Activity

Over the next few weeks, Waits practiced piano at Grove Street so often that X gave him a key. In a diary, X wrote that she knew she could respect him because unlike so many other musicians, he understood that “the importance of succeeding in life is a noose. It’s nothing but a noose.”† The admirat…

Over the next few weeks, Waits practiced piano at Grove Street so often that X gave him a key. In a diary, X wrote that she knew she could respect him because unlike so many other musicians, he understood that “the importance of succeeding in life is a noose. It’s nothing but a noose.”† The admirat…

all she’d left behind were her plangent songs that tell me so little and her unfinished memoirs that reveal little more

Tim Holt, a book editor X befriended that year, was the only Big Bar regular who didn’t quite belong. He arrived each Friday at five to attend to his customary three martinis as he read through a stack of book submissions. The bar was nearly empty at that time—quiet enough to read for an hour, then…

This sort of gesture—to force someone into feeling what they wanted to avoid—was something X did all her life to anyone she felt she had the right to change. It seems that the more she loved someone, the more pain she wanted to dredge up, the more demanding she became, no matter the cost, no matter…