Word: discomforts
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...this cheerful, good-natured, owl-spotting nature boy? And what has he done with Jonathan Franzen? He's not the same tortured genius who wrote The Corrections. Success has changed him. He's a slightly different kind of genius now. His wonderful and supremely personal new memoir The Discomfort Zone (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 195 pages) offers a few clues...
Franzen grew up nerdy and nervous in a small, comfortable town in Missouri called Webster Groves. Here are a few things that young Jonathan was afraid of, according to The Discomfort Zone: "spiders, insomnia, fish hooks, school dances, hardball, heights, bees, urinals, puberty, music teachers, dogs, the school cafeteria, censure, older teenagers, jellyfish, locker rooms, boomerangs, popular girls," and most of all, "my parents." When he wasn't afraid, Franzen was embarrassed. Here's another list citing reasons why the boy Franzen wasn't popular. "I had a large vocabulary, a giddily squeaking voice, horn-rimmed glasses, poor arm strength...
...places The Discomfort Zone reads like outtakes from a Judy Blume young-adult novel. On a church retreat, a girl caught Franzen cheating at cards and thereafter addressed him as "Cheater." He once publicly confused the words masturbation and menstruation. For a high school speech class, he brought in his stuffed Kanga and Roo toys to illustrate his talk about Australian wildlife. "It's like, if I were making a list of things that I don't want to talk about and don't want to write about publicly, these would be at the top of it," Franzen says. "That...
...when a Shi'ite friend who had been riding with them was allowed to leave. When the men showed their media badges, issued by the U.S. military, the cops accused them of being American spies. "We'll send you to the Interior Ministry," a cop said, obviously enjoying their discomfort as he bundled them into the back of a pickup truck. "You may be released or jailed, or maybe somebody will use an electric drill on you." In the end, the TIME men were able to talk their way out of captivity after the owner of a shop near...
...love Gabrielle for the acid pleasure it gave me, for the eloquence of its characters discomfort, for the brute delicacy of its direction (shifting seamlessly between courtship and bitterness, between black-and-white and color) and especially for the beautiful performances of Huppert and Greggory: she the queen for 30 years of serious French film, he the stage actor proving he knows how to pitch an emotion so the camera just catches it. Chéreau, a distinguished director for the stage as well as for film - Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train and Intimacy being his movies...