This piece of mine, written Friday, appears on today’s (Monday) op/ed page of the New York Times.
Raise High the P.R. Blitz
by Jennifer Finney Boylan
THE national bereavement over the death of J. D. Salinger provided a strangely public moment in the career of a writer who’d become best known, in recent years, for his reclusiveness. There [...]
(Postscript: thirteen has been a kind of amazing year for sean, my accompanist in this piece. By way of contrast, you could check out what he looked and sounded like only one year ago, in the same piece of argle-bargle generated for xmas 08. And Zach, seated to my left [...]
By Christmas 1966—the year of the great snowstorm–my Uncle Al had disappeared. No one knew what had become of him– whether he’d finally fallen in love, or if he’d been overwhelmed by one of the deep despairs that plagued him throughout his life, or if he’d finally run into trouble during his endless travels throughout [...]
A late breaking Thursday-morning update… alert readers have written to me pointing out that clearly the creature pictured next to me is actually the THING, not the HULK, a distinction so obvious I’m mortified to have failed to comprehend it. Thing, all rocky; Hulk, green. The Times regrets the error ….and to be serious for [...]
The Oprah show that my family and I were on last spring re-runs today, Monday, I believe. You could check it out if you wanted.
The good news is that we were among “Oprah’s Most Memorable Guests.” The bad news is that the other “memorable’ guests included lying Ted Haggard, the Texas Polygamist [...]
I wrote the following very short entry for the Penguin Blog in support of my story, “Trans,” in the anthology LOVE IS A FOUR LETTER WORD, which is about broken hearts and breakups. The entry I post herewith; the blog itself you can visit here, if you want, and read more from the other authors [...]
• Amtrak train pulled into New York as my iPod coughed up “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters.” “My own seeds shall be sown in new York city.” Cool.
• At the Met, had a conversation with the portrait of the woman looking out at us with a sad, lovely expression, pens in hand; over her shoulder a [...]
Jenny Boylan's eleventh book, FALCON QUINN AND THE BLACK MIRROR, will be published by HarperCollins in May 2010.
"You hang around our family, you learn all kinds of stuff."
August, 2002.
With President Clinton and Maine's Governor John Baldacci, fall 2006.
Edward had been my teacher at Johns Hopkins in the winter of 1986. He visited Colby in fall, 2007. As we took our leave of each other, he kissed me on both cheeks and said, "We have done well. You and I."
Jack was my professor at JHU when I did my thesis, back in the day. After many years, I can now confidently say I finally understand his definition of plot. Which is, of course, "the perturbation of an unstable homeostatic system and its catastrophic restoration to a new and complexified equilibrium."
