First Person Singular

I got to talk to “Glory Goes and Gets Some” author Emily Carter for my series on The Rumpus. Carter is a such a great writer. Her stories are so evocative of a certain place and time, her characters are so well drawn. I have such admiration for her talent, and her incredible bravery, as a writer and just a person surviving a crazy life. 

After enduring my standard self-indulgent neurotic line of questioning (mostly about how to least upset your parents through your writing), Carter inscribed my copy of her book: “Sari, Good luck, & give ‘em all what they need, not want,” and I really appreciated that perspective. She signed it Emily Carter Roiphe.

I can’t recommend this collection highly enough. It’s newly available in e-book format from Emily Books. You should get it!

(Also check out Emily Books co-founder Ruth Curry’s really great essay about the story in particular that Carter says most upset her mother.)

“Memoir is actually the most egoless genre, even though it might seem ostensibly so much ego-driven. In order for it to succeed, you have to dissolve the self into these larger universal truths, and explore these deeper mysteries. If it’s purely autobiographical and ego-driven, it’s going to fail.” - The very egoless and brave Nick Flynn

My conversation with him is up now on The Rumpus.

My conversation with Half A Life author Darin Strauss is up now on The Rumpus. 

This conversation was very different from the others I’ve had. Strauss’s subject matter is much more grave. When he was eighteen, a girl swerved her bike in front of his car and died. Strauss was determined not to be at fault for the girl’s death. Still, she’s been haunting him his whole life.

This time I found I was reluctant to interject too much of my usual neurotic questioning, or my own instances of agonizing over people minding being written about. My experiences seem utterly trivial compared to Strauss’s.

I will have you know I didn’t cry this time - even though apparently two of Strauss’s other recent interviewers have.

The first time I was in the same room with Shalom Auslander, I didn’t even know he was there. I was at the birthday party of an agent I knew, at her home near Woodstock. At the end of the party, I randomly mentioned to someone that I’d loved Auslander’s painfully funny memoir, Foreskin’s Lament, and she said to me, “Are you kidding? He was just here. He stayed mostly in the living room, with the kids, but he was in and out of this room all night. He walked right past you several times.”

Shoot me, I thought. For three years, I have wanted to talk to Shalom Auslander, but felt strange about approaching him. Specifically, I wanted to learn how he found the guts to write his memoir about leaving his nutty Orthodox Jewish family behind for a saner life with his wife and kids. 

A couple of weeks ago, I got the chance I’d been wishing for. I interviewed Auslander for my new series on The Rumpus, “Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me,” and it was awesome. We talked about being different from the rest of your family, and the importance of taking the liberty of writing about that at any cost. Not asking permission for that liberty - taking it.

For me, the risk in doing that could be getting disowned. Auslander has essentially been disowned by his family, so I was desperate to hear from him what that’s like.

After talking to him, I began to feel a bit more emboldened, much as I did after talking to Vivian Gornick. Thanks, Shalom. Thanks, Vivian. Thank you, Stephen Elliott, for letting me publish these interviews.

Now, let’s see if I can take Sugar’s advice, and “write like a Motherfucker.”