The morning her book came out, Portland was glum and gray. “It’s a physics principle I will not be able to explain properly, but the idea is if you are observing the thing, the thing is being acted upon and changed by the observer,” she says. The Mythmakers glances at the years-long labor of a novel, as Martin toils on his debut: “.he tried to make himself write, but nobody talked about the physicality of writing, the way it felt like dragging one’s feverish body through deep sand.” At the same time, the very act of diary-keeping here has an upside. ![]() Everyone always says you only have a first book once,” Weir tells me. “I just really tried to reset and take a breath and enjoy the week. Such practical wisdom runs throughout this wellness diary, which falls-high stakes-over pub day. Now, with chicly designed cans of Ghia floating around at seemingly every party, “it’s so easy to just not.” “For a lot of people, drinking doesn’t derail them the way that it did for me,” says Weir, who decided to stop at 24, back when it was easier to wave away a beer by saying she was on antibiotics. Her guide to the nonalcoholic beverage landscape is a bright counterpoint to Sal’s fogged-out nights. She keeps a Phone Pot, useful for entombing an intrusive device during off hours. A buzzy novel would be enough to land someone in this wellness column, but glimpses into Weir’s strategies for living have intrigued over the years. (The cusp-of-summer weather recalls a line from The Mythmakers, framing an early ’70s infidelity: “The city lost its blossoms, its inhabitants shed their clothes.”) If it’s a role reversal for Weir to be on the receiving end of interviews, it’s also new for us, as colleagues, to talk with a tape recorder on. Weir, a senior editor at Vanity Fair who relocated to Maine during the pandemic, is back in Manhattan when we speak, hours before a book event on the Lower East Side. ![]() From there, Weir hopscotches across time and space, threading together flame-out careers and wildfires, astrophysics and the inexact metaphors that novelists filch from science. In a stumbling escape from her Brooklyn life, she heads upstate to track down Martin’s widow and the manuscript. It’s a posthumously published story, part of a larger novel, Sal learns. (Weir offers sly side lighting on the publishing power dynamic, by way of an anticipated “What the Fuck call” to Sal’s phone: “‘I’ll cut right to the chase,’ said my editor, for whom I had once purchased Imodium.” The job is no more.) In need of distraction, Sal fixates on a short story by an older writer of middling renown, the details of which (the ingenue’s rose hair clip, banter about literary muses) seem drawn from their chance meeting years earlier. How well can you know a writer by reading their fiction? Is it expected or inadvisable to linger over scenes that seem to tiptoe up to lived experience? In Keziah Weir’s intricately braided first novel, The Mythmakers, Salale Cannon is a twenty-something magazine journalist who has skidded into a professional black hole, her recent profile of an elusive-and, it turns out, flagrantly deceptive-playwright having blown apart in the public eye.
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