What to Read on the Upper East Side
All my recent literary roads led to the Upper East Side, so I just went up there and embraced fate.
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Hi! It’s Sunday and I’m sleepy, having ignored my own publication schedule for too long.
Of late, I’ve kept myself busy by swapping secrets in coffee shop gardens; spotting baby turtles in Prospect Park’s lake; enjoying Le Fond’s summer pavlova and handmade pasta; stumbling upon the de Zurbaran painting that once symbolized religious devotion, but now appears on the cover of Ottessa Moshfegh’s infamously icky new book; treating myself to late-night Van Leeuwen mini sundaes (I love a brown sugar cookie dough scoop topped with whipped cream, salted caramel, walnuts, and their perfectly slender chocolate sprinkles); wiggling my toes in sand at the beach; dog-spotting and playing cards in Cobble Hill Park; getting a summery haircut; crafting on Carroll Garden stoops; weeping at Joe Hisaishi’s symphonic concert of music from my favorite Miyazaki movies; taking long lunches; playing a tight 100 hours of Fire Emblem: Three Hopes; and more, somehow.
The Books: Upper East Side Edition
My recent reading, and a visit from readerly pal Emily, sent me on my semi-annual trek to the Upper East Side. Since I’ve had a pretty Brooklyn-heavy itinerary recently, I outlined the fruits of my reading and Gossip Girl antics for you today in case you need some inspiration to leave your own neighborhood.
I read and adored 84, Charing Cross Road and The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by Helene Hanff, both contained in my pocket-sized Plain Foxed Edition plucked from Savoy Bookstore in Westerly, Rhode Island. When multiple staff recommendation cards at the shop summed this book up as a “luminous true story of correspondence spanning decades and an ocean, all because two people love books,” I knew I had to have it. 84 contains twenty years of letters between the New York-based Hanff, a self-described "poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books," and a bookseller at a second-hand bookshop in London. The two forge a powerful friendship that soon extends to others at the bookshop, where Hanff sent food parcels during Britain's postwar shortages. Though their quippy letters expand to include updates on family life, baseball, recipes, and other mid-century ephemera, books are always at the heart of the conversation. When Hanff published the letters in 1970, the epistolary work became a hit (and was subsequently adapted into an Anthony Hopkins movie); The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street was published later as a memoir of Hanff's trip to London following 84's success.
I was so touched by the story that I made the pilgrimage up to 72nd Street, where Hanff’s former building is now named Charing Cross House in her memory (though it seems to have gone co-op since she lived there). It also conjured the ineffable pleasure of reading about places I know quite well: obviously there’s the New York of it all, but Hanff’s experience of London happened to center on the same neighborhood where I lived during my time studying abroad. Her sense of wonder while experiencing a place she’d previously only dreamed of struck a particular cord.
Pairs well with: a delectable Eton mess, and Fran Leibowitz (particularly her New York-centric Netflix show Pretend It’s A City).
On the same trip uptown, I pierced the veil of humidity to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in search of a specific piece of museum history. This is because I recently finished the audiobook of Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe, which kept me riveted from start to finish. Keefe, a staff writer at The New Yorker who wrote a huge story about the Sackler family in 2017, unspools the complex dynamics and corrosive greed powering the family that lined its pockets by flooding the US with the addictive painkiller OxyContin. They are one of the richest families in the world, and they got that way by fueling a crisis that has killed more than a million Americans. Unlike other salient portrayals of the opioid epidemic, Keefe’s work is centrally focused on how generations of Sacklers pioneered dishonest medical advertising practices and duplicitous sales tactics to monetize addiction while simultaneously establishing cultural cachet through philanthropy. The book is a character study in the hubris and horror of these “philanthropic monsters,” who have never been criminally charged for their role in the crisis and have agreed to pay a paltry sum to settle more than 1,500 lawsuits while denying wrongdoing. But their philanthropic reputation is paying a different kind of price: Sackler money has now been rejected by a spate of prestigious institutions that once touted the Sackler name.
This brings me back to the Met. Despite announcing that they would no longer accept Sackler contributions in 2019 due to public outrage over the family’s actions, the Met took until December 2021 to actually remove the name from its perch above the monumental gallery containing the Temple of Dendur. Funding from Arthur Sackler, who created the blueprint for outrageously misleading medical advertising by asserting Valium was non-addictive in the 1960s, made the Met’s plans to house the Temple of Dendur possible. Keefe spends the first third of the book on Arthur, who established many of the insidious practices used by generations of Sacklers: hiding behind shell companies, using medical jargon to obfuscate the truth in both advertisements and journalism, and reputation laundering. He died before OxyContin was put on the market, but his mark on the family is obvious. As I walked through the Egyptian art collection—which has an unsurprisingly racist history—and was let out into the palatial and airy gallery housing the Temple, I quickly found the big glass pane above one of the exits. While the Met has removed the Sackler name, you can still see its physical imprint. They didn’t change the pane of glass at all, they just scraped off the lettering.
Keefe’s narration kept me spellbound throughout the 18-hour audiobook, and my mother had a similar experience when she started it a week later. This is a fascinating and enraging book you should read.
Pairs well with: Hulu’s Dopesick for a devastating dramatization of the lives impacted by OxyContin abuse and the Sacklers, and HBO’s satirical dramedy Succession, which is regularly referenced throughout Keefe’s book for its depictions of rich family fuckery.
In other news, I also finished book seven of the Wayward Children series by Seanan McGuire; The Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura; The Sunbearer Trials by Aiden Thomas (publishing next month); and Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny by Holly Madison (which I am NOT linking to). While I’ll be sure to discuss some of these books further in a future newsletter, I’ll leave you with the following tidbit from Holly Madison’s: the infamous Playboy mansion is actually situated on LA’s very own Charing Cross Road. Obviously, it is not as wholesome as Hanff’s aforementioned work.
The Articles
The Unlikely Author Who’s Absolutely Dominating the Bestseller List, Slate (~10 min). I see Colleen Hoover’s books on every single internet platform every single day, and I recently saw two separate people reading It Ends With Us and Reminders of Him while sprawled on blankets in Prospect Park. I, a person who has never read a single Colleen Hoover book, identified both covers from a significant distance because I see them EVERYWHERE and even recognize CHOICE QUOTES from her smashiest hits. This article from Slate digs into what makes her books so apparently irresistible, and conveniently spoils them so I don’t actually have to read them.
Is Publishing About Art or Commerce?, The New Yorker (~8 min). The publishing world had quite a time watching the Department of Justice’s trial to block the merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. This article from The New Yorker is a birds-eye view of the chaos that comes from a bunch of CEOs trying to explain how their companies work in what I have also started to view as my own personal Super Bowl. The biggest takeaway is that publishing bigwigs have a lot to gain from gatekeeping the ways its industry works, since it means that writers can get cheated out of jobs and money under the guise of industry standards; salaries for publishing jobs can be low because of the industry’s perceived prestige; and labor-organizing is particularly difficult. This trial puts a lot of that reality on display.
The Power of Hugs in Anime, The New York Times (~3 min, gift linked). This interactive story is just a delight to scroll through, to be honest. As a person who spent a lot of time trying to interpret body language as a teen and also spent a lot of time watching anime, I felt extremely gratified to see this story come to life.
That’s all for today. Bye!