Activity

INTERVIEWER

There’s a story in Forty Whacks in which the narrator is writing to a shrink. Did you go see one?

HOWE

I’ve never been a shrink person myself, but I did go briefly because I was ordered to.

INTERVIEWER

Hence the irreverent tone.

HOWE

Well, I never stopped wisecrac…

Well, he would go off to the lab, and I would scribble away and type and read. I had written short little novels that were like bad dreams, and randomly I wrote to an agent and sent him one of my manuscripts, because I had enough shame in me to know I had to make money for myself. He said I had to …

[...] Whatever vague concept of truth I had previously tried to represent in pigment had evaded me, not because I lacked skill but because truth simply did not exist, especially not in art. Yes, I told myself, standing before the unstretched canvas, sipping from a jug of martinis Webb had fixed for…

[...] The most beautiful woman in the world had become, after some years, the woman she found most beautiful, and the woman she found most beautiful had become, after a while, merely beautiful, merely nice-looking, turning, eventually, around the time Navini was sixteen or seventeen, into just anot…

[...] It was so typical of her mother to act like she wasn’t wanted, so manipulative of her to say she wished she hadn’t come, to try to hurt the daughter who was in fact the only one in her life who took the time to talk to her and try to understand her, though it was no use anymore, she went on, …