By the same author

  The Fiery Pantheon

  Lives of the Saints

  Malaise

  The Ritz of the Bayou

  Sportsman’s Paradise

  The Oyster Diaries

  A Novel

  NANCY LEMANN

  New York Review Books New York

  This is a New York Review Book

  published by The New York Review of Books

  207 East 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 2026 by Nancy Lemann

  All rights reserved.

  Portions of this work have previously appeared, in slightly different form, in the following: “Diary of Remorse” was first published in The Paris Review (Issue #241); “The Oyster Diaries” was first published in The Paris Review (Issue #248); “Lions and Daughters” (copyright © 2023 by Harper’s Magazine, all rights reserved) was first published in Harper’s Magazine (June 2023) and is reproduced here by special permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lemann, Nancy author

  Title: The oyster diaries / by Nancy Lemann.

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2026.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2025035057 (print) | LCCN 2025035058 (ebook) | ISBN 9798896230328 paperback | ISBN 9798896230335 ebook

  Subjects: LCGFT: Diary fiction | Novels | Fiction

  Classification: LCC PS3562.E4659 O97 2026 (print) | LCC PS3562.E4659 (ebook)

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025035057

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025035058

  Cover photograph: Curran Hatleberg, Untitled (Windshield), 2021; © Curran Hatleberg

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  ISBN 979-8-89623-033-5

  v 1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com

  Contents

  Cover

  By the Same Author

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1.

  Diary of Remorse

  Extraordinary Measures

  Anhedonia

  2.

  The Garden of Wrath

  3.

  The Oyster Diaries

  Love in the Ruins

  Opera, Oysters, the World

  Lions and Daughters

  Biographical Note

  To Emmeline & Eliza

  And to the memory of my father

  You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. This city will always pursue you.

  —C.P. Cavafy

  All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavor to find out what you do not know by what you do. That is what I called guessing what was at the other side of the hill.

  —The Duke of Wellington

  Diary of Remorse

  I was plagued by remorse, but my remorse seemed inspired by insignificant dumb things—things not really worthy of bona fide remorse. That didn’t make it any less painful or plague-worthy, as I was still riddled with disgrace on a minute-by-minute basis; so I decided to conduct a scientific study to analyze the cause.

  Remorse is akin to regret but more violent than regret. The overall atmosphere seemed like generic self-loathing. But that was too vague. Once I conducted the scientifically controlled study, I could identify the source of the trouble and modify my behavior so I would not be covered in dishonor.

  It was a Wednesday morning in our nation’s capital. The president’s helicopter flew overhead, rattling the windows of my house. The world’s handsomest man, who lived across the street, was listening to opera in his garden. Supposedly he worked at the National Security Council. So why was he listening to opera in the middle of the day wearing his gym shorts? Probably a spy. But the opera was significant.

  That night I went to Rigoletto at the neighborhood movie theater where they stream productions from the Royal Opera House in London. I had no real expectations because usually in their presentations you have to watch these super annoying blond-haired women in evening gowns effusing in an airhead way about the opera for what seems like an eternity before it starts. You have to grit your teeth to get through that—and then they do it again at intermission. Plus between the acts. Even their erudite-sounding British accents cannot rescue these breathy blond-haired women in ball gowns from their realm of being incredibly annoying and idiotic.

  But they didn’t do it that way this time—maybe they got too many complaints about how excruciating it was. Instead they had the conductor making scholarly points about the opera: the comic and the tragic alternating, the ridiculous preceding the sublime. As in Don Giovanni.

  The duke must have reminded me of Don Giovanni, for I could not stop thinking of him. His love of life, his hopeless philandering, the robust way he throws his voice into its registers, the effort visibly emanating from his physical frame. I was ecstatic—to be moved by something, to feel, to think, and to remember.

  A return of my old obsession with Don Giovanni consumed me. I found a new production of it to stream on my device when I got home—noting that its star, Erwin Schrott, was the same one who had played the role twenty years ago when I first moved to Washington, DC, and attended the opera here. He had struck me deeply at that time. He was young then, I remember noting. I marveled at his youth. He was twenty years younger than me. Now he would be twenty years older—as would I. So this would be a profound rotation.

  And there was an additional rotation from twenty years before that, when I first became obsessed with Don Giovanni and studied it endlessly on the screen porch of my apartment in New Orleans, while the streetcar rumbled past.

  The philosophical idea of the rotation often comes up in the novels of Walker Percy, the hero of my youth. Walker Percy seemed to have got the idea from Kierkegaard and then run with it in his own way. I would have to pursue the original rendition of the concept to seek more understanding of its elusive meaning.

  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.

  So far Kierkegaard was everything I adore: he’s in a bad mood, everything annoys him, and he is not afraid to repeat himself. Kierkegaard was my bible, my blueprint, it was turning out. And it was all leading to the key issue—the Walker Percy rotation or Kierkegaardian repetition.

  Which I would apply to the Erwin Schrott–Don Giovanni situation.

  “It is in your power to review your life, to look at things you saw before, but from another point of view.”

  Erwin Schrott 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?

  •

  A friend of mine in New Orleans claims to remember everything he’s ever seen or been told. Remembers everything that used to be everywhere where something else is now. A lot of it was his father showing him things when he was a boy. He lives two blocks from where he grew up, assailed by his memories at every turn.

  Mildred, his nurse, who weighed three hundred pounds and always stored her gum behind her ear. The Cannibal Special at Camellia Grill. How there used to be hat racks everywhere. His grandfather wearing a straw boater hat and a seersucker suit wobbling toward him while he was playing with his friends in the street.

  “Would you kids like a cracker?” said his grandfather.

  “Henry get back in the house,” yelled his grandmother.

  At night listening to the train whistle blow and the lions roar in Audubon Park. Weenie Bradley, who drank herself to death the night before her daughter’s wedding. The mental institution between Magazine Street and Tchoupitoulas in a dark moss-hung quadrangle next to the Home for Incurables. The gray days, the twisted oaks. Near the levee next to the insane asylum.

  “The past is so much a part of the present here and it’s unhealthy,” my friend says.

  “The passage of time upsets him,” says his wife.

  “OK, but the passage of time upsets everyone,” I said.

  That bend in the river, where the hospital is—my mother died there, I was born there.

  •

  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.

  February 1, 2021

  First day of scientifically controlled study

  No remorse, shockingly.

  Twenty years ago when I moved to Washington and went to Don Giovanni I did not know that I was destined for a decade of increasing heartaches culm
inating in a bonanza of heartache that ultimately calibrated my soul with insight my soul had been waiting for its whole life. I had never understood the adage that failure and despair can be elucidating and strengthening. All that was unbeknownst to me then.

  I took the subway downtown. The weather was gray and cool. Helicopters flew overhead. America had invaded Iraq. I was paranoid. The streets were curiously empty. Washington is a strange town to get a handle on. It’s a more small-time town than New York. But I have a love-hate relationship with New York now, for its atmosphere of a dying civilization, a decaying frazzled edifice that could easily crumble and crash to an end. The love part is for its suave crumbling gleam. Same with New Orleans—which is ever more rickety than suave.

  Washington is not the type of place that reaches in and grabs you by the heart and makes you fall in love with it. Government and politics and pundits—you don’t fall in love with that. Unless you’re already in love with that. And the capital, despite its immense officious buildings and gleaming infrastructure to protect the pols, certainly had a sinister air at that moment, when we had invaded Iraq.

  The cherry blossoms were duly out in the cool gray evening. Cherry blossoms don’t ordinarily grab me but I will admit they looked nice. Giant pandas don’t really grab me either, even though everyone is constantly raving about how adorable they are. There were no cafés to stop at as I proceeded on my way to the opera hall. That’s the nature of this town—all business. Methodical, plodding, no cafés for boulevardiers and bohemians. There are no bohemians or boulevardiers in Washington. So I just sat and read for an hour in the hall, being early.

  I did not know when I had heard such beautiful singing before. I wept silently for the duration of the performance. Don Giovanni in particular had the most beautiful voice. But the shock at first was how young he was. How young they all were. I had never seen such young opera singers, surely. It meant of course that I was now old. But this wasn’t depressing. It was actually exhilarating. There’s a feeling that the young have their battles to fight and dreams to achieve and you have already fought and achieved yours. But what then?

  Usually the opera is in a vast hall with a vast remote stage and the actors in a stiff tableau. This time I was sitting in a box right on top of the stage in a quaint historic building because the Kennedy Center was being renovated. A lucky break because I despise the Kennedy Center, with its soul-crushing Soviet-style architecture.

  In the production notes it said that the director of the Washington Opera, Plácido Domingo at that time, wanted the locale to seem like Seville. And indeed it did. It also reminded me of Palermo, maybe because I was reading a biography of Lampedusa with its hypnotic cast of ruined aristocrats paralyzed by centuries of decadence. Sun-bleached squares and café tables and white umbrellas and processions of priests and popes and bishops. The young man who played Don Giovanni—Erwin Schrott—did overact a bit, but no overacting could detract from the sheer beauty of his voice. I could not understand how such a young boy could have such a voice. I had never heard a bass like his. In one scene they had him take off his shirt, and that was very poignant. I just wanted to end my life and go off with him.

  I was glued to the stage, weeping silently at the beauty of the entire evening. It made you forget the war in Iraq for an hour or two, getting lost in the garden of art.

  •

  “My soul always turns back to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare,” says Kierkegaard.

  “I feel that those who speak there are at least human beings: they hate, they love, they murder their enemies, and curse their descendants throughout all generations, they sin.”

  Also they get depressed. Like the guy at the beginning of The Merchant of Venice with the random melancholy. Kierkegaard was definitely getting depressed as I read on. Sinking into lassitude, boredom, etc. “My soul has lost its potentiality.” He goes on and on about it.

  He keeps getting more depressed and annoyed by everything. Until suddenly—someone is trying to tell me something—for the next sentence is: “What do I hear—the minuet from Don Giovanni!”

  (Are you kidding me?)

  •

  3 p.m. still no remorse

  February 2, 2021

  However I did get a sinus cold yesterday. I think it came from the movie theater where I attended Rigoletto, which was filthy, as if it hadn’t been cleaned in a year, as is probably the case, due to COVID—no revenues, skeleton crews, etc. It was permeated with the kind of mold or bacteria that could get into my sinuses and cause problems. Not only that, but I had to have emergency dental surgery.

  My dentist and I have a unique relationship. A sadomasochistic relationship, maybe. She has an interesting attitude to dentistry. Other dentists have fancy staffs and high-tech equipment. My dentist is more like Ernest Shackleton. Modern innovation in dentistry is not her focus but she gets the job done.

  The sinus and dental problems come with a psychic or spiritual malaise: I have no thoughts, no personality, nothing. “My soul has lost its potentiality,” as Kierkegaard would say. And even though I can’t help but notice that he devotes virtually an entire book—or at least several dense chapters—to the bliss inspired by Don Giovanni, I can formulate no thoughts about them, and it is all because of my sinuses.

  Also you don’t expect bliss from Kierkegaard, so it’s dis-concerting.

  Now he’s back on his home turf: how boring everything is. Ironically that is the least boring part. To see him careen from the heights of bliss back to his depression and boredom—it’s like watching the World Series waiting for that final archetypal moment where the winners go berserk with joy on the field and the losers stare vacantly in the dugout.

  February 5, 2021

  Ever since I started keeping my diary of remorse, my remorse has evaporated.

  The lockdowns start and stop and then I go back and forth to my odd and unlikely hometown. I see that my interest in my volunteer job (monitoring justice in New Orleans criminal courts) is largely prurient. For this I should have remorse but don’t. When I get my docket in the morning I compare it to all the other dockets, pining that they are more exciting. Judge DeBose has murders, rapes, and kidnappings on his docket today, not to mention a case of false personation (???) and false imprisonment, but I am not assigned to his courtroom. My consolation however is that today I am in the courtroom of the piping mad personality-ridden Judge Hollingsworth.

  The defendants in New Orleans always have names like:

  Jockward Jones

  King Malveaux

  Stokes Meilleur

  Bingo Fox

  Margaret Lemmonier

  And the judges have names like that too. Talk about a vanished world. The grandiose criminal court building. The old-time bars and cafés amid the greenery.

  February 9, 2021

  A smooth flight in, despite a storm, the swamps in darkness, the pavement glistening, a black sky, palms. The Gulf South.

  The curtain rises. The tragedies begin.

  The stated context of my work is to observe/monitor/report injustice. I am an observer, officially, who has not observed any bad judicial conduct or impropriety in any legal proceeding; the only improper thing I have observed is the overall shock of how things are there: almost 90 percent of defendants are black. (85 percent of the judges are now black, at least, on the plus side.)

  Judge Hollingsworth was very calm today. Everything was running smoothly. I guess that’s why she was calm. Usually she’s piping mad. There’s a lot for Judge Hollingsworth to get mad about: Mardi Gras delays, no-show lawyers, huge backlogs from COVID. She wants things to move along. Complains that everyone is wasting her time. On the warpath.

  She had thirty-nine cases on her docket today. She wants New Orleans police officers testifying in court to get back out on the street protecting the public. She has cases that have dragged on for two years that she is incensed about. She denied a bond reduction. She keeps giving everyone these withering looks. Kind of like Chef Ramsay.