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5/4/09 17:22![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlectomyIf you read Sherman Alexie's semi-autobiographical Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, you laugh a lot, but you also emerge with a sense of how hard and painful a life it must have been, painful enough so that you have almost no choice except to wallpaper humor over the painful parts. There are three funerals over the course of a year in the book. In Alexie's real life, there were nine.
(He says that it once had a working title of "The Funeral-a-Month Club.")
Hearing him speak, it's the same thing; he's a very funny speaker. He's funny enough to wring a big laugh out of "I would have killed hundreds of people." (Before discovering his talent for writing, he attempted to major in pre-med.) And then he talks about having 22 relatives die of alcohol-related causes.
I nearly didn't manage to go -- the 96th street station was closed to uptown trains, and I didn't realize I could take a downtown train from 110th, so I ended up at 110th and Lenox trying to run the considerable distance crosstown and make it in time. But I'm very glad I slid in under the wire.
(He says that it once had a working title of "The Funeral-a-Month Club.")
Hearing him speak, it's the same thing; he's a very funny speaker. He's funny enough to wring a big laugh out of "I would have killed hundreds of people." (Before discovering his talent for writing, he attempted to major in pre-med.) And then he talks about having 22 relatives die of alcohol-related causes.
I nearly didn't manage to go -- the 96th street station was closed to uptown trains, and I didn't realize I could take a downtown train from 110th, so I ended up at 110th and Lenox trying to run the considerable distance crosstown and make it in time. But I'm very glad I slid in under the wire.
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(no subject)
6/4/09 03:22 (UTC)