Losing Mum and Pup.   I had to read Chris Buckley’s book about his parents, of course. I was a bit surprised to find myself liking it.

Now, no doubt Bill and Pat Buckley had their faults, as we all do. The rule I grew up with, though, was: “Speak as you find.” I never experienced anything but kindness and generosity from the Buckleys, and so am not in the market for negative portrayals. Based on what I’d heard beforehand, I therefore expected not to like Chris’s book.

A couple of things won me over. One was the reminder (I can’t say “revelation,” since it wasn’t any particular secret) that Bill was not a very attentive parent. I’m an inattentive parent myself — stamped thus by my own parents’ English-traditional parenting technique, which consisted principally of shooing kids out of the house after breakfast with a warning to be back in time for supper or go to bed hungry. The effect of Chris’s stories was therefore to bond me with Bill all over again, one inattentive parent to another.

I said that to one of my National Review colleagues, in the context of an incident Chris relates in the book — the one where Bill got bored ten minutes into Chris’s college-graduation ceremony “and rounded up the family and friends in attendance and whisked them off to lunch at what we now call ‘an undisclosed location,’ leaving me to spend my graduation day wandering the campus in search of my family.”

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I said to my colleague: “I can all too easily imagine myself doing that.”

The colleague — who, though not at all Latina, is certainly wise — replied: “Or wanting to.”

Just so. The other thing that won me over was just the book itself, as a book. I do think there is a fair question of propriety in asking whether it ought to have been written at all. Chris having decided to write it, though, I don’t see how he could have written it any better. It’s funny, observant, and tender, all in the right places; it’s also grim, also in the right places, giving us an unsparing picture of the miseries and indignities of old age and the thing that comes after old age.

You can, as I said, argue that one should not make books about such matters when they involve your own parents. I had dinner last night with a gentleman, an admirer of WFB from far back, who was spitting furious with Chris for having written the book.

It’s an argument. I’m just not convinced by it. I know the feeling of having a book you need to write — not for the money or the recognition, but just to get the darn thing off your chest, or, more precisely, out of your head and onto paper.

Writers are really very ruthless people, novelists most especially so. We are jesters, gadflies, and sometimes borderline lunatics, excavating our own little mines of experience to make up stories. It’s a funny line of work, really, and it bleeds back over into our actual lives. My advice to the parents of America would be not to let your kids become writers if you don’t want to end up in a book.

The novelist Jean Rhys was once asked in a BBC interview why she had written a certain novel. She replied: “Revenge.”

Having been nice about Chris Buckley’s book, I feel I have license to pick a small nit. On page 35 occurs this: “Age six, I had sat on his lap right here in this room and learned to touch-type, ‘The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy cow,’ on his old Royal typewriter.”

It’s “the lazy dog,” Chris. The point of that exercise is to hit every letter of the alphabet at least once. You need “dog” for the “g,” see? That aside, thanks for the book, and congratulations on its success.


Book report.   I seem to have done a lot of reading this month. As well as Chris Buckley’s book, I’ve read Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, Bruce Hood’s Supersense, and Thomas Metzinger’s The Ego Tunnel, all very well done and well worth the cover price if you want to know (a) useful and interesting things about the probable future of work, or (b) why human beings believe preposterous things, or (c) why you, your precious self, do not exist.