The other day I heard Daniel Pinkwater, the writer of children’s books and self-proclaimed fat guy, interviewed by Terry Gross on her show Fresh Air. There’s always been something vaguely annoying about Terry but I’ve never been clever enough, or perhaps never tried hard enough, to identify and articulate exactly what.
Now Pinkwater comes along and without any apparent effort to humiliate or ridicule her, makes it plain that Terry is something of an idiot. When she asked him “were you close to your parents [when you were a child]?”, he said something like “Close? They were my parents,” i.e., how far away could they be, for fuck’s sake? This was but one of numerous examples. It loses a lot in the retelling but take my word for it.