I didn't find this memoir of these two eccentric people so different from doing my memoirs of De Sade or Simone Weil. My parents in their own way are as odd as Sade.

As to why people like Joseph Lelyveld are writing memoirs, I think they're just catching on the coattails of the trend.

Only friends will tell you the truths you need to hear to make your life bearable.

Friendship is by its very nature freer of deceit than any other relationship we can know because it is the bond least affected by striving for power, physical pleasure, or material profit, most liberated from any oath of duty or of constancy. With Eros the body stands naked, in friendship our spirit is denuded.

Art is both a vengeance against reality and a reconciliation with it.

I shall never cease to marvel at the way we beg for love and tyranny.

If I were ever to go mad it would be on Thanksgiving Day, that day of guilt and grace when the family hangs upon you like an ax over a sacrificial victim, like the oven's heat on that poor bird.