Playfully surreal reading about the comedy of human foibles.
Conan O’Brien’s longtime personal assistant dishes on the career she never saw coming.
Growing up, Movsesian couldn’t get enough TV, from Sesame Street and Mister Rogers to TGIF programming on ABC. “I eventually made it to HBO,” she writes, “and from there, any dreams of a more ‘productive’ hobby were over.” After an adolescence spent egging houses and not doing homework, she decided her future was in TV. While a student at USC, Movsesian was hired as an alternative programming intern at NBC without knowing “what the fuck” the job entailed. That experience gave the author her first, most invaluable lesson about work: “Never ask questions and always pretend like you know what you’re doing.” She also learned that bosses mistreating their employees was the norm. “I’ve seen people mistreat others because they themselves were mistreated,” she writes, “and think it’s a rite of passage to treat someone like garbage.” At age 26, when a random joke landed her a job as Conan O’Brien’s personal assistant, everything changed, and their mutual “juvenile tendencies” began to feed off each other. As he made fun of her and her unadulterated lust for junk food, Movsesian struck back. O’Brien recalls that she retaliated with “ingenious time-sucking distractions”—like watching TV and napping at work—that revealed her “unquenchable thirst to stick it to The Man,” which, in this case, was O’Brien himself. Nonetheless, as he reveals in the foreword, even though he calls Movsesian the “World’s Worst Assistant,” he also praises her as “one of the most honest and really caring people I know.” This lighthearted, often amusing book, which also includes black-and-white line-drawn comics, will have greatest appeal to fans of Movsesian (who has appeared on several of Conan’s shows, including a special filmed in her ancestral Armenia) and of Conan himself.
Playfully surreal reading about the comedy of human foibles.Pub Date: July 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-18551-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
Of great interest to Didion completists, though a minor entry in the body of her work.
The late novelist and journalist records her innermost, deeply personal struggles.
Didion died in 2021. Afterward, a file of private notes was discovered among her things, including notes addressed to her late husband, John Gregory Dunne, recounting sessions with the noted Freudian psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon, “a staunch defender of talk therapy.” Talk they do, with Didion serving up a battery of problems and MacKinnon offering wise if perhaps non-actionable responses to them, for instance, “Nothing about families turns out to be easy, does it.” It’s not easy, for sure, and Didion’s chief concern throughout is her daughter, Quintana Roo, who died after a long illness, the subject of Didion’s 2011 memoir Blue Nights. Indeed, so many of the conversations concern Quintana that Didion—by design, one supposes—skirts her own issues, although MacKinnon identifies some: “I did think you might have developed more self-awareness,” he says, referring to Didion’s habit of squirreling herself away whenever difficult subjects arose. Didion counters that she cherishes privacy, adding that she sometimes left her own parties to shelter in her office and admitting that her long habit of overwork was a means of emotional distancing. It’s not wholly that Didion lacks that self-awareness, but that the keenest insights about her come from others, as when she records, “I said a friend had once remarked that while most people she knew had very strong competent exteriors and were bowls of jelly inside, I was just the opposite.” That Didion was constantly anxious, sometimes to the point of needing medication, will come as no surprise to close readers of her work, but the depth of her anguish and guilt over her inability to save her daughter—she threw plenty of money at her, but little in the way of love—is both affecting and saddening.
Of great interest to Didion completists, though a minor entry in the body of her work.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9780593803677
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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SEEN & HEARD
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