"For years, I sat in my mother's office, doing my mother's job."
"I know because I heard the same thing from Tina and Gottlieb and Shawn and Ross,"
"It's surprisingly hard to get the longer reported pieces that are funny along the way."
"the greatest piece of active sublimation in my experience."
A lunch at the Red Flame Diner featured Roger Angell sharing grilled-cheese sandwiches and editorial counsel about crafting comic reportage. Angell inherited a fiction-editing lineage from his mother, Katharine White, and later occupied the same editorial role. He described years of working in his mother's office as doing her job, a phenomenon a therapist labeled the greatest piece of active sublimation in his experience. Angell observed that producing longer reported pieces that remain funny is surprisingly difficult and cited predecessors including Tina, Gottlieb, Shawn, and Ross. Notable comic reported pieces included work by Calvin Trillin, Mark Singer, Ian Frazier, and Susan Orlean. Angell died in 2022 at age 101.
Read at The New Yorker
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