Before I dive into this week’s book recommendation, allow me to get personal for a moment. There’s a reason I’m thinking about this book in July. July is my brother’s birthday month, and I’m missing him a lot this year. I read this book a few years after my brother died from leukemia, and I immediately felt a really deep, personal connection with a lot of the specifics of this story. I think a lot of people will.

This book is one of my all-time favorites for a reason. It hits at some really rough emotional truths that had me sobbing, but there were also moments of real humor, believe it or not. I can’t imagine how anyone wouldn’t love this one. If you haven’t read it, please do!

Mary Robison is interviewed by Rebecca Bengal in the new Summer issue of The Paris Review.

I am reading Mary Robison and thinking about smoking. Specifically, I’m rereading Robison’s 1979 debut, Days, a collection of short stories about sad people who smoke. There’s Charlie Nunn, the retired teacher who smokes while supine on the rug, letting ash accumulate on his unshaven chin. There’s Guidry, the alcoholic who rests the day’s first cigarette on his sink’s soap caddy as he shaves. There’s Gail, the bride whose father strikes a match on his trouser fly to offer her a light. These characters don’t smoke because they’re sad; they smoke because it’s the seventies. Still, I’m tempted to read all the smoking as symptomatic of a condition that afflicts characters across Robison’s oeuvre: a near pathological refusal to consider any moment but the present one.

When I first read Robison, I was also a sad person who smoked. That was seventeen years ago. I was an M.F.A. student living in my first New York apartment, a sixth-floor junior one bedroom ($1,300 a month!) just south of 125th Street on Manhattan’s West Side. I’d take my Camel Lights onto the fire escape, which offered a view of the shimmering Hudson. Unlike the characters in Robison’s stories, whose default mode is passive resignation, I was romantic; sadness and smoking were aspects of the “young writer” persona I hoped to cultivate. I’m embarrassed to admit that I once defended my habit to a girlfriend by explaining that cigarettes were my friends before she was around and that they’d comfort me after our inevitable breakup. All this is not to say that I wasn’t sad, or that I didn’t love smoking, but that both were integral to my conception of self.

Robison’s 2001 novel, Why Did I Ever, also became integral. On its surface, the story of Money Breton, a Hollywood script doctor and mother of adult children who takes Ritalin and drives around the American South, had little in common with either my life or the autobiographical first novel I was writing. But Money’s narration—pithy, sardonic, and unsentimental, but also stealthily poetic and fundamentally humane—struck a tonal balance I’d been struggling to achieve in my own work.

How did Spain and England make it to the final? Will Gareth Southgate sub on Pete Donaldson? And will Pete wet himself?

Two days out from the final of Euro 2024, Marcus, Luke, Pete and Jim relive Spain and England’s journey to the final!

Along the way, Kevin Keegan carries the Olympic torch by an orphanage, there’s an unprecedented number of broken noses, and Big Mama UEFA turns to Pete for sustenance. Come join us for the countdown to Sunday!

We're back on stage and tickets are out NOW! Join us at London Palladium on Friday September 20th 2024 for 'Football Ramble: Time Tunnel', a journey through football history like no other. Expect loads of laughs, all your Ramble favourites, and absolutely everything on Pete's USB stick. Get your tickets at footballramblelive.com!

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April 28 – July 21, 2024

May 30 – July 13, 2024