Earlier in his career as an author, essayist, and film critic, Phillip Lopate wrote:
"Informed, familiar essays tend to seize on the parade of everyday life: odd characters, small public rituals and vanities, fashions, love and disappointment, the pleasures of solitude, reading, going to plays, walking the streets."
The author is director of the nonfiction graduate program at Columbia University and he is still busy exploring the parade of everyday life. In a handful of the essays in this top-drawer collection, Lopate reveals some unpleasant things about himself that other writers would never think to share with the general public. Here you will find musings on his feelings of competition with his older brother, strife with his wife, having sex, family secrets, and an act of violence as an adolescent.
If the author's confessions are too much for you, other matters in his parade might prove of interest to you, such as the delights of baseball, the lively connections between novels and films, walking the High Line in New York City, writing poetry, and pondering the works of Allen Ginsberg and James Agee. In the introduction, Lopate admits that he is no longer in the process of becoming but is rather "more or less a closed book." That may be true but his relish for fresh insights conveyed through essays shines through each and every selection in Portrait Inside My Head.
