The government-funded “Monitoring the Future” survey, an annual measure of substance abuse by teenagers, recently reported that drug, alcohol, and cigarette use by teens is at the lowest level in the survey’s 40-year history. Given that the decline continues a ten-year trend and that the iPhone was introduced ten years ago, some have speculated that teens are simply swapping the high of illicit substances for the high of Instagram likes. One doctor, blogging for Harvard Medical School, referred to the findings as “a bit of a silver lining” to teens’ ceaseless phone use.

Readers of Adam Alter’s Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked will find little consolation in a possible correlation between the rise of smartphones and the dip in drug use. Alter’s unsettling but riveting book argues that today’s tech, from e-mail to video games to Netflix, is as addictive as the most habit-forming narcotic; moreover, as Alter observes, unlike drugs or alcohol, quitting technology, whose grasp extends into our jobs, schools, recreational activities, and social lives, “isn’t an option.”

Alter, an associate professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business and the author of 2013’s Drunk Tank Pink, spends much of the book establishing that we have a problem. He convincingly argues that technology is increasingly engineered to be addictive, making all of us, but especially children, vulnerable to its dangers; it’s not for nothing that Steve Jobs didn’t let his own kids near an iPad.

The author doesn’t use the word “addiction” lightly: one of his goals is to legitimize the notion that behaviors are as addictive as substances. (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders almost included Internet addiction in its latest edition; for now, gambling disorder is the only behavioral addiction listed in the DSM.) Brain scans show that the pattern of neurons firing across the brains of “a drug addict as he injects heroin” and “a gaming addict as he fires up a new World of Warcraft quest” are “almost identical,” Alter writes. Indeed, he spends time with a WoW addict who, after a stint at an Internet addiction rehab clinic near Seattle, relapsed spectacularly with a five-week binge spent playing the game 20 hours a day. World of Warcraft’s effect on the young man’s life was easily as ruinous as a hard drug habit would have been.

Irresistible draws on the work of scientists and social scientists, and Alter excels at applying their research to examples that resonate with everyday tech users. For instance, he describes a 1970s-era study of lab pigeons that pecked buttons in order to receive food pellets. Sometimes the pigeons received food with every peck, while other times they would peck in vain until finally food would be delivered. The psychologist who devised the study found that the pigeons’ dopamine levels spiked when the buttons delivered food on an unpredictable basis.

Alter applies this finding to a very different type of button. “It’s hard to exaggerate how much the ‘like’ button changed the psychology of Facebook use,” he writes of the company’s 2009 activation of the feature. “Users were gambling every time they shared a photo, web link, or status update. A post with zero likes wasn’t just privately painful, but also a kind of public condemnation: either you didn’t have enough online friends, or, worse still, your online friends weren’t impressed.” Many Facebook users compulsively track their “likes” and post in an effort to attract ever more positive reinforcement. “Like pigeons,” Alter observes, “we’re more driven to seek feedback when it isn’t guaranteed.” Little wonder that Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube all introduced “like” buttons, too.

Unfortunately, after Alter sells us so convincingly on the idea that our immersive relationship to tech is hindering our human relationships and our overall quality of life, the solutions he offers hardly feel up to the task. He encourages employers to disable access to work e-mail between midnight and 5 a.m. He describes intriguing apps like the Demetricator, which prohibits Facebook users from seeing—and thus obsessing over—how many people have liked or shared their posts (“10 people like this” becomes “people like this”). He praises “a growing movement of ethical game design,” spearheaded by designers spooked by gamers whose lives have been destroyed by their creations; an ethical game might, for instance, have a natural stopping point to encourage players to disengage.

Given that these strategies are not in tech companies’ or employers’ economic interests, it’s hard to envision them gaining much traction, particularly as the tech landscape evolves in ways impossible to imagine now. (Alter is especially dire predicting virtual reality’s eventual “capacity to render face-to-face interactions obsolete.”) His conclusion, that screen-free downtime will teach us that “the glow of…social bonds will leave us richer and happier than the glow of screens ever could,” feels platitudinous after reading about all of the very specific hooks designed to ensnare us. Moreover, Alter’s book arrives at a time when our devices are irresistible for another reason: many of us are so anxious about the current political situation that we’re compelled to keep checking on the latest developments in a dizzying news cycle. I already know that my relationships with my loved ones are more rewarding than my relationship with my smartphone or laptop. That knowledge doesn’t always prevent me from scrolling through my Facebook feed for just five more minutes even when there are real people in the room waiting to spend time with me. After reading Irresistible, though, I better understand why.

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The array of culprits and the goggling audience alike ranged from the most glittering members of France’s aristocracy to Paris’s dregs. That’s one reason the bizarre chain of events that kept France intermittently on edge and in a tizzy from 1670 to 1682, retold with verve by Holly Tucker in City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic, and the First Police Chief of Paris, may qualify as the first truly modern scandal. What historians of Louis XIV’s reign most often call “The Affair of the Poisons” had it all: sex, death, forgery, sorcery, clandestine meetings in sordid locales, political rivalries and shenanigans, iniquity among the powerful. Not to mention a dedicated flatfoot out to get to the bottom of things — and, ultimately, an official cover-up once somebody too close to the king for anyone’s comfort was implicated.

Previewing our own age of tabloid docudramas, “audience” isn’t even a wholly figurative term. The whole gallimaufry went on long enough that a play burlesquing it was produced on the Left Bank in time for one of the well-born suspects to attend it, not long before she wound up in the dock herself. Like a number of her peers, the duchess of Bouillon (some name!) had been hoping to bump off a husband she disliked with help from a sinister back-street necromancer, abortionist, and peddler of potions known as Madame Voisin. Unlike some of the other perps, however — including her sister Olympe, the duchess of Soissons, who bolted the country when alerted to her impending arrest — Bouillon had enough temerity to successfully stymie Tucker’s hero: Nicholas de la Reynie, the founder of the Paris police force.

La Reynie had been given the newly created post of lieutenant general of police in 1667. That was shortly after the official formerly, and ineffectually, responsible for maintaining public order — one François Dreux d’Aubray — died of what was declared to be gout. (Not so, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.) At the time, Paris was, so Tucker tells us in a chapter title, the “Crime Capital of the World”: filthy, overrun with cutpurses and mayhem-prone drunks, and — thanks to people of all classes acquiring the heretofore exotic gadgets known as pistols — newly lethal. Since venturing outdoors was particularly dangerous after dark, among de la Reynie’s first steps was to order the streets hung with lanterns, turning Paris into “the first major European city to be illuminated at night.” Isn’t it nice to know the origin of la Ville Lumière‘s nickname?

Murder by poisoning was a common enough fear that at least one apothecary specialized in selling antidotes certified by La Reynie himself. But at least in aristocratic circles, fear didn’t blossom into hysteria until Louis XIV’s beloved sister-in-law — the young wife of “Monsieur,” the king’s younger brother Philippe — fell mortally ill in June 1670 after drinking a glass of chicory water. That September, two brothers of the marquise de Brinvilliers both sickened and died after sharing a pie with some guests at their country estate. They were the sons — as the marquise was the daughter — of François Dreux d’Aubray.

Brinvilliers didn’t come under suspicion until her lover and accomplice, Gaudin de Sainte-Croix, died two years later (not from poison, apparently). He left behind a box of incriminating materials that ended up in the hands of one of La Reynie’s police commissioners. Recognizing she was in danger, she fled into hiding in Liège, and La Reynie’s men only tracked her down and hauled her back to Paris in 1676. Doubtless guessing what was in store for her, she tried to kill herself more than once on the journey.

Nonetheless, at her trial, she “bitterly denied everything, using rank and privilege as her principal alibi,” Tucker writes. But Louis XIV had instructed the courts to show no mercy. Sentenced to death by beheading but trying to forestall the torture session that preceded it — known as the “Extraordinary Question” and meant to extract both religious contrition and useful confessions — Brinvilliers admitted to poisoning her father and her brothers. By way of a bonus, she added that she’d tried to kill her husband by the same means five times.

Her breasts bared to the mob once the executioner tore her dress off her shoulders — a rare, perhaps unprecedented humiliation of a French marquise in those days, though Tucker doesn’t say — she was decapitated on the place de Grève that July. Before her death, however, Brinvilliers had supposedly told La Reynie, “Half of the nobility have done the same things, if I felt like talking, I’d ruin them all!” He wasn’t to find out how near being true that was until investigating a rumored plot to kill the king — by poison, of course — led him by circuitous stages to Madame Voisin.

The 1679 arrest of Voisin and her frequent collaborator, a charlatan known as Lesage, was the affair’s real turning point. The clientele for their services, from charms and spells to aphrodisiacs and deadly toxins, had included not only wealthy bourgeoises but noblewomen — noblewomen whose identities de la Reynie was determined to find out, and did. Once three of them, with more to come, were in custody at the fortress prison of Vincennes, “the public’s interest became insatiable,” and it was partly for that reason Louis decided to establish a secret tribunal to conduct the many trials in prospect: the Chambre Ardente, or “Burning Chamber.”

This is where Tucker’s expert reconstruction of the case merges with the other, superficially unrelated story she’s been telling in counterpoint from the start: the many loves of Louis XIV, from poor Louise de la Vallière (who ended her days in a convent) to Athenais, marquise de Montespan, the most famous royal mistress of the reign. To Louis’s mounting incredulity, if not horror, several of his erstwhile bedmates ended up implicated in de la Reynie’s investigation, including, among others, Brinvilliers’s sisters Olympe and Marie Mancini — a.k.a. the duchesses of Soissons and Bouillon, respectively, both of whom he’d dallied with in his youth.

But then Lesage, seconded by Voisin’s daughter Marie-Marguerite once her mother’s 1680 execution turned her talkative, implicated Montespan herself. Worse yet, the accusations against Athenais were the most lurid of all, involving incantations, elixirs, and black-magic ceremonies — allegedly climaxing with a ghoulish child sacrifice — to either win back the king’s love or punish him for tiring of her. She was suspected of poisoning twenty-year-old Marie-Angelique Fontanges, her chief successor in the royal bed, and even of plotting the ultimate revenge: regicide. Naturally, we’ll never know how much of this was true, how much exaggerated or concocted — but it does seem all but certain that she had at least dabbled in Voisin’s hoodoo.

That was too much for Louis, who chose to simply refuse to believe the charges rather than have Montespan arrested or interrogated, despite the testimony against her. The Chambre Ardente was permanently dissolved in 1682, having tried 88 of the nearly 200 people by then under detention. La Reynie’s final report on the whole affair was kept secret, and when the only copy was returned to the king after La Reynie’s death, Louis had it burned. But unbeknownst to the Sun King, La Reynie’s voluminous investigation notes survived, becoming Tucker’s (and everybody else’s) primary source of information on the case.

The story has been told before, perhaps most memorably in Frances Mossiker’s The Affair of the Poisons (1969) as well as, obviously, many biographies of Louis XIV and other studies of his reign. But beyond Tucker’s prodigious archival research and eye for the telling detail, one of her book’s strength is that, unlike most of her predecessors, she isn’t seduced by the glamour of Versailles, much less the wicked allure — even now, going on three centuries after her death — of the marquise de Montespan. (Lisa Hilton’s besotted 2002 Athenais is an almost comical example of Montespan’s charisma overpowering moral judgments that disfavor her.) Among City of Light, City of Poison‘s most admirable qualities is the way it corrects the balance by not only giving the indefatigable La Reynie pride of place, but plunging readers into the squalid, brutally impoverished seventeenth-century Paris where the likes of Voisin thrived.

Another asset is that Tucker knows a lot about medicine — meaning, in this case, poison. Her previous book, 2011’s Blood Work, used seventeenth-century experiments with blood transfusion as a window into the political and social underpinnings of the Scientific Revolution. This time around, she keeps readers fascinated by savvily explaining the ingredients of all the toxins and other potions that play a role in the story, the often gruesome ways they were obtained, and their effect on the intended recipients.

To her credit, she wants us to stay alert to the human suffering involved. That’s true whether she’s contemplating the anonymous Paris infants abducted for Voisin’s grisliest recipes or detailing the agonies involved in being subjected to the “Extraordinary Question,” particularly when women are the victims. She’s most winning when she admits toward the end that De la Reynie’s unmoved witness to the tortures he put in motion considerably darkens her otherwise favorable view of him.

Despite Tucker’s impressive structural knack, there are times when the material’s many strands escape her grip. Even readers with some prior knowledge of the Affair of the Poisons may find themselves wishing for a “Cast of Characters” crib sheet that keeps the dozens of players identifiable. But that takes very little away from this book’s central achievement, which is to turn them all — aristocratic or base, vicious or virtuous — from historical waxworks into flesh-and-blood creatures with convincingly vivid fears, pains, and malevolent or upright motives. The story told in City of Light, City of Poison may be peculiar and occasionally ghastly, but only seldom does it feel remote.

 

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About midway through her collection of personal essays, Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life, Yiyun Li tells a story. Like nearly every story in the book, it’s unadorned and melancholy, its simplicity at once a demonstration of the virtues of narrative economy and a display of emotional distance. But this story is an extreme version of both — I keep coming back to it, and keep feeling chilled by it. Li has been hospitalized twice in a matter of months for fear she will kill herself, we’ve learned, and now she is sitting on a bench with her young son:

I was aware of his comfort in putting his hand in mine and keeping it there as though it was the most natural thing in the world. It must be, but it occurred to me that I didn’t understand it. I could approximate understanding, but it would only be that of an anthropologist.

It is devastating to read Li write about the inability to find strength, reassurance, or even much sense in holding her child’s hand. And it’s all the worse because Li doesn’t aim to devastate you. Her book contains no symphonically memoir-ish threadings of past and present agonies; it harbors no studious efforts to find poignancy in the clinical literature, as so many recent memoirs of loss and depression do. Li writes that she finds melodrama suspect, evidence of our selective memories striving to put the best face on things. So Dear Friend is Li’s attempt to address suicide and depression absent such rhetorical support beams. What’s left? A remarkable — if very hard to love — memoir of the small comforts of literature and a sizable urge to throw off the baggage of personal history.

This is surprising from Li because the mood — and sometimes the very argument — of Dear Friend contradicts the detail and layers of empathy that mark her fiction. Across two story collections and a pair of novels, she’s mastered a sensitivity to the interweaving of past and present, individual and community, that she often denies in this book. Her 2009 novel, The Vagrants, was a study of the long reach of the execution of a Chinese villager during the Cultural Revolution, but she’d never visited the town in which it was set while she wrote it; visiting later, she feels no particular impact. Her fans admire a scene in her story “Kindness” about a girl who attempts to return hatched chicks to their shells, but Li tells us that the story has no autobiographical basis and sees the need to connect the writer to the work as a kind of affront.

This goes beyond the usual discussions of the authorial fallacy — it’s a kind of denial of personhood itself. Li tells us a fair bit about her family and friendships, particularly her friendship with the late Irish story writer William Trevor, an early mentor. But her two hospitalizations are bereft of detail — we don’t know what the proximate triggers for them were. She quotes from ER notes that say she felt like a burden to loved ones, but she challenges that assessment: “To say a burden is to grant oneself weight in other people’s lives; to call them loved ones is to fake one’s ability to love.”

Dear Friend is punctuated with grim aphorisms like that. Reading is a virtue because “to read is to be with people who, unlike those around one, do not notice one’s existence.” Honesty? “A lie sustains life with absoluteness that truth fails to offer.” Memory? “There is no reason to pass on my memories, which I have been guarding all these years, to my children.” Suicide? “I distrust judgments . . . on suicides. They are, in the end, judgments on feelings.” Later, she writes of suicide that “a sensible goal is to avoid it” — hardly a thundering condemnation. Dear Friend takes its title from a letter by the novelist Katherine Mansfield, and you can see why Li admired the line so much. It contains a recognition of the urge to connect, through writing if nothing else, while also acknowledging a nearly unbridgeable chasm between two different lives.

Li is aware that the way she frames her life as a reader and a person is unusual — she reports on the brickbats she’s received for refusing to have her work translated into her native Chinese, and acknowledges that she is sometimes marked as “coldhearted and selfish.” She knows, too, that this loose assemblage of thoughts about mortality, identity, and literature (Mansfield and Trevor but also Stefan Zweig, Nabokov, Hardy, Turgenev, Elizabeth Bowen, and more) is disordered. “Coherence and consistency are not what I’ve been striving for,” she writes. Lacking or denying the familiar comforts of identity and autobiography plainly had consequences for Li. But Dear Friend isn’t a defense of the virtues of that absence so much as a first attempt at exploring what a life might be like without relying on them so heavily. If that does seem coldhearted, the flipside is that the very same attitude that made her a writer: She abandoned a promising career as an immunologist to pursue fiction, in part by neglecting all of those narratives about destiny and appropriate professional trajectories.

“I have spent much of my life turning away from the scripts given to me,” she writes — an elevating aphorism if there ever was one. And yet, how much of a clean break can anyone, even Li, make from those scripts? She writes about how she destroyed most of her journals and letters before she left China for America and then adds, parenthetically: “What I could not bring myself to destroy I sealed up and have never opened.” That line is almost as disarming as the one about holding her child’s hand and feeling nothing. Literature is full of departures and disconnection — a hero goes on a journey, a stranger comes to town. Li’s book proffers an extreme vision of that emotional separation, but it’s not one that most readers will find unrecognizable. We’re all on that journey; it’s just that Li is traveling light.

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It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts — for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments . . . To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured.

—from President Woodrow Wilson’s April 2, 1917 address to Congress, proposing entry into WWI

In Woodrow Wilson, biographer John Milton Cooper Jr. describes the president’s call to arms as not only his greatest speech but, in its combination of idealism and solemnity, “the greatest presidential speech since Lincoln’s second inaugural address.” After “an uproar of cheers and rebel yells, and the waving of little flags,” followed by landslide votes in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, America entered WWI a hundred years ago this week — on April 6, 1917.

Wilson had been reelected the previous year on a neutrality platform; among those factors that caused his turnaround on WWI, says G. J. Meyer in The World Remade, was his fear that if the U.S. played no role in the war it would have no role in the postwar settlement, jeopardizing the president’s hopes for establishing the League of Nations. Another, connected factor was vanity:

If the United States not only went to war but became the nation that broke the stalemate, that made victory possible, Wilson might well find himself at the head of the table. It was not an ideal solution, but from his perspective it was infinitely preferable to being excluded. It would impose on him the responsibility — in no way unwelcome — to stop the Allies from imposing a kind of peace that could never be more than unstable and short-lived. This was a quintessentially Wilsonian aspiration, at once noble and egotistical. It accorded perfectly with his sense of his own great destiny.

The nation also had a quick change of heart, says Michael S. Neiberg in The Path to War, and in no time the refrain of non-interventionism, prevalent since the days of Washington and Jefferson, was drowned out by George M. Cohan’s “Over There” — the song written just a day after war was declared, and quickly more of a hit than “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” had been just two years earlier. Neiberg’s examination of this turnaround is an attempt “to fill in the gap in America’s collective amnesia” about the war, and to weigh the public’s appetite for the era of international responsibility and entanglement “whose impact we are still feeling”:

Contrary to what many have written or assumed, Americans were neither the unwilling dupes of propaganda, the blind followers of a messianic president, or naïve puppets of a millionaire class. Rather, I argue, they chose to fight, even if they did so because they thought they had run out of viable alternatives . . . Their country would emerge from the war and the peace it produced a far different place.

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Many readers have called Melissa Febos’s second book, Abandon Me, “emotionally devastating,” and that’s just what she wants. “I hope for nothing more,” she says, “than to burn the village down with my writing.”

A memoir in essays, Abandon Me centers on the consuming, emotionally abusive relationship Febos fell into with a married woman while she simultaneously reconnected with the Native American birth father she hadn’t seen since childhood. Both relationships push Febos to explore the many ways in which abandonment played out in her childhood and early romantic relationships. The book focuses in particular on her relationship to the man who raised her, a sea captain who, while loving, was absent from her life for months at a time, propelling Febos into a protective self-sufficiency that kept her from experiencing the pain of being left for most of her adult life. The particular magic of this book, however, is, that while it may burn the reader’s village to the ground, it also equips the reader with the tools to build a better, more resilient village. The book explores shame, loss, and the meaning of family with such tenderness and vulnerability that readers can’t help but look at their own wounds through a more empathetic and, hopefully, healing lens.

I spoke with Melissa in her Brooklyn apartment about heartbreak, writing as an act of faith, and how the most frightening and painful experiences are the ones that set us free. —Amy Gall

The Barnes & Noble Review: You once told me that your writing process for this book was completely different from anything you’d previously written. Can you say more about that?

Melissa Febos: I’ve long been a pragmatic writer. I do outlines, I make lists, I impose structure. This book just wouldn’t allow for that. I had to find my way into the narrative and meaning of all the essays in this collection pretty much blind.

The first essay I wrote for the book was “Call My Name,” which is about my reaction to hearing people say my name. I entered the writing of it completely phonically. It made sense, because my relationship to my name is so fused with sound, but it was unlike any kind of writing I’d ever done before. I made my way through each paragraph very slowly, sound by sound, and that led to another paragraph where I did the same thing, and it went from there. I groped my way through without knowing what I was writing about or trying to say. Once I had what I thought was a draft, I took that draft and completely broke it apart and shuffled around the paragraphs endlessly and then I hammered each line for months. It was the only thing I worked on. I say to my students that by the time you are done with something you should have it completely memorized and you should have a relationship to every shape and every white space on the page, because every single aspect of what you write should be a choice — and that was 100 percent true for this book.

The revision process was the same for all the essays. Once I had a draft, to figure out the structure I would literally print it out, cut up the paragraphs, and organize them on the floor in piles by theme, by narrative thread, by subject, and then I would arrange them in an order that seemed right and make notes where I needed to add transitions, and then I would tape it all up on a board on the wall. It looked crazy, like some formula out of A Beautiful Mind, but it became a map that saw me through. Without fail, every essay I did this for I’d have this background voice in my mind saying, “This is ridiculous. This is a very elaborate form of procrastination. You are failing.” I’d think, “You’re right. This is impossible. But I don’t know what else to do and it worked last time,” and then at some point, seemingly out of nowhere, it would work. It was totally frightening, but I knew I had to keep the blinders on and go. This was the most spiritual writing I’ve ever done, because it required so much faith.

BNR: How has your definition of abandonment changed since you wrote this book?

MF: So much of my narrative of myself and my relationships is about leaving and being left. And I had the idea early on, maybe when I thought of the title — which I came up with before I wrote any of the book — that I wanted to find the other meaning of abandonment, which was to let go of yourself, yielding to something in a liberating way, rather than having something wrenched away from you. And that felt really beautiful and open to me, especially since it had never been my experience.

Even though I’ve had very intense life experiences and it seems kind of wild and crazy to have been a junkie or a dominatrix, I’ve always been incredibly controlled. And in fact those experiences were my way of attempting to show that I was in control. Even pushing boundaries is a way to prove that you have power.

So I wanted to give myself to something that felt soft and free and joyful. I wanted to give myself to myself. That was the dimension that I did find in writing the book. The whole process was this big circle through all the abandonments of my life, back to myself.

From the age of seven until thirty-two I think I was very committed in a conscious and unconscious way to not being abandoned, and by that I mean to not feeling the way being abandoned felt. I made sure I was never left and never had my heart broken by someone else. I was successful at that and it made me safe in some ways. But it also kept me in bondage to a smaller realm of experience. But, in living the relationship I write about in Abandon Me, that wasn’t an option any more. I got hurt. And there’s something incredibly freeing about being hurt. Because, if you survive it, you know that it’s possible.

BNR: In some ways, it’s freeing to be hurt, too, because you bear less responsibility.

MF: Yes. While less painful, it’s lonelier to be the person who leaves, because you are the one who made the decision and you can’t fight against yourself. Whereas, in my relationship with Amaia, I gave away all my power, or convinced myself I had, so I had someone to beat my fists against and to blame and long for, and before I had never had that. I had never wanted something that fiercely from someone. I had only had people want that of me.

BNR: Did that relationship and the experience reframe your sense of past relationships both romantic and familial?

MF: It gave a body to something I had believed in in name only. I knew that not knowing my birth father and that my [step]father leaving to go to sea for my whole childhood was traumatic. I knew that I had a certain reaction to that which was to become superhumanly self-sufficient and to never fall in love with anyone who didn’t love me a little bit more, as an insurance policy, and I knew that the feelings of grief I experienced with my birth father not being in my life and my father being absent probably still happened but I had never accessed them at all. And it genuinely didn’t feel like a conscious manipulation on my part. I didn’t go into relationships saying, “I will not allow myself to get hurt.” But that moment of recognition would always come where I said, “Fuck, I’m going to break this person’s heart and I’m going to be alone again.” And with Amaia, the story I had been making jokes about my whole life, where my abandonment issues were going to catch up to me and rise to the surface and I was going to go nuts and be the neediest person on the planet, happened.

This is maybe bad news for some people: needing someone and feeling disempowered and afraid and feeling like you can’t live without someone and having all of that childhood survival imperative attached to a love interest was as painful as I had feared. It was excruciating. But it didn’t last forever, and maybe it had to be that blunt because I have such a high tolerance for painful things. In order for me to get clean from heroin, it had to get really, really ugly. In order for me to stop being a dominatrix it had to get dark, and in order for me to really face my own shadow parts and childhood pain it had to be something I couldn’t negotiate with.

BNR: One of the sentences that really grabbed me happens to be on the first page of the book. You say of your childhood, “We were lucky and we were loved, which isn’t the same as happy, if you believe in such a thing.” Do you believe in happiness? What is the difference between love and happiness?

MF: I think of happiness and love as being in the same category insofar as they are not endpoints or sustainable conditions. They are processes. But I think love is an act. And I think that what we refer to as happiness is just a point in the wave of human emotional experience. It’s the peak rather than the trough. If you are a changing person, then you will have moments that you could call happiness, and then you will have moments that are many other things. So, for instance, in my family I had a privileged upbringing. I was loved and I never doubted that, and no violence was committed against me, but, my parents were sad and struggling and working through things. They were also inspired and affectionate and hilarious, and I wouldn’t trade them for the world, but it wasn’t all an unbroken line of happiness. I think families are simply more complicated than that.

BNR: Your connection to literature and reading is one of the most illuminating aspects of the book, and you incorporate other authors into your own narrative so seamlessly. How did you make decisions about what works to include?

MF: It wasn’t a decision or plan, it was organic to the material and also to the process, which was one of relentless intrusion. Different characters, different sounds, different texts would just come in while I was writing because I didn’t know where my next step was going to fall. Normally, if I was writing an essay and a quote from John Berger busted in I would say, “Get out of here!” But because I had no idea what the structure was going to be, I just let these lines in. It makes sense to me now because I was writing about my childhood and narrative and patterns throughout history and my understanding of all of this has come from other people’s words.

Some of the books I mention, like The Road Less Traveled or Franny and Zooey, were books that were on my parents’ shelf when I was a child or books that were central to the time in my life that I was writing about. Others, like the books by Jung or Winnicott, were books that I came to when I was living the adult experiences I describe in the book because I was grasping for a way to feel in control of what was happening to me. I felt so unhinged, and those were the kind of thinkers who made me feel like it was possible to make sense of things. Jung is a psychologist, but he’s also magic. He’s dreams and archetypes and delving into the psyche. He studies madness by practicing it in some ways, and that was what I wished for myself. I get asked a lot if I pursue crazy experiences so I can write about them. I don’t. What happens is, I get entrenched in crazy experiences and then I try to survive them by attaching a narrative to them.

I also have always been attached to books that make sense of pain. There’s something in us — that I think has to do in part with contemporary American culture, but is also human nature — where we recoil from pain and see it as a sign that something needs to be fixed. But, with emotional pain, there isn’t always something to fix. Philosophers and psychologists and historians have paradigms for understanding how pain is not always a sign that something is broken, and I need a lot of reminders of that, especially when I’m in pain.

BNR: Sometimes, I find it easier to be vulnerable on the page than face-to-face with another human being.

MF: Sometimes?! [Laughs]

BNR: That’s true for you, right?

MF: 100 percent. That’s why I’m a writer. Almost everything I write about is a conversation I couldn’t have with another human being. Only after I have a conversation with myself on the page can I put it out into the world. And after I’ve done that, I have to talk about it out loud to other humans, and I’m more comfortable talking about it by that point. But I am a secret keeper and a compartmentalizer, and I used to be a liar. It’s not in my nature to be forthcoming and vulnerable. All my instincts scream at the idea. And yet, I have figured out that my survival depends upon it.

BNR: What is your favorite thing about language?

MF: Language will never let me win. I’ll never be able to master it. I’ll never be able to make it do exactly what I want. And that’s why it’s the one thing I’ll never be finished with, because it will never give itself to me completely. Which also means, I’ll always be in love with it. So, read into that what you want. [Laughs]

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April First is nearly upon us, but this is no hoax:  We asked Mike Sacks, author of And Here’s the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers and Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today’s Top Comedy Writers, to supply us with his highly personal list of essential reading from the comic muse.  True to form, he supplied the following collection of fiction, memoir, and impossible-to-classify works, which range from the famous to the obscure, and which take in every mode from pure frivolity to tragicomedy at its darkest.– The Editors

The Sellout

By Paul Beatty

This dazzling comic novel — perhaps the funniest of the past decade — deals with race, class, politics, and an American Dream that’s becoming more and more difficult to discern in this post-Trump era. Sarah Silverman has written that the novel reads like “demented angels wrote it.”

 

 

Fiction Ruined My Family

By Jeanne Darst

Playwright and TV writer Darst comes from a once-distinguished St. Louis family with its grandeur long since faded. Her mother, a former debutante who once graced the cover of Sports Illustrated as a teen equestrian, descends into alcoholism while her father, a journalist and novelist who barely writes, dreams about finishing the Great American Novel. He never does. Perhaps that’s the most American aspect of it all.  Tragic and laugh-out-loud in equal measure.

 

Will Not Attend: Lively Stories of Detachment and Isolation

By Adam Resnick

Resnick, a former staff writer for Late Night with David Letterman, as well as the creator of the cult TV sitcom Get a Life, delves into his isolated, bleak Pennsylvania childhood as one of five sons of a hotheaded insurance salesman and meek mother. One of the most honest memoirs ever written — and hilarious all the same.

 

The Collected Short Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman

A huge influence on the work and sensibility of Steve Martin and Woody Allen, among many other comic minds, novelist and playwright Friedman’s collection of short fiction predated the “so pathetic it’s sad” humor of The Office and countless other modern-day comedies. Middle-aged loser Harry Towns figures prominently in many of these stories, a “hero” who’s so lost that he snorts coke the day his mother dies and remains far more concerned about his body lice than he does about his young son’s whereabouts in a Las Vegas casino.

 

Any Similarity to Persons Living or Dead Is Purely Coincidental

By Drew Friedman and Josh Alan Friedman

The sons of Bruce Jay Friedman, Drew (a genius illustrator whose work has appeared everywhere from The New Yorker to Mad magazine) and Josh (a former contributor to Screw magazine and author of the indispensable look at 1970s New York Tales of Times Square) combined to produce this deeply hallucinogenic dive into society’s forgotten characters: elevator men, comic-book store workers, C- and D-level stars of old Hollywood. R. Crumb  — a huge fan — provides a rare blurb.

The Time Machine Did It

By John Swartzwelder

The reclusive Swartzwelder — writer of a record fifty-nine Simpsons episodes — has never given an interview, although he does now have a Twitter account (@JJSwartzwelder). Through his own imprint, Kennydale Books, Swartzwelder has published twelve comic novels, all of which read like a Simpsons episode for print. Start with his first, The Time Machine Did It, published in 2004. Opening: “Frank Burly is my name. Okay, it’s not my name. I lied about that.”

The Stench of Honolulu: A Tropical Adventure 

By Jack Handey

The former SNL writer and creator of “Deep Thoughts,” as well as two collections of short New Yorker fiction, wrote his first novel about a morally questionable narrator and his best friend journeying to Honolulu in search of the greatest treasure known to man: the Golden Monkey. The book reads like an extended “Deep Thoughts“ segment but with a plot arc; each line a perfectly crafted gem propelling this insane story.

Home Land: A Novel

By Sam Lipsyte

Lipsyte, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, as well as many other publications, centers his second novel on a character nicknamed Teabag, a former high school stoner who spends his adulthood wondering just when (and where) it all went so horribly wrong. I suppose you could start with his nickname, which unfortunately does not originate from his love of the popular drink.

The Collected Stories of Richard Yates

This collection of the late author’s work compiles twenty-seven of his short stories. While Yates is certainly no humor writer, his work is often humorous in the deepest and most resounding key. A literary magic sleight-of-hand that has rarely been equaled.

 

 

Tenth of December

By George Saunders

Named one of the ten best books of 2013 by The New York Times Book Review, Saunders’s collection of short stories explores such dark subject matter as kidnapping and human trafficking — although perhaps these aren’t even considered “dark” in this post-Trump world — while still managing to remain humorous throughout. As The Times commented, “Tenth of December never succumbs to depression. That’s partly because of Saunders’s relentless humor; detractors may wonder if they made a wrong turn and ended up in the land of the joke after all.” Not a bad place to end up, this “Land of the Joke.”

 

Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor 

By Lynda Barry

Lynda Barry’s Ernie Pooks Comeek was a classic of the alternative-comics world, the deep humanity of its characters perfectly aligned with the author’s razor wit.  Syllabus draws on Barry’s discoveries as a teacher to would-be artists: an effort to spark creativity in those who might feel they lack talent or who might just need a good kick in the creative ass. Through exercises, drawings, doodles, and poems, the book — made to resemble a grade-school notebook — offers guidance for any creator, with especial appeal for those who appreciate Barry’s exuberant style.

I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence 

By Amy Sedaris

One of the few humor books to provide solid cooking and entertaining advice, I Like You is an aesthetically pleasing, funny page-turner and the only book I’ve ever read — beyond James Joyce’s Dubliners — with a list of suggested foods to feed to alcoholics. Broiled Frozen Chicken Wings with Applesauce: Try it. It’s delicious.

 

Gone with the Mind 

By Mark Leyner

Leyner, an accomplished writer of both novels and screenplays, has finally written his memoir. But in typical Leyner-esque fashion, it’s all fiction — or mostly. Even beyond that, the book is the transcript of a live reading that Leyner gives of this very book, complete with an exceedingly long introduction by his mother that takes place at a food court within a New Jersey mall, populated only with a few Panda Express employees. A superb and completely unique work from an unconventional author, and, according to Leyner, his last-ever book. He’s off to Hollywood, for good this time.

 

Birds of America: Stories

By Lorrie Moore

The short stories in this collection include Moore’s pieces from publications including The New Yorker and The Paris Review. Moore extracts humor out of (very) serious subjects, particularly in “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” the story for which she won the O. Henry Award. “The Oncologist describes the tumor as ‘fast but wimpy,’ which the Mother sees as Claudia Osk from the fourth grade.” How does one write a story about a malignant tumor in a child and still make it funny? A miracle.

 

How to Win at Feminism: The Definitive Guide to Having It All — and Then Some!

By Beth Newell, Sarah Pappalardo, and Anna Drezen

A satirical advice guide — from the editors of the relatively new women’s online humor magazine, Reductress (if you haven’t read it, please do so now) — How to Win at Feminism plays on the misguided, often demeaning methods in which the media tend to cover women’s “issues.” One piece is titled, “How to Get Catcalled for Your Personality,” another “A Note from Ruth Bader Ginsburg After She’s Had Her Wine.” These pieces are so accurate that if they were reprinted verbatim in most women’s magazines, I’m not so sure they would even raise an eyebrow.

Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? A Memoir 

By Roz Chast

New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast’s first graphic memoir describes the anxiety, humor, and sadness surrounding the last few years with her angry mother and complacent (sometimes infuriatingly so) father. The story holds nothing back, exposing the nuances of an unsettled relationship between a grown daughter and her aged parents. Favorite tidbit: Roz’s mother was known to give a “blast of Chast” to strangers and family whenever she was irate or annoyed  — which appeared to be quite often.

SkyMaul: Happy Crap You Can Buy on a Plane

By Kasper Hauser

Written by San Francisco−based sketch comedy group Kasper Hauser, SkyMaul perfectly parodies the much-maligned (and now much-missed) SkyMall in-flight shopping catalog. Items for purchase in this version include Reality-Canceling Headphones and a Facial Aquarium that enables you to “take your aquarium to work on your face.” Late author David Foster Wallace praised the book and wrote that “the D.U.I. Mask really works!” We can only assume he footnoted the hell out of that mask. There’s a SkyMaul II, which is just as spot-on.

 

Frank: The True Story That Inspired the Movie 

By Jon Ronson

British author Jon Ronson pens this deeply engaging true story about Chris Sievey, a musician and comedian who, in the early 1990s, took his musical persona, Frank Sidebottom — famous for wearing a giant paper-mâché head — on tour. Ronson played keyboards for Sidebottom’s Oh Blimey Big Band, and the book explores his unusual experiences on the road, although “unusual” doesn’t quite do it justice.

 

Role Models

By John Waters

To me, Waters is funnier on paper than he is on the big screen. Here, he writes in great detail (and with great respect) about his, yes, “role models,” including former Charles Manson acolyte Leslie Van Houten, as well as an “outsider pornographer” named Bobby Garcia, who specializes in the sub-sub-genre of “Marine porn.” We all have our kinks.

 

I Don’t Care About Your Band: Lessons Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Felons, Faux-Sensitive Hipsters, and Other Guys I’ve Dated 

By Julie Klausner

Comedy writer and current co-star of Hulu’s Difficult People, Klausner writes a funny, insightful, and unbelievably candid memoir of her dating life in New York in her twenties. She delves (deeply) into her mistakes and offers (very) hard-won advice. It’s like reading a personal diary that was never meant to be read by anyone but the author — and perhaps not even her.

What the Dogs Have Taught Me: And Other Amazing Things I’ve Learned

By Merrill Markoe

One of the brilliant minds behind Late Night with David Letterman, Markoe incorporated her love of dogs into the show by creating the long-running “Stupid Pet Tricks,” among other animal-based bits. This book is a collection of humorous essays that contain conversations with dogs, reflections on getting married, and searching for past lives. Letterman recently said about Markoe, “We haven’t had an original idea since she left [the show].” Markoe is the author of numerous books, all wonderfully distinct. You will never confuse her writing style with anyone else’s.

Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence

By Paul Feig

Freaks and Geeks creator and acclaimed comedy writer/director Paul Feig penned this terrific memoir about his embarrassing adolescent years. In one particularly haunting passage, Feig writes about a teacher who mispronounced his last name, thereby causing years of torment from his peers.

 

Night Terrors: Sex, Dating, Puberty, and Other Alarming Things 

By Ashley Cardiff

Cardiff’s in-depth memoir explores her sexual development, along with all of the anxiety and discomfort that came tethered to it. Kicked out of catechism at eight years old, Cardiff writes, “Luckily, if you want to freak Catholics out, the best way to do that is be a child discovering what sex is.” Bonus: a recurring and disturbing dream about Prince.

 

Digging Up Mother: A Love Story 

By Doug Stanhope

A very personal and candid memoir from hugely successful and cult favorite stand-up comedian (and Howard Stern regular) Stanhope about his close (and very odd) relationship to his mother through the years leading up to her ugly death from cancer. Stanhope takes a dark subject and creates both humor and beauty from it. The books opens with Stanhope describing the call he received from one of his mother’s caregivers, who “spoke like a mortician from a 1950s horror movie.” He can’t remember her name, so he calls her Morticia.

 

In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash 

By Jean Shepherd

Portions of this book inspired A Christmas Story, the 1981 movie for which humorist, radio personality, and storyteller Jean Shepherd is probably best known. In God We Trust is grittier than the Christmas classic, blending both humor and more adult themes. In some ways, the book is a continuation of A Christmas Story with a now-adult Ralph, the central character and narrator, returning home to visit his childhood friend, Flick, who has remained in their hometown. Flick’s life hasn’t been entirely easy, but he happily informs Ralph that their BB gun from childhood still “comes in handy sometimes.”

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If, as a conservative estimate holds, 50,000 novels per annum are published in this country alone, then something beyond a combination of luck, connection, and talent is required to propel a small handful of them to hoopla status as one of the year’s “big books.” Magic, perhaps.

Conjuring literary magic is at once a matter of repetitive practice and the mysterious workings of a telepathic meter for knowing what readers crave. Only then does an author get a shot at a place in the pantheon. With the publication of The Good Thief in 2008 Hannah Tinti ascended to where the air starts getting thin. With her new novel, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, she has reached publishing’s empyrean heights. She has pulled off the writer-magician’s ultimate trick.

An allusion to celestial attainment is more than apt, considering the foundation of her novel’s architecture is built on a modern-day retelling of the Twelve Labors of Hercules. It is also — and here its bona fides as a contemporary literary novel are presented with a flourish — an intricate mélange of propulsive thriller and sophisticated character study, narrated à la mode from shifting points of time and place and dusted lightly with supernatural suggestion. Of the second after a trigger is pulled, we read, “For a brief moment she was nothing but a person in a place and there was no past and there was no future, only this single moment where her life flashed open — and she was awake and she was alive and she was real.” Tinti writes like a sharp lathe cuts.

The titular character, a father on the run from a dark past, possesses a superhero’s ability to have survived explosive dangers. His co-traveler is his young daughter, Loo (short for Louise). As endearing as her father is sadly affecting, she is an obdurate chip off the old block. Loo is introduced in the first pages with a gun in her hand, while a shot from another rings down the final curtain. Symmetry is something of a fixation with the author. Depending on your preferences it will either amaze how many items she can make appear and reappear (leitmotifs run from gun-firing technique to whales to cigarettes, Chinese food, and a medical kit) or become mildly annoying in its stainless showmanship.

Clever of Tinti, too, to have mined ancient mythology, for its all-too-human characters are the richest lode. Like Hercules, Samuel Hawley is a god with a temper. Samuel is often tempted and found unequal to a challenge; he is as strong as he is weak. He is imperfect and he is great, because he allows himself to be transformed by love. This is his ticket to immortality, to Olympus — which is here a fictional town in Massachusetts. As in the myths, the natural world is also imbued with the power of vengeance: the ocean and its denizens swallow people without compunction; the constellations above — a recurrent image in a book replete with decorative and ingeniously deployed symbolism — are wistful stories of error etched permanently in the sky.

The plot contains surprises, the mise-en-scène is full of vibrant visual detail, the characters are idiosyncratic, and the climax is as heartwarming as it is unexpected — Tinti’s novel seems premade for the screen (so long as the cinematic realization is in the hands of a director who can somehow channel Hitchcock, Michael Curtiz, and Ingmar Bergman). It has, naturally, already been optioned.

The screenwriter will need preternatural talent, too, in order to convey the sort of breathtakingly compressed thematic summaries Tinti is wise enough to drop ever so sparingly into the action.

Their hearts were all cycling through the same madness — the discovery, the bliss, the loss, the despair — like planets taking turns in orbit around the sun. Each containing their own unique gravity. Their own force of attraction. Drawing near and holding fast to whatever entered their own atmosphere.

Loo grows into her own maturity as her father reckons with his. With elaborate authorial intention the image of the heart, oversized or beating or stopping with a bang, recurs to a simple but powerful end.

Reaching the end of a novel this meticulously constructed is like standing in the stairwell of a multistory building and looking down the vertiginous drop at the many geometric coils of the stair you climbed to get here. The years Tinti spent working on this novel are reflected in it in both good and bad ways, just as its characters are a seamless mix of morally questionable and hearteningly kind. Every writer is of course the god of her own work, rearranging the landscape of creation and animating all who wander in it. This one is very much like an invaluable pocket watch it describes, timepieces being one of almost too many musically repeated figures, whose worth is dependent on the number of “complications” it contains. (That’s a term both technical and symbolic.) The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley displays such a high degree of polish any trace of the maker’s hand is removed. Every sentence perfect, every circumstance layered with meaning, effect, intrigue, and forward motion. Can a writer be too good? That’s the one question posed by her novel the omnipotent author never foretold.

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For reasons at which I can only guess, a cohort of great English biographers was born in the 1930s and 1940s, among them Claire Tomalin, Michael Holroyd, Hilary Spurling, Selina Hastings, Jenny Uglow, Hermione Lee, Peter Ackroyd, and the recipient of today’s attention, Richard Holmes. Speaking generally, Holmes and the others share a particular sort of empathy with their subjects that — perhaps? — reflects their having come of age as writers in a postwar era of loosening British reticence and, more important, of growing impatience with the notion of empirical objectivity. For Holmes, whose writing career began in the last third of the twentieth century, biography implies a certain intimacy; it is a “handshake across time” and “a simple act of complex friendship.”

Best known for his fine biographies of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Holmes is also the author of any number of other works, including The Age of Wonder on the Romantics’ discovery of the sublimity of science, and now, with the publication This Long Pursuit, three collections of shorter pieces. In “Travelling,” the first chapter in the present book, Holmes writes that empathy is the biographer’s “most valuable but perilous weapon.” Empathy of some sort is a fairly obvious requirement for the biographer of any era, but like all abstract qualities its nature and meaning mutate over the generations. For Holmes, empathy involves more than sympathy or intellectual grasp, but something akin to union. He decided early on that biography demanded that he “physically pursue his subject through the past,” putting himself in every place the subjects lived, visited, passed through, and even dreamed of, to recapture what they experienced.

As he travels and pursues his research through texts, correspondence, journals, and what have you, he engages in “a form of double accounting,” keeping a record of the objective facts of his subject’s life on the right side of a notebook and his own questions, speculations, impressions, emotions — all his reactions and puzzlements — on the left side. In this way he edges into the life, getting as close to his subject’s experience and inner world as possible. In Holmes’s view, biography is a “an act of imaginative faith,” and I would say that it is not given to everyone to pull it off — the faculty is a rare one.

The book includes a chapter on the questions he raised in his own mind in writing The Age of Wonder, which is to say, questions on the relationship of science and creative literature — a subject that I, in a distinct minority, find interesting only in its loonier manifestations. There is an excellent chapter on the teaching of biography writing and the changing nature of biography over time, the latter being one of his persistent themes. There’s another fine essay on memory, which is to say, forgetting; and a chapter on ballooning — the author’s eccentric obsession, about which he wrote his last book, Falling Upwards.

After all this, Holmes gets down to business — his business: biographical writing. In separate chapters he looks at the lives of ten writers who flourished — artistically, if not materially — in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Some are his old pals, notably Shelley, Coleridge, and Wollstonecraft, and in taking them up again he demonstrates how never-ending the writing of one life truly is. In a wonderful essay, “Shelley Unbound,” Holmes discusses the warping effect the actual events in a subject’s life have on our later assessment of that subject. This is a very odd, very astute observation, and one he explores brilliantly in showing how Shelley’s untimely death “was used to define an entire life, to frame a complete biography,” producing “what might be called thanatography.” Prime mover in this respect was Shelley’s friend, “the incorrigible myth-making” Edward John Trelawny, who, over fifty years, continued to rewrite his account of the fatal shipwreck “accumulating more and more baroque details, like some sinister biographical coral reef.”

The emphasis put on the Romantic tragedy of the poet’s death — which Holmes shows to have been the result of imprudence, bad luck, and incompetently altered boat design, rather than destiny — affected not only assessments of Shelley’s character but also how his poems were interpreted, lending them a fatalistic and prophetic import. As a tonic, Holmes throws the Romantic version of Shelley as “a youthful, sacrificial genius” up against an alternate history in which the poet does not die at twenty-nine in 1822. Given the trajectory of his unfinished work and his political beliefs, Shelley, Holmes suggests, would likely have put his pen behind the Reform Bill of 1832, “sharpened up” John Stuart Mill, “hobnobbed with Coleridge at Highgate (‘a little more laudanum, Bysshe?’),” and eventually be “scandalously elected as the first Professor of Poetry and Politics at the newly founded, and strictly secular, University of London.”

In addition to Shelley, Coleridge, and Wollstonecraft, Holmes devotes a chapter to Margaret Cavendish (“Mad Madge”), developing the theme that women, excluded from membership in the Royal Society for 285 years, were more alert than men to the social implications of science. Other chapters cover Isobelle de Tuyll, known as Zélide, and her first biographer, Geoffrey Scott; Madame de Staël and her influence of the Romantics and later writers; Mary Somerville, first to write about science for the common reader; the interpretations and uses of John Keats (though Holmes is strangely silent on the adventures of Keats and Chapman in Myles na Gopaleen’s ludicrous columns in the Irish Times of yore); the portrait painter Thomas Lawrence; and William Blake and the reclamation of his reputation.

Holmes has called himself “an experimental biographer . . . fascinated equally by lives as they are lived, and lives as they are told.” The pieces here are an expression of that, of “the infinitely puzzling difference between chance and destiny in biographical narrative; between the contingent and the inevitable, between the phrase ‘and then . . . ‘ and the phrase ‘and because . . . ‘ ” as each sends the story off in a different direction. Life may be short, but biography never ends.

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