Reviewed by Matt Usher
Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even if it’s a Lie:
A Memoir in Essays
by Steve Wasserman
Heyday
October 2024, Hardcover, 416 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1597146470
Age alone is not enough to beget wisdom. Wisdom is just as much a living thing as its close allies, knowledge and experience. It’s a muscle that needs constant and rigorous exercise, or it will atrophy and rot.
Steve Wasserman has experienced enough for a handful of lifetimes. He is possessed of a great skill in weaving those allies and moments into a compelling narrative that is clear as a pane of glass. Though there are signs everywhere that he was an adept observer, one that takes good notes and has capacious memory. Not only that, but he has a good choice in friends, people who were or became notable. Here we find portraits of titans such as Christopher Hitchens and Susan Sontag richly painting many a page.
Elsewhere in Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If it’s a Lie, we find observations and considerations over the topic of a perhaps diminishing market for literature itself, in its print form. These are deepened by Wasserman’s cavernous closet of literary hats: agent, reviewer, publisher, editor, and now, essayist. He quotes Jason Epstein, expressing a notion that Wasserman is sympathetic to:
I must declare my bias. My rooms are piled from floor to ceiling with books so that I have to think twice about where to put another one. If by some unimaginable accident all these books were to melt into air leaving my shelves bare with only a memorial list of digital files left behind, I would want to melt as well for books are my life.
Indeed, throughout this collection, the text is enriched by this ‘bias’, a clear love for the printed word. He does honor to the poetic thoughts of WB Yeats: “Time that is intolerant/Of the brave and innocent/And indifferent in a week/To a beautiful physique/Worships language and forgives/Everyone by whom it lives”. This above all gives breath to these essays. Just as Yeats speaks of time, so it is true by Wasserman. His writings honor those by whom his life was filled with the living word.
One of these figures is the aforementioned Susan Sontag whose library, he says, swelled to a staggering twenty five thousand books. Just as he had written an obituary for her, this essay is lapidary with care for and memory of her. Not the least because he helped her find many of those volumes. Through Wasserman’s ink, historical figures are realized from the angle of both a professional acquaintance as well as a friend. Owing to that, we see here miniature biographies that serve both as a memorial as well as an analysis. Here the essays cover much ground and fit much more than their length suggests.
Christopher Hitchens gets his own essay, as well, one that serves also as a sort of obituary for a colleague and, “…boon comrade, peerless writer, stalwart friend.” This is a signal of something that had before been a strain in the essays: Wasserman’s past as an active agent in leftist movements. He downplays his own involvement: “I helped birth ideas by others, smarter and more articulate than I could be on my best day … I do have opinions about everything, but most of them are unoriginal.” One wouldn’t mind were he to express those opinions more fully. He undersells the nuance, an example being the marking of disagreements with Hitch and the writer and speaker’s unfortunate slide toward a late in life neocon conversion. He speaks for many in their contention, but, on the balance, Wasserman credits Hitchens: “I must hand it to you: No one made a better case for American intervention in these benighted lands than you.”
This is to say little of this collection’s depth in its near 400 words. The articles trace these personal connections and observe movements through the literary world. They draw from essays one of their best traits: you’re always learning something new. It may be overwhelming to read the flood of names and movements, but Wasserman makes it a pleasure to experience. You won’t walk away from this book dissatisfied.
About the reviewer: Matt Usher is an agender, highly neurodivergent writer and musician who likes poetry, tabletop roleplaying, trading card games (mtg and ygo), and professional wrestling. They are based out of Brooklyn with their two partners in a happy polecule. Most of their works are short stories but it happened that their first credit was in literary criticism. If you want to reach out and/or contact them regarding their reviews or stories (please do), you can find them at https://bsky.app/profile/mattusher.bsky.social