"The bonds between ourselves and another person exist only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and not withstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.... [The] memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment...."
-- Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
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Story is memory. Whether it's a true story you're after or a made up story, every story is a carefully selected collection of images pulled from somewhere in our conscious and subconscious minds; every story is a meticulously controlled fabric knitted from either first-hand memory, or second-hand memory, or an objective memory (gathered from interview and research), or a hybrid fictionalized memory, balancing the delicate territory between real and make-believe until the line between the two grows clear enough for us to see that there is no such thing as an entirely true story, nor is there anything entirely a product created from imagination.
Memory doesn't work like that. Memory won't work like that. Memory won't leave us alone. And memory has more than just a passing interest in what we choose to do with it.
A true story is not true in the sense that most of us think of the word "true." And a make-believe story is not make-believe in the way most of us learn that idea in childhood. A story is never all true, and a story is never all untrue.
It can be both. It is often neither. It will always be all of the above.
None of this is news. For as long as writing has existed it's been pretty straightforwardly understood that writing--either fiction or nonfiction--is based upon truth. Writers write what they know, after all, as the rule goes. And if a writer doesn't know, then he/she finds out. And what is gleaned from those who do know combines, then, with the memories of the writer to form the story--all of which will at some point, hopefully, connect with the selective memories of the reader. And from this there will be Truth uncovered and distilled.
All of this occurred to me as I was looking over a list of the various books I've read during the past twelve months. When filtering through them with the idea of selecting some of my favorites, I noticed some random classifications or relationships among my "best reads" of 2022:
- 1 collection of short stories
- 1 collection of poetry
- 1 work translated into the English language
- 1 collection of letters/correspondence
- 1 work by a renowned humorist/essayist
- 2 works written by stand-up comedians/actors
- 2 works (one fiction and the other nonfiction) either by or about musicians
- 2 works of postmodernist metafiction
- 2 "comeback" novels--after 16 years of unpublished silence--from one of the great living novelists
- 2 novels whose plots hinge crucially on the world of higher mathematics
- 2 nonfiction oral histories
- 2 works (written independently and both nonfiction) by a husband and his wife
- 8 novels
- 10 works of nonfiction
If it's true that all story is memory, and if Marcel Proust is correct when he suggests that man is a helpless solipsist, viewing all of life and our interactions with others only through the lens of how it affects us, then memory is a lie that we tell ourselves. It is our version of events to satisfy us, to satiate us, to seduce us into believing that either our memories are better than they ever were or that we are better people than we actually are. Either way, we are drunk, dazed, "duped," as he puts it. This is our Truth; and though we may dream of escaping the Truth through our concocted memories, escape is finally impossible.
Memory is our regret, Proust says. Memory is our self-imposed exile. Memory is our fate.
[Aside: It would take the great French author a multi-volumed masterpiece detailing one madeleine cake dipped in tea, spread out over the length of seven long novels (all totaling nearly 1.5 million words), to say what contemporary American singer/songwriter-turned-novelist Josh Ritter sums up in the span of two short, poetic paragraphs from his recent novel The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All (look for it in my list below):
"I know how memory works. I know what happens to it. Some people pine for the past so bad that if you give them even a glimpse of an ear they'll grab hold of it and hang on, telling you stories about the past as if the present were drowning them.... Memory has a way of growing things, of improving them. The hardships get harder, the good times get better and the whole damn arc of a life takes on a mystic glow that only memory can give it.... I will say this because there are some things that defy memory's special magic. There are the things that get stuck in our heads that for some goddamn reason don't improve or grow out of all proportion. Nothing sticks to these memories, nothing accrues to them. Maybe the first time you saw your lover's face is one. Maybe the night you caught the winning touchdown is another, or the cold afternoon you buried your father. You can't figure out just why, but they remain crystal clear when everything else in life is clouding over, turning to long shadows and receding into the mist of fucking unreality and tall tale. I know how memory works. I know how wily it is." (49-50)]
** The following books are ordered alphabetically by the authors' last names.
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Musical Tables: Poems (2022) -- Billy Collins
I've said before that I would read anything Billy Collins sees fit to publish--even his grocery list, if it comes to that. And I suppose his latest book of poems puts my words to the test. I wasn't sure I would enjoy this new collection of poetry, seeing as how the poems in it are all, in his own terminology, "short poems."
But I gave the new book a try, of course, because...well, it's Billy Collins. And what do you know?
(Why was I doubtful?....)
In Collins' own words, from the Afterword, he explains it better than I can:
"Small poems are drastic examples of poetry's way of squeezing large content into tight spaces.... Its length, or lack of it, is its only formal requirement.... The small poem is a flash, a gesture, a gambit without the game that follows. There's no room for landscape here, or easeful reflection, but there is the opportunity for humor and poignancy." (139-40)
As an art form, the short story holds a unique and distinctly important place in American literature.
Depending on whichever critic or reader you ask, it could be possible that no writer has yet, still, penned the supposedly fabled "Great American Novel." But our canon is replete with one finely crafted, impeccable, perfect short story after the next. And yet the short story--despite its role in the history of writing--is a dying art form. It perhaps doesn't hold the status it used to. Still, it can be a delight to pick up a book of stories and be carried away to that special place where great writing takes you.
This collection of short stories from Ford appeared at the height of his powers in the mid-1980s and early-1990s--falling between his heralded novel, The Sportswriter (1986) and his Pulitzer Prize-winner, Independence Day (1995).
There is not one false, weak, disingenuous moment in this great little book of stories. Taken as a whole, it is a contemporary masterpiece.
With only his second novel, 2001's The Corrections (cited already by some critics as one of the great novels of the 21st century), Jonathan Franzen exploded the zeitgeist of the contemporary literary scene. And of course it would have been easy for him to stop there with his career and to rest on such well-earned laurels.
Undoubtedly, many readers did stop there with Franzen. But if they did, they have missed one of America's great, living "Gen X" authors, consistently feeling for--and finding--the pulse of this country and its culture. This, his sixth novel, is the first volume of what Franzen plans as a trilogy (tentatively titled A Key to All Mythologies), in which, in his own words, he hopes "to span three generations and trace the inner life of our culture through the present day".
In this first volume of the trilogy, we meet the typically Franzenesque dysfunctional family, the Hildebrandts, in 1970's suburban Chicago.
And I can't wait to see where he goes next with his twisted tale.
Reportedly, Rolling Stone Magazine founder-and-publisher Jann Wenner is not a fan of Joe Hagan's 2017 fully licensed, in-depth, tell-all biography--so much so that Wenner saw fit just this past year to publish his own autobiography, Like a Rolling Stone: A Memoir. (To set his own story straight, I guess...as straight as his story can be set.)
It is no surprise that Wenner was ultimately upset with Hagan's book. The portrait painted of Wenner here is--on the whole, I must confess--that of a bloated, belligerent, bullying, coke-fueled, sexually-fluid, narcissistic man-child...who also happens (it is equally fair to say) to have been a genius in the world of publishing and pop-culture.
In his own way, Wenner set about to change the world. And so he did just that.
Love him or hate him, Jann Wenner's story is a distinctively American one. And despite his subject's after-the-fact objections, Hagan tells it well.
In 1949, New York City author Helene Hanff was searching for British classics and hard-to-find titles in English literature when she first reached out to Marks & Co. Antiquarian Booksellers, at the eponymous address, in London, England.
From her first correspondence--an overseas letter in the mail--she was introduced to Frank Doel, the store's quiet, unassuming, and brilliant book-buyer and dealer. Proving himself more than apt he wrote Hanff back, promising to help her. And so the two's long-distance letter-writing friendship was born.
While their relationship began as strictly business--and would remain so for the next 20 years, completely platonic and virtuous--their correspondence continued in a delightfully gentle, lovely, charming way. They got to know one another as bibliophiles, certainly, but also as complex people leading complicated lives. They would remain long-distance friends and "pen-pals" (a concept alien in today's world) until Doel's sad, untimely death in 1968.
I needed to read this book in 2022--a short, inspired, beautiful reminder that people are basically kind and good. How refreshing.
In regards to new novels by Stephen King (still churned out at least once per year--an admittedly amazing output, by any measure) I feel somewhat like weakened, forlorn, haunted Michael Corleone in The Godfather: Part III: "Just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in!"
Whenever I say to myself I'm done with him, another year goes by, and a new Stephen King novel appears. And so I stubbornly read it, beginning it--each time--with the hope of seeing glimpses of the old King in fine form. Does that happen here this time? Yes, in large amounts throughout the story.
And what of the story this time? What is the plot?
Are you kidding? Does it matter? Look at the book's cover: His name looms large over the title. You are reading, after all, Stephen King. The plot, characters, conflicts, resolutions are all secondary. Almost interchangeable at this point
Is it still fun, though? Is this book worth it? Yes. I liked it. Is it great? No. But it's damned entertaining. How could it be better? Well...we'll have to wait 'til next year.
If you are a reader and a writer, it is inevitable, I suppose, to form a list of other writers you enjoy reading, other voices you enjoy "hearing" on the page, other styles, other ways of doing this writing thing.
One of those writers for me is Chuck Klosterman.
Put simply: I wish I could do what he does.
I've read everything I can get my hands on of Klosterman's. I have taught some of his essays in my college classes over the years. He is so good. He is incredibly good, in fact, at doing his "Chuck Klosterman" thing, which is on full display here. (It's fair to say that I wish I thought and wrote like him, in fact.)
From politics, to music, to sports, to movies, to popular culture, to the news headlines of the 1990s, Klosterman dissects the eponymous decade like no one could. (And, let's be honest, it is, ironically, a decade known for its embrace of irony that would give a book like this a tossed-off shrug, and a "Whatever" eye-roll, and a sarcastic shrug. As if to say, "What's the big deal? Get over yourself.")
Which, after all, is the point, goddammit. And which makes this book as perfect as it is.
In 1988 I saw Philip Kaufman's wonderful film adaptation of famed Czech writer/dissident Milan Kundera's 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. And immediately after seeing the movie four things happened in succession: 1.) I became convinced that Kaufman's movie is one of my favorite films of all time; 2.) I became convinced that Juliette Binoche is not only one of the most luminous, graceful, beautiful creatures on our planet, she also happens to be one of our greatest actors; 3.) I became convinced that Daniel Day-Lewis is one of our greatest actors, as well; and 4.) I searched out the 1984 source-novel of Kundera's--having never even heard of him before or never having read a word of his--and I read it, and I quickly became convinced he is one of our greatest writers of the 20th century.
(34 years later, by the way, I still stand by those four convictions.)
And yet I'd never read Immortality, published only two years after I first became introduced to Kundera's work. I remember the book when it first came out. I bought it, brand new, hardback, and I put it on my bookshelf....where it has sat, for some inexplicable reason. So this past summer I decided to dust it off and re-enter the magical, ephemeral, tragic, existentially dense yet poetically light-as-a-feather prose of one of the world's great masters of the craft.
It was like revisiting an old friend. I still love Kundera's writing. And I love this book.
If all one knows of contemporary American filmmaker Richard Linklater is his 1993 breakout hit, Dazed and Confused, which follows the graduating class of 1976 on the last day of school in Austin, Texas, that would probably be okay. But then you would be missing out on Linklater's amazing catalog of filmwork--a catalog of movies ranging from his indie-defining debut three years earlier, Slacker (1990), filmed on a 16 mm Arriflex camera with a budget of only $23,000, to his "Before" Trilogy (1995-2013), starring Ethan Hawke and Julia Delpy, to his ambitious, 12-years-in-the-making intimate epic Boyhood (2014), etc.
Linklater is a chameleon of a filmmaker; he is comfortable in various genres, exploring different types of films, and expanding his already expansive oeuvre. As a result, then, he is often misunderstood. He has--from the beginning--been a film artist concerned with profound things: the notion of time, the passage of time, and our perception--unfixed and changing--of our passing through time, as well as our memories of it.
Melissa Maerz (the wife of Chuck Klosterman, by the way, for trivia's sake) is exploring young Linklater, immediately following his impressive/confounding breakout indie debut and suddenly feeling pressure from a studio to now make something more accessible, more comfortable for more people in theater seats, something more broadly popular. A portrait of the artist as a young man, indeed, Maerz traces Linklater's attempts to "make a hit" while still staying true to his artistic ideals. It's a fun read.
Cormac McCarthy has always been a bit of an outlier in the stratified air of those living writers shortlisted as "the greats." His writing has always been a bit of an acquired taste, in a way. (And I would imagine he does not care.)
From Blood Meridian (1985)--a novel mystifying and under-the-radar at the time of its publication but which has grown in estimation with many critics now embracing it as one of the greatest American novels of the 20th century--to his National Book Award-winning All the Pretty Horses (1992), to No Country For Old Men (2005), made into the Oscar-winning Best Picture by brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, and to his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road (2006), regarded by many as his career's dark, apocalyptic magnum opus.
And then...nothing, for the past 16 years. Until 2022, to be more specific, and the sudden surprise appearance of not one but two new novels (or more fittingly a single novel--sort of--published in two parts).
The first part--The Passenger--traces the plight of Bobby Western and, in short interstitial chapters, his younger sister Alicia. The two are the troubled, grown children of their father, a contributing scientist/engineer on the American team that developed the atomic bomb. Bobby is a salvage diver investigating an airplane crash as the novel opens, while his sister Alicia (a math prodigy from an early age struggling now with schizophrenia and haunting hallucinations) is visited by deformed, nightmarish personages who appear to her and converse with her in the days, weeks, and months before her eventual suicide.
This is a thoughtful and tricky novel. To be honest, there is much to think about within its pages, and I'm still thinking about it. I don't know that I can fully explain all of the novel yet, let alone understand all of it yet. (Call it a "work in progress.") But this is a thought-provoking and brilliant late-career surprise by a master.....
....followed a month later, of course, by the equally surprising publication of Stella Maris, the "sister novel" (pun intended, I guess) of The Passenger.
This short novella focuses solely on Alicia Western, told in true McCarthyesque style from the supposed transcriptions of Alicia's therapy sessions at a private psychiatric clinic in Wisconsin. It is 1972. She is a troubled young woman, struggling with her past as an astonishing math prodigy--a young genius, to put a fine point on it--her deteriorating mental state, her conflicted feelings for her father and his life's work, and her guilt-ridden feelings for the troubling relationship (to put a fine point on it) with her beloved brother Bobby.
This book is loaded end-to-end with dense discussions between Alicia and her therapist as they probe her haunted life and turn, often, to talk about quantum physics and top-shelf mathematics (well beyond my reach, to be honest).
This book is slim, but what it lacks in page-count it more than makes up for with its deep philosophical discourse, and its fast-paced turns-of-phrase, and its quick-witted wordplay, and its forensic autopsy into Alicia's tragic young life and her tortured soul. It is a sad book, haunted and haunting.
Despite the "tender" in the book's title, this is a tough book, a nonfiction bildungsroman tracing young John Joseph Moehringer (shortened to J.R. by his family) and his growth along his own "road of trials" into the world of men and learning to navigate the cultural minefield of masculinity and what it really means to be a man.
The precocious son of a single mother, young J.R. soon finds himself spending his days in Manhassett, New York, whiling away his time at his uncle's local bar. He befriends all the bar's regulars--grown men with distended bellies and bellowing voices, telling jokes, reveling in one another's company, arguing, bickering, challenging one other, forgiving one another, helping one another, giving of themselves to one another, and all the while shaping young J.R.'s consciousness and awareness of not only what a man is but also what a man should be.
All of this is charming and reads like a dream. But Moehringer's early life-lessons are put to the test as he grows up, goes off to college, falls in love, has his heart broken, and finds his life's passion in the world of journalism and the lure of the written word, struggling with his first jobs as a cub newspaper reporter, and growing into his own type of man first laid out for him in those days of his youth at his uncle's bar.
This is a lovely and loving tribute to family, friendship, and faith in one's self. It's a wonderful read.
Bob Odenkirk's memoir is slim, tightly written, honest, humble, snarky, funny (as you would expect), and joyous. He details his beginnings as a stand-up comedian, his early days cutting his teeth as a staff writer on such big shows as The Ben Stiller Show, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, and Saturday Night Live (the latter a gig most comedy writers would kill for but one which Odenkirk generally despised). He doubled as a comic actor during these days, as well, making the occasional appearance on Garry Shandling's great The Larry Sanders Show during its run in the 1990s.
It was around this time he and fellow comedian-and-muse David Cross joined forces to form HBO's underground cult-favorite sketch show Mr. Show with Bob and David (1995-98). Odenkirk would, of course, go on to land the plum role of his career when showrunners Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould offered him the opportunity to play smarmy/loveable criminal lawyer Saul Goodman on Breaking Bad. This would pay off even bigger when in 2015 Gilligan and Gould created a spin-off prequel of the character, Better Call Saul, featuring Odenkirk in the titular role, of course.
If you are a fan of the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul universe, then you already know all of this, and if you're not a fan, then it probably doesn't matter. Suffice to say, though, Odenkirk comes across in his book as a genuinely affable, likeable sort of guy (albeit with the occasional tough, homegrown, Chicago-style prickliness to his nature maybe). He is someone who has not forgotten his Midwest roots. He is someone who is lucky, and talented, and humble enough and smart enough to be able, still, to recognize the difference between those two things.
This is the first book of Ruth Ozeki's I've read, and it won't be the last. She first came to my attention, I must admit, with her 2021 novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness. Before diving into her newer writing, though, I chose to first read this earlier novel.
Consisting of two seemingly disparate narratives (that of course begin to mirror one another and play off one another in a hinted multiverse/metafictional sort of way) there is the novelist Ruth Ozeki living with her husband in British Columbia, c.a. 2011, who discovers a book washed ashore on the beach outside their house. The book turns out to be the diary of a young teenage girl, Nao Yasutani--a Japanese-American transplant from California to Tokyo, where her father moved her family in a return back to the homeland, where he sinks into a crippling depression, leaving Nao to embrace her memories, her imagination, and her will to survive.
Assuming the diary is an artifact of the destructive 2011 tsunami which wiped out much of coastal Japan, the novel's Ruth Ozeki--a writer herself--sets off on a personal interior-journey of her own, researching the girl's story as she reads it, and reflecting on her own life, her own identity as an Asian immigrant herself, a transplanted writer--like Nao--searching for the sense of her own life's story, for the sense of her own Asian-ness, for her own sense of who she is.
Where does one begin to talk about a novel by Thomas Pynchon? (I've tried this before when writing an essay about my experience reading the infamous Gravity's Rainbow, and it turned out to be a monumental undertaking--both the reading of the novel and the writing about the reading of it.)
Pynchon is--I think it's fair to say--possibly one of those writers who people say they've read, or they say they have his book(s) on their bookshelves, or they say they fully intend to one day get to reading him, but the number of people who actually read his book(s) is woefully small. In fact it may even be fair to say that he--like James Joyce, like Marcel Proust (see above), et al.--is one of the most unread "great" authors that we've ever had.
It's not hard to understand why. Pynchon's books are an undeniably difficult and challenging read. It's a workout. But, like the best of workouts, ultimately worth the effort.
This is his debut novel, and I find that fact extraordinary. The level of sheer confidence he demonstrates here--confidence in himself as a young writer, as a storyteller, as a player with words and ideas, as a sculptor, as a weaver weaving all the various strands of characters and plots and subplots and images and themes into a singular thing--is impressive, to say the least. V. is an amazing accomplishment by a young genius-author just getting started.
American singer/songwriter Josh Ritter is also a novelist (see, as well, his 2011 debut novel Bright's Passage). As a songwriter, his narrative/poetic gifts have earned him accolades from critics and audiences over the years. Possibly one of my favorite examples is from his 2006 album The Animal Years and its mesmerizing song, "Girl in the War." https://youtu.be/kqLssKusGzM
Ritter as a novelist--and with this his sophomore effort--is equally impressive. In the spirit of full disclosure, though, I suppose I should admit that at first, through the beginning of this book, I wasn't so sure how I felt about it. But gradually, through Ritter's firm vision and astute control of voice--that of 99-year-old Weldon Applegate recounting his rough-and-tumble life as a lumberjack in the remote mountain landscape of Cordella, Idaho--I began to fall into the book's rhythms, its patterns, its manners, its vulgarity, its roughness, its toughness, its beauty, its poetry.
If you're having a bad day, I suggest you pick up a book by David Sedaris, turn to any of his essays about the angst-driven absurdities of contemporary life, and begin reading. Any combination of the following three things (or all of them) will more than likely happen: 1.) You will find yourself smiling, nodding your head, and laughing out loud; 2.) You will turn the page and find yourself still smiling, nodding, and laughing; 3.) You will finish reading the book and begin looking for more by Mr. Sedaris.
As time goes on, it becomes blissfully apparent that David Sedaris is the preeminent humorous voice for our existentially absurd 21st-century existence. His observations (though obviously tinted through the lens of his millionaire/humorist/famous-writer/celebrity sort of life) are always grounded in reality. Yes, his life is obviously different from mine in too many ways to count. And yet the things that happen to him, his reactions to those things, the thoughts that occur to him in the wake of those things that happen are all relatable, and insightful, and sometimes moving, and almost always ridiculously funny.
This, his latest book of essays detailing his life during the COVID-19 pandemic (among other things), does not disappoint.
Though I read a lot, I have to confess that I find most praise heaped upon a book in the midst of garnering its "15 minutes of fame" to be just another case of unjustified overhype. If I'm told that a book will scare me, I doubt it; I can only recall one (maybe two) instances of actually being frightened by an author's prose--the example that comes to mind most clearly is Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.
Similarly, when I'm told that a book is funny or that I will "laugh out loud" (you know...literally LOL), I have my doubts. (The only instances I can recall of laughing out loud while reading a book was--at many points--deep into Bill Watterson's beloved Calvin and Hobbes collections.)
Anyway...all of that is to say that this book by Jerry Seinfeld--a collection of his stand-up bits and routines from his early days up to the present--as well as Sedaris' latest book (see directly above), made me laugh out loud on more than one occasion.
You hear Seinfeld's voice as you read these comedic gems; you hear his inflections, his timing, his signature Seinfeldian delivery, and that is clearly a huge part of his "act." His simple, dry observations of daily life--with all its inherent, insipid stupidities--are so spot-on and insightful. He is obviously a living legend in the world of comedy. And this is a masterful little primer showing how a great comedic mind thinks and how it first works its humor out onto the blank page.
It is probably prudent to address the proverbial "elephant in the room" right from the start: Why would you want to read a "biography" of the band Led Zeppelin?
I can only tell you why I read it: 1.) I am a longtime fan of the band's music (although I know it is not particularly fashionable to admit such a thing nowadays considering the band's legendarily reprehensible and allegedly criminal behavior throughout its history); and 2.) I am a fan of pop-culture historian/journalist/biographer Bob Spitz.
I became familiar with Spitz through his great little 1979 10th-anniversary in-depth history Barefoot in Babylon: The Creation of the Woodstock Music Festival, 1969, as well as his massive The Beatles: The Biography (2005).
I mean, who has the balls to write a "biography" on a band--particularly a constellation-sized band like The Beatles? And then to not even subtitle the book "A Biography" but "The Biography"?
Well...Bob Spitz has the balls, obviously. And so he's done it again. This time the band in question is (arguably, depending on who you ask) of equal constellation-size as his earlier subject. Love them or hate them, though, the Zeppelin inarguably changed the popular music landscape--they helped to usher in the age of "album rock" instead of simply selling singles/hits for the studios; they were instrumental in leading the way for the creation of the "hard rock/heavy metal" movement in pop music; they helped to evolve the rock 'n roll live concert tour and stage performance; and they helped to launch the role of FM radio throughout its heyday-decade of the 1970s.
And, oh yes, there were drugs. And women (sometimes, reportedly, underage girls, to be exact). And there was abundant abhorrent "bad-boy" behavior from a bunch of grown adults who obviously should have known better. And there were more drugs. And there was alcohol. And binge-drinking. And vomitus. And in-fighting. And out-fighting. And dust-ups, and breakups, and patch-ups. And there were more drugs. And there was more drinking. And trashed hotel rooms. And mudsharks...sadly. And good times, and bad times, and stairways to heaven paved with good intentions but destroyed with bad choices.
Yes, but the legends, the myths.... Did it really all happen the way we've heard? Is the band's legend deserving of its music, and vice versa? And finding the answer to an inquiry like that is exactly why someone might want to read this book. I recommend doing so. It's brilliant.
Like the rest of the world, I always felt as if I knew Anthony Bourdain. I mean, I felt like I really knew him. Like we were friends, in fact, and like he was someone I could call or text and hang out with over a beer, and talk to him, and hear that inimitable, nasally, sarcastic voice rant and rave about his favorite travels, his favorite meals, his favorite memories of the days working the line in New York City....
I didn't know Anthony Bourdain, but I felt that I did. ("Ahhh, celebrity," he might say.) He was beloved around the country, around the world. And though we all felt we owned a little piece of him, which gave us the right to feel that we knew him, of course we didn't. No one did. Not really.
Woolever's book is undoubtedly a celebration of the icon--his joyousness, his exuberance, his mythic lust for the perfect meal, the perfect drink, the perfect turn-of-phrase, the perfect wording to perfectly record the perfect moment in life.
But life is not perfect. Life is messy, and perfection is not real. And Woolever's book pulls no punches in taking, at times, a critical look at her subject--the man's imperfections; his inability to really, truly "live in the moment" and to enjoy life; his sadnesses; his disappointments; his mood swings; his regrets; his depression....
Anthony Bourdain was a giant in the world of cooking, and writing, and travel, and television journalism. (Notice I use the word "journalism" instead of "entertainment." This is a fine point raised throughout the book and one I particularly agree with: Bourdain was one of the finest--if not in fact the finest--cultural chroniclers/journalists of our time, even though he sadly never saw himself that way.)
In the end, he was as beloved and as well-known a popular celebrity as we've had. And yet in a crowded room he felt alone, unloved, and unknown. And finally, in the end, his anger, his sadness, his loneliness, his desperation, his despair took control of his carefully controlled life.
A joyous read throughout, it is a loving remembrance of a highly respected and much-celebrated public figure. And by its closing pages it is probably the most crushingly sad thing I've read in quite some time.
Now, this is a book....
