Author of the week: Daniel Menaker

last updated 8 January 2015

Daniel Menaker might not have become a writer if his older brother hadn’t died, said Rachel Martin in NPR.org. On Thanksgiving Day, 1967, the future New Yorker fiction editor was playing backyard football when he got tired of defending passes and urged his brother, Mike, to switch places. “So I said, ‘Why don’t you play back?’ And he said, ‘You know I can’t, because I have bad knees,’” Menaker recalls. “And I said, ‘Well, I think your precious knee will hold up.’” On the game’s very next play, Mike tore ligaments in the knee, requiring surgery; an infection soon killed him. Daniel was 26, and only then did he start writing seriously, to make sense of the event and to manage his guilt. “I’ve come to terms with it, but I still do write about it,” he says.

Menaker’s new memoir, My Mistake, doesn’t dwell on the tragedy, said Anna Goldenberg in Forward.com. Many more pages are devoted to his 26 years at The New Yorker and subsequent tenure as a top editor at Random House, all delivered in a voice that’s humorously apologetic. He apologizes for resorting to humor so often, too. “People like me keep some pain and suffering and possibly love at arm’s length by being detached and ironic,” he says. “Irony is an addiction— a way of keeping interval and space between you and what should be really immediate to you.” Menaker doesn’t even like the phrase he chose as the book’s title. “It’s a form of phony self-effacement that I practice all the time,” he says. “It’s kind of disgusting, actually.”