Virtual Memories Show #129:
Amanda Filipacchi – Donkey Skin
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“I love the notion of great beauty hidden in ugliness. Or vice versa.”
Amanda Filipacchi joins this week’s show to talk about her latest novel, The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty: A Novel
“My big life obsession is my lack of productivity and my constant struggle to be more productive. . . . In theory, I have a routine, but I don’t find myself sticking to it.”
Also, I make a pretty amazing bookstore discovery in the airport in Milwaukee, and give (as expected) heady praise to Clive James’ new essay collection, Latest Readings
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We talk about a bunch of books in this episode. Here’s a list of ’em (Note: if I ever go to a Patreon crowdfunding model for the show, this is the first thing that goes subscriber-only):
- The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty: A Novel
- Love Creeps: A Novel
– Amanda Filipacchi
- The Remains of the Day
– Kazuo Ishiguro
- The Blazing World
– Siri Hustvedt
- In Search of Lost Time
– Marcel Proust
- Survival In Auschwitz
– Primo Levi
- The House of Mirth
– Edith Wharton
- Jane Eyre
– Charlotte Bronte
- Crime and Punishment
– Dostoevsky
- The Picture of Dorian Gray
– Oscar Wilde
- The Great Gatsby
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Lottery and Other Stories
– Shirley Jackson
- Emma
– Jane Austen
- The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel
– Haruki Murakami
- Up in the Air
– Walter Kirn
- Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade
– Walter Kirn
- Big Brother: A Novel
– Lionel Shriver
- We Need to Talk About Kevin
– Lionel Shriver
- May We Be Forgiven: A Novel
– A.M. Homes
- Sparta: A Novel
– Roxana Robinson
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! You might like:
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About our Guest
Amanda Filipacchi
is the author of four novels: Nude Men
Born in Paris, France, Amanda Filipacchi was educated in both France and the US, and has lived in New York since the age of seventeen. She earned a BA from Hamilton College and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. She lives in Manhattan with Richard Hine, also a novelist.
Credits: This episode’s music is Head in a Box by Lori Carson. The conversation was recorded at an undisclosed location on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones
, joins the show to talk about Chanel’s impact on women’s fashion and French national identity, how she managed not to get tried for collaboration after the war, the one figure from our age who compares to Chanel, what it’s like teaching the accordion-and-beret crowd, and more! 
– Walter Isaacson
– Ta-Nehisi Coates
– Scott Herring
– Jonathan Strauss
(Princeton University Press, winner of the Kayden Award for outstanding manuscript in the humanities), 
(Princeton), and, as co-editor, 
(University of Nebraska Press, winner of the 2011 award for book design from the American Alliance of Museums). Her new book is 
(Pegasus Books). We discuss the importance of reading for pleasure, the difference between book-collecting and shopping, the role of the book reviewer (and how it differs from that of the critic), a recent negative review he didn’t want to write, why he doesn’t read reviews of his work, what his mother said when he won the Pulitzer Prize, and more! 
– Thomas Berger
– Thomas Berger
– Daniel Boorstin
– Daniel Boorstin
– Joseph Conrad
– Cyril Connolly
– Edmund Crispin
– Michael Dirda
– Michael Dirda
– Lloyd C. Douglas
– Clifton Fadiman
– Clifton Fadiman
– Clifton Fadiman
– William Gaddis
– Jonathan Galassi
– Robert Hichens
– Homer
– Michael Innes
– Clive James
– Rudyard Kipling
– Nikos Kazantzakis
– Judith Krantz
– Alison Lurie
– Charles Mackay
– Jay McInerney
– Baroness Orczy
– Ayn Rand
– James Salter
– Neal Stephenson
– Thoreau
– John Williams
– William Zinsser
Michael Dirda is a weekly book columnist for 
, and of four previous collections of essays: 
, 
, and 
, in addition to his newest collection, 
! We also talk about her need to try different genres, that pigeonholing process, how abandoning the supernatural for her Cass Neary novels was like working without a net, how her success at writing may be attributable to the Helsinki Bus Syndrome, what it was like to be at the punk scene in the mid-’70s, how she learned to strip down her prose for her recent (and excellent) noir crime novels, just how she ended up in coastal Maine, and more! 
– Jennifer Marie Brissett
– Julian Cope
– Pamela Des Barres
– Daryl Gregory
– Liz Hand
– Liz Hand
– Liz Hand
– Liz Hand
– Thomas Harris
– Greill Marcus
– Sally Mann
– Legs McNeil
– Kem Nunn
– Jean Stein, George Plimpton
– John Steinbeck
– JRR Tolkien
– Laura van den Berg
– Rob Young
(Henry Holt).We talk about what it means to miss New Jersey, what makes The Shore different from any other seaside amusement region, what he learned while writing for the YA category, what he unlearned from his copywriting day-job, the value of 
(Knopf) (and one of the best books I’ve read this year). We discuss Merrill’s allure as a poet and the alchemy that allowed him to turn base wealth into artistic gold. He also talks about learning the art of literary biography on the fly, the challenge of recreating Merrill’s life in Greece, Merrill’s silence over AIDS, how we can understand the Ouija board-derived poems of Merrill’s masterwork, and more! 
and, as editor for the Library of America, 
and 
. His lectures on modern poetry are available free online at 
, 
and 
, as well as translations of the Italian poets Eugenio Montale and Giacomo Leopardi. He has served as a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin, and as executive editor and later president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. In 2008 he received the Maxwell E. Perkins Award, which recognizes an editor, publisher, or agent who “has discovered, nurtured and championed writers of fiction in the U.S.” A former Guggenheim Fellow and poetry editor of the Paris Review, he also writes for the New York Review of Books and other publications. He lives in New York City. His new novel is 
(Other Press). We talk about the process of adoption, her history with Nigeria (and why she loves its literary scene), the trick of balancing cultural differences and societal norms, and how she became a published writer in her 30s, after years of planning her book tour outfits. We also discuss the growth of writing programs in the UK, choosing her secondary school on whether they required uniforms, and her take on New York vs. London. 
, and 
, how a trip to Patagonia led to a new phase of his art, and why he decided to become a cartoonist instead of a painter (while making his rep in fashion illustration). 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
(with Lou Reed), 
, and his newest book,