Shalom Auslander Reading
Thursday, October 11, 7:00 pm
Brookline Booksmith
Free
More info

From far away Shalom Auslander's memoir looks delicate and sweet, with lightly outlined white images traced on a red background. The title appears in a cursive font with looping letters. Then you look at the actual words on the cover--Foreskin's Lament.

In this memoir, Auslander and his long departed foreskin have a lot to gripe about. Auslander was raised in an Orthodox Jewish community in Monsey, New York, and the god he came to knew was irritable. Even today, he writes, "[God] is still angry, still vengeful, still--eternally--pissed off."

God--not to mention a hard-drinking father and a mother who was the "belle of the misery ball"--needled Auslander over every single decision. Eventually, Auslander's little rebellions against god, his parents, and the community grew from snapping into non-kosher Slim Jims to shoplifting. This memoir is a way for Auslander to reconcile himself with his past and allow his own son to grow up without constantly fearing the wrath of god.

Even though his upbringing wasn't the happiest, Auslander rips into his past with a savage sense of humor, and he is able to make the darkest, most painful moments funny. After telling him he could curse as much as he liked, Bostonist asked him about fame, his current relationship with the man upstairs, Reform Judaism, and the Jewish literary canon.

Bostonist might reorder questions, but basically we'll take what you say, type it out, and put it online. We'll take out any "ums" or "uhs" or anything like that.

Probably a few "fucks" and "shits."

We allow that. That's totally fine. We've had a few people who went out of their way to say it because we allow it. Go wild! Feel free!

Excellent. Let me take my pants off. Hang on a minute.

Okay. [Ed. Note: This was over the phone, so he could have been butt-naked for all we cared.]

Go for it. I'm ready.

Gawker did a post about your brushes with fame, and Entertainment Weekly did a feature on you as one of the "bright young things." So, how is your relationship with fame? You said you were worried you were going to get addicted to it.

It's not great. I'd rather just stay really anonymous and do the things I have to do to keep from killing myself. I'm worried that there's a sign on the road that says, "ASSHOLE AHEAD," and that's just going to be who I am.

Are you feeling any asshole tendencies?

I asked for Cristal in my office, and there's none here. Somebody's gonna get fired. Is that a green M&M?

You wrote that you dragged your memoir over to your desktop trashcan tons of times in your book. How many times did you really do it? Do you still get this last-minute urge to pick up as many copies of your book as possible and burn them?

More of the interview after the jump! Image of Shalom Auslander from Penguin/Riverhead. Image of the book cover from Amazon.

I deleted it three times. I actually did do it without faking it, which would be a funny thing to do. Each time I did was preceded by fairly frightening news about the child my wife was carrying. When you are raised with the idea of this guy [God] who is just a complete prick and crazy and likely to do these kinds of things, you worry about it. In a paranoid frenzy a few nights ago, half-legitimate, half-pot-induced, I was pretty convinced that I needed to call my publisher and have them stop the book. I thought I've got friends who are sick, an aging dog, I've got this amazing little baby--what am I doing fucking around with this guy? Why did I start this? This is ridiculous!

It took a lot of understanding and coaching from my very understanding wife. Some sex and petting and ice cream, and the pot wears off and I feel a little better. But it's definitely still there.

God comes off as a major jerk. Are there times you think he's nice or neutral?

I'd settle for neutral. Neutral would be the best. Gone would be really great. If Nietzsche were right, that would be really sweet, but I don't think he was. I look at my life and see some great things, mostly with my family, my wife and son, and think, "He's been nice. He has his good side." But when you add up the good and the bad, it looks less like sometimes he's good, sometimes he's bad and more like an abusive husband who kicks the shit out of you every night and some nights he says he's sorry and he brings you a bag of ice. It's very typical abusive behavior.

You write about your friend Craig, "Craig's a nice guy, but he was raised with Reform Judaism. Theologically, I have more in common with a Christian." Why is it hard to find something in common with people who are Reform?

There are two answers to the question. The first answer is that I have an instant rapport and understanding of people who were raised with the same god as me. The religion doesn't seem to matter. I have the same god as anyone who has been raised on Revelation, and we have the same god as anyone who was raised on the Koran. I have literal interpretations of these books.

Craig, being raised Reform, the concept of God, or even a personal god, is foreign to him. It's more in his case, or my understanding of it, that there's a part of his belief that is about community and a part of his belief that is about tradition, and a lesser part of it, or a smaller part of it--not lesser of importance--has got to do with this relationship.

I was raised to read about Abraham and Abraham arguing with God. And Moses being chosen by God and saying, "Find somebody else." There's a lot of this personal stuff that I was told was the way to react to this god. That's the way I grew up. That's what I internalized. It's interesting that later in life, the people who taught me these things are the ones to criticize me for believing it.

In a New York Times article, you and a reporter drove back to Monsey [where Auslander was raised]. Did you see your family on that trip?

My parents--I don't know where they are, but they moved a while ago.

What happens when you see reminders or go back to the town? What happens when you see people who are living the same way you were raised?

I've been back a number of years before after my son was first born on the Jewish New Year, as we were trying to reckon with it, and I was writing the book at the time and trying to get my head around what it was like to be there. Riding around with somebody later, I was amazed at, first of all, the changes that had gone on. The place had gotten quite a bit more religious, or at least outwardly so than it had been when I was there. That's a bit frightening and sad, and most of the people that were there had left. But it isn't so much flashbacks to things that happened. It's just very sad. It seems like there are people there that are happy. And there are some people there that aren't happy. It's hard enough to fucking get through life to go through a family and go from being a kid to being an adult without complications that all this stuff adds on top of it. Life is fucking hard enough, and nothing that I was taught eased it at all. The feeling I felt most was loss. And, obviously, anger.

There's a part of me that looks at it--I see a father walking along the street with his son, and they're in Sabbath clothes. Half of me wants to get out and beat the shit out of the father, and the other half wants to throw the kid in the back of the car and give him a chance at life. That's me forcing my life and my point of view on the kid, and there's a possibility that he doesn't care and he's quite happy. Maybe that's actually a good dad, and maybe, more than anything, none of this has anything to do with God at all, and maybe it's just bad luck and bad family. Or maybe God in a way created that bad family or caused at least some of that stress and direction.

You go there, and you hope for answers. And you drive away with nothing.

Are you raising your son with any religion?

Is Berenstain Bears a religion?

It sounds like one.

It's kind of a nice one. Right now, I'm proud that he's going to turn three in a month and has never heard that there's a guy who floods the world when you fuck him off and that six million people died because they assimilated and God doesn't like it when you do that. He's never going to hear that. If I find out that he has been told that, then I'll bring my own furious vengeance to bear. I'm not going to hide anything from him. I'm going to explain it to him as basically as I can, try to find some positive spins on the God mix I was taught and let him kind of find himself.

The title is Foreskin's Lament, and it's easy to think--oh--Portnoy's Complaint when you pick it up. I was reading it on the train, and the cover is really pretty. When people look at it, they stare--foreskin?

Craig, whom you mentioned, did the art direction and did the type. You feel like Merchant Ivory did porno. If they could do that fancy type and "Up My Ass 4"--that would be great.

As far as Portnoy's Complaint, I didn't even intend that. I found out about that when my Dutch publisher called saying they were having trouble translating it. There's a way to do it, but it would lose the reference to Roth. I was like, "What?" I had no idea. But I think that's the trouble with being Jewish and writing anything about yourself. People are going to think, wow, it could easily have been "Why the allusion to Angela's Ashes?" This construct of a title isn't unusual, so I didn't intend it at all.

It's an instinct, though, when I picked it up, and then you read your dialogue with your shrink.

Really?

I could see an element of the tradition, even if they're very different books.

I think I finished Portnoy's when I was a teenager, but that was over 20 years ago. The only other book of his which I loved was Sabbath's Theater, which is also a possessive followed by a noun. I'm not that familiar with it, so it wasn't like, here's an interesting literary allusion to the past. I grew up with people who revered the past, so I try my best not to.

So you're not thinking of yourself as contributing to some grand Jewish literary tradition?

Oh, god, no! This is not a Jewish book. This is a book about God. Every time I read chapters at readings, every time I send them to people that I know, other writers who are in this world, the issue is not about Judaism. I know that it uses the specifics of it to deal with it, and I know that the Jewish media is saying this is about Judaism. All I can tell you is that it is between me and God. It's about me trying to figure out how did I get here, how am I finding out my wife's pregnant and just living with these terrors and realizing that it's time to get over these terrors because you've gotta figure out how to be halfway normal at least half of the time. I don't see it as part of a tradition at all. If it is a tradition, to me it's the tradition of Bill Hicks, or Lenny Bruce … I don't know if that's a straight line, but it seems to come more from a place of that or Beckett than anything specifically Jewish.