A very simple, perfectly observed slip of a novel about growing up in a long, long gone Hollywood. O’Brien, the son of stars from early Hollywood who soaked their marriage in booze has written an almost sui-generis pre-coming of age story – I say almost – because his writing has a Fitzgeraldian elegance to it, and contains a description of riding horses with his dad from Santa Monica to Santa Barbara through the mountains that is indelible.

Another great book about Hollywood from another time, this time non-fiction. Hollywood in the 1940’s, a city and industry where European intellectuals found refuge in Santa Monica Canyon, (Thomas Mann finishing Dr. Faustus on Mayberry Drive), Igor Stravinsky wrote music for Walt Disney’s Fantasia, a match made not in heaven, but somewhere way down below. Freidrich writes with a kind of exuberance about foolishness, pretense, possibility and licentiousness in the 40’s as World War II provides both a murmuring drumbeat in the background, and subject matter for some good, bad and absurd films. The title, borrowed from Berthold Brecht’s “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny”, where ‘Here we’ll have fun… Gin and whiskey/Girls and Boys…” Brecht makes frequent gimlet-eyed appearances here, as do the moguls and chorines, the future presidents Reagan and Nixon, a bevy of communists and half barking-mad stars marinating themselves in martinis and fatuousness. Freidrich writes like someone you want to have a long boozy dinner with, and just listen to the stories that didn’t make it into this great book.

Fitzgerald’s last novel and in my opinion his most heartbroken, hardest-earned, most costly book. The story of a young psychiatrist, Dick Diver who marries a patient, Nicole, a wealthy traumatized beauty, and moves her to the quiet, almost empty off-season South of France before it was vulgarized into just another gorgeous place destroyed by market-forces. He takes care of her at increasing expense to his own well-being, losing his sense of self, his own wits and agency along the way, until all light is occluded by his wife’s madness. Dick Diver, like Fitzgerald, leans more and more heavily on the booze as his wife has an affair with a caddish brute named Tommy Barban. Fitzgerald tries to synthesize his own wife Zelda’s descent into mental illness, and his helplessness in the face of it. Virtually dismissed upon publication, it is now regarded as his masterwork. To me, it is a kind of Guernica, a painting – an absolute truth, a heartbreaking one, in which an artist explores his own decline without once blinking.

David Hare has for me, been the model of playwright as public intellectual, a brave, insatiably curious explorer blessed with the driest of mordant wits, and leavened by a deep sense of what it means to be actually good, decent, even loving, in a bloody and ruthless world. Skylight is the story of the aftermath of an affair between a restauranteur/ mogul/hotelier and a younger woman who used to work for him and his wife at their first restaurant. Long after it has ended, Tom, now a heart-sick furious widower, now rich, now a raging, restless and very broken soul blessed with a first rate mind and a blinkered view of his own nature, shows up at his ex-lover, Kyra’s flat in search of something much like salvation. The love between Tom and Kyra is/was/will be impossible, and hovering over that love is the story of two Great Britain’s, impossible to reconcile. Plays that weave the personal with the political are my North Star, because the personal is political, and all politics are actually personal. There is a seam of kindness, an argument for connection in this play that shows Hare at his very best, a brilliant and conflicted prickliness a-swirl in his soul at all times, struggling to be reconciled.

Stone captures a Los Angeles where dissipation was still a passion as powerful as lust for money, wherein a dissolute, sodden and spiraling screenwriter on the way down starts on a journey to a film set in Baja California where his screenplay of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is being shot, starring his great love, another crazy madwoman, Lu-Ann Verger, cousin to Nicole Diver of Tender is the Night is trying to hide the hallucinations that have come with not taking her meds in order to be ‘present’ for the camera, so her eyes are ‘there’. The reunion is a perfect admixture of chaos, debasement, and a race to oblivion for both of them, to the dismay of everyone watching; director, producer, husbands, wives, supplicants, stuntmen, crews, etc. It is a brutal and hilarious book, a picture of all the dreams that go wrong when the dreams all come true and look nothing like the George Hurrell glamor shots that stand in for truth in show biz. Stone wrote with an almost preternaturally pitch-perfect ironist’s lack of surprise, but with the smile of expectations being met. Stone knew madness well, and he knew the bottle well, and he knew movies well too, having had two of his own novels filmed, Dog Soldiers, which became Who Will Stop the Rain, an underrated Karel Reiz film, and WUSA, starring Paul Newman and Tony Perkins, based on his first novel, A Hall of Mirrors. All now are ghosts, but we can visit them in film and on the page. At a drinks thing after his Book Soup reading, Stone and I sat together, and he signed my copy of Children of Light with the words, “Good luck with your play and all the others to come on the boards.” My first play, Mizlansky/Zilinsky was about to open. Years later in Key West, at a dinner, he claimed to remember that night well. He was being kind.

In the early 1980’s I worked at Book Soup in Los Angeles, a great L.A. indie bookstore, still there, still thriving, new owners (Froman’s, Pasadena) took over post the death of the great Glenn Goldman. I was there for around 4 years. We were open til midnight back then, across the street from Tower records, and the Tower classical annex, and the original Spago, a kind of holy trinity of LA nightlife at the time, along with the restaurant Le Dome, also open late, where you could sit quietly with a plate of pasta with butter, shallots, vodka and caviar and a glass of wine, which I would do sometimes during my dinner break. Bruce Wagner was a regular, restless, late-night Book Soup customer, and that was my shift, and I annoyed the fuck out of him, always wanting to talk, and preen, and so, as John Gregory Dunne said, and I paraphrase, “never piss of a writer, we always have the last word’, or something like that, he added me to the cavalcade of freaks. I love him, and now when I see him, it’s sort of like seeing a third act crinkly smiling wise Alan Ginsburg, with whom Bruce has something in common, call it joy. Now mellowed, now a sage of the of the west coast, but still the great chronicler of nightmares and cons and tricks and mirages and forms of numbness of the dream coast, Force Majeure captures the crimes of our canyons much like Wee Gee snapped bodies in the wake of shootings. Force Majeure feels like the compilation of aches from insomnia, smog, neon, traffic and hope that make LA so singular.

Central America as a kind of actual hell, set in an imploding Nicaragua in 1984, an American woman, marginally some sort of observer for an anti-war group, equally contemptuous of the Sandinistas and the Americans brewing trouble, it takes the form of a vast and almost Malarial vision of Latin America in free-fall. Not far from there now, Venezuela also now totters precariously and apparently the great Clair Denis is making a film of Stars at Noon – the perfect film maker for such an endeavor, having once turned Melville’s Billy Budd into Beau Travail, a movie with French Foreign Legionnaires, madness and stillness set in Djibouti. The late Denis Johnson would no doubt appreciate that she is essaying his words into pictures.

An incandescent novel about a hapless Englishman named John Self who is about to direct his first film in New York, but really it is the great novel about the vanishing point of the soul, that poor little invisible organ wherein it is obviated, smashed, run through and defenestrated by excess. It is a novel of the catastrophe of useless self-knowledge, self knowledge as mirage. It is the novel of Excess; of drugs, booze, porn, sorrow, sloth, greed, and self-hatred. Mr. Amis allows himself to appear here and there, to try and get Mr. Self to help himself before all is lost. All is lost. The book is populated exclusively by monsters, and all of them are hilarious, gaspingly so. Most thrilling though is Amis’s masterful command of the hypnotic, mesmeric power of all these fucking words strung together like firelights across the Atlantic. It is also prophetic in that we now live in a world where market forces run amok have virtually changed human nature itself, and turned so much that is beautiful into ash. A breakthrough 1980’s novel, written before it was just all greed, and which seems to prefigure Donald Trump without even mentioning him, it is just an utterly vital read, and unlike anything else, except for the fact that he followed that book with London Fields and The Information, both of which are so good that your eyes water.

She was a brilliant novelist, and an even better short story writer, but nothing compares to her two volumes about life in a kitchen (this and a follow-up, More Home Cooking), about cooking for friends, about de-mystification of the sacred temple of high cuisine, and about what it is to be a woman in New York and to cook with love. She batted these out for the late lamented Gourmet Magazine, apparently on a little green typewriter. Not all the recipes work perfectly, but all the anecdotes do, and all feel like you’re sitting with her in her apartment, drinking a glass of sauvignon blanc while she experiments with some very dubious concoction with like, a fish and some camembert, (I am making that part up). There is a perfect set piece of a little story about a dinner party that turns into a fiasco before it even begins, and a couple of recipes that I prefer to Alice Water’s versions, but more than that, is the idiosyncratic voice of a reliable narrator with a sense of humor. The baked mustard chicken is to be commended. The haggis is to be admired from a great distance as a hybrid Marx Brothers-like comedy verging on horror.

There are so many books about writing about this mysterious blob called the self, there’s so many books about how to write, but nothing has the singular idiosyncratic kindness and careful humanism of this transformational collection of essays about how a young boy grows up to be a full-fledged artist. I do not throw the word around lightly but I do think this will come to be regarded as a masterpiece of not just memoir writing but Queer culture in America in the last quarter of the 20th century. And into this new one. This is a book I love unconditionally, almost a photo album from within. And anybody planning to write a story about a thing they lived through, called ‘a life; could not find a better guide.