Category: Books

The Reivers (1963): The Unexpected Afterlife of The Meat Eater

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After my brother Scott received his initial cancer diagnosis in 2021, I started making more frequent trips to Phoenix to see him. During many of those visits to his house, he began pulling things out of the past like a magician who had decided, late in his career, to specialize in nostalgia. Baseball cards. Old records. Toys I hadn’t thought about in decades. Artifacts from shelves that, in my mind, had long since been cleared, boxed up, or lost to time.

And then one day, he handed me a Super 8 film.

“I don’t know what this is,” he said.

Which, if you think about it, is exactly the kind of sentence that should make you both excited and slightly nervous.

When I got back home, I took it to a local shop to have it digitized. A few days later, I went back to pick it up, and the guy behind the counter was smiling in a way that suggested I was about to become either very proud or mildly horrified.

“I don’t know what this is,” he said, echoing my brother almost word for word, “but it’s the best thing I’ve seen in a long time.”

That felt promising. Or at least memorable.

I rushed home, opened the link, and hit play. It was a movie I had made when I was twelve years old with my friends Jamie and Dave. A full-blown cinematic production titled The Meat Eater, which is exactly as subtle and nuanced as it sounds.

The casting was tight. Jamie was the detective. Dave was the serial killer. And I, displaying an early commitment to range, was the victim. Multiple times.

Jamie, it’s worth noting, was a very popular kid. The kind of kid who didn’t need to spend his afternoons making low-budget horror films. And yet, for a stretch of time—right around the period after my mom passed away between seventh and eighth grade—he did. We weren’t best friends, but he was kind to me during a time when kindness mattered more than I probably knew how to articulate. Looking back, that feels like a bigger part of the story than anything we actually put on film.

The premise of The Meat Eater was simple. Dave would kill me, and then, in a bold narrative choice that really pushed the boundaries of suburban storytelling, he would eat me. To achieve this effect, we purchased hamburger meat, placed it on my stomach, and covered it in ketchup. This was our special effects department. It was meant to be funny. And it was. Just not in the ways we’d eventually come to appreciate.

What makes the whole thing remarkable, watching it now, is not just the plot—which holds up about as well as you’d expect—but the complete absence of supervision. No parents. An alarming number of BB guns. At one point, we were jumping off the roof of Jamie’s house into the swimming pool, which felt like a perfectly reasonable idea at the time and, in retrospect, like something that probably should have required at least one adult in the general vicinity. And through all of it, an unwavering confidence that what we were making was not just a movie, but important.

And honestly, it kind of works. Not because it’s good, exactly, but because it’s so fully committed to being whatever it is. There’s plenty of humor in it, and we were very much in on the joke. But there’s no distance. No sense that we were making something disposable or temporary. Just three kids, a camera, and the firm belief that a hamburger and some ketchup could carry an entire narrative.

No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.”

– Pink Floyd, “Time”

Which, in a strange way, is exactly what The Reivers is about.

Published just a month before two time Pulitzer winner William Faulkner died, The Reivers won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1963. It’s often described as a lighter, more accessible Faulkner, which is a bit like saying a roller coaster is a more accessible form of flying. Or that a bar fight is a more accessible form of conflict resolution. Or that a road trip with questionable decision-makers is a more accessible version of growing up. Technically true, but still not something you approach casually.

The novel tells the story of Lucius Priest, an eleven-year-old boy in Mississippi, who embarks on an impulsive road trip with two companions: Boon Hogganbeck, a charming and reckless family friend, and Ned McCaslin, a resourceful and morally flexible man who may or may not be the most competent adult in the group. What begins as a simple joyride quickly turns into something else entirely, involving stolen cars, questionable decisions, a detour through a brothel, and a series of escalating consequences that none of the participants are fully equipped to handle. It is, in other words, a perfect childhood adventure disguised as a very bad idea.

What elevates The Reivers beyond mischief is the way it’s told. The entire novel is narrated by an older Lucius, looking back on the events of his youth with a mix of affection, embarrassment, and hard-earned clarity. The story hasn’t changed, exactly, but the meaning of it has. At the time, it felt like freedom. Later, it looks a lot like chaos. At the time, it felt like courage. Later, it edges closer to recklessness. At the time, it was just something that happened. Later, it becomes a story worth telling.

For me, The Reivers sits somewhere in the lower middle of the Pulitzer rankings. It’s undeniably enjoyable, occasionally chaotic, and filled with moments that linger, but it doesn’t quite reach the emotional or stylistic heights of Faulkner at his best. What it does offer, though, is something a little different. It reminds us that not every meaningful story needs to be heavy. Sometimes it’s enough to capture a moment in time, let it unfold with all its messiness intact, and trust that meaning will reveal itself later.

These are the days you’ll remember.”

– 10,000 Maniacs, “These Are Days”

Watching The Meat Eater, I had the same feeling. The same sense that what once felt immediate and important now reads as something slightly different—messier, funnier, and, in its own way, more meaningful.

At twelve, we weren’t making something ironic or self-aware. We were absolutely trying to be funny, and at least to us, we were succeeding. But we were also making something we believed in, with the full force of our limited resources and unlimited confidence. We thought we were telling a funny story. We didn’t realize we were becoming one.

And like Lucius, I’m now the one looking back, trying to make sense of it. Trying to reconcile the seriousness of the experience then with the absurdity of it now. Trying to understand how something so small—a few minutes of film, a hamburger, a bad idea—could carry so much weight decades later. Because it’s not really about the movie. It’s about the people in it.

I lost track of Dave after elementary school. Somewhere along the way, the thread just snapped, the way those threads tend to do. One day you’re making a film together in a backyard, and the next you’re living entirely separate lives without even realizing when the transition happened.

Jamie, though, stayed in orbit a little longer. Although he started high school at a boarding school, he came back to Phoenix and we ended up at the same high school for senior year. Then, like most people, we drifted.

But when I found the video, I sent it to him. No context. No warning. Just a digital time capsule dropped into his phone.

And recently, when I was in Phoenix, we met up for a drink. It had been decades. And yet within minutes, we were right back there, talking about The Meat Eater, laughing about scenes we hadn’t thought about in years, filling in gaps in each other’s memories like two slightly unreliable historians reconstructing a very low-budget crime.

At some point in the conversation, I also told him I still remembered how he had treated me during that time after my mom died, and that it had meant a lot to me. And then, a few minutes later, Jamie told me something I didn’t know. He said that one of the reasons he ended up going into the tech field was because of my dad. Back then, my dad had brought one of the early home computers into school, and when Jamie would come over, we’d spend hours playing games on it.

I had no memory of that meaning anything beyond what it was at the time. Just something to do. Another way to pass an afternoon. But for Jamie, it stuck. It mattered. It shaped something.

Which is the part of all of this that I can’t quite get over. The idea that these small, seemingly insignificant moments—a Super 8 film, a shared afternoon, an early computer—don’t just disappear. They ripple outward in ways you don’t see, connecting people and decisions and lives long after the moment itself has passed.

It’s strange what survives. Not the things you expect. Not the moments that feel important while you’re living them. But a shared memory that refuses to fade completely, even as everything around it changes.

In The Reivers, Faulkner suggests that we don’t really understand our lives while we’re living them. We understand them later, in the telling. In that sense, The Meat Eater wasn’t just a movie. It was the beginning of a story that took forty-five years to understand.

And somehow, improbably, it’s still doing what it was always meant to do.

Not bringing people back, exactly. But reminding you they were never entirely gone in the first place.

P.S.

On a whim, after finishing this essay, I tried to find Dave. Facebook came up empty, which felt about right. But a quick Google search turned up a psychologist who lives less than a mile from me with the same name.

So I emailed him. Just a short note asking if he had grown up in Phoenix and if he happened to remember me.

Unbelievably, it was him.

I sent him the video.

This was his response:

“Oh my god that’s insane! I had no memory of that, but after watching it, now have a faint recollection of it. What a solid production. Sorry I had to kill you so many times and eat your organs. I guess that’s why I always had this feeling of having a part of you with me all this time!”

Which, all things considered, feels like about as good an explanation as any.

The Confessions of Nat Turner (1968): How Woo Are You?

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A few months ago, I wrote an essay where I told the story about how I ended up in Puerto Rico giving a talk called “How Woo Are You?” to a group of relative strangers at an event called “fake church.” What I didn’t tell you, somewhat intentionally, was what the talk was about. Since then, more than a few people have asked me the obvious follow-up: what was the sermon actually about? I’ve been waiting for the right moment to tell that story, and two recent events have convinced me that the time might be now.

First, Parisa and I were recently back in Puerto Rico for a visit. Same streets, same humidity, same slightly disorienting feeling that life had looped back on itself. And second, Friday night was Nowruz—the Persian New Year—and it hit me that I had given that fake church talk on Nowruz in 2023. So, between the return trip and the calendar, it felt like a nudge. Or at least enough of one to finally answer the question.

There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.

— Leonard Cohen

If you read that original essay, you know the setup. I’ve always been a pretty firm believer that we’re in charge of our own destinies. Not in a grand, manifest-your-future kind of way, but in a more practical sense: say yes to things, show up, lean in, and over time those small decisions compound into something that starts to look a lot like luck.

So I began my talk the same way I began that essay—by telling the story of how I got to Puerto Rico in the first place. The sticker, the café, Andrea, a trip to Israel, Gillian, the co-living house. A chain of yeses that, in retrospect, feels improbably linear, but at the time was anything but.

Then I read a poem. It was Charles Bukowski’s The Laughing Heart. If you know it, you know it’s not subtle. It’s a kind of gravel-voiced insistence that your life is yours, that even in a world that feels indifferent or chaotic, there’s something inside you worth protecting. It’s a call to stay awake, to resist sleepwalking through your own existence. It’s also, not coincidentally, a pretty good manifesto for the way I’ve generally tried to move through life.

The Laughing Heart by Charles Bukowski:

your life is your life

don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.

be on the watch.

there are ways out.

there is light somewhere.

it may not be much light but

it beats the darkness.

be on the watch.

the gods will offer you chances.

know them.

take them.

you can’t beat death but

you can beat death in life, sometimes.

and the more often you learn to do it,

the more light there will be.

your life is your life.

know it while you have it.

you are marvelous

the gods wait to delight

in you.

(And speaking of gravelly voices, if you’ve never heard Tom Waits read this poem, it’s worth a listen.)

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.

— Semisonic

But because it was Nowruz—a holiday about renewal, reflection, and the passage of time—I wanted to balance that idea with something else. So I told the group I was going to read a second poem, this one from the Persian poet Rudaki called “All is as it is supposed to be.” And it goes like this:

There is happiness now, be happy.
Why are you sad? Why do you worry?
Destiny does what it must for you.
The viziers’ ways won’t work for you,
Fate will decide what is best for you.
Life’s wheel won’t create another like you.
Your mother won’t bear another like you.
God will never close a door on you,
Before opening a hundred better doors.

If Bukowski is about agency—about grabbing the wheel—Rudaki is about something closer to surrender. Trust. The idea that maybe the wheel doesn’t entirely belong to you in the first place.

At that point, I told a second story.

Jesus, take the wheel…”

— Carrie Underwood

In 2005, I was living in San Francisco and working at Wells Fargo—really my only stint at a big company. My team had a small suite of offices in a downtown high-rise. There were maybe eight of us total, so when the doorbell rang, whoever happened to be around would grab it.

One day, I was alone when the bell rang. It was a DHL delivery guy holding a package for someone named Stacey Larsen (name changed to protect the innocent).

I told him there wasn’t a Stacey Larsen in our office. He showed me the label—definitely Wells Fargo, definitely Stacey Larsen. So I invited him in and said we could try to track her down on the intranet. We found a Stacey Larsen who still worked at Wells Fargo, just in a different building. We called, got voicemail, left a message. The DHL guy left.

End of story. Or so I thought.

About six weeks later I attended my 20-year high school reunion back in Phoenix. On Friday night of reunion weekend, there was a house party—classic backyard kegger, exactly what you’d expect. At some point, I’m standing outside, smoking a clove cigarette, when up walks my junior-year prom date.

Stacey Larsen.

“Hey Stacey,” I said.

“You’re an idiot,” she said, in a tone that made it clear she wasn’t actually upset. Which, to be fair, is a label I’ve earned in a variety of contexts, but I was still completely unclear on the specific one here. My face must have reflected that.

“That package you got…” she said. I just stared at her.

“At Wells Fargo. That was for me.”

It turns out that, unbeknownst to me, Stacey also worked at Wells Fargo and had actually occupied the exact same office in the exact same suite before my team moved in. She had connected the dots before I did. I was still staring at the dots.

What are the odds?

It’s a strange world we live in…

— Depeche Mode

So those were my two stories. And if there was a point to the talk, it was this: I’ve always believed that we create our own destinies. I still do. I believe in saying yes. I believe in showing up. I believe that most of what looks like luck is really just the accumulation of small decisions made over time.

But.

There are moments that don’t quite fit that model. Things that feel too coincidental, too specific, too… authored. Moments where you didn’t cause anything to happen, but happen it did.

So in my head, I’ve started to imagine what I call a Woo-O-Meter. On one end: pure free will. We are in complete control. Every outcome is the product of our choices. On the other: pure fatalism. Everything is pre-ordained. We’re just along for the ride.

When I was younger, I would have been pinned all the way to the free will side. These days, I’m not so sure. At that point, I looked around the room and asked, “How Woo Are You?”

You don’t have to serve somebody…

— Bob Dylan

Which brings me to The Confessions of Nat Turner. William Styron’s 1968 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a fictionalized first-person account of Nat Turner, the enslaved man who led a violent rebellion in Virginia in 1831. The book unfolds as a kind of retrospective confession, with Turner awaiting execution and recounting the events and, more importantly, the internal convictions that led him there.

Styron doesn’t present Turner as a simple revolutionary or a one-dimensional symbol. Instead, he’s deeply introspective, conflicted, and intensely religious. From a young age, Turner believes he has been marked, chosen for something larger. He experiences visions, reads meaning into natural events, and becomes increasingly convinced that he is an instrument of divine will.

As the story progresses, that belief hardens. Turner wrestles with doubt, hesitates at key moments, and questions whether he is misreading the signs. But each time, something happens, a coincidence, a vision, a moment of clarity, that he interprets as confirmation. Not suggestion. Confirmation.

Styron’s prose matches that interior intensity. It is dense, lyrical, and often beautiful, more concerned with psychological depth than narrative momentum. When it works, it pulls you deep inside Turner’s mind in a way that feels immersive and unsettling at the same time. You don’t just observe his thinking. You inhabit it.

Which is also why the book can be a demanding read. The pacing is deliberate, the language occasionally heavy, and the focus so inward that it sometimes sacrifices narrative propulsion. Compared to some other Pulitzer winners, it is less interested in story as story and more interested in the philosophical and moral architecture underneath it. That emphasis on interiority shapes how the story unfolds.

And so when the rebellion finally comes, it doesn’t feel impulsive. It feels inevitable. That’s what makes the novel so unsettling. It’s not just about what Turner does. It’s about how he understands why he’s doing it. He isn’t surrendering to fate in a passive sense. He’s acting, deliberately and forcefully, with the conviction that the outcome has already been decided.

Which raises a question the book never fully answers, and maybe can’t: Is Turner exercising free will? Or is he carrying out a destiny he believes he has no right to ignore?

Reading it, I couldn’t help but think back to that room in Puerto Rico. Not because my stories carry anything close to the weight of Turner’s, but because the underlying tension felt familiar. The idea that you can move through life making choices, saying yes, creating momentum, and yet still occasionally encounter moments that feel less like decisions and more like instructions.

Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.

— Grateful Dead

I still believe in saying yes. I still believe that showing up matters, that motion creates opportunity, that most of what we call luck is just the residue of effort and openness over time. But I also think there are moments—small ones, usually—where something else seems to be at work. Not enough to rewrite the rules. Just enough to make you wonder who else might be holding the pen.

Maybe we choose more than we think. Maybe we control less than we’d like. And maybe the truth lives somewhere in between— in the space where a sticker turns into a trip, a trip turns into a story, and a misdelivered package somehow finds its way back to a name you hadn’t said out loud in twenty years.

That night in Puerto Rico, after I finished, we went around the room and everyone shared where they landed on the Woo-O-Meter. Some people were firmly on the free will side. No hesitation. Others leaned toward fate, convinced that more was being written for them than by them. Most people, like me, hovered somewhere in the middle—unsure, but curious.

What struck me wasn’t where people landed. It was how easily everyone had a story. A moment. A decision or a coincidence they couldn’t quite explain but also couldn’t ignore. Which, I think, is the point.

Not that we have to choose a side. But that if you pay attention long enough, life will give you enough evidence to question whichever side you thought you were on.

Elbow Room (1978): Same Me, Better Seating

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A digital display showing the year 2026, with a highlighted red block indicating the number 6. The background has a sleek or metallic look.

New Year’s Day—now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.”

 — Mark Twain

I recently read that in the original Roman calendar, the year didn’t begin in January at all. There were ten months, March through December, followed by an unnamed stretch of winter days that didn’t count for much of anything. Agriculture paused. Military campaigns stopped. Society went off the clock. January and February were essentially a holding pattern, so unproductive they weren’t even worth naming.

Only later did January get promoted into the calendar and named for Janus, the two-faced god of beginnings and endings, the past and the future, the doorway between them. Which feels about right. January has one face looking forward, full of plans and intention, and another turned backward, quietly taking stock. Yet despite the name, we tend to emphasize the first face and ignore the second. We stuff January with expectations. Resolutions. Clean slates. We ask it to do an awful lot of work for a month that was once considered so useless it didn’t merit a name. We treat January like a launch pad when it’s probably better understood as a threshold.

To be fair, I lean fully into that impulse myself. Four years ago, on New Year’s Eve, while self-isolating after a COVID exposure and thinking very hard about time, I wrote a blog post that ended up being about resolutions. It started with time. Specifically, with how little of it there is, and how oddly motivating that realization can be. I borrowed an idea from Tim Urban about measuring life not in years, but in experiences: presidential elections voted, books read, pizzas eaten, Olympic Games watched. The point was simple and unsettling. The future is shorter than it feels.

But instead of the usual year-long promises that tend to collapse somewhere between January 12 and the first decent excuse, I tried something different in 2021. I set twelve one-month resolutions, one per month, and graded myself on them at the end of the year. Dry January. Writing February. Delete the Apps August. Reach Out December. Some worked. Some failed spectacularly. The whole thing felt part self-experiment, part pandemic coping mechanism, part quiet attempt to impose order on a year that was aggressively uninterested in being ordered. Looking back now, the tone is unmistakable: restless, corrective, and just a little hard on myself.

2026 feels different. Not better or worse. Just different. The urgency has softened. The impulse to optimize every habit has given way to something closer to curiosity. Where the 2021 resolutions were about fixing, eliminating, and improving, the 2026 list is more about attention. About where time goes when no one is tracking it. About noticing rather than upgrading. Less “new year, new me” and more “same me, better seating.”

Which is a long way of saying: I’ve made another list. Another set of monthly resolutions. Not because January 1 is secretly magical, and not because I think a clean calendar page changes much of anything on its own, but because these small, bounded intentions have proven oddly useful. They create just enough structure to invite change without insisting on reinvention. Enough space to move around inside your own life. Enough, you might say, elbow room.

Oh, elbow room, elbow room / Got to, got to get us some elbow room.

– Schoolhouse Rock

Which brings me to the 1978  Pulitzer Prize winner, Elbow Room, by James McPherson, who also happens to be the first Black American writer to win the Pulitzer for Fiction. Born in Savannah, Georgia, the son of a domestic worker, he trained as a lawyer, studied at Harvard, and eventually turned to writing, later teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. That background matters, because his fiction is deeply concerned with systems: how people move through institutions, how class and race shape opportunity, and how dignity survives in places that don’t always make room for it.

It is important to note that Elbow Room isn’t a novel but a collection of short stories (more on that in a moment) that follow Black Americans navigating work, ambition, identity, and constraint in mid-20th-century America. And because of this structure, there’s no grand unifying plot, no single protagonist, no sweeping transformation arc. Instead, McPherson gives us people mid-stride. People negotiating, adjusting, recalibrating. People trying to claim a little space for themselves in environments that rarely offer it freely.

As an aside, it’s also worth noting why Elbow Room didn’t appear in my earlier essay about Pulitzer-winning short story collections, the literary equivalent of greatest-hits albums. Whereas those books gathered stories written across decades and asked the reader to treat them as a retrospective achievement, the Elbow Room stories were conceived, written, and published as a collection. The book isn’t an archive. It’s a statement. The stories speak to one another quietly and intentionally, forming a cohesive whole rather than a career-spanning scrapbook. (As another aside, this won’t be the last short story collection to show up on the countdown.)

But turning back to the book at hand, the best way to see what McPherson is doing is to look at a couple of the stories themselves, where the themes of adjustment, constraint, and dignity are doing their quietest and most effective work.

Start with the title story, “Elbow Room.” The story centers on a Black professional navigating a workplace and social environment that is superficially polite but structurally cramped, a setting where expectations are unspoken but relentlessly enforced. Nothing overtly catastrophic happens. Instead, the pressure accumulates through small interactions, subtle slights, and the constant need to calibrate behavior. The tension lies in the gap between what the protagonist wants, what he deserves, and what the world seems prepared to offer him. The story isn’t built around a dramatic turning point so much as a growing awareness: of limits, of leverage, and of the narrow but real ways one might still assert agency inside those limits.

Similarly, the story “Just Enough for the City” follows a man who has left a more familiar, manageable life behind in order to test himself against the promises and demands of urban ambition. What he encounters is not failure exactly, but strain. The city offers opportunity, but only in calibrated doses, and only to those willing to absorb a fair amount of exhaustion along the way. The story resists both triumph and despair. Its power comes from its modesty. The goal isn’t “everything,” or even happiness in some grand sense, but sufficiency. Enough money. Enough footing. Enough dignity to stay. It’s a quietly bracing portrait of ambition scaled to reality, and of learning where the line between striving and self-erasure actually sits.

McPherson’s style matches his worldview. He’s not flashy. He doesn’t write for the quote you screenshot and share. He writes with controlled intelligence, moral attentiveness, and a willingness to let conversation, setting, and small decisions do the heavy lifting. If there’s a critique, it’s that the restraint can occasionally feel like distance. Some stories have more intellectual force than emotional heat. Sometimes you admire what he’s doing before you feel it. But when it lands, it lands the way real life often does: quietly, and then all at once.

What Elbow Room ultimately offers, though, isn’t just a set of themes but a posture. A way of moving through the world that favors adjustment over overhaul, calibration over declaration. McPherson’s characters don’t announce who they’re becoming. They make small, often private decisions about how to behave inside the lives they already have. They notice where pressure is coming from, where space is available, and how much effort it’s worth expending to claim it. Change, when it happens, comes less from bold intention than from sustained attention.

You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

— Bob Dylan, “Subterranean Homesick Blues”

Seen through that lens, my 2026 resolutions don’t feel like resolutions so much as monthly experiments in that same kind of attention. Small, bounded commitments designed less to change who I am than to adjust the conditions I’m operating under. Each one creates a little structure, a little friction, or a little space. Not transformation, but calibration. Not reinvention, but elbow room.

So here they are. None of these will change my life. That’s kind of the point.

The 2026 Monthly Resolutions

Dry January: No alcohol for the month.

Relationship February: One intentional act of connection each week (time, conversation, presence, or a note).

Move Every Day March: Some form of movement every day. Walking and stretching count. Consistency over intensity.

Phone-Free Windows April: No phone for (a) the first 30 minutes after waking; and (b) the last 60 minutes before bed.

Make Dinner May: Make dinner at home three nights per week.

Reach Out June: Text one person every day you genuinely like but don’t see often.

Arty July: Four “arty” things (theater, museum, concert), one per week.

No New Stuff August: Buy nothing new for myself. Used or nothing. Food and experiences excluded.

Simplify September: Remove one thing per day (object, obligation, habit or commitment).

No-Scroll October: No mindless social media scrolling on weekdays. Posting allowed. Mindless scrolling not.

Quiet Walk November: A 20-minute walk every day. No headphones. No podcasts. No music. Just walking and whatever shows up.

Memory December: Write twelve short reflections, one for each month of the year (5-10 sentences each).

Reading them now, what strikes me most is (a) how much I like them and (b) how unambitious they are. There’s nothing here about becoming faster, thinner, richer, or more efficient. No life hacks. No glow-ups. Just a series of small, intentional choices about how to spend time and attention. Enough to notice something. Enough to change the way the day feels, without pretending to change the whole life.

And because I apparently need to relearn the same lesson until I die, I’ll say it explicitly: the point isn’t to “win” 2026. The point is to live it. To build a year that has a little more room in it.

That’s where Elbow Room ends up being the perfect January book. McPherson isn’t selling reinvention. He’s describing the real work: how people adapt without disappearing, how they keep their agency even when the options are limited, how they make room for themselves and for others. That’s a much better model for resolutions than the annual fantasy that we’re all about to become a radically upgraded operating system.

Four years ago, I was counting elections and Olympics and trying to impose order on a year that refused to cooperate. This year, I’m counting walks, dinners, texts, and moments of stillness. The future is still finite. That part hasn’t changed. What has changed is how I want to meet it. Not with grand declarations or perfect follow-through, but with a series of small, intentional choices. Enough to notice. Enough to adjust. Enough room to move.

For now, that feels like enough.

The Keepers of the House (1965): Does Your Mother Know You’re a Monarch?

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When Sweden gambled on a French general, it got 200 years of monarchy. When Alabama underestimated Abigail Howland, it got scorched earth.

A bronze statue of a general on horseback, set against a backdrop of buildings with varied architectural styles and a cloudy sky.

I’ve played all my cards, and that’s what you’ve done too.

— ABBA, The Winner Takes It All

Parisa and I recently took a trip to Scandinavia—a few days in Copenhagen, a Swedish cruise, a train across Norway, and a solid amount of time marveling at how everything managed to be both efficient and cozy. While in Stockholm, the largest of the Nordic capitals, we joined a walking tour through Gamla Stan, the city’s old town. That part of Stockholm is especially stunning. The buildings look like pastel candy boxes, and the Swedes themselves are both impossibly beautiful and annoyingly well-dressed. As the tour wound through the cobblestone streets, we came across a statue right next to the Royal Palace of a man named Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte.

Now, I don’t claim to be a European history expert, but even I know “Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte” doesn’t sound particularly Swedish. And clearly, I wasn’t the first tourist to wonder why a French guy on a horse had such a prominent statue in the middle of Stockholm, because before I could say ursäkta mig, the guide stopped to tell us the tale. What followed was one of the most unexpected, wonderfully bizarre royal origin stories I’ve ever heard.

There’s not a soul out there / No one to hear my prayer.

–ABBA, Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)

Back in the early 1800s, Sweden was in a serious bind. They’d just lost Finland to Russia, their king had been overthrown, and the guy they installed in his place—Charles XIII—was elderly and childless, so not exactly brimming with heirs. With no viable successor and the monarchy teetering, the Swedish parliament did something bold, strange, and a little desperate: they offered the throne to a French general who was not only not royalty, but who also had never set foot in Sweden.

That general was Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, a career soldier who rose through the ranks during the French Revolution and fought alongside Napoleon who, we might recall, was definitely against monarchies. But he was no fool. When a country you’ve never visited offers you a crown, you don’t pause to debate political philosophy—you say yes. He converted to Lutheranism, took the name Karl Johan, and—against all odds—turned out to be exactly what Sweden needed. He led them through the Napoleonic wars, brought political stability, and founded the House of Bernadotte.

And here’s the kicker: not only did this French general do the job well, but his descendants have now ruled Sweden for over 200 years. The monarchy he was never meant to inherit? Still going strong. Still French. In fact, the only person in the current royal family with an actual Swedish bloodline is Prince Daniel—the guy who used to be a personal trainer before marrying Crown Princess Victoria. Which means that the Swedish crown is, to this day, balanced on the broad shoulders of a man who probably once taught a spin class.

Take a chance on me

–ABBA, Take a Chance on Me

A wise man once told me that “desperation breeds creativity,” and the phrase has stuck with me. Standing there in Stockholm, hearing how an orphaned monarchy took a wild gamble on a French revolutionary and somehow ended up with 200 years of peaceful succession, it struck me as an odd decision—but not a wrong one. It also made me think about another unlikely heir: Abigail Howland, the steely protagonist of The Keepers of the House, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1965. Her story isn’t about thrones or crowns, but it is about what you do when history hands you something heavy—and you decide to carry it anyway.

Written by Shirley Ann Grau, the book is set in rural Alabama and centers on the Howland family, landed Southern aristocrats who have run the same plantation for seven generations. On the surface, it’s a story about inheritance, race, and the slow decay of old money in the modern South. But underneath, it’s about what happens when long-held secrets come to light, when polite society turns on its own, and when the people you underestimated decide they’ve had enough.

The Howlands are a fixture in their small Southern town: wealthy, respected, and just aloof enough to be mythologized. William Howland, the family patriarch, is a quiet man who keeps to himself, raises his granddaughter Abigail after her parents die, and maintains the land with a kind of grim, inherited duty. He also, as it turns out, lives for decades in a secret common-law marriage with Margaret, a Black woman, and fathers several children with her. Those children are sent away and erased from polite white society, but not from the family’s bloodline.

Abigail grows up sheltered from the scandal. But when William dies and she inherits the estate, the past begins to surface. At first, the townspeople still treat her with the same reverent distance they afforded her grandfather. But once his secret is exposed—and once she’s seen as the white woman who inherited not just the house but the stain of racial mixing—everything changes. Her fiancé, a rising segregationist politician, abandons her for political expediency. Her social circle vanishes. The town turns on her, not with torches and pitchforks, but with lawsuits, whispers, and slow-motion ostracism.

And then Abigail flips the script.

There was something in the air that night, the stars were bright…

— ABBA, Fernando

Rather than retreat or collapse under the weight of shame and betrayal, she leans in. Hard. She becomes the keeper of the house in the truest sense: not just maintaining the family name, but wielding it like a weapon. She uses her resources, her name, and the town’s own rules of inheritance and land ownership to dismantle the social order that rejected her. It’s not a redemption arc. It’s a power play. Cold. Calculated. Viciously effective.

I’ve complained before about the lack of intentionality in some Pulitzer-winning protagonists. Take Daisy Goodwill from The Stone Diaries, for example, who drifts through life while others quietly shape her story. Abigail is the antidote. She doesn’t just reclaim the narrative; she owns the ending. There’s no soft fade into memory, no quiet elegy. Abigail stays rooted in the house, in the town, in the blood-soaked legacy she’s chosen to defend. If Daisy’s life is a collection of photographs someone else left unlabeled, Abigail’s is a hand-scrawled manifesto in Sharpie on the front porch wall.

That said, The Keepers of the House isn’t a perfect novel. It moves slowly at times, with long stretches of atmosphere that veer into over-description. The racial dynamics, while central to the plot, are sometimes handled with the kind of distance that feels more convenient than courageous. And the character development outside Abigail and William can feel thin—people drift in and out of the story like background extras. It’s a book with sharp bones, but not always enough flesh.

If we’re still using the Scorsese framework I proposed back when reviewing Martin Dressler, this one probably lands in the Casino tier. Flawed, a little bloated, maybe not his best—but when it hits, it really hits. And like Casino, its final act is a ruthless, unexpected coda that lingers long after you close the book.

The history book on the shelf / Is always repeating itself.

— ABBA, Waterloo

But beyond structure or style, what lingers is the shape of the story—and who dares to shape it. Because that’s what these stories—Bernadotte’s, Abigail’s—are really about. The unexpected turns. The side doors. The idea that history isn’t always written by the boldest or the best prepared—but by the ones who said yes when no one else wanted the job. Whether it’s a French general grabbing a crown, or a Southern woman reclaiming a poisoned inheritance, the lesson is the same: desperation doesn’t just breed creativity—it sometimes creates legacies. Messy ones. Contested ones. But legacies nonetheless.

Sometimes the story isn’t passed down. It’s taken back.

A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011) – Time, Time, Time is (Not Really) on Your Side

~ ~ 2 Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot about the passage of time lately. Some of it is logistical: my youngest, Macy, just finished her freshman year at a prestigious performing arts boarding school, so the house has been (for the most part) kid-free for a while. Some of it is social: I’ve started to notice that I’m increasingly the oldest person in the room. (Recently, I met two recent UCSB grads—go Gauchos!—who were fascinated that I was in college when the Berlin Wall came down.)

But mostly, it’s Scott.

A few weeks ago, I was back in Arizona for my nephew’s—Scott’s son’s—high school graduation. After Scott received his initial cancer diagnosis back in 2021, I spent a lot of time flying back and forth to Phoenix, but this was the first time I’d been back since he passed away. (I wrote about him here, if you’re curious.) In his final months, Scott and I spent hours reminiscing about the past, which was wonderful. But we also talked about the future—specifically, the parts of it he wouldn’t get to experience. One of those was his son’s graduation.

As hard as those conversations were, the ones about missing specific milestones weren’t the hardest. No, the hardest moments were when he expressed regret: things he’d put off, assuming—as we all do—that there would be more time. Later is the most dangerous lie we tell ourselves.

A few months after he died, I read an interview with Anne Hathaway in the New York Times. She’d just turned forty, and the interviewer asked how she felt about “middle age.” Her reply: “I hesitate at calling things ‘middle age’ simply because I can be a semantic stickler and I could get hit by a car later today. We don’t know if this is middle age. We don’t know anything.”

For reasons I can’t quite explain, that quote has stuck with me. Maybe it’s because she’s right. Calling this “middle age” assumes we’re guaranteed an equal number of years on either side. But life doesn’t work like that. Time is not symmetrical. It’s not fair. And it’s not predictable. That idea—of how we talk about time, plan around it, and quietly pretend we understand it—has been rattling around in my head ever since.

“Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the future.”

— “Fly Like an Eagle” by Steve Miller Band

All of which leads me to Jennifer Egan’s 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner, A Visit from the Goon Squad. Egan’s novel is obsessed with time—not in a philosophical, abstract way, but in a deeply human one. Rather than telling a single, continuous story, Goon Squad unfolds as a kaleidoscope of loosely connected narratives, each centered on a different character—music executives, kleptomaniacs, washed-up rockers, PR agents, children, and more. Their lives intersect across decades and cities, sometimes only glancingly, but together they form a rich mosaic of experience, memory, and change. There is no true protagonist—just a web of people caught in the undertow of time.

One character puts it bluntly: “Time’s a goon, right?”

It’s a funny line until it isn’t. Because in Egan’s world, time isn’t just a backdrop—it’s an antagonist. The goon. The enforcer. The one that shows up late in the story and punches you in the gut with the realization that youth, relevance, possibility—they don’t last.

Time in this book isn’t linear. It loops, skips, fast-forwards, rewinds. It’s messy. It erodes memory, reshapes identity, and reorders the people we thought we were becoming. In one chapter, we meet a character in their prime; a few chapters later, we find them lost, sidelined, or forgotten. The chronology is scrambled, but the emotional progression is sharp and deliberate.

“Time may change me, but I can’t trace time.”

— “Changes” by David Bowie

The characters in Goon Squad are all aging in their own way. Some go quietly, like Sasha, who gives up her impulsive, self-destructive tendencies to build a quieter life. Others rage against it—like Bennie Salazar, a record executive clinging to the ghosts of the punk scene and the gold flakes in his coffee. There’s a whole subplot about washed-up musicians trying to engineer a comeback through viral toddler stardom. It would be bleak if it weren’t so painfully familiar: a world where cool has an expiration date, and no one is quite ready to admit they’ve passed it.

Egan paints the aging process as both absurd and inevitable—especially in the context of a youth-obsessed culture like the music industry. One minute you’re at the center of everything, shaping taste and trend; the next, you’re a punchline at a digital marketing pitch meeting. Some characters try to reinvent themselves, others try to disappear, but most are left grappling with the slow realization that cultural relevance is fleeting, and personal identity isn’t immune to obsolescence.

Egan doesn’t treat aging with sentimentality, but she also doesn’t mock it. Instead, she captures that peculiar feeling of looking around one day and realizing the rooms have gotten younger while you’ve stayed the same. Or worse, realizing that you’re not the main character anymore—you’re someone else’s cautionary tale.

“Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, ‘It might have been.’”

— Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

And then there’s regret. Goon Squad is full of it, though the word itself rarely appears. The most devastating moments are the quietest ones: when Sasha reflects on the trail of things she’s taken and the people she’s hurt. When Bennie revisits old recordings of bands he once believed in. When characters realize, too late, that what felt like detours were actually their lives.

Even the book’s structure reflects this sense of emotional aftermath—so many of the chapters take place years after the “main event.” Egan doesn’t show us the moment the marriage breaks, the career collapses, or the betrayal happens—she shows us the echo. The damage. The emptiness that lingers long after the decision is made. That narrative distance gives regret its full weight, reminding us that the things we walk away from don’t always stay behind us.

Regret in Egan’s novel is rarely loud. It’s ambient. It hums underneath the stories like a bassline you can’t quite tune out. You feel it in the silences, in the slide transitions of a PowerPoint created by Sasha’s daughter—yes, one chapter is told entirely through slides—chronicling the subtle rhythms of domestic life. It’s tender, inventive, and quietly heartbreaking. A reminder that the most meaningful parts of our lives often unfold in moments so small we don’t realize they’re worth noticing until they’re gone.

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

— Søren Kierkegaard

Goon Squad reminds us that life doesn’t follow a clean tracklist. It’s more like a playlist on shuffle—disjointed, surprising, sometimes jarring, occasionally perfect. Moments you thought were throwaways become the ones you replay in your mind. And the songs you skipped too quickly—the people, the chances, the years—come back with a different weight the second time around. Egan’s novel doesn’t offer answers, just the raw material of living: time that slips, aging that humbles, and regret that lingers like a melody you can’t quite forget. It’s not always an easy listen, but it’s worth keeping on repeat.

A few weeks ago, sitting at my nephew’s graduation in the hot Arizona sun, I couldn’t help but feel the presence of someone missing. And yet, as his son walked across the stage, Scott was there too—in the past we shared, in the regrets we talked through, and in the reminders he left behind. Goon Squad hits hard because it echoes something I’ve been living: that time isn’t just something we lose—it’s something we carry. And the only thing more painful than looking back is imagining we had all the time in the world.

You Say You Want a Resolution

~ Pulitzer Guy ~ 2 Comments

One of my all-time favorite blog posts is this one by Tim Urban which discusses the passage of time, and in doing so, puts into clear focus the finite aspect of our lives. In particular, he lays out a lifespan not in the usual units of measurement such as minutes or hours or months or years, but instead by activities. For example, a presidential election only happens every four years. Assuming I live to be 90, therefore, I’m only going to punch the presidential ballot about another 10 times. Yikes.

That example, by the way, was intentional. The four-year cycle of presidential elections (or World Cups or Olympic Games) is apropos here at Pulitzer Schmulitzer because it has been just over four years since my last blog post. Another yikes. There are lots of reasons for this unintentional break, but suffice it to say that unlike presidential elections, the frequency of my writing is entirely in my control. And knowing that, I came to the patently obvious conclusion that I’m not going to finish this countdown unless I significantly pick up the pace here.

Why am I thinking about this now? Well, part of it is simply that fact that this is the time of year where “best of” lists abound as we look back on another loop about the sun. (Another part of it is that I had a COVID exposure so am self-isolating on New Year’s Eve and have some time on my hands.) On an individual level, it’s hard not to use this time to take stock of our accomplishments and failures and grade our past twelve months. More importantly, however, the end of the year also gives us an opportunity to think about the year ahead who we’d like to be. Granted, in reality New Year’s Day will just be like any other Saturday in our lives. But it feels different. It feels like we have a chance to close a chapter and start again with a blank slate. And not surprisingly, therefore, it is also time for New Year’s resolutions.

Historically, I’ve never been a huge proponent of either forming or following through on New Year’s resolutions. Part of this is certainly my fault, but most of the time my resolutions were either too vague, too small, too big, too numerous, or really, too stupid. As a result, I often forgot about them or ignored them or simply failed at them after a week or two.

At the start of 2021, however, I adopted an idea that my friend Gillian wrote about a few years back: instead of doing yearlong resolutions, set 12 one month resolutions. This structure helps in a couple of ways. First, you’re more likely to succeed (and success comes much quicker), with this shortened timeframe. Second, if you don’t succeed on any particular goal, you year isn’t shot; you simply start again the following month. So on this, the last day of 2021, here is my look back at my previous twelve months. With grades.

DRY JANUARY

Grade: B

Giving up alcohol in January certainly isn’t a novel idea, but honestly probably was (and probably still is) the most important one for me. The more I read about alcohol, the more I’m convinced that drinking is one of the worst things you can do to your body. The flip side, of course, is that drinking is super fun. (Or, as Kid Cudi put it, “All the crazy shit I did last night / Those will be the best memories”).

But at the start of 2021 we were a year into the pandemic, and if there is one thing I’ve learned from COVID is that pandemics are hard and a break from booze was sorely needed. I wasn’t perfect; I actually started on January 4th and had two other events that month where I drank, but 5 drinking days out of 31 was my best in a while. A long while.

WRITING FEBRUARY

Grade: F

February was supposed to be the month I kickstarted my writing. Specifically, I wanted to post two Pulitzer Schmultizer blog posts. It was a total fail. That said, the fact that I did set that goal gnawed at me periodically through the year, and may, in fact be another reason why I’m aiming to publish this piece in 2021. (Spoiler alert: I made it.)

READING MARCH

Grade: C

Given that I’m an avid reader, you would think the fact that I spend so much more time at home without a commute would have led to a significant increase in my reading time. You would be wrong. Turns out that the commute itself provides some built in reading time. Removing that time from my schedule also removed a fairly ingrained habit, and I didn’t find a suitable replacement.

So in March 2021, my goal was to read for an hour a day. I gave myself a C, but I consider this one a success; I was just over-zealous on my ambition. An hour a day is simply too much (or is simply too much for me), and I realized this fairly early on. What I also realized, however, was that a half-hour was doable, revised my goal accordingly, and was very successful reading that amount. So maybe a C with an asterisk.

VEGETARIAN APRIL

Grade: A

I love meat. But, like alcohol, the more I read about meat, and in particular the meat industry, the more I’m coming to believe that we’d all be better off as vegetarians. While this has been a slow realization for sure, over the years, I have cut out some specific things from my diet. I haven’t eaten veal in forever, for example. More recently, I decided that I won’t eat any of the top 10 smartest animals. Granted, most of these are fairly easy to avoid, but giving up octopus and, to a much greater extent, pork, has been a sacrifice. As noted above, I love meat and pork is very, very tasty.

Despite my love of meat, however, this one turned out to be relatively easy. My only slip up was a booze-fueled, unintentionally enthusiastic inhaling of a Kentucky Fried Chicken drumstick. (For Pulitzer Schmulitzer fans, you are aware of my weakness for KFC.) I will definitely do this one again.

OUTDOOR MAY

Grade: D

If you asked me at the start of the year which monthly resolution I thought would be the easiest to accomplish, I might have said this one. My goal for the month was simple: do two camping trips and take two hikes. What did I actually do? One hike and one night in a glamping tent at Safari West where I stayed up all night listening to two mating geese. I aspire to improve on this one in 2022.

BEACH BODY JUNE

Grade: A-

The goal for June was straightforward: do at least 30 minutes of exercise every single day. I already exercise a lot so this one wasn’t a huge stretch, but like with my reading, the COVID disruption to my schedule had somewhat surprisingly resulted in me being a little less disciplined with my work out routine. I missed maybe 1 or 2 days during June, but otherwise met this goal and, more importantly, re-established a much healthier routine.

LEARN SOMETHING NEW JULY

Grade: C

In hindsight, this goal – to “learn something new” – was frankly too vague. I did absolutely learn some new things. For example – and this is a little embarrassing – I actually barbecued for the first time in July. I’m not kidding. Not only that, but the grill had seen such little use that it wouldn’t light so I had to learn how to replace the igniter. But that wasn’t really what I had in mind at the start of 2021. In my head my goal for July was something more lofty like to take a course. As such, I gave myself a C with the real lesson here to be more specific with my objectives.

DELETE THE APPS AUGUST

Grade: A

If my reading time decreased during the pandemic, my time on social media increased in equal measure. As such, August’s goal was to delete Facebook, Instagram, Snap and TikTok from my phone. To be clear, I didn’t delete my accounts. But simply by removing them from my phone – especially from the home screen – it required me to be much more thoughtful and intentional about accessing them because it also required me to log in on desktop or through mobile web. This little bit of added friction, believe it or not, totally worked to decrease aimless scrolling and even more importantly the habit of opening them up at any moment of downtime. I loved this one and have never added any of the above back to my home screen.

DO SOME GOOD SEPTEMBER

Grade: F

September was supposed to be the month where I did a volunteer activity every Saturday. Again, like Outdoor May, I went into 2021 assuming that this would be a layup and again failed miserably. Didn’t do one thing. Yes, work was really busy this month, and yes, one Saturday I was actually at my first post-COVID wedding, but I believe I could have done more to make this happen. Of all of my 2021 resolutions, I may be most disappointed by this one.

ARTS OCTOBER

Grade: B+

At the start of 2021, vaccines were just around the corner and I assumed that by October life would be for the most part back to normal. As such, my goal for the month was to experience some of the things that I’ve missed the most these past few years and see one concert, one play, one museum exhibit and one art event of my choice. I was close. I went to two days of Outside Lands (I’m counting that as the concert and the event of my choice), and went to see an Orchestra performance of Anime hits on November 10th (nothing this elaborate mind you but this was one of the “hits”) and the Art of Banksy exhibit on November 24th. So technically I didn’t see the play and didn’t do it all in October, but technically COVID didn’t cooperate either because of the Delta variant so screw it, I’m giving myself a B+.

GIVE THANKS FOR YOUR STUFF NOVEMBER

Grade: A-

Similar to booze, the meat industry, and mindless social media consumption, I often struggle with how much stuff I consume. Because November is the time to give thanks, this month’s goal was simply to not buy anything new (food items excluded). Like Vegetarian April and Delete the Apps August, this one turned out to be relatively easy. I had to buy one tie and one dress shirt to wear for a business trip to New York, but other than those purchases I was the non-conspicuous consumer.

REACH OUT DECEMBER

Grade: B-

Last but certainly not least was one of my favorite goals of 2021: make a point to reach out to people that I adore but that I don’t get to see. My original thought was to do one reach out per day, so 31 in total. Ultimately, the reach outs were much more lumpy and I probably ended with about 20 so I’m giving myself a B-. Nonetheless, when I did do it the responses brought me a lot of joy. Makes you wonder why we don’t prioritize this more often. (Also, if you just read this paragraph and are mad that you weren’t one of the 20, don’t be. The other thing that this resolution taught me was that there are so many people that fall into this category. I’ll hit you up in 2022.)

So we’ve reached the end of this post and of 2021. I’ll get this posted right under the wire, and promise that this weekend I will work on my list for 2022. Some of these I will keep forever (Dry January is definitely needed), some I will keep because I failed at them last year (Writing February, Outdoor May and Do Good October), some I will improve on (Learn Something New July), and some I will drop because I don’t need them (Delete the Apps August). But most importantly, I resolve to pay more attention to Pulitzer Schmultizer and make some progress on my countdown. I hope you all keep me accountable.

In the meantime, I’m going to leave you with words from two people much more articulate and wise than I am. Both are about life and understanding that it is very finite. The first piece is from a commencement address the author Joan Didion – who just passed away last week – gave in 1975 at UC Riverside:

“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”

And the second is a poem called The Laughing Heart by Charles Bukowski:

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

(I love this poem and the only way it would be better would be to watch Tom Waits read it.)

So I made it. It is 11:13 on New Year’s Eve. Wishing you all the best in 2022.

#48. Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie (1985): You Never Know What’s Going to Happen – Notes from My 7-Year-Old

~ Pulitzer Guy ~ 3 Comments

[Editor’s Note: Pulitzer Schmulitzer! is where we count down our favorite Pulitzer Prize winning novels for fiction according to the unpredictable and arbitrary whims of yours truly. To learn how Pulitzer Schmulitzer! started and read about the methodology or complete lack thereof behind the rankings, look no further than right here. If you want to see what we’ve covered so far, here you go. Now, on to the countdown.]

“Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.”

-Victor Hugo

“The face you have at age twenty-five is the face God gave you, but the face you have after fifty is the face you earned.”

-Cindy Crawford

Sometimes I find it tough to read my 7-year-old daughter Macy. She’s mostly happy to see me and I know she loves me, but as I often tell people when describing her, she skews happy. She loves everything. For example, she recently found a note pad where you could list five things that you love. Macy’s list, in order (and spell corrected):

  1. Hugs!
  2. Kisses!
  3. Soccer!
  4. Musicals!
  5. Dinner!

Note - List of Loves
Macy’s list of things she loves. “Dad” did not make the cut.

It is interesting to note that like us here at Pulitzer Schmulitzer!, Macy is a big fan of the exclamation point. And it is also interesting, maybe more so, to note that although “Dinner!” made the list, “Dad!” did not.

So I was very excited Sunday morning when Macy, after working very diligently on a drawing at the dining room table while I read the paper, handed said drawing to me and said, “I made you a card.” I was even more excited when I read it because it said: “Thank you for being a rock ★ parent! I’m going to miss you so so so so so so so so so much. Love Macy.”

Pride in my own parenting skills swelled within me. I looked at my youngest lovingly and we had the following interaction:

Me: That is so nice Macy. Thank you. (Quick hug ensued leading to more pride swelling). But why are you going to miss me?

Macy: What?

Me: (Showing her the note) You said you were going to miss me so so so so so much, but I’m not going anywhere.

Macy: (Taking a closer look at the card.) Oh, I forgot something.

At this point, Macy took the note back, grabbed a pen, and quickly started writing. It took only a few seconds before she handed me the now augmented note that read as follows: “Thank you for being a rock ★ parent! I’m going to miss you so so so so so so so so so much … when you die! Love Macy.”

note-rock-star.jpeg

Although I was still happy that she was going to miss me, I was understandably a tiny bit conflicted about the prerequisite. It was a little morbid. But in her defense, Macy has been a little preoccupied with death these last few months and I think I know why. First, she recently asked if she could have a fish tank. So, over my objections, we took her to a fish store and brought home a five-gallon fish tank, a miniature castle, some foliage, and three little guppies – Fire, Joey and Sparkle.

All was good with the world for about 16 hours until she woke up the next morning and found Joey lying dead behind the castle. Tears flew from her eyes immediately and she decided that Fire had killed him. I’m not totally sure what Sparkle’s alibi was, but Macy was convinced that Fire was a bad apple. She was inconsolable.

Actually, I take that back. She was somewhat consolable and started to pull it together until I retrieved Joey from the tank and headed to the bathroom to flush him down the toilet at which point we had the following interaction:

Macy: What are you doing with Joey?

Me: I’m going to flush him down the toilet.

Macy: NOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!! (Tears flying out of eyes once again. Now actually inconsolable.)

Me: What would you like to do with Joey?

Macy: BURY HIM!!!!!!

So shortly thereafter, Macy and I were standing outside in the yard holding a fish funeral for Joey. We buried Joey in a small Kleenex box, his little guppy body laying on a bed of tissues. We said a few words, which was hard given the limited time we knew each other, but it was sweet. And as the last spoonful of dirt covered Joey’s casket, Macy said: “Can we get another fish?”

The second reason Macy has been fascinated with death recently is that I turned 50 this summer. I can barely believe I’m that old, but to my seven-year-old, it is inconceivable. (And you just thought of The Princess Bride). She’s just learning to count that high. In her mind, the difference between 50 and the age of the universe is not that much. Like 20 years.

So because we had many celebrations around my birthday, she was acutely aware that I’m the oldest one in the family that means, of course, that I am going to be the first one to die. And my death will be followed by, in order, Gigi, Sam and Lily thereby leaving Macy the last one standing. The first time she told me this, I was trying to get a sense of whether this chain of events bothered her or comforted her. I’m still not totally sure. But what I was sure of was that I didn’t want her to think that was necessarily how things were going to turn out, so I said something to the effect of, “you never know what’s going to happen.”

I’ll get back to that story in a minute, but first we must detour to Foreign Affairs by Allison Lurie, the 1985 Pulitzer winner that comes in at #48 on our countdown. Foreign Affairs tells the story of Virginia Miner (Vinnie), a fifty-four-year-old spinsterish professor at Corinth University who specializes in children’s literature. She loves travel and is off to London (which she also loves) for a six-month research trip with plans to write a book about playground rhymes. Her mood, however, is a little soured because a critic named L. D. Zimmern recently trashed her work in a nationally circulated magazine.

Also bringing her down is Chuck Mumpson, a sanitary engineer from Tulsa, Oklahoma and her seatmate on what would otherwise be a pleasant flight, who proceeds to accost her conversationally. Although currently unmarried, Vinnie couldn’t be less interested. She’s had her share of affairs and even a brief marriage, but at this point in her life, Vinnie has stopped believing that falling or being in love is a good thing. So to silence Chuck, she gives him a copy of Little Lord Fauntleroy. Unfortunately, this plan ultimately backfires when the smoking, drinking and generally loudly American Chuck contacts her in London. It turns out he has been inspired by Little Lord Fauntleroy to want to trace his own family history. Vinnie slowly becomes involved with his project, and then with him.

Meanwhile, in a parallel story, one of Vinnie’s young colleagues, Fred Turner, has left his wife, Roo, at home for his own sabbatical in London, where he is researching John Gay. In chapters that alternate with those recounting Vinnie’s triumphs and tribulations, we learn that Fred and Roo have quarreled and he fears the marriage is over. He consoles himself with the affections of a beautiful and aristocratic television actress, Lady Rosemary Radley, who gives him the entree into London high life. The exquisite but not so young Rosemary has never managed to have a really successful love relationship—though she is not resigned to this, as Vinnie is. Ultimately, these two stories come together when, quite by accident and with the encouragement of Chuck, Vinnie becomes an emissary for Fred’s estranged wife. What makes this favor more challenging for Vinnie is that Roo’s father is none other than the nefarious critic L. D. Zimmern.

I won’t give away the ending, but suffice it to say that Vinnie’s relationship with Chuck opens her eyes to the fact that she has many years to live and a lot to experience, including love. Literate by nature, Vinnie comes to the realization that literature may have unintentionally betrayed her. “In the world of classic British fiction,” she reflects, ”almost the entire population is under fifty, or even under forty – as was true of the real world when the novel was invented.” Even today, in most novels ”it is taken for granted that people over fifty are as set in their ways as elderly apple trees, and as permanently shaped and scarred by the years they have weathered. The literary convention is that nothing major can happen to them except through subtraction.”

But in real life – or the “real” life of Vinnie – she has many years to live and much to experience. Why, therefore, she concludes, should she ”become a minor character in her own life? Why shouldn’t she imagine herself as an explorer standing on the edge of some landscape as yet unmapped by literature: interested, even excited – ready to be surprised?”

As one who is now near Vinnie’s age in the novel, I absolutely love this and appreciate what Alison Lurie as to say about getting older. Foreign Affairs offers a wry commentary on who we perceive ourselves as being and the sometimes jarring reality of who we are and how much we are constructed by other people’s perceptions of us. The book is witty, truthful (sometimes painfully so), intelligent, warm, humorous, and ultimately inspiring. Fast forward 30 years and I’ll probably suggest Macy read it.

However, it is currently above her reading level, so when Macy handed me back the updated note she had written, I did my best to translate the message. I told her that 50 isn’t that old and (fingers crossed) I have many years of life and living left to do. She didn’t need to miss me quite yet.

As an aside, what I really wanted to do but can’t because she is only seven, was go one level deeper and add that she shouldn’t be anti-death (although again I’m not sure she is). Death is in some ways in underrated. To be clear, I’m not talking about senseless death, or early death, or painful death; not the death of war, terror, cruelty, poverty, abuse, neglect, suicide, disease. But normal death is our admission fee for the privilege of life. It gives life urgency. It makes life worth living. And yes, graying hair and creaky joints are part of that fee. Our lives are finite — so, as we’ve discussed many times here at Pulitzer Schmulitzer!, we should live them with gusto.

But in the end that conversation didn’t happen and Macy’s takeaway focused on the uncertainly because “you never know what’s going to happen.” So I shouldn’t have been that surprised to find the following message scribbled a few days later on a pineapple note pad:

Note - Pineapple
“Can we please get another dog. We only have two fish and who knows if there gonna die? Love Macy

#49. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (2009) – Make America Hate Again: Why I Wish There Was A Little More Olive Kitteridge in Donald Trump

~ Pulitzer Guy ~ Leave a comment

donald-trump-alec-baldwin-snl

[Editor’s Note: Pulitzer Schmulitzer! is where we count down our favorite Pulitzer Prize winning novels for fiction according to the unpredictable and arbitrary whims of yours truly. To learn how Pulitzer Schmulitzer! started and read about the methodology or complete lack thereof behind the rankings, look no further than right here. If you want to see what we’ve covered so far, here you go. Now, on to the countdown.]

So my very public promise to write more frequently was a total fail. But, in all honesty, it wasn’t for a lack of trying. I’ve just been having the hardest time with this post. Here at Pulitzer Schmulitzer!, my usual formula is to tell a personal story and then connect it (albeit very tenuously) to the book I’m reviewing. And if you know me, you also probably know that telling stories about myself is generally not an issue. Most of the time, writing about the book is the hardest part for me. Not so this time.

So we’re going to flip things around and start with the book: Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner. Set in a small community on the coast of Maine, Olive Kitteridge is a “novel-in-stories,” a book-length collection of short stories that are interconnected. Think The Canterbury Tales, or, if you’re looking for more Pulitzer themed examples, Jennifer Egan’s 2011 Pulitzer Winner A Visit from the Goon Squad, and Junot Diaz’ non-Pulitzer winner but still popular This is Where You Lose Her (he did win the Pulitzer for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008)).

If the author can pull it off, I’m a fan of the novel-in-stories format. (Actually, I like the format in other mediums as well. For example, some of my favorite movies are very Olive Kitteridge-esque. The Player, Magnolia, Go, and of course the (relatively) new Christmas classic Love, Actually all follow the same formula.) Some complain that telling stories in this manner doesn’t leave room for nuanced character development. That may be true, but telling a story or stories in this manner has a ton of benefits as well.

Specifically, I like the idea that our stories don’t exist in a vacuum but instead are messily enmeshed. In real life, I like the idea of six degrees of separation and discovering random connections with strangers I meet. In fiction, I like the fact that these stories remind me that things aren’t always about me; a reminder I need surprisingly often. We’re all living in our little worlds but we’re doing it all together, and sometimes paths cross with less than optimal outcomes. But often those outcomes have less to do with the parties involved than with all the backstory – often unknown to the other party – that comes with them.

Turning specifically to Olive Kitteridge, Strout weaves together 13 different stories that encompass a wide range of experience. One story takes place at the funeral of a man whose wife has just learned he cheated on her. Another features a hostage-taking in a hospital. Elsewhere, an old lover surprises a lounge pianist, sending her reeling back into painful memories, and in another, an overbearing mother visits her wary son and his boisterous, pregnant wife. Most stories center on some kind of betrayal, and a few document delicate and unlikely romances.

And linking these stories together is the novel’s namesake, Olive Kitteridge, a seventh-grade math teacher and the wife of a pharmacist. Olive’s presence in each of the stories varies. In some she’s at the center, but in others she remains only on the fringe. (And for the record, the stories in which she appears the least are also often the least interesting). Through these interactions, we learn not only about Olive herself, but we also see the effect that she has on those around her.

Truth be told, I had a great story lined up to accompany this novel that involved me delivering Christmas trees. How I ended up in the situation is unimportant, but suffice it to say one rainy night a few weeks before Christmas I found myself driving a Ford F150 around the East Bay with three trees in the back and stranger by my side. As the night wore on, each delivery became a story unto itself. There were highs and there were lows. And with each stop I was getting a short but rather intimate look into strangers’ lives. It was an Olive Kitteridge experience. It was a cute story (at least in my head).

But despite knowing for over a month now that was my story, I just couldn’t pull it together. Given the current political environment, it seemed too light. I thought I could cure it by weaving in some humorous jabs at Donald Trump, but poking fun of him – although there really is so so much to poke fun at – came across as simultaneously petty, ineffective and unsatisfying. There are plenty of people far funnier than I am making fun of him all day long. I got so fed up I finally scrapped the whole idea and hoped I could find another connection to Olive Kitteridge. If our paths cross, I’d be happy to tell you of my Christmas tree adventures.

“Luckily,” it only took one week of Trump being President to figure out a new connection. You see, Olive, like Trump, comes across as an asshole. She is neither nice nor sympathetic. As one of the town’s older women notes, “Olive had a way about her that was absolutely without apology.” That’s putting it nicely. Her son, in contrast, told her more bluntly, “You can make people feel terrible.” She dismisses people with words like “hellion” and “moron” and “flub-dub.” Sound familiar?

But as is true of most people, Olive is more complicated than she seems on the surface. She may hurl insults at her son, but she also loves him a lot. The same goes for her her husband who she also loves, although she has trouble expressing it. She’s definitely has her moods, but she also laughs spontaneously, and most importantly, she harbors a sense of compassion, even for strangers. In one story, for example, Olive bursts into tears when she meets an anorexic young woman. When Olive tells the girl that “I’m starving, too,” the girl takes one look at this large woman and says, “You’re not starving.” “Sure I am,” Olive says. “We all are.”

Olive may seem like an asshole, but through these stories, we learn that she also has a remarkable capacity for empathy, and it’s an empathy without sentimentality. She gets that life is lonely and unfair, and that it takes a lot of luck to experience blessings like a long marriage and a quick death. She knows she can be a shit; she has regrets. And because she has that self-awareness, she understands people’s failings — and, ultimately, their frail hopes. By the end of the novel, you may hate her brusqueness, her self-centeredness, and her difficulty accepting changes, but you admire her quiet strength, her forthrightness, her realistic views of life, and the fact that she controls her emotions.

And Kudos to Ms. Strout, because the novel-in-stories format is a perfect medium for capturing this complexity. Each story is presented from different viewpoints and shows Olive’s many sides as she interacts with family, neighbors and friends, as she experiences age, loneliness, grief and love. It’s through these stories that we discover a character infinitely richer than originally assumed.

You’ve probably figured out where I’m going with this. When Trump incomprehensively garnered enough electoral votes to secure the Presidency (I can’t bring myself to say “won”), I consoled myself in the weeks that followed by hoping that he had a little Olive Kitteridge in him. I told myself that once he was President, the importance of the office would temper his campaign promises. I wanted to believe the Republicans – who only weeks before refused to support him – when they suggested that we should give him a chance.

For example, Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire, was asked before the election what he thought about Trump’s proposal to ban Muslim entry into the United States. Although Thiel initially expressed misgivings about Trump’s language, he ultimately came to his defense by arguing that we – and specifically the media – shouldn’t take him literally. “[T]he media always has taken Trump literally. It never takes him seriously, but it always takes him literally.” In other words, Trump didn’t mean he wanted an actual ban. “I think a lot of the voters who vote for Trump take Trump seriously but not literally. And so when they hear things like the Muslim comment or the wall comment or things like that, the question is not ‘Are you going to build a wall like the Great Wall of China?’ or, you know, ‘How exactly are you going to enforce these tests?’ What they hear is ‘We’re going to have a saner, more sensible immigration policy.’”

Although his literally/seriously argument seemed far-fetched when applied to a man hoping to run the most powerful country on Earth, I hoped Thiel was right. Sadly, it took only all of one week of the Trump presidency to realize that he wasn’t, and that what Trump said on the campaign trail was exactly what he meant. He really does want to repeal the Affordable Care Act and take insurance coverage from 30 million people. He really does want to build a wall despite the fact that anything that impedes the inflow of tequila seems like a horrible idea to me. He really does hang out with and trust neo-nazis like Steve Bannon and thinks it is a good idea to add him to the National Security Council. And he really really doesn’t like Muslims.

As we all know by now (hopefully), last week he signed an Executive Order that halted refugee entry into the US for 120 days, and barred all citizens of seven predominantly Muslim nations – Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen – from entering the US for three months. Although supposedly done to protect Americans, this is pure security theater. How do I know? Well, I know it because of the number of people killed in the US by refugee terror attacks. Zero. I know this because “nobody in the counterterrorism community pushed for this.”

I know this because it doesn’t even target places that pose the largest threat. Not a single American was killed on U.S. soil by citizens of any of those countries between 1975 and 2015. Interestingly, nearly 3,000 Americans were killed by citizens from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirites and Egypt in the same time period, with the bulk of those being victims of the 9/11 attacks. Yet in those three countries, Trump has significant business interests. Hmmmm.

trump-middle-east-map

I know this because even putting aside refugee v. non-refugee or even the specific countries, enacting this Executive Order in the name of American safety is pure farce. Sadly, I stole the following chart from Kim Kardashian West, but I’m sure its directionally correct and more importantly it proves a (my) point.

list-of-things-that-will-kill-you

If Trump were really concerned about the safety of American citizens, he should start with tackling our gun laws since guns are about 5,868 times more likely to kill you than an Islamic jihadist immigrant. Then, in order of operation, we should make everyone install bed rails, bolster bus and lawnmower regulation, wear rubber shoes and, of course, get some control over those pesky toddlers. But we won’t.

We won’t because this isn’t about protecting the American people. This is about divisiveness and hate. Which honestly doesn’t make that much sense as a strategy until you realize he’s doing this because he knows that he will never be able to tell his voters, “Your lives are better now.” He has no plan, so he’ll have to keep them scared, angry or both. For four years. This is literally his only play.

And again, there are people that are a lot smarter than me that are writing far better articles about the situation we find ourselves in at the moment. You should read them. But I will say that on a personal level, of my eight great-grandparents, four came to this country from somewhere else. One from China, one from Denmark, one from Ireland and one from Mexico. And my immigrant great-grandparent tally may even be higher than that if I actually had a good handle on certain branches of my family tree (which is another story I’d be happy to share if our paths cross). America isn’t great despite immigrants. America is great because of immigrants.

Thankfully, the response to Trump’s Executive Order gives me hope. Over one weekend, the ACLU received $24 million in online donations, six times the amount is usually receives in a year. Starbucks announced plans to hire 10,000 refugees over 5 years in 75 countries. There are Google docs going around with every Senator’s stance on the Muslim Ban with telephone numbers. The Pope chimed in and said you can’t reject refugees and call yourself a Christian. Pretty sure he was talking about Paul Ryan. Even the acting US Attorney General told her staff that the Order was illegal and to not enforce it (at which point she was summarily canned).

But most importantly, people – normal people – have rallied. They showed up last week at the Women’s Marches and they showed up this week at airports. The bar for being a superhero is so low right now. You don’t need capes or karate. You just have to show compassion and empathy. You just need to funnel your inner Olive Kitteridge.

There is a quote I love from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, about an Irish immigrant family at the turn of the century: “There are very few bad people. There are just a lot of people that are unlucky.” This is true of Olive. By the end of the novel, we recognize not only Olive’s glaring flaws, but also her inherent nobility, and she reminds us that we are complicated and imperfect creatures. And reading a book like Olive Kitteridge reminds us that we need to try and understand people, even if we can’t stand them.

But we must also remember that although the number may be very few, there are actually bad people in this world. Sadly, it appears that one of those people is now the most powerful man on the planet. I wanted to believe that there was something deeper behind his angry rants. But as I’ve said before, we have to embrace the world that is, not the world we wished it were, or the world we thought it was. And in this world, Trump is seriously, literally, an asshole.

#50 How My Dad’s Mattress Ended Up on Our Front Lawn: Lessons Learned from A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor (1987)

~ Pulitzer Guy ~ 1 Comment

[Editor’s Note: Pulitzer Schmulitzer! is where we count down our favorite Pulitzer Prize winning novels for fiction according to the unpredictable and arbitrary whims of yours truly. To learn how Pulitzer Schmulitzer! started and read about the methodology or complete lack thereof behind the rankings, look no further than right here. If you want to see what we’ve covered so far, here you go. Now, on to the countdown.]

We’re about a month removed from the closing ceremonies and I’m sad the Olympics are over, but not necessarily because I want to watch more events. Honestly, it was killing my productivity. And my ability to catch up on other television shows. Or both. Hello Mr. Robot my old friend.

No, the reason I’m sad is that these Olympics will hold a special place in my heart because it was really the first Olympics that we shared with Sam and Lily. They must have watched the 2012 games in London, but at that point Sam was 11 and Lily had just turned 10 and they were still going to bed early enough that they wouldn’t have seen NBC’s ridiculously late night coverage (a topic for another day). But now they’re four years older. Sam is learning to drive, Lily is in high school and they now stay up ridiculously late which is super handy if you want to watch the Olympics.

So this year we spent a lot of time between 8 p.m. and midnight sitting around our bedroom watching Simone Biles, Kerri Walsh Jennings, and Usain Bolt. We discussed green pools, the Zika virus, and the sexism imbedded in this headline.

olympics-article

We lamented the US Women’s Nation Soccer team losing way too early. We laughed at Michael Phelps giving Chad le Clos a pre-race death stare, the diving scores that covered the athlete’s groins so it made them look like porn stars, and Ryan Lochte dying his hair brown again after saying “my bad” for lying about being held up at gunpoint. (That helped for one second.) And we marveled at the athleticism and sportsmanship on display such as Katie Ledeky beating the the silver medalist by nearly 12 seconds in the 800m final, and New Zealand’s Nikki Hamblin and Abbey D’Agostino of the USA helping each other out after colliding in their heat of the women’s 5000m. In hindsight, it was two weeks of together time that was wonderful.

And although I love that I have my nights back, I’m a little melancholy due to the fact that the Olympics only happen every four years, and that time we just spent together may not be replicated with the older two kids (Macy, I realize, is another story). When the Olympics descend on Tokyo in 2020, Sam will be nearly 20 years old and in college (hopefully). Lily will have just turned 18 and be a full-fledged adult and getting ready to go off to college (again, hopefully). Who knows if either will be in the house and even if they are, will we all sit around our bedroom for four hours every night watching synchronized diving? Doubtful.

Am I being overly pessimistic? I don’t think so. I’m dating myself, but the first Olympics I clearly remember were the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games. It was the Olympics of Nadia Comaneci and the first perfect 10. It was Sugar Ray Leonard and Spinks brothers, Michael and Leon, taking gold medals when boxing still mattered. It was the US men’s basketball team winning after the controversial loss four years earlier. It was Caitlin Jenner, then known as Bruce, winning the decathlon, soon to have (at that time) his face all over boxes of Wheaties. Germany was still divided between East and West and everyone thought the East German women’s swim team was doping when they nearly swept all the swimming events. Probably because they were.

And even now, I remember watching with my parents and loving it and being so excited for it to happen again. Except it didn’t. In 1980, the US boycotted the Moscow games for reasons I don’t recall. By the time the 1984 Olympics rolled around in LA, the Russians and most of the Eastern Bloc boycotted in retaliation for the US boycott, and I was entering my senior year of high school. As such, neither the USSR nor I participated. And then I was gone.

But, and this is a big but, having that one Olympics with my parents made a difference. Not only do I still remember much of it to this day, but it also led to one of my top five favorite Dad stories. I was so obsessed with the Olympics that when my birthday came around I wanted to have an Olympics themed party. Most of the events were fairly straightforward. Lots of races (both running and swimming), we had a roughly round-shaped rock that we used as a shot put. There was a diving (read: cannonball) competition. But my favorite event was high jump, but not because I love that event or because I did especially well. No. That event was my favorite because my Dad dragged his mattress from his master bedroom on to our front lawn so that we would have padding when we landed. And he told me not to tell my Mom.

I remember thinking it was so out of character. The whole thing. I’ve spoken at length about my Dad and he had many, many fabulous qualities, but a secretive rule breaker he wasn’t. He was very practical and honest and had I been a betting man at that tender age, I would have said there is a snowball’s chance in hell that he’d drag a mattress – his own mattress – on to our front yard in support of fake Olympic glory. And then I would have double-downed that he would have run this plan by Mom first. Being wrong about your parents, however, is just part of growing up.

And I’m 99% sure that if I could tell him that story today, he would have no recollection of ever doing that and certainly wouldn’t think that it had any impression on me. In fact, there were all sorts of other “lessons” I inadvertently learned from my Dad that I’m sure he never intended. For example, to teach my new puppy, Toby, how to swim, he threw him in the pool. Lesson learned: sink or swim. Literally. When we came across a gruesome car crash in Mexico with a bloody dead guy impaled on the steering wheel, I looked at him and he didn’t flinch. Lesson learned: don’t freak out. When my grades dipped during my sophomore year of high school, he told me not to show him my report card. Lesson learned: when the lesson is learned, the lesson is learned. (Alternate lesson: give ‘em enough rope).

Lessons learned, or scar tissue developed, during childhood is a great intro to Peter Taylor’s A Summons to Memphis, the 1987 Pulitzer Prize winner. Summons tells the story of Phillip, a New York City book editor and the 49-year-old son of imposing Memphis lawyer George Carver. Phillip, who is unmarried, returns home when George, an octogenarian, decides to remarry, a development that Phillip’s two older and also unmarried sisters, Betsy and Josephine, intend to prevent. With gusto.

But it turns out that the crux of the story isn’t the kids’ obsession with thwarting their father’s new love. Instead, it is the family’s history and the kids’ belief that their father totally ruined their lives. Unlike the father in A Thousand Acres, however, whose transgressions were objectively unforgivable, George is guilty of the much more pardonable sin of moving the family from Nashville to Memphis. In their minds, that decision 40 years earlier blighted all of their lives. Seriously, it can’t be fixed.

A little background is in order. Other than George who was born in rural Tennessee, the Carvers are natives of Nashville. And George, despite his upbringings, pulled himself up by his proverbial bootstraps, attended the prestigious Vanderbilt University and became a respected Nashville lawyer. In Nashville, the family leads an ideal life blessed with meaning until George is compelled to uproot the family and move to Memphis in order to protect his reputation due to his association with a former friend, the unsavory Mr. Lewis Shakleford. Tragedy ensues.

One sister had to give up an engagement; Philip was forever torn from an adolescent love; and the children’s mother, who has been dead for a few years before the book begins, had to leave all that she knew behind and start anew. And in Memphis the hardships continue. The teenage daughters are not allowed to be presented in Memphis and are thus denied the opportunity to find acceptable suitors; the other brother Georgie eventually runs off to fight in the war; the mother declines physically and mentally; and Philip moves to New York City to get away from it all. On the surface that is pretty much it to the story (I’ll leave you in suspense as to the success or failure of their thwarting attempts).

But really, A Summons to Memphis is about whether we ever get over the pain and betrayals – or what we remember as the pain and betrayals – from childhood. Granted, it is hard to get too worked up over the kids’ pain and betrayals in this story. It seems silly to blame a move of 200 miles as the determining factor for the rest of your life. But in retrospect, maybe the seeming triviality of the father’s actions in this book force us to take a closer look at the question. In other words, some people experience such horrible childhoods that the fact those experiences affect them throughout life seems a foregone conclusion. For most, however, those supposed wrongs might appear innocuous when viewed through the eyes of an objective outsider. In any case, A Summons to Memphis is a fine reminder that forgetting the injustices and seeming injustices which one suffered from one’s parents during childhood and youth must be the major part of any maturing process. The Carver children haven’t done so well on that front.

Bottom line, A Summons to Memphis is a finely written novel — as most of the books on the countdown from here on out will be — that tells a semi-interesting story. And for parents such as myself, it is a somewhat troubling reminder that all of your actions, intentional or not, will make an impression on your children, but a select few will change who they are as adults. And the kicker is you won’t know which actions those are until it is too late. (So maybe the really important lesson that we should teach our kids is that if you’re dropped into a swimming pool, you should swim.) All you can do is try your best, and drag your own mattress onto the front lawn once in a while. And by all means, spend time with your kids, even if it means nobody goes to bed before midnight. It might just be the thing they remember decades later. Lesson learned.

#51 Beloved by Toni Morrison (1988): As Yoda Would Say, Love or Hate. There is No Like. Hmm. (alternate title: I Did Not Love It. Controversy?)

~ Pulitzer Guy ~ 5 Comments

Hamilton
The cast of Hamilton

[Editor’s Note: Pulitzer Schmulitzer! is where we count down our favorite Pulitzer Prize winning novels for fiction according to the unpredictable and arbitrary whims of yours truly. To learn how Pulitzer Schmulitzer! started and read about the methodology or complete lack thereof behind the rankings, look no further than right here. If you want to see what we’ve covered so far, here you go. Now, on to the countdown.]

There was a busy and sad news week in April – led by the death of Prince – where you might have missed the fact that the US Treasury Department decided your wallet has too much testosterone so they’re booting Andrew Jackson off the $20 bill and replacing him with Harriet Tubman. If your third grade history class is a little fuzzy, Tubman was one of the most important figures in the movement to end slavery. Now, not only is she the first woman to appear on US currency in more than a century, but she is also the first African-American ever to appear. And Andrew Jackson, the man she is replacing, owned slaves. Karma’s a bitch.

What you might have also missed if you were endlessly looping every Prince album from 1980’s Dirty Mind through 1987’s Sign o’ the Times (which, if you haven’t done, then you should right now), was that the original plan wasn’t to replace Jackson, but rather to replace Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill. That’s not happening anymore because, well, Hamilton. Controversy? Not really.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Hamilton is the Lin-Manuel Miranda written Broadway phenomenon; an unlikely sounding hip-hop musical about Alexander Hamilton, one of the lesser-known founding fathers of America. The numbers are staggering. After a successful off-Broadway run, it took in over $60 million before it opened on Broadway in August 2015; it’s sold out through January 2017; the album, which reached number three in the rap charts, is the highest selling cast recording for 50 years; tickets for even Monday evening shows can fetch up to $2000 for the best seats; and it just collected a record-breaking 16 Tony Award nominations.

But Hamilton is more than just numbers. It has been called historic and game-changing and, honestly, everyone seems to agree. Hollywood stars, hip-hop royalty and politicians of every persuasion have turned out in droves to see it. President Obama took his daughters, Bill Clinton has seen it, as has Julia Roberts, Susan Sarandon and Madonna (though she, according to cast members, spent most of her time glued to her phone). Jay-Z and Beyoncé posed with the cast after the show. One night JJ Abrams, the director of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, came and asked Manuel to write music for a scene in the film.

But its not just famous people that love Hamilton. Little kids love Hamilton and make cute little kid YouTube videos. Finicky critics love Hamilton. Ben Brantley, the New York Times critic, wrote, “I am loath to tell people to mortgage their houses and lease their children to acquire tickets to a hit musical. But Hamilton… might just be about worth it.” And even more finicky (finickier?) and sometimes hard to please teens love the show. How do I know? Because I’ve got one.

My daughter Lily started listening to the Hamilton soundtrack right before Christmas. I’m not entirely sure what the impetus was to make her queue it up on Spotify, but I am sure that once she started listening to it she couldn’t stop. Within a fairly short period of time, she knew every word to every song. She knew every cast member, including ensemble cast members and backups. She even enlisted her little sister to accompany her in a cute little video.

Which brings me to Beloved from Toni Morrison, the 1988 Pulitzer Prize winner and probably the most controversial novel on the countdown. Just as Frank Bascombe from Independence Day was the anti-Lemmy Kilmister, Beloved is the anti-Hamilton. People love or hate this book in equal numbers.

Set in Ohio in 1873 after the end of the Civil War, Beloved tells a lot of stories with a lot of voices, but the central one belongs to Sethe who is living in a farmhouse with her youngest daughter Denver, and her mother-in-law Baby Suggs. There is almost no way to explain this book without giving away the plot (ergo, SPOILER ALERT), but their house is also home to a sad but very angry ghost, who everyone believes is the spirit of Sethe’s baby daughter, who, at the age of 2, had her throat cut under appalling circumstances. We never know this child’s full name, but we – and Sethe – think of her as Beloved, because that is what is on her tombstone. Sethe wanted ”Dearly Beloved,” from the funeral service, but had only enough strength to pay for one word. Payment was 10 minutes of sex with the tombstone engraver.

Not surprisingly, a haunted house doesn’t make for the greatest home environment. Sethe’s two young sons have run away from home by the age of 13, and Denver, the only child remaining, is shy, friendless, and housebound. To add insult to injury, not long into the book and with the ghost in full possession of the house, Baby Suggs dies in her bed. Insert sad emoji.

But characters – and stories – such as these don’t exist without some significant trauma in their past, and Sethe’s past comes front and center when Paul D – one of the slaves from Sweet Home, the Kentucky plantation where Baby Suggs, Sethe, Halle (Sethe’s ex), and several other slaves once worked – arrives at their home. They fled Sweet Home 18 years before the novel opens, and when we begin the flashbacks, we see why. If there is such a thing as a good slave owner, then Mr. Garner, the original owner of Sweet Home, might qualify. He treated the slaves well, allowed them some say in running the plantation, and called them ”men” in defiance of the neighbors, who want all male blacks to be called ”boys.” But when he dies, his wife brings in her handiest male relative, who is known as ”the schoolteacher,” and, as is often the case with people whose nickname is “the schoolteacher,” he is a total asshole.

Throw in the schoolteacher’s two sadistic and repulsive nephews, and from there it’s all downhill at Sweet Home as the slaves try to escape, go crazy or are murdered. Sethe, in a trek that makes the Snake’s journey in Escape from New York look like a stroll around the block, gets out, just barely; her husband, Halle, doesn’t. Paul D. does, but has some very unpleasant adventures along the way, including a literally nauseating sojourn in a 19th-century Georgia chain gang.

So Paul D. and a shit ton of baggage arrive at Sethe’s home, and surprisingly, he appears to make things a little better. He forces out the ghost, and even gets Denver out of the house for the first time in years. But never forget, this is a Pulitzer winner which means that, chances are, this isn’t a story where things are going to work out for everyone in the end. And sure enough, on the way back home with Denver, they come across a young woman sitting in front of the house, calling herself, of all things, Beloved. Paul D is suspicious (duh) and warns Sethe, but she is charmed by the young woman and ignores him.

Not surprisingly, inviting a random 20 year-old who shows up out of nowhere calling herself the same name as your baby daughter who died tragically turns out to be a poor decision. Beloved gets in everyone’s head and sooner or later has sex with Paul D in a shed. He feels horrible and is racked with guilt, but when he tries to tell Sethe about it he instead tells her that he wants her pregnant. Lesson: just no.

Albeit, Sethe is initially elated so, to be fair, Paul D’s ad lib does put the breakup playlist on hold for a few. But when Paul D tells his friends at work about his plan to start a new family, they tell him the real story of how Sethe’s two year old died. I’ve given away too much already (and honestly would rather not discuss it), but suffice it to say that the news is too much for Paul D and he leaves. Without him around, Beloved consumes more and more of Sethe’s life until it reaches the point where it is clear that both cannot survive.

As I mentioned at the outset, people’s opinions on this novel vary widely. But regardless of where you think this book should sit in our literary countdown, there is little disputing that both the story and the writing are somewhat painful to get through, although I have a much harder time with the latter than the former.

Stories about slavery, especially good stories, are hard to read. On purpose. It was a brutal and lamentable part of our nation’s history, when very specific (and horrific) things happened to actual human beings. And being a book about that period, Beloved describes all of the beatings, whippings, rapes, killings, all of the families torn apart, individuals humiliated and lives wasted. As it should. And that may make the novel hard to read for some, but that isn’t a valid critique of the book.

For me, what made this book difficult to read wasn’t the story, it was the presentation. I’ll give you one example:

“In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ’cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, you! And no, they ain’t in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead. No, they don’t love your mouth. You got to love it. This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved.”

Look, Toni Morrison is a much much much (I could go on for a while) more talented writer than I am, so I’m sure many people will completely disagree with me, but I find passages like the above hard to read. And not in a good way. It is a little over the top. A little Faulkner-esqe (and we see where that got him on the countdown). A little too, well, much. As I read this book, I kept feeling that she was trying too hard to impress and that the story therefore suffered a teeny bit because of it (IMHO).

But regardless of the prose, I admire Beloved for what it aims to achieve: to make us remember a terrible part of American history. And by remember, I don’t mean in a generic “there was slavery in the United States” way, but instead that there were very specific (and horrific) things that happened to actual people. With many wide scale events such as war, racism, or the holocaust, it is easy to get lost in the numbers, to forget that individual people were affected or perished.  Beloved personalizes slavery, which makes it easier for people-in-general to identify with the subject. It elevates a terrible part of history beyond mere statistics.

And maybe that’s where Beloved and Hamilton share a common bond. We all learn about the War for Independence in school but in our heart of hearts, we don’t care. We aren’t really moved by it. Hamilton changes that because it shows us a period in history through the story of a single, albeit sometimes unsympathetic, man. Just as we really feel the horrors of slavery because of how we see it affected Sethe, we understand the sacrifices people made when establishing this country.

But, and this is a big but, delivery matters. Beloved will never be universally beloved because Morrison loses the reader (or at least some readers) with her challenging writing. There are no little kids making videos recreating scenes from Beloved. Miranda, in contrast, engages a whole new generation of people with his never-before-heard all-rap Broadway musical. Its accessibility enables the story. Hence that’s why Alexander Hamilton will remain on the ten-dollar bill while slave owner Andrew Jackson gets the boot.

Oddly enough, the very same week that equally universally beloved Prince died, I found myself at the Richard Rogers Theater in New York with Lily watching Lin-Manuel Miranda do his stuff. To tell the truth, I was a little concerned that there was no way the play could live up to the hype. I shouldn’t have been. I loved it. No controversy there.

Lily and Daveed
Lily’s selfie with Lafayette/Jefferson actor Daveed Diggs after the show.