the last book I ever read (Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, excerpt two)

from Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall:

When Bob asked Elizabeth to marry him, she could not accept. She would never marry anyone, she told him, hoping the rejection would hurt less, and it must have seemed to her the truth. He turned fierce, berating her. Bob guessed, or someone knew, although Elizabeth never spoke to him of her love for Margaret or any woman, that “I’d like him better if he were a girl”; she seemed to “have it in for” men. The accuracy of the first of his charges, which Elizabeth would not dare admit, was no comfort in close quarters with someone she cared about, although not in the way he’d hoped. She liked Bob—he was one of the few men she did like—and wasn’t afraid of him, and yet she felt trapped, chained to the bed listening to his accusations in the “cheap hotel” where they’d gone for a night to find a future that left each of them alone.

A year later Bob shot himself. His suicide note was directed to the “girl” who had refused his marriage proposal, a postcard she received while staying at the Hotel Chelsea, one of several residences she adopted in the 1930s and ‘40s in or near Greenwich Village, choosing to live close to Margaret in New York City rather than hide away in Boston as she had once planned: “Elizabeth, Go to hell.” The message struck at the helplessness and shame she’d often felt when imagining her mother’s fate, yet there could be nothing “happiest” about the way this failed romance reached a conclusion.

the last book I ever read (Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, excerpt one)

from Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall:

This was 1914, the year the Great Salem Fire consumed more than a thousand buildings and left twenty thousand residents homeless; the year Gertrude Bulmer Bishop was hospitalized for mental illness at Boston’s Deaconess Hospital, where she jumped out a second-story window but was not badly hurt. Gertrude was moved to a private sanatorium in Norwood, Massachusetts, and stayed three months before returning to Nova Scotia and Elizabeth, who had settled there with her Bulmer grandparents. By now Elizabeth had come to view her mother more as one of the Bulmer aunts, and the least reliable of them. Or perhaps not even that—Grandmother and the aunts had become Gertrude’s caretakers. Was it before or after this hospitalization that one of them found Gertrude sleeping next to Elizabeth, holding a knife? Not to use against Elizabeth, but perhaps to ward off the demons—or the provincial authorities—she feared would take Elizabeth from her. Gertrude could not stop grieving for William; what if she lost Elizabeth too?

the last book I ever read (David Talbot's Season of the Witch, excerpt fourteen)

from Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love by David Talbot:

If Dianne Feinstein was the best possible local leader in the war on AIDS, Ronald Reagan was the most disastrous leader for the country to have sitting in the Oval Office. The demon virus took root in the population at the worst possible moment. “The AIDS story is the purest illustration of how this administration deals with health concerns,” said Stanley Matek, former president of the American Public Health Association, during the height of the plague. “They tend to see health in the same way that John Calvin saw wealth: it’s your own responsibility, and you should damn well take care of yourself. This epidemic, however, has tested the limits of that philosophy.”

At a time when the American public desperately needed reliable medical straight talk about AIDS, Reagan blocked his widely respected surgeon general, Dr. C. Everett Koop, from delivering speeches or talking with the media about the disease. “For an astonishing five and a half years,” Koop recalled later, “I was completely cut off from AIDS.” White House advisors, he said, dismissed the epidemic as a problem for gays, junkies, and other social undesirables. The president’s aides, according to Koop, “took the stand, ‘They are only getting what they justly deserve.’”

the last book I ever read (David Talbot's Season of the Witch, excerpt thirteen)

from Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love by David Talbot:

Bobbi Campbell—a boyishly handsome hospital nurse who led a second life as a drag queen nun (Sister Florence Nightmare) in the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence—was one of the first people diagnosed with KS. He noticed the purple blotches on his feet after hiking with his boyfriend in Big Sur, and at first he assumed they were blood blisters. But when they got bigger, Campbell went to Dr. Marcus Conant, a dermatologist at the UC San Francisco medical complex overlooking Golden Gate Park, and Conant recognized it as one more strange occurrence of KS. Campbell immediately went public with his diagnosis, writing a story about his “gay cancer” in the Sentinel, a local gay newspaper, and persuading a drugstore in the Castro to post photos of Kaposi victims in its window as a warning to the community.

A political comrade of Cleve Jones’s urged the activist to meet with Campbell, who showed him the lesions on his feet and told him about his plans to start a gay cancer support group. Later, over dinner, Marc Conant filled Jones in on what he was learning about the mysterious new plague. Jones turned pale and ordered a stiff drink. He was thinking about all the young men with whom he had juicily joined flesh, and about how the Castro had turned itself into one big bed. “We’re all dead,” Jones muttered.

the last book I ever read (David Talbot's Season of the Witch, excerpt twelve)

from Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love by David Talbot:

It has become fashionable in recent decades to disparage public service. The political profession is widely scorned and reviled. But there are times when political leadership seems like a blessing. San Francisco in November 1978 was a broken vessel on a dark sea. The city had endured so many blows and afflictions that it seemed cursed. When deliverance finally came, San Francisco owed it in large part to an unlikely leader. Though she was a homegrown native, she seemed miscast for the role. San Franciscans had a fondness for lovable rogues and other colorful characters. But in a city of Marx brothers, Feinstein was Margaret Dumont, forever distressed and befuddled by the antics around her. Not only was she the grownup in the room, it seemed like she had always been a grownup.

Feinstein was well grounded, resolute, firm, managerial. Even her eccentricities, like her love of uniforms and ceremonial displays of military power, seemed unweirdly un-San Franciscan. Yet she turned out to be precisely the right leader for the time. While she shifted the city back toward the center, she stabilized it enough to allow many of the revolutionary changes that preceded her to become fully absorbed by the body politic. Though she herself was not in harmony with all of these “San Francisco values,” they become enshrined under her leadership.

the last book I ever read (David Talbot's Season of the Witch, excerpt eleven)

from Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love by David Talbot:

Warm, wickedly funny, and flirtatious, Harvey Milk was the opposite of Dan White in more ways than one. White was the sone of heroic fireman Charlie White, who worked himself into an early grave trying to feed ten hungry mouths. Grim and devout, White spent his entire life trying to live up to his father’s life of service. In Catholic school, Danny White became known for being good with his fists, mixing it up with the black kids whose families were pressing in on the old Irish neighborhoods. He was also good at sports, captaining his high school football and baseball teams, and heading for the New York Yankees farm system until an injury ruined his playing career.

White’s life never measured up. He served in Vietnam but saw no action, and army officials called his record undistinguished. A self-described “romantic,” he grew a beard and ran off to Alaska to write stories like Jack London, but he had no literary talent. He joined the SFPD, but, disappointed that it did not offer the heroic opportunities in his imagination, he quit and became a fireman. He finally matched his father’s heroism one day, rescuing a mother and baby from the seventeenth floor of a blazing fire at Geneva Towers—ironically, the crime-infested housing project in Visitacion Valley that symbolized to many in White’s neighborhood the end of their way of life. It was a daring act, rushing through the flames and out into the balcony where the woman was screaming, with her baby cradled in her arms, and then sweeping them both to safety. But the next morning, the Chronicle buried the story about the courageous fireman who was also running for supervisor on page six. His late father’s heroics had made the front page.

the last book I ever read (David Talbot's Season of the Witch, excerpt ten)

from Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love by David Talbot:

Jonestown was a hideous stain on all those in the Bay Area left who had been taken in by Jim Jones, including attorney Charles Garry. The aging lawyer was forced to flee for his life during the Jonestown bloodbath, huffing and puffing through the Guyanese jungle alongside Mark Lane—another celebrity attorney who had shared Garry’s rosy view of Jones’s “paradise.” Garry forced Lane to carry his suitcase as they sweated their way through the thick, tropical greenery. Lane griped about his burden, but suspecting that the heavy case was stuffed with money, he kept carrying it. The suitcase was actually filled with the toiletries and grooming equipment that the notoriously vain Garry found indispensable, including the hair blower he used to perfect his combover. Back home in San Francisco, Garry struggled to make sense of the debacle. “Jim Jones created one of the most beautiful dreams in the world and then destroyed it,” said the still-confused attorney.

the last book I ever read (David Talbot's Season of the Witch, excerpt nine)

from Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love by David Talbot:

At the victory podium, Moscone made a point of calling out to his gay supporters, who had delivered a critical block of voters in the close election. San Francisco, he proclaimed to loud cheers, is liberated territory—a haven that “allows with pleasure gay people walking the streets of the city with freedom from harassment.”

But Moscone’s state-of-the-art field operation could not have succeeded without two organizations that were beginning to make a major impact on San Francisco. “The two institutions that were most helpful in getting George elected were the Delancey Street Foundation and the Peoples Temple,” said Richard Sklar, who became the city infrastructure’s indispensible fix-it man under Moscone. “They each put hundreds of bodies on the streets during the campaign.” Both organizations served society’s rejects, and both were run by charismatic misfits. Delancey Street, a self-help community of addicts and ex-convicts, was founded by John Maher, a Bronx grade school dropout and ex-junkie with a Tammany Hall gift for street politics. The Peoples Temple, a renegade church that ministered to a flock of mostly black lost souls, was run by a more mysterious man, the Reverend Jim Jones.

the last book I ever read (David Talbot's Season of the Witch, excerpt eight)

from Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love by David Talbot:

At one point, Randy reached out to Jack Scott, asking him to dinner at a house in San Francisco, where they ate roast beef and drank vodka late into the night while the publisher pumped him for information about Patty. On another occasion, Scott met Randy and Catherine at a Mexican restaurant in Ghirardelli Square near San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, where he reported to them that Patty was growing increasingly disenchanted with the Harrises’ macho style as she developed a feminist consciousness and was talking of secretly visiting her parents. Randy wondered if Patty might agree to return if Catherine resigned from the UC Board of Regents, but again his wife refused adamantly, saying that she didn’t trust “that little weasel Scott.” She was growing increasingly fed up with her husband’s dalliances with the radical underground.

“Randy would meet with anybody who might help find Patty,” recalled Weir. “He struck me as a very uptight, traditional person, but sincere. When I look back at him through older eyes, the eyes of a father, I feel sorry for what he went through. He would have given away his whole fortune to get her back safely. I think the whole thing broke his heart.”

the last book I ever read (David Talbot's Season of the Witch, excerpt seven)

from Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love by David Talbot:

Good Earth members briefly considered turning to armed resistance against the police brutality. But, they decided, that’s not who they were. Instead of going down the violent path of the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, and other armed groups on the radical left, Good Earth found a good lawyer. His name was Tony Serra, and with his long Native American-looking hair, pirate’s gold tooth, and stoner aura, he seemed every bit the spacey hippie that the Good Earth hard hippies disdained. But when it came to the legal battlefield, Tony Serra was a brilliant warrior.

Serra, a San Francisco native, grew up in the outer Sunset district in an artistic, blue-collar family that also produced a younger brother, Richard, who would become a world-renowned sculptor. Their father, an immigrant from Mallorca, Spain, made jelly beans. Their mother, a Russian-Jewish bohemian aesthete, later killed herself, walking straight into the ocean at the end of Taraval Street, where she had taken her boys to the beach when they were growing up. Serra majored in philosophy at Stanford and threw thimself into combative sports, joining the boxing and football teams. After graduating from law school in 1962, he tried to avoid his professional destiny, bumming around Morocco and South America and writing bad poetry.

the last book I ever read (David Talbot's Season of the Witch, excerpt six)

from Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love by David Talbot:

As hard drugs took their toll on Haight-Ashbury, the neighborhood descended into crime and squalor. By 1969, most of the stores on Haight Street were boarded up and vacant. Cats were said to be hard to find on the streets, because starving junkies were hunting them for food. The neighborhood was hit by a wave of grisly drug murders. A twenty-three-year-old biker who claimed he had been high on acid for eighteen straight months were pulled over by police one day. He was driving a stolen black Volkswagen owned by an unemployed flute player turned drug dealer. The severed arm wrapped in blue suede that police found in the back of the car also turned out to belong to the flute player. “I’m very, very hazy about that arm,” the biker told his lawyer after he was arrested on murder charges.

the last book I ever read (David Talbot's Season of the Witch, excerpt five)

from Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love by David Talbot:

During the 1950s and early 1960s, San Francisco had a blossoming but largely secret gay life. Indeed, the song that would become the city’s anthem, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” was written in 1954 by two gay lovers who were pining for “the city by the bay” after moving to Brooklyn Heights. Tony Bennett made the song famous, singing it for the first time at the Fairmont Hotel’s Venetian Room in December 1961, with future mayor Joe Alioto in the audience. By then, the songwriters—Douglass Cross and George Cory—had moved back to the Bay Area, where Cross died of a heart attack and a grief-stricken Cory later took his own life.

the last book I ever read (David Talbot's Season of the Witch, excerpt four)

from Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love by David Talbot:

Music was at the heart of San Francisco’s magical transformation in the 1960s. And at the beginning of the decade, the Fillmore was the music’s hot center. They called the Fillmore “the Harlem of the West.” The streets were filled until the early morning hours with a parade of peacocks: men with diamond stickpins, satin ties, and long coats; women in slit dresses and furs. Adventurous white kids like Jerry Garcia would sneak into the Fillmore clubs and dance halls, this forbidden empire of cool, to hear the music they couldn’t find on Top 40 radio.

And then it was all gone, destroyed block by block by the wrecking balls and bulldozers of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. As Jerry Garcia later sang, “Nothin’ shakin’ on Shakedown Street, used to be the heart of town.” The agency launched the first phase of its massive urban renewal project in 1953, erasing stores, nightclubs, and churches and more than twenty-five thousand residents from hundreds of city blocks. Geary Street, a bustling commercial center, was turned into an eight-lane expressway, so that cars and buses carrying commuters downtown from the predominately white west-side neighborhoods could hurtle directly through the Fillmore without stopping. Ten years later, the agency kicked off the second phase of its Fillmore blitzkrieg, uprooting an additional thirteen thousand people and shuttering thousands of more businesses over sixty square blocks.

the last book I ever read (David Talbot's Season of the Witch, excerpt three)

from Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love by David Talbot:

In this febrile environment, no minister with Edward Beggs’ restless spirit could sit in suburban stupor for long. When Beggs heard that Glide Church was establishing a shelter for the growing teenage runaway population in San Francisco, he knew this was his pastoral calling. He left his life in the church and became the founding director of Huckleberry House. The name was Beggs’s idea; his homage to American literature’s most famous young runaway. Beggs saw Huck Finn as a “revolutionary” who hit the road with his black friend Jim rather than bow to the cultural values of the day, just like the young people pouring into San Francisco. When Huck decided, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell,” rather than condemn Jim to a life of slavery, Beggs believed it was one of the great moral epiphanies in the American odyssey. Had Huck and Jim been living in 1960s America, he surmised, they would have kept heading west, directly for the Haight-Ashbury.

Emmett Grogan thought Huckleberry House “was as lame as its name,” calling it a “nice, mild, safe, responsible way for the church to become involved in ‘hippiedom.’” The Diggers made an effort to take care of the boys and girls washing up on the shores of the Haight. “The city was telling all these kids—our age, a lot of them younger—to get lost,” Coyote recalled. “And our feeling was that they were our kids. You know? This was America; these were our kids.”

the last book I ever read (David Talbot's Season of the Witch, excerpt two)

from Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love by David Talbot:

The Haight was still just a scruffy, fog-bound neighborhood when Marilyn moved there, with Russian bakeries where you could buy piroshkis. But the fairy dust was already floating overhead. The year after she settled in the Haight, a young band called the Grateful Dead moved into a big Victorian across the street at 710 Ashbury. Janis Joplin rambled around the neighborhood in her scarves and boas, swigging from a bottle of Ripple with her bandmates, and Marilyn would bump into her at Peggy Caserta’s clothes store on Haight. They all became friends. Nobody was a celebrity in those days. The neighborhood thought it owned the bands. Everyone took care of one another.

the last book I ever read (David Talbot's Season of the Witch, excerpt one)

from Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love by David Talbot:

A couple of years later, Ferlinghetti opened up City Lights Books with partner Peter Martin, son of the assassinated anarchist Carlo Tresca. Italian garbage truck drivers would roar up to the curb and run inside to buy the anarchist newspapers that the store got directly from Italy. It was a cramped one-room establishment in those days; they didn’t even own the basement, which is where the Chinese New Year Parade’s endless, red and gold dragon was tucked away the other 364 days of the year. But City Lights became a beacon to the poets, wanderers, and angel-headed hipsters who were making their way to San Francisco. You could browse forever, and nobody would bother you. It was here that Ferlinghetti first met Ginsberg, who entered the store one day trailed by his usual crowd of young men, looking more like a horn-rimmed Columbia University intellectual than the wild Whitman of Cold War America. Ginsberg would pound out “Howl” on his typewriter a few blocks away in his railroad apartment at 1010 Montgomery Street.

the last book I ever read (Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, excerpt twelve)

from The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett:

Incredulity joined astonishment in the girl’s face.

Spade said: “Miles hadn’t many brains, but, Christ! he had too many years’ experience as a detective to be caught like that by the man he was shadowing. Up a blind alley with his gun tucked away on his hip and his overcoat buttoned? Not a chance. He was as dumb as any man ought to be, but he wasn’t quite that dumb. The only two ways out of the alley could be watched from the edge of Bush Street over the tunnel. You’d told us Thursby was a bad actor. He couldn’t have tricked Miles into the alley like that, and he couldn’t have driven him in. He was dumb, but not dumb enough for that.”

the last book I ever read (Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, excerpt eleven)

from The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett:

He stood in the doorway with his soft hat crushed between his head and the top of the door-frame: he was nearly seven feet tall. A black overcoat cut long and straight and like a sheath, buttoned from throat to knees, exaggerated his leanness. His shoulders stuck out, high, thin, angular. His bony face—weather-coarsened, age-lined—was the color of wet sand and was wet with sweat on cheeks and chin. His eyes were dark and bloodshot and mad above lower lids that hung down to show pink inner membrane. Held tight against the left side of his chest by a black-sleeved arm that ended in a yellowish claw was a brown-paper-wrapped parcel bound with thin rope—an ellipsoid somewhat larger than an American football.

the last book I ever read (Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, excerpt ten)

from The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett:

Spade went in. A fat man came to meet him.

The fat man was flabbily fat with bulbous pink cheeks and lips and chins and neck, with a great soft egg of a belly that was all his torso, and pendant cones for arms and legs. As he advanced to meet Spade all his bulbs rose and shook and fell separately with each step, in the manner of clustered soap-bubbles not yet released from the pipe through which they had been blown. His eyes, made small by fat puffs around them, were dark and sleek. Dark ringlets thinly covered his broad scalp. He wore a black cutaway coat, black vest, black satain Ascot tie holding a pinkish pearl, striped grey worsted trousers, and patent-leather shoes.

the last book I ever read (Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, excerpt nine)

from The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett:

Spade waited until a bespectacled pudgy man and a thin-legged blonde girl had passed out of hearing. Then he chuckled and said: “That would go over big back on Seventh Avenue. But you’re not in Romeville now. You’re in my burg.” He inhaled cigarette-smoke and blew it out in a long pale cloud. “Well, where is he?”

The boy spoke two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second “you.”

the last book I ever read (Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, excerpt eight)

from The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett:

She blushed. She picked up a slice of bread encrusted with grey liverwurst. She put it down on her plate. She wrinkled her white forehead and she said: “It’s a black figure, as you know, smooth and shiny, of a bird, a hawk or falcon, about that high.” She held her hands a foot apart.

the last book I ever read (Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, excerpt seven)

from The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett:

“I got it all right,” Spade told Brigid O’Shaughnessy, “but Mrs. Flitcraft never did. She thought it was silly. Maybe it was. Post Street was empty when Spade issued into it. He walked east a block, cross the street, walked west two blocks on the other side, recrossed it, and returned to his building without having seen anyone except two mechanics working on a car in a garage.

When he opened his apartment-door Brigid O’Shaughnessy was standing at the bend in the passageway, holding Cairo’s pistol straight down at her side.

the last book I ever read (Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, excerpt six)

from The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett:

“I got it all right,” Spade told Brigid O’Shaughnessy, “but Mrs. Flitcraft never did. She thought it was silly. Maybe it was. Anyway, it came out all right. She didn’t want any scandal, and, after the trick he had played on her—the way she looked at it—she didn’t want him. So they were divorced on the quiet and everything was swell all around.

“Here’s what had happened to him. Going to lunch he passed an office-building that was being put up—just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn’t touch him, though a piece of the sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek. It only took a piece of skin off, but he still had the scar when I saw him. He rubbed it with his finger—well, affectionately—when he told me about it. He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.”

the last book I ever read (Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, excerpt five)

from The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett:

She sighed happily and sat on the walnut settee. Her face relaxed and her body relaxed. She smiled up at him with admiring eyes. “However did you manage it?” she asked more in wonder than in curiosity.

“Most things in San Francisco can be bought, or taken.”

the last book I ever read (Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, excerpt four)

from The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett:

Spade walked up Sutter Street to Kearny, where he entered a cigar-store to buy two sacks of Bull Durham. When he came out the youth was one of four people waiting for a street-car on the opposite corner.

Spade ate dinner at Herbert’s Grill in Powell Street. When he left the Grill, at a quarter to eight, the youth was looking into a nearby haberdasher’s window.

the last book I ever read (Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, excerpt three)

from The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett:

Mr. Joel Cairo was a small-boned dark man of medium height. His hair was black and smooth and very glossy. His features were Levantine. A square-cut ruby, its sides paralleled by four baguette diamonds, gleamed against the deep green of his cravat. His black coat, cut tight to narrow shoulders, flared a little over slightly plump hips. His trousers fitted his round legs more snugly than was the current fashion. The uppers of his patent-leather shoes were hidden by fawn spats. He held a black derby hat in a chamois-gloved hand and came towards Spade with short, mincing, bobbing steps. The fragrance of chypre came with him.

the last book I ever read (Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, excerpt two)

from The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett:

“I went to bed. And this morning when I went out for breakfast I saw the headlines in the papers and read about—you know. Then I went up to Union Square, where I had seen automobiles for hire, and got one and went to the hotel for my luggage. After I found my room had been searched yesterday I knew I would have to move, and I had found this place yesterday afternoon. So I came up here and then telephoned your office.”

“Your room at the St. Mark was searched?” he asked.

the last book I ever read (Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, excerpt one)

from The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett:

Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down—from high flat temples—in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.

the last book I ever read (South and West: From A Notebook by Joan Didion, excerpt ten)

from South and West: From A Notebook by Joan Didion:

When I read Gertrude Atherton I think not only of myself but of Patricia Hearst, listening to Carousel in her room on California Street.

The details of the Atherton life appear in the Atherton fiction, or the details of the fiction appear in the autobiography: it is difficult to say which is the correct construction. The beds of Parma violets at the Atherton house dissolve effortlessly into the beds of Parma violets at Maria Ballinger-Groome Abbott’s house in Atherton’s The Sisters-in-Law. Gertrude’s mother had her three-days “blues,” as did one of the characters in Sleeping Fires. Were there Parma violets at the Atherton house? Did Gertrude’s mother have three-day blues?