Rules for Others to Live By: Comments and Self-Contradictions

“Richard Greenberg turns life upside down and sideways. Read­ing the provocative Rules for Others to Live By is like having dinner with a friend whose point of view shakes up and invari­ably runs counter to conventional thinking. He’s a debunker of the pretensions of daily life.” 
—Delia Ephron, author of Sister Mother Husband Dog and Siracusa 


Between stressing about his theater friends and reconciling his complicated feel­ings about an inconsistently wonderful New York City, Tony Award–winning playwright and Pulitzer finalist Richard Greenberg also maintains a reputation for being something of a hermit. He takes the time to privately process the absurdity of the world outside, and the result is this hysterically funny and daringly thoughtful collection of original essays. In Rules for Others to Live By, he shares lessons from his highly successful writing career, observations from two long decades of residence on a three-block stretch of Man­hattan, and musings from a complicated and occasionally taxing social life. Firmly sympa­thetic to the struggles of the more bizarre and unstable among us, Greenberg tackles a range of topics—from the difficulties of friendship to the art of writing, the pain of heartbreak to the curiously unpredictable weather of his neighborhood, and the moderate hypo­chondria that comes with age, as well as the more serious health crises that unfortunately also come with age. In essays that are at turns quietly subversive and thoroughly hopeful and life-affirming, Greenberg’s distinct and hilarious voice articulates our own mild obsessions and the idiosyncrasies that we can only hope will go unnoticed in a crowd.