A poignant drama about two influential yet fragile figures grappling with the “very excruciating life” of an artist.
Actual conversations between two iconic gay artists form the basis for a new play.
In 1978, longtime friends Andy Warhol and Truman Capote made cassettes of their conversations, “approximately eighty hours of recordings.” Roth, director of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast on Broadway, learned that Pittsburgh’s Warhol Museum owned these tapes but that they were inaccessible to the public. With the help of museum board members such as artist Cindy Sherman and filmmaker John Waters, he gained access. Most of the conversations were dull, but then he got to “the magic tape” in which Warhol suggested they “take their words and make a play out of them.” That play never happened, but Roth has fashioned his own “non-fiction invention” from the conversations of “two of my idols.” The first half of the book consists of the text of the play, short scenes in which Warhol and Capote gossip about everything from the vagaries of fame to Capote’s rehab stint for alcoholism. The second half is a “Bonus” section of exchanges in which they dish about boyfriends, sex clubs, and a famous woman who was “one of Hitler’s greatest friends.” Roth redacted many names from the bonus exchanges, leaving place holders for “a very famous rock star” and “a trend-setting woman of high social standing,” among others. These excisions might leave readers who are thirsty for gossip feeling parched. The play, however, is an imaginative portrait, with Capote coming across as the needier of the two, wondering if he’s wasted his years while maintaining he was “the one and only real true genius in America.” Meanwhile, Warhol was his concerned caregiver, eager to protect the man he was so obsessed with in his youth that Capote’s mother had to tell him to stop pestering her son.
A poignant drama about two influential yet fragile figures grappling with the “very excruciating life” of an artist.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982103-82-8
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.
The comic and television personality turns serious—semi-serious, anyway—in a combination memoir and self-help book.
Handler opens these generally short essays with a memory of childhood that closes with the exhortation to keep the child within us alive into adulthood: “Hold on to that child tightly, as if she were your own, because she is.” The memory soon veers into the comically absurd, with an account of a cocaine-fueled cross-country trip with a random companion who looked like another TV personality: “I don’t know if Dog the Bounty Hunter does copious amounts of cocaine, but he sure looks like he does.” Drugs and juice are seldom far from the proceedings, but therapy is close by, too, and clearly the latter has been of tremendous use, if “exhausting in the sense that every new development or idea led to a period of intense self-awareness followed by waves of acute self-consciousness coupled with endless self-recrimination.” As the anecdotes progress, that intense self-awareness becomes less fraught. Some of her life lessons are drawn from her experiences wrestling with the yips and setbacks of performing before audiences; some turn into knowing one-liners (“I knew if three men in a row told me not to do something, it was imperative that I do the opposite”). Most, even if tongue-in-cheek or rueful, are delivered with a disarming friendliness laced with her trademark archness: Her account of a dinner opposite Woody Allen and daughter/wife Soon-Yi is worth the price of admission alone. In the main, Handler is a cheerleader for everyone worthy of cheers, and especially women. As she writes, encouragingly, “You have misbehaved, and then corrected, and then misbehaved again, and then corrected some more”—and have grown and flourished.
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593596579
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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