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“... my passion. In the absence of Maria, our hero might have diddled one of those undulant oaks. Like Susan Cheever’s Home before Dark and Kaylie Jones’s Lies My Mother Never Told Me, Alexandra Styron’s Reading My Father is further evidence that growing up as the daughter of a famous writer can mean growing up feeling like a background drawing, even an ...”

“... off a cold: ‘One Thursday,’ David France writes in How to Survive a Plague, ‘sexy Tommy McCarthy from the classifieds department stayed out late at an Yma Sumac concert. Friday he had a fever. Sunday he was hospitalised. Wednesday he was dead.’ Later, there were tests. A virus detectable in the blood. You were ill, but you might not feel it ...”

“... John Kelly, used to refer to his boss’s White House as Crazytown. According to The Divider, Susan Glasser and Peter Baker’s riveting account of Trump’s presidency, Kelly, who thought Trump was the most flawed person he’d ever met, bought a copy of a book called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (written by 27 mental health professionals) to help ...”

“... it.’ The task was to liberate the novel from the ‘tyranny of significations’, an idea that Susan Sontag soon lifted in Against Interpretation. Depth, character and humanism, as Robbe-Grillet saw it, were ‘obsolete notions’ that stood in the way of what Barthes called the pleasure of the text, and Sontag the ‘erotics of art’. Robbe-Grillet ...”

“... on Monroe to spot these moments of what might seem like odd affinity. Lee Strasberg’s daughter, Susan, remembered a self-portrait Monroe drew alongside a sketch of a Negro girl in ‘a sad-looking dress, one sock falling down around her ankles’. And according to Gloria Steinem, when the Mocambo nightclub in Los Angeles was reluctant to hire a black singer ...”

“... magazines of the New York intellectuals, went to cocktail parties with Lionel Trilling and Mary McCarthy, and kept quiet about his identity and his politics. His parents, who were themselves estranged from Palestine (his father said Jerusalem reminded him of death), were relieved that their moody and contentious son was showing such prudence. Thanks to his ...”