Books
20th edition of Emily Post’s ‘Etiquette’ offers updated advice on pronouns and much more
A guide for daily life ‘with all its successes and mishaps’
Some families manage bakeries, nurseries, or vineyards.
For Daniel Post Senning, great-great grandson of Emily Post and an Emily Post Institute co-president, and Lizzie Post, great-great granddaughter of Emily Post and an Emily Post Institute co-president, etiquette is the family business.
The Emily Post Institute, based in Waterbury, Vt., conducts seminars and trainings. It partners with businesses and nonprofit groups to “bring etiquette and manners to a wide audience,” according to its website.
When you think of etiquette, you’re likely to be transported to Downton Abbey. Butlers, finger bowls, the dancing school lessons you hated as a kid – stuffy, rich (usually white, hetero) people at formal dinners managing a zillion salad forks – come to mind.
But, for Post and Senning, who co-host the popular, entertaining podcast “Awesome Etiquette,” etiquette is as far from being an ossified, exclusionary code of manners as we are from being the Dowager having tea at Downton.
Emily Post, the acclaimed etiquette maven, published her first book on etiquette, “Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home,” in 1922.
Post’s seminal book, considered by many to be the “holy writ” of etiquette (and stolen from libraries almost as frequently as the Bible), has been revised by Post herself and her descendants during the past century to evolve with changing times.
“Emily Post’s Etiquette, The Centennial Edition” by Lizzie Post and Daniel Post Senning, the 20th edition of Emily Post’s “Etiquette,” is just out. (For info on “Emily Post’s Etiquette, the Centennial Edition,” the Awesome Etiquette podcast and the Emily Post Institute, visit emilypost.com.)
The “Centennial Edition” has lively, up-to-date advice and discussion on everything in life in the early 2020s from the use of “mx” as a title to grief to respecting people’s pronouns to how to get company to stop making bigoted “jokes” to how to handle an inebriated guest.
From the get-go, Emily Post, who was born in Baltimore in 1872 during the Gilded Age and died in 1960, didn’t view etiquette as restrictive or exclusionary. “As Emily explained,’” Post and Senning write, “etiquette is not some rigid code of manners; it’s simply how persons’ lives touch one another.”
If you browse some editions of Emily Post’s books (as this reporter has), you won’t find schoolmarmish directives or ethereal descriptions of the etiquette gods’ mannered lives on Mount Olympus.
You’ll find daily life “with all its successes and mishaps,” Post and Senning write, “With tales like ‘How a Dinner Can Be Bungled’ and characters such as Mrs. Worldly, Constance Style, Mrs. Kindhart and the Onceweres.”
Emily Post painted relatable pictures of what to do and not to do, Post and Senning write.
Though Emily Post wouldn’t have known what a smartphone or social media were, her etiquette “still aims to equip you,” write Post and Senning, “with a sense of confidence and preparedness for some of the situations you’ll encounter at home, at work, in your social life, and when you’re out and about.”
Despite claims that etiquette is dead, it is very much alive, say Post and Senning.
Steven Petrow, an award-winning journalist and expert on civility and manners, agrees. “I’m always surprised by how timely Emily Post’s advice continues to be,” Petrow, who is gay, said in an email to the Blade. “Recently, I wrote about ‘monkeypox manners,’ and cited Mrs. Post’s timeless advice about respect, consideration and honesty in our social interactions, which includes those in the bedroom.”
Post and Senning graciously took time out from their busy schedules (the launch of the “Centennial Edition,” hosting their podcast – along with their other work with the Emily Post Institute) to talk with the Blade over the phone in separate interviews.
“Emily Post’s Etiquette, The Centennial Edition” was a Herculean labor of writing and editing for Post and Senning. It took a year to write the book, Post said. And, then there was all of the time spent to ensure that the book was carefully edited.
“I would write,” said Post, 40, who manages the Institute’s publishing efforts, “Dan would come in and help me edit the book.”
It was intense, “day-to-day” labor for her and Senning (along with their other work), Post said. “I’m grateful to all the people who were willing to have their lives disrupted while we worked on it,” she added.
Etiquette has been used for less than gracious purposes, Post said. “It can easily be exclusive.”
The Post family believes that etiquette is based on the principles of consideration, respect and honesty. This may sound abstract. But these principles aren’t empty words. They have a profound impact in the real world.
Before joining the Emily Post Institute in 2008 when he was 30, Senning worked in the performing arts, touring with the Laurie Cameron Company in Los Angeles.
Today, Senning, who lives in Duxbury, Vt., with his wife, Puja and their three children Anisha, Arya, and William, manages the Institute’s training programs. He has co-authored several books on etiquette covering topics from business to digital manners and regularly speaks with media outlets about business, technology, and dining etiquette.
In 2009, same-sex marriage became legal in Vermont. “Then, before the Supreme Court same-sex marriage ruling,” he said, “we were in the vanguard. We got questions about how to respond to same-sex weddings,” Senning added.
The Institute’s response was to note how normal civil unions were, Senning said, and that same-sex weddings weren’t different from hetero weddings.
“If you’re invited to a civil union, reply,” Senning recalled the Institute advising, “let people know if you can or can’t attend.”
Senning loved the “normalization” of the response. “It was really affirming to me,” he said.
Etiquette isn’t only for happy times. It’s called on when things get rough.
“Etiquette has a role in hard times,” Post, who’s been an American Express spokesperson and written columns for publications ranging from “Broccoli Magazine” to “Women’s Running,” said.
Many go through hard times from losing a job to being ill to grieving, she added. Emily Post may have written on etiquette a century ago, but her thoughts on grief ring as true on an iPad screen as they did then in a hardback book.
“At no time does solemnity so possess our souls as when we stand deserted at the brink of darkness into which our loved one has gone,” Emily Post wrote in 1922, “And the last place in the world where we would look for comfort at such a time is in the seeming artificiality of etiquette; yet it is in the moment of deepest sorrow that etiquette performs its most vital and real service.”
“All set rules for social observance have for their object the smoothing of personal contracts,” Emily Post added, “and in nothing is smoothness so necessary as in observing the solemn rites accorded our dead.”
Etiquette can help people grieve together in community through writing a condolence note, attending a funeral or another act of common grief, Lizzie Post said.
If you’ve suffered a loss, it can be incredible to realize the impact a loved one has had when you receive condolence notes or see so many people at a memorial service.
There’s a new trend where you can take part in the grief without going to a funeral, Post, who lives in her native state of Vermont, said. “When someone dies, for example, you raise a glass at five o’clock to honor them.”
Sometimes you have to use etiquette to stand against prejudice. If someone’s telling a racist or anti-queer joke at your dinner table, you’ll need to say, “‘I’m sorry. This is not a joke for this table,’” Post said.
While etiquette counsels against rudeness, safety trumps etiquette, Post and Senning have said on the Awesome Etiquette podcast and in the “Centennial Edition.”
Tolerance doesn’t mean tolerating an unwanted hug, an inappropriate touch or being “othered,” said Post, who has co-authored and authored etiquette books on topics ranging from weddings to legalized cannabis use.
Take hugging. “We talk about how to ask for a hug and how to block a hug,” Post said.
Etiquette experts, like the rest of us, take time off. On vacation, Post, co-author and narrator with Kelly Williams Brown of the Audible Original “Mistakes were Made” (think etiquette meets “Broad City”), doesn’t want to be rude to people. “But, sometimes, I don’t want to analyze behavior,” she said, “I just want to act.”
For info on the fascinating life of Emily Post, go to “Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners” by Laura Claridge.
Books
‘Hello Stranger’ unpacks the possibilities of flirting
Manuel Betancourt’s new book contains musings on modern intimacy
‘Hello Stranger: Musings on Modern Intimacies’
Published by Catapult
Available Jan. 14; hardcover $27
Two strangers lock eyes across a bar. Or maybe they reach for the same book on a shelf in a bookstore. Or maybe they’re a model and artist, exchanging nervous smiles as the artist tries to capture a piece of the model’s soul on canvas or film.
In a Hollywood film, we’d be led to believe that these moments are laden with momentous importance – a flicker of sexual charge and desire, a chemical reaction that leads inexorably to life-altering romance and happily ever after.
But in his new book of essays “Hello Stranger: Musings on Modern Intimacies,” queer Colombian film and culture critic Manuel Betancourt unpacks the notion that flirting needs to be anything more, suggesting that flirtation can be a worthwhile endeavor in itself.
“One of the things that if you read any kind of love story or watch any kind of rom-com, you’re constantly encouraged to think that flirtation is sort of like preamble to something else,” Betancourt tells me over cookies outside of Levain bakery in Larchmont.
“Actually, flirtation doesn’t need to do that. You can flirt just for the act of flirting, and that can be fun, and that can be great. What is it that you find instead in that moment of possibility, at that moment when anything can happen? Just what happens when you’re trying to be the best person you could be? It’s almost more exciting when you know, there’s nothing else on the horizon.”
But “Hello Stranger”isn’t a how-to guide to flirting. It’s more like a cross between cultural criticism and memoir.
Over a series of essays that alternate between examinations of flirting scenes in movies, books, and art, and anecdotes from his own personal life, Betancourt traces the ways that we use flirting to create different kinds of intimacies.
“This is not a how-to, because I don’t think gay men need help with that,” Betancourt says. “But I also know that I’m a gay man in Los Angeles whereas I know there are young folks in Ohio that may not think of it this way because they’ve been conditioned, and actually we now have such a breadth of gay literature and a culture that’s continually teaching us we need to find the one.”
The book is a deeply personal one for Betancourt, who recently got divorced from his husband and joined a polyamorous relationship as he began writing it.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about different intimacies with strangers, with friends, with lovers, things that fell outside of what we understand as traditional. And so it felt like an easy way to turn all of these things that I was dealing with on a personal level into a more cohesive and coherent project,” he says.
“I wanted to think through where the joy in flirtation lies. Like, why are we so drawn to it? Why was I so drawn to it? Why do I enjoy it so much? And of course, being the kind of literary academic that I was, I was willing to find other people must have thought about this, other people must have depicted it on screen and books,” he says. “Other people can teach me about this.”
The book starts with examinations of the fleeting, flirtatious intimacies seen in films like “Closer” and “Before Sunrise,” before diving into more complicated (and queer) relationships in the books “The Sexual Outlaw” and “A Little Life” and the portraiture of photographer Peter Hujar, using them as springboards to examine Betancourt’s own relationships to cruising, dating, nudity, and relationships both monogamous and otherwise.
“I wanted to begin with those straight, very common, understandable ways of thinking about these things, and then the book slowly gets clearer and we end in polyamory and conceptual monogamy, and these very different ways of thinking.
“What else I wanted to do for those gay readers that are maybe looking to find something here, is show that none of this is new. I think a lot of us try to think, like, ‘This is modern and polyamory is so 2024,’ but what I wanted to do is give a cultural history of that.”
Though it’s not an instruction manual, Betancourt says he did improve his own flirtation skills while researching the book, as evidenced in a spicy anecdote he recounts in the book about cruising a man in a hotel bar, where he was actually working on writing “Hello Stranger.”
“You just have to pay attention, open yourself up, which is also what Hollinghurst, writes in ‘The Swimming-Pool Library.’ His protagonist is able to like cruise and hook up anywhere he wants to in London, because he’s always looking, like literally looking. He’s constantly out seeing the world as if it’s a cruising playground and that is all apparently you need to do.
“If you’re crossing paths and you see someone who you’re attracted to and you lock eyes, that is the moment to make something happen and it’s about being open to the possibility and then also letting the other person know that you are.”
Nurturing that openness was difficult at first for Betancourt, due to his upbringing in Bogota, Colombia.
“For me it was a very different cultural thing because of the kind of culture of violence, the culture of unsafety in Colombia. You’re sort of encouraged to not really trust anyone,” he says. “It takes almost locking that away because you can’t approach any of those situations with fear.”
“This is about, like, teaching myself because I’m not great at it either. So, it’s about reminding myself, oh yeah, be open and more attentive.”
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‘Cher: The Memoir Part One’
By Cher
c.2024, Dey St.
$36/413 pages
Mother knows best.
At least that’s what she’d like you to think because she said it a hundred times while you were growing up, until you actually believed. One day, though, if you were lucky, you learned that Mother didn’t always know best, but she did her best – like in the new book “Cher: The Memoir Part One” by Cher, when Mom helped make a star.
Though she doesn’t remember it, little Cheryl Sarkisian spent a few weeks in a Catholic Charities orphanage when she was tiny, because her father had disappeared and her mother couldn’t afford to take care of her. “Cheryl,” by the way, was the name on her birth certificate, although her mother meant to name her “Cherilyn.”
That first time wasn’t the last time little Cher was left with someone other than her mother, Jackie Jean, a beautiful, talented struggling singer-actress who’d been born into poverty and stayed there much of her life. When money was tight, she temporarily dropped her daughter off with friends or family, or the little family moved from house to house and state to state. Along the way, relocating in and out of California gave Cher opportunities to act, sing, and to learn the art of performance, which is what she loved best.
In the meantime, Jackie Jean married and married again, five or six husbands in all; she changed her name to Georgia, worked in the movies and on TV, and she gave Cher a little sister, moved the family again, landed odd jobs, and did what it took to keep the lights on.
As Cher grew up in the shadow of her glamorous mother, she gained a bit of glam herself, becoming sassy and independent, and prone to separation anxiety, which she blamed on her abandonment as a small child. In her mother’s shadow, she’d always been surrounded by movie and TV stars and, taking acting classes, she met even more.
And then she met Salvatore “Sonny” Bono, who was a friend before he was a lover. So, here’s the very, very happy surprise: “Cher: The Memoir Part One” is a downright fun book to read.
If you’ve ever seen author Cher in interviews or on late night TV, what you saw is what you get here: bald-faced truth, sarcastic humor, sass, and no pity-partying. She tells a good story, ending this book with her nascent movie career, and she leaves readers hanging in anticipation of the stories she’ll tell in her next book.
The other happy surprise is that this memoir isn’t just about her. Cher spends a good amount of the first half writing about her mother and her grandmother, both complicated women who fought to keep their heads and those of their offspring above water. Readers looking between the lines will be enthralled.
Surely, “Cher: The Memoir Part One” is a fan’s delight, but it’s also a great memoir for anyone who particularly loves the genre and doesn’t mind a bit of profanity. If that’s you, then you got this, babe.
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Books
A tale of lesbian romance and growing into your place in life
‘I’ll Get Back to You’ an enjoyable holiday read
‘I’ll Get Back to You’
By Becca Grischow
c.2024, Penguin Books
$19/320 pages
Christmas tree lots, ugh. Santa, New England, snowflakes, mistletoe, blah blah blah.
The cable TV lineup is full of that stuff this time of year but it’s nowhere near as magical as Hollywood wants you to believe. Honestly, thinking of romance (or the lack thereof) right now is almost enough to bring out your humbug. Get this, though: There’s plenty of romance to go around this Yuletide, but in “I’ll Get Back to You” by Becca Grischow, it might take some planning to find it.
It was supposed to be a great dual-birthday celebration.
Murphy and her BFF, Kat, were planning a “Blackout Wednesday” of drinking and debauchery, followed by a sleepover and snacks at Murphy’s house before they went to Kat’s parents’ place for Thanksgiving. That was the plan, until Kat ruined it by bringing her new boyfriend, Daniel, along and assuming that Murphy wouldn’t mind.
Murphy minded very much. She hated being the gay third wheel, and it was doubly annoying when they all ran into Ellie, who’d graduated a few years before Kat and Murphy.
Wait, Ellie was straight in high school, wasn’t she? Well, she wasn’t now and when Ellie, Kat, and Daniel started comparing notes about attending the University of Illinois, it was all Murphy could do not to roll her eyes.
She wasn’t feeling this holiday thing. She was feeling kind of loser-ish, in fact: still living in her childhood bedroom in her parents’ house, working a job she’d had since she was 16, still at community college and failing accounting.
And, apparently, failing at love, too, because Ellie told Murphy that they could be friends, and that was all. But when Murphy realized that Ellie’s mother was the professor who was about to fail her in accounting class, Ellie came up with a plan.
If they could pretend to have a relationship, then maybe Ellie’s mother would grant Ellie her dream of attending college in New York City. And maybe she’d “play favorites” and give Murphy a passing grade.
It was a weird plan. Super weird.
Alright, let’s just admit this: A book like “I’ll Get Back to You” isn’t going to change the world or influence people in high places. It’s probably not going to land on the bestseller list. It’s just a light, fun little story – and isn’t that what you need during the holiday season?
With your typical girl-meets-girl, struggle-and-argument, wacky-plan-happy-ending format, author Becca Grischow tells a tale of friendship and romance and growing into the place in life that’s meant to be, which is a good but subtle reminder for some readers who need it. Grischow gives readers a cast of characters who are kind but authentic, fallible but trustworthy, and mostly pretty likable, too, which makes this an easy book to enjoy at just the right time.
If you haven’t found your holiday romance for the season yet, here’s one to look for beneath the mistletoe. Find “I’ll Get Back to You” and you’ll like it a lot.
Va. House approves resolution to repeal marriage amendment
Indian Supreme Court rejects marriage equality ruling appeals
Marjorie Taylor Greene calls Sarah McBride a ‘groomer’ and ‘child predator’ for reading to kids
Second Trump administration will put trans youth at further risk
Anti-LGBTQ Franklin Graham to give invocation at Trump’s inauguration
Teen gets probation in attack on gay man at 14th & U McDonald’s
Fire set at Arlington gay bar listed as arson
Homophobe Anita Bryant dies at 84
Prominent Cameroonian activist faces terrorism charges
