For various reasons, it was just the four of us this year for Thanksgiving. With Owen studying forestry in New Haven and Julia working full time as a dietician and studying for her Master’s, the kids lead busy lives. Having this day together felt like a gift. We all contributed to our Thanksgiving feast. Owen is the cranberry sauce expert. Julia handled the Brussels sprouts and mashed potatoes...
I asked Julia if she had to read any Charles Dickens in high school. Her groan was quite audible: Great Expectations, the coming-of-age story of the orphan Pip, which she called a long and boring slog. Her response jogged my own memory of slogging through Great Expectations and then A Tale of Two Cities for a class and then never reading Dickens again. At one time the most famous and popular...
A writer friend of mine was telling me how much he admired the movie, “The Swimmer,” based on a story by John Cheever. Of course I had to investigate. Cheever was one of those mid-twentieth-century literary lions, and his story “The Swimmer” is his most famous one and was often anthologized (not anymore: twentieth-century white male authors have fallen out of fashion). Before seeing the movie, I...
I was hesitant to see the new Martin Scorsese film, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” because its runtime is almost 3.5 hours. I doubted any movie could hold my interest for that long or that I could stay in my seat for that length of time. But my sister insisted I had to see the film, so I did. I stayed in my seat. And I was interested, from beginning to end. The story, based on the book of the same...
I remember bits of a conversation with my father, who was a devout Catholic, and along with my mother raised all of his five kids in the Catholic religion. I was an adult at the time, living in California, and back in Buffalo for a visit. I’m not sure what led to his question, which was this: “You believe in God, don’t you?” I didn’t. I’m an atheist. But I didn’t come right out and say it. I...
I just read novelist Amy Bloom’s brief memoir, In Love, about her husband, Brian Ameche, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and decided he’d rather take matters into his own hands and his life rather than face the “long goodbye” of dementia. Although it may be easy enough to kill yourself—guns, razor blades, high heights, etc.—such methods are very messy and traumatic for survivors. Brian...
“You’re not too smart, are you? I like that in a man.” So says femme fatale Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner) to inept but cocky lawyer Ned Racine (William Hurt) when they first meet in Lawrence Kasdan’s 1981 directorial debut, the steamy noir film Body Heat. Matty’s pronouncement on Ned’s intelligence sets the stage for what’s to come: she convinces Ned to help her murder her husband so she can...
I have a friend who doesn’t want to read books or watch shows or movies that are sad or involve tragic circumstances. It’s a form of curation: she doesn’t need that negativity in her life, doesn’t want to be exposed to those feelings because it interferes with her happiness. I’m the opposite. I find sad, depressing, painful, tragic stories to be essential to my own quest for well-being. These...
As a writer of books, I believe in the freedom of all writers to write whatever they want, to express whatever ideas are bubbling in their brains. Consequently, I’m against all book bans, which I consider the equivalent of banning free thought. And yet book challenges and bans have become a primary front in the pathetic culture war being waged in our country. What exactly are book challengers...
We went to see Barbie the other night. There’s a reason the movie is breaking all kinds of revenue and attendance records: it’s highly original, visually compelling, and a lot of fun. Margot Robbie (Barbie) and Ryan Gosling (Ken) deliver outstanding performances. And it had me smiling a lot. In some ways, I’ve never seen a movie like it—the way it depicts Barbie’s perfect, plastic fantasy world...
I was late to Succession, the wildly successful HBO Max series that ran for four seasons. I knew eventually I’d get to it after my sister told me, “I couldn’t stop watching, and I hated every minute of it.” After working my way through the 40-episode series, I can see why she said that. Every episode was compulsively watchable, while often leaving me uncomfortable. I consider that a testament to...
Seventy-eight years ago today, the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. A second bomb fell on Nagasaki on August 9. Between the two attacks, hundreds of thousands of people were killed, leading to a quick Japanese surrender in World War II, and forever changing the course of history. Theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” is...
There’s nothing special or particularly inventive about starting with the ending when telling a story. We do it ourselves in the real world all the time. Who among us hasn’t started a story: “Mom, Dad, I’m calling from the police station.” “Okay, son, you better tell us what happened.” And the details leading up to that moment unfold. In the storytelling arts, beginning with the end is an...
Sharks bit three people last week off the beaches of Long Island. The Robert Moses State Park Field Beach was briefly closed on July 4 following a shark sighting. Swimming was banned at several Nantucket beaches earlier this week after great white sharks were spotted in the area. It’s Jaws all over again! Which is why H & I joined a friend to see the original movie when it was playing on the...
I’m not usually one for patting myself on the back, but I know I did one thing right as a parent: fostered a love of reading in both of our kids. It began with countless hours of Harriet and I reading to the kids when they were young, then came the phase of pressing upon them to read this or that book I thought they’d appreciate, and now we’re in what I call the era of reciprocity: now they’re...
