October 203: Loving Jill Lepore

Plus, go see Jaja's African Hair Braiding and The Holdovers.

Dear Writers,

Israel is at war. This is is not necessarily a political newsletter so I will only share that our family has three generations of cousins living in Israel. We visited them in June. Two visited us here in the US this month. The news is heartbreaking and terrifying. We pray for peace.

It is hard to pivot to other news but here goes:

I am deep into loving and listening to Jill Lepore’s new essay collection, Deadline (Lepore reads the book on Audible; she’s hilarious and entertaining.) Lepore, David Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard and frequent contributor to The New Yorker, is fierce, funny, juicy, and brilliant. Thank God this woman is alive and writing so much and so well.

Some of my favorite essays, published online, have different titles in the book. You can read the online versions here:

• The Lingering of Loss (gorgeous essay about Lepore’s late friend Jane; title essay “The Deadline”)

• The Prodigal Daughter (tribute to Lepore’s late mother; title same in book)

• The Everyman Library (tribute to Lepore’s late father; title same in book)

• The Rescued Portrait of My Italian Grandmother (worth reading; not in book)

• The Strange and Twisted Life of Frankenstein (great piece about Frankenstein author Mary Shelley; “It’s Still Alive” in book)

• Herman Melville at Home (unnerving piece about Moby Dick author, his writing habits and poor treatment of his family; “Ahab at Home” in book)

• The Right Way to Remember Rachel Carson (wonderful portrait of science writer and author of Silent Spring; “The Shorebird” in book)

• Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The Great Equalizer and Ruth Bader Ginbsurg’s Unlikely Path to the Supreme Court (“Misjudged” and “To Have and To Hold” in book)

• If you are a Lepore groupie, check out Annotation Tuesday! Jill Lepore and The Prodigal Daughter. Lepore annotates the essay and discusses one of her other books, Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin.

• Shout-out to college journalists:

  • Read this 2014 profile of Lepore in the Harvard Crimson.

  • Read this 2011 Q&A with Henry Finder, Lepore’s New Yorker editor, in the Yale Daily News. Finder says: “You’re ultimately in the storytelling business, and storytelling is about omission, it’s about holding back as much as it is about disclosure. You don’t say everything at once — you can’t — you’re titrating information. You’re not playing every card, you’re holding a card back for the right moment. Writing is a matter of being strategic about the sequence of revelation so that you can develop tension, so you can promote emotional engagement, you can get a sense of an article that turns and doesn’t unfold exactly the way you would predict from first paragraph. The ideal piece works on a dramatic, human level as well as on a level of explanation.”

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Join Judith Rabinor and me for Writing Our Secrets, Friday, December 8, 12-3 p.m. Secrets generate plot, sustain tension and are the backbone of almost every compelling story. In this workshop, we’ll show you how to use them to propel your own stories forward.

Joins us for Write Night, Thursday, October 12, 6-7 p.m. It’s free and it’s live! Writers can read two pages of their work (500 words, max) out loud. Maximum 12 people.

Jaja’s African Hair Braiding. Fabulous, new, Broadway show with short run (ends November 5). The play by Jocelyn Bioh is (mostly) a comedy about women and work, women and friendship, mothers and daughters, and being undocumented. Read NYT review, At ‘Jaja’s,’‘Where Everybody Knows Your Mane, here.

The Holdovers (opens October 27): Funny, moving movie starring Paul Giamatti, Da'Vine Joy Randolph and Dominic Sessa. The movie takes place in an all-boys Massachusetts boarding school at the tail end of 1970 and was filmed at Deerfield, Northfield Mt. Hermon, St. Marks, and Groton (Sessa was “discovered” at Deerfield, where he was a star of the drama club.) If you went to school in New England, the snowy school landscape will feel deliciously familiar. Beautifully acted story about absent fathers, grieving mothers, mental illness, teenage boys, privilege and lack of privilege. We saw an advance screening, followed by a Q&A with director Alexander Payne. Sessa’s girlfriend was there and asked if Sessa had stuck to the script or improvised. Payne said he stuck to the script except for one line. Preview here.

Joshua Ferris: The Dinner Party (fiction, The New Yorker)

Beth Raymer, My Father Taught Me the Benefits of Delusion, (nonfiction, NYT)