Book Description

Raised as an agnostic who acknowledged her Jewish heritage mainly because it seemed like caving in to Hitler not to do so, Lesser always assumed that she would never visit Germany. Yet once in Berlin, she is astonished to discover a place that is at once spur and antidote to many of her dissatisfactions and longings. Hoping, in Berlin, to write a book about the Scottish philosopher David Hume, she is not sure whether it is the writer or his ideas that she finds sympathetic, and eventually she comes to see that the only way to learn something from Hume is not to think about him as having something to teach. Instead of writing about Hume, she decides to write about her "difficult friendship" with Leonard Michaels. In doing so, she comes to see that their difficulties--fights and reconciliations, mutual obstinacy, and an intensely shared interest in the arts--were an essential and binding aspect of a friendship which, despite Michaels' recent death, remains an important part of her life.

A completely honest, at times funny, and always engaging self-portrait unlike any other memoir or autobiography.

About the Author

Wendy Lesser is the editor of The Threepenny Review and the author of seven previous books. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Remarque Institute, and the American Academy in Berlin. She divides her year between Berkeley and New York.

Review from Publishers Weekly

Lesser (Nothing Remains the Same) divides her newest book into three parts, in which she describes a stint at the American Academy in Berlin, her writing (or not writing) a book there about David Hume and what she calls "difficult friends." In the first part, "Out of Berlin," the music she hears there provides a structural motif; a self-described "excessively linear personality," Lesser moves by associative glides as she turns thoughts about all sorts of things (the loss of what might have been, the acquisition of self-knowledge, religion, goodness) into absorbing narrative. In revisiting her "book that [didn't] see the light of day," Lesser offers a lively portrait of Hume and a disquieting sense that "if he had anything to teach me at all, it was the value of not arriving at a firm conclusion." The rich details from music she heard in Berlin and the book she thought she might write there provoke, but are sadly missing from, the third essay, an extended memoir of the "difficult friend," the writer Leonard Michaels). Borderline banality (quarrels and making up) engulfs the deeply felt personal loss. Readers who value lucidity, sophistication and all the elements of "intelligent conversation" will enjoy the first two essays and, perhaps, forgive the third as the work of a "difficult friend."
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Review from Kirkus

Three loosely connected essays by Threepenny Review founder and author Lesser (The Pagoda in the Garden, 2005) explore her concern with the connection between art and experience. A recent trip to Berlin, Germany, informs these three reflections by Lesser, a self-described atheist and secular Jew who never expected in her lifetime to set foot in Germany. As a fellow in 2003 at the American Academy in Berlin, Lesser overcame her aversion to things German and writes in the first essay, "Out of Berlin," of her recognition of how deeply Jewish the city still is, especially in terms of its passion for art and culture. The rigorous self-examination undergone by Germans since World War II suggests "a nation of people who are very much alive to their own capacity for unforgivable behavior." And this darkness attracts Lesser, who, at 51, is at the "Mittelweg" of her life and prone to feelings of regret, as she delineates more fully in the last essay, "Difficult Friends," about the recent death by cancer of her dear friend, writer Leonard Michaels. Sharing with Lenny, as she calls him, a quick temper and little moderation for passions, she quarreled often with him during the years of their long friendship over issues of loyalty. In the end, his death robbed her of a sizable part of her intellectual life at Berkeley, where she lives. The middle essay, however, is the most toothsome, examining her failure to write her intended book about Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, whose work she first encountered at Cambridge 25 years ago. A kindred figure and fellow atheist until the end, Hume strikes her as "someone to be carried through life as a sort of talisman against non-sense." Although sheshares his literary bent and admires his personal benevolence toward others, his class snobbery dooms him. A personality-driven, authoritative, sometimes circuitous work.