How to Sound Smart About Books Even If You're an Idiot

Find yourself sitting around in book clubs, feeling like a fool? Don't know much about Foucault except some feces-related anecdotes? Wonder why everyone has read Ulysses, and you haven't, and now you are sorry, aren't you?

If you were too poor, or, like, whatever to go to grad school, here's how to sound smart while people in your proximity have polysyllabic conversations about books you haven't bothered yourself to read.

It was written by my stoic, tolerant, foul-mouthed BFF Lydia Netzer, who is a writer, really great, and a book doctor that I highly recommend if you have a tome that needs tending.

From "Ten Words to Make You Sound Smart in a Book Discussion":

7. French Feminism: French feminists invented the idea of a female kind of writing, "ecriture feminine" which is super-sexy and completely different from phallocentric male discourse. French feminists believed women should write about women, and their bodies. If you use the phrase "writing the body" you will get knowing nods from male friends and phone numbers from the girls.

Read the rest here.

Happy in the ER

In "Marry Him! The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough," Lori Gottlieb's controversial polemic on what the hell love has to do with marriage (not a lot, she says), Gottlieb opines: "Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business." Maybe she's right. Maybe she isn't. I don't know. But I will say that the same could be said of writing. My paraphrase: "Writing isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a series of very small, mundane, and often boring acts undertaken in service of a business that rarely turns a profit." Maybe writing is like a marriage, one in which you can never quite make out what your spouse looks like. Or maybe writing is like a religion, one in which the true believer waits for a god who shows himself only through inscrutable signs. Yesterday, I had a fit over my novel-in-progress, Happy. I suppose this was inevitable. I am nothing if not an undoer. Luckily, the Harpoonist, a writer and book doctor, was there to help. Like an expert surgeon, she grabbed a scalpel and began slashing at the book on the operating table before her. Happy thanks her for the intervention that brought it back from the dead. If you are a writer whose book needs doctoring, I recommend the Harpoonist highly.