Our Secret Life in the Movies

by Michael McGriff, J. M. Tyree

Overview

A whip-smart fiction debut, Our Secret Life in the Movies riffs on classic and cult cinema. Inspired by films from silent-era documentaries to music videos, the authors unfold a dual narrative about two boys growing up in the 1980s. Coming of age during the last days of the Cold War, these boys dream of space exploration and nuclear winter, Reaganomics and Dungeons & Dragons, Blade Runner and Red Dawn. Haunting, cinematic, and full of life, Our Secret Life makes it clear that we are in the movies and the movies are in us.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780989275965
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	11/04/2014
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Michael McGriff's books include Home Burial (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice selection; Dismantling the Hills; a translation of Tomas Tranströmer's The Sorrow Gondola (Green Integer, 2010); and an edition of David Wevill's essential writing, To Build My Shadow a Fire. He is a former Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, and his work has been recognized with a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. J. M. Tyree is the author of BFI Film Classics: Salesman, and the coauthor, with Ben Walters, of BFI Film Classics: The Big Lebowski, from the British Film Institute. His writing on cinema has been published in Sight & Sound, The Believer, and Film Quarterly. A former Truman Capote-Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University, he currently works as an associate editor of New England Review.

Editorial Reviews

09/22/2014
McGriff and Tyree’s collection of flash fiction has a concept that’s sometimes too high, though it definitely has its upside. Both esteemed film scholars, they have selected 39 favorite films and each written very short stories inspired by them. The source material is eclectic but largely obscure. There are only four mainstream movies (among them On the Waterfront and Blade Runner), and a handful that could be described as cult (e.g. Donnie Darko, Jesus’ Son); many of the rest will be unknown, even to avid filmgoers. Perhaps unintentionally, they’ve written an entertaining entry in the subgenre of “must-see-films” books. “Sheets of Galaxies” by McGriff, about a teenage would-be astronaut, and “Thrown Rod, Cruel Stars” by Tyree, about people obsessed with conspiracy theories, are both vivid nuggets and, while they might leave the reader unsatisfied, could also prompt them to watch (or rewatch) “Intergalactic,” the Beastie Boys music video that inspired them. So too the stories inspired by Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes and Carlos Saura’s Cria Cuervos. With Michael Mann’s Miami Vice as a starting point, McGriff imagines tough-kid antics, while Tyree tracks a young criminal in training; both are colorful and provocative in light of the source. Thus do movies prompt us to dream. Read the book with a pad and pencil, and make your own list. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"Wildly intelligent and deeply felt, Our Secret Life in the Movies gives us a fascinating look at American life, shot through an insightful and compassionate lens. After reading it, the world seems bigger. A tremendous book."—Molly Antopol "Reading Our Secret Life in the Movies is like finding a lost frequency on the AM dial. The voices you hear in this book are strange, hypnotic, and intensely American."—Jim Gavin "A book of poignant and affecting beauty. Readers are presented with characters who are losing their innocence in lockstep with the changing nation they inhabit, and the end result is a book that provides great insight into both who we are and how we got this way. A remarkable achievement."—Skip Horack "A beautiful aftershock of the movies."—David Gordon Green "An intriguing, frequently affecting experiment that challenges its readers to think anew about sharpening and refracting their memories of both life and art."—Kirkus Reviews "Brilliant."—BBC "Indelibly wrought." —Vogue "A co authored mash note to cinema classics."—The Paris Review Daily

From the Publisher

2014-10-14
Coming-of-age along the weirder edges of late-20th-century America is evoked through a montage of gritty, frequently bizarre tales spinning obliquely off cult and classic movies.If you were to read a story about a man who leaves his family to marry one of a dozen eggs he buys at a grocery store (yes, you read it right the first time), would it occur to you to somehow connect this to the 1983 science-fiction thriller Blade Runner? Assuming you'd seen the movie and given some thought to its theme, you might—or you might dismiss the connection altogether. Such challenges to memory and intellect make this novel as close to an interactive experience as reading a collection of cutting-edge short fiction can be. McGriff and Tyree take turns writing brief stories inspired by, but not directly connected to, the same movies. Some links are easier to make than others: The railroad-tracks riff deployed by both writers off George Washington (2000) will resonate with those who remember a principal setting of David Gordon Green's haunting reverie of childhoods at risk, while On the Waterfront (1954) inspires one of the writers (there are no bylines) to take a surrealistic stroll along the docks while the other takes off after someone who ratted him out. But after a while, it doesn't matter how you match your memories of the movies with theirs or whether you've seen all of them. Because what emerges from these sometimes-opaque, often strikingly realistic sketches is a portrait of suburban or rural youth from the 1980s to the present day; "linked snapshots," as the authors' introduction aptly puts it, "chronicling our parallel trajectories as the last children of the Cold War." An intriguing, frequently affecting experiment that challenges its readers to think anew about sharpening and refracting their memories of both life and art.

Kirkus Reviews