![]() I wonder, having typed that: Is it name-dropping when they’re your own parents?” Was there anyone they didn’t know?Įven their son is impressed: “I hereby promise that this will be the only time I deploy this particular cliché – larger than life people. They lived mostly in Stamford, Connecticut, but kept an apartment on East 73rd Street (not large enough for Mum’s 500-person memorial service), and spent winters in Gstaadt, Switzerland, hanging out with the Galbraiths, David Niven, and the Nabokovs. Mum was Pat Buckley, New York socialite extraordinaire, friend of everyone from the Reagans and Kissingers to Truman Capote. The passing of one’s elderly parents is not the high ground of tragedy but only sad – and in this case, sad with many layers of ambivalence. ![]() He maintains his equilibrium – between crying jags – in part because their deaths are in the natural order of things. He’s a sort of Fred Astaire on the computer keyboard, with a strong dose of vinegar and of self-mocking good humor that must come from having grown up with parents as self-involved as his were. The easy answer is that Buckley – even when writing about these events – is an irrepressibly graceful, witty, and entertaining writer. Is the same true, I wonder, when a humorist writes a book not intended for laughs? When, say, the very funny satirist, Christopher Buckley, writes a memoir – say, Losing Mum and Pup – about the deaths of his legendary parents in 20? I took this to mean that in the structure and expectations of prose – its demands for clarity, explication, logic, resolution – there is nowhere for the writer to hide the way she can in the indirection and convoluted alleyways of poetry. I once heard a poet say that a poet who writes prose is backing herself into a corner. When, say, the very funny satirist, Christopher Buckley, writes a memoir – say, Losing Mum and Pup – about the deaths of his legendary parents in 20? June 2nd, 2009 I wonder, when a humorist writes a book not intended for laughs.
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