paper trail

Sarah Hepola on Kavanaugh and blacking out; Stormy Daniels's new memoir

Deborah Eisenberg

Sarah Hepola, the author of the memoir Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget, considers Brett Kavanaugh’s claim during his Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week that he has never blacked out from drinking (Hepola calls Kavanaugh’s claim that he has “gone to sleep” after drinking a “semantic dodge”). She also delves into a memoir by Mark Judge, whom Christine Blasey Ford says attacked her with Kavanaugh. In Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk (which is reportedly extremely hard to find), Judge describes the behavior that led him to get sober, including “a wedding rehearsal dinner where he got so blasted he doesn’t remember the evening’s end. A friend informs him the next day that he tried to take off his clothes and ‘make it’ with a bridesmaid. Mr. Judge’s response cuts me. ‘Please tell me I didn’t hurt her,’ he said.”

At Politico, Bill Scher reads Stormy Daniels’s new memoir Full Disclosure, and compares it with other memoirs about alleged presidential mistresses, from Nan Britton’s The President’s Daughter (about Warren Harding) to Gennifer Flowers’s Passion and Betrayal.

Literary scholar Peter Conrad looks at how Shakespeare’s plays offer insight into the age of Trump and Brexit.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s Eric Chinski has purchased the North American rights to Leah Redmond Chang’s Young Queens, a novel about four royals of the Renaissance: Catherine de Medici, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth Tudor, and Elisabeth de Valois.

Giles Harvey profiles Deborah Eisenberg, the magnificent story writer and “chronicler of American insanity.”