Steve Almond (b. 1966) is an American writer whose work crosses fiction, memoir, literary criticism, political commentary, and the craft of writing itself. He has published twelve books across more than three decades and built a reputation for confessional candor joined to comic timing and moral argument. His subjects run from romantic obsession and grief to football, candy, popular music, and the condition of American political life.
Almond grew up in Palo Alto, California, and graduated from Gunn High School before attending Wesleyan University. He did not move into the academy at once. Instead he spent roughly seven years as a newspaper reporter, first at the El Paso Herald-Post and then at the Miami New Times. He has credited that apprenticeship with teaching him to observe American life beyond the affluent world of his childhood and his education. The reporter’s habits stayed with him: close listening, attention to the texture of ordinary lives, a documentary realism that marks both his fiction and his nonfiction and separates his work from straight autobiography.
He drew wide literary notice with My Life in Heavy Metal (2002), a story collection about romantic obsession, emotional exposure, and modern manhood. Reviewers admired the energy of the prose, the dark comedy, and the refusal to soften flawed men into sympathetic ones. The collection set out themes he would return to for the rest of his career: the pull between longing and self-destruction, the search for real intimacy, the absurdity of contemporary courtship. The collections that followed, The Evil B.B. Chow (2005) and God Bless America (2011), confirmed his command of the short form. His stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and other anthologies.
His commercial breakthrough came with Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America (2004), a book that mixes memoir, cultural history, and business reporting. On the surface it traces the decline of regional candy makers under corporate consolidation. Underneath it reads as an elegy for vanishing local traditions and small-scale enterprise. Candyfreak reached the New York Times bestseller list and won the American Library Association’s Alex Award. It marked Almond as a writer who could turn a light subject into a serious meditation on the country.
He has moved between genres with ease. His essay collections, among them (Not That You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions (2007), Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (2010), and Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country (2018), fold memoir into cultural and political reflection. A recurring claim runs through them: that American life rewards emotional avoidance, consumption, and tribal feeling while it punishes honest vulnerability. He tends to enter political disagreement through character, empathy, and moral responsibility rather than ideology.
His most contested nonfiction book is Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto (2014). A lifelong fan of the game, Almond argued that the mounting evidence of traumatic brain injury, together with the sport’s commercial use of its players, made continued fandom hard to defend. The book pressed readers to ask whether entertainment can justify lasting neurological harm, and it became a visible entry in the national argument over concussions and player safety. His readiness to indict a sport he loved reflects a pattern in his writing. Affection, he holds, should not buy a subject exemption from moral scrutiny.
Almond has also written novels. The first, Which Brings Me to You (2006), co-written with Julianna Baggott, unfolds through confessional letters between two strangers who meet at a wedding, a structure that lets the book examine romantic idealism, self-deception, and the cost of honesty. Nearly two decades after publication it became a feature film, released in January 2024, with Lucy Hale and Nat Wolff. His later novel, All the Secrets of the World (2022), follows two girls whose lives turn after a school shooting and takes up adolescent friendship, violence, and trauma. It has been optioned for television.
Among his recent books, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories (2024) carries his fullest statement on craft. He treats storytelling not as a set of techniques but as an ethical practice grounded in emotional honesty. He urges writers to give up perfectionism, to sit with uncertainty, and to extend empathy even to the characters they find hardest to love. The book gathers what he learned across decades of teaching and restates his conviction that literature exists to deepen human understanding rather than to entertain.
Teaching has grown into a large part of his working life. He has taught creative writing at many institutions and conferences, including the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, GrubStreet, the Tin House Writers Workshop, and Wesleyan. In 2022 he received a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Students and peers describe his workshops as candid, weighted toward emotional authenticity over literary fashion or commercial calculation. He has carried that teaching into 2026.
He has never kept to literary circles alone. In 2006 he resigned an adjunct professorship at Boston College to protest the university’s choice of Condoleezza Rice (b. 1954) as commencement speaker during the Iraq War. He writes from the progressive side of American politics, yet he has also criticized ideological conformity within progressive literary culture and argued that writers owe their loyalty to intellectual independence rather than to a coalition. That skepticism toward groupthink has made him a hard man to place, willing to challenge orthodoxies on the left and the right alike.
He has become an advocate for independent publishing. Alongside the books from major houses, he has self-published. Letters from People Who Hate Me (2010) collects the hostile mail his Boston College resignation produced, and This Won’t Take Long (2014) gathers short reflections on writing and creativity. Both grow from his belief that authors can build a direct relationship with readers outside the traditional system, and from a broader quarrel with institutional gatekeepers.
Beyond his books, Almond has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, GQ, The Wall Street Journal, Poets & Writers, and The Boston Globe. For several years he co-hosted the advice podcast Dear Sugars with Cheryl Strayed (b. 1968), first under The New York Times and later under WBUR. The program built its identity on radical empathy, with the two hosts answering questions about love, grief, family, and identity through psychological depth rather than quick counsel. His years as a reporter shaped his approach there too, leading him to treat each caller’s dilemma the way an interviewer treats a source, as a life to be understood in full.
Almond lives near Boston with his wife, the novelist Erin Almond, and their three children. He continues to write essays, teach, and speak at literary festivals, and he remains a public defender of emotional honesty in art and in civic life. His books range across fiction, memoir, criticism, politics, and craft, yet a single outlook holds them together. He believes that real storytelling demands emotional courage, that moral life starts with honest self-examination, and that literature remains a rare place where people can face hard truths without losing their humanity.
Steve Almond and the Sacred Word
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued that a man builds his life around two terrors he cannot look at directly. The first is death, the plain fact that the body rots and the self goes out. The second is insignificance, the suspicion that the life meant nothing, that a man could vanish and leave no mark on the order of things. A culture answers both with a hero system, a scheme of value that tells a man what counts as a meaningful life and lets him earn the conviction that he is more than food for worms. The hero system hands out the currency. Sacred values are the coin. A man spends his days acquiring the coin his system honors, and the acquiring lets him believe he will not be erased.
Steve Almond runs a hero system with a single coin. The coin is honesty. Not the small honesty of the accurate receipt. The large kind, what he calls emotional honesty, the courage of a man who looks at his own grief and longing and shame and says them aloud, and the radical empathy that extends the same looking to other people, even the ones he cannot love. His craft book carries the creed in its title, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow (2024). Truth is the thing that flies. Mercy is the thing that sends it. The whole career bends toward the claim that the felt and spoken truth is what a life is for.
Becker lets us name Almond’s two terrors with some care, because they are not the standard pair. The first is death, and Almond meets it without the usual cover. He has said he never believed in God. No afterlife waits, no resurrection, no judgment, no immortal soul to carry the score forward. The second terror is the one that organizes him, and it is not mere insignificance. It is numbness. The unfelt life. The man who reaches the end having anesthetized himself against love and loss, who chose comfort and consumption and tribe over the raw nerve of the real. Almond’s books name this enemy again and again, the emotional avoidance he sees rewarded everywhere in American life. His hero is the man who refuses the anesthesia. To feel fully, and to make a reader feel, is how Almond defeats death. The body dies. The honest word stays on the page, and the page keeps a stranger awake at two in the morning forty years on. That is his immortality, and he has no other.
Watch the subtraction that concentrates it. Becker says every hero system rests on what a man refuses as much as on what he affirms. Almond subtracts God, so heaven cannot carry his significance. He subtracts the tribe, since he answers to intellectual independence and not to any side. He subtracts the gatekeepers, self-publishing past the major houses and quarreling with the institutions that guard literary entry. He subtracts even the safe paid post, resigning his adjunct chair at Boston College in 2006 over the invitation to Condoleezza Rice (b. 1954). One thing survives every cut. The honest word. Strip away God and tribe and institution and salary and the man is left holding candor alone, which is why candor has to bear the entire weight of his standing against death. A hero system with one coin must mint that coin without rest.
The trouble with a sacred word is that other men hold it sacred too and mean something else by it. Becker’s deepest point is that hero systems do not share a vocabulary so much as collide over one. The word that anchors Almond’s whole project sounds in other rooms like a different word.
Consider the man bent over the Gemara in a study hall in Lakewood. For him truth is emes, and emes means fidelity to what was received and transmitted, the chain running back through the teachers to Sinai. To be honest is to carry the text forward without distortion, to subordinate the small self to the law that outranks it. His immortality runs through the chain, a link added, children who learn, a name a tradition keeps. He hears Almond’s gospel of private feeling and recognizes the elevation of the impulse over the commandment, the inner voice set above the received word. What Almond calls courage the scholar calls vanity, the yetzer dressed as virtue. The same syllable, truth, buys two opposite immortalities.
Consider the attending physician in a surgical intensive care unit at three in the morning. Truth for him is the accurate chart and the disclosed error, the morbidity and mortality conference where a man stands before his peers and says what he missed and who died because he missed it. Honesty is measured against outcomes, and it serves the next patient, not the speaker’s soul. He holds death back with his hands and loses anyway some nights, and his significance is the protocol that survives him and the patient who walks out. To this man Almond’s candor with no body on the table reads as a luxury, feeling performed where nothing is at stake. He would not know the word for it. He would know that it is not what he means by the truth.
Consider the infantry sergeant on his fourth deployment. Truth in his world is the after-action report and accountability to the men, but beneath the reporting sits a deeper truth, loyalty, and loyalty forbids airing the platoon’s wounds to strangers. You do not sell a brother’s weakness for a byline. His immortality is the unit, the dead carried in memory, the line held so the next man lives. The confessional memoir, the genre Almond perfected, strikes him as betrayal worn as bravery, a man exposing in public what a real man dies to protect. He hears emotional honesty and hears a man with no one to keep faith with.
Consider the Rinzai monk in a zendo, working a koan toward the dissolving of the very self Almond spends his life polishing. Truth for him is seeing through the I, the recognition that the stories the ego tells, including the proud story of its own honesty, are empty. To this man Almond does not face the self. He elaborates it. He builds a finer prison and engraves candor on the bars. The monk’s death-denial, in Becker’s reading, is the renunciation of death-denial, the surrender of every immortality project, which Becker noted is its own kind of project. He and Almond use the word truth to point in opposite directions, one toward the deepening of the inner life, one toward its disappearance.
The poker professional adds a fifth meaning. Truth at the table is the math, the read, the expected value over a long enough run, and honesty is owed to the numbers and never to the opponent. The face is concealment by trade. An open heart is a tell, a leak, free information handed across the felt. To him Almond’s whole creed describes a man losing money he does not know he is losing. His significance is the proven edge against variance, the score that says the world was read correctly. There are more rooms than these, the diplomat for whom calibrated discretion is the honest service, the hospice nurse for whom mercy means a truth withheld at the right hour. The list runs as long as the count of hero systems, which is to say it does not end.
This is what Becker exposes in Almond. The candor he treats as a universal good, the truth that should set every man free, is the local coin of one hero system, the liberal literary professional’s, minted in Palo Alto and Wesleyan and the workshop he calls the artificial welfare state for people who are word-drunk. He takes his dialect for the language. He preaches his immortality scheme as the human one.
The scheme shows its strain at the places where Almond’s own life refuses it. The home team is the sharpest. He says he never believed in God and then says he is drawn to the Jews when he walks into a room, recognizes them, feels the attitudinal link, names Philip Roth (1933-2018) and Saul Bellow (1915-2005) as carriers of a shared apprehension of life. It is the home team. The tribe he subtracts from his hero system to leave candor standing alone keeps reaching back in and claiming him, and he reports the pull without folding it into the creed. The attack on Mark Sarvas, a fellow Jew and a fellow writer, on Salon on Yom Kippur in 2005, shows the same thing from the other side. The apostle of empathy without borders wages a near-tribal war on a rival inside his own house, and the violence runs hottest toward the man most like him. The collaboration with Julianna Baggott (b. 1969) gives the third strain. He describes the writing of their novel as two fragile narcissists sharing a byline, sent back into the ring by their spouses to beat on each other, and calls the emotional veracity of the letters the product of the beating. The honesty he prizes turns out to be quarried by combat, not poured from an open heart.
Three things to watch in the man, then, none of them a flaw so much as the shape of the scheme under load. Watch the moments his candor runs against his comfort with no audience to reward it, the football book above all, because those are the moments when the coin might be more than coin. Watch the home team, because the tribe he subtracted is the surest sign that his hero system left something out that the body keeps voting for. And watch the word truth itself in his mouth, because the day he treats it as one dialect among many rather than the speech of all mankind is the day the scheme would have to admit it is a scheme, and a man who has staked his defeat of death on a single sacred word does not reach that admission, since to reach it is to feel the cold he built the word to keep out.
Steve Almond and the Alliance Theory of Political Belief
David Pinsof, David O. Sears (b. 1935), and Martie Haselton advance a claim that unsettles the standard picture of political conviction. In “Strange bedfellows: the Alliance Theory of political belief systems,” forthcoming in Psychological Inquiry, they argue that belief systems do not grow from deep moral values such as equality or liberty. They grow from alliance structures. People choose allies by similarity, by transitivity, and by interdependence, and then they support those allies with a set of propagandistic biases that defend the coalition’s reputation and attack the rival’s. The moral vocabulary comes after the alliance, not before it. On their account partisans on both sides claim altruism, impartiality, honesty, and love for themselves while assigning selfishness and malice to their opponents, and this matching of virtue to ally is the thing the theory predicts. The final move is the one that does the most work. Motivated reasoning, they write, reads less as a cognitive defect than as an honest signal of loyalty. The person who reasons toward his coalition’s conclusion advertises that he can be counted on.
Steve Almond presents a hard case for this frame, and that is what makes him a good one. His public identity rests on a single claim about himself: he holds loyalty to intellectual independence rather than to a tribe. He criticizes the orthodoxies of the left from inside the left. He preaches emotional honesty and radical empathy. He resigns positions on principle. Run Alliance Theory across this self-portrait and the portrait becomes evidence for the theory rather than an exception to it.
Start with the independence itself. Almond writes from the progressive side of American letters and then attacks ideological conformity within progressive literary culture. He treats this as a stand outside the coalition. Alliance Theory reads it as a position inside one. The literary-progressive elite runs a status code that rewards the pose of standing above the tribe. The writer who scolds his own side for groupthink signals to that side a rare and prized quality, the willingness to tell hard truths, and he collects the distinction that comes with it. He criticizes the coalition to an audience drawn from the coalition, in venues the coalition reads, and the criticism raises his standing within it rather than costing him a place in it. Independence functions here as a similarity cue. It marks him as the kind of ally the literary class most admires, the one who will not flatter. The pose presupposes the membership it claims to transcend.
His resignation from Boston College in 2006 carries the argument further. He left an adjunct post over the university’s invitation to Condoleezza Rice (b. 1954) as commencement speaker during the Iraq War. In a 2006 interview he gave the reason in the vocabulary of virtue: the school was cashing in on her fame, chasing donations, telling students that lying is acceptable as long as you gain power. Alliance Theory does not deny that he meant it. The theory predicts that he meant it. The resignation signals loyalty to the antiwar progressive coalition and rivalry toward the Bush administration, and the moral framing, lying for power, is the moralization that mobilizes support for the ally and opposition to the rival. The frame gains force from what Almond did next. He gathered the hostile mail the resignation produced and published it as Letters from People Who Hate Me (2010). That is competitive victimhood turned into literary capital. The grievance becomes the product. The book emphasizes the malice of his attackers and the cost he paid, which is the victim bias the paper describes, the embellishment of harm that mobilizes third parties to one’s side.
The 2005 attack on Mark Sarvas tests the frame against a harder fact. Almond went after Sarvas, a fellow Jew and a fellow figure in the literary world, on Salon, and he did it on Yom Kippur. A reader who takes Almond’s anti-tribal self-image at face value finds this puzzling, since here is the independent man waging coalitional war. Alliance Theory removes the puzzle. Rivalries occur within groups as readily as between them, because the cues that select allies, similarity and interdependence, also generate competition among the similar and the interdependent. Two literary Jews working the same small status field are rivals before they are anything else. The independent posture does not prevent coalitional combat. It relocates it, from the safe enemy outside to the dangerous rival nearby, and the timing on the Day of Atonement reads as a status display aimed at an audience that would register the transgression.
Then there is the home team. In the same interview Almond describes his pull toward other Jews in plain language. He says he never believed in God, that he identifies culturally, that he is drawn to the Jews when he walks into a room, that he usually recognizes them, that they share an attitudinal link. It is the home team. He names Philip Roth (1933-2018) and Saul Bellow (1915-2005) as carriers of a Judaic apprehension of life. This is the similarity cue stated without disguise. The man whose brand is independence avows a coalitional loyalty he did not choose and cannot argue himself out of. Alliance Theory treats the avowal as the ordinary condition, the visible form of the alliance instinct that the political self-image papers over. Almond is more candid here than his public philosophy permits, and the candor confirms the frame.
The signature concepts, emotional honesty and radical empathy, do the coalitional work the theory assigns to virtue language. Both terms run through his memoir, his criticism, and the advice podcast Dear Sugars he co-hosted. Both resist definition. Empathy for whom, honesty about what, the terms do not say, and the vagueness is the point. A concept loose enough to mean many things serves as a loyalty signal precisely because it cannot be pinned to a policy that might cost an ally. To stand for emotional honesty is to claim altruism, sincerity, and love for oneself and one’s side, which is the self-attribution the paper documents on both wings of politics. The craft book Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow (2024) raises the vocabulary to doctrine, casting storytelling as an ethical practice grounded in honesty and mercy. Alliance Theory hears in this an account of how a writer builds the reputation that holds his readers and his peers, a reputation for the very qualities his coalition prizes.
Against Football (2014) is where the frame meets the most resistance, and an honest reading should say so. Almond attacked a sport he loved on grounds of brain injury and the exploitation of players. Football fandom does not map onto the progressive alliance the way the Rice protest does, and the argument cost him a pleasure he valued rather than buying him standing with an ally. The book looks like a value operating free of coalition. Alliance Theory can answer that the concussion argument carried its own emerging coalition, the players and the medical critics against the league, and that taking the players’ side fits the victim-and-perpetrator structure the paper lays out, the powerful institution harming the vulnerable laborer. The answer holds, though it strains, and the strain is worth marking. The frame accounts best for the cases where Almond’s conviction tracks an alliance and accounts least well for the cases where conviction cuts against his own comfort with no ally in view. A reader who wants truth over the frame’s tidiness should keep both columns open.
What Alliance Theory delivers on Almond is a single reversal applied across the career. The thing he offers as proof of independence, the criticism of his own side, the resignation, the empathy, the honesty, the refusal of tribal loyalty, is the behavior a skilled coalition member performs and a high-status coalition rewards. The theory does not require that he be a cynic. It requires the opposite. The honest signal works because he means it, and the man drawn to the home team is the same man who tells the literary class he answers to no team. Both are true at once, and Alliance Theory explains why a writer can hold them together without strain and call the result a conscience.
If Mearsheimer Is Right: Steve Almond and the Social Animal
John J. Mearsheimer (b. 1947) builds The Great Delusion (2018) on a claim about human nature before he says a word about foreign policy. We are social beings from start to finish, he writes, and individualism runs a distant second. Liberalism makes the opposite wager. It treats people as atomistic actors who carry an inalienable set of rights, and it grounds its universalism in that picture, since everyone on the planet holds the same rights and a liberal order feels called to honor them everywhere. Mearsheimer answers that the picture inverts the order of operations. People are born into groups that shape their identities long before they can assert any individual will. They form strong attachments and make sacrifices for fellow members. They are tribal at the core, because the surest path to survival runs through the society that protects and feeds the long human childhood.
The childhood is the heart of his case. A person spends his early years nurtured and socialized while his critical faculties are still forming, so the value infusion arrives before the capacity to weigh it. By the time reason comes online, the family and the society have already loaded the moral code. Mearsheimer ranks the three sources of our preferences and puts reason last, behind innate sentiment and socialization. People have limited choice in building a moral code, he writes, because so much of their sense of right and wrong comes from inborn attitude and from the milieu that raised them. The autonomous chooser of liberal theory is the fiction. The socialized member is the man.
Set Steve Almond against this and the strain shows at once, because Almond is a liberal individualist of the purest literary type. His public identity rests on the autonomous conscience. He answers to no tribe. He holds loyalty to intellectual independence above loyalty to any side. He preaches radical empathy, a concern that crosses every line and reaches every person, and emotional honesty, the courage of the single self facing its own truth. Each of these is a liberal claim in Mearsheimer’s sense. Each assumes that a man can stand apart from his group, examine his inheritance by the light of reason, and choose his commitments fresh. If Mearsheimer is right, Almond has the order backward.
Begin with the independence. Almond came up in Palo Alto, the son of two psychiatrists, took a degree at Wesleyan, worked years as a newspaper reporter, and earned an MFA at Greensboro, where he found what he calls the artificial welfare state for people who are word-drunk. Mearsheimer reads that sequence as a value infusion, not a series of free choices. The milieu that prizes vulnerability, candor, and the writer’s solitary integrity is a particular American class with its own code, and Almond absorbed the code during the long apprenticeship in which his critical faculties were still forming. What he experiences as independent conscience is the socialization of the liberal literary professional, broadcast back to its own audience as a feat of reason. The man who answers to no tribe answers to the one that taught him to say so.
In a 2006 interview Almond described his pull toward other Jews without apology. He never believed in God. He identifies through culture and history. He is drawn to the Jews when he enters a room, recognizes them, feels an attitudinal link. It is the home team. He names Philip Roth and Saul Bellow as carriers of a shared apprehension of life. Mearsheimer needs no further evidence. Here is the social nature reasserting itself under the individualist self-description, the attachment that arrived through inheritance rather than argument and that survives even the loss of the belief that once justified it. Almond cannot reason his way out of the pull and does not try. He reports it as a fact about himself. The reporting is the theory’s confirmation. The tribal core holds when the creed has lapsed.
The collaboration with Julianna Baggott (b. 1969) on Which Brings Me to You (2006) shows the social animal in another register. Almond describes the writing as combat, two fragile narcissists sharing a byline, each sent back into the ring by a spouse in the corner to beat on the other. The liberal account would cast two autonomous artists negotiating a contract of equals. Almond’s account is closer to a fight between rivals bound by interdependence, the emotional veracity of the book purchased through the conflict rather than through the cool exercise of craft. The sentiments came first and ran hot. The reasoning followed.
The Boston College resignation in 2006. Almond left over the university’s invitation to Condoleezza Rice during the Iraq War, and he gave the reason in the language of universal principle, that the school told its students lying is acceptable when it brings power. That is liberal moral universalism, the appeal to a standard binding on everyone everywhere, the kind of claim Mearsheimer says motivates liberal states to overreach abroad. Mearsheimer’s deeper argument cuts the other way, though. He would expect the universalist gesture to ride on a prior tribal commitment, the antiwar progressive allegiance of Almond’s class, and to dress the allegiance in the costume of principle. The resignation fits that reading. What it does not give Mearsheimer is the foreign-policy payoff his book is built to explain. Almond is a memoirist, not a state. His universalism stays moral and aesthetic and never commands an army. The social anthropology travels well to a single writer. The geopolitics it was built to support does not, and a reader who wants truth over a clean fit should say so plainly.
Radical empathy. Almond’s doctrine extends concern past every boundary, to the stranger, the rival, the difficult character on the page. The craft book Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow (2024) raises this to a rule of art, mercy for even the figure the writer finds hardest to love. Mearsheimer treats boundless universal concern as the liberal dream that human nature defeats. Sympathy runs along the lines of the group first and thins as it moves outward, because the long childhood trained it to. Almond’s own evidence supports the deflation. The man who preaches empathy without limit attacked Mark Sarvas, a fellow Jew and a fellow writer, on Yom Kippur, and avows that his warmth bends toward the home team when he walks into a room. The universal doctrine sits on the surface where reason operates. The graded, tribal sympathy operates underneath where socialization and sentiment do their work. When the two meet, the lower layer wins, which is the whole of Mearsheimer’s claim about which of the three sources governs.
If Mearsheimer is right, then, Almond is the social animal who has been trained by a particular tribe to prize the appearance of standing free, and who supplies, in his own candid moments, the evidence that the training took. His independence is the value infusion of the liberal literary class. His empathy is the universalist creed that human attachment keeps cutting down to size. His drawn-to-the-home-team avowal is the core the creed cannot reach. The figure survives the frame, but not as he describes himself. He survives as a case of the thing Mearsheimer says we all are, a member first and a free chooser a distant third, with reason arriving late to ratify what the group already settled.
Author Steve Almond – Which Brings Me To You (Novel), The Evil B.B. Chow (short story collection, Candyfreak (non-fiction), My Life in Heavy Metal (short stories)
I call Steve (who blasted his nemesis Mark Sarvas, a fellow Jew, on Salon.com on Yom Kippur, Oct 13, 2005) Friday afternoon, July 21, 2006.
Steve: "My parents were psychiatrists. I don't think I wanted to do that. I've got lousy memory when it comes to my childhood. My earliest memory [about work] was that I'd work for a newspaper. I did that after college for almost a decade."
Then Almond got an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. "The MFA is the artificial welfare state for people who are passionate about writing and reading. There aren't many environments where people are word-drunk.
"People used to make a living at writing before MFAs were around, but then there were venues where you could make a living as a short story writer. The culture was a reading culture.
"There's more great writing than ever. There are just fewer readers."
Luke: "What was it like writing a novel with Julianna Baggott?"
Steve: "It was a thrill at the beginning. Then it got complicated and rancorous. That's what happens when you have two fragile narcissistic characters sharing a byline and a fictional world. We went at it fiercely. That was good for the book, to knock each other around. It wasn't pleasant. It was exhausting. The emotional veracity of those letters was predicated on Julianna and I putting each other through the wringer."
Luke: "Are you and Julianna a couple?"
Steve: "No. She's been married a dozen years. I just got married [to Erin, a writer from California]. But the writing of the novel was intense. We were in an intense relationship for six months. Would we want to write another book together? I can only guess that she would say no.
"My wife is a fan of Julianna's. I'm sure Julianna's husband heard a lot of 'That f—ing Steve Almond' comments. My wife heard a lot of 'Juliana's driving me crazy.' We each had someone in our corner to tell us to be less sensitive, that what matters is the book, to rub us down with salts and then send us back out into the middle of the ring to beat on each other more."
Luke: "How involved are you in Jewish life?"
Steve: "I write this crazy Jewish sex column. My wife tells me she's converting to Judaism. I've never believed in God. I'm deeply compelled by Jewish history. I identify culturally. My mom would use Yiddish words. They sneak their way into my work. I'm proud of the moral and intellectual tradition of Judaism.
"A lot of the great writers — Philip Roth, Saul Bellow — they have a Judaic perspective on life, an anguished apprehension of the suffering people go through in trying to love those around them.
"The Old Testament is the best writing on earth. It has the best stories.
"When I walk into a room, I'm drawn to the Jews. I usually recognize them. We have an attitudinal link to one another. It's the home team."
We talk about the internet.
Steve: "Any literary website has a certain amount of interviews, reviews and serious consideration of what interviews means. That's great. Then there's the other half — the Fox News part — malicious, gossipy, aggrieved, envious."
Steve: "Boston College had a lousy record on gay rights and other things. Then I found out they were inviting Condoleeza Rice and I just thought it was a f—ing cynical thing to do. To cash in on her fame and make sure you get lots of donations and send the message to students that it is OK to lie as long as you get power."
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Yosef Abramowitz Edward Alexander Michael Berenbaum Sally Berkovic James Besser Reuven Blau Stephen Bloom Andrew Silow-Carroll Shmuley Boteach Benyamin Cohen Debra Nussbaum Cohen Robert Cohn Ami Eden Rob Eshman Larry Cohler-Esses Frances Dinkelspiel Matt Dorf Ami Eden Charles Fenyvesi Eric Fingerhut Amnon Finkelstein Sue Fishkoff Samuel Freedman Stephen Fried Robert I. Friedman Heshy Fried Jonathan Friendly Neal Gabler Evan Gahr J.J. Goldberg Ari Goldman Yossi Klein Halevi Malcolm Hoenlein Wayne Hoffman Hollywood Jews Mickey Kaus Eve Kessler Michael Kinsley Amy Klein Marc S. Klein Lisa S. Lenkiewicz Gene Lichtenstein Jason Maoz Jonathan Mark Deborah Dash Moore Alana Newhouse Gustav Niebuhr Ori Nir Steve Rabinowitz Gary Rosenblatt Jennie Rothenberg Debra Rubin Neil Rubin Walter Ruby Douglas Rushkoff Jonathan Sarna Cathy Seipp Rabbi Avi Shafran Mark Silk Sheldon Teitelbaum Jonathan Tobin Tom Tugend David Twersky Teresa Watanabe Steven I. Weiss Leon Wieseltier Paul Wilkes Lauren Winner Yori Yanover Larry Yudelson
