Bookshelf

Joyce Glassman Johnson, a distinguished author, was a young aspiring novelist in 1957 when she met Jack Kerouac through a Barnard classmate, Elise Cowan, an aspiring poet. Elise was in love with the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who knew that Kerouac, then 34, had just returned to Manhattan and needed a place to stay. Ginsberg introduced him to Joyce, who had an extra room in her apartment and, after reading Kerouac’s first novel, was eager to meet him.

The disconnect between the stock market’s recent climb and the fact that millions remain unemployed or have lost their homes and savings to the housing bust comes as no surprise to writer Barbara Garson. Her fourth nonfiction book on the human side of America’s economy—Down the Up Escalator: How the 99% Live in the Great Recession—is being published April, 2013.

In a recent New Yorker cartoon, a fiftyish woman in a bathrobe looks down on a naked man in bed. “I am proud of my body,” she tells him. “Just not in this light.” He has already brought in two glasses of wine and undressed. Now it’s her turn. What will break the impasse? 

With courtesy from Zest Now: Fifty and Forward

In the late 1990s I met three Holocaust survivors in my hometown, Rochester, New York—Ellen and Erich Arndt and Erich’s sister, Ruth Gumpel. All three had amazingly survived, “hiding in plain sight,” in the middle of Berlin during World War II, along with four other family members. Fascinated by their incredible tale, I volunteered to work with them as a writer so we could preserve their story for posterity.

Many of us in our fifties, sixties and, yes, even our seventies, are re-marrying or cohabiting after divorce or widowhood. More often than not, we are marrying men who already have families peopled by children, grandchildren, siblings, ex-spouses, and ex-inlaws from a first or second marriage. Because there are suddenly so many more relatives, we have to figure out how we can blend gracefully into a pre-existing family.

Ask a writer to name the hardest thing about writing, and you’re apt to hear “beginning the damn piece.” Lily Tuck, who at 73 is still an active and prodigious writer, learned this from the well-known writing teacher Gordon Lish. Indeed, Lily’s own first sentences are bull’s eyes.

Pop-psychology books trigger the skeptic in me. Who, I wonder, is this stranger with slim credentials who’s lecturing me on how to become a better person? And how can I trust that the people he cites—Jim H., Mary G.—aren’t composite characters, or even fictional?

Books are as seasonal as shoes, even if you’re a pool-phobic, sand-suspicious urbanite whose ideal hot-weather outing is lunch on Beach Street in Tribeca. Lightweight novels are of course the summer norm: the strappy sandals of literature. But they’re not the whole story. A month or so of fluff brings on a craving for substance—sentences to nourish the soul and perk up the lazy mind.