David Mamet. Bitch.
I have been reading a book of essays by David Mamet. He’s the screenplay writer behind some of my favourite films; Glengarry Glen Ross, Wag the Dog, and State and Main.
I’ve never come across his prose before, and this series of short essays is making me laugh out loud. Here’s an extract from an essay called ‘True stories of bitches’;
“Once in the midst of a particularly bad day I was having lunch at a crowded eatery. I was asked to share a table with a pretty woman in a proclaimedly unpleasant mood.
Being by profession, experience and inclination suspicious and not bit paranoid, I took her truculent silence personally. On arising to pay the check I nodded at my accidental table partner and said ‘Nice chatting with you.’ She looked up and said, ‘My best friend died today.’ To which I responded, ‘Hey, Bitch, I didn’t kill her….’ Laugh if you will, cry if you must, but I like to think, like bitches everywhere, that my quick and elegant rejoinder raised that woman from the morass of her legitimate personal problems, and enmired her in mine.”
David Mamet, Writing in restaurants. First published in the USA in 1986 by Viking Penguin Inc. , New York
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