Books |
The Fran Lebowitz Reader
By
Published: Jan 19, 2021
Category:
Humor
“Pretend It’s a City” is a seven-part Netflix series Fran Lebowitz made with Martin Scorsese. It’s Fran at her most lovable: mean, condescending, rude and judgmental. Friends who binge nothing are inhaling it. The New Yorker raves. Spend a minute with the preview and you’ll see why.
For newbies and the young: Fran is a satirist and social commentator who thrived in the ’70s and ’80s as a tough-talking demolition machine, destroying entire categories with astringent, precise sentences. She was a great character — she chain-smoked, wore blazers and white shirts and faded jeans and Bass Weejuns, and growled at interviewers as if they had just rudely awakened her.
Then she just… stopped. In the last few decades, Fran has written almost nothing — indeed, she’s made a career effort not to finish her long-awaited novel, “Exterior Signs of Wealth”. She’s supported herself on book royalties, lectures at colleges, and occasional appearances as a no-nonsense judge on “Law & Order.” As she admits, “I’ve never met anyone who even comes close to me in laziness. I would have made a perfect heiress.”
Her pieces were collected in two books, Metropolitan Life, which now sells on Amazon for upwards of $431, and Social Studies, which starts at $768. Unless you’re a collector, you want “The Fran Lebowitz Reader, which draws from those books. Not every piece sings, but the sentences do. [To buy the paperback of “The Fran Lebowitz Reader”from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
For instance:
Why writers smoke: The words are in the cigarettes.
There’s no such thing as advice to the lovelorn. If they took advice, they wouldn’t be lovelorn.
Success didn’t spoil me. I’ve always been insufferable.
The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.
The outdoors is what you have to go through to get from the apartment into the taxi.
The first requirement of a climber is a toehold.
Meatloaf —a marvelously rough kind of Spam.
Being offended is the natural consequence of leaving one’s home.
Will the change of administration deaden her wit and quiet her rage? Don’t bet on it.
