VIDEO: John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead, and Shalom Auslander, Feh
[0:00]She roars as much as I don't see her.
[0:02]As you'll soon see.
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[1:14]And now I'm going to introduce Nancy, who's
[1:17]here from the Jonathan Club, our wonderful partners tonight.
[1:20]So thank you.
[1:22]And welcome.
[1:23]Thank you.
[1:24]Thank you.
[1:25]Thank you.
[1:27]I have to say, I think this is an inspired pairing of authors.
[1:31]Have you two ever been on us together on a stage before?
[1:34]Recently.
[1:35]Oh, where was that?
[1:37]I was posting video news.
[1:39]Yeah.
[1:39]It's the pornography awards.
[1:42]Long story.
[1:44]But when I hope we have a chance to get to it.
[1:49]OK, if you don't mind, I'm going to read from this tonight.
[1:52]But we couldn't have people from different,
[1:56]more different backgrounds.
[1:57]Start with John on our right here.
[2:00]John is the author of ICU called Indeed.
[2:04]He gives us a hero, Bud Stanley, who is an obituary writer,
[2:08]who doesn't really know how to live.
[2:11]And after one night after downing a generous portion of Scotch,
[2:15]he writes his own obituary and accidentally publishes it.
[2:21]It's a rather aspirational obituary.
[2:24]And I had to quote from it.
[2:26]Bud Stanley, the first man to perform open heart surgery
[2:30]on himself, died today in a hot air balloon accident.
[2:35]His wife, Miss France, has confirmed the death.
[2:39]It goes on from there.
[2:41]John comes from a very large Boston Irish Catholic family.
[2:47]He is one of six brothers.
[2:51]When I read that, John, I really wondered how your mother
[2:55]dealt with all that testosterone in the house,
[2:58]especially when you guys were teenagers.
[3:02]He is a New York Times best-selling author whose first novel,
[3:06]Truth in Advertising, won the Thurber Award for Humor.
[3:12]He's written many Humor's articles for The New Yorker.
[3:15]And his recent book, I think it's good to know,
[3:18]was published by Zibi Media.
[3:21]So you got covered here.
[3:23]I might mention Shalom just last month
[3:27]got the Thurber Award for Humor.
[3:29]He also won it for his book, Beth.
[3:34]Mine was the better one.
[3:37]I'm glad you straightened that out.
[3:39]You got first in the porn awards, but I got first.
[3:41]OK.
[3:42]Well, there you go.
[3:44]Shalom terms that he grew up in what
[3:48]he calls the 15th century in a extremely religious
[3:55]and highly dysfunctional Orthodox Jewish American home
[4:00]in Monsie, New York.
[4:03]He's been called The Bad Boy Philip Roth.
[4:09]And his latest novel, Beth, is a continuation of a memoir
[4:15]he wrote earlier called For Skin's Lament.
[4:20]If there were a Pulitzer for book titles,
[4:23]I think we'd have two winners here.
[4:27]Recently, I was at a stand-up comedy event.
[4:32]And one of the comedians looked at the audience
[4:34]and said, you Jews may have your guilt,
[4:38]but we Catholics have our shame.
[4:40]And my first thought was, she clearly
[4:43]hasn't read Shalom's books, because he
[4:49]tells us of the shame and self-loathing
[4:53]that was hardwired into him from a very young age
[4:58]and which he has spent.
[5:00]his life and his writings dealing with.
[5:03]It's lucky for us that he does so with Stark humor,
[5:08]sometimes brutal humor, audacity.
[5:12]There's an element of real joy
[5:14]at upending all the Jewish traditions and upbringing.
[5:18]But even though I found I was often squirming,
[5:22]it's all done and creates great belly laughs.
[5:26]That is what these two writers share.
[5:29]They give us a look at the darker corners of life
[5:32]with sharp, provocative and hilarious humor
[5:36]that never detracts from the profound wisdom
[5:39]that underlies their stories.
[5:42]Given the world today,
[5:44]we're the only way not to cry at times is to laugh.
[5:48]We can only be grateful for such gifts.
[5:51]So I'm gonna turn the program over to you guys,
[5:53]but I wanna mention one thing
[5:54]that I'd love to hear you address at some time,
[5:57]because it's-
[5:58]Gaza.
[5:59]Well, we've got a load for now.
[6:02]That's the first.
[6:06]It's clear humor, you both use humor to survive.
[6:11]And I just wondered how much of that was conscious
[6:14]or when you set out to do that
[6:18]or it just kind of flowed from your writing.
[6:20]I think that'll, so thank you.
[6:21]Yeah, you want to start it off?
[6:25]Do you want a little thing you want to do?
[6:28]All right.
[6:29]Like I hold you.
[6:30]I sent this a little earlier
[6:31]and he said, you can do it if you want.
[6:34]I also didn't know you were Jewish.
[6:35]I was much more supportive.
[6:38]I was much more supportive than that.
[6:41]So thank you for being here.
[6:42]Thank you, Nancy.
[6:43]It's very nice of you all to be here.
[6:47]I just wanted to give you a loose overview
[6:49]of what we might chat about.
[6:51]We put this together earlier.
[6:53]I think we're gonna start by talking a bit
[6:55]about how we know each other
[6:56]because we've only known each other a little bit.
[6:58]I feel like I've known for a long time now
[6:59]and how our books are similar
[7:01]in that they're life-hearted stories about depression
[7:05]and meaninglessness and life's incoherence
[7:09]at grief, death and God's cruelty, but with humor.
[7:13]We'll jump briefly into topics like terminal illness
[7:17]and then we're at different points in the evening.
[7:19]We're gonna compliment each other's books
[7:21]despite the fact that neither one of us has read the other.
[7:25]And then we're gonna open it up to questions
[7:28]which our answers will be fictitious
[7:31]and simply to make us sound intelligent.
[7:35]And then later...
[7:36]Back of the back of viewers was fantastic.
[7:38]Thank you.
[7:38]And then later we'll probably get drunk
[7:42]and weep that we're both frauds.
[7:43]So if there are any questions so far, great.
[7:47]We met last month.
[7:50]I have hosted the Thurber Awards
[7:52]for the past couple of years.
[7:55]And instead of just copying biographical information
[7:58]from people's websites, I like to call them.
[8:01]And shalom was the first person I reached out to
[8:05]and we did a zoom and about five minutes into it.
[8:12]I was like, this guy's like my lost twin brother.
[8:15]Like he had me laughing, he's just, he's a reverend.
[8:19]And then...
[8:20]That would make us one of seven.
[8:22]Yeah, I'm not that great.
[8:25]And I had started reading the book.
[8:29]I hate reading the books for the Thurber thing.
[8:31]It's just a pain in the ash.
[8:33]And I don't like reading people's books that aren't mine.
[8:37]But instantly I need a voice.
[8:42]And it's the hardest thing you'd do as a writer,
[8:44]develop a voice, right?
[8:45]It's so easy to have caricatures, right?
[8:50]Cartunish people that are not very layered.
[8:56]And because we've been exposed to so, so much
[8:59]with TV and movies and books,
[9:00]we've seen so many kinds of characters.
[9:04]The challenges to make them real and talk real
[9:08]and do weird things.
[9:09]And fiction is a bit of a Wizard of Oz thing.
[9:15]Wizard of Oz thing.
[9:17]Memoir and certainly doing what he did
[9:20]is make it in front of the world
[9:22]and takes tremendous courage to share stuff
[9:26]that is profoundly painful,
[9:28]but to somehow find a way to bring in lightness.
[9:31]So we talked for about an hour
[9:33]and then the book blew me away.
[9:37]I didn't wanna like it as much as I did.
[9:39]And I was so rooting for him to win it,
[9:42]which I'm so glad he did.
[9:45]And it turns out we actually lived in Jerusalem
[9:50]at around the same time.
[9:51]Yeah.
[9:52]He was trying to figure out, do I explain the dark humor?
[9:56]Yes.
[9:57]So I was traveling and wanted to go.
[10:00]somewhere and I was a pretty cloistered Irish Catholic idiot who hadn't traveled and I just
[10:05]ended up there and working on an archaeological dig and you know he's trying to find the meaning
[10:10]of his life and does he stay in this religion and is God meaningful or real or anything and I'm
[10:16]dealing with similar issues existentially why I can't get laid in by Jewish girls and
[10:23]you help me figure that out nobody can you help me figure that out you know and said
[10:33]dude you're fucking going I'm well I get over it but look there are huge differences and that's
[10:41]one of the beauties of a book right is that it can transcend we don't know each other any of us
[10:48]and yet you sit with his book or my book and you feel something that is intimate and organic
[10:56]and I guess I just I want to talk about in a very loose way there's two emotions that are
[11:03]interesting and he deals with them both beautifully and I deal with them a little bit
[11:08]tremendous pain and being able to find a little light in the darkness and well that goes
[11:13]back to the original question which is you know why why do it and is it intentional
[11:20]and I can't say a few I my guess again also like we've only known to show their little while
[11:26]on reading I see you to call to know is that it's the similar thing which is you know life's kind
[11:33]of fucked up like no matter how you look at it there's there's good parts but there's a lot of
[11:38]pain there's a lot of worry there's a lot of hurt and it's for the first 20 years of my life
[11:45]I decided that I was going to fight back against it with rage and anger and it didn't get me
[11:53]anywhere it just got me enraged and angry and then a few things happened in my life where
[12:02]I realized there was another way at this that that that was sort of the music of the people
[12:10]that I came from right so to this day I cannot listen to a violin because every fucking
[12:17]Jewish documentary about the past is violent and it's it's just it just to me it's the sound
[12:26]that that gets made when you're about to die or get thrown out of Spain or whatever so
[12:33]it gets very upsetting and all I could figure out to do is to laugh at it right so
[12:40]but not in like uh for me and again this is very clear in your book as well it's not like
[12:47]it's not like hollywood filmy fart jokes it's not a sitcom laugh right
[12:54]just again like which is which is fine but but there's uh there's like for me the the goal
[13:05]and we talked about this actually at the at the festival is uh I aim for a ha ha ouch
[13:13]like that's the thing is like I can make you let's laugh at this but you know what underneath it
[13:19]it kind of hurts doesn't it um I remember as a teenager reading not knowing what I wanted to do
[13:26]I read Kafka first because I asked somebody in a bookstore for a funny book
[13:34]um and seriously I got blessed this person and he was like a real asshole like in a
[13:39]Manhattan used bookstore real superior like what do you want I'm like what's funny and he's like
[13:44]here and he hands me the metamorphosis um and and I hadn't read I didn't I didn't go to college
[13:50]I hadn't we don't read in Yeshua not certainly not that so I was like read it and I'm like yeah
[13:56]this is hilarious like not only does he turn into a bug and not only does his father kill him
[14:02]but the punchline is and then they're very happy that he's dead like everything goes well
[14:08]um and then I read through him and I went back and I said what's funny and he said
[14:13]here read this play in a game he waiting for Guedo so I met Kafka and Beckett and then I remember
[14:19]thinking maybe I can do this and I saw Vonnegut I was reading Vonnegut I saw like him described
[14:26]on the back of one of the books as America's laughing prophet of doom and I thought oh I can do that
[14:34]that sounds like a fun job so that was where for me the introduction was all of that that was where
[14:41]and at the time I was listening to Ramones and Lenny Bruce and all these people were doing
[14:46]the same thing in my head Kafka was no different than Lenny right there's a similarity or which
[14:52]you're prior or all these people so it became like that's just the crowd I want to hang with
[15:00]And it's very clear in yours, like you're dealing with obituaries and funerals.
[15:06]And I was struck actually because one of the things in the story that's funny is people
[15:09]going to funerals that they don't belong at.
[15:15]And I was reminded reading that on the way here, um, on audio, on, on, on, on, on, on.
[15:22]Interesting.
[15:23]That, uh, about a play, one of the earliest plays I ever wrote was, it was called jumpers.
[15:28]There's about people who go around the city, uh, encouraging people to jump.
[15:33]It's like when they hear that there's someone on a roof, they all go out and they know
[15:36]each other from, uh, the other one and, you know, they're like, you know, there's all
[15:40]these relationships interrupted by jump, and they keep going.
[15:44]And I was like, wow, it's such a similar thing, and it is.
[15:48]It's just like, well, there's this giant thing of death.
[15:50]And what do we do?
[15:51]Yeah.
[15:52]We left.
[15:53]We left.
[15:54]We picked up.
[15:55]Jumpers was just picked up by the Disney Channel.
[15:56]Wish.
[15:57]Christmas movie.
[15:58]Yeah.
[15:59]You're upbringing was profoundly painful and, uh, dark, and it really was the 1500s.
[16:11]Yashiva and your family life, right?
[16:13]It was not a pleasant household.
[16:15]But you were able to find, you know, I think yours was much worse.
[16:24]My, uh, my mother died when I was 12, and I'm lucky, lucky.
[16:30]I know.
[16:31]I know.
[16:32]I know.
[16:33]That was priceless line, shalom, um, but I, I, uh, I didn't know how to process it.
[16:47]And so I started, I remember seeing money Python for the first time and reading Woody Allen
[16:53]stories in the New Yorker and, and it was, uh, it was weird and, and dark and, and, uh,
[17:01]made no sense, right?
[17:02]It was absurdus.
[17:04]Yeah.
[17:05]And it really helped me, it gave me a rope.
[17:10]Yeah.
[17:11]Well, there's something.
[17:12]Look, obviously, I'm going to say this and you'll agree with it, but I, I, I think there's
[17:18]something much more, there's more wisdom and humor than there is in tragedy as a, as a,
[17:24]as a, as a whole, there's something about humor that speaks and says the truth.
[17:31]And what the truth it says is we ain't that great, right?
[17:34]We fall down.
[17:35]We slip on banana peels, uh, even my name was, you know, we wrote all these essays.
[17:40]The last one was, and just remember, we all, we all, we all shit on the same toilet,
[17:45]things and, well, things as well.
[17:48]Tragic tries to make us noble, but I don't, I don't buy it.
[17:52]Like I just, I feel like it's pushing something that, that sounds a little bit more like advertisements
[17:58]for humans, whereas humor comedy says, it's okay.
[18:04]It's okay.
[18:05]We all do this.
[18:06]It's, it's fine.
[18:08]It's comforting.
[18:09]So for me, like if I have to sit down and write something tragic, not only do I not want
[18:14]to, because I can never get through to the end of it, but I have, I can't figure out
[18:18]what it is I'm saying.
[18:20]But if I, if I write something or tell a story or a mom's stage or whatever it is, and
[18:24]it makes me laugh, I can trust that there's something in there that I can keep pulling
[18:30]threads out of.
[18:31]So it starts with, it starts with a laugh that's, um, I, I teach, um, writing because
[18:38]I'm so fabulous.
[18:40]And, uh, one of the first things we talk about is that literature started as, as sin.
[18:48]If you go back to the first novels, right, Kiyoti, that was anti-Christian.
[18:53]He had to fit, he had to write other things around it and pretend.
[18:57]But it was making fun.
[18:58]It was laughing, uh, Robale, all these, all these old writers were just having a laugh.
[19:06]And then somewhere around the New Yorker era, things got very serious.
[19:16]It became religious, literature became very religious.
[19:20]And there's, uh, there's a Torah, which is the New Yorker and there's certain profits
[19:25]and certain priests and certain things that matter and everything else doesn't fit in.
[19:30]But for me, it was like, I said, it was like, I was this, I was this kid in an ultra-Orthodox
[19:36]community in the middle of Manhattan having just left a porn theater after cutting like
[19:44]Talmud class.
[19:46]Uh, and I had porno in my bag and I had five bucks left over and I'm waiting for the bus
[19:51]home.
[19:52]So I go into a used bookstore and they give me Kafka and they give me Beckett and they
[19:57]give me Leonard Michaels and all these creeds.
[20:00]and Roth and Woody Allen and no cottage for Weinstein and all these crazy crazy things.
[20:06]And to me, it was like, oh, this is sin. So when I teach them like, what's the sin? Where's
[20:11]the sin? Because if there's no sin, I'm just not interested. What's the Voltaire line?
[20:17]Oh, so the Voltaire line. Yeah, Voltaire one said, God has a stand-up comic telling jokes to a
[20:24]room full of people who were too afraid to laugh. He also said, fuck the Jews. But the first
[20:31]one really spoke to me. The one thing I would say about tragedy that I boring the wrong word
[20:40]not, I'll probably say this wrong, but I don't think it goes far enough tragedy. And the reason
[20:47]I adore the ability to put to push through that. And you might not love this word, but I think
[20:57]it gives us a little hope humor in the face of darkness. It gives us, and maybe hopes the wrong
[21:04]word. It gives us something we're all connected through tragedy. Everyone in this room has lost
[21:09]someone dear to them, and it will remain in them. I was talking to a lovely woman, Jamie, who's a
[21:16]trauma therapist. And I don't think we have a vocabulary for death and grief and deep pain. I don't.
[21:30]I think we have throwaway phrases, time heals all wounds and untrue things like that.
[21:36]You know, we've all been to many wakes and funerals and such shiva. And there's always that
[21:41]moment where you're like, that's going to be me one day. But then that disappears very fast. And I tend
[21:46]to run from it, right? And I came across in the research of the book, a wonderful line that I also
[21:54]shared with Jamie. It's from the Maharabatta, I think I'm pronouncing that correctly. Ancient,
[21:59]Indian poem, epic poem where a wise person has asked, what's the greatest wonder in the world?
[22:05]And his answer is the greatest wonder in the world is that every day people die, but the living
[22:09]act as if they have nothing but time. And that really struck me because it's so obvious, and yet
[22:16]it's so it's so how I've lived a huge portion of my life. Yeah, a huge portion of my life. But
[22:24]the moments, I think we wear these masks. And I think that that naked, powerful writing like this
[22:36]takes the mask off and says, oh, you're anxious, you're scared, you're afraid, you're in pain,
[22:43]you're, we go about our day and we do the things. We pick up the dry cleaning and have our teeth
[22:48]cleaned and meet friends. But there is this boiling thing, you know, it's very hard to be a human.
[22:55]And we find, I think, in pain and humor, a communal grace that helps the day. It's a long day,
[23:07]if you can't laugh. And to your point, I'm at a point now, I have a very hard time reading books
[23:14]that don't make me laugh a little bit. Yeah. You know, I need, this is a deeply painful book. And
[23:23]yet I'm reading it to my wife. I'm like, why am I laughing? And I find that's, that's,
[23:30]well, that's a rare thing. You're a high. I was, but I think it's a world view too. Like, I think
[23:41]it is. I shared this with you. I dedicated this book to my brother Tom. He died in 2019,
[23:49]he was a firefighter. My dad was a firefighter, both grandfathers were firefighters.
[23:55]Writer, they assumed I was gay. Every, I was the only one who went to college and my family and
[24:04]Tom worked at 9-11. We think he got contracted something from there. And anyway, he had pancreatic
[24:10]cancer towards 63. My brothers and I would go visit them. They would come down from Boston. I'd
[24:16]come up from New York and we'd sit around and make fun of him, which is our way of saying,
[24:19]we love you. And his wife calls and says, come, it's close. She's a hospice care nurse,
[24:26]she was in no pain. So I arrived first. The other four were coming down. And he's sitting in a
[24:32]chair. He's a big handsome guy, handlebar mustache. I described this someone, a best photograph in
[24:37]sepia. And he's got a blanket over him. We're chat for a bit and I hear a carpool into the driveway.
[24:43]And I say, the others are here. It's my four brothers. And Tom sort of Buster Keaton quick drops
[24:48]on arm, drops his head and trying to suppress a grin says, tell them they're too late.
[24:56]He had two weeks to live. And
[25:00]I laughed, but I was in shock, and it was just gorgeous to me.
[25:04]It was gorgeous because it was kind of a fuck you to the universe, but it was like, he lived.
[25:13]He was happy.
[25:14]He didn't want to die, but that's who he was, and that he could go out that way to me was.
[25:21]Yeah, that was just, he's also the one who said on the day we buried my mother.
[25:26]It was a warm day, the windows of, we were all excited to be on the linazine, and as we're pulling into the funeral home.
[25:33]I mean, the cemetery, there's a U.S. Postal Service truck blocking our way, and there are people lining things, looking at us, and Tom says, must be the deadlighter office.
[25:43]And it was just where that thing.
[25:47]Yeah, I had a novel called, an novel called Hope A Tragedy, that's about, essentially,
[25:55]about a guy who buys a farmhouse in the upstate New York to get away from his past, and his history, and he finds an old lady in the attic, working on a typewriter, who claims to be Anne Frank.
[26:08]And she's like 82 years old, and a huge pain in the ass, and she wants Matza, and she's not going to leave until she finishes her second book.
[26:15]But the main character is obsessed with, for various reasons, is obsessed with last words, famous people's last words, and what his last words are going to be,
[26:23]because he wants them to have meaning.
[26:25]So he talks about other people's last words.
[26:28]And so the two that just stand out while you were talking about that, because they're so funny to me.
[26:33]One was Voltaire, who I have a bit of a procession with, who he was dying, and they brought a priest in.
[26:40]And they said, do you want to denounce the depth Satan?
[26:46]And he said, now is not a good time to be making enemies.
[26:51]And then died.
[26:52]I was like, wow, what a way to go. You fucking nailed it.
[26:55]And the other one was Oscar Wilde, who famously said, either the drapes go or I do.
[27:01]But it is. It's like death.
[27:05]And you know, look, there's something about, if you go around selling books and writing as a Jew, then people are going to be like,
[27:15]why are you so guilty? Why did you have such issues? Why did you joke? Why did you use this? Why did you use that?
[27:21]Unsubstac it might be control Hollywood.
[27:24]You know, it depends where you are.
[27:26]But it always struck me as like, what do you, what you guys don't feel that?
[27:31]Everybody feels that.
[27:33]I don't know anybody who doesn't issue mother issues or father issues or issues with death and depression and anxiety.
[27:40]That's just human.
[27:41]I'll tell you one of my favorite jokes.
[27:44]I'll tell you why it's one of my favorite jokes after I talk to you.
[27:47]It's one of my favorite Jewish jokes.
[27:49]And it's about a guy who lives in a little straddle in Europe.
[27:52]And he, he, everything's going wrong with him.
[27:54]And he decides he's going to go seek out the great revenue who lives at the top of the hill.
[27:59]And ask him what the meaning of life is.
[28:01]So he gets his pack together and he walks and he goes through this hot desert.
[28:04]And then it's pouring rain and then it's snow and ice.
[28:07]And he gets to the mountain and he has to climb up and he almost falls.
[28:10]And he has to camp out and he gets to the top of the mountain.
[28:12]And there's the rabbi.
[28:13]And he says, Rabbi, what's the meaning of life?
[28:15]And the rabbi says, Moza.
[28:17]And he says, Moza.
[28:19]He goes, yeah, Moza.
[28:20]He goes, what the fuck are you talking about, Moza?
[28:23]It's Moza.
[28:24]He goes, I came thousand miles through sand and snow and ice.
[28:29]I nearly fell off this mountain.
[28:31]And you're telling me it's Moza.
[28:33]And the rabbi shrugs and says, okay, so it's not Moza.
[28:36]Okay, but here's why that's my favorite joke.
[28:41]Because just about every group of people has a form of that joke.
[28:46]There's an Asian, there's a Zen one, there's an African one, there's a European.
[28:50]Everybody has a form of this joke.
[28:52]But it's about their people doing and saying the same thing.
[28:56]So to me that's like, that's the uber joke, right?
[28:59]That's where you get to stand back and go, gosh, we're also silly.
[29:03]We're all the same and we have no idea, right?
[29:05]And we go on to these little coffin shaped glass things we have.
[29:10]And we're told we all hate each other when we're all different.
[29:13]And it's bullshit.
[29:15]And to me, the best comedy to say tells us reminds us that we're all kind of schmucks.
[29:23]And that we take it so seriously.
[29:25]Yeah.
[29:26]Yeah.
[29:27]Yeah.
[29:28]We'll go about our day and have to be serious at certain times.
[29:31]But I don't know, man.
[29:33]I remember thinking that when I was in religious school, when I was 18, 19,
[29:38]I was like struggling with God.
[29:40]And having this kind of epiphany at a certain point going, you know what?
[29:45]If I sit here and pray all day, every day, it's not going to change anything.
[29:49]He's still fucking crazy.
[29:51]I've read the book.
[29:52]He's nuts.
[29:55]This guy makes Trump look stable.
[29:59]And so.
[30:00]Praying isn't gonna work and crying isn't gonna work.
[30:02]So I might as well laugh because if I laugh, I win.
[30:07]So I die, I go to heaven or hell,
[30:10]and God wags his finger at me,
[30:12]and I say, you know what, asshole?
[30:13]I laughed.
[30:14]I didn't take it all that seriously, do what you want, right?
[30:18]Just, I was told in that, you see the world that,
[30:21]by the way, if there are children in the house,
[30:25]I'm sub-stacked, that my punishment for masturbating
[30:29]was that I was gonna go to hell and be boiled
[30:31]in a vat of my own wasted semen.
[30:37]And now, recess, kids.
[30:41]And I remember thinking the time,
[30:43]I just hope they put me in a vat next to the guy going,
[30:47]hey, I don't know for you.
[30:49]I don't want them to put me next to Arthur Miller
[30:52]or someone writing tragedy.
[30:54]Like just make me laugh and let's get out of here.
[30:56]Let's get through this eternity of misery together.
[30:59]It's not how I felt about you.
[31:01]Is it true about the boiling finger?
[31:05]I'm up to like my third vat.
[31:10]Are there questions?
[31:14]I know I have some.
[31:16]It's been a lovely literary evening.
[31:21]We're happy to continue talking about grief
[31:23]and death and sorrow.
[31:24]Anyone with this?
[31:25]Anyone with this woman.
[31:27]God.
[31:30]So, getting back to us now.
[31:32]Yeah.
[31:33]Thanks for everyone's experience with my feelings.
[31:37]Is that every family within that,
[31:39]or is it that for that religious realm for 21?
[31:44]No.
[31:48]For me, okay, so the question was,
[31:51]was it just, when I talk about it,
[31:53]if I was just my family, or was it either?
[31:56]Right.
[32:00]I wish for the world that my family
[32:04]was the only dysfunctional family in the world,
[32:06]or that the version of God I was told about
[32:08]was only told to me.
[32:11]But part of what the book is about
[32:12]is that the story of theft is a Yiddish word
[32:16]for Express's disgust.
[32:19]Right, it's like, but in the worst possible way.
[32:22]So, that story was taught to me,
[32:28]was taught to me as that's the story of man.
[32:31]Right, God made us, and we stole from him.
[32:36]And then he kicked us out.
[32:37]And then we were so bad he flooded the world.
[32:42]He's never, ever liked us.
[32:44]I say this without any kind of exaggeration at all.
[32:48]But if you were to take the Old Testament,
[32:50]replace the name God with the name Fred,
[32:53]and then give it to a bunch of school kids,
[32:55]and say, who in this story hates Jews?
[33:00]They would say Fred, obviously Fred has a problem.
[33:03]So, I was told that we were awful.
[33:06]But the reason I started to write the book
[33:08]was because later in life,
[33:11]I met Philip Seymour Hoffman, who I talk about in the book,
[33:16]who is Irish Catholic, and grew up completely different
[33:19]from me, but in that element, the same way.
[33:23]He was as fat or thought he was as fat as I did.
[33:27]And we met, and we connected based on that,
[33:31]on this shared fatness,
[33:33]and we would sit in bars and laugh about the shit we were told.
[33:38]Phil didn't, we don't wanna go into a church
[33:40]for a location scout.
[33:42]He was like, can we please just shoot it outside?
[33:45]I don't wanna go in.
[33:47]Sad irony is that the church we were talking about
[33:49]was where they held his mother made his funeral.
[33:53]So, he did go into the church against as well.
[33:56]But, fair was kind of how he felt about himself.
[34:01]Fair is a lot of what we all feel.
[34:03]It's not one person or one thing,
[34:06]but it seems to me that what's weird about humans,
[34:09]and this is what I write about in the book,
[34:11]is that if you read neurologists and studies
[34:16]and researchers, what's interesting about us as creatures,
[34:20]is that we're the only creature that uses story
[34:22]is our operating system.
[34:25]Stories how we remember, it's how we form connections,
[34:27]it's how we talk, think, and act.
[34:31]And yet we tell a story for thousands of years
[34:34]where we're the antagonist.
[34:36]We're we're the bad ones.
[34:38]We still tell it today, over and over,
[34:40]not just in Judaism, and most religions,
[34:44]and that's where most people,
[34:45]90% of the world grows up with,
[34:47]with this story of your bad.
[34:49]I call it, they don't call it the Old Testament,
[34:52]in the book, I call it the big book of you suck.
[34:57]And I wonder what would happen if we didn't do that?
[35:00]If we weren't raised being told that, you were raised Irish, I'm assuming
[35:05]You were told the same story is you're a sinner
[35:09]You're bad some some of them if you're Calvinist you can never even get better. Right if you're Calvinist you can never even get better
[35:16]There's over before it starts so it's a fucked up story
[35:21]And so it was it was that realization
[35:25]Because I was struggling with it and it was we're meeting him and starting to realize well, this is not just a
[35:32]Thing from the community I came in came from not geographically not as a religion. It's much larger than this and once I saw that
[35:41]I couldn't unsee it. I start to see it everywhere. I would see it in a Nike commercial
[35:45]Right you suck get in the gym. You felt love
[35:49]Just do it you idiot
[35:51]Right, hey you with the ugly smile have some Colgate
[35:56]Right if only you were in a Tesla things would be better. It's all it's all predicated on the fact that you need fixing
[36:03]You're not enough
[36:05]Right, and there's a story that we that people go to to this day and they raised their kids on it
[36:10]How could you raise your children both with any religion or he raised us both with my kids
[36:20]And they're better for it. They are better for it. We
[36:26]My wife's grew up going to a Quaker school and
[36:32]We've struggled we were married in a unitary in church
[36:38]We are casual church covers
[36:41]We belong to an Episcopalian church, which is my wife's
[36:48]But the Episcopalian church today where I live is a very liberal
[36:54]Open that said it is strange for me to sit there and listen to readings in the New Testament
[37:00]right as a
[37:02]Not as a writer, but just as a feeling person. It's it's
[37:06]I
[37:07]love the community
[37:08]of the people of the smell of the old wood
[37:12]Love the dust and the ancient unanswered prayers. I love the
[37:18]Handshaking
[37:20]I have a problem with the words
[37:23]Right, I'd love I'd love I'd love some rewrite maybe yeah, there is that quite there for publishing that being trapped and right between the two
[37:33]Really because yeah, when I when I
[37:37]When I was in that that Yeshiva, I remember one day like me and my friend best friend at the time
[37:43]We decided to
[37:45]It was on 180th Street and we decided to do the most non Jewish thing we could think of
[37:51]Which was to get on the subway and go to Madison Square Garden for a monster truck show
[37:57]Because Jews don't go to monster trucks and
[38:00]So we got on the train put our yamokas in our pocket went to Madison Square Garden
[38:04]Pave the tickets we get inside and holy shit. It's so not Jewish
[38:09]There's dirt everywhere like where it used to be the basketball and there's jumps and there are these two big trucks
[38:16]Revving their engines and the crowd screaming and I remember sitting there and the guy MC comes out and
[38:22]He says all right
[38:24]Let's hear it from all you Chevy fans and half the place starts screaming chanting Chevy and
[38:31]Then he says let's hear it from all you Ford fans
[38:34]And the other people start screaming Ford Ford and all I thought was I've made a huge mistake
[38:40]I don't want to be a part of this. I don't want to be a part of that
[38:44]What is in between?
[38:46]Orthodox and monster truck
[38:49]And I feel like I'm still looking for that like I don't know I I think I think it's probably the natural state of
[38:59]thinking people to be
[39:02]Disconnected from anyone thing to be uncertain because the minute for me. I grab onto something
[39:08]I'm like well that can't be right. I
[39:11]Mean, maybe this is a crap answer, but I think there's a
[39:16]Humanism and what you do. It's a there's a deep connective tissue and telling stories
[39:25]Because that's it is how we live
[39:28]But it's stories of that reveal
[39:32]There are so detailed that they reveal a universal thing
[39:36]Right
[39:37]There's no reason I should in a way that I should pick up that book and have it make sense
[39:43]But it makes complete sense because while I didn't grow up like you I've felt that pain and fear and confusion and
[39:51]I think most of us are trying to figure it out and
[39:55]We lean on old stories and go to midnight master when
[40:00]ever it is. And that's why I think something like that is so valuable. Well, if that makes
[40:07]people pay $2,495 for a hardcover, I'll take it. Yes. I know you guys will, too.
[40:12]You know, you don't have to, you know, that's fine. I'm not particularly interested in
[40:40]the, you know, suffering Olympics. But I'll tell you that, like, honestly, I didn't, I didn't
[40:50]write it to enter it. But like, my wife who's here and probably not going to speak to anybody
[40:56]afterwards, she grew up in a version of Judaism in England that that she refers to as Jewish Taliban.
[41:08]So that's not a great place to have a vagina. And so I'm very much aware that, look, to be
[41:17]totally honest, like if, if someone said to me, now you can, you know, you're back in heaven and
[41:22]go pick, who do you want to be? Do you want to be a Jew in America or do you want to be gay? Do you
[41:30]want to be a female? Do you want to be, here we go, Palestinian? Do you want to be an African? I pick
[41:35]a Jew in America, white guy, any day of the week. But that doesn't mean it, it doesn't mean it doesn't hurt.
[41:43]Yeah. Did you take heed for using amfrank as a character in your book such an icon? And did you take heed
[41:55]because Philip Roth had done it awesome? Well, an interesting thing about did I take heed for using amfrank in
[42:01]hope and tragedy? I hadn't read Philip Roth's book. I didn't even know about it until I was
[42:06]already into publishing when somebody asked me about it. So here's, it's good back to what I was
[42:14]saying earlier about this sin. I'm very aware that that was a sin, but I'm not supposed to say that.
[42:20]But the purpose of writing the book for me was that I was, as a kid, I was raised on her
[42:29]every year. They brought us into the the Yeshiva auditorium for Holocaust Memorial Day and showed us
[42:37]her picture and then showed us piles of dead bodies and mass graves and everything else.
[42:42]And I was seven. And by the time I was 14 going into those rooms, I saw her face and I thought,
[42:49]fuck off. You're just telling me I'm going to die. I don't need you. You grew up in where you
[42:55]I'm I'm in New York. Get off my back. And I wanted to I decided at a certain point to reread
[43:02]her diary because I'd only read it when I was a kid. And the girl that they told me about was
[43:08]not the girl I met there. She was not a little suffering child. She was incredibly strong
[43:16]wild. She was a force of nature. And I felt like she would probably have huge problems with the
[43:25]people who raised me. And so I wanted to literally have someone meet her. And so she's in the
[43:31]attic and she's writing, but she's strong. And she's determined and she's noble and she's a lot
[43:38]smarter than him. So there's nothing. Yeah. So people might have heard it and initially said,
[43:45]hey, how dare you. But if you read it, you can't have you can't argue with it because it's
[43:50]basically saying, what have we done to her? How have we used her? Right? Because we have. And that
[43:58]was what the story was trying to understand was trying to in a fictional way, but literally
[44:06]resurrect her and say, who would she be now if she lived? Because I think she'd be a fucking
[44:10]handful in the best possible way. She would be a difficult woman. And I am married for 34 years
[44:18]to a very difficult woman. I love difficult women. They were the best. So I, but I don't think
[44:24]she'd be a little wilting flower. And I don't think she'd be talking about her suffering.
[44:29]And it certainly wouldn't be using it to justify anything.
[44:32]That was not how I ever missed your name Frank. And if you go to the end Frank house,
[44:39]I don't think that. I was raised that way. And I rediscovered it. But there is a, there is a world
[44:51]hey, I'm with you. I don't know either. If you find out, let me know. I'll give you,
[44:56]if you find out, let me know. I'll give you my email.
[45:00]Yeah.
[45:01]Yeah.
[45:02]Yeah.
[45:03]Um, I'm always curious about the different authors about the beginnings of their books.
[45:09]And that research, consisting of that you guys had, I'm curious that there's someone that is writing fiction versus memoir.
[45:17]It seems to be also written fiction as well.
[45:19]I would love to hear more about the beginning stages of the books because you guys want to tackle such big themes.
[45:26]Um, and you want to achieve that through more of a very serious and so I'm just curious to hear more about the foundation of what you guys want to build upon to articulate your input.
[45:38]When did you go to funerals?
[45:40]I didn't.
[45:41]I mean, I'm curious if you've ever heard of RITs.ie and he spent any time on there.
[45:46]All right.
[45:47]What is that?
[45:48]Well, just because you're Irish Catholic.
[45:49]My parents are Irish.
[45:50]Okay.
[45:51]Okay.
[45:52]I know the Irish love.
[45:53]Yeah.
[45:54]Nothing makes them quite as happy.
[45:57]My father would pick up the Boston Globe in the morning and smoke on a lucky and go right to the obituary.
[46:18]He called them the Irish sports pages.
[46:19]Yeah.
[46:20]Yeah.
[46:21]Oh, they love it.
[46:29]Yeah.
[46:30]Well, disappointing if they haven't.
[46:35]What kind of research do you do?
[46:37]What kind of research?
[46:41]I interviewed two obituary writers, one for the New York Times, one for the Washington Post.
[46:46]I was a journalism major, but never really practiced journalism.
[46:51]I've always been fascinated by obituary because I think they're kind of amazing.
[46:55]They're intriguing as hell.
[46:56]They're whole lives.
[46:58]So I've always read them.
[46:59]I have been lucky enough to have many people in my life die.
[47:02]So I've been to many, many funerals.
[47:07]Research.
[47:08]I mean, I read the Tibetan book of dying.
[47:11]I read the Bhagatab Gita again because I had to read it in college.
[47:15]I was looking for some answers and I didn't really find any because I don't there's no answers in this.
[47:24]What's I don't know.
[47:26]I mean, I don't know that I did research that would be particularly helpful.
[47:32]I read.
[47:33]I talked to a lot of people.
[47:35]I don't know.
[47:38]Someone asked me if I write for an audience.
[47:40]We both got our start in advertising as copywriters.
[47:44]And I'm so sorry.
[47:50]Everyone can hit her on the way out.
[47:53]And it was interesting and kind of fun and it paid the bills.
[47:57]And it was, I met some amazing people.
[48:00]But you write to an audience.
[48:03]And that's, that's it.
[48:06]I think, and you tell me what you think.
[48:08]I think it's a very dangerous thing.
[48:10]I write to myself.
[48:12]Yeah.
[48:13]But I'm doing so I pray that I'm, I have so much so many filters of, I,
[48:20]I want it to be so honest, I guess that it resonates if that makes any sense.
[48:30]If I sort of thought, well, 80% of fiction is bought by women.
[48:33]And so I really need to between 40 and 62.
[48:36]And I think that would be the death net.
[48:39]People say, well, do you try to write funny?
[48:41]I've never tried to write funny.
[48:43]I think, well, sorry, I have.
[48:45]And it's been a disaster.
[48:47]It's horrible.
[48:49]It's, if I get lucky in some things funny, it's, I'm in the middle of some really sad thing.
[48:54]And my disease brand goes, right?
[48:57]Yeah.
[48:58]What's your research?
[49:01]Well, your life.
[49:03]Your life.
[49:04]Yeah, for a fact, it did 20 years hard time.
[49:09]And I'll start with the docs community on the inside.
[49:13]So block D.
[49:14]But what's interesting is, you know, your knowledge of the Old Testament.
[49:19]And I mean, you've read so deeply in philosophy.
[49:22]Yeah.
[49:23]Yeah.
[49:24]So it was some of it was for that was this was going in and finding what other people
[49:29]talked about in terms of shame or the human animal and story.
[49:34]And where does story come from and why do we use it for fair?
[49:37]That was the main thing.
[49:40]Narrative was what I was investigating.
[49:43]Why do we tell stories at all?
[49:47]Let alone why do we tell stories where we're back.
[49:50]That was that reason.
[49:52]I wrote a novel about a family of cannibals.
[49:57]Cannibal Americans.
[49:58]And.
[50:00]who live in Brooklyn, and when their mother dies they have to eat her, which is the tradition.
[50:11]But they hate her, and she weighs like 800 pounds and there's 12 of them that's a lot
[50:16]of red meat, so they're trying to figure out what to do.
[50:19]And for that I met with a butcher, I met with a butcher, I met with a butcher, I met with
[50:29]a butcher who helped me figure out what they would do, what the steps were, and
[50:37]what had to happen, and when, and how to prepare it, and how much time you have before
[50:42]it goes bad, because they're in Brooklyn, and they can't just hang her out outside.
[50:50]Although one of them does suggest he's going to know in Brooklyn, like, so that was
[50:56]bad, I mean, I don't really, it's for that kind of stuff that I wouldn't know otherwise,
[51:01]but it sounds right, and it sounds like bullshit, but the truth is, I mean, I'm sure this
[51:07]is the same to you, writing is self-discovery, it's, for me, I had a certain point in research
[51:13]where I know I'm just wasting time, you know what I said, writers or thieves, right?
[51:21]You watch, and you listen, and you, you, you incorporate all of that, right?
[51:29]I mean, that's, yeah, I look, that's why it's hard, that's the risk, because I've worked
[51:37]with television and film, and like, that is where you go in and people are like, well, we
[51:42]need a four quadrant film for summer, and it's got to talk to this, and a lot of people
[51:45]seem to be into AI, you got anything, you got anything for AI, what else you got, and that's
[51:50]all outward, directed, right, but, but, but a book, like to me, like there's, that's one
[51:57]of the most rebellious things you can do right now, is the only thing more about us is
[52:01]writing a poem, because no one's going to buy a fucking poem, but, but it comes from such
[52:09]an important place, and it says, I don't care, I'm not in it for the money, I don't care
[52:15]what you think, I'm doing this for myself, right?
[52:18]He's going to the poetry books, it is for sale, saying, right, I meant like real poets.
[52:36]So that's risk is that you sit down and you're an advertising, so you know, like advertising,
[52:41]you put someone else's name on it, right, you, you have their logo, and someone tells
[52:46]you what to say.
[52:48]What's interesting, I think, and why I'm actually hopeful, even in the AI world, is that
[52:53]unique voices and individual voices and human voices are, I think in a matter more.
[53:01]Human songs made by humans, poems, plays, books, art, anything, there are already people
[53:08]like who are organizing to have everything stamped when it's not made by humans.
[53:12]And I don't think they're going to need to.
[53:14]I think people are just going to be like, okay, great, so your machine wrote a book
[53:18]based on Save the Cat or some shit who cares, right, but ultimately your weirdness,
[53:25]your uniqueness is what we're trying to find, right?
[53:28]AI is never going to write that.
[53:31]You can feed in the history of the world and every book ever read and every experience,
[53:37]and it's never going to find that, ever.
[53:41]And although I wrote that, it wrote that, yeah, it's not bad, yes.
[53:53]Either one, this is for each one, have you ever had a situation in the running a memoir
[53:59]that where something that was just really kind of vital to a point that was tremendously
[54:06]valuable that involved someone else in your life, obviously, that writing it was going
[54:15]to hurt them or cause harm or something like that.
[54:20]And when you face that, did you write it anyway?
[54:22]And unless there's a situation where you actually can't disguise it again, what do you
[54:26]do with that?
[54:27]Right.
[54:28]So the question was, are there moments in memoir where writing something might hurt somebody?
[54:34]And yeah, of course, there are my approach, I'll tell you William Faulkner's approach
[54:41]because I thought it was great because Faulkner had a very troubled relationship with his
[54:47]mother and pretty much every one of his novels has an old woman who's a horror show.
[54:54]And he was asked about that and he said, what do you think, do you worry about how she
[55:00]feels and Faulkner is Faulkner, and he's probably drunk at the time, but he said,
[55:05]old on a greechner and is worth any number of little old ladies, right? So for him it didn't
[55:09]matter. For me, I can't be that cut off. What I stumbled on by writing was that I just started
[55:20]to realize when I was writing brief nonfiction that I'm the biggest schmuck in the story.
[55:28]Like, I'm a schmuck for, you know, someone may have told, a rabbi may have told me something,
[55:33]but I believed it, right? Like, so there's always that sort for me, that's, that's my safe place,
[55:40]right? So as long as I'm not, you know, acting like I'm some kind of, you know, font of wisdom,
[55:47]or I'm always right in this story, and everyone's always wrong and it's axe grinding,
[55:53]and that it's an even playing field. It's an equal opportunity offender that I'm okay with it.
[55:58]That's for me, that's my line, but I think everyone has to have their own.
[56:02]I'm being told we have time for one more. So I'm going to be curious.
[56:07]I did my dissertation on Orthodoxy, I'm always ready to perform, and
[56:13]but I went to my... That doesn't count. I went to the line for the classic,
[56:19]with Steve with them, and your books kind of lastfulness to Orthodoxy,
[56:25]and I wonder when you do these talks. What kinds of reactions do you have?
[56:30]Did everyone hear that? No. The question was, is light petting between consenting adults
[56:35]except for a little bit? But at first, I... That wasn't the question, but that's the one I'm going to answer.
[56:43]The question is, well, you repeat the question. It was, is the, when Shalom goes out to these
[56:48]kinds of events, that there's... It can be seen that there is a blasphemous nature
[56:55]to what he's written and what is the reaction from someone. My reaction is, I don't particularly
[57:02]care. It depends what book. I think by now the people who are going to get angry at me know what's
[57:12]coming, and that goes through political writing, any of my writing. It was when the first book came
[57:19]out that I got people angry, but the nice thing was that most of them are pretty stupid,
[57:26]and so it helps to answer. I remember one guy at a Barnes & Noble New York City,
[57:32]or at the Orthodox guys stood up and he said, something to the effect of, you know,
[57:38]when your children in 20 years come home and their ultra Orthodox, I'm going to really laugh.
[57:46]And I said, well, first of all, that is a really long time to wait for a joke.
[57:54]In case you don't know, there are places you can go in this city where people are on stage,
[57:58]and they're just telling jokes right now. But what I said was, look, that says more about you as a
[58:06]a father than it does me. If my son comes home and he's an ultra Orthodox and happy, I'm happy.
[58:11]I don't give a shit. If you're doing that a fear, then I'm going to have a question myself
[58:16]with what kind of fear did I put into you, but I don't care. If you're happy you're happy.
[58:21]Someone earlier asked, you know, how do you decide to raise your kids? Well, me and
[58:25]early thought, we'll give unconditional love a shot. It's just crazy enough to work.
[58:30]And it has. So, um, did you expose them to any structure, religion? No. And that's none of your
[58:43]business. No, it's the irony is that they have a better connection to it because
[58:54]everything we've done was just fun and not about an angry God who's judging you.
[59:00]So, so they have, they have a great time on Passover because it's just a lot of laughs and friends
[59:06]and, you know, there are certain holidays that rub me the wrong way. Like for Hanukkah specifically,
[59:14]because it's actually a celebration of right wing lunatics over moderates. So I have a problem with it,
[59:20]but for them it's candles and presents and some weird little toy that spins on the floor.
[59:25]Last one. I don't know you all that I think.
[59:30]Everything about what's the one you're considering.
[59:36]Oh, wow. Oh, I'm so sorry. She asked if I ever wonder what my obituary is going to set.
[59:48]I hope it'll be a few years that I was a good dad and a good friend. You know, I don't know.
[59:55]I don't have a great answer for that.
[60:00]trying to think of what my tombstone would be. That's one. There's a few that I like. I can have
[60:08]more than one. I can have an iPad that you can scroll through various. Don't order the fish.
[60:20]Here he lies, big surprise. The shrimp's fantastic. Big party in hell.
[60:30]Yeah. My dream sort of model funeral for me was Graham Chapman. Monty Pies.
[60:38]Oh, yeah. We're at least got up. We're at least got up and started doing the dead parrot routine,
[60:43]but about Graham Chapman saying this is a dead gram. It's a very dead gram. And then Michael
[60:50]Pailen got up and they all started seeing always look on the bright side of life from
[60:55]and it was just it was just funny and it's just it was so ant not a Western sad kind of thing.
[61:02]It was like it was a fun guy. He was great. We had a lot of laughs. We made some great art.
[61:07]Good riddance. Thank you.
[61:10]Thank you for coming. Thank you the hilarious. It looks for sale and I'm sure they'll sign
[61:20]them for you. Yes, we will. It's a scrunch or a stock and we'll see you soon. Oh, I forgot to mention
[61:25]myself, sir. Thank you.
[61:33]Yeah, I don't tell you that. What's that? No.
[61:40]Yeah.
[62:10]You
[62:40]You