We're still in our Summer of Spouses season, in which we're exploring the lesser-known spouses of famous writers. This week's marriage is a particularly interesting one, and a particularly sad one. Margerie Bonner married Malcolm Lowry when both were in their thirties--she'd been an actress and a personal assistant, while he'd been working on the novel that would eventually be regarded as one of the twentieth century's best. Without her help, it seems unlikely he ever would have finished it. After Under the Volcano was published, Lowry became an even more spectacular drunk than he was while writing the book, and his life sort of spiraled out of control. Then, it's possible his wife killed him.

In addition to our discussion of the Lowrys and their marriage, we also eat some snacks (and drink some coffee) sent to us by a listener. We also dive into the internet's top forum for good advice on marriage and divorce, Yahoo Answers!

If you like the show, please consider subscribing to our Patreon, which helps offset our costs and allows us to keep doing the podcast each week. In exchange for $5, you'll also get access to a monthly bonus episode, Book Fight After Dark, in which we explore some of the weirder reaches of the literary universe: Amish mysteries, caveman romances, end-times thrillers and more!

Welcome to another week in our Summer of Spouses season, in which we read and discuss the work of writers who are married to (or otherwise partnered with) more famous authors. For this week's show we read a couple pieces by the writer Siri Hustvedt, an accomplished essayist and also the wife of writer Paul Auster. We discuss her mix of research with personal essay, which sometimes toes the line of academic writing.

In the second half of the show, we taste test some frozen abomination that is somehow allowed to trade on the Icee name.

If you like the show, please consider subscribing to our Patreon, which helps offset our costs and allows us to keep doing the podcast each week. In exchange for $5, you'll also get access to a monthly bonus episode, Book Fight After Dark, in which we explore some of the weirder reaches of the literary universe: Amish mysteries, caveman romances, end-times thrillers and more!

Welcome to another week in our Summer of Spouses season, in which we read and discuss the work of writers who are married to (or otherwise partnered with) more famous authors. We're interested in how those relationships work, how they collaborate with each other, or don't, and whether it ever becomes frustrating to feel as if you're working in someone else's shadow. This week the couple is a happy one, at least by most accounts: Joan Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne. For our reading, we checked out one of Dunne's essays about Hollywood, in which he discussed the work he and Didion did as screenwriters and recalled some of their more comical and frustrating moments inside that world.

In the second half of the show we visit that bastion of internet wisdom, Yahoo Answers, in search of helpful marriage and relationship advice.

If you like the show, please consider subscribing to our Patreon, which helps offset our costs and allows us to keep doing the podcast each week. In exchange for $5, you'll also get access to a monthly bonus episode, Book Fight After Dark, in which we explore some of the weirder reaches of the literary universe: Amish mysteries, caveman romances, end-times thrillers and more!

We're continuing our Summer of Spouses, in which we read work by the less-famous halves of literary couples. This week it's a couple stories by Michael Dorris, who was married to the writer Louise Erdrich. He had some pretty big successes of his own, including a nonfiction book called The Broken Cord, which is credited with raising awareness around fetal alcohol syndrome. He and Erdrich were, for a time, also quite the literary power couple, working together on some projects and editing each others' work. Then Dorris's life took a very dark turn.

In the second half of the show, we talk about some of their happier days--or at least they seemed happy from the outside--when the two regularly helped each other with their writing and referred to each other as "indispensable." Also: a follow-up on Tom's previous use of the term "horse bath," and the various regional colloquialisms people use for quick washes in the sink.

If you like the show, please consider subscribing to our Patreon, which helps offset our costs and allows us to keep doing the podcast each week. In exchange for $5, you'll also get access to a monthly bonus episode, Book Fight After Dark, in which we explore some of the weirder reaches of the literary universe: Amish mysteries, caveman romances, end-times thrillers and more!

We're continuing our Summer of Spouses, in which we read work by writers who may have sometimes been overshadowed by their more famous partners. This week our author is Tess Gallagher, a celebrated poet and also the second wife of the late Raymond Carver. Gallagher was already a successful poet by the time she met Carver, who had recently stopped drinking, and who seemed to enjoy a second lease on life with her. We talk about Gallagher's 2006 essay "Instead of Dying," published in The Sun, about her years with Carver. The essay depicts a pretty idyllic partnership, though it's also important to consider what's left out of that version of Carver's story, including his first wife and their children.

In the second half of the show, we share some bad marriage advice from the past, and Mike taste-tests some cold brew coffee to see if he can finally get onboard with a thing everyone else in the world seems to (wrongly?) enjoy.

If you like the show, please consider subscribing to our Patreon, which helps offset our costs and allows us to keep doing the podcast each week. In exchange for $5, you'll also get access to a monthly bonus episode, Book Fight After Dark, in which we explore some of the weirder reaches of the literary universe: Amish mysteries, caveman romances, end-times thrillers and more!

This week we're starting our new summer season, in which we'll read work by the less-famous halves of writer couples. To kick it off, we discuss an essay called "Envy" by Kathryn Chetkovich, in which she writes about the crippling jealousy she felt after her boyfriend, Jonathan Franzen, published a little book called The Corrections. The essay caused a bit of a lit-world stir when it came out in 2003 from Granta.

We also talk about the upcoming season, and why we're interested in exploring these spousal relationships. Plus, Tom reads tweets to Mike against his will.

If you like the show, please consider subscribing to our Patreon, which helps offset our costs and allows us to keep doing the podcast each week. In exchange for $5, you'll also get access to a monthly bonus episode, Book Fight After Dark, in which we explore some of the weirder reaches of the literary universe: Amish mysteries, caveman romances, end-times thrillers and more!

This week is the final installment in our Spring of Scandal season, and we're wrapping it up with an essay by a writer who saw a scandal from a unique perspective: as a private investigator hired to get information from college football players, and from a madam, related to a sexual assault case filed against a large university's football program. Erika Krouse details her involvement in the case, and her mixed feelings about the relative ethics of the job, for this piece in Granta.

In the second half of the show, we tackle a writing question: specifically, what you do when you're between projects and can't seem to get going on something new. Not that we have any great advice. But commiseration is helpful, right?

If you like the show, please consider subscribing to our Patreon, which helps offset our costs and allows us to keep doing the podcast each week. In exchange for $5, you'll also get access to a monthly bonus episode, Book Fight After Dark, in which we explore some of the weirder reaches of the literary universe: Amish mysteries, caveman romances, end-times thrillers and more!

This week we're continuing our Spring of Scandal season with a discussion of Mark Greif's "Afternoon of the Sex Children," first published in N+1, and later appearing in Greif's collection Against Everything.

This week we continue our Spring of Scandal with an essay by Sarah Marshall, first published in the Believer, called "Remote Control: Tonya Harding, Nancy Kerrigan, and the Spectacles of Female Power and Pain". The essay revisits that particular scandal, and in particular how the public narrative of it formed and then cemented itself in our shared cultural memory.

In the second half of the show, we talk about a recent literary scandal in the romance world, one that has the unfortunate hashtag #cockygate. We also eat a weird Pop Tart, and hope it doesn't kill us.

If you like the show, please consider subscribing to our Patreon, which helps offset our costs and allows us to keep doing the podcast each week. In exchange for $5, you'll also get access to a monthly bonus episode, Book Fight After Dark, in which we explore some of the weirder reaches of the literary universe: Amish mysteries, caveman romances, end-times thrillers and more!

This week we're delving into the world of sports, and also the world of the 1980s, and also the world of essays that are maybe kind of mean? Pat Jordan is a real titan of sports writing, one of those figures that's always cited as an influence by younger writers. He was particularly celebrated for his profiles of athletes; unlike so many other magazine writers, Jordan was known for being unsparing with his subjects. But when does that tip over into mean-spiritedness? That's one of the questions we consider this week.

In the second half of the show, we talk about what makes a good celebrity or athlete profile versus a bad one. We also discuss an ill-conceived Vogue profile of Asma al-Assad, wife of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which basically wrote around the inconvenient part about her husband being a horrible autocrat. Vogue eventually wiped the piece off the internet.

If you like the show, please consider subscribing to our Patreon, which helps offset our costs and allows us to keep doing the podcast each week. In exchange for $5, you'll also get access to a monthly bonus episode, Book Fight After Dark, in which we explore some of the weirder reaches of the literary universe: Amish mysteries, caveman romances, end-times thrillers and more!