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On my radar: Taffy Brodesser-Akner's cultural highlights

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is an award-winning journalist for the New York Times magazine, known for her profiles of celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Tom Hanks. Born in 1975, she grew up in Brooklyn and now lives in New Jersey with her family. Her acclaimed debut novel, Fleishman Is in Trouble, is longlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction and is published in paperback in July.

1. Nonfiction

Why We Can’t Sleep by Ada Calhoun

Ada Calhoun’s Why We Can’t Sleep is a book about dread and generation X women in midlife crisis. It’s about relationships, the economy and security. Calhoun talks about our generational instability and all the chaos that’s been going on around us for some time and how unprepared we are for it. If you look around now, how businesses are planning to be closed for six weeks, it’s shocking to me how close to the edge we’ve been living.

2. Podcast

Script Notes

Two screenwriters, John August and Craig Mazin, discuss what’s important in screenwriting. I discovered this podcast two years ago after my friend recommended it. I’ve always been interested in storytelling and never really found a way to talk with people about it, but they discuss it with such intimacy that I feel it has made me a better writer. Sometimes they disagree, but they’re never nasty to each other – which is a real rarity.

3. TV

My Brilliant Friend: The Story of a New Name (HBO)

I ate up Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels like they were a giant pizza and I was extremely stoned. I didn’t have high hopes for the adaptation because I think that even though there are great adaptations out there, once you love one form, the other will fall short. This series, about girls growing to womanhood in Naples – starting in, I think, the 1940s – is just as good as the books. It’s beautifully shot, devastatingly performed, and in my heart, it is a heartfelt, if unintentional, response to Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood, which tracks a single boy from childhood to adulthood. This, I feel, is our Girlhood.

4. App

Down Dog

This app has been offering free yoga classes because everyone is going insane [during lockdown]. I didn’t know about it before I signed up for the free trial, but I will be subscribing to it after the free period is up. It’s really hard to find hard yoga on an app; I feel like I really need a class that beats you up and is rigorous throughout your body, and I can’t often find that.

5. Film

Being John Malkovich (1999)

I watch this film fairly regularly. It is so beautiful and entertaining. The combination of sad and funny is something that’s really hard to get right. A friend of mine sent me over the original script, which is even better than the movie. It’s almost a perfect movie, but the first draft of the screenplay is even better – they made some choices to make it less meta, but I reject those choices. It also has nothing to do with the terrible stuff going on at the moment and I am really grateful for that.

6. Fiction

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

I can’t say that I have enjoyed reading My Dark Vanessa because it makes me feel so uncomfortable, but I can’t put it down. Anybody who has been a teenage girl has to be reading this through their fingers. I never had an affair with a teacher, but this feels like a diary entry I could have written about most days of my life as a 15-year-old. I think fiction should make you uncomfortable. I really admire it.