Memoir pile up

At some point this summer, I found myself wildly interested in reading a new memoir by a woman named Susanna Sonnenberg entitled Her Last Death.



I ran over to The Strand and got my hands on the last reviewer's copy! I started recommending it to my sister before I was 20 pages in! And then somewhere in there, I just lost — not interest, really, because hers is an interesting tale regardless, but faith in the narrator's voice and conviction. I felt like she was kind of whining a bit. So I told my sister, eh, don't read it after all, and I'll probably end up selling the book back to The Strand. (I know — harsh.)

But it's weird: after I finished the book, I read an interview on Amazon.com with Sonnenberg which starts:

Amazon.com: You follow a rich family tradition of writing memoirs steeped in eccentricity. Did you feel pressure to follow the familial literary path?

SS: My father, stepmother and grandfather all wrote memoirs. My stepmother has written two, both wonderful. She's taught me a lot about the difference between recounting a life and telling a story. It’s the story that’s important, if you're going to ask a reader to pay attention to it. So you better think really carefully about the way of telling. I never felt pressure to follow, but the anxiety of influence is another matter! I made a point of not looking at my father's beautiful memoir at all while I was writing mine.

This got me interested in her dad's memoir. I looked it up and got it out of the library.



Well, can I just say? Lost Property was my favorite book of the summer and perhaps the year! I've never read anything like it before or since. Sonnenberg the Elder grew up in 19 Gramercy Park, the huge, old mansion that was recently renovated on the corner of Irving Place, which in his time was full of crazy amounts of art, servants, and wealthy weirdness (and as I'm sure it continues to be). He's a highly literate lady killer who travels all over the world and dresses well and gets his dad to pay for everything but accrues debt all over the place anyway — in other words, lots of great contradictions, but also just beautiful, self-aware writing. I keep remembering a line he wrote that goes something like, "It was time for me to face myself. Being two-faced, this was difficult." I kind of get the feeling that if I'd met this guy at a party I'd probably want to smack him, but reading his highly entertaining memoir was great, great fun.

At some point I put it together that Sonnenberg the Elder is married to Dorothy Gallagher, a writer I also love! In fact, I have a quote of hers pinned up somewhere so I see it every day, I like it so much. It's from a New York Times article:

"The series of snags and calamities that Ms. Gallagher has bumped up against throughout her life — the ex-husband who carried brass knuckles, the psychiatrist who seduced her, her current husband's total paralysis — reminded me of an essay she wrote a few years ago for The Times about writing: 'Truly, life is just one damn thing after another. The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story. Not, you may note, to serve her family, or to serve the truth, but to serve the story.'"

So now I'm rereading How I Came Into My Inheritance. It's still excellent.



And both How I Came Into My Inheritance and Strangers in the House have been recently released in a single volume entitled Life Stories, which is pretty cool, if you like two books squished together like that.

But it's just funny, isn't it? I don't mean to dis Susanna's book. I know — believe me, I know — it's not easy writing about your complicated relationship with your coke-sniffing mom and her sex addiction, your resulting sex addiction, and all the shenanigans that took place in tony locations like New York, London, Monte Carlo, Greece, Barbados — oh my. And she even took Gallagher's advice and wrote a good story. It's just, in this case, in my opinion, her dad and her step mom are just like, whoa. In a way, I admire this Susanna person more for the attempt to write something when she's got such crazy good scribes in her life to live up to, than for the end result.

Walk this Way

Now this is a great New York Times article, written by my old friend-in-passing David Rakoff. But I don't understand why it wasn't on the front page of all the New York editions, in a taking-up-the-entire-front-page kind of way. I'm going to post it here, and if you don't hear from me for a while, it's because I'm out on the street handing out xeroxed copies of it, too. Enjoy!

She's super fly, that's why

An image popped in my head last Friday as I was putting together a birthday box for my sister Erica, and I suddenly I knew I had no choice: I had to stop, drop, and roll over to my colored pencils and get to work pronto. Erica was the inspiration, as she is so totally super fly in ways too numerous to mention. (Well, O.K., here are some: She's beautiful. Whip smart. Incredibly insightful. Creative. Fa-Fa-Fa-Fashionable, I tell you. And phew! that's enough for now. The short list will have to suffice.) But another inspiring aspect was the fact that she'd recently bought 3 dresses in 3 different colors and sewed them together in a "I want them all, my way!" flurry of fashion-y chutzpah. So a big part of the image I saw involved the resulting dress. It also involved Pam Grier:



As well as the poster image for the movie Super Fly, which is, check it out, a color pencil drawing. (I knew colored pencils were S.F.)



The final result:



Oh my goodness, look how bad ass my sister is with Leo, her friend the A train, and an aquamarine umbrella we can all imagine might turn into a double-barrel shotgun if necessary. Which reminds me: Oh, how I wanted to draw my big sis with a big, double-barrel shotgun. But alas, that would have been so far out of character as to have been just plain wrong. Even faced with a dangerous criminal, my sister would find a way to get him/her to sit down and talk about his/her need for attention and how never knowing his/her father had perhaps contributed to a life of crime, rather than pistol-whipping him/her Pam style. That's just the non-violent way it is with this woman. And to each her own, right?

HAPPY BURFDAY, MY SISTAH!

Even frogs like to sew

How did the Japanese company that made these know perfect stickers would somehow involve frogs, cats, thread, buttons, pockets, sewing baskets, and a bunny with a bouquet of flowers? It's like a sticker dream come true.



P. got these for me when he went to one of his favorite hangouts recently: Mitsuwa. So I slapped him back by buying him this wincingly cute mug. Will you look at this thing?



It just sits there smiling at you until you turn it upside down and put some coffee in the sucker. There was a panda version, too, but interestingly, the panda lacked the bear's charisma. It's usually the other way around, I think.

And no, don't be thinking there's always such cutey cutey cuteness going on around here. Sometimes we give each other really gross, scary gifts like shrunken, taxidermied lizards, multi-tentacled, half-alive jellyfish, and other things. For serious...kind of. OK, not.