by Lauren Leto
For a while in summer 2008 you had the Philip Roth ringtone—it was a viral sensation after an interview where Roth pretended to mock “Jewish shouting” as exemplary of what the movie version of Portnoy’s Complaint was like.
Roth has said, “When the whole world doesn’t believe in God, it’ll be a great place.” Repeat this next time you see a story on the news about religious uprisings or an upcoming Tea Party event.
Next time the media is abuzz with winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, moan, with profound exasperation, “Roth didn’t win again?!” Roth’s bald lust for the Nobel is widely known—more so even than Mailer’s ambition to write the Great American Novel. Friends have attested to Roth’s depression in the wake of tuning in to hear the winners announced. In more recent interviews, Roth says he tries not to even be aware of the day they announce the year’s winners.
How to Fake Like You’ve Read Lionel Shriver
BASICS
Expat novelist Lionel Shriver, who now lives in London…ugh, God, I’m bored just writing this description. I think she’s more interesting than she comes across in interviews, which are horribly safe and seem to be controlled by her to avoid exposing anything unique besides the standard sentiments that writing is hard work and sometimes it’s a painful process. Her characters, however, are so vibrantly emotional, like tuning forks set to a high pitch, usually pushed beneath a calm countenance for the sake of keeping up appearances, that it makes me feel as if she’s constantly writing herself into the narratives.
ESSENTIALOGRAPHY
We Need to Talk About Kevin
An epistolary novel exploring an egregious act of violence committed by a child who annoyed his mother and escaped the interest of his father.
Five words: Perfectly captured anxiety of Columbine.
The Post-Birthday World
Split into two parts, the book portrays how the protagonist’s life would be if she had an affair and how it would proceed if she didn’t.
Five words: “What if” world, Sliding Doors.
So Much for That
Gripping account of the damage terminal illness can wreak on a marriage and family.
Five words: Health-care bills become tragic fate.
DETAILS
Shriver is often photographed wearing heavy fleece gloves. Before you scoff at her habit as eccentric, she suffers from Raynaud’s phenomenon, a disorder that causes fingers to hurt and turn blue or white from lack of proper circulation.
She legally changed her birth name, Margaret, when she was fifteen years old. Shriver has admitted to lying to reporters in interviews and claiming that her parents always wanted a boy. In reality, she thought it was a strong name and felt she deserved to go by something more powerful and therefore more masculine.
Cheer up any recently discouraged aspiring writers by letting them know Shriver’s powerful We Need to Talk About Kevin was rejected over thirty times. Also, you can advise the same writer friends to avoid the debt-laden route of graduate school by quoting Shriver’s scoff about her MFA degree. She declared that the accolade has “a kind of indulgent, middle-class gestalt.”
Many interviewers broach the subject of Shriver’s childlessness. They bring up the fact that the mother from We Need to Talk About Kevin has been described as the “Anti-Mom” and segue into questions about why the author hasn’t had children. She cites her selfishness as the main reason. Focusing even more on Shriver’s love and familial life, other interviewers home in on her marriage to her ex-agent’s husband. Reading one of these borderline-intrusive interviews with Shriver makes it easy to understand why some writers are resolutely reclusive and publicity averse.
How to Fake Like You’ve Read Margaret Atwood
BASICS
Margaret Atwood is a Canadian novelist and poet often pigeonholed as a feminist writer, though her writings range from intense examinations of Canadian identity to highly political tracts.
ESSENTIALOGRAPHY
The Handmaid’s Tale
In the future, a totalitarian government oppresses all of its citizens through visual classifications of their roles for the purpose of creating a more efficient society.
Five words: Men rule, girls…make babies.
The Blind Assassin
Half mystery, half love story, part novel within a novel—the story of a man on the run, the woman he loves, and the sister in the middle.
Five words: Rote descriptions with grandiose plot.
The Year of the Flood
Loosely connected to Atwood’s previous work Oryx and Crake, a nature cult called God’s Gardeners predicts a fatal plague that wipes out much of Earth’s inhabitants.
Five words: Stripper, waitress, liobams for salvation.
DETAILS
Despite Margaret Atwood’s horrid Twitter feed, you can’t bring yourself to unfollow her. As a fan, to know that she’s expounding thoughts into the atmosphere without seeing them is inconceivable, no matter how many boring retweets and links she posts.
If Canadian politics is a helpful reference point for you, Atwood is a Red Tory, not a Liberal. She’s very explicit about this in interviews. Mainly because she believes that power should reside in the hands of the community rather than the moneyed establishment. Her principles are reflected in the dystopian framework of her novels.
Atwood describes Oryx and Crake as “adventure romance”; use that line next time someone speaks condescendingly about science fiction.
If you’re a woman, you first heard about masturbation while reading The Handmaid’s Tale. And no, that’s not why “handmaid” is in the title.
How to Fake Like You’ve Read Tao Lin
BASICS
This egregiously twee novelist and poet whose biggest accomplishment is his social media presence also runs Thought Catalog, a blog with a mission to let amateur writers emote about twentysomething middle-class problems. Lin has been relegated to the genre “urban hipster lit.”
ESSENTIALOGRAPHY
Eeeee Eee Eeee
Eeeee Eee Eeee affirmed his agenda as annoyer provocateur.
Five words: This book’s title is annoying.
Shoplifting from American Apparel
A novella about Lin’s youth, partially comprised of inane Gmail conversations.
Five words: Minimalism from a trite offender.
Richard Yates
Two main characters named Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning engage in an online affair. Osment is twenty-two years old and Fanning is only sixteen years old.
Five words: Confusing to find in stores.
DETAILS
You mention that you purposely gift Lin’s books to friends who are “less sophisticated” readers.
Lin once tweeted: “‘pulled’ my penis in opposite directions near its ‘head’ to make it ‘wider’ as @meganboyle ‘poured’ cocaine on the now-larger surface.” To which his wife (@meganboyle) tweeted “snorted cocaine off @tao_lin’s balls while grinning as it fell ‘everywhere’ and then licked the balls ~6x, some of the penis ~2x,” which, taken together, amounted to a decidedly more interesting piece than Lin’s “How to Give a Reading on Mushrooms” for Thought Catalog.
His writing is listless. Lin manages to describe an emptiness short of nihilism. If you’re talking to a fan you can say you “think Lin’s definitely making a larger statement about technology with his particular brand of ennui.”
Lin’s metafiction style has launched a thousand shitty blog posts by amateur authors. But you can credit him for practically creating metafiction, the cousin to the independent film genre mumblecore.
How to Fake Like You’ve Read Mary Karr
BASICS
Memoirist and poet most famous for making her crazy Texan family famous. How crazy? Her mother gave her a copy of the book Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre at age twelve.
ESSENTIALOGRAPHY
The Liars’ Club
Karr’s first memoir recounts the quirks and darker moments in her childhood, being raise
d by a manic-depressive mother and a hard-drinking father.
Five words: Wild child observes insane family.
Cherry
Karr begins to kick up her own fair amount of trouble in this memoir about her teenage years in Texas and California.
Five words: Wilder child explores life’s boundaries.
Lit
Reflections on how she became an alcoholic and fought her way to sobriety through Christianity.
Five words: Wildest woman finds her way.
DETAILS
One of the biggest fears of any thinking memoirist is that they stand to anger and distance important people in their lives. Karr largely avoided complaints from those she wrote about in her memoirs because, as she says, she was usually “the biggest asshole” in her story.
The essay “Against Decoration” in her collection Viper Rum is one of the most succinct arguments against the overly flowery work of contemporary poets. You can say, “I think I have to agree with Mary Karr that many contemporary poets use metaphor as an end instead of a means to an end,” whenever someone claims someone like Rosanna Warren is the best living poet.
Karr dated David Foster Wallace. This is pretty much the number one reason people who weren’t already fans of Karr because of The Liars’ Club picked up Lit, which was published after DFW’s death. They met as recovering alcoholics. Before they had even kissed, DFW got “Mary” inside of a heart tattooed on his arm. They are an embodiment of the metaphor “The brightest fires burn the fastest.” Within months they had both changed their phone numbers and stopped talking to one another. When DFW married artist Karen Green, he added an asterisk to the tattoo and “Karen” as a footnote below.
Don DeLillo, after she called him once to complain about writing, sent her a note in the mail that read simply, “Write or Die.” She wrote back, “Write and Die.”
How to Fake Like You’ve Read Mary Gaitskill
BASICS
Want to impress your young aunt who had a brief Felicity stage during college? This writer who is best known for being naughty is a favorite of many 1990s NYC undergrads.
ESSENTIALOGRAPHY
Two Girls, Fat and Thin
A story about two sisters, one fat and one thin (bet you didn’t see that coming), that switches points of view from fat sister first person to thin sister third person (a transparent device intended to portray how the chubby one has a better handle on her world than her sister).
Five words: Ayn Rand satire, visceral, dark.
Bad Behavior
Short-story collection that contains some of the best sex scenes you’ll come across in contemporary literature (the world these scenes take place in is a more sordid and morally twisted one than reality can offer).
Five words: Naughty secretary fantasy come true?
Veronica
An aged model who once walked in Paris and now cleans offices is haunted by the death of her friend Veronica and the squandered opportunities of her youth.
Five words: Remember: higher rise, higher fall.
DETAILS
As one of the most cutting-edge contemporary sexual fiction writers, Gaitskill is curiously afraid of one of the most sexual symbols in literature—horses.
In the late nineties Gaitskill championed then up-and-coming author J. T. LeRoy, a former prostitute and transvestite teen who turned out to be an elaborate ruse by a twentysomething woman. Gaitskill originally took to LeRoy likely (at least partially) because Gaitskill herself once worked as a stripper and call girl. Their stories were so similar that many presumed Gaitskill was secretly LeRoy. Around the time he was outed as an unknown struggling female writer, Gaitskill claimed that she didn’t care whether LeRoy was a hoax, she thought he was interesting no matter his true backstory and identity.
You can shut up Ayn Rand fans by saying, “Gaitskill’s Two Girls, Fat and Thin taught me how cultish philosophies like objectivism appeal to people who lead uneventful lives.”
How to Fake Like You’ve Read Dave Eggers
BASICS
The man (in)famously responsible for making twee mainstream but also commendable for his various charity works and founding McSweeney’s. Bring him up to anyone who has read a book in the last decade and they have something to say. Forewarning that anyone who claims him as their favorite author is likely quite dull.
ESSENTIALOGRAPHY
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
A young man’s quest to keep his family together after both his parents die and he is granted guardianship of his eight-year-old brother.
Five words: A heartbreaking work of self-flagellation.
You Shall Know Our Velocity
Eggers’s first novel. Two friends plan out how to spend $40,000 in ways that’ll make it available to random strangers.
Five words: You shall know our donkey.
What Is the What
Based on the life of a Sudanese refugee and presented as his autobiography, though Eggers fictionalized sections of it.
Five words: Point: Pain is the pain.
DETAILS
(When discussing Eggers, after every third sentence, mention how much you admire him for McSweeney’s.)
People can gab about his humanitarian efforts all they want but Eggers’s prior obsession with MTV’s The Real World makes you distrustful of his holier-than-thou attitude.
Eggers founded 826 National, a reading program for underprivileged kids. The flagship program, 826 Valencia, is located inside of a pirate shop in San Francisco. There’s also an 826 NYC located in a superhero shop in Brooklyn. They’re best known for attracting A-listers and not accepting your application to volunteer. Sarah Vowell is the president of 826 NYC. Sherman Alexie is on the board of directors for 826 Seattle, which is inside of a space travel store. My favorite 826 location is the Robot Supply and Repair shop in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Eggers’s books Zeitoun and What Is the What were both part of the Voice of Witnesses project. What Is the What more likely helped you remember that “is” should be capitalized in a title than spurred you to go and help out in Africa.
At a college talk, Eggers gave out his e-mail address and offered to respond to anyone who wrote him dismayed by the seemingly bleak future of publishing. This e-mail address was posted by several news outlets and blogs poking fun at his idea of using electronic correspondence to spread word of the rosy future of print.
It is necessary to misstate the book’s title and use the word “twee” at least twice while discussing the pitfalls of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
How to Fake Like You’ve Read Zadie Smith
BASICS
This English practitioner of what literary critic James Wood dubbed hysterical realism tells stories about humdrum middle-class life with an exploration of the experiences and actions of often unlovable characters. Zadie Smith burst on the scene with a spectacular and often jealousy-provoking story: she received a substantial book advance at the age of twenty-one for two novels based on only eighty pages of a story. She frequently cites her love of E. M. Forster—On Beauty is a subtle retelling of his book Howard’s End. She also has a penchant for Franz Kafka. A 2004 article in the New York Times mentioned that Smith was working on a musical about Franz Kafka with her husband, poet Nick Laird. The musical has not been mentioned by her since, but her love for Kafka remains in essays she published about his work and his biographies.
ESSENTIALOGRAPHY
White Teeth
Explores the different ways in which a culture can deconstruct the folkways and beliefs of its immigrant populations.
Five words: Deus ex machina, teeth unify.
The Autograph Man
Smith’s second novel, highly anticipated but disappointing in the estimation of many, details a man distracting himself from the loss of his father with the pursuit of a rare autograph.
Five words: Tandem in name and identity.
On Beauty
In small part a modern retelling of E. M. Fo
rster’s Howard’s End, in large part a look at two different families living in America and making themselves mad by attempting to accept or fight against social constraints.
Five words: Hapless rendered so by happiness.
DETAILS
Remember to correct anyone mispronouncing “Zadie” with a short “A.” She changed her name from “Sadie” to “Zadie” for the express purpose that it be pronounced with a long “A,” as in “Zaydie.”
If you’re also a film buff, you can bring up Smith’s piece in The New York Review of Books called “Generation Why?” decrying Facebook and other social networking technology after the movie The Social Network was released. Interestingly enough, in earlier interviews Smith herself admitted to being addicted to the Internet and wasting too much time on Facebook. Famous authors, they’re just like us!
If your conversation partner isn’t a fan of Smith, you can fall in step by pointing out the mistakes in Kiki’s Floridian accent in On Beauty and saying it became very distracting for you. If they are indeed a fan, you can say, “Smith creates the best kind of unlovable characters,” and add that you’re afraid to admit how much of yourself you see in the unstable actions of her protagonists.
How to Fake Like You’ve Read William Gaddis
BASICS
Feeling the need to show off? Lug The Recognitions around. End up with a shooting pain in your shoulder and a patronizing attitude toward plebeians whose only foray into epic novels was Infinite Jest. William Gaddis was an angry, bitter man, and it shows in his brilliant works.
ESSENTIALOGRAPHY
The Recognitions
At first ignored by book critics who thought it too long to be worth their time, Gaddis’s most famous work outlines a painter’s descent into art forgery with the message that one should lead a life filled with integrity by creating true, honest work.
Five words: Parody Faust, to live deliberately.
J R
