My wife and I have a big anniversary to celebrate this week: Not a wedding anniversary or a meeting anniversary or even the anniversary of the first time one of us got a car stuck in 2 or 3 feet of Green Mountain slop on a dirt road in mud season. (We try to forget […]
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When I need a new career because people have stopped reading novels — and, alas, someday people really will have chosen podcasts over pulp — I am going to become an animal communicator specializing in interspecies telepathic consultations in person or by phone. I am only half-kidding. Last month I saw an ad for an […]
It wasn’t enough that James Frey made up sizable parts of his faux memoir, “A Million Little Fibs and a Few Mighty Big Whoppers.” Now we know that young male novelist JT Leroy is not in reality an HIV-positive former teenage truck-stop prostitute and drug addict who turned his nightmarish childhood and adolescence into searing […]
I have been asked often this week if I see any parallels between the hunting accident at the center of my novel, “Before You Know Kindness,” and the hunting accident involving Dick Cheney and Harry M. Whittington. I don’t. In the novel, the rifle was fired by a 12-year-old girl with no knowledge of firearms […]
I don’t get nearly beaten up often, but I do sometimes. I should note that I have never actually been beaten up, because I am both fast and — when not fast enough — pathetic. Getting nearly beaten up is an occupational hazard when you have written a weekly newspaper column for close to 15 […]
I am sitting at a Starbuck’s on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in early January, tapping away at my laptop computer. The following is actual overheard dialogue between two middle-aged men. One is wearing the sort of New York Giants team jacket that makes perfect sense on an 8-year-old, but looks a little pathetic on guys […]
“Smelly cat, smelly cat What are they feeding you?” — Phoebe Buffay (a.k.a., Lisa Kudrow on “Friends”) The other day my wife noticed that my winter boots smelled a lot like a litter box. This is noteworthy because at the time my wife made this observation, I was in the process of putting the boots […]
First, a disclaimer: I am happy to discuss the degrading experiences that mark my life as a novelist on the road. Book tour, I’ve noted, is a term that may have been coined by Inquisition torturer Torquemada when he was trying to find a slower, more subtle form of torment than either the rack or […]
A lot of people have asked me over the last two weeks what I think of author James Frey’s revelations that he made up sizable parts of what he claimed was his memoir, “A Million Little Pieces.” They’re asking me in part because I’m both a novelist (fiction) and a columnist (nonfiction), and in part […]
If you wonder often why the great civilizations of early Mesopotamia disappeared – And, gosh, who doesn’t? – it’s probably because their bricks smelled like dog poop. My daughter tried to make a mere two bricks for Social Studies last month, and for days our house smelled like a kennel of dogs with diarrhea. It […]
