AS A CHILD, SERGE DANEY KNEW his father only through the stories his mother told him. According to legend, Pierre Smolensky was a worldly, well-to-do gentleman involved in the business of cinema; throughout the interwar years, he dubbed films and perhaps even appeared in some under the stage name Pierre Sky. Only seventeen when Pierre took her under his wing, Daney’s mother claimed that he spoke all the languages in the world. For a while, the memory of Pierre was preserved in mythological amber, not unlike the images of Cary Grant and James Stewart, those beautiful American stars whom the

DO NOT MISTAKE Lynne Tillman’s Mothercare: On Obligation, Love, Death, and Ambivalence for a memoir. While it is unflinching, this book isn’t primarily about the vexed origins or aftereffects of the fraught mother-daughter relationship it describes (although all of that is in here). Rather, it is about performing the duty of keeping a person safe in an age when medicine often prolongs our lives long past our capacities. In this sense, Mothercare is more of an essay, or a dispatch: reportage from the trenches of care work. The “great difficulty” of writing, Elizabeth Hardwick once noted, “is

I SUSPECT EVERYONE WHO KEEPS A DIARY of wanting it to be found. What you write depends on what you allow yourself to see, and how you want to be seen. It’s a common thought—Susan Sontag famously said, “A journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people”—and points to a basic contradictory principle of the unconscious. Self-admission is always tied to self-betrayal. 

Anne Truitt began keeping a daily journal in June 1974. Her ostensible aim was to “record my life and see what happened.” It may have had more to do with steadying her mind. Her decision followed two retrospective

FORMIDABLE HARDWICK! Most writers are soon forgotten after their deaths. Yet Elizabeth Hardwick, since her death in 2007, has achieved a rare transfiguration. Having left behind the indignities of mortal life—hangovers, rashes, insomnia, unwritten lectures, misplaced hearing aids—she has been enshrined as an intellectual totem. Publishers have brought out not just a Collected Essays, as one might expect, but an Uncollected Essays, foraging through back issues of Mademoiselle and House & Garden for every glittering fragment. Other literary productions have whetted, not sated, the readerly appetite

I REMEMBER seeing the cover of B. S. Johnson’s book Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs? in a bookstore when I was eighteen. (Johnson was thirty-nine, had only a few months to live then, and his book is not in fact a memoir.) That title stayed with me for years and haunted me whenever I’d think of writing anything concerning my own life. The proper time to write a memoir was one’s sunset years, when one had retired from the hustle and bustle and could sit by the window in quiet contemplation. One’s task in the intervening decades was to write novels, which were generally understood

In 2012, the British magazine Sight and Sound polled the film critics of the world to name “the best picture ever made,” and the result, that year, was Hitchcock’s Vertigo. David Thomson has described the film as a “piercing dream,” but, possibly challenging common sense, I am not going to explicate the full plot of the film at length here, or make a claim for it, in case the reader has never seen it. I will simply say that in this movie, a detective is asked to follow a beautiful, glamorous woman who is thought to be suicidal. Notice that the plot really begins with a request moment based on