What Our Writers Are Reading This Summer
In place of our usual staff picks this week, we’ve asked five contributors from our new Summer issue to write about what they’re reading.
From the cover of A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life by Allyson Hobbs.
Some books are like strange strong drinks: you know from the first sip if it’s your kind of thing. Elia Kazan’s memoir, , is mine—relentless, bitterly funny, extremely unboring. Kazan, one of the most celebrated figures in midcentury filmmaking (he directed , , , and more), was born in Turkey to Greek parents, and moved to New York as a child. A restless man, he maintained several sets of clothes and small bank accounts all over the world,, he received a cable, in code, reporting that he “had a new son by a woman not my wife.” A few dozen pages later, he writes, “I consider myself rigidly moral—moral enough, in fact, to admit this: There is one thing I’ve lied about consistently, and that is my relationships to women out of wedlock. I’ve again and again lied to my wives about this.” (Marilyn Monroe was one of his many girlfriends.) He gives himself extraordinary permission and somehow makes you feel it’s earned. He writes, “People have often accused me of being selfish and self-centered. They’re quite right. All artists are. They protect like all hell what’s most precious for them—the privilege to exploit the full range of their curiosity.” (“”)
