Luke Ford

The father comes into the bedroom at night to talk about Samuel Beckett (1906-1989).

Leora Skolkin-Smith (b. 1952) is eleven and lives between an apartment in Manhattan and a house in Pound Ridge, New York. Her father is an entertainment lawyer. He represents Beckett and Marlon Brando (1924-2004) and Federico Fellini (1920-1993) and Carol Channing (1921-2019), and he counts himself among the first Americans to back Waiting for Godot. He sits at the edge of his daughter’s bed. He tells her how a writer reaches the depths of existence and still lands the work on a Broadway stage and on a shelf in a bookstore. He keeps coming back, night after night, to say it again. The girl is hooked before she understands what she has agreed to.

She grows up on the stories that travel home with him. Fellini, the wild man he meets in Italy, the director who loves women. Brando, who once throws the father’s briefcase across a street and calls after him, “Fetch, lawyer-boy.” The daughter listens. The men her father serves are the largest figures in American culture, and they treat her father as a fixer, and the girl files all of it away. She learns young that art and status sit in the same room and that the room is not always kind.

Every three years the family flies the other direction, to Jerusalem, where the mother was born before there was a State of Israel.

Jerusalem is the second world, and it does not match the first. The mother’s family carries the war inside the house. They speak of survival as the only subject. To them the personal questions of an American girl mean little against the question of whether the family, the people, the country, will exist next year. Skolkin-Smith later calls their vision an absolutism, a chauvinism, a pressure too large for a child to digest. She loves them and cannot breathe around them. She moves between Pound Ridge and Jerusalem and belongs to neither. The split becomes the wound, and the wound becomes the work.

She does not go straight to the page. She acts first. She spends years in the theater, and the theater teaches her what the bedroom lectures promised: rhythm, silence, the weight a line carries when an actor holds it one beat too long. The training never leaves her prose.

Then comes the breakdown.

As a young woman she suffers a serious hospitalization. She lives on the locked ward. She wears the seclusion-room dress that runs from neck to thigh. She sleeps in a common dorm among other patients and listens to them at night. She comes out of the hospital with the one thing she cannot yet turn into a book: a self that has been to the edge and back. She tries. She writes two novels in these years and finishes neither into anything she can use. She calls herself a boxer with words in this period, punchy and defensive, swinging at the page to prove she is a writer at all.

She enters Sarah Lawrence College as a transfer into her own life. She is a sophomore, insecure, full of longings that ordinary Americans around her do not seem to share. She takes a writing class. The teacher is Grace Paley (1922-2007).

Paley runs the room the way Paley runs everything, as a combative pacifist with a heart too large for the space. She reads the girl’s mess and does not flinch from it. She does the opposite. She tells the girl the mess has a story, that the political horror of the Middle East can enter fiction through a single confused family, that Jerusalem can live on the page in the girl’s own words and not in her mother’s. The instruction lands like a key turning. For the first time Skolkin-Smith sits at the center of her own world instead of the edge of someone else’s.

Paley’s apartment in the West Village becomes a destination. Skolkin-Smith and her friends call it headquarters. They go there to be mothered. Paley feeds them and argues with them and sends them back out with a dictum the younger writer repeats for the rest of her life: if you do not like something in the world, go change it. Skolkin-Smith earns her bachelor’s degree and her Master of Fine Arts at Sarah Lawrence and stays on with a graduate teaching fellowship. She studies with Susan Sontag (1933-2004) as well, and Sontag hardens her sense of the ambition fiction can hold. But Paley is the one who saved her, and she says so for fifty years.

The world that taught her about Broadway and the bookstore now teaches her about rejection.

She is twenty-five, out of graduate school, and an editor named Karen Braziller options her at Persea Books. Braziller wants the entertaining version, the recognizable arc of mental illness, the story a reader can follow without strain. Skolkin-Smith hands her the mess instead. They have a contract. They part anyway, because the writer will not take the editorial cure. She files the parting under Paley training and moves on.

She admires Elisabeth Sifton, a distinguished editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Sifton almost takes her first book. Then Sifton turns it down for want of narrative drive. The rejection cuts deep because the writer respects the source. So she goes back to the bare frame of the thing and teaches herself what narrative drive is, not for that book alone but for every book after. The lesson holds. She decides, in the Paley spirit, that she alone judges what fails and what survives, not an outside gatekeeper, and that the only standards she answers to are whether the work is true and whether it is her own.

The first novel arrives in 2005. Edges: O Israel, O Palestine sets two runaway teenage lovers loose in the Israel of the early 1960s, before the Six-Day War, and sends them across into Jordanian territory. Paley selects it for her own imprint at Glad Day Books, edits it line by line, and then nominates it for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award. The novel does not argue a politics. It puts ordinary people inside a history that is breaking around them and watches what the history does to a body and a family. The Jewish Book Council selects it. The National Women’s Studies Association lists it. Tovah Feldshuh (b. 1952) records the audiobook and earns an AudioFile Earphones Award for the reading. The Bloomsbury Review later names Edges among its favorite books of twenty-five years. Producers option the film, retitle it The Fragile Mistress, and plan a shoot in Jerusalem, Jordan, and New York, though the picture has not reached the screen.

She is not finished with those characters. In 2011 she publishes The Fragile Mistress, which begins as a sequel and turns into a rebuilding of Edges from the studs. She pushes deeper into the daughter’s fractured mind, the mother who will not let go, the sex, the residue that political violence leaves in a private life. The Israeli and the Palestinian appear as people with interiors rather than as positions in an argument. Princeton University later places Edges, The Fragile Mistress, and her next novel inside its Fertile Crescent Moon series on women writers and the conflict, setting her among Israeli and Palestinian voices.

The next novel turns the camera inward. Hystera (2012) leaves the geopolitics and walks onto the ward. Its narrator, Lillian Weill, blames herself for the accident that kills her father, drifts through failed affairs and ruined friendships, and retreats into delusion inside a New York psychiatric hospital in the 1970s, the decade when Patty Hearst (b. 1954) becomes Tanya the revolutionary on the front pages. Skolkin-Smith builds the book from the inside of the illness rather than from the chart at the foot of the bed. She wants the reader to live in the patient’s mind, not to diagnose it. Hystera wins the 2012 USA Book Award for Fiction and the 2012 Global E-Book Award and reaches the finals for the International Book Awards and the National Indie Excellence Awards. Kirkus Reviews calls the prose sharp and surprising.

Then she goes quiet for more than a decade as a novelist, and returns on March 6, 2024, with Stealing Faith, published by Story Plant Gold. The novel follows a young writer and the older, famous writer who remakes her life, and it draws without disguise on the years under Paley. It opens at dawn in August 1988 on a Vermont farm, the older woman down to bones and baldness after seventy-nine years in New York, and it reaches back through the narrator’s own months on a locked ward, the FDR Drive at her shoulder, her psychiatrist husband holding her through it. The book is about apprenticeship and creative inheritance and the sexism a woman writer met inside a prestigious American university in the late 1960s, when the literary establishment ran on men. A 2026 interview in Vol. 1 Brooklyn returns once more to Paley, and the writer says the same thing she has said for decades. She wishes everyone had a Grace Paley.

The Paley dictum stays operational. Skolkin-Smith does not keep her literature inside the literary world.

She and her husband, a psychiatrist, build creative-writing programs for psychiatric patients across New York City. Their nonprofit runs in hospital after hospital for roughly a decade. She designs the work for people in the position she once held, on the ward, in the dress, and she wins cultural and national grants to carry it in. She teaches writing to homeless women. She helps found the Emmett Till / Anne Frank Project, named for a Black boy murdered in Mississippi in 1955, Emmett Till (1941-1955), and a Jewish girl murdered by the Reich, Anne Frank (1929-1945), and the project brings Black and Jewish young people together to read each other’s histories of hatred and survival and to talk across them.

Her criticism keeps pace with her fiction. She writes for The Washington Post, Critical Mass, Psychology Today, The Quarterly Conversation, and The Brooklyn Rail, and serves as a contributing editor at ReadySteadyBook. The tribute she files for the Post when Paley dies in 2007 opens at headquarters, the West Village apartment, the mother of all those needy female selves.

She knows her own lineage and names it. She reads Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) and takes from her the sparse, repeating, near-cinematic line that renders trauma by suggestion and leaves the rest in the white space. She reads Clarice Lispector (1920-1977), Elfriede Jelinek (b. 1946), and Violette Leduc (1907-1972), and from all of them she takes a permission to put the interior life first and the plot second. One interviewer hears Paul Bowles (1910-1999) in the merciless distance of her sentences and Ana\u00efs Nin (1903-1977) in their rawness. She refuses the fashions of the market. She will not write the entertaining version of madness, the version Braziller wanted, and she pays the commercial price for the refusal and judges the cost worth it by her own internal court.

Place her, then, in contemporary American fiction as a writer of the seam between the private and the historical, who learned in one childhood room that art and power share a table and in another, Paley’s, that a damaged self can become a public instrument. Her novels gather feminist concern, mental illness, Jewish memory, and Middle Eastern history into books that resist the side a reader might want them to take. She does not deliver verdicts. She shows how a war arrives inside a daughter, how a mother’s absolutism becomes a girl’s silence, how a hospital becomes a country and a country becomes a hospital. The father promised her a writer could reach the depths and still reach the stage. She kept the first half of the promise and let the second go.

The Great Delusion

If John J. Mearsheimer is right in his anthropology, the literary work of Israeli-American novelist Leora Skolkin-Smith shifts from an exploration of individual psychological awakening to a stark depiction of how deeply tribal contexts and historical geographies capture the human mind.
Skolkin-Smith’s fiction, most notably her novel Edges: O Israel, O Palestine, frequently centers on characters navigating the fragmented, complex boundaries of pre-1967 Israel, historical Palestine, and the United States. In a standard liberal framework, her work can be read as an individualistic journey—a coming-of-age story where characters use personal insight to reconcile displaced lives, cross cultural borders, and assert their own independent identities amid geopolitical chaos.
Mearsheimer’s realism upends this interpretation, showing that the fragmented personal histories and cultural displacements she writes about are the direct consequences of group survival and intense childhood socialization.
First, the deep identity crises within her narratives are not isolated psychological dilemmas. Mearsheimer notes that individuals are born into social groups that shape their identities long before they can assert their individualism. For a character navigating the pre-1967 Middle East, identity is not an autonomous choice or a flexible project of self-actualization. It is fixed by the historical memory, trauma, and survival logic of the group. The sense of displacement her characters experience happens because they are caught between the intense value infusions of competing historical realities. A man cannot simply reason his way out of these ancestral claims; they are pre-loaded into his consciousness before his critical faculties form.
Second, the political realities and underground movements that form the backdrop of Edges such as references to the 1940s Haganah reflect Mearsheimer’s premise that humans are tribal at their core because embedding within a society is the best way to survive. The intense loyalty, sacrifice, and conflict defining these groups are not ideological aberrations that can be smoothed over by universalist human rights discourse. They represent the raw operation of collective survival. The legal and national boundaries that displace her characters are instruments used by these social coalitions to maintain security against external rivals.
Third, Skolkin-Smith’s exploration of institutional mentorship and personal connection, as seen in Stealing Faith, also aligns with Mearsheimer’s emphasis on intense socialization. The relationship between a mentor and a young writer is not a neutral exchange of technical tools. It is an intense transfer of values and worldview. The friction and transformation that result show how vulnerable the individual mind remains to the psychological and moral frameworks imposed by powerful figures within its social circle.
If Mearsheimer is right, Leora Skolkin-Smith is a chronicler of the inescapable weight of inheritance. Her narratives demonstrate that human choices are strictly bounded by tribal history, showing that a man’s moral universe and sense of self remain profoundly tethered to the specific historical landscape and social group that produced him.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

If Pinsof is right, the work of novelist Leora Skolkin-Smith serves as a description of coalitional fragmentation and displacement rather than a purely psychological exploration of trauma.

In her fiction, such as Edges: O Israel, O Palestine, Skolkin-Smith depicts characters navigating the fractured historical and cultural landscapes of the Middle East and the psychological strain of shifting identities. A standard literary reading views these struggles as a tragic crisis of belonging, where historical trauma and geographical division fracture the inner life of the individual, requiring empathy or artistic healing to bridge the gap.

Pinsof’s framework shifts this focus. The geographic shifts and cultural ruptures in Skolkin-Smith’s narratives do not reflect a broken human condition. They document how the human animal responds to changing coalitional dynamics. When a character moves between distinct cultural worlds, the resulting internal tension is a functional calculation of fitness. The mind must rapidly re-evaluate its tribal loyalties, status cues, and social alignments to survive in a new, competitive social landscape.

Furthermore, her novel Hystera, which deals directly with themes of madness and institutionalization, can be viewed under Pinsof’s lens not as a story about an objective mental breakdown, but as a depiction of what happens when a person’s strategic capacity to navigate her immediate hierarchy collapses. What the therapeutic elite pathologizes as madness is often the ultimate breakdown of a person’s social signaling tools.

Under Pinsof’s frame, Skolkin-Smith’s writing does not offer a sentimental plea for global understanding or psychological healing. Instead, her work exposes the harsh realities of displacement, showing how individuals adapt their internal architecture to maintain position and security when their external coalitions fracture.

Leora Skolkin-Smith in the Field

Pierre Bourdieu builds his account of art on a single division. The literary field splits into two poles. At the heteronomous pole, art answers to the market, and success reads in sales, contracts, and the size of the audience. At the autonomous pole, art answers only to other artists and to the field’s own history, and success reads in prestige that pays nothing and lasts. The two poles run inverted economies. The autonomous pole treats commercial failure as proof of purity and treats the refusal of money as the surest route to the one capital it honors, the symbolic kind. Leora Skolkin-Smith’s life sits inside this map with almost nothing left over, because she is born at one pole and spends her career walking to the other.

Her father holds the heteronomous pole in its richest form. He is an entertainment lawyer who represents Beckett, Brando, Fellini, Channing. He helps carry Waiting for Godot to a wide American audience. His work is the conversion of art into box office and back, the placement of difficult genius onto a Broadway stage and a bookstore shelf at the same time. He sits at his daughter’s bed and tells her this is the goal, the depths of existence and the paying house in one motion. The lesson is a position-taking, though the girl cannot name it. He teaches her that art and commerce share a table, and that the lawyer sets the terms.

What the father gives her, in Bourdieu’s accounting, is cultural capital in its embodied form. She grows up easy around the largest figures in the culture. She hears Fellini described from the inside, collects the Brando stories, learns the manners of a house where great art is the family trade. This inheritance is the engine of everything that follows, because cultural capital of this depth can be reinvested anywhere in the field. She takes the inheritance and turns it against the half of the house that earned it. She moves the capital from the commercial pole to the pole that despises commerce. The move is available to her because the father’s world gave her the means to make it.

The trajectory runs through the theater first, then through a breakdown and a hospital, then into Sarah Lawrence College. There she meets Grace Paley, and the consecration begins.

Consecration, for Bourdieu, is the transfer of symbolic capital from a figure who holds it to a newcomer who does not. Paley holds a great deal. She is a canonical writer, later a state poet laureate, a name the autonomous field honors. She reads the younger woman’s work and selects it for her own imprint at Glad Day Books. She edits it line by line. She nominates it for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award. Each act moves prestige from Paley’s account into Skolkin-Smith’s. Susan Sontag adds more from the same pole. The Sarah Lawrence teaching fellowship adds the institutional stamp of the academy. Years on, Princeton places her novels in a humanities series beside established Israeli and Palestinian voices, and the university consecrates her a second time. The prizes that Hystera wins, the USA Book Award and the Global E-Book Award, sit lower in the hierarchy of consecration, but they run the same errand. They pay in standing.

The autonomous pole asks its players for the appearance of disinterest, the show of caring nothing for money, and Skolkin-Smith offers the real article. She marries a psychiatrist. She says the two of them chose callings that earn little and that money worries her as costs rise. She publishes with small presses, Glad Day, Fiction Studio Books, Story Plant. The autonomous field rewards this relation to economic capital, because disavowal of the market reads as proof that the artist serves art. She has the disavowal, and she has the scarcity behind it, and the field counts both in her favor.

At twenty-five, fresh from graduate school, she is optioned by Karen Braziller at Persea Books. Braziller wants the recognizable version, the entertaining arc of mental illness, the story a reader follows without strain. Skolkin-Smith hands her the difficult thing instead and will not take the editorial cure. They part with a contract on the table. Read through Bourdieu, this is the autonomous pole refusing the heteronomous demand in one clean motion. The writer turns down the readable book and the smoother path to sales, and the refusal becomes symbolic profit. She files it, in her own words, under the training she received from Paley. Elisabeth Sifton (1939-2019) at Farrar, Straus and Giroux supplies the matching case from the other direction. Sifton nearly takes the first book, then declines it for want of narrative drive. The respected gatekeeper’s rejection sends the writer back to learn her craft on the field’s own terms rather than the market’s.

Her later statements formalize the position. She says she alone judges what fails and what survives, not an outside gatekeeper, and that her only standards are whether the work is true and whether it is her own. This is the autonomous field’s foundational claim stated by one of its members. The field becomes autonomous to the degree that it generates its own criteria and recognizes no judge outside itself, and the artist who says she answers only to an internal court speaks the field’s purest doctrine. Bourdieu calls the deep investment that keeps a player in the game its illusio, the shared belief that the stakes are worth the chase. Skolkin-Smith’s belief that being true and being one’s own settles everything is that illusio. The field produces the conviction that produces the artist.

The structure of the work answers to the structure of the position. Bourdieu calls this homology, the rhyme between where an artist stands in the field and what the art looks like on the page. Her fiction puts subjective consciousness ahead of plot, suggestion ahead of exposition, the fractured interior ahead of the clean line of story. She refuses to assign the Israeli and the Palestinian to ideological positions and renders them as people with insides instead. She names Marguerite Duras as her model and takes from her the sparse, repeating line that leaves the rest in white space. Each of these is a position-taking within what Bourdieu calls the space of possibles, the menu of available moves at a given moment in the field’s history. The aesthetic of suggestion opposes the commercial arc the way the autonomous pole opposes the heteronomous one. So the refusal she makes to Braziller at the level of career and the refusal she makes to conventional plot at the level of form are the same refusal, performed twice. The narrative drive Sifton asks for and the entertainment Braziller asks for name the heteronomous demand, and the writer declines it in the contract and on the page alike.

Place her, then. A habitus formed in a high-culture home at the commercial pole. An inheritance of cultural capital reinvested against the very commerce that produced it. A trajectory carried by consecration from Paley, Sontag, the academy, and the award apparatus. An economic account kept thin, by circumstance and by the field’s reward for thinness. A body of work whose form rhymes with its maker’s position.

Why This Wall Of Silence About Mother-Daughter Sexuality?

That was the most shocking part of Leora Skolkin-Smith's novel Edges. I've never seen this explored in English-language literature.

I call Leora Sunday night, July 30, 2006. "I can't think of another novel about a girl-mother almost-incestuous relationship."

Leora: "That was a large part of the reason I took to paper because I wasn't seeing that in [English-language] literature either."

Luke: "I can't think of a single example."

Leora: "There's an absence of that complex ambiguity in the relationship between girls and mothers. That bothered me. A female's progression into womanhood is dependent on that relationship.

"I've seen it represented in older works, in French works, in European authors, in Elfriede Jelinek. She wrote The Piano Teacher. She's fierce about that.

"I grew weary with the standard answers about child abuse and what incest was.

"I can't tell you how many letters I've gotten from women who said, 'Thank you. You just wrote about my mother and me.'

"It's a fearful place to go.

"I got a lot of support from men who said it was fascinating to read the female point of view. 'I've read a lot of Philip Roth and he's so honest.' But women have been holding back for many reasons, including fear of damaging the feminist movement.

"I know a lot of people simply put the book down. They couldn't go there."

Luke: "Is there something more Israeli or European in this openness?"

Leora: "I think so. I'm only half-American. My mother is Israeli. The literature I've always read is European, with a lot about the body and sexuality and symbiosis. There's a strong Puritanical streak here with a different view of sexuality and where it belongs."

Luke: Toni Bentley's book The Surrender, about anal sex, got big play for probing the last sexual taboo. I'm thinking there are a lot more important and bigger taboos about sexuality than anal sex such as a daughter's awareness of her mother's boundary-less sexuality.

Leora: "Thank you. In America, yes, we have a lot of psychoanalysis, but a lot of it is suspect and a lot given to clear-cut incest with clear-cut boundaries. There's just an entirely different sensibility and way of looking at life [in America]. If you bring up the Clinton incident in Europe, people don't even know what the fuss was.

"What about Australian literature?"

Luke: "Not big on mother-daughter sex."

Leora: "I know how terrifying it is, but you just go with what you have to do."

Luke: "There's a ton of stuff about boys wanting to have sex with their mothers. There's nothing new with that."

Leora: "I'm a big fan of Proust. He's a great teacher of complexity and ambiguity."

Luke: "Is your mother [born in 1920] still alive?"

Leora: "Yes."

Luke: "And she's got all her senses?"

Leora: "No. She's in a home. She has dementia.

"She did read my book. She loved it. She keeps it on her night table.

"She grew up in Palestine but was she educated in Austria. She said to me, 'You were honest.' That's her way of judging what you do as an artist.

"Grace Paley is the arch-feminist and she thought it was fascinating to see the daughter's side of what was going on.

"A lot of people see it as a negative portrait of my mother. I don't see it that way. She was just a complex, charismatic, problematic figure."

Luke: "Really screwed up."

Leora: "Yes. Definitely of the body. That's a problem for people."

Luke: "We don't like mothers who have so few boundaries with their daughters."

Leora: "Then I got fascinated with this whole issue of boundaries in the Middle East. That's all they ever fight about."

"Part of the complexity of my childhood is that every year we went to Israel for three months. My father is a New Yorker [American Jew, atheist, intellectual] and he made sure we knew her world."

Leora has a sister three years older and a brother three years younger. "My sister just hates her guts. The boundaries between a boy and his mother are different."

Luke: "Was he her favorite?"

Leora: "Oh yeah. He could do no wrong."

Luke: "Did your mother help the Haganah?"

Leora: "Oh yes."

Luke: "What are the differences, if any, between your mother and the mother in your book?"

Leora: "That's a hard question."

In other words, very little.

Luke: "Did your mother have these lack of boundaries?"

Leora: "Oh yes. She still does.

"I began to heal myself from that by understanding the culture she was raised in."

Luke: "What was your mother's reputation in New York?"

Leora: "It was very difficult for me growing up in Pound Ridge. Not only were we the only Jewish family, my mother was the only Israeli. She was an oddity. But everyone admired her.

"There were a lot of innuendoes about my mother being a primitive. She wasn't like the other Westchester housewives.

"I feel like I'll never have to write another book about my mother as long as I live because that was a very complete portrait."

Luke: "I can't think of any Jewish community in the U.S. who wouldn't ostracize your mother."

Leora: "Yes. The Jewish Book Council selected my book and publicized it but they had trouble with it because it didn't fit in to anything. It doesn't fit anyone's conception of Judaism or Israel."

Luke: "Was she physically affectionate with a lot of people?"

Leora: "Yes. That's the Israeli way. Just think of the Italians or the Spanish. Somehow people just understand that Italians are like that.

"Jewish Americans are very different from Israelis. They are very reserved."

Luke: "Was your mother sleeping around while you were growing up?"

Leora: "Oh no. She stayed loyal to my father."

Luke: "Did your parents have a good marriage?"

Leora: "I'd have to say no. It was a terrible marriage.

"I lost my father early in my life. We were in a car accident together. I was 17. He had permanent brain damage. He lived for six years. My mother brought him home from the hospital and looked after him.

"It was my college interview. He was driving me home from Vermont. He had a stroke [at the wheel] while we were going about 50mph."

"People ask me if my mother was homosexual. My answer is that she was polymorphous."

Luke: "Did your mother cling to you?"

Leora: "Oh God. Yes.

"The French sense of family is incredibly cloying. French parents don't visit their children. They stay over. I don't think my cousins have left the home where my grandmother was born. Americans are concerned with independence."

Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece, writes on Amazon.com:

Leora Skolkin-Smith's brief novel follows fourteen-year-old Liana Bialik on a trip to Israel with her mother and sister in 1963. The three women have left their Westchester home to attend the reburial of Leona's maternal uncle, whose grave is to be moved to the Israeli side of the country's border with Jordan. At the same time an extended visit with her birth family is intended as a comfort to Liana's mother after the recent death–by apparent suicide–of her husband. The tragic stories behind the deaths of these two men, Liana's father and uncle, though only hinted at in the book, form the backdrop to Liana's coming-of-age story.

Set amidst the barbed-wire borders of pre-1967 Jerusalem, Edges is more concerned with the figurative boundaries between Liana and her mother, whom Liana simultaneously loves and is repelled by. Certainly there is much in her mother, as Skolkin-Smith describes her, to send one screaming: "Her body was usually without undergarments which gave the sheets a hot, wettish odor. Her hair and face creams gave off a strong, fruity smell and tempered the raw coarse aromas that got loose from her flesh." In this and other passages the author paints Liana's mother as aesthetically odious–just the sort of way a girl of fourteen might view her mother. But reeking of sweat and other bodily fluids as she is, Liana's mother is not the only thing that smells in this book. Skolkin-Smith's Jerusalem is filled with the unappealing odors of food and people as well as of cocktail napkins, orgasms, and mirrors (which smell respectively like walnuts, curdled milk, and "sweat and old yarn").

We can view with sympathy Liana's desire to free herself from her mother's stifling, sweaty, noisome affection, if not the dramatic means by which she eventually makes good her escape. Her story becomes entwined with that of an American boy who's recently gone missing and whose disappearance has caused a national stir. Apparently the boy doesn't want to be found, but why this should be is never made clear. Skolkin-Smith's Edges is a quiet novel filled with small moments. Much of the story is told in dialogue, the stilted English of Israelis conversing in an unfamiliar tongue. They pepper their speech with untranslated Hebrew, which may be off-putting to readers unfamiliar with that language. More problematic for my own appreciation of the novel is that the various characters often have fractured encounters with one another that don't quite make sense:

"Two small nuns in black bowed in front of some ruins, and a priest with a scarlet-red Russian turban was smoking a cigarette beside a church door. He saw us and crossed the vestibule."

"'I am American. Christian. Does it matter?'" my mother began, and he waved us along, away from him."

Skolkin-Smith's characters rarely express themselves fully, much falling between their words. (Liana, for example, runs off with the American boy without the two ever having a conversation to that effect beforehand.) This imperfect communication probably reflects real-life dialogue well, but it is difficult to follow on the page.

Readers who like their prose on the poetic side–and anyone interested in a story that evokes the sights and sentiments and indeed the smells of 1960's Jerusalem–should give Skolkin-Smith's novel a look.

Leora: "Debra Hamel is a wonderful person. She has a Ph.D. from Yale. But she's very American. We had lots of dialogues about what she was saying. 'Fractured encounter' is a valid criticism but that was my experience.

"Artists face these challenges. Do you want to be clear? You know you'll get more.

"Israel's a wild chaotic place. There are few introductions to anybody. Everybody is living on top of one another.

"I chose to bring a sensibility and sometimes that won over how clear I was going to be.

"I'm a visual writer. I'm not good at the logic of plot because it doesn't excite me."

Luke: "Did you have any suicides in your life?"

Leora: "It's better for me not to talk about it."

Ivy, the sister of protagonist Liana, doesn't change much in Leora's novel. "That's true of my sister too," she says. "She's always going to hate my mother."

Luke: "When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?"

Leora: "I've always wanted to write and to act. My father was a lawyer for actors."

Leora married at age 22 to the son of a diplomat and 32 years later, they're still married.

Luke: What's with the hyphenated name [Skolkin-Smith]?

Leora: "That was very conflicted. He's a Christian atheist. I'm a Jewish atheist. I don't believe in the manifest destiny of the Jewish people or Zionism or any of that. I was very sensitive about taking away my identity. My husband is a doctor. I didn't want to get letters [addressed to] 'Dr. and Mrs. Smith.' After your fourth letter as a physician's spouse, you begin to feel faceless. 'Leora Skolkin-Smith was an announcement of identity.

"It wasn't a feminist thing. I just wanted to keep my identity."

Luke: "Does he have the hyphenated name too?"

Leora: "No. He's just Matthew Smith.

Luke: "Do you have children?"

Leora: "That's something I couldn't do physically. I've managed to mother a great deal people who are not from my body."

Luke: "Would you rather write a great novel or have a great marriage?"

Leora: "Wow. Great music. That's a fear question inside myself. I never want to have to answer that. That's how important writing is to me and he is to me. I'm glad I'm with a man who can handle that. He's a psychiatrist. My intensity forced me into writing."

"I'm lucky enough to have a man who pays the rent while I write."

Leora has two degrees from Sarah Lawrence College — a B.A. in Writing (1975) and an MFA (1980).

Luke: "What do you love and hate about the writing life?"

Leora: "I love writing. I hate the writing business. I don't think writing is a consumer product. I hate competing with other writers. We're not horses. They set you up for this horse race. I was nominated for a bunch of awards for this book. I've resented it."

Luke: "You resented being nominated? You resented not winning?"

Leora: "Of course I resented not winning. I won one thing — a stipend from the PEN/Faulkner Writing Foundation — and I wanted everyone to be happy for me. I'm going to Washington D.C. They're putting Edges into the school system."

Luke: "When you say you hate the business, what you're really saying is that you hate that aspect of reality."

Leora: "Yeah."

Luke: "This is just life."

Leora: "Yeah. You want everyone to love you. You want everyone to walk up to you and say you've transformed their life. Of course you want to win the Pulitzer."

In the mid-1990s Margot Singer (b. 1962) holds the title of principal at McKinsey & Company in New York. She earned it through a decade of client teams, slide decks, and red-eye flights, the analytic grind the firm asks of the people it grooms for partner. The credentials sat in place early. Harvard first, an A.B. in History and Literature, magna cum laude, in 1984. Oxford next, on a Marshall Scholarship, an M.Phil. in international relations in 1986. Then consulting, and consulting paid. By the measure of the firm she had arrived.

In 1997, at thirty-four, she walks out. She trades the partner track for fiction and a family and heads west, and a few years later she enrolls in a doctoral program in English and Creative Writing at the University of Utah, where she takes the degree in 2005. The move reverses the usual line of ambition. Most people climb toward the corner office. Singer left it for a desk and a manuscript no one had asked her to write.

Her writing returns to Jewish displacement and inherited memory. The families in her fiction leave Europe ahead of the catastrophe, some for Palestine, some for America, and their children carry the weight of that move whether or not they can name it. She came to the subject with the consultant’s training in her hands, an ear for structure and a habit of mapping a problem before she solved it, and she turned both toward questions a deck cannot close.

Her first book, The Pale of Settlement (2007), gathers nine linked stories under the name of the western borderland of the Russian empire where the czars confined their Jews. The recurring figure is Susan Stern, a journalist in early-2000s New York with family in Israel and German-Jewish grandparents who fled in the late 1930s. The stories move from Manhattan to Jerusalem, from a dig in the Galilee to Kathmandu, and they circle one question. How much of a life comes down as inheritance, and how much does a person choose?

In one strand a character kneels over an excavation in the Galilee, brushing dirt from shards that might confirm an ancient text. The work runs patient and uncertain. The past arrives broken, a piece at a time, and the digger decides what the pieces mean. Singer treats memory the same way. Her characters sift, and the sifting never settles.

The collection won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction, and the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and it took an Honorable Mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. A debut by a former consultant in her forties had announced a writer.

Ten years on came the novel Underground Fugue (2017). Singer set it in London in the weeks around the July 2005 transit bombings and built it on a borrowed architecture. She had been listening to Bach. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) left an unfinished work, the Art of Fugue, and from it she took the novel: four alternating points of view, each voice entering in turn and carrying the theme forward, the way a fugue hands its subject from part to part. She mapped the book’s recurring images on a chart laid out like a musical staff, returning to flight, heights, stars, water, grayness, music, and the underground.

The four voices belong to neighbors thrown together by chance. Esther, an art conservator, has come from New York to nurse her dying mother and to escape the grief of her son’s drowning and a marriage falling apart. Through the party wall she plays Bach on her mother’s old German piano, and the man next door hears it. That man is Javad, a neuroscientist who left Iran decades back, called now to examine a silent stranger the tabloids have named the Piano Man, a possible case of dissociative fugue. Javad’s son Amir slips at night into the city’s disused tunnels, a teenager with a private life his father barely registers. The father asks where the boy goes and gets back nothing, just out, hanging around, and the explorations carry Amir underground on the eve of the attacks. The fourth voice is Lonia, Esther’s mother, who escaped occupied Europe as a girl through a coal-mine passage that answers Amir’s tunnels across sixty years.

The title carries both senses of the word. In music a fugue interweaves voices around a single subject. In psychiatry a fugue is a flight from the self, a forgetting. The Latin root, fuga, sits under refugee and fugitive. Singer wrote the migration in the book as a flight from homeland and from identity at once, then found, drafting it, that the deeper story ran the other way, toward connection, toward what her people were running to. She laid out the argument in a 2017 essay for The Paris Review, “Can a Novel Be a Fugue?”, and traced the form back through Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) and others who tried to give fiction the structure of music.

Underground Fugue won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish American Fiction and the Nancy Dasher Award, and the Sami Rohr Prize shortlisted it. Before publication Elle named it among the year’s most anticipated novels by women.

Alongside the fiction she has worked the border between criticism and craft. With Nicole Walker she co-edited Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction (2013, second edition 2023), a book that asks what happens when a writer pushes the line between memoir, journalism, criticism, and lyric essay rather than where the line belongs. Writing programs across the country assign it. Her own habit of borrowing structures, the fugue for a novel, runs straight through the argument.

Her most recent book turns the method on her own family. Secret Agent Man: Essays (Barrow Street Press, June 15, 2025) circles her father and the question that gives the collection its title, whether he once worked for intelligence. She does not solve it. She had no interest in a tribute. She wanted to know where he came from, who he was, and who she became as his daughter. The essays let the mystery stand, on the premise that the stories families tell themselves stay unfinished by nature. The book won a gold medal in the Independent Publisher Book Awards and reached the semifinals for the Chautauqua Prize.

For more than twenty years she has taught at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, where she holds the Thomas B. Fordham Chair in Creative Writing and directs the creative writing program and, in a turn that puts the McKinsey training back to use, the university’s arts strategy. She directed the Lisska Center for Scholarly Engagement, the fellowships office, through the 2010s, and from 2009 to 2022 she led the Reynolds Young Writers Workshop, a summer program for high school writers. Denison gave her its Bonar Family Mentorship and Teaching Award in 2018. The fellowships and residencies stack up behind the books: the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, the Thomas H. Carter Prize for the Essay, and stays at Yaddo, Ragdale, and Ucross. She lives in Granville with her husband and two children.

A pattern holds across the work. Singer treats a story as an inquiry, not a verdict. She digs, she sifts, she sets the voices in counterpoint, and she leaves the gaps where they fall, between what a family remembers and what the record shows, between the life a man inherits and the one he makes. The consultant who once turned ambiguity into a recommendation now keeps the ambiguity on the page, where it does the harder work.

The Great Delusion

If John J. Mearsheimer is right in his anthropology, the work of Margot Singer shifts from an exploration of personal, fragmented memory to a documentation of the total capture of the individual mind by family history and historical trauma.
Singer’s work, including her short story collection The Pale of Settlement, her novel Underground Fugue, and her essay collection Secret Agent Man, frequently examines themes of displacement, secrecy, and the way the past haunts the present. Her narratives follow individuals who are dislocated by political violence, family history, and the geographic movements of their parents and grandparents. In an individualistic, liberal framework, these narratives might be read as an independent writer using creative nonfiction and fiction to examine the fluid, flexible nature of identity, or characters using personal reflection to navigate their own lives.
Mearsheimer’s realism upends this interpretation, showing that the fragmented personal histories and cultural displacements Singer documents are the direct consequences of group survival and intense childhood socialization.
First, the focus on family memory and inheritance in Secret Agent Man ceases to be a matter of personal reflection and becomes a study of an inescapable value infusion. Mearsheimer notes that the main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are exposed to intense socialization before their critical faculties develop. Singer’s examination of her family history—marked by the displacement of European Jews fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe—demonstrates this exact reality. The historical trauma, secrecy, and cultural identity of the primary group are pre-loaded into the consciousness of the child. The individual does not independently formulate a moral or historical framework; her mind is a container for the memories and survival strategies of the tribe that came before her.
Second, the structural backdrop of Singer’s fiction, such as the 2005 London tube bombings in Underground Fugue, reflects the realist premise that human life is defined by the raw clash of competing group interests rather than individual choice. The characters in the novel are dislocated by political violence and betrayal, demonstrating that the atomistic actor is an illusion. When geopolitical conflicts erupt, the individual is instantly pulled back into the reality of his group identity. The social groups into which people are born shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism, and political violence forces those latent loyalties to the surface.
If Mearsheimer is right, Margot Singer is not a chronicler of autonomous individuals discovering their own separate truths. Her work demonstrates the enduring weight of inheritance, showing that a person’s identity, sense of home, and understanding of the past remain profoundly tethered to the historical survival and social conditioning of the group.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

If David Pinsof is right, the work of fiction writer and essayist Margot Singer represents a detailed documentation of coalitional navigation and self-serving narrative adaptation under the guise of exploring memory, loss, and identity.
In her short story collection The Pale of Settlement and her novel Underground Fugue, Singer focuses on themes of displacement, family history, and the shifting borders of personal and cultural alignment. A standard literary analysis views these works as a poignant exploration of how historical trauma and geographical dislocation fracture the human psyche, suggesting that art can bridge these gaps by cultivating deeper empathy and understanding.
Pinsof’s thesis upends this perspective. The characters in Singer’s fiction—navigating complex socio-political landscapes from London during transit bombings to historical cultural divisions—are not broken individuals suffering from a crisis of identity. They are rational actors processing changes in their coalitional security. The internal conflict a character feels when crossing cultural boundaries is a functional calculation of social fitness. The mind must rapidly assess new environments, detect hidden betrayals, and realign its loyalties to preserve status and security.
Furthermore, Singer’s essay collection Secret Agent Man investigates family mysteries and the elusive nature of memory, specifically surrounding her father. Under Pinsof’s frame, the human tendency to build mythologies around parents or reframe family histories is not a failure of memory or a product of psychological confusion. It is a strategic mechanism. Human beings construct self-serving narratives about their lineage to forge useful political alliances, claim a unique moral or cultural position, and outmaneuver rivals in the social hierarchy.
Under Pinsof’s frame, Singer’s writing does not serve to fix a broken world through shared understanding. Instead, it exposes the sophisticated, hard-wired machinery the human animal uses to manage secrets, negotiate trauma, and defend its position within a competitive landscape.

December 19, 2008

We did this via email (her website):

* When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

I had absolutely no idea. I hated grownups who asked that question.

* How did you find out that writing was your thing?

I always loved to write. It’s one of those things that I just knew, deep down, from a very young age. And everybody told me I was good at it, which helped.

* How did you avoid losing your ability to write clearly after spending so many years in higher education? Did all that education affect your style and your thinking?

Since when does higher education stunt your ability to write and think?! I prefer to think that I reclaimed my writing faculties by going back to school after ten years in the business world! For a while, I could only think in groups of three bullet points. And I had picked up some awful habits, like using “impact” as a verb.

* Why did you do a PhD in Creative Writing?

I sort of fell into the PhD. I moved to Utah to be with my boyfriend (now my husband) who was living there at the time. I thought I’d go out for a year or two and ski and try to teach myself how to write. Because I’d quit my job, I decided to apply to the MFA program at the University of Utah, and I liked it so much that I stayed on. Also it was pretty clear that if I actually wanted to get a job teaching at the university level, I’d be better off with the Ph.D.

* If Mark Twain or William Shakespeare did a PhD in Creative Writing, how do you think that would’ve affected their work?

I like to think that they would have appreciated having the time to write. For me, being in the program was permission to spend a few years reading and writing pretty much whatever I wanted, while hanging around nice and helpful people gave me deadlines and urged me on. It was a gift.

* Tell me how your book Pale of Settlement came to be.

For a long time, I was just writing one short story after the next with no particular plan. Then one day I realized that I had a group of stories that seemed to fit together, thematically. These were the first few stories in the book. At that point the main characters all had different names, but it became clear they were really all one character, Susan.

*Have you spent much time in journalism, if not, how did you research that part of the book?

I spent the summer after my first year in college working for a small regional newspaper in Waltham, MA called The Middlesex News. I had the police beat. The cops liked to tease me. Every morning when I came in to read the blotter, they’d call out, “Hey, Lois Lane!” I also worked on my college newspaper, but I sold ads, I never wrote a thing—I was too intimidated. As for the research, I just read a lot. Also, I have an ex-boyfriend who is a reporter. That helped too.

* What do you love and hate about teaching?

I love the students, especially when they get excited about their work. I hate the whining. Neither students nor academics seem to appreciate how good they have it.

* Is there any part of writing that comes easily to you? Which parts of writing are most difficult for you?

None of it feels easy, though I suppose that, compared to other people, it is probably relatively easy for me to hear the “music” of a sentence in my head. What’s hard is deciding which word should come next. And then. And then.

* What are the most interesting reactions you’ve had to your book?

One reviewer (who shall go unnamed) insisted on the “subtle and marked allusions” in one of my stories to Wallace Stevens’ poem “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock.” I had never read the poem until I looked it up then. Funny how that works.

Also, a few people have come up to me at readings and asked me to explain how it was that Jews lived in “Palestine” before 1948. One lady actually said, “But I thought Palestine didn’t exist.” I rattled on about the Ottoman Empire and the Treaty of Versailles and the British Mandate for a while until her eyes glazed over. Now I give a little historical context before I read.

* Have you spent much time in Israel and what do you love and hate about being there?

My father emigrated to Israel with his family in 1939, and my uncle and cousins still live there today. When I was growing up, we went to visit my grandparents for a couple of weeks every other summer. The longest I spent there was the summer of 1983, when I took classes at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I haven’t been back to Israel since 1997.

I love Israel, even though (or maybe because) as everybody knows, it’s a crazy place. But in Israel I’m always caught in the middle – not a tourist, but certainly not a local, either. It would help if I spoke Hebrew, but I don’t.

* What’s the story of you and Judaism? Have you ever flirted with belief and practice?

I’m not religious in the least. Although once, when I was twelve or thirteen, I got fed up with my parents’ half-assed approach to Passover and I highlighted the (Maxwell House) haggadah so my father wouldn’t skip through so much of it. On the rare occasions that we have a family seder, he still uses that haggadah with the highlighted bits.

* Have you flirted with blogging?

Nope. I don’t know how you find the time.

* What most surprised you about the process of publishing and promoting a book?

How utterly insane and irrational it is, from a financial viewpoint, to write a book. (I knew this, but it surprised me all the same). And how incredibly rewarding it has been nonetheless.

* Anything weird or funny happen on the road to all of your awards?

Before I submitted the book to contest, I tried going the agent route. Most of the agents I sent the manuscript to didn’t even bother to reply. One agent, however, wrote back immediately—like in a day. She rejected the book, but kindly advised me to “try to get some of the stories published in literary magazines.” In fact, nearly all of the stories already had been published in literary magazines. Not only had she not bothered to read my manuscript, she hadn’t even bothered to read my cover letter. I guess that’s not funny or weird, just pathetic. Thank god for the contests and awards – without them the short story would really be an endangered form.

I call Margot Friday morning.

Margot: "It did occur to me early on that I was writing about Israel in a way that a lot of people in this country don’t."

Luke: "Could you elaborate?"

Margot: "A lot of the American writers who have written about Israel in recent years have tended to write about it from a more religious standpoints. Nathan Englander, Tova Reich. Not so much, what does it mean to have this connection to a place when you are not necessarily particularly religious? Where your family is sorta from but only very recently. There’s been less written about the period from the 1980s until now. I’m thinking about ‘A Palestine Affair‘ by Jonathan Wilson, set in the 1940s. There’s less written about the more contemporary period, which is a time of great questioning for Israelis, probably more Israelis than Americans questioning these Zionist ideologies that a lot of Americans are vaguely brought up with. Americans have the attitude, why should I care about Israel? It’s not a place I want to go. It’s dangerous, unpleasant. I was going there all the time. We had grandparents there. We didn’t go to synagogue. I didn’t have that kind of indoctrination that Americans get."

Luke: "Am I being blind or was there an absence of ideological intent in your book?"

Margot: "That’s right. I tried quite hard not to be ideological."

Luke: "Are there common ways people respond to your book?"

Margot: "No."

"I haven’t had many responses that surprised me. I was surprised in the opposite way — over how many people get it."

Luke: "There are some similiarities between you and the protagonist Susan?"

Margot: "Some. Initially I started writing stories that were drawn more closely. As time went on, they evolved away from me. It was me but not me, the me that might have been had circumstances been different."

Luke: "Publishing your book. Is it the greatest thing that ever happened to you?"

Margot: "My children have to trump the book but it’s up there."

Luke: "What was it like being a Jew in a goyisha place like Utah?"

Margot: "I found myself for the first time in my life in a Jewish community. It was not what I expected when I moved there. My husband is not Jewish. Because it is such a Mormon place, the Jewish community is pretty cohesive, liberal, welcoming and inclusive. Because I have young kids and they were in pre-school, I found I was hanging out at the Jewish Community Center a lot. Unlike New York, where I didn’t feel like I needed to seek out any Jewish stuff. In Utah, I found I was part of the community. It was cool. I didn’t grow up with that. My family did not belong to a synagogue. We didn’t go to any community centers. We had this stream of Israelis who would show up to the house from time to time… I feel more isolated here in central Ohio, even though Columbus has a large Jewish community, but I’m not really a part of it."

A Google alert lands in Andrea Seigel‘s (b. October 28, 1979) inbox one morning in 2008. She keeps the alert running on her own name and defends the habit with a joke about being a Kardashian. The alert carries a paparazzi photo. Britney Spears (b. December 2, 1981) walks out the back of a Malibu restaurant. Photographers ring her on three sides, the way they work a star, so that a face turned from one lens swings toward another. Spears wears a white dress. She carries a pack of cigarettes, a phone pressed to the pack, and a paperback. The paperback is To Feel Stuff, Seigel’s second novel, a book the market has all but ignored. Seigel sees the photo and loses her composure. She starts emailing everyone she knows.

That morning exemplifies her working life. The front door of literary fame stays shut. Her books reach the world through side entrances, carried by a pop star, a public-radio confession, a detective podcast, a sensation that has no name yet. She writes about people stalled on the edge of adulthood, and her career keeps her on an edge of its own.

Seigel is born in Anaheim and grows up a few miles south in Irvine, a master-planned city of cul-de-sacs and ranked schools in Orange County. That suburb becomes the ground of her early fiction, the place her characters want to flee. She graduates from Woodbridge High School, goes east to Brown University, and takes a master of fine arts at Bennington College in Vermont. The training is literary. The appetite is for popular culture. The two never separate in her work.

Her first novel, Like the Red Panda, appears in 2004, when she is twenty-four. The narrator, Stella Parrish, is seventeen, smart, alienated, two weeks from graduation and from a place at Princeton. Her parents died of a drug overdose at her eleventh birthday party. She lives with foster parents she cannot reach and visits a grandfather who plots his own exits from a retirement home. Across two weeks of final exams and senior rituals, Stella plans her suicide and narrates the approach in a cool, watchful voice. The book offers no endorsement. It records a mind talking its way toward a door. Reviewers reach for Holden Caulfield. The Salon critic confesses that he opened the novel hoping to hate one more teenage lament and closed it won over by Stella’s company. Amazon lists the book among its debut novels of the year. Booklist marks it for adult readers and teenagers alike. A studio options the film. No film follows.

To Feel Stuff arrives in 2006. Elodie Harrington lives in the infirmary at Brown, sick in ways the doctors cannot chart, and the novel folds a ghost story, a campus romance, and a medical mystery into one frame. The haunting carries grief and the distance young adults keep from their own lives. The book earns respect and sells almost nothing. Its Amazon rank settles in the three millions. This is the paperback in Britney Spears’s hand.

The Kid Table follows in 2010. Seigel takes the idea from the children seated together at a family wedding, the table set apart from the adults. The novel gathers a cluster of cousins across a single wedding weekend and moves among them as they negotiate family rank, friendship, and first romance. Ivan Reitman (1946-2022) options it for Paramount. No film follows that one either.

In 2015 she writes Everybody Knows Your Name with Brent Bradshaw, a young-adult novel about fame, social media, and the teenage hunt for a self. It is her last novel to date. The work moves toward screens.

The sideways pattern reaches its clearest form in a feeling she carries from childhood. In the fourth grade a friend named Mindy comes to the house and asks to see Seigel’s things. She works through a shell collection one shell at a time and murmurs what she likes about each. A warmth opens at the crown of Seigel’s skull and runs down to the nape. Seigel is seven when she starts hunting the sensation. She sits in the library to hear pages turn. For years she assumes she is a tribe of one.

In March 2013 she carries the feeling onto This American Life, in an hour built around the idea of tribes. She describes the tingle and the loneliness of believing no one else feels it. Then she finds the videos, the strangers online who feel what she feels, the whisperers and the show-and-tell channels. The label for the sensation, autonomous sensory meridian response, sits at the clinical edge of the language, a term coined to sound neutral. Her segment is the first time the phenomenon reaches a mass audience. She later makes the videos herself.

The household scene catches her at her funniest and most exact. She and her husband Brent watch a Twilight film, his pick, and she uses Bella’s turn to vampire, the new ear for every small sound, to explain the tingle to him. He never buys it. He cannot feel it. The gap between them holds the comedy and the loneliness at once.

Her move into film starts on a Los Angeles street. Seigel drives past a sign twirler on a corner, a woman dancing hard and throwing herself into the work, and a song on the radio moves her in the same minute. The two things meet. She begins inventing an inner life for a woman who cannot make herself step forward. She develops the script.

The film, Laggies, opens in 2014. Megan, played by Keira Knightley (b. March 26, 1985), is twenty-eight and stuck in a quarter-life crisis. When her boyfriend proposes, she bolts and hides out in the home of a sixteen-year-old, Annika, played by Chlo\u00eb Grace Moretz (b. February 10, 1997), and the girl’s single father, played by Sam Rockwell (b. November 5, 1968). Anne Hathaway (b. November 12, 1981) holds the lead first and leaves for Interstellar. Lynn Shelton (1965-2020) directs, her first feature from a script she did not write.

The title starts a small war. Seigel insists that everyone knows what a laggie is, a word she and her high-school friends used for a person who lags behind. Shelton has never heard it. Shelton runs the word past focus groups and keeps waiting for recognition. The recognition never comes. The word turns out to be Seigel’s invention, common only inside one teenage circle in Irvine. The title stays. British distributors release the film as Say When. Shelton moves the Orange County story to Seattle and shoots at real addresses, the Northgate Nordstrom, an actual police precinct with its own sign on the wall. The reviews land in the mixed-to-warm range. Shelton says the script let a woman be flawed and fumble her way toward herself, the territory studios usually hand to men.

Seigel keeps writing for the screen. She joins the room for Pen15, the comedy that stages middle-school humiliation with adult actors playing thirteen, a register close to the one her novels work. She writes for Handsome: A Netflix Mystery Movie in 2017 and contributes to The Silent Twins in 2022. She keeps a low profile in literary circles and a steadier presence in film and television.

The Britney photo gets its answer in 2015, on a podcast called Mystery Show. The host, Starlee Kine, takes the case Seigel hands her: how did a book no one read end up in the hands of the most photographed woman alive. Kine calls bookstores. None of the clerks have heard of To Feel Stuff. She meets a bookseller whose parents won the lottery before she meets one who knows the novel, and the odds tell her how far the book has sunk. She studies the photo for clues, the paparazzi triangle, the white dress Spears wore through a pregnancy though she carries no pregnancy in the frame. The answer, when Kine reaches it, is the plainest one. A fan gave Spears the book, and a camera caught her carrying it to a pool. The episode sends a new audience back to a novel the market had filed away.

Seigel writes the people caught on the inside edge of growing up, the ones who can see the next room and will not walk into it. Her narrators watch more than they move. Her comedy runs cool and her sympathy runs warm, and she declines the redemption a softer writer might grant. Stella plans her exit in good prose. Megan hides in a teenager’s house. Elodie haunts an infirmary she cannot leave.

Seigel writes about the wish to stay on the threshold, and the world keeps meeting her at thresholds, the glancing contact rather than the full embrace. A pop star at a pool. A radio audience learning the name of a feeling they thought private. A detective working the phones to solve the mystery of who read her. The discovery always comes sideways. It comes anyway.

The Great Delusion

If John J. Mearsheimer is right in his anthropology, the individualist premise of self-authorship is an illusion.

For a novelist and screenwriter like Andrea Seigel, whose work explores the hyper-individualized, anxious subcultures of modern Southern California, this structural reality reshapes how her stories and characters operate.

If Mearsheimer is right, the intense psychological isolation, alienation, and personal identity crises Seigel depicts are not failures of individual willpower or unique psychological flaws. They are the predictable consequences of a liberal culture that tries to strip away tribal attachments. Her characters, adrift in an atomistic world, are not self-actualizing; they are suffering from the absence of the thick social group that human biology requires for survival.

The tribalism Mearsheimer describes does not disappear in a liberal society. It merely finds new, more fragile channels. In a world stripped of traditional structures like nation, religion, or extended family, people seek solidarity in lifestyle enclaves, subcultures, and aesthetic groupings. The characters in Seigel’s fiction grasp for identity through these alternative groups because the innate need for socialization remains constant. Their anxieties reflect the logic of a system that promises total autonomy but delivers isolation.

Reason remains subordinate to socialization in this framework. The moral codes and political leanings of the secular, educated cohorts Seigel observes are not the result of independent critical thought. They are the result of intense group conditioning within elite academic and cultural circles. The hyper-individualism they celebrate is itself a dogmatic conformity, an enforced value infusion from their specific tribe.

If human rights and individual autonomy are secondary to group survival, then the elevated moral language used by modern cultural elites is an instrument of status and coalition-building. The political and social stances of her characters serve as signaling devices to maintain standing within their peer group. What looks like deep personal introspection in a contemporary drama is the operation of an individual trying to navigate the unspoken rules of his tribe.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

If David Pinsof is right, the teenage alienation and existential dread in the novels of Andrea Seigel, such as Like the Red Panda, are not tragedies of miscommunication. They are strategies.
In Like the Red Panda, the main character Stella looks at the world and sees empty posturing. She claims that nothing means anything until a person decides to hold nothing next to something and declare a difference. She views romance and social conventions as blank concepts that people fill with arbitrary objects to make them real. She chooses isolation because she finds the world shallow.
Pinsof argues that nothing is broken. Humans are savvy primates who perform tasks that serve their Darwinian interests. Under this view, Stella is not a victim of a cold universe or a society that fails to understand her. Her alienation is a high-status signal. It is a way to look down on her peers and assert moral superiority over people who play ordinary social games. The sadness she feels is not a structural glitch. It is a tool. It allows her to reject the hierarchy while trying to place herself above it.
If Pinsof is right, the search for authentic connection in Seigel’s stories is a front. The characters do not suffer because people fail to understand them. They suffer because they understand the social game all too well and choose a cynical posture to win a different kind of status. Their angst is an instrument to dominate rivals under a pretext of deep sensitivity. The hole they find themselves in is a hole they dig themselves, because living in the hole makes them look more interesting than the people standing on the grass.

Novelist Andrea Seigel

We did this via email (Andrea returned the answers Sept 23, 2006).

* To what extent do you identify with your protagonists in your two novels?

they're all, at the very least, slivers of me. so if i didn't identify with them, then i'd be someone completely alienated from herself.

* How did your friends and families react to your novels? Particularly the first one?

everybody was congratulatory. they expect this kind of shit from me.

* How long have you had this cynical persona? What things are you naive about?

i've had it internally since, probably fifth grade. externally since, probably, ninth grade. i'm naive about what "being in love" means to other people.

* You signed your email "andreaa." Why the extra "a" at the end?

that's kind of a long, boring story, but it's partly because 1. when typed, i dislike the visual symmetry of my name (starts low, swoops up, returns with an equal and constant lowness on the other side) and 2. because in the days before the internet i used to be a bbs'er, and my handle was "andreaa," so i got really used to signing off that way.

* How do you feel about the work of Brett Easton Ellis?

i think it's genius, and not in the empty way that a lot of people throw around genius. i literally think what he's doing with his endless combinations of various levels of assholes are evidence of an extraordinary intelligence.

* What causes your right eye to twitch? I have the same thing. For me it is lack of sleep.

i have no idea, but it hasn't been twitching since i returned from new york.

* How do you feel about your author photos and how do you choose them?

i'm pretty indifferent toward the first one. i'm living with the second. i chose the first because i had this look on my face like, "what can you possibly want from me?" which i thought was appropriate. when 'panda' came out, this girl in a book club called to tell me that the members of her club had spent a half-hour discussing how bad that author photo was. they thought i looked like an unattractive slob. they wondered why i "hadn't done more with myself." i chose the second because it was one in a set of ten that all looked almost exactly identical, so there wasn't all that much of a choice. i wore a smocked strapless romper-type thing that i liked because it reminded me of my childhood, but my publisher cropped out my clothing. i generally don't like any photos of myself.

* In your blog, you say looking sad is your nature. Is that true? Do you struggle with depression?

yes. this is true. i have a naturally sad face when it's at rest. some people confuse sad with mean. i would say that i struggle with manic-depression, minus the bouts of stealing.

* How did you like Catcher in the Rye?

i liked it fine. it's not one of my favorite books. it was one of the smoother reads on my sophomore year a.p. english syllabus.

* When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

a lawyer.

* What did your parents want most for you and from you?

what they want most for me: stable success from me: a softer nature

* What's the story of you and God and Judaism?

oh my god, this is like writing my torah portion speech. i can't do it again. the short story: i was bat mitzvahed right around the time i became an atheist. when i get on a plane, i talk to something and say, "please, please, please let this be okay." i think that if there's any sort of power capable of hearing those kinds of thoughts coming from all people, then that power doesn't give a shit about who's following what kinds of rules or rituals, since it can obviously see straight into people's psyches and figure out the truth of that person's beliefs within a nanosecond.

* What are the juiciest things your peers say about writing and their careers as writers?

they say nothing juicy. i'm serious. i mean, we often talk shit on specific people, but there's nothing particularly scandalous to be said about writing. it's one of the unsexiest endeavors ever.

* In what ways are your perceptions of life keener than other people's?

i can't answer this question without sounding like an asshole, and while i often sound like an asshole– i'm just not there tonight.

* How has your choice of vocation affected you, relationships?

it has nurtured already overwhelming loner tendencies in my personality. it has, i'm sure, prevented a lot of relationships and damaged some, too. it has been good for my thinking and bad for pretty much everything else in my life.

* How do you know when you've done good work?

a little voice in my head says, "good girl." i'm not kidding.

* What have you sacrificed to be a writer?

the excellent health coverage i was getting at the disney channel.

* What do you do best and worst as a writer?

best: voice. worst: plot.

* Why do you write what you write?

why do you rent the movies you rent?

* Were there any events in childhood that prefigured your adult work?

i think pretty much every single social gathering i encountered past the age where i was allowed to just sit in the corner and drool and talk to my stuffed dog went into making my adult work what it is.

* What do your books say that has not been said before?

again, another question requiring an assholic response that i just don't have the heart for tonight.

* Surely you feel that your view of life that is unique? How so? How do you find your understanding of life differs from everyone else?

i do. but you can't talk about these things. because supposedly everyone is a huge, fucking mess inside. that's what i hear. all i know is that while everyone may secretly be struggling in the room at a party, i'm repeatedly the only one in the room incapable of even attempting a public fake-out.

* How important is it that your reader sympathizes with your characters or likes them?

well if people are capable of simultaneously hating and loving themselves, then i'm fine with them hating my characters, too, since that doesn't preclude the love.

* How has your writing affected your life?

it's both sustained and wrecked it.

* Do you like your protagonists?

they have their moments.

I Love Novelist Andrea Seigel

Here are some excerpts from her blog:

June 15, 2004

I just got back from my first ever TV interview, and I'm still unsure what this was in reference to, but the first thing Connie Martinson said to me was, "Well, I don't know if you knew this interview was going to be for TV, but if you're fine with that, then I am too." You might be thinking that the "fine" talk was in reference to the taping of the interview, but it was actually directed more, as far as I can tell, at what I was wearing. I think Connie was dissing my threads.

More.

September 5, 2006

"When are you getting off?" someone suddenly yelled. There was a teenage girl standing directly at my right, bouncing breast and she was staring up at me without any self-consciousness, so I understood right away that she was mentally disabled. "Give me fifteen minutes." She gave me two, and then came back to my boob again. "Are you getting off now?" she asked. "It hasn't been fifteen minutes," I said. "Now?" she asked. I believe that it's condescending to treat people with mental or physical handicaps or ailments any differently than you would were they without these handicaps or ailments. This is why, even though my mom sometimes tries to pull the cancer card with me– "Andrea, I cannot argue with you right now. Not when I'm going through all of this"– I proceed to argue with her anyway, because if I didn't treat her like I always treat her, what would that say about the power of the cancer? (Incidentally, her cancer numbers are dramatically lower and I wanted to put up these cancer numbers to illustrate, but my mom bitched me out on the phone yesterday saying that that information was personal, that I should just let everyone know she's doing well, and I argued, "How can those numbers possibly be personal?") I thought to myself, "This girl seems to be around five-years-old mentally. And would I get openly annoyed with a five-year-old had she been asking me basically the same thing every two minutes?"

Laurie Gwen Shapiro (b. 1966) keeps a list of strangers.

The list is a spreadsheet of Gawronskis up and down the East Coast, names and numbers she pulled from public records. She has found a newspaper item from 1928 about a Polish American teenager who swam the Hudson River at night to stow away on Richard E. Byrd’s ship to Antarctica. The boy was Billy Gawronski. She wants to know what became of him, and the trail runs cold in the archive, so she does the unglamorous thing. She dials.

Most calls end fast. People hang up. She asks each one a version of the same question and waits for the click. “Did you have an ancestor that jumped in the Hudson and stowed away to the Antarctic in 1928?” A lot of hang-ups.

On the nineteenth call, to a number in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, an elderly woman with a Polish accent answers. She is Gizela Gawronski, Billy’s widow. From that one phone call comes a book, and from the book comes a second career.

This is the work, and the method. Shapiro recovers forgotten lives from the paper record and tells them as stories without making anything up. The phone call to Maine is the whole approach in miniature: the cold case, the long odds, the patience, and the moment a real person on the other end turns dust back into a life.

She was born and raised in New York City and went to Stuyvesant High School, then to the S. I. Newhouse School at Syracuse University, where she took a degree in 1988. The city’s layered past, its immigrant streets and demolished buildings, runs under everything she writes. After college she went into independent film, and that is where she learned to build a story scene by scene, to interview, to find the picture that carries a moment. The instincts came before the prose did.

Her first real attention came through a documentary. In 2000 she and her brother, the artist David Shapiro, co-directed Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale. The film follows Tobias Schneebaum (1922-2005), a gentle painter from Brooklyn who walked into the Peruvian jungle in the 1950s, lived among Indigenous people, and came home saying he had taken part in a ritual act of cannibalism. The Shapiros took the old man back to find the men he had lived with. The film won festival honors and the Truer Than Fiction Award at the 2001 Independent Spirit Awards. She later produced an HBO documentary, Finishing Heaven, that drew an Emmy nomination.

She came to books as a novelist first, and the novels were comic. The Unexpected Salami arrived in 1998 and earned an American Library Association Notable Book nod. Then came The Anglophile, The Matzo Ball Heiress, and Brand X: The Boyfriend Account. She has described The Matzo Ball Heiress as the first work of Jewish chick lit, and she says it with a straight face and a small grin. The novels turned on family, romance, and modern Jewish life. They sold. They were not the thing she was built to do, and she seems to have known it. The documentarian and the novelist were waiting to merge, and the stowaway gave them the chance.

Consider the night the boy went into the water.

It is August 24, 1928, on the Hoboken piers. The sun goes down at six forty-five. A baby-faced seventeen-year-old with soft gray eyes stands and watches the City of New York, moored and guarded, and waits for true dark. The next afternoon she will sail nine thousand miles for the last unexplored place on earth. Byrd (1888-1957) is a household name, a rock star to a boy who keeps a scrapbook of him. Rockefellers and Vanderbilts have begged for berths as mess boys. Billy Gawronski, son of a Lower East Side upholsterer, has no berth and no chance of one. So he swims.

They catch him and send him home. He tries again. He hitchhikes to Norfolk, Virginia, to reach the second ship, the Eleanor Bolling, and stows away there. Four attempts in all. Somewhere in the middle of this the press falls for him, and then Byrd does too, amused by the nerve of the kid, and gives him a job as a mess boy. The Polish boy from the tenements ships out for Antarctica beside the heirs to American fortunes.

Shapiro found the documents that make the story human. Byrd’s expedition records gave her each man’s age and hometown, even where they carried scars. Better than that, she found letters. Billy’s immigrant mother, Francesca, wrote to the most famous explorer in America and begged him not to take her only son a second time. And Byrd, a man of his word, secretly promised her he would not, even if the boy stowed away again. A meddling mother, in writing, ninety years on. Shapiro called the widow in Maine to tell her the answer to a question the family had carried for decades. Why was Billy never asked back for the second expedition. Now they knew.

The Stowaway: A Young Man’s Extraordinary Adventure to Antarctica came out in 2018, a bestseller and an Indie Next pick, and it set her reputation. She had found the seam between the archive and the yarn and learned to work it.

The magazine work runs alongside the books and sometimes feeds them. Her byline has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, New York, Slate, The Daily Beast, Aeon, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Forward, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She helped found The Faster Times, an online newspaper launched in 2009 during the worst of the print collapse. She wrote for years about the city’s hidden corners at Untapped New York, the old streets and the forgotten piers.

Her best-known essay tracks a dead woman’s ashes.

Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) died in New York with no husband and no children. Lillian Hellman made the arrangements and never told the crematory what to do with the remains. So the ashes of the sharpest wit of the Algonquin Round Table sat on a shelf at Ferncliff Crematory in Westchester. Years passed. The storage fee went unpaid. A clerk, out of patience, mailed the urn to the address on the paperwork, a law office downtown. There the box sat on a desk, then in a filing cabinet, for fifteen years. Parker had left her literary estate to Martin Luther King, Jr., and after his murder it passed to the N.A.A.C.P., which built her a small memorial garden behind its Baltimore headquarters, a circle of brick laid to recall the Round Table, under the epitaph she chose for herself: “Excuse my dust.” In 2020 the ashes were exhumed and moved again, to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, near the city she never really left.

“The Improbable Journey of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes” ran in The New Yorker and won the 2021 Damn History Award. The piece does what the books do. It takes a person flattened into a coffee-mug quotation and follows the physical fact of her, the literal box, through fifty years of misplacement, and on the way it asks who tends the dead and who forgets them.

She did the same service for a living man. Her New York Times profile of the World War II pilot Si Spiegel pulled a decorated airman out of obscurity and won the Silurians Press Club gold medallion for people profiles. The pattern holds across her work. Find someone the record dropped. Pick him up.

Her biggest book turns the method on a face everyone thinks they know.

The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage That Made an American Icon came out in 2025. Amelia Earhart (1897-1937) has carried a century of other people’s meanings, and Shapiro set out to give her back her own. She does it by putting a second figure in the frame: George Palmer Putnam (1887-1950), publisher, promoter, the self-styled P. T. Barnum of the book trade, who once staged his own kidnapping for press. In 1928 Putnam went looking for the right woman to fly the Atlantic as a passenger and sell the book about it. He found a social worker and weekend pilot with cropped hair and an easy way with a camera. He made her famous. Then he pushed her, flight by riskier flight, to keep the fame fed.

Shapiro drew on diaries, archives, and audio interviews nobody had used. The portrait that comes out is double. Earhart is brave, curious, vain, careless, kind, shrewd, a real woman and not a saint. Putnam built the icon and may have helped kill the woman, urging her into stunts and weather she could not handle, up to the last flight that killed her. Shapiro lets Earhart speak for herself where the record allows. In a letter before the wedding the pilot warns Putnam that marriage may cost her the work that means most to her. When the ceremony finally happens, after one wedding day she abandoned in tears, she wires her sister four words: “BREAK NEWS GENTLY TO MOTHER.” The book landed on year-end best lists at NPR, The New Yorker, Smithsonian, Amazon, and HISTORY.com, and was named a 2026 Kansas Notable Book.

A thread runs through the documentary, the magazine pieces, and the books. Shapiro studies how myths get built. She is less drawn to the hero than to the people behind the hero, the publishers and publicists and reporters who turn a brave or stubborn human being into a legend the public can buy. Byrd had his press operation and his radio men at Little America. Putnam had his blockbuster machine. Parker became a brand of quips long after the woman went quiet. Shapiro keeps asking the same question of each. How does a real life become a public story, and what gets lost in the trade.

She is strict about the cost of getting it wrong. Years in documentary taught her to build a scene, to pace it, to find the dramatic turn, but she draws a hard line at invention. She reconstructs from what the record proves and refuses to put words in dead mouths. The discipline is the point. The drama has to come from the documents or it does not count.

She teaches the craft now. As an adjunct professor in the graduate program at New York University‘s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, she runs feature writing and works with younger nonfiction writers. She speaks at universities, museums, historical societies, and journalism conferences about archives, biography, and the building of a true story, and she keeps a working author site that gathers the books, the essays, and the talks.

Shapiro went from the cutting room to the novel to the archive and found, in the third place, the form that used everything the first two had taught her. She picks a name the record almost lost. She dials the strangers. She waits for the nineteenth call. Then she gives the dead back their lives, and the living back a truer version of the famous, and she shows the reader the machinery of fame in the act of running.

The Great Delusion

If John J. Mearsheimer is right in his anthropology, the foundations of Shapiro’s individualist narratives crack. The lone-wolf explorer or the daring aviator ceases to be an atomistic actor driven by autonomous reason. Instead, these historical figures become products of their tribe and their socialization.

Mearsheimer argues that society shapes identity before a person can assert individualism. Under this framework, the desire to sneak onto a ship or fly solo across an ocean is not a pure expression of personal choice. It is a manifestation of a value infusion from a Jazz Age American culture that celebrated celebrity and physical exploration. The stowaway craze of the 1920s was a collective social phenomenon, a tribal ritual of its day, rather than an accumulation of independent choices.

The creation of an icon like Earhart requires a showman like George Putnam and a public eager to consume a specific image. The icon functions as a tool for the group. The community uses the individualist hero to reinforce its own collective myths. Shapiro tracks the structure of fame, but a Mearsheimer lens reveals that the engine of that fame is the social group. The individualist remains embedded in the tribe, serving its collective needs even while pretending to fly away from it.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

If David Pinsof is right, Laurie Gwen Shapiro has written a textbook case study in evolutionary status-climbing rather than a mere biography of an American icon. Her 2025 book, The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon, tracks the relationship between a record-setting pilot and her mastermind promoter husband. From a Pinsofian perspective, the alliance between Earhart and Putnam is not a story of romantic idealism or the tragic distortion of an authentic soul by a greedy media culture. It is an example of two rational animals executing a flawless strategy to dominate the attention economy.
Putnam functions exactly like the corporate PR departments Pinsof describes. He understood that the public does not invest in raw utility or naked ambition. People invest in stories. Earhart’s stated motives of modest heroism and pure feminist trailblazing served as the high-status mission statement. This statement hid the actual machinery of the operation, which focused on securing resources, maximizing fame, and outcompeting rivals for elite social standing. Her overconfidence was not a cognitive glitch. It was a necessary tool to convince the public that she could achieve the impossible, a trait that generated immense wealth and status.
The media culture that Shapiro describes was also acting rationally. Newspapers and publishers did not misunderstand Earhart or fall prey to misinformation. They ran her stories because doing so increased their market share in a competitive ecosystem.
If Pinsof is right, the myth of Amelia Earhart is not a misunderstanding to be corrected by digging through archives. The myth was the point. The deliberate crafting of her image was a savvy adaptation to a human environment that rewards moralistic and heroic signaling. Shapiro’s book exposes the exact type of calculated, self-serving behavior that Pinsof argues drives human history, proving that when the stakes are high, human beings use every weapon available to win.

Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)

A career, in the account Bourdieu built, is a trajectory through fields, and each field runs on its own currency. Move from one field to the next and you must convert what you hold into what the new field will accept. A festival prize buys little at a bank and a great deal at a publishing house. Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s life reads as a chain of such conversions, and her subjects, the people she chooses to recover, run on the same conversions she does. The work and the worker share a logic. That is the case for the frame.

Start with her trajectory, the path Bourdieu would track across positions.

She trains in the field of independent documentary. There she banks two assets. The first is symbolic capital, the recognition the field confers on its own: the Truer Than Fiction Award at the 2001 Independent Spirit Awards for Keep the River on Your Right, later an Emmy nomination for the HBO film Finishing Heaven. The second asset has no certificate. It is the cutting-room eye, the feel for a scene and a cut and a turn, lodged in the body through years of practice. Bourdieu calls this embodied cultural capital, and he calls the durable set of dispositions it forms a habitus. Stuyvesant, the Newhouse School at Syracuse, a childhood in the immigrant city, then the editing bay: these lay down a way of seeing that structures everything she makes afterward.

She converts next into trade publishing, and the first conversions are partial. The comic novels sell and earn a notice or two, an American Library Association Notable Book for The Unexpected Salami, but they sit at the commercial pole of the literary field, the zone Bourdieu names large-scale production, where the reward is sales and the prestige is thin. The Matzo Ball Heiress is good fun and low in the field’s symbolic hierarchy. She has economic capital and a foothold. She does not yet hold the consecrated kind.

The Stowaway changes the rate of exchange. Here the documentary capital pays out at last. The archive work, the cold calls, the reconstructed scenes built from letters and ship records, these convert her embodied film capital into a form the book field rewards: narrative nonfiction with an evidentiary spine. The book becomes a bestseller and an Indie Next selection. She has now bridged the two poles, the commercial and the prestigious, in a single object.

Then comes the move that lifts her position. She converts into literary journalism, the consecrated air of The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the Times, and the field rewards the move with its own rites. The Damn History Award for “The Improbable Journey of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes.” The Silurians Press Club gold medallion for the Si Spiegel profile. These are acts of consecration, the term Bourdieu reserves for the moments a field’s authorities certify value and, in certifying it, manufacture it. An award does not find worth lying in the work. It confers worth, and the conferral is the point.

The last conversion to date is institutional. She takes a post as an adjunct professor in the graduate program at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. The academy is the consecrating body par excellence in Bourdieu’s account, the place that turns a practitioner’s accumulated capital into a credential it can pass down. She now stands on both sides of the transaction: a writer the field has consecrated, and an agent of consecration for the next cohort.

So much for her path. The deeper claim of the frame is that her subjects move the same way, and that she has chosen, perhaps without naming it, the conversion process as her standing theme.

Take Billy Gawronski on the Hoboken pier. Byrd’s expedition is a field with a wall around it. The berths go to men with capital Billy lacks: the right name, the right schools, the social ties that put a Rockefeller or a Vanderbilt on a list of seventy thousand and a tenement boy nowhere near it. Billy cannot enter the field by its rules, so he forces the gate. He swims, four times, and the swimming converts into press attention, and the press attention converts into Byrd’s amused favor, and the favor converts into a mess-boy berth. The conversion does not stop at the ice. Byrd writes him a letter to Nicholas Murray Butler at Columbia. That letter is social capital transferred from a famous man to an unknown boy, and the boy converts it into a seat at the university, institutional cultural capital that a Polish upholsterer’s son could not have reached by any straight path. The whole arc is a sequence of exchanges across fields that were closed to him at the start. Shapiro found the documents that show each trade.

Take Putnam and Earhart. Putnam inherits a position at the prestige pole of publishing, the genteel house of Putnam & Sons, and he drags it toward the commercial pole, toward the blockbuster, the stunt, the staged kidnapping, the manufactured star. Earhart is the star he manufactures. In Bourdieu’s terms she is symbolic capital under production. Putnam meters her, releasing her into the public in measured doses, each flight a fresh issue of the currency, each book the conversion of that symbolic capital into the economic kind. He pushes her into worse weather and longer odds because the engine needs feeding. Shapiro’s argument, restored to the frame, is that the icon is a produced good, and that the producer’s commercial logic shaped the recklessness that killed the product. The marriage is a coalition for the manufacture and sale of a name.

Take Parker’s ashes, which dramatize the afterlife of symbolic capital. A name like Dorothy Parker is capital that outlives the body, and the body’s literal remains become the contested object of custody. The crematory shelf, the law-office filing cabinet, the memorial garden behind the N.A.A.C.P. in Baltimore, the move to Woodlawn: this is a half-century fight over who holds the relic of a consecrated name and who tends it. The estate ran to Martin Luther King, Jr., and then to the N.A.A.C.P., so even the inheritance is a transfer of capital across fields, from the literary to the political. Shapiro tracks the relic because the relic is the symbolic capital made solid, a box you can lose in a drawer.

Her recovery project, seen through the frame, is a position-taking. The field of biography is crowded at its center, around the consecrated names that every writer already works. Shapiro stakes out the margin. She recovers the unconsecrated, the forgotten boy and the lost airman, low-competition ground where she faces no rivals and can import a subject the field has not yet valued. She then performs the consecration herself, and the value she confers on the subject accrues to her as its discoverer. The strategy is differentiation, the move by which a newcomer carves a distinct position rather than fighting for a saturated one. Her turn on Earhart is the same move at higher stakes. By dragging Putnam back into the frame and stripping the saint down to an ambitious, careless, shrewd woman, she takes a position against the settled doxa of Earhart biography, the received account that every prior book has shared. To contest the doxa is to bid for a position above the writers who merely repeated it.

One refusal of hers reads, in this light, as a claim staked at the prestige pole. She will build a scene and pace it and find its turn, but she will not invent dialogue or fictionalize an event. The trade’s autonomous pole, the zone of craft answerable to its own internal law, prizes exactly this restraint, the documented reconstruction over the novelist’s license. The commercial pole would tempt her to juice the story. Her line against invention is a bid for the autonomous kind of legitimacy, the respect of the practitioners who decide what counts as serious nonfiction. The illusio of her trade, the shared belief that makes the game worth playing, is that the archive yields a recoverable truth. She subscribes to it and turns the subscription into a mark of rank.

Bourdieu reads every move as accumulation and position, and the reading cannot see motive. A writer who follows a single newspaper clipping down nineteen phone calls might be chasing capital, or might be chasing a story she cannot put down, and the frame has no instrument that tells the two apart. It maps the positions a life occupies and stays silent on the hunger that drove the choosing. That silence is the price of the method’s reach. The frame also flattens the difference between a calculated career and a curious one, since both leave the same trace on the field map. Read Shapiro this way and you learn a great deal about the structure of her rise and almost nothing about the woman on the phone in the dark, waiting for someone in Maine to pick up.

Shapiro built a career by converting capital across fields, from film to fiction to nonfiction to the academy. Her subjects rose, or were raised, by the same conversions, the stowaway trading nerve for a Columbia seat, the publisher trading a wife’s courage for sales, the dead wit’s name passing from estate to estate. And the subject she returns to, book after book, is the conversion process: how a private life becomes public capital, who runs the exchange, and what the rate costs the person being sold. She is a student of capital conversion who is also, in her own trajectory, a case of it. The frame does not have to reach for that. She hands it over.

Hero System

For fifteen years a cardboard box of Dorothy Parker sits in a filing cabinet in a downtown law office. No one paid the crematory, so a clerk lost patience and mailed the ashes to the address on the paperwork, and there they stay, in a drawer, behind hanging folders, while the woman’s quips ride the rims of coffee mugs in gift shops two miles north. The wit of an age, unclaimed. The name floats free of the person and sells. The person lies in a drawer and dies a second time.

This is the thing Laurie Gwen Shapiro cannot abide, and the thing she has built a working life against.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued that every culture hands its members a hero system, a set of sacred values by which a person earns the sense of cosmic worth that holds off the knowledge of death. Under the system sit two terrors. The first is the body’s end. The second runs deeper and frightens more, the dread that the life signified nothing, that it might close without a trace, as if it had never happened at all. Shapiro lives close to the second terror and has refined it to a single point. Call it the second death, the day the last rememberer dies and the person goes out like a pilot light. The box in the drawer is that death caught in the act. Her sacred value, the one her whole craft serves, is the recovered trace, the name hauled back into the light before the last witness goes.

Say the word out loud, though, and it splinters. Remembrance is a sacred value for almost everyone and means a different thing in each hero system that prizes it. Walk it across a gallery of the living and the dead and watch the word changes in their hands.

A carver of ancestral panels on the Norwegian coast, or his cousin working a Maori meeting house, does not recover the dead at all. He houses them. The ancestor stands in the worked wood, present, addressed, fed with attention. Remembrance for him is not retrieval from an archive. The dead never left. To carve the face is to keep the line breathing in the room, and an archive would be a strange and bloodless thing, a way of admitting the ancestor had gone somewhere he could be lost.

A Carthusian in his cell flips the value over. He wants the world to forget him. He takes a new name, eats in silence, will be buried in the cloister garth under no stone, a mound and a wooden cross that rots. Remembrance by men is a snare. He labors to be remembered by God alone, and God needs no paper. To be recovered by a journalist in two hundred years, written up, quoted, given a second public life, would strike him as a small damnation, the ego dragged back from the peace of being nothing to anyone but Him.

A renunciate on the Ganges has performed his own funeral rites while still breathing. He stood over the fire that burned an effigy of himself and walked away dead to his family, dead to his name, the household tablet turned to the wall. For him the surviving self is the disease. To be remembered is to stay chained to the wheel, to keep the small hungry I that the whole discipline exists to dissolve. Shapiro’s gift, the second life, is to him a sentence.

A Norse settler in tenth-century Iceland would understand Shapiro better than any of them, and still not quite. His remembrance is word-fame, the deed cut into the saga and the verse. Cattle die and kinsmen die and the man dies too, the old poem runs, and the one thing that outlasts the grave is the report of what he did. He does not want to be recovered. He wants to have done the thing worth telling, the voyage, the killing, the law spoken at the Thing, so the line about him survives on its own legs. The deed earns the memory. Shapiro’s stowaways and lost pilots often did the deed and lost the line anyway, and she supplies the missing verse. The Icelander would thank her and find it odd that the deed alone no longer keeps a man’s name.

A son sweeping a grave at Qingming holds remembrance as debt. The tablet on the home shrine carries the name; the spring rite carries the food and the swept stone and the burned paper money the dead need where they are. Forget the rite and the ancestor goes hungry and the household sours. Remembrance here is filial maintenance, a standing account between the living and their dead, and it runs through the blood line, not through strangers. A writer who recovers an unrelated dead man does a kind thing and an unintelligible one. The dead belong to their own.

A family in Kumasi spends a year’s wages on a funeral, hires the dancers, prints the cloth, sets the body in state for the whole town to file past, because the size of the send-off is the measure of the honor and the door through which the dead becomes an ancestor who can be poured a drink and asked for help. Remembrance is the rite performed loud and in public, the opposite of a quiet box in a drawer, and the worst fate is the pauper’s burial no one attends, which Shapiro’s Parker in fact received and which Shapiro’s essay, decades late, tries to reverse.

The modern systems crowd in too, hungrier and stranger.

A founder in a Bay Area longevity lab wants none of this. He wants the backup. Remembrance for him is continuity of pattern, the self preserved as data and restored to a new substrate, death a bug awaiting the patch. He loves an archive the way Shapiro loves one and means the reverse by it. She wants the dead recovered as a story other people can read. He wants himself recovered as himself, running again, and a story about him would be a consolation prize for a project that failed.

A girl optimizing a feed lives by a remembrance that lasts a day. The name trends and the name is gone, and oblivion is the algorithm losing interest by tomorrow afternoon. She would grasp at once what Shapiro’s George Putnam understood before the tools existed, that fame is a product you manufacture and meter and sell, that you build the icon and release her in doses. Putnam ran Earhart that way, each flight a fresh issue of the name, and a reviewer of Shapiro’s book reached for the only word that fit and called the result a modern influencer. The girl and the dead publisher share a hero system across a century. Remembrance, to both, is reach. Shapiro studies that system from outside it, and her interest is the cost the product pays.

Then the inversion that makes the whole gallery sharp.

A man in witness protection sits in a strip-mall town under a name the state printed for him last year. The marshal told him the first rule the day they moved him, that the old man is dead and must stay dead, no calls home, no posts, no trace. His salvation is to be in no archive. The document Shapiro hunts for love, the ship’s manifest, the cold-call hit, the diary in a relative’s attic, is the document he prays no one ever pulls. A woman who crossed a border and burned her papers at the crossing lives the same truth. To be recoverable is to be deportable. For these two the trace is not resurrection. The trace is the hand that finds you.

So the sacred value turns on its head depending on the system that holds it. The carver keeps the dead present. The monk and the renunciate work to vanish. The Icelander wants the deed, not the rescue. The son pays a debt down the blood line. The town honors with noise. The founder wants himself restored as code. The girl wants reach that lasts a day. The hunted want no trace at all. Shapiro wants the stranger’s life pulled whole from the paper before the last witness dies. The same word, remembrance, and nine different gods behind it.

Her own formula has a date of birth, which is the freshest thing to notice about it. Her hero system could not have existed before the documents did. The recovered trace becomes a road to immortality only once a society keeps newspapers and ship logs and passenger lists and photographs and, later, searchable everything. Her terror, the second death, and her remedy, the recoverable record, are twins born of the same machinery. The Carthusian’s God needed no files and the Icelander’s saga lived in a memorized verse, but Shapiro’s resurrection runs on the filing cabinet, the same drawer that holds the horror and the cure. She is a creature of the archival age and her sacred value is its native faith, the belief that nothing documented is ever truly lost, only misfiled.

Watch what she does and a stranger thing surfaces. Her subjects each ran a hero system, and hers is to be the one who carries theirs. Byrd wanted the deed and the flag at the bottom of the world, word-fame in the Norse key, the name kept by the act. Billy wanted off the Lower East Side and into the adventure tale he had read a hundred times, then, when the Depression came, into respectability, a Columbia seat, a captain’s bars. Putnam wanted to mint fame and sell it. Parker, the wit who fed the Round Table its best lines, left her estate to Martin Luther King and after him to the N.A.A.C.P., as if she trusted the deed of justice to carry her further than the jokes, and the jokes carried her instead while the justice went to a memorial garden behind an office in Baltimore. Each of them bet on a different door out of death. Shapiro bets on none of theirs. She stands one floor up, the custodian of other people’s immortality projects, the rememberer of the rememberers, and her own bid for cosmic worth is to be the keeper of the keepers, the one who holds the names that held names.

She comes from a people who made remembrance a commandment. The tradition behind her tells the living to remember, to say the name of the dead and add that the memory should be a blessing, to light a candle once a year and read the roll, to give a newborn the name of someone gone so the name walks on in a child. Zachor, the imperative, remember. She secularized it and aimed it at strangers. The candle became a New Yorker essay and the roll of the dead became a spreadsheet of Gawronskis up the East Coast, dialed one by one until an old woman with a Polish accent picked up on the nineteenth call and a name came back from the drawer. The covenant changed its object. She remembers people who are not hers, which her ancestors would find either a betrayal or the highest form of the thing, and might argue about for a long evening.

Her one inflexible rule belongs to the terror, not to the craft. She builds a scene and paces it and finds its turn, all of it learned in a cutting room, and she will not invent a line of dialogue or stage an event the record cannot prove. The rule reads like fussiness and runs much deeper. A resurrection that lies is no resurrection. If she fills the gaps with a novelist’s guesses she has not recovered the dead man, she has replaced him with a flattering double, which is a second erasure wearing the first one’s face. The dread under the work is precise, and the discipline answers it precisely. She would rather leave a birth date blank than carve a wrong one, because a wrong date is the second death dressed as the cure.

A few coordinates, then.

The value to track is not truth and not story but the place where they fuse, the recovered trace that can be proved, because that fusion is where her dread and her hope meet and where the whole career sits. Watch the documents she leans on hardest, the letters and the manifests, since those are the relics her faith treats as load-bearing, the bones the resurrection needs.

Watch, too, whom she chooses. She skips the famous and goes for the dropped, the tenement boy beside the Rockefellers, the airman the record let slip, the box in the drawer. A democratic instinct runs through the selection, the claim that the second death is a wrong owed to anyone, not a privilege of the great, and that a clerk and a stowaway deserve the candle as much as a king. That instinct is the moral center of her hero system and the part of it most worth defending.

A limit. Becker can read every act as a flinch from death, and a writer who follows one newspaper clipping down nineteen phone calls might be fleeing oblivion or might be a person who cannot put a good story down, and the frame owns no instrument that tells the two apart. It explains the hunger and stays silent on whether the hunger feels like dread or like joy from the inside. Shapiro on the phone in the dark, waiting for Maine to pick up, may be holding off her own erasure or may be having the best afternoon of her year, and the only honest thing to report is that the frame cannot see her face. What it sees, and sees better than any rival, is why the box in the drawer made her a writer, and why she keeps reaching into drawers.

Watergate as Democratic Ritual & Cultural Trauma

A society decides whom it counts as its own. Jeffrey Alexander (b. 1947) gave that decision a structure and a name. In The Civil Sphere he describes a zone of social life where strangers extend solidarity to one another on the strength of shared values, and he shows that the zone runs on a hard binary. Civil actors come coded as rational, autonomous, candid, capable of self-rule, fit for the company of equals. Their opposites come coded as irrational, dependent, secretive, driven by private appetite, unfit. The sphere sorts people and groups onto the pure side or the polluted side of that line, and the line is the boundary of the word we. The sphere can also move the line. It repairs itself by reaching across the border and pulling in those it once left out, recoding them from unfit to fit, widening the circle of who belongs. Alexander calls that work civil repair.

Read Laurie Gwen Shapiro through this frame and her whole project resolves into a single act repeated. She is a carrier of the sphere’s values, in the sense Max Weber (1864-1920) and after him Alexander gave the term, an agent who carries a moral claim into public and works to make it stick. Her claim is always the same. The person you forgot belongs inside the we. The frame does something the other frames cannot. It explains the guest list. It tells us why these names and not others.

Look at whom she chooses. A Polish upholsterer’s son from the Lower East Side, swimming the Hudson to a berth the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts begged for. A woman who flew the Atlantic and built a public life when the public life of women ran narrow. A wit who left her whole estate to Martin Luther King and after him to the N.A.A.C.P. The selection is not random and not merely a hunt for good stories, though the stories are good. Each subject can be incorporated. Each can be re-narrated as a bearer of the qualities the civil core already honors, courage, self-command, candor, the refusal to stay in an assigned place. The tenement boy beside the heirs is an argument that the national we should have had room for him all along. Earhart the feminist trailblazer is the same argument. Parker the civil donor is an argument that the sphere already owes her, that her name belongs on the honor side of the ledger and was filed on the wrong side by neglect. Shapiro recovers the forgotten, and the forgotten she recovers are candidates for the pantheon. The recovery is the repair.

Alexander’s trauma theory names the obstacle she has to clear, and her craft is the tool that clears it. In the essay on cultural trauma he sets out the conditions under which a wider public will take a victim’s suffering as its own, and the third condition is the hard one. The audience must see the victim as sharing the qualities the audience values in itself. Strangers do not extend the we to a sufferer they cannot recognize. Central Europeans grant that the Roma suffered and decline to carry that suffering as part of their own identity, because they have coded the Roma as alien. Distance defeats solidarity. The whole problem of civil repair sits in that gap between the victim on the page and the reader in the chair.

Shapiro’s method is a solution to that gap. The scene built from a ship’s manifest, the status detail pulled from an expedition record, the documented intimacy of a mother’s letter to an admiral, these are the techniques that close the distance and make a dead stranger feel like one of us. The cutting-room eye she carried out of documentary does civil work. When she dials nineteen Gawronskis and reaches an old woman with a Polish accent in Maine, she is gathering the material that will let a reader in 2018 recognize a teenager from 1928 as kin. Identification is the bottleneck of incorporation, and her sentences are engineered to break it. The aesthetic arena, in Alexander’s terms, is where genres and narratives produce the imaginative identification that lets a public participate in another’s experience, and she works that arena with a documentarian’s discipline. The Diary of Anne Frank did this for one trauma and survivor literature for a later phase of the same one. Shapiro does it one recovered life at a time.

Her Earhart book runs Alexander’s binary so cleanly it could serve as an illustration of the discourse. George Putnam arrives coded for the profane side, the showman, the manipulator, the man who staged his own kidnapping for press, the promoter who meters his wife into riskier and riskier stunts to feed the machine. Calculation, secrecy, private appetite, the whole polluted register. Earhart stands on the pure side, the social worker with public feeling, the brave self-determining woman, the flyer who insists on a hand at the controls. Shapiro purifies the heroine in part by polluting the promoter, which is the move the civil discourse makes by reflex, the good guy and the bad guy sorted onto the two faces of the code. A reviewer found the portrait of Putnam close to a villain’s, a Svengali and a stinkard, and that reading is the discourse working as designed.

What lifts the book above a morality play is a refinement the frame can register but does not require. Shapiro admits Earhart’s polluted traits and incorporates her anyway. She lists her subject as ambitious and careless, courageous and lazy, kindhearted and shrewd and overconfident, a flyer whose limits at the radio helped kill her. The civil sphere often demands a saint before it will widen the we, a victim scrubbed clean enough to recognize. Shapiro performs a harder incorporation, the admission of a flawed adult into the company of the honored without first laundering her. That is civil repair grown up. It widens the we without pretending the new member is spotless, and it suggests a sphere mature enough to hold an icon and her faults in the same hand.

The Parker essay is civil repair in a single gesture, and it shows the routinization Alexander describes, the stage where a trauma cools into monuments and sacred ground. Parker dies and her ashes go unclaimed, sit on a crematory shelf, get mailed to a law office, wait fifteen years in a filing cabinet. Read through the frame, that neglect is a civil failure, solidarity withdrawn from a member who earned it, the we contracting around a woman it should have kept. Then the slow repair. The N.A.A.C.P. builds her a memorial garden behind its Baltimore headquarters, a circle of brick laid to recall the Round Table, a sacred place with an inscription, and decades later a proper tombstone and a move to Woodlawn. Alexander watches traumas settle into museums and markers and swept stones, the lessons set in ritual routine. Parker’s afterlife followed that arc, and Shapiro’s New Yorker piece is a late intervention in it, a re-narration that names the neglect as a wrong owed and restores the donor to the honor side of the ledger. The civil-rights bequest, the support for the Scottsboro defendants and the protest over Sacco and Vanzetti, all of it returns to the record as the civil credential it was, against the coffee-mug version that kept the quips and dropped the citizen.

Notice where she launches from. The New Yorker, the Times, The Atlantic. These are the organs of the civil sphere, the institutional arenas where its discourse gets performed for the largest audience, and her standing in them is the sphere certifying her as a legitimate carrier of its values. The Damn History Award and the Silurian medallion are acts of civil recognition, the sphere honoring the work that honors its members. Alexander would read her byline in those outlets as a license, the boundary-keepers handing a writer the authority to revise the guest list in the sphere’s name. She holds that license and uses it on the dead who cannot lobby for themselves.

A few coordinates, then.

Watch whom she admits and ask what civil quality the admission turns on, because that quality is the membership test the sphere is applying through her. Watch how she codes the antagonist, since the purity she grants the subject often comes paired with the pollution she pours on a Putnam, and the pairing is the discourse, not the woman. Watch the arenas, the flagship magazine and the memorial garden and the new tombstone, because those are where the sphere performs its repairs and stores them once the feeling cools.

And watch the edge of her sympathy. The names she cannot recover tell you where the present draws its line, and a writer who spends a career enlarging the we is also, in every choice of subject, marking the place the we still ends. Shapiro reaches across that line for a living and pulls the recoverable dead through it. The frame’s last word is that the reaching is generous and the line does not move far. It moves one rescued life at a time, and only for the lives a reader can be brought to love.

Novelist Laurie Gwen Shapiro

9/8/06

* You did not disguise Sheila Nevins much. What's your relationship with her and HBO?

She can talk in a loopy grandmotherly way, but damn she is a sharp businesswoman. I coproduced two low budget docs that she bought for HBO about Frank McCourt and his brothers. She did put in a respectable bid for a feature doc (Keep the River on the Right) that my brother David and I ultimately sold to IFC for a theatrical release. But I do place a small bet with my film pals exactly how many minutes into the Oscar documentary section she will get a brown-nosed call-out as a saint. Hilarious. Documentary makers know how hard it is to get films commissioned.

* What did you learn from writing your first novel, Salami? Your style seemed to change after it.

I had ever so much fun writing Unexpected Salami. I wrote in six weeks during my lunch hour at an evil company simply to entertain myself. A top agent took it right away and sold it in a week. Seriously. I then labored for two years over a novel that was thoughtful and "well-written" but didn’t sell. So I’ve learned to keep pushing motivation on my characters (This comes naturally though as I get older) – but not to chuck light sentences that come to your fingers instantly.

* Anglophile was so much fun to read. Was it fun to write? Where did that book come from?

I think Matzo Ball Heiress is easier to like – Food, Dynasty Jews, Sex, Jokes. I have old and young fans for that. Unexpected Salami I’ve heard described as Seinfeld meets Spinal Tap (lots of male reader emails for that one). But The Anglophile, while humorous, it got into sexual fetishes and is a bit sadder. Not as wide a net. Attracts a little more intense quirky people. But that’s okay. Let me be the first to say nearly all of my favorite people are intense and quirky. It came from my completely indulging myself. I love all things British, except Chinese food in Liverpool.

* Does it matter that your books move from being fun to read to being literature? The writers I love to read for relaxation are fun but literary. Ben Elton. Hanif Kureshi. TC Boyle. Bill Bryson. Lorrie Moore. (Okay Ben Elton is not always literary, but when he is on, which is not always, no one is funnier. I embarrassed myself on a Manhattan subway when reading a passage in Stark that featured an elegant French Canadian cursing all wrong in English. ) The reason that I’m (for the time being) stopping adult fiction is that at Random House I have an amazing editor for my young adult novels who is pummeling me daily into not sailing on my natural comic ability but to delve deeper and deeper. I’m kind of shocked that she even talks seriously to me like this. Frankly, I’m taking less money for Young Adult simply because that’s all I ever wanted as a writer. Someone who believes in me in a big way. I think my other editors were simply amused by my quirkiness and could maybe get lucky on a breakout book.

* When you were a kid, what were your ambitions for your life?

I wanted to first be a magician, then a writer. My 4th Grade teacher, Miss Hayeem, an intense Jew from India told she had a dream I would be a writer, and I utterly believed her. My parents also thought I would be a writer. At my summer camp Camp Tranquility I never learned to swim, but I was the editor of the camp paper from the age of 10.

* Was there a point when you realized you would be a writer?

When I sold my first novel. I can never recapture the utter glee in that moment. Second only to the birth of my kid. My agent said, before she announced the amount, "keep your day job." But I didn’t. I hated it. Money went down, but happiness ensued.

* What crowd did you hang out with in high school?

I went to Stuyvesant, a math and science high school in NYC. It really wasn’t a pocket protector place you might imagine. It was in downtown Manhattan, at the time in the East Village. Lucy Liu and Tim Robbins went there other years, and if you can imagine them young, that’s what most of the people would be like. No mall rats or pom-pom girls, thankfully. Ultimate Frisbee much more important than football. Girls wore sexy short black dresses to the prom, which was an ironic affair. My brother’s year was even at the Playboy Club – mine was at the World Trade Center, RIP. I had friends, but I dated out of school. I had a thing for a guy much older than me, though we always stopped short before actual sex. Thinking I was ultra mature was in retrospect idiotic. He was just immature. What kind of 30-year-old man dates a 17 year old. A wanker. A near pedophile. When I reached 30 I couldn’t dream of being involved with a 17 year old. Shudder. My first teen novel will be published in October 2006 by Random House. (Brand X ) It explores this time.

I hung around with the people who hung around with English teacher Frank McCourt, that is to say the creative ones who somehow got into this hallowed math school despite a lean towards verbal over math ability. They were going to make their parents happy (the school is not just prestigious, it’s free) but miserable by the rigidity. I am really shocked that the talented creatives from my gang hardly followed though on creative careers. My reunion was lawyer after lawyer. They are well off though! (My husband and I have fantasy counterparts living in genteel rusticity in rural France with no bills. We took early retirement after a corporate lawyer life.)

* What do you love and hate about the writing life?

Love that I get the publicity off my own creative ideas. Hate that when I occasionally fall flat, get the publicity too. Love staying at home. I have nasty PMS and by I hated to go to work on those days. I once saw a long check list for PMS and I had everything on it (highlights on the list — PMS dandruff, dizziness, paranoia and hunger). Luke, I mean I had every symptom on that effing list except suicidal thoughts. Now I can work extra hard on the days I am functioning and eat a steak and down three homemade screwdrivers during the worst of my hormonal cycle. I can blub at the drop of a hat with no one in the next cubicle to pity me, and once my daughter is in school I can go back to bed at 9:30 a.m. The other day was a bad PMS day and I caught the tail end of American Iron Chef’s "Battle Pea" –and watching the unthinkable chocolate-coated pea popsicle being considered by wary judges was my sole semi-intellectual activity for the day. Screw regular work. This week is good hormonally and I have huge productivity.

* What role has Judaism/god played in your life? Did you feel called by God to write novels and produce docs on gay cannibals?

I would say my morality is derived from an intensely questioning Jewish background. There are a lot of famous rabbis a few generations back. My family were Religious Zionists to Jerusalem in the 1890’s. We’re talking Mea Shearim, the most orthodox area. My atheist grandfather, son of a rabbi, came to America partly to get out of this lifestyle. My parents are not religious, but I went to Hebrew School twice a week after school, like many Americans. I was Bat Mitzvahed. I also was the first girl at my Conservative synagogue to read from the Torah. Then I went to Israel and was really turned off by the fact that women couldn’t be next to their son during their bar mitzvahs at the wall. My mother said I was a mini-suffragette for a year. I never went to Shabbat service again unless for a family thing. Maybe because of this Hebrew schooling, when I was younger, before Israel, I believed in God. My parents never talked about God. Later I found out they were agnostic, my father more so. I am agnostic though, not atheist. Who am I to know what everything means? Science is more of a God for me than a traditional God. I am baffled what I should teach. My daughter knows what a synagogue is, and that she is a Jew with a Christian father, but I have not yet brought the concept of God up yet. I wonder what to do all the time. I look to Alduous Huxley as a role model. He spent a lifetime searching, and all he could come up with a the end of his hardcore delving was "Be Kind." I think that is where I am now too. My religion in 2006 is that I don’t shit on people if I can help it, and I mean that figuratively by the way before you crack a joke.

So no, I am not a practicing Jew. But I happily identify myself as a secular Jew. For one, I was born and still live on the Lower East Side. I mean give me a pickle and I can immediately tell you if it is quarter sour, or three quarters sour. I knew in a millisecond when word came that Monica Lewinsky said "Schmucko" that she was not merely of Polish heritage like Tara Liapinski. I love Old School Lower east Side Yiddish, which my Dad can speak. The newer take in Hasidic Brooklyn is not salty as the old Socialist Yiddish. I love visiting old synagogues when I travel. But I don’t want to be kosher. Or go to synagogue other than the occasional special event. A little bit of synagogue is just right for me. I enjoy myself when I do go once or twice a year.

* Did you take your husband's last name? Any qualms?

Why should I take his name? He had his life, I have mine. Also, I didn’t want to be a Jew with the name O’Leary. My husband loves my last name so we briefly considered sharing the O . Laurie and Paul Shapir O’Leary looked weird though. My daughter took her father’s surname—although she has my "religion" and two Hebrew names to honor her great grandmas.

* What are the juiciest things your peers say about writing and their careers as writers (that they don't reveal in interviews)?

How obsessively they read Publishers Marketplace online for lowdown on advances. Jealousy is weird emotion to control. I suffer too. I finally canceled my internet subscription to get away from that place.

* In what ways are your perceptions of life keener than other people's?

Honestly I have decided that I have a very light form of ADHD which allows me to hyperfocus on what keenly interests me. (Never diagnosed.) I feel a little like my eye is akin to Glenn Gould’s ear – except instead of teeny rhythms all around me, I remember odd details. I can still tell you what color the piping on the tube socks this hot guy in my calculus class in 11th Grade had on. (Teal.)

* How has your choice of vocation affected you, relationships?

Pisses off some people. My family says, "Watch what you say around Laurie." Also it’s weird what people will read as themselves. I had three guys who I used to date all contact me and say hey so weird you put me in a book as the ex-boyfriend in your book. One was a Type A luging sex-obsessed Mayflower descendant, one was a hilarious perpetually-broke Jersey shore type, and one was pretty darn effete writer though 100 percent straight, like Lyle the Effeminate Heterosexual from SNL. All saw themselves.

* How do you know when you've done good work?

You feel it in your bones. I love my essay in the Modern Jewish Girl’s Guide to Guilt. It was short. But I knew when it was done. On the other hand I chucked half a novel once because when I thought about it – it was crap. And this was a contracted novel with a deadline. I started over with a new plot, The Anglophile, which I raced to get in on time. If I could I would rewrite the end of the book. The last three chapters were rushed.

* What have you sacrificed to be a writer?

Not much except a regular bankable income. Everything now comes once a year or every to years. I was due to get half a million for a film deal, but that crumbled on the last day of an option after nine years. That stung. I’m not really stuck in a solitary situation as I make films too. No one who says they made a doc by themselves is telling the truth – even our small documentary had 80 people involved.

* What do you do best and worst as a writer?

I think I am on paper as least a reasonably funny woman. I think more men than women risk humor, but that may be changing. Sarah Silverman and Samantha Bee from John Stewart are fearless. Worst – I like my digressions, but often I go overboard. I fight for some though even if an editor begs me to take them out. Digressions are in my brain, and I think people my age and younger deal better with them and often they work. But a big red pen is a good thing for an editor assigned to me, whatever her age.

* Why do you write what you write?

I can’t do much else except talk on the phone rally well. I use to think I was someone really special. Did you feel that way as a kid? A sense of "I’m different." But again now I think I have a mild form of ADHD that would be different in a girl that gifted me with an intense creativity and a different nature from most. I was given an award by the Soros Foundation for being the most creative on a campus of 50,000. But they could have also given me an award for most things lost while enrolled. If you are a ditzy smartish woman with really bad handwriting – I think you have to look up ADHD. What has convinced me is that many ADHD women have a fear of escalators. I read that and I was like. WHOA. That is my exact phobia. I will take an elevator if there is one even a mile down a hall. I read girls almost never get diagnosed, and can achieve in a big way in what they like. Two highly successful creative women I hang out with have just been diagnosed and are taking action so they don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. They have stains all over their shirt and glowing press for their journalism and fiction. And hate escalators.

* Were there any events in childhood that prefigured your adult work?

I was quite popular in elementary school — happy girl. I was just fine in high school, not an A lister but okay. But I have a scarring memory of being ostracized at the end of 8th grade. Partly because I wouldn't do drugs, partly because the last place pollyannas are appreciated is in eighth grade. It was brutal, and just a handful of people caused the torment, the rest were sheep. Sometime when I write, I simply really want to show those motherfu**ers. Revenge if channeled well, is a good tool to get you to write. But I’m sure none of the ringleaders give a shit about whether I sell a book or that I won the Spirit Award. But in my fantasy they do care, and I get my writing quota done. Whatever works.

* How has marriage/motherhood affected your philosophizing and writing?

Motherhood rocks, although I think I need another one. I obsess over her so much that she may hate me soon if I don’t bring another in to balance out my love. I write during the time she is in school. So in that way she has focused my writing more. No more dilly-dallying. Except during PMS days.

* What do you want from your kids aside from their happiness?

I want my daughter (so far only one kid) to have a sense of humor. Because when life is sucking, you need one. Thankfully she does. She is a cute funny little blonde without a traditional girly girly nature. She reminds me of a teeny Amy Sedaris. Also a sense of heritage. I want her to travel to Vilnius, Lithuania and Mea Shearim, and when she is older to Auschwitz, even though my family were in America before the war. She can already tell you every Aussie animal, and one day I want to take her to Cork, where the O’Learys once ruled. She listens to the usual Disney Channel music dreck, but she is very musical via her dad and we sneak in traditional Celtic music and Yiddish music on occasion, as well as alternative rock.

* What does philosophy teach you about dealing with a man with an angry erection?

All I can remember from Philosophy 101 is that Sartre thought lust was ill-fated. Indeed: all of my early experiences with angry erections, while memorable, led to nasty breakups. My husband and I started out as friends who slept together, and there have been far too many bungled sexual encounters that stem from excessive wisecracking in our bedroom, but we’ve lasted a long time.

* How often do you experience the consolation of philosophy? At moments of crisis since you became an adult, how often has it been as genuinely useful as a sympathetic friend?

Rarely. However. I do have two brilliant philosopher friends who comfort me during crisis – I figure they have done all the deep reading I could never slog through. During crisis I read humorous nonfiction. Bill Bryson saved me this year during a family crisis that has eased (someone close was very sick.) Jeffrey Steingarten too. I can never read fiction during crisis.

* Your husband and your writing. Does he read it in advance? Is he allowed to critique it?

My husband is an Aussie musician and by this very background finds it distasteful when I use a big vocabulary word. His idea of a perfect book is Catcher in the Rye – "Unpretentious." As I pointed out to him recently – that was also Mark David Chapman’s idea of a perfect book. I find not using a juicy vocabulary ridiculous if the word is used well. I like words. Not just fancy ones, but ones with good sounds which includes all words that start with P. I try to steer clear from him when writing: One bad look and I’m done for the day. Likewise, I am banned from his live performances. He says I am the pits as far as a live audience goes. Apparently when I went to his Melbourne gigs I would cross my arms and cringe even when I liked something very much. We are not a good collaborative unit. Stupidly, we are working on an experiment now – a bildungsroman (a word he of course abhors) of his life in Australia and after two weeks of collaboration I am ready to drop it. He wants everything to stay exactly the same, and I am all for combining events and characters. And I would safely say he hates me right now. I work much better with my brother. But my husband makes me laugh much harder. My brother and I produce good work but we are forever bickering over sibling crap.

* As you travel, what depresses you and what inspires you about Jewish life?

I was in Paris this spring working on a novel involving Jews, and it was an eye-opener to say the least. I keep forgetting that in NYC I live in a bubble, thinking there is no anti-Semitism. Even in Australia, I’ve heard quite a few people who are otherwise educated use Jew as a verb. They didn’t even realize what they were saying to me. What inspires me is history. Remembering occasionally that NYC is not center of universe. Jews can exist in China, and have no idea what a bialy is, but damn is their story interesting.

* Which contemporary writer is the biggest wanker?

I hate to slam people in public, I really do. I have two in mind though in a big way, both blog.

* Are there any exhortations or questions you repeat to yourself on a daily basis?

Two pages. That is the way to write any big thing. Break it down. I thank a post-college writing mentor Abigail Thomas for that wisdom. She used to say that if you simply wrote two pages a day for a year you’d have over 700 pages, so you can miss quite a few days and still have a novel’s worth in a year.

* What left you unsatisfied when you read Jewish-American literature?

It is almost impossible to write about intermarriage without hearing about it. Secular Judaism topics are thought of as immature and lesser. But the reality is that most American Jews are secular, and these lives are real. I don’t feel I have to have my Jewish characters apologize for not keeping kosher. I wouldn’t even though my great grandfather determined that he was the final word in Jerusalem for Ashkenazi Jews on what was kosher. I don’t hate my heritage because I love lobster. Nor do I think of myself as self-loathing simply because I love a man who is not Jewish. I truly love him. My grandmother, born Orthodox, fell in love with an agnostic Jew. She kept Shabbos more as a reminder of her youth, and she’d let me roll out the balls of ball of challah dough. Her dinners start with the cliché: chicken soup. We had jars of the stuff in our freezer. I loved her, and the smell of Jewish food is still blissful. How could anyone say I hate Jews in a review? Idiotic.

* Has the Holocaust changed literary structure so that the traditional linear narrative is no longer appropriate?

Interesting, and people gasp for air when I tell them this as I am known for light comic fiction, I am 2/3rds through a Holocaust novel that I just sold to Random House. My husband who has not read a word calls it my "Chick Lit meets Holocaust" novel to piss me off. But it is not that. I am simply stretching my skill set, challenging myself to go to a darker place, learn things I don’t know. I have been doing a lot of research, and conducted some harrowing interviews. But I still want to be entertaining in a noble way. I would imagine that even in the camps people would try to stay sane by looking for even the smallest shred of entertainment. Mainly I am reaching inside me to my sense of self as a Jew. I am confident I have found the voice I need, the language – but it is precisely the sinew of the novel that is still baffling me. Can I get back to you on the structure question in 2007 when the book is due?

In the winter of 1972 a New York family drives through Italy. The father has come to settle a small legal matter for a client named Basil, a marijuana dealer, and the job takes a few days. Then the mother takes over the trip. She wants her children in front of the masters while the light moves across the canvas. In the title essay of his memoir Criminals, Robert Anthony Siegel (b. 1960) returns to the Uffizi at the height of a ten-year-old. The walls climb past him, packed top to bottom with dark paintings in gold frames, more than a boy can hold, and his chest tightens. His mother leans close and tells him they stand inside one of the great museums on earth. She means it as a gift. He wants to be down in the café with his father, his brother David, and his sister Perrin, eating a cannoli. He keeps the wish to himself.

The family runs along two lines that never meet. The father, Stanley, defends criminals in Manhattan and loves them more than the work allows. He wears cowboy boots and a beard and rides a motorcycle to court. His clients run to killers, drug dealers, and the Hells Angels, and he brings the boy along to meet them. The mother, Frances, trained for the law too, then walked away from it for symphonies, ballet, and good restaurants. She came out of Brooklyn and meant to leave it behind. She wants her children refined, fluent in the larger world, everything the father is not. The home holds together on the gap between these projects, and on the jokes that cover it.

The Angels give the father what the law cannot. They offer escape from middle-class routine, from fatherhood and appetite and his own Judaism, a borrowed wildness he can drive home at night. The family manages the danger with comedy. At the dinner table they turn the clients into harmless characters, silly men, a performance no one need answer for. When a neighbor confronts the father for defending killers, he answers by twisting the famous warning of Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984). He recites it with the drug addict, the streetwalker, and the thief in the place of the persecuted, so that no one remains to speak when they come for him. The boy laughs along. Only as a grown man does he weigh the rest of it, that some of the men his father reveres ride through the city in Nazi insignia, that the Angels carry White-nationalist ties the jokes at home never named.

The contradiction collapses. Stanley goes to prison for crossing the line with the clients he cannot stop loving, for conduct bound up with representing them. The sentence runs short. It marks the family for good. He comes out diminished in reputation and income, sinks into depression, and tries to rebuild a practice while age and money close in. Years on, Alzheimer’s takes hold, long after the behavior has already turned strange. At the funeral the grown son meets Sandy Alexander, once president of the New York chapter of the Angels, a figure of fear from childhood, and finds a broken man across the room. The son reads the brokenness as a fair response to a life.

Long before the prison and the funeral, the boy looks for a way out, and he finds judo. In the essay “Choke” he sets the scene in the dojo of his sensei, the one adult in his world who carries no fear and no sadness. The man stands by the table where he eats, a glass of whiskey in his hand and a Soviet fur hat on his head, his six-foot black canvases stacked around him like characters written at speed. A friend of the boy’s mother once called him the most handsome man she had seen. The boy dreams of Tokyo as a return to a home he has never visited, a place where a truer self, a Japanese self, waits for him, where the big shaved-head fighters from the judo books take him in. He chokes a training partner named Brian into the dark and feels no blame for it. He studies Japanese and judo through high school, and becomes fluent in the first and a champion in the second.

He carries that hunger into his education. At Harvard he majors in East Asian studies and spends his junior year in Tokyo. He goes back to Japan on a fellowship from the Japanese Ministry of Education, from 1983 to 1985, and studies comparative literature at the University of Tokyo while he works on the side as a translator and a copywriter. He reads deep into Japanese literature and absorbs its restraint and its attention to small things. He earns a Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and holds a writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. The discipline of the mat and the discipline of the Japanese sentence both find their way into his prose.

He publishes his first novel, All the Money in the World, in 1997. A wealthy defense attorney and his Harvard-age son sit at the center, and a client’s false accusation pulls the father’s life apart. The book reads the family from the inside, the private bargaining over ambition and loyalty rather than the noise of the case. He returns to faith, memory, and self-invention in his second novel, All Will Be Revealed, in 2007, a blend of comedy, mystery, and family drama. In both books the inner reckoning outweighs the plot, and ambiguity does the work that resolution does in other writers.

Then, in July 2018, he turns the method on his own family in Criminals: My Family’s Life on Both Sides of the Law. He builds the book from linked essays rather than a straight chronology, and he treats memory as an act of imagination, a search for a story in material that refuses one. He will not sort his parents into heroes and villains. He loves them too much for revenge and sees them too clearly for myth. Reviewers reach for Geoffrey Wolff’s (b. 1937) The Duke of Deception and praise the spare sentences, set one at a time, and the comedy that carries the grief without softening it. Siegel says the first surprise was writing a memoir at all, since he had always counted himself a private man, and the second came fast behind it, that he had no more to hide than anyone else, only more shame.

His stories and essays run in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian, The Paris Review, The Drift, The Oxford American, Ploughshares, Tin House, Bookforum, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. “Sean” wins a Pushcart Prize. “The Right Imaginary Person” wins an O. Henry. “Thirteen Ways of Listening to the Rain” lands in The Best American Essays 2023, and his story “Ten Variations on a Staircase” runs in Five Points in the winter of 2024. The judo essays, “Choke” among them, turn the mat into a study of fear, endurance, and attention. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington for more than two decades and mentors a long line of first books, and he also teaches at Tunghai University in Taiwan on a Fulbright, at Hollins, at Catapult, and at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn. He marries the novelist Karen E. Bender, and they raise two children, Jonah and Maia. After the long Wilmington years he moves back toward New York and keeps teaching workshops and coaching writers.

The same self stands in the Uffizi at ten and sits later at the writing desk. One subject holds the work together: the stories a family tells to survive itself, the line between knowing who you are and fooling yourself about it, the house where love and deceit live under one roof. Siegel does not settle the contradiction his parents handed him. He writes from inside it, and treats honest life within the ambiguity as the closest thing to self-knowledge a man gets.

The Vital Lie of the Honest Son

The Siegels eat out because home has turned to acid, and in a good restaurant they treat one another with a care they cannot manage at the kitchen table. Picture a night in Manhattan in the middle of the Seventies. The father takes them to a French place with white cloth and a captain who knows his name. He orders escargot for the table and tells the children which fork to take. He wears a good suit and Italian shoes, and on a lean month the jacket will not close over him, so tonight he sits large and content inside the cloth that still fits. Money from his clients buys the wine. His clients run to drug dealers and the Hells Angels and now and then a man who has killed. None of that reaches the table. At the table the father plays the host, generous, loud, loved. The mother watches the room and the children at once. She came out of Brooklyn and means for her son to leave it further behind than she did. She leans toward Robert and names what he should notice, the sauce, the painting on the far wall, the way a cultivated man carries an evening. His brother David wants the bread. His sister Perrin, who is four, wants to go home. The boy of ten sits between his parents and reads both of them, and keeps the reading to himself.

Two answers to the same fear sit at that table.

Ernest Becker (1924–1974) set the fear down in two parts in The Denial of Death (1973). A man knows he will die. Beneath that he suspects something worse, that he might not count even while he lives, that he is an animal who feeds and fails and rots and leaves no mark. The hero system answers both terrors with one move. It tells a man what significance looks like and promises the significance will outlast the body. A culture hands out many such scripts. A family hands out fewer, and the Siegels handed Robert two, at war across the bread basket. The interest of his life, and the reason he becomes a writer rather than a casualty, lies in his refusal to simply take one. He builds a third.

Begin with love, because the family runs on a surplus of it and cannot agree on what it is.

For the father, to be loved means to be needed by men the law hunts. The client’s devotion proves he counts. He drives a motorcycle to court and wears the beard and the boots, and he carries the boy into the clubhouse so the boy can see him welcomed there, where the danger lives. Love, in his system, is the wild thing that chooses you and lets you near. For the mother, love means rescue by elevation. She gave up the law for museums and concerts and the conviction that a child set in front of the masters will join their permanence and never be small. Love, in her system, is the gift of the eternal, handed down. For Robert the writer, much later, love becomes attention. To love a man is to set him down in sentences exact enough to survive him. One reviewer of the memoir describes its prose as hammered into place by love, and the phrase reads as a fair account of the method: the care is in the precision.

Three Siegels, one word, three meanings that do not overlap. Push past the family and the word splits further, because the world holds many hero systems and not one. For the hospice nurse, love is presence at the threshold, the easing of a death she has no power to stop, significance earned at the bedside. For the founder who stakes a fund on a stranger with a notebook, love is belief past the evidence, capital as faith. For the Mande griot, love is the keeping of names in song so the lineage does not fully die, the dead held in the mouth of the living. Each of them says love and means a sacrament the others would not recognize. Becker’s point arrives here with force. The sacred word is shared. The thing it names is local to the system that needs it.

Truth runs the same way, and the Siegel home shows why a man might fear it.

The household survives on a lie that is also the love. To say the true thing, that the clients are killers, that the money is dirty, that the father is sinking, would end the family in an afternoon. So the loving act is the joke that turns killers into bumbling characters, and truth becomes the threat the comedy holds off. The father trades on a second kind of truth at work, the account a jury will buy. He sells persuasion for a living and knows that the usable story and the accurate one part ways more often than the law admits. Robert grows up between these and arrives at a third truth, the story that refuses to lie. He will not hand his parents the redemption a tidy ending would give them. He looks for some semblance of truth in the memory of them and stops there.

Carry the word outward and watch it break apart again. For the forensic accountant, truth is the ledger that survives audit, the column that reconciles to the penny. For the field biologist, truth is the observation another worker can repeat. For the Talmudic student, truth is the disagreement preserved, the dissenting rabbi kept on the page beside the one who carried the ruling, machloket, the argument built to outlast the men who had it. Each of them serves truth. None would accept the others’ definition as the real one. The word is a flag many armies carry, and each marches under it toward a different permanence.

Then there is discipline, the value Robert builds himself out of when the two inherited systems fail him.

He finds judo as a boy and finds on the mat a way to become a body that does not fear. His sensei carries no fear and no sadness, the only adult in his world who seems unbroken, and the boy studies him the way an apprentice studies a master, wanting the stillness as much as the throws. The work is shugyō, the slow making of a self by repetition, and it is the same labor he will later bring to the sentence, set down one at a time, refined by the thousandth attempt. The dojo and the desk run on a single article of faith, that practice can build a man who lasts. Discipline, for Robert, is self-cultivation as a bid against death.

The word does not hold still for others either. For the dancer in the corps de ballet, discipline erases the single body into the line, and the immortality on offer is the perfected ensemble in which no one stands out. For the free-solo climber, discipline is the margin that keeps him on the rock, mastery counted in survival itself. For the violinist raised under the daily Suzuki regime, discipline is the thousand cold mornings that buy a single tone. Each bows to discipline. Each means a different rescue from the same animal fact, that the body fails and time runs out.

Beneath love and truth and discipline sits the value that organizes all of them, and that Becker treats as the root. Shame.

Shame is the body’s verdict, the felt sense of creatureliness, the animal that fouls itself and gets seen doing it. The Siegels carry a heavy load of it. The father grows too large for the suits. He goes to prison for crossing the line with the clients he cannot stop loving, and comes home smaller in standing and in money. The family answers shame with the performance of decency in public, the good manners and the escargot laid over the rot at home, so they can hold themselves the normal ones. Robert inherits the load. Then, writing the memoir, he reports a discovery that turns the system over. He learns he is no more private than any other man, only more ashamed. So he publishes the shame. He names the creatureliness in print and survives the naming, and the survival is the victory. Exposure becomes the hero-act.

Once more the word travels and changes. For the penitent in the box, shame discharges through the priest and converts to grace. For the witness at a truth commission, shame and testimony braid into a public record that lets a nation go on living. For the man who films his own breakdown for a following, shame converts to intimacy and intimacy to reach. Each meets the same animal verdict. Each routes it toward a different kind of lasting.

The memoir reveals Siegel’s hero system.

Alzheimer’s takes the father before death does. The man dissolves while the body remains, significance leaking out of him in front of his son, and this is the terror at its worst, not only the end but the erasure that comes ahead of the end. Robert answers with authorship. He writes the father back. Criminals re-fathers the father, sets him down in language exact enough that the disease does not get the last word. The son becomes the author of the man who authored him. Becker called the deepest human wish the causa sui project, the dream of fathering oneself, of owing one’s being to no one. Robert performs a version more literal than Becker described. He gives birth to his own father, in sentences, after the father can no longer hold himself together.

Honesty is also a hero system. Siegel asks for some semblance of truth and not the truth. He refuses the moral redemption that would expose the book as a lie. His sacred value, in the end, is honesty about the limits of honesty, and that is the most a man gets while the body lasts. He takes it and builds a life on it.

Three places to watch. First, the love that he learned as attention he now turns on strangers, in workshops and on the page, and the open question is whether attention with no blood behind it still reads to him as love, or whether the work has become the only family that holds still. Second, he built the system on his father’s dying, and with the father gone the engine needs new fuel; the late essays on judo and on the aging body suggest he has found it in his own approaching creatureliness, which the frame predicts and the work confirms. Third, he has made honesty his immortality, which leaves one exposure he has not yet risked, the account in which he is not the gentle witness but the implicated son, the boy who also wanted the dangerous men to love him, and who got, from their money and their menace, everything that made his family feel chosen.

The Great Delusion

If John J. Mearsheimer is right in his anthropology, Siegel’s writing undergoes a major shift in interpretation. Siegel’s 2018 memoir, Criminals, looks at a family structure caught between legal enforcement and criminal activity. Mearsheimer’s assertion that individuals are profoundly social beings shaped by an enormous value infusion long before their critical faculties develop provides a strong framework for reading this kind of family history.
In Criminals, the standard liberal view might see individual actors making personal, rational choices to either uphold the law or break it, operating as autonomous agents responsible for their own moral calculus. Under Mearsheimer’s logic, however, these choices are largely illusions of autonomy. The individual members of the family are born into a highly specific micro-society—the family unit—that imposes its own intense socialization during a long, vulnerable childhood.
Mearsheimer argues that by the time an individual can reason effectively, his group has already instilled a foundational worldview. For Siegel’s subjects, the conventional societal boundary between legal and illegal behavior is subordinate to the internal logic, loyalty, and survival strategies of the immediate tribe. The family functions as the primary social group that dictates identity.
What looks like individual criminal defiance or individual ethical rebellion is instead a reflection of inborn attitudes and early socialization. The moral code is not chosen through independent reason; it is inherited from the surrounding structure. If Mearsheimer is right, the core of Siegel’s exploration is not a collection of personal moral failures or triumphs, but an illustration of how completely an individual remains embedded in, and shaped by, his primary tribe.
This tribal logic extends deeply into Siegel’s essays and his relationship with Japan, a culture he has spent decades studying and writing about. In a liberal framework, an American writer immersing himself in Japanese literature and expatriate life is an act of ultimate cosmopolitan individualism. It looks like a lone actor choosing his own intellectual path, free from the constraints of his birth culture.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology suggests something different. The impulse to look outward, to seek refuge or meaning in a foreign culture, is itself a reaction to the primary tribe. When the family structure or the native society infuses a young person with conflicting values, the individual does not escape into pure autonomy. He searches for an established social structure that might resolve those conflicts.
Japan operates as a society famously structured around collective obligation, where the social group explicitly takes precedence over the individual. For a writer shaped by the internal contradictions of an American household, the appeal of such a structure is not found through abstract reason. It is found through an innate sentiment, a search for a coherent tribe where the rules of belonging are clear.
Even the act of writing a memoir fits this pattern. Memoir writing appears to be the most individualistic project possible, an exercise in solitary self-examination and personal expression. Yet Mearsheimer notes that reason and individual choice are secondary to socialization. The memoirist is not an atomistic actor looking inward at a vacuum; he is a chronicler of his attachments. He writes to map the social groups that formed him, using the language, tools, and literary traditions handed down by his society.
The narrative engine in Siegel’s work is the tension between the myth of the independent self and the gravity of the group. If Mearsheimer is right, the independent self loses the argument every time. The writer remains a product of his early value infusion, and his work is an artifact of that socialization, rather than a departure from it.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

If David Pinsof is right, the family history in Criminals is not a story of tragic dysfunction or a search for emotional truth. The book becomes a chronicle of two distinct strategies for status and survival.
The father, a criminal defense lawyer who goes to prison for his ties to drug dealers, does not suffer from a moral misunderstanding. He operates in a high-stakes environment where people fight dirty against the coercive apparatus of the state. He uses self-serving bias to justify his choices and maintain his alliances with the underground economy.
The mother pursues an opposite but equally rational strategy. She reacts to the threat of low social status by pushing her children toward high culture, fine dining, and international refinement. This choice is a weapon to outcompete rivals and secure a place among the cultural elite.
The memoirist himself acts as a rational animal within the attention marketplace. By framing this family history as an exploration of memory and ethics, he converts raw family scandal into literary prestige. The pursuit of artistic truth serves as the high-status mission statement. It hides the underlying logic of the project, which secures elite standing in the literary hierarchy. The book functions as a savvy instrument to gain reputation and outcompete other writers for prestige.

Confabulation

David Pinsof writes:

Confabulation. A bullshit explanation for our behavior. When we don’t know why we did something, instead of saying “I don’t know why I did that,” we say we were following our hearts or expressing ourselves or venting or whatever. Much of who we are is a tapestry of confabulations.

As a novelist and professor of creative writing, Siegel spends his life examining why people act and how they justify those choices through speech. Pinsof defines confabulation as the false explanations people invent for their behavior when they do not understand their own true motives.
This concept serves as the engine for narrative voice and character development. In his novel All Will Be Revealed, a nineteenth-century spiritual medium fakes her trances and begins to wonder if her entire talent is a self-delusion. His memoir Criminals and his first novel All the Money in the World both deal with the fictions family members construct to live with crime and greed. Writers create compelling narrators by capturing the way human beings invent stories to hide real impulses from themselves. Confabulation is not just a psychological error. It is the core of fiction and the foundation of human voice.
The utility of confabulation for Robert Anthony Siegel shows in how he structures the internal lives of his characters. In a literary context, confabulation is the link between a character’s hidden desire and his spoken rationale. When a character lacks self-knowledge, he does not remain silent; instead, he constructs an elaborate, elegant justification. This justification forms the prose style of the narrator.
In All Will Be Revealed, the plot turns on spiritualism and early photography in the late nineteenth century. Both fields relied on a willing vulnerability to deception. A medium who produces fake ectoplasm or a photographer who captures ghostly silhouettes must provide a narrative that satisfies the client and preserves his own self-regard. The characters do not view themselves as simple con men. They invent a higher purpose, telling themselves they provide comfort to the grieving. The narrative tension arises because the reader sees the material greed while the character listens to his own noble explanation.
This logic extends to his memoir Criminals, which examines his father, a defense attorney who fell into illegal financial schemes. In families where illegal behavior occurs, members rarely acknowledge the raw facts. They construct a domestic folklore. They frame greed as survival, or rule-breaking as a sign of superior intelligence. The family members use these stories to protect their social standing and internal peace.
For a writer, tracking these social paradoxes is essential. A narrator who fully understands himself is flat; he leaves no room for subtext. The prose becomes sharp and lifelike only when the character tells a story about his life, and the reader must look through the cracks of that story to see the actual choices being made. Confabulation provides the specific material that a novelist uses to build a voice.

What the Money Became

A client hands the father a stack of cash and tells him to run, money enough to leave the country and vanish ahead of the trouble closing in. The father keeps the cash and stays. He spends it on junk food and good clothes. Siegel, looking back, guesses the man had grown too broken to go. Read the scene for what the money is and what becomes of it, and the arc of the family comes into view. The cash sits there in its rawest form, liquid, anonymous, dangerous, worth in the long run far less than the thing it can be turned into. The father turns it into appetite and into objects he can wear. Two generations on, the same stream of money becomes a degree from Harvard and an essay in The Paris Review. The distance between those two fates is the subject.

Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) read a society as a set of fields, each one a game with its own stakes and its own rules, and he held that players carry capital in several currencies at once. Economic capital is money and property. Cultural capital is taste, credentials, the trained eye and ear, the educated body. Social capital is the network, the men who take your call. Symbolic capital is honor, the recognition the other players grant. The drama of a life often sits in the exchange rate between these currencies, in the labor of turning one into another, and in the losses taken at the counter. The Siegel home runs as a small factory for such conversion, and the work divides along clear lines. The father accumulates. The mother converts. The son banks the result in the most legitimate and least liquid form a man can hold.

Place the father in his fields first, because he occupies two at once and they pay him in opposite directions. Within the legitimate field of the law he holds a dominated position. He defends drug dealers and the Hells Angels and now and then a killer, the bottom of the profession’s order, far from the white-shoe firms that set the field’s idea of honor. His cultural capital there runs thin. He wears the beard and the boots, rides the motorcycle to court, carries the outer-borough body and the Depression-bred hunger, and none of it reads as distinction to the men who run the bar association. Within the other field, the demimonde of his clients, he stands near the top. The Angels welcome him. The clients love him and need him, and he loves and needs them back, and that mutual hold is social capital of a high order in a world the law despises. He lives on the gap between his two standings, and the gap holds until the law collapses it. Prison destroys his symbolic capital in the legitimate field at a stroke. He comes home smaller in reputation and in income, tries to rebuild a practice that no longer commands what it did, and sinks. His habitus formed in one arrangement of the world and the world moved under him. Bourdieu gave that lag a name, hysteresis, the disposition stranded after the field that made it has changed. The father keeps playing a hand the table no longer honors.

The mother runs the conversion. She came out of Brooklyn, which she names to her children as parochial, airless, a place that does not read books and resents the people who do. She trained as a lawyer because her parents pushed her toward it, loathed the work, and gave it up. Hold that for a moment, because she discards institutionalized cultural capital, a law degree, the kind of credential most climbers would kill to hold, and trades it for a different currency she rates higher. She pours herself into legitimate culture, the museum, the symphony, the ballet, the long lunch where a child learns which fork and how a cultivated man carries an evening. She tells Robert that a truly educated man needs an afternoon in front of a Titian while the light changes across the canvas. She runs the household as a strategy of reproduction, and she would not have flinched at the word distinction, because she chose it on purpose and worked at it harder than the father worked at anything legal. The family already sees this much about itself. What the mother cannot see sits one level down. Her taste is a currency whose value she does not set. The field of legitimate culture fixes the rate, consecrates the Titian and not the comic book, and her refinement is as borrowed as the money that buys the museum memberships. She cannot see that the laundering she runs needs the dirt to launder, that her ascent and the father’s clients draw on a single account. The escargot and the manners lie over the source the way good cloth lies over a body that has grown too large for it.

The son walks the three states of cultural capital in order, and the order tells the story. Bourdieu separated cultural capital into the embodied, the objectified, and the institutionalized. The embodied state comes first, instilled in the body of the child, slow, intimate, paid for in a parent’s time. The mother does this work at the Uffizi and the dinner table, building into the boy the taste that will later read as nature and not as labor. The objectified state surrounds him, the paintings on the walls he visits, the books, the good suit, the props of a cultured life. The institutionalized state arrives last and converts the rest into something the world will certify. He goes to Collegiate, then to Harvard, where he takes a degree in East Asian studies, then to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for the M.F.A. that consecrates a writer inside the field. The prizes follow, the O. Henry, the Pushcart, the place in The Best American Essays. A chair at the University of North Carolina Wilmington turns the writer’s precarious holdings into a salary and a title. The dirty cash has become, by the end of this passage, the cleanest capital a family can own, a credential no one can spend and no one can confiscate, the kind that passes for merit because the labor that built it has been forgotten.

Japan belongs to the same logic, read as a flight. Robert finds judo as a boy and finds in the dojo a field where his American class position carries no weight, where rank comes from the throw and the choke and the years on the mat, and where a new currency, fluency and the sempai-kohai order, can be earned by a man with no inherited place in it. He goes to Tokyo for his junior year, then back on a fellowship from the Japanese Ministry of Education from 1983 to 1985 to study comparative literature, and he works on the side as a translator. He looks, in Bourdieu’s terms, for a field with a friendlier exchange rate, one where the family’s stain does not price his every move. Then he brings the foreign capital home. The essays on Japan and on judo, the story translated into Japanese, the Fulbright that later sends him to teach in Taiwan, all of it converts in the American field, where the cross-cultural memoir reads as a rare and legitimate distinction. The escape becomes another deposit.

The literary field gives the trajectory its last and strangest turn, because its economy runs upside down. Bourdieu argued in The Rules of Art that the field of cultural production rewards the disavowal of the economic, that the writer wins symbolic capital by appearing to want none of the other kind, that the loser in the market can be the winner in the game. A man enters this field and must perform indifference to money as the price of admission, must treat the work as love and truth and craft rather than as a bid. Into this field walks the son of a criminal, carrying the one set of materials the field can transmute into pure gold. He writes Criminals. He takes the family’s lowest holdings, the father’s crime, the prison, the shame, the dirty money, and turns them into literary capital of the highest grade, prizes and standing and the praise of his peers. The conversion completes itself in front of the reader. A reviewer calls the prose hammered into place by love. Another calls the book compassionate, clear-eyed, brave. Read the praise as the field doing its proper work, which is to consecrate by denying the economy, to certify the book as love so that no one need notice it as the terminal conversion of three generations of capital. Bourdieu called the denial misrecognition. The field cannot run without it, and neither can the memoir.

The split that powers the work is the same split the conversion left in the man. Bourdieu, who climbed from a village in the Béarn to the Collège de France, wrote about the cleft habitus, the divided disposition of the man who rises far enough that his body carries two worlds at odds, the origin he left and the height he reached, neither fully his. Robert carries the clubhouse and the Uffizi in one frame, the father’s demimonde and the mother’s high culture, and the split never closes. It becomes his subject. The families that cannot tell love from deceit, the line between knowing yourself and fooling yourself, the boy who reads both parents and trusts neither, these are the cleft habitus turned into art. The wound the ascent opened is the vein the work mines. He does not write in spite of the division. He writes because of it, and the day it healed the writing might lose its source.

Three places to watch. First, the reconversion problem. His children inherit the institutionalized capital, the educated home, the writer-parents, but they do not inherit the hunger, because the dirt and the climb that fed it are two generations gone. The third generation often cannot reproduce the ascent, since the engine has been removed in the name of giving the children a better start. Watch whether his material thins as the cleft heals in his heirs. Second, the autonomy question. A chair, the workshops, the weekend novel bootcamp, the private coaching, all of it pulls him toward the heteronomous pole of the field, the writer as service provider paid by the hour. Watch whether the late work holds the autonomous pole, where standing comes from peers and not from customers, or bends toward the market it once had to disavow. Third, the foreign vein. Japan and Taiwan gave him a capital that priced well in the American field for decades, the exotic distinction of the man who crossed over. Field tastes move. Watch whether the appetite for the cross-cultural memoir holds, or whether it shifts under him and strands the very capital that once paid best, the way it stranded his father when the field he had mastered stopped honoring his hand.

Watergate as Democratic Ritual & Cultural Trauma

A neighbor stops the father in the lobby of their Manhattan building and asks how he sleeps, defending the men he defends, the killers and the dealers and the rest. The father does not flinch. He answers with a borrowed sermon. He recites his own version of Pastor Niemöller’s warning, the one about the silence that lets them come for one group and then the next, except he sets the drug addict in the first line, and the streetwalker, and the thief, so that he stands at the end as the last honest man who still speaks while someone remains to speak for. The neighbor has no answer and goes up in the elevator. Siegel tells the scene in Criminals. Some of the men his father speaks for ride through the city in Nazi insignia, the emblem the real Niemöller stood against.

The scene is a quarrel over a code. Yale sociologist Jeffrey C. Alexander (b. 1947) argues that a society holds itself together on one, a sorting of the world into the sacred and the profane, the pure and the polluted, and that civil life runs on a particular version of this division. On one side the code sets law, honesty, responsibility, the universal rule that binds every man alike, the open hand of citizen solidarity. On the other it sets crime, corruption, personalism, the loyalty a man owes to his own faction over the loyalty he owes to all. The code runs older than any case and tells each case what it means. Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) gave the sacred and the profane. Mary Douglas (1921–2007). gave pollution as matter out of place, the dirt that threatens because it has crossed a line it should not cross. Alexander builds the civil sphere on both. The Siegels live across the line the code draws, and the boy grows up reading it from the middle.

Place the father on the polluted side, because that is where he chooses to stand and where he finds his joy. His value is loyalty to particular men, and his clients are the most particular men a city holds, drug dealers, the Hells Angels, now and then a man who has killed. He loves them and needs their love, and he raises personal loyalty above the impersonal law he was trained to serve. Read him through the Watergate hearings that Alexander anatomizes and his position comes clear. He is the administration witness, the one who pleads loyalty and family and the practical necessity of the thing, not the senator who speaks for the law that holds high and low to one standard. He even brings the boy to the clubhouse, where the pollution lives, and lets the child stand among the men the code marks as profane. Matter crosses into the home, and the father carries it in himself.

The mother runs the purification. She came out of Brooklyn and means to leave it behind, and her instrument is civility. She fills the children with museums and concerts and the long, correct dinner, and she codes the family, through this work, back onto the sacred side of the line. The family eats out because home has turned to acid, and in public they treat one another with a care the kitchen cannot hold, and the public care is the point. The manners are a rite. The escargot is a rite. The Uffizi is a rite. Through them she keeps the dirt in its place and presents the Siegels to the world as the decent ones, the middle-class family that happens to live among lowlifes and remains untouched by them. Douglas would name the labor at once. The mother spends her days keeping matter from showing where it should not show.

The prison ends the performance. The law reasserts the universal rule the father set below his clients, and the reassertion is a public rite of its own, a degradation that strips a man of standing in front of everyone who knows him. He is polluted now in the open, not by a neighbor’s question but by the state, and the legitimate sphere expels him. He comes home reduced, smaller in name and in money, a man the decent world has marked and set aside. The purification the mother ran for years cannot reach this. The dirt has been certified.

For a long time after, the family declines to make the crime mean what it might mean. Alexander insists that trauma is built and not born, that an event does not carry its own wound, that some group must do the work of telling a society it has been injured before the injury becomes real to the society at large. The Siegels do the opposite work. They metabolize the father’s crime as comedy. At the table they turn the killers into bumbling characters and their own place beside them into a joke played with the tongue in the cheek, a performance that can never leave a mark. No one in the family rises as what Alexander, after Weber (1864–1920), calls a carrier group, the agent who broadcasts the claim that a wound has been dealt. The humor holds the wound off. The pollution stays deferred, laughed into harmlessness, the way larger societies have looked at their own atrocities and agreed not to see.

The memoir is the work the family refused, done late and done alone. Decades on, Siegel becomes a carrier group of one and builds the trauma he would not build as a boy. He walks, in his own quiet way, the four representations that Alexander says every successful trauma claim must answer. He sets down the nature of the pain, the shame and the secrecy and the long childhood spent reading two parents and trusting neither. He sets down the victim, and here the claim strains, because the Siegels suffered the crime and lived on its proceeds at once, victim and beneficiary in one house, a victim the code does not quite know how to honor. He makes the bid for identification, the move Alexander calls expanding the circle of the we, when he tells the reader he is no more private than any other man, only more ashamed, so that a stranger reads the book and sees his own family’s lies in the Siegels’ lies. Then he comes to the attribution of responsibility, the naming of the antagonist, and there he stops. He will not fully pollute his father. He will not hand the reader the villain the code wants.

Alexander notes that when the trauma process enters the aesthetic arena it gets channeled by form toward catharsis and identification, and the memoir of family disgrace has a form it wants to take, the arc that names the guilty party, expels him, and leaves the survivor cleansed. Siegel withholds the arc. He refuses the redemption that would let the reader close the book purified. The refusal is itself a move inside the civil sphere, not a retreat from it. By holding his father as loved and culpable at the same time, he argues, under the surface of the prose, for a wider civil discourse, one that can carry a polluted man without either washing him or casting him out. Alexander describes how the years after Watergate brought the once-persecuted, the old communists and the antiwar fugitives, back into a sympathetic and familiar light, a retrospective refiguring of who belonged inside the community. Siegel performs that refiguring on his own father, and reaches toward the Angels.

Truth carries the same charge for him that it carries in the code. The Watergate senators built their case on the civic faith that a citizen who knows the truth acts justly, that the truth, once told, sorts the pure from the impure on its own. Siegel holds truth sacred too. He looks for some semblance of it in the memory of his parents and refuses to claim more. Yet his book shows the civic faith its limit. The truth he finds does not deliver the verdict the binary wants. He is the truth-seeker the code reveres, the figure Alexander finds in the Watergate witness who pursues the facts without vanity, except Siegel turns the figure around. He pursues the truth to understand, and the understanding leaves the pollution standing, unresolved, a man and not a monster on the page. Alexander writes that scandals are not born, they are made. So are the traumas a family carries, and Siegel makes his on purpose, knowing the making will not close the wound.

In the end the constructed trauma cools. The spiral of signification flattens. The vivid pollution that drove the book settles into an object, a volume on a shelf, a case discussed in a seminar, a craft talk on the method of making a dead man present on the page. The affect detaches from the meaning under the desiccating attention of the specialist, and the specialist, now, is Siegel himself, teaching the construction of the very wound he spent a career constructing. The fire becomes technique. The man who told the society of letters that his family was injured now teaches the telling.

Three places to watch. First, the circle of the we depends on an audience willing to grant a polluted man their sympathy, and that willingness moves with the climate. A civil sphere more alert to the Angels’ White-nationalist coding might refuse the identification Siegel asks for and recode the memoir as an apology for criminals, which tests whether his widening holds or shrinks back to the binary it tried to soften. Second, he remains a carrier group of one, and the trauma he built is a private one; watch whether he generalizes it, whether the family disgrace becomes a public claim about crime and decency and the American household, the move from his family to the family that lets a small trauma reach a wide audience. Third, watch the routinization. The teaching and the coaching and the craft talks might desiccate the affect for good, or he might keep finding fresh matter out of place to construct, the aging body and the judo essays suggesting a new boundary to police, the creature that fails set against the civility that denies it.

Robert Anthony Siegel's Literary Novel – All the Money in the World

Robert Anthony Siegel's website.

I sat down one Friday night and zipped through this novel in three hours. It's linear, realistic and fun — a welcome change from the many writing-exercises-packaged-as-novels I've endured the past three months.

What's wrong with writing scenes that lead into the next scene and propelling the reader along?

I also enjoyed Like Normal People, the novel by Robert's wife's Karen Bender, but its nonlinear structure made me work harder than I wanted. I almost gave up on the book after 40 pages.

I wonder if reading a book should be like watching cricket or baseball — you can fall asleep for an hour and not miss anything?

Time frame shifts don't allow your mind to wander for a page and then know where you are when you return your attention.

When I read a book, a dull book anyway, I like to skip every other page (or every other 50 pages). That way I can read twice as many books and sound twice as smart as the next blogger.

I've been rereading Tom Wolfe over the past few months (some pleasure amidst the work I'm doing for my project on American Jewish Lit) and Robert's book melded with Wolfe as pure pleasure with its scene-by-scene construction, close attention to status details and its unashamed fascination with the way life is lived in our fascinating country.

I call Robert (the eldest child of four kids) Wednesday, August 16, 2006.

Luke: "When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?"

Robert: "I was grandiose. I wanted to be important. It had something to do with writing. I was a heavy reader."

Luke: "There are fewer better platforms for a grandiose life than writing."

Robert: "You're wrapped up in what you think about things. Part of the experience of writing a novel is putting yourself at the center of the world. When you come in contact with the real world that grandiosity is a problem. You have to let go of it.

"In many ways, being a writer is humbling. There's almost no readership left for literary fiction. There's little chance to be noticed and to gratify those urges. My first book disappeared almost immediately. It had that classic 90-day shelf cycle. It had a silver lining. It kept me focused on my own writing. There wasn't a lot happening in the outside world. I had to focus in on my inner experience as a writer."

Luke: "Your dust jacket photo and the photo on your professor's page are very different."

Robert: "Two children in between those."

Luke: "What crowd did you hang out with in highschool?"

Robert: "I went to a small private school in Manhattan. Everybody inevitably circulated together. I didn't have many close friends. I was shy. I lived downtown. I was a commuter in a neighborhood school.

"Like many shy people, I've learned to compensate. I teach, which is a branch of performance."

At Harvard, Siegel got a BA in East Asian Studies (Japanese).

Luke: "What makes All the Money in the World literary as opposed to a John Grisham-style law-drama genre?"

Robert: "It was a difficult first publishing experience. It didn't get any support from the publisher, which is part of the reason it disappeared so quickly. In so far as they tried to tried to do anything, they tried to represent it as something it wasn't — as a crime novel. It was the heyday (1997) of the legal thriller.

"People who bought it by mistake were unhappy. When the book got reviewed, it often went to a crime reviewer who was also unhappy because the expectations were so different.

"The book's plot was straightforward. It wasn't a point of interest for me. The focus was on character and the language that carries that experience. That makes it literary."

Luke: "Who's the protagonist of the book?"

Robert: "It's hard to say. The point of view switches between the attorney, Louis Glasser, and his son Jason. Louis is a more interesting character. He's the one who undergoes the drastic life change. It's his book. But Jason stands at the periphery and gives it meaning as an observer.

"That question is unresolved. It might've been a stronger book if it had been resolved."

Luke: "Isn't there a rule against that? It seemed like the protagonist changed 75% of the way through the book."

Robert: "I'm very aware of it as a first book. I'm struggling with so many personal issues and craft issues and my relationship to the material. I was learning as I went."

Luke: "How does Louis change? I know he loses weight and regains the will to live."

Robert: "Losing weight for him is a tremendous thing. If character is destiny, the fault in his character is appetite.

"And yet [the book] doesn't end with a grand pronouncement. That's another thing that marks the book as literary. I was trying to hold within the bounds of normal human experience rather than trying to create a neat dramatic arc. It's true to life. People go through terrible things and sometimes the one reward is having survived.

"Plot was such a struggle for me. It was the last thing I thought about. I was working hard making a plot that runs like a train, from station to station, going somewhere."

Luke: "Have you read John Grisham?"

Robert: "I haven't. I don't want to. For me to read something, there has to be something interesting going on. I don't play videogames either.

"It was pure coincidence that the world of my novel happened to invade their terrain.

"My father was a criminal defense lawyer. I knew that world intimately from childhood on, of small single practitioners with an office near the court buildings in downtown New York. They made good livings but everything was fragile. They worked out of phone booths in the court building and it wasn't clear if they had an office. Some of them worked out of their cars.

"It was my vision of adulthood.

"After college, I worked for my father as a paralegal for a year and a half. That was frustrating. Never work for your father."

Luke: "Did your father bring these crooks home, like Louis Glasser?"

Robert: "In that way, he was like Glasser. He didn't have clear boundaries between work and home, in part because the hours are so strange. When someone gets arrested, you have to go bail them out. It drove my mother wild. I could often hang out at his office. It was a relaxed place. There would be some toys for me. I'd sit there and watch the show (from age six on).

"My dad's clients were always friendly but they were also scary. Kids are learning the difference between what's allowed and what isn't allowed and there's something fascinating and scary about adults who don't follow those rules."

Luke: "How did your father like your book?"

Robert: "He liked it. When he went into criminal defense, that was the least prestigious rung on the legal ladder. He had done extremely well in law school but I think he went in this direction because there was a personal affinity and he lacked a certain comfort with a tonier environment. Like Louis Glasser, he'd grown up poor on the Lower Eastside. He felt he fit in better."

Luke: "How did the publication of your book affect you?"

Robert: "Because nothing happened, it affected me powerfully. These fantasies of literary self-transformation are common among writers. I expected to be changed, whether rich or famous. I thought I'd feel different, that I'd be more confident, that I'd writer better and faster. I would stop having bad days and anxieties. None of that happened. It was a difficult lesson to absorb, but a valuable one."

Luke: "If you would've turned your first novel in to a genre legal-thriller, the primary emphasis would've had to have been on the plot?"

Robert: "Yes. Character must serve plot instead of exploring the ambiguities of what Glasser's guilt is and what it means to him and his family. As one reader put it, Glasser is innocent enough not to deserve his fate but not innocent enough to avoid it. One way to have made it a genre novel would've been to stack the deck, to make him innocent but appear guilty. Then most of the novel would've been about his fight to prove his innocence."

Luke: "Do they give teaching positions to people who write genre novels?"

Robert: "It's a good question. There are literary writers who take a vacation and do genre stuff. Most MFA programs tend to be dominated by literary writers. Literature needs help. Genre work can support itself in the marketplace.

"When I was trying to figure out what plot is, I read some genre books. I really like Elmore Leonard. The plots are fun but mechanical. I picked up on old Elmore Leonard book for a buck on the street. I read it and then realized I had already read it. They tend to be formulaic. There are a bunch of people who transcend genre such as Raymond Chandler."

Luke: "What's your relationship to Judaism?"

Robert: "It's complicated. My father grew up Orthodox but was disillusioned. He said he went to Hebrew school and all the rabbi did was hit all the kids. We had no religious education in the house. I was not bar mitzvahed. But the cultural milieu was Jewish. My grandmother on my father's side was still kosher and yiddish speaking."

Luke: "Do you teach class on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur?"

Robert: "Don't. Those are not holidays here. I have to take off specially. My undergrads are fascinated. For some of them, I'm the first Jew they've ever met. I take that as a pleasure and responsibility. I tell them what it is like to be a Jew."

Luke: "Was there a time in your life when you realized you were going to be a writer?"

Robert: "It's a continuing anxiety. That first book was so hard to write… I wanted to solve the question of whether I was a writer. The reaction was so thunderously silent that there was no strong affirmation. It's not a question you can look to the outside world to solve. If it hadn't gotten published at all, would that have made it less of a book?

"The book sold so poorly that when I finished the second (two years ago, it is tentatively titled All Will Be Revealed, due out in March 2007), I couldn't sell it. I recently sold it to MacAdam/Cage. It was an enormous relief because it coincided with the tenure process. I had to publish a second book to qualify for tenure."

Luke: "Tell me about your second book."

Robert: "It's set in 19th Century New York."

Luke: "Are there a lot of Jews in it?"

Robert: "None, but in a way, the whole western world is Jewish after Freud.

"It's about a crippled pornographer who makes erotic stereographs (which give a three-D immediacy) and spiritualism.

"I give the pornographer in this book the same last name as the pornographer in my first book – Auerbach."

12/26/06

All Will Be Revealed by Robert A. Siegel

According to the publisher:

A [porn] photographer [Augustus Auerbach] is drawn to a beautiful psychic in a turn-of-the-century novel about love, possession, adventure, and greed. At the close of the nineteenth century, wheelchair-bound Augustus Auerbach's only interest is his extraordinarily lucrative business: the manufacture and marketing of "exotic" photographs. His outlook is forever altered, however, when one of his models pressures him to attend a seance.

From page 10: "In the rush to shape the landscape, the interior life of ht enation had been forgotten — had been, in effect, left with Auerbach. Fortunately, he had accepted the task with a sense of high purpose. Whatever bridges were needed to reach our secret desires, whatever canals were necessary for the shipment of our darkest wishes, whatever railroads were required to transport our most powerful cravings — he would build them. He would build the tunnels and corridors, the dungeons and pleasure domes of our yearnings."

All Will Be Revealed was the opposite reading experience for me compared to Siegel's first book, All the Money in the World. I loved Money from the start but was disappointed by the ending. Revealed bored me for the first half of the book and then thrilled me towards the end.

Money started with one main character and proceeded in a linear manner. It sucked me in right away. Then, in the second half, the protagonist changed and I was disappointed by the lack of a thrilling denoument.

Revealed begins with five separate stories and jumps around in time. I wouldn't have put up with that except I liked the author and was going to give him every chance in the world for all to be revealed.

I just watched The Rock for the second time. That's how you tell a story — with lots of cool explosions.

Go down the stairs of a two-story brick house in Boro Park, Brooklyn, and you reach a room that does not exist. A seamstress keeps it. She is sixty, childless, married a long time to a retired schoolteacher who lives at the top of the same stairs and rarely comes down. Women come instead. They come for a bra that will not leave red marks, and they stay for the talk. The seamstress measures a back with a tape and a glance and names a size before the customer has unbuttoned her blouse. She knows the brides by the green-strapped demi-cup they choose and the widows by the white they no longer bother to replace. She fits the body and reads the life. Upstairs her husband calls down that he did not notice she had gone.

The room is the lingerie shop in Ilana Stanger-Ross‘s first novel, Sima’s Undergarments for Women, and it is the best way into her work, because everything she has written since happens in a version of it: a small space, run by a woman, where strangers undress and confess, and where the labor of care goes on below the line of sight. Stanger-Ross (b. 1975) built her career in that basement and then walked up the stairs and out the door into a second vocation that turns out to be the same one. She delivers babies. She has spent two decades attending women at the threshold the seamstress can only mourn.

She was born in Brooklyn and raised inside its Jewish world. She took a bachelor’s degree at Barnard College, then a master’s in fiction at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she held a University Fellowship. The early grants came in a steady line, the kind that mark a young writer the field has decided to watch: the Leeway Foundation, the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, a residency at Ragdale, a Timothy Findley Fellowship. Her short fiction appeared in The Bellevue Literary Review and Lilith. Her essays and journalism ran in The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, The Literary Review of Canada, and the online magazine Killing the Buddha. She married the historian Jordan Stanger-Ross, moved north, and settled in Victoria, British Columbia, the small capital city on Vancouver Island where she still lives.

The marriage put two writers under one roof who study the same thing from opposite ends. Jordan Stanger-Ross teaches history at the University of Victoria and works on migration, race, and what governments take from people. In 2009, the year his wife published her novel about a woman’s private loss, he published Staying Italian with the University of Chicago Press, a study of immigrant neighborhoods in Toronto and Philadelphia. He went on to direct Landscapes of Injustice, the large public project on the dispossession of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War, and the Crown honored him in the House of Commons with a national research award. He writes about loss as a matter of record, deeds and seized property and the apology that comes too late. She writes about loss as a matter of the body, a child who never arrives, a marriage that goes quiet. The same grief, told from the archive and from the bed.

Sima’s Undergarments for Women came out in hardcover from the Overlook Press in 2009, with the Penguin paperback close behind. The launch happened at Dale’s Gallery on Fisgard Street, in the few blocks of Victoria’s Chinatown. The bookseller from Cadboro Bay Books, Amber Rider, made the introduction. The crowd filled the gallery and bought every copy on the table before the reading was through, and the store ran out. Stanger-Ross was thirty-three. She had written, at that age, a sixty-year-old woman so complete that reviewers reached for Amy Bloom (b. 1953) and Alice McDermott (b. 1953) to place her.

The novel earns those names through patience. It runs a little past three hundred pages and almost nothing happens, by the standards of plot. Sima Goldner fits bras. Her oldest friend Connie, loud and married to a lawyer named Art who keeps his own secrets, cannot understand why Sima has stayed sad so long. Then a young Israeli woman, Timna, walks in looking for a demi-cup, takes the job of seamstress, and stays. Sima falls into something close to love. Not romance, though the feeling carries romance’s weather, the fascination and the jealousy and the storing up of a smile to keep for later. Timna becomes the daughter Sima could not have. The reader sits inside Sima’s head the entire time, in a close third person so tight it reads like confession, and watches her see herself the way the customers see her and the way she fears they do. Stanger-Ross cooks the small scenes at full heat. Sima makes a Rosh Hashanah dinner large enough to feed an army for one young guest, and Lev teases her for it, and the over-cooking says more about her hunger than any speech could.

The critics split. Publishers Weekly called the book more than a novel of female friendship and praised its verve. Booklist and Library Journal went warm. Kirkus admired the texture of the shop and then said the quiet part, that a heroine this sorry for herself is hard to like. Entertainment Weekly loved the character and felt cheated by the ending, which withholds the revelation about Timna that the reader has been trained to expect. Both complaints point at the same choice. Stanger-Ross refuses the payoff. She keeps the camera on Sima and lets Timna stay a partial figure, because the book is about the woman who watches, not the woman watched. A reader who wants a secret unsealed will close the book unsatisfied. A reader who wants to understand how a person survives her own disappointment will find few debuts that go deeper.

The same year and the years just after, Stanger-Ross trained as a midwife, taking a degree in the subject from the University of British Columbia. She did not leave writing for medicine. She carried one into the other. Her short fiction kept appearing; she contributed a story, “Anna & Patrick,” to a limited-edition anthology the Strand bookstore commissioned with Kate Spade New York, seven women asked to fold a single line into a story of their own. But the center of her life moved to the birthing room.

Consider a scene she would know in her hands. A first-time mother labors in her own bedroom in Victoria, the lamp low, the partner useless and trying, the hours stacking up past the point where fear arrives. The midwife sits on the floor. She does not rush the room. She checks the heartbeat, names what the body is doing in simple words, tells the mother that the pain has a use, that the work is normal even when it does not feel survivable. This is the part of medicine the textbooks rank below the clinical readings, and it is the part Stanger-Ross treats as the craft. One of her husband’s doctoral students, thanking his advisor in a dissertation, recorded that the historian’s partner, Ilana, a midwife, delivered the student’s first child, a service he noted the acceptance letter had not promised. The detail is small and tells the truth of the household. The work crosses the desk and the kitchen and the birthing room without changing its nature.

That synthesis became a book. A Is for Advice (The Reassuring Kind): Wisdom for Pregnancy appeared in 2019, a small illustrated gift volume organized through the alphabet, C for Control, F for Fear, W for Water. The guide makes one argument against its genre. The pregnancy shelf runs on fear and on the worst-case search at two in the morning. Stanger-Ross writes the opposite. She treats birth as a normal event of the body, asks the expectant mother to trust herself, and stays out of the wars between the home birth and the scheduled cesarean, the epidural and the unmedicated labor, the breast and the bottle. She takes no side in those fights and hands the woman the authority to choose. The physician and author Gabor Maté (b. 1944) blessed it in a blurb. Readers who wished they had read it during their own first weeks said so in the reviews. The tone is the best-friend blogger; the spine underneath is clinical and feminist.

Stanger-Ross writes about care, the work mostly done by women and mostly unseen, and about the rooms where it happens. Her Jewish material comes through community and family custom and the obligations one person owes another, not through theology argued from a podium. Her people stand between independence and duty, the life they wanted and the family they have, the tradition they keep and the modern world that keeps pulling. She holds the camera close and lets the large questions rise out of the small ones, a woman’s body, a friendship, a fitting in a basement, a heartbeat found again on the monitor.

Her published output stays slim. One novel, one pregnancy guide, a scatter of stories and essays across two decades, set beside a full clinical practice with The Midwives Collective in Victoria and the raising of two daughters, Eva and Tillie. She keeps a website that introduces her as both novelist and midwife and refuses to rank the two. As of 2026 she still attends births and still writes, and treats each calling as the other’s teacher.

She sits in the line of contemporary Canadian Jewish letters, and she sits outside the usual literary economy, a working clinician who publishes when the work demands it rather than when the market does. The basement shop and the birthing room turn out to be one room seen twice. A woman comes in frightened of her own body. Someone who has done this many times sits down beside her, takes a measure with a tape or a hand, names the thing without flinching, and stays until the worst of it passes. Stanger-Ross built that room in fiction first, then spent her life walking into the real one.

Reassurance: The Hero System of Ilana Stanger-Ross

A first labor goes long past the hour when courage runs out. The bedroom in Victoria holds a lamp turned low, a partner who keeps offering water no one wants, and a woman on her hands and knees who has stopped believing the night will end. The midwife sits on the floor beside her. She does not stand over the bed. She finds the heartbeat, counts it, and reports the number in the flat voice a person uses for good news she wants believed. She names what the body is doing. She says the pain has a use even when it feels like dying. The room calms a degree, then another. Nothing has changed in the cervix or the chart. What has changed is that someone in the room is not afraid, and the fear in the others now has a place to drain.

This is the heroic act in the world Ilana Stanger-Ross has built, in fiction and then in flesh. To be the calm one at the gate. The work, the novel about a Brooklyn seamstress and the small alphabet book that tells expectant mothers to stop being afraid, runs on a single sacred word, and the word is reassurance. Around it sit a few others such as trust, normal, the body, presence, care. Set them down and her values stand up.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gives the reason a word can carry that much weight. A person faces two terrors. The first is death, the plain fact of annihilation. The second is insignificance, the suspicion that a life leaves no mark on a universe that will not notice it go. A culture answers both with a hero system, a scheme that tells a person how to earn a place in a meaning that outlasts him. Sacred values are the local currency of that scheme. They feel holy because spending them is how a person buys his way out of nothingness. A value makes sense only inside the system that issues it. Carry the same coin into a foreign country and it buys something else, or nothing.

Stanger-Ross answers both terrors at the one door where they stand closest together. Birth is the event that refutes death, the arrival that says the line continues, and birth is also the event most shadowed by death, the hour when both lives ride on the next twenty minutes. She stations herself there. She defeats annihilation not by conquering it, which no one can, but by attending the one moment that talks back to it, and by holding the terror of the woman in front of her so the woman need not hold all of it alone. Against insignificance she has a harder fight, and she knows it, because she chose the most invisible labor there is. The midwife builds no monument. She leaves the room and the family forgets her name inside a year. Her answer is generativity by proxy. The children belong to other people; she has a hand in every one of them. And she keeps a second account open, the writing, a slower bid for the kind of permanence the room cannot give. Her first novel grieves exactly this through Sima Goldner, the childless seamstress at whose table no one gathers, whose husband climbs down the stairs to say he had not noticed she was gone. The terror of leaving nothing behind is the engine under the comedy of the bra shop.

Now turn her sacred words over and watch them change face in other hands. The new ground is not that her values meet opposing values. It is that the opposition hides inside shared words. People believe they disagree about birth. They disagree about what safe means, what trust names, what counts as care, and each meaning is minted in a different system of significance.

Take trust the body, the first article of her creed. The body is competent. Birth is a normal physiological event. Trust means yield to it, get out of its way, let it do the old work it knows.

A maternal-fetal medicine specialist hears that sentence as negligence dressed up as wisdom. He runs the high-risk unit on the third floor, and he keeps a private ledger of the catastrophes that arrived wearing the word normal. The placenta that tore at minute forty. The cord around the neck. For him the body is the thing that fails, and the heroic act is vigilance, the monitor that never blinks, the section called one decision early. His significance comes from the saves, the children alive in the world who would not be, and from the nights he carries afterward. Tell him to trust the body and you have asked him to put down the only weapon his hero system gives him against the terror he meets every shift. In his country, calm is the thing that gets people killed.

A different reading again from the ultrarunner who has not slept on a bed in three days of racing. He says trust your body too, and means the reverse. He means override it. The body is a liar that begs to quit at mile sixty with eighty still to go, and the will that overrules it is the self worth having. Pain is information he files and ignores. His heroism is transcendence through suffering, the proof that the man is not the meat. Yield to the body, in his system, and you are a coward with a quitter’s nervous system. The word she uses to mean surrender, he uses to mean conquest.

Carry care into the glass tower where a founder is shipping a product at two in the morning. He uses her other verb without knowing it. He talks about delivery, about what his team will deliver by the quarter’s end, and he believes, with the certainty of a man whose hero system has paid out, that work no one can see did not happen. Significance for him is scale, the metric on the wall, the name on the building, the dent left in a market that will remember the company after he is gone. The unseen labor she treats as the highest thing, the floor-sitting, the hand on a back, reads to him as a rounding error, love that failed to scale. He would ask her how many. She delivers, at most, a couple of hundred a year, by hand, one room at a time, and keeps no growth curve. By his lights she has wasted a good mind on a craft that cannot compound.

Then walk her words back into the neighborhood where her novel lives, Boro Park, and into the kitchen of a Haredi mother of nine. She blesses the same arrivals, but the meaning sits in another universe. The child is not a private joy or a woman’s choice. The child is a commandment kept, a soul brought down, a brick in the rebuilding of a people that was nearly erased. Fruitfulness is obedience to Him, and barrenness is not a wound to be soothed with talk of a full life elsewhere. To this mother the gentle line in the alphabet book, the suggestion that a woman might find her meaning in many rooms and not only the nursery, sounds close to a small heresy, a comfort that talks a woman out of the one work that counts before God. She would not be unkind about it. She would light the candles and pray the comfort did no lasting harm.

And there are more. The trial lawyer for whom reassurance is a soft lie and truth the only honest gift. The actuary who hears comfort as sentiment until someone hands him a real probability. The drill instructor who keeps young men alive by feeding their fear rather than draining it, because in his country fear is the asset and calm is the luxury of people who have never been ambushed. Each of them is a serious person inside a coherent scheme. None of them is simply wrong. They mean different things by the same handful of syllables because each word is a passport stamped by a different authority.

A subtraction story always sounds like maturity. Becker’s reply is that the heroic layer is not a gloss you can scrape off to reach the real thing underneath. The bra-fitting and the floor-sitting are the life’s bid against death and obscurity, and a person without such a bid does not exist, only a person whose bid you have failed to find.

Three places will tell whether the hero system holds. The first is the bad outcome, the birth that goes wrong, because a system built on reassurance meets its test the day reassurance turns out to have been false, and the calm voice has to find something to say that is both true and survivable. The second is the thin shelf. The writing is her one route to a permanence the delivery room cannot grant, and a single novel leaves that account underfunded; what she does with the second half of a working life will settle whether the literary bid was a youth’s ambition or a standing vow. The third is the inheritance. The daughters carry her name and her example, and generativity by proxy resolves, in the end, into generativity proper, the question of what passes down the stairs to the next women in the home.

A hospice nurse, two thousand miles away, sits on the floor of another low-lit room and does the same work at the opposite gate. She finds no heartbeat to count. She names what the body is doing, she holds the fear of the people in the room. She has never read the novel or the alphabet book and she keeps the same creed. That is the test of whether a hero system is real. You find it standing in a stranger who arrived at it alone. Stanger-Ross imagined the room first, in a Brooklyn basement that does not exist, and then spent her life walking into the ones that do.

March 20, 2009

I read this new novel straight through last Shabbat.

I loved its story about an old life redeemed by a beautiful girl.

I interviewed the author, Ilana Stanger-Ross, on March 19.

Luke: "When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?"

Ilana: "In what point in childhood would that be? I remember wanting to be a secretary, pretty terrible career ambitions for the daughter of a feminist. At some point, I wanted to be a writer. So there you go."

Luke: "About what age?"

Ilana: "I remember being in sixth grade when I was eleven years old, and my teacher had a recorder and she just played a tape and the tape was the sound of falling rain. She had us write. I wrote a truly ridiculous piece looking back. I wrote from the perspective of an old homeless man. I was an eleven-year-old upper-middle-class kid. But I thought it was pretty fabulous. More than that, I was enchanted by writing. From that point on, I took that as part of my identity."

Luke: "Where were you in the social pecking order in high school?"

Ilana: "It’s funny. I saw that you had asked that to a few people. I was trying to think how I would describe myself. I wasn’t particularly cool. It’s pretty weird though. If you had asked me a year ago, I would’ve said, oh, I was totally uncool in high school. I kinda wanted to be a rebel. I didn’t do anything rebellious, but I just had the attitude, ‘I’m too smart for this. These people are all idiots. I’m really the cool one even though socially I feel totally awkward day to day.’

"But then the strange thing is Facebook, right? Now I have all these high school friends on Facebook and it makes me rethink who I was in high school. I feel like so many people remember me from high school that I seem to have way more friends in high school than I remembered. I kinda left high school and thought, ‘I’m never thinking about that period of my life every again.’ And really didn’t. Now all of a sudden, high school has a totally different feeling to me because all of these very friendly people are friends with me on Facebook. I don’t really know any more what I was like in high school. Trying to be the rebel but not really succeeding."

Luke: "Has your place in the social pecking order changed over time?"

Ilana: "I’m a lot more confident than I was back then. I went to a big public school in Brooklyn, Midwood. I’m surrounded by such different people now. It’s a whole different culture."

Luke: "I was the class clown, an anarchic influence. And that hasn’t changed. Are you more of an observer? A participant? An organizer? Do you put people together? I’m trying to picture you in a group of people."

Ilana: "In those ways, I’m similar. I’m an organizer. I take a lot on. I talk out of turn a fair bit. I’m pretty nerdy. I’ve always done my homework and couldn’t resist answering questions if I knew the answer."

Luke: "Has your happiness level been pretty constant over the span of your life?"

Ilana: "Yes. I’m a pretty stable, pretty happy, person. I’ve had it pretty easy. I haven’t had to face any kind of crisis situation. I was raised by parents who made me feel loved. Anyone who does art has that kind of darkness that they go to but my darkness is pretty tame."

Luke: "Where does the publication of your book rank among the things you are happiest and proudest of?"

Ilana: "I worked on that novel for years. I began it seven years ago. I am sure I am not along here — there’s ambivalence with publication. It can be almost difficult to return to it and to see it out there. I like looking at it in a book store but then opening it and reading it, I find quite difficult.

"You’re always looking up to the next level. I’m looking at your website at some of those writers and I don’t feel at all that I’ve arrived.

"The flip side of that is that I have two young daughters. For them I’m proud and happy every day. That’s much more tangible."

Luke: "I’ve been struck in my interviews how for those who’ve never married, publication of their book tends to be the greatest thing they’ve ever done. For those who have married, let alone have children, it ranks down there."

Ilana: "A book doesn’t hug you at the end of the day, right?

"I’m a fulltime student midwife. Some of the people who know me from that have no idea that I’ve written anything."

"I’m able to compartmentalize pretty well. I’m so busy, [a bad review] doesn’t ruin things. I don’t have the time to think about that."

"Every book has its weaknesses and authors are more aware of its weaknesses than anybody else."

Luke: "What have you found most interesting about the reactions you’ve received to the book?"

Ilana: "The whole time I was writing this novel, the whole time I felt I was writing a fairly depressing, fairly dark book. The one perspective we get is Sima. Most of it takes place in a basement bra shop, so it’s a bit claustrophobic. And sad. I thought it was this dark sad book about this woman who was quite alienated from her needs and desires. She’d experienced infertility. She had never forgiven herself. Then this very strange relationship with this young woman. It has aspects of mother-love and aspects of lust and desire and obsession. To me it is a strange sad book. For me, the strength of it was that it was very internal. For a reader who enjoys that, we don’t always get books that are so internal with the way our minds really work, with all the things we wouldn’t really admit.

"Certainly trying to get it published was difficult. I kept hearing from publishers, well, I loved it but I can’t sell it. It’s not enough of a page turner.

"What’s been interesting to me has been things like Entertainment Weekly. Getting a few of these reviews where I’ve written a page turner. People I’m not close to writing to me, ‘I loved your book! It was so fun! I zipped right through it! I couldn’t put it down!’

"It’s just so odd to me. Really, was it fun? It’s got the pink cover. Because of the bra shop, there’s been an attempt to market it as chick-lit. I’ve done a lot of radio where it is said, ‘It is a book about women’s friendships set in a bra shop.’

"To some extent, I’ve played into that. Certainly I have because you want your book to sell. You want readers. On the other hand, are you compromising yourself? Can women’s fiction not be taken seriously? What does this mean?

"Just that disconnect for me between what I thought I was writing and what has been received has been fascinating."

Luke: "What did happen to Timna? Did she have an abortion?"

Ilana: "I will honestly tell you that I don’t know."

Luke: "I love that theme about how people can come into your life and play a redemptive role but you can’t idealize them as redeemers. That’s not all they are."

Ilana: "That’s right."

Luke: "I’m sure the desire to be rescued or turned around or changed or reborn or reinvigorated is certainly one that I experience. How did that theme of redemption come to you?"

Ilana: "I had the setting of the bra shop before I had the characters. I pictured a couple both falling in love with this young assistant and then that changing their relationship."

"Casting Timna as an Israeli was interesting for me. I am an American Jew. I grew up in the Zionist youth movement (the left-wing socialist segment). I went to summer camp and learned all about Israel and did activities about when you make aliyah, where will you move to.

"When I was 18, I moved to Israel and lived on a kibbutz. Israel was the playground for American Jews. For right-wing American Jews, Israel is filled with machisimo, it’s where you get to fulfill aggressive fantasies through visions of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. For the 18-year old American Jew, they’re going there and they’re looking to have sex, right? Especially if you are a woman, the Israeli army guys.

"I was curious too about the way that Americans sexualize Israelis. For American Jews, Israel is our sexy other.

"Once Timna really became a character, I stopped thinking about that."

Luke: "What’s the story of you and God?"

Ilana: "I don’t know. That one’s still being written. For a long time, I said I didn’t believe in God and I don’t really believe in God, but I do think that there is something worth honoring beyond ourself. I’m at births all the time. Miracle is such a cliche, but you are the first hands touching a baby being born. It’s an incredible place to be.

"Now that I’m a mother… It’s one thing to grow up Jewish and to take that thing for granted, but when you have kids, you have to figure out what is Judaism going to look like for our family. We don’t live in a Jewish place. I live in Victoria, British Columbia. So it’s not like it is in the air here the way it would be if I were raising my kids in New York. I feel like I have to think quite consciously about it. If they are going to think of themselves as Jewish, then that has to come from my husband and I. So we’re still figuring all of this out."

"I was flying from Victoria to New York There are no direct flights of course. We landed in Toronto and then we got on the plane to go to New York. I got on the plane and I looked down the aisle of the airplane and I thought, ‘People on this plane look like me.’

"It was so strange. It was just one of these visceral things that come to you. I hadn’t realized I was missing that."

"I grew up in Flatbush. I grew up going to stores with my mom where she knew the owners. She cashed her checks at the grocery store where they would pinch my cheeks and they’d give me cookies. I miss having something like that. It’s quite anonymous where I am. I miss that culture. At the same time, I don’t want to live in New York City. I love where we live. It’s fun to feel exotic."

Luke: "How do you feel about the Orthodox? Did you feel like they were constantly judging your Jewishness?"

Ilana: "I didn’t grow up in Borough Park. I grew up in Flatbush. The street I grew up on was not at all Orthodox. There were a bunch of Jews on my street but also a bunch of African-American families. It was a block away from Ocean Avenue, which was mostly African-American. The first black family to move on to my family’s block was in the 1970s, shortly after we arrived. That was fine. It wasn’t like there any kind of neighborhood scene over that. But they moved away a few years ago and there was a rumor that a Hasidic family was moving in. My parents and other people on the street were really upset. ‘They’re going to put a shul in the basement! And then it is going to be crowded. And they’re going to be running businesses. There’s going to be no parking.’

"That was hilarious to see all these Jews, many non-Jews, getting upset because the black family was leaving and possibly Hasids were moving in.

"Growing up, I went to public school. I went to Hebrew school after school at a Conservative synagogue near us that had its own day school. Going to Hebrew school three days a week beginning when I was five and up until I got bat mitzvahed, it did feel like, here we were at their Hebrew school and yet always being made to feel that we weren’t quite with the righteous kids because we weren’t the day school kids.

"My father grew up Orthodox. He had left that. He sometimes would despair over how little we knew at the same time he had made that choice not to raise us Orthodox."

Luke: "How did college, particularly the MFA, affect your writing?"

Ilana: "I went to Barnard. I studied History. I assumed I’d be an English major and do all sorts of creative writing and it didn’t happen. I think I purposefully didn’t want to be in a creative writing class with a lot of other young women who I felt would be a lot like me. Looking back, I was probably wrong to feel that way. But that’s where I was coming from at that time. I took one writing class and I took it at the School of General Studies. It was a much more diverse group of people.

"The MFA I did at Temple University. It was the time to write. It was pretty huge. I was fully funded there. I didn’t want to go into debt for an MFA. I didn’t trust that that was a responsible position.

"I started working one-on-one with a professor there. I was developing this as a short story. He was the one who said to me, ‘Why isn’t this a novel?’ I’m not convinced that I would’ve written this as a novel if I hadn’t had that support. Having a deadline. Handing in work every week. Having someone challenge you. That was wonderful.

"I’m really removed from a writer community right now."

"I knew, I can’t work in a coffee shop and make writing the center of my world. That goes back to the nerd I was in high school. I didn’t trust enough in my writing. I needed to feel that I had something else. I just couldn’t do it. I know that [poverty] is one way to be an artist and probably the truest way today. If you are going to be begin, you are going to put everything you can into your art and you will support yourself however you can. But no, I’m too much of a nerd. I can’t do that. I need a real job. I did the publishing, writing, editing thing and that wasn’t for me. When I was at Temple, I thought, ‘Oh God, I don’t want to teach writing.’

"Before that, I felt the goal was to teach writing. And all the professors seemed so miserable so I thought, I don’t want to do that. I realized I wanted something quite removed from that. Also, I wanted to feel that I was really making a difference. I wanted to know at the end of the day that my work had value. There’s absolute value in working in writing but there are so many people doing it and I guess I wanted something more concrete."

Luke: In the social group you have known, is it embarrassing for a woman to want a man to come along to marry her and take care of the finances?

Ilana: "Very embarrassing, sure, and unrealistic too, right? Just look at the divorce rate. Maybe that would work, but longterm it might not work for you. Lots of men are also looking to pursue their art. The majority of my old friends aren’t married. Now that I’m married and I have kids, everyone I know has kids. That’s what happens when you have kids.

"When I grew up, my friends were hardcore feminists and would never say something like that.

"I had the opposite embarrassment where I struggled with not making a living… It’s incredibly indulgent to take hours to write a novel that you don’t know will be published. And even if it is published, does that ever translate into earning money for those hours? It takes a lot of chutzpah to do that. It wasn’t always easy for me. That’s why I couldn’t work in a coffee shop. I do feel a need to make a living and to prove myself. At times, I’ve really struggled with the fact that I haven’t made money. Right now I’m a student. Even though I’m working fulltime hardcore hours, I’m not making money and I’m paying money to my university. I pay money for childcare. It’s hard to carve out that time to do art because it is very difficult. Realistically and in terms of identity, it’s hard for smart young women to say, this matters even though I can’t show that it matters in terms of income."

"When I was in high school, I started a ‘Women’s Issues club.’ It’s an awkward word but I didn’t know what to call it when I was 16. The idea was that we get together and talk about healthcare for women, talked about abortion rights, went to the abortion rally in D.C. I remember my sister who’s seven years older than me said, ‘You shouldn’t do that because guys aren’t going to like it.’ I was raging. Of course I wasn’t doing it to meet guys.

"I depend upon my husband in every way, including as a writer because he’s an amazing reader and because through these times when I’m struggling and thinking, what’s the point? This is indulgent, he never said that. He said, ‘You’re writing this novel. This novel’s good. You need to give time to this novel.’

"Somebody else might’ve said, ‘You want me to watch the kids while you write this damn novel of yours? Are you crazy?’"

Luke: "Could you have written this book without the wisdom that comes from marriage and motherhood?"

Ilana: "Yeah. These things happened as I was writing the book. I don’t know that wisdom necessarily comes from marriage. I do think wisdom comes from motherhood but I don’t think you need to have motherhood to have wisdom. I’m sure those experiences impacted me and therefore the book in all sorts of ways but I guess your question makes me nervous, makes me worried that women need that, that classic this is the environment in which women thrive. It is the environment in which I thrive but I certainly don’t think it is necessary."

In Schenectady the General Electric works runs its shifts and the town carries the company’s name in the air. Inside a house there, a girl listens to what her parents do not say. Six languages move through the rooms. German stays out of the family’s mouth at home, though both parents carry it from the old country. The girl is Elizabeth Rosner (b. 1959). Her father survived Buchenwald. Her mother survived the war hidden in the Polish countryside.

Her parents met after the war, married, and crossed to America. Her father reached Buchenwald at fifteen and came out at sixteen, he and a brother the last of their family left alive. Her mother fled the Vilna ghetto at twelve and hid in the countryside for two years, until the Russians drove the Germans out of Poland. The two of them brought that arithmetic of loss into a postwar American town built on turbines and electric light. Rosner grows up among neighbors whose fathers punch a clock at GE and come home to ordinary supper. Her own supper holds a war nobody will name. She watches her parents the way a child watches weather, reading pressure she cannot yet measure.

She leaves for Stanford, then takes a Master of Fine Arts at the University of California, Irvine, and studies further at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. She writes poems first. The poems teach her a discipline of rhythm and compression she never sets down, and her prose keeps the habit. She teaches. She publishes essays. Fiction comes later, and when it comes it carries the poet’s ear.

Her first novel, The Speed of Light (2001), reaches readers in nine languages. Julian, son of survivors, lives a contained life until a German photographer enters it, a woman shadowed by her own family’s part in the Nazi years. Rosner sets the children of victims and the children of perpetrators in the same frame and asks what passes between them. She does not hand down guilt as a fixed inheritance. She tests whether speech can cross the line that history drew. The book takes the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, lands on the American Library Association‘s Notable list, and reaches the shortlist for the French Prix Femina étranger. It marks her as a novelist who comes at the Holocaust through one room and two faces rather than through the machinery of historical reconstruction.

Blue Nude (2006) reveals an American painter in Paris who befriends an undocumented African immigrant, and the novel moves through displacement, race, and the duties of an artist toward a living model and a living man. The San Francisco Chronicle names it among the year’s best. Trauma still organizes the book, though it wears different clothes.

She comes home to her family’s ground in Electric City (2014), set in Schenectady. She braids family history into the town’s history, the immigrant labor and the postwar identity and the current that runs under all of it, visible and not. NPR lists it among its best books of the year. The same year she publishes Gravity, a collection built over some twenty years, poems that read the body as a place where grief is stored and sometimes, without warning, lifted.

Then she sets down a book that gathers everything.

The first trip is 1983. She travels with her father to Weimar, the cultured town a short distance from the camp, the town of Goethe and Schiller and Bach. Her father knows the German he refused at home, and here it comes back to him. He faints on arrival. The body keeps its own record. They go up to the beech forest the camp was named for, Buchenwald, and the gray of the place settles over the gray of memory. He shows her where a boy of fifteen learned what men can do to men.

The second trip is 1995. The Germans hold a commemoration, and former prisoners, their liberators, and the town’s residents come together at a gathering the organizers call the Survivors’ Café. The name gives Rosner her title and her image: the long tables, the coffee, the old men who were once starved boys, the children and grandchildren of every party to the thing. At one of these tables her father falls into conversation with a German woman, a therapist, granddaughter of a Nazi officer. She counsels the descendants of perpetrators and carries a guilt she has not laid down. He answers her in the German he had buried. Rosner watches her father and the German woman find the same wound from opposite sides, the inheritance of the killers and the inheritance of the killed meeting over a cup at a folding table in Thuringia. On this trip he passes a kidney stone. On the last trip, in 2015, he loses a tooth. Three journeys, three small surrenders of the body, each one the war collecting a late installment.

Out of these trips comes Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory (2017). The book is more than memoir. Rosner reads deep in the literature of atrocity and in the new science of epigenetics, the study of changes the environment writes into us and passes forward. She wants to know how a daughter inherits a wound she never received, and she finds language for what she has felt since the silent suppers in Schenectady. She opens with what she names the Alphabet of Inadequate Language, an acrostic that runs from A for Auschwitz to Z for Zyklon B, a confession that words come up short before they begin. She holds two truths at once. The cycle of trauma asks to be interrupted through care and therapy. The stories ask to be carried forward so the past survives the death of the last witness. She quotes a survivor who predicts the Holocaust will die with its survivors, and she sets her hope against him: that the generations after will keep individual losses as singular, a man, a child, a name, and not let them dissolve into the round numbers of mass death.

She does not keep the inquiry inside the Holocaust. She moves to the descendants of American slaves, to the children of the Cambodian killing fields, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the population marked by September 11. Reviewers split on the reach. Some find the gathering of catastrophes too wide for one book. Others find in the synthesis a true advance, clinicians among them who had waited for a book that puts the research on intergenerational trauma beside a daughter’s account. The work reaches the finalist round for the National Jewish Book Award in Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice. Viet Thanh Nguyen (b. 1971) calls it powerful.

Her father, near ninety, tells her that she is almost lucky to have this to write about. He means the Holocaust. He means the material of her life’s work. He says it the way a survivor says a hard thing, and she carries the line as she carries the rest. In 2017 she brings him an early copy at his home in Schenectady. He is eighty-eight. He holds the book. She had wanted him to hold it before the threshold arrived, the day when no survivor is left to hold anything. Her mother does not see the book. She died in 2000, the girl who hid in the forest for two years now gone the quiet way.

Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening (2024) widens the project. Rosner grew up in a house of six languages, and she turns that childhood into an inquiry about listening as a discipline and an ethic. She braids memoir with neuroscience, psychology, multilingual experience, animal communication, music, and philosophy. She argues that attention is a skill a person can train, that deep listening builds empathy, and that empathy might begin to mend what violence breaks. The book reads as the natural sum of the earlier ones. She had spent decades on the transmission of memory. Here she studies the act that receives it.

Her nonfiction reaches into craft as well. She contributed to The House on Via Gombito: Writing Tutorials from the Center for Writers (2014), with reflections on structure and the writing process, work that fits a long practice of mentoring. Her essays and criticism appear in the New York Times Magazine, Elle, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She lectures on trauma, remembrance, creativity, listening, and the ethics of storytelling, and she crosses freely between literature and psychology and history and neuroscience rather than speaking only as a novelist.

She teaches creative writing for years, at the University of California, Berkeley Extension and at conferences across the country, and she works as an editor and manuscript consultant and writing coach. Writers come to her for the craft and for the harder thing under it, the vision a book needs before its sentences can find their order.

Rosner refuses to sentimentalize the suffering or the recovery. Trauma in her pages is neither a permanent name a person wears nor an obstacle a person clears and forgets. Healing is an ongoing labor of witness, conversation, and attention, never finished and never guaranteed. Her novels rarely stage the historical horror at the center of the frame. They watch the horror keep working in ordinary lives decades on, in a marriage, a studio, a kitchen, a body that faints in Weimar.

She is rooted in Jewish history and she keeps reaching past it, to genocide and displacement and racial violence and migration and inherited grief, holding the universal and the particular in the same hand. Memory means listening and answering, the present taking responsibility for the dead.

Rosner lives in Berkeley, California, and goes on writing fiction, poetry, essays, and nonfiction while she lectures here and abroad on memory and resilience and the art of listening.

She carries the words. She passes them on.

The Carrier

At a folding table at Buchenwald in 1995, three people drink coffee and listen, and each one listens for a different thing.

The first is a man who came into the camp at fifteen and came out at sixteen, one of two from his family left alive. He has not spoken German at home in America for half a century. Here the language returns to his mouth like a tooth he thought he had lost. He listens the way a man listens at the edge of a grave he climbed out of once. Across the table sits a German woman, a therapist, granddaughter of a Nazi officer. She counsels other grandchildren of the men who ran places like this. She listens for absolution, or for the nearest thing to it that a survivor might hand a German across a cup of coffee. Beside her father sits Elizabeth Rosner. She listens to both of them, and under both of them, for the dead who are not at the table and who will never be at the table, the family subtracted before she was born.

The organizers call the gathering a Survivors’ Café. The name is gentle and the place is not. Beech trees stand around the cleared ground the way beech trees stand around any clearing in Thuringia, indifferent, German, old. The coffee is hot. The talk is quiet. And the single act these people share, listening, means something different in each chair.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued in The Denial of Death (1973) that a human being lives under two terrors and builds a life to manage them. The first terror is the body’s, the knowledge that the animal dies and rots and ends. The second terror is the meaning’s, the suspicion that the life counted for nothing, that the cosmos will not notice the going. Becker said we answer both with what he called a hero system, a scheme of value that tells a man what counts as significance and hands him a part to play in it. Inside the system he earns a symbolic life that outlasts the physical one. The lawyer wins. The mother raises sons. The scientist publishes. The monk dissolves into God. Each buys the same thing with different coin: the sense that he will not, finally, be erased.

A hero system assigns meanings. The same word changes its content as it crosses from one system to the next, and a man can hear his own sacred word in another’s mouth and not recognize it. Sacred values are local. They earn their force inside a particular scheme of significance and lose it when carried out.

Take Rosner’s sacred word. Listening.

Walk it through a few hero systems and watch it change.

A trial lawyer listens. He listens across a courtroom to a witness he means to break, and his listening is a held breath waiting for the seam in a story, the date that shifts, the verb that hedges. He earns his standing in an order built on combat, and a good ear is a weapon there. He listens to win. When he hears a man falter, his pulse lifts. Listening, in his system, is predation with manners.

A Carthusian listens too, in a stone cell above a valley, under a rule of silence that runs for most of his waking life. He listens for God, which means he listens against himself, against the chatter that proves he is still a separate man with wants. His hero system rewards erasure. The more of him goes quiet, the closer he comes to the thing he wants, which is to stop wanting. Listening, for him, is self-subtraction offered up as worship. Set him beside the lawyer and the word will not hold its meaning across the gap. One listens to assert. The other listens to vanish.

A sonar operator in the sail of a submarine wears headphones in the dark and listens to the sea. He sorts shrimp from screw, biologic from a contact that should not be there. His listening guards the tribe inside the hull. A missed sound is a hundred dead men. He earns his place by vigilance, and the sea answers him with threat or with nothing. His ear serves fear. Listening, in his system, is the body of the watch standing between the crew and the deep.

A simultaneous interpreter sits in a glass booth above a hall and listens in one language while speaking in another, three seconds behind the man at the rostrum, never her own words, always his. Her hero system prizes the vanishing act. The better she works, the less anyone knows she is there. A diplomat hears his counterpart and forgets that a woman in a booth lifted the meaning across the chasm and set it down on the far side. She earns significance by erasing her own trace. Listening, for her, is carriage. She is a channel and takes pride in leaving the water clear.

A hospice nurse listens at a bedside to a man with days left, and she listens for what he needs said before he cannot say it. She does not listen to win or to vanish or to guard. She listens to accompany. Her system rewards presence at the one door no one walks through twice with company. Listening, in her chair, is the refusal to let a man die unheard.

Five chairs, five sacred ears, five meanings. The word travels and the content does not. Becker would say each ear earns a different immortality, and he would be right.

Now set Rosner in a sixth chair and the word changes again.

Her listening braids several of these and belongs to none. She listens like the interpreter, to carry meaning across a gulf, but the gulf she works is death, and the speakers on the far side cannot lean toward her. She listens like the hospice nurse, in the presence of the dying, but her dying came two generations back and reach her as silence and as the look on a father’s face. She listens like the Carthusian, against the noise of her own life, to hear a register most people screen out. She does not listen like the lawyer, for the crack she can exploit, and she does not listen like the sonar man, for the threat she can sink. Her ear serves transmission, and what it carries is the named dead.

This is where the inheritance shows. Rosner took her title, Third Ear (2024), from a line that runs back through Theodor Reik (1888-1969) to Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Nietzsche used the phrase in Beyond Good and Evil (1886) to mock readers who could not hear the music inside German prose, the ones who lacked, he said, a third ear. Reik, a Viennese analyst and an early student of Freud, lifted the phrase for Listening with the Third Ear (1948) and turned it toward the consulting room. The third ear, for Reik, hears what the patient does not say, the meaning that moves under the words and arrives through a gesture, a pause, a tightening of the hand. Rosner inherits the term and turns it again. Her third ear hears the dead. It is an organ for picking up the frequency that silence carries, the register her parents broadcast at the supper table in Schenectady without ever choosing a word.

That table is the subtraction story. Most hero systems answer a loss. Rosner’s answers a loss she never witnessed. Her family in Europe was taken before her birth. Her father came out of Buchenwald with a brother and almost no one else. Her mother fled the Vilna ghetto at twelve and hid in the Polish countryside for two years. They married, crossed to America, and built a house in a General Electric town, and inside that house they spoke six languages and refused the seventh, German, the language of the killing. Their daughter grew up reading pressure she could not measure. She inherited a wound with no memory of the wounding. The thing was subtracted before she could lose it, and her listening became the search for an event she did not attend.

Becker helps name the two terrors that drive her.

The first is the camps, the ash, the body burned into the round number. The second is harder, and it is the one she works. Becker called significance the deeper hunger, and Rosner found the form of insignificance she fears most. She fears the second death, the one that comes when the last witness dies and the story goes with him, when the individual loss dissolves into the statistic and a man who had a name and a knife and a brother becomes a fraction of six million. She says it plainly in Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory (2017). A survivor she interviews predicts the Holocaust will die with the survivors. She sets her hope against him, that the generations after will keep the dead singular, a man, a child, a name, against the gravity that pulls every atrocity toward arithmetic.

Her hero system answers both terrors at once. If she carries the words, the dead are not finally dead. And if she is the carrier, she is not finally insignificant. She has a cosmic job. The role solves her death and her meaning in a single move, which is what a hero system does when it works.

She reaches for biology to seal the claim. In Survivor Café she takes up epigenetics, the study of changes the environment writes into the body and passes forward, and she finds in it a proof that the wound lives in her, that she carries the parents’ trauma in her own wiring, in mother’s milk drenched in sadness. The science does identity work here. It tells her she is not separate from the dead. The murdered run in her chemistry, which means she is already what she wants to be, a vessel, a continuation, a place where the lost keep going. A reader can grant the feeling and still notice the load the science is asked to bear. The research on intergenerational transmission is young and contested, and studies out of Israel cut both ways. Rosner needs it to mean more than it has shown, because her hero system needs the wound to live in the body and not only in the telling.

Watch what the system costs her, because the cost is the honest part.

A carrier needs cargo, and the cargo is grief. Her hero role asks the wound to stay open. Transmission and healing pull in opposite directions, and she knows it. She writes that the culture must interrupt the cycle of trauma through care, and in the same book she writes that the culture needs the stories kept alive so the past is not forgotten. A healed wound transmits nothing. An open wound transmits forever. She holds both and cannot fully reconcile them, and the strain shows in the work, which circles the camps and returns and circles again. The third ear that hears the dead must keep the channel open, and an open channel is another name for a wound that will not close.

There is a second cost. The carrier’s claim can crowd the carried. To make oneself the vessel of the dead is to stand between the dead and everyone else, and the posture can shade from service into ownership. Her father felt the edge of it and named it. Near ninety, he told her she was almost lucky to have this to write about. He meant the Holocaust. He meant that his catastrophe had become her material, her standing, her subject. He said it the way a survivor says a hard thing, and she kept the line, which is to her credit, since it indicts the very role she has chosen. The man who lived it hands the daughter who inherited it a small, exact warning about the trade she has made.

A third cost shows in the reach. Survivor Café moves from Buchenwald to the descendants of American slaves, to the Cambodian killing fields, to Hiroshima, to the population marked by September 11. The move is generous and it adds value, because it offers the carrier’s gift to others and refuses to hoard the wound as Jewish property alone. It also dilutes. A book that holds every atrocity holds each one more loosely, and reviewers split on the reach for that reason. The hero system wants to be universal, because a universal carrier is a larger hero, and the universalizing pull works against the singular naming the same book defends. She wants the dead kept singular and she wants the form of inheritance kept universal, and those two wants do not sit easy together.

None of this unmakes the work. It locates it. Rosner is not a chronicler of the camps, which she did not see, and she is not a survivor, which she says clearly. She is a carrier, and the carrier is a real and old office, older than the term, the one the tribe assigns to the person who keeps the names. The Alphabet of Inadequate Language that opens Survivor Café, running from A for Auschwitz to Z for Zyklon B, is the carrier’s confession that the freight exceeds the cart, that words come up short and remain the only thing she was handed. She carries them anyway. That is the part she will not put down.

So three coordinates, for the reader who wants to know where to watch.

Watch the open wound. Her hero system runs on transmission, and transmission needs the cut to stay fresh, so look for the moments when healing and remembering pull against each other and she chooses remembering. She will keep the channel open because the role requires it, and the cost lands on her own body, which is the body she says the dead already inhabit.

Watch the science. When she reaches for epigenetics, she is reaching for proof that she is not separate from the lost. The reach tells you less about the research than about the need, which is the need to belong to the dead by blood and not only by love.

And watch the father’s warning. He gave her the truest line in her own book, the one about luck, and it cuts at the office she holds. A carrier earns significance by standing close to the dead, and the man who climbed out of the grave once told her, across the distance between the one who lived it and the one who tells it, what that closeness can become. She wrote it down. She listened with the third ear, and what it heard, that time, was the cost of listening.

The Great Delusion

If John J. Mearsheimer is right in his anthropology, Rosner’s work serves as an illustrative case study for how the social group shapes human identity. Rosner’s nonfiction, including Survivor Café and her poetry collection Gravity, focuses on inherited grief and intergenerational trauma. Her writing tracks the deep, lasting imprint of a history that her family carried into her youth in Schenectady, New York.
Under a liberal framework, an individual is an atomistic actor who constructs his own identity through independent reason, unburdened by past generations. In that view, a writer like Rosner might be seen as a lone agent choosing to examine history objectively, or choosing how to react to her parents’ past through autonomous moral calculus.
Mearsheimer’s logic alters this interpretation. He argues that individuals are born into social groups that shape their identities long before they can assert individualism. For Rosner, the primary group is a family home defined by the memory of mass tragedy. According to Mearsheimer, the long childhood ensures that an individual is exposed to intense socialization when his critical faculties are not yet equipped to think independently. By the time an individual develops reasoning skills, the family and society have already imposed a massive value infusion.
Rosner’s work explicitly describes this exact structure—the “gravitational pull” of a family’s history and traditional upbringing. What a liberal viewpoint sees as an independent search for identity, Mearsheimer’s anthropology views as the inevitable reality of a deeply social being trying to process the value infusion of his primary tribe. The individual does not formulate a moral code or an identity in isolation.
The focus of Rosner’s examination—how mass trauma impacts people on a cultural and personal scale across generations—aligns with Mearsheimer’s view that human nature is tribal at its core. Survival and identity are embedded within the collective experience of the group. If Mearsheimer is right, Rosner’s writing is not a product of autonomous individual expression, but an exploration of how the group imprints its history onto the individual, leaving him permanently linked to the collective memory of his tribe.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

If David Pinsof reasons correctly, the books of Elizabeth Rosner rest on the central illusion of the intellectual class. Her non-fiction works, Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening and Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory, treat historical trauma and social division as problems that people can solve through deep listening and empathy. She frames memory as an instrument for social transformation.

A Pinsofian analysis strips away this idealism. Wars and atrocities do not occur because human beings misunderstand each other. Groups destroy one another because they compete for power, territory, and status. They understand their incentives. They fight to win.

Her focus on healing and empathy provides a high-status mission statement. This statement hides the competitive logic of the literary world. Cultivating awareness of inherited grief allows a writer to signal moral superiority and claim a high position in the cultural hierarchy. The work functions as a tool to outcompete rivals for prestige. People praise books about empathy to signal their own goodness. If Pinsof speaks the truth, her call for connection might represent a strategy to secure status in a marketplace that rewards idealistic signaling.

Novelist Elizabeth Rosner – Blue Nude, The Speed of Light

I call her Tuesday, September 12, 2006.

She's the middle child. "My parents were Holocaust survivors and that found its way into everything. They wanted us to be able to take care of ourselves. That I wanted to become an artist made them nervous."

"My father was from Hamburg, Germany, and my mother was from Vilna, Lithuania.

"My father was a research scientist and then an entrepreneur. My mother was a homemaker and then an interpreter."

"They were big on education. My boyfriend calls me an overachiever. It was instilled in all of us."

Luke: "What you found that children of Holocaust survivors have in common?"

Elizabeth: "We feel that we're carrying our parents' histories. We want to compensate our parents for what they endured. Sometimes this is imposed by the parents — when kids are named after the dead, after lost children. Some children resent this and leave their parents.

"There's an unusually high frequency of artists and psychotherapists. We want to express ourselves and to heal."

Luke: "How do you react to the rampant victimology in our society? How do you ration your compassion?"

Elizabeth: "I want to say that compassion should never be rationed. It should be infinite."

Luke: "Do you ever tell anyone, 'Buck up! I'm a child of Holocaust survivors!'"

Elizabeth laughs. "No. People feel equally strongly about their own drama. I have a hierarchy about which dramas are more deserving of empathy.

"I grew up in an environment in which my suffering was never counted as legitimate. It was measured against something so extreme, so incomparably excruciating… I was denied a sensibility about my suffering."

Luke: "Should survivors of great evil and their children be held to the same standards of moral accountability as anyone else or do they deserve a break?"

Elizabeth: "That question comes up around Israel. In some ways, people who've suffered should be held to a higher moral standard."

"I was always infuriated and saddened when I'd hear anything that sounded like racism from my parents or from other survivors. You of all people should know that that is completely unacceptable under any circumstances."

Luke: "What crowd did you hang out with in highschool?"

Elizabeth: "I was somewhere between the nerds and the cool people. I never felt like I belonged to any of the crowds."

Luke: "What attitude were you raised with vis-à-vis God and Judaism?"

Elizabeth: "It was complicated. We were Modern Orthodox in our affiliation. My parents had huge disagreements about how to observe [Jewish law]. We kept kosher. We kept the Sabbath. My father and the kids would walk to synagogue on Saturday mornings and my mother would go shopping. We went out to dinner, we'd eat fish and vegetables and she'd have a shrimp cocktail. It'd piss my father off. My mother's way of being Jewish was internal, how she felt and identified. My father was more about observance and rules and affiliations. Yet, it was shocking to me to find out in my early teens that my father did not believe in God. It wasn't a theology for him but a way of life.

"It was a brutal way to grow up. I became a feminist at a young age because I felt so pissed off about being a second class citizen. My father and I had fight after fight about it. He blamed my mother for setting a bad example.

"I went to a public school and then to Hebrew school in the afternoons.

"When I became an adult, I rejected [Judaism and God]. I became a kosher vegetarian. It was a way of retaining a tribal identity. I searched in vain for a Jewish community but I'm not much of a joiner. I was looking for a place with more liberal interpretations of love and no longer referring to God with male pronouns, but even that didn't do it for me. I had mixed feelings about declaring myself as part of us vs. them.

"I feel a lot more drawn to Buddhist and other Asian notions of God that are more abstract and less patriarchal and domineering, more god in the self, god in the collective, god in oneness."

Luke: "That picture of you on the dust jacket of Blue Nude. Is it just me or is that a very sensual photo?"

Elizabeth: "It is. The photos for Speed of Light and Blue Nude were taken on the same day by the same photographer. It was a five hour session. I hadn't written Blue Nude yet. I decided to use that photo for that book because I felt it went with the book. A lot of the themes in Blue Nude are reflected in that photograph."

Luke: "How important is it to you to look good?"

Elizabeth: "That's a loaded question. In our culture there's so much emphasis on appearance. We respond to beauty. That was reinforced by my mother. The theme in Blue Nude — can beauty save your life? That has a literal association for me with the Holocaust. I did hear stories from my mother that implied or even stated explicitly that a particular kind of non-ethnic beauty saved her life.

"One of the reasons that I chose writing over other art forms was that it wasn't going to be about me and what I looked like."

"The things that writers do to get their books read and how willing they have to be to put themselves out there. John Updike wrote recently that in the early stages of his career, he never went on the road. He never put himself out there. It was just the books went out. Now there's so much emphasis on book tours and interviews and making sure your name is on everybody's internet site.

"I was dumbstruck by how many people asked me if they were going to turn my book into a movie. I'm asked if I'm going on a book tour and how many cities I'll be going to. Everybody knows the marketing lingo now."

Luke: "How necessary were the science definitions in The Speed of Light?"

Elizabeth: "To whom?"

Luke: "To you."

Elizabeth: "I loved them as metaphor.They were useful to me as a fourth voice in the novel, as a way for Julian's inner voice to become visible to the reader. Structurally they were important for transitions and framing.

"There were times when I thought that if some readers skip these, I'd be OK with that. They were there for people who wanted to make use of them.

"I had a lot more in my draft than my editor allowed me to keep. He was right.

"Did you not like them?"

Luke: "I started skipping them."

"Do you write your books so that they are a pleasure to read or is there something more important to you than the reader's pleasure?"

Elizabeth: "I'm not thinking about pleasure, either my own or the reader's. I'm trying to get at some emotional honesty. I want the reader to feel met in some deep place."

"I have a short attention span. I watched a lot of television as a kid. I can be focused but for a short period. So I listen for the sound of one of my characters and that would last as long as it lasted [even if just for two paragraphs in the case of The Speed of Light]. For a while, I just wrote in pieces thinking I'd assemble them and they'd be longer but it felt more mosaic and I just had to surrender to telling the novel as a braid of three overlapping interweaving narrations. Any number of readers said that was challenging for them. Most people who talked to me said that once they got used to it, they loved it.

"When I started working on Blue Nude, I knew I did not want to repeat that structure. It felt right to linger longer with each character [there are two main characters, a German artist and an Israeli model]."

Luke: "How has your choice of vocation affected you?"

Elizabeth: "I have a lot of freedom. I'm free of the day-to-day grind. I choose my own schedule. I have a more insecure life, wondering when my next check is going to come. I feel that I use my best self when I write.

"I felt the same way about teaching, which I did for 20 years at the college level [Elizabeth graduated with her MFA from U.C. Irvine in 1985].

"When I get up on stage or at a book store to talk about my work, I feel lucky to do that. Having this conversation with you feels like a great privilege to me. There was a lot about my childhood that made me feel I wasn't being listened to. Now I feel seen and I feel listened to."

Luke: "If a reader feels that Julian and Paula [two of the three main characters in Light] are self-absorbed spoiled brats, is that a legitimate interpretation?"

Elizabeth: "Are you speaking personally?"

Luke: Yes. I wanted to say to them, "If you had to work for a living, you wouldn't have this privilege of self-absorption." Did you have sense of them?

Elizabeth: "I saw them as damaged and needing to grow. I was more empathetic towards them and less judgmental. I feel that's my job as a writer. If I had those judgments, I wouldn't have been able to keep going.

"I had more critical feelings about [the German artist] Danzig in Blue Nude than I did about either Julian or Paula. Danzig's more narcissistic.

"Writing for me is an exercise in compassion."

Luke: "You love that word 'compassion.'"

"How has your choice of vocation affected your relationships?"

Elizabeth: "It matters what people close to me think of my work and their willingness to read my work and talk about it with me and respond to it, preferably positively. I remember having a brief involvement with someone who was dismissive of my writing, and that was completely unacceptable. When I write, it's on my mind all the time and I want to be able to talk about it."

"It's heightened my sensitivity. I'm more easily affected by other people."

Elizabeth Rosner writes in The New York Times Sunday Magazine May 28, 2006:

Twenty-five years ago, while an undergraduate at Stanford, I got a job on campus as a lifeguard, deepening a love of swimming and water that has lasted throughout my life. I took the duties seriously and studied the swimmers with professional vigilance, relieved at the end of each day that no emergency rescue had been required. But the greatest challenge of the job was standing poolside in a bathing suit with my body on display.

Work began in the locker room, where I changed into my Speedo and surveyed my reflection, assessing what would be on view for the next few hours. I was plagued by self-criticism. I imagined the swimmers judging my shape, until I made myself remember that I was there to guard their lives, not their fantasies. Later I performed my variation of the same ablutions everyone else did, showering and hair washing, the application of lotion and makeup — preparations for re-entering the other world of walking upright on solid land.

I call her Thursday afternoon, Sept 14, 2006.

Luke: "When did you first attempt a novel?"

Elizabeth: "When I was in graduate school in my early twenties, I was supposed to be writing fiction. I kept on feeling pulled toward memoir, so I wrote a pretend fictionalized memoir that felt like a deformed baby. I got my degree but I wasn't happy with the writing outcome. I gave the narrator the name Irene so I could trick myself that I was still writing in first person. As someone pointed out, every time I inserted an ellipse, I was hiding something, which was a good point that I did not take kindly to at the time.

"I ended up discovering that it was a [free verse] poetry collection in disguise.

"All my poetry is free verse.

"My prose has always been lyrical and my poetry prosaic.

"In my new novel, I'm working in autobiographical territory. I'm expecting it to become more fictionalized as I work with it. It might end up a memoir."

Luke: "How do you know that people are engaging with your poetry when the audience for poetry is so tiny?"

Elizabeth: "That's the truth. I don't know. I imagined that more people would find my poetry after I became published as a novelist but I'm not sure that has happened. I have this collection of poems that I sell when I do readings and speaking engagements. It is the autobiographical companion to my novels."

Luke: "How did your life change after you published a novel?"

Elizabeth: "I felt legitimized. Even so, there was something about the publication of the second novel that really affirmed that. Several people said to me after the second book came out, 'Now you're a real novelist.' As though the one book was a fluke.

"I left my teaching job when my first book was bought. That was a leap to full-time writing that I wouldn't have made [without a book contract]."

"For a long time as a kid, I was aware of being different from my peers. I grew up in a WASPy part of upstate New York (Schenectady). I was an Orthodox Jew with parents who survived the Holocaust. I was odd. When people would talk about WWII, it was so abstract, and I would think, 'My parents were there.'

"A lot of my parents closest friends were also European Jews but most of my friends were not Jewish.

"I graduated highschool at 16 and went to live in the Philippines for a year by way of a scholarship from Rotary International, who, many years later, sponsored me to live in Australia for a year.

"That (the Philippines) added a bizarre layer to my life, living in this Catholic and exotic landscape, where, again, I was a complete freak."

Luke: "Have you sought out situations where you would be isolated?"

Elizabeth: "It's starting to sound like that. I know I've sought out experiences where I would be challenged. My father turned 16 in Buchenwald. I had a profound realization of how different my life was from his, and at some level, I wanted to test myself in a difficult place. I don't have anything like a death wish. I don't choose life endangering things."

"I lived in Israel for three months in 1980. I was 20. I stayed on a radical kibbutz in defiance of my father. It was about experiencing Israel through my own awareness, not as it was imposed upon me by my family.

"I was with Israelis who were communists. They were Zionists in a completely different way.

"I had an Israeli boyfriend but it never occurred to me to imagine my life there. I never felt like I belonged there. I have mixed feelings about even traveling there now."

Luke: "Did you find teaching enervating?"

Elizabeth: "Yeah. I love teaching, but to teach well, you have to draw from the same sources as writing. You have to be present and spontaneous and attentive. I use that up in the classroom and when I get home, I'm empty."