The figurative language of Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Reading time: About 2 minutes

I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of metaphors from Taffy Brodesser-Akner….

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is is an American journalist and author. She became a full-time staff writer for The New York Times in 2017 and she shot to fame with the publication of her first novel, Fleishman Is In Trouble in 2019. It eventually became a streaming series on Hulu.

Her more recent novel, Long Island Compromise, released earlier this year, is a look at Jewish American life, told through the lens of one family’s traumatic history, which was marred by a kidnapping. Still, despite the serious subject, the novel is often hilarious, and Bodesser-Akner has a light touch, particularly with figurative language. Here are my favourite examples from this book:

  • The humidity had dwindled but the heat had remained. It had rained briefly, and his nostrils filled with the petrichor first-day-of-school scent that didn’t exist in Los Angeles and that felt like the Earth’s own baptism.
  • A sliver of moon hung in the still sky and a breeze came off the water and he felt that he was floating in amniotic fluid, that he somehow had de-individuated from this place the longer he was here, and he didn’t know where he ended and his surroundings began.
  • It was Mandy Patinkin who played Archibald on Broadway. Carl could now mouth the words along with him, not wildly, no longer crooning, but the crazed whispering of silent prayer. Mandy Patinkin approached the footlights. It was like they were singing to each other.
  • She laid her flute inside its velvet coffin and kissed her father on his cheek and ran.
  • She had a voice that was so croaky it was like it had already been replaced by its inevitable voice prosthesis.
  • “It’ll be reassuring to know you have it [a heart pill],” she’d said, as she folded it into a tiny square of paper, the way criminals transport diamonds in movies.
  • His home was now a nightmare. There was drilling all the time, and dust everywhere — heavy metals and sundry carcinogens having a party in the air. Jus the arrogant, mocking tone of voice of Yoav, the contractor, whom Nathan hated down to his liver.
  • There was a way to have a faucet that lay beneath the surface of the kitchen island and only surfaced like a rose growing in fast-motion when summoned.
  • She was short, with straight hair that clung flat and close to her face and bangs that covered half of it, as if her face didn’t want to cause too much trouble.
  • But there she was, laid up in bed, covered not just with the idea of shame but the weight of a planet of it: the crust layer of this revelation, but then also the mantle layer of her listlessness and friendlessness.
  • Jenny ordered an Uber and then sat in the back like a caged animal.
  • By then, Phyllis had had several elective surgeries that included an eye lift, a neck lift, a facelift that included a revamp of the initial eye lift and an additional neck lift — everything lifted so high that it appeared that gravity was just another force on Phyllis’s payroll.
  • Genes can lie dormant but they don’t dilute — even the recessive ones stand backstage in full dress, waiting for their turn to go on.
Scroll to Top