In my experience the hardest part about coming out with a book is you spend anywhere from one week to one month afterwards going around absolutely furious that you haven’t won an award yet.
Ugh! Finally someone who really understands the recondite art of the epigraph! It makes sense that it would be you...!
Many years ago, before this newfangled trend of the double, serious-then-flippant epigraph, my first novel featured two perfectly serious ones, like yours: mine were a stanza from one of Wordsworth's "Lucy Poems", which gave the novel its achingly pretentious title, and the other was a grief-stricken line from a letter from Camille Claudel written to Rodin while she was in an asylum, which I provided in French, and then *in my own English translation* ... Surely, I thought, anyone seeing the delicate interplay, the way one cut against the other, the ... Well... Like you, I deserved a prize. On the other hand, your book did get published! Mine is under contract with a UK publisher, but they have not been in touch in two years, and beginning to suspect they might not exist ...
If I had an award, I would give it to you. "Meeting New People" is one of my favorite books, slugging it out with Gilead and Olive Kitteridge and Jincy Willett's catalogue and my own gay monster novel. AND, it arrived from the library an hour after I'd received bad news, which was so very comforting. I'm going to send it to my favorite old lady tomorrow - she won't know what hit her - and it's made me a better sport about having to / getting to go to culinary school as a visa ploy.
I wonder how old the high culture / low culture epigraph practice is? I know off the top of my head that Slouching towards Bethlehem did it in 1968, but I don't know if it was around much before then.
I went to the most haphazard of public schools, except for the year (12th grade) I went to a fancy private school. My yearbook quote, from The Bell Jar:
I’d discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty.
I think the apex of this trend was an early version that did a two-for-one, quoting "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger," and then attributed it to both Nietzsche and Kelly Clarkson.
I finished your book recently! The descriptions of food got me excited about cooking in a whole new way. I keep thinking about your descriptions of vegetables and greens in a new exciting way. I think you deserve an award for just that: Makes You Fall In Love With Cooking Again.
Not so fast, Lavery, my wife's novel ("Better Luck Next Time" (2021)) had TWO funny epigraphs. But then she, like you, doesn't exactly play by the rules.
Your epigraph game was so elegant that it would have been inelegant to even mention it!
YOU deserve the Nobel just for this Substack Essay, Danny, which is the funniest I have read all month (and we are getting to the end of the month).
I've long recognised you as an innovator but I'm nobody important so this might be faint or even damaging praise. Got your book on the way tho
Gold Star! Or would you like to choose your own sticker? 😊
Ugh! Finally someone who really understands the recondite art of the epigraph! It makes sense that it would be you...!
Many years ago, before this newfangled trend of the double, serious-then-flippant epigraph, my first novel featured two perfectly serious ones, like yours: mine were a stanza from one of Wordsworth's "Lucy Poems", which gave the novel its achingly pretentious title, and the other was a grief-stricken line from a letter from Camille Claudel written to Rodin while she was in an asylum, which I provided in French, and then *in my own English translation* ... Surely, I thought, anyone seeing the delicate interplay, the way one cut against the other, the ... Well... Like you, I deserved a prize. On the other hand, your book did get published! Mine is under contract with a UK publisher, but they have not been in touch in two years, and beginning to suspect they might not exist ...
If I had an award, I would give it to you. "Meeting New People" is one of my favorite books, slugging it out with Gilead and Olive Kitteridge and Jincy Willett's catalogue and my own gay monster novel. AND, it arrived from the library an hour after I'd received bad news, which was so very comforting. I'm going to send it to my favorite old lady tomorrow - she won't know what hit her - and it's made me a better sport about having to / getting to go to culinary school as a visa ploy.
I wonder how old the high culture / low culture epigraph practice is? I know off the top of my head that Slouching towards Bethlehem did it in 1968, but I don't know if it was around much before then.
I went to the most haphazard of public schools, except for the year (12th grade) I went to a fancy private school. My yearbook quote, from The Bell Jar:
I’d discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty.
I think the apex of this trend was an early version that did a two-for-one, quoting "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger," and then attributed it to both Nietzsche and Kelly Clarkson.
the physiology of taste!! both more and less interesting a book than i had
hoped, but EXCELLENT epigram choice!!
I finished your book recently! The descriptions of food got me excited about cooking in a whole new way. I keep thinking about your descriptions of vegetables and greens in a new exciting way. I think you deserve an award for just that: Makes You Fall In Love With Cooking Again.
Not so fast, Lavery, my wife's novel ("Better Luck Next Time" (2021)) had TWO funny epigraphs. But then she, like you, doesn't exactly play by the rules.