ARTICLES, REVIEWS & ESSAYS

Review of The Hard Crowd Essays 2000 -2020 by Rachel Kushner published in The New York Times Book Review:

Not long ago I met a Frenchwoman legendary for her youthful wildness. One story I’d heard involved her borrowing a motorcycle. She was living up a mountain, it was dead-winter, and she needed to go down into the village for cigarettes. The guy who lent her his motorcycle told her that the only way to make it down the icy hairpin bends to the bottom was never once to put your foot on the brake. She did as he said. I seem to remember that she smashed herself up and maybe the bike too, but she survived, and the guy was in awe. “You didn’t use the brakes? But I was just kidding!”

This woman, who now lives on a sheep farm with her partner and child, showed me a memoir she’d written about her hard-rocking youth. She didn’t know if it was any good, she said, but she’d needed to write it because of all her gang of friends, she was the only one who was still alive.

I was reminded of this Frenchwoman’s need to bear witness when reading Rachel Kushner’s collection of essays — not just because Kushner writes eloquently about being a girl who rides (and crashes) motorcycles, but because she keeps circling round this phenomenon of being the sole survivor of a scene, an era, a group of friends.

Review of Mantel Pieces published in The New York Times Book Review:

The person we meet at the beginning of Hilary Mantel’s collection of essays is 35 and has already published two novels. She’s immensely ambitious, but she’s had some obstacles to literary success: She’s female; she’s the daughter of Irish Catholic millworkers; she comes from a village in England’s industrial North; she has had to support herself as a barmaid, medical social worker and department-store assistant; she is married to the boy she met at 16 and has followed him to postings in Africa and the Middle East; she’s dogged by a chronic illness. And finally, most damning: Her chosen genre, historical fiction, is considered down-market. All of which means it will take her a bit longer to become herself — or rather, to persuade the world of her prodigious powers. She’s still a long way from becoming Dame Hilary, internationally renowned author of the “Wolf Hall” trilogy.

“Mantel Pieces,” which includes nearly 30 years of Mantel’s essays for The London Review of Books, accompanied by facsimiles of her correspondence with its editors, is the story of an outsider finding her literary home. When the book opens, it’s 1987, and Mantel, with exaggerated self-deprecation, is offering her services to a magazine she considers the finest in Europe…

MY PROFILE OF POLITICAL ARTIST Piotr PAVLENSKY, PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE:

My memoir of 70’s New york and my teen friendship with stephen varble, published in granta summer 2018 and reprinted in lithUB

This is a story about New York in the 1970s. A broken, genderfuck friendship story.

When I was 14 years old and an aspiring writer, my best friend was a 28-year-old drag queen and performance artist named Stephen Varble. I was in the ninth grade at Brearley, an all-girls school on the Upper East Side, and at that point Stephen was really the only boy I knew. For almost three years, we explored the seedier undersides of the city; he introduced me to cocaine and kissing and to John Waters’ star Divine, and I provided him, grudgingly, with something approaching home. We charmed, wounded, infuriated each other, squabbled and made up, but even in our most exasperated moments, we each had this weird faith in our friendship as a kind of artistic endeavor: I interviewed Stephen about his work, recorded in my diary every conversation, every meeting; we wrote poems about each other; Stephen commissioned a photographer friend to make a film of the two of us, of which only two stills survive. He called me “Nenna Fiction.”

I went away to college, and stopped answering Stephen’s letters. He became a religious recluse, got AIDS, and died; later he was forgotten because his art was so militantly ephemeral, and because most of the photographers who documented his performances also died of AIDS and were forgotten. Now both he and they are being rediscovered, and the first museum show devoted to Stephen Varble’s work is opening in New York in September this year. It’s taken me 40-odd years to be able to begin thinking about this friendship, which is also a story about Aids, genderqueer art, and a city that not so long ago offered possibilities of wild, unsurveilled freedom and experimentation.

Wild, Free, and Utterly Lost—Writer Fernanda Eberstadt on the Panic and Pitfalls of Post-Collegiate Life

Vogue (USA) - Magazine

New York in the 1970s was a wild, sleazy city, and as a teenager, I found myself exploring its leather bars, amusement arcades, and discos with an intensity that didn’t leave much room for school. On my report cards, the number of days absent was higher than most of my grades. One night in eleventh grade, my best friend and I took our schoolbags to Studio 54, stowed them under a seat in the upstairs gallery, and went straight to our Upper East Side girls’ school the next morning, bleary but triumphant. Hadn’t our parents noticed we didn’t come home the night before? my children asked many years later when they heard this story. Parents didn’t notice much in that unsurveilled era...