"I was thrilled by its truthfulness. It stuck with me for the rest of my life. And I’d still swear by that. I felt, 'This is true. Everything else is fake. This is really what’s going on.'"

Said Wallace Shawn, about the Eugene O’Neill play "Long Day’s Journey Into Night," which he saw when he was 13 in 1956.

Quoted in "Is Wallace Shawn the Only Avant-Garde Artist Who Gets Stopped in Times Square? He’s most commonly recognized for his screen roles as a plotting hit man and an unlikely Lothario, but it’s his work as a playwright that shows more of his true self" (NYT)(gift link, because the article is long and there's a lot going on, including the way strangers are always exclaiming "Inconceivable!" at him).

Unlike many of his characters, Shawn speaks slowly and with many pauses in the service of sentences that ultimately emerge perfectly formed. He is also polite and courtly and at great pains not to offend, so much so that one fears inadvertently violating whatever code of etiquette is obviously almost sacred to him. So private that he asked me not to reveal what he ate throughout our meetings, he nonetheless has written a play whose broad outlines, and even some poignant details, are flagrantly autobiographical....

The new play is "Moth Days." There's also a new production of his older play "The Fever." And you don't have to tell me, Althouse, you should go to New York and see both plays. I haven't traveled in years.

ADDED: The full title of the play is "What We Did Before Our Moth Days." According to the linked article, "Moth Days" are "those fluttery, flyaway moments before death, as one of the characters imagines them." Poetically, "moth" calls to mind mother... and also that Yeats line, "And when white moths were on the wing/And moth-like stars were flickering out...."

"For those seeking insights about any remorse Ginsburg might have felt about not retiring while a Democrat was safely serving as president, Totenberg offers little..."

"... possibly because Ginsburg was not always forthcoming with her; of a meeting the justice had with Barack Obama at which the president gently tried to raise the question of her retirement, Totenberg says, 'She never told me about it.' Nor does she report how Ginsburg responded to the news of Donald Trump’s election. But she does seem to speak with authority when she explains that Ginsburg had been eager to give 'the first female president the power to nominate her successor.' And at the time of the election, Totenberg points out, Ginsburg was not in a health crisis. 'It was a gamble, and she lost,' she writes. Rather than defending Ginsburg’s choice to remain in office, she emphasizes how valiantly Ginsburg fought to stay alive and keep working once Trump was elected....  In one indelible image, Totenberg knocks on the door of a hotel room to find Ginsburg, hair down, desperate for Totenberg to leave so she can continue her frantic search for a medicine to ease her stomach troubles...."

Writes Susan Dominus, in "Nina Totenberg Opens Up About Her Friend Ruth Bader Ginsburg/In her memoir, 'Dinners With Ruth,' the NPR journalist writes about their parallel ascents in fields that were not friendly to women" (NYT).

We could have lived without that "indelible image," but books must be written. 

IN THE COMMENTS: Some people are saying it's unethical for journalists to be friends with the subjects of their writing. But I said, "Read 'The Journalist and the Murderer,' about the journalist’s method of fake-befriending the subject. Isn’t that what we’re seeing here?"

Here's an excerpt from Janet Malcolm's "The Journalist and the Murderer," the best book I ever read about journalism: