On a sunny Sunday, a roomful of would-be bohemians gathered in the basement of McNally Jackson Books to listen to Katie Roiphe, that great defender of the lost art of messy lives, Daily Beast book editor Lucas Wittmann, publisher and author James Atlas and novelist Donald Antrim answer the pressing question of our day: were Read More
Freud’s concept of der Familienroman, translated as “the family romance,” is a developmental stage that begins as the child grows intellectually and discovers the limitations of his parents. It is defined as a series of changing fantasies: after noticing that other sets of parents are perhaps more impressive than his own, the child imagines that he was adopted; having become sexually aware, he goes on to fantasize that his mother was impregnated by a man who is not his father. Since this is Freud, the term should be considered more polemical than literal. In an introduction to the 1909 paper “Der Familienroman der Nerotiker,” Freud’s biographer Peter Gay points out that the German suffix “-roman” has two meanings: “romance,” for one, but also “novel,” an appropriate subtext for an idea that is rooted in the stories a child tells himself about having been the product of deeply repressed family secrets. Read More
In 1956, before Anne Roiphe set to work on any of her eight novels, the rising senior in college lay naked in a Parisian attic with a Fulbright scholar she’d met earlier that day. “Terror clamped me closed,” Ms. Roiphe, a former columnist for The Observer, writes in Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Read More
