Sarah Lyall

“It was cold and gray, and it was in January,” Bardugo said recently, describing the joy of her first visit to campus, as an alienated Los Angeles teenager. “You can’t imagine what it was like for a young Goth kid, this place of stonework and bare branches and darkness and strange wonderful buildings. I felt so at ease there.”

Bardugo, now 44 and living back in Los Angeles, had chosen as her preferred interview location Gold Bug, a Victorian-vibed jewelry-and-curio boutique named for an Edgar Allan Poe short story. With its delicate taxidermied fawn, ostrich-egg chandelier and framed prints of lethal snakes, the shop is a little oasis of anti-Californiana in a neighborhood of peppy athleisure stores. Bardugo loves it.

“Things that are dark and close to the other side are what bring me joy,” she said.

If you read young adult fantasy fiction, you may well share that view. And you will most likely have heard of Bardugo, a superstar in the crowded genre, with books like “Shadow and Bone” and “Six of Crows,” both set in the Grishaverse, a universe where people can harness magic and science in extraordinary ways, for good and for evil.

Her books have sold more than 3 million copies in English, been translated into 41 languages and are being made into a series commissioned by Netflix. “Six of Crows” spent more than a year on The New York Times’ bestseller list. Bardugo’s following is passionate, nearly cultlike.

“Ninth House,” her latest novel and her first for adults, is set not in a fake universe, but in and around Yale — although a Yale dreamt of only in Bardugo’s own philosophy. Its streets, for starters, are teeming with ghosts, many bearing the gaping wounds that killed them, who cluster around the living but can be seen only by a few.

Meanwhile, the dean of the college does secret double duty as the faculty liaison with a shadowy organization called Lethe House. In this alt-Yale, Lethe is charged with regulating the magic practiced at the eight most powerful of Yale’s famous secret societies, known here as the Ancient Eight or the Houses of the Veil.

These elite clubs exist in real life, minus the occult nicknames, and their self-mythologizing exoticism is profoundly satisfying to their members and profoundly irritating to everyone else. (Do the men of Skull and Bones really strip naked and masturbate en masse into a sacred sarcophagus while leveraging their alumni connections into fancy postcollege careers? Don’t ask them or they will supposedly have to leave the room.)

“I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if these senior societies weren’t just old boys’ networks and drinking clubs? What if they were actually centers of arcane magic?’ ” Bardugo said.

Yes, it would indeed be fun. Each has its own specialty in “Ninth House”: Skull and Bones practices divination using human entrails; St. Elmo conjures storms; Aurelian does fantastical things with books and language, at one point curing a novelist’s writer’s block with a ritual involving the exchange of blood and ink.

According to established genre conventions, the novel Bardugo planned had to be aimed at adults, she explained. “YA fiction tends to have a finite quality,” she said. “You’re looking toward a goal — prom or graduation or revolution — and we leave these characters after a moment of tremendous transformation.”

She continued: “But the challenges faced by my heroine are different and don’t stop at one particular point.” She was referring to Alex, the star of “Ninth House,” a traumatized freshman whose work for Lethe is both painful and revelatory. “The goal for her is trying to survive in the world and take care of the people she loves.”

The book is full of insider Yale jokes, including a running gag that Berzelius, one of the senior societies, has no magical specialty and no famous alumni. (“The idea is that they were left behind by their adherence to science,” the author said.)

As an undergraduate, Bardugo was a member of Wolf’s Head, to whose members she has awarded the fictional specialty of therianthropy — the ability to change from human to animal form.

Alas, that is not the case in real life.

“I cannot shapeshift into an animal,” she said. “But I can shapeshift into a drunker person.”

Born in Israel, Bardugo soon after moved to her grandparents’ house in Los Angeles with her mother. (Her father is not part of her life.) Almost nothing appealed to her about California — not the other kids, not the clothes, not the “Sweet Valley High” books that her classmates loved but that left her traumatized.

“It wasn’t until I picked up Neil Gaiman, Diana Wynne Jones and Stephen King that I found there were people who were like me,” she said.

The feeling of otherness flared when she visited Princeton as a potential applicant.

“I stayed with these girls who had a water fight in the dorm,” she recalled. “They were like, ‘You’re going to think we’re so wild!’ ” But what she actually thought was: “I need to be free from this hellscape immediately.”

After college, Bardugo took her time finding her way to fiction writing. She worked at an advertising agency, at an alternative newspaper, at various dot-coms. She wrote the scripts for movie trailers and became a makeup and special-effects artist. She applied for and got in to several MFA writing programs, but was too depressed to enroll.

What she was meant to do was write fantasy, she realized. She completed her first novel, “Shadow and Bone,” the first of a trilogy featuring a scrappy heroine named Alina Starkov, at the age of 35. She has produced more than half a dozen novels set in the same world, and recently wrote “Wonder Woman: Warbringer” for the DC Icons series of books. She works on several things at once; her mind is full of her stories.

Bardugo wears all black, and during the interview accessorized her outfit with a ring depicting two moths and a necklace of the Three of Swords tarot symbol. She is an admirer of the Crone, one of the three faces of the Wicca moon goddess, who represents the wisdom and power that come with maturity.

“I have been taught my whole life to fear aging, to fear changes to my body and to the way the world will perceive me,” she said. “At this age, getting to live the life I want, I feel so much more powerful than I ever have. I love the idea of the Crone and her power, and that none of it derives from sexual desire.”

“Ninth House” can be dark and violent; the dead do not always rest peacefully, and life is hard for those who live. But the book is also a kind of wish fulfillment, the extension of Bardugo’s own yearning. She expects it to be the first in a series of perhaps five books that will take Alex through graduation.

“This was the moment he’d been waiting for,” she writes of one of her characters, after he has performed a neat magic spell: “the chance to show someone else wonder, to watch them realize that they had not been lied to, that the world they’d been promised as children was not something that had to be abandoned.”

She shares that feeling, from the perspective of someone living in a nonmagic world. It registers as a kind of heartache, she said, a “homesickness for a place you have never been.”

“We never stop looking,” she went on. “We’re all waiting for that moment — this belief that there will be no back to the wardrobe, that it goes all the way through.”

This article originally appeared in

A Star of Young Adult Imagines a Supernatural Ivy League in Her Debut for Adults

PASADENA, Calif. — There are many things that might attract a potential student to Yale, but the gloom of New Haven, Connecticut’s dead-of-winter aesthetic is not the first that springs to mind. Unless, perhaps, you come from California and you hate the sunshine and you are Leigh Bardugo, future fantasy novelist.

“I think this book could really save the world,” she says, holding up “The Resisters,” by Gish Jen, which is scheduled for release next year. Patchett ordered a big box of advance copies and has been giving them to everyone she knows.

“It’s about baseball, and it’s presented in such a calm, natural way, and I think it’s particularly wonderful,” she says.

It is a hot day in late August, and it is getting toward lunchtime. In addition to discussing literature by other people, Patchett, 55, has collected me from my hotel and driven me to Parnassus, the dog-, children- and free-coffee-filled bookstore she co-owns with Karen Hayes.

She has peppered me with questions about my weekend plans and my domestic situation. She has discussed with the store manager the vexing problem of Goober, a Bernese mountain dog who comes to work with an employee and whose sweetly lazy disposition does not make up for the fact that wherever he goes, a trail of drool follows. She has suggested books that I might like and attempted to prevent me from paying for them.

Now we have reached her house and been greeted by Sparky, a small black-and-white shelter dog who also “works at the bookstore,” as she puts it, and lunch is on the table — various foods purchased by Patchett’s husband, Karl, from the local farmers’ market. (Alert readers will recognize Karl from Patchett’s book of essays, “This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage.”)

It seems like a good time to discuss “The Dutch House.” Her eighth novel, it tells the story of Danny and Maeve Conroy, siblings who are haunted by loss — of their parents, their home and their understanding of the past. Like other Patchett books, including “Bel Canto” and “Commonwealth,” it is deeply rooted in the peculiar specifics of its characters but feels universal in its themes.

If “Commonwealth,” which explores the collateral damage done to children by their parents’ divorces and remarriages, was semi-autobiographical, then “The Dutch House” is in one respect almost anti-autobiographical, a cautionary tale. Patchett began to play with that idea after interviewing Zadie Smith about Smith’s novel “Swing Time” at an authors’ event.

“It hit me that autofiction is not about what happened to you,” Patchett says. “It’s about what you’re afraid might happen. I began to write a book about the kind of stepmother I am afraid of being.” (This is the wicked Andrea, who marries Maeve and Danny’s father.)

Patchett began work on “The Dutch House” in 2016; two years later, she threw her draft away. “It was horrible to write,” she says cheerfully. “It was like Thelma and Louise going over a cliff. I made so many errors in judgment.”

She switched from first person to third, but that didn’t help. “I thought, ‘This is like death,’” she says. “But actually it was like burning a cake. I thought, ‘I’m going to stand here in the kitchen and eat these little fluffy things and throw everything else out and make it over again.’”

It was getting to the end of 2018. Patchett had just a few months left before her no-going-back deadline, and like an unruly toddler, the book would not behave. She pulled it together with help from a number of friends, all writers themselves.

From Barbara Kingsolver, Patchett got the idea to change what happens to the children’s mother. From Nell Freudenberger, she got the recommendation to read the works of Kate DiCamillo, author of “Because of Winn-Dixie,” with whom she began an email friendship — and who then suggested a new ending.

And from Jane Hamilton, to whom she always reads drafts of her books aloud (and vice versa), she received the gift of tough love. “She said, ‘I really like it, but the whole third section is trash,’” Patchett recalls. “Well, not trash, but she said there were major problems. So I had to rethink a lot of stuff.”

This is the sort of thing that happens when novelists get together, Kingsolver says. In her case, she was staying with Patchett in the midst of a long book tour. When she asked how the new book was going, “Ann made this miserable face, and I said ‘OK, let’s talk,’” Kingsolver said via email. They stayed up late into the night.

“As it happened, I have a friend whose mother had done the very thing that Ann’s fictional mother had done in her book, which seemed completely implausible to Ann,” Kingsolver said. “I talked about the circumstances as I understood them, and what had led to this unusual family trauma. How elements of it might be useful in a story. I remember it as a fun conversation — taking apart a fictional engine and pondering how it might go back together. For some of us, that’s the definition of a good time.”

Born in Los Angeles, Patchett and her sister moved to a farm outside of Nashville after their parents divorced and their mother remarried. (Their father, a police officer, was an inspiration for the father in “Commonwealth.”) Their stepfather had four children of his own, which made for complicated interfamilial relationships. Eventually, Patchett’s mother would divorce him, too.

Patchett has two stepchildren with her husband but has never had a burning desire to be a mother. Among other things, that gives her more free time in the day. “I never thought for a moment I could have it all,” she says. “Either I could have children, or I could write.”

But she has deep connections to an extended family that includes friends; book people; her mother and sister, who live nearby; and Karl, whom she began seeing after her brief first marriage collapsed. They dated for 11 years before making it official.

“If I’m getting married again, and I said I never would, then I’m all the way in,” she recalls telling him. “There’s no halfway. And if you ever leave me, look in your rearview mirror, because I’m coming for you.”

Patchett is not big on technology — no Twitter, no Instagram, no TV. She bought a new cellphone after her 15-year-old flip phone was recalled by the manufacturer, and she uses it mostly to call Karl when she is on the road. People who text her should know that she will not be texting them back. Callers who are not Karl are often treated to an outgoing messaging announcing that “I do not know how to access these messages,” she says.

What she likes most, really — besides her house, her husband, her family, her dog, her friends and her writing — is Parnassus.

“All we want to do is read and talk about books and wear flip-flops,” she says. “I’m really glad we have this place together where we can go. We’re like the guys from ‘Cheers’ who sit at the bar.”

Parnassus is about to confront an unpleasant turn of events: the arrival of an Amazon brick-and-mortar store in the nearby mall. Patchett is trying not to let it unnerve her. She sees promoting books and bolstering the publishing industry as part of her job.

She’s an ambassador for the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, which helps bookstore employees who encounter financial hardship. She welcomes other authors to her store and has raised the art of the public literary conversation — writers interviewing writers about their work — to a new level. “I want to be part of the ecosystem that keeps our industry alive,” she says.

After the interview, Patchett takes me back to my hotel, pointing out the Nashville sights. “Call if you need anything,” she says, “or if you get in trouble with the police or have an adverse anaphylactic reaction!” (That last remark is very probably an allusion to “Commonwealth.”) And then she drives away.

Ann Patchett Will Eventually Discuss Her Book

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Although the purpose of this conversation is to promote her new novel, “The Dutch House,” Ann Patchett is in no great hurry to talk about herself.

You are French. You are the author of several successful novels. You have written an impractical 700-page screenplay about “the mystical honeycombed interior” of Herman Melville’s mind. You are 50 years old, have a net worth of 20 euros and are about to be evicted from your apartment.

What now? If you are the narrator of French novelist Yannick Haenel’s “Hold Fast Your Crown,” a story of madness, art, alcohol and creativity, you repair to your bedroom with a six-pack to watch one of your favorite movies, “Apocalypse Now,” while musing on its significance to you and perhaps to life itself.

“Every time I see the beginning of ‘Apocalypse Now,’ it seems I am witnessing a lamb being sacrificed,” Haenel writes. “I always rewind and rewatch the first 10 minutes of the film, in which a hidden liturgy seems to be seeking a follower. Does the path that passes through crime exist? The silent path that goes beyond massacre and leads you to innocence?”

“Hold Fast Your Crown” has been elegantly translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan. How much readers enjoy it will depend on whether they are charmed or irritated by its narrator’s aversion to the practicalities of daily life, and how far they are prepared to go in admiring the drunken vicissitudes of his busy, elusive and allusive intellect. “Back then, I was crazy,” his story starts, and it’s a boast as much as a warning.

The novel concerns itself with a surreal period in the life of the narrator. Having unsurprisingly failed to interest anyone in his screenplay, “The Great Melville,” which explains (among other things) how a true writer is someone “whose solitude reveals a relationship with truth, and who at every moment devotes himself to it, even if that moment comes out of minor tribulation, even if that truth escapes him and seems obscure, even insane,” the narrator decides that only one person is capable of bringing his vision to life: American director Michael Cimino.

Cimino, as you might know, directed not only “The Deer Hunter,” whose symbolic use of a deer as prey resonates throughout Haenel’s novel, but also “Heaven’s Gate,” that magnificent debacle that all but ended his success as a filmmaker.

“He embodied in American film what Melville had embodied in American literature,” Haenel writes of Cimino; “he was the last great American film director.” Discuss. (Or not.) Both men experienced triumph and then melted into obscurity; both “approached the very truth there is in failure, and probably began to no longer separate failure from truth.”

Through a well-connected agent friend, the narrator gets hold of Cimino’s phone number and contrives to meet him in New York, where the two get royally drunk, debate film, literature, immigration and other matters and try, unsuccessfully, to visit Ellis Island. The narrator concludes that Cimino has moved beyond conventional film to direct scenes inside his head, which is how it should be. “The days of films projected on a screen would soon be over,” he writes.

Cimino is not the only famous person who wanders into the story. Back in Paris and invited to meet the agent at a restaurant, the narrator finds actress Isabelle Huppert at their table. She orders “raw meat, a sort of steak tartar,” and scarfs it down with “stupefying gusto.” She talks about “Heaven’s Gate,” which she acted in, playing a madam.

The narrator is a pessimist, at least in this scene, during which he posits that the artistic flame that used to illuminate the world has now gone out. Huppert disagrees.

“The world, I don’t know, maybe you’re right, maybe it is dead,” she says. But there are incredible people still left. “With them, believe me, your fire, even if it is invisible, will never go out.”

The novel is stuffed with incidents. There is a dog, a menacing neighbor, a private museum devoted to hunting, two mysterious mustachioed men, a waiter who resembles Emmanuel Macron, a funeral, a terrorist attack, a stolen car, several sexual encounters, and endless discussions of art and the meaning of existence. Some of the more abstruse passages in the novel made sense to me; others did not, even when I reread them several times. Maybe it helps to be French. (The book won the Prix Medicis, and was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt.)

We never get to hear exactly what happens in “The Great Melville,” and it’s fair to say that no one will ever make it into a movie — especially not Cimino, whose death is reported in the course of the novel (in real life, he died in 2016). The narrator’s screenplay is a MacGuffin, and we might consider the plot as a series of vivid set pieces, a loose scaffolding upon which the author can hang his grand philosophies.

There are times that the novel seems to be making its way, however discursively, toward some profound, possibly whale-size, revelation. You decide. As the narrator begins his tale, he remarks that if he tells us all his thoughts, “and how and why they occur to me, if I tell you about their simultaneity, this story will go on forever.”

Please, no, the reader thinks. But maybe the exhaustion and occasional exhilaration of being exposed to so many ideas all at once is a reward in itself, a step closer to whatever truth, or consolation, or cosmic understanding, Haenel believes we all yearn for. Or maybe, as he writes, “literature didn’t need any other fulfillment than itself.”

Translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/books/review-hold-fast-your-crown-yannick-haenel.html" id="a8cdbd3b-c604-3b7a-a194-5e1d0dfc709b">The New York Times</a>.

(Books of The Times)

'Hold Fast Your Crown': A Narrator Follows a Vision to the Edge of Sanity

The year was 1987. The sounds of Debbie Gibson, Duran Duran and the Pet Shop Boys wafted from the radio, ear candy to a generation of voluminous-pantsed youths. To Manzoor, these provided little relief from the agony of his particular disaffection. But one day, a classmate lent him a cassette tape of the music of Bruce Springsteen.

“I was like, ‘Isn’t he the guy who makes millions out of pretending to be working class?’ ” Manzoor said recently. His classmate responded: “Bruce Springsteen is the direct line to all that is true and meaningful in the world.”

The first song Manzoor listened to was a live recording of “The River,” with its striking, incantation-like spoken introduction. He had never heard anything like it.

“It wasn’t music about escapism but about confrontation — confronting what it’s like to grow up in a town that has problems, to have issues with your parents,” he said.

Unable to afford to buy the records, he went to the library. “I was borrowing the albums and photocopying the lyrics and studying them. I would come home from school and go upstairs and put on ‘Born to Run’ and ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ and play it all night.”

How a bandanna-clad musician from New Jersey helped a Pakistani kid in suburban England survive high school by speaking directly to his troubles — restlessness, alienation, the burden of parental expectation, inchoate longing, being working class, being poor — was the subject of Manzoor’s 2007 memoir, “Greetings From Bury Park: Race, Religion and Rock ’n’ Roll.” It is also the subject of the movie “Blinded by the Light,” which opens in the United States on Aug. 16.

(Bury Park is the name of the Luton neighborhood where Manzoor was born. Alert Springsteen-ophiles will notice that the book’s title echoes that of Springsteen’s debut album, “Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.”)

Directed by Gurinder Chadha, the movie has a similar feel-good multicultural-triumph-over-adversity vibe as her best-known movie, “Bend It Like Beckham.”

Early reviews range mostly from complimentary to ecstatic. Writing in Variety, Owen Gleiberman called it “delirious and romantic,” an “incandescent ode to the life force of pop music.” It got a standing ovation at Sundance.

After “Yesterday,” Danny Boyle’s fantasy about a suddenly Beatles-free world, it is the second movie released this year featuring a nonwhite Briton whose life is changed by the transcendence of music.

Manzoor is now 48, a seasoned journalist and the father of two children with his Scottish wife, Bridget. He is working on a new book and often does his writing at the British National Library, where he sat down over coffee recently to discuss the film and his membership in the vast tribe of Bruce fans.

It is weird, Manzoor said, to see your life on screen, even if the fictional one diverges from the real one. The movie, for instance, leaves out his older brother, presents his mother as fluent in English and shows him actively arguing with his father, none of which is real. But the story is mostly true, he said, “emotionally autobiographical” in the way Springsteen’s songs are.

“My mum really did make clothes until 1 in the morning,” just as his movie mother does, he said. “My dad really did work at Vauxhall until he got laid off, and he really did wear suits to the job center” when he looked for a new job that never materialized, he said. And the teenager in the film, played by Viveik Kalra, is called Javed, which is Manzoor’s family nickname.

It is not realistic, obviously, to think that the people of Luton have a habit of breaking into Bollywood-style dancing in the streets. But that was a way the director helped incorporate Springsteen’s music and words into a film meant to tell the story of a young man yearning to be a writer and transformed by music. (This is another reality tweak. Back then, Manzoor wanted, if he wanted anything at all, to be a DJ.)

“I didn’t want to make a jukebox musical,” Chadha said. “The film is about writing and words.”

“The pressure was to take that idea of writing and make it dramatic,” she said.

Take her approach to “Dancing in the Dark,” the gateway song that brought new fans to Springsteen in the mid-1980s with a catchy tune and a jaunty video featuring an as-yet-unknown Courteney Cox. Just as “Born in the U.S.A.” can be misconstrued as upbeat and patriotic when it is really about dead-end jobs and unemployment, so does “Dancing in the Dark” fool you until you know what it says. In the movie, the lyrics pour across the screen, as intimate and immediate to Javed as the poetry he has been secretly writing.

“People might listen to ‘Dancing in the Dark’ and go, ‘What a great song,’” Chadha said. “But when you listen to the words, it’s a song about alienation and a kid feeling out of step with where he is, hating himself and wanting to get out, feeling that something better is happening somewhere else.” (In other words, the way all teenagers feel.)

Chadha and Manzoor have known each other for a long time, but Chadha made it clear that in order to make a film of “Greetings From Bury Park,” they would “have to get Bruce on our side” and eventually secure permission to use his music, she said in an interview.

In 2010, Springsteen came to London for the premiere of “The Promise,” a documentary about the making of the album “Darkness on the Edge of Town.” Chadha took Manzoor along as her guest.

By this time, Manzoor had been to more than 100 Springsteen concerts, and Springsteen had begun to recognize him as a superfan. (He stood out for being Pakistani, having big hair and positioning himself near the front.) On the red carpet, the singer unexpectedly spoke to Manzoor. “He said, ‘I’ve read your book, and it’s amazing,’” Chadha related.

After everyone stopped hyperventilating and went home, they began slowly to work on the screenplay (Manzoor and Chadha share credit with Paul Mayeda Burges, her husband and longtime collaborator). Then Chadha went off and made her next film, historical drama “Viceroy’s House,” putting the project on hold for a few years.

“And then Brexit was happening,” she said, “and it was very ugly. The world was turning into quite a divisive place. And I said, ‘I’m going to pick up this project, and I’m going to put all my frustration about the world in here.’ ”

There was still the question of the music. In 2017, Manzoor sent an impassioned email to Springsteen, pleading his case. Springsteen said yes, and so 12 of his songs — “Badlands,” “Thunder Road” and “Hungry Heart” among them — appear in the film.

The movie has particular resonance now. Anti-immigrant nationalism is again on the rise in Britain, just as it was in 1987, and race relations in the United States are increasingly ugly and violent. “Blinded by the Light” offers a nostalgic look at the sort of American values — tolerance, open-mindedness, inclusiveness, optimism — that sometimes feel like relics of another time.

“The thing that is touching to me, and sad, is the role that America plays for me,” Manzoor said. “When I was 16 I truly looked to America as the promised land. I thought, ‘If it gets too bad in this country, I can just go there.’”

In one scene in the film, drawn directly from real life, U.S. immigration officials question the young Javed as he arrives in New Jersey to visit Springsteen’s hometown. Their response shows how thoroughly love of Springsteen transcends what might seem to be unbridgeable differences of race and age and nationality. Talking to people about the movie has reminded Manzoor of this again and again.

Recently, he related, a couple from New Jersey approached him after an advance screening of “Blinded by the Light.”

“They said, ‘You’re just a Pakistani version of us.’”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/arts/blinded-by-the-light-sarfraz-manzoor.html" id="b288ddcb-f13a-301a-a31d-282910099244">The New York Times</a>.

A Pakistani Teenager's Rock 'n' Roll Salvation

LONDON — Being a teenager in the unexciting London suburb of Luton in the 1980s was gruesome enough without the added complication of Pakistani parents who functioned as an in-house anti-fun squad. But for Sarfraz Manzoor, salvation came when he was 16, in the prosaic location of his high school common room.

CRICCIETH, Wales — Everyone here seems to know Jan Morris, even the waitress at the local fish restaurant. “Have you met Jan before?” she asks as Morris materializes from what, due to a trick of the light, looks to be the ocean itself, clouds of white hair wafting and fluffing around her face.

Morris is 92 and walks carefully, with the help of a cane. She has lived in this corner of North Wales — a three-plus hour train ride from London, and then another 45 minutes by car — for most of her life. In Britain, she is a renowned and beloved essayist, historian, journalist and chronicler of places, the author of more than four dozen books, but it wasn’t until her latest work, “In My Mind’s Eye,” was serialized on BBC radio last fall that many of her neighbors realized there was a celebrity in their midst.

Morris has lived many lives, and it is impossible to separate who she is now from who she was before: James Humphrey Morris, who was born in 1926 in Somerset, England, and whose education and career were typical of privileged Englishmen at the time.

Morris was a choral scholar at Christ Church, Oxford; served in the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers during the waning years of World War II; and at age 23, met and married Elizabeth Tuckniss, the daughter of a tea planter. They raised four children together (a fifth died in infancy).

Morris worked as a journalist specializing in splashy, intrepid assignments for the Times of London. In 1953, the exclusive account of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s historic ascent of Mount Everest turned Morris into that rare thing, a famous journalist, because of how exciting and competitive the story was and how physically dangerous to cover.

“I Had Been Born Into the Wrong Body”

A different sort of fame would come in 1972 when, after a lifetime of feeling trapped inside a body that felt as if it belonged to someone else, Morris traveled to Casablanca, Morocco, and underwent gender-reassignment surgery. She was 46. It was an extraordinarily bold thing to do. Few people at the time understood what such a transition entailed, let alone knew anyone who had one.

“I was 3 or perhaps 4 years old when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl,” the author, now known as Jan, wrote later in “Conundrum,” her account of her struggle to reconcile body and spirit.

Freed from the constraints of her old body, and freed perhaps of the expectations that come with being a male writer, Morris shifted into a different sort of writing, writing lyrical nonfiction books about places (Venice, Trieste and Oxford, among others) and history, including “Pax Britannica,” a three-volume history of the British Empire.

The biggest constant in her life has been Elizabeth, who was first her wife and then her ex-wife — same-sex marriage was illegal in Britain in 1972 — and is now her legal civil partner, her closest companion for more than 70 years. The couple settled here in Wales; Elizabeth mostly stayed home and Morris lived a peripatetic existence, traveling and writing and then traveling again.

17,900 Feet to Base Camp

At lunch, wrestling with a pizza and sipping a glass of wine, Morris is looking back at her life from the vantage point of her 93rd year and reminiscing about the Everest expedition.

Covering the story required being embedded with the Everest team, climbing 17,900 feet to base camp for word from the summit, and then, thrillingly, sending a coded telegram via runner to announce the news to the world. Morris felt a kinship with the rest of the expedition, she said, that never really went away.

“It altered my life so much,” Morris says. “And now I’m the only surviving member of the expedition, and I miss them all.” When Hillary died, in Auckland, New Zealand, in 2008, the New Zealand government flew her and Elizabeth to mark the significance of their shared history.

Morris now lives in the difficult, vexing, preoccupying land of what she calls “extreme old age.” Although longevity has made her more interesting, she thinks, it is not so fun when there is too much of it. She is no longer able to travel much, for instance, and has had to curtail her old wanderlust. “Old age is a great mistake,” she says.

But the remark comes with such a disarming smile and so much charm. “In My Mind’s Eye” — a collection of mini-essays, written one per day over the course of many months — reveals that her writing is just as elegant and erudite, and her mind just as supple, playful, curious, rigorous, humorous and surprising as ever.

The essays range wildly, touching on, among other things, the superiority of her car; the beauty of Welsh rainbows; the felicity of the word “anathema”; the question of whether absolute truth in recollection is possible; the madness of contemporary politics; and the transcendent mundanity of family life.

She also writes about importance of kindness, to each other and to nature. When she sees a bug in the house, Morris ushers it to safety; when she inadvertently kills a woodlouse, as she recounts in a scene in the book, she apologizes.

“That’s the very last thing I wanted to do to an old friend,” she says to the dead woodlouse, as it disappears down the drain.

“It’s so simple, and everyone agrees with it,” she says at lunch, of being kind. “If you could make it the basis for all society, how lovely it would be.”

“To Me Gender Is Not Physical at All”

Morris is a handsome woman, tall and formidable, wearing a butter-yellow coat over a pair of trousers and sweater. She is impatient with questions about transgender politics, possibly because she made peace with her own decisions so long ago. Having reached her age and lived for equal amounts of time as a man and as a woman, she says, the transition she made so long ago somehow feels less relevant.

“I’ve never believed it to be quite as important as everyone made it out to be,” she said. “I believe in the soul and the spirit more than the body.”

Or, as she writes in “Conundrum”: “To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music, it is a spring in one’s stem or an exchange of glances, it is more truly life and love than any combination of genitals, ovaries and hormones.”

In reading “Conundrum,” you’re struck (among other things) by the good humor, practicality and nonjudgmental nature of Morris’ friends and colleagues. Back then, most people seem to accept her transformation with equanimity, in some cases because they genuinely thought it was none of their business or were too British to bring it up.

Gender politics doesn’t seem to intrude too often around here, either, and Morris’ unconventional history has been at once extraordinary and perfectly normal to her neighbors, she says. “I’ve lived two genders, and in this part of Wales they haven’t twitched at all.”

Morris is happily working on another book of journal entries, though her age has given her the license to select only what she wants to do.

In “Mind’s Eye” she recounts her response when offered a writing assignment: “It’s very kind of you to think of me, but to be honest I can’t be bothered.” (To which the editor replied, “Bravo!”)

She also has another book of essays, meant for posthumous publication.

“It’s quite a nice book, but I don’t know why I have decided that this particular one shall be my last,” she says. “Everyone thinks it’s because I have a flaming revelation. I wish I had, but I haven’t.”

“That Subtle Demon of Our Time”

Morris’ deep love of Elizabeth, her lifelong companion, has run like a golden thread through the conversation. When they first met, they so delighted in each other’s company that when Elizabeth took the bus to work, Morris would ride with her so the two could keep talking.

But now Elizabeth is suffering from dementia, what Morris calls “that subtle demon of our time,” and it is a difficult time for a couple who have always shared everything. Morris prefers not to dwell on it, but it is clear that weighs heavily.

It has made both of them by turns bewildered and grumpy and scared, she says. But “kindness reconciles us still,” Morris writes in “Mind’s Eye.” “In all our long years together, in life as in love, we have not once said good night without the sweet kiss of reconciliation.”

They have already had a headstone made for the grave they will eventually share. It is sitting under the stairs in their house.

It says, in both Welsh and English: “Here are two friends, at the end of one life.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/books/jan-morris-in-my-minds-eye.html" id="73773b84-85c7-3844-aaf3-d417be06fd52">The New York Times</a>.

(Profile)

The Many Lives of Jan Morris

Walking into the shop feels for a moment like walking back in time. Vintage posters exhort wartime women to, for instance, Join the Wrens, the British women’s naval service. But the present is here, too. In the window is a blowup of Sen. Mitch McConnell’s ill-tempered remarks about Sen. Elizabeth Warren in 2017, using language that sounds decidedly “Jane Eyre”-ish: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”

Persistence is one way to describe the philosophy of the shop itself, which began 20 years ago as a mail-order publishing business reprinting forgotten titles from an era in women’s fiction beloved by its founder, Nicola Beauman. Having come into a small inheritance from her father, she opened the business with a list of 12 books that first year.

Here you will find books by women you have probably never heard of, like Oriel Malet and Isobel English, and some who might be more familiar, like Katherine Mansfield and Frances Hodgson Burnett. (There are even a few men on the shelves.)

You’ll also find, in pride of place, “Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day,” a 1938 novel by Winifred Watson that was brought to Persephone’s attention by a customer who said it had been her mother’s favorite book. Published by Persephone in 2000, the book — about a poor, drab governess mistakenly sent by her employment agency to work for a glamorous nightclub singer — became an unexpected hit for the company, was made into a movie and has been a consistently buoyant seller ever since.

“I’m pretty allergic to the egocentric idea that it’s all down to my taste, but I have to confess that I have always had this huge interest in early 20th-century fiction by women — what academics would call middlebrow, and I would call a good read,” Beauman said.

“The connection between them is that they were forgotten and they’re very well written,” she continued. “I’m very keen on story and on page-turners. When I get to the end of a book, I like to put it down and feel absolutely wrenched by what I’ve read, to be in a different world.”

Each year perhaps a half-dozen more books join the list, so that there are now 132 in all. All are still in print, and all are still for sale, each for a flat 13 pounds (if you’re ordering from the United States, they’re $20 apiece); every time the new titles arrive, the old books are moved a bit and the shelves reorganized to make way.

After a few seasons as just a publisher, Persephone became a bookstore, too, leaving its old office in Clerkenwell and expanding into its current space. It is both office and shop, one purpose blending into the other across two rooms.

Overall, the shop’s most popular author is a woman named Dorothy Whipple, who has an impressive 10 books on the list, Persephones No. 3, 19, 40, 56, 74, 85, 95, 110, 118 and 127. Her books are funny and spirited and full of insight about real people’s lives.

“I like books that tell me how we lived,” Beauman said. “I’m very, very interested in the novel as social history.” Also, she said: “Good writing is important to me, and that’s why we only have 132 books.”

The books are austerely elegant, bound in light-gray paper and unadorned except for the title in a white rectangle on the cover. Beauman was inspired by the plain covers of 1930s Penguin books and the French custom of publishing books with white covers and red writing, she said, while the colors are something of an homage to old Dean &amp; Deluca coffee mugs.

“I thought, ‘Why can’t a book look like this?’” she said.

Or, as it says on the company website: “Persephone books are all grey because — well — we really like grey. We also had a vision of a woman who comes home tired from work, and there is a book waiting for her, and it doesn’t matter what it looks like because she knows she will enjoy it.”

Inside, though, the books are riots of color. Each book has a different endpaper taken from textiles or prints associated with the year in which it was originally published. Some come from the Victoria &amp; Albert museum; others might be fabrics contributed by customers. “Once somebody brought in a wartime scarf, and you could literally smell their mother’s powder on it,” Beauman said.

Persephone has a devoted and passionate following. Some 30,000 people subscribe to its free magazine, the Persephone Biannually, which includes articles about the newest books and other subjects. Its website contains Beauman’s own wittily erudite musings, which lately have taken an alarmed tone because of uncertainty over the fate of small businesses during the protracted debacle that is Brexit, or Britain’s exit from the European Union.

Last month, the company celebrated its 20th anniversary with smoked-salmon sandwiches, tea, Champagne and cake in an all-day party with a steady stream of visitors giving way to a larger crowd at night.

“The idea at the beginning was that if you like one of our books, you’ll like them all,” Beauman said. “That has worked almost entirely. It’s quite rare for someone to dislike any of the books. I hate to use the word ‘brand,’ but we are something of a brand.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/books/persephone-books-women-london.html" id="a7a3fdb0-4caa-30ea-a648-68d90a1fdadc">The New York Times</a>.

LONDON — Lamb’s Conduit Street seems almost too adorable to be real, as if Ye Olde Fantasy Englande, the one that exists in your head, had suddenly sprung to life. But it feels exactly right that this cobblestone thoroughfare in Bloomsbury, filled as it is with idiosyncratic shops selling artisanal cheese and homemade cakes and other rarefied items, should also be home to Persephone Books, a gem of a place devoted mostly to overlooked works by female writers of the mid-20th century.

A Bookstore of One's Own

For those of us who have long wondered what is going on in the unusual brain of British thriller writer Sophie Hannah, her entertaining recent work of nonfiction, “How to Hold a Grudge,” is a perfect document. It explains, among other things, her relish for parsing human motivation down to the subatomic level and her characters’ tendency to respond to normal events with abnormal behavior that holds some internal logic for them (and for her, since she made it up) but seems wackadoodle to the rest of us.

Now all is clear. It makes sense that a woman who would devote several pages to the litany of emotions she felt about a seemingly innocuous incident involving a friend and his dog would also be the author of “The Next to Die,” the latest in a series featuring the chronically dysfunctional, always amusing Culver Valley police officers.

This time around, they are forced to participate in a regional task force with officers from other jurisdictions. They’re looking for a serial killer who has murdered two pairs of best friends after sending them homemade white books containing snippets of foreboding poetry. (Pay attention to the use of books and stories in this plot.)

It’s a weird case, but these are weird cops. They begin their discussions by debating whether the name they have awarded the killer for publicity purposes — Billy Dead Mates, a play on “Billy No Mates,” Brit-speak for a person with no friends — even makes sense. “He’s killing pairs of best friends, yes, but they’re friends with each other, not with him,” one of the officers says. “To call him Billy Dead Mates implies he’s killing his own friends. And we’ve no reason to think he is.”

The squabbling continues even as the officers band together in resentment against the ineffectual psychological profiler who has been foisted upon them and spar with Detective Inspector Giles Proust, the senior officer working the case. Proust’s nickname, the Snowman, refers to “the icy wasteland he had in place of a heart,” Hannah writes, and he exists for the purpose of raining invective upon his subordinates.

Who will be the next victim? Maybe Kim Tribbeck, a prickly standup comedian whose first-person narration forms parts of the novel. She has received one of the murderous books — hers says “Every bed is narrow,” a quote from Edna St. Vincent Millay — which makes her an obvious candidate. But, as Kim points out, she is not yet dead and has no friends at all, let alone a best friend whose murder could be paired with hers to conform to the killer’s established pattern.

Meanwhile, a magazine writer named Sondra Halliday, one of those people who always take a good argument too far, has been ranting online about how the killings are yet another example of the patriarchy’s complicity in violence against women. “Billy Dead Women,” she calls the killer, which is illogical, because one of the victims is a man. Her obsession with the case naturally makes her a suspect.

In “How to Hold a Grudge,” Hannah peppers discussions of the grudges of others with deconstructions of her own — grudges being negative experiences from the past “that you choose to remember in the present for valid, positive reasons,” she says — and of her forgive-but-do-not-forget philosophy. She is inclined to give her characters room to express their own irritations.

There is annoyance aplenty in “The Next to Die,” and it is strange but funny. Sgt. Charlie Zailer, for starters, is annoyed that her sister and her sister’s boyfriend may have “pretended to split up rather than actually split up,” so she does a little off-piste undercover work, spying on her sister on trains and in cafes.

Kim is annoyed at her ex-husband for smoking too much weed, and at her ex-boyfriend for being so clueless and uncommunicative. “How do most people resist the urge to flatten you with a meat hammer?” she muses, of the boyfriend. Proust is annoyed at the way Sondra spells her name. Sondra is annoyed at men in general.

Hannah is also a poet and the author of two extremely good Hercule Poirot mysteries, written with the approval of Agatha Christie’s estate, that pay homage to their source but bear Hannah’s trademark bite and off-the-wallness.

Longtime admirers of this author were excited to see her appear in a thrilling cameo role in a recent New Yorker article about publisher and novelist Dan Mallory. Mallory, who was once Hannah’s editor and sort-of friend, is revealed in the piece to be a serial fabulist who fooled large swatches of the publishing industry by falsely claiming to have a fatal brain tumor, among other things. As Ian Parker points out in the piece, Hannah’s second Poirot book, “Closed Casket,” features a preposterous but charming Mallory-esque character whose own multitude of falsehoods includes the pretense that he is dying of kidney disease.

Hannah’s plots are like intricate jigsaw puzzles whose pieces you cannot believe will fit together, until you see the completed picture. Her denouements tend to make more sense in retrospect than at the time. The fun in reading “The Next to Die” — even when the scaffolding fails to fully support the structure — isn’t in learning whodunit, but in following the labyrinthine byways of its author’s peculiar worldview and the twisted motives of her characters.

“I should hope that nobody would read one of my books only to find out the answer,” says one of her characters — a novelist herself — in “Closed Casket.” “It’s the working out, and the psychology, that matters.”

399 pages. William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/15/books/review-next-to-die-sophie-hannah.html" id="393c24b8-be31-3077-a21f-8358de691b40">The New York Times</a>.

In 'The Next to Die,' a Serial Killer Targets Pairs of Best Friends

Maybe you think your obsessive need to find out everything about everything via your personal device is a delightful reflection of the boundlessness of your curiosity and the suppleness of your intellect.

But your little quirk might not seem so charming when you see it manifested in Dan, the dispirited journalist in Helen Schulman’s new novel, “Come With Me.” Having slid down the greasy newspaper pole into joblessness, Dan has become a self-loathing middle-age slacker who whiles away his days e-chatting with other underemployed writers and using Google to settle the picayune disputes anxiously raging in his brain.

But as with the pleasures that come from pornography and Krispy Kreme doughnuts, these cerebral gratifications are brief and ultimately unsatisfying. His phone is his sin, his soul, his torment, “an oxygen tank for his breath-starved mind,” Schulman writes. His thirst for understanding can never be satisfied: Each moment of knowing gives rise to a new moment of not-knowing.

The other characters in this smart, timely and highly entertaining novel all have their own troubles with, for lack of a more specific term, technology. This is the shadow under which we operate. What is all this convenience and quick-fix distraction doing to people, to families, to society? Is it bringing people together or driving us apart? Are we using it, or is it using us?

These are not new questions. None of us is immune to the siren call of our gadgets, or to the nebulous sense of voluntarily hurtling toward some unforeseen future that is very bad. But Schulman, whose most recent previous novel was the best-selling “This Beautiful Life” (2011), has wrapped her distress in such an attractive package that the book slides down almost without your noticing its seriousness of purpose.

Here is Dan’s son Jack, constantly on Skype and FaceTime with his long-distance girlfriend, Lily, bringing her along 24/7 while he eats, showers, sleeps and has virtual sex (with her). The sex is better on the phone — “it was like she was in a trance, like she’d do whatever he wanted” — and they end up spending more time together when they’re apart than when they’re actually in the same place.

Here, too, are Jack’s younger brothers, twins known uncharmingly to the family as Thing One and Thing Two, after the Dr. Seuss characters, who have the requisite alarming love of PlayStation.

Then there is Amy, Dan’s wife, who serves as the book’s emotional heart. Juggling work and home, she’s ended up doing PR for a rackety startup run by the ludicrous Donny, a hoodie-wearing, Steve Jobs-imitating, Mark Zuckerberg-worshiping 19-year-old who happens to be the son of one of Amy’s oldest friends. Sometimes their meetings are held in his dorm room at Stanford, featuring his never-made bed. Sometimes he surprises her for breakfast meetings at home and finishes the box of Puffins that is meant for her kids.

Donny’s company is experimenting with an algorithm that allows people to play out alternative virtual-reality scenarios from their pasts — their “multiverses” — for “Sliding Doors"-style experiences. He makes Amy his guinea pig, using intimate details about her that his indiscreet mother has shared with him. Her would-be lives spin out in front of her.

She relives bits of her history and sees what it might have been like if she had, for instance, stayed with the irresistible, irresponsible, unfaithful, unemployed musician/actor/philosopher she lived with before Dan. What if she had not aborted their baby? What if Eric, the older brother she revered, had not died? What if? These fictional scenarios are utterly convincing and fill us with as much confusion, fear and longing as they do Amy. “It’s like nostalgia, only a billion times worse,” she says. “It’s like being boiled alive in oil.”

The family reaches a fault line when Dan becomes interested in a woman named Maryam, a photographer who is obsessed with the devastation wrought by the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan.

Along with an exotic magnetism that quickly wears thin and a Knight fellowship in “experimental storytelling, immersive journalism and interactive design,” Maryam can out-nerd even Dan with the cascade of facts at her fingertips. She has a tiresome belief in her own fabulousness and a habit of sounding as if she is quoting from her own Nobel citation.

“I came to Stanford to study the neurobiological effects of cyberconnectivity,” she declares. “But recently, every cell in my body has been crying for Japan.” One of her former lovers is described as a “South American professor/revolutionary/poet, a super hottie, a sexual adventurer, who had also been in the Olympics.”

Schulman deftly moves around, telling her story from various points of view. Sometimes she strays a little far afield — I wasn’t sure I cared about the dating travails of Jack’s girlfriend’s mother, as amusing as they were — but her observations, particularly about the ridiculousness of the Northern Californian startup mentality, are always apt and sharp.

As the book gathers itself toward its conclusion, the crises that strike the family are all too non-virtual. Their machines cannot help them. We can play out multiple scenarios, dream multiple fantasies, write multiple stories in our heads, but in the end we have only one — complicated, imperfect, hard-to-face — reality.

Sarah Lyall

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