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How Matthew Berry Went From Hollywood Writer To Fantasy Football’s Biggest Name, Entrepreneur

by www.forbes.com Leave a Comment

Before the Kansas City Chiefs-Jacksonville Jaguars playoff game on Jan. 21, Matthew Berry stood in the snow on the sideline next to Chris Simms. The two men were part of NBC’s “Football Night in America,” the most-watched pre-game show in sports.

The segment centered around prop bets, a subject Berry knows well considering his nearly 25-year career as a fantasy football writer and analyst.

On air, Berry predicted Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence would go over 1.5 touchdown passes, mentioning the Chiefs had allowed the most passing touchdowns in the NFL during the regular season. And he said that Jaguars receiver Christian Kirk would have at least six catches, noting the Chiefs had yielded the most receptions to slot receivers in the league.

The projections proved correct. Lawrence threw for two touchdown passes, both to Kirk, who had nine catches for 105 yards in the team’s 27-17 loss.

That’s not to say Berry is flawless in his predictions. Like anyone, he has hits and misses. But just the fact that Berry was even in the position to give his informed opinion on a national show that millions of people watch is remarkable given his roots. He wasn’t an NFL player like Simms or an NFL coach like Tony Dungy, two of his “Football Night in America” colleagues.

No, Berry grew up dreaming of working in Hollywood as a writer. He did work in high school as a nighttime radio DJ for a classic rock station and worked for the student radio and television station at Syracuse.

Still, after graduating college in 1992, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in screenwriting.

“Professionally, I never thought I would be in front of the camera,” Berry said. “I always thought I would be behind the scenes as a writer and producer.”

And he did just that, writing for movies and television shows such as “Married…with Children,” a comedy that aired on Fox FOXA . In 1999, he saw an advertisement from Rotoworld, a fantasy sports website that was looking for freelance writers who would work for free. Berry had played fantasy sports since the spring of 1984 when he was 14 and joined a rotisserie baseball league, so he sent an email to someone at Rotoworld.

“They wrote me back the next day and they said, ‘We looked you up on IMDB. Married…with Children is our favorite show of all time. You’re hired,’” Berry said. “Because I wrote mean wife jokes for Al Bundy, I was given the opportunity to write a free column for a low-trafficked website on the internet.”

Over the next few years, Berry continued working in Hollywood and writing for Rotoworld. He became known as “Talented Mr. Roto,” a nickname his wife thought of when they were watching “The Talented Mr. Ripley” movie that came out in 1999.

“I wanted a name that made me sound like an expert, but also one that was sort of goofy enough that let people know I didn’t take myself too seriously,” Berry said. “As I’m sitting there trying to come up with nicknames, my wife goes, ‘How about the Talented Mr. Roto?,’ I was like, ‘Brilliant. Sold. This is so over the top and silly.”

By 2004, Berry had developed a devoted audience who enjoyed his work, so he decided to go off on his own and start his own website. He paid someone $10,000 to build the website and content management system and brought along some contributors to write articles.

For the first year, Berry worked on the website while also juggling his Hollywood writing duties. In early 2005, he spoke with Eric Abrams, his longtime writing partner.

“I went to him and I said, ‘Listen, man. I’ll probably make no money at all. I’ll probably fall flat on my face. But I just want to be happy. I want to chase happiness, and the thing that make me happiest is this dumb little fantasy football website I’ve got. I’m just giving you a heads up. I’m giving you a year’s notice,’” Berry said.

Berry followed through on his promise, giving up screenwriting at the end of 2005. Early on, Berry didn’t have money for advertising or marketing, so he reached out to radio and television stations across the U.S., telling them he would come on the air for free as long as they promoted his website.

“A lot of people said yes to that,” Berry said. “Necessity is the mother of invention. I became a spokesperson because I had to be. I couldn’t afford one. I couldn’t afford to hire a celebrity or an athlete to go out and do this for me. I had to do it myself.”

Berry’s most high-profile gig early on was appearing on ESPN Radio’s affiliate in Los Angeles. Soon, he began writing for ESPN’s website, appearing on ESPNews and shows such as “Cold Pizza” and meeting company employees and executives. Still, he continued operating his website until 2007 when ESPN approached Berry.

“No one was buying any yachts or anything like that, but we were in the black, we had a good reputation and we had a nice subscriber base.” Berry said. “ESPN said to me, ‘We want to buy your website, move you to Connecticut and make you the guy.”

The idea was to make Berry the face of ESPN’s fantasy sports coverage similar to what Mel Kiper Jr. was for the NFL draft. And over the next 15 years, Berry became synonymous with fantasy sports thanks to his passion, enthusiasm and high-profile job.

Along the way, Berry never lost his entrepreneurial spirit. He still owns RotoPass, a subscription bundling website that he started in 2004. He was also a co-founder of Fantasy Movie League, a game/website aimed at predicting box office sales that National CineMedia bought in 2017.

Berry co-founded a fantasy app called Fantasy Life, as well, named after the best-selling book he wrote in 2013. Betsperts acquired the Fantasy Life app in 2021, but Berry continued with Betsperts as a board member and minority shareholder.

Early last year, Berry started the Fantasy Life website and daily newsletter that covers NFL news, fantasy football and sports betting. The company has a few full-time employees, including CEO Eliot Crist, as well as a board of advisors that includes Adam Ryan, CEO of Workweek; Austin Rief, CEO of Morning Brew; and Tyler Denk, CEO of beehiv, a newsletter platform.

“If you meet Matthew, you immediately realize he’s an entrepreneur,” Ryan said. “And if you look at how he got his start, it was in the same way that most entrepreneurs got his start. He was working for free, building his reputation, writing, blogging. He understood the business of fantasy, which allowed him to have success quickly. His entrepreneurial spirit is what feeds the company.”

Since Berry arrived at ESPN, he said he had clauses in his contract that allowed him to start his own companies. But during contract negotiations last year, Berry said ESPN offered him a three-year deal with the only caveat being that he had to sell his stakes in the companies he founded.

“I didn’t want to do that because I live those businesses,” Berry said. “I think there’s a very bright future with those businesses and I also made promises to investors and employees that I would be there to support and do everything I could to help those businesses.”

As such, Berry decided to leave ESPN and pursue an opportunity where he could continue with his side businesses and also contribute to overall NFL coverage, not just be part of fantasy coverage as he had been at ESPN.

“I’ve got nothing bad to say about ESPN,” Berry said. “It was a really good run…I left ESPN with hugs and handshakes. They were very gracious to me on the way out the door, and I still have a lot of very close friends over there.”

Last summer, Berry agreed to a four-year deal with NBC that included weekly appearances on “Football Night in America” and the “Sunday Night Football Final” show after games that airs on Peacock, NBC’s streaming service. He also hosts a daily fantasy football show on Peacock, where he and others discuss the latest news with an emphasis on fantasy and betting implications. This week, he’ll be in Arizona, hosting the show from the site of the Super Bowl, another highlight in his unlikely career.

“I’m so happy at NBC because I feel like I get the best of both worlds,” Berry said. “I get the opportunity to be an entrepreneur, but more importantly I also get to work with a great company and great people on the NFL and on the premier show in the NFL. I’m truly blessed.”

Pulp fiction | ‘Cinema Marte Dum Tak’: Meet the makers behind the docuseries on Bollywood’s forgotten impish cousin

by www.moneycontrol.com Leave a Comment

(Clockwise from left) Amazon Prime's new docu series 'Cinema Marte Dum Tak's co-creator Vasan Bala, head researcher Pritesh Kumar Srivastava, co-director Disha Rindani and researcher Aseem Chandaver.

(Clockwise from left) Amazon Prime’s new docu series ‘Cinema Marte Dum Tak’s co-creator Vasan Bala, head researcher Pritesh Kumar Srivastava, co-director Disha Rindani and researcher Aseem Chandaver.

In the first decade of India’s economic liberalisation, which is also the last decade for the single-screen theatre’s reign, few filmmakers rose from the Hindi film industry’s netherworld to make the most of a time and place that once was and never will be.

Cinema Marte Dum Tak, Amazon Prime Video’s six-episode docuseries, is a cheerfully entertaining and often poignant look at these filmmakers who, as co-creator Vasan Bala tells Moneycontrol , “made feature films in the time and budget it takes to make a short film.”

The series, which premiered on Friday, looks back at the career of four filmmakers: Vinod Talwar, Kishan Shah, Dilip Gulati and J Neelam. From the early 1990s to the early 2000s, they rolled out hundreds of feature films which could cost less than Rs 4 lakh and earn up to Rs 40 lakh within a week.

Stills from 'Cinema Marte Dum Tak'. Stills from ‘Cinema Marte Dum Tak’.

The formula? Mostly non-stars, minimal locations, skin show, violence, horror, and innuendo-filled dialogue — a combination that the interviewees proclaim to have worked wonders for their working-class audience of labourers and rickshaw -pullers.

Over time, with the Hindi film industry’s corporatisation, rise of multiplexes, and the onslaught of the Bhojpuri film industry that absorbed the raunchiness of these movies, Bollywood’s little, impish cousin disappeared.

“When we set out to look for these filmmakers, they had all gone dark and underground, retired into their family life, miles away from cinema,” research head Pritesh Kumar Srivastava tells Moneycontrol . He adds that their starting wish-list of filmmakers to interview had up to 50 names but several refused to appear in the series.

Bala explains, “In the corporate space paperwork, legal clearances take a long time but the pulp-movie industry believed in per-day cash and a handshake to start and finish a movie. This drastically different mindsets needed to come as one.”

We had got a glimpse of this world in Ashim Ahluwalia’s Nawazuddin Siddiqui-starrer Miss Lovely (2012), in which a duo of filmmaker brothers combine sex, violence and grotesque horror in quickly made low-budget films that draw huge profits in a short period. Five years later, Shamya Dasgupta’s non-fiction book Don’t Disturb The Dead : The Story of the Ramsay Brothers (2017, HarperCollins) looked into the lives of Bollywood’s horror genre pioneers, the Ramsay brothers, mistakenly believed to have inspired Miss Lovely .

” Miss Lovely wasn’t inspired by the Ramsays at all, but by other, more dubious brothers,” Ahluwalia wrote in the foreword, adding that his film took inspiration from the “rougher, cheaper, wilder lot” of filmmakers who borrowed Ramsays’ methods to make “primal, anarchic films”, which, are, often, dismissed pejoratively as B-grade, C-grade, or Z-grade cinema. Ahluwalia is credited as the creative consultant for the Vice Studios’ production.

“Because of the kind of films they made, and how society understood them, they were distrustful easily,” Srivastava says about the difficulties in bringing the interviewees together. Co-director Disha Rindani adds how the filmmakers would abuse Srivastava and stop taking his calls or responding to emails for months.

“Once word of mouth spread within their industry that this series is happening for real and we are legit, people started agreeing to be part of our series,” Bala says. These films often featured actors who have simultaneously been part of A-list productions: Raza Murad, Kiran Kumar, Mukesh Rishi and Harish Patel. They appear in the series, offering their observations and anecdotes from time to time.

The series was conceived when Vice Media’s Samira Kanwar approached Srivastava to “make something” on these films in 2019. Bala entered the picture in 2020 as executive producer.

“By the time I was there, Pritesh had introduced the potential interviewees to us and all that was left to do was pitch it to Amazon,” Bala says.

The makers had decided that they wouldn’t be “laughing at them but with them” or “accept them, or not, or whatever, with their good, bad and ugly, as anybody would want to be accepted”. The idea was not to create a “ hahaha show, like MTV spoofs, where we would laugh at someone’s expense,” Bala clarifies.

The series is structured around Talwar, Shah, Gulati and Neelam, who have all but left filmmaking, gearing up to make one short film each in their own inimitable style. Interviews and clippings from their works are interspersed in the documentary. In the end, the foursome are touchingly given a red-carpet premiere, a sort of mainstream acknowledgement they yearned for but never received in their prime.

“Initially, we thought the four directors would make one film but that terrible idea was quickly dropped because each has their own style,” Bala says, “It was interesting to see how they get their crew together in a short time and shoot their film on negative (film roll)”.

Production of Cinema Marte Dum Tak was often halted throughout 2020 and 2021 owing to the COVID-induced lockdown. Srivastava and his team would have to stay in constant touch with the interviewees so they don’t lose interest, or, worse, disappear.

(From left) Yesteryear directors J Neelam, Vinod Talwar, Dilip Gulati and Kishan Shah. (From left) Yesteryear directors J Neelam, Vinod Talwar, Dilip Gulati and Kishan Shah.

But as Rindani tells Moneycontrol , “The last piece of the puzzle was Kanti Shah,” and until his interview had been secured, the makers were not entirely feeling confident.

Kanti Shah, younger brother of Kishan Shah, was the most financially successful of these filmmakers. He managed to finish films quickly, had an aesthetic style better than most, and had the gall to get top stars, such as Dharmendra and Mithun Chakraborty, to act in his films. These films, such as Loha (1997), and, especially, Gunda (1998), are today cult classics, even among the most mainstream of Hindi film-watching cinephiles.

Kanti Shah does appear in the series but, interestingly, he has soured relations with his peers, and, apparently, his family, too.

“The deal with Kanti is that you are alone at the top,” Bala observes. “His success brought him narcissism and megalomania.”

Rindani has an interesting insight: “As you see in the series, the others had a family life, or, you have a woman (J Neelam) who is living life with some kind of dignity and normalcy. Kanti, by, contrast, doesn’t have a family life. He is a rake with no fear of judgement by society and has broken those ties. He knows he can’t be judged and he’s able to do what he wants to do.”

Yesteryear director Kanti Shah watching his 2005 film ‘Angoor’, starring Sapna Sappu. Yesteryear director Kanti Shah watching his 2005 film ‘Angoor’, starring Sapna Sappu. (Photo: Amazon)

Among the researchers on the show was Aseem Chandaver, whom Bala describes as “the biggest fanboy for these sort of films”. Chandaver, Bala says, provided the “analytical framework” for the series: “What is which filmmaker’s style, whose filmmaking gradually declined, who talks too much, that sort of thing Aseem knew best.”

Chandaver, whose Instagram profile offers a treasure trove of moments from those films, tells Moneycontrol , “There are some guys on whom you can make one whole season. You can make a whole season on just Kanti Shah. Or Suresh Jain, the king of sleaze, best-known for his waali films (in late 2000s), Dabbeywali , Kaamwali , Machhliwali .”

The three-year making of the series also witnessed the deaths of many possible interviewees, such as cinematographer Dilip Dey and composer Sawan Kumar Sawan.

One noticeable lack in the series was the voices of the women who starred in these films. These women, in their roles, were frequently in states of undress, molested and raped — staples of the genre. While Neelam does talk about “women empowerment” in these kind of films (it is true that many of these films worked because of the heroine’s star power), it doesn’t quite address the issue.

Turns out that the makers did approach these actresses but “they didn’t want to return and associate with this world,” Rindani says. Sriprada was among those who were approached but she died during the pandemic. Bala, in fact, wants to cast Poonam Dasgupta, a sort of Sridevi of these films, in one of his retromaniac movies. His recent film, Monica, Oh My Darling , for instance, had a role for actor Shiva Rindani, Disha Rindani’s father. Shiva Rindani is also among the interviewees in the series.

Another aspect untouched in the series was that the audience for what Chandaver would call “terribly awesome movies”, instead of B, C, or Z grade, shifted to their smartphone screens, with several streaming sites such as Ullu and Kooku, offering semi-sexual content. It’s not that this audience disappeared into thin air, as the series sometimes suggests.

Rindani says, with the Central Bureau of Investigation cracking down on the porn industry in Gujarat in 2021, the people in the digital space making these films went silent, “restructuring and re-strategising”. In fact, Shiva Rindani was offered to direct a few of these digital-era films.

What’s next for Season Two? Chandaver hopes they “cross international boundaries” and Bala says he has been trying to get Roger Corman, the guru of Hollywood B-movies for Cinema Marte Dum Tak for a long time.

“I have been sliding into his DMs since the pandemic,” Bala says. Corman, who is 96, after all, mentored the who’s who of Hollywood’s greatest directors: Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron.

Rindani’s suggestion is more local: Ram Gopal Varma. “That’s a great idea,” Bala muses.

Wilbur Smith dead – Beloved adventure novelist who sold 140million books dies at home in South Africa aged 88

by www.thesun.co.uk Leave a Comment

THRILLER writer Wilbur Smith has died at his home in South Africa after spending the morning reading and writing with his wife.

The 88-year-old passed away “unexpectantly” in Cape Town after selling more than 140 million books.

Many of his novels feature the Courtney family and follow their exploits across the globe over 300 years.

His first novel ‘When the Lion Feeds’ was published in 1964 and became an instant bestseller.

A tweet on his Twitter this evening read: “We are so sorry to announce that the beloved, global bestselling author Wilbur Smith passed away unexpectedly this afternoon at his Cape Town home, with his wife Niso by his side.

Kevin Conroy Scott, literary agent for Wilbur Smith for the past 11 years, said:

“Wilbur Smith was an icon, larger than life, beloved by his fans who collected his books in hardbacks and passed his work down through generations, fathers to sons and mothers to daughters.

“His knowledge of Africa, and his imagination knew no limitations. His work ethic and his powerful, elegant writing style made him known to millions.

“I cherish the role of working side by side with his wife Niso and the Wilbur and Niso Smith Foundation to keep the flame of his fictional universe alive for many years to come.”

Smith was a talented bushman and survivalist. He was also a pilot and enjoyed hunting.

Eating the Sun by Oliver Morton

by www.theguardian.com Leave a Comment

T his is a book about “the most important process on the planet”: photosynthesis. Plants grow by “eating the sun”, trapping its energy and using hydrogen from water and carbon from air to produce flowers, fruit and seeds. The “scrap of sunlight” converted into organic matter by the world’s plants each day is equivalent to the energy in the global arsenal of nuclear weapons. But, by releasing the energy locked away some 300m years ago in fossil fuels, we have upset the delicate balance of the carbon cycle and made “the atmosphere itself as artificial as a Capability Brown landscape”. From molecules to the planetary scale, Morton’s beautifully written book reveals how life is made from light. The living landscapes we inhabit are shaped by photosynthesis, and Morton’s sense of wonder at the pervasive influence of this process is nowhere stronger than while walking across the South Downs near his home: “It’s grassland like this, more than any other habitat, that gives us both homes and horizons.” A rich and wide-ranging study.

The Essential Colette

by www.nytimes.com Leave a Comment

Colette was not merely the most famous writer of her day, but one of the most famous people, period. A demimondaine with a shocking reputation, by the time of her death , in 1954, Colette was an institution, the first French woman of letters ever honored with a state funeral. (The church denied her a Catholic burial on the grounds of her multiple divorces.)

By turns revolutionary and retrograde, liberated and conservative, a traditionalist who defied labels and loved a title, Colette was nothing if not contradictory. Both her life (81 years long) and her body of work (which exceeded 40 books) were epic, and given that her writing was so often autobiographical, the two were inextricably conflated in the public mind. But if anything, her notoriety obscured the greatness of her prose: Her event-filled life often overshadowed the accomplishments of her best-selling fiction.

Born in Burgundy in 1873, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette married at the age of 20 and moved to Paris with her husband, the dissolute, publicity-hungry writer and publisher known as “Willy.” Her first novels (the “Claudine” series, about the coming-of-age of a precocious Burgundian schoolgirl and published under her husband’s name) were wildly successful. Meanwhile, the Colette-Willys — bohemian, avant-garde and in and out of complex ménages — took Paris by storm. When the pair divorced, Colette, without access to her earnings, turned to journalism and to the traveling music hall stage, where her scanty costumes, cross-dressing and much-hyped kiss with her real-life lover Mathilde de Morny ( “Max”), the Marquise de Belbeuf, cemented her sulfureuse reputation.

1910’s “The Vagabond,” a fictionalization of her years in the theater, established Colette as a popular writer in her own right; 1920’s “Chéri” and its sequel (based in part on her affair with her second husband’s teenage son, and, later, her much younger third husband) were regarded as instant classics. A tireless worker, Colette spent the 1920s and ’30s producing novels, short stories, plays and memoirs. Although she wrote women’s interest pieces for pro-Nazi journals throughout the Occupation, she retained her exalted position (and, some would argue, the freedom of her Jewish third husband).

During the postwar period, Colette’s public image softened: She was a famous eccentric, known as much for her love of cats and creature comforts as for her work. It was a trajectory not unlike that of Gigi, the titular heroine of her 1944 novella, who climbs through Paris’s social strata, from a world of courtesans to that of society hostesses. I n 1953, Colette was named a Grand Officer of the Légion d’Honneu r. She was also considered a serious artist: “ Colette is the greatest living French writer of fiction,” Katherine Anne Porter wrote in The New York Times in 1951 , “and was while Gide and Proust still lived.”

What is her most famous book?

That’s easy: For Americans, it’s probably GIGI (1944). Don’t worry if you hear the title and go straight to “The Night They Invented Champagne.” Colette herself handpicked Audrey Hepburn for the lead in the American stage adaptation by Anita Loos, and the sale of the book’s film and dramatic rights allegedly made her feel financially secure for the first time in her life. If you think “Thank Heaven For Little Girls” has aged badly, consider that the entire story is about a 15-year-old about to be auctioned off to the highest bidder: The character of Gigi was, according to oft-repeated gossip, based on the socialite Yola Henriquet, whom Colette first observed on her honeymoon in the French Riviera with the much-older media magnate Henri Letellier and the aging courtesans who’d raised her. (Colette herself never confirmed the rumor.)

Like many of Colette’s works, the novella is both cynical and deeply human — effervescent, yes, but with tragic notes. (Colette, who was a passionate lover of food and wine, would not object to the comparison.)

I want queer fiction.

Colette’s earliest books, the “Claudine” series, follow the heroine from her youth as a rebellious teenager to her maturity as the toast of avant-garde Paris. Willy may have envisioned books brimming with salacious schoolgirl fantasies (which, remember, he was supposed to have written himself) but even as a young writer Colette wasn’t capable of anything that simplistic — or centered on male gratification. The first in the series, CLAUDINE AT SCHOOL (1900), billed by Willy as Sapphic erotica, flew off the shelves. But as fun as the books are (and they’re really fun), readers looking for a cheap thrill would have found themselves seeing the world through fresh eyes: those of a young woman eager for freedom and empowerment, exploring queer sexuality and challenging perceived norms of ambition and comportment. This was no tortured version of bisexuality: Claudine loves it all and, far from being punished for it like most queer characters of her time, thrives triumphantly.

The series was a hit with everyone from kids to literati: There were Claudine stage plays, Claudine perfumes, and (obviously) Claudine schoolgirl uniforms. Willy controlled the rights, of course. The claim that the unscrupulous libertine tied Colette to her chair to make her write is probably exaggerated, but he certainly forced her to crank out the “Claudine” sequels — and is remembered as the guy who took credit for his more talented wife’s life and work. By the end of the series, Claudine: Against the Willy character’s wishes, she moves in with a woman and leaves him a pathetic, aging shell. The layers of identity dynamics are a thesis in themselves: A man claims the voice of a queer young girl, which is actually that of a young woman who often presented herself as a young man. (As did Colette; she frequently appeared publicly in gentlemen’s attire.)

How about some picaresque feminism?

Try THE VAGABOND (1910). Short, propulsive, action-packed and sexy, this 1910 novel finds 33-year-old Renée divorced from a coercive, chronically unfaithful roué (sound familiar?) and trying to forge her own path as a traveling actor. The cast of characters — demimonde, society, canine and everything in between — is unforgettable, and Renée is a great feminist heroine: honest, fearless, sometimes self-destructive and always charismatic. (The character of her ex also neatly solidified Willy’s public reputation as a villain.) After reading about her years of roughing it, you’ll appreciate the author’s real-life independence more, but even without the colorful backdrop of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century theatrical universe, this would be a riveting character study.

I have a short attention span.

You’re in luck! Colette was a prolific short story writer, and her THE OTHER WOMAN: Collected Short Stories is a glorious buffet of her signature themes: love, sexuality, independence, aging and French society. Then, too, some of her most famous works were novellas ( “Gigi,” “Mitsou” “The Cat”), and several of her novels — including all the Claudines and “The Vagabond” — are what we’d call “slim” today.

I want sex in the city!

Colette described THE PURE AND THE IMPURE (1932) as the work that was closest to autobiography, although it’s more abstract than many of her other portraits. A series of dialogues exploring sexual experience — including a faked orgasm — it takes you from drawing rooms to opium dens, society marriages and gay salons. Contemporary reviewers didn’t know what to make of this one, but Colette called “The Pure and the Impure” her “personal contribution to the sum total of our knowledge of the senses.”

I want sex in the country!

GREEN WHEAT is set in a villa in Brittany, where every summer young Vinca and Phil resume their holiday friendship, begin to grow up and, inevitably, discover the pleasure and heartbreak of adult sexuality. A tender slow burn from 1923.

I’m not in the mood.

If you feel like reading about family dynamics, the idylls of Burgundian country living and one of the greatest love letters ever written to a mother, you need to seek out the series of sketches MY MOTHER’S HOUSE (1922) and the indelible short portrait SIDO (1929).

I’d appreciate some real talk about aging.

Colette wrote about aging — and, specifically, women aging — throughout her career. (Her last two books concern an esteemed novelist who’s fallen into the trap of writing so much seeming autobiography that no one knows who she really is.) While the “Chéri” novels are classics, JULIE DE CARNEILHAN (1941) comes at the subject from a different angle. “Chéri”’s Léa is financially independent and secure. In contrast, Julie, the scion of a once prominent family, is barely eking out a living as a single, increasingly invisible woman in wartime Paris. While dealing with the financial realities of women of a dying generation, “Julie de Carneilhan” is also a meditation on loneliness.

My needs are simple. Give me something about a cat.

Colette was a dog lover, too ( “Dialogue des Betes” is a conversation between a French bulldog, Toby-Chien, and a feline, Kiki-La-Doucette), but by the numbers she was a Cat Person. (Her comment “Time with a cat is never wasted” is a staple of any cat fancier calendar.) If you’re not convinced, check out THE CAT (1933) perhaps the most famous novella ever written about a love triangle between a man, a woman and his cat.

I’m sold. What can I read to learn more about her?

Judith Thurman’s SECRETS OF THE FLESH is a masterpiece of biography. You can probably skip the 2018 biopic — although Keira Knightley’s suits are pretty fabulous.