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The Oyster Diaries
From the author of the cult classic Lives of the Saints, a diaristic novel of middle-aged reckoning that roves from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans, from court records to Don Giovanni, all of it riotously narrated by one of American fiction’s most singular voices.
Delery Anhalt—middle-aged and prone, like Don Quixote, to “embroidering everything into vast ideals” but incapable (like Desdemona?) of identifying the Shakespearean villains in her life—finds herself at a crossroads. Her father and his peers, the old guard of New Orleans, are entering their twilight years. Her daughters are stepping decisively into adulthood. Delery, caught between the demands of the generations, takes stock of herself in a series of diaries that move freely between present and from the waning days of Covid and her employment as a virtual court monitor of criminal cases in New Orleans to the travails of daily life in Washington, DC. Throughout, she revisits—with frankness, with fury, with not a few qualms and some further thoughts—what she calls her lions at the her insecurity, ego, annoyance, operatic wrath (felt most keenly toward bad houseguests), and remorse.
The Oyster Diaries, the latest novel by the incomparable Nancy Lemann, is a funny and poignant portrayal of the vicissitudes of adulthood that sees the return, from her legendary debut, Lives of the Saints, of the heroic wastrel Claude Collier. This is an exuberant, indignant, insightful performance, and an irresistible addition to the books that have made Lemann one of the keenest, most engaging, and simply beloved of American writers at work today.
Delery Anhalt—middle-aged and prone, like Don Quixote, to “embroidering everything into vast ideals” but incapable (like Desdemona?) of identifying the Shakespearean villains in her life—finds herself at a crossroads. Her father and his peers, the old guard of New Orleans, are entering their twilight years. Her daughters are stepping decisively into adulthood. Delery, caught between the demands of the generations, takes stock of herself in a series of diaries that move freely between present and from the waning days of Covid and her employment as a virtual court monitor of criminal cases in New Orleans to the travails of daily life in Washington, DC. Throughout, she revisits—with frankness, with fury, with not a few qualms and some further thoughts—what she calls her lions at the her insecurity, ego, annoyance, operatic wrath (felt most keenly toward bad houseguests), and remorse.
The Oyster Diaries, the latest novel by the incomparable Nancy Lemann, is a funny and poignant portrayal of the vicissitudes of adulthood that sees the return, from her legendary debut, Lives of the Saints, of the heroic wastrel Claude Collier. This is an exuberant, indignant, insightful performance, and an irresistible addition to the books that have made Lemann one of the keenest, most engaging, and simply beloved of American writers at work today.
240 pages, Paperback
First published April 7, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 79 reviews
May 15, 2026
This is a novel in the form of a diary, that of Delery Anhalt, a New Orleanian now living in DC. It goes back and forth as she moves between Louisiana and DC, as she remembers people and events from her past. It is not quite as stream of consciousness as The Lives of the Saints, but it is very much in Lemann's typical style, which I call rambling with intent. It is more reflective, more concerned with the spirit, life and death than the Saints. We find out more about Louise Brown, Claude Collier, and other characters from her earlier book.
Don Giovanni is a leitmotiv; many other literary works pop up. And I like her choice of epigraphs, beginning with Cavafy:
It well describes Lemann and New Orleans.
Some quotes:
It is a book that is often quite funny, but always elegiac, for people and places long gone, for a city that will slowly sink into the sea.
Don Giovanni is a leitmotiv; many other literary works pop up. And I like her choice of epigraphs, beginning with Cavafy:
You won't find a new country, won't find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
It well describes Lemann and New Orleans.
Some quotes:
When you're young you spend a certain amount of time trying to find yourself; but in the middle of this journey of our life, you tend to lose your way. Probably the same amount of time it took to find yourself when you were young, is the amount of time it takes to realize that you have lost your way again and must renew the search.
Maybe more like scrupulosity in my case--haunted by small sins, too small for God to care about, but that still disturb the soul.
If this life on earth is all there is, that renders it absurd.
Self-loathing is bad, but there is a fine line between self-loathing and self-awareness.
"I have decided to live in the past," she announced one day in 1960.
New Orleans decided to do pretty much the same thing. You could kind of hear things coming to a screeching halt in some previous epoch.
"Did you have a therapist, Mom?"
"I had one but she was illiterate and tedious and annoying, so I had to get out of it."
He told me he had seen a vision of the Virgin Mary in the drugstore that day. He had seen a vision of the Virgin Mary oncee before--in the gym at school in the sixth grade.
We all know what was revelry for him. Ancient Greek, Latin fricatives, his book-lined house, its atmosphere of intellect and calm, an anchor in the storm.
By your sorrows you may be unbroken, but you will always have to return to them from time to time, wandering amid the ruins.
It is a book that is often quite funny, but always elegiac, for people and places long gone, for a city that will slowly sink into the sea.
May 29, 2026
If you read The Oyster Diaries looking for a conventional narrative, you won't find it. I've read her Nancy Lemann's debut novel, Lives of the Saints , and it's the same deal there. What you will find are splendid moments and anecdotes.
Those moments and anecdotes are enough for me.
The Oyster Diaries is set in Washington, D.C., where the narrator, Delery Anhalt, lives, and in New Orleans which she visits virtually to monitor court sessions (humorous and sad) and in person to help care for her elderly ailing father (and to escape troubling events at home). He keeps a diary of all of the oysters he's consumed for years, from whence the title comes. The N.O. settings are the most enjoyable. There's also an odd account of an African Safari at the end of the book which didn't work for me.
Some writing moments:
When Delery learns that her best friend is marrying her father:
"It's pretty hard to build a segue from being someone's dear friend to marrying their father, surely. She insinuated herself aggressively into all our hearts - that is not a crime."
...
The reality is more positive - she loves him, he loves her, she would enhance and prolong his life, she would look after him. we wouldn't have to. Magnanimity has its advantages."
"Being elderly, most of my father's friends had diseases or were in tragic declines. This was the decline but not the fall."
"After a few months, the situation with my father stabilized and he was home, surrounded by adoring women - his wife and an array of rotating nurses. He was rickety but suave - like New Orleans.
"'Am I disturbing you?' I asked lamely. after playing him the briefest bit (of Don Giovanni).
'You're disturbing me just perfectly.'"
"My father's study looked like a cross between the laboratory of a mad scientist and a repository of documents in a Kafka novel after a tornado."
"The first time it was my turn to put on the seder, I studiously followed all of the traditions of my mother-in-law. I did try to put my individual stamp on it in however infinitesimal a way. I might delete one of the eight courses possibly, I mentioned.
The response to this suggestion was that basically there was a knife vibrating in the wall next to my head."
And, thankfully, The Oyster Diaries marks the return of Claude Collier from Lives of the Saints. He utters an all-time classic pickup line (although in the context of the novel, it's not a pickup line):
"'They must have let the angels out of heaven,' he said when he saw me."
Perhaps this is a common, cheesy line. I don't know because I'm not one for flirting. My wife tells me that I've been clueless when a woman was obviously flirting with me. I just think it's a great line.
Oh - and Nancy Lemann uses the word anhedonia several times throughout the novel. I had to look that one up. A general definition is an inability to experience pleasure or a loss of interest in pleasurable activities. I'm sure that I'll forget that definition once this review is written, since I doubt it will be come part of my active vocabulary.
Those moments and anecdotes are enough for me.
The Oyster Diaries is set in Washington, D.C., where the narrator, Delery Anhalt, lives, and in New Orleans which she visits virtually to monitor court sessions (humorous and sad) and in person to help care for her elderly ailing father (and to escape troubling events at home). He keeps a diary of all of the oysters he's consumed for years, from whence the title comes. The N.O. settings are the most enjoyable. There's also an odd account of an African Safari at the end of the book which didn't work for me.
Some writing moments:
When Delery learns that her best friend is marrying her father:
"It's pretty hard to build a segue from being someone's dear friend to marrying their father, surely. She insinuated herself aggressively into all our hearts - that is not a crime."
...
The reality is more positive - she loves him, he loves her, she would enhance and prolong his life, she would look after him. we wouldn't have to. Magnanimity has its advantages."
"Being elderly, most of my father's friends had diseases or were in tragic declines. This was the decline but not the fall."
"After a few months, the situation with my father stabilized and he was home, surrounded by adoring women - his wife and an array of rotating nurses. He was rickety but suave - like New Orleans.
"'Am I disturbing you?' I asked lamely. after playing him the briefest bit (of Don Giovanni).
'You're disturbing me just perfectly.'"
"My father's study looked like a cross between the laboratory of a mad scientist and a repository of documents in a Kafka novel after a tornado."
"The first time it was my turn to put on the seder, I studiously followed all of the traditions of my mother-in-law. I did try to put my individual stamp on it in however infinitesimal a way. I might delete one of the eight courses possibly, I mentioned.
The response to this suggestion was that basically there was a knife vibrating in the wall next to my head."
And, thankfully, The Oyster Diaries marks the return of Claude Collier from Lives of the Saints. He utters an all-time classic pickup line (although in the context of the novel, it's not a pickup line):
"'They must have let the angels out of heaven,' he said when he saw me."
Perhaps this is a common, cheesy line. I don't know because I'm not one for flirting. My wife tells me that I've been clueless when a woman was obviously flirting with me. I just think it's a great line.
Oh - and Nancy Lemann uses the word anhedonia several times throughout the novel. I had to look that one up. A general definition is an inability to experience pleasure or a loss of interest in pleasurable activities. I'm sure that I'll forget that definition once this review is written, since I doubt it will be come part of my active vocabulary.
March 24, 2026
THE OYSTER DIARIES
Nancy Lemann
Thank you for the #gifted copy @nyrbooks , out 4/7.
“By George, some things are difficult. Let’s get on with it. You have to have an iron nerve.
But I am a heartless maniac, blithe and cold. What planet are you from, lady? I keep asking myself. What planet am I living on, to be so coldhearted? I don’t know.”
Following Delery Anhalt between New Orleans and Washington D.C. as she sorts out end-of-life matters for her father and deals with her own trudging, life-altering mess, The Oyster Diaries makes much of the every day and really uncovers that side of us that just doesn’t care about things as much as maybe we thought it would.
I love the way Nancy Lemann is able to parse out the obscure sentiments we have that don’t always get named, the parts of ourselves we’re ambivalent toward, ignorant of, or confused about, but that we still bleed out from slowly but surely anyway.
I love how she builds a contrasting, complex America between New Orleans and DC, displaying disparity and joy, the wide gap of cultures (or the gap between places of culture and those without) and that she isn’t shy about spelling things out plainly.
Lemann has a dry, dry wit. It’s so dry I missed the jokes sometimes until I read back through parts again and realized I nearly missed the out-loud-chuckle this book came to make me anticipate. She’s able to place so much timelessness among modern concerns; it feels like you’re reading a Classic, but about someone you know.
I haven’t felt so deeply known and understood by a book in a long time. I don’t know if that means I’m currently going through the same sort of mental anguish as most middle aged women do, or if it speaks to just how much Lemann touches on the human side of things: the difference between being a good person and being a person who just halfheartedly tries to be one, and how she painstakingly-yet-humorously finds that little pit of eye-rolling, shoulder-shrugging anhedonia that is such a core tenet of being human.
It’s a book about trudging through when you have to, and I think we can all relate. I enjoyed it.
Nancy Lemann
Thank you for the #gifted copy @nyrbooks , out 4/7.
“By George, some things are difficult. Let’s get on with it. You have to have an iron nerve.
But I am a heartless maniac, blithe and cold. What planet are you from, lady? I keep asking myself. What planet am I living on, to be so coldhearted? I don’t know.”
Following Delery Anhalt between New Orleans and Washington D.C. as she sorts out end-of-life matters for her father and deals with her own trudging, life-altering mess, The Oyster Diaries makes much of the every day and really uncovers that side of us that just doesn’t care about things as much as maybe we thought it would.
I love the way Nancy Lemann is able to parse out the obscure sentiments we have that don’t always get named, the parts of ourselves we’re ambivalent toward, ignorant of, or confused about, but that we still bleed out from slowly but surely anyway.
I love how she builds a contrasting, complex America between New Orleans and DC, displaying disparity and joy, the wide gap of cultures (or the gap between places of culture and those without) and that she isn’t shy about spelling things out plainly.
Lemann has a dry, dry wit. It’s so dry I missed the jokes sometimes until I read back through parts again and realized I nearly missed the out-loud-chuckle this book came to make me anticipate. She’s able to place so much timelessness among modern concerns; it feels like you’re reading a Classic, but about someone you know.
I haven’t felt so deeply known and understood by a book in a long time. I don’t know if that means I’m currently going through the same sort of mental anguish as most middle aged women do, or if it speaks to just how much Lemann touches on the human side of things: the difference between being a good person and being a person who just halfheartedly tries to be one, and how she painstakingly-yet-humorously finds that little pit of eye-rolling, shoulder-shrugging anhedonia that is such a core tenet of being human.
It’s a book about trudging through when you have to, and I think we can all relate. I enjoyed it.
April 20, 2026
I realize I’m the outlier here but I did not enjoy this book. The author writes with humor and uses a lot of big words but what is her point. My biggest take away is that I never want to do a safari regardless of the guide’s charm. Do not recommend.
May 2, 2026
I recently moved to New Orleans, where I spent my college years, but that was so long ago as to feel like a dream I once had, and not terribly useful for much besides nostalgia, which is one of the place's chief features -- grasping at a past. Nowadays, the New Orleans required reading list is daunting, but after a few common titles that exist on everyone's own version of it (and, in this century, includes a lot of Katrina reportage), it sort of falls off into dense histories and small-press fiction and essay efforts that only kinda-sorta wind up being what a reader like me is looking for. Native daughter Nancy Lemann, who left her Uptown roots years ago, wrote "Lives of the Saints" in the 1980s, and I think I always meant to read it because at the time in New Orleans there was a lot of talk about it, and I probably soon will. It's still on some locals' you-should-read list, but not many.
Lemann's "The Oyster Diaries" just came out, and Dwight Garner in the NYT liked it, and that's what brings me here. And I did find a lot of what I need right now — a thoughtfully ruminative novel (of sorts) that links a New Orleans then and a New Orleans now: a seasoned skepticism, bordering on misanthropy, that sees through the cliches of an overwrought (and overwritten) city and seeks something more meaningful, or gives into an idea that all meaning is easily lost? Sorry, that was a word salad, but that is also an effect of Lemann's affect here, almost like an extended muttering to one's self.
There is something really lovely going on here in the story of the narrator's frequent returns from Washington, DC, to New Orleans to help care for her dying parents and reconsider her dying/reviving/re-dying city and its gauzy past, her past.
I mean, I guess? The last third of the book gets too incoherent to really know what I signed up for. The writing remains lovely to the end. I imagine as many people won't be able to make neither heads nor tails of it.
Lemann's "The Oyster Diaries" just came out, and Dwight Garner in the NYT liked it, and that's what brings me here. And I did find a lot of what I need right now — a thoughtfully ruminative novel (of sorts) that links a New Orleans then and a New Orleans now: a seasoned skepticism, bordering on misanthropy, that sees through the cliches of an overwrought (and overwritten) city and seeks something more meaningful, or gives into an idea that all meaning is easily lost? Sorry, that was a word salad, but that is also an effect of Lemann's affect here, almost like an extended muttering to one's self.
There is something really lovely going on here in the story of the narrator's frequent returns from Washington, DC, to New Orleans to help care for her dying parents and reconsider her dying/reviving/re-dying city and its gauzy past, her past.
I mean, I guess? The last third of the book gets too incoherent to really know what I signed up for. The writing remains lovely to the end. I imagine as many people won't be able to make neither heads nor tails of it.
May 5, 2026
sooo that’s my girl … she expands to me what a book can be. her voice is truly one of a kind. she’s so funny
July 31, 2026
“ this is a question age asks looking back at itself”
I absolutely loved this. I love her voice. Spending time in New Orleans is a treat and a tragedy
I absolutely loved this. I love her voice. Spending time in New Orleans is a treat and a tragedy
May 5, 2026
I really loved this book. It's a bit ragged and unkempt, maybe down at the heels, and like New Orleans itself, where this is largely set, that's a lot of its appeal. Nancy Lemann's voice is clear and distinctive and shines through every passage.
It's been awhile since I read something and immediately started devouring all of the published and available works of an author (if anyone has a copy of Sportsman's Paradise they'd like to lend me, please reach out).
It's an absolute joy to spend time in Nancy Lemann's company during her Wastrel Youth.
It's been awhile since I read something and immediately started devouring all of the published and available works of an author (if anyone has a copy of Sportsman's Paradise they'd like to lend me, please reach out).
It's an absolute joy to spend time in Nancy Lemann's company during her Wastrel Youth.
May 10, 2026
As a zellenial I loved the interactions with her and her daughters. As others have said this might not be for everyone but it was for me. I also enjoyed that it was an easy read but she did include many ‘big’ words for me to look up and add to my vocabulary
June 10, 2026
OBSESSED with this diva
October 6, 2026
I loved this so much. Nancy Lemann was not on my radar but I picked up this book in the local authors section of the library and adored it. So funny and witty. Would recommend to fans of Eve Babitz.
May 6, 2026
A somewhat scattered rendering of a chaotic life…but mostly about death. The primary settings are New Orleans, Washington DC, and several countries in Africa. There are some extremely poignant passages, but also a great deal of rambling with some unclear characters. Well, unclear as to relationship or family, but extraordinarily clear in philosophy.
June 7, 2026
Hm, not sure how I felt about this. Really funny at times with a unique voice. But a little bit adrift.
For example: the book ends on a safari trip that Delery isn't particularly interested in going on (husband's idea) and that ends with some pain on her end (recent hip replacement + COVID). At first I thought this was kind of a random and unsatisfying end point to this novel which is focused on grief—long goodbyes to family members set against the slowly decaying glamour of New Orleans. So why are we in Botswana now?
But on second thought, this kind of random, meandering narrative fits with the rest of the novel. Delery says herself that she is not a mover and shaker; she is a stoic whose life is built on abnegation and quiet suffering. Cool, I guess. Not asking for a different kind of character. I suppose I was just hoping for some kind of resolution / progression beyond this ambient, static distress. Delery suffers in DC, in New Orleans, in her house on the coast, in Botswana and Zimbabwe, in memory. It's a little tiring.
Like her father's daily oyster diary, Delery's diary of remorse is a creative concept and acts as an index of the author's neuroticisms. Unfortunately, for both diaries, form takes precedence over content: they're a bit of a drag to read.
For example: the book ends on a safari trip that Delery isn't particularly interested in going on (husband's idea) and that ends with some pain on her end (recent hip replacement + COVID). At first I thought this was kind of a random and unsatisfying end point to this novel which is focused on grief—long goodbyes to family members set against the slowly decaying glamour of New Orleans. So why are we in Botswana now?
But on second thought, this kind of random, meandering narrative fits with the rest of the novel. Delery says herself that she is not a mover and shaker; she is a stoic whose life is built on abnegation and quiet suffering. Cool, I guess. Not asking for a different kind of character. I suppose I was just hoping for some kind of resolution / progression beyond this ambient, static distress. Delery suffers in DC, in New Orleans, in her house on the coast, in Botswana and Zimbabwe, in memory. It's a little tiring.
Like her father's daily oyster diary, Delery's diary of remorse is a creative concept and acts as an index of the author's neuroticisms. Unfortunately, for both diaries, form takes precedence over content: they're a bit of a drag to read.
April 23, 2026
a strange, unique, and very meandering account of middle age
this is a multi-part sort of diary through which the narrator explores her key relationships with her parents, children, in-laws, and (unfaithful) husband; she is in pursuit of deeper understanding: of others & of her own self
it’s also an exploration of meaning, which she mostly finds through beauty
i was toying between a 4 and a 3 but the last portion felt really off & tone death to me, and I’m not sure why it was even included
overall i liked the bits and pieces about intellectual pursuit & the search for beauty but it was a bit too all over the place for me
the writing reminded me a liiitle of Offil and Jong but it just didn’t do it for me the same way
this is a multi-part sort of diary through which the narrator explores her key relationships with her parents, children, in-laws, and (unfaithful) husband; she is in pursuit of deeper understanding: of others & of her own self
it’s also an exploration of meaning, which she mostly finds through beauty
i was toying between a 4 and a 3 but the last portion felt really off & tone death to me, and I’m not sure why it was even included
overall i liked the bits and pieces about intellectual pursuit & the search for beauty but it was a bit too all over the place for me
the writing reminded me a liiitle of Offil and Jong but it just didn’t do it for me the same way
August 1, 2026
I enjoy this book. I’m a fan of Lemann’s breezy writing style, and found lives of the Saints to be utterly delightful. The fact that it’s somewhere between memoir and auto fiction made me assume that the narrator was the same between the two works, and I think that may have been prevented me from enjoying this one as thoroughly as I did, the one before.
There were moments in oyster diaries, where it did feel as though the same narrator was revisiting some of the same hearts and the same themes as her past. But this novel was more focused on the experience of relationships ending as perhaps many persons of middle-age have experienced. So, well, we briefly visited the courtrooms and New Orleans of the past, we also spent significant amounts of time in more internal realms, having to do with relationship relationships, and life and aging, parenthood, and being a child.
That’s not to say that this novel was any worse objectively or less compelling than saints, but I think I wanted a continuity that wasn’t there. 3.5?
There were moments in oyster diaries, where it did feel as though the same narrator was revisiting some of the same hearts and the same themes as her past. But this novel was more focused on the experience of relationships ending as perhaps many persons of middle-age have experienced. So, well, we briefly visited the courtrooms and New Orleans of the past, we also spent significant amounts of time in more internal realms, having to do with relationship relationships, and life and aging, parenthood, and being a child.
That’s not to say that this novel was any worse objectively or less compelling than saints, but I think I wanted a continuity that wasn’t there. 3.5?
Read
September 6, 2026You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. This city will always pursue you.
—C.P. Cavafy
*
“It is a curious fact that those who do not bore themselves usually bore others, while those who bore themselves entertain others. Those who do not bore themselves are . . . the most tiresome, the most utterly unendurable.” (7)
*
So far Kierkegaard was everything I adore: he’s in a bad mood, everything annoys him, and he is not afraid to repeat himself. (7)
*
“It is in your power to review your life, to look at things you saw before, but from another point of view.” (8)
*
According to Kierkegaard, “It is a very beautiful sight to see a man put out to sea with the fair wind of hope . . . but one should never permit hope to be taken aboard one’s own ship, least of all as a pilot; for hope is a faithless shipmaster.” Or to summarize: Only when you cease to hope are your hopes realized. (9)
*
He was rickety but suave—like New Orleans. (59)
*
Everything is not wonderful, obviously. In fact realizing that things are not wonderful is the key to life. Then you can go forward with your shoulders squared to meet what comes. (61)
*
When you’re young you spend a certain amount of time finding yourself; but in the middle of this journey of our life, you tend to lose your way. Probably the same amount of time it took to find yourself when you were young, is the amount of time it takes to realize that you have lost your way again and must renew the search. (84)
*
—C.P. Cavafy
*
“It is a curious fact that those who do not bore themselves usually bore others, while those who bore themselves entertain others. Those who do not bore themselves are . . . the most tiresome, the most utterly unendurable.” (7)
*
So far Kierkegaard was everything I adore: he’s in a bad mood, everything annoys him, and he is not afraid to repeat himself. (7)
*
“It is in your power to review your life, to look at things you saw before, but from another point of view.” (8)
*
According to Kierkegaard, “It is a very beautiful sight to see a man put out to sea with the fair wind of hope . . . but one should never permit hope to be taken aboard one’s own ship, least of all as a pilot; for hope is a faithless shipmaster.” Or to summarize: Only when you cease to hope are your hopes realized. (9)
*
He was rickety but suave—like New Orleans. (59)
*
Everything is not wonderful, obviously. In fact realizing that things are not wonderful is the key to life. Then you can go forward with your shoulders squared to meet what comes. (61)
*
When you’re young you spend a certain amount of time finding yourself; but in the middle of this journey of our life, you tend to lose your way. Probably the same amount of time it took to find yourself when you were young, is the amount of time it takes to realize that you have lost your way again and must renew the search. (84)
*
September 16, 2026
With all the ironic and laconic family chronicling and commentary of Joan Didion’s Democracy and all of the humid Louisianan charm of a classic American southern novel, The Oyster Diaries by Nancy Lemann infuses the family saga with all the needed jaded sarcasm and intermittent sagacity to make it uniquely memorable and surprisingly essential. “Insecurity. Ego Problems. Anhedonia. Operatic Wrath. These are the lions at the gate—the point is to banish them.” Our narrator Delery manages more often to re-appraise her mythos than necessarily banish or condemn it; Delery historicizes herself and more widely her family with an unsure heart but a steady hand, and an uncertain but determined to be reconcilable mind. Lemann shows that hindsight can be both 20/20 and 100% riffed upon.
September 25, 2026
Nancy Lemann has such a gorgeous style that balances humor, tragedy, and philosophical prose nearly perfectly.
This book isn’t as strong and consistent as Lives of the Saints, but I’d almost argue that’s the point. The narrators of the two books are essentially the same person, but in the Oyster Diaries she’s older, jaded, more willing to give in.
I’ll have more to say later, but I really do think Nancy Lemann is one of the loveliest authors out there.
This book isn’t as strong and consistent as Lives of the Saints, but I’d almost argue that’s the point. The narrators of the two books are essentially the same person, but in the Oyster Diaries she’s older, jaded, more willing to give in.
I’ll have more to say later, but I really do think Nancy Lemann is one of the loveliest authors out there.
May 25, 2026
Loved it! I fully admit that I picked up this book because a) I liked the pretty sunset on the cover and b) the title was really intriguing. What could an “oyster diary” possibly be? I won’t spoil it.
This book is very much of the realistic fiction ilk; so much so that I sometimes had to remind myself that I wasn’t reading a real person’s musings. I loved Del’s dry, incredibly sarcastic voice and found her perspective on life intriguing and fun to read. Behind the humor, there is a wonderful sincerity in Nancy Lemann’s fondness and appreciation for New Orleans and its culture.
Gem of a book with beautiful writing (and lots of fun 50¢ words to look up).
“You'd think I'd need a drink. But I don't drink. It's all part of the anhedonia.”
This book is very much of the realistic fiction ilk; so much so that I sometimes had to remind myself that I wasn’t reading a real person’s musings. I loved Del’s dry, incredibly sarcastic voice and found her perspective on life intriguing and fun to read. Behind the humor, there is a wonderful sincerity in Nancy Lemann’s fondness and appreciation for New Orleans and its culture.
Gem of a book with beautiful writing (and lots of fun 50¢ words to look up).
“You'd think I'd need a drink. But I don't drink. It's all part of the anhedonia.”
August 30, 2026
I am going to be honest and say I didn’t do this book justice. I tried but I have so much going on this week and the book is demanding. When I got the reference I was delighted, but some passages bested me completely. I don’t understand opera and Don Giovanni? But there was also art and politics and Mardi Gras. Wonderful, humorous repetition of language. The depictions of old New Orleans society butting up against the modern world were fascinating. It took me a while to realize this was a novel and not memoir given the intimate details, the unique characters, and the elegiac tone. I will try it again sometime, maybe even read up on or listen to Don Giovanni first.
September 7, 2026
short n sweet, written as diary entries
I liked the humor of the author and i felt like reading a book that took place in DC
I liked the humor of the author and i felt like reading a book that took place in DC
September 20, 2026
That old villain Claude Collier just has to pop his drunk ass in again
Read
June 16, 2026Just a phenomenal intelligence, the kind of intelligence that makes you feel ashamed to be so dull inside so much of the time. Could've done without the safari part.
September 6, 2026
Recently read The Lives of Saints and thoroughly enjoyed Lemann’s writing style in both books. Sometimes it seems like something is completely unrelated, but it always comes together at some point. Great characters.
May 3, 2026
nearly every detail of this book is shot through with melancholy but it is truly so funny, maybe the funniest new novel I have read in quite some time. A novel that understands the rot at the centre of most of "high society" -- highly recommended
May 23, 2026
Oh what I forgot to write anything for Nancy?? I must have been sinking in a quagmire of unreality and lack of purpose. This book has a million quotable lines, I love a wise southern belle. “Why is a person an empty vessel of insecurity— what is this vagary, why does the ego need nonstop confirmation to restore its fragile balance?”
August 23, 2026
Nancy Lemann came to me during this odd period in which isolation has felt less like a singular event than a suffocating climate. I have been reading around the South for some time now: Didion on New Orleans, Tennessee Williams on desire and decay, Faulkner on inheritance, weather, blood. Through most of it, I did not yet know what I was looking for in those books. I only knew that the women in them seemed to understand something about performance, about damage, and about the rituals by which people remain gorgeous while immense pressure and devastation privately undo them. Lemann gave me the mirror plainly. Or plainly enough. As I get older, I am beginning to connect the dots.
June 21, 2026
"Kierkegaard was so not what I expected. I started at the beginning. First he keeps talking about how boring and annoying everything is. "It is a curious fact that those who do not bore themselves usually bore others, while those who bore themselves entertain others. Those who do not bore themselves are...the most tiresome, the most utterly unendurable.'
Many fine points about what is annoying and boring follow. 'The unpleasant is merely a piquant ingredient in the dullness of life.'
Which explains why it is so diverting to analyze things that are annoying" (7).
"'It is in your power to review your life, to look at things you saw before, but from another point of view.'
Erwin Schott playing Don Giovanni: Was it the same or different twenty years ago, and if so, how?
Or rather: What is different among the circumstances of the thing itself that is the same (Don Giovanni)? The thing is the same but you are different?" (8).
"I had been relegated to accommodate a beach house for a swarm of houseguests mainly consisting of my husband's relatives. Which was annoying, kind of in the same way that being expected to fulfill the dictates of my mother's dinner-party books would have annoyed me. But it is a universal truth of life that many people and things are annoying, and that finding an effective way to deal with this is important.
The first basic thing is to identify and quantify what is annoying and why. The next thing is to move forward, noting that annoyance is unavoidable and inevitable in life. Rather than kind of sinking further into paralysis and rage at each annoyance.
Annoyance turns to wrath if you're not careful. Not that wrath is so bad. It's kind of a more stern form of annoyance. Maybe a more elevated form. I don't know. But I do know that if you let it get out of hand, pretty soon you're looking at the wrath of Achilles" (59).
"But why is my favorite subject how annoying some people are? Like the fire only burns when people are annoying me and when I marvel at their inability to--to what, be like me? Obviously I have an ego disorder" (61).
"Defeat is more interesting than victory. The ancient Greeks preferred to write heroic legends of defeat, which stirred men's hearts more than tales of victory. These two defeated lions stirred mine" (213).
Many fine points about what is annoying and boring follow. 'The unpleasant is merely a piquant ingredient in the dullness of life.'
Which explains why it is so diverting to analyze things that are annoying" (7).
"'It is in your power to review your life, to look at things you saw before, but from another point of view.'
Erwin Schott playing Don Giovanni: Was it the same or different twenty years ago, and if so, how?
Or rather: What is different among the circumstances of the thing itself that is the same (Don Giovanni)? The thing is the same but you are different?" (8).
"I had been relegated to accommodate a beach house for a swarm of houseguests mainly consisting of my husband's relatives. Which was annoying, kind of in the same way that being expected to fulfill the dictates of my mother's dinner-party books would have annoyed me. But it is a universal truth of life that many people and things are annoying, and that finding an effective way to deal with this is important.
The first basic thing is to identify and quantify what is annoying and why. The next thing is to move forward, noting that annoyance is unavoidable and inevitable in life. Rather than kind of sinking further into paralysis and rage at each annoyance.
Annoyance turns to wrath if you're not careful. Not that wrath is so bad. It's kind of a more stern form of annoyance. Maybe a more elevated form. I don't know. But I do know that if you let it get out of hand, pretty soon you're looking at the wrath of Achilles" (59).
"But why is my favorite subject how annoying some people are? Like the fire only burns when people are annoying me and when I marvel at their inability to--to what, be like me? Obviously I have an ego disorder" (61).
"Defeat is more interesting than victory. The ancient Greeks preferred to write heroic legends of defeat, which stirred men's hearts more than tales of victory. These two defeated lions stirred mine" (213).
July 27, 2026
"I didn't see him until ten years later. It was at a plantation in the Louisiana countryside called Perseverance. A branch of his family had lived there since the Civil War and farmed the land. Sugarcane was doomed but they had more luck with soybeans. They had names like Po-boy and Peanut and took their vacations at a summer house in the next town one mile away.
To get there you went through the swamps outside of New Orleans towards Baton Route and took the ferry at Gramercy across the Mississippi river, then followed the levee the rest of the way. It was pretty much at the ends of the earth.
And there was the blue-eyed boy with the crooked smile and the sublime hell in his soul. And was I myself toddling about at the beginning of lie, among the ghosts in their now remote nether realm. "They must have let the angels out of heaven," he said when he saw me. "
"In Venice with my father when Grace was twelve he took us to approximately one zillion churches to look at the Carpaccios. He pointed out the red bird in the corner of a Carpaccio he said had led him to have an epiphany in 1958. Every day his secretary FedEx-ed him hard copies of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which he read on the boats while gliding past the palazzos with their marble angels, the ornate architecture everywhere, sometimes opera playing, on the green canals. We had oysters on an ancient court with Moorish arches and white umbrellas under awnings crisply flapping in the wind. Opera, oysters, the world."
"The next day a certain evidence of fall was in the air--the Southern fall--a hot fall, amid the oaks, the kind that in childhood when you went home from school with a friend, their mother would be sitting at the kitchen counter wearing a black lace slip and drinking vodka, staring out at the velvet green lawns."
Aren't three quotes enough to want to read this book about New Orleans, unique characters, heat, romance, travel, and mostly families? I loved this book and its meandering observations and people.
To get there you went through the swamps outside of New Orleans towards Baton Route and took the ferry at Gramercy across the Mississippi river, then followed the levee the rest of the way. It was pretty much at the ends of the earth.
And there was the blue-eyed boy with the crooked smile and the sublime hell in his soul. And was I myself toddling about at the beginning of lie, among the ghosts in their now remote nether realm. "They must have let the angels out of heaven," he said when he saw me. "
"In Venice with my father when Grace was twelve he took us to approximately one zillion churches to look at the Carpaccios. He pointed out the red bird in the corner of a Carpaccio he said had led him to have an epiphany in 1958. Every day his secretary FedEx-ed him hard copies of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which he read on the boats while gliding past the palazzos with their marble angels, the ornate architecture everywhere, sometimes opera playing, on the green canals. We had oysters on an ancient court with Moorish arches and white umbrellas under awnings crisply flapping in the wind. Opera, oysters, the world."
"The next day a certain evidence of fall was in the air--the Southern fall--a hot fall, amid the oaks, the kind that in childhood when you went home from school with a friend, their mother would be sitting at the kitchen counter wearing a black lace slip and drinking vodka, staring out at the velvet green lawns."
Aren't three quotes enough to want to read this book about New Orleans, unique characters, heat, romance, travel, and mostly families? I loved this book and its meandering observations and people.
August 14, 2026
Born of money in aristocratic New Orleans and married into millions more in the Washington power bubble, Delery Anhalt nonetheless arrives at middle age nagged by disappointment.
She is encaged, albeit behind gilded bars, by marital deception, professional irrelevance, waning maternal influence and the inexorable erosion of her past, one nearly wholly defined by her father, a demanding, adventurous, eccentric man who devoted as much time to learning ancient Greek as he did to rearing his daughter.
Delery dissects her dilemma in this diaristic collection of introspective essays. Often acerbic in tone, they display a keen eye, a polished intellect, and, ultimately, an enduring realization bordering on sadness that what she expects would be most impactful in life (say the death of a parent) pales in comparison to other random moments (for instance, the self-possessed magnificence of lions in repose).
As testament to the authenticity of Delery’s narrative voice – or perhaps to my own naivete – once I stopped reading to search whether “The Oyster Diaries” is indeed fiction. (It is.) Thereby assured, I continued on and encountered what always happens when someone, whether in print or at a dinner table, bares his or her soul: a pendulum of interest swinging from fascination to indifference.
The New York Times, in an effusive review, says Lemann’s books are “for the misanthropes, the anti-socialites, those with negative self-regard.” (Me, checking the mirror. Yep.) It is also a book for readers capable of forgiveness, in this case of pardoning the less-fulfilling excesses of Lemann/Delery, and enjoying the overall clarity of language, vision, and humanity that makes “The Oyster Diaries” worth your time.
She is encaged, albeit behind gilded bars, by marital deception, professional irrelevance, waning maternal influence and the inexorable erosion of her past, one nearly wholly defined by her father, a demanding, adventurous, eccentric man who devoted as much time to learning ancient Greek as he did to rearing his daughter.
Delery dissects her dilemma in this diaristic collection of introspective essays. Often acerbic in tone, they display a keen eye, a polished intellect, and, ultimately, an enduring realization bordering on sadness that what she expects would be most impactful in life (say the death of a parent) pales in comparison to other random moments (for instance, the self-possessed magnificence of lions in repose).
As testament to the authenticity of Delery’s narrative voice – or perhaps to my own naivete – once I stopped reading to search whether “The Oyster Diaries” is indeed fiction. (It is.) Thereby assured, I continued on and encountered what always happens when someone, whether in print or at a dinner table, bares his or her soul: a pendulum of interest swinging from fascination to indifference.
The New York Times, in an effusive review, says Lemann’s books are “for the misanthropes, the anti-socialites, those with negative self-regard.” (Me, checking the mirror. Yep.) It is also a book for readers capable of forgiveness, in this case of pardoning the less-fulfilling excesses of Lemann/Delery, and enjoying the overall clarity of language, vision, and humanity that makes “The Oyster Diaries” worth your time.
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