The novelist and essayist Sloane Crosley, whose new collection is “Look Alive Out There,” says that “any woman who has to take an author photo where she looks the just-right amount of appealing is a literary hero.”
An advance copy of “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” by Ottessa Moshfegh; “Sabbath’s Theater,” by Philip Roth (I know); “The Real Thing,” by Tom Stoppard; and “Nest in the Bones,” by Antonio Di Benedetto. I try not to keep too many books on my nightstand or else I go to sleep and wake up feeling inadequate. I don’t need visual aids for this.
I’m not a huge memoir person. However, I do like an unstable mother story — like “Haywire,” by Brooke Hayward, or “The Liars’ Club,” by Mary Karr. I think of “Oh The Glory of It All,” by Sean Wilsey, every time I’m in San Francisco. I wonder what Dede Wilsey is up to, what flavor of soup she’s sending back to the kitchen. “Priestdaddy,” by Patricia Lockwood, and “H Is for Hawk,” by Helen Macdonald, both feature beloved mothers, but I still enjoyed them.
Never once have I thought, “I could really go for some personal essays right now.” Somewhere, in a cold dark room, my publisher is shrieking, reading that sentence. What I mean is the drama of someone’s personal life is not a selling point for me (and yet it’s often paraded as one). I look for an articulate witness, not what they’re witnessing, and I have a pretty short fuse if I feel like I’m in clumsy hands. To read David Rakoff is to be in the best hands. If you’re not moved by his live performance of “The Invisible Made Visible,” it’s because you’re a toaster oven and should stick to what you know. Other Olympians: Nora Ephron, Joan Didion (who is actually quite funny), Meghan Daum, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Geoff Dyer, David Sedaris and Fran Lebowitz (who makes an appearance in “Look Alive Out There” as a “more-famous writer,” which is an understatement). Every few years, people say the form is dead. They get very worked up about this. Not enough essayists are Montaigne (I should hope not, he died of tongue paralysis) or certain perspectives go out of fashion. I just like funny. If it’s funny, it can come from anywhere and do whatever it wants when it gets here.
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