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[b:Maybe: A Story|114428|Maybe A Story|Lillian Hellman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1293947519l/114428.SY75.jpg|110186] is an explanation of sorts for Hellman's previous memoirs and the factual mistakes in them. In the eighties, [a:Lillian Hellman|66241|Lillian Hellman|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1257464297p2/66241.jpg] and [a:Mary McCarthy|7305|Mary McCarthy|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1254084720p2/7305.jpg] were in a legal dispute over comments McCarthy made during an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show on PBS. I remember seeing the show when it aired and searched for a source of conflict between the two and found that there was nothing substantial. They just didn't like each other.

 But there are memories I have of her that I know to be accurate, although, as I have said before, I do not always know what she was saying or if what she said was sometimes based on her fantasies or the fantasies of others. I am certain, for example, what she said about Alex and the baby in the restaurant and so on.
 And once, when we were both about twenty-five, I guess, we met in Small's in Harlem. I don't know who I was with but I know that she came in and sat at the next table with two men. She was in a beautiful loose dress with narrow shoulder straps that were too loose. She was moving to the music when the straps slipped and the top of her dress fell down. It was a fine sight: the beautiful breasts and the high loose piled fair hair. One of the men with her said, "You arrange things well."

[b:Maybe: A Story|114428|Maybe A Story|Lillian Hellman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1293947519l/114428.SY75.jpg|110186] is an explanation of sorts for Hellman's previous memoirs and the factual mistakes in them. In the eighties, [a:Lillian Hellman|66241|Lillian Hellman|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1257464297p2/66241.jpg] and [a:Mary McCarthy|7305|Mary McCarthy|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1254084720p2/7305.jpg] were in a legal dispute over comments McCarthy made during an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show on PBS. I remember seeing the show when it aired and searched for a source of conflict between the two and found that there was nothing substantial. They just didn't like each other.

 But there are memories I have of her that I know to be accurate, although, as I have said before, I do not always know what she was saying or if what she said was sometimes based on her fantasies or the fantasies of others. I am certain, for example, what she said about Alex and the baby in the restaurant and so on.
 And once, when we were both about twenty-five, I guess, we met in Small's in Harlem. I don't know who I was with but I know that she came in and sat at the next table with two men. She was in a beautiful loose dress with narrow shoulder straps that were too loose. She was moving to the music when the straps slipped and the top of her dress fell down. It was a fine sight: the beautiful breasts and the high loose piled fair hair. One of the men with her said, "You arrange things well."

 I seldom glance at the descriptions this site has of the books I've read or am thinking of reading, but I looked at the one for this book and I was surprised at how inaccurate it is. The core of it is the impending death by cancer of an unnamed old friend of the narrator. Not that other things aren't there, but it's this that everything hangs on.
 If I met Nunez at a social gathering and were at my best in every way, she'd edge away from me in under a minute because she'd find me so uninteresting and dimwitted. It would be no surprise—what else could I expect from someone who's hung out with Susan Sontag and many others?—but I'd be bummed nonetheless. You ever see nodders? At meetings or lectures they bob their heads in agreement like those dunking bird toys as they agree with everything a speaker is saying. I felt like one as I read [b:What Are You Going Through|51152434|What Are You Going Through|Sigrid Nunez|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1585361945l/51152434.SY75.jpg|74855144], though my nodding was internal.
 I know the topic sounds like a downer, and no, it is not told with a heartwarming dose of humor. The book is, however, so good that even I, a man in my sixties with two kinds of cancer and a questionable heart, liked reading it. It's short enough and goes fast enough that reading it again would be a good idea.
 An added bonus is that it has illuminating insights into writing and writers.

 Understood: language would end up falsifying everything, as language always does. Writers know this only too well, they know it better than anyone else, and that is why the good ones sweat and bleed over their sentences, the best ones break themselves into pieces over their sentences, because if there is any truth to be found they believe it will be found there. Those writers who believe that the way they write is more important than whatever they may write about—these are the only writers I want to read anymore, the only ones who can lift me up.

 [b:Maybe: A Story|114428|Maybe A Story|Lillian Hellman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1293947519l/114428.SY75.jpg|110186] is an explanation of sorts for Hellman's previous memoirs and the factual mistakes in them. In the eighties, [a:Lillian Hellman|66241|Lillian Hellman|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1257464297p2/66241.jpg] and [a:Mary McCarthy|7305|Mary McCarthy|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1254084720p2/7305.jpg] were in a legal dispute over comments McCarthy made during an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show on PBS. I remember seeing the show when it aired and searched for a source of conflict between the two and found that there was nothing substantial. They just didn't like each other.

 But there are memories I have of her that I know to be accurate, although, as I have said before, I do not always know what she was saying or if what she said was sometimes based on her fantasies or the fantasies of others. I am certain, for example, what she said about Alex and the baby in the restaurant and so on.
 And once, when we were both about twenty-five, I guess, we met in Small's in Harlem. I don't know who I was with but I know that she came in and sat at the next table with two men. She was in a beautiful loose dress with narrow shoulder straps that were too loose. She was moving to the music when the straps slipped and the top of her dress fell down. It was a fine sight: the beautiful breasts and the high loose piled fair hair. One of the men with her said, "You arrange things well."

 This was the choice for my local library's book group. I'd never heard of the author or the book, so I thought it would be interesting to read it without reading even one sentence of the back cover or inside flap (it's still in hardback as I write this). All I knew about [b:The Postcard|63880836|The Postcard|Anne Berest|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1669656399l/63880836.SX50.jpg|92938792] was its title and the author's name, [a:Anne Berest|4306711|Anne Berest|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1675718237p2/4306711.jpg].
 I am, as I've mentioned here several times, a very slow reader. I also have such a short attention span that I would probably be diagnosed as an adult with ADHD (though I'm too lazy for the hyperactivity part). It's hard for me to focus on anything for an extended period of time.
 But. I soared through this book, which is 475 pages long, in a week.
 It covers history familiar to most. (If it isn't to you due to youth or lack of exposure, it will be after reading it.) I often have trouble reading translated works—the author is French—because I quibble with choices the translator made, but this has been translated almost flawlessly. It won't get in your way, even if you're as bad as I am.
 The most disturbing thing about it is that, although most of it takes place in France in the years before and during World War II, it's timely.
13:40

 When you live in another country and its culture is less diverse than your own, you become aware of trends and fads not dissimilar from those of where you're from but that you were too close to to see. Japan, where I lived for some years decades ago, is known for having crazes over things—usually cute things—that often got international coverage by journalists on the interesting-things-done-elsewhere beat. (When I was there, koalas and "Jesus Christ lizards" had their time.)
 It's the only way I can explain the success of [a:Sayaka Murata|8816506|Sayaka Murata|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1522684114p2/8816506.jpg]'s 2016 novel, [b:Convenience Store Woman|36739755|Convenience Store Woman|Sayaka Murata|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1680105376l/36739755.SX50.jpg|51852264]. It's awful. The translated version is badly written, and I found no new ideas or moments that I haven't seen expressed better elsewhere many times. What I can't explain is why this short novel (I'm a very slow reader, but I read it in under three hours) has over five pages of gushing blurbs in the front. It's like they're trying to brainwash readers into seeing every scene in it as deeply profound, and if you don't get it, you're being culturally bigoted. But guess what: the emperor has no clothes.
 It might been an alright short story, but even then, it wouldn't show you anything you haven't seen by [a:Haruki Murakami|3354|Haruki Murakami|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1615497402p2/3354.jpg].
Excerpt:

 For breakfast I eat convenience store bread, for lunch I eat convenience store rice balls with something from the hot-food cabinet, and after work I'm often so tired I just buy something from the store and take it home for dinner. I drink about half the bottle of water while I'm at work, then put it in my ecobag and take it home with me to finish at night. When I think that my body is entirely made up of food from this store, I feel like I'm as much a part of the store as the magazine racks or the coffee machine.

 My first exposure to [a:Dave Barry|6245|Dave Barry|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1668011283p2/6245.jpg] was reading his syndicated column in The International Herald Tribune in 1988 while I was living in Japan. He was hilarious. I felt a kinship with him in some ways. He went to Haverford College, which is across the street from The Haverford School for Boys, where I went for ten years. After college, Barry worked for a wire service in Philadelphia as what was then called "a rewrite man." I worked for a wire service in Philadelphia too, though not the one he did. 
 That said, [b:Dave Barry Does Japan|725996|Dave Barry Does Japan|Dave Barry|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1399773285l/725996.SY75.jpg|121369], a 1992 book, is a good example of how badly humor ages. It's like watching the Abbott and Costello one-reel films that had people rolling in the aisles in the 1940s. You can see how it would have been funny then, but it isn't now. In fact, a lot of it's irritating, and some of it would have bothered me even if I'd read it when it was published, but that's because having lived in Japan for three years, I found some of his mistakes unacceptable, even though he's open about just visiting for a couple of weeks. 
 Its timing was unfortunate. Barry writes as if Japan was still the economic and cultural (one followed the other) juggernaut that it was in the 1980s, but by the time Does Japan came out, Japan was two years into a recession caused by the asset price bubble's collapse in 1990, a recession so severe it led to what the Japanese call The Lost Decades.  
 Barry talks about journalists he knew, whose knowledge of Japan was far greater than mine, and how helpful they were to him, yet they seemed to have failed him in some crucial ways. A noticeable one is when he writes about his difficulty with the language. He goes on at some length about how hard it was to say things like DOH-moh ah-REE-gah-toh correctly, for example. You'd think one of his experts or his own readings would have mentioned that Japanese is noninflected, so the right way would be closer to: Doumo arigatou. 
 I could go on, but I won't. I doubt many will bother reading this book these days, unless they're interested in how Japan has been seen by the West in the past. One lesson humorists might learn from it is to not use footnotes when trying to write funny. If you must, make sure they're used infrequently and only if they are hilarious. 
4:17

 Maybe some smart people already know, but I wonder when books and movies by and/or about homosexuals stopped being of a genre and appealed to everyone. It was probably incremental. The 1993 movie "Philadelphia" might have been a milestone.
 [a:Andrew Holleran|136007|Andrew Holleran|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1329337078p2/136007.jpg]'s 2006 [b:Grief|251520|Grief|Andrew Holleran|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1436326724l/251520.SY75.jpg|243729] is so beautifully written that it would be a shame if it were ever read only by a gay audience. The review excerpt in the front pages that describes it best to me is "A book to savor." If you read it, read it slowly. (It's only 150 pages long.)
 It might be especially appealing if you have any interest in Washington, D.C., or Abraham Lincoln.
 Excerpt:

 Of course, museums are morgues—tombs containing art. Their sepulchral quality was part of their appeal—the dim light, the silence, the tourists wandering through them like ghosts. It was hard to decide which museum resembled a morgue most—the Sackler, which is underground, like a cave in which a Mongol raiding party had hidden its treasure, or the Freeer, which felt like the villa of a rich man who has gone abroad and died. The National Archives had the same cold light as the Tomb of Napoleon, and the National Gallery made you feel, when you entered the echoing rotunda, and walked between its dark marble pillars, you were entering the palace of Pluto. They all removed you from the world though they ejected you back into it at five o'clock, when I would take a slow walk back down the Mall, past the touch football games office staffs played on the Ellipse, darting across the grass with flushed excited faces.

 [a:Elizabeth Strout|97313|Elizabeth Strout|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1361387789p2/97313.jpg]'s 2021 [b:Oh William!|56294820|Oh William! (Amgash, #3)|Elizabeth Strout|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1617988577l/56294820.SY75.jpg|87609499] is the first of hers I've read. From reading it, I'd recommend that anyone who hasn't first read her [b:My Name Is Lucy Barton|25893709|My Name Is Lucy Barton (Amgash, #1)|Elizabeth Strout|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1450653428l/25893709.SX50.jpg|45584499] because while Oh William! stands alone, the narrator, Lucy Barton, often refers to incidents that she won't go over here but has written about before, so I think you'll get more out of it.
 That's my only real criticism of it. Overall, I liked the voice of the narrator, a once divorced, once widowed sixty-three-year-old woman, very much. Questioning, uncertain of herself in nice ways. She often repeats herself, but not in a vague or careless way. It's like she's restating things to make them real to herself.
Excerpt:

Please try to understand this:
 I have always thought that if there was a big corkboard and on that board was a pin for every person who ever lived, there would be no pin for me.
 I feel invisible, is what I mean. But I mean it in the deepest way. It is very hard to explain. And I cannot explain it except to say—oh, I don't know what to say! Truly, it is as if I do not exist, I guess is the closest thing I can say. I mean I do not exist in the world. It could be as simple as the fact that we had no mirrors in our house when I was growing up except for a very small one high above the bathroom sink. I really do not know what I mean, except to say that on some fundamental level, I feel invisible in the world.