Long weekend . . . nice, but long. Lots of work, visits, and late night writing, but I also found snippets of time to do a bit of reading. I read the bulk of The Collected Short Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman.
Friedman is an eclectic writer who has cut his teeth as a humorist, essayist, and a Hollywood screenwriter and NY playwright . . . so he's done it all. I've been meaning to get to his books for a long time, and I finally managed to crack open this thick volume of his collected works. Great stuff here.
What I really enjoy about Friedman is that he doesn't take himself too seriously. He's able to wallow in self-deprecation and doesn't go after the easy laugh in his humor. He's smart and snappy and his short fiction here gives me something to shoot for.
He even claims his mother dropped him on his head as an infant, and this explains his bizarre and warped sense of himself. The same thing happened to me too, but my mother also gave me Castor oil and insisted that suppositories were superior to the chewable form of Flintstone vitamins. Most of my childhood was spent bending over the bathroom sink for my daily allowance of nourishment. Mom doesn't remember it this way, but believe me, a straight guy never forgets.
How do you like them apples, Mr. Friedman? And you think you're warped?
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