Naming a child after a fictional character is a high-stakes proposition. Like naming a kid for a family member, it can be more meaningful than just picking a name out of a baby book, but it also comes with much more baggage. Unlike a family name, however, a name from pop culture carries connotations not just among relatives, but in the wider world as well. Who could meet three sisters named Amy, Meg, and Laurie Jo and not think of Little Women?
David Letterman is ready to talk. He’s “giddy,” he tells me, and “delighted,” and “about to crack with excitement,” and at first he seems to be joking, laying on thick the irony and sarcasm that defined his persona for so long.
But he’s not kidding. “I’ve had no one to talk to about this, since it happened, save my poor wife,” he explained earnestly, and added, “It took me less time to get over the bypass surgery than it did to get over hosting the Academy Awards.”
Yet here we are, 25 years later, discussing the one and only time he hosted the Oscar telecast. He doesn’t mince words; Letterman calls it, at three separate points in our conversation, “the greatest professional embarrassment I’ve ever endured.”
Grocery stores simply stock items that people seek out on a daily basis: vegetables, spices, and condiments regularly used in cooking in that particular neighborhood. The most natural way to observe how people live at my destination of choice is to navigate this annoying, but necessary everyday routine.
I still buy fabric in my travels and give myself new projects: a wool smock dress is next, and a mustard jumpsuit that I might wear on my book tour, if I finish it in time. And I continue to follow fabric stores and pattern makers, saving Instagram photos of tunics and coats alongside recipes. But I’m only sewing for myself, and occasionally for my partner, and I do it on my own timeline. Some projects take months, and that’s fine. My hobbies need space to be unproductive, useless, aimless. My life needs fewer transactional components, not more.
Individually, the chapters exercise hypnotic intensity, but the overall effect is even more profound. With his panoramic vision of the displacements of war, Yoon reminds us of the people never considered or accounted for in the halls of power. Hearing bits of a speech by President Johnson, they ask, What on earth is a domino? What does your Cold War have to do with us?
Yoon makes us care deeply about these adolescents and what happens to them. For all that he eventually reveals, some details are forever dropped between the shifting plates of survivors’ memories. That’s cruel, but like everything else here, entirely true to the lives of people scattered by war.
In Interior Chinatown, the conceit is a world where literally everyone is an actor and the world itself is an omnipresent television production studio (the entire novel is written in the form of a screenplay). Every job is a role. Every actor has only a few roles that are available to them based on the demographic limits of their race, gender, and age. Actors try to land increasingly better roles, bigger roles, within these limits. Roles that pay better. Roles that get more attention. Roles that will deliver them happiness, move them up the social ladder, and bring them to the doorstep of assimilation.
The Roman author Aelian describes a virginity test that involves a woman trying to feed a barley cake to a snake: if it won’t bite or, wearing a blindfold, the woman fails to find the snake, then she apparently isn’t a virgin and should be punished. Although there are plenty of men in this book – and not just oppressors but young lads who become “withered and aged because of … constant masturbating” – it is unavoidably an account of injustice against women, and a compelling one.