You get the sense, rather, that it pains her to give readers the gossip they want. She dispatches her brother’s wife with the observation: “She sits at home and watches talk shows and soap operas.” She even exacts posthumous revenge on her teacher Elizabeth Hardwick, who once quipped that Janowitz’s work was “not Chekhov”, by marveling that “she wrote so well without really saying anything, about Henry James and so many other topics.” When Janowitz gets coy or retreats into cliché in passages about her famous friends, it doesn’t seem to be out of discretion. She inveighs against The Catcher in the Rye and skinny women who don’t eat and Woody Allen (her gripe is with a small anachronism in Midnight in Paris, not his personal life). Janowitz’s greatest strength has always been her bluntness, and there’s certainly no lack of it in Scream. Of visiting Reed and his then-wife Sylvia in their Upper West Side home, she writes: “If you don’t have any shoes and nowhere to live, you don’t want to admire someone’s apartment and their closet contents.” Here is all she has to say about the social life of the Brat Pack: “I knew each of my two packmates a bit.” Inside there was a suffering, lonely entity.”Ī chapter titled On Lou Reed devolves into a lament on how difficult it is to be friends with people who have money when you’re broke. Analyzing Warhol, she arrives at the banal conclusion that he “wanted to appear like an onion, many layers but all exactly the same”, even though “you could tell that he was more complicated than that. When she finally interrupts the family narrative to address the part of her life she must know readers will be curious about, Janowitz clams up. The story triggers a flood of brief, loosely connected chapters about her parents, childhood and recent years caring for her elderly mother in upstate New York. By the end of the visit, he’s disowned her. Her first memoir opens with a recent vignette in which the author’s apparently sadistic elderly father Julian summons her to his home on the pretense that he’s leaving the property to her. “I did not particularly like being semi-famous,” she writes, 200 pages into the book, though her reticence to discuss that period becomes obvious much earlier. But Janowitz has no deep desire to relive those years. She touches on all of that, eventually, in Scream: A Memoir of Glamour and Dysfunction, her first memoir.
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