In February 2015 the New York Times runs a column by a novelist most of its readers do not know. The title is “Going Off.” Each week Diana Spechler (b. 1979) reports on what it takes to come off the drugs that hold her depression, her anxiety, and her insomnia in some kind of order. She writes from inside the experiment. Each morning, one hundred milligrams of bupropion. Each night, a quarter milligram of lorazepam. Trazodone, gone. She lowers the doses and watches what comes back.
The psychiatrist across the desk had given her the plan in numbers. Get the mood near one hundred percent. Get the anxiety near zero. She had heard versions of this before and quit the medication each time, because it stopped working or because it stopped her writing. For two years on the pills the sentences would not come. She forced them out. Off the pills the depression returns, and the old fear with it. She sits between the flatness the drugs give her and the despair they hold back, and she describes the narrow ground.
The response comes fast. Readers write with their own stories, their own pill counts, their thanks. Some write in anger, because she refuses to come out for the drugs or against them. Doctors and patients worry that a column in the country’s paper of record might push the wrong reader to throw out her prescriptions. Spechler answers that she advocates nothing. Her aim, she tells one woman who calls her, is to undo shame. She wants the talk that families and clinics keep behind closed doors to happen on the page, under her own name.
This is her subject. Across novels, essays, and the stories she tells aloud, Spechler returns to the spot where a private wound becomes public speech, to the cost of saying the thing and the relief of saying it.
She was born in Boston in 1979 and grew up in a suburb she could not wait to leave. She took an MFA in fiction at the University of Montana. From 2004 to 2005 she held a Steinbeck Fellowship at San José State University, which bought her time for a first novel and a seat among other young writers. Later came a fellowship from the Sozopol Fiction Seminars in Bulgaria, a LABA fellowship at the 14th Street Y, residencies at Yaddo and Hawthornden and the Anderson Center, and the Orlando Prize for nonfiction from A Room of Her Own Foundation. The honors mark a writer who moved between fiction and the essay from the start.
Her first novel, Who by Fire, appeared in 2008. It tells the story of the Kellermans, a family broken by the kidnapping of the youngest child, Alena, who was taken as a girl and never found. Years pass. The brother, Ash, blames himself. He drops out of college, claps a yarmulke on his head, and goes to Israel to study in a yeshiva, cutting off his mother and his sister. The sister, Bits, fills the silence with men. The mother, Ellie, has not recovered. When Alena’s remains surface at last, Ellie sends Bits across the world to bring Ash home for the funeral. Spechler tells it from three sides, turning the book over to each in turn, so the reader sees Ash through Bits and Bits through Ash and the mother through both. The title comes from Leonard Cohen (1934-2016), who took it from the Yom Kippur prayer Unetanneh Tokef, the liturgy that counts who shall live and who shall die, who by fire and who by water. The novel asks an old question through a modern family. When we set out to rescue the people we love, what do we wreck in ourselves?
Skinny followed in 2011. Gray Lachmann is twenty-six and sure she killed her father. After his sudden death she eats. She gains weight she cannot stop gaining. Reading his will, she learns he kept a second daughter, a teenager named Eden, and she builds a plan around the girl. She will take a counselor job at the southern weight-loss camp where Eden is enrolled, lose the weight, find the sister, set things right. The camp is half racket. The director sells delusions. The co-counselor is nineteen. Gray studies her overweight charges with the same hard eye she turns on her own body, and she falls for the lean athletic director who praises her for shrinking. Spechler writes Gray’s voice in the cadence of the diet boards, the self-loathing and the false cheer, and she refuses to turn the weight loss into rescue. The body changes. The grief does not.
Both novels circle the same ground. A family comes apart. Someone holds guilt for a death. The body and faith and food carry the weight of feeling. Jewish life runs through the work, the yeshiva and the Yom Kippur liturgy in the first book, the devout father who eats the bacon in the second. Spechler grew up with this material and uses it without piety.
The medication column changed her course. “Going Off” ran from February to July of 2015 and ended with a list, “10 Things I’d Tell My Former (Medicated) Self,” advice on tapering slow, lining up support, guarding the hours she needed for writing. The series brought a large readership to a question that drug companies and many doctors preferred to leave alone. What happens to a person inside the withdrawal, and what does it mean to want a life without the pills. Some critics found the column muddy and worried over its romance with purity. Others called it candid work on a taboo the press had ducked for years. Spechler signed with Crown for a nonfiction book built on the column. The novelist had turned essayist.
She also learned to tell stories without a page. Spechler has won the Moth StorySLAM eight times and has carried her stories onto the Moth Radio Hour, the Moth podcast, and NPR. Flavorwire named her a writer to see read live. The live work asks the same of her as the prose. Watch close, tell the truth about yourself, find the larger point in a small private scene, and earn the laugh that keeps the room from looking away.
Since 2015 she has made her living on the road. A dispatch from Barcelona opens with a man on the sidewalk who will not move, shirtless, a navy backpack on his shoulders, his dark hair going every way at once. She tries to pass. He holds his ground. The scene is the method in miniature, a stranger watched close and turned into a study of strangers and the rules they break. She runs these pieces in her Substack, Dispatches From the Road, part travelogue and part account of the writing life, the freelancing, the teaching, the work of staying a writer outside the old machinery of publishing.
She lives now in Dallas, after New York and a spell in Austin. She covers the city’s tables for its magazines, the omakase counters and the strip-mall kaiseki and the steakhouses where agents close their deals. She has written on sobriety, on solo travel, on food, on the body, on the small medical choices that turn out to be large. She treats travel as a question about the self. Who is she when the familiar drops away?
She teaches, too. She has taught for the Gotham Writers Workshop and Stanford’s online program, and she now teaches in the MFA at Cedar Crest College, including its Pan-European program, and works as a developmental editor and coach. Her classes press the same points her own pages keep. Look hard, get the feeling right, build the scene, and turn the lived thing into something a stranger can use.
Across the forms, the preoccupation holds. Spechler writes about the thin line between closeness and isolation, about people who try to build a self out of loss and keep reaching for the ones who can hurt them most. She works against shame. She tells the private thing in public and asks the reader to do the same. The pills, the dead father, the kidnapped sister, the body that will not behave, the road that never ends at home. She keeps returning to the spot where a person stands alone and tries, on the page, to be known.
Diana Spechler and the Hero System of Confession
The psychiatrist lays out the plan in numbers. Get the mood near one hundred. Get the anxiety near zero. Diana Spechler (b. 1979) has sat in this kind of chair before. She has taken the pills before and quit them, because they stopped working or because they stopped the writing. On the medication the sentences locked up; for two years she pried them loose one at a time. Off the medication the old dark walks back in. She sits in the gap between the flatness and the dark, and in February 2015 she starts to publish the gap, a week at a time, in the New York Times.
Each morning, one hundred milligrams of bupropion. Each night, a quarter milligram of lorazepam. Trazodone, cut. She lowers the doses and records what comes back. The column is called “Going Off.” She wants, she says, to undo shame. She signs her name to it.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued that a man builds his life as a defense against the knowledge that he will die. No one can live inside that knowledge, so each culture hands out a hero system, a code for earning the sense that you count and will not be wiped away. We take up the code and call the result a self. Read Spechler through that argument and the career resolves into a single project. She beats death by becoming known.
Two terrors drive the work, and both wear her own face. The first is erasure. Her fiction keeps circling a child who vanishes. In her first novel a little girl is taken and never found, and the family she leaves behind spends years undone by the empty place. In her second a father dies without warning and the daughter eats herself toward a body she no longer recognizes. The medicated flatness is its own small death. She cannot reach her own grief, cannot write, sits sealed inside a self gone quiet. To disappear while still breathing is the fear under all of it.
The second terror is insignificance. The wound is private, and the world tells her the private wound is small, and shame agrees. Keep the door shut. The thing behind it counts for nothing, and so do you. The dread runs deeper than vanishing. It is that her vanishing will mean nothing, that the suffering adds up to no more than itself.
Her hero system answers both at once, in a single act. She says the hidden thing aloud, in her own voice, under her own name. The saying witnesses her, and a witnessed life resists erasure. The saying turns the wound into something a stranger can pick up and use, and a wound that helps a stranger stops being only hers. The byline is a headstone she carves while she is alive enough to read it.
Her one move, repeated, is subtraction. She goes off the medication to reach what she calls the body as a self-sustaining ecosystem, the true self she trusts to lie beneath the chemical scaffolding once she strips it away. The diet camp of her second novel runs on the same faith. Take the weight off and the real girl appears. Her family novel performs the harshest version, subtracting a child and studying the hole. The belief sits under everything she writes. The real self is what remains after you remove the additions, and you find it by taking away.
Her critics caught the romance in this. A drug-free life can become a purity quest, the pills recast as contamination, and more than one reader of the column worried that subtraction had turned into its own reward. The worry has teeth, because subtraction is also the shape of dying. To strip away the supports is to rehearse the vanishing she fears most. She courts erasure in a shape she controls, on a page, so she can narrate the disappearance rather than only suffer it. The going-off is a death she gets to author.
Her sacred value is candor. Her candor goes past not-lying. It is the conviction that to say the shameful thing in your own voice, under your own name, is the heroic act, the thing that saves you. Inside her hero system that word carries rescue. Carry the same word into other hero systems and it breaks into pieces.
Set one act on the table and walk it around the room. A woman publishes, in the nation’s paper of record, the week-by-week record of going off her psychiatric medication.
The psychiatrist who set out the numbers reads it and frowns. In his system honesty is what a patient owes a clinician in a small room, accurate report toward accurate treatment, held in confidence. The heroic act is the unshowy maintenance, the right dose held for years, the patient kept alive and dull and breathing. Her public going-off looks to him like noncompliance dressed as art, and worse, a hazard to the reader who copies her and throws out her own prescription. To him candor served the cure. She has aimed it at strangers and called the aiming brave.
A Hasidic rebbe reads the same column and covers his eyes. He lives by tzniut, the law of the guarded and the covered, and to him the inner life is private before it is anything, clothed the way the body is clothed. What is hidden lies close to holy. The heroic act is the mitzvah done where no one watches, the devotion that seeks no audience. Here candor means keeping faith with the law and with your given word, not the broadcast of your suffering. He has a married daughter who carries her own darkness and tells no one outside the house, and he counts her silence a strength, a fence around something precious. A writer who prints her wounds in the Times has, to him, traded a treasure for attention.
A career Marine colonel reads it and sets it down. He has carried things he will name to no one, and he believes the line holds because each man holds his portion and does not narrate his nightmares to the press. In his system the disclosure of fear is a liability, a crack the enemy widens. The hero endures and keeps the burden quiet. “You carry it,” he says. “You do not perform it.” Her column reads to him as weakness staged for applause, and the applause offends him more than the weakness.
An old refusenik reads it last. He spent years in a camp for printing the truth the state denied, and to him truth-telling is the highest act a man can attempt. The truth he risked his life on was a public truth, the lie at the center of a regime, the thing a nation needed said. He looks at a free woman publishing her serotonin levels and sees the sacred word spent on a private mood, the courage of the comfortable. Same word, other weight, other cost.
There are as many readings as there are systems, and in most of them the word that rescues Spechler turns on her. The poker player knows that to be read is to lose, and counts the unreadable face the only strong one. The Stoic governs the passion and declines to stage it. The surgeon gives the hard news and walks to the next room. The value she has built her life on looks, from those windows, like exposure, indulgence, a wound held open on purpose.
And there is the engine of the project, the part that unsettles. Her heroism feeds on the shame it fights. The telling is brave only while the thing told stays forbidden. Strip the taboo and the act goes slack. She has said her goal is to lift the shame around medication and mental illness, yet a world without that shame would leave her heroics no fuel. She needs the closed door to keep opening it. The confession depends on the sin.
Watch the value cash out in a room. A Moth StorySLAM runs on a hard rule: five minutes, no notes, a true story, your name pulled from a hat, judges scattered through the crowd. She has won eight of these. The room quiets. She hands over the secret, the kind most people spend a life hiding, and somewhere in the telling the laugh comes, and the laugh is the room agreeing to carry the thing with her. For five minutes she is not alone with it and not erased by it. She walks out lighter and drives home to the desk to do it again on the page, where the room is larger and slower to answer.
She lives in Dallas now, after New York and a stretch in Austin, and earns her keep on the road. One dispatch opens with a man on a Barcelona sidewalk who will not move, shirtless, a navy pack on his back, his dark hair going every way at once. She tries to pass him. He holds his ground. By the next sentence she has turned him into a paragraph. The motion has not changed since the column. She subtracts the familiar, lowers herself into a strange city, and makes herself legible to readers who will never shake her hand. The travel writing is the going-off carried on by other means, the self stripped of its settings to see what stands once the supports are gone.
Three coordinates fix her.
The first is the gift, and it is real. She hands the reader who hides the same wound the sight of someone who carried it, said it, and kept working. She turns private waste into common use. That is the confessional tradition at its best, and she practices it with nerve.
The second is the cost. The work can mistake the telling for the healing, can take exposure for repair. It feeds on the taboo it claims to fight, so it holds a quiet stake in the shame it works to lift. And its long habit of subtraction can drift toward the erasure it set out to master, the purity quest that ends in the empty room.
The third is the wager. She is betting that to be known beats to be safe, that the cure for shame is to say the thing in your own voice and stay alive to say the next one. Every other hero system in the room leans across the table and tells her to cover it. She uncovers it, signs her name, and waits to see who answers.
We did this interview at Diesel Books in Brentwood Thursday evening. Here's Diana's website.
I am deeply impressed by this young woman. It's the subliminity of her prose, the profoundity of her thoughts, and the beauty of her eyes. Not sure which is most important to me.
Here's Diana at her book reading tonight in front of eleven of us (mainly friends and family):
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Before her reading, I sat down with Diana in an alley behind Diesel Books for an hour-long video interview.
Luke: "When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?"
Diana grew up in the Boston suburbs. "I've always wanted to be a writer & Since the time I could pick up a pen."
Her dad is a doctor and her mom owned a party-planning business.
Diana has a younger brother (Orthodox) and an older sister.
All of her family lives in Texas.
Diana: "It wasn't until my senior year in college that I knew you could even go to graduate school [for writing]. I asked one of my professors at [the University of Colorado] can I go to graduate schoool for creative writing, he said, 'I don't recommmend that. You'll be broke for the rest of your life. I haven't seen your writing. Maybe you're a star. Probably not. It's a terrible life.'
"Once he saw my writing, he became a mentor for me. I did go graduate school for creative writing [an MFA at the University of Montana]."
Luke: "Where were you in the social pecking order in high school?"
Diana: "I always assumed I was popular & I had a lot of friends. I certainly chose social life over school during high school. That always makes you cooler when you're young."
"I was always confident about my skill [as a writer] until I got to graduate school, where I was on the bottom rung & At the first day of workshop, the professor said, 'You were all the best in college. Get over it.' Suddenly I was at school with really talented writers & I suddenly felt self-conscious about not being well read enough, about my lack of life experience, which you need to write anything of substance & Once I started to doubt my skill, I really started to work at it. Writing became very serious to me. It's a very serious artistic pursuit and if you don't treat it as such, you're not going to get very far."
"Reading Huck Finn in high school did nothing for me as a writer. It was reading all these writer writers such as Lorrie Moore. You don't read Lorrie Moore in high school."
"When I am not writing, I feel very off-kilter. Right now I'm not writing because I'm on book tour. I don't have structure in my life right now. So I'm not writing as much as I should be or the things that I'm writing are not what I want to be working on. Everything feels off because of that. I keep saying, 'I want to get back to my writing.' What I'm saying is that I want to feel normal."
Luke: "In which emotional state do you do your best work?"
Diana: "When I'm alert and well-rested."
Luke: "How about angry, sad or happy?"
Diana: "If I am too much of anything like that, it's distracting."
Luke: "So you don't write out of one primary emotion?"
Diana: "No. In many ways, I see it as work & Like anybody else going to work, you don't want to be distracted. You want to be well-rested & The emotion that I feel, usually I pick up the emotion of whatever it is that I am working on. To start off with any strong emotion, it's just going to take me longer to get to where I want to be."
Luke: "Even rage?"
Diana: "If I was in a rage, I don't think that I would sit down to write."
Luke: "What role has Judaism played in your life?"
Diana: "Well, I was raised with quite a bit of it. My family, we were Reform growing up. My family now is mostly Conservative. I am sort of unaffiliated. I am more interested in it than involved in it."
Luke: "What did people in high school expect you to become?"
Diana: "A writer."
Luke: "How did you end up in Montana?"
Diana: "I got that magazine US News and they had the list of the top ten grad schools [MFA programs]. I looked at the ones with MFA programs on the list. I crossed off the ones where I couldn't imagine living, such as Amherst, Massachusetts, and applied to all the other ones. When I got into Montana, I had never been to Montana, but I knew it was a great program. One of my friends got accepted with me and we drove out from Boulder, Colorado.
"I had a great two years, not just because I got such a fabulous education, but because it is such a great place to live."
Luke: "How did the MFA program change you as a person?"
Diana: "Again, it made me a serious writer and a better reader."
"I remember a serious shift in the way I saw the world & The ability to question and to step back a bit."
Luke: "Were you a confident program before the MFA program?"
Diana: "Yes, but it was unwarranted confidence."
"I've become more confident about my writing since my book came out. Unfortunately, I am very dependent on external validation. As artists we have to be otherwise it's journaling."
Luke: "How did you decide to make the Shlomo Carlebach thread so exact?"
Diana: "It's based on him but it's not him exactly. It s fiction. You're talking about the character Yudel Zeff."
Luke: "I can't think of any differences aside from the name."
Diana: "I had been to a Carlebach shul in Jerusalem and I was completely blown away by the music and the experience. The feeling that Ash describes in the novel was something that I felt, the music made me feel I was being lifted off the ground. I was so blown away, I wanted to find out who this guy was, then I stumbled on all this information and I felt very conflicted. It hasn't necessarily been proven. I didn't want to slander him or his name, even though a lot of the other events in the novel are true to history. The bombings, the siege of the Church of the Nativity.
"Yudel Zeff means the wolf who's beloved.
"You're the first person who's asked me about him."
Luke: "I'm curious why this guy is exact. There is no fictionalizing aside from the name."
"You dropped him in the same way you dropped in all those historical events. Exact."
Diana: "Yeah.
"I love research. I did quite a bit of it. It's a great way to procrastinate."
Luke: "Carlebach is such a fascinating story you don't need to fictionalize it."
Diana: "True."
Luke: "What were the hardest and easiest parts of writing your novel?"
Diana: "There were no easy parts. The hardest part was constructing the plot."
"I remember printing out the first draft and thinking, 'I have a novel!' It was hundreds of page but there was no novel. There were just characters walking around having thoughts and feelings."
"I write character-driven fiction. I first come up with the characters and then the plot emerges because of who the characters are."
Luke: "How do you go about constructing your sentences?"
Diana: "When I was a newer writer, I paid a lot more attention to it. Now that I've found my voice, syntax comes naturally to me. I have to play with the syntax because it is important to make every character sound different."
Luke: "What modifying word would you most like attached to your writing?"
Diana: "Oh wow. Engaging."
"How about you for your writing?"
Luke: "I like brutal."
Diana: "You and I are probably very different people."
Luke: "I love it when people see the savagery in my work. I'm someone who climbs aboard a ship with a sword in his mouth and starts stabbing people."
Diana: "I'm more like the person at the bow of the ship with a rose in her mouth."
Luke: "I am going to get in so much trouble if I print what I just said."
"'Engaging.' Is that analogous to 'compelling'?"
Diana: "'Compelling' is a better word. 'Compelling' implies more substance & smart entertainment."
Luke: "What things have been said to you about your mature writing that have meant the most to you?"
Diana: "The two compliments that I've loved best that I've been getting in response to this novel are (A) people who say they stayed up all night or missed work to finish my novel, and (B), when people say, 'I've never been to Israel,' or 'I'm not Jewish, but your book made me want to go to Israel.'"
"I want to be entertaining. Part of being brutal or savage as you said is being entertaining to people. To be heard, you have to engage."
Luke: "Do you use writing to settle scores?"
Diana: "No, but you do, don't you?"
Luke: "Yeah."
Diana: "Sometimes I settle scores with myself. I was doing a lot of searching spiritually when I was doing this project. An interviewer was asking me recently about some of the conversations between Ash (convert to Orthodox Judaism) and Monica (a seductress who left Orthodox Judaism). That they felt real. And I said, 'Actually, they were in my head. They were battles I was having with myself at the time I started the novel.'"
Luke: "You strike me as breathtakingly levelheaded."
Diana: "Thank you, Luke."
Luke: "Are you breathtakingly levelheaded?"
Diana: "No. I think I am often ruled by emotion, but it is a beautiful compliment. Thank you."
Luke: "What do you love and hate about being interviewed?"
Diana: "I like being the center of attention. I don't like the anticipation of a question I know I'm not going to want to answer."
Luke: "What are some of the best questions you've been asked?"
Diana: "These are, these are, these are it. These are probing."
Luke: "A friend [Robert J. Avrech] compared my interviewing technique to North Korean torture. I thought that was the greatest compliment."
Diana: "But I'm enjoying it. I don't know if that means I m masochistic. Maybe I should go to North Korea? All I did was come to California."
Long pause.
Luke: "I tend to close my eyes when I think."
Diana: "I've noticed."
Long pause.
Luke: "What has the publication and success of your novel meant to you?"
Diana: "It's tangible reward which is amazing. I toiled for years on this novel and at the risk of sounding dramatic, it really was awful at times because I had no idea if it was ever going to see the light of day. I had no idea if anyone was going to like it. I assumed people wouldn't. Sometimes it just felt self-indulgent, wasteful, pointless, like I was going in the wrong direction. Other days felt the opposite. 'Oh, I'm brilliant. Who knew?' Of course, minutes later, I'd be in the pits of despair. It's an emotional rollercoaster. It's thankless work when you're not getting published. Suddenly, in a day, I had a book deal. Then one day, it looked like a book, and it came to my house in a box.
"I opened the box and thought, 'There is the fruit of my labor.' I can't think of anything more gratifying."
Luke: "Would that be in the top five of things that ever happened to you?"
Diana: "Oh yeah. It's number one."
Luke: "How has your choice of profession affected you?"
Diana: "I'm a highly emotional person. I don't know if the writing does that to me or if I am a writer because I am that way. It's difficult to say because I've never been anything else. My adult life has been very tied up in this career path."
Luke: "How would your best friends describe you?"
Diana: "Loyal and hard-working. I'm sure if they were being honest, they would also have negative things to say about me but I'm not sure I even want to think about what those things are.
"How would your friends describe you?"
Luke: "Cynical, sarcastic."
Diana: "Your cynicism seems willful, though."
Luke: "Yeah. Probably my mother knows me better than anyone."
Diana: "What would she say?"
Luke: "Interesting. Disciplined. A lot of things people cry about I find funny."
Diana: "Honestly or willfully?"
Luke: "Honestly. I don't contrive a laugh. I think of people who want to reform me. They're really sweet people, good people, good Orthodox Jews."
Diana: "What do you they want to reform you to?"
Luke: "They want to save me."
Diana: "They want you to be more observant."
Luke: "Yeah, and not so cruel in my writing. Be shomer mitzvot [observant of Jewish law] and clean up my act. And that makes me laugh. It's a really pure place that they are coming from, but it strikes me as funny."
Diana: "Their earnestness?"
Luke: "Yeah."
Diana: "Or their failure to not see it in black or white?"
Twenty second pause.
Luke: "Maybe naivete. I'm a bit of a shark. When I'm around guppies, sometimes it makes me laugh."
Diana: "Because of how easily you can eat them? Because of how close they are swimming to sharp teeth."
Luke: "Right, right."
Diana: "This feels like a scene in a horror movie and you're about to kill me. Is this what's happening? I'm glad we're close to the bookstore I'm reading in."
Luke: "Now you see where Amy Klein was coming from.
"I love to lambast myself. I love to disect myself in the most cruel ways."
"Your sentences [in your novel] strike me as unostentatious."
Diana: "Thank you. A lot of people tell me that I write the way I talk, which I think is true. I do edit. I do like the natural sounding sentences."
"Like every other writer in the world, when I was 13 I read ‘'Catcher in the Rye' and decided this is what I want to do. I want to write like this. I thought to myself, 'You're allowed to write like this. I can't believe it.' Because it sounded like a conversation. You can make something so beautiful and it just sounds like someone talking."
Luke: "You mentioned that a few years ago you were on a spiritual search. What were you searching about and what did you find?"
Diana: "I think my main question was, 'Is there value in practicing Judaism that is not Orthodox Judaism? If I believe, why would I not practice to the letter of the Law? If I am not practicing to the letter of the Law, doesn't that mean I'm not sure that I believe?' That was for me. I'm not judging other people."
Luke: "What did you come to?"
Diana: "Sometimes I say, complacency. Sometimes I say, some peace with agnosticism. It depends on how hard I am being on myself."
Luke: "Do you believe in God?"
Diana: "I'm agnostic."
Luke: "Do you believe in moral absolutes?"
Diana: "No. I believe that every person has a right to his safety, to food, water and shelter."
Luke: "Do you have moral guideposts?"
Diana: "None that I can think of. Do you? The Torah, right? Yeah."
Luke: "Anything that I haven't asked that I should ask you?"
Diana: "No. I'm getting so tired."
I turn off the camera.
Diana: "You want to get a drink?"
Luke: "OK."
I lead us down 26th street. We're searching for a bar. I'm lost. I don't drink. I don't know how to do this.
Luke: "I'm not very good at real life."
Diana: "I'm good at real life."
Luke: "You'll have to lead."
Diana: "OK."
She finds a bar on the corner with San Vicenete. She orders a glass of red wine. I order a Diet Coke.
I talk about myself. We have 20 minutes to kill before her reading.
I'm just getting started unburdening myself when it is time to go.
The check comes. One of my gentler qualities is that I have never run over anyone or anything to pick up a check. Nobody gets hurt when they come between me and a bill.
Diana pays.
"Thank you," I say from the bottom of my heart.
While no Orthodox Jew touches money on the Sabbath, I'm more religious than most. I don't like to touch money on Thursdays as well.
When we walk back to Diesel Books, I lose touch with Diana. I try to find the bathroom on my own. It's a major trauma.
I could write a novel about it.
I spend ten minutes on The Decameron and then rejoin Diana for her reading.
As I watch the replay on video, I notice that my nightvision feature makes Diana's clothes see-through.
Diana talks about her whirlwind tour. "I haven't slept yet. I wake up every morning and I have no idea where I am."
Luke: "You care to tell us more about that?"
Diana: "Be careful what you say. Luke is famous for recording careless things people say on his blog. Right? I just thought I should warn them. Many of them are my family."
Luke: "Tell me the truth."
Diana: "You wish."
Diana reads for two minutes and take questions.
Bloke: "How come the father doesn't narrarate?"
Diana: "He's absent."
Another Bloke: "Is that symbolic?"
Diana: "Like what?"
Another Bloke: "Like God the father?"
Luke: "Yeah, because God is absent from the book and the father is absent from the book. It's a Godless universe that they are living in."
Diana: "Well, not Ash [the ba'al teshuva]."
Luke: "He believes but [he's a nutter] there's no reason to believe in the book."
"He [Ash] believes in God but I'm wondering about the universe of the book."
Diana: "I don't really know what you mean."
Luke: "Are all three voices equally authoritative?"
Diana: "Probably not. As a reader, you'd probably trust Bits and Ash more than you would trust the mother."
Luke: "I wouldn't trust the mother and I wouldn't trust the guy who became Orthodox. Even though Bits is screwed up, she's still the most authoritative voice in the book."
Bloke: "I'd agree with that."
Luke: "The guy went off the deep end. The mother's a nutter. The girl's a slut, but she's still the voice of reason in this universe of insanity."
Girl: "I think the book is more about family than about religion. You could substitute any religion in there and it would still work."
Diana: "I think so too."
"I think I was writing a family story before I was writing a Jewish story. To me it's a story about guilt, rescue and family bonds before it is about anything else."
Luke: "Did you have an experience of trying to rescue that backfired?"
Diana: "Many times, probably. I think we all do. You'll start to think that someone needs rescuing and what that means is that you want that person to be more like you, or more like society, or more capable of fitting in in some way, you think it is for the good of the person, but it's really a form of narcissism. Growing up and gaining maturity allows you to see that for what it is. If someone is not asking to be rescued and you are offering rescue, you have to question your own motives."
Luke: "Do you see people drowning and do you feel driven to rescue?"
Diana: "I've never seen someone drown."
Luke: "Not literally."
Diana: "Like struggling? Yes, I do. Many people feel compelled to fix, especially when you see a friend take a bad turn. It can be really difficult not to give in to the tendency to try to fix it."
Luke: "Did your theme evolve from the characters?"
Diana: "It came later. I came up with the characters first."
Bloke: "How long did it take you to write?"
Diana: "Four and a half years."
Bloke: "Do you think you'll return to these characters again?"
Diana: "I think these characters are better off without me. I cause them nothing back grief."
"I know exactly what they look like… The girl looks like me."
Bloke: "What was your profession while writing this?"
Diana: "I've always had odd jobs. I would never take on another career because I didn't want to have a career that wasn't this. Currently I'm teaching and working in a bar and working as a ghostwriter. I've done all kinds of things. I had a fellowship at San Jose State for a year. I was a writer-in-residence at a boarding school. Whatever I could do to make writing the center of my life."
Luke: "Were your parents concerned when you said you wanted to be a writer?"
Diana: "Yeah. My mom thought it was something I should do as a hobby. I don't think they knew anybody who did it professionally. The thing about choosing to be an artist is that you make up your own life. You don't have a template. When you're an artist, you just have to do what works for you to make your art your main focus."
A dark mysterious woman asks a question: "When you were writing your book, what was the most self-revealing part?"
Diana: "You're so pretty, by the way. You're strikingly beautiful."
Woman: "It's make-up."
Diana: "Self-revealing?"
Luke: "Probably the anonymous sex."
Diana laughs and sips her water.
Diana: "The thing I learned about myself that I was happy to learn was that I don't give up very easily. There was a lot of reason to… I also learned that I can lose it very easily. So it's disconcerting. I remember one time I lost three days work because my computer was having a problem. I literally was screaming and trying to pull my hair out of my scalp."
"I don't find writing to be magical or therapeutic. Now that I've been doing it for so long, it feels like work… The actual process is not cathartic for me."
"This is like book club, except that half the people haven't read it."
Luke: "You don't have an interpretative dance about the novel?"
Diana: "That's something I'd have to prepare for. I don't think that I could do it impromptu."
