Joel Yanofsky

Several years ago a young man asked me what it takes to write a memoir. “Wait for something bad to happen,” I told him. Then, by way of encouragement, I added, “Don’t worry. It will.” This was more curse, I see now, than helpful writerly advice. In my defence, I had so-called misery memoirs on the…

A few years ago, after writing a memoir about my family, specifically my son’s autism diagnosis, I was grateful to receive the occasional email or Facebook message commending me on being a good father. Grateful but also surprised. I secretly wondered: what book were they reading? After all, my portrait of myself was of a man overwhelmed by self-pity—more frustrating than frustrated. Of…

Last December, after the film version of Barney’s Version came out, I noticed that the chatter on my Facebook page about the movie and the Mordecai Richler novel it was based on had taken a familiar turn. One FB “friend” wondered, without going into detail, whether anyone else was disturbed by the anti-Semitism in the…

The story of Mordecai Richler showing up Saidye Bronfman, wife of Seagram’s liquor baron Samuel Bronfman, may be apocryphal, but it is too good and, by now, too enduring, not to repeat. The two met at the 1976 Montreal movie premiere of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, where Mrs. Bronfman, by most accounts a…