Word: woolf
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...that it doesn't matter what you write. "I could do pretty much whatever I wanted," Michael Cunningham remembers fondly, "because nobody was likely to pay attention." That was before Cunningham wrote The Hours, his moving reimagination of the novel Mrs. Dalloway and the life of its author, Virginia Woolf. The book won a Pulitzer. Nicole Kidman got an Oscar for the movie. Just like that, Cunningham's precious obscurity was gone. "It's harder to feel the necessary degree of recklessness when people are paying attention," he says. "You have to be willing to fail...
Cunningham wants to be clear up front about the whole Whitman thing. "That came in later," he says, over a double cappuccino at a Greenwich Village cafe. "I suspect it will look to some people like [I thought], 'Virginia Woolf was a gold mine. I might as well try to cash in on Whitman as well.'" The poet appears in person only in the book's first part, a grim, oddly lyrical look at the lives of poor factory workers trapped in the filth and squalor of 19th century Manhattan. "Who was striding through all that but Mr. Walt Whitman...
...Yale (where his father Bart was president before becoming commissioner of baseball; he died in 1989), he has made team play a religion. "He was hands down the best actor at Yale," says Shawn Levy, who directed Giamatti in a school production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and painted him blue in the 2002 Frankie Muniz vehicle Big Fat Liar. "He could have dominated every play, but he served them and took nothing for granted...
...rival agencies. When professional circumstances pit the Smiths against each other, a hilarious fire fight between two trained killers ensues ("I missed you, honey" becomes a double entendre), which somehow, mysteriously, becomes a portrait of a marriage rediscovering its lost flame. It's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with concussion grenades...
Honor thy father and thy mother is a sound precept in life, but dubious advice for a writer. From James Joyce to Tennessee Williams, from Virginia Woolf to Mary Gordon, modern literature has thrived on an undercurrent of patricide and matricide. Monstrous parents, it seems, are what gifted children barely survive in order to write about them with inspired resentment. Loving memoirs tend to rank second only to corporate histories of tool-and-die companies as the kind of book any reader can put down. In the face of this, Wilfrid Sheed, a witty, acerbic critic and novelist (Office Politics...