What Does Laurie Abraham Want?
Laurie Abraham wrote one of her new books as a fly on a tenement wall and another as a modern woman staring into her soul.
The book is a harrowing family chronicle larded with the usual statistics that paint the bigger picture. Normally we would have interviewed Abraham in search of the person behind the reporter, but there was no need. In a collection of essays she and five friends published earlier this year, Abraham revealed herself.
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So here she is, contemplating her “uncommonly strong need to win, to be right, whatever the subject, and especially with men,” and the real poser Mike asked her after one bitter fight, “if I was capable of loving someone with more conservative views than I held. . . . I did not answer.”
In both books you’re writing out of a keen sense of dissatisfaction, we observed.
“Actually,” said Abraham, “the ‘Arguments’ essay was written right after that argument, when I was stewing alone at home and he was out playing Frisbee. I banged that baby out in the heat of anger. That’s why when it starts out, immediately we’re on the back porch. Well, I was still on the back porch when I was writing it.”
We hear the Sun-Times was so eager to get rid of Crowley it didn’t even wait for her contract to run out. An unpleasant business, no? And it could get even nastier if Crowley, who’s a lawyer, decides to sue. But why should the Sun-Times trouble any of us with the details? What matters is there are brighter days ahead.
