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April 24, 2008

I think you know what time it is. It's time to get ill.

And my op-ed is up, too.

Basically, I looked into Pat Buchanan's head to describe his boogey-man.

Scary!

Posted by Colson Whitehead

April 21, 2008

I had to get a beeper 'cause my phone is tapped.

My article on Self-Lit is up here.

For "space" reasons, we cut a little. With the magic of the internet, I present these crucial paragraphs:

I ask Jane Persons, an associate editor at Quist Publishing, about the sudden popularity of personal memoirs, or Self-Lit. “Reality TV is responsible,” she declares one evening in her office, the exuberant hubbub that is Union Square percolating beneath the windows. “Before reality TV,” she explains, “there were no memoirs. Only dry histories of important subjects, a few novels, and the occasional travel guide. But once ‘Cops’ went on the air during the writers strike of ’88, starting the reality TV craze, there was no looking back. People started writing about their lives. And the public started buying them.”

I look at the walls of her office, which are literally lined with books. Above the couch is a poster for last fall’s big memoir, “She Called Them Brussel Sprouts: A Survivor’s Tale,” which Persons edited. The author, Stephen Meadows, is following up with a book on grilling -- recipes interspersed with personal anecdotes that one assumes he left out of his first book. I wonder, can there be such a thing as too many memoirs? Will we run out of interesting stories?

Persons remains sanguine about the prospect: “The world is full of things it would never occur to most people to do, but which can be quite harrowing if handled correctly. Gerbil taunting, cheese rubbing. Unicycles. One of last year’s best-selling Self-Lit books came from that most unlikely quarter, the underground world of butter-smearing. I’m still kicking myself for passing on it.” I investigate later. According to BookScan, “Are You There God, It’s Me, Margarine: Confessions of a Butter-Smearer” has sold 4 million copies and been translated into two languages.

The next week I’m in the cemetery. Margaret says she wants to show me where her friends hang out. As we walk past the graves, she murmurs their gang names, as if to refute that which has been carved into stone. “Choc …Ula …Franken …Berry …Lucky …Charms.” She whispers, “All my homies are dead or in prison.”

Posted by Colson Whitehead