There isn’t something inherently radical about drawing oneself, but to render the female body at all risks opening an artist up to scrutiny. When my first book, a graphic memoir, came out, I was surprised by reviews that called attention to the way I looked. “The abundance of self-portraits makes her author photo on the back flap oddly unsettling,” wrote one review, “Because it both clearly resembles yet subtly contradicts the character in her artwork.” I’d drawn myself both as too real, and not real enough.
Soon I started questioning my own body every time I sat down to draw. Should I cut out that fat roll or should I accentuate it? Do I smooth out my hair? I often take reference photos of myself before I draw difficult poses. In one, my nipples showed through my tank top slightly. Should I draw them, then, I wondered? What will it mean if I have nipples? What will it mean if I don’t have nipples?
The Peanuts characters are among the most iconic kids in American culture, right up there with the March sisters and Tom Sawyer. But kids, really? Most college-educated adults I know would be thrilled to attain Linus’s level of erudition; he is, after all, conversant with the writings of Dostoyevsky, Orwell, and the apostle Paul. Then there is the business of Schroeder playing Beethoven on his toy piano, and Lucy moonlighting as a psychiatrist, and Sally raging in one strip against “middle-class morality,” and pretty much all the characters’ impossibly articulate access to their every passing emotion. And I am only scratching the surface of Peanuts’ absurd precocity.
It all started on a weekend away for the Booksluts, a Sydney book club with the motto “We’ll read anything.” Six of the group’s eight regular members were discussing “Crime and Punishment,” and talking about the club’s upcoming tenth anniversary, which they dreamed of celebrating with a Trans-Siberian Railway trip. They jokingly decided that they would fund the trip by writing a novel together. Much vodka had been consumed by this point, and plot discussions degenerated into mass hysterics.
But the next morning the friends went out and bought butcher paper and Sharpies and spent all day brainstorming. They decided that their novel would be a rural romance, set in the Australian outback, and agreed on the backstory of their heroine, a city girl who inherits the farm where her father—now mysteriously disappeared—grew up. Sparks would fly when she meets the handsome (and engaged) cattle farmer next door.
Dedicated birdwatchers can identify a bird even when they do not have time to note its distinguishing marks of plumage and song. A skilled birder can tell you the breed from its general impression, size and shape, even if it is just a blur flying past in the dusk. A writer’s voice is like that, too, perhaps. A skilled reader can spot it from a single sentence flashing by.
This wasn’t just coincidence. It’s exactly what Mr. Gladwell’s towering success — his five best-selling books, his six-figure speaking fees, his top-rated podcast — rests on: the moment when the skeptic starts to think that maybe we’re wrong about everything and maybe, just maybe, this Mr. Gladwell guy is onto something.
Nearly 20 years and millions of sales after his nonfiction debut, Mr. Gladwell is at something of a professional tipping point. He elicits from readers the kind of polarized reactions usually reserved for talk-radio hosts. To one camp, he is a master storyteller, pithily translating business concepts and behavioral science to a lay audience. To others, he is a faux intellectual, dressing up ordinary truths (such as an “Outliers” argument that success results from a combination of hard work and opportunity) as counterintuitive genius. How “Talking to Strangers” is received could cement Mr. Gladwell in one of those camps for good.
That’s right. You can say no to the back-to-school Read-a-Thon. No three cheers for finishing a book or dollar for every book read. No bonus iPad time if she would please finish one chapter of a single chapter book.
Just as reading shouldn’t be a punishment, it shouldn’t be rewarded. It shouldn’t be work and it shouldn’t be required to earn time for play. Reading isn’t something to plow through determinedly, accounting for each title.
It was 97 degrees in Sunrise, Florida, in late May—the kind of weather that’s practically destined to cause heatstroke, especially for someone wearing a vest, goggles, rubber boots, and a hard hat. But Joseph Kavana didn’t seem to notice the sweat that had soaked through his blue button-up and pooled around his chest and armpits. The 70-year-old first purchased the 65 acres we were standing on more than 20 years ago and was, finally, on the precipice of transforming it into his vision of utopia, what he’s dubbed Metropica. So passionate was the developer about his project that he probably would never have taken me back to the air-conditioned leasing office to finish his presentation if I had not stated outright that I was about to faint.
Once safely inside, Kavana returned to explaining what that vision amounts to. Turns out it’s an Instagram-friendly mall that you can live in—one that happens to be smashed up against the side of an enormous swamp.
What holds “The Grammarians” aloft, ultimately, is its riveting love story — not the tale of the twins or their respective marriages but of their deep bond with language. “We are alone,” Daphne thinks in a moment of profound grief. “And our lives are as meaningless as a single, lonely letter, an s with just a hiss that meant nothing, a p sputtered, a t of staccato disapproval.” Even as she rails against the limits of language, she can’t help proving its power to console, or at least to distract with its beauty. To quote another midcentury musical the girls would likely have grown up hearing: “If that’s not love, what is?”