If you thought the Sonny & Cher video made me bawl…
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.”
