Shaved Meats, Piled High: May 2018
The Penn is Mightier Than the Pen
In late March, I was asked to interview Sean Penn at Politics & Prose. He was about to publish a book, Bob Honey Just Do Stuff. I knew nothing about the book, but Politics & Prose has been very good to me, and I like doing author interviews. Over the years, I've had the opportunity to interview Mindy Kaling, Lee Child and Jess Walter. It's a job I take seriously and I take pride in how I do it.
But also -- as someone who has met a lot of actors, I feel they are often unfairly stereotyped as shallow and criticized whenever they are perceived as getting out of their lane. Whether it's writing a book or talking about politics or even responding to natural disasters, actors seldom catch a break.
Would Sean Penn's novel have been published if he weren't Sean Penn? Probably not. Is that fair? Probably not -- and he was quick to concede that. When I met him, he expressed wonder at the attention he was getting and said, with apparent humility, "I know it's not this way for other writers."
In the weeks leading up to the event, the Internet boiled and bubbled. I saw some people suggest that those who had blurbed Penn's book be criticized and censured, which seemed a little extreme to me. His titular character, Bob Honey, was often conflated with Penn, who was then accused of Bob Honey's misogyny. A friend said he was a wife-beater, but the evidence isn't there; Penn threatened a lawsuit when that allegation were made by director Lee Daniels a few years ago. There was legitimate concern, in my opinion, about a beautiful young African-American woman presented as a nameless "chocolate" objet de crush, but you could find similar passages in quite a few mainstream crime novels being published right now.
I'm sure it's frustrating to see an Academy Award-winning writer get attention for his first book, especially when the reviews are scathing. But I'll tell you this much: I've never met a writer who was more nonchalant about his reviews. At the end of the evening, Penn pulled out his phone and showed me the mock-up for full page ads in the New York Times and the Washington Post, which gleefully used the most savage barbs. A lot of very good writers could learn a thing or two from Penn about how to react to reviews.
READ/READING: Less, Andrew Sean Greer; That Kind of Mother, Rumaan Alam; The Idiot, Fjodor Dostojevskij; He, John Connolly; Lou Berney's as-yet-untitled novel.
REREADING: Role Models, John Waters; The Saturdays, Elizabeth Enright.
ME, ME, ME: To paraphrase The Fantasticks: The tour is not done (two more events) (if you don't count the UK in July) /oh no, not quite/for tours never end/On Suspense Night (Hello, St. Louis!)/And despite what pretty publicists say/The hardcover takes you only halfway/ (Trade paperback of Sunburn will be published July 31, and I'm doing a doozy of an event in August).
Laura Lippman
May 2018