The Long Road to Owl Town

Am I "blogging" again? I honestly can't tell. But I know one thing! I do "blog" every time I read a book with an owl in it, because I have to add it to my long list of books I have read with owls in them, which I started keeping for reasons that are lost to history. Anyhow! This time we have a book with a book with an owl in it in it, which I think we've had before, but I'm tired. Maybe I'll try to look that up one day. It's a long way to our latest owl! It's complicated. Get yourself a drink. Get comfortable! Here we go. So! You know that Megan Abbott and I have formed between ourselves a little club, in which we read what I will loosely call celebrity biographies. Well! Now we are reading one about Louise Fitzhugh, the author who created Harriet the Spy. Everyone is in her circle, or in her circle's circle. To present just one small example, the last person I was forced to "blog" about, for entirely different reasons, was George Segal, and then his brother, of all people, pops up in this book! That's nothing. But I'm not here to talk about the exciting things. All I want to tell you is that one of Louise Fitzhugh's girlfriends was friends with a woman who dated Patricia Highsmith. So, after these two (Patricia Highsmith and Louise Fitzhugh's girlfriend's friend) broke up, they both wrote books in which they murdered characters based on each other! Patricia Highsmith's ex-girlfriend murdered her (figuratively) with a hammer, and Patricia Highsmith returned the favor (by other literary means) in a book titled THE CRY OF THE OWL. Hey! As long as I'm here, I'll tell you something else. What the hell. Louise Fitzhugh lights Janet Gaynor's cigarette, which transaction produces much the same magical benediction as when someone lights William Holden's cigarette in THE MOVIEGOER, the latter incident covered almost too thoroughly in my lamented nonfiction book about cigarette lighters.