The Crime Lady: Return to MacDowell
Dear TCL Readers:
It’s crunch time for, well everything. For me, that is book revisions. I am working on them at something of a feverish clip at MacDowell, which I am delighted to have returned to finish out the residency that was interrupted in mid-March by this little thing called a pandemic? I voted, it’s valid, and early voting is on, and I hope you have a plan to vote, or have done so already. So much is riding on this election, and we’ll only know how much after years have passed.
Revisions are going pretty well, and if all goes according to plan, my next book will be published just about a year from now. Fall 2021 may resemble the Before Time. I suspect it will not quite get to that level. There is no use predicting anything, which is why I’m quite happy to be immersed in mid-20th century America, a more comprehensible (if awfully inhospitable) time.
Speaking of the mid-20th century, my newest feature, for AirMail, is on the actress Sue Lyon, and the hidden-in-plain-sight sexual relationship she had with James B. Harris, co-producer (with Stanley Kubrick) of the 1962 film Lolita. I’ve wanted to write about Lyon for years, long suspecting that the downward trajectory of her life after teenage stardom had, if not a clear starting point, at least an inciting incident — one that had been rumored for many years.
The answer proved to be far more complicated than a short article can convey, which is why I concentrated on one single story. There is a longer project in the works that I hope will capture the full scope of Sue Lyon’s life, the many highs and the spectacular lows, a rather gothic family history, and the friends, lovers, husbands, and family who were in and out of her life, sometimes by their choice, often by hers.
Many thanks, above all, to Julia Vitale, who edited this piece with the equivalent of a honed scalpel; to Matt Fallon for diligent factchecking; to Graydon Carter and everyone at AirMail (including Ashley Baker and Michael Hainey, for talking about the story on the weekly podcast); and to everyone — quoted and not — who talked to me for the story.
**
READ/WATCH/LISTEN
Skip Hollandsworth has a podcast! It’s called Tom Brown’s Body and it is very good, on the disappearance of a young man from the small town of Canadian, Texas, and the clouds of suspicion that rested on pretty much everyone.
It is strange to say that I am catching up on my 2021 reading, but strange is still true. Forthcoming books I think highly of include Tod Goldberg’s short story collection The Low Desert; Joan Silber’s new novel Secrets of Happiness (my god, how much she can do in a mere sentence or two); Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Committed; Annabel Lyon’s Consent; and Cynthia Ozick’s Antiquities.
This week marks the reissue of Susan Taubes’ debut (and only) novel Divorcing. I think it’s my favorite novel of this year, and one I keep feeling eludes me in full (I’ve read it three times, I am certain I will read it a fourth time before 2020 is up.) It feels so specifically “me” in the way that Helen Weinzweig’s Basic Black With Pearls did, dealing with forgotten women of a certain age, childhood trauma, the tragedy of emigration, Yiddishkeit, and more than an element of the fantastic. Taubes died of suicide the week after Divorcing was published in 1969, and the novel was unjustly neglected thereafter. Thanks to NYRB Classics, it won’t be again.
I haven’t watched the new season of Unsolved Mysteries but it is my understanding that one of the episodes tackles one of my pet cases — the 1989 disappearances of two little boys from the same Harlem playground over one scorching summer. I’m extremely curious how they handle the story, which is a true heartbreaker.
And if you aren’t subscribed to the paid newsletter version of The Crime Lady, you may have missed an essay I wrote on a grimy, parody pulp novel that was, apparently, the inspiration for Jeffrey Epstein to pursue his monstrous life of crime. Here’s the button to subscribe:
The next newsletter arrives after the election. A world that will be different, despite having changed so much in the past few months.
Until then, I remain,
The Crime Lady