68. The Happy New Year Episode

KIM ASKEW: Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode, everyone. I'm your host, Kim Askew.

AMY HELMES: And I'm your other host, Amy Helmes. So we just rang in 2022 a few days ago, which seems like as good a time as any to sort of take stock and deal with assorted odds and ends for this podcast. Right? 

KIM: Yes.

AMY: Last year we talked about New Year's resolutions, which I am not that good at making or keeping, but what I am good at is a good old fashioned New Year's purge. I was in full "Marie Kondo" mode over the holidays. Gave me a little time to do some organizing. Have you ever done that sort of Marie Kondo -- she's the author of the life-changing magic of tidying up, right? 

KIM: Yeah. Oh my God, totally, and in fact, forget about spring cleaning. Every year I'm all about holiday cleaning. Okay. Maybe not "cleaning." Eric would argue with me about my choice of words there. Purging is right; like getting rid of stuff. I'm not the best at cleaning, but I'll get rid of things because I want to get rid of the old stuff so I have room for all the new stuff. Anyway, speaking of "sparking joy," we agreed that we needed to talk about our favorite other podcast of the year, "Once Upon a Time at Bennington College," right? 

AMY: Oh my God.

KIM: Yeah. It was written and hosted by writer Lili Anolik, and the series takes a deep dive into a small liberal arts college in Vermont and how it shaped the careers of Donna Tartt, Bret Easton Ellis, and my favorite Jonathan Letham, all of whom were at the school at the same time in the early 1980s.

AMY: Enthralling. 

KIM: Yep.

AMY: I literally was champing at the bit every week for the latest episode to drop. I couldn't. I was beside myself and Mike, my husband, he was super into it too. 

KIM: Okay. I remember driving to meet you a couple of different times and listening to it on the way there. And then we would talk about it. I mean, I was actually enjoying getting in the car and driving around LA; any excuse to listen to this podcast. 

AMY: Right. It made LA traffic bearable. 

KIM: Absolutely. And the way Lili Anolik, like, just talks about everything. Every sentence sounds like it's going to be salacious, even if it isn't. She just has that skill. 

AMY: She's kind of letting you be a fly on the wall at Bennington College in the early eighties — 1982. I kept texting this podcast to all my friends and urging everyone, like, "You've got to stop everything, and this is a podcast you need to listen to." And I would always preface it by saying, "I'm not really a Bret Easton Ellis kind of person. It's not my favorite, but just do it," and I have a new appreciation for him now. 

KIM: Me too! 

AMY: And I want to go back and read Less Than Zero. 

KIM: Me too.

AMY: Still, American Psycho, oh my God, that was hard, as Lili goes into, but she takes us back to his teenage years in Los Angeles which was fascinating, especially since we live in LA; to be able to picture all that and see it shaped him and then going back and forth between him and Donna Tartt and her story, and just all the characters at Bennington College... 

KIM: Oh, I was constantly Googling people named Brick and... 

AMY: Oh, Brix, yeah. 

KIM: And somebody "horse" ... Madeline Horstman, or whatever. Madi Horstman I was trying to find these people. 

AMY: I looked up all their pictures. 

KIM: I totally did. 

AMY: I read the Esquire article that sort of inspired the podcast. And I gasped when she found the real-life people from The Secret History. 

KIM: Totally. And all the little details, like the apricot scarf. There's a whole... 

AMY: Of the professor! Yes, yes, And the Carly Simon connection... 

KIM: "It was an Alfa Romeo!" And the B-side of the Police's "Every Breath You Take," I mean, oh my God, I just get chills talking about it right now.

AMY: A lot of you probably already know about it , but if you don't, we’re fully championing this one. I think it would be a great springboard for a movie. 

KIM: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Or a TV series. I mean, oh, and can I also just, I know we're getting very excited because we love this, but I want to talk about Jonathan Letham. I've read his books since like the Nineties since, before Motherless Brooklyn. I've loved him for the longest time, and just getting to see how his story was woven in there. And he was kind of the outsider, and I'm not going to say much more because I don't want to give anything away, but watching his origin story and how it was woven in with that of Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis and how they all knew each other -- like more than knew each other. I mean, it's just, oh my god, it's incredible.

AMY: It gave me such nostalgia for the Eighties, too. I just wish I could take a time machine just, go back for the music.. And the Brideshead Revisited element!

KIM: Yes. Oh my god. If we had gone to Bennington College, we would totally have been dressing like Brideshead Revisited. And one of the things they talk about is sort of making their experience of what college should be -- your idea of what maybe going to Oxford or Cambridge is like -- to recreate that for themselves. I would have bought into that completely. I would have been carrying a teddy bear 

AMY: The scarves! I know. Okay, so we should mention that Bret Easton Ellis and Jonathan Letham participated in the podcast. So we get to hear their interviews. 

KIM: And they talk and they read from their essays, and they're completely honest, it seems like; are open and very comfortable talking about it, which also just makes it that much better.

AMY: Yeah. On the other hand, Donna Tartt did not participate in the podcast. And what are your thoughts on how she's portrayed? 

KIM: Um, Yeah, so she's famously a very private person, so not surprising that she wouldn't say much. Though, I mean, Jonathan Letham actually lets them read letters that she wrote to him, which I was kind of like, Oh, I wonder... I have a feeling he must have gotten her okay to do that as a somewhat friend of hers.

AMY: I don't know...

KIM: Probably not, but I mean, wow. I mean, that seems like an invasion, but that's a whole other thing. That seems a bit of an unfair thing to do, but I'm glad he did because I love hearing those letters. But I don't think she comes across as, um ... you know, she comes across as very driven. Let's put it that way. That's maybe a soft way of saying it: very driven, very ambitious, kind of doing what she needs to do to create the world she wants to create.

AMY: I don't think Lili Anolik had a ... I think she was trying to be very objective, in, you know, telling Donna's story. But when we get to the interviews with some of the inspirations behind The Secret History, those guys are pretty scathing at times. So, it's very interesting. Everyone should make their own judgment. And I do wonder if they were a little harsh toward her because she was a girl, you know? Didn't like her being in their midst, their little special club that, you know, she was trying to elbow her way into. 

KIM: And Lili Anolik says from the beginning that they always had sort of a negative perspective of her and they were bringing that into whatever they said about her and to take it with a grain of salt, in that way. It certainly makes for a more interesting story to make her a little ... she almost comes across as a little tiny bit "Lady Macbeth" or something.

AMY: Yeah. And then I'm not going to give it away because it's in the last episode, but there's an anecdote about something that happened in terms of Donna Tartt's inspiration for The Little Friend, where it's a question of using somebody else's personal history to inspire that book. And there was some hard feelings. 

KIM: Yeah. Didn't that remind you of Willa Cather and Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and their whole feud? 

AMY: Yep. That's the first thing I thought of. Yeah. I mean, we talked about that whole question as a writer: can you have dibs on somebody else’s story? Is that fair? I mean, I think you can. I think all is fair in writing. 

KIM: Especially if you can live with it, honestly. I mean, it's like if you can live with somebody getting mad at you, and maybe not speaking to you forever, if it's worth it to you for your art, then I guess you can. You can be a bad art friend.

AMY: It does seem like there were things that she easily could have changed to make it not so... 

KIM: Yes. 

AMY: Even for The Secret History, too, there maybe were things that she didn't need to have it be that directly lifted from real life to tell the story. Well, but I mean, we all love The Secret History, so... 

KIM: I wouldn't want The Secret History to be changed. Yeah. And when you do hear the source in her life and the people that she knew and how she turned that into what she did, I mean, it just makes me respect her writing in that book even more.

AMY: One hundred percent. And she's always kind of had an air of mystery... she keeps everything close to the vest and a bit protected and...

KIM: And she's wearing a vest, usually, too!

AMY: Yeah. 

KIM: So it's convenient. 

AMY: But I think this podcast just preserves that concept of her, right? Even though things were revealed about her, she's almost more mysterious than ever now.

KIM: Yep. Yeah, yeah. I want to reread all the things from everyone .

AMY: Yes, same. 

KIM: Yeah, 

AMY: Bottom line, Lili Anolik had the difficult task of telling Donna Tartt's story without her participation, but it reminded me of that famous Esquire article, I don't know if you know it, Kim, by Gay Talese: "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." (Better a cold than COVID, right?) Um, but this is an article that's kind of legendary. Gay Talese was supposed to write a cover story profile of Sinatra, but was told that Sinatra had a quote-unquote "cold," meaning he couldn't do the interview. And so Talese was like, "What do I do now? I have to turn something in." Well, he went on to write a story about Sinatra by interviewing about a hundred people who were in Sinatra's orbit. His dry cleaner, you know … anybody that kind of dealt with him in any way. And the resulting story that he came up with is now sort of what they teach every would-be reporter in Journalism 101 when it comes to writing a story on an unwilling subject. 

KIM: I mean, the profiler's revenge. 

AMY: Yeah. Maybe just sit down with the guy. Give him 30 minutes 

KIM: Yup. 

AMY: Or 15 or whatever. Yeah. Getting back to how Donna Tartt is portrayed in "Once Upon a Time at Bennington," it drives home the point of how tricky it is to tell someone else's life story.

KIM: Right.

AMY: Yeah, there's a new biography out on Elizabeth Hardwick, the writer and literary critic. And she dreaded the idea of somebody eventually writing about her life. In the 1970s she wrote a letter to the poet Elizabeth Bishop in which she said, "I can't tell you how I dread the future with biographies. Fortunately, I'll be dead before most of them come." So yeah, writing biography or telling somebody else's life story is always going to be somewhat subjective.

KIM: Yeah, that's true., And incidentally, the name of that biography on Hardwick is called A Splendid Intelligence, and it was written by Cathy Curtis.

AMY: Also Elizabeth Hardwick, we should mention, wrote the introduction to a novel that we're going to be featuring in an upcoming episode soon. It's Tess Slesinger's The Unpossessed, so when I saw Elizabeth Hardwick's name in the intro, I thought, ``There she is!"

KIM: Yep. 

AMY: But getting back to biographies, I think I can confidently state that if anybody was going to ever try to write my story, including you, Kim, they would get it so wrong.

KIM: Yep. Yep, definitely. 

AMY: Yeah. The flip side of that is probably also true. I'm not sure I could write your whole life story. How could I possibly know everything, right? I don't know that you can ever really know another person fully. 

KIM: Yeah. And it's interesting, that idea of interviewing everyone around someone, that's probably the way that you would get closer to the truth. Anyway, so yeah, I think we really try to keep this in mind whenever we're trying to paint a portrait of the "lost ladies" we feature, and sometimes we are working with limited information. And that's why we were so thrilled this fall when we received an email from Brook Ashley. She's actually the goddaughter of Dare Wright, who we featured in a mini episode back in September. If you remember, it was about Dare Wright's The Lonely Doll. 

AMY: I love that she reached out. 

KIM: Yeah. So Brook Ashley, Dare's godchild and author of Dare Wright and The Lonely Doll, actually wrote in to clarify some statements we made based on our research of Dare. We feel so privileged that Brook wrote us and gave us this additional information. There were quite a few points that offer a different perspective on Dare Wright, and as her godchild, we think it's important that we share these with you. And we're posting the entire letter on our website lostladiesoflit.com. And thank you, Brook Ashley, for writing in. It really means a lot to us that you reached out and gave us an opportunity to provide some additional context on Dare Wright's life. So go back, listen to the episode if you want, maybe, and also visit lostladiesoflit.com so you can get fully Brook Ashley's perspective. And again, we want to thank Brook so much. It's always exciting when someone writes us who has even more knowledge on a particular subject. 

AMY: Okay. So last thing for this episode. Kim, anything fun and exciting that you read this year that, (you know, doesn't necessarily have to be a lost lady) that you want to talk about? 

KIM: Oh my gosh, talking about more books. Yeah, let's do it. Okay. So some of the books that I managed to fit in that weren't for the podcast that I absolutely love ... so I'm only gonna mention ones that I loved. I'm super picky about what I read, as you know, Amy. So forget all the social media hype, these are the real deal. These are the ones that I loved. Um, there's Colson Whitehead's Harlem Shuffle. It's a crime novel set in 1960s Harlem, and it has a noir feel to it. It really appeals to me, and great writing, so I recommend it. And you've probably also heard of Lauren Groff's Matrix, and I want to loan that to you, Amy. It's been getting lots of well-deserved praise. It's amazing. It's a historical novel loosely based on the life of Marie de France. Really loosely, but it's really all about ambition and power from a purely female perspective for a change, which is especially great.

AMY: Good. Yes. add that to my pile .

KIM: Then I have another one for your pile and this is not by a woman, but it's R.C. Sherriff's The Fortnight in September, and it's a New York Review Books book, and it's the best. It's about a working class family's annual vacation, and it is so good. It's like one of those books that just leaves you with a good feeling.

AMY: Is it funny? 

KIM: It's funny, it's witty. It's a little poignant too, but just uplifting at the same time. So another one I read this year... oh, my god, I'm a huge fan of Rachel Cusk and her new book, Second Place. She's a genius, and I can't recommend this book enough. A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, which is by George Saunders. It's so good. He breaks down Chekhov stories, and it's based on his course at Syracuse University.

AMY: I know, I love George Saunders, and I just wasn't sure the Chekhov angle, if I didn't know the stories…

KIM: Yeah, he breaks them down and you can actually read them as part of it. So you don't… it's not like you have to know them from memory or anything. He has passages and sometimes the full story, and he breaks it down and talks about it. And also it’s not just for people who love to read, but also, writers, I think, would get a lot out of this book. Um, and then Excellent Women by Barbara Pym. I read that for one of Sadie Stein's McNally Jackson seminars. It was my first introduction to Barbara Pym, and I can't wait to read more. And also, Sadie Stein was one of our guests in the previous year and she's coming back in a couple of weeks with another episode.

AMY: Yeah. Our first returning guest. I read Excellent Women also. I think you gave it to me when you were done, and I loved it and I would love to do a whole episode on Barbara Pym. So hopefully sometime in 2022, we can get that on the agenda. 

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: On my end, I'm a non-fiction girl, so the one I read this year that I loved … actually, I think I mentioned it last week when we were discussing Virginia Cowles ... I read the 2019 biography A Woman of No Importance, which is about the World War II spy Virginia Hall. And it was incredible. I'm pretty sure it's going to be made into a movie. But along those same lines, this is one I haven't read; I haven't gotten around to it yet, but it came out this year. The author is Rebecca Donner and it's a biography of her great, great aunt, Mildred Harnack, who was part of the German Resistance during World War II. called All the Frequent Trouble of Our Days. And that is one that I've got to get around too soon. I've been desperate to read it. I also read Ann Sebba's biography of Ethel Rosenberg, which came out this year. Also I just want to give a shout-out to a book that I just finished called Gentlemen Overboard. It's by a lost man of literature. And I found out about it through our guest Brad Bigelow from neglectedbooks.com. This is a book that was just put out by Boiler House Press recently but it's also come back into print in a number of other languages as well. It's a really slim volume. It's comic, but also really poignant and profound. Basically the story is about a guy on an ocean liner, and he slips and falls overboard. And so he's treading water in the ocean for the entirety of the book. 

KIM: Oh, wait, does he have a volleyball? 

AMY: That's Castaway, but yeah, it good. And another novel that I have on hold at the library and it's probably going to take forever for my turn, but I really want to read Amor Towles's The Lincoln Highway. 

KIM: Oh, me too. I've heard that's good. I read A Gentleman in Moscow and I loved it, so yeah, I definitely want to read The Lincoln Highway. 

AMY: And he did Rules of Civility. 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah, we loved Rules of Civility!

AMY: Loved it, I know! And then finally, because I listen to audiobooks a lot while walking my dog, and now that the "Bennington" podcast is done, I need something else. 

KIM: Awww.... bye, Bennington podcast.

AMY: I know. I didn't want it to end. But anyway, actually I'm having fun right now because I'm listening to Eve Babitz's Sex and Rage on audio book. I decided with her recent passing that I wanted to read a bit more of her. And same with bell hooks. So I have Ain't I a Woman? downloaded and Eve Babitz. 

KIM: Amazing. 

AMY: And surprise, surprise. Guess what book, I still haven't finished, y'all? 

KIM: The Clarissa countdown of the 21st century? 

AMY: I haven't made a lot of headway, and Rosemary Kelty, if you're out there, I'm wondering if you have finished it because I know you were starting it the last six months or so, and you probably beat me to the finish line. If so, let us, know. 

KIM: Yeah. So that might not be all for Clarissa, but it's all for today's podcast. 

AMY: Yeah. 

KIM: We're looking forward to sharing a lot more interesting books with you in the coming year. And if you'd like to know in advance what those books are, be sure to sign up for a monthly newsletter over at lostladiesoflit.com.

AMY: Happy New Year, everyone! Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.