"The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1984-1994," by Thomas Mallon: Book Review

From airmail.news

By Thomas Beller

The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983–1994                                                   by Thomas Mallon

 I read the whole thing, all 567 pages of Thomas Mallon’s The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983–1994, which surprised me, because once I got past the parts that I was in some way witness to, as a student of Mallon’s at Vassar College in the 1980s, I had expected to skim. I tried to skim. But the skimming never lasted long. And so, despite my best efforts at slothful reading, my attention kept getting snagged, on lines like:

“There are no bones in David Leavitt’s hand. It’s like shaking a chicken patty.”

“I saw Imelda Marcos, best foot forward, getting into a limo with Jersey plates.”

“[Gore Vidal] is always, entirely, on. He looks away from you when he delivers most of his lines (which is what his conversation consists of), as if afraid he might establish too much of a human connection and crack his own persona.”

“Joan Rivers has a face that’s been redesigned for television but not life: It is beyond surgery, beyond reconstruction. One can only call it a head transplant.”

Mallon is, among other things, a master of the bitchy aperçu and the briskly summarizing detail. He is a gossip of the highest order.

(Full disclosure: I appear twice, very much in passing. In one instance, I come to his office to complain about an adviser; Mallon notes that “her real trouble is that she refuses to find him adorable.” In another, I come to his Manhattan apartment during summer break: “Tom Beller came by on his bicycle for beer—Ferris Bueller’s day off.... He means well but he is a Vassar Student x 2.... He talks a mile a minute and he’s very smart, but not as smart as he thinks he is.”)

The book begins in the fall of 1983, not a particularly happy time for Mallon. He is a 32-year-old English professor awaiting news of his tenure case, while at the same longing to escape higher education (for October break, “the students go off to California & London; the faculty may get as far as Vermont”) with its narrowing, politically correct worldview.

As a practicing Catholic and anti-Communist, he is averse to the party of Carter and Dukakis and Mondale but not yet able to stomach a vote for Reagan. (“There are limits to what one can do for one’s anti-communism and country.”) He is also recovering from the breakup with a classics post-doc named Tom Curley that has left him both crushed and anxious. The breakup and his longing for Tom, who gets sick with AIDS, is nearly as overwhelming as the sense of mystery and anxiety about this new plague, which kills so many of the author’s friends.

“Keeping a diary is not a practice that universally endears one to one’s friends,” Mallon observes in the introduction to his first non-academic work, A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries, published in 1984. I read The Very Heart of It in a state of growing amusement and amazement at Mallon’s acid pen. Not for nothing was he a protégé of Mary McCarthy’s.

Publishing one’s diaries is an act usually reserved for the famous, the dead, or the British. Mallon is none of the above. He grew up in small-town Long Island before going on to Brown, Harvard, Cambridge, and New York publishing. One of the touching details of the book involves a reference to his father “growing old and sick with worry as he shelled out all 84 payments at the Dime Savings Bank” in order to pay for Brown.

                                                                                          Thomas Mallon in 1985

The book consists of brief entries and quickly jotted impressions, and amounts to a kind of sketchbook of the Vassar English Department, literary life in New York City during the AIDS crisis, and Condé Nast in its last golden age. Mallon is a keen observer of not just himself but of his contemporaries, stray encounters on the street or in late-night bars, and the political scene. (“Nov 19: Dallas is 20 years ago Tuesday, and we are going through a national orgy of commemoration.... It’s as if we’ve decided to be governed by an apparition for a month or so.”)

In his hands, keeping a diary isn’t so much an act of introspection or reflection as it is an act of discipline. It’s a kind of apple-a-day-keeps-the-doctor-away approach, which is to say one anecdote, one image or snippet of dialogue, one colourful zinger per entry. There is a thrill in getting a contemporaneous account of those years, but what makes the book sing is the voice: smart, attuned to the specific, delightfully and relentlessly snide. That last quality, consumed in such abundance, left this reader feeling slightly queasy, but I was nonetheless ready to accompany Mallon wherever he went.

https://airmail.news/issues/2025-6-14/when-we-were-young

Leo Tolstoy’s failed project

From meer.com/en 

By Elizaveta Burnashova 

Is it possible to capture ‘life as it is’?

When you write an entry in your diary, what do you usually write about? Do you expound on the secret thoughts and feelings that have filled the landscape of your mind during the day? Or do you just note matter-of-factly, “Slept badly. Finished the project at work. Meeting Monica for dinner”? When thinking about the world’s great writers, one would probably expect their diaries to be more of the former—highly poetic, intricate, and deep. However, that is not always the case. One notable example would be Leo Tolstoy, who kept a diary that resembled more a highly detailed logbook of his mundane endeavours than a complex literary product of a genius mind. But why would someone like Tolstoy—a wizard with words, one of the most acclaimed writers of all time—keep such a plain, non-literary diary?

The answer could be quite simple: because Tolstoy, like many writers of his time, was a fervent realist. The Realist movement in the arts, including literature, emerged around the 1850s as a response to (and, for the most part, a negation of) the preceding Romanticism movement. Romantics tended to focus on the individual and his struggles in a society that does not understand him, to use rich symbolism to depict the various states of his inner self and to occasionally tread onto the territory of the supernatural, exotic, and sublime. The realists, on the other hand, attempted to give a truthful, unaltered portrayal of reality, often addressing societal issues as well as personal ones and avoiding, for the most part, artificial, fictitious elements.

Leonid Pasternak (1862–1945), a renowned Russian painter and the father of the famous poet and translator Boris Pasternak, was closely associated with the celebrated author Leo Tolstoy, capturing intimate portraits of the literary giant during his lifetime

For Leo Tolstoy, authentically picturing reality seemed to be a passion he developed at a very young age. The diaries he kept in the days of his early youth were quite peculiar: they consisted of pages divided vertically in half, with one side titled ‘The Past’ and the other ‘The Future.’ In ‘The Future’ column, he listed everything that he intended to do the next day—curiously, not only about the outside world but also about his inner reality: the tasks of paying visits or completing his writing were listed next to such goals as ‘not being lazy’ or ‘not having unholy thoughts.’ Then, in the ‘The Past’ column, which he filled out the next day, he stated whether he succeeded or not. The Present, as we can see, is surprisingly excluded from this format and exists exclusively as a conjuncture between the Past and the Future, a line of ink dividing the page in half.

Such a way of keeping a diary allowed Tolstoy to keep his journal very close to life, stating only events that took place and avoiding any speculative narration or ungrounded dreaming. But over time, Tolstoy grew tired of this approach: he had kept a diary of a similar nature for almost ten years (until 1857), and in his later entries mentioned that although he would now rather write down “what is happening inside of me and how it’s happening; those things I never told anyone, the things no one knows,” he simply cannot help but fall back into the habitual log-keeping manner.

It seems like the same dilemma—explaining fully everything that is hidden inside while also portraying in a truthful and sufficiently detailed manner the events taking place on the outside—was the key problem that Tolstoy faced when working on his most ambitious project: portraying ‘life as it is.’. His most acclaimed novels, such as War and Peace or Anna Karenina, are celebrated not in the least for their immersive realism and psychological believability, for their masterful portrayal of complex characters, detailed social settings, and the nuances of human emotions.

In these works, Tolstoy manages to tell stories that seem utterly real, even though we know that they are fiction; he finds a way to make his readers forget about the conventionalities of a literary text, ignore all the omitted details and generalizations, and feel like they are peeking right into the private lives of real people—or into the internal workings of a whole nation’s history. But the intricate balance that supports the astonishing verisimilitude of Tolstoy’s texts was a lesson learned from failure, namely—from his bold attempt to depict ‘life as it is’ that resulted in an abandoned and unpublished short story and a subsequent change of approach to his writing. The failed story I am referring to is “The Story of Yesterday.”

           In 1910, Leo Tolstoy stood on the stairs leading to the balcony, holding a letter in his left hand, Russia

Tolstoy’s first novel, *Childhood, was published in 1852; while being a piece of highly self-reflective, psychologically accurate, and largely autobiographical writing, the novel was nevertheless quite expressionistic in style, seamlessly blending fact and fiction. This approach was the first step away from the meticulous, true-to-life writing style that we saw in his diaries and in that previous literary experiment that never saw the light of “day—“The Story of Yesterday,” which he worked on a year before Childhood. In this unfinished short story, Tolstoy attempted to recreate one day exactly as it was, with no fiction at all; expectedly, he failed. The problem he encountered was that of narrative time.

Let us look at the first page of this unusual text. The narrator begins the story of his one day by stating the time when he woke up, but as he does that, he feels compelled to explain why he woke up so late—because he went to bed after midnight. That, in turn, prompts him to note that he has a rule to never go to sleep later than midnight and that he breaks this rule around three times a week. Already in this first paragraph, the narrator must leave the present moment in the narrative (waking up), go to a certain point in the past (staying up late last night) that explains why the present moment is the way it is, and then abandon the narrative time altogether (mentioning a rule that exists outside of time).

This pattern of circular, rather than linear, time repeats itself countless times throughout the short story: the narrator begins his description but feels that to perceive ‘life as it is,’ as the subject perceives it within the text, the reader needs to have as much context and background as the subject himself, which makes him constantly step aside from the narrative and add more and more details and explanations to the text. For Tolstoy, the present moment in a text cannot exist without the past—the same as in his diaries—but this seemingly necessary stepping aside from the narrative time to explain some piece of background is what eventually causes the text to crumble: the narrative ends up being buried under layers of details and digressions, and what started as a literary text slowly turns into a rather chaotic historiographical sketch.

As was mentioned before, “The Story of Yesterday” was never finished: after three weeks of writing, Tolstoy was still stuck in the morning of his described day, so he eventually gave up. His next literary endeavor, Childhood, already exhibited significantly less excessive detailing and constant backtracking than his ‘Life as It Is’ short story. As he kept refining his literary style and finding appropriate ways of depicting reality without drowning the text in unnecessary detail, Tolstoy ultimately created several masterpieces that can serve as nearly perfect examples for what a century later would be described by Roland Barthes as the ‘reality effect.’

Barthes explained that the new realism that appeared in the XIXth century was essentially characterized by the fact that a referent and a signifier collided directly, expelling the signified from the sign, and “the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent, standing alone, becomes the true signifier of realism”.

This means that the details that are given in the text for seemingly no reason (as they do not contribute to any structural development of the text) are necessary for the creation of the ‘effect of reality’—an’ implicit verisimilitude, or, as Barthes puts it, "that unavowed ‘vraisemblance". According to Barthes, oversaturation of a text with true-to-life details that are justified solely by the fact that they are true-to-life is only acceptable in historical discourse—which is well illustrated by Tolstoy’s failed attempt—but literary texts instead must employ the ‘effect of reality’ without attempting to convey the entire reality exactly as it is.

Tolstoy, who lived almost a century before Barthes’ publication, instinctively understood this principle. While working on War and Peace, he wrote about “the necessity of lies, which arises from the need to describe actions of thousands of people scattered across thousands of miles.” So, the idea of the ‘reality’ effect’—substituting millions of real details with just a few that would themselves signify the Real—was indeed one that he arrived at in the course of his literary career. Although he did not succeed in his attempt to write down one single day in all its intricacy and complexity, this ambitious project was one of the pivotal moments for his development as a realist writer, which ultimately helped him create his profoundly authentic and strikingly lifelike masterpieces.

References

Bartes, R. “The Reality Effect.” French literary theory today: a reader, 1982, pp. 11–17.
Паперно, И. Если бы можно было рассказать себя...: дневники Л.Н. Толстого». НЛО, no. 61, 2003.

https://www.meer.com/en/88762-leo-tolstoys-failed-project

Velmans' book may be the ticket for summer reading

From pencitycurrent.com

By Curt Swarm

If you liked “A Man Called Ove” by Fredrik Backman, which was made into the movie “A Man Called Otto” starring Tom Hanks, you'll no doubt take a shine to “The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen, 83¼ Years Old” translated by Hester Velmans.  The main differences are the “Ove” book takes place in Sweden and involves an old man living in a type of retirement village, whereas the “Groen” book takes place in the Netherlands and involves an old man in a nursing home.  But if you're the “Accidental Tourist” like me, Sweden-Netherlands, they're all one-and-the-same.  Pompous of me, I know.

Hendrik Groen decides to keep a journal while being a resident (“inmate”) of a nursing home, to keep himself occupied and his mind active.  His wife has dementia, doesn't recognize him, and is in a different mental institution.  He doesn't have any children and has no visitors.  He finds that keeping the journal helps him relax and accept life in the nursing home with a grain of salt.  The journal becomes the family he doesn't have, if you will.  “Once I have committed something to paper, I can distance myself from it a bit, and then I'm less insufferable.  That's a lot nicer for the people around me too.”  (I've noticed the same effect for my writing also.)

“The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen” is full of geriatric humour and wit, laced with end-of-life insight.  “Today is World Alzheimer's Day.  What are you supposed to do with that?  Try to remember it?”  Dementia or Alzheimer's Disease, next to falls, is their biggest fear.  Pointedly, Hendrik Groen's story of surviving in the nursing home revolves around, like the earth revolving around the sun, a close female friend he meets in the nursing home.  His friend progresses through the stages of Alzheimer's Disease, with Hendrik looking after her.  

Like Ove's attachment to Saabs, Hendrik becomes interested in old people's means of transportation, namely a mobility vehicle called a Canta.  He buys one and, not satisfied with its 3 mph, has it souped up.  Of course he gets himself into all kinds of trouble.  Here in the US, we have golf carts and UV's buzzing to the Post Office and grocery store, plugging up parking lots and confusing drivers on the streets.  In the Netherlands it's the Canta.  

I won't say that “The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen” is a must read for all seniors.  Being a senior myself at 76, and having just recovered from cancer, except for the side effects of treatment, the book hits a little too close to home.  I did ask myself a couple of times, “Do I want to be reading this?”  But I'm glad I did.  Ginnie asked me what I was cackling about while I was reading it.  I read her some passages, and now she is reading it, and cackling, and reading me passages.  

“The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen” is the first book of a trilogy.  So, if you're looking for something that will last through the dog days of summer, Hendrik Groen may be your ticket, depending on how fast or serious a reader you are.  I'm going to put off books two and three for a while: “On the Bright Side: The New Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen, 85 Years Old” and “Two Old Men and a Baby.”  I'll switch writing styles and read some Anne Tyler.  After all, she's written over 20 books, which includes a Pulitzer Prize winner.  That should keep me busy for awhile, not necessarily out of trouble.

Ginnie's father, Paul Harvey (no kidding), is turning 98 on Sunday the 15th this coming June.  He resides in assisted living.  Being an avid reader, I think I'll buy him the hard bound copy of “The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen” for his birthday.  He may enjoy it or he may not.  If we see him driving a Canta to church or the barber shop, we'll know he liked it.  If he disowns me from the family, we'll know he didn't. 

Happy summer reading.

https://www.pencitycurrent.com/stories/velmans-book-may-be-the-ticket-for-summer-reading,119999

Edging Toward Japan: Samuel Pepys and Sei Shonagon - the ultimate love match

From mainichi.jp/english

By Damian Flanagan

A few weeks ago, I attended a rather unusual concert in Cambridge, England. All the pieces of music dated from the time of the famous English diarist Samuel Pepys (1633-1703). My knowledge of the pop songs of the 1660s is not what it should be and I didn't have a particular strong conception of what music from this period actually sounds like.

We are talking here about going back to a time before virtually all the famous classical composers -- before Beethoven, before Mozart, even before Bach. As it turns out however, the music of the 17th century gets on perfectly well without all of them and is teeming with beautiful pieces and charming songs played to the accompaniment of the strangest of instruments.

We started off with some songs played on the spinet, a kind of early harpsichord, and then the musicians produced an extraordinary instrument called a "theorbo," which is an extravagantly oversized lute. Pepys himself loved music and probably owned the very spinet on which the songs were performed, and ordered the making of a "theorbo" which he proudly declared in his diary to be as good as any in the country. When not writing his diary or helping to run the British admiralty (his day job), he even composed songs himself. 

Of late, I've found myself getting more and more interested in Pepys and his world. Years ago, I listened to actor and director Kenneth Branagh reading extracts from the voluminous diary (which covers the years 1660-69) and recently I've been reading Claire Tomalin's prize-winning biography of Pepys, "The Unequalled Self".

What is fascinating about Pepys is partly the turbulence of the time he lived -- the nine years of the diary cover the chaos and anxiety in England following the death of Oliver Cromwell, the initially jubilant restoration of Charles II, the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666, and the war against the Dutch amongst many other happenings. But amidst all these mammoth events, there is the even greater fascination of being immersed in the domestic minutiae of Pepys' daily life, sharing with him his passions and disappointments, his surreptitious affairs and ambitions, his bowel movements and flatulations, his moments of anger, grief and joy.

Tomalin recounts that Pepys was an astoundingly good diarist because for him every day of life was an adventure in human consciousness, filled with the sheer thrill of being alive, of being able to sense and enjoy everything the world had to offer -- its food, its music, its voluptuous women, its poetry, its conversation and company, its seasons and heats and frosts, and, not least, his cherished books. All these things were part of his all-consuming embrace of life that makes him a thrilling literary companion.

Samuel Pepys (Portrait by John Hayls, 1666. Public domain)

These days, if I feel like disappearing for a while into an alternate universe, then I might turn to Pepys and transport myself back into the 1660s. Yet Pepys is not the only explorer of consciousness that I have turned to of late.

On recent trips to Japan I wanted to introduce my two daughters to a writer who might capture their interest and so began listening with them to a reading (in English) of "The Pillow Book" by Sei Shonagon. As we had our breakfasts every morning in Japan, we would be transported to Sei Shonagon's world of the Imperial Court in Kyoto around the year 1,000 where Shonagon was a courtier. We would enjoy her sometimes caustic and always beautiful observations on the men and women around her, the changing colours of the mountains, the preferred etiquette of her lovers, the seasonal colours of the mountains, the sound of the flute in the night air...

I must admit that I am a fairly recent covert to Sei Shonagon. In my younger days, I had a far greater appreciation of Shonagon's contemporary and rival, Murasaki Shikibu, the author of the monumental "The Tale of Genji". Shonagon seemed to me much the inferior of the two. But rediscovering "The Pillow Book" with my daughters, I now see that Shonagon is a much more fascinating, individualistic personality than I first appreciated.

She is never less than her own woman and, like Pepys, is an admirably honest and perceptive contemplator of the sights, sounds and flavours of her own existence. Unlike Pepys, she was not keeping a day-to-day journal, but rather a compendium of observations on diverse subjects that cumulatively add up to an almost cubist portrait of a world now vastly lost in time.

                                                                    Sei Shonagon (Painting by Uemura Shoen, 1917-18. Public domain)

Sitting in an autumnal chapel in Cambridge, England, listening to the music of the 1660s, I found myself strangely thinking about Sei Shonagon and about how fundamentally similar she and Samuel Pepys were. In their professional lives, they were robust and worldly, but in their private lives they were seekers of (sometimes illicit) joy and things of beauty, candid in their assessments of themselves and others.

I was thinking that this strange linkage of Samuel Pepys and Sei Shonagon was a whimsical idea all my own, when my daughter surprised me at breakfast the next morning by suddenly saying, "Last night I dreamt of Sei Shonagon and Samuel Pepys..."

When I responded that I had been thinking about them too and that they would have made a great couple, my 14-year-old daughter recoiled in distaste at the idea. "Ugh!" And yet I'm still thinking it could have been a match made in heaven, or in hell, to put two such quick-witted, intelligent and highly opinionated minds together.

We live in a world in which, to a tiresome degree, people are compartmentalised according to their nation, their race, their gender, their sexuality. Yet sometimes, people from vastly different cultures at completely different historical periods can appear profoundly similar in their thrilling engagement with the sheer mystery of being alive. We make a mistake, I suspect, when we keep Sei Shonagon cloistered in a room called "Heian Court Literature", alongside (to her probably insufferable) companions like Murasaki Shikibu.

Pepys himself, I suspect, would have found boundless joy in the colours and beauty of the Heian court, stealing through the night-time garden of a Heian lady, intent on begging entrance for a moonlit tryst. While Sei Shonagon longs, I think, to burst into a wider world, to explore Pepys' library of Western books, to smoke a pipe and drink some wine, and sing songs of love while Samuel flirtatiously accompanies her on the theorbo.

https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20250517/p2a/00m/0op/004000c

Meet Celebrated Southern Memoirist Judy Goldman

From styleblueprint.com

Judy Goldman’s new book — "The Rest of Our Lives" — invites readers to see aging as an exhilarating time for embracing a new kind of existence. Get to know this inspiring FACE of the South! 

When Judy Goldman turned 80, she felt she’d run out of things to write about. The South Carolina native had already published seven books — three memoirs, two novels, and two poetry collections. Then Judy, now 83, remembered what she often told her memoir workshop students: Write about what keeps you up at night. So, she decided to do just that.

Judy’s newest book – a memoir titled The Rest of Our Lives – tackles the topic of aging, offering readers a new and refreshing way of viewing each stage of life they enter. We caught up with Judy to learn more! 

How did you get into writing?

I started writing in the third grade. That’s the year I started keeping a diary. I wrote my first poem in the third grade, and I took it to my teacher, and the way she reacted to it, you would have thought I was headed for a Pulitzer. She went crazy over it. It was terrible. It showed no talent whatsoever. But that was the early encouragement that I had …

When I went to New York, I pursued a career in copywriting and advertising, and I did that for years. I was a copywriter for ad agencies and then freelanced, so I’ve always written. I was amazed that I could earn a living doing something I had always done and loved to do.

But when I was in my 30s, both of my parents were going through the process of dying at the same time. I was young to lose both parents. I took to my typewriter instead of taking to my bed, and I just wrote one poem after another. All I wrote about was loss. A friend who was in a poetry group with me said, “Judy, you are the high priestess of loss.”

But it got me through that period and started me on my path to being a writer. I stopped writing advertising copy and just devoted everything to writing poetry, then novels, then memoirs.

Judy Goldman is the author of eight books and is often asked to give talks on her writing. Image: Judy Goldman

Your newest memoir is about aging. How did that come about?

Usually, after I publish a book, I have an idea for a new book, and I’m ready to move on. But after my last book was published, I had no idea what to write about. I told my husband, “That’s my last book. I’m not going to ever write another book.” And he said, “You always say that.” I find that very annoying, because it’s so true. But part of thinking that was my last book was thinking, I’m too old to write. That’s what was happening to me.

We’re never too old to write. If we’re worrying about something, if we’re trying to figure out, “how am I going to get along or conquer the challenges of this stage — and there are challenges at every stage, not just old age; there are challenge at 15, 21, 35, 83 — we just have to decide it’s a place full of possibilities.

What encouragement would you give to a woman who wants to start writing or doing something new, but feels too old?

We have to understand that the details of our lives matter. Write about the details of your life—whether in poetry, memoir (both of those are very personal), or fiction—and use the details of your life when you’re creating your characters. Really understanding that the details of our lives matter is important, no matter what we’re trying to tackle next.

What impact does memoir writing have on your everyday life?

In general, I think the biggest effect writing has on my life, particularly writing memoirs, is that it makes me notice things more. I take in more, and I think it’s really good for us to be aware of what is around us. Many times, people ask me if writing a memoir is cathartic. I’m not sure it is, because it’s not writing in a diary — although maybe the initial impulse is the same.

What happens in a memoir is you’re trying to turn your own experiences or memories into art, into something that might matter to somebody else. And that’s very different from writing in a journal.

Judy Goldman’s eighth book and fourth memoir, The Rest of Our Lives, invites readers to reconsider their views of aging. Goldman says the book could be a guide for 80-year-olds and 40-year-olds and everyone in between. Image: Judy Goldman

Does writing a memoir feel different from writing poetry or fiction?

Writing poetry and writing a memoir feel very similar to me because they both use the language of feeling. They’re both intimate. They’re both like a fireside chat with the reader. As for writing fiction, I published two novels that should never have been published. I know that’s a terrible thing to say in an interview, but I was not very good at making things up. I would rather write out of the experiences of my life.

What do you wish more people understood about aging?

If we bother to imagine what old age is like when we’re young, we tend to think it’s something foreign or alien. Really, old age just echoes all the other stages we’ve passed through on our way from then to now. And each stage brings with it the fear of the unfamiliar, along with the exhilaration of trying out a new kind of existence.

What writers inspire you?

Usually, it’s just whoever I’m reading. I don’t read books for pleasure anymore. I read books to learn. I started writing fiction and memoirs so late. My first novel was published when I was 58, so I feel like I have so much to learn. If a book doesn’t have something to teach me about writing, I close the book. My current favorite is Claire Keegan. Her books are jewels. My favorite of hers is Small Things Like These.

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When she’s not working, Judy enjoys spending time with her children, grandchildren, and her husband, Henry. We’ve been married for 57 years! I always wanted a really good love story, and Henry and I got a really good love story. We decided to get married during our third date, “she says. “I had been engaged to another guy and broke my engagement three weeks before the wedding, so I knew what I was looking for. And when I met Henry, I thought, this is it. And he thought the same thing. Image: Judy Goldman

What do you like to do when you’re not working?

I like to walk. I like to be with my family. My daughter lives 10 minutes away, and my son lives eight minutes away.

What’s the best advice you have to offer?

It’s a quote from the poet Nikki Giovanni: “I recommend old age,” she said. “There’s just nothing as wonderful as knowing you have done your job.”

Aside from faith, family, and friends, name three things can’t you live without.

My new vegetable peeler, the photographs of family and friends I have all around my house, and cutting azalea blooms from other people’s yards, and putting them in my condo.

https://styleblueprint.com/everyday/southern-author-judy-goldman/

"I risked jail by writing illegal WW2 diary - now at 99 I want to share secrets"

From thesun.co.uk/news

FORCES fighting in World War Two knew the rules: Anyone who kept a diary risked being be jailed.

But now, at the age of 99½, ex-Royal Marine Tom Hill has finally decided to reveal his secret wartime journal.

Father-of-two Tom showed The Sun the tiny booklet that he has kept hidden for 80 years.

It records the horrors and hilarity of war.

As the anniversary of VE Day — when war ended in Europe — approaches, Tom says: “I knew if I was caught with it I’d have ended up in jail.

“But I went to so many places and I knew if I didn’t write them all down I’d forget where I’d been.

“I kept it hidden with my medical kit in a front leg pocket. Thankfully, the medical kit wasn’t ever inspected so I got away with it.”

But what a tale the notebook, only slightly bigger than a credit card, has to tell.

It goes from the beaches of Normandy, where Tom spent 16 days under fire before his landing craft was sunk, to the Far East and Australia. 

                                                                                       Tom serving in Australia in 1944

                                                                                                   Credit: Paul Tonge

He was in the Panama Canal when VE Day was declared on May 8, 1945. His delighted last entry on May 30 says simply: “UK — Here I come!”

Despite working as a tool setter — a protected job that meant he would never have to fight — Tom volunteered to join the Royal Marines, the only regiment that would take 17-year-olds, and he became a landing craft Coxswain.

I went to so many places and knew if I didn’t write them down I’d forget. I hid the diary in my medical kit and thankfully I got away with it         Tom

At his home in Birmingham, he says: “I wanted to do my bit for my country, especially after witnessing Coventry Road being bombed and seeing first-hand how we were being targeted by the Germans.”

                                          At the age of 99½, ex-Royal Marine Tom Hill has finally decided to reveal his secret wartime journal

                                                                                                       Credit: Paul Tonge

Here, he reflects on some of the entries from his first-hand account of history . . . 

JUNE 1943: After six weeks training in Portsmouth, Tom travels to Scotland to join the former merchant ship Empire Battleaxe, which was home to 90 marines.

JUNE 4, 1944: Back in Portsmouth, Tom ferries troops out to the Battleaxe at anchor in the Solent.

He says: “We didn’t know of the plan for the D-Day landings in France.

“The first we knew of it was seeing troops playing with foreign money on board the ship. We hadn’t been told a thing!”

JUNE 6, 1944: After being held back 24 hours due to bad weather, Tom arrives off Normandy.

He was in the four-man crew of an LCA landing craft, navigating eight miles through choppy waters, taking 35 troops at a time across from the ship to Sword Beach.

He says: “The sights we saw going back and forth were terrible, just awful, ships being sunk and injured troops in the water, but we had to keep going.

“Shells were going over our heads, troops were being shot at. By night all hell seemed to break loose and we were in the crossfire.

“Either side of us I could see LCAs with their doors blown off. The sergeant on another LCA signalled to me that he had one engine and couldn’t fire the other.

“He asked me to move around and take a look.

“I could see a body of one of our troops was wrapped round the propeller shaft rendering it unusable.”

For 16 days Tom and his crew ferried in hundreds of troops and supplies to the beaches before being used to deliver mail.

On one mail run they came across a ship where a shell had gone through a hatch, killing every soldier onboard.

Tom recalls: “There were two lads sharing a flagon of rum while they filled bags with body parts from down below.”

JUNE 22, 1944: On day 16, the landing craft is hit by a storm and sunk.

Tom says: “We abandoned ship and swam together to the nearest boat, which was an American tugboat.

“The captain told us they were returning to the USA and asked if we wanted to go with them.

If I drank one rum I must have had two or three pints of it. I’ve never ever been drunk since then. After grot time, where we spent time with pals, I was tied in my hammock from 11 o’clock until 4 o’clock. The lads thought it was hilarious                   Tom

“While the idea of a new life far from the noise of D-Day was an attractive thought, we got aboard a British ship and were given five days survivor’s leave.”

He then rejoined HMS Battleaxe on an 11-month mission, attached to the American 7th Fleet, all over the Pacific, from Samoa to Sydney.

NOVEMBER 25, 1944: My 19th birthday, in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. A day I will never forget.

Tom says: “If I drank one rum I must have had two or three pints of it. I’ve never ever been drunk since then. After grot time, where we spent time with pals, I was tied in my hammock from 11 o’clock until 4 o’clock.

“The lads thought it was hilarious.”

Later, a prisoner of war became seriously ill and Tom had to ferry a doctor from an American ship to treat him.

He says: “I got alongside and shouted for them to throw a line down. I was greeted with the response, ‘Sorry pal, I haven’t got a pen or paper’.

“It made me really cross that I had to sit in the water for a long time waiting for a rope while we had a really sick POW.”

MARCH 19, 1945: Sydney. Tom says: “Water was always in short supply so we’d strip off and shower in the rain. We had a detachment arrive of six nurses who were all on deck when it started raining.

“A Tannoy announcement reminded us there were females on board and not to strip off and shower.

“One of the nurses piped up, ‘Don’t worry, lads. We’ve seen it all before’.

MAY 8, 1945: Panama Canal. Tom says: “VE Day didn’t matter much to me. By then, D-Day and France felt like it was far away.

“But despite the end of it all in Europe, the campaign in the Pacific and Japan was still going on.”

MAY 30, 1945: New York. UK here we come.

Tom says: “We got back into Portsmouth and were given ten days leave. Our commanding officer told us to make the most of it as afterwards we would be heading back to the Philippines. I remember feeling like it was really unfair. We’d been everywhere.”

Eighty years later, retired school caretaker Tom carries survivor’s guilt that he made it home when he watched so many others perish.

On Thursday, Tom will be attending a Royal British Legion VE Day party with dozens of World War Two veterans at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffs.

He says: “I’m one of the lucky ones, I’m still here. What I saw on D-Day and in the Pacific will always stay with me.

“So many good men I served with didn’t get to see the world in peace.

“I think of them all often and will do so again on VE Day.”

 https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/34753088/royal-marine-tom-hill-ww2-diary-ve-day/