Alice Gregory is a writer who talks on the page—about people, places, eras, and anything else—just the way a million young dreamers hope they’ll be talked to when they arrive in New York. Her prose is a sumptuous (not to say fancy) mix of cosmopolitan understanding, never-ending engagement and wonder: the moon and the stars, with skyscrapers and a few attributed aphorisms in between. Even while she occasionally laments a world she’s sad to have missed, she makes you believe there still is a shimmering society soaked in art and literature right on the corner of, well—she knows where it is. In a review of Edmund White’s City Boy, she admits discovering White when she was just 17, “staying with chic family friends in a modern glass house in the 6th arrondissement.” Where else? She then commiserates with White who, decades before she thinks it, writes: “I remember thinking how strange it was that all the writers of the past seemed to know each other but that ‘we’ didn’t.” Ah, there were giants in the earth in those days.
It’s hard to believe she doesn’t know the colossi—but it’s probably just all the reading. She does interview the likes of Sam Lipsyte: is that really less of a get than Susan Sontag? She’s in her element discussing hard science, social science, literary history, the visual arts and more, of course. She comes from California, which may be why she’s good on film, too. (Or maybe not.) Please note: Ms. Gregory will use the word bricolage when necessary. No surprise then that you’ll find her at moreintelligentlife.com. (Is the more expansive, or a taunt? No matter.) Tell us what you’ve discovered, Alice Gregory. We’re listening.