With his amazing new book, FEH: A Memoir (Riverside Books), Shalom Auslander explores how the judgmental disgust of FEH infected his life, and what it meant to get sick & tired of the disgust and outrage FEH-stival and look for a way out. We talk about the sense of shame, disgust and self-loathing at the core of our common story, why every bookstore should be called, 'You Suck', his friendship with the late Philip Seymour Hoffman and how they bonded over FEH, and how hard he's worked to find the un-FEH for his kids. We get into how story is our operating system (but what happens when there are bugs in the OS?), how the FEH machine came after his psychiatrist, the notion of misotheism, and his video series UNGODLY where he reads the Bible and asks, 'What if God is the antagonist?'. We also discuss his ultra-orthodox upbringing, how "Jewish heritage" has been subsumed by Holocaust memorials, his antipathy toward the pop-culture Anne Frank and how he rewrote her for HOPE: A Tragedy, his time in the advertising industry and how it led to his TV show Happyish, his bleak Peanuts parody strip that got Jeannie Schulz's approval, the neurological condition where blind people believe they can see and how it parallels our existential state of FEH, the realization that cynicism doesn't mean you're smart (just lazy), and a lot more. Subscribe to Shalom's Substack • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal and via our e-newsletter
The Virtual Memories Show
Episode 597 - Shalom Auslander
(upbeat music) - Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and we're here to preserve and promote culture one weekly conversation at a time. You can subscribe to The Virtual Memories Show through iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Google Play, and a whole bunch of other venues. Just visit our sites, chimeraobscura.com/vm or vmspod.com to find more information, along with our RSS feed. And follow the show on Twitter and Instagram at VMSPod. Well, I am in the middle of some heavy work stuff, but I'm dealing, you know? It's the annual planning craziness for the conference that I organize and host every fall down in Maryland. And this year's version is September 19th, the 20th, so less than two months away, which means I really need to get two days' worth of speakers and panelists confirmed. There are some other factors that have me out of sorts. I wrote up this weekend in the newsletter about the death of my close friend, John. I've talked about him before, short version. He got diagnosed out of the blue with a brain tumor in February of last year. And the past 17 months were just awful. It was an awful trial. It was awful from my long distance, trying to stay in touch, but not knowing how much you're supposed to and how much to gauge of what was left of him from the tumor and the medication and everything else. But that's right. When I was kids or a planning a memorial next month and I'm just hoping it's not when I'm doing a speaking gig up in Boston, so I can go down to Virginia and pay my respects. You don't need to hear all that stuff. That'll just humanize me. Instead, let's get to this week's show where my guest and I stare down an asshole God. That guest is Shalom Auslander and his new book, Fat, a Memoir, is phenomenal. I loved it. I laugh my ass off multiple times. I have thought a lot about the realizations. Shalom brings into that book about the nature of the story. We have all been raised under and the shame and self-loathing and disgust we're raised with in our, we'll say, Judeo-Christian world and how we need to rewrite that story and about how pervasive misery can be and what it takes to change and change the world, but also change yourself. You guys know I go on and on about the nature of the question of whether a person can really change and Shalom gets into that and again, he's also hysterically funny in this book. It's not just some big cosmological or philosophic take on God, although that plays into it. Anyway, I usually go on and on about the guest's book in these intros. I am not gonna do that this time. You are gonna get an awful lot about why this book is so amazing from our conversation by itself. So just trust me, go get fat. That's F-E-H-Feh, a memoir. It's out now from Riverhead Books by Shalom Auslander. As caveats go, when Shalom mentions Phil, that is the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, who he was friends with and who features extensively in the memoir. They were gonna make a TV show together, which we'll talk about, but anyway, other caveat. We tried recording in a conference room at the hotel where he was staying. We got kicked out and had to go record in his room itself and that plays into the conversation. We're in a hotel, so there's a vacuum cleaner going on in the background, right out in the hall sometimes. And the housekeeper knocks at one point. I could have edited that out, but it's funnier the way we leave it in. Oh, and last thing, his animosity towards Paul Rudd. That comes from Paul Rudd playing the title role in the mini series, The Shrink Next Door, which that shrink was also Shalom's psychiatrist and the story that is portrayed in that mini series from one patient's perspective is what led to the disbarment of that man. And that story, Shalom's relationship with the psychiatrist and the guy's unrelated downfall, is all part of fair. It really is a remarkable book. I cannot recommend it highly enough and you're gonna find out why in just a minute. Here's Shalom's bio. Shalom Auslander was raised in Muncie, New York, nominated for the Corret Award for Writers Under 35. He has published articles in Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Tablet Magazine, The New Yorker and has had stories aired on NPR's This American Life. He is the author of the short story collection, Beware of God, The Memoir, Four Skins, Lament and the novel Hope, A Tragedy. He is the creator of Showtime's Happy-ish. He lives in Los Angeles. His new book is Feh, A Memoir. And now, the virtual memories conversation with Shalom Auslander. (upbeat music) - So where'd Feh come from? We'll start really vague in general, but you know. So Feh is a Yiddish word that I don't know where it comes from, but it means it's just what you say when something's disgusting. So like we're sitting here in this hotel in New York City and when you check in and you get in your room and it's full of roaches, you would say Feh. If you're a Yiddish disposition. So that's where it came from. But it was something that I realized I'd grown up with hearing, not just about roaches and shit on the street, but about people, about myself, about sin, about the non-Jewish world, about the kidding class who didn't keep Sabbath. Like it was just a hideously judgmental word. It was the worst thing you could say. A short, I mean, Fagalah was the worst, Fagalah meant gay. And that was, there's nothing is no getting over Fagalah. But Feh was just sort of like, you're just like intrinsically bad in an almost Calvinist kind of way. And so when I was starting this book and we can get into where the impetus for it came from, it was just the first thing that came to mind. It was just, yeah, I just, when I think of myself, or I think of the world, or I think of that guy in the car next to me with his music to the other thing, that's the feeling, it's just fat. And I was just at 52, when I started the book 51, it was just sort of, it was COVID, it was a lot of things, and I was just so tired of feeling that and hearing that voice and seeing it everywhere. It seemed to be that this thing that I hated from youth had become the culture of the world. All anyone did online, essentially. And in politics and on TV was to look at somebody else and say, Feh, you're bad for this, you're bad for that, you're bad for your color, you're bad for your race, no matter what it is, no matter what, in every direction. And it was just what I was calling a festival. It's just like, it's like everyone's shooting on everyone. And mostly themselves, when they weren't shooting on other people and I was just like, where does this come from, what a weird thing. - That's always been my defense mechanism. If I shit on myself, that allows me to shit on everybody else. Just take me a long time to get over that and have the, hey Gil, maybe not shitting on anybody would be a nice way to move forward. - Yeah, and the problem is when you do one, the other becomes easy, right? So I've always noticed that the times where I've been most that way about the world at large is the times where I felt worst about myself, right? Obviously. And the easier, so we kind of in a weird way in a very pure, tentacle sort of way, we're like, well, if we judge ourselves harshly, we'll do better. Right, we'll work harder. So, thus, the modern bookstore, where everything is how to maximize your whatever, how to do this, everything is a hack, everything can be improved, made faster. But the problem is when we get really good at doing that about ourselves, it becomes second nature to do it about everybody else. And when we're doing it about everybody else, we don't realize that we are doing it about ourselves as well, right? Like there are, there are those people who you think, well, they're just haters of other people. But I guarantee you, the people that they hate more than anybody are themselves. So it became this interesting question for me that was always there in my life, sort of going through therapy and trying to correct some of the shit from when I was a kid. But it all sort of started bubbling up more when I first met Phil and then the experience I had knowing him and in the years since. And then leading from that into COVID and Trump, and it was just, it was like, it was just these, this idea kept popping up over and over again that seemed larger than just, oh, I was told shitty stuff about myself and my particular religion and my particular community. And it started to seem like, am I the only one noticing this? Does anybody else give a shit? This seems so obvious to me. And yeah, and so I started to do some research and started to read a lot about story and the way story works and the way story affects us individually, and it just became this kind of like, okay, well, I don't know if I'm making it past this pandemic, I don't know what's gonna happen, but I gotta say this, this has, somebody's gotta start talking about this. - If the story at the root of everything is-- - You suck. - Yeah. - Yeah, we never quite get over that. - Yeah, and it's bizarre, it's utterly bizarre. And I write about this in the book where I started to do some reading and it's pretty clear to neuroscientists and anyone studying this, that story is our operating system, right? It's ROS, that's how we see the world, it's how we remember things. We're sitting here, you're gonna walk away with a story about this to tell people. I'll walk away with a story about it to tell me they may not match. - Oh, well, the story about not being able to do the conference room or whatever it is. - Yes, you know. - Or being thrown at the conference room. But story is the thing. We remember, we learn, we communicate, we raise our children with it, we judge things with it. And if you look at the sort of earth story of humanity, the oldest story is the story of you suck. It's the story we've been telling ourselves for thousands of years. God made you out of dirt. The first thing you did was steal from him. He threw your ass out. Your son tried to kill his brother or killed his brother. God said, fuck it, you're so horrible, I'm flooding everything except he made one mistake, he let one live. That guy raped his daughter. (laughing) And it just gets worse and worse and worse. And what's interesting is that when you start to, for me, I started to notice this story being told in places where you didn't expect it to be told. And Schopenhauer, a great atheist, but telling the same fucking story. I was reading at the time because it was COVID and it was a bestseller at the time, Yovanoa Harari species. It's actually arranged according to the Old Testament. And this is a bright guy with no, who's an atheist, right? But no awareness that way. You're just telling me the Bible story. You're just not saying Abraham and Moses. - But you're following the same mode and same template. - It's your awful, we never should have been here with the worst thing that ever happened, a creature of no significance, except that it shits on things. - And it's a bestseller. - Yeah. - Surprise. - So that's the curious part to me. Not that someone would say that. First of all, where does that story come from? But second of why do we want to hear it so much? Why are we so compelled by that? It doesn't seem to make sense. It doesn't seem to make sense that you would take a creature from birth and say you're the antagonist and they would go, okay. - I guess I'm damned. - I guess I'm bad. I guess I ruined everything. I guess, you know, the fall, it's my fault. So that was sort of where that all came from. And it still obsesses me. And I still feel that I still see it everywhere. I see it in every news story. I see it in every conflict. I see it in my own life. I see it, you know, among my kids, my friends, everything. It's just this, holy shit, this is such a weird thing. How did this happen? - When it becomes the entire framework, it's very difficult. - As you put it, you're not escaping the penal colony with Schopenhauer. The penal colony was, in that particular penal colony, was in a much, much larger one. - Yeah, Schopenhauer said. He said, "The whole world is this bonya. It's not just this one prison." And you're like, "Wow, to get help." You know, like it doesn't, I'm not, you know, I come from like, you know, pogromed and holocausted and inquisitioned people. So I'm not sitting here saying, "Aren't you in special?" But the opposite is just equally as weird. It's darker, it's just like, I'm not sure the glass is half empty or half full. I just know, yeah, there's probably some microscopic plastic in the water, so don't drink it. But it's better than dying thirst, right? Like there's mixes of things. And it took me a long while to get there. So it's very, I get really, really pissed off when I see another iteration of it. I see it, you know, I have teenage sons, but when they were younger, they'd be on YouTube or Insta for a half an hour and be miserable afterward. And these are very happy kids. And you're just like, "Well, what did you watch?" - Degradation machine. The whole thing is just to pull you into it. - Shame incorporated. - Yeah, it is. They watched a half hour of You Suck. And it doesn't say that, but it says, you know, my son at the time to say my older son was really into basketball. Practice, whatever, you know. As an adult, I'm like, "Dude, we're short Jews." - Yeah, there's only so far you're gonna get in this world with this. - Yeah, for anywhere we're in the owner's box. (laughing) - But tried really hard all that. And then, you know, oh, here's this kid who's in third grade in dunks. - Yeah. - And here's a kid who's in seventh grade and hits a thousand threes. And he's better than Steph Curry. And here's this and here's that. And they have 12 million followers and you've got nothing. So fuck you. And it's not inspiring. It's not uplifting. It's just because it's relentless. For my younger son, it was terror. It was in third grade, they're teaching him about climate change and now there's gonna be no planet when he's seven. And so curious, he goes online. And it's hard on the ice flow and here's the bear and the ice flow and here's how the sea levels are rising and you're fucked. And not only you fucked, again, Calvinist, you can't do anything about it. It's too late. Have a nice day. Click here to subscribe. (laughing) And so it's twisted as fuck. And again, I know there's shit going on. But there's no reason to fix it if we're already evil. Right, like why try? That's what I don't get about strict religion. If the odds of you getting penance for anything, for that from that psychotic asshole God is that slim and it's slim because Moses sinned once. I sinned once before getting out of bed in the morning. And he didn't get what he wanted. If you think there's no way you're gonna win, this is a Tony Soprano that doesn't give a fuck. There's no getting on his good side. And so you're like, yeah, so if we tell ourselves that story is the state of the world that we're in now, any surprise. - It reminds me why the theory of why the Gnostics were suppressed as hard as they were because this is exactly their mindset. Oh, we're in the realm of an evil God. And there is no winning out of this. And that's the Christian church. Like, no, no, actually, let's not say that. Let's not let anybody know. - Right. - Although the Kabbalists have their versions of this too, which again, you grew up with, I just read academically. - Yeah, but it's weird because like, you see religion in some cases on the decline, even if it's actually getting a political one thing versus mental, you know. There's this, but the story isn't. - Yeah, that's what I mean. The mental trust of that is still. - The story isn't in decline. So you see, oh, great news. You know, membership in churches is down. People aren't going as much. People don't say they didn't be living God, but they don't believe in any one thing. And yet the story of Yousak is stronger than ever. And so it's because it's this terrible poison. It's not that, and I know that for myself at 20 hearing this being an angry pessimist, I would have said, well, it's told because it's true. But what if that's not the case, right? What if at 20 I didn't know everything? Because it's not that I'm optimistic, it's just that pessimism has sort of let me down. (laughing) It's just that pessimism has not really led to anything. And so I'm just, on the one hand, I'm like, okay, well, I guess there's some good and organized religion losing its grip on people. But the story's only gained power, you know? So you read books on anything or whatever a book is anymore. What do people read now? Headlines. You read a headline. (laughing) - Yeah, they scroll through it. - Yeah, you read a brief headline and make a snap judgment about the world, but it's all shit. It's all like, I go to the gym and I'm like, I'd rather just get sick and old than have to sit on a treadmill and watch Wolf fucking Blitzer. - That's why I work out at home. I know space is a thing in LA, but at my house, it's literally dumbbells and a yoga mat downstairs. I'm like, I don't need to be around human beings. I'm just gonna do this by myself. - And you're like, what? This makes no sense. People are here to get better. This is literally a place where you want to feel better. - This mental-- - I don't want to see anybody watching it. I think it's a habit. Everyone's got their own phone. They're watching porn. They're doing whatever the fuck they want to do. But you have to have this screen on and it has to be this sickening ghoul who's clearly hiding an erection every time he says some bad news. It's fucking sick. And it doesn't matter if it's CNN or Fox. That's all bullshit. It's all the same story. And it's just bizarre. It's bizarre. I remember in the middle of COVID, as this is all going on in my head and you had to call ahead 'cause you only allowed one person in the store at a time and I remember walking around going, holy shit. No wonder nobody fucking reads anymore. The whole-- Every bookstore should just be called, you suck. Everything was about you suck. You suck on every side of the aisle. Up, down, left, right, you suck. No matter what you do. - These are our tips for getting ahead. - Yeah, not only are you a racist, if you think you're even more of a racist, like it's just like, it's Calvinism, I can't win. I'm a sinner no matter what I do. So the response is my response was to religion. Well then fuck you. Then shut the fuck up, I'm not gonna, I don't care. - I did enjoy, I don't know if it's an elogism or not, but misotheism. I really thought that's much better than atheism in terms of there is a god, but he's an asshole. Yeah, that's-- - That seems to point at something. I could kind of like understand that. Like, I've been doing this project of my own, just a video series called Ungodly, which is like going verse by verse through the Old Testament and saying, well, what lesson do we learn from this verse if God's the antagonist? If God is the bad guy, so it's good lessons from the bad God. And it's like, wow, when you do that, suddenly it's like, okay, so maybe the lesson is, if someone eats one of your apples, show the fuck out, right? Maybe anger isn't a good way to deal with things, right? That's the lesson, kids. You can go home now for Shabbos. Don't get pissed off because one part, deal with your anger, right? Whatever this story might be, hey, maybe when you tie your son to an altar and hold a knife over his neck, if you read the rest of the story, Isaac grows in to be a completely ineffectual failure. So maybe the story is, kids, what the lesson here is, is that when a bad person tells you to kill your son, make sure you put your family first. Wow, great lesson. Suddenly this book is a book I would wanna find in my hotel. - Yeah. (laughing) - Instead of this horror show. - I will say back in March or April, I was staying in the, I was staying in wehocking at a trade show here in the city and thought I would do the, let me just open the Gideon's up and just, just open something randomly, see if there's some sort of thing I can use for any sort of writing or monologue or something. And blanking on the, the verse I opened up to, but basically it was Israelites just massacring and massacring and hamstraining the, or stringing the horses and God hardened their enemies, hearts of the Israelis would go even harder on them. And it's just, it's like, wow, we're a couple of months into the war in Gaza. - This is really not breaking any new ground here. - It never does. - Let's just go killing God's name. - I'm always like, well, if you're gonna leave a book in my hotel room, what, how about, how about like Sedaris? - In Japan, it's Confucius. I was in a Japanese, then I opened up a, I will take, I mean, yes, they have a Book of Mormon or something over there too, but I will take this, this, you know, and give this a re-type and no idea. - Why don't you mention it all? How about like something by Edward Gory? Something funny? And then, you know, like, why not? Where did this idea come from that? We're gonna leave this book in your hotel room to remind you of how shitty you are. - So why a memoir in this case? Was there another form you looked at working in for this? - Yeah, the reason for memoir for me, anytime I've done that is because it is when the reality of it needs is important, right? So my first memoir was "Four Skin's Lament" and it was about my very twisted relationship with this personal God who was an asshole and trying to get over that. And I had written a lot of fiction trying to do the same thing, but ultimately you go, well, it's fiction, it's a character. No one really thinks that. And the whole point of that is no, I really do. And going out with it into the world, finding wow, lots of people really do. So it was the same thing with "FAT" where it was like, well, I could probably create a fiction and a character who's worrying about this or thinking about this or aware of this and what happens because of that. But I felt it was important to make it real, to for it to be, no, no, no, just so you know, this isn't made up, this is going on. And here's all the aspects of it. Here's where I see it. Here's where you'll see it if you look for it. Here's the danger. Here's what it does, it causes death. It causes suicide. It causes war. So we need to, this isn't fiction. This is no time for that. This is like, you know, this is a five alarm story fire. And the way it's-- - I'll say structure. It feels like a bunch of threads that we've into this picture that you're the common element within them, but the mode of writing, I suppose, or the storytelling model that you worked with, anything in mind, or was it just, let me start here and see what the sledge back turns into. - Let me start here. And then it was also just, I wanted the reader to have that same experience that I had of, so here's the thing that happened, beginning, middle, and end. And the next chapter might just be a fact. - In that mode of it, also, where there's just a paragraph or two for a chapter, and then, you know, 15 pages for the next, with a longer story, I thought was a, it made for a good read. - And it's also, it's just the way that it all occurred to me. So I'd be thinking about this story, thinking about something I was told. And then I wake up and I'm wondering why are people joining next door? It's just, it's just a bunch of fucking psychotics who are paranoid and angry. And then, just out of curiosity, finding out that the asshole who started is a multi-millionaire now. And Sean Hannity is a multi-millionaire. And Wolf Blitz, and at some point, you know, I watched the TED talk with Adichay, and it was like, oh, a single story, that's interesting. So I wanted it to sort of like be that, that kind of like, oh, once you start to realize that you're gonna start to see it, in lots of disparate places, that you might not expect, right? - I'll start again, Muncie. - I'll start again, Muncie, but maybe ending with, you know, Jonathan Swift, and species, or sapiens, and COVID. And just going, wow, there's a line here. There's a line here. - Well, say it is, it's not totally bleak readers. - There is a redemptive moment that it culminates in. I wanna say, you know, a Christ-like, - Act. - Not a Christian act, but something that embodies, at least what we like to think of as the, you know, if there was a Jesus, this would be one or two things that he did that would actually be amelatable. - Yeah. - How do you feel about, about, you know, including the note of, just the idea, and you don't make it as a explicitly Christian thing, or a Christ-like thing that occurs, but that sense of, you know, wanting to make sure there was redemption of some kind, or at least a sense of looking forward. - Well, because there is, because there is, the minute you start, so, without giving too much away, it ends up, you know, and as a writer who has put in a, and the G of Box, I was very aware that, wow, you're ending at a church. (laughing) This isn't gonna go-- - Wasn't gonna go into too much detail, but yeah. - It's not a typical church, it wasn't a typical person, and it wasn't a typical time. But the reason I think was, the reason I was open to it at that time was because I was questioning the story. So, it could have been any other place as well, but it was just that once you start, once you start to see the story, it's a very easy story to see through. You just have to acknowledge that that's the story. So, it's not particularly complicated. So, once I was becoming aware of this, and I saw it in myself, and people I knew in my life, and the damage it had done to some people, the damage I'd seen it do to the world, well, then all of a sudden, that fog starts to lift, because you're aware of it as a story. And as a story, you can go, well, just it can't be right, like, it's the same thing with the God story. Like, you read, there can be a God, but it can't be that God. Why would it be a dick? - Yeah. - Like, it doesn't make any sense, and it's the construct of terrified people, and the way fair is the construct of controlling people or angry people, and you start to go, oh, wait, it's a story. So, if I just put that story to the side for a minute, oh, well, here's someone giving a homeless person a dollar. Here's someone helping a blind woman across the street. Small things to begin with. You start to go, okay, that doesn't redeem our horrible sapien being, but it's okay. And then the next day, you start to see it a little bit more, and you start to question, wait a minute, like, okay, so I was on next door, I was online, and it's telling me that the world is ready to implode. We're all assholes. The assholes all wanna kill the other assholes, and there's no answer. And then you look out your window, and it's kind of a nice day. And people are greeting each other as they walk by, and someone makes a joke while you're at Whole Foods, or whatever it is, and you're like, wait, this is such a fucking disconnect, and can it just be about money? Can it just be 'cause of the clicks, maybe? Maybe, but even then, why do we wanna read it? It's like we're affirming something horrible about ourselves. And it's not even confession. It's not even towards some end of expiation, or now I've cleared myself, I can start over. It's just wallowing, and you're awful. And so it ends there, not because of the there, but because of everything that comes before it, because it opens your eyes to something, and you start to go, oh, well, that's kind of fucked up. - One of the ongoing threads throughout the book is your relationship with your psychiatrist, who we won't go into the whole story, but ends up becoming disbarred, and you lose your relationship with him. Did the loss of that relationship? - I don't wanna say help, but allow you to take that step. Had you thought about it in those terms of the-- - No, what it was was, in large part, that story was a fast story. The story told about this person, who literally saved the lives of thousands of people. And depending on who you listen to, or whatever, there was one incident. And look, everyone makes mistakes, but it was like, oh, wow, I was already thinking this. And then I sort of lost, so I haven't had a father, really. - This is what I'm getting at. I mean, having Ike, the psychiatrist, as a surrogate father figure, and then losing him as he did a few years before this, did that, well, what did that do to you, I guess? - So it was the manner in which it happened, right? So it wasn't just, he got hit by a truck one day. I was already starting to ask the question of this story, and I personally felt like he had been taken down by a femme machine, by a machine that pays for and amplifies fat. And you can call it whatever you want. In one version, it's cancel culture, and another it's something else. I myself don't want to know all the specifics, because I know them roughly enough to know that in the story of one person's life, and this is a Travis day, this was a moment where somebody who was done intense good was declared fat, and it was worth asking why, and was that just? And should Paul Rudd have said yes to the role without asking any questions? And it was one sort of, so it wasn't any kind of like, in and of itself, obviously had implications for me in my life, because that person was not part of my life, but it was the manner in which it took place that was so kind of like, wow, that's pretty crazy. You made one mistake, and however big, but it wasn't suggesting anything right or wrong. I'm just saying, this is someone for 40 years. Literally saved people's minds from this very story, including me, and to see it unravel that way was very shocking, especially to be living and working in LA, and how we had the time. - As the meeting machine takes the story and makes it into-- - And you're just like, wow, like, what am I a part of here? What, this isn't good, this is just, again, it was another like, yeah, there it is again, there's that, there's that, it's like in a, remember in Butch Cassidy, like, who are those guys, these men in black, on black horses, who every time they turn around, they're there, they're gaining on you, and that's what this story felt like, was like, who are these guys, like what? The stories everywhere, and when I tell people at a bar, at a coffee shop, I didn't know, they're all like, oh yeah, like they know, it's not even like a surprise, it's just like, they haven't questioned it, but they're, oh yeah, those are those guys, they're chasing us, they've been chasing me since I was born, and they wanna kill me, and they will if I let 'em catch up, right? But where are they, who paint these guys, who's, you know what I mean? And so it's tempting to kinda go, it's money, it's a clickbait machine, and yeah, that is there, but the story, the story predates all of that, so is it a control, is it, I don't know what it is, and I don't care, I just want the story to be revealed, as a story. - I will say, to branch into TV for a moment, watch one episode of that, didn't know the true story aspect of it, I forget the name of it, or is it the shrink neck store or something, whatever. Just felt kinda, not really comfortable with this show, didn't watch it. The other thing was, was going to watch Happy-ish to prepare for this, and the way you kind of wrote it off, literally the show that actually got produced in one line in the book made me think, chances are I don't need to sit down and watch that to have this conversation that we're going to have, so just so you know, where we're coming from. - Well, you know, I really liked it, and there was obviously a lot of tragedy mixed in with it, it would have been a different thing completely. - Basically, yeah. - The moment you introduced Philip Seymour Hoffman as we'll say a character in the book, but a figure in your life, there is that moment of what year is this taking place, 'cause this is all leading to something that's gonna be very, very, very bad. - Yeah, yeah. - Seeing how that progresses and seeing the relationship that you guys built and the tragedy of losing it. - And that was a big, that was a big, I mean, pre-tragedy, it was an eerie similarity in our lives. I was Orthodox Jewish as a kid. He was, I was Catholic, I was in Muncie in Rockland County, he was from Rochester, also not far away, and there was just a lot of similarities in our families, our siblings, our parents, and how they did or didn't relate to us. And he was very clearly, as I say, in the book, he was a feh. He was one of these people who you know was raised on that story and it got to them hard. And a lot of the characters he plays or played were feh. And it was, it always seemed to me that his art was going into a feh character and finding the unfair part, even in the worst situation. Like that was, at his best, that's what he was doing. - I'm a secret Mark for Senechteke in New York. I know it's a weird one, nobody ever makes it through the whole thing, but that's one of my all-tivers. - And I think he was really good at that because that really was him. That was what he spent his life trying to do with himself and ultimately I think failed for various reasons. But then again, his death and the way that was spun too, was just, it was like, oh, this beautiful artist, human being, fell apart, fell succumb to something. And so we're gonna just focus on that. And we're gonna run sickly pictures of him, Photoshop to make him look even sicker on the front page of the post and USA 10, everything else for weeks afterward. And we're basically just gonna run the headline feh. We're not gonna ask why and we're not gonna ask how. We're just gonna say feh and move on. And he's just another dumb junkie from Hollywood. Probably got what he deserved, let's move on. And it was like, to me like, here we go again, like here's an opportunity to talk about this story, to say where did this pain come from? Where did this view of himself come from? It's so unfair, it's unfair with anybody. You talk to somebody that you hate or you think you're gonna hate for more than 30 seconds and it's over. I went recently to some tiny little town in Mississippi and I was sure that everywhere I went, I was gonna get. Red hats and they'll see my name on my license and ask me to show me my horns and ask me to shapeshift and all the other stuff. And you know what, not fucking once. Everyone was just friendly and yeah, I don't know. They have Klan hoods in their closet, maybe they do. I don't know, but why assume that and why it was just normal people who you can just talk to. - It's like the Sacha Baron Cohen thing when he did the "Throw the Jew Down the Well" routine, again, Arizona or something and people took that as, oh, they're all anti-Semites and it was, no, they were trying to make an out-of-towner feel like he was welcome and that was, you know, that was what he was saying, like, oh boy, I guess we have to sing along with him. - But the cameras don't follow you into their cars on the way home going to shit, that was fucked up. - Yeah. - A lot of it is that because that's the story of that, right? You know? And so, you know, Phil was just sort of, he was just the most famous fan I ever knew, but he was one of the best people I ever knew. And it was, it was, it was at a time where I was starting to question that about myself. It's one of the reasons I wanted to do "Happy-ish" because it was about an industry advertising and marketing. - Which expenses? - That's 15 years or so, right? - And it's whole purposes to make you feel fat, right? You're not gonna buy whitening toothpaste unless you feel bad about your teeth, so we're gonna make you feel bad about your teeth by showing you people with better teeth. Like, it's just a very simple math, it's not clever. It's anti-human propaganda, right? And there's a lot of that. And so, that was why I wanted him to be in it. We were talking about, we met talking about a book of mine that he wanted to do, "Hope, A Tragedy," and as a film. And I was working on this at the time and thinking about the story and thinking about fat, and was just shocked that to meet someone who it was so on the surface. - And someone you'd consider a success, even though I'm sure he'd considered himself a object failure. - By every, at least, Western measure, right? And it just dripped off him. It was just so clear that, and when we would joke and laugh about it, about fat, about feeling that way, that was when he just, he had this laugh, this amazing, amazing, amazing laugh, when it was genuine, when it was like this, it was just Dionysian, it was just like, it was just like the gods themselves, laughing. - The whole thing back, and then the whole thing. - Yeah, and just in his whole body shaking, and it was, there was nothing he could do to stop it. I get the chills just thinking about it, and it was like, it came from a release of that story. It came from just laughing at that story. I didn't, I'm not a shrink, I can't fix it, I can't cure it, obviously. But just to be able to laugh at it, and just go, this is fucked up. And okay, who told me this? Was it the Old Testament? Was it the New Testament? Was it Mom? Was it Dad? Was it the Priest? Was it the Rabbi? Was it the Imam? It was somebody, right? You are not born hating yourself. You're just not, right? We're scared, we're terrified. We need a lot more raising than most animals. But we're not born hating ourselves. Someone put that in there. And what would the world be like if they hadn't? Like I just don't, I just don't get it. I don't get it even on a secular level, right? Like if you're telling me that the world's fucked, because we fucked it, and we pissed in the ocean. I know we pissed in the ocean, but if you're telling me we're fucked, then why would I stop pissing in the ocean? Like there's no upside to the story. And by the way, there are, if you look for it, they're hiding it, but if you look for it, there's lots of like, wow, a seven year old made a machine that cleans the water. Like wow, I don't know nobody about that. No preconceived notion that they're fucked. They just came up with this so we fix this. Problem when they found a great solution. And like, wow, some kid turned his iPhone into a plane that doesn't work on it. And you're just like, oh, where did that go? Why, I'm not looking for like, as a kid, right? When news was news or like a news program, there'd be 20, half hour long, 28 minutes of horror, and then a squirrel skiing, right? And I'm not looking for the squirrel skiing, but what's explained to me the 28 minutes of horror? Because I just, and now it's 24/7 horror. And everything feels like it's, since 2012, 2013, when all this social shit started, social media shit started, it's just, it's just exponentially gotten worse. Because those are the only stories being told. - But as you cite, post 9/11 also, luckily, we did not have Twitter and social media. We did have news feeds that were updating regularly. You and I both fell into the wheels within wheels, doom scroll, the world is ending, you know, this sort of apocalypse that mentally is very, very difficult to extricate yourself from. As I learned over a couple of years in the wake of that. Yeah, it's that sense of it's easier to be pissed off and outraged and to be callous about it, to demonstrate your callousness, I guess. Demonstrating earnestness without being performative, I guess, is the challenge. - Well, yeah, because that's just a performance. It's like, I think a lot of it also has to do with raising children to be totally honest. Like, we have a very, very close family. My wife and I both came from shitty backgrounds, let's just say. And very determined to not put our own kids through that. And so one of those, one of the elements of that was fast. So when I was, even before I kind of addressed it directly, I was aware of it. So when my kids would watch something on YouTube or hear something or whatever, my instinct was always to say yes, but. So a plane got hijacked and people died. I know it's horrible and things have to change. But that doesn't mean you don't go on planes, right? There's a billion of them every day and nothing happens. So, yes, let's talk about that one, but let's also. But you see what happens when they don't do that, when it just becomes abject terror, right? So I think having to find the unfair for my kids, even while I was thinking God, what a fucking load of shit you're selling them. Even as that's going on, I'm still finding it. And after a while, you're like, oh, well, I'm not really totally full of shit. Let's talk. I just made a good point. - This is my, the mission statement on my site for this, for the podcast, I lifted from the end of invisible cities by Talio Calvino, where I only just realized now in the finding the unfair is exactly how the book ends, where Marco Polo and the emperor who I'm blanking on are talking and the emperor realizes everything you've described is all leading down to Inferno and we're fucked. And Marco Polo's thing is, when you're in the middle of Inferno, you have to find the things that are not Inferno and give them space and let them grow. And that's, as I determined on November 10th, 2017, was largely the mission I had going forward after the election, or 2016, after the election, I was just like, why the hell am I even doing this? This is just this weird cultural side thing I do. And I realized after that election, I was like, I'm doing this because that happens and we need something that has no profit motive to it, has no clicks, my other story about getting away from the click culture, which I've talked about on the show before, getting diagnosed with leukemia is a great way to stop looking at your likes and clicks and everything else I discovered. - Really, imagine that. - Yeah, dormant, non-aggressive. And just two days ago, I had my most recent check-in where my numbers were fine. As another side, I will say that in the week of anxiety building up to a regular oncology check-in, this book is a great fucking job getting your mind up. I laughed my ass off reading a fair a whole bunch of times and thought, well, that certainly got my mind off of the white blood cell count and everything else. I'm gonna be doing it on Friday, but-- - Yeah, so basically, that's where I'm selling it as a cure for the leukemia. - Yeah, just a little bit of getting me away from the anxiety, good job there, Shalama. I'm happy for that. - Well, that is part of what it is, like when you start to look at it, it's horrible and stupid, but it's funny. - Yeah. - It's just like-- - And your advertising aside were gut-bustingly hysterical, so I'll give you that. I know they're bits and they're stick, but they really, really hit the set. - No, those were, yeah, sadly, it's all true, but it is this moment where you go, wait, when you start to realize it, it's kind of hilarious. And so, now I can go to the gym and I see Wolf with his earnest face, or Anderson, or whoever, and I find it funny. I can look at it and just kind of, not what they're saying, but here's a whole concept. So, I moved to LA 'cause I'm a schmuck, and we're in New York, and I came into town for some work, and I was at the gym the other day. They have the flight, and there's Wolf, and I gotta tell you, I only watched two minutes of it. Because I couldn't take it anymore, but I was left with the impression that I was, when I got to New York, I was gonna find Berlin in 1938. It was just footage of anti-Jewish, this, and red upside down and Hamas icons there, and you're just over and over and over, and I swear to you, I thought I was, I'm like, "What the fuck, why am I going there?" - They're gonna know they're gonna take one look at me. - Yeah, I'm gonna get off the plane and just go right on a train, like, "Listen, I'm not going in the shower. "I'm not falling for that one again." Like, it was just crazy, and you get here, and it's nothing like that. And then you start to go, "Wait, that's kind of funny." And if I look at it critically, then, I'm like, you know, they kept showing the same three seconds over and over and over and over and over. Like, I couldn't even, if I wanted to find the location of where that horror took place, that paint-centric horror happened, I couldn't find it. It would take me a year to find it. But it's like, that was the story. We'll be back with more after this. I want the fuck, go fuck yourself. - And then we're gonna sell you ads for nutritional supplements and all the other boner pills and everything else you need to-- - Then I picture him three hours later floating around in his infinity pool with his rose rice and going, "Oh, piece of shit. "You're fucking cool, you all are." - It's always been the if it bleeds at leads thing, which predates social media, but now it's, again, like you say, things are amplified in a way that's-- - It all bleeds. - Yeah. - And it's all your fault. That's the asterisk on it. It's bleeding 'cause you cut it. - Okay, we had a little break here because of some stuff we weren't supposed to talk about on Mike, but now we'll get back with a discussion of his novel, "Hope, A Tragedy." - The story is of a guy who moves to the woods to get away from his past and history and buys an old farmhouse with his family. Here's some noises up in the attic one night and goes up and he finds Anne Frank. And she's 82, she's working on her second book. And she's just a huge pain in the ass to him. And this is like the last thing he wants in his life. He moved to the woods to get away from all this shit and history. He actually moved to the one town left in the world where there is no history. Like that's their whole thing. Nobody slept here. No one-- - No. - Nothing happened here. You know that thing that happened with the revolution or not here, it didn't. That's a big sign on the way into town. Nothing happened here. And so of course, prices are through the roof. And he has to deal with her now and she's making crazy demands. He's trying to keep it quiet. She needs matzah to write. And there's no stores for 100 miles that sell matzah. (laughing) And, but it ends up actually becoming a very kind of moving. I mean, for me, the writing of that book was, I mean, they're all, they're all slogs emotionally. But that sort of began with me kind of, it's a fun, interesting story. For the book before that was a memoir for skins. And I went to, I got invited to what's called the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York to do a reading. And I was like, "Ah, I didn't even know there was one." Right on. And I get there and I'm like, I walk and I'm like, and the press person's there and the head or the museum and they're like, "Oh, welcome." And I'm gonna go around and I'm like, "Wait a minute, this is a fucking Holocaust museum." (laughing) - Technically Jewish heritage. - I had all the Jewish heritage. - I've been to every Holocaust museum on the planet. I'm not going anymore. And why would you call it that? - Yeah. - And they're like, "What do you mean?" I'm like, "Well, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, where's the Groucho Marks win?" Where's the Joey Ramon section? I want to go see that. Where's Spinoza? (laughing) - To quote the basket. You know, 5,000 years of Gory's history. - It's like, there's a lot to talk about, other than this. And so I was like, I decided, and then, and there was, you know, obviously always the 10 foot by 10 foot image of Anne. And I just wanted to sort of confront my, my sort of-- - Ambivalence. - Ambivalence, or not even, and typically toward-- - Yeah, I was gonna be kind and say ambivalence, but-- (laughing) - No, you grow up seeing her, and she'd become this symbol of your own future, your own miserable death. You're gonna die just like she did, at the end. And I was curious, and I started to reread her diary. And all the different, you redacted versions, and unredacted, and re-redacted, and everything else. And I was just like, "Wait a minute, this is nothing like the girl I was told about." - Right, this person is not the saintly martyr of our childhood, but-- - Yeah. - Not only is she sinful, she's badass. - Yeah. - She fought with her parents, she didn't like the religious kids at school, she wanted to be famous, she was into pop stars. This was like, that is such a more interesting character and story that I wanted to get to know. And I had this inkling, I just remember I had this inkling where I was like, you know, I think if she were alive today, she'd be probably pretty hateful toward the type of people who are telling that story. - Yeah. - And so I wanted to bring her back (laughing) and have her take on hate in the world, and religion, and the Middle East, and abortion, and everything, and see where she came out. And the closest sort of analog to me was Helen Keller, who we like to think of as the poor little blind girl, but no one talks about her radical leftist life. She was a badass, she wasn't just a little poor little Annie Sullivan doing letters in her hand. She was like out there, but we don't want that girl. We want the victim. - The sanitized. - Yeah, the little, the martyr, the Virgin Mary, right? So I think, and even in the book, Anne Frank says, "I'm the Jewish Jesus." But neither of those are real people, right? I think it's actually a really, really good time for it, post October 7, post all this post Trump to be at. - There's crossed post Trump. - Post Trump won. - Yeah, yeah. I'm still going post Trump. I'm also going, you know, Meteor or 2024, is my analogy. - Yeah, hey, look, I was Sanders. I was in that little crowd. - I have to work with him, work with his office occasionally, and that's an interesting, I'll tell you some stuff off my-- - I'm sure, I'm sure, but it's always the-- - But let me also, with the Anne Frank resurrection, I will say, feel attention with the Ghost Rider with any Philip Roth spirits, or was it totally your own father? - You know, it's really funny, as-- - Because his Anne Frank is just a project. No, thank you. No, thank you. - No, we're good. - Open with that. - The sense of-- - There's Anne. (laughing) - The sense of, you sound like you've actually made Anne Frank as a human being as opposed to Roth basically making an extension of Zirman's erotic needs. - Yeah, you know what's really interesting is we totally frank with you, I hadn't read it. - Yeah. - I read Portenoy. - I was conceived to Portenoy. (laughing) - Are your mothers a liver? - Well, yeah, I mean, she may as well have been. She'll never listen to this, well, I need to warn my dad, so, you know, I'll take care, yeah. - I read Portenoy, I thought, oh, it's interesting. I, you know, I was very, I was in the Yeshiva world, so it was fascinating to me that I didn't even want to read about it. But I was also reading Leonard Michaels and Singer, and they were more interesting, sort of, I didn't know cop, it was Jewish. (laughing) But there were people who I found more interesting, and so I kind of, after reading, and then I read Sabbath's Theater, and I think that was him at his best. - Yeah, I was gonna cite that earlier when we talked about FED that had you gone in the novel direction, that's the end point. - Yeah, yeah. - How could you die? Everything you hated was here. - Right. - It was kind of the culmination of that. - Yeah, yeah, and so, huge. - Yeah, and there was also, I don't know if you know, Heller, something happened. - Yeah. - Similar thing, and it just, the problem is in fiction, it's just, it's just a notice dive. - Yeah. - Right, and I didn't want to, I just didn't want to do that. So, I also thought Sabbath Theater was amazing, it was pure it, and I was just like, when I started, some of the other ones after, but I felt like it was, he was a moron, his sort of literary face, and I wasn't really interested in that, as much as I was interested in, you know, books and literature for me as an ultra-orthodox kid were devastating, there were bombs being set off. - And they were about permission. - Yeah. - And that's what I found fascinating, because you and I have a number of similarities, except you actually built a writing career, and I'm a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry. (laughing) - Right. - Yeah, that's why I'm broke. - Yeah, I take that in the positive, in my case. But that sense of giving yourself permission, or in my case, knowing your parents are in the background, that it's always something that's hamstraining you, and in your case, extricating yourself from all that, and giving yourself permission to write, and to write, rub a lazily, to really embrace the-- - The freedom of that, you know, and you look at novels now and I don't feel like, at least, there are a lot coming from other countries that were, I think, where there's more oppression, or more struggle, where the writing and the novels feel more like rebellion, like a weapon. - Yeah. - You know, as opposed to a story, or I'm gonna, wouldn't it be interesting if a liberal lived in the Midwest, or whatever it is, like, it's just, there's just an incendiary, it's an incendiary device, which is what I loved about it, because whether it was, whoever it was, they just spoke to me in that way. So, once Roth started doing what I felt was-- - Trying to get a bill? - Yeah, or comfortable, or, look, I love Becca, but I feel like at a certain point, post Pulitzer, he was writing for the critics, like, he was still doing the same thing, but it didn't have the same explosive energy that it seemed to have earlier. And that's, you know, cliche, I liked him when he was younger. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - But, you know, by the same token, you know, Voltaire wrote "Kendy" when he was 70. You know, "Servantes" wrote "Chiode" when it was 50s, which was ancient at that time. So, it doesn't have to happen that way, and some people just hang on to that fire. So, it was really funny, actually. I was on tour for the book when someone said to me, "Did Roth and Frank influence you at all?" And I just went, "Fuck! "Are you fucking kidding me? "Don't tell me he wrote a book "where a guy finds Anne Frank in his house." And she was like, "No, no, no, no, no. "It's more like a masturbatory thing." I'm like, "Ah, okay." - Oh, thank God, well, yeah, no. And again, it's a very different, if you have to reading the ghost writer, she does not really have a character, like most women in Roth's books. And I was a big Roth acolyte, et cetera, blah, blah, blah. But I can recognize the limitations. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was great for what Roth was great for me young because I just didn't know anyone cared. But there was also, I don't know if you know, Leonard Michaels. - You mentioned, but I don't recall it. - Leonard Michaels wrote short stories, and I remember reading them on this bus full of ultra-orthodox Jews that traveled back and forth between Times Square and Muncie. And I'd sit in the back with a bag full of pornography and pot and reading books that I bought at a used bookstore. - And I was gonna tell you, because I spent chunk of my time going up and down Route 59 over the years. There is a porno joint in on '59, and I might still be there. - CNN. - I guess I don't recall the name of it. - Is that one of the strip club? - No, no, there's an actual adult video store across from where the flea market used to be in any way. So you go right across where the jack in the box was, the across from that and the traffic light. - And it's still called jack in the box. - Yeah, unfortunately. You know how many people they poison and kill, they'll keep the brain going. - That's a good name for a porn shot. - Yeah, too. Especially the one you described with the video works. - That's such a good name. - But you just switched to that, they do better. - But yes, there was an adult video 'cause he's writing. Wow, you have to go all the way to New York, but I think that place in Route 59 was already open. - Now it wasn't the only way. - It would have been late '80s. - That was like there's a local video store behind the curtain of shame. - Yes, where you have to go back and, and again, I don't know anything about that. - Oh, well, what's all this about? - Yeah. - And then you like have to cover it with like Tequila Sunrise and somebody's shitty movie, and then when you get to the front, but you know, I think I just want the one in it. - Yeah, just the one in the middle. (laughing) - Well, let me ask you, you mentioned memoir, you've done short stories, novels, as well as TV writing and non-fiction articles. Favorite mode? Or mode you feel most comfortable? - Well, the thing that my heart is most is novels, just because it's so free. I mean, it's, you know, all fiction is non-fiction and non-fiction is fiction, et cetera. I would say the scale is probably more connected to the need for collaboration, which is, which has the same, I think, graph as the amount of money behind it. The more money there is in that industry, the shittier the work, which is why the Hollywood is the shittiest. And that's not criticism of Hollywood writers who I've known. - No, but it's what the process does. - They're absolute, they're genius craftspeople, but there's always a schmuck in a suit who says, "Well, that's not gonna make back my 100 million." And I'm the guy in the room going, "Well, but I only wanted you to spend 500,000." And like, "No, no, we need blah, blah, blah." I'm like, "Well, now we're fucked "because it's too much money, "and I'm gonna go edit it down and turn it into crap." So it's this sort of, you know, McDonald's has to make shitty food because there's 12,000 of them, and they have a lot to cover. I'd rather work at the local burger place that can risk something. And, you know, you can't shoot a short film for what even a big publisher can put on a medium-sized book, right? So immediately it doesn't need, the math is in your favor. I know it's a closed world to a lot of writers, and that's its own problem. But once in, you're not faced with Roy from accounting as much to me. I'm sure there's still the dollars don't matter. And I'm sure there's, I've had enough authors where the, either the book came out right at the beginning of the pandemic, which was great, five years of my fucking life are gone, or they had turnover in management with the publicists all left, and there's no one here to sell my book. - Yeah, and that happened. And look, my novel previous to this was "Mother for Dinner," which was a real, there's a total pastic of identity politics came out, like in middle of COVID. I remember reading, doing the audiobook record, in my apartment, a guy came in a hazmat suit to hang up, you know, to have all the blankets sound. And I was just like, oh, this is so fucking ridiculous. It would have to happen to me. But my publisher's saying, yeah, well, you know what? It happened to Polanyak's book, and it happened to like everyone's got books coming out, and only thing people are reading are about Trump or the pandemic. And so that's gonna happen, but I think in Hollywood, when that happens, you're done forever. It's your fault. - Reading the write-ups about the Elaine May biography, and you make Ishtar and you never work again. - Right, yeah. - And it's like, well, she had an artistic vision in a career, and I'm sure there were aspects that are beyond just the, you're a woman who failed once, and therefore you're done, but you're out there. You don't have stories of, yeah. - Yeah, I keep waiting for the '70s films to come back, and it feels like there should be guerrilla filmmaking now, 'cause there's so much tech and so many. You don't really need the studio there, but it's impossible to distribute. It's not impossible to distribute, it's impossible for the audience to fight. - To drop in the ocean. So someone is gonna figure that out, about how to amplify it or distribute it properly, and then we can all be there when they put the for rent sign in front of Amazon studios in Culper City, 'cause it's a lovely house. I live there, and it's like, it's this beautiful old man-shiny white building in the middle of a city, and you're like, that is the nicest shit factory I've ever seen. - It bums me out that we didn't do this, I was in LA two weekends ago. I just didn't have time to read the book before that and set this whole thing up, 'cause you know, I suspect seeing you in LA would be even more, more, and I talked about this in a recent episode. Like when Art Spiegelman sent the cartoonist Ben Catcher, who was very Borschfeldt, New York, and sent him to cover a surfing competition in Hawaii for a details magazine, it's like, that takes inspiration. Yeah, I'm taking you to a completely wrong environment and you're going there, so you'll see in the middle. - We're gonna put David Foster-Walls on a cruise. - Yeah, still one of the, well, but for me, the best thing he wrote. - Yeah, that's what I was trying to do. Definitely in the world of the best things. Yeah. - We mentioned a sort of antipathy towards Roth. Bruce J. Friedman as a stronger influence. - I thought that the bridge was funnier, it wasn't more of an influence, I don't think either of them were huge. I mean, I found out for Bruce-- - He's from the Beckett and Kafka. - Yeah, I found out about Bruce because so many writers that I liked were angry with him for coming up with the term black humor. He did a, he did this collection and it was called, you know, and I have it, it's like, and it's great. It's like whatever, Heller and Bonnegett and some of his stuff. It was seen by someone who was like, "Wait, they'll put me in that box." But it's not a terrible box to be in, but-- - He was one of my all-time great getts. I sat down with him and he told me at the beginning, I lost my hearing aid yesterday, so they're gonna have to speak up. And that was something, okay, I will talk as loudly as I have to get Bruce J. Freeman to respond. - No, he was, to me, he was really funny and really smart. And I think just for me, 'cause I grew up in such a fucking shtettle, like anytime anything veered too close to that world, my instinct was like, okay, that's fucking awesome. How do I do that? - Yeah. - In the real world, in the larger world, right? And there is that whole tension with writing, right? Like, you want it to be universal, but it has to start with the particular, and in the particular fund, the universal, and the universally fund, and which comes first and all that. But I always felt like, I just felt there was great writing and great, I still feel I was at McNally, the bookstore downtown. And I love that place because it's the only bookstore that's divided by region, it's kind of amazing. So you can go, oh, what's happening in China? And there's like 800 books that you never knew about, and you start to see all these great things, and I have the same feeling reading some of them, which was like, wow, I get it. And I'm looking for, it's like I'm scavenging for techniques and ways to sort of take from these little tent and bring it into the world, because they're so powerful and they're so good. So how do you, and that's going to sound ironic coming because I'm always been put in the Jew box, but it's not my intent to be in the same way that it wasn't for some of the Black Umarists or whatever. But influence on writing for me is mostly Irish, other than Kafka, who is the main one. And to be honest, comedians, you know, Dick Gregory, it was a huge, huge influence for me. - It still is, I just think, for all the wackiness, I mean, what do you expect? Look at the guy's mind, it was way too sharp to be on this planet, you know? Or Lenny Bruce or Bill Hicks or Eddie Murphy in his time. I remember listening to a bootleg cassette of Eddie Murphy. When I was like eight years old, I got passed around, somehow I got a copy of it. Delirious, I think, or raw, one of them. And I was so naive that, and it made me laugh so hard, I thought, I'm gonna play this for mom. Yeah, I sure love this. And it was like, what is that you're listening to? Where did you get that, who gave it to you? No more cassettes. So, or frankly, Bugs Bunny, there's influences for writers that aren't always writing. When I hear a writer, when they were young, like what I forget who it was, was like writing letters to updike or something. I'm just like, that's a little narrow. And you're in your sphere of influence, like, I don't know, like, there's a lot of Linus Van Pelt in what I write, and Schultz was genius. I remember I wrote for Esquire for a little bit. They used to have this year in dubious achievements. Oh, I remember those, yeah, yeah. And I think I wrote, they brought me in to write the last one. The very, they didn't know his last one, it was like, 1990, or 2000, something like that. And I was like, okay, and I did the whole thing myself. And one of the things I wanted to do, 'cause Schultz had died that year. So, I wanted to do a four by four Schultz cartoon, you know, Peanuts cartoon, where the characters hear that he died. And it was called Man Search for Schultz, you know, the take off on Man Search for Meaning. And it was like, Charlie Brown finds out, and Lucy finds out, and Linus finds out, and they all have their different reactions to their God dying. So, Linus is free to cross-dress, and Snoopy can have sex with whatever. And but Charlie is always very conflicted and, you know, but he realizes after discussion with Linus that he's free and to be whatever he wants, and the end frame is just him on the phone with a couple of strippers, like on a party line. And they were like, we're gonna need some conclusions from Allied or United Arab, whoever it was who owned them, I forget. And they decided wisely to just go directly to his widow. Yeah, Jane knows, yeah, yeah. And it was one of the biggest honors of my life that she wrote back saying he would have loved this, absolutely go do it. And I was like, oh my God, it doesn't get any better than that. You know, like, to take the super dark humor and find out that, you know, Sparky would have loved this. It was just like, oh my God, this is it. Every cartoonist I have recorded with who's had an interaction with Schultz, it is like meeting God for all of them. They all had to be, I got to sit down, and the God was self-effacing, and the kindest guy in the world. Again, the anti-fair, you know. Yeah, and there's a lot of, and my writing, I think, 'cause that was when I was very young, but by the time I was a little older, Calvin and Hobbes was a huge, huge influence, mainly Bill Watterson's a fucking genius. And just about every frame of that is perfect. It's so, so smart and caring and good. And in fact, I have someone online, I forget who is, what his name was, I wish I could remember. I'll let you know 'cause he deserves the nod, but he took Watterson's graduation speech to Kenyon or wherever he went, and put it to Watterson-type-ish strip with the father telling his son this speech throughout, about, you know, follow your heart, you're not gonna get paid as much, but you'll have a soul. And at the end, they're go sledding together, like in Calvin, huh? And I had it printed on vinyl, and it's being violent things in our house, 'cause I just wanted my kids to see it, 'cause that's the gospel, like that's holy. - I was gonna say it weirdly, we'll get to the theological aspect, another absent god, a guy who did not want public acclaim, nobody knew it, I have two friends who worked with him on an exhibition, so they do know what he looks like. They went out to lunch with him once and realized no one else in this entire building has any idea who we're sitting with at this table, and they would all freak the fuck out if they knew. And that's why he's an absent god. He just, I created my thing, I don't want public acclaim. - I don't want plushies, I don't want bumper stickers, I don't want the video game, he was just, I-- - So you've emulated the avoiding success thing, I'm just kidding. - Yes, that's my role model. - I tried to follow failures, is it? No, but he was clearly not, I mean, I revere it, I bought the box set from each of my kids when they're, like that's their bar mitzvah present. - Yeah, it's our gospel. It really is something you can, if I had kids, this would be exactly the, this will get you pretty far with understanding how to, what the world's gonna be like and how you should be learning as a good person. - I've been strange because I'll spend four years on a book and just 300 pages and then he'll say it in three frames. - Yeah. (laughing) And more like of all, I'm like, oh fuck you, duck death. - So may I have the family respond to fat? Have they-- - I haven't been in touch with my family for-- - Have your immediate family been in response to-- - Okay, so-- - If it's not imposing on the first website. - No, no, my wife is my first reader, so she, which is frustrating for her because I ruin every book by showing her an early draft. - In which she's performing that same role in the book itself, in this case, where she's critiquing yours-- - She's the editor of my life, she is the wise one, although she would say not. - It's funny we both do substacks because we have to, but they're funny because each one kind of is like, it's like, yeah, I'm nuts, but this I don't have to-- - Commenting on the other-- - This other half of me keeps me sane, but the other half is saying, I'm nuts, that one keeps me sane. So it's, I think it's a very symbiotic relationship. My children don't read me. - No, that's a good thing, I figure the last thing they need is, oh my god, a dad wrote, yeah. - No, I think it started with my oldest who took a copy of my first memoir, which opens up with me because I'm terrified of God and retribution, picturing Orley, my wife dead in a car wreck. That's the opening, maybe. - And you've read that and he's like, after her page, he's stopped, he's like, I don't need to know this. I just, he was very wise at a young age and so now, but what's funny now is that they're older, their friends read it and they're like, oh, you should read this, it's about a family of cannibal Americans living in Brooklyn and it's really funny and they're like, yeah, nope, not gonna happen. Not gonna happen, that's just, they're, it's quite, they're lifesavers for me. There's two boys, they just, I learned about myself, I learned about life and them and-- - And how you wish it could have been? - Yeah, and I think there's a lot of like, wait, I didn't tell them to hate themselves and they don't. And when they do, it's usually because someone out there has made them feel that way. And I know that's part of being human, we judge ourselves and all that. But there's so much of everything that I've done in writing that changed the moment. Even like, just writing in general, I didn't actually start putting things down on paper in full story form until we were already kind of thinking about, maybe we're sane enough to have a child, maybe we won't transfer all our misery onto another living being, let's see how that goes. And then that worked out and so few years later, we had another. But it's just very, sometimes if I go online enough or I listen to wolf enough, I go, what a selfish act to bring them into this horrible world. But the reality, and this is probably at the core of, is they don't see it that way. If I gave them an option, would you rather have never been born, they'd look at me like, I was fucking crazy. What are you talking about? Look how it's all. - It's the best way, yeah. - Yeah, yeah, there's shit. And you know, one son goes to college so he's watching Gaza protests and the others, you know, dealing with his issues as a teenager in this social media world. And it's, there's ups and downs, of course, but there's no doubt. They're not gonna be anti-natalists when they grow up. Because that requires a real, some damage. I talk about in the book, this syndrome where people, it's a neurological disorder, extremely rare. - Oh, the one where blind people think they can see? - Yeah. - I thought that was tremendous. I mean, keeping the theme of blindness if you have throughout the book, I thought that was a great one. - Yeah, and it's real. And it's not, they're not lying, they're not pretending. They're, if you put them on a lie detector, nope, there's a light over there, suitcase over there, some cockroaches in the corner, if you tell them. This is all, and then they get up and walk into a wall. And you say, what happened? They're like, I guess I was looking in the wrong direction. My mistake. And they're convinced they can see. And all they know about it is two things. There's no cure except to tell people, no, this is what's really happening. And that it comes from trauma. It's not genetic, it doesn't just happen. Something hit you in the head. And I feel like that was my life story and maybe humanity's story. We got hit in the head by this horrible story. And we're still suffering the repercussions of it. And we still think we can see. We're still sure that the world outside that window is the way we see it. And it's, it's because we keep getting hit in the head by the story every day, every day. Try and go one day without hearing it. You won't be able to make it. You won't make it out your front door. If you check your phone, it's gonna, you're gonna get hit in the head. You can hear me rolling my eyes. - Yeah, I'm trying to think of it as a, try and hear that sound effect, that crack of a wooden bat on a human skull every time it happens. And then at the end of the day, ask yourself why you're depressed. Because someone's been bashing you over the head with a horrible fucking story. And it's, I don't think that we're gonna get better. And it's such a horrible story that it says that anything but that horrible story is foolish, naive, sentimental, right? I remember reading a Foster Wallace piece. I think it was in his, it was an essay about television or irony or something where you're suggesting that maybe the most radical thing in years to come, the most radical thing you could be is sentimental. - Yeah, that earnestness. - Yeah, and it's hard, it's hard for me to be that way. And when I read it, I don't like it. But what I, but what I found writing fell was that I don't have to be pro earnestness. I could just be anti-misery. - I'll take that. - You know, like fuck you and your fucking negativity. I'm sick of your shit. I'm not gonna run around sticking flowers in the end of rifles, but, and I know shit is bad, but man, you're not fucking helping. Just shut the fuck up. Because I've been online and I've been outside and they don't fucking match at all. - There is the, and that's when I close the browser or close the app. - Yeah, and you know, it's really interesting. Like the minute you're aware of it, you see it everywhere. Like, there was some rain in LA. It's just fucking rain, right? The media. - It's a rain bomb, the apocalypse is coming. You're gonna flush away the streets. - So I'm getting calls from friends back in New York. Are you okay? And I'm like, wow, you really bought it. You're a sucker. And then two weeks later, I'm calling them, so I'm, how's the blizzard? 'Cause I saw the blizzard, the arctic snowblastifier, whatever. It's all porn. - The whole vortex is coming in. - There's no storm. You lived here for your whole life. It's, you know, there's no storm. - There's three or four inches. And yeah, we dug it out and we're fine. - And it's never, it's never right. It's just always bad. - They turn the faces of the moon into the most important goddamn thing in the world. - Yeah. - So, no, this is a double twin blood moon that's coming out this week. You have to go see it. - Yeah, I remember, I remember it's a very close friend who sadly passed away, but during COVID, I remember he called me one day to say, "Hey, I know you don't read the news, "but you might want to check out The Times." There's a story about a possible vaccine that they've had some success with this vaccine, which everyone was just looking for, you know. And I remember picking up the newspaper 'cause you still could back then. And it was like on page 30. And the cover story was killer bees making their way into California. And they're just like, "Oh, fuck yourself." Go fuck yourself. There's no excuse for this. You are actively taking part in the destruction of this world. Stop it, just stop it. I don't need a happy newspaper. I don't fucking need a newspaper at all. Like I joke with my friends. I try my best to live in a bubble. I don't, I'm not on social. I don't read the news and you know what? Because of its pervasiveness, I know everything. Leaks in. I don't watch anything and I know exactly what's going on, exactly how many people were killed in Gaza. I know exactly what Trump said and didn't say, "I know what happened in the court case "and I don't read anything." It's everywhere. As I say in Feds, like... Yeah, the anti-email, don't include any of this in emails. You need to edit still. And still. "Hey, let's fuck with him." Yeah, but as I say in it, it's like, it's, so what you get told is, "Oh, you're living with your head in the sand." Or you can't kill the messenger. The kill the messenger thing comes from a time where one messenger came to a king and said bad things are happening and he didn't want to listen. Today, there are 12 billion messengers and they're crawling all over your fucking house. They're like insects. They're coming through the doors, through the windows. You can't get away from them. So you know what? I might want to kill a messenger or two. And maybe I want a house where some of the messengers don't get in because this isn't that. What we're dealing with now is like guns. It's not, no one could have imagined when they wrote rules about these things. What would transpire? And because we're God-makers, as a species, we will never change what was written, right? Even when we say it's a living document, but we're not going to change it, right? Or you can't live with your head in the sand. Well, you know what? That's a reference to an ostrich, which is the most successful mammal in the history of the world. It's existed for thousands of years. So maybe it knows something we don't know. (laughing) You know what? I tried not doing ostrich for a little bit. I'm going to give ostrich a genericism a shot. The dirt looks okay. I'll wait for my head in there. Because you know what? Even with your head in the sand today, you're going to know everything. You're going to know everything. Trust me. Trust me. You'll keep getting pinged. You'll keep getting pinged, and the minute you take your head out for a drink of water, your best friend in the world is going to say, did you hear what happened in blah, blah, blah? Did you hear about the bomb in the building and the place? Great. Now, what am I supposed to do? Yeah, I can't do anything about it. What do you want me to do? I'm angry. I'll send a letter. I'll go to a protest. I will perform. I will perform my outreach on the internet. Yeah, I'll put a little black square on my social thing and act like a hero. And I get wanting, I get it. You've got to try and fix things. But I think one of the things that need fixing is the story that tells us there's no fixing this, right? In the book, I quote Bill Hicks, who was like a sort of a role model for me when I was younger. And he had a line who were a virus with shoes. And I thought it was very funny when I was 20. And now, 20 years later, I think, well-- 30? Yeah, shut up. Sorry, dude. We're seeing the age show. I'm going to own that. Now, five years later, I think, well, maybe the virus is the story that tells us we're a virus with shoes. What if that's the virus? And we've just been unaware of it. Imagine that. We emerge from some muck. We develop driverless cars. We wipe ourselves out, and it's over. And the punchline is that we were killed by a story. The storytelling animal was killed by a story. If that's God's writing, it's pretty good. It's pretty fucking good. I got to give it to him. That's kind of funny. That's kind of genius. But we're doing it. We're doing it. And it's at least worth saying, on some level, on some scale, in a book, on a podcast, wherever I can, just ask yourself the question. Just ask yourself the question. Is this story fucked up? I don't care who's telling it to you. It could be a rabbi, it could be a scientist. Is this fucked up? Because it is. And it's everywhere. So as a parent, I find myself, like, my major job is keeping the story balanced for my kids. Not blacked out. I'm not the guy who says you can't have a phone. It's just understand what you're seeing. Understand what it's going. Yeah, if it bleeds at least, this is not good. I remember being when my son was very young. We were walking around the streets of the city, and he's like, what are all these people who's building doing? And I'm like, they're lying. They're lying for a living. Trust me, I'm doing it. That was Daddy's job. I was doing it. People who write magazines are doing it. The people who write ads are doing it. They're figuring out a way to get you to talk about these things. And for whatever reason, we slow down on the highway when there's a crash, right? So that was always the thing I was told. That's what we do is we point out the crash on the highway. And because we slow down, it's because we're ghastly, where we want to see blood. But what if we're slowing down because we all wondered, somebody need help? Because no one ever considers that. But I've seen people stop and get out of their cars to help. Most people's instinct, right? I remember having to tell my younger son this because he'd watched some Apocalypse film, right? And Hollywood Apocalypse films are all the same. That should happen. Humans make it worse. They pay fracture, go into tribes, kill each other, eat their babies, the end. But people who work in disaster areas will tell you it's the complete opposite. Everyone pulls together and figures out how it is. And when it comes together, this is bullshit. Yes, there were people in New Orleans shooting from buildings. Those are the most people. Most people? Yeah. We're in robo to try to help their neighbors. I always tell the story, and it always makes me cry when I tell it, about the three black students or dropouts who were petty criminals, et cetera, storm hits. And the three of them stole school buses and just loaded up everybody they could and drove to Houston. It's amazing. And that was the-- Right. And the headline is, yeah, three steel buses. Right. And it's one of those, like, wow, their lives were defined in a certain way. And they just took it and said, oh, fuck it. Yeah. But they're going to do an hour on the news about corrupt years. And there's just no fixing them. Once they steal cars, they'll steal buses. The NOPD is shooting mentally disabled people out of the experiment. And they shoot at everybody? They did that. They also burned criminal to death in the car to cover up some theft they were engaging. It was Nora. Nora wants PD to be a-- Yeah. Here's a similar thing. I can't-- I get all that, and I lived in the city with cops, my whole life. But I also know a lot of really great cops. Oh, yeah. So I can't-- I can't get behind the ACAB thing. All cops are bastards. No. Not all cops are bastards, and not all people suck. It's our responsibility. It's our responsibility to not get taken into that sort of thinking. That's easy. Your cynicism doesn't make you clever. I thought it did when I was younger. But cynicism doesn't make you smart or clever. It just makes you lazy. That's it. I'm going with that end of invisible cities is my mission statement again. My big question that I always ask people-- and I didn't tell you last night when I was texting you about this-- what are you reading? What am I reading? Which sounds like it's a very warm momentous question. I just went to the bookstore and bought a whole bunch of books. I was going to tell you there's a McNally Jackson over at Rock or Fellow Center, too, so if you're walking, you can head right over. Yeah, OK. It's a nice store, too. It's the same thing, a nice vibe and really good. Well, these days, I usually-- I'm usually writing, and I don't like to read when I write, because I find that like-- Yeah, it infects you. If I read Breakfast of Champions, I start writing Breakfast of Champions. Yeah, I mean, as much as I love it, I just can't do it, because I morph into that. I'm a shapeshifter, I'm a Jew, you know? Well, as an aside, before we get to the reading question, you have a page in the book of I should have done this. I should have done that. The rhythms of it feel like Colney Drey. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, I-- yes. Very much a-- you know, forgive us this. You're beating your breast. For sure, that's a very astute point. I didn't think of it. Not a conscious thing? OK, because to me, it was the-- oh, that's the religious thing that has embedded way back in his brain, just came out on the page in that-- Absolutely right, that's a very good point. OK, so it wasn't a conscious point. No, and you know, I was really into a system of a down, the metal group, and if you listen to them, like I remember I got into them, and I was playing them one day, and my wife was like, is that a Jewish band? Because you can hear the Armenian old rhythms, right? The old R&B guys did the same thing. They took church music, but made it about going to the club and getting late, and they got a lot of shit for it, gospel tunes, you know? So I think that does happen without intent. It's just like, yeah, that's the soup. You're going to taste it and go, oh, I'll get a little-- Yeah, I'm feeling a little bit-- That's supposed to-- this crossed with that as all the teachers have to go. And the academics do after the fact. Oh, see, here's what he did. Right. And it's like, no, I just kind of sat down and vomited, and you're picking out that, oh, yeah, chicken for dinner. I didn't sit there. Oh, yeah, I didn't make that up. But I'm trying to think, fiction-wise, like, the person I've been reading-- I recently did a-- let's do it this way. Personally, I was most compelled to do a shelf read on recently. It was a British writer, Robert Sherman, if I'm pronouncing it. Maybe Sherman, because it's spelled that way. Who writes just fantastically smart, dark, funny stories like they've never read before. They're really-- who's really an impressive writer. And then there's just writers that I know keep up with what they're writing. I'll always see what they're-- Do you have much relationship with writers? Not really. There's a handful. But I always-- I didn't get that vibe from the book, where then I talked to Michael Chabon about what I was thinking. There wasn't that sort of-- No. Now, I think Murakami writes about this in his last book, where most writers don't get along with other writers. Yeah, but they fake it. Yeah, for damn. For blurbs. Yeah, it's all career aspiration. But maybe you're not supposed to. It's a type of-- I can't imagine an artist saying that way. It just doesn't-- there's a-- I guess, at least in my sort of reverential idea of what an artist is, whether it's writing or-- Yeah. It's someone-- And I saw his side of the pack. It's the little-- it's the fawn off to the side that everyone's going to say, oh, fuck it, it's not going to make it, but somehow it does. That's a writer. [LAUGHTER] Usually with a leopard right on its tail. And yeah, so he's the guy who I read a couple of things. Actually, a reviewer from the Irish Times mentioned him to me. And I was like, oh, I'll give it a shot. And I just went right through all of it. So he's definitely worth reading. And otherwise, just a couple of contemporary-- Not really, I mean, honestly, people I find most interesting these days are Middle Eastern or Chinese, just because I think they're dealing with so much more, and there's so much ancientness. It's not even a question of politics. It's not like, oh, well, only the writers come out of repression, so whatever. I mean, it's a repression everywhere. I was going through that with Eastern Europe where-- Yeah. There were writers, critics, who felt that the Eastern European writers in the '70s, they're the only genuine writers because they were the ones fighting, and Roth's take was-- it doesn't explain why they all want to come here. They're not happy that they're under that oppression. They really rather be-- Right. But for me, I think it's because of the ancientness of it. And just the alienness of culture tends to-- The clash of the modern and the old. So it's not like, oh, because dictatorship or anything like that. It's just like, oh, to me, I can relate to finding myself with way too much history. Just baggage up the wazoo, don't do this, don't do that, you owe this, you owe that. In this world, and in this particularly modern world, and the desire for, I guess, individuation, or some sense of freedom, and done in a playful, novelistic way where they're not trying to be-- see, I have a problem with seriousness, right? With melancholy, like forced. Like, it's a little bit like the fester, like, it's not helping. I remember I wrote about this in "Fap," but I had this discussion with Phil. One day I was just in a bad mood. It was like, because production's a nightmare, and I was away from my family, and I was unhappy. And we were in a production van going to a location, and he had just finished doing "Death of a Salesman" on Broadway. And it just took a lot out of him, because it's a motherfucker, right? And he was talking about Arthur Miller as a genius. I'm like, oh, fuck Arthur Miller. And he goes, what? He's like, what? I'm like, he thought I was driving. I'm like, no, fuck Arthur, fucking Miller. He's like, he's laughing. He's like, what's your problem with Arthur Miller? I'm like, because I don't-- commits me to jump off the roof doesn't make you a genius. You know what? I know life sucks. I don't need Arthur to tell me that. Give me two hours at Lincoln Center, and I'll make you fucking jump off a roof. It's not hard. Give me a reason to live. Tell me that it sucks, but it's funny. Gallows humor, right? Like, the guys and two guys are next to each other, and burning in hell, and one says this, and the other says that, like, that speaks to me. Like, in hell, you can still laugh. No matter what they do, you can still laugh, right? So I have a problem with, like, that kind of thing. And what I'm finding from a lot of, whether it's Iranian, Lebanese, Israeli, and Chinese writers, like, they dress all this stuff, but with such creativity and such a fuck you. Like, I guess that's what it is, that seriousness to me feels like giving up. Do you know what I mean? I get you. It feels like, oh, always me. My mother was that way. Like, I don't-- I'm not impressed, right? It's just standing up. You know, it was the Bukowski thing. What matters most is how well you walk through the fire, right? So I'm going to walk through it laughing. Like, my feeling is, like, if God is the asshole that you all tell me he is, well, when I die, and I meet him face to face, and he says, you're going to hell, I can at least say, fuck you, asshole, I laughed. Yeah. [LAUGHTER] I won. Shalav, I look forward to the next book. I also look forward to a couple of years from now discovering you've started, like, an anti-feck cult. And you're, like, the leader of this whole thing. That's my vision of sort of where this is going. That's really why I'm in New York. And I can see that. That works where we get the church of Scientology, just down the street. I can convince anybody, if shit, I can do it. Right. Thanks so much for coming on. This has been a blast. And thank you for this book, because, well, like I said, in the particular straits I was in for the week leading up to it, this book was an awfully good-- Well, I'm so personally glad you got a clear bill to help. If I came in with you guys, you're going to believe your book comes out, then I've got cancer. I can go, and you have a press I can get. Thanks so much, man. Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING] And that was Shalom Uslander. Go get his new memoir, Thet. It's from Riverside Books. It is out now. I hope you got some idea why I love this goddamn book so much. And what Shalom's writer voice is like, both in terms of the humor and the-- I don't want to say earnestness, but the depth of it all, what he's really fighting for in the course of this book, it's on fire. And well, there are a ton of laughs. I think it'll make you not just try to reframe and maybe fix your approach to life, but to maybe try and reach out and fix that bigger story we're all trapped in. When you really step back and look at it the way he kind of portrays it here, there's a lot that doesn't make sense and a lot that dominates the way we act on a daily basis that just emiserates us all. So go get fat out now. Now, as Shalom said, he is not on social media, which, as we all know, is a good thing. But he does have a substack called fetal position. That is at shalomoslander.substack.com. And his website is also shalomoslander. In both cases, it is all one word spelled just like it sounds. S-H-A-L-O-M-A-U-S-L-A-N-D-E-R. I'll have a link to those in the show and episode notes for this one, along with a link to fat. Now, you can support the virtual memory show by telling other people about it. Let them know there's this podcast comes out every week with interesting conversations with fascinating people, occasionally a little profane, which is also fun. You can also help out the show by telling me what you like and don't like about it, or who you'd like to hear me record with, or what movie, or TV show, or book, or piece of music, or theater, art exhibition, comic, whatever. You think I should check out and turn listeners on too. You can do that by sending me an email, DM, if we're connected on Instagram, or Blue Sky, letter, or postcard. I love postcards. I mail out a postcard every day, which is kind of a fun practice to be in. You can get my mailing address from the end of the newsletter that I send out twice a week. It's there for that reason. You can also leave a message on my Google voice number. That's 973-869-9659. That goes directly to voicemail, so you don't have to worry about getting stuck in an awkward conversation with me. And messages can be up to three minutes long, so go any longer than that. It'll cut you off. Just call back and leave a second message. And let me know if it'd be OK to include a piece of your message in an upcoming episode of the show. You might have something interesting to share with listeners, but I'd never run something like that without the speaker's permission. So let me know. Now, if you've got money to spare, don't give it to me. I mean, it's nice when people contribute to the-- there's a link in the newsletters where people can contribute, and there's a Patreon and blah, blah, blah. But really, my job treats me just fine. You should be helping other people and other institutions who need-- when it comes to people, you can go through, go fund me, Patreon, Kickstarter, crowd funder, Indiegogo, and all those crowdfunding platforms, where you'll be able to find people who need help, make in rent, or medical bills, or car payments, or vet bills, getting an artistic project going. There might be something where just a couple of dollars from you can make a real difference in their lives. So look for those opportunities when you can. And when it comes to institutions, I give to my local food bank and the World Central Kitchen every month. I make targeted election contributions happen to make one this past weekend, but also give to Planned Parenthood, Freedom Funds. There are a lot of things where, if you've got a little money to spare, you can help make a difference in the world. So I hope you will. Our music for this episode is "Fella" by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. To visit my archives to check out my episode with Hal from the summer of 2018 and learn more about his art and painting. And you can listen to his music at soundcloud.com/mayforth. And that's M-A-Y, the number four, T-H. And that's it for this week's episode of "The Virtual Memories Show." Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next week with another great conversation. You can subscribe to "The Virtual Memories Show" and download past episodes at the iTunes Store. You can also find all our episodes and get on our email list at either of our websites, vmspod.com, or chimeraupsgira.com/vm. You can also follow "The Virtual Memories Show" on Twitter and Instagram at vmspod. At virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com and on YouTube, Spotify and TuneIn.com by searching for "Virtual Memories Show." And if you like this podcast, please tell your pals, talk it up on social media, and go to iTunes, look up the "Virtual Memories Show" and leave a rating and maybe a review for us. It all goes to helping us build a bigger audience. You've been listening to "The Virtual Memories Show." I'm your host, Gil Roth. Keep reading, keep making art, and keep the conversation going. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]