I recently read and enjoyed The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by Adelle Waldman, recommended by my friend Sarah. Published in 2013, it’s a character study of Nate, a 30-something writer living in Brooklyn, navigating romantic relationships and his ascendant career in New York’s rarefied literary circles.
Nate is kind, cruel, smart, stupid, sensitive, self-absorbed, self-aware and totally naive about his behaviour. Waldman’s precise, wry depiction of Nate’s inner life, status anxiety and attitude towards women renders him both sympathetic and toxic in nuanced and entertaining ways. Seek it out.
I devoured the new season of The Bear which is as stressful and heartbreaking as the first. The sixth episode, ‘Fishes’ is just astonishing television and Jeremy Allen White deploys his mournful thousand yard stare to poignant effect.
I loved - of course - the introduction of a love interest for Carmy, his childhood friend, Claire who’s always had a thing for him. There are so many sweet moments between them which offer respite from the kitchen carnage but I also found her Manic Pixie Dream Girl presence heavy handed as a plot device. As the series goes on, Claire is presented as a conflict in Carmy’s life, an element that threatens to derail his focus as he opens his new fine dining restaurant.
Their relationship is distilled into a stark binary - Carmy can either have professional success or personal happiness but not both, as illustrated by the scene where both Claire and the guy who’s meant to be fixing the restaurant’s fridge call Carmy’s phone and he is paralysed with indecision about which to take.
I suppose The Bear has never been about subtlety but it just felt too contrived and blunt to be believable. Nevertheless, the show is as absorbing as ever and though the cooking scenes are mostly peripheral to the drama, they are a visual feast.
For the last 2 decades, my husband has taken the same three books on holiday: Silence of the Lambs, Neuromancer and Brave New World. They have been packed and unpacked repeatedly on a number of continents as mere showpieces. Well this year, he actually read The Silence of the Lambs and thrust it into my hands when he was done. Of course I’ve seen the film a few times but it was fun to read a properly gnarly, old fashioned thriller.
A few weeks ago I interviewed Katherine Ryan and her husband for The Sunday Times Magazine. Having previously been pretty agnostic about the comedian, I was fully charmed - she conducted the entire 1 hour phone call while wrangling a newborn and a toddler in the playground and managed to be funny, engaging and focused on our conversation. Afterwards, I ended up watching a load of her comedy specials and this clip where she skewers Hamilton, a show which I love by the way, is brilliant.
I think we might have reached the nadir of pop fandom. I was already feeling resentful about how stressful, expensive and complicated it is to get concert tickets and then this story in yesterday’s Times revealed that Beyoncé fans have been paying for tickets to the Renaissance tour where you can’t actually see the show. “Images show fans watching Beyoncé — or what little they could see of the singer — from several feet behind the stage to the left-hand side, their seats just above the top of two Portaloos.” As a friend said, “Honestly I’d rather pay to stay in the Goop Guest House.”
And finally - new Emily Henry alert! Details about her next book here.
See you next time!
Hannah