Writers get revenge, taking advantage of the month’s scant social calendar to give readings until your ears bleed. … Tonight humorist Patricia Marx reads from her novel, Him Her Him Again the End of Him, at Barnes & Noble. “As the doctors say, you’ll feel a little discomfort and then it’s over,” she told us. “ I try to just entertain. Sometimes I’m so aware of how boring readings are, that I play the audio book and then talk back to it.” Ms. Marx’s novel is about that age-old problem of women obsessing about men who are wrong for them and ruin their lives. We asked Ms. Marx what can be done. “I don’t think it’s simply because the person is unavailable,” she said. “I think it becomes habit. Sometimes you’re just used to obsessing about the person. … I think that your shrink would tell you, and they’d be right, obsession happens because you don’t want to face life without the obsession. But why it latches on to that particular person, I don’t know.” Women are complicated, you see. Whereas men, she noted, “decide they want to get married and whoever is standing in the elevator with them is the one.” In other literary happenings, Geoff Kloske of Riverhead Books heads to the Montauk Club in Park Slope to fete the publication of a nausea-inducing anthology called Brooklyn Was Mine, which was edited by two Vogue editors and features contributions from, among others, Jennifer Egan, Katie Roiphe, Darcey Steinke and, yep, Jonathan Lethem. Just when was Brooklyn “theirs”? Must have been before they bought the Bugaboo and blogged about it, back in the gritty days when their parents bought them a Park Slope apartment and they could only afford the maid once a week. …
[Patricia Marx reading, Barnes & Noble, 396 Avenue of the Americas, 7:30 p.m., 212-674-8780; Brooklyn Was Mine party, the Montauk Club, 25 Eighth Avenue, Park Slope, 6:30 p.m., invite only]
