Shortly after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Maj. Gen. Leslie R. Groves of the U.S. Army, who directed the making of the weapons, told Congress that succumbing to their radiation was “a very pleasant way to die.”
His aide in misinforming America was William L. Laurence, a science reporter for The New York Times. At the general’s invitation, the writer entered a maze of secret cities in Tennessee, Washington and New Mexico. His exclusive reports on the Manhattan Project, when released after the Hiroshima bombing, helped shape postwar opinion on the bomb and atomic energy.
At the time of my first novel’s death, I had written fewer than twenty new pages, best characterized as a project rather than a novel. I was twenty-nine years old, hardly ancient, but I had been writing fiction since I was sixteen. Thirteen years is either a lot of time to throw away to pursue a new career, or a lot of time to be doing something and not yet know what you’re doing.
Somethinggate is so ingrained that it has become one of those cultural allusions that I’ve been writing about lately. It’s a useful bit of shorthand, and everyone knows where it comes from and to what it pays homage, right?
Not necessarily.
William Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well is rarely staged. A so-called "problem play" that explores questions of morality, its ambiguous tone, unlikeable characters, and confusing ending have rendered it unpopular. The gist: Orphaned Helen, a "poor unlearned virgin," is desperately in love with noble Bertram, who is kind of a jerk. She cuts a deal with a king to magically heal him in exchange for compelling Bertram to marry her. Bertram refuses to consummate the marriage, so Helen fools him into sleeping with her in a "bed trick." In the end, in one line, Bertram seems to suddenly love Helen back.
Early in Mona Awad's new novel All's Well, protagonist Miranda Fitch calls the play "neither a tragedy nor a comedy, something in between." That's also an apt description of Awad's book — a surreal exploration of chronic pain, women's believability and visibility, and desperation that straddles the line between comedy and horror.
Elena Ferrante’s novel, The Lying Life of Adults (2019; out in English translation by Ann Goldstein in 2020), follows Giovanna, a Neapolitan girl on the brink of adulthood, as she learns about life through her family and their stories of the past. The novel also follows a bracelet as it is passed from one female character to the next, tying them together and, by revealing secrets and truths, breaking them apart. Ferrante often uses objects in her fiction to explore relationships and time, but she also uses them as objective correlatives; while the bracelet in The Lying Life of Adults serves as a way to move the reader through the plot, it is also clearly identified as an object, one that carries symbolic meaning. The bracelet’s ownership is an important thread that runs through the book: there are those who wear the bracelet, those who hold it, and those who leave it behind.
Writing is, Didion says, “an aggressive, even a hostile act. ... It is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, the imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.” The writer is always saying “I, I, I.” How bracing and strange it is to find that the young Didion, whose collage-like style leaves so much space for the reader’s imagination, should question her right to impose.