Lizzie Skurnick's Blog, page 5

Chapters reading series at The Center for Fiction

I was thrilled to be asked to participate in Girls Write Nows's Chapters Reading series! It kicks off with next week with Dolen Perkins-Valdez. Mine's April 23rd. Here's the entire upcoming series below.

In today's movies, girls in peril face many horrors

At first blush, the heroines of the films "Precious," "New Moon" and "The Lovely Bones" seem to have little in common — except that they all started out as characters in novels.

Precious is an abused, teenage mother who can barely read. "New Moon's" Bella is a vampire-in-waiting who lives to be courted by a glittering heartthrob of the undead. Susie, the narrator of "The Lovely Bones," is the product of the kind of suburban idyll for which Kodachrome was invented.

Yet despite these diverging...

'Staying True'? Most Marriage Memoirs Do Anything But

Like Elizabeth Edwards' "Resilience," scorned-wife screeds are most pertinently a thinly veiled opportunity to bash an ex's paramour. (Edwards' book might as well have been illustrated by a photo of her giving Rielle Hunter the finger.) And, like many conjugal postmortems, "Resilience" also loses its authority by trafficking in a deeply implausible transcendence. You'd find it a lot easier to buy Claire Bloom's "Leaving a Doll's House" or Mia Farrow's "What Falls Away" were those literary...

Pregnancy Is Not the Public's Business

When should you have a baby?

I ask not because I am planning one of my own (sorry, Mom!) or because, as I creak over the midpoint of my 30s, I can't weigh the risks and drawbacks for myself. It's not even that I care what you think. But between the Super Bowl's controversial Tim Tebow ad, Lifetime's highest-rated debut ever, "The Pregnancy Pact," Rielle Hunter's very public child-support woes, and a flood of recent other online, onscreen and on-page debates, I've finally realized that even if...

The End of Single Women

Given our culture's fascination with getting to the happily ever after, why is it always so unsatisfying to hear from someone already there? Is it that details prized from the circumspect spouses are almost belligerent in their banality? (See Michelle Obama on Barack's morning breath.) That the narratives themselves are so ludicrously one-gendered? (When's the last time you saw a husband wrestle in print about a marital bed he still enjoys?) Or that a genuinely frank admission peskily seems a...

Fatherhood Gets Hip

Jonathan Safran Foer has a son. He's notthe Son, I don't think, although I might be forgiven for doing so. Because even though it is generally agreed that we are living in a child-centered moment, Eating Animals, the Everything Is Illuminated author's somewhat reheated contribution to the recent spate of ruminations on flesh eating (verdict: don't), is a singular entry in the annals of parenting literature—bypassing a now-commonplace obsession with one's offspring to head straight to...

Saint or Monster, Elizabeth Edwards Isn't the Issue

With all due respect, I could not disagree more with the notion that Elizabeth Edwards has her priorities straight.

As the globe knows, the past few years have been particularly unkind to her: she got terminal cancer, learned of her husband's affair, and then got the shattering news that he'd fathered a child with the other woman.

via Politics Daily.

Examination Passed

Shelf Discovery voted on of The Book Examiners 10 best books of 2009!

Constant Comment

You would think that since I've been on the internet for 97 years I'd be accustomed to commenters — but sprung full-blown, as I was, from the serene foreheads of a literary blog and a women's blog, I had no idea what it was to be subject to hundreds of people yelling at me aggressively in (sic).

HOWEVER. Thanks to the torrential traffic floods of the Daily Beast and Politics Daily, I have been yelled at for about a week and am starting to get the hang of it. (A friend who combs through to...

Attention, Dearest Fine Lines readers and Shelf Discovery fans!

I'm sitting here working on pieces on New Moon, The Lovely Bones, and Push's transition from page to screen, as well as dissecting the particulars of Elizabeth Gilbert's new memoir Committed, and I was suddenly overcome by a semi-procrastinatory but genuine RUSH of gratefulness to you all. I don't know that in the years of Fine Lines or since I've been able to adequately thank you for your wonderful comments, emails and assorted contributions to the uncovering of this miraculous period of...