Author Julie Gilbert Discusses the Writing of Her New Book ‘Giant Love’
Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
Should you feel like a creep reading about transgressive family affairs on the subway?Credit…Librado Romero/The New York Times “My sister. My daughter. … She’s my sister and my daughter!” If you’ve ever seen Roman Polanski’s sun-bleached neo-noir “Chinatown,” which turns 50 this year, you can’t forget it: a defiant, tear-stained Faye Dunaway wailing the sordid secret of her troubled-heiress character’s life while Jack Nicholson’s flinty detective Jake Gittes slaps her halfway to next Saturday. I thought of that scene again recently after reading a much-passed-around piece in The Atlantic about the surprising prevalence of incest that has been exposed by test results from popular ancestry sites like 23AndMe. And I felt smugly justified in never getting around to swabbing myself with one of the two DNA kits, still languishing somewhere at home in a junk drawer, that I’d received as thoughtful but vaguely terrifying gifts. Better, perhaps, to never know that you are 6.7 percent Slavic highlander, and also that your great-uncle is actually your grandpa. The two books in this week’s column are not about that sort of flowers-in-the-attic depravity (or even the highbrow provocation of literary fire-starters like Kathryn Harrison’s fevered 1997 memoir “The Kiss” ). But they do cast a sometimes-discomfiting eye on blood ties: tales of romance and longing that transgress most good people’s idea of familial propriety, and sometimes cross much starker lines. Should you feel like a creep reading these on the subway? Forget it, Jake ; it’s fiction. — Leah Six years before he won a Booker Prize for “The Line of Beauty,” Hollinghurst produced a slimmer, more glimmery snapshot of gay life in London at the turn of the millennium. Alex, a diffident Scotsman in civil service, still pines for his former live-in boyfriend Justin, an out-of-work actor who treats the whole world like an adoring stage. Justin has abruptly left him for Robin, a handsome older architect with a failed marriage, a cottage in Dorset and a 22-year-old son named Danny who shares both his father’s enviable bone structure and his sexuality. When Alex falls for Danny — and the […]
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Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
The Mallorcan Joana Marcús is a young bestseller in Spain and America, writer of young adult novels with a romantic
