David Abrams has unveiled his first January review since returning from Iraq. And it’s Kirstin Allio’s Garner. And Dan notes that Garner, recently described by Mr. Segundo in Show #23 as “The Rockford Files, but more literary,” is nominated for the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.
Month / March 2006
But A Full-Scale Nervous Breakdown, Complete with Men in White Suits, Would Really Make Laura Miller Do the Happy Dance!
Laura Miller: “One of the most interesting and newsworthy response I ever got was when I asked a novelist who’d just written (but not yet published) a memoir, ‘People often find that when they write about their past, the process dredges up old memories they’d entirely forgotten. Was there anything like that with this book that really surprised you?’ He told me he’d remembered being molested by one of his parents’ friends as a child!”
The Bat Segundo Show #24
Author: Liz Perle
Condition of Mr. Segundo: Vengeful and nostalgic for bad investment decisions.
Subjects Discussed: The quiet contract, what power means, responding to Ariel Levy’s review, the emotional middle class, lying to partners about money, conspicuous consumption, status, the two tiers of women-centric economics, guilt, women not being allowed to talk about money, describing women with aesthetic qualifiers, money and marriages, how younger women view money, gender income disparities, political obstacles, Caitlin Flanagan, value shifts over the past thirty years, on being a Target and IKEA queen, materialism, working class economics, Larry Ellison, David Denby’s American Sucker, and the “exclusivity” of quotes.
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The Bat Segundo Show #23
Authors: Dan Wickett and Kirstin Allio
Condition of Mr. Segundo: Snubbed and pining for Beelzebub.
Subjects Discussed: The ideal of the perfect sentence, Faulkner, research, New Hampshire, 1920s vernacular, the controversy of Mrs. Heald, drafting Garner, agents and literary fiction, literary influences, Wallace Stegner, naming names, cemeteries, the difficulties of writing about girlhood, and being skeptical about craft.
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Well, We Yanks Have Benedict Arnold, the Baltimore Riots & McCarthyism In Our History…For a Start
Peter Carey on James Frey: “It’s trite to say it, but the US is a country run by liars going to war on a fantasy, so it’s interesting to see people getting self-righteous about James Frey. And by the way, if you’re going to publish a memoir by an addict in rehab, everyone knows that one of the corollaries of addiction is lying. So I don’t see why everyone gets into such a fucking uproar because an addict is a liar! Oprah acted like a total bully: talk about about crushing a butterfly on a wheel–or a cockroach on a wheel– because that’s what she did on television to this little creep.” (via Galleycat)