I'll Be Your Mirror

In his third book of essays, David Lazar blends personal meditations on sex and death with considerations of popular music and coping with anxiety through singing, bowling, and other distractions. He sets his work apart as both in the essay and of the essay by throwing himself into the forms pastinterviewing or speaking to past masters and turning over rocks to find lost gems of the essay form. Ill Be Your Mirror further expands the dimensions of contemporary nonfiction writing by concluding with a series of aphorisms. Surreal, comical, and urban moments of being, they are part Cioran, part Kafka, and part Lenny Bruce. These are accompanied by Heather Frises illustrations, whose looking-glass visions of motherhoodfunny and grotesquemeet the vision of the aphorist in this most unusual nonfiction book.