{"id":7903,"date":"2014-10-07T13:10:45","date_gmt":"2014-10-07T17:10:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lilith.org\/?post_type=articles&p=7903"},"modified":"2014-10-07T13:10:45","modified_gmt":"2014-10-07T17:10:45","slug":"on-not-learning-to-flirt","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/lilith.org\/articles\/on-not-learning-to-flirt\/","title":{"rendered":"On Not Learning to Flirt"},"content":{"rendered":"

Daphne Merkin<\/strong>\u2019s new memoir, The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, The Brontes, and the Importance of Handbags<\/strong> (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, $28) is biting, insightful, and as revealing and withholding as a well-observed life deserves. Alert to all kinds of experiences, Merkin mines her fraught relationship with her father in the chapter \u201cOn Not Learning to Flirt.\u201d Here\u2019s a taste:<\/em><\/p>\n

I was invited one summer to spend a weekend in New Hampshire\u00a0with the writer Saul Bellow at the behest of his agent, who had recently taken me on as a client. Bellow was his larger-than-life, oxygen-eating self, as charming a host as you could wish for, discoursing on everything from Bach to his secret recipe for tuna fish salad that called for a tablespoon of ketchup. He was solicitous of me, praising what writing of mine he had read, and in general conspiring to make me a happy guest. But his very assumption of masculine irresistibility, which his agent had succumbed to long ago, put my teeth on edge, and I spent a good deal of time taking walks by myself so as not to have to be an audience to his sweltering ego.<\/p>\n

\"reviews<\/p>\n

Towards the end of the stay, Bellow and I were talking outside, just the two of us, while he tilled his bounteous garden. I could swear he did an imitation of Marlon Brando in The Godfather by cutting an opening into a piece of orange skin, sliding it over his teeth, and then smiling at me ghoulishly, but whether I am inventing this in retrospect or it really happened, I know I suddenly felt tenderhearted toward him. As Bellow was seeing us off, I leaned over to give him a hug, and after we had said our goodbyes, he added, in a quiet voice, \u201cBe kinder to the male gender.\u201d This suggestion, in the simplicity of its appeal and the vulnerability that lay behind that appeal, broke through my already-wobbly defenses, opening up vistas of affection withheld and received that I mostly had shied away from. I cried all the way to the airport and then throughout the plane ride, feeling that I had been seen and understood, that the once-ignored little girl was now an adult woman whose feelings and responses left their mark on the male beholder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Daphne Merkin\u2019s new memoir, The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, The Brontes, and the Importance of Handbags (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, $28) is biting, insightful, and as revealing… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","tags":[84],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lilith.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/articles\/7903"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lilith.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/articles"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lilith.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/articles"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lilith.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lilith.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lilith.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lilith.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}