(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you're listening to a weekly podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. You can subscribe to the show on iTunes, and you can find past episodes, get on our email list, and make a donation to the show at our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm. You can also find us on Twitter at VMSPod at facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow and at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. I'm recording this week's intro from a hotel room in Columbus, Ohio. I decided to come out here from New Jersey for a quick getaway because I have the dumbest idea of vacations, I guess. In this case, I came out here to see the new exhibitions at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum on the campus of Ohio State University. They just opened twin exhibitions at work by Bill Watterson, the cartoonist who did Calvin and Hobbes, and Richard Thompson, whose cul-de-sac is, I think, the best post-Calvin and Hobbes comic strip around. Mr. Thompson developed Parkinson's disease a few years ago and had to retire from cartooning. We're hoping to get together to record last year, but his health really precluded that from happening. I'm still hoping to meet him on a Washington DC trip sometime just to thank him for the joy his work has brought me. But next best thing, I came out to Columbus to see his work and that of Mr. Watterson. It's really a neat pair of exhibitions. For both of them, you get to see a lot of the, well, the in-process comics work and in Watterson's case, you see some of the early pitches he made to the syndicates. There's some commentary from him and the captions all along the walls. And with Mr. Thompson, you just see an amazing, amazing artist at work in a lot of both the comic strips, the spot illustrations, portraits, and other things that he's done. And overall, if you love the art of cartooning and it's both drawing and writing, you should make a pilgrimage out here to Columbus and see the Billy Ireland Library. The two exhibitions for Watterson and Thompson will be running together through August. You can find out more about the library at cartoons.osu.edu. And that brings us to this week's episode. My guest this time around is Tova Mervis, who was the author of three novels, the newly published Visible City, and by newly, I mean like a week ago, as well as the outside world and the ladies auxiliary. That last one was a national bestseller, my mom read it. So, you know, it's a sign that it's good. Also, Jewey. Tova's essays have appeared in a number of anthologies and newspapers, including The New York Times, Boston Globe Magazine, commentary, good housekeeping, and poets and writers. And her fiction's been broadcast on national public radio. She's been a scholar in residence at the Hadassa Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University and visiting scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. She lives in Newton, Massachusetts with her three children, but she was in New York City for her book tour for Visible City, and that's when we got together. I will now make an admission. When Tova's publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, sent me Visible City to see if I'd be interested in doing an interview, I had some skepticism. At first glance, I had the notion that this was a novel essentially about mommy culture in the upper west side of New York, and I really thought, man, those are some tone deaf publicists. But I gave the book a read and was really pleased to discover how wrong I was. Visible City does focus on a dissatisfied mother of a couple of toddlers in the upper west side, but it's much bigger than that. And really, the book doesn't follow easy paths, and it manages to grow in scope and velocity in ways that really impress the heck out of me. I found myself really drawn into the workings of the novel and the characters, and it far more than I was expecting. So I let the publisher know that I'd love to interview Ms. Mervis and then proceeded to ask her almost nothing about the book in our half hour conversation. So that's why I'm telling you right now that it's a good book. I don't know if I give enough of an indication of that in our podcast, but you guys are used to that by now. So if it's not clear from the interview itself, I think Visible City is quite a rewarding novel, and my mother loved the ladies' auxiliary. Now, this interview is only about half an hour long. Ms. Mervis speaks quickly, and well, I had my afternoon coffee about 30 seconds before we started recording, so things were a little high speed. So that being the case, I've decided to give you guys a little bonus this time around. In January, I wrote this essay monologue during my trip to England, and I've gone back a few times to polish it up, but each time I do that, I just keep adding more material. So I have decided to break the cycle and record a reading of it, and that starts shortly after my talk with Ms. Mervis. The monologue's about 10 minutes long and incredibly boring. Just indulge me, okay? And now, the virtual memories conversation with Tofa Mervis, author of Visible City. (upbeat music) What aspects of New York came into focus for you when you moved away to Massachusetts? Well, I guess you always get to see a place better when you no longer live there. And for me, what I missed most about living in New York was the sense of watching people. I felt like I missed the constant sense of that other people's lives were taking place all around you. Living in a Boston suburb, I felt like I lived closed off in my house, in my yard, or in my car. And I really longed for that sense of walking down Broadway and passing people or looking out my windows and catching little snippets of other people's lives. I feel like that is such a city experience that is really unique to living among so many people all at once. And there's nothing remotely comfortable where you are at this point? I guess, you know, if I look up my car window as I drive by people at 30 miles an hour, but for me, there wasn't that same sense that you step out of your house and you're surrounded by people. I feel like in a city you are constantly engaged with strangers and constantly interacting. And to walk down Broadway is to always feel that something unexpected could happen. And I really crave that. It was one of the big pleasures for me of living in a city and it was one of the hardest adjustments for me to moving out of the city. - Would you say it's what you miss most about New York or was it something more specific? - Definitely what I miss most. - Some people have the coniches. - Right, it wasn't that, it was not the food, it was walking. - And specifically Upper West Side or? - I do, I feel like, you know, everyone has their own New York and for me, the Upper West Side was really what epitomized Manhattan. I was never a big fan of Midtown or, you know, I feel like I rarely went below 72nd Street. I have to say, having small kids when I lived here, it was anywhere we could walk to. And so the parks of Tindall Park and Riverside, north towards Columbia, that area was really what I loved. - And Zabars is a line of demarcation. - Sure, sure, exactly. Don't know below Zabars. - The writing of the book, you'd mentioned in some interviews, took about eight years or so from beginning to end. - It took about, I started writing it 10 years ago, which is sort of a shocking number for me when I think back about what happened over those 10 years, how did it take so long? But the book evolved slowly. It started off with a woman watching her neighbors from her window. And from there I moved to other characters and developed it. And in some ways it took so long because I have small children. But I think mostly it took so long because I wanted to interweave many different characters. And I also had to be willing, I think, to push past this sense of what my characters were going to do. I had to let them free in some ways and unleash them. And so I think that took a long time for me to be ready to finish the book. - What was that sense in which they surprised you? Did you recall an exact moment where it really turned? - I think I used to always scribble notes to myself on my draft, Unleash Nina. She was my main character. And I would be like, what does that mean exactly? But I would say it over and over. And I felt like I set up a scenario where all of my characters were unhappy in one way or another. They were all watching other people as opposed to looking inward at their own lives. But I didn't know what people do about that. I felt like while I was writing a realistic novel, and I think some part of me believed that no one actually acts on their unhappiness. Everyone just sort of ruminates or thinks about it. - I should have seen my old man's midlife crisis. - In the 70s. - Exactly, right. Then I discovered, actually, you know what? People do things. I discovered that in my own life. And I discovered that for my characters also. And I think I had to be willing to say they make changes. They don't just stay where they are. And I wanted to let them wrestle, really, with what is comfortable about keeping things the same. There's an enormous comfort in, even when we're unhappy, maintaining a status quo. Because to make change is enormously scary. And I wanted my characters to sort of jump off that ledge and be willing to make changes, which is what they do in different ways over the course of the book. - And at the risk of crossing over into the personal, you yourself went through some significant changes in recent years. I, the book centers around couples that are exploring the peripheries of marriage and what it all means. And you had a recent piece in the New York Times about getting an orthodox divorce and a Huffington Post piece on nine terribly dysfunctional couples. - It's nice to be an expert on something, I guess. - So how much of the book was a working out of your own? - The book is not autobiographical in that it's not my marriage, but certainly my own sense of unhappiness infuses the book. And I think that for many years, I stewed in unhappiness, but didn't think I would ever do anything about it. And over the past few years, discovered that actually people do things about unhappiness and that I was willing to also. And so I think the book is really my attempt to look honestly at what draws people together and what pushes them apart. And what happens when it's so hard to see people close to us, that we think we know someone and we don't, or to discover that the life we've created, that we follow the path we're supposed to follow, supposed to in quotes. And then discover it doesn't lead us where we want to go, or to say, you know, one of my characters who's in her late 20s feels like she can push that rewind button before she makes permanent decisions. And I felt like how many of us have that wish sometimes that we could undo decisions or start over. And so those questions were very much on my mind, both in the book and in my own life. - Dare I ask outside of divorce, what other conclusions did you reach about the way people live or how we reify, I suppose? - I think that people live with a lot of unhappiness. I think that one of the things I'm always interested in as a novelist is that gap between how we present ourselves on the outside and how we exist on the inside. I feel like if I had to name one thing that interests me most as a writer, I would say that is that, that it's so easy to be fooled by everyone else's facades, right? Everyone else's lives are perfect. Only mine is filled with this mess and this complication and the things I think about in the middle of the night or the things I worry about. But everyone else sails through. And of course, that's the lie. It's the lie we tell each other everywhere. But I felt like I wanted to give voice to the sense that if you peek behind those facades, if you peer in people's emotional windows, you find great, great vast areas of uncertainty and doubt and desire and unhappiness and betrayal and all the emotions that make up our human portrait. And I feel like that in some ways living in that place is what teaches me the most about myself and also about people, about what it means to live among people. And the ways that two people don't see things the same way, right? I mean, one person's urge for freedom is another person's betrayal and how that I think is the impossibility really of life with people, but it's also inevitable, really. I shudder to ask in the novel writing, creating your own world sense, do you wish you'd married later in life? And it's not not worth anything about the kids or anything like that. Right, right, of course, you know, you could redo. I got married when I was 22 and I don't think I had any idea yet who I was or who I wanted to be. I got married at the beginning of my trajectory and I think that's a scary place to get married because one of the things I believe in so much is that we all grow and change and that's always the gamble with marriage, right? You know, how will we both grow and change? Will we grow in the same direction? And I think back to my 22-year-old self, I don't think I knew, I don't think I wanted to know who I might become. I wanted to stay within a certain world. I very much wanted to be what I felt like I was supposed to be and I think that that force was so powerful to fit into this image of what I thought was who I was and I think that life teaches us, we don't know who we're going to become and we can't predict it but it's, you know, that feeling that you have to hold back, that you can't be yourself, that you might think one way but the counter voice says you can't think that way. I think it's a very damaging way to live. - You're raised orthodox Jewish. How did your relationship to Judaism change over the course of, well, over the course of your life but over the course of your marriage to this? I'm starting to not talk about the books. - That's fine. - I realize, and I have more questions about that. - That's fine, don't worry there. Well, I think my relationship to Judaism because I'm an orthodox Jewish has always evolving and maybe, you know, I think in some ways we over religious grappling always needs to be evolving. I don't think that we do anyone any favors when we only can think one thing or we have to stay in a place we are because I think that things become stagnant and I don't think it's honest to say that what I thought then is what I must think now and I think a lot about the idea of journeys and growth and I don't think you can go on a journey where you already determine what the ending has to be. I don't think that's a real journey. And so for me, my relationship to Judaism evolves and I certainly went from being very strictly inside the orthodox community and really adhering to orthodox Jewish law in a very strict way to now really a sense of, I don't know what I would call where I am now. I think I sort of like that yet that it doesn't have a name or a label or definition. I usually go with Zen Judaism but nobody falls for that. Exactly, sort of this global sense of figuring it out or finding or searching or, you know, I think I'm still on the stage of letting go also of maybe not being before I can figure out what I'm going to be but it's always evolving and it's complicated and it's, you know, I think that my Jewish upbringing is always very close to who I am and it's so imprinted on me. So some parts, even if I don't affiliate that way or identify, I'm still shaped by it. So in some ways I'm always part of that world. You did study Talmud once upon a time. Do you think that's informed or influenced your writing? Well, I think one of the things that I really credit my Jewish education with is a real love of texts with a sense that these ancient texts speak to the president. There's this belief that the texts are not these old books that we once have but that they are in constant conversation with now and I think I do feel like I gained this love of the written word from that in this sense. Also, maybe ironically that you can argue with texts that one opinion does battle with another opinion and then you bring in a third voice, that sense of cacophony of opinion and that is something that I always value about my education. And beyond Judaism, what writers do you think influenced you the most? Well, I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. Someone had a group of Southern writers for like as the first writers I loved. I loved Adora Welty and Larry O'Connor, that sense of voice. I feel like Adora Welty's voice just jumps off a page where you feel her women that she writes about, I hear them in my head and also the strong sense of place which is important to me whatever I write about. And now, you know, I love Philip Roth. I feel like there's no writer that makes me feel as caught up in a narrative, as riveted by the prose, as Philip Roth. I love Alice Monroe. I love, I read sort of randomly almost widely. I love Jeffery Eugenides, Virgin Suicide. It was a book that really shaped me early on as a writer. And what point did you decide this was the career for you? When I was young, I was always one of those kids who loved to read. I was always someone who, you know, hold up on the couch for hours at a time reading. I have no idea what you're talking about. Right, exactly. You know, that sort of don't make you start reading, please, kind of, or faking being sick so I could finish a book. And then I always loved to write, but I don't think I ever thought about it seriously until college. And I studied at Columbia. One of my teachers was Mary Gordon, who's a wonderful novelist who really influenced me to take fiction seriously. And she gave me the best piece of writing advice I'd ever gotten. And she said, I was complaining my senior year of college that I didn't have ample time to write. And she just looked me in the eye and said, "If you're a writer, then you write." And it was so clear and no frill. And I hear that voice to this day, this sense of so much of fiction writing is sitting down and writing. And after that, I really felt like this was what I wanted to pursue. And of course, I had no idea what would come of it. I feel like you never know with fiction writing. It's hardly a clear professional path. But I applied to the creative writing program at Columbia. And I wrote, there I wrote, was an early version of my first novel. And managed to grow from that into? I did, I did many different versions and many drafts. And I ended up, I also was an intern at a literary agency, which was far smarter than it was a far smarter move than I realized. It was really just a way to have a summer job. And I realized from working there what an agent did. I knew nothing at all about publishing. And there was one agent in that office that I really loved. And I worked at The Courage after I'd finished revising the ladies' auxiliary to ask her to read it. And she liked it and she sold it. And it was like a dream. It felt, I felt like I wrote it with no expectation whatsoever that it would ever be published. And your first two novels deal pretty explicitly with Jewish culture and the lives of Jews, where this one visible city, obviously taking place in the Upper West Side, is backgrounded in Jews. But it's less explicitly Jew-y. I guess. Was that a conscious decision on your part? It wasn't. Or was it already moved into the background? I think that it's funny. I think so much of my early writing of a book is a conscious decision. I feel like I start with a few snippets. And so my first two books were very much about the Orthodox Jewish world I grew up in. And when I started Physical City, I was very much involved in that world. And I never made the explicit decision that it wasn't going to be a Jewish novel. I just started with this idea of windows and watching people. And I think along the way, I expected at some point it was going to take a turn and somehow end up becoming more Jewish. But it didn't really happen. It took me into a different direction. I got interested in stained glass and urban explorers and people who sneak into these sealed off places. And the Jewish piece came in in one character in a small way. But it didn't really become particular to the novel. And I think that for all that the content is not explicitly Jewish, someone said to me, you have a therapist, a lawyer, an academic on the Upper West Side. We know your characters are Jewish. And I feel like it's Jewish in that way. And I feel like it's the same person who wrote those earlier books. It's still my own-- the lenses of my Jewish eyes, where I'm so steep in that world, are still present, even if it's not as explicit in the book itself. Now, I haven't read your earlier books. But is there a level of caddiness to Memphis society versus orthodox Jewish society? Because I'm sort of envisioning like designing women, but greater wigs and stuff. It's funny, whenever people hear I'm from Memphis, the first response I always got for years was, I didn't know there were Jews in Memphis, the sort of shock. And on one hand, it's an anomaly. But other way, it meets orthodox Judaism and southern culture meet beautifully. I feel like there's such a melding of social norms. In the South, there's a way we do things, and a way we don't do things. And in orthodox Judaism, there's a way we do things, and a way we don't do things. And I feel like they're both worlds that are very well structured. They have rules that you are expected to follow them if you want to be one of us. And so I grew up as this cocktail of those two worlds, and where they're both so strong. And so I think one of the things I knew about growing up in Memphis was, you don't say what you think. It's just implied. When "Ladies, I'm so glad it came out." It was a big news in Memphis. And people were upset, or they heard I had written a not-nice book about the community, or people weren't sure if it was good or bad, or nice or not nice. But no one ever said anything explicitly to me. People just smiled at me and said, we heard you wrote a novel. And I knew exactly what that meant. I knew exactly how to read between those lines. What do you feel it was more difficult to extricate yourself from, or at least to grow from the southerners, or the strictures of orthodoxy? Southerners was easier to shed. I felt like, after a few years of New York, I felt like Memphis is always, in some ways, my home, but not where I was from anymore. It stopped being a place that shaped me. It feels like a part of my past. And for many years, I said, y'all, that was the one remnant of it. And even that is gone now. And when I'm back there, I regain that sense of connection. And I think I have a longing for it, a longing to have that sense of being connected somewhere and being so rooted. I'm a sixth-generation Memphian. And so I grew up with this sense that you are from here. It's not just that you happen to live here. And that's a sense I haven't managed to recover. This is where I must live. I feel much more transient now. I come from the uprooted Jews. I'm first-generation American. Mom was London. Dad was Romania. They spilled back to Ukraine and Germany and everywhere. I realize, after years of reading Philip Roth, that that Jewishness is very, very different from my Jewishness. And we have a whole lot of different perspectives that we can call. Well, still everybody on the outside just looks at us and we're Jews. Exactly. Yeah. Italia, Covino, influence at all. I'm sort of hoping with the title of Visible City. Yes, I love invisible cities. And it's funny. I went looking for the title. And I guess I had invisible cities in the back of my mind, in some sense. But I went actively looking. I didn't have a title. And I saw the phrase "visible city" in my book. And I thought, oh, that's right. And then I went back to reread Invisible Cities. And it just opened up a world. I love the play, imagine it this way. Imagine a city that way. And in some ways, I felt like, well, this is my imagining of a city. I'm going to imagine it this way. And do you think you came up with the right city? Or at least the right city for you? Yeah, I mean, it's funny. People still wanted to ask me if Invisible City could have written about another city? And maybe. But for me, the upper west side of Manhattan feels so part of the book. It's hard to imagine it any other way. I feel like it is so tied to this particular place. And I guess we all carry our own cities. I mean, the upper west side that I conjure my mind is not the one that exists outside anymore. And the 10 years of writing it, the city has changed. And new buildings have gone up. But I think we all hold on to our own versions of when we think back to my neighborhood. It might be one that exists more fully in our memory. But I have a Manhattan that lives in my mind all the time. How much did the city change over those 10 years? A lot. And one of the things I was interested-- I was interested in the low hundreds, that neighborhood of the upper west side, where these big apartment buildings were going up. And as I was writing it, there was a battle over two new buildings that were being built right off of Broadway in the low hundreds. And there was a lot of neighborhood opposition. And so I sort of followed the neighborhood battle about that. And questions about, will this change the character of the neighborhood? And will this change the foot traffic and just the visual skyline of our neighborhood to have this huge glass towers among the brownstones? And those questions were really interesting to me in writing the book. And I spent a lot of time learning about and thinking about historical preservation. And I felt there there was the same potion poll about when is change important and when do we want to keep things the same. And I felt like these battles that were taking place about buildings and public spaces are taking place in our personal lives as well. I thought it was compelling at the one character who doesn't really seem to mind the buildings going up, is the one who's lived in the area the longest. Right. There's assumption we have to all be opposed to it. But I don't think that's true. People are not as attached to the way it was. Or maybe people who've lived there the longest have seen these neighborhoods go through so many evolutions that for Leon, my character, who doesn't mind this big tower, he feels like he's seen many versions of the Upper West Side come and go. And so here's a new iteration of the Upper West Side. As long as it's not one of those Frank Gary monstrosities, we have a few blocks out of here, I guess. That's permissible. How did you come across the symbol of stained glass that sort of ties together most of the book? Well, it's interesting. I've always been fascinated by windows. Being a window watcher, I always love to take pictures of things through windows. So windows were sort of very central to me always in thinking about the book. And I guess I got interested in stained glass in two ways. One of them is my now ex-husband was really interested in John Lafarge and Tiffany stained glass. And so that was a piece of the book that we shared, this sort of bittersweet realization that he gifted this piece to me of the book. And then I sort of started to learn a lot about stained glass. And what became interesting to me about stained glass was it's a window that, of course, we don't see through. It doesn't offer the vantage point, but it requires light to shine through it in order for it to become-- to illuminate it and to see the colors. And I also thought a lot about the way that a novel is like a stained glass window. I felt like just looking at a stained glass window with the number of pieces assembled to make this whole. I felt like that's what writing a novel feels like to me. Every day, I feel like I would put in one tiny little pane of glass. And so I wanted something that my character would think is hidden in one of the buildings. And so that was sort of the plot that I devised, the sense that idea that something could be hiding just out of sight but present. And I felt like that was true in so many things in the city where I really love the idea of ghost subway stations where we ride the subway underground and pass by these old stations that were once in use and some of them are really beautiful. But we don't even know they're there. And so I look for many different ways in the book to have these closed off spaces in the city. And then I always go back to in our emotional lives the parts of ourselves that don't get enough light or that people don't get to see. Who are you reading? Who am I reading? Well, right now I am reading The Centive Pine by Lara Vapignar. She's a Russian-American writer I really like. I just finished reading Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter. I recently read Where You Go Bernadette by Maria Stemple. I read somewhat randomly I feel like. Some of them is it's whatever catches my interest. Donatard is on my next to be read list. Everybody's. Exactly. Everyone's to be read list. Since I read in Binges, I'll read like all of Donatard. I had not read her other two books either. Yes, I'm woefully not educated in Donatard. So I feel like I'm going to read all of Donatard next. It was a college read, The Secret History, which was fine because I just come back from a semester or summer at a rather similar school to the one that The Secret History takes place in, which I was glad we had no back-an-allias and murders. I'm not giving anything away. Right, exactly. That's what I'll be doing for the next month or so. I'll be having a Donatard festival. I guess you can tie the Southern thing to that too. Exactly, exactly. And what are you working on? I know the new book has just come out now, but you want to talk about that? Yeah, I am working on two new things, which is sort of odd for me to work on two things at once. I'm working on, I'm loath to even say the word, but a memoir. I'll try and make myself say it. I have a block against actually using that word, but I'm writing sort of based, I've written a lot of non-fiction essays in the past year, and I'm really interested in writing, I'll call it a longer non-fiction piece, so I should get around my memoir version word to that word, but-- Creative non-fiction. Creative non-fiction, extended essay, book length essay, maybe I'll call it-- about religion and divorce. And I'm really interested in writing about religious transformation and the way, you know, asking the question of how do you, in your 40s, discover what you actually believe in, and what of the past can you shed, and of a religious upbringing, stays with you no matter where you go. And so, maybe like an expansion of the New York Times, I say I wrote about my religious divorce. And I'm also working on another novel. I feel like I always have to be working on something fiction. I feel like there's such freedom in being able to invent. Which, non-fiction doesn't allow you to, you know, to whatever, to the best of your ability, you're obligated to tell it as it was, and everyone sees things differently and will have a different version of what was, but I feel like my obligation in non-fiction is to stick as closely as in my capacity to what happened, or to what I think happened. But in fiction, you can go anywhere. And so, I'm writing a novel set in Newton, Massachusetts, where I live, and it's the first idea I've had to write about Boston. I have not really wanted to write about Boston, but someone told me a story about a lake that's at the center of Newton called Crystal Lake. And there's always an argument among neighbors, but who's allowed to use the lake, and where you can swim or not, and what's private property and public property. But there's sort of a local urban myth that people swim across the lake in the middle of the night. And that idea just was so intriguing to me. I imagine these sort of stayed suburban Newton people sneaking out of their house to swim at night. And so, that sort of became the birth of the book. And I'm interested in writing about religious passion or lack thereof, and about teenage angst, I guess, and about, you know, coming up with a book piece, you know, but I'm interested in two neighbors who are feuding with one another also. And so, it feels like, you know, trying to assemble my next thing last, or picking up a piece here, a piece there. I'm not sure it's all gonna end up, but at the point I'm gathering with little pieces. - And your kids are getting old enough that you can spend a little more time unbrokenly working on this stuff. - There's always a snow day, or a sick day, or a teacher conference day, but in general, I mean, my children are 15, 11, and six now, so there's a little bit more continuity. And I think so much of writing with kids is not just the time and the day, but space inside my head to really focus and sink in deeply. And that definitely, as kids get older, it becomes easier to do. - And what was the response like to your New York Times piece about getting a divorce? And what was the family response in particular? - Well, you know, I worked on the essay for about a year. I sort of worked on it slowly, and then I would change things, and then I'd say, oh, I'm not gonna write about this publicly, and I'd put it aside, and then I'd go back to it. And then I decided that I was gonna write it. I felt like I was really compelled to write about my own story, and I felt like this was a story I wanted to share. And so I signed it to the New York Times, sort of hoping they wouldn't take it out of nervousness, and I got an email back the next day saying that they loved it and wanted to publish it. And I didn't know when they were gonna publish it. And then I went to Costa Rica for a week, which was wonderful, I was completely off the grid, and happened to check my email once, and they said, oh, we're gonna write it tomorrow. And I was like, oh no, I'm far, I don't have a computer, I have no internet. But in some ways, when you put your most personal knot of pain and uncertainty out into the world, the Costa Rican Rainforest is a really good place to be, to be far. And so I had the experience of sort of saying, this is my story, this was my truth in my own private wrestling, and I'm sending it into the world, and I'm gonna be unreachable for a few days. And then when I came back, you know, I was nervous, I feel like anytime you write nonfiction, people react, and that's to be expected. But one of the things that really gratified me was, I came home to several hundred emails from strangers, sharing with me their personal stories of religious transformation, or grappling, or divorce, or any kind of painful moment. And just this outpouring, really, of people wanting to connect and share with me their story, and it was wonderful. It was like being given this hug from this makeshift community. And it was really, it took me by surprise, I don't think I expected that reaction. I really felt connected to this larger story of people's private grappling. And I got emails from people who were more in similar situations, people who had gone through a divorce, or people who were orthodox in no longer were, but people from worlds vastly different from my own, from a former men and a priest, from a woman who felt like her daughter was not accepted in her church because she was a single mother. I got emails from people who wished they were divorced, but were unable to do it. If you just arrange across so many cultural backgrounds, and for me really hit home the notion that when we tell stories about our lives as hard or as painful as they are, they find people who connect. They find other listeners or readers who can say, "I also feel this way." And for me as a writer, that was, I think, the most gratifying thing to have this just slew of emails from these people. - You could publish a whole shebang as a collection called "Toll Story Was Right." - Right, exactly, just right in all the varieties. I mean, every person's individual story, I mean, it was really unbelievable to see that there's so many different ways that people grapple and come to terms with those grappling, and so many of them always people forge their own paths. - Tova Mervis, thank you so much for coming on "The Virtual Memory Show." - Oh, thank you, my pleasure. (singing in foreign language) And that was Tova Mervis. Her new book, "Visible City," is out now from Houghton Mifflin-Harkord. You can find it in better bookstores. Like I said, I enjoyed it and I, well, it wasn't expecting to. It's a very interesting and entertaining novel. You can find out more about Ms. Mervis at her website, tovamervis.com. That's T-O-V-A-M-I-R-V-I-S. You should check out that "New York Times" piece on her divorce, which was published last February, as well as her Huffington Post piece on dysfunctional couples from literature. And you can find both of those at her site. And now, you get a little bonus material. For now, the monologue is called "Lines Composed in the Veil of York," pretentious as that sounds. (singing in foreign language) I left London in the dark and we rolled into the dawn. Several of my clients in Northeast England flew me over in January for facility visits. I spent a few days on my own, then took an early morning train up from King's Cross Station to Newcastle. The marketing agent who organized a trip apologized that there was no direct flight there from Newark, but I told them not to worry. I enjoy train rides through unfamiliar areas. A few years earlier, I was fraught with anxiety on my first trip to Germany. But a long train ride from Frankfurt to Robinsburg really put me at ease. Something about the frost-shrouted landscape and the gray factories of Stuttgart and the Singsong voice of that provincial ticket taker. Somehow that gestalt helped me dismiss the connotations I've always had for Germans and trains. Well, anyway, that boogeyman was vanquished when my train pulled in late to the station at home. That caused me to miss my connection to Robinsburg and have to wander in the old city for an hour. I figured, if Germans can't get their trains to run on time, that myth is punctured. This time, the landscape was less compelling or memorable than I really hoped. Not bleak by any means, but which is empty. There's farmland and mostly colorless and England's winter chill. An hour from Newcastle, we encountered a very deep fog, although the train didn't seem to slow down and caution. That night, I went out to dinner with a marketing agent. He told me that the fog was a notorious feature in that area, which was known as the Vale of York. I'd arrived in mid-January, the coldest and dankest time of the year. You can't always choose these things. It's privilege enough that clients are willing to pay to bring me out to see them. But, you know, the previous August, I did schedule a business trip to Chicago so that it would overlap with a Cubs home game, allowing me to finally visit really feel. At dinner, I told the marketing agent about my shallow English roots. My mother grew up in a Jewish section of London before decamping for Israel and then America. The marketing agent told me about Gateshead, the town next to Newcastle, and its large population of Orthodox Jews. He himself was a Hindu with Punjabi parents, but he was born and raised a Jordi. We were both uprooted, native-born transplants. That night, in a Marriott in Newcastle, I dreamed that I brought my wife down to my old temple in Hebrew school. The Lakeland Hills Jewish Center. I wanted to show her the place, which had shut down some time in 2013 and was now for sale. It was a small building with a shoul that originally had room for 50 or so congregants, plus a classroom, a small kitchen, and two bathrooms. I had never been able to escape the smell of institutional coffee the rabbi's wife used to make before Hebrew school. But parents were among the cosigners of the temple's mortgage back in the '70s. There were fewer than a dozen Jewish families in our two towns back then. Sometime in the '80s, they extended the building from the back, more than doubling the seating in the shoul. In the dream, I think it was a holiday because I was dressed in a suit. When we got to the shoul, it had been reopened for the day, which was surprising. We went inside and I discovered that everything had been restored. In fact, it looked better than it ever had. The carpet at Florida had been replaced with blue and gray marble, and even the individual chairs had been replaced by benches. While I showed my wife around, other congregants arrived. They were people I'd known from childhood, parents of my Hebrew schoolmates and others. All the men were in suits, so it must have been a big event, but it wasn't clear whether the temple was reopened for a holiday or if the reopening prompted the celebration. I introduced Amy to some of the newcomers, and then I thought I caught a glimpse of Saul Cone. I knew Mr. Cone had died a few years earlier from lymphoma, 60-something years after he was liberated from Auschwitz. I looked around for him, but it was in vain. I walked over to look for the memorial wall, this brass plaque with inscriptions of the names and years of deceased congregants and their loved ones, but that whole wall was covered with a canvas. I couldn't tell if the memorial had been removed or if that part hadn't been restored. I didn't try to move the canvas. I don't recall anything else from the dream. That morning, I took a cab hired by my clients to get me to the train station in Newcastle. The driver was prompt, but complained about his back when he picked up my carry-on suitcase, which, to be fair, was quite heavy. As we drove along the time, and you must forgive my Geordie accent on this one, he asked, "Can I inquire about your name?" "My what?" "Yoraneum." "It's Roth, isn't it?" "Yes." "Yes, Gilroth." "So, are you a Jew then?" "Yes." "I thought so." "I've known maybe seven or eight Roth, and they've all been Jews here and if my attempt at a Geordie accent." "What are you supposed to say in that situation?" I offered up. My father's family settled in the Schwarzwald region of Germany and France before moving on to Romania. Should I have gone with, "Oh, were they good Jews?" Or, "How dare you make the slightest comment about my religion. Let me out of this taxi right now, even though we're on a bridge over the time." Or maybe I could have used Howard Stern's old line. "No, I'm not really Jewish. My mother was raped by a Jew." As it was, I, while I was disappointed that the driver didn't follow up by noting that I don't look Jewish. A backhanded compliment that I've always secretly treasured. On my first trip to Germany, one of my American clients asked me why I was so uptight about things. After all, he said, "You look more German than the locals." Now, the driver told me he'd only had one problem with a Jew and 30 years of driving a cab in Newcastle and Gateshead. And rather than talk to the police, he decided to tell one of the rabbis he knew instead. He said that within an hour, there were three rabbis at his car with a signed apology from the man and his full fare. "It don't make sense to go to the police in these situations," he said. "The rabbis get things sorted out quicker." I told him that I'm not an observant Jew, but when I go to pray during the high holidays, I do it with the lobovatures. He asked if they're welcoming and I said, "They're fine. "They're happy to see even a wayward Jew like me." He said he'd asked one of the rabbis once how a non-orthodox Jew would fare at one of their synagogues. And the rabbi told him, "Well, they'd feel mighty uncomfortable." Well, first time I went to the lobovature, as I said, they called me up to make a blessing over the Torah. The driver asked if I can read Hebrew and I said, "I can sound it out just fine. "All those years of Hebrew school just stuck with me, I guess." That's when I remembered my dream. For a moment I was lost in it, thinking about Rabbi Sprenzen and his wife, who taught us as children. He told me about his wife's daughter. She lives in the Berkshires in Massachusetts with a husband who flies in ultralight, and they go to visit her and the kids each summer. He told me how he enjoys the quiet and the wildlife out there. I told him about my home in New Jersey, and we get deer, bear, and wild turkey walking through our yard, even though we're only 25 miles from New York City. I told him how funny it was that weekend when I saw a flock of tourists in London shooting pictures and video of a squirrel in Russell Square. I wondered about where people live that squirrels are exotic. He told me about the native red squirrels in Scotland how gray ones have virtually extincted them. He said the gray ones are almost twice the size of the reds. The poor wee ones have no chance. But he said that hybrid squirrels have been appearing lately. Mixes of grays and reds. Maybe five or six years from now. "That's all they'll be," he said. That's when we reached the station. I boarded my train and rode through the morning fog in the Vale of York on the way to Nottingham. (upbeat music) And that's it for this week's Virtual Memories Show. Thank you so much for listening. If you've made it this far, that means you actually put up with all my monologuing and such. I appreciate it. We'll be back next week with a conversation with critic and literary historian, D.G. Myers. Till next week, do me a favor and go to our iTunes page and post a review of the show, or hit up our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm and make a donation to this ad-free podcast. And if you've got ideas for guests or have comments you want to share with me about that monologue, drop me a line at growth, G-R-O-T-H at chimeraobscura.com. Or at VMSPod on Twitter or at our Facebook page, facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow. Until next time, I am Gil Roth and you are awesome. Keep it that way. (upbeat music) (singing in foreign language) (singing in foreign language) (singing in foreign language) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
