Orange is the New Black

Writing: Fiction Must Be Stranger Than Truth

Midway through a pitch at Showtime a few years ago I literally lost the plot. I’d flown in to Los Angeles from London that afternoon. I never sleep flying east to west, so I compensated for my fatigue by over-caffeinating. The caffeine mixed with the adrenaline rush of performance. I became a blithering idiot, human Jell-O right there in the meeting with the network’s top execs. I couldn’t remember the plot or the names of characters I had created and written myself.

Luckily, I had two seasoned producers on either side of me. “The story is autobiographical,” one of them said, trying to pick me up and carry me across the finish line. I shot him a surprised look; that was an outright lie, wasn’t it?

Charles Cullen

Love Is… Never Resenting Success

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” — Gore Vidal

I’ve always thought that quotation summed up Vidal to be what he was: as a bitter old queen’s bitter old queen. I was reminded of his words the other day when I had a brief private chat on Facebook with my friend Charles Graeber, author of The Good Nurse, an investigative book about the most prolific serial killer in history, Charles Cullen, which was released last week and entered at number fourteen on The New York Times non-fiction bestseller list. After his appearance on a 60 Minutes special on Sunday, as well as Charlie Rose,