A poignant drama about two influential yet fragile figures grappling with the “very excruciating life” of an artist.
Actual conversations between two iconic gay artists form the basis for a new play.
In 1978, longtime friends Andy Warhol and Truman Capote made cassettes of their conversations, “approximately eighty hours of recordings.” Roth, director of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast on Broadway, learned that Pittsburgh’s Warhol Museum owned these tapes but that they were inaccessible to the public. With the help of museum board members such as artist Cindy Sherman and filmmaker John Waters, he gained access. Most of the conversations were dull, but then he got to “the magic tape” in which Warhol suggested they “take their words and make a play out of them.” That play never happened, but Roth has fashioned his own “non-fiction invention” from the conversations of “two of my idols.” The first half of the book consists of the text of the play, short scenes in which Warhol and Capote gossip about everything from the vagaries of fame to Capote’s rehab stint for alcoholism. The second half is a “Bonus” section of exchanges in which they dish about boyfriends, sex clubs, and a famous woman who was “one of Hitler’s greatest friends.” Roth redacted many names from the bonus exchanges, leaving place holders for “a very famous rock star” and “a trend-setting woman of high social standing,” among others. These excisions might leave readers who are thirsty for gossip feeling parched. The play, however, is an imaginative portrait, with Capote coming across as the needier of the two, wondering if he’s wasted his years while maintaining he was “the one and only real true genius in America.” Meanwhile, Warhol was his concerned caregiver, eager to protect the man he was so obsessed with in his youth that Capote’s mother had to tell him to stop pestering her son.
A poignant drama about two influential yet fragile figures grappling with the “very excruciating life” of an artist.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982103-82-8
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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