Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle: A brash novel about early 2000s New York that finds treasure in the trash
Aftertaste
Author
:
Daria Lavelle
ISBN-13
:
978-1526683946
Publisher
:
Bloomsbury
Guideline Price
:
£16.99
Ukrainian-American Daria Lavelle's debut novel is a tale of love, loss and horror set against the freakish backdrop of Manhattan's dining scene. Kostya is a chef who can taste the food dead people desire, which he re-creates for ghosts to share with the ones that mourn them. As with many underworld ventures, things go amiss. Already, Aftertaste has summoned quite a stir, with a movie in the works.
There's Stephen King in this novel's ancestry, in style as well as scares. Like King, Lavelle is unabashed that her prose can be clumsy and cliched – 'orgasmic eating experience', 'the perfect, crispy crackle of golden fried chicken skin'. What matters is momentum. Lavelle's writing pounds with bada-boom dialogue and the kind of adrenaline found in an over-heated kitchen during service.
In the way she uses brands and celebrities as descriptors, Lavelle evokes Bret Easton Ellis in American Psycho. About one Russian kingpin, she writes: 'While his accent was goofy, all Rocky and Bullwinkle … his face was early-era Brad Pitt, the rest of him in an Armani underwear ad, his confidence reeking with too much cologne.' Just as Ellis never escapes the 1980s, Lavelle's New York, although purportedly present-day, is mired in the early aughts. Macho chefs and hidden speakeasies abound; the East Village is still cool, and Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential very much alive.
There's a banquet featuring ingredients that once upon a time might have induced gasps – the endangered songbird ortolan, the potentially lethal fugu fish. Kostya's love interest Maura is by-the-book retro, a manic-pixie dream girl with purple hair.
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Is Afterlife sometimes sloppy and occasionally bad? Perhaps, but to read it is a rush. Besides, one should be suspicious of someone who disdains all junk, be it a McDonald's French fry or Real Housewives marathon. As an elegy to a city where garbage and greatness go hand in hand, it's only appropriate to find a little trash in Aftertaste's soul.
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Irish Times
11 hours ago
- Irish Times
Re-reading my teenage diaries: joy and pain radiates off the pages
I didn't realise it at the time, but I came of age at the very end of an era. As someone who was born in the 1970s, I turned out to be part of the very last generation of habitual letter writers. For centuries, people with the means and the education had left written traces of themselves behind. Some wrote diaries; almost all wrote letters. When I started college in 1993, letters were the only way of keeping in touch with faraway friends. But then, incredibly quickly, everything changed. During my college years I wrote dozens of letters – letters to friends on Erasmus or summers abroad, letters from my own summers in Berlin and Boston. Sometimes I abandoned a letter and left it unfinished, tucked inside a notebook or folder pad, because so much had happened since I started writing it, the letter was out of date. But in the summer of 1997, just after I graduated, I got my first email address. And letters vanished from my life completely. While I was writing those letters, I also kept a diary, documenting my life (or more accurately, my extremely dramatic feelings about my life) in a series of ring-bound notebooks. For decades those unfinished letters and diaries were hidden away in my wardrobe and in a box in my parents' house. Until last summer, when I unearthed them and found myself travelling back in time. My first novel for adults, Our Song, is the story of Tadhg and Laura, who were bandmates in college before their friendship ended acrimoniously when they were 21. Sixteen years later their lives are very different – Tadhg is a massively successful musician, while Laura's just been laid off from her advertising job. But then Tadhg contacts Laura and asks her to finish a song they started writing together in their college days. The novel's narrative moves between the older Tadhg and Laura as they rediscover their old musical and personal chemistry, and the story of their younger, messier selves. And that's where my diaries and letters came in. READ MORE It's a long time, to put it bluntly, since I was 21. If I wanted to accurately capture the feelings of the younger Laura, I needed to remind myself what it felt like to be young and messy and full of big emotions. I needed to remember what it felt like to make stupid romantic choices, to never be honest about my feelings, to have my heart broken. Luckily, I had the perfect means to do just that. [ Anna Carey: 'Today's teenagers are pleasingly similar to my generation' Opens in new window ] When I opened the large cloth-covered notebook that covered the period of my life from 1994 to summer 1997, I thought reading about my college years for the first time in decades might be funny. I knew it would be helpful for the book. I didn't, for one second, predict that it would be so emotionally intense. Back when I wrote my first young adult novels, I had looked at my diaries from my mid-teens and laughed at the melodrama of my little teenage self. That girl from the early 1990s felt like a kid. She felt like another person. But the writer of my college diaries didn't feel like another person. She felt like me. Younger, of course, and much messier and more dramatic, but to my own surprise I didn't feel a massive sense of distance between the person who wrote about her college heartbreaks and the fortysomething reading about them three decades later. And so when I read my way through that notebook and the one that followed, I was reliving the highs and lows of my mid-1990s life. I found myself feeling genuinely angry with people I hadn't thought of in decades, about incidents I had totally forgotten. I found myself emotionally experiencing all of it. My joy and my pain radiated off the page so strongly, it was almost overwhelming, decades later. Anna Carey at Two Pups Cafe in Fairview, Dublin After I told a friend about my weirdly emotional research project, she unearthed the letters I'd written to her back in the day. Then I found the letters she wrote to me, and for weeks we photographed and WhatsApped every page of our 1990s correspondence to each other, both of us weeping with laughter over long-ago misadventures. And it wasn't just letters. In college, to practise her typing, my friend went through a phase of transcribing our conversations on her family computer as we chatted in her house. Miraculously, she found printouts of these transcripts and suddenly there we were, our brilliant, hilarious, stupid young selves, with our in-jokes and personal dramas, talking about gigs and parties and people we forgot about decades ago. It made me laugh until I cried and then suddenly to my surprise I was crying not with laughter, but at the sheer intensity of this contact with my own youth. It's a strange thing, going back in time. And sometimes you realise the story you've told yourself about that period could have been a very different one. Reading my diaries and letters, I could clearly see the narrative I created for myself at the time, one that I internalised and that still affected how I saw my younger days. But decades later, I saw that I could have chosen to tell a very different story. My younger self made decisions that, at the time, I refused to see were decisions. I put up with situations that were making me angry and miserable when I could have just walked away. Early on in college a boy told me he wasn't in love with me any more. At the time it was the most blunt, hurtful thing anyone had ever said to me, one that hung over me for months. Unsurprisingly, I remembered that all too well. But I had no memory of the fact, documented in my diary almost as an aside, that he told me it was because he didn't think I had ever really been in love with him. And looking back, I realised he had been right (on that point, at least). But when I was young and hurting, I didn't see it that way, or I didn't care, because what mattered was that he had rejected me. After writing that detail in my diary I forgot about it. How would the next year of my life have been different if I hadn't forgotten the part I'd played in that relationship's end? If I'd framed the incident as one in which I wasn't totally passive? It made me wonder what stories I'm telling myself about my life now. That's a lot to get from a 31-year-old notebook from Miss Selfridge. [ How I turned my book The Making of Mollie into a play – with a little help from some young innovators Opens in new window ] The French writer Henry de Montherlant famously wrote that 'happiness writes in white ink on a white page' and so it's not surprising that most of my diary entries were full of angst. In summer 1997 I went to Boston and fell in love with an American man (Gen Z might disapprove of age-gap relationships but they have nothing on my generation; my friend unearthed a letter to a mutual pal in which she wrote that 'Anna has two jobs and a Texan lover who's 25 '. Bear in mind I turned 22 towards the end of that summer so this was hardly a problematic gap). I was very, very happy and in a healthy romantic relationship for the first time in my life, and I hardly wrote in my diary all summer, apart from a few breathless lines marvelling over my magical good luck. It was the American boy who set up my first email address for me, and when I tearfully returned to Dublin we corresponded not via letters but emails, all of which vanished into the digital ether long ago. I didn't know it, but that was the beginning of the end for me and letters. My diary writing continued, but it also petered out after I got together with my now-husband back in 2001. My diary thrived on drama, and a happy, settled relationship is not very dramatic. Anna Carey and her husband-to-be Patrick Freyne on stage with their band El Diablo circa 2000. But then, to my surprise, both diary writing and letters returned to my life. About 10 years ago I got a 'one line a day' five-year diary, a dated journal in which you write a single sentence about each day. It wasn't like my old diary, where I poured out my soul, but it was a written record of my day to day life – something I wished I'd done more back in the '90s, instead of spending my summer in Berlin writing very little about my magical experiences in an amazing city at an incredible time in its history but a lot about my stupid boy-related angst. Letters returned in an unexpected form. At the height of lockdown in 2020, the New Yorker magazine writer Rachel Syme started a pen pal exchange, and I signed up. I've been corresponding with my Brooklyn pen pal Erin for five years now; we hit it off from the first letter, and I love that there are now written records of our lives and thoughts and feelings on each side of the Atlantic. When I was writing my new book, I wrote to Erin about its progress, sharing the highs and the lows. It makes me happy knowing that somewhere in Brooklyn is a series of postcards and letters telling the story of how I wrote Our Song. For a book that couldn't have been written without handwritten journals and letters, it feels just right. I think my younger self would approve. Our Song is published by Hachette Ireland. Anna Carey will be talking to Sinéad Moriarty as part of the Dalkey Book Festival on June 14th.
Irish Times
11 hours ago
- Irish Times
Trump country: ‘Most people just see those of us who live here as hicks and hillbillies'
'There are two words that a southwest Virginian just cannot say,' Bill Smith explains as he sips a whiskey in Good Times, one of the more recent places to open in the town of Big Stone Gap. He pauses for effect. ''Yes.' And 'No'.' Because they don't want to be impolite? 'Well. That's part of it. They also don't want to hang their asses. You can hear it in the jokes. Someone can say something really cutting. And then they'll say, 'Awh, I was just joking with ya.' I came from a place where if you don't answer a question straight, you get: what's the matter, can't you make up your mind?' READ MORE Smith moved from Montana to Big Stone Gap (population 5,114), one of Virginia's many recovering coal towns, 30 years ago. He brought with him a sense of adventure inherited from his mother, who was a big-band singer from Chicago and, later, a renowned drama schoolteacher in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Smith is one of those people who move in no hurry and yet seem to have packed a thousand lives into seven decades. He was a firefighter in California, plus a musician, plus an actor. In Virginia, he worked manual jobs, then as a sports reporter covering the Big Stone Gap school football team during a few feverish all-state seasons. He also curated the acclaimed Crooked Road festival. On the afternoon we meet he has just finished-up substitute teaching at the local high school. He'd never heard of Wise County, much less Big Stone Gap, before the 1990s. But one night he caught a performance by Roadside Theater, an Appalachian touring group, and he met Nancy Countiss. 'That was it,' he chuckles. 'I came out here in 1994. Not on a whim. But I fell in love. The last show I did was in Montana, and 10 days later I was learning how to make hydraulic hoses here for minimum wage.' By 'out here' he means the pioneer trail in reverse: crossing the fabled Cumberland Gap, the mountain pass that intersects the Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia state lines, and into the triangular wedge of counties in southwest Virginia. He arrived just as the coal companies had begun their exodus, disrupting the deeply established patterns of life throughout Appalachia, the 13-state mountainous region of the United States that has acquired a reputation that is in some ways distinct from and deeper than the country itself. Bill Smith: 'Education was never a priority bcause you could go into the mines and make more than the teacher' Cumberland Gap viewing point Bill Smith doesn't yet consider himself local, 'although it helps that my wife's family's been here 300 years'. He's a natural raconteur and has a fizzing mind with which he bounces through topics and centuries at will. Over the course of an afternoon, he tells me that here, the big open-plan Good Times restaurant, was the original location for the town newspaper the 'Post', where he began working in 1996 'just as Westmoreland coal was leaving and things were tense'. He talks about the difference between formal schooling and inherited knowledge. 'Education was never a priority. Because you could go into the mines and make more than the teacher. People have a tendency to look down on miners. But it is highly technical and dangerous and always has been.' That takes him on the rich seam of storytelling running through the Pow [Powell] Valley, and the inherited music tradition. He talks about the Bristol museum, about an hour away, where Ralph Peer all but created the US country music tradition through a series of recordings he made in the summer of 1927. 'And you can't throw a dead cat around here without hitting a musician. Some of the best old-time and bluegrass music in the country is within 100 miles of here. Last Saturday there were three different bands in town. But before the pandemic there weren't really any bars here to speak of. For years, it used to be the front porch.' He explains how the consequences of the pandemic are still taking a toll. 'Too many kids came out of Covid damaged. They were feral. This is our first proper year back in school. The pandemic in this area – we had almost 1/10th of our population die. I lost 14 friends. I think it was over 1,000 people in Wise County.' Something jigs a memory of an inherited story: his wife's great-great grandfather, eight years old and walking for days with his family on the move to Wise County. 'He was carrying the family pewter. And a chair. Well, seems he got real tired of hanging on to the pewter and he chucked it. Piece by piece. Into the woods. But we have that chair still.' Then he says, out of the blue, ' Daniel Boone walked the ground right about my house,' as if the famed pioneer had passed by just last week. Trump country: In the 2024 election Wise County returned Donald Trump with an 81 per cent vote, neighbouring Lee County with 85 per cent The overarching point is that while Smith still considers himself 'an oddity' to the true locals in town and in this part of Appalachia, the richness and singularity of the region has him spellbound. 'It's wild,' he says. 'And it's conservative. And it has cultural depth.' It is, we agree, a long way from Washington, longer than its 430 miles suggest. You can catch a little of Virginia's hauteur in its nickname, 'Old Dominion'. Arlington House, perched above the cemetery, looms over Washington, DC , as the former home of the Confederate general Robert E Lee. If you drive the I-80 and swing a right past Senator Tim Kaine's constituency office in Abingdon, after which the state turns truly mountainous and bewitching, you will finally end up in Lee County, named after the famed general's father. The cross-state drive takes about seven hours, allowing stops for petrol and Dunkin' Donuts. In the 2024 presidential election, Wise County returned Donald Trump with an 81 per cent vote. Neighbouring Lee County voted Trump by 85 per cent. These are thumping returns in counties that can make for grim reading in the statistical data: 27 per cent of people live below the poverty line in Lee County. An unofficial stat: in an area of gorgeous natural beauty, Lee County shows no hotels on the usual listing sites. Barbara Kingsolver, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Demon Copperhead, which is set in southwest Virginia. Photograph: University of Edinburgh/PA It has, more recently acquired a literary significance as the setting for Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver's phenomenally successful, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that transposes the blueprint for David Copperfield on to a live-wire teenager in southwest Virginia during the opioid epidemic that ravaged this part of the state. Kingsolver grew up in Kentucky and lives in Virginia. She has railed, wonderfully, against the authenticity of vice-president JD Vance's memoir Hillbilly Elegy which, she said, was dismissed by neighbours for 'the hollowness, the fact that he isn't really one of us'. In the same 2024 Guardian interview , she said she has, despite the accolades, 'dealt with this condescension, this anti-hillbilly bigotry for a lot of my life'. [ Barbara Kingsolver: 'The first time I set foot in Ireland I felt so at home. Something about the language, the culture' Opens in new window ] Kingsolver is a fearsome defender against all the national prejudices Appalachia has faced down. More impressively, she has put her money where her mouth is. January marked the opening of the Higher Ground recovery centre in the town of Pennington Gap. It's a bungalow dwelling in the heart of the town that has been converted to a refuge for women recovering from addiction. The shelter is funded by Kingsolver, with absolutely no fanfare. Over lunch in the McDonald's down the street, Elizbeth Brooks, who grew up in Lee County and runs the centre, tells me she understands exactly what Kingsolver means by the casual prejudice thrown at Appalachians. 'I feel like it varies. I mean there is a stigma to our area. And we are – I don't know, most people just see those of us who live in Appalachia as hicks and hillbillies and all that. And they do. And … I agree with Barbara. On the TV shows and everything it's all they focus on. They don't focus on the beautiful areas up here. They don't spend time here. 'My own family, when we travel, if you go to a bigger area, people can be rude and disrespectful. Here we are friendly. My dad will wave at every single car. The finger raised from the wheel. Even the counties surrounding Lee County will kind of make jokes … 'Oh they're from Lee County'. Some people take offence. And especially with schools and stuff too. There's … a snobbery.' About eight years ago, one of the worst moments of Brooks's life catapulted her into an unlikely transformation. She was eight months pregnant with her first child when she says she was arrested and, because of previous charges, placed on a Court Recovery programme. She had, in her teens, graduated from alcohol and marijuana to opioids and methamphetamines, dropping out of Wise college and falling into a pattern of addiction. Elizabeth Brooks: 'If you go to a bigger area, people can be rude and disrespectful. Here we are friendly' 'When you are in addiction there is a lot of isolation,' she says. 'You shut everybody out.' A 2019 report by the Washington Post included data analysis recording that, between 2006-2012, 34.9 million opioids, or 120 pills per resident, were shipped into Wise County alone. Brooks regards her eldest child Jayden as 'my miracle baby'. She has been sober since July 7th, 2018, and was working as an addiction counsellor when she was asked to run the new centre. She speaks with Kingsolver regularly, usually on Zoom. 'She's been wonderful. I don't know how she does it because she's a very busy woman.' There are six women in the residence now. 'I do their medications. It's kind of about building up their stability and accountability and getting them stable in the real world. A couple of my girls … they are, I wouldn't say hot-headed, but they are little firecrackers. And their personalities clash a little. So, it is kind of learning how to be emotionally stable as well. I tell them: there is more to recovery than just being sober. You need to work on yourself, get your mental health right, get your job and just be accountable for yourself.' One of the very first residents, Crystal, who is working at the counter in McDonald's, talks about the transformative effect the home has had on her life. Brooks likes that prospective residents be sober for about five or six weeks before taking a place there and returning to employment is part of the deal. But it can be difficult finding a job in Lee County. The Appalachian Regional Commission reports that in Lee between 2018-2022, 26 per cent of people lived in poverty and the average household income was $41,000 (it is $75,000 nationally). Brooks works nine to five. Jayden is autistic. She is due to give birth to her third child this summer. Evenings are busy: weekends a chance to come up for air. 'I tell my girls too – I'm no different from they are or any better because in my recovery, at any point, it's always a battle for me, too, just like it is for them. I've learned a lot about my triggers and staying away from them situations I don't need and that's what keeps me sober. Because I'm not saying I still couldn't have a bad day and go down the wrong path. We were like a runaway train ... I felt like we didn't have any kind of leadership whatsoever — Hank Fannon 'And before my fiance now - a thousand people would tell you I would never be engaged to a police officer in my life. And I would never have been with somebody who treated me with the most respect, that I respect myself with. It's very different now, and I am very grateful.' She and her fiance have held back on their wedding date because of the growing uncertainty over Medicaid changes; her boy is dependent on the treatment he receives through the programme. She is closely tracking the political conversation on autism taking place in the capital. In April, US health secretary Robert F Kennedy pledged 'a massive testing and research effort' to determine the cause of autism. Trump has appeared to suggest that vaccines could be to blame for autism rates, although decades of research have concluded there is no link between the two. [ 'Slippery slope to eugenics': advocates reject Robert F Kennedy jnr's national autism database in US Opens in new window ] 'There aren't many options for my son around here. So that would affect him. I feel like that would have made a really big impact on the election if people knew that. Just because it is going to hurt everyone. And I don't really see the helping part of it. I don't understand how that helps because unless you have a child with autism you don't really – there is nothing that causes it. And I think they could have worded it a lot better.' Hank Fannon: 'Trump is the most patriotic thing that has come through in a long time' Still, this is steadfast Trump country. And the ARC reports slowly climbing figures of median income levels and employment throughout the region. There is no sign of any real crisis of faith in Trump Republicanism here. On the way back from Big Stone Gap, I find Hank Fannon at the telephone in the office of the immaculately tidy tyre business he owns. Like seemingly everyone in this part of the country, Fannon's voice is rich and melodic. A television in the corner of the office is showing Fox News on silent and images of Trump's recent visit to the Middle East. The Fannons are in both the tyre and real estate business. 'It's a little tighter-fisted than it was,' he says. 'But Trump … he's the most patriotic thing that has come through in a long time. That shooting, wherever it was ... that put him in the White House. And the tariff thing is impacting, yeah. I sell some American-made stuff. All the China-built stuff. It's probably raised prices, $20, $30 a tyre. And I can't eat nothin. 'People are subject to doing impulse spending with this kind of stuff. If you need a tyre, it's just like going to the doctor: hurt's bad; 'I gotta get something done now.' But we were like a runaway train the other way. I felt like we didn't have any kind of leadership whatsoever. I knew when Trump came back into play it would tighten up a little – for a while.' But property prices, always modest, are beginning to rise. Appalachia is not immune to the property escalation heist that has gripped America. People are noticing the extraordinary value to be had in this part of the country – and the stunning landscape. We talk for a while about the economic realities of the region. Fannon sighs before answering. 'This is a depressed community, first off. There is a lot of poverty here. So, indirectly I am living off fixed-income people. So … I don't know. It bothers me some. We sell real estate in this region and it has been cheap real estate. But right now ... you can put a sign in the yard. A lady died three weeks ago and her daughter and I went to school together. And it sold in two days.' Joey O'Quinn works part-time in the tourism centre and plays in a band called the Hillbilly Hippies It also sold for well above the asking price. Up in Big Stone Gap, Joey O'Quinn, who works part-time in the tourism centre, is talking to a friend of his, Les Bailey. There's a bottle of gift whiskey on the counter and they joke about never opening a second bottle before noon. Bailey is rushing off to take their mutual friend, Larry Mullins, to the doctor. They all play in a band called the Hillbilly Hippies. Tourism is beginning to make an impression. Big Stone Gap is slowly opening itself up to the idea that it can be an attraction to outsiders, with new restaurants and cafes alongside the staunch jeweller's and legal firms on the main street. It has the natural splendour and the unrivalled music heritage and – the scarcest of commodities – authenticity. The local cafes and restaurants are friendly and without affectation of any sort. O'Quinn, who worked as a regulator with mining companies, believes the future for this part of Virginia lies in tourism, flipping the 'hillbilly' stigma after centuries. 'We have to be sensitive to that balance. This has been an impoverished region, yes, since the 1800s. But there are so many good things in terms of music and the mountains and all that culture.' Close to the tight triangle of land where the three state lines of Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky intersect, people driving the US-58 often do a double take as they pass by Junior Whitt's place. The striking thing about these counties is the absence of Trump banners or mementoes. But Whitt's place is a shrine to Maga-ism. Junior Whitt's place is a shrine to Maga-ism. Photograph: Keith Duggan He is sitting on a sun chair enjoying a smoke when I stop to ask him what inspired all of this. We find ourselves looking at the Confederate flags he has hanging. He says he hangs them because they are part of the history of the state, of the region. Often, strangers stop and ask to take photographs and Whitt will engage them in conversation. 'Well, from what I'm hearing all the time: they are for Trump,' he says in a gentle voice. 'They are not for the other side. I don't go for the transgender stuff and all this critical race theory stuff. I don't go for this stuff and a lot of other people don't go for it. That's why I'm against the Democrats. I don't vote for all that. And a lot of other people say, well, I don't vote for that either. I say, well, it's the same damn package. If you vote for 'em you, vote for it. They say, 'I never thought about it that way; you're right'. Yeah, I'm right. 'This house across the road ... they are big Democrats. We get along and everything. I hear it every day. People from out of state come through, see this, stop and walk around. And they're for Trump too. If the Democrats got back in, they would have destroyed us.' We chat for a while more. When there are no cars passing, it is incredibly serene here. Whitt waves an arm against the blue sky in the vague direction of his childhood home, on a farm near the Pow river. His parents were Democrats. He says his father would turn in his grave if he could see the party now. He sounds suddenly frustrated and tired by the state of American politics. 'See, back then you had some good Democrats. They sat down and talked with people.'
Irish Times
12 hours ago
- Irish Times
This Interim Time by Oona Frawley: Moving essays by the daughter of Irish actors in New York
This Interim Time Author : Oona Frawley ISBN-13 : 978-1843519225 Publisher : Lilliput Guideline Price : €16.95 'I did not understand that the approaching loss would affect me, or how; I did not know that as the years passed I would begin to see him from different perspectives and rue that he did not live long enough to know that.' Academic and novelist Oona Frawley's collection of essays deal with grief and memory and how our perspectives on both shift as we gain both age and experience. Rooted in the writer's own experience as a daughter of an Irish immigrant actor couple in New York , these essays offer the intriguing viewpoint of a person neither truly here nor there. The sense of otherness makes the writer's work of piecing together information about her parents' lives all the more gripping. Those with an interest in Ireland's rich theatre history will relish the details of her parents' lives as actors in New York. In spite of her father's alcoholism, and the resulting difficulties in their family life, there is an air of glamour here. If anything, I would have relished a little more detail about certain aspects of the story – we discover the writer's father's shame over the loss of a job at an insurance company, but not how he and the writer's mother made the transition to becoming actors in New York. But perhaps this would have skewed the focus of these essays, which map the loss of the writer's father to cancer, then her mother to dementia, then finally the untimely loss of a close friend. READ MORE Though the book deals with the anger and frustration of grief, there are moments of aching tenderness, such as when the defeated writer cries at her mother's bedside in her final days: 'One day I broke off, put my head down on the edge of her bed and sobbed, unable to speak. After a few moments her hand fumbled awkwardly near my hair, trying to console me.' [ My father's friend who knew nothing about his alcoholism surprised us at his funeral Opens in new window ] The fragmentary style of the essays lends depth and vividness to the memories unearthed and juxtaposed. This is an absorbing and moving read for those who have enjoyed essay collections such as Katie Roiphe's The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End.
