Andy Warhol tells all (well, most...)

Writing in the June 30 issue of the New York Times, Sophie Atkinson tells how helpful she found rereading Andy Warhol's 1977 autobiography: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and Back Again) during the pandemic lockdown. She quotes the book's editor, Steven M.L. Aronson, as saying: "Warhol told me that he felt the book could give people a way that they could think, too, and that they could use it to solve their own problems." And so it proved for her.

Those of you who read Olivia Laing's The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Living Alone, which we discussed last month, may be surprised to learn from Atkinson that Warhol, a partygoer who could rarely attend a happening without at least a six-person retinue, was an ardent disciple of puttering around his apartment solo. "If I only had time for one vacation every 10 years," he wrote, "I still don't think I'd want to go anywhere. I'd probably just go to my room, fluff up the pillow, turn on a couple of TVs, open a box of Ritz crackers."

Coincidentally, just a few days before Atkinson's essay appeared, the NYT featured Valerie Solanas, who shot Warhol (as Laing recounts), in its ongoing "Overlooked No More" obituary series. Bonnie Wertheim's profile of the "radical feminist" is not quite as detailed or sympathetic as Laing's, but she does usefully cites several works Solanas' sad life has inspired.