I have read a number of Lipman's novels and they are always enjoyable. Not romance: perhaps domestic novels might express it best. I don't know where or when I got this collection, but it was published in 1987. "After Emily" looks at pregnancy and young motherhood as it was in the early seventies through the late eighties. All the things that changed over that period have changed again in the thirty-five years since. The central character is a college professor raising two girls on her own as her husband has a new family. And it is not so much a story but her observations on the proper time to have a child and the proper way to do it. She has colleagues of her age (late thirties) just having a first baby now. You feel this story is very much based on Lipman's own life.
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Yesterday I learned that a casual friend of mine had died suddenly. She was in her sixties and it was a shock to all of us. Only a month or so ago, she emailed me asking for suggestions for placing a crime story-flash fiction length. I gave her an idea or two but said I wasn't really up on the current markets. Which is true. How I wish now I had taken the time to look around a bit for her. I am no longer in the writing group she curates and apparently some of them knew she hadn't been feeling well.
Look out for your friends, Friends. They can slip away suddenly.
15 comments:
Just because she was a casual friend does not mean it's a casual loss. Missed opportunities may always haunt us. Tke care, Patti.
I'm very sorry to hear of your loss, Patti. And you're right; we shouldn't pass up opportunities to be there for each other. You don't know when the last one will be.
I was always expecting my older friends to be the ones, not Robin.
Sorry to hear. It affects us even when the person who has passed is a friend or acquaintance we haven't seen in a long time. I recently learned of an old school friend I hadn't seen in years died unexpectedly, in his mid-40s. It took me a long time to wrap my head around it.
Here is my entry for this week: https://casualdebris.blogspot.com/2023/09/casual-shorts-isfdb-top-short-fiction_26.html
Thanks,
Frank
We've had friends (about our age) die suddenly during the past year. I suspect Covid-19 long-term effects might have something to do with it. Sadly, we're all on thin ice now...
Sad but true. We've lost a few people recently, including a very good friend of mine in North Carolina (we visited her after the Raleigh Bouchercon) who died suddenly in her sleep in her mid-60s. It was a real shock.
I read that Lipman collection in 2019.
I got the new Captain Leopold story collection by Ed Hoch from Crippen & Landru, but before I read it (these stories were published between 1981 and 2000), I discovered there was an earlier collection of Leopold stories, LEOPOLD'S WAY, published in 1985, which begins with the first of his stories, "Circus" (1962). I got an ebook copy from the library and I'm reading it first. There were over 100 Leopold stories, police procedurals without the supernatural of impossible crime elements in some of Hoch's other series. I will say I was disturbed by the story "End of the Day" (1970), as Hoch has Leopold's assistant, Sergeant Fletcher, angrily refer to another character as a "fag" when angry. Leopold later things about it and seems to excuse the slur as coming in the heat of an angry moment, but it bothered me. It was unnecessary and added nothing to the story.
In 1970 that language was much more common. So the question is if you reprint to you make changes. I say yes. But I will cut slack when it is the original text. For words at least if not for actions. You even hear such terms on TV shows of the day. Almost every episode of FRIENDS takes shots at both gay people and overweight people.
So very sorry about your friend, Patti.
Very sorry to hear about your friend, Patti.
Elinor Lipman was an author that I looked for several times at the book sale, because they continue to add new books throughout. I looked both for novels and short stories, but never could find anything. I also looked for both Andre Dubus II and III, with no luck. You never know what / who you will find at the book sale.
Further condolence for your friend Robin, Paitti. I have a friend in recovery from a fall, and others muddling through, as am I...
I might put a late one together today, but part of what tied it together was Anthony Boucher obits, so maybe not.
Jeff, as I mentioned last week, that wasn't (perhaps only technically) the first Leopold story, even if it's the first to make him central.
Alas, Patti's right--inults such as that remained rife in '70s...was it supposed to suggest thuggery/jerkishness in the character? One might elide It today--"He used an epithet."--but I'm not sure I'd revise it. I suppose "trigger warnings" do have their place.
And sorry for you recent losses, Jeff. A Lot of friends of friends and acquaintances of late.
So, New Cat wanted to take a nap on me late this afternoon, so I read or reread a few more stories in the EQMM issue I was reading for SSW, and the Edward Hoch story was part of his Rand series, espionage fiction, and the Briton Rand's young associate is queried by Rand if the junior colleague thinks his new female acquaintance, a Caucasian newsmagazine reporter, might be the Chinese spy that they expect to arrive, and he responds, "Her eyes don't slant." Well, this guy is supposed to be a bit callow, but I think Hoch definitely wanted to add a bit of jarring grit to the machine...I'll note also that my cohabitant Alice's eyes don't slant, either.
“The past is a foreign country..." as L. P. Hartley famously noted...and some of us will still do as they did Back Home, while others want our New World.
This kind of thing is hard to tolerate now. I just heard a discussion on where Gael Garcia Bernal, a straight male, should be playing a gay man in Cassandro. I just don't know. Does this mean we cannot imagine ourselves in any other body?
It's a balancing act...keeping in mind so much bad imposture there's been in years past, and still, in various forms of narrative art. It would be a very narcissistic or even solipsistic world if storytellers of various sorts could only present characters of their own descriptions...how many stories or scripts could I write about balding middle-aged Anglo-Italian-Cherokee-French men with facial scars exclusively? (How many do we have already?)
Doing the work as honestly and responsibly as one can is mostly what's asked of us, I think...and That Takes Effort.
And some characters will be asses and bigots.
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