Foreign Affairs
There are 2 things I want to say about the TT wedding:
1) I’m so annoyed by the random posts that keep popping up of celebs all gussied up with the equivalent of “So, we did a thing…” in the caption. Dear celebs: If you were mandated by some sort of agreement to make a post like that, ew. If you just decided to do that of your own accord because you couldn’t stand people not knowing that you were there, ew again. Thx for your attention to this cringey matter!
2) I’m extremely fascinated by some sort of magical fairyland that was built within Madison Square Garden. If you’ve read Maria Semple’s latest, Go Gentle, maybe you, too, thought of the glass house that the Lockwoods built behind the façade of an old Manhattan building.
If one really puts their mind (and money!) to it, one can build whatever sort of bubble or set one wants. (And then surround themselves only with people who fit in to this scenery.)
This charming novel, Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie, won the Pulitzer in 1985. Two professors from fictitious Corinth University (i.e. Cornell, where Lurie was a professor), an Oklahoma sanitation engineer, and a (maybe) posh British actress cross paths in London while sharing impressions of so-called typical Americans and Brits. What’s it “like” to be American or British?
Protagonist Vinnie (a thinly veiled Lurie, I would assume) can’t decide quite what side of the spectrum she’s on (although her passport is undoubtedly American) — a conundrum made even harder when her well-established Anglophile tendencies continue to be tested. She’s built her own “set” to live in within England as a whole —perhaps like a psychological or figurative version of the Swift-Kelce MSG set-up — but when that gets punctured, all sorts of identity-related crises surface.
It is very hard to “be” something else. “The mimicry of other living beings is a nasty business; the more successful the imitation, the more there is essentially something horrible and uncanny in it.” Zing.
(And btw, loved Lurie’s statement in an interview re some actors: “They come into a room and everyone notices them, but they have this emptiness inside …[they don’t] have much of a self.” Zing again.)
originally published on instagram