August 1, 2025: News flash: And Just Like That… is kaput with season three. Not a news flash: And Just Like That…wasn’t Sex and the City. It couldn’t be. But AJLT could have been…better. Today Vogue.com kindly runs “10 Things I’d Have Liked to See in And Just Like That… Season 4” (see here), my annotated list of storylines that might (and really should) have been.
June 20, 2025: By “he” I mean Northern Irish novelist Steve Cavanagh, not Anthony Hopkins. And by “it” I mean that in my interview with Cavanagh, he admits that his gangbusters new thriller, Fifty Fifty, pays homage to Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, which I suspected but did not say because I didn’t want him to think I was accusing him of being derivative. Anyway, Cavanagh told me other interesting things, and you can find out what they were by reading my interview, which runs today in Shelf Awareness (see here).
March 8, 2025: Yeah, well, I kind of like the 1976 remake of A Star Is Born. (“To think this came out the year punk broke,” I wrote in the notes I took while watching it for the first time recently.) And I will never not find it marvelously weird that Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne wrote the screenplay (with an assist from screenwriter/director Frank Pierson). I wrote about Didion and Dunne’s screenwriting partnership for Vogue.com, which kindly runs my piece today (see here).
February 5, 2025: …have something in common besides an appreciation for Kyle MacLachlan. To find out what, you can read my piece at Allure, posted today (see here).
January 10, 2025: Me, I have not been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, but Adam Haslett has been (twice). I had the pleasure of conducting an email interview with Adam for Shelf Awareness that ran a few days ago (see here). It’s largely about his new and, I think, Pulitzer-able novel, Mothers and Sons, which I review today reviewed a few days ago (not sure how I missed this) (see here).
January 1, 2025: In Susan Minot’s Don’t Be a Stranger, which I review today in the Portland Press Herald (see here; it’s apparently in print on January 5), a fiftysomething single mother falls for a dishy thirtysomething guitar-slinging ex-jailbird New Yorker, who kind of sounds like a young…
December 31, 2024: This year I read five corking good books about Old Hollywood, all published in 2024; they’re listed alphabetically below.
Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Philip Gefter
Don’t you want to read a book that Eric Idle read too?
Dancing on the Edge: A Journey of Living, Loving, and Tumbling Through Hollywood by Russ Tamblyn with Sarah Tomlinson
A real heartbreaker because Tamblyn doesn’t even pretend that he got everything he wanted.
The Devil Raises His Own by Scott Phillips
This novel was, I mean, jeez. What? Wow. This novel. Yikes.
Giant Love: Edna Ferber, Her Best-Selling Novel of Texas, and the Making of a Classic American Film by Julie Gilbert
I finally understand the photo I have of my grandparents with some of the cast and crew of Giant, including Liz looking imperious and George Stevens looking drained but satisfied. My grandparents look, of course, dapper and mystified.
The Girl from the Grand Hotel by Camille Aubray
For anyone who ever thought that Elsa Lanchester and Charles Laughton should have played married detectives in a movie.
December 4, 2024: If you know me, you know that I’m the world’s least technological person, so rest assured, I am not on Instagram. But the National Book Critics Circle, of which I am a proud member, is, and they recently put me in an NBCC member Instagram spotlight (see here), if I even said that right. How untechnological am I? This thing has been posted since October and I only just discovered it now. Anyway, thanks, NBCC! And love you, Doris!
September 3, 2024: No, not Kirk: Kirkus. For which I’m now writing. Book reviews, I mean. In addition to my other swell book-reviewing gigs. Please do keep ’em coming.
