TV Diary

No Escape

I hoped watching The Durrells In Corfu would offer an escape from the dark of winter, but instead, found a meditation on the male bumbler.

Alexander Chee
9 min readJan 30, 2021

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Last month, as the winter began, I was hoping to escape but there was nowhere to go: the surge of cases due to holiday travel had filled the hospitals across the country, and the weather was cold, which made socializing into cold walks with friends where we wore masks and yelled to each other from across the street. Indoors, I tracked the bad-faith contesting of the election by conservatives, the attempt to overturn the results in the courts and in state legislatures, and the botched vaccine roll-out by the Trump administration, all of it seeming to culminate in the assault on the Capitol Building. With 400,000 dead, it seemed just plain evil that the governmental priority of the now former ruling party was to overturn the election that sought to hold them accountable for such mistakes as lead to those deaths — including officials who had won their elections and yet, for the president’s sake…

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Alexander Chee
Alexander Chee

Written by Alexander Chee

Author of the novels THE QUEEN OF THE NIGHT and EDINBURGH, and the essay collection HOW TO WRITE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL.

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