BARNES & NOBLE DISCOVER PRIZE

Nonfiction Finalist

Bettyville available in paperback 3/16.

 George Hodgman  IS ON FIRE.

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It’s that time of year: THE HATE LIST 2015

1. Carrie’s wig
2. Jimmy Fallon and the new late night TV line-up with the exception of my new boyfriend James Corden. I HEART JAMES CORDEN.
3. Snatch chat.
4. That McNulty/Noah Saloway is British. How?! How?!
5. The only movie I loved this year will not get nominated. Room.
6. Unsubscribe feedback requests
7. The House of Trump.
8. I hate the jacket of PURITY so much I can’t pick it up which is okay since I haven’t read The Goldfinch yet.
9. The term “binge-watching.”
10. FOMA (there is nothing better than missing out)

What’s on your list. Let’s make it long and ugly. Happy new year! Love, Betsy

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Dear Ms. Lerner,

May I hire you as an online writing coach?

Even a few feedback sessions for an exorbitant amount of cash would help.

Sincerely, NAME WITHHELD

Dear NAME WITHHELD:

I don’t even know what a writing coach is. Is it an editor with a whistle and clip board?  I also don’t believe that writers need coaching. WRITE TEN SENTENCES OR DROP AND GIVE ME FIFTY. I would be more impressed with the push ups. In any case, when you can’t write, you’re supposed to wallow. You’re supposed to turn on yourself. Pull the hair from your chest, grow bitter and alcoholic. Hiring a coach could potentially ruin all that. On the other hand, what kind of cash are we talking about? Would it fund a month at Canyon Ranch? A nip and tuck? First class air fare for the year. Pavers? Let me know.  Love, Betsy

How much would you pay me?

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Just saw Joy. Oy. This movie suffers from the fallacy that lightening can strike twice. That you can make magic instead of respecting the fact that magic happens. That you can put Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper and Robert DeNiro in a bottle, shake, and voila: movie magic. The worst part for me was when Joy, out of despair, cuts her own hair. Then, a few days later, it looks like Frederic Fekkai cut and blow dried it. Friends, I am familiar with self hair cutting. My first attempt was in the third grade when I tried bangs. The year resulted in my plastering down the too short pangs with a parade of barrettes. Now, with the equivalent of a toe nail scissors, I take to my own locks when I’m stressed. It starts as snipping and ends up Bellevue. I do this a lot when I’m writing. Picking, snipping, jerking off. I love writing.

Any corroboration?

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Carrie Mathison decides to go off her meds to get her mojo back. She’s figured out if she goes off her lithium, she’ll have a window during which the mania will kick in and with it her x-ray vision, super-human powers. I know it’s just television, but this is mental. What were they smoking in the writer’s room? This is my illness and it’s not user-friendly. Not that I haven’t been tempted.

Writers, stay on your meds. Okay?

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I’ve never believed in “best of” lists until now. Congratulations to George Hodgman and Patti Smith. Thank you Maureen Corrigan of NPR. Fucking A.

Bettyville: A Memoir

by George Hodgman

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Hardcover, 278 pages

In Bettyville, George Hodgman, who had a major career in editing and publishing in New York City, writes of moving home to Paris, Missouri to care for his elderly mother, Betty, who’s never acknowledged that her son is gay. In the opening scene, Hodgman is roused by a fretful Betty in the middle of the night: “[h]ere she is, all ninety years of her, curlers in disarray, … peeking into our guest room where I have been mostly not sleeping. It is the last place in America with shag carpet. In it, I have discovered what I believe to be a toenail from high school.” Like Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Hodgman’s Bettyvillecaptures the exhaustion, sorrow and moments of absurdity involved in caring for elderly loved ones.

M Train

by Patti Smith

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Hardcover, 253 pages

Unlike her first memoir, the now classic, Just Kids, which was all about the thrill of “becoming,” Patti Smith’s incantatory M Trainis mostly about the challenge of enduring erosion and discovering new passions (like detective fiction and a tumbledown cottage in Rockaway Beach, Queens). Smith, of course, is a “kid” no longer. She’s now 68 and she’s suffered a lot of losses, including the deaths of artist Robert Mapplethorpe, who was her partner in crime in the Just Kids years, and her husband, musician Fred “Sonic” Smith, who died suddenly in his 40s. “They are all stories now,” says Smith, thinking of these and other deaths. The narrative of M Train, fittingly, is fragmented and incantatory, more like Smith’s distinctive song lyrics. At bottom, though, both of Smith’s memoirs tell a haunting story about being sheltered and fed, in all senses, by New York City.

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When I was a young girl, I was convinced that the Nazis were going to storm our house and take me away or kill us. My mother sat me down and explained the difference between rational and irrational fears. Since then my irrational fears have multiplied exponentially.

1. I will be killed like the Clutters.
2. I will be pushed in front a subway
3. A crane will fall on my head
4. I will choke on a turkey and bacon wrap
5. A drunk driver will hit my car head on
6. I will fall while crossing the street and get run over; manuscripts will spill out of my canvas tote and the pages will be taken up by the wind and scatter over Fifth Avenue like confetti.

What’s your irrational fear(s)?

p.s. two people haven’t claimed their copy of Calf. So please send me your address for your copy.

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