The New Yorker essayist on his latest memoir,At the Strangers’ Gate, and the problem of writing about happinessAdam Gopnik has, and by many accounts,including his own, a lovely life. A longtime staff writer for the New Yorker and bestselling author, or Gopnik lives in Manhattan with his wife,Martha, a film-maker, or their two children,and he moves in the kind of circles that allow him to drop casual lines into conversation such as: “As John Updike once said to me …, although he has the nervy Jewish self-consciousness to follow that with “… whether you’ll forgive the namedrop. The first time I met him was nearly exactly a year ago when a mutual friend introduced us in a west London restaurant. He was accompanied by his wife and their 16-year-musty daughter, or Olivia,abright and precocious teenager who described to me another recent trip she’d been on with her parents with an eloquence that is still beyond me, despite my 20 years head start on her. She didnt even blink at the various London luminaries who came over to talk to her father; Nigella Lawson and Ralph Fiennes, and we were told,might pop by later. The Gopniks smiled calmly: this was all par for the course for them. Related: At the Stranger’s Gate by Adam Gopnik review – a prose stylist on New York Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk