The Age of Sincere Inauthenticity

Oddmakers took bets on the 2020 State of the Union Address that President Donald J. Trump couldn’t go 45 seconds without making a false statement. The president made his first untrue statement in his opening sentence, followed by 30 more in his speech. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker had previously documented 16,241 false or misleading claims by the president during his first three years in office.

To help us understand how Trump gets away with constant falsehoods — and even maintains considerable public support — his former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci explained on Bloomberg TV, “He’s an intentional liar. It’s very different from just being a liar-liar.” Trump isn’t inauthentic when he “uses a methodology of mistruth,” Scaramucci clarified on Fox News; “he’s trying to galvanize his base, and it’s a media device.” In other words, Trump is being sincerely inauthentic.

It’s a mistake to see Trump’s inauthenticity as a singular phenomenon. He couldn’t survive, even thrive as he has, without the pervasiveness and broad acceptance of inauthenticity throughout American life, something years in the making. Alternative facts, slanted histories, fabricated videos, fake memoirs, fantasy games, virtual reality, and celebrity unreality have been bubbling in a cultural cauldron — a veritable olla podrida — for some 50 years since Nixon’s inauguration in 1969. Trump isn’t an anomaly. He’s an iconic example of an enormous shift in much American literature, art, film, comedy, architecture, music, television, social media, sports, as well as politics which might be aptly described as “sincerely inauthentic” in both positive and negative ways.

“Now and then it is possible to observe the moral life in the process of revising itself,” the literary and cultural critic Lionel Trilling announced in 1970 in a series of Harvard lectures, titled Sincerity and Authenticity. The cultural anxiety of those transitional Vietnam War years, similar to our own, led Trilling to investigate the primary values in Western culture. An emphasis on sincerity as a virtue, he said, dominated moral life for some 400 years with its injunction for people to present themselves to others as they honestly think and feel. The chief cultural villains of the time from Shakespeare’s Iago to Dickens’s Uriah Heep were liars and dissemblers whose public impersonations and false behavior deceived others. Dissimulation or feigning or pretense was the height — or nadir — of insincerity.

By the 20th century, sincerity as a public virtue came to seem antiquated, according to Trilling, undeserving of respect in modern culture. Displays of moral earnestness and honesty were increasingly exposed as ways of conforming to the opinion of others. “There is no deeper dissembler than the sincerest man,” Emerson wrote in the early 1840s, early recognizing the need of individuals to engage in public role-playing to gain esteem. “The public be damned!” modern writers and thinkers proclaimed. What’s important in life and art is authenticity, not to respond to conventional social demands but to be autonomous individuals, unfeigning and indifferent to approval from the establishment herd.

At the time of his lectures in 1970, Trilling sensed cultural values again shifting. Authenticity seemed to be falling into disrepute just as sincerity had slipped downward in the previous century. Trilling observed without approval the increasing celebration of individuals devoid of authentic accomplishment and the fantasy of melodrama overtaking authentic literature. Fakery and lies about an inauthentic war led to the questioning of authenticity everywhere.

Looking back on Trilling’s lectures, it’s not unreasonable to imagine his voice from the grave saying that even beyond Trump we now live in an age of sincere inauthenticity. An odd cultural mutation has occurred. Inauthenticity is sincerely embraced or understood as an expression of sincerity as in the recycled songs on TV’s American Idol, now in its 18th season. Singers’ exaggerated displays of karaoke demonstrate one extreme of how inauthenticity can be sincere, as when untalented singers on the show sincerely maintain belief in their authentic talent despite the judges’ mockery of them; after all, family and friends have told them they’re good. Opposing this heartfelt form of misapprehending inauthenticity is a self-conscious acceptance of it to a degree that can be transformative, as when the professional singer Courtney Love says, “I fake it so real that I’m beyond fake.” In a keynote address at a music-business convention in Austin, the American troubadour Bruce Springsteen announced, “We live in a post-authentic world.”

The single nod Trilling makes to popular culture is when he asks, “What is a hero?” He finds the answer not in the traditional notion of a person performing an approved act of unusual courage but in the famous line from the critic Robert Warshow on Western films, a statement that like a Zen koan you either get or you don’t: “A hero is one who looks like a hero,” referring to the iconic figure of the movie cowboy. From Greek theater to contemporary films, the male hero is one who looks like a hero, Trilling says, because “the hero is an actor — he acts out of his own high sense of himself.”

Trilling didn’t live long enough to see actual actors and game show hosts become presidents of the United States to illustrate his point about the shakiness of sincerity and authenticity as criteria for admired public behavior. Skillful role-playing became increasingly apparent with the election of the “Cowboy Presidents,” Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Reagan was a professional actor and Bush was potentially one. Norman Mailer, who at the time of Trilling’s lectures was the most public of famous writers in the United States, said about Bush, “The presidency is a role, and George, left on his own, might have become a successful movie actor.” Bush defeated an authentic war hero and accomplished athlete in John Kerry because, Mailer said, “Bush is the better actor. He has been impersonating more manly men than himself for many years.”

Now comes Trump. “This guy’s a performance artist,” journalist Mark Singer, author of Trump and Me, told a colleague after his first encounter with the future president two decades ago. We all to one degree or another inhabit a persona that masks our most intimate thoughts and feelings, Singer wrote in The New Yorker, but Trump “has deliberately chosen to exist only as a persona, never as a person.” He remains in character at all times. None of his biographers has figured out what truly goes on in his head. After the election, Singer asked several actors and acting teachers about such a calculated persona.

“With a really great actor, it always comes down to a feeling of spontaneity,” Austin Pendleton of HB Studio said. “Trump has that — the freshness of a really fine actor-artist. The reason his positions are all over the map is because he lives in the moment. That’s electric to people.”

Richard Feldman of Juilliard said, “What makes Trump so powerful is that he believes his own story. When he says those women made up those stories of sexual assault, what makes him feel authentic is that some part of him believes it.”

Everyone remembers Trump saying, “Grab ’em by the pussy,” when he bragged about his exploits with women in a taped conversation with Billy Bush, host of the TV show Access Hollywood. What isn’t so often cited is that Trump was then NBC’s biggest star, the network’s “cash cow,” as Bush wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece. Bush and seven other guys on the bus laughed at what they took to be Trump’s “crass standup act. He was performing. Surely, we thought, none of this was real.” But much was real, according to firsthand accounts of Trump by some 20 women. Then the president claimed the voice on the tape wasn’t his. In another off-camera conversation, after Bush reportedly challenged him for inflating his TV ratings, Trump replied, “People will believe you. You just tell them and they believe you.”

During his initial year as president, Trump asked people to believe an astonishing 2,140 documented false or misleading claims, something that would’ve been his undoing in an earlier time. During and since his impeachment, the untrue statements have kept mounting to include fantastical assertions about the coronavirus. In London last year, I saw All’s Well That Ends Well, a play that exposes the character Parolles as an inveterate liar. Parolles, whose name means “Words,” is both a braggart and “the lie incarnate,” as described by the Shakespeare scholar Muriel Clara Bradbrook. “To give the lie was the deadliest of insults,” a violation of the Elizabethan code of honor. “Crimes of violence were less dishonorable; the convicted liar was finished socially.”

As opposed to today’s political moment of repeated lying and fakery, sports used to offer a rare arena in American public life for displays of authenticity. An athlete presumably couldn’t fake catching a sphere of laced cowhide in the end zone or pretend to run a sub-three-hour marathon. When I was a boy, interest in athletics, at least on the professional level, was mostly limited to the three major sports — baseball, football, and boxing. Boxing was the essential sport, the authentic sport, now replaced in TV popularity by mixed martial arts, a combination of kicking, wrestling, and slugging that emphasizes violent street-fight action over technique. The biggest payday in professional boxing history occurred in 2017 when former boxing champion Floyd Mayweather came out of retirement and without serious training easily knocked out a mixed martial arts champion in what The Ring magazine derided as a “spectacle.” An authentic boxing match alone couldn’t garner such fans or money. “There’s no way I can watch boxing,” a 25-year-old fan of mixed martial arts recently told The New York Times. “It’s just too boring.”

The same response to wrestling as “boring” occurred early in the last century when fans wanted the spectacle of nonstop action rather than skilled matches requiring discriminating appreciation. You might now click your remote for months, or perhaps four years between the Olympics, before catching a glimpse of authentic wrestling, formerly the glory of sport in Greek civilization. The fakery of bulked-up wrestlers in comic spectacles exploded in popularity in the 1980s and reached their apogee on TV in the late 1990s. Trump hosted two WrestleMania spectacles in Atlantic City before getting into the action himself. Impersonating a tough guy, he flung a wrestling promoter to the floor and pummeled him with fake punches. Three years before winning the presidency, Trump was inducted into the World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Fame.

In contrast, nothing is more authentic than serious literature, Trilling said. It fosters personal autonomy. Those of us who were students in his audience may have been the last generation in America to accept without a flinch his claims of serious art as the model of authenticity and the artist as its personal example. Indifferent to commercial demands or audience approval, modern literature followed its own dictums. It challenged us. It tore away social masks of hypocrisy. It generated resistance. It offered nothing less than the meaning of life, the reason for existence. Modernism, with a big M, was subversive and adversarial. It was transformative. It threw rocks at the Establishment.

During the spring of Trilling’s lectures, Norman Mailer, the then-antiwar activist who defined his position as a writer in opposition to the corporate, technological establishment, came to Harvard to give a reading and referred to Trilling, who sat among us in the audience of 500 in Sanders Theatre. Extending his adversarial position beyond mainstream culture to those in the audience who protested the Vietnam War, Mailer said, “Revolutionaries have two options: one is to be militant, and the other is to think.” He went on, “Throwing bricks is good for some guys and bad for others. The main thing is to do it authentically.” A glimmer of approval brightened Trilling’s face.

The advent of modernism didn’t produce smiles everywhere. Even as the primary principle of authenticity waned during the Vietnam War, much modern writing was loathed for its propensity to shock and divert literature into the gutter. Every shift in cultural values is iconoclastic in its professed reaction to what came before it, while it silently continues some part of what it seemingly rejects. Early 20th-century writers who attacked romanticism in art and poetry now seem in retrospect incredibly romantic in sentiment and language. While traditionalists condemned modern writing and art negatively as degraded and even, in cases, obscene, deserving to be banned, writers and artists themselves celebrated individual creativity with religious intensity. “[T]he devotion now given to art,” Trilling said, meaning primarily literature, “is probably more fervent than ever before in the history of culture. This devotion takes the form of an extreme demand: now that art is no longer required to please, it is expected to provide the spiritual substance of life.”

The status of art’s salvific power quickly became outmoded, even to Trilling. On the cultural horizon he saw troubling signs of an easy acceptance of mass-produced art, rife with cultural commonplaces. Art no longer made demands on its audience or outraged its habitual sensibility. He noted an increasing conjunction of advanced art with popular and commercial art. The result was disturbing. To be authentic is to be singular not a copy. “Inferior art, commercial-popular art, has always been thought corrupting,” he said.

In 2008, the mass-produced commercial object merged with the anointed important work of art when the New York Guggenheim Museum devoted its spiral space to a comprehensive, 30-year retrospective celebrating Richard Prince as one of “contemporary art’s foremost innovators,” particularly for his series of “appropriation art” called Cowboys, which initiated his enormous art-world success when he began making blown-up photographic reproductions of cowboy scenes from Marlboro cigarette ads. “This was a famous campaign,” Prince has said. “If you’re going to steal something, you know, you go to the bank.” Prince set the auction record for photography when one of his photos of a Marlboro advertisement sold for $1.2 million. No original vintage photograph by an American master had previously sold for a million dollars. He later surpassed the record for the most expensive photograph sold at auction when another reproduction from his Marlboro cowboy series went for $3.4 million. The original photographers of the ads and the cowboy models received no credit or payment. “There’s not a pixel, there’s not a grain that’s different,” Jim Krantz, a commercial photographer, said about a photograph he had taken for a Marlboro ad and Prince’s enlarged duplication of it.

“Making art has never been a mystery to me,” Prince said. “It’s never been something that’s very difficult.” In reproducing stock images of mass media as his own autonomous work, Prince says he found a “reality that has the chances of looking real but a reality that doesn’t have any chances of being real.” Art always made him feel good, he told a Vanity Fair reporter. “Anything I do,” he added, “I hope it would make you feel good. It’s as simple as that.” In the process, authenticity is no longer to be considered an authentic value.

The term “postmodern” doesn’t appear in Trilling’s original lectures, but in their published version in 1972 he added a footnote — with hyphenated spelling that indicates the new usage of the coinage — describing “Post-Modern” as the current period when “the faculty of ‘taste’ has re-established itself at the centre of the experience of art.” The older adversarial position of modern art to its audience has become anachronistic. “At the present moment,” Trilling says, “art cannot be said to make exigent demands upon the audience. […] The audience likes or does not like, is pleased or not pleased.” This decade was momentous, according to the Native American writer Paul Chaat Smith in Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong, when truth ceased to matter “because television and popular culture rule the world.”

Now some 50 years later, Trilling’s intimation is full blown. “When watching a show such as American Idol (or, in the UK, Pop Idol), we can feel as though authenticity doesn’t matter any more,” Hugh Baker and Yuval Taylor propose in Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music. What matters is an appeal to the likes and the dislikes of television viewers through a homogenization of music from the past to reach the widest possible audience. In Trilling’s beloved realm of literature, many memoirs with audience-appealing stories of degradation, recovery, and redemption have in recent years been exposed as inauthentic. None of these frauds, however, matched the uproar over the fabricated events in James Frey’s autobiographical account of his triumphant recovery from crime and drug addiction.

Frey’s best-selling book, A Million Little Pieces, was supposedly a true story. The problem was that America’s Queen of Sincerity, Oprah Winfrey, endorsed James Frey on TV (twice), and he’d lied to her. Modern autobiography, as Trilling tells us, is a carry-over from the age of sincerity when a new sense of the individual self came into being; the person depicted in Rousseau’s Confessions may repel us, but the writer in his impulse to reveal himself honestly demonstrates his likable sincerity. Writers may sincerely misremember or embellish some things, as memoirists habitually do, but they can’t outright lie, as Oprah accused Frey of doing when she publicly shamed him and his publisher. But nobody wanted this story, Frey claimed, when he presented it as a novel. Eighteen publishers turned it down. He blamed his agent, editor, and publisher for labeling his book a “memoir” that with Oprah’s blessing then rapidly sold two million copies. They, in turn, all claimed they were duped. Nevertheless, all managed to work together — author, agent, editor, publisher, and Oprah — to create a salable commodity that even as fiction is a sincerely inauthentic story. Frey’s role in this escapade merited him a $1.5 million contract for his next book, Bright Shiny Morning, published with jacket photographs by Richard Prince.

The cultural chasm since Trilling’s time is no better evident than in the replacement of the terms “serious novel” and “quality fiction” with the epithet “literary fiction,” a label congenial to a marketplace where novels of literary merit form just another genre based on audience taste, along with thrillers, romances, chick lit, and fantasy. Books are now only commodities, novelist Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in Harper’s, “and a ‘good book’ means a high gross.” Few today talk about quality fiction or serious novels as did old-timers like Le Guin and Mailer. In a National Book Award speech, Mailer echoed Trilling when he said the purpose of a great novel is not to kill time on an airplane trip but to enter and even alter a person’s life. “The good serious novel and most certainly, the rare great novel, is now inimical to the needs of this market place.”

Trilling claimed the organic principle of architecture is the chief criterion for what is authentic in art and life. Hemingway professed the same view in his theoretical statement about modern writing: “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.” The lack of organic design is also what the novelist Chitra Divakaruni detected in many of the 300 contemporary novels she read in a five-month period while judging the National Book Award. Many flagged after 50 pages to leave her wondering if “the novel was sold on the strength of its first few chapters, after which the writer slackened off and the editor didn’t care.” The successful novel in her view effects a shape, a design. Unlike the architectonic aesthetic of modernist writing, self-conscious prose and voice-driven fiction rely more on what B. R. Myers in The Atlantic called a “barrage of hit-and-miss verbiage than on careful use of just the right word.”

The Italian writer Italo Calvino would agree. “It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty — that is, the use of words,” he wrote in the lectures he was to deliver at Harvard 15 years after Trilling. “It seems to me that language is always used in a random, approximate, careless manner, and this distresses me unbearably. […] That’s why I try to talk as little as possible.” At least in writing, Calvino says, he can revise each sentence to the point of reduced dissatisfaction with his words. Lots of words, though, are what we’ve been getting since Calvino died in 1985 before he could deliver his lectures, more words than ever on radio call-in and TV talk shows, as well as on our computers and mobiles during the Big Bang of misinformation in posts, tweets, blogs, podcasts, and videos.

“Blog writing,” the cultural critic Sarah Boxer wrote in The New York Review of Books, “is Id writing — grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty,” all intending to say, “Hey, I’m here.” But who’s “I”? The self can hide behind aliases or anonymity or simply dissolve into another self and a virtual reality. Authenticity doesn’t matter; what matters is to be noticed with links on other blogs pointing toward your blog to achieve fame as a blog celebrity or, more precisely, a blogebrity. The blog Eschaton notes that the audio-and-visual media of YouTube began “the age when it is impossible to tell parody/irony/performance art from completely sincere product.”

What’s normal about inauthenticity today is its widespread acceptance. Thirty years ago the popular R&B singers Milli Vanilli had a Grammy revoked for lip-synching to the voices of others. Eight years ago, at the time of her death, the pop star Whitney Houston’s Super Bowl XXV performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” was repeatedly shown on TV as one of the greatest national anthems in history and the highlight of Houston’s career. Before this year’s 2020 championship game Rolling Stone called it “the gold standard for all Super Bowl performances […] one of the most stunning moments in American sports history.” A TV commentator said, “Whitney sang her heart out into the mic.” He neglected to add how the microphone was turned off and Houston lip-synched to a prerecorded tape, albeit her own. Viewers of President Obama’s inauguration watched Yo-Yo Ma earnestly playing his cello while they actually heard a recording made two days earlier. Ma said he wanted the performance to be emotionally genuine.

“The secret of people who had class was that they remained accurate to the facts,” Mailer wrote some 40 years ago in The Executioner’s Song, a claim striking many today as anachronistic. Facts are prosaic, as Mailer shows, open to multiple interpretations, but they need to be confronted not dismissed as fantasy. With one foot fixed in the age of modernism Mailer stretches the other back to earlier writers like the novelist George Eliot, who best expresses this aesthetic when she said, “Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: — in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.” In almost a postmodern satirical performance of this aesthetic quest, Mailer tried to create the authentic sound of a fist hitting someone’s face for his movie Tough Guys Don’t Dance by punching himself. “The sounds of punches in movies are all phony,” he said. While a sound designer used a portable digital recorder, Mailer hit himself in the face and the chest again and again, at least 20 times, until he got the authentic sound he wanted. In contrast, the sound designer of the film No Country for Old Men used a pneumatic nail gun to reproduce the explosive bangs of an air-tank cattle gun when a psychotic killer shoots people. The soundman was looking for impact. “I wasn’t looking for authenticity,” he said, “so I didn’t even research cattle guns.”

“Fantasy from del Toro Wins Top Oscar” was online news after the 2018 Academy Award for Best Picture went to a love story between a mute woman and a mysterious, scaled creature ripped from Amazon waters. Fantasy and spectacle are what Hollywood knows best. This year’s 2020 Academy Award for Best Picture went to a technically skillful South Korean film passed off as a PC social message artistically dominated by fantasy and violence. Trump disparaged the film without seeing it or recognizing its Americanized allegiance to the fantasy and spectacle he called for: “Can we get, like, Gone with the Wind back, please?” Last year, the 2019 Best Picture Oscar went to a movie derided by The New York Times movie critic Wesley Morris as a “particularly perverse” example of a “racial reconciliation fantasy.” Films about environmental degradation of the Amazon or any other place received no attention. In the past two years, Oscars also went to three triumphant blockbusters about World Wars I and II, but none to films about the United States’s longest-running wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At a Pennsylvania rally after the Oscars show a year ago, Trump fostered his own spectacle, racking up another half-dozen false and misleading statements to add to his growing record. He boasted of his appeal to women voters and taunted the TV celebrity, who, according to the Times that day is “a fantasy candidate for Democrats: Oprah Winfrey.” The previous day Winfrey herself opened a $250 million Walt Disney fantasy, starring as a celestial guide magically traversing space and time. As if invoking her supernatural powers, she told People magazine that she’d asked God to tell her if she should run for president, but she hadn’t heard back.

The posturing figure with the sweeping hair whose intellectual significance makes him an important precursor to our time is the playwright, novelist, and personality Oscar Wilde, who, in Trilling’s words, was “one of the great figures of Victoria’s reign.” In his attack on Philistine respectability and earnest sincerity, Wilde quipped, “The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has yet discovered.”

Fantasy, role-playing, and impersonation led to what Trilling feared is a loss of personal integrity and authenticity. “In our time,” he said, “the conception of the self has been undergoing a drastic revision, of which a notable element is the lessening of the value formerly assigned to individuation.” The result is a fake person following the herd to the point of scarcely being a self at all but rather a “reiterated impersonation.” To be authentic is to be original, individualistic, unlike anybody else. “Born Originals,” the 18th-century aesthetician Edward Young asked, “how comes it to pass that we die Copies?” Today even Trump’s propensities aren’t one of a kind. Populist demagogues thrive throughout the world.

Like most of us in his audience, Trilling missed what he discerned elsewhere when examining details that distinguish the morality of one age from another: change doesn’t consist simply in the loss of old status and privileges; “something is gained as well as lost — something is gained through the loss” — a new relation to art and a new awareness. A century after Wilde advised the young to be as artificial as possible, he might now say that their second duty is to be, as he was, aware of it.

Overt inauthenticity has appropriately made a comeback in recent years with a revival of the great performing arts of sincere inauthenticity like magic, ventriloquism, and impersonation. The ventriloquist Terry Fator with dummies that impersonate celebrity singers won a million-dollar prize on a primetime TV talent show and caused a delighted Oprah to fall out of her chair. He performs as a multimillion-dollar Las Vegas headliner at the Mirage, an inconceivable achievement in the era of Trilling when ventriloquism would have been considered unhip or old-fashioned, meaning inauthentic for the present time. Magic was then a moribund public art as well, but it’s now booming with several magicians appearing on Oprah and in primetime series. Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself set an off-Broadway New York theater record for a magic show with repeated extensions and sold-out audiences. In January 2020, magician Derren Brown culminated a string of sold-out performances on Broadway. In literature, magic and fantasy increasingly sell and win awards. In acknowledgment, the 2020 L.A. Times Book Prizes in October will offer for the first time a special prize to include fantasy and speculative fiction.

Impersonators on TV have moved from the wings to center stage. The comedians Whoopi Goldberg and Dave Chappelle, as paragons of outraged authenticity, once whipped a phony, hypocritical society with lacerating tough talk. They then gave way to comics who reveal social deceptions they work on themselves, like Sarah Silverman, who describes her funny self-impersonation as an earnest “asshole,” which in politer phrasing is to say she’s an inauthentic jerk but sincere in thinking otherwise. Impersonating a news anchor, the comedian Jon Stewart invested “fake news” with cultural authenticity before Trump as president appropriated and sullied the term. Trump himself engaged in impersonation to disguise the staging, shooting, reshooting, and editing that go into the accepted fakery of so-called TV reality shows. The importance of inauthenticity became increasingly apparent when in 2007 the impersonator of a conservative political pundit on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report was voted the Associated Press Celebrity of the Year for having the biggest impact on pop culture.

Self-aware manifestations of inauthenticity also dominate much popular writing and art. David Sedaris, described on Wikipedia as “the rock star of writers,” cheerfully writes, “Like most seasoned phonies, I roundly suspect that everyone is as disingenuous as I am.” The death of a friend left him unable to shake the mixed sincerity and inauthenticity of his mourning: “My grief was genuine, yet still, no matter how hard I fought, there was an element of showmanship to it. […] It was as if I’d learned to grieve by watching television.” In a review of the Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective of the artist Cindy Sherman, titled “The Art of the Impersonator,” critic Sanford Schwartz sees as both limited and enthralling Sherman’s large self-photographs presented as fake paintings in cheesy frames; “the sheer human spectacle of someone continually transforming herself into one person after another has proved riveting.” The convicted art forger John Myatt, perpetrator of what has been called “the biggest art fraud of the 20th century,” is now out of prison and successfully selling his forgeries as “Genuine Fakes.”

In his final lecture, Trilling acknowledged that the modernist age was over and inauthenticity was on the rise. As if to punctuate his anxiety that April evening in 1970, the sound of sirens and the smell of tear gas entered the hall as he spoke. Many of us in the audience had attended a massive afternoon peace rally in Boston Common to protest the Vietnam War. A splinter group protesting the New Haven trials of Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers marched into Harvard Square with 1,500 demonstrators chanting, “Free Bobby Seale,” and, “One, two, three, four, we don’t want this fucking war.” Street fighting raged in the square for four hours as a growing number of demonstrators threw bricks, looted stores, torched police cars, and set fire to buildings. Twelve hundred cops swung nightsticks and shot tear-gas canisters. Two thousand National Guardsmen stood by. Charging police drove protestors onto Mount Auburn Street, where bystanders swelled the final crowd to nearly 3,000, including many from the Trilling lecture.

Today other wars flare on the horizon, joining domestic unrest and a global pestilence to mark what may be equally a turning point in an unnamed but so-called post-authentic, post-fact, post-truth, post-racial, post-gender, post-literary, post-historical, post-text, post-postmodern era. While Trilling felt uneasy about the shift away from the ideal of an integral authentic self, he recognized that the truth of the self can at times consist in its being not true to itself, in there being no self to be true to, or at best only a fragmented self composed of many selves. Poor Emma Bovary, the fictional heroine of Flaubert’s novel, has been castigated by readers and critics for the inauthenticity of her fantasies and self-corrupting impersonations. One of the most touching moments in Trilling’s lectures is his defense of Emma Bovary against the condescension of her harsher critics who see her inauthenticity in the “roles that she was continually playing for others and for herself and which were based on the most platitudinous of conventions.”

Trilling cautions us to understand that Madame Bovary is each one of us. We are all insincere. We are all inauthentic. Trilling revealed the fear underlying our reading of the original Madame Bovary. Uneasy laughter at today’s characters of sincere inauthenticity underscores a revelation no less distressing: we are all self-deluded to one degree or another. We are all self-deceived. But there are degrees. There’s no going back to modernism’s naïve view of authenticity. If awareness grants freedom, then recognition of our inauthenticity and self-deception may perhaps free us to become less so. Will 2020 reveal Trump as the apex and culmination of a 50-year shift in cultural values and the initiation of a new one? Will more heroes then emerge who don’t look like heroes? Today several young novelists, playwrights, filmmakers, painters, comedians, and magicians express in their art a poignant longing to bridge the gap between the magical and the prosaic. They may point to a future as we spiral deeper into the age of fantasy or finally out of it with greater awareness of the tragedy and necessity of human self-deception.

Four hundred years ago, the disgraced and vilified Parolles in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well admits he’s a liar. Trump doesn’t. Parolles gains some authenticity in his awareness. The question of Trump’s awareness remains. Whether or not he escapes electoral defeat or later indictment, he’s still an iconic figure of our time, a conjurer of magical cloud pictures as opposed to prosaic facts. Trump and his shifting self-creations manifest what Trilling called a “cultural mutation” that has evolved into a 50-year merger of sincerity and inauthenticity. Social media from Facebook to TikTok buzz in response to a global pandemic with news about washing hands, elbow bumps, the Wuhan Shake, government plots, secret labs, and magical cures. Statistics show that false news stories travel faster on Twitter than factual ones. Inauthenticity is “liked.”

Our Age of Sincere Inauthenticity. By Frank Bergon. Los Angeles Review of Books,  April 12, 2020

The Untold Stories Behind Peter Hujar’s Lesser-Known Works

New York-based artist Peter Hujar never encountered much in the way of success in the course of his lifetime, explains Joel Smith, the curator behind a new exhibition of his powerful photographs entitled Speed of Life at that city’s The Morgan Library and Museum. Hujar was simply not a self-promoter – a fact which placed him in stark contrast with his contemporaries. His restrained nature was by no means due to a lack of confidence, however. “I would say it’s exactly the opposite,” Smith continues. “He felt that the work was so strong that it should speak for itself – it was a temperamental disinclination to put himself forward. So when the work did not go over the top without effort, I think this confirmed his worst suspicions about the world. And when a photographer like Robert Mapplethorpe, who really relished the opportunity to promote himself, made it straight up to the top, and defined a new top for what a contemporary photography could do in terms of renown, that also confirmed for Hujar that this world was not all for him.”

Disenchanted, Hujar turned to the East Village underworld in which he felt himself to be most at home, and set about creating singularly affecting photographs of the artists, writers and thinkers – a set of people he considered the greatest of the era, but who also happened to be “simply his neighbours, and the people that he sees two or three nights a week” – instead. He died tragically early in 1987, at the age of 53, having contracted AIDS, but the impact he made over the course of his relatively short career is still felt today.

“Those who knew him the longest and the closest speak of how funny he was, how well read, how playful, and how unpredictable – which is to say that he could fall into depressions that really cut him off from the world,” says Smith. “He was a very sensitive person, but on the other had a very tough personality, as somebody who was used to rejection of various kinds. A central fact about him is that he knows by the early 1950s that he’s gay, and that he will not be accepted for that, and what he does about it is move out, at age 16, into an apartment of his own in Greenwich Village, which is the one place that he could be where it would not be an issue. Because he did not present as homosexual in any of the standard ways that that would have been visible at that time, people took him as straight for decades of his life, and all of that sort of informs his special role in a changed world. Once there becomes a way of being out of the closet, he still continues to be the person he’s always been.”

At that time his was a “secret fame”, Smith says – but in the years since the world has learned more about him. Perhaps as a result, his oeuvre has been reduced down to a few instantly recognisable portraits. Take the 1973 shot Candy Darling on her Deathbed, for example, a quiet and serenely sentimental image capturing the Velvet Underground muse reclining as though for a restful moment in the final days of her life. Or, writer and political activist Susan Sontag stretched out, gazing thoughtfully into the air above her. “It’s altogether appropriate that [these images] are well known,” says Smith, “but the body of work is so much richer.” In the interests then of shedding light on lesser told elements of his story, here Smith shares four images from the Morgan’s captivating exhibition about Hujar’s work.

Daisy Aldan, June 19, 1955

“The earliest exhibition print that we know of in all of Hujar’s work is his portrait of Daisy Aldan, which he made in June of 1955. Daisy was his high school English teacher at the School of Industrial Arts, and a classmate of his from high school told me just last month: if you were unhappy with your life and you wanted to become someone else, Daisy was the person you wanted to know. She had been a radio actor as a child, she was a poet, she was a translator of Baudelaire, she was very widely connected in literature and the arts – and she really brought Hujar into the world of culture, she’s the first adult who encouraged him in his art.

“This portrait is in a classic Avedon mode of its time, it’s really where Avedon was at that moment. In fact, just this morning, I can tell you that as I prepared to talk to you I looked at it in the gallery and I thought ‘You know, this is a kind of performance’. It’s a very gentle, intimate kind of performance, but what he’s doing is photographing somebody in action, which he seldom does later on. It’s such a striking intersection. He is channelling something very intentionally from Avedon, and the element of it that lives on in his portraiture is the simplicity of the set-up. That’s really what he got from both Avedon and Penn, I think – the idea that you leave the sitter alone.”

Greer Lankton, 1983

“Greer Lankton had had her sex-change operation four years before Hujar made this picture. She looks so fresh and so natural; to me it’s a picture that doesn’t tell you how to feel about this person. It doesn’t tell you to be suspicious about anything, about her gender identity. It’s not a gotcha picture that says ‘Ah-ha! You thought you were seeing somebody born female!’ It’s studiously neutral and yet, as glamorous in its presentation of this person as can be. In that sense, I think it’s profoundly empathetic. It’s really making gender the same kind of challenge or puzzle for us that it was for Greer.

“It’s quite a lovely portrait. She was over the moon about how the session had gone, and deservedly so.”

Hudson River, 1975

“The Hudson River picture from 1975 is one of a group of pictures of the surface of the Hudson River that Hujar made to be placed in a religious setting at Fordham University, which is a Catholic university in Manhattan. They were all in different states, and sometimes you can see clearly that the sun is reflected on a part of the water, but more often it’s quite ambiguous, as in this image. This one has the least sense of its relationship to a source of light. You have the clearest view of the water through the whole thing.

“To me, it has a Zen quality to it; it’s a very contemplative image. You could count these waves for hours. It reads as an absence of all the things that I think people associate with Hujar’s work – there’s not a person, there’s not a creature, there’s not a single thing inside the frame. It’s just the endless world of nature that you’re seeing. At the same time, he’s of course aware that it’s the Hudson River, and I think you’re seeing a little bit of a building near the pier reflected in the left foreground.

“This quality – you could call it spiritual, it’s somehow about the same kind of practice of peacefulness that a lot of the dancers and movement he photographed has about it – is something that I think is worth recognising throughout his work. He’s bringing the world to a standstill for the sake of his art form, which relies on stopping time, but at the same time recognising that things flow on.”

The Untold Stories Behind Peter Hujar’s Lesser-Known Works. By Maisie Skidmore. February 02, 2018.  AnOther Magazine

 If portrait photography is stereotypically discussed in terms of capturing something revealing or true about the sitter that can only be seen with a camera, Hujar is making an argument for another function of the portrait. He isn’t after Truth, but allowing people to be vulnerable, to share something small of their private selves. Hujar’s photographic look is tender.

I’m sure his work feels urgent to many of us right now—especially those with bodies that are marginalized and threatened—for a multitude of reasons, but it is this gentleness that stands out to me. Hujar’s photography memorializes and monumentalizes acts of tenderness and moments of vulnerability, things that lately feel less and less practicable and, for that reason, more and more important.

Why Peter Hujar’s Photos Feel So Resonant Right Now. Ashton Cooper, April 23, 2018.  ArtNet News

 
       

   

Many of Hujar’s subjects are nude, or nearly so, as though literally baring their souls or revealing their vulnerability to someone they trusted. The sittings often took hours, and Hujar in a quiet, gentle manner coaxed his subjects into relaxing and posing in unexpected ways. He even photographed himself running nude in a bare studio, young and handsome.

He had a way with form. Sometimes just body parts, legs. Or torsos, such as a reclining figure, sometimes on the diagonal. He also clearly worked instinctively, intuitively. He challenged himself to intimately explore his subjects, to tease out their secrets and their souls, through the prism of the camera lens. Back then the camera told the truth, reflecting not only the reality of the subject but also of the picture taker. The only manipulations took place in the darkroom through dodging and burning areas of the exposing paper, to lighten or darken for better effect, or by cropping the image.

Hujar printed most of his photographs himself. A black-and-white darkroom was fairly easy to assemble and maintain in a semi-domestic setting. He took great care with the process in order to create a finished print that met his standards. This included spotting the finished product himself to ensure a clean image. The vintage prints reflect this.

Hujar felt like he was the end of a photographic era—perhaps one of more formal images, intimate portraits, black-and-white prints. A younger generation came up in the 1980s and took up color and quick snaps, composed narratives, staged intimacies. And then in the future photography became ubiquitous through the smartphone, and Photoshop replaced the darkroom, Instagram the gallery.

A Formal Intimacy: Peter Hujar: Speed of Life. By Ingrid Dinter. May 11, 2018.  BOMB Magazine

Fran Lebowitz on the first time she met Peter Hujar…

“I met Peter in 1971, at a screening in Midtown. I didn’t know who Peter was, but I saw this handsome guy, and I thought ‘there is Peter Hujar’. He was very handsome, and this was one of his claims to fame. I saw this very handsome guy wearing a rough tweed jacket and a woollen sweater. When the movie was over he stood up, and he was wearing a skirt.

“This was shocking for numerous reasons. One, he wasn’t the skirt type of guy – he looked really like a librarian, in the skirt. And two, it was illegal to wear women’s clothes then, so even the people who wore them routinely, they did not do it in Midtown. This was my first view of Peter. I never saw this skirt again, but I did ask him ‘Why were you wearing a skirt, Peter?’ And he said, ‘Because one day I thought, it’s not fair: women can wear pants, why men can’t wear skirts?’ And I thought, ‘that’s the thing you think is unfair?’”

On Hujar’s theories about his lack of success…

“Peter would think of reasons he wasn’t succeeding, and they would be never the reasons why he wasn’t succeeding. For instance, in Peter’s mind he wasn’t not succeeding because he threatened to break a barstool over an art dealer’s head. He wasn’t not succeeding because (I believe) he punched a woman dealer in the face. [Rather, he believed] he was not succeeding because all successful people’s first and last names started with the same letter, like Marilyn Monroe. This was the thing he was out for, for like a year. And every time he would see you he would tell you. Those were the reasons. He would say, ‘do you think I should change my name?’ And I was saying, ‘no, I think you should change your behaviour’.

“So, we went to lunch, they were perfectly nice. And that night he went to some bar with them, and he threaten to break up a barstool over their heads, and consequently they did not give him the show. But not because his name was not Marilyn Monroe.”

On his photograph of Candy Darling on her deathbed…

“Candy asked him to do that. You know, to take that photo of her. He told me, ‘You wanna come?’ And I said, ‘Peter I don’t think you should do that. I mean Candy is dying, that’s horrible.’ Candy was young, she was 27 when she died, and even I thought that was young then, even though I was like 23. He said ‘No no, she wants me to do it,’ and she did. So we went to the hospital, someone did her make-up, her hair, and she posed for those photographs. I thought it was horrible – not the photographs, fantastic! – but I thought, I can’t imagine this is what you care about when you’re dying. But this is what she cared about.

“And then when Candy died, Peter and I went to the funeral together, which was at Frank E. Campbell, which was the fanciest funeral home in New York, still is. It was winter, and when we got to the funeral home, we went into the room where the body was, which is the first time I ever saw an open casket. The casket was open, and on the back of it – it was a very elaborate casket – there were these things, I think they’re called Mass Cards, from the Catholic Church, they were there with the rosary beads, and also these photographs of Candy, these publicity shots. Candy was in the coffin, in full drag, in full make-up. And I was shocked by this.

“Peter was wearing his coat, and he was right behind me, and all of a sudden he takes his camera and he takes a picture of it. And I was so angry at him for doing this. I said ‘This is awful!’ He goes, ‘She would have wanted me to do this!’ I said, ‘How would you know?’ And I think she probably would have, you know. I think I fought about that with Peter for about two days, and I’ve never seen that photograph of Candy dead.”

Fran Lebowitz Remembers Her Friend Peter Hujar. By Maisie Skidmore. June 28, 2018. AnOther Magazine

         

A.M. Homes on What it Means to be A Moral Writer

A.M. Homes’s Days of Awe is a strong short story collection that scales and unpacks, without judgment, the labyrinth of layers that influence human behavior in what Homes celebrates as being “in all its inglorious beauty.” In the path blazed by Grace Paley, her former teacher, Homes writes the truth according to her characters. Brother on Sunday, the collection’s opening story, embodies Homes’s uncluttered intelligence to trust that a story can be kept simple and remain complex, stinging, ambitious and ongoing.  

Days of Awe’s precise details straddle comfort and pain with authenticity. Its meticulous pacing borrows from a gymnast’s scissoring and soaring routine on a pommel horse. The non-autobiographical material tunnels into the territory of global consciousness at a critical point in our history. Homes’s devoted readership will take pleasure in a few pieces that are legacy tales from her earlier works, and which provide a continuation and evolution of preexisting characters. And those new to Homes’s work will appreciate her mastery of the dynamics of siblings, life partners, friends, strangers and strangeness all of which are both contrasting and combustible.

Yvonne Conza: The title story Days of Awe circles around a love affair sparked between former friends reunited at a genocide conference. What were you going for in this story in the big and small picture?

A.M. Homes: I am always trying to tell the story as well as I can, and to be true to my characters. Grace Paley always said, write the truth according to the character.

I am interested in how quickly awareness of the Holocaust is fading –how we don’t seem to notice that there are genocides all over the world and how even in these horrible moments, people want a sense of connection, they continue to be human, they mate, they love and when it is all over those who have survived have mixed feelings about what it means to survive and their duty to those who were lost. To me it’s heartbreaking and so very real. And then we make judgments about whose story is most valid, who has the right to tell the tale — and I find that interesting as well. And now, many Holocaust survivors have died from old age — and I am conscious of who is left to tell the story — who is left to remind us. My work is often about taking the collective unconscious and making it collectively conscious.

……

YC: You have said, in response to this being called a “powerful” book: “Regarding the power of the book — it took a long time and is very much tied to other work I’ve done/been doing, thinking about thinking about the world we live in.” Talk about this more. It’s a compelling statement that feels right with this book.

A.M.: It’s hard for me to describe — except to say we are living in interesting times, the pace of our social, cultural, political world is moving so fast that it is hard to get ones footing. A writer depends on a kind of terra firma — in order to go off screen into the imagination — and know that when one comes back to the surface — things will for the most part be the same. At our current speed of acceleration — one worries that one might surface another (unfamiliar) world entirely. My work is drawn from ideas and ‘issues’ I see before us — history, the forgetting of history, the human cost of war, what one expects of family, of marriage of oneself… in order to explore these ‘non-fiction’ sometimes almost philosophical ideas I have to turn inward — which feels difficult when all one is compelled to do is read/watch the news — as if bearing witness.

….

YC: Do you think a writer’s past work remains in the DNA of current and future works? If so, which of your previous books or short stories have influenced you the most in writing Days of Awe?

A.M.: The short answer is yes always, as different as each/all of the work is it is part of a progression that in some ways is invisible to others… for example the character Henry Hefelfinger in Rockets Round The Moon, is the early (younger) version of Geordie Harris, in The Chinese Lesson, who is actually an early iteration of Harold Silver, the main character in May We Be Forgiven. So that’s a very concrete example and there are literally dozens of those. Going back through you can see that my interest in human behavior — why people do what they do — and how it affects them and those around them is at the core as is a kind of morality which I never can tell if I should ‘advertise’… ie what does it mean to be a moral writer — and is that a good thing? I’m not passing judgment on my characters — in fact kind of the opposite — I give them room to expose themselves, to come to know themselves in ways that before we spend time together they might not. Here’s the big reveal — and it’s not about me as a writer — but about an idea that concerns me a lot. People sometimes say, am I supposed to “like” that character…. The notion of whether or not a character is likable worries me, it’s a very-very modern and troubling idea #1 was Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov likable? Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert? And do we want the character to be “likeable” so we can “relate” to them — and can we only see ourselves in a likable person — i.e. we need to be made to feel good about ourselves and our reflection in literature? This to me opens a whole world of discussion and perhaps a course I should teach someday called: I Don’t Like You, I Love You, the problems of Q-Rating Literature.

YC: This collection represents a faceted diamond in which light and illumination is always possible, even when there is disruption or loss. Can you speak to this?

A.M.: I like your idea of faceted diamond where light and illumination is always possible…that’s lovely. I am always trying to tell the stories of my characters lives, of their experiences and these are in some ways just slices of the fullness of their lives and hope to capture the essence of both what we know and what we don’t know about ourselves, our lives, our histories. And yes, even in disruption and loss I am looking for light — which doesn’t mean dismissing gravity but light as illumination — learning, discovery. I want to remain always curious, engaged, looking and thinking.

YC: In your earlier books, reviewers often remarked about being shocked or surprised by your writing about certain topics that were “haunting, terrifying, twisted, dangerous …” Did you find those descriptors as helpful or too summarizing?

A.M.: Words like haunting, dangerous come easily — but at the same time they’re not very specific and perhaps leave too much room for one to simply project into that word whatever one wants — so I think the more specific one can be in describing something the better — even if one disagrees with it — at least you can understand exactly what the person is saying.

I’ve always been bothered by the idea that that I am writing to shock people — that’s something applied to my work from the outside. I’m writing to tell stories — to illustrate the human heart — and if people find it shocking, well, that means it hit a nerve, but I don’t set out to shock or disturb. What happens in a career that spans quite a few years is that reviewers go back and they don’t read the past books — they read the reviews, and they bring those misconceptions forward and apply them to new material, so it’s hard to escape.

Electric Literature,  June 12, 2018.

                                                               

On her interest in the differences between the public and private faces people present

I'm definitely, if not obsessed by that, I think there's a big gap between who we are publicly and how we present ourselves, and who we are to ourselves and our families. And most interesting to me over the last ten years is also who we are in our online lives, that we can have these either avatars, or sort of other personas in our exchanges, or even the ways there's different tones to our emails. So I am deeply interested in that split between public and private self.

On the story "National Caged Bird Show" and writing naturalistic dialogue

I think my understanding of dialogue really comes from the theater. I grew up in Washington, D.C., going to plays at Arena Stage all the time. So it was really the work of Edward Albee and Harold Pinter and Arthur Miller that gave me a sense of dialogue. And in this case, the thing was, how do you represent these two main characters, plus what I almost think of as the chorus around them, which is the other people who are witness to their conversations, and in ways that are cryptic and condensed, and almost like a Morse code for communication.

I'm always listening, and I think there's that interesting difference between what you actually hear people say, and how we account for that on the page or on the stage, and those compressions that have to happen. I think Edward Albee was just so truly brilliant at that.

On Albee and writing about the breaks in tense relationships

I'm interested in those shifts or fractures in things, and it's interesting because he was a mentor to me, and he was somebody I knew throughout my life. And Edward, like me, was also adopted, and we talked a lot about that outsider experience and what that perspective was, but also shifts in emotional states, and that sense of ambivalence about relationships. It's very hard, I think, for someone who's grown up feeling that their existence was some how temporary, or that they could be given back at some point, to attach easily. So there's a lot about attachment in the stories, always.

On writing stories about people and relationships

I think throughout history, there have always been wonderful stories about couples and families — I mean, that is the stuff of life. And the nice thing is, they come in what I call doses. You know, you can read one story, you don't have to read a whole book of stories at a time. So you read one or two, and then they sit with you for a while. I think they're a medication. Literally, we're living in such complicated times that if you can sit down and read a story, or two stories, depending on what you need, it's food for thought but it's also for the soul and for the mind, to see life reflected back to you in a way that is both funny and moving and complex.

A.M. Homes: Short Stories Are 'Food For The Soul And For The Mind'.  Alabama Public Radio, June 13, 2018   

                                                                                          
                                                                      

Mary Elizabeth Williams : You said a few years ago you feel your work is very American. It feels like what it means to have an American identity is changing so fast right now. What does it mean to be an American writer, writing about American things right now?

A.M. Homes : Before the election, I was talking with my agent and my publishers about this book idea that I've been trying to figure out as a novel that was basically about the downfall of the American government. When I first talked about it they said, "That's science fiction, you don't write science fiction." I said, "I feel like there's something really interesting happening.” Things are happening around us so fast. What it means to be an American is super important because there isn't a agreed upon American identity now. There's no agreed upon set of values or what democracy is, immigration, about who we are to each other. There isn't a sense of being united as a country. We're not seeing reflected back that idea that freedom is a basic human value. It's very tricky.

  

Williams : Seeing how teenagers have risen to the challenge, have really taken charge of the narrative, is exciting. It is also terrifying because it is such uncharted waters.

 

Homes : I think that things like the teenagers in Florida are really challenging the status quo. It's amazing, and they're doing it in a different way than the teenagers of the early 1960s or mid-1960s did. What worries me is that people are forgetting their relationship to history. If [you] don't know what your history is, it's very hard. The absence of history is problematic.

I think that the middle of America, and the people who were coal miners and worked in factories, really feel lost. And they're lost because our system is not giving them new kinds of jobs. The perception is that their work has gone to immigrants, which isn't true. I understand why they could feel America has lost something. It's lost them. And they want to feel part of America and feel part of their country.

Williams : And it's easier to conceptualize an idealized past than it is to construct a vision of a future.

Homes : If you look at people like Martin Luther King, John Kennedy, Obama, they led on dreams. I think we have gone the way of the tax rebate: “I'll give you $300 for your family if you vote for me.”

Look at Nixon. Nixon started the EPA. Nixon was open with relations with China. I think it's fascinating to look at somebody who we see as a truly complicated president and then look at where we are now, like “Wow, what are our goals for ourselves as a country?" They're not clear, and also interestingly, they're not very inward looking. There's not a lot of, "Why aren't we doing more infrastructure projects that would employ people? Why don't we have programs for veterans that would bring them back and give them jobs with other veterans so they have a sense of community?" There are so many things that we could be doing that are not difficult to do, but that's not where the lens is. I'm interested in and fascinated by it. I guess I would love to see some fairly regular but smart person run for office.

It's also become a money game. There's so much about how much money can you put into it. Trump capitalized on free media. Nobody really talks about that, but early on it looked [like] there were six New York Times crews following him. I asked one of the editors, “Why are there six crews following him?” He said, "Because he makes news." That's part of what happened in his over-the-top speeches. All of a sudden he made news, so he got [an] enormous amount of essentially free advertising every day. It's a complicated thing.

Williams : When I get very despairing about everything, I think, "Just because I don’t have the map doesn’t mean my kids don’t, or it doesn’t mean my kids won’t draw a new one."

Homes : I have these students who are so incredibly smart and don't know anything. I say to them, the careers they’re going to have in 10 years don’t exist right now. Their future, smart as they are, is going to not be based on facts they can learn and papers they can write right now, but it will be based on what they can dream for themselves. They're our leaders for tomorrow. I think if your leaders don’t have an imagination, they’re not going to be good leaders because they’re going to follow directions.

How do you teach somebody to think for themselves or make a decision? I think the two things that will help a young person are history and economics. I think really, economics relates to all of it. That’s where everything is coming from at the moment. And then, what does it really mean to be a leader?

Williams : It’s so devalued in our culture: Do you communicate? Do you know how to present your ideas? Do you know how to make a case for you ideas? Do you know how to talk to another person?

I want to ask you one more thing, because you have one of the most durable careers in literature. For a fiction writer you’re in a very small pool, and especially as a woman. I’m wondering, how has the game changed for you? What does it feel like doing it now?

Homes : Part of me honestly thinks there’s no way it’s been 30 years. That’s crazy. In my mind, that's just not even a possibility. The other piece that really bothers me is that I came of age at a time when the literary world was divided and there was no such thing as a fiction section. There's women's fiction and gay fiction. Everything became very fragmented. I think in many ways being a woman who writes has really been kind of difficult actually, because I think of what kinds of books would be appealing to the young men and women I think I’m writing about. The truth is that the expectation in America is women writers write about domestic things. English writers seem to be, for want of a better word, allowed to write about these large, social and political ideas. Being able to go to Europe and touring, there are tons of people of very diverse crowds, and that’s kind of great. Here when I’m talking to people, sometimes I’ll be talking to a guy and he'’ll say to me, “Oh, I’m here to tell my wife about your books.”

I feel in some ways there are probably young people who would like my stories and novels, who don’t even know about them. I’d like to think that maybe in this world we're in right now where things are changing, that there’s slightly less divide in how books are marketed and sold and even put on bookshelves. When bookstores divided into sections, they took black writers out of fiction and women writers out of fiction. That really meant there was a large section of the book store was just the white guys section.

Williams : The flip side is, how can we legitimize writing about the domestic? How can we write about women’s stories in a way where we're not just shipped off to the literary ghetto?

Homes : Last year a student came to me and said, "I'm taking a course in 20th century fiction. Is it true women weren't really writing in the 20th century?" The reading list was Faulkner and all these books. I said, "Let me make a little list for you. Here's Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor and all these other women. Give this back to your professor and tell him, 'Hey, I just found out there were women writing in the 20th century.'" If it's not brought into this in a different way, then [the writing] stays separated. And then people have to take "Women’s Literature," or "Gender in Fiction," which isn’t the same because then it also becomes self-selecting of young women looking for place to talk about women’s writing.

I was giving a talk with another writer and some guy said, “I haven’t read your books, but I have a question.” I said to him, “I’d be happy to give you a copy of my book,” and he said, “I don’t read books by women, but I do have a question." He really didn’t want to hear it. Grace Paley said that women have always done men the favor of reading their work and men have not returned the favor. Grace was a feminist, but as importantly, Grace loved men. I think that what she taught me was that you can be a feminist and advocate for equality and you can also love men. That’s always been really important because I do love men. I write a lot about male characters. I also think women’s lives and the roles that women play and the relationships that women have are equal to the lives men lead.

I love writing so much. I feel enormously lucky. My books come out around the world, and that also means to me as an American writer, the stories have resonance in all countries. They come out in Korea and they come out in Hungarian and Romanian. That, to me, is secretly my favorite part of it, that they travel.

A.M. Homes, too, has met this guy at a reading: “I don’t read books by women”. Salon, June 11, 2018

     

                                                                 

A.M. Homes: For almost as long as I can remember, I’ve felt a deep sense of connection to J.D. Salinger’s work. It starts with the pervasive sense of loss in his books—the way his characters seem to be trying to bridge the gap between innocence and an awful kind of knowing, one that involves an awareness of trauma and grief. Part of it, too, is the way he often breaks from the action to talk directly, informally to the reader. It’s easy to feel, Oh, he’s talking to me. But there have also been these eerie points of resonance between Salinger’s books and my own life that have made me feel a special kinship with his work. (...)

 By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. A.M. Homes on  the short story “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor,” ,J.D.Salinger.  Her  story “The National Caged Bird Show,”  ( in the collection of stories :   Days of Awe)  is a kind  of  homage to “For Esmé.”

The Atlantic, June 19, 2018

On Writing Letters to Famous Strangers, essay by A.M. Homes. 

As a teenager, I wrote letters to strangers. I was trying to write my way out of my parent’s house, where I was psychically trapped. Like an alien seeking contact, I started by doing research. I went to the Bethesda Library, where they had phone books from all over the country. I remember being surprised by the number of well-known names one could find in a New York phone book in the 1976–1978 time period: Art Garfunkel, Mikhail Baryshnikov—those are just two I recall, but I know there were dozens. (...)

The Paris Review, June 27, 2018. 

                                                                 
                                                                 

If you are interested in other books by A.M. Homes read this article by  Lorraine Berry.

How A. M. Homes Is Chronicling Modern America: A Primer.

Signature reads, June 4, 2018