Alexander Kinglake’s Eothen, in which the 19th Century English writer visits Cairo during the plague, and Xavier de Maistre’s A Journey Around My Room.
I haven’t read American Dirt – I read Paul Theroux’s empathetic (and true) On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – but it seems to me that when we start telling authors what they can and cannot write about we’ve entered the old world of the Soviet Union.
For years I was told that travel books were a tough sell. Now I’m being told that memoirs are a tough sell. I could write about a beagle that survived Auschwitz and I’d be told that books about dogs and books about the Holocaust are a tough sell.
Yesterday at the Miami Book Fair I listened to an impassioned defense of immigrants from Suketu Mehta and then heard two Florida poets – English professor David Kirby and cattle rancher Sean Sexton – deal with truth and beauty.
I finally read Leslie Jamison’s “The Cult of the Literary Sad Woman,” in which she argues, unexpectedly, that pleasure and happiness are as legitimate as literary subjects as pain and sadness. I hope it is read by every publisher who puts out memoirs.
The Miami Book Fair has begun with its Author Evenings, which I rarely attend, as they often feature celebrities masquerading as writers. (I made an exception one year for Saul Bellow, who at a certain point in his life became the reverse) This year’s lineup includes Samantha Powers, George Will, Debbie Harry, John Waters, and Mo Rocca. I’m vaguely tempted to go tonight to hear Rocca so I can ask him if he felt a twinge of uneasiness a few weeks back when he turned his CBS Sunday Morning report on newspaper obituary writers into an advertisement for his new book.