Sundays are for drinking! So once again we've outsourced our coverage of the New York Times Book Review to Intern Alexis. This week, the memoirs are closer than they appear as Maureen Dowd reviews Jane Fonda's autobiography, My Life So Far, which comes three weeks after the paper's original review (but at least this one doesn't mention Fonda's "vagina foyer" which has popped up in every other article, derailing appetites everywhere). There's the inevitable article on how anyone can be a writer these days (the hell you say!). Also, hilariously, Sex and the City writer Cindy Chupack wants to know why guys just aren't that into her. —NH

Letters

Say it, sister. Janice A. Oser of Staten Island gets real with Walter Kirn, taking his two cents on book reviewing ( No matter how much you rave, you can count on maybe 5 percent of your readers actually buying the book. It becomes more important to write something that s worth reading in and of itself ) very much to heart. That s why so many Times reviewers cavalierly spoil novels for readers she writes. She then goes on to say that she will never read another review by Walter Kirn and that she will read only reviews by Kirn s own books and not buy his books. We love when readers take the NYTBR so seriously that they get angry and irate over the minute injustices and inanities that populate its pages in other words, do our job for us.


The Book Business
By Sarah Glazer

When we started reading Sarah Glazer s essay on the anyone can be a writer phenomenon that is self-publishing, we were counting down the seconds, wondering how long it would take Glazer to make the requisite blog comparison. And we didn t have to wait too long. About a third of the way in, Glazer writes, With all this democratic activity, self-published authors have essentially become the bloggers of the publishing world, with approximately the same anarchic range in quality that you find on the Web. Hmm that s funny, because if we re to believe the New York Times Book Review, well, it seems as though bloggers themselves have already become the bloggers of the publishing world

On Poetry
By David Orr

Because crime fiction gets its own weekly feature, we suppose it was about time that poetry got its weekly slot as well (Not that we would know, we don t read poetry, we re illiterate, etc. sorry we re still annoyed, we won t make that joke anymore. We were pleased that David Orr s gonna be manning the ship, as he s a delightful writer and certainly has a way with the words. In his debut column, he takes down poet of the moment Jorie Graham calling her work, among other things, foggy. We liked the touch of whimsy he brought to the column, making up the name Lorna Snootbat and yodeling on about Poooeeetrrry!

My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor's Tale
By James Atlas

Reviewed by James Campbell
James Campbell, in his review of James Atlas s new memoir makes some pretty groundbreaking statements about The Memoir: Nowadays, the urgent voyage is into the heart of oneself. If you can confront a little darkness along the way drug or alcohol addiction, sex abuse, racism; all overcome, naturally so much the better. The literary motto of our age is that everyone has a memoir in them. Everyone has a memoir in them, you say? This is silly for several reasons. Reason number one, William Grimes beat this phenomenon to death a few weeks ago, in his piece, "We All Have a Life. Must We All Write About It?" Reason number two, in Grimes s everyone has a memoir in them -athon, he frikkin uses James Atlas as an example of how everyone has a memoir in them!

Almost a decade ago, James Atlas, in The New York Times Magazine, proclaimed the age of the memoir. Then he posed a question. Can it last? "Will memoir prove as evanescent as other cultural phenomena?" he asked.

Apparently not, since he just published his own memoir, My Life in the Middle Ages. It's about being middle-aged. That leaves plenty of time for at least one sequel.


It's all sort of confusing, and our head hurts thinking about all this, to tell you the truth. To further confuse things, while re-reading the Grimes piece, we noticed that in the accompanying illustration the small child is writing a memoir called My Life So Far. A coincidence that this is the title of Jane Fonda s new memoir that is reviewed in this week s NYTBR by Maureen Dowd? Is that small child supposed to be Jane Fonda? And if so, we did not realize that in addition to having a thing for threesomes, aerobics, and Vietnam, she was also a Hello Kitty fan.

Essay: The Between Boyfriends Tour
By Cindy Chupack

Sex and the City writer and author of The Between Boyfriends Book writes bitterly about her "He's Just Not That Into You" rivals. Let me just say: they were recently on Leno, and I was on Leeza. "Leeza Gibbons at Night. She then goes on to complain about how she wasn t able to pick up any dudes at her readings. "I wanted to meet the love of my life on the book tour," she writes. This reminds us a bit of Curtis Sittenfeld s recent back page essay,"You Can't Get a Man With a Pen" about her own struggles with picking up guys at readings. Let s hear it for women writing backpage essays. But let s not hear it for women writing backpage essays about girlie things like being bitter about love and relationships, mkay?