Happy birthday, Renata Adler

"I have met very few writers who write at all."

Welcome to the latest issue of Subtle Maneuvers. Previously: Illustrator and writer Hallie Bateman on welcoming weed into her creative process and letting go of guilt.

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Renata Adler (b. 1937)

Today is Adler’s 83rd birthday. A film critic at the New York Times in the late 1960s, and a staff writer for the New Yorker in the 1960s and ‘70s, Adler is probably best known today for her two novels, Speedboat and Pitch Dark, published in 1976 and 1983, respectively, but republished in 2013 to widespread acclaim. The former is about a young journalist who, in Meghan O’Rourke’s words, “chronicles her life in a fragmentary, knowing fashion, shifting back and forth in time, and drifting around in the way that writers do,” and it contains one of the best descriptions of the so-called writing life that I’m aware of: