“Cannonball,” a short film from California Is a Place. In the midst of economic turmoil, skateboarders take over pools on foreclosed properties.

“Prison Valley,” a Web documentary from Upian, David Dufresne, Philippe Brault and ARTE, a European cultural channel (via Interactive Narratives). In this look at Cañon City, Colo., a longtime hub of the prison industry, ominous voiceovers evoke crime dramas, as if something terrible might happen at any moment. Then you realize in a town that lives off prisons, it already did.

“The Korean War: Not Forgotten,” a multimedia project from The Virginian-Pilot (via Interactive Narratives). A timeline of the conflict provides context as veterans share their war experiences. “And the last night of the war, there was fighting all night. The Chinese and the North Koreans just flew thousands and thousands of soldiers into the battle.”

“Take Care,” a short film from Gillian Laub, produced by Eric Maierson (via MediaStorm). Virginia Gandee, a 22-year-old living in Staten Island, New York, has a 5-year-old daughter and a dying grandfather, and dreams of becoming a nurse. Gorgeous visuals.

“Cartoons after Southampton ban photographers from Argyle match,” drawings from This Is Plymouth via MetaFilter. A football team bans photographers in an effort to corner the market on images from their games, so an artist picks up his sketchpad. Similarly unexpected images form the basis for “Red Eye,” a pictorial account of an airplane flight by Christoph Niemann, from The New York Times.

And on the lighter side, “Scene In” from Alexandra Garcia and Nick Kilpatrick of The Washington Post (from this year’s American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors multimedia prize winners). Easter Sunday outfits? Check. Gold Cup finery? Check. Local club scenesters? Yup. A series of beautifully shot and edited fashion spot-checks from greater D.C.-area neighborhoods and events.

I recently heard “The Liars’ Club” author Mary Karr talking about how memoir shouldn’t be about payback. When you were writing “Seven Years,” were you thinking about payback, or was it something else?

There was a story that The Awl had done about a week before written by a woman who had been in New York for five years. It was a story about “What I’ve learned in five years of being in New York,” or something like that. I know Choire Sicha, the editor of The Awl; we’re friends. And I said, “Hey, I’m leaving.”

People always ask me about freelancing. I do this stuff where I go to Columbia and I give talks, and people ask me for help with editors and help with pitches. And so I said, “Why don’t I just write about my experience in the last seven years?” And he actually said that normally he would not be up for that, but he knew that a lot of my anecdotes were really crazy, and so he said yes.

It’s the kind of thing that I wrote in my head mostly, and then I just sort of poured it out the way I would a late night email to a boyfriend, or a letter from summer camp. So it wasn’t really payback.

I’m not suggesting your piece is payback, but Karr was saying that a lot of people write first-person pieces imagining that they’re going to pay back people who treated them badly. Her point was that the best first-person pieces really don’t do that.

I definitely was aware as a journalist that people would comb through it and try to decipher it. People do that for everything, with Stephen Glass’ memoirs, or Michael Finkel, or “The Devil Wears Prada,” or Toby Young. Those are a lot more payback and a lot more like, “I got inside, and here’s what it’s like.”

One of the things that I did want to do – which is not really payback – I wanted to relate the normalcy of these situations. There are so many people who would give their kidney to have a story in The New York Times, or a story in GQ. Once you’re inside it, and you see how the sausage is made, it’s not so fascinating. And also it’s not like you get made; it’s not like you’re a made man.

One of the most telling moments in New York was that a friend was a Harper’s intern, which was this already-storied position to be in – so many great people have gone through that role. He related that he had to deal with writers who would be calling and asking desperately about their paychecks. The takeaway wasn’t that Harper’s is financially in trouble or anything like that. The takeaway for us was that you could be someone who gets to do 8,000 words at Harper’s, and you’re still fretting about money, that it’s still this juggling act, this vaudevillian situation of catch as catch can.

I didn’t want to do payback in terms of spite against specific editors, but I did want to relate specific experiences in quoting. As much as I could, I tried to quote, “Here’s what an editor said to me.” Facts, so that it didn’t seem like me being moody and bitter.

You didn’t name names, which I thought was interesting.

I quoted things, but I didn’t name names. There’s really no point in naming which Times editor told me not to bother coming to him anymore. But obviously people at New York magazine knew the editor who sent me that condescending email. Other people pieced it together, and people obviously know who Steve is, although I didn’t put his full name. He doesn’t need that showing up in Google.

People like to do sleuthing in comments with things like this. And so I was surprised, in a good way, by the comments, because I would really not want feuding to happen. I just wanted to relate the experiences in an honest way, and the way to do that is to quote people in actual instances. Like the stuff with the Fortune editor – it’s not important who that person is. It’s more about the experience, and that things can be sloppy. I think a lot of those examples show me as sloppy.

The email I wrote to Adam Moss is insane. I think I wrote it on a Monday, and he took until Thursday to reply, and I basically thought for those four days that I would be banned forever from writing for New York. When I wrote the piece for The Awl, I told Choire, “We should run the whole email,” because I’m not really a fan of excerpting things. He said, “Yes, but it makes you look crazy.”

That’s actually the part of your piece that we’ve quoted in our commentary.

The thing to Adam – I bounced it off of one person, a friend who does communications for another newspaper in town – and she was like, “This is really intense.” At the end of the actual meeting with Adam, I told him, “Thanks for replying to my email even though I was kind of a crazy person.” And he said, “Yeah, it was really intense.”

And I said, “Yeah, you know, but it all worked out.” And instead of saying anything friendly, he said, “Yeah, it was much more intense than normal.” But he was very chatty later.

I wouldn’t say the piece was spiteful. If you click to the other first-person piece that I did – 3,000 words about being in unrequited love with a straight guy – that’s not a relationship vendetta or anything, the kind of spiteful or passive-aggressive thing you might see in those “Modern Love” columns in the Times. It’s more like, “Here’s an experience that people don’t talk about.” So if I talk about it, hopefully people will feel less lonely. I’m an immigrant. I’m a gay man. I’m a Southerner. I went to public schools, which in New York is really a thing. I didn’t go to Yale or Princeton or Harvard.

There’s a sense that people don’t talk about that, and so if you do talk about it, other people feel less lonely. And that’s one thing that I heard so much in emails with people getting back to me: “You really made me feel like I’m not alone, and that there’s a shot for me, that it’s possible.”

You can’t think if you get one book on the New York Times bestseller list, or you get one TV show pilot greenlit, or one feature in Rolling Stone, that you’re going to be set. It’s this constant hustle, and I think people don’t talk about that. I guess it was payback or spite against the mythos or fantasy world of the “made career.”

Did you see in the comments on your piece that someone thought your essay was a hoax because there’s no Richard Morgan at The Commercial Appeal?

That’s because I don’t start until the 16th, which is actually awkward, because that’s the day that Elvis died, and it’s a big day of mourning in Memphis. But that person actually emailed me and said, “Please tell me that you’re real, because I wouldn’t want this to be another viral marketing hoax.” One of the people in comments was Toby Young, and he said something like, “You should have been more spiteful. You played nice, and I got a movie.” But I found the comments more often said things like, “That is the scariest and sweetest thing that I’ve ever read,” “That was so nerve-wracking and romantic,” or “It filled me with hope and dread.” I didn’t know if they were compliments or not.

I think the piece said, “Here’s what happened. Here’s a dissection of my seven years. Judge for yourself if this was a success or not.” On paper, when people introduce me at panels, my resume looks really good. But in the middle, in the gaps between, it’s vitamin soup. That’s Choire’s phrase, by the way.

With the piece itself, did you just suggest it, and Choire said, “Go for it”?

He just greenlit it, and then I just sort of filed it, and then he cleaned it up a little. It was edited, but lightly edited. He changed transitions here and broke up a gigantic paragraph there. It was pretty direct and clean.

I remember being very scared, because he sent me back a one-word email that was all caps. And the only other time I ever had that was when I quit Gawker, there was this thing where I sent them my IM transcripts with Nick Denton. And when I did, the reporter sent me back one word that was all caps: FASCINATING. I became extremely scared.

But when Choire wrote back, it was PERFECTION. I got really nervous. I didn’t know if that was sarcastic or not. I started looking at it again and wondering if I should take this part out, if I should make it less moody, less emotional, less jokey. In the end, you just sort of have to make peace with the facts of it.

When you asked (in an email) about using humor and the first person, there are parts of it that are really didactic, just very cold pieces of a factual essay. But if you wrap it in humor, that’s the best use of humor. Humor is such a great medium for disturbing or upsetting information, which is why there are so many racist jokes and sexist jokes and political jokes. But when you read it, you can tell that it’s just me.

So you didn’t create a persona? You wrote it as yourself?

I think that’s really important. I did struggle with voice for a while. When you write for ESPN, it has to be quick and jabby and fratty and funny. And when I wrote for the Times, I always felt like I had to tell myself, “Write as if you were wearing a monocle.” When you freelance for a bunch of publications, there’s schizophrenia in terms of the different voices and different audiences. I sort of got tossed adrift in the beginning, and then I established my own voice.

If I can make a piece in Scientific American resonate with the same voice that a piece in ESPN does, I feel like that’s an accomplishment. And if that’s me, then I feel more comfortable. It’s actually one of those things where when you find your voice, you get more comfortable with your voice, and you do it more, and it gets stronger. If you read that other piece, the personal essay, the relationship essay, you can tell it’s the same kind of me, even though it’s a me that has retreated much more into research and academic stuff with the citations.

The other pieces I’ve seen from you are similarly off-kilter: a nerd who becomes a star for a day, Barbie goes vampire and such. It does feel like that’s part of your voice.

Yeah, I definitely sympathize with the underdog, with Fesh in his story. That was very frustrating. That was originally planned as a “Talk of the Town” piece, and they were sort of like, “This doesn’t feel right,” and that was it. There are a lot of editors who say, “Oh, this is good, but it’s not right for us.” And I think, “If it’s good, why don’t you run it?” I still get frustrated with that kind of thing.

You use humor, and you write a lot about comedy performers. Do you have any background in comedy?

No, but I love comedians. I moved a lot when I was a kid, so I had to be funny. Unless you’re the star of the football team, the only way to make friends quickly is to be funny. And comedians are amazing in terms of their storytelling. I’m hypnotized by improvised comedy. A comic touch is important – that’s how people remember things.

So you were never a comedian, but were you really a ranch hand in Colorado, an evangelist in China, a hitchhiker in Costa Rica and a track & field statistician in North Carolina?

Yeah, I tried out for the track team, but I collapsed with a quadruple heartbeat, and that’s when I learned I had a congenital heart defect. So I became a statistician, so that is the only way I could be around all the male runners. But I broke the gender barrier, if that matters.

And then I was in the Young Life Ministries, and I was in Campus Crusade for Christ. When I came out, I came out in my college paper – I had an opinion column, and I came out while I was the head of Campus Crusade for Christ, which was the largest organization on that campus, at North Carolina State University. It was 1300 students meeting every week, or maybe 1200. And we did an evangelism summer program in China. I was a ranch hand in Colorado at a place called Frontier Ranch in Buena Vista, Colorado. And Costa Rica? I got abandoned in Quepos, which is this Pacific Coast town, and I had to hitchhike my way back to San Jose, which is a three-hour drive over rope bridges. That was really rough, but I managed to do it.

But that bio – I keep meaning to fix that bio, because one time I interviewed a guy, an archaeologist, and he slam-dunked a giant pineapple onto the table when I first started the interview, and he waved it in front of me. My bio says, “Pineapples are his weakness.”

I assumed that meant you loved them.

Yeah, I would probably eat anything with pineapple on it. But he sort of waved it around as if it were kryptonite and made a joke about it. It was weird and awkward and made me think I shouldn’t put that much information about myself out there.

A lot of working journalists who work full time for news organizations imagine that if they lose their jobs at newspapers or magazines, they’ll try to make it as freelancers. You’re moving the opposite way, going from freelancing to a newspaper gig. What would you say to them?

There are so many different considerations. You’re OK to be a freelancer if you have a spouse who has a job where you can get health insurance or you can lean on their salary. I don’t have that. But also the thing that’s difficult with freelancing is that if you sold a story today to GQ – a 5,000-word story at $2 a word – you’d get $10,000 three months from now, after it runs. It would be two weeks after publication – at least that’s how Condé Nast works. So you can have success right now, but there’s this perpetual motion machine where the money I’m earning now from freelancing is not related at all to the work I’m doing now. It’s related to the work I did three months ago or two months ago. The work I’m doing now will allow me to have a life three months from now.

When you first start that, you’re existing off the freelancing you did three months ago, which was nothing. So there’s this initial drought period. And then maybe you luck out, but it really takes a while to get a lot of work going. There’s a part of The Awl piece where I describe it as “choosy begging.” People emphasize the choosy part when they fantasize about being a freelancer, and not the begging part. But there’s so much freelancing you have to do that’s just 300-word stories.

Nobody wants to point to some 200-word infographic in the front of the book of some random magazine and say, “That’s what my career is.” But that’s what you have to do – you have to have a bunch of those to float your passions.

I really don’t want to say anything bad about any of my J-school professors, because they were all amazing, and I would not be the person I am today without them. But J-school has a problem where it only teaches how to do an 800-word AP story or a 5,000-word New Yorker story. I don’t know what they teach for broadcast, because I didn’t do any of that.

J-school doesn’t prepare you for 300-word front-of-the-book items. It shouldn’t – because like any education, J-school should be aspirational – but it’s really easy to write an 800-word AP story if you’re being told that a story has a lede and a kicker, and a beginning and a middle and an end. But it’s really hard to do all that and distill it into a haiku version for those front-of-the-book pieces that magazines require. One professor told me something that helped me a lot: “Stories are not beginning, middle and end. Stories are change over time. All you have to do is have the end of it, and the beginning of it, and then what happened in the middle.” Which is basically the same, but having it distilled as “change over time” makes it so that you can do it in two sentences. You can do it in sort of a Harper’s Index way, with just one sentence and another sentence, and that’s a story.

That was another one of those stress-relief moments for me. It really let me feel comfortable approaching things like tone, rather than dealing with structure. Structure is the most frustrating thing to deal with, but once you get over that, you can focus on tone and doing that subliminal aspect of journalism as a certain kind of evangelism.

And even when you can pull that off, editors will still sometimes kill the story.

You have to know that freelancing can be like an abusive relationship. You sort of get slapped in the face, and you say, “OK, great. I’ll try that again later. That’ll be great.” It’s extremely frustrating.

But you just stick with it. There are so many stories where I’ve made more money off of kill fees than from publication, because a story just got shoved from magazine to magazine or from department to department.

You have to be very hopeful. You can tell in that Awl piece that I’m basically hopelessly romantic and optimistic. You have to be someone who believes in what you do and believes that being a writer is who you are. I couldn’t be an ad guy. I could use my writing skills and my communications skills in PR or speechwriting, or advertising, or in book publishing, but I just know that I’m a writer. You have to know that.

As is the case with the two essays we’ve selected as our latest Notable Narratives, they are often excruciatingly personal, with the blade of intimacy sharpened on a hard stone of humor. Richard Morgan’s “Seven Years as a Freelance Writer, or, How to Make Vitamin Soup,” from The Awl, recounts the story of a skilled professional trying to survive as a self-employed journalist. Jennifer Lawler’s “For Jessica,” from her own blog, weaves a recent report about the happiness levels of parents into an account of her daughter’s crushing medical challenges. A very hard read, Lawler’s piece attempts nothing less than to redefine the idea of happiness.

When you bring her to the hospital for the eighteenth time, or maybe it’s the twentieth, and she says, “I want roses, like a princess. Red ones,” you make sure she has them, even though it destroys your budget for the month. Raising your daughter makes it impossible to also hold a steady job, so you freelance, despite the fact that you’re not really cut out for writing about things normal people are interested in.

And you find out, interestingly enough, that there are so many not-normal people in the world that you don’t ever have to write for the normal ones if you don’t want to. Which is a huge relief. It’s a club and the password requires an appreciation for dark humor, and you have to have been through gut-wrenching grief to get here, and you look at the people who don’t know, and you realize, for the first time, that you don’t want to be them: innocent, unknowing, unformed, unrealized, their lives entirely unlived.

Morgan’s piece narrates a different kind of struggle. Along with offering cringe-inducing stories of the most awkward moments in his freelancing career, his essay serves to inspire and warn writers who believe they’re dying to walk in his shoes.

After getting the runaround for a month, I sent balloons to an editor at Rolling Stone with a note: “This is cheaper than skywriting. Lemme know about my story.” When the Times asked me for writing samples, I sent them only a 3,000-word essay I had written about unrequited love with a straight guy. I sent a looooong note to a personal and professional hero, Adam Moss, wherein I compared him both to Big Bird and The Pope and quoted him to himself— no, really.

It’s a style that’s easy to do badly, but these writers tell you something difficult and wonderful and secret — something no one else will, or can. Their words have a looseness that lives in a different ZIP code than Hemingway. The language feels impulsive and headstrong, and carries the reader through year after year, in tales that seem too long to possibly read to the end. But you can’t help yourself – you don’t stop reading, and you end up thinking about the stories for days.

[For more on vitamin soup, read our interview with Richard Morgan. And for a post-surgery update on Jennifer Lawler's daughter, see her new blog post.]

CLASSIC NARRATIVES

See how Chris Jones and David Grann both build a narrative and then proceed to deconstruct it.

“The Mark of a Masterpiece,” by David Grann from The New Yorker. Grann’s latest threatens to set him up as our literary debunker in chief. On the heels of questioning the evidence around the arson charge that led to the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, Grann looks at the science and the art of Peter Paul Biro, who has made a career of indentifying lost work of art masters.

AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen

“TV’s Crowning Moment of Awesome,” by Chris Jones in Esquire.  Jones peeks behind the curtain of “The Price Is Right” to consider  a Las Vegas weatherman, a game show, long-shot odds and the unknowable nature of everything. We love surprises.

RANDOM FARE

“China worries about losing its character(s)” by Barbara Demick from the Los Angeles Times (via TheBrowser.com). Texting and typing are replacing the elaborate strokes that make up written Chinese. And when it comes time to jot down a few words, more Chinese are realizing they can’t remember exactly how.

“The Road (a comedic translation),”from Jacob Lambert on The Millions.com. Arts criticism can have a narrative bent, of course, but what about a parody fiction as literary criticism? Here’s a sample of Lambert’s treatment of Cormac McCarthy’s monstrously popular novel:

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold and the ditch he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Not in a weird way … In the dream from which he’d wakened he and the child had wandered in a cave, scrounging for rotted batmeat. Shadows playing the walls like clownpuppets, the whitegloved fingers gnarled and ginshaken. Encircled by the dim, an abattoir lullaby. They came to a great stone room within which lay a longdead lake, its water stagnant and foul. And on the far shore a eunuch mime, naked save for a filthy gray cravat. Dead eyes milky and hollow. With a thin straw to its dirtscarred lips, it knelt, sipping from the brack. It heard their steps, craning its mimeneck to see what it could not. Skin translucent, ribs charbling and swortled, the heart beating tiredly. Facepaint smeared. It waved sadly in their direction, for it could not speak. Then it scuttled into the inky blackness. The man shook his head in the freezing predawn. No more peaches before bed.

Lambert’s take reminds us of the 2007 New York Times piece, “10 Things To Do Before This Article Is Finished,” which lay bare the structure of the ubiquitous trend story — doing one while mocking it.

“Working Lives (1),” from Granta. A compact little nugget of memoir in just over 1,000 words. Interviewer Isa Pessoa and translator Julia Michaels have crafted an account from Antonio Oliveira Ruvenal, a cab driver in Rio de Janeiro. Watch how the story spirals out from Ruvenal’s childhood into his adulthood and then constricts back down to the lives of his children.

“Divine Provenance: the Dalai Lama and His Mysterious Patek Philippe,” from Hodinkee.com (via @esquiremag). A blog sketch rather than a full narrative, but with this strange tale behind the Dalai Lama’s snazzy chronometer, who cares?

Pekar was a non-fiction storyteller who recorded his daily existence for others to draw. In the medium of American comics, where the power fantasies of corporate superheroes in tights are the norm, Pekar’s work stands out as the extraordinary testimony of an ordinary working-class man in an ordinary American city. Pekar’s main topic was the chronic ache of life, and reading his work brings relentless reminders that life takes death along for the ride.

Newspapers have published lengthy obituaries on Pekar (see our list at the end of this post). Comic book fans and specialists have populated the Web with profiles of all kinds. Harvey Pekar was, for a time, a trending topic on Twitter. But Pekar has already told us about his life in excruciating detail, and so the best source on his life may well be Pekar himself.

Encouraged by Robert Crumb in the early 1970s, Pekar started writing comics. Even when his work was illustrated by well-known graphic artists such as Crumb and Dean Haspiel, the creative spotlight was always on him as writer and protagonist. His work offered the ordinary adventures of a middle-aged file clerk suffering from a restless existential angst.

“Curmudgeonly” is perhaps the word most often used to describe him, but the tone and themes of his stories were as diverse as the team of artists who rendered his dialogue and plots. To read an issue of his “American Splendor” series is to perceive a single life as a polyphony where a character’s psychological and physical identity is never the same.

So what was Harvey Pekar’s contribution? How were his comics different?

A comic book author who could not draw, Pekar became one of the leading artistic figures of an often unappreciated medium. Like the graphic genius of underground masters Harvey Kurtzman and Crumb, Pekar’s comics were an anomaly. Nothing in them reflected the “splendor” that had defined comics for decades. His narrative universe was in fact a form of “minor literature,” focusing on the deliberately picayune instead of the grandiose.

Part Steinbeck and part Bukowski, Harvey Pekar unwittingly reimagined the Great American Novel as a comic book. If any greatness were to be found in this exercise, it would be in shedding light on the grim reality of everyday urban life. “American Splendor” did for comics what Allen Ginsberg’s “Reality Sandwiches” did for poetry, but unlike Ginsberg, Pekar’s writing was always part of a collaborative effort, where dramatic dialogue was waiting to be “performed” through the illustration styles of a gallery of artists.

Coming from the streets of Cleveland, “American Splendor” proved that “ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.” The series was inserted into the black and white tradition of underground cartooning, but it shied away from the hallucinogenic scatology of the 1960s comix that Crumb and others pioneered. Unlike many of his peers, Pekar did not cater to fantasy. He made no attempt to imagine a better world. He simply wrote his life as he lived it, and in collaboration with the artists he created a very personal form of urban, hyper-local, working class, neurotic autobiographic storytelling. His narrative skills transcended the grids of printed comic book pages to reach the realms of film, music, and biography and webcomics.

Like other key figures of American comic book culture (Robert Crumb, Dan Clowes, Chris Ware) Harvey Pekar was a passionate collector of jazz records, and it is possible to read in his work the syncopated melancholy of an art form in danger of extinction. “Our Cancer Year,” the graphic novel he wrote with his wife Joyce Brabner, represents the height of his drive for the existential monologue, which he had inaugurated in an early collaboration with Crumb (“The Harvey Pekar Name Story,” later translated into the 2003 film “American Splendor,” in which he played himself, as did star Paul Giamatti).

If ever there were a comic book tragic hero, it is Pekar. More Hamlet than Macbeth, he was constantly concerned with self-reflection and the imminence of death: the hospital archive where he worked most of his life until retirement was a constant reminder of life’s futility, and therefore of the importance of stories not usually told. Pekar’s storytelling was, most literally, a survival mechanism, a life-affirming exercise.

His aesthetic and political perspective acquired the critical appreciation of an educated elite; nevertheless Pekar wanted to write “clearly” in order to be understood by everyone. In 2003, he appeared in a movie about his life and work, and his belief that “you can do anything with comics” guided his life project.

In his final years, Pekar told the story of his troubled teenage years for the first time in “The Quitter,” which received widespread critical acclaim. For Smith magazine, Pekar worked with a team on “The Pekar Project,” creating an ongoing webcomic series to explore in different formats and styles his concerns about life and death in corporate America. His last work is journalistic in nature, offering glimpses of what the future of online, non-fiction graphic reporting might become.

Pekar achieved an intensely personal, visual body of work that was nonetheless collaborative. Seamlessly combining the short story with long-form narrative, he employed his obsessed depression to illuminate the beauty of the mundane.

In Harvey Pekar’s comics, life and art merge, but between the romantic ideal of success and the objective hardship of daily life, there is still a chasm. Pekar might have been successful enough to become a regular guest on David Letterman, but his pen (and tongue) remained too sharp to settle in the soft focus of mass media. His work was tense with contradictions: optimistic in its negativity and funny in its seriousness. Moreover, in a medium built on fantasy and lies it told the uncomfortable truth.

[For more on Harvey Pekar's life, see these links to obituaries and remembrances worth checking out, from Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times (with others here and here), New York Daily News, The Washington Post, The Washington Post’s comics blog, Mediaite, Comics Reporter, Comics Beat, The Comics Journal and The Guardian.]

Ernesto Priego is researching comics and narrative as a Ph.D. candidate in information studies in the U.K. at University College London. He has written previously for Nieman Storyboard on manga memoir and on comics as narrative journalism.

No one, it seems, has time to read an article, never mind a book. Books, like fine art before them, have receded from the intuitive routine of everyday life. These days, we have to make a differentiated, focused effort to concentrate on reading. Like art set aside in a gallery or museum that requires a special visit, now books too require a special gallery of attention in your mind. You must set aside time, and set aside space, and of course set aside the Internet so you can’t just check your messages or update Twitter in between chapters. Or — who are we kidding? — in between pages. We’re getting our entertainment — or news, or information, or even our meditative moments — here and there, interspersed throughout the day, while doing other things.

Our short attention spans provoke much lamentation, but it’s really nothing new. According to a PBS documentary on vaudeville, an act was viable if it could manage to keep the audience’s attention for three minutes. Three minutes!! That’s a span we can understand — approximately the length of the average YouTube video, or a popular song.

A detail from "Blue" by Peggy Nelson

People have been complaining about the speed and fragmentation of modern life since well before there was a “modern” to complain about. And now that we’ve become modern, or even post-, it’s faster and more fragmentary than anyone anticipated, and looks to be going ever further in that direction.

But maybe this is not bad. This is not good versus evil going 40 rounds for the title. This, I would suggest, is something more neutral. Fragmentation and absorption are models of interaction. And like all models they invite other perspectives.

For example, consider a book, back in the day when we had time for them. A nice, long book with hundreds of pages, one so good you don’t want it to end. You are completely immersed, looking forward to the end of the day when you can lose yourself in it again, staying up past your bedtime for just a few more pages. Good, right? Our lost Eden, right? But now consider: what may be absorption and focus from one angle could be irresponsible escapism from another. What are you doing with yourself while reading that book? Hiding from your surroundings, spending hours of time alone and immobile, emerging to measure real things in your life by the imaginary story? Replace “book” with “Internet” and this looks a lot like addiction.

Now consider a Facebook game like FarmVille, Twitter novels like @ARTGatz or my own @adelehugo, or a film or series broken up into short segments, such as the YouTube comedy series The Guild, perfect for viewing in a corner of your screen at work. What may be fragmentary and distracted frittering from one point of view might also be a way to integrate the experience of art into everyday life. When traveling I have seen microfilms in subway cars. The tiny TV screens in taxis show local news and weather updates, although they are heavily bracketed by advertising. Their problem is not that they are short but that they are using most of that minute or two to “sell” us.

I’m not advocating a complete replacement of long with short, nor am I claiming, with Pangloss, that “all’s for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” I don’t think that bullet points are or should be a substitute for an in-depth story. But I am saying these are models of interaction, and there’s always more than one way to look at, and use, a model.

In addition, there’s often a future concealed within the fragment. For example, take FarmVille: You check in every day for weeks, maybe months, as you tend your virtual 2.5D farm with your friends. It’s not a narrative, but it provides a location for a tentative community. Or consider what happens as you follow a Twitter feed: it accumulates over time to a portrait of an individual, and occasionally, may even develop into a relationship. Short pieces may be grouped in series and provide a long-form in aggregate; and they may be stepping stones to an eventual community or relationship, in which new stories are built on and relate to a shared history of previous ones.

Some good examples of short-form nonfiction series include The New York Times’ One in 8 Million project, The Globe and Mail’s “Behind the Veil,” Sundance Channel’s documentary shorts, or the short investigative clips on Current TV.

Online spaces are often considered in opposition to real-life communities, and suffer in the comparison. But it’s not so much that online community should be measured as a poor substitute for something more “real” – it is more that we use every space in which we interact as a location for community, and we use every available technology to do it – whether that technology is bricks and mortar, the Internet, the printed page or even language itself. The larger context for narrative includes not just the stories, or the tellers, but of course the listeners. Ideally, a story finds or activates a large audience engaged with the issues; in an interview with the Harvard Business Review, Jane Goodall touches on the importance of storytelling in changing both attitudes and behaviors.

So it’s not a single story we need to be looking at – it’s related stories, too, as well as the places where stories are collected and accessed. And we need to look at how people are using those places, and how we might better activate the narrative potential of all user behaviors, including some that may not seem to be directly relevant.

In other words, small increments, doled out consistently over long periods of time, can accumulate to — in *some cases — significance. Of course this does not happen with every interaction, every storyline, or every online experience. But it is happening. Within our short attention span theater we may be building long-term networks—and rehearsing new models for long-form storytelling.

[This post is an expanded version of a piece Nelson originally wrote for HiLobrow.com. For related thinking, read HiLobrow editor Matthew Battles’ look at how the Internet influences the way we read and learn, published in a series over at Nieman Lab.]

AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen

Summer is upon us! Well, actually it’s kind of cold and gray outside here, but as you, our imaginary beachgoer, break out the sunblock and pack the Cheetos and flip-flops for a day in the sand, we’d like to introduce the first in an ongoing series of posts listing stories we’re reading, watching or listening to—stories we think you might want to check out.

Sometimes the events themselves make a piece worth a look. In other cases, the skill in storytelling catches our collective editorial eye (the baleful gaze of which resembles something from Tolkien).

If you want to pass along stories you think we should see (and should perhaps include in future lists), please don’t hesitate to send them to us. And yes, we’ll be rotating media, so there will be posts on “What we’re watching” and even “What we’re listening to” in future weeks. Stay tuned…

ARTICLES

“The Spill, the Scandal and the President” by Tim Dickinson from Rolling Stone (via The Browser).

According to reports by Interior’s inspector general, MMS staffers were both literally and figuratively in bed with the oil industry. When agency staffers weren’t joining industry employees for coke parties or trips to corporate ski chalets, they were having sex with oil-company officials. But it was American taxpayers and the environment that were getting screwed.

“School of Fight: Learning To Brawl with the Hockey Goons of Tomorrow” by Jake Bogoch from Deadspin.

Tom Bloomberg decided to teach me how to punch another kid unconscious on a hot summer day in rural Manitoba.

“Stranger-than-fiction Manhunt Ends in Skwentna” by Joshua Saul from Alaska Dispatch (via Gangrey.com).

Ben remembers breaking into one lodge and finding a stuffed moose and a well-stocked medicine cabinet inside. He said he took eight big Percocet and four or five Oxycontin—a pretty decent amount of synthetic heroin. “I threw up on the moose,” he said.

“Christina Finds Her Voice” by Jo Ciavaglia from the Bucks County Courier Times.

In an emergency room earlier this year, a young woman listed her symptoms, then explained why, if a CT scan were done, doctors would see that half her brain is gone.

“Chosen, but Not Special” by Michael Chabon from The New York Times (via David Quigg).

The presence of Jews among the not-yet-extinct peoples of the world can no more be credited to any kind of special trait or behavior than the Tasmanians or the Taino ought to be blamed for their own eradication.

BOOKS

The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum.

Until the early nineteenth century, few tools existed to detect a toxic substance in a corpse. Sometimes investigators deduced poison from the violent sickness that preceded death, or built a case by feeding animals a victim’s last meal, but more often than not, poisoners walked free. As a result murder by poison flourished. It became so common in eliminating perceived difficulties, such as a wealthy parent who stayed alive too long, that the French nicknamed the metallic element arsenic poudre de succession, the inheritance powder.

Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present by Hank Stuever (Christmas in July June!).

Before the Black Friday dawn, the sky is still a mix of dark blue and the sick sodium-vapor saffron of the suburban night. I park by the Beijing Chinese Super Buffet and walk across the lot to the Best Buy, where hundreds of people—some in their twelfth or thirteen hour of standing in line—await the day-after-Thanksgiving doorbuster sale.

From “a really little town” in Berkshire County, England, Richard Dunlop-Walters hopes to give you something worth checking out at a site called, well, “Give Me Something To Read.” The site catalogs links to long-form stories online, including the usual suspects at The New York Times and The New Yorker, engaging pieces from The Chronicle for Higher Education and The American Scholar, and odd gems like “How To Spot a Spook” from the November 1974 issue of Washington Monthly and a 1996 game theory argument in favor of promiscuity.

“Give Me Something To Read” grew out of Instapaper, which allows users to download stories for later reading. In June of last year, Dunlop-Walters took over editing duties for the site from Instapaper founder Marco Arment—who is also lead developer of Tumblr. Most of the audience for the site comes via the Instapaper app and Tumblr.

Stories that appear on the site arrive via both crowdsourcing and individual human intervention. Dunlop-Walters explains the crowdsourced part: “Once users bookmark an article a certain number of times, it goes into the queue.” The number required to get in the queue goes up, he says, as the traffic on Instapaper increases. Sifting through the queue of stories to find ones that make an impression, he chooses material for the left-hand column on the site, which is titled “Editor’s Picks.” The Editor’s Picks that get the most positive feedback via Tumblr’s notes system of likes and reblogs make up the bulk of the links in the right-hand column, which is titled “Greatest Hits.”

In terms of his own tastes, he talks less of fidelity to individual writers than to publications. Asked for specific examples of favorite articles, he mentions “How American Healthcare Killed My Father,” a piece from The Atlantic, and “The Interpreter,” a story about the Pirahã tribe in Brazil from The New Yorker that he says is “largely responsible for getting me into linguistics.”

While the site invites submissions, Dunlop-Walters says “maybe three or four people a week” actually send anything. Though he tends not to include interviews, his only rule is that selections must be nonfiction. “And it doesn’t have to be straight journalism,” he adds. “I posted a blog post called ‘The Secret Lives of Professors.’ But generally they come from newspapers and magazine articles.”

While there is less of an emphasis on narrative nonfiction than can be found at Gangrey.com or even @longreads, the site boasts a clear personality. It’s fond of think pieces, especially about human cognition and national security issues, and offers a poke in the eye on questions of sexual conventions and history.

“Curation is kind of an interesting thing,” says Dunlop-Walters. “It seems the Web is largely moving toward automation and crowdsourcing. When you rely on the opinions of everyone, things tend to average out and become boring—well, not exactly boring, but very rote and not surprising. I think it can be helpful to keep an individual sense of taste. I don’t think there’s anything that can replace that.”

Last year also brought the publication of A Drifting Life, an 855-page memoir by 75-year-old Yoshihiro Tatsumi, published by Drawn & Quarterly. Tatsumi is recognized by fans as the grandfather of alternative manga, a style identified with social realism and visual experimentation. It’s worth taking a look at both projects, because Tatsumi’s life and memoir have arguably played a role in making innovative storytelling projects like Manga Memoirs possible.

A Drifting Life

Eleven years in the making, A Drifting Life is several things at once: a graphic narrative portrait of the manga artist as a young man after World War II, a treatise on the storytelling possibilities of experimental manga, and a testimonial to the very concrete relationship between form and content in comics.

A Drifting Life offers insight into the development of manga as an industry and a form of multimedia storytelling. Hiroshi, Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s stand-in protagonist, starts creating and publishing manga in seventh grade, inspired by the “postcard manga” contests hosted by the comics magazines that he and his jealous, chronically-ill brother passionately read and analyze. Coming from a poor family, Hiroshi uses one and two-panel humorous manga submissions as a means to make ends meet.

Hiroshi would soon find the postcard and two-panel format too constricting, and would begin creating longer stories with serious plots and experimental visuals inspired by world literature (Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare) and Japanese and American film (Kurosawa and Hitchcock). Managing to combine the personal with the theoretical, Tatsumi’s memoir offers an account of the historical development of manga as a medium caught between the demands of the market and the drive to experiment with narrative approaches.

Tatsumi’s graphic storytelling about serious subjects predates that of his American counterparts by decades (see my prior Storyboard series for a history of true stories in American graphic novels). If, as The New York Times assures, A Drifting Life “has a rolling, rumbling grandeur,” it is because Tatsumi has done more than take on serious subjects—he aspires to change the way stories can be told. During one of his internal monologues about the creative process, Hiroshi aspires to synchronize “panel and time.” By using the medium of comics to tell his life story as an author and the story of the Japanese comics medium itself, Tatsummi achieves not only the seamless blending of life and art, but also an impressive example of graphic storytelling, where the images themselves serve as examples of the cultural history they tell.

A Drifting Life emphasizes the basic role that letter writing and the postal system, including the waiting times in between sending and receiving letters and packages, played in defining the creative process and narrative techniques of Japanese comics. Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s lesson is clear: the ways that comics are produced determine the medium’s storytelling powers. Without knowing it, in his struggle to develop a kind of “manga that wasn’t manga” by aspiring to recreate cinematic storytelling out of still images in panels on printed pages, Yoshihiro Tatsumi was anticipating the revolution of digital storytelling.

In A Drifting Life Hiroshi spends a long time writing, reading and waiting for letters delivered through the post. “Postcard manga” combined a medium of communication with an art form—the postcard was the art work itself. Tatsumi’s book is also testimony to the influence of non-Japanese cultural products, and in this sense his comics are also an expression of multiculturalism.

Manga Memoirs

If Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s memoir emphasizes the key role that reader-submitted material played in the development of Japanese comics, Manga Memoirs takes this formula, based on the direct interaction between readers and publishers, into the realm of Web 2.0.

Manga Memoirs is the 21st century expression of manga storytelling. It stimulates manga creation to narrate experiences of multiculturalism, a hybrid approach that is mirrored in the website, which combines print and digital media.

The anthology is the result of a continuous open call for submissions from regular people of Japanese/Canadian descent who register to the site and submit their work for consideration. The best stories are commented on by readers and participants of the community and chosen by a committee. The site combines online digital tools with the publication of a printed book anthology featuring the winning submissions. It is based on user-generated content but reciprocates by stimulating comics creation, reflection on multicultural identities and the active participation in a social networking site composed by people with shared backgrounds and interests.

Manga Memoirs’ creative director, Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin, describes the narratives they ended up featuring:

The vastly personal nature of the stories submitted, and the restrictive 8-page count gave birth to some lovely and meaningful “slice of life” moments. Layer in the innocent feel of manga artwork and the result is a charming and approachable form of story consumption.  I believe that people who may not be drawn to short stories or other text-based forms of autobiography still find themselves drawn to Manga Memoirs because of the artwork, and end up moved by the intimacy of the author’s offering, in spite of themselves.

Even though the first anthology has already been published in print, they keep receiving submissions, and allow the publication of comments, reviews, blogs and new related work. Says Clark-Bojin:

At this time the first Manga Memoirs anthology has gone through a limited print run in both English and Japanese, and we are in early talks with partners to launch the campaign for the second anthology. The response to the quality of the artwork, storytelling and the process in general has been so positive, I would be surprised if this first volume was the last.

The digital comics platform/reader allows the user, through the “page peel” function, to learn about the creative/production process behind each story, as well as extra information that completes the narrative, such as scripts, drafts, reference images, information about characters and creators, etc.

Talking about facilitating the digital manga project, Manga Memoirs editor Morgan Jeske says

The great thing about Manga Memoirs, to me, was that it strived to showcase both cultures, using a medium that is in its infancy here in North America. When I say infancy, I don’t mean it to sound as if I’m saying it’s stunted or underdeveloped, but that in comparison to manga in Japan, it’s very, very young.

Despite the sometimes uneven quality of the source stories in the final print anthology, the project offers insight into the promising future of true comics storytelling and publishing by combining print and digital tools and “opening up” the publishing platform to regular people. While Tatsumi’s memoir is largely limited to the physical identity of a bound book, Manga Memoirs turns his ideas into a social enterprise that can unfold everywhere for all participants.

Stitches is the harrowing account of Small’s childhood growing up in a 1950s Midwestern home where no one speaks. His mother expresses herself through the slamming of cabinet doors. His father pummels a punching bag in the basement. His brother beats on drums in his room. In this environment, the young David Small retreats into his art and into his imagination.

At age 14, David goes into hospital to have a cyst removed from his neck. He’s told it’s a routine operation but when he wakes up, he has stitches from ear to chest, and only one vocal cord. For the next 10 years he can no longer speak in anything above a whisper. He later finds out that his cyst was cancer. But no one’s told him this. It’s the first of many secrets that are revealed to him or that he uncovers by accident.

A book about voicelessness and secrets lends itself to graphic form, and Stitches has been roundly praised. The Washington Post called it “brilliant and heartbreaking.” Library Journal wrote, “Small’s art lifts his memoir into the extraordinary.” Stitches was also short-listed for a 2009 National Book Award.

I was excited to get my hands on the book prior to Small’s talk at Harvard. But when I went to the Lamont Library, where the memoir had been held on reserve, I couldn’t check it out. Due to a kink with my borrowing privileges, I was told I couldn’t even remove it from the lending desk. “But I have to read it for class.” “You can read it over there.” The Librarian pointed me to an easy chair, situated five feet from the security desk, with its bright florescent light and constant parade of patrons.

I settled into my seat resentfully, and then I opened the book. Stark industrial landscapes in Detroit give way to an empty street where all of the homes look alike. The reader is then led into the open door of one of these homes, through the living room, where a young boy is drawing on the floor, and into the kitchen, where a woman is doing the dishes. “Momma had her little cough.” I was immediately sucked in. Three hundred and twenty-nine pages later, I lifted my head and found myself again in the bright light of the library entrance, blinking, disoriented.

I recently caught up with David Small by phone from his home in Michigan to talk about Stitches.

“Graphic novel” is a form that now encompasses all kinds of storytelling, fictional and factual. As someone who’s made a career as an illustrator, how would you compare reading pictures vs. reading words?

I wasn’t a fan of the graphic novel before I did one. I’ve always been interested in the worldless form, in picture books, but an entire novel in complex ideas and pictures? I’d not seen anything aside from Maus that made me want to try it. Then a Parisian friend showed me some graphic novels from his shelf. Here were some very sophisticated themes being dealt with and the art was terrific, much less raw than a lot of the stuff being done in America. That’s one of the problems with graphic novels. Who wants to spend 400 pages looking at what each picture means? You don’t often see good art and good story combined, and that’s what I saw happening in those French books. And I thought, “I can do that.”

Did Stitches come to you first in images, or in words?

It first came in memories, which are like images. But I had to write things out before I could draw them. I think that writing gives a kind of structure that images can’t. Writing is left-brained and drawing is right-brained. I think the left brain has the organizational frame work that helps to give the order to the chaos of memory that’s necessary to make a story that’s comprehensible to the reader, and also to the writer. I could draw all day but not in any form that would cohere.

Also, since I’m not a very good writer, drawing helped get me started. There was a tremendous relief because the visual language is much more my thing, my milieu. Also, because my story is about being wordless, being forbidden to speak as a child, and then having my voice taken away, the graphic form seemed perfect.

The New Yorker compared your book to silent film. And in many ways, Stitches could be a storyboard for a movie.

Absolutely, but it’s not a movie.  It’s a book that was influenced by film.

Who were the influences?

Bergman. Hitchcock. Polanski. Buñuel—his simple way of telling a story. Psycho is brilliant visual storytelling. The camera swoops into a particular building, then into a window. It carries the viewer. But there are writers who do this too. Flaubert will take you away from Madame Bovary’s room and take you into the landscape and the light, and it will tell you about the experience she’s going through. That was a cinematic technique he devised before there was any cinema.

During your talk at Harvard you described the importance of stripping away writing. How difficult was this for you?

I resisted it a first. It was my wife who kept saying, “You really ought to try paring this down to a silent book if you can.” I resisted. I felt dependent on language. But then I saw the sense of it and I made it my own. The words were so poorly done.  It goes along with the whole problem of picture books if the author is not the illustrator. The author doesn’t need to say that the character has a bathrobe on if they have a bathrobe on in the picture. The author has to cut his precious text. I had to go through this process myself.

How did you decide what to strip away? How did you find your themes?

In your life everything and everybody is important. But to a reader they’re not. What helped me was my editor Bob Weil telling me to find leitmotifs and encourage the ones that I already had going. Alice in Wonderland was a leitmotif and it became a great connecting mechanism. The dreams are the connecting thing, too. Rather than picking my themes, it was a matter of recognizing them and discarding some of the subplots that seemed essential, but really weren’t.

In the memoir, you write about your desire, as a child, to escape through art. And the conclusion of one chapter shows an illustrated David Small actually diving into the page. But David Small the author creates this world through drawing. Was it hard to recreate and return to such a painful world?

Absolutely. It was very painful, and for that reason I was very reluctant to do it. That was the root of my problem. I was still caught in that world, in a way. My brother and I avoided each other for 50 years because neither of us wanted to be reminded of that world. I didn’t want to see him because I saw he was recreating the life we had in Detroit. He bought the same kind of house we grew up in. Furnished it the same. Married a hypochondriac. And he was just this sort of silent, passive aggressive guy, just like our family. I had no respect for that. And I hated seeing it in myself.

What was it like to recreate your mother in such a graphic way?

It was thrilling, in a way, to bring her back to life. The power of being able to resurrect the dead in a picture, as well as all of those places I can’t revisit because they don’t exist anymore. But seeing her on the page, scrutinizing my every move, I felt like she was going take my voice away. I felt it so strongly when I started drawing. And I began to get very tense.

It was during that time that [my wife] Sarah and I were at a restaurant. I was resting my hand on my neck and I could feel this swelling. The tumor, that had taken years and years to develop before, seemed to be coming back in a manner of minutes. I thought it was a hallucination until I saw Sarah’s face and she went pale. She could see it happening. She shoved a glass of wine at me and said, “Drink this,” and I did. Then I got up, went into the bathroom to check, and there indeed was this lump exactly like at 14. I realized at that moment that if I didn’t let it out somehow, it was going to kill me. This was proof. I would have died right there in that john if I hadn’t got a grip. This is not going to happen. I’m going to make this book.

How did authoring and drawing your story change your perspective on it?

When I was creating my mother and myself I suddenly realized the size difference. It really matters! When you’re six and you’re in that body, the grown ups look like giants. But then I drew myself and thought, “That little powerless thing. How could you treat a creature like that, who is so dependent?” It made me realize my position in a totally different way. I was not responsible for my mother’s unhappiness. I was just this little kid trying to be a kid and getting through the day.

You’ve illustrated many award winning children’s books including Imogene’s Antlers and The Gardener. How did your style of drawing change for Stitches? 

First I eliminated color. We have such an emotional reaction to every color. To have to think about whether I should put in a red or ochre in every panel for 300 pages, it would have killed me. I wanted a black and white book, like the films of Bergman. To strip away color gets to the issues more directly. Then, I tried to develop a style that was more like handwriting. You can see my early books I can draw a hand like nobody’s business. But in Stitches it’s reduced to its gesture. I would do the gesture in a single line if possible, just to speed the process up and not be bogged down by making everything accurate.

Was it strange to go from tales of wonder to this darker story? Did you feel like you had to negotiate between two worlds?

Not for me. I had a foot in both worlds for my whole career. I was an editorial artist for magazines like The New Yorker and the Times for years. I wanted to be an editorial artist before a children’s illustrator, but it turns out my strength was in picture books. It was a relief to have the reins taken off [with Stitches]. Because when you work for kids you want to be careful about the language you’re using and the way you depict. Books can have dark humor, like Imogene. But the last thing I want to do is take away hope.

The afterward to Stitches was strangely moving. After getting to know your family as illustrated characters it was startling to see them in photographs, as real people, with their own histories, their own problems. Why’d you do it?

I think my first impulse was childish. I wanted to show everyone that I drew my mom and dad like they looked. Then I thought, wait… it’s an important thing to show the human beings behind the story. To see the people makes it easier to understand them. That’s the process that I went through. To go from feeling they were monsters to thinking they were doing the best they could. They really weren’t the malevolent beings I thought they were. I’m not saying the book was act of forgiveness, but an act of understanding close to forgiveness.

Your book is about secrets but in writing and touring this book you’re exposing those secrets to everyone. Is that strange for you?

It doesn’t bother me. They’re dead. The fact I walked in on my mother and her lover, that was something she was probably expecting all her life. In fact, a lot of people knew about it but couldn’t admit it to themselves. That’s the interesting thing about these secrets. They’re out in the light. It’s family and friends who willingly choose to ignore them.

Your parents were dead by the time you wrote Stitches, but your brother is still alive. What was his reaction?

I was forced to show it to him, in a nascent state, because of a publishing scandal that occurred three years ago, where a woman had lied about her memoir. The publisher lost a lot of money. My publisher was concerned that anyone who was still alive who shared my experience might have a different memory. I had to admit my terrible relationship with my brother and send him the book. He took me aback. “I love this book,” he said. “It’s a terrific story.” “What do you think about it as a family history?” “It’s a snapshot of my youth. It took me right back.”

How did it change your relationship?

We’re friends. We talk. We call one another. He’s quite a good film critic. I don’t know if we’ll be best friends, but we’re brothers again.

————–

Alysia Abbott is a writer and former WNYC radio producer. Her work recently aired on KRCC and has appeared in a number of anthologies and publications, including Time Out and Salon.com. She is currently working on a memoir about her own childhood.