“Whether
I'm critically well received, whether or not I sell books - of course it
becomes progressively harder to get them published - nevertheless, it's what I
do, every day.” – Tama Janowitz
Born
on this date in 1957, Janowitz is part of the celebrated “Brat Pack” group of
authors – along with Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney from the 1980s. A novelist, short story writer,
and close friend of artist Andy Warhol, she first gained acclaim through her
1986 short story collection Slaves
of New York,
later adapted into a film starring Bernadette Peters.
Author of 7 novels, that short story
collection, and 3 nonfiction books, including a celebrated memoir, she lived in
both Manhattan and Brooklyn before settling near Ithaca, NY, where she
continues to write and sometimes teach.
Among her many awards are the graduate
fellowship that led to an MFA degree from Columbia, the Alfred Hodder
Fellowship in the Humanities at Princeton University, and a grant from the National
Endowment for the Arts. While she’s
been chastised for her seeming obsession with money – a focus of many of her
works – she says it’s just the part of life she’s chosen for her writings.
Her 2016 memoir, Scream: A Memoir of Glamour and Dysfunction,
not only touches on that but also her somewhat “wild child” early life that
often put her into the gossip columns and (some say) helped her book sales. But
Janowitz has no deep desire to relive those years. “I did not particularly like
being semi-famous,” she said. “I
did not write books to be liked.”
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