elliott holt

Man, I’ll miss Stefon.

Bill Hader — who is leaving Saturday Night Live after eight years this weekend — on his audition for the show:

I remember getting in the elevator for my audition and there was a guy next to me who had a backpack full of props and wigs and things, and I went, ‘Oh, my God, that guy is so prepared, I have nothing, I have no props.’ And that was Andy Samberg. And Andy Samberg said he was looking at me going, ‘Oh, that guy has no props. He doesn’t need props.’ And that was the first time we met, was in that elevator.

(Source: skeletonsriot)

from Paper Mag’s May issue:

“I have expensive taste in paper,” says writer Elliott Holt of the personalized stationery she orders annually from London. “I write thank-you notes. You have to pick your own font. Mine feels very ‘me.’”

But Holt also has an interest in more contemporary forms of communication: Already a winner of the Pushcart Prize for short fiction, she drew attention during last fall’s inaugural Twitter Fiction festival when she tweeted a murder mystery from three discrete fictional accounts. Her first novel You Are One Of Them comes out this summer and hinges on different forms of correspondence.

“Email was still a novelty in 1995,” Holt writes in You Are One of Them, before carefully re-creating the new technology’s strangeness. As she says now, “You could never have imagined the way our notions of connectivity would change with e-mail. International borders break down. And of course, our notions of identity changed, too. It’s a lot easier to impersonate someone online.”

annaverity:

General Book Recommendation: You Are One of Them by Elliott Holt, which will be published on May 30th.

Sarah Zuckerman and Jennifer Jones are best friends in an upscale part of Washington, D.C., in the politically charged 1980s. Sarah is the shy, wary product of an unhappy home: her father abandoned the family to return to his native England; her agoraphobic mother is obsessed with fears of nuclear war. Jenny is an all-American girl who has seemingly perfect parents. With Cold War rhetoric reaching a fever pitch in 1982, the ten-year-old girls write letters to Soviet premier Yuri Andropov asking for peace. But only Jenny’s letter receives a response, and Sarah is left behind when her friend accepts the Kremlin’s invitation to visit the USSR and becomes an international media sensation. The girls’ icy relationship still hasn’t thawed when Jenny and her parents die tragically in a plane crash in 1985.

Ten years later, Sarah is about to graduate from college when she receives a mysterious letter from Moscow suggesting that Jenny’s death might have been a hoax. She sets off to the former Soviet Union in search of the truth, but the more she delves into her personal Cold War history, the harder it is to separate facts from propaganda.

You Are One of Them is a taut, moving debut about the ways in which we define ourselves against others and the secrets we keep from those who are closest to us. In her insightful forensic of a mourned friendship, Holt illuminates the long lasting sting of abandonment and the measures we take to bring back those we have lost.

I started reading it yesterday, and I’ve been firmly engrossed ever since, and I’ll likely finish reading it tonight unless I fall asleep first. (Hiking has me feeling very tired.) As for what I’m loving about this book: the voice, the settings (geographic and historic), the mystery, the descriptions of Washington D.C. and of pre-teen friendship and of family, and the cover, which seems to be this strange optical illusion of looking like a Victorian era woman in a giant hat until I look more closely and see that nope, she’s definitely living in the late 20th century.

Thanks for reading!