Side Editions to put it out in the world. My hope was always to make B-Side an occasional press that would publish other writers, too (and publish them well, in thoughtfully-designed books you want to hold and read) and this happened with 1095 Short Sentences by Donato Loia, which came out in 2024.

Anyway, I read those posts about publishing and sometimes they’re informative and helpful. Sometimes they’re validating. And then sometimes you encounter a similar story – from over a hundred years ago – and realize it was ever thus (more or less). I recently finished reading Edmund White’s Marcel Proust, a slim biography in the Penguin Lives series.

After Swann’s Way was rejected by a few publishing houses – including the house started by André Gide, what would become Gallimard (Gide was later like, oops, my bad) – Proust nevertheless remained resilient. Of course, he was also independently wealthy. White writes:

Proust immediately asked a friend whether Bernard Grasset would publish his book if all the expenses were paid: what today we would call ‘vanity publishing,’ except that in those days in France well-heeled authors, even those who were well-known and talented, often resorted to subsidizing their own publication – not so hard to understand in a period when even the most famous writers seldom sold more than two thousand copies of their books. [italics mine]

Please note: I have no intention of drawing a comparison here between the work of Proust and my own. Who would even dare? I just find these details about the mechanics of how literature actually gets out (and got out) into the world fascinating.

I completed In Search of Lost Time a few years ago and commemorated the accomplishment with a T-shirt from the brilliant Marisa (hi, ) of Fine of Course, to go with my Barthes and Rohmer merch from her. I then immediately started the cycle again and have been reading it, more slowly, more leisurely this time around, in between other books. I’m almost done with The Fugitive and I’ll probably start the whole thing once more when I get to the end of Finding Time Again. It’s truly fathomless.

I was in Paris a couple of years ago and found Proust’s grave in Père Lachaise.

While trying to locate it, I also found my favorite review of anything ever.

I’ve got a couple of upcoming events I wanted to let you know about:

Oak Park, IL, Tuesday, April 14, 6:30pm

I’ll be in conversation with the wonderful poet Christine Poreba, at the Main branch of the Oak Park Public Library. Talking about Watching the Detective.

Chicago, IL, Tuesday, May 5, 7:30pm

I’ll be part of the lineup for the Tuesday Funk reading series at the Hopleaf. There’ll be books! Drinks! General merriment!

In late 1998, when I moved to New York City, I technically worked in “media,” but the scrappy online magazine (RIP FEED) that employed me just out of college was like a distant, barely signaling satellite in the glossy print journalism galaxy – in which JFK Jr.’s George existed.

Our office, however, was located around the corner from Balthazar, which I went to one evening for drinks, dressed all in black. The wrong kind of black, though, for that place: men’s pants from Goodwill, a wool crewneck sweater secondhand from somewhere, Steve Madden loafers with a stacked heel. I don’t even know that the provenance of the clothes mattered so much as the proportions. Something was off, probably me. We didn’t stay there for very long.

(Side note: The sweater could have come from Beacon’s Closet, which opened in Williamsburg in 1996 as a resale shop. Beacon’s Closet! And those highly-selective, judgmental young women, maybe occasionally a young gay man, behind the counter where you would go to sell clothes for cash or store credit, who had mastered giving you a certain look, after they assessed the items you presented to them. That look was somehow both extraordinarily withering and utterly detached. The whole experience was captured, years later, in an episode of Broad City when Abbi shows up to resell a satchel full of stuff. The only thing they accept is the satchel.)

I’ve been seeing a lot of recollections, online, about that time in New York, or rather about that time in the specific milieu where fashion met society met media met politics. My understanding of that milieu, in those days, was vague. Or I guess my attention just lay elsewhere. As a self-involved 21-year-old (Is “self-involved 21-year-old” redundant? Isn’t “self-involved” implicit in being 21?) who thought of herself as something of an indie kid, to my mind, JFK Jr. and Carolyn were – in today’s parlance – essentially “normies.” And therefore, not especially interesting to me. What was interesting was subcultural and there seemed to be nothing subcultural about them; they were the culture. Mostly what I remember is the phrase “buttery chunks” being used to describe Carolyn’s blonde hair; ask your colorist for “buttery chunks.” (Bessette Kennedy’s colorist was Brad Johns, the “Founding Father of Chunking,” according to Vogue. Nobody I knew, then, had a colorist.)

Time changes your perspective, of course. So much becomes poignant. Even, or especially, the fact that you didn’t care much about something becomes poignant. A blitheness you no longer have. Or can no longer afford to have. And it’s weird to reach an age where years of your own life have become “history” to younger people and even to yourself.

I also recently watched the documentary Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! and I laughed, for sure. But mostly I found it touching. It left me with a lingering sadness I still can’t entirely shake. For a lost world, I suppose – and I don’t mean that in the “You could never make Blazing Saddles today!” sense. It was the footage of Brooks and Carl Reiner, into their 80s and 90s, after their wives, Anne Bancroft and Estelle Reiner, had died. They would spend their evenings together eating TV-dinners on trays and watching movies, best friends for 70 years.

One night, Brooks found Reiner collapsed in the bathroom after a heart attack. Brooks: “I was still hoping that they would put the stuff on him and boom, get him up. I kept yelling at them, ‘Keep it up, keep it up,’ and they thought I was crazy after an hour of yelling . . . I just didn’t want him to go. I just couldn’t — I wouldn’t accept it. I loved him so much.”

Now Carl’s son, Rob Reiner, also featured in the documentary, is gone too. Along with so many others. And Brooks, at 99, reminds me of how my grandfather – another aging, Jewish, first-generation American – looked in his final years before he died at 102. A face that has grown turtle-like in aspect, thinned skin that is loose but also drawn more closely around the contours of the skull. Chelonian (relating to or being a tortoise – I looked it up). The loneliness that accompanies that look. My grandfather was the last – of his friends and family of that generation – to go.

I haven’t only been watching TV. I do other stuff, too, I swear. Like: I’m going to be in Brooklyn, reading at the Ditmas Lit series on Wednesday March 25 at 8pm, with a great line-up of writers. See you there?

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If I were to post a Best of What I Read in 2025, it would have to include 1977’s The Little Lamb – story by Judy Dunn, photographs by Phoebe Dunn – a book from my childhood that resurfaced in my home early last year. Finding it and opening it, I experienced what people on the internet refer to in meme-speak as “core memory unlocked.”

A girl named Emmy cares for a mischievous lamb named Timothy. She makes dandelion crowns for the two of them. (“The only trouble was – Timothy ate the dandelions.”) They play hide and seek, Timothy knocks over a bushel of apples, they go to a birthday party. All of it is captured in 1970s sun-and-shadow film photography. And Emmy’s clothes! It hit me that I always aspired to dress like Emmy, her sweatshirts, sneakers, her party dress – and often still do.

Relatedly, in 2024 I found an old copy of Babar Visits Another Planet. I’d read it as a child and had long been haunted by an image of Babar stepping out of a spaceship and onto a gooey planet, losing his black dress shoe. “Haunted” gives that experience an eerie cast and is maybe not the right word. It was more dream-like. A dream-image you keep returning to and it occurred to me that I could find the book online, order it, and see how the reality related to the dream. (Yes, Babar is a “problematic fave” and I don’t want to dismiss the valid critiques of the series, but at the same time, I’m interested in the return to images and narratives that lodged themselves in a child’s mind, however fuzzy or faded they may have become over the years.)

In this story, Babar and his family are having a picnic when they’re sucked up into a rocket ship that takes them into space. They land on a planet of smaller, curly-eared pachyderms whose feel for architectural, interior, and industrial design is astounding.

Babar’s shoe is lost to the planet’s sticky surface; at one point he goes to a supermarket that sells footwear, but nothing is large enough for his feet, so he decides to take off his other shoe and go around in his dotted green socks as it “will be more elegant.”

The French writer Nathalie Sarraute explored the phenomenon of image-memories that resurface – specifically via illustrations in books – in her 1983 memoir Childhood, which she wrote in her early eighties. She refers to an edition of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper: “I don’t think there was any other book in my childhood that I lived in as I lived in that one.” She lived specifically in two images – “two furrows which two images, and those two alone, ploughed . . .” The images are of Edward, the prince in pauper’s clothing, being ridiculed, and Tom, the pauper in royal finery, being waited on. She writes:

“It is curious that, although I read this book over and over again, everything about it should have vanished except for these images, which still remain as intense, as intact.”

Sarraute’s novels can be challenging to love but Childhood is so accessible and moving on the subjects of time and memory. I wrote about this particular passage in my latest book, Watching the Detective, as it concerns the sensations, whispers, images, and half-thoughts of childhood that are formative yet elusive as we age. For me, this interest has less to do with nostalgia – often a kind of regressive, faintly embarrassing yearning – and more with being-a-person-in-time. Less about an idealized past, more about recognizing a continuum.

In addition to Babar Visits Another Planet, I tracked down a copy of another book whose images ploughed furrows. A book about Nadia Comeneci, part of a series called Sports Star, that also included books on Pelé, “Mean” Joe Greene, Chris Evert, Walt Frazier, Dorothy Hamill, and the like.

Last October I went to a Halloween party. The theme: Dress as your childhood idol. Easy. Nadia. Olympics champion at the Montreal games in 1976. So renowned that somehow children (e.g. me) who came into the world after she achieved the first ever perfect 10 score in gymnastics – a score so unprecedented the scoreboard couldn’t properly register it – still read books about her, still wanted to be like her. (It would be years before abusive coaching practices in gymnastics became part of the public consciousness; they definitely weren’t mentioned in my Nadia book).

In the Sports Star series, all the photographs are black and white. So my memory of Nadia, in that period, is in black and white. For my costume, I used black electrical tape to fashion the diagonal stripes and lettering on a white track jacket, basing it on a photo, from the book, of Nadia on a medal podium. I also bought fake bangs. Days after the party, I saw another photo of a medal ceremony only it was in color. And the stripes on Nadia’s uniform were blue, red, and yellow. I had never thought to question the color of the black and white image that was fixed in my mind, which must have been bolstered by an unexamined assumption that in Soviet-era Romania they somehow didn’t have color??? (I know.)

I’m not sure a lot of people born after, say, 1990 recognize Nadia now, certainly not instantly as an icon. I had to explain the costume to my neighbors, who have two young daughters, girls who decades ago would likely have been Nadia fans, taking gymnastics classes on Saturday mornings, whether they were good at the sport or not.

I understand, intellectually, that as time passes, so do cultural references; the actual experience of that on an emotional level, though, continues to wound. The alienation of aging. I often think about this passage in Mary Gaitskill’s novel, Veronica, in which the narrator’s father uses music to connect with people, to embody feelings, as a kind of emotional shorthand.

“But eventually those feelings got attached to other songs, and those singers didn’t work as signals anymore. I remember being there once when he was playing the songs for some men he worked with, talking excitedly about the music. He didn’t realize his signals could not be heard, that the men were looking at him strangely. Or maybe he did realize but didn’t know what else to do but keep signaling.”

As a young person, the narrator thinks her father is ridiculous. “I didn’t see that I was making the same mistake.”

By the way, Veronica came out in 2005. I think I first read it a couple of years after that. If I did make annual favorite lists, it would probably be on my 2025 edition, too. Sometimes you just keep signaling.

My new book, Watching the Detective, is available to purchase here and here and at select bookstores. It has appeared on a few lists!

Some news first: my latest book, Watching the Detective, is out! There’s more info on the B-Side Editions site, which is having a holiday sale: get 10% off an order with the code THANKS10 at checkout.

I love the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago for its slate of excellent movies, but I may love it even more as a place where you can encounter a very Upper-West-Side-of-yore type that you don’t see much outside of Manhattan any more, let alone in this city of the big shoulders. The kind of people waiting in line for The Sorrow and the Pity in Annie Hall, say. The kind whose presence makes you feel like you’re in a movie yourself. The kind that proclaim their arty-intellectual bona fides just loudly enough and often engage in some kind of petty, public drama. The last time I went to see a movie here, a Boomer couple (I’m assuming, maybe they weren’t a couple) were having an argument over where to sit. The man had made himself comfortable in a solo seat and didn’t want to move when the woman found two seats together. Foot stomping and clenched fists ensued. “You have to talk to me,” she hissed, but he wouldn’t. She went and sat by herself.

So, I was already looking forward to going to see Peter Hujar’s Day there.

My husband was ordering tickets in advance and invited our high schooler along. Much to our delight and surprise, he said yes. I’m not sure what sold him on it. He knew nothing about the photographer Peter Hujar, played by Ben Wishaw, or the writer Linda Rosenkrantz, played by Rebecca Hall. He mostly knows Wishaw as the voice of Paddington and as Q from the Daniel Craig Bond movies and an episode or two of Black Doves. He’d seen Hall in Godzilla vs. Kong. Maybe it happened to be a rare Saturday when he had no better offer from friends and so he agreed to hang out with his parents. But he’s also a culturally curious kid who’s interested in the world around him. Maybe that was enough.

As you enter the theater at the film center, there’s a large photograph of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert on the wall and I realized, in a moment that made me feel very wizened crone, that my son had no idea who they are.

They’d been film critics in Chicago, I explained, and had a TV show that was syndicated nationally. They would review newly released movies and give them a thumbs up or thumbs down. My son asked, not unreasonably, if they were the model for Statler and Waldorf, the Muppet hecklers, and I said, “I think they’re just two different pairs of men being judgmental in a theater.” (But I don’t know . . . According to Wikipedia, Statler and Waldorf debuted on the Muppet Show in 1975, the very same year Siskel and Ebert first appeared as a duo on TV).

History lesson over, popcorn and candy in hand, we found seats and settled in. It’s a mesmerizing movie, visually entrancing in a way that’s both lulling and arresting. Director Ira Sachs and cinematographer Alex Ashe bring to life the 1974 interior of Linda’s Upper East Side apartment (filmed at Westbeth, the artist housing complex in the far West Village) on grainy, color suffused 16 mm film, immaculately lit, evoking a long-gone New York even as the camera never leaves the building, while Wishaw and Hall speak invitingly in city accents that, at this point in time, are an endangered species. Pure catnip for me.

But as I watched, I was wondering what my son was thinking. Was he bored out of his mind at this depiction of a tape-recorded account of a now-famous photographer’s work day? Regretting his decision to join us? At one point, he checked his dad’s watch for the time. But at another point, during a passage set to Mozart’s Requiem, he tapped me on the arm and said, “that’s Lacrimosa.” He plays the viola in his high school orchestra and they’re performing this movement as part of an upcoming holiday show. It’s heartening, to me, to hear him express any excitement about classical music because I can feel this sporty, video-game loving kid’s commitment to the instrument waning (he’s been playing, through the public school system – god bless – since fifth grade).

A group trip to Europe, on the horizon, motivates him, and he has a fantastic teacher, but beyond that, the lingering question is: Why should he continue? Because you’ve already put so much into it, I say. That’s not a good reason, he says. And I suppose it’s not. Because it looks good on a college application, I say, resorting to pragmatism and kind of hating myself. But I don’t even know, at this point, if colleges care much about the arts. And maybe I only want him to continue for selfish reasons. I love watching him perform with the orchestra, not simply as a proud parent, but because I’m witnessing my child joining in something communal and transporting, something that requires cooperation and where the sum of what is produced is greater than any one part. What these student musicians are creating, in the high school field house (a large gym, essentially) or the auditorium, is beauty.

Back to Peter Hujar’s Day. My kid’s verdict: “It wasn’t the most entertaining movie, but I appreciated it. The performances were amazing.” He then asked if we knew of all the people mentioned in the film. Meaning those aside from Hujar and Rosenkrantz: Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Vince Aletti, Glenn O’Brien, and Fran Lebowitz. I’m sure other names were dropped over the course of the recording, but I can’t remember them now. If the references went over his head, he nevertheless found the film – a kind of ode to friendship, conversation, creative impulses, and human intimacy and sensitivity – compelling. And I found that compelling. That despite the unending scroll of doom-laden headlines, the shitshow of AI, and phone-induced brain decay, all of this – friendship, conversation, creative impulses, human intimacy and sensitivity – is still here. It’s not long-gone. It’s not even as imperiled as an old New York City accent. It’s still here and it still matters.

It’s available to order at B-Side Editions and it’ll be at a few independent bookstores as of November 18th. (Consider this my modest effort to mess with book distribution paradigms and not contribute to lining the pockets of billionaires.)

I’d like to think this is a text that builds upon itself, making it a little difficult to extract a cohesive, resonant fragment. But! Here’s an attempt at a brief excerpt. And I can include some imagery here, a nice bonus.

My father had a Thermos, red with a black diamond pattern, a plastic screw-top cap that doubled as a cup. It sat on top of the fridge in his kitchen for as long as I could remember. That kitchen, with its pink laminate countertop in a faint crosshatch pattern; stainless steel backsplash above the stove; white cabinets with red ceramic knobs; a white rotary wall phone; my mother’s set of red Dansk Købenstyle cookware on an open shelf; curtains in the breakfast nook made of Marimekko Unikko fabric, those bold red and pink abstracted poppies. My mother left it all, or most of it, she tells me, when she moved out, so that we, my sister and I, would be comfortable, so that the house would be almost as familiar as always, when we stayed there on weekends.

The Thermos came into my possession during one of the many times my father tried to pare back his belongings, when I lived in a relatively permanent home of my own and had room to acquire things. Was it useful to me? Yes, potentially, but I already had other insulated bottles that could serve the same purpose. Something beyond the functionality of the object made me want to keep it. Some sense of connection to the past, to my own life, to my father’s, to my mother’s (though that is a different story)—more free-floating than specific, but compelling.

Columbo once drinks coffee from the very same red Thermos—“Our Thermos!” I said when it appears on a table in an interrogation room in “Publish or Perish” (1974). The Thermos then resurfaces in an entirely distinct storyline, a couple of episodes later, in the hands of Johnny Cash in “Swan Song” (1974). Cash plays an ex-convict country singer, Tommy Brown, being blackmailed by his Evangelical wife, Edna. He fills the Thermos with drug-laced coffee, and takes it onto a light aircraft flight with Edna and an underage singer he’s been sleeping with named Maryann, a pivotal part of the blackmail plot. He passes them the spiked brew and then tosses it out the window, before parachuting himself. Drugged Edna and Maryann go down with the plane. The Thermos gets so much screen time in this episode it’s essentially a supporting character. My dad’s Thermos now sits on the top of my fridge.

When I was once at the Sunny Point Cafe in Asheville, North Carolina, during a road trip with my husband and our then 12-year-old, a song by the Highwaymen came on the sound system, and we explained to our son who that supergroup consisted of: Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, and Johnny Cash. “The guy from Columbo?” he asked.

I tell my father I’m making my way through Columbo, and he calls it a “classic” and in our agreement, I feel an affinity, a bond. I tell him about the Thermos sighting and he’s so pleased. At having the Thermos in the first place, at keeping it for years, at my wanting it for myself. At the way the past continues into the present, how they shape and reshape each other.

In my 20s, I wrote a short story that didn’t go anywhere. By that I mean that it was never published—I don’t think I even completed it. But in it a young woman is visiting her father’s house. Her parents divorced when she was little, and her father has never quite moved on. In a hall closet there are still clothes that belonged to her mother, from 20, 25 years earlier. The young woman finds a trench coat hanging there and tries it on, hoping it might make her look like Charlotte Gainsbourg, only the effect, to her mind, is more Columbo. Now that I think about it, I did show that story to someone—another writer, who said I might want to avoid pop cultural references. Because it took the reader out of the story? Because it dated the prose? Both, perhaps. I’ve dated my prose now. Already. And what is the story I’ve taken you out of?

I have some sense of the story I want to tell, but I don’t yet know its overall shape. Only that it has to do with fathers and daughters, Peter Falk, an old TV show, certain French writers (oddly?), and the way that events and experiences that seem discrete and disparate are connected, a different way to measure time. The way that tangents and digressions are necessary. Essential, even. Maybe taking you out of the story is the story itself.

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I was driving home from the grocery store and “Hysteria” by Def Leppard came on the radio and it reminded me of the time when I worked in an office tower in Manhattan, at a desk job that could be stressful at certain times, but that, at other moments, had enough built-in downtime that my office mate and I could close the door (we had a door!) and watch, in a series of 10 minute installments uploaded to YouTube, the entirety of Hysteria – the Def Leppard Story. (In the intervening years, someone has since uploaded the full movie).

We also watched some Bachelor-like reality TV shows and to this day I wonder if there was ever anyone auditing our work computer internet history (and if so, were they like, “Whatever, I’m giving these guys a pass”)? If capitalism is a process of extraction, I like to think we were just filling up our reserves. I’m not saying it was subversive on our part. But it was . . . something.

Why did we decide to watch this VH1 movie from 2001? I no longer remember. What I do recall is my coworker saying, after we finished the first clip, something like this was the shortest 10 minutes he’d ever experienced and we needed to keep going until we watched the whole thing. Like time was moving differently, and like Time itself wanted us to watch this movie during our workday. And who were we to defy Time itself?

It opens with the car crash in which drummer Rick Allen lost his left arm. But then flashes back seven years earlier, to a young Joe Elliott, with an Aladdin Sane poster in his bedroom, leaving to start his day at a tool factory in Sheffield (where an old-timer calls him an idiot). After missing a bus, he encounters Pete Willis in the street, who says his band is breaking up after their singer and lead guitarist quit. Cut to the remaining band members – currently called Atomic Mass – coming over to Elliott’s house to hear him audition. And one of my favorite clips:

I don’t know why it’s so memorable for me. Something about the innocence of it, maybe? And the yearning? That Elliott, at least in this telling, has been dreaming of this moment, has even already made posters for an imaginary band he wanted to join, because really he’s been longing for a different life. And then there’s the collaborative effort (friends!) to perfect the band name by changing the spelling. The notion that you could “rock harder” by erasing an “a” and an “o” and adding a “p.” Like, fuck oppressive orthography! Maybe it does rock harder?? I suppose it depends on what your metric for “rocking” is. Somehow the Swedish subtitles in this upload only enhance the whole experience.

In unrelated yet still somehow related news, I ordered a used copy of one of the few Anita Brookner books I haven’t read, A Friend from England, which was published in 1987, the same year Def Leppard’s “Hysteria” came out.

And that’s it. I could never fit this into an IG story.

So I’m incredibly lucky to know Matthew Jacobson, a Chicago-based designer who puts such care and intelligence into his work. He has a long, storied history designing album covers at record labels, but of course, he’s also applied his skills to other areas. He came up with something so distinctive, smart, and delightful for my forthcoming book, Watching the Detective, which ostensibly has to do with watching Columbo but becomes a kind of investigation into a lot of other things, too.

Herewith, exhibits A-D!

I love how the letters in the tie on the front fit together like puzzle pieces – the book is something of a puzzle, in the way that, you know, life is. And there are some surprise elements you can’t see here, they’re in the French flaps – you gotta wait for the actual thing. Matthew also designed the cover for Donato Loia’s 1095 Short Sentences, the second book published by B-Side Editions, the small press I started in order to put out my last novel, Consolation. All I told Matthew for this one was that maybe it could somehow reference Columbo’s iconic raincoat. And while I know I said graphic design is a mystery to me, I do have a strong sense of the aesthetic I want for B-Side Editions: an abstract, somewhat minimal style that favors shapes and lines and carries over from book to book.

I wanted to know a little more about what Matthew does and how he does it. And I thought you might, too. So I asked him a few questions via email . . .

You ran an indie record label and you've done a good deal of work for musicians like Jack White and Spoon – album covers, posters, creative merch like playing cards. What role does music play in how you design? I mean, from the literal: Do you listen to music while you work? (And if so, what?) To the more abstract: Does designing feel at all musical to you? Are you conscious of the ways that movement and rhythm and a sonic quality are present in your work?

MJ: Yes, I founded the indie label Le Grand Magistery in 1996 with two goals: give musicians wider exposure and design their records. Over time, the less glamorous parts of running a label (accounting, mailings, logistics) took over, but design was often the part that excited me most.

I’ve designed more individual pieces for Jack White and his bands (The White Stripes, The Raconteurs, and artists on his Third Man Records label) than for anyone else. In almost every case, I’m listening to the music while I design. Sometimes that isn’t possible. For instance, when Beck recorded a single at Third Man Records in Nashville while I was Head of Design, I hadn’t heard the songs before starting the cover art. I ended up loving the design (I even have it framed in my office), but I know it doesn’t quite reflect the sound. Normally, my guiding principle is that you should be able to judge a record by its cover.

With Spoon (and Britt Daniel’s other band, Divine Fits) I usually hear everything from demos to final masters during the design process. I’ll put the songs on repeat and immerse myself until the visuals feel like they live inside that same sonic world.

So yes, to your first question: when I’m designing for music, I listen to that music, and only that music. Never anything else. For example, I won’t listen to a Scott Walker record while designing a Spoon record.

When I’m designing other things that don't necessarily have music attached to them (e.g., books, logos, packaging) I mostly work in silence, or I’ll put on instrumental music I don’t know well so I don’t get distracted by words and stories. Michael Nyman's music is a good example of the sort of thing I can listen to while working.

As for the more abstract part of your question, designing rarely feels like making music to me, since I don’t play an instrument. But it does give me a kind of high. There is rhythm, movement, and even silence in a visual composition, much like there is in a musical one. But just as with running a record label, the work is never only about the highs. There are also the tools, the templates, the math, and the logistics that go with it.

You're also a magician! From childhood, though you still perform on occasion. Does graphic design feel like a magic trick? (Because it seems like one to me).

MJ: My ideal is that every design carries some element of magic or wonder. A wink. A smile. A laugh. A discovery. The act of designing itself doesn’t feel like performing magic to me, though in a sense I am making things appear out of nothing. What matters most to me is that the finished piece has a touch of the unexpected, something that feels a little magical.

In Watching the Detective there’s a hidden reveal on the back cover and inside flap. The sleeve for 1095 Short Sentences is a bit of a visual puzzle that may not make sense at first, but once it does, there’s that spark of recognition and joy.

Speaking of your old record label, Le Grand Magistery, you're no stranger to the world of DIY – the ethos and the hustle, the drive to put things you believe in out into existence, and balancing it all with other work. I'd love to get your perspective on that. To me, it seems even more important, these days, to create these kind of alternative, very human-centered ecosystems.

MJ: I learned DIY from the ground up running Le Grand Magistery. It taught me the ethos and the hustle: you (and your friends and/or family) imagine the work, make the work, sell the work, ship the work, and somehow balance it with everything else on your plate.

As the saying goes, there are no small parts, only small actors. Side hustles and small projects can matter just as much as the big ones—sometimes even more. I always try to put everything into everything. It’s hard for me to do anything halfway, even when I probably should. For example, the last Jack White poster I designed (for his show in Detroit) began with me designing just three buttons, but by the end I had designed more than 130. Nobody asked me to do that, but I felt it would make the project more impactful:

In the online world, people celebrate launching with an MVP as in “minimum viable product.” I prefer to think of MVP as “most valuable product.” In design, marketing, and music you often only get one chance to make a lasting impression. Ad campaigns, book covers, albums, and other cultural artifacts are judged at launch. You rarely get the time or budget to fix what you wish you had done differently, and by then it’s usually too late anyway. That makes the first release crucial, and it pushes me to treat every project, no matter the size, with the same care.

I do appreciate the possibilities of new tools, including AI, but humans are where it’s at. The human-centered ecosystems that small, independent projects create feel more meaningful and resilient than generic scale-at-all-cost platforms. Those connections are why I keep doing DIY work. However, I also love working within large organizations, where skilled collaborators of every stripe pull together toward a shared goal. But in the end no matter the size of the team, like Soylent Green, it’s people.

And tell me (because I'm both curious and self-centered): How did you come up with the concept for the cover of Watching the Detective? Is the process different when you're working on a book cover?

MJ: It was important to me that Watching the Detective, the third release on B-Side Editions, felt like part of the family. It needed its own identity, but to still fit within the series. As with everything I design, I try not to “decorate” for decoration’s sake but to design in service of the narrative. The cover should feel like the book, or at least draw directly from it.

I don’t believe I have a personal style that runs across my body of work. My job as a designer is to visualize the style of the world you (as the author) have created. That’s no different from what I do with music. The cover has to live inside the world that it encases.

You had mentioned Peter Falk’s raincoat as something possibly worth reflecting in the design. While looking at photos of Falk as Columbo, the idea came to me of forming his tie out of the book’s title text. From there I hand-drew (with digital tools) each letter in the title and in your name, and built the look and feel of his wardrobe with just a few simple shapes.

For the spine and other elements (the back cover and the inside flaps) I was thinking about how Columbo once solved a case by studying a typewriter ribbon. So all of the text is written in a typewriter font. It just made sense. If someone walked into Columbo’s office and asked, “Why is all the text typed out with a typewriter?” he’d know the answer instantly, without the need for investigation.

Oh, and one more thing…

This isn’t really about design, but long before I moved to Chicago I was hooked on a song about the city by Cath Carroll. It’s called True Crime Motel, which sounds like the kind of place Columbo might wander into. :)

THANK YOU, MATTHEW! (I’m using all caps, as if this were a text from my dad, because that also has to do with the new book).

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Is there anything more evocative a than a wall of lockers at a high school? Probably, yes, but it was the orange and blue lockers in the halls of the local public high school that triggered my latest and most reverberative Proustian madeleine and tea moment. Back-to-school night for parents and guardians, last week, was an exercise in the cascading disorientation of time and memory. You haven’t moved and yet you’re instantly transported to adolescence – orange and blue were the colors at my own alma mater. (Though I did actually move; it was also an exercise in the literal sense, too – following my kid’s schedule had me climbing four flights of stairs and hustling down a long corridor to make it to the next classroom before the bell and I will admit it left me winded).

It wasn’t only that, though. It wasn’t only the madeleine effect, the unlocking of the past, it was also what Proust so hauntingly captures in the final volume of In Search of Lost Time. When Marcel attends a party, in Finding Time Again, with people he hasn’t seen in years, some of the people he’s spent pages and pages writing about, and it’s as if they’re all wearing disguises at a masked ball. Dressed up in something like age-costumes, “everybody seemed to have put on makeup” – dying their hair white, contouring their faces with furrows. He can’t reconcile the people now in front of him with the young people he once knew.

He then encounters his old friend Bloch:

For me, who had known him on the threshold of his life and always pictured him thus, he was my school-friend, an adolescent whose youth I measured by that which, thinking myself to have carried on at the age I was then, I unconsciously attributed to myself. I heard somebody say that he certainly looked his age, and was astonished to notice on his face some of the signs generally thought to be more characteristic of men who are old. Then I understood that this was because he really was old, and that it is out of adolescents who last a sufficient number of years that life makes old men.

Walking the halls of the high school, suddenly everyone seemed so shockingly… old. Shocking because I guess it meant that I was old, too. (Most of us were likely somewhere between our very late 30s and late 50s.) It definitely had to do with the context of being in a high school, where you might imagine all of these people as teenagers. As having been teenagers. Even though I hadn’t actually known any of these people as teenagers. It reminded me, too, of a recent night out, dining at the bar of a Fulton Market restaurant, near two aging finance bros who were mostly talking shit about other aging finance bros they worked with. Somehow it was impossible not to imagine them as little boys. I don’t mean this to sound condescending (or maybe I do, a little bit). But it was more like genuinely wondering: How did you get here? How did you get from that to this? How does that happen?

The night I went back to school, a reunited Oasis took the stage in Chicago. The following day, I’d see friends post about going to the show on a beautiful evening at Soldier Field, the ecstatic experience of it, the emotional release and communion – a secular event that demands the vocabulary of religion. Hearing a song like “Live Forever,” written by a twentysomething Noel, performed some thirty years later and sounding great – to a massive audience, many of whom have lived with the song for decades – conjures something other than nostalgia. Is there a Greek (or maybe German) word for being-in-time-over-the-course-of-time? Now my Instagram algorithm is awash with the Gallaghers (the time Noel met Seinfeld, Noel’s daughter Anais on the BBC, talking about going to twelve European shows and being exhausted and not knowing where her dad and uncle get the energy, Liam fucking loving his tambourine) and I find myself carried along with it, despite the fact that in the Brit Pop battle between Oasis and Blur, I sided with… Pulp? Or maybe Elastica. Really though, at the time, my shoegazing heart belonged to Slowdive.

There’s a certain sadness in here, there has to be – it’s what creates the poignancy. Saudade, for sure. But there’s happiness, too. The immediacy and satisfaction and sheer presence of people doing the thing. Of still doing the thing. Pulp has also been touring and sounding great. (A friend recently compared Jarvis Cocker to a fine wine, as in “aging like a”). And I’ve loved the late Slowdive albums.

Anyway… I made an olive oil cake with blueberries from the farmers market (see previous post).

The text that accompanied the recipe was kind of over the top (rapturous and orgasmic about produce) but nevertheless convincing. It was delicious and a perfect way to hold onto the season before it goes.

I then immediately started re-reading it and I’m now back in book 4, Sodom and Gomorrah. My first go-around, there was something of a push, I think, simply to get through it. (You can do this! Keep going!) Reading it again, I find I’m slowing down and actually enjoying it even more. And realizing, in some instances, that certain moments of tedium now feel revelatory.

This second time around, I landed on this sentence: I had deplored the canicular weather during which my grandmother had died …

I don’t know why I didn’t look up “canicular” initially, but this time I went straight to the dictionary. “Of or relating to the dog days.”

I had always taken this idiom somewhat literally, envisioning a panting dog on a sweltering August day. A day for a sweaty, botched bank robbery like the one in August 1972, depicted in Dog Day Afternoon. But I love knowing about the dog star association. How ancient and astronomical it feels. Today happens to be a lovely, fresh 72 degrees but I’m sure it’ll get “canicular” again around here before September’s end.

Over the years, I’ve grown more attuned to the cyclical nature of the seasons. It could have to do with living around Chicago, where people come alive in the summer and tend to hibernate in the winter (“cozy season” – the time of year when we’ll renew our lapsed BritBox subscription). Or it could have to do with having a garden now and cultivating it, knowing when things will bloom, when to tend to them. It could also be a function of growing older. In my late twenties, when I lived in Brooklyn, there was a community garden down the block and every year I swore I was going to get a plot and then I just … didn’t. Maybe it felt like I had better things to do? Or if not “better,” simply “other” things. I was in New York City, after all. Joining in also seemed like an extension of the performative, theatrical aspect of farmers markets – how excited people got over vegetables; I wanted to be one of those people, tried (not very hard) to be one of those people, and then resented that I wasn’t. (I do enjoy a farmers market now, in theory and practice. The fact that my local one has a first-rate donut stall helps).

Anyway, In Search of Lost Time is always there in the background now, but it gets mixed in with other stuff. Currently, that’s ’s new story collection! An Oral History of Atlantis. An Echo and the Bunnymen ref in the second story – I’m in!

x,

Deb

I’ve been working on a new book and wanted to share some info. It’s called Watching the Detective and it has to do with everyone’s favorite show, Columbo.

The situation: A woman in Chicago dives deep into a bottomless well of streaming options and finds herself methodically screening old episodes of Columbo. Soon Peter Falk becomes a constant presence, a shadow of sorts, turning up everywhere in his famous raincoat, scratching his eyebrows and apologizing for his cigar. Soon dusky blue sedans, landline phones, wall-to-wall carpet, and the Los Angeles of the previous century create a revealing alternate context for her life in this one. Mixing memoir and cultural criticism, Watching the Detective offers a close reading of the classic television series through a personal lens. From beginning to end, this book is an investigation, seeking to understand the comforts to be found not in mere nostalgia, but in exploring new connections, finding new ways of seeing. Reckoning with the vagaries of memory, the passage of time, and the sometimes mysterious bond between fathers and daughters, Watching the Detective – like the series itself – is a bit of a brain teaser. Both highly subjective and utterly universal, at turns slyly funny and unexpectedly moving, it's also completely unforgettable. Like the lieutenant himself, once this book has got you, it never quite lets go.

It’ll be out from B-Side Editions later this year.

In the meantime, can I share some incredible blurbs it’s received?

"Like Nicholson Baker's U&I or Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage, Shapiro has written a tender, funny, and supersmart memoir masquerading as a treatise on an artist—in this case, the fantastically avuncular Peter Falk. Shapiro's deeply informed yet enjoyably roving approach mirrors that of the glass-eyed, perpetually raincoated gumshoe. She shows how our pop-culture obsessions, far from frivolous, track onto our actual lives, providing clues and maps to memory and desire... Just one more thing: I loved it!"

—Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams

"A spellbinding dive into the mysterious and enduring pull of Columbo, Watching the Detective turns the tables and investigates the man himself. Rewatching every episode, piecing together clues, Deborah Shapiro explores the now-lost world of 1970’s L.A., lets us see the props, the paint on the cars (and yes, the wardrobe), all to summon the ghosts of a shared past that, under her gaze, almost acquires the texture of myth. The book is a moving meditation on the haunting power of moving images. Part memoir, part time capsule, it defies categorization in the best possible way."

—Camille Bordas, author of The Material

"Watching the Detective takes one of the modest comforts of 20th Century life – Peter Falk's irresistibly tender television gumshoe – and uses it as a prism through which to strain the nightmares of the 21st. The result is a book that seems, somehow, fathomless, glowing with insight and uncanny intelligence. Like Columbo itself, I wished simply that it might never end."

– Matthew Specktor, author of The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood

I’ll post updates as they unfold, but I’ll leave you with some books that went into the research:

And this legendary photo:

I mean, c’mon.

x

Deborah