Last Sunday John Irving spoke at the 92nd Street Y in New York City to discuss his new novel, In One Person. As in most of his work, sex and sexual identity are issues Irving explores in this new novel. The New York Times reported that during his appearance at [...] Continue reading »
Deathbed Regrets
The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing is a memoir published last year by Bronnie Ware, an Australian palliative care nurse, songwriter and music teacher. Ware drew on her experience caring for patients in their final weeks and months. The book was an [...] Continue reading »
Art Well Served By Age
I didn’t write my first play until I was 49 and, now 62, I worry constantly that I have too little time left to realize my artistic ambitions (Broadway and London’s West End are mixed in there somewhere). So you can see why I would be heartened by the recent [...] Continue reading »
Eat, Pray, Show Up, Do the Work
I just watched a wonderful TED presentation by Elizabeth Gilbert about creating art. Gilbert is the author best known for her book Eat, Love, Pray which was then made into a successful movie starring Julia Roberts. Gilbert is addressing the doubts and psychic turmoil that all artists are familiar with. [...] Continue reading »
Pinter and Fraser, a Love Story
Sometimes you gain more insight into an artist and his creative process from an oblique perspective than if the writer addressed the subject head-on. Such was my experience reading the history author Antonia Fraser’s memoir Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter (2010). Fraser and Pinter met at a [...] Continue reading »
A Pep Talk for Artists
I don’t know if you ever sat in a high school locker room at halftime when a coach hurled chalk into the wall, kicked over chairs, and chewed out his discouraged troops with a vocabulary far removed from English class. Once witnessed, never forgotten. Besides being immensely entertaining and frightening, this [...] Continue reading »
A Mugging Knocks Characters About
Contingency – the outsized role that chance plays in our lives – is the focus of Penelope Lively’s fine new novel, How It All Began. Lively, one of Britain’s most popular novelists, has long been interested in the subject. Her 2005 anti-memoir Making It Up, which I also enjoyed, imagined [...] Continue reading »
Alone, Under an Apple Tree
“Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.” Pablo Picasso’s observation, cited by Susan Cain in her recent essay in the New York Times, was heartening to me. A huge adjustment I’ve had to make – and it’s still in process – since trading my business career for the mostly solitary [...] Continue reading »
New Novel Gives Actors a Hug
If creativity is an inheritable trait then Esther Freud certainly benefited on that account. The 48-year old British novelist is the great-granddaughter of Sigmund, yes that Sigmund; daughter of the famous painter Lucien Freud (who died last July, age 88); and sister to fashion designer Bella Freud. Esther Freud’s seventh [...] Continue reading »
The Portrait Of a Failed Playwright
“It’s a strange, compulsive business, the urge to make plays. To act in them, or write ‘em, or produce ‘em. It’s no use appealing to reason.” That’s Henry James counseling a friend in Author, Author, a novel (2004) by British writer and retired literature professor David Lodge. I just read [...] Continue reading »