A Writer Writes

It's been a good and bad week of writers. Let's start with the good news.

This is one of the best magazine pieces I've read in ages. I not only wished I wrote it, but I could see how it could easily appear in The New Yorker with a few minor edits. Great stuff.

Nora Vincent, a lesbian neo-con, hasn't been around for a while and I've missed her. I even mentioned her as a possible replacement for the repititious Maureen "Men are dumb because no one will marry me" Dowd. Now, Vincent has a book about her adventures dressed as a guy, called Self-Made Man. It wasn't a walk in the park, she tells us. Listen to Instapundit and his wife interview her here.

It was a very bad week for shallow, dishonest writers. First, James Frey took his lumps from Oprah when he admits that his drug rehab memoir was mostly fiction. (Duh, says most of the publishing industry who declined to publish the book when it was pitched as a novel).

But the writer dressing-down of the week has to go to Hugh Hewitt grilling of LA Times columnist/snarky lisper Joel Stein. He wrote a some-what brave if embarassing column that claims that since he does not support the war he refuses to support the troops. He does not wish them ill but neither does he admire them or the job they are trying to perform in hellish circumstances.

You have to admire Stein's bravery and I bet there are a ton of anti-war Lefties who wish they could say what Steine wrote. (A while back, a neighbor almost came out and wished for another attack on US troop as we saw in Black Hawk Down right before the election. It would be horrible, she said, but maybe it could help things...)

Hewitt did his usual shtick, which is to show that reporters and media members are reliably liberal and therefore anti-war/freedom/Bush. Stein's shallow answers and the realization that he could have been more precise is truly embarassing. Back to the gossip pages, Joel.