So, we pulled back the doors in front of the big screen last night, turned on the cable box, and watched the Oscars. I’m not feeling particularly well this morning, as a result. It’s as though I’d consumed a cubic foot of popcorn. I think it was the disaffected bonhomie of Ellen DeGeneres that did me in. Passing around slices of pizza as if the A-list stars in the front rows were hanging out in her rec room — she must have given the dressers heart attacks!

And then there was Kim Novak. I tried closing my eyes, but that only made it worse.

And the very offensive exceptionalist-American Cadillac ad, with the polished brute who delivered a sermon on personal responsibility. Hard work –> Cadillacs in the driveway! It was just a shade less objectionable than overt Nazi propaganda. I was glad to see that it didn’t run a second time.

Matthew McConaughhey’s thanks-be-to-God remarks made me wish for a rule that would confine expressions of gratitude to the members of the Academy generally and to the colleagues who assisted and/or supported the prize-winning efforts. These colleagues would go unnamed.

Finally, there was Sandra Bullock — but I hasten to say here that Sandra Bullock was a very good thing about the evening, possibly the best. As the movie in which she starred, Gravity, piled up awards, I found myself wanting more and more for her to win one, too, because, after all, it was she who brought all that technical wizardry to life. I loved Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasime, and recognized her performance in that film as an unprecedented achievement: never, as I think I wrote at the time, had Woody Allen put one of his films so completely in the hands of an actor, to do with as she would. The result is an extraordinary study of opportunistic evil. Ms Blanchett certainly deserved her Academy Award. But I wanted it for Sandra Bullock.

When the show was over, we closed the doors. The cable box will shut itself off after a while. Barring fast-breaking news occasioned by a genuine catastrophe, the video equipment in the living room, which we never use to watch movies, will be untouched until next March. I don’t know how long it will take to shake off the hangover of broadcast television production values. What visually toxic stuff!

***

The novelist and screenwriter Diane Johnson grew up in Moline, Illinois, right across the Mississippi River from Davenport, Iowa, the town my paternal grandmother came from. My father grew up a few miles upriver, in Clinton, Iowa. When I visited Clinton for the first and only time in 1962, I was reminded of home, because, just as in Bronxville, the bluffs that rose from the flats by the tracks and the river (the rather humble Bronx River, in Bronxville’s case) were dotted with elegant, half-secluded manor houses. It was at the local country club that I first tasted boiled Maine lobster. What might have seemed out of place in even the fanciest of restaurants, so far from Maine and the sea, was perfectly normal as a country club stunt, although whether the crustaceans were flown in or trucked, I never did learn. I wouldn’t have cared, being only fourteen years old.

My father had an aunt, not vastly older than himself, who lived in Clinton with her husband, several pets, and no children. She was somewhat stout, but she was as sporty as her wiry mate; they were great golfers. They were also, at least for Clinton, quite sophisticated. To my eyes — I had met them before, in New York, but never seen them on their home ground — they were more sophisticated than my parents, or, for the matter of that, any of the other Bronxville adults I knew. (Notwithstanding the sprinkling New Yorker contributors who apparently lived in Bronxville, all unbeknownst to me, it was in Clinton that I first saw the magazine in the brown paper wrapper in which it was at that time mailed to subscribers.)  My father’s aunt and uncle liked me and I liked them, and when they asked my parents if I could stay on a few days with them while my parents went to Chicago, I was bitterly disappointed that the invitation was declined.

I think about the Mooneys quite often, and what that week in Clinton might have been like; doubtless my hosts would have been unpleasantly surprised by my disinclination to make friends of my own age. But what really strikes me is that the life that I’ve grown up to lead is so much more small-town than theirs. This was very much on my mind as I read through the later chapters of Diane Johnson’s new memoir, Flyover Lives. Once she left Moline for California, Johnson exchanged the stability from which she had always longed to escape for an almost nomadic worldliness, as a result of which she knows a lot of famous people, a few of whom are good friends. I, in contrast, seem to have migrated to an interior Clinton, quietly surveying from my house on the bluff the world that passes below. Aside from a handful of friends, all of them accomplished but none of them remotely famous, I know nobody.

It’s the films that brought Johnson into collaborating with Stanley Kubrick Mike Nichols, and others; but even as a budding writer at UCLA, she knew Alison Lurie. I have never known any writers at all. I did meet, one time, a fellow who was trying to write a television show, but that’s it. For a long time, I thought that there must be something wrong with me, that I didn’t know any writers, but I got over that years ago, at about the time I began writing online. I learned that there would be nothing to learn from writers as such, only from what they wrote — and, even more, from what I wrote. And didn’t write.

It’s what isn’t written that makes Flyover Lives more than a mere treat, and, instead, a considerable work of art. The homely simplicity of Johnson’s voice is occasionally spiked, but it never bogs down in details. Johnson doesn’t bother to spin a continuous narrative; rather, she picks through a box of anecdotes and documentary remains with the calm dispassion of an old lady sitting in a rocking chair on a fine summer afternoon, and taking her time about it. Loose ends abound, to the extent of constituting a positive motif. We never learn a thing, for instance about the college-age romance that led to Johnson’s first marriage and four children; only an astringent, one-page chapter disposes of it (“… he struck me once,” screams the only note of violence). In what year did Johnson take her children and an au pair to London? We’re not told. Such information would clutter the page. Johnson is not aiming for timelessness. On the contrary, by withholding the date stamp, she demonstrates how memoir, as distinct from autobiography, inhabits a double now, the now of life and that of recollection, which makes a now of a then. These nows have no inherent dates, because they are now.

This is true even when the recollections are not her own, but those of her great-great-grandmother, Catharine Martin, who, old as the century, composed a sheaf of memoir in 1876. There is an immediacy to Catharine’s reports that redeems her somewhat stolid style. Either Catharine was surprisingly well-read or, as seems much more likely, she was able to write as she spoke, to transcribe a story as she would tell it — no common gift! The extended passage in which she narrates the loss of her first three children to scarlet fever is quite ironically lively, the rich surface detail pregnant with unspoken grief.

The occasionally querulous understatement of Johnson’s writing is not really funny, but it certainly twinkles, and every now and then a spark flies.

The children were thriving in England. Off they went to school each day in their little gray shirts, neckties, knee socks, and navy skirts or short pants. We drank big cups of tea in the morning, with lots of milk, and sometimes we had bacon, and always had porridge. We felt very English, though they reported being called in their school “the Yanks.” Simon, aged five, had a disappointment at his kindergarten when another child was chosen instead of him to play Jesus in the Christmas pageant. It came out that this was because Davey, a thalidomide child, could take off his legs, and thereby fit into the manger.

The last bit set off in me an explosion of laughter that did not stop when Kathleen, to whom I just managed to read the passage aloud, squealed in horror. “That’s awful!” she protested — but I only laughed the harder. Yes, it’s horrible, but you don’t see it coming, and when it does arrive it quite fails to strike the “appropriate” note of maimed disability. Not only is Davey capable of removing his legs, but he gets a leading role in the pageant! With luck, even the most awful disadvantage might be turned inside-out. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how the forebears who migrated from New England to Ohio and Illinois would have survived their ordeals and lived to produce Diane Johnson’s parents without the benefit of such resilient flexibility.

Flyover Lives tells me a lot about what Diane Johnson’s life is like, but it does not trick me into imagining that I know her. What is written points to what is not written, and what is not written is none of my business. I come away persuaded that I have been told everything that’s interesting, and that everything withheld would mean little or nothing to me. No illusion of intimacy haunts the memoir’s pages, or persists when it is closed.

It’s exactly that discretion and pertinence that was so flouted at the Academy Awards ceremony. Happily, Sandra Bullock never said a word.