Category: Ask Bee
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The World According To Garp
Essay · Literature & Ideas A Novel About Everything That Can Go Wrong, Written With Love The World According to Garp is a novel about a novelist, which gives John Irving permission to make it about everything else: about mothers and sons, about feminism and its discontents, about the randomness of violent death, about the…
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Chapter 49: Love and Marriage
Topper and I return to the house from dinner in Palm Springs. Mr S and Ms Bacall have walked ahead of us and are already inside, deep in conversation. When Mr S finds me alone by the pool, he hands me a drink and settles beside me. “You know, baby, Cary was right,” he says.…
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Stop Making Sense: David Byrne and the Art of Intelligent Strangeness
He arrived in New York with a ukulele and a stammer and an idea that pop music could be the vehicle for the most serious questions a person could ask. Fifty years later, the former lead singer of Talking Heads remains the most restlessly curious, most formally inventive, most genuinely odd figure in American popular…
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Chapter 48: Loving You
Back at Bryn Mawr, I’m racing to finish my senior thesis, determined to do it quickly and well. Tilly is supposed to be working too, but she’s distracted. Buddy comes down to visit us so often that their constant antics are beginning to get on my nerves. More than once, I slip a noise complaint…
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Tove Ditlevsen
Essay · Literature & Lives The Copenhagen Trilogy and the Cost of Seeing Clearly Tove Ditlevsen wrote about the interior lives of women — their desires, their loneliness, their addiction, their marriages, their children, their slow suffocation inside the arrangements that society had made for them — with a directness and a formal precision that…
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Affordable Style: Inns and Guesthouses of Essaouira & the Atlas Foothills
Morocco’s Atlantic coast and mountain landscapes offer a different kind of escape: atmospheric, artisanal, and surprisingly affordable. While Marrakech draws luxury seekers, the port town of Essaouira and the villages of the Atlas foothills remain places where riads, kasbahs, and guesthouses welcome travellers with warmth and character. Here, affordable style is woven into hand-carved wooden…
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Chapter 47: Wild in the Country
We are wasting away the day, lying on the sofas in the TV room at Tilly’s family’s country place. “What a party,” Tilly mutters, placing a bag of ice on her forehead. I laugh. “Good though.” “Happy New Year,” I say. “Happy New Year, Birds.” She groans. “Can you get up and change the channel,…
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Chapter 46: The Idle & The Wild
“Am I glad to see you!” Tilly picks me up at Idlewild Airport. She’s back from Europe, and she looks so English now it makes me chortle. She notices. “I’m transmorphing into that little English rose you arrived as,” she smiles, then adds, with bite: “A bit more sophisticated, though.” She adjusts her hair in…
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Nel Mezzo del Cammin: Dante and the Journey That Is the Argument
He was thirty-five years old, exiled from his city, stripped of everything that had defined him, when he began the most ambitious poem in the Western tradition. He set it in the middle of his own life because the middle of a life is where the crisis comes — when the path forward is no…
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I’m Not a Fan of the New World Order
A political deep dive into Trump’s reckless behaviour on the world stage — and why the consequences will outlast him Introduction Foreign policy is usually a slow-moving business. Alliances take decades to build, trade relationships are negotiated over years, and a nation’s credibility is a resource accumulated patiently across generations of diplomats, treaties, and crises…
