I have a thing about how Los Angeles is portrayed on film and in books. An author who makes me laugh, perhaps because of his dour satiric streak, is Evelyn Waugh. He visited Hollywood in 1947 to discuss a film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, loathed the place, and ended up…
Category: Fiction
INTERVIEWER There’s a passage in one of your books in which you and Auden are on a train, and you’re savagely attacking religion, and he says: “Be careful, my dear, if you carry on like that, one day you’ll have such a conversion.” Do you think of it in those…
I just completed a very big task in terms of the book I wrote, and I thought I’d reward myself, by reading a childhood favorite of mine; a novel I read—enchanted, immersed—compulsively one week during a hot summer vacation many, many years ago. A book written over a period of…
Whereupon, at the tender age of thirteen, I set upon the path of playing nothing but hookers. Ida Lupino Is it any wonder she turned to directing? In an era, I might add, when that was a nearly impossible career choice for a woman. Have times changed? Not much. The…
I’m greeting the New Year with the cold that spans the world right now, so thanks to Mr. Benny and Ms. Crawford we have some comfort food for cold weather. And by “cold weather” I mean something like this: Now, in my house meatloaf is variously known as “oh, that!”…
Something has been troubling me recently, and as the New Year is approaching I decided to clear my mind. Little did I know that when I thinly disguised two (secondary) characters in my first novel that the people the characters were partially based on would be drummed out of the…
NCE upon a time, many years ago—when our grandfathers were little children—there was a doctor; and his name was Dolittle—John Dolittle, M.D. “M.D.” means that he was a proper doctor and knew a whole lot. . He lived in a little town called, Puddleby-on-the-Marsh. All the folks, young and…
There’s another marvelous memoir, from the amazing Diana Vreeland, you might be interested in reading. Her autobiography reads like a novel. This extract resonates with me because of its delicious contradiction: “Truth is a hell of a big point with me. Now I exaggerate—always.” DV Do I? But of course.…