This Is Running for Your Life

November 12, 2012
In this whip-smart, achingly funny collection, film critic Orange (The Sicily Papers) trains her lens on aging, self-image, and the ascendancy of the marketing demographic, among other puzzles of the Facebook generation. In one standout
essay, she chronicles the battles behind the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Hawaii’s war memorial “adventure” packages and sunny tourist boutiques serve as fitting backdrops for her chronicle of a psychiatry convention caught up in Big Pharma’s lucrative cult of the brand name. Other essays are deeply personal: in an account of a grim nursing home visit, Orange recalls how the movies forged her bond with a grandmother made distant by periodic depressions—and, in turn, how their visits to the cinema when she was young shaped Orange’s love for the movies. In another meditation, she traces the parallel escape routes film and running offered in college, as she struggled for a sense of self. Other topics include the evolution of the “dream girl,” the romance of the tragedy-driven artist, and the unsettling birth of “neurocinema,” a market research technique based on MRI scans. Though a travel memoir on Beirut falls out of step with the other pieces, this only testifies to the overall coherence of a collection whose voice feels at once fresh and inevitable. Agent: Melissa Flashman, Trident Media Group.

November 1, 2012
Film critic and essayist Orange (The Sicily Papers, 2006) situates this collection of new and previously published pieces around her thoughts on leaving "the Next Generation," which she "had unwittingly been a part of for two decades." Comparing herself to her grandmother, who found cellphones the "gadget too far," the author explores the implications of a modern life lived online. She looks at the reinvention of the dream girl typified by Marilyn Monroe as a young woman whose self-presentation is "[a]ll two-dimensional tics and self-conscious dysfunction," a pose she derides as "a watered-down affront to iconoclasm." Orange's grandmother was in many ways a model for her. In the last two decades of her life, she maintained a fully engaged, modern life as a film critic in her own right, although her reviews were written on ticket stubs that she shared with the author. Films, writes Orange, also take on a new aspect today as people share clips from YouTube, and fiction and reality often meld together. She gives as an example what happened after Whitney Houston's death, when "clips of old performances" and shots of her looking "disheveled, even wild," were viewed together. Film and life blend as people become the stars of their own life sagas through postings on Facebook and blogs and other online forums. "Networks like Facebook, Flickr, DailyBooth, and Instagram have forged a new standard for social realism," Orange writes, "and though they are designed to promote individuality, what jumps out immediately is the organized, ticky-tacky sameness of the profiles." In the last, autobiographical essay, the author explains how running has helped structure her life. Other topics include the role of the director in modern film theory, a trip to Lebanon, brain scans and lie detection. An intriguingly different take on today's culture.

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February 1, 2013
In the opening essay in this engrossing collection, a book that restores one's hope for the future of intelligent life on earth, Orange introduces the theory of receptivity, a phrase that neatly describes the source of her fathoming inquiries. In this extended thought piece, written, as is every selection, with an ensnaring mix of intense curiosity, personal disclosures, buoyant wit, and harpooning precision, Orange considers the ways technology has altered time and asks why nostalgia is now such an integral part of American culture. Film is critic, journalist, and writer Orange's great passion, and her inquiry into permutations of the cinematic dream girl, from Marilyn Monroe to today's approachably edgy, adorably frantic, but damaged pixies, unveils crucial aspects of our collective imagination. Incisive analysis of the impact of social media is matched by a poignant dispatch on her nervy 2008 sojourn in Beirut and a startlingly profound report on what was actually at stake at an American Psychiatric Association conference. Orange's receptivity is acute, her mastery of language thrilling, and her interpretations of the forces transforming our lives invigorating.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)