Elisa Albert (born July 2, 1978) is an American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist whose fiction and nonfiction return to a fixed set of subjects: Jewish identity, motherhood, illness, female anger, artistic ambition, and the friction between individual candor and communal expectation. She writes women who refuse to be likable. She treats personal experience as evidence for arguments about culture and institutions. Critics place her in a line that runs through Philip Roth (1933-2018) and Saul Bellow (1915-2005), though she works that inheritance from a female vantage and turns its assumptions over to inspect them.
Albert grew up in Los Angeles in a secular Jewish family that turned observant during her early childhood. In a July 2006 interview she traced the geography of that childhood. She lived in Brentwood, then Westwood. She attended Temple Emanuel for elementary school and Harvard-Westlake for grades eight through twelve, graduating in 1996. Her parents, both lawyers, married and raised two sons and a daughter with little Jewish practice until about 1980, when they attended a weekend at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute. There, by Albert’s account, Dennis Prager (b. 1948) posed the question that organized a generation of Jewish outreach: do you want your grandchildren to be Jewish? Her mother took up Friday-night Shabbat dinners and a kosher home. Her father went along without conviction. The marriage came apart over years. The couple separated in 1986 and divorced in 1995. Albert recalled that her parents said almost nothing to the children about the split, and she counted that silence among the murky features of a childhood she could not later reconstruct.
Two facts shaped her adolescence. The first was the school environment. Albert described Harvard-Westlake as a stressful private school full of what she called Stepford people, a place where she felt no value for her physical presence. By her own description she was fifty pounds overweight, five foot ten, a size twelve or fourteen, embarrassed and miserable. She wore combat boots and overalls and used no makeup. She wrote a high-school newspaper column, “Phat Albert,” that she described as her own vitriol turned on everyone around her. She listened to the folk-punk singer Ani DiFranco (b. 1970) and copied a DiFranco lyric across her bedroom walls in black marker, the verse about a woman whose hard truths get charged to her anger rather than to other people’s fear. The second fact was death. Her older brother received a brain-tumor diagnosis at twenty-five, when Albert was fifteen. He died when she was twenty. A second surgery took the essence of him before the end, and the family treated the prognosis with an optimism that left little room for honest talk. When Albert said aloud that he would die, relatives admonished her, as if the words might cause the outcome. She located the source of her commitment to honesty in that moment.
Albert earned a Bachelor of Arts from Brandeis University in 2000, with a major in English, a concentration in creative writing, and a minor in women’s studies. She chose Brandeis over the more prestigious options expected of a Harvard-Westlake student, a decision treated in her circle as a small scandal. At Brandeis she kept her distance from Hillel and from organized Jewish life. After two years working in New York publishing she entered Columbia University in 2002 and completed a Master of Fine Arts in 2004, where she held the Lini Mazumdar Fellowship. Graduate school gave her the community she had not found in Jewish institutions. She described workshops of writers from varied backgrounds who shared a single set of values: humor, truth-telling, good prose, and attention to questions that carried weight. Several visiting writers told her she was a writer and pushed her toward publication, among them Jayne Anne Phillips (b. 1952) and Stephen McCauley. She supported herself over these years through a long list of jobs, bookseller, copywriter, executive assistant, barista, babysitter, Hebrew-school teacher, and doula, work that later fed her fiction’s attention to caregiving and ordinary labor.
Albert married Joel Farkas, a Fordham law student, in August 2003 at a Malibu winery, in a ceremony performed by Rabbi Michael Gotlieb of Kehillat Maarav, the Santa Monica Conservative synagogue her parents helped found. She was twenty-five. The marriage failed within a year, and the couple separated and divorced. She wrote about the collapse in an essay for the anthology The Modern Jewish Girl’s Guide to Guilt, where she described the gap between her triumphant New York Times wedding announcement and the tailspin of failure and guilt that followed. She framed her own youthful choice as a response to grief, a wish to give her parents joy and replace the brother she had lost. She married young, she said, and married the wrong man, and she counted herself fortunate to have left fast and without children.
The aftermath sharpened her quarrel with the Los Angeles Jewish community of her upbringing. In the 2006 interview she described the spread of news about her divorce through that community as gossip dressed up as concern, and she turned the laws of lashon hara, evil speech, against the yentas who traded in her misfortune. Her objection ran deeper than her own case. She held that the community refused to acknowledge real suffering, that people greeted her after her brother’s death and after her divorce with cheerful evasions, and she called the refusal to name a tragedy a lie and a moral failure. She reserved her hardest words for Camp Ramah, the Conservative movement’s summer camp, where she spent eleven summers. She called it the Jewish Lord of the Flies, a world of adolescents playing adults with almost no supervision, and she alleged predatory relationships between staff and teenage campers. She said such pairings drew no censure because the camp’s purpose, as she saw it, was the manufacture of Jewish couples, celebrated afterward in alumni newsletters that read to her like a marriage market. She described a respected elderly rabbi who toured camps and day schools to tell teenage girls to marry and bear children early or carry the blame for the death of the Jewish people, and she called the message anachronistic and antifeminist and condemned the room full of people who accepted it. United Synagogue Youth drew the same contempt. She called these worlds insular, provincial, and empty of curiosity. Against them she set graduate school, where she felt at home among people who questioned everything and where, she said, things mattered.
Her religious position matched this stance. Albert told her interviewer she did not believe in a bearded presence watching over the universe. Her sense of the sacred attached to the preciousness of life, to the people she loved, to the feeling of doing good, and to yoga, which she offered half in earnest as her form of attendance. She felt no divine presence in synagogue and went, when she went, for community and ritual. Her relationship to Judaism kept evolving. She had come to respect cultural and religious institutions in a way her younger self could not, and she held that the tradition could withstand iconoclasm and questioning, that its point was to make people better. She also held a blunt view of Jewish power and Jewish journalism. She judged American Jews secure and powerful rather than beleaguered, and she dismissed the Jewish press as sanitized and crap, unwilling to be gritty or hard-hitting, quick to shut the door on anyone who questioned the community from inside.
Her literary debut, How This Night Is Different (2006), gathered interconnected stories about young American Jews working through marriage, sex, family obligation, and religious identity with irreverent humor and emotional pressure. The collection won the Moment magazine Emerging Writer Award and drew the Roth comparison that has followed her since. Albert described its closing story, which both imitates and addresses Roth, as a charge meant to dynamite everything before it, an attempt to level her own shtick and take aim at her narrative habits. She admired writers who could stand back from their own patterns, Roth among them, and she said she needed that self-puncturing to close the book and move on.
Her first novel, The Book of Dahlia (2008), follows twenty-nine-year-old Dahlia Finger as she dies of brain cancer and narrates the experience with caustic humor and clear sight. Albert built the structure around the clichés of self-help literature and used it to satirize sentimental attitudes toward illness while refusing to sentimentalize death. The novel reached the finalist round for the Sami Rohr Prize, and Entertainment Weekly named it among the ten best novels of 2008. The subject sat close to her brother’s. She wrote it as she approached the age at which he died.
Albert edited the anthology Freud’s Blind Spot (2010), a collection of essays on siblings by writers including Etgar Keret and Jill Soloway, work that extended her interest in family conflict and marked her role as a literary organizer. Her second novel, After Birth (2015), became her breakthrough. It examines the isolation of early motherhood through Ari, a woman caught in postpartum collapse, thwarted friendship, and the demands placed on mothers. Albert refused the picture of motherhood as natural fulfillment and insisted on resentment, anger, loneliness, and bodily exposure as part of the truth. The book established her as a leading voice in contemporary feminist literature and anticipated the public conversation about maternal mental health.
Human Blues (2022) follows the singer-songwriter Aviva Rosner through fertility treatment, marriage, celebrity, and aging, and it weighs reproductive technology against artistic ambition without resolving the conflict. Publishers Weekly placed it among the ten best works of fiction of 2022, and The New York Times praised its humor and emotional honesty. Her first essay collection, The Snarling Girl (2024), with a 2025 paperback, gathered more than a decade of essays on literature, feminism, antisemitism, publishing, motherhood, ambition, and Jewish identity. The nonfiction voice matches the fiction: combative, restless, set against politeness and self-censorship, and committed to candor as the condition of honest art.
Albert’s prose moves between satire and vulnerability through rapid dialogue, dense interior monologue, and exact emotional observation. Her central conviction holds that psychological honesty requires showing women as angry, selfish, frightened, and contradictory rather than smoothing those qualities away, and that intimacy comes through the admission of disappointment and failure. She told her students they should not write at all unless they meant to be honest, in fiction or in nonfiction, whether or not the truth felt good to say. She resisted the label of anger as a pejorative and preferred to call her work righteous, sentimental, tender, rueful, and questioning.
Her public profile widened after the Israel-Hamas war. In September 2024 a panel she was to moderate at the Albany Book Festival was canceled. Organizers first attributed the cancellation to objections from two participating authors, which prompted charges of ideological exclusion and antisemitism within literary institutions. The participating authors later gave a different account of their objections, and the New York State Writers Institute acknowledged errors in its handling. Albert responded in essays, including one in Tablet, arguing that the episode reflected a hardening intolerance for disagreement inside the American literary establishment. The controversy placed her at the center of a national argument over Zionism, free expression, and the limits of dissent in cultural institutions. She had been settled for years in upstate New York, where her husband holds a faculty position at the University at Albany, and she has taught at Columbia, Bennington College, Texas State University, The College of Saint Rose, and other programs, with a fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Amsterdam.
The 2006 interview also recorded the limits Albert drew around her own life. She objected when her interviewer linked her published New York Times wedding announcement to a discussion of her fiction. She held that her essay in the guilt anthology was narrative nonfiction rather than journalism, that she had renamed her ex-husband out of respect, and that the wedding announcement, public but personal, had nothing to do with her work and exposed family members who had nothing to do with it. The exchange grew sharp. She wrote that she had spoken freely on a friend’s recommendation and feared she had misjudged, and she closed by stating that the correspondence had gone to her legal counsel. The objection sits beside her own practice. She has treated her marriage, divorce, body, brother, and family as material for years, and she has argued in print that blurring the line between a writer’s life and a writer’s work does a disservice to all. She wants the line drawn by the writer, on the writer’s terms, and resists having it drawn by anyone else.
When her interviewer asked whether she would rather write a great book or have a great marriage, Albert called the question laughable and asked him to pose it to a male writer to feel its absurdity. She rejected the premise that the two exclude each other. She named the present as the happiest period of her life, and gave a reason: she knew who she was and what she wanted, and she had learned to honor her own feelings rather than treat them as faults.
The news reached her by relay. A rabbi’s wife ran into a friend of Elisa’s at a mall several states from New York and offered, in a bright voice, the report that the marriage had ended. The friend carried it on. A relative of Elisa’s, further removed, took a pseudo-sympathetic phone call from the rabbi’s sister-in-law. By the time the report finished its circuit, Elisa had become a small event in a network that runs on such events, and she sat at its center, the divorcée, the object of the call. She drew one lesson from the relay. The community should spend less on themed bar mitzvah parties and more on the laws of lashon hara, the evil speech a man owes it to his neighbor not to spread.
The complaint sounds like etiquette. It runs deeper. Two systems of salvation had collided in a shopping mall, and each held the other guilty of the same sin.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) held that a man builds his life against the knowledge that he will die and that his life might count for nothing. He called the defense a hero system, the cultural project that lets a man feel he has earned a place in a scheme larger than his body and longer than his years. The terror runs two ways. One is death, the literal end of the animal. The other is insignificance, the suspicion that the life left no mark, that the man ate and bred and rotted and meant nothing. Every culture hands its members a way to be a hero against both terrors. The cultures hand out different ways. The same word names rescue in one and ruin in the next.
For Elisa Albert the heroism is acknowledgment. She built the value at a deathbed. Her older brother had a brain tumor, and a second surgery took the man before it took the body, and the family met the prognosis with an optimism that left no room for the truth. When Elisa said aloud that he would die, a relative admonished her. How dare you say that. As if the word might cause the thing. She traced her commitment to honesty at all cost to that rebuke. She learned that the people around her would rather hold a comforting silence than name a tragedy, and she decided that the silence was the lie and the naming was the virtue. Years later she put it plainly. So much of the sorrow we carry around is helped by acknowledgment. To refuse the acknowledgment is immoral.
Set the value inside the system and it organizes the rest of her. The novel about a young woman dying of brain cancer, narrated without one sentimental gesture. The novel about the postpartum body that no one will describe as it is. The essay about the divorce that the community traffics in gossip but will not face. The refusal to be the nice woman who makes a room comfortable. Behind all of it stands the brother no one would call dying, and the book that answers him. She told an interviewer she does not believe in a bearded presence watching the universe. She subtracted Him young. What remained as the carrier of significance is the work, the thing she makes that outlasts the body she distrusted from adolescence, and the few people she loves. Becker would recognize the shape. A man removes God and must then build his immortality from the materials at hand. Elisa builds hers from sentences that tell the truth others will not.
Now take her sacred word and walk it through other lives, because acknowledgment means a different act in each, and in most it means a sin.
Carry it into the home of a frum woman in her own Los Angeles, the world she grew up in and fled. There a guarded tongue is the discipline of a lifetime. The mouth that names a neighbor’s divorce, a family’s shame, a daughter’s trouble, spreads a wound through a body that has to survive together. To acknowledge, in that home, is to gossip, and gossip kills three at once, the speaker, the listener, and the one spoken of. The woman who keeps the secret is the hero. Elisa, naming the camp and the divorce and the mother and the dead in print, is the tongue the tradition warns against. The rabbi’s wife at the mall and Elisa each accuse the other of the cardinal sin, and each is right inside her own house.
Carry it to a Korean eldest son raised on filial piety, the man who tends the line of ancestors and will one day be tended by his own sons. To acknowledge a father’s failure in public, to write the divorce and the drink and the cruelty for strangers to read, dishonors the dead and the living and the unborn at one stroke. His heroism is the face he keeps for the family. Hers is the face she strips off it. The same act, acknowledgment, saves one man’s name and ends another’s.
Carry it into a Trappist enclosure, where men take a vow against speech. There the noise of acknowledgment to other men is the thing that drowns the only listener who counts. God already knows the death, the grief, the sin. To say it aloud to a brother monk is vanity dressed as honesty. Silence is the road to Him. Elisa’s whole vocation, the public saying of the private thing, reads in that cloister as the disease the vow was built to cure.
Carry it to a man in the British Foreign Office, raised to handle grief with composure and to treat a scene as the failure. He says I’m so sorry once, quietly, at the funeral, and then nothing, and the nothing is the courtesy. The people Elisa hates, the ones who meet her after the brother’s death with that’s a bummer, have a nice day, are heroes in his code and cowards in hers. He spares her by not dwelling. She calls the sparing a lie.
Carry it to a Sicilian widow who learned omertà at her mother’s knee. To carry a family wound to an outsider is the betrayal that damns. The wound stays in the house or it stays nowhere. Elisa carries every wound to the largest outside there is, the reading public, and calls the carrying a moral duty.
The word does not bend only against her. Carry it to a Pentecostal woman at the front of a storefront church, on her feet, testifying, naming the addiction and the abandonment and the night she nearly died, the whole room saying amen. Here acknowledgment is sacred, public, loud, the equal of Elisa’s in its refusal of the polite silence. The act looks like hers. The cosmos behind it does not. The testifier names her ruin to glorify God and to win the others to Him. Elisa names hers to defeat the communal lie and to outlast death by authorship. Same gesture, two heavens.
Run a second value the same way and it splits as cleanly. Elisa calls her anger righteous and bristles when the word carries a pejorative edge. In her system anger is fidelity, the proof that she has not gone numb, the engine of the truth-telling. In the high school she fled and the camp she loathed, anger made a girl ugly and loud and obnoxious, the three words she guessed those people would still use for her, and an ugly loud girl does not get the crown of rubies in the alumni newsletter for marrying well. For a Stoic the anger is a passion to be put out, a sign the man is not yet free. For the diplomat anger is the loss of the game. Elisa’s central virtue is the others’ tell that something has gone wrong with you.
Here the essay would close if it followed the usual road. One value, many refractions, a tidy relativism. The material refuses the tidy ending, because Elisa polices a line of her own, and the line shows what her hero system is made of.
In 2006 a writer interviewed her about her first book and then posted, alongside the interview, the text of her New York Times wedding announcement, a document already public, already the first result her name returned in a search, already the template she herself had built an essay around. She objected. The announcement was personal. It exposed her parents and her former in-laws. It had nothing to do with her work. Blurring the line between a writer’s life and a writer’s work, she wrote, does a disservice to all. The exchange sharpened. She closed it by stating that the correspondence had gone to her legal counsel.
Read the objection against the rest of her and it looks like a contradiction. The woman who put her divorce, her body, her brother, her mother, and her camp into print for strangers now invokes a lawyer over a public wedding notice. Becker dissolves the contradiction. Her sacred value was never exposure as such. The value is authorship. She names the dead and the divorce and the camp, and she holds the pen the entire time. To be written by another man returns her to the one condition she escaped, the divorcée at the center of the relay, the object of the bright phone call, the template that reads like every other template, the woman things happen to. The hero of acknowledgment has to be the one who acknowledges, never the one a stranger acknowledges in his own paragraph. Becker’s name for the deepest project is causa sui, the wish to be one’s own cause, self-made, self-named, a small god who authors himself. To be authored by another is to be a creature again, and the creature is the thing she has spent a career outrunning.
That gives the rule. She fights hardest not at the moment of exposure but at the moment of authorship. Expose herself and she is the hero. Let another hold the pen and she calls the lawyer.
And the rival is not one system but a crowd of them, each a working answer to the same terror she answers with the book. The community she left is no villain. It is an immortality project that predates her by three thousand years. It survives death by continuity, by the chain of Jewish families that carries the name past any one body, and speech that wounds a member wounds the body that has to outlast every member. The rabbi who toured the camps and the day schools to tell teenage girls to marry early and bear children or carry the blame for the death of the Jewish people was not a fool to Elisa’s enemies. He was a man staring at demographic extinction and offering the one form of forever his system knows, the grandchild, the link in the chain. Elisa heard the speech as anachronism and insult. Both the rabbi and the novelist had looked at death and flinched and reached for a cure. He reached for the child. She reached for the sentence. Two heroisms against one terror, and each treats the other’s cure as a betrayal of life.
Three things to watch from here. The first is the recurrence. Her most personal material keeps circling the death no one would name, the brother in the body of a dying woman called Dahlia, and the value of acknowledgment runs deepest precisely where the unacknowledged death sits, so the place to read her is wherever a character refuses to say the obvious aloud. The second is the prediction the frame makes about her public life. The next fight will not come from a confession she chose to publish. It will come from a sentence about her that she did not write, and the size of her response will track the loss of the pen, not the loss of privacy. The third is the cost, and the cost is steep. The hero of authorship buys her significance from readers, and a congregation of readers is a fragile god to serve. The community she left offered an immortality that does not depend on being read, the grandchild who carries the name whether or not anyone admires the prose. She traded the chain for the book. She traded the people at the mall for the people in the workshop. The trade bought her the freedom to tell the truth at any cost, and the bill comes due as a kind of exile, a woman who can go home to Los Angeles only as a tourist among ghosts, valued, by her own account, in the rooms she chose and unreadable in the rooms she was born into.
Intellectuals frequently maintain that human misery and social friction flow from a simple misunderstanding, suggesting that a bit of positive psychology, self-help guides, or targeted therapy will cure existential dread. Albert explicitly targets this myth in her creative work. Her first novel, The Book of Dahlia (2008), is deliberately structured around the cheesy aphorisms of a self-help guide. She subverts this framework to expose it as useless baggage when a young woman confronts the harsh reality of terminal brain cancer.
Similarly, her second novel, After Birth (2015), applies a blistering tone to modern motherhood, stripping away the feel-good, idealized “mission statements” society uses to romanticize child-rearing. Rather than treating motherhood as an arena of universal sisterhood and emotional harmony, Albert portrays it with searing honesty and dark humor. This tracks closely with Pinsof’s assertion that our stated motives—to inspire and nurture—are frequently masks for the raw, Darwinian realities of survival, physical toll, and baseline human strain.
Pinsof argues that social conflict is not a “whoopsie” born of primitive tribalism or a lack of communication; it is a zero-sum competition over status, cultural dominance, and institutional leverage. The reception of Albert’s work and her positioning in the literary marketplace illustrate this operation clearly.
Albert has spent her career writing with what critics call “feminine swagger,” intentionally leaning into provocative, irreverent territory. Her debut collection, How This Night Is Different (2006), explores traditional Jewish rituals with an aggressive, youthful exuberance. In the social marketplace of elite fiction, where authors must consistently signal progressivism or adhere to polite institutional norms to protect their status, Albert’s aggressive style functions as a high-stakes competitive tool. It allows her to carve out a distinct territory, alienating the squeamish while forging tight alliances with readers who prize raw authenticity over defensive platitudes.
This zero-sum logic erupted into public view when the Albany Book Festival canceled a panel featuring Albert after two other authors refused to share a stage with her, labeling her a “Zionist”. Mainstream commentators might view this institutional collapse as a grand misunderstanding—a breakdown in reasonable discourse that could be fixed if the parties simply sat down to bridge divides. Pinsof’s essay strips away that comfort. The cancellation was a calculated exercise of power within the cultural hierarchy. The protesting authors used moralistic pretexts to dominate their rival, degrade her social standing, and signal their own adherence to elite progressive orthodoxy. The festival organizers did not act out of ignorance; they made a savvy, defensive calculation to protect their own market share of attention and avoid a public controversy that might threaten their status.
Albert’s counterattack—calling the decision an act of bigots robbing her of an opportunity—likewise reflects a rational deployment of moral outrage to defend her position in the competitive arena. The human mind, as Pinsof notes, is about as well-designed for social warfare as a hawk’s eye is for hunting. Every player in the literary ecosystem understands the incentives under which they operate all too well.
Mainstream literary critique views Albert through the framework of radical feminist individualism. She is celebrated as an unfiltered, iconoclastic voice who exposes the hidden somatic and psychological realities of modern womanhood, maternal isolation, and Jewish identity. Her work relies on the idea that speaking truth through uncompromised personal text is a form of liberation and a way to challenge suffocating societal myths.
Mearsheimer’s realism cuts through this expressive individualism, reinterpreting Albert’s literary output and raw anger as the predictable reaction of a tribal animal confronting the collapse of community infrastructure within a secure but alienating empire.
In After Birth, Albert delivers a fierce portrait of postpartum depression, physical vulnerability, and the desperate need for female solidarity. Her narrator, Ari, rages against the institutionalization of childbirth and the deep loneliness of raising a child in a fragmented modern town, looking for salvation in a raw connection with another new mother.
If Mearsheimer is right, Albert is documenting the high price the human animal pays when it is detached from its primary tribal container. The intense vulnerability of childbirth and the long human childhood are biological realities that require high-cohesion group protection to navigate.
Albert treats maternal rage as a psychological and cultural rebellion against patriarchal expectations. Realism reveals it as the biological survival instinct screaming against isolation. The modern liberal state protects the perimeter and ensures material abundance, allowing individuals to live as autonomous units. However, this setup dismantles the immediate tribal defense network—the extended kinship group. Albert’s fiction chronicles the trauma of an animal stripped of its pack, left to protect its offspring with no collective armor.
Throughout her essays and fiction, Albert champions a fierce, punk-rock ethos of independence, skepticism, and self-curation. In The Snarling Girl, she tracks how she learned to trust her own voice by rejecting elite expectations, commercial metrics, and conventional family pressure, positioning the writer as a sovereign creator who builds a unique system of belief. Mearsheimer’s hierarchy of human preferences places independent creative reason and self-chosen identity last among human motivations, far behind the unreflective survival drives of the group. The fierce, adversarial independence Albert cultivates is a luxury product of peak domestic security.
An individual can only afford to be a “snarling girl” veering left, mocking elite institutions, and pursuing unconditioned personal expression when a dominant state vehicle ensures total baseline protection. The intense socialization an individual receives during childhood hardwires the brain for group alignment long before an artist can develop a stylized counter-narrative. Albert views her voice as an escape hatch into individual autonomy; realism shows it is a highly specialized behavioral variation tolerated only because the empire’s defensive shell is secure.
Albert’s work frequently engages with contemporary Jewish identity, moving between irreverence toward institutional dogma and a deep, visceral connection to Jewish history and the reality of antisemitism. She explores the tension between wanting to exist as an unconstrained modern artist and being pulled back into the historical trauma and collective memory of her lineage.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology explains this pull through the permanent logic of boundary maintenance. Human beings are bounded creatures who rely on clear lines to separate the in-group from the out-group. Cultural trauma is not just a subject for literary reflection; it is the primary psychological armor a tribe uses to guarantee internal solidarity.
No matter how iconoclastic or secular an intellectual attempts to be during periods of abundance, the thin veneer of cosmopolitan individualism cannot withstand systemic friction. When external hostility rises or the collective group faces perceived threats, the social animal drops its customized lifestyle narratives. It returns instantly to the primary, unreflective defensive alignments infused during early socialization, proving that the ancient boundaries of the tribe remain far more powerful than the contemporary text of the novelist.
Elisa Albert has published her divorce, her mother, her body, her dead brother, and the summer camp she calls a Jewish Lord of the Flies, where she alleges that the staff preyed on teenage campers. She renamed her former husband in the divorce essay and called the work narrative nonfiction. When a writer reprinted her New York Times wedding announcement, a public document and the first result her name returned online, she called the act inappropriate and a disservice to all, and she closed the exchange by stating that the correspondence had gone to her legal counsel.
Two exposures, opposite verdicts. One thing sorts them, and the thing is alliance.
David Pinsof and his coauthors argue that the contents of a belief system come from a man’s alliances and rivalries rather than from abstract values he carries into every case. When a man invokes honesty, fairness, or loyalty, he is most often mobilizing support for an ally or opposition to a rival. People choose allies by similarity, by transitivity, the friend of my friend and the enemy of my enemy, and by interdependence, and they defend those allies with a set of slanted habits Pinsof calls propagandistic biases. They rationalize an ally’s wrongdoing and magnify a rival’s. They embellish an ally’s grievance and deny a rival’s. They credit an ally’s success to merit and a rival’s to luck, and they reverse the ledger for harm. The biases run on both sides of any conflict, and from the inside they feel like honesty. Politics, in this account, is the country of loyalty and conflict, and it borrows the language of morality to recruit third parties to a side. The framework reaches past national parties. It fits any structure of allies and rivals, the office, the clique, the literary world, the shul.
Albert presents herself as the truth-teller in a world of cowards. She tells her students they should not write at all unless they mean to be honest, in fiction or in nonfiction, whether or not the truth feels good to say. She calls the Jewish press crap and sanitized. She calls the community of her childhood shallow, incurious, and afraid. She offers honesty as the principle that explains her, and fear and schadenfreude as the principle that explains everyone who flinches from her. Read through Pinsof, the principle thins out and a map of alliances shows through.
Start with the map. Albert’s allies are the workshop and the literary world she entered through Columbia, the friends she made in graduate school, the writers who, by her account, value the same things she values, humor, truth-telling, good prose, the articulation of things that carry weight. Philip Roth sits among the allies as a consecrated ancestor, the pillar she says she has eaten and made part of her. The feminist literary coalition that rewards the unlikable woman is an ally. After the Israel-Hamas war the diaspora Zionist literary set becomes one, with Tablet and Commentary as venues. Her rivals are the institutional Judaism she says she loathed, Camp Ramah and United Synagogue Youth and the day-school crowd, the communal gossips she calls yentas, the touring rabbi who tells teenage girls to marry early, the Jewish weeklies, and after 2024 the literary institutions that canceled her panel in Albany. She assorts by the artist’s tag. The workshop people are dissimilar in background and similar in creed, and the creed is the axis she weighs. The camp people share her ancestry and fail her creed, and the shared ancestry buys them nothing.
Now take her keyword and run it through the coalitions, because honesty fills with different content in each, and the content tracks the alliance.
Inside her own coalition, honesty means aesthetic candor, the unsentimental sentence, the refusal to make a room comfortable, the willingness to write the postpartum body and the dying woman without one consoling gesture. Truth-telling consecrates the member among writers and signals loyalty to the creed. The writer who softens is the apostate. The writer who exposes is the hero.
Inside the community she left, the governing speech-value is lashon hara, the law against speech that wounds a fellow Jew. Honesty stops at the boundary of the people’s survival, and loyalty outranks disclosure because the coalition has to last. Their honesty is the guarded tongue that keeps the family whole and the marriages forming and the children arriving. She heard their rationalization and repeated it with contempt, that when it is someone you know it is not gossip, it is news. She has her own version. When she writes the camp world it is narrative nonfiction and telling it like it is. When the camp world talks about her it is lashon hara. The label tracks the side. Each coalition calls the other’s speech the sin, and Pinsof declines to crown either one the honest party, because each says the same thing about the other.
Inside the literary institutions that excluded her, the governing word is justice, and the cause is Palestinian solidarity, and within that coalition her Zionism codes her as the transgressor and her exclusion as principle. The same words, honesty and justice and conscience, carry the content that serves that coalition, and the content puts her outside the door. She experiences the door as bigotry. They experience it as integrity. The word did not change. The alliance did.
The propagandistic biases sit on the surface of her record once the map is drawn, and they need not be cynical. Pinsof’s biases run beneath awareness and feel, to the one running them, like clear sight.
Her victim accounts embellish the grievance and deny the mitigation, the standard shape. The divorce relay across state lines becomes glee and schadenfreude, the perpetrators’ malevolence emphasized and any innocent reading of communal worry set aside. The Albany cancellation becomes antisemitism and ideological exclusion. The later record, the participating authors offering a different account of their objections and the Writers Institute conceding mistakes in its handling, is the kind of mitigating circumstance a victim account passes over on its way to the verdict.
Her perpetrator accounts protect the allies. She is a free-expression partisan, and the literary coalition she belongs to polices speech too, yet her fire concentrates on the camp world and the festival left, and rests easy on her own side. Her exposure of the people she grew up with reads, to her, as courage. Their exposure of her reads as abuse. The wedding announcement is the clean case. Authorship aimed at a rival is truth. Authorship that makes her the object is a disservice that earns a lawyer. The act is identical, the printing of a public fact about a private life, and the verdict flips with the direction of fire.
Her attributions follow the same sorting. When a writer a year behind her in graduate school landed in the New Yorker debut-fiction issue, she felt the sting and then credited the story, a fantastic story that deserved its recognition, the favorable internal reading an ally receives. The camp marriages she attributes to shallowness and herd feeling and the absence of curiosity, the unfavorable internal reading a rival receives. Her own ostracism she attributes to the fear and smallness of the people around her, an external cause that leaves her conduct untouched. The community’s drive to marry the young and raise large families she reads as anti-feminism and folly. The same drive, described from inside that coalition, serves the plainest of group interests, the survival of a people that counts its dead, and the rabbi who tours the camps is defending that interest in the only currency his coalition mints, the grandchild. She extends to her allies the charity she denies her rivals, and the charity and the denial both arrive dressed as discernment.
The closing move in Pinsof is the symmetry. Partisans on every side of every conflict claim honesty, courage, and love for themselves and assign fear, cruelty, and bad faith to the other. Albert says exactly this. She is the honest one and the brave one, and the people who greet her at Whole Foods with a bland hello are the cowards who will not name a death or a divorce. The camp world, unheard in her telling, would say she is the cruel one, the daughter of the community who sold its privacies to strangers for standing among other strangers, the woman who skewers people who cannot answer back. Pinsof does not referee. He notes that the structure produces both stories on schedule. Her hard reading of the suburb she fled is the honest signal of loyalty that buys her seat in the workshop, and to trust the coalition’s side of the story is the membership fee of any coalition. Distrust your friends’ account and they stop counting you a friend.
Three things follow. The first is where to read her, and the place is the transgression she never names and the ally she never skewers, because the searching candor runs outward and goes quiet at the coalition’s edge. The second is what the frame predicts about her public fights, and the prediction is that the next one breaks at an alliance boundary rather than over a private fact, a quarrel about who counts as ally and who as rival, fought in the vocabulary of honesty and justice. Albany was that fight, and the frame would have called it. The third is the cost. Her name stands for fearless truth, and the name holds only while the truths point away from her own side. The day she turns the unsparing eye on the literary, feminist, and Zionist coalitions that now shelter her, she pays the membership price she once charged the people of Camp Ramah, and the fearless name and the warm belonging come apart in her hands.
Ask the people Elisa Albert grew up with to describe her and, by her own guess, they pause and then reach for weird, loud, ugly, obnoxious. Ask the friends she made in graduate school and the words come back cheerfully acerbic, smart, funny. Same woman, same voice, two verdicts. The verdicts split because the two sets price her by different standards, and the standards belong to different markets.
Pierre Bourdieu called such a market a field. A field is a structured space of positions with its own stakes, its own capital, and its own authorities who rule on what counts as value. What earns a fortune in one field earns nothing in the next. A person carries the dispositions formed by upbringing, a habitus, and the same habitus that wins standing in one field can mark her as a failure in another. People spend their lives converting one kind of capital into another, economic into cultural, cultural into the rarest currency of all, the symbolic capital a field grants to those it consecrates. Albert’s life reads as a long conversion, out of one field and into another, and her work is the record of the exchange.
The field she was born into had a clear currency. West Los Angeles, the prosperous Jewish professional class, the Conservative synagogue her parents helped found, the day school and Hebrew High and eleven summers at Camp Ramah. The capital that field minted was the good marriage and the Jewish family, and it consecrated its winners in public. She described the apparatus with a cold eye, the alumni newsletter with its corner of mazel tovs for couples who met at camp, the crown of rubies for the bride, the rabbi who toured the camps to tell teenage girls to marry early or carry the blame for the death of the people. To meet your spouse at Camp Ramah was to take the prize the field existed to award. Albert refused the prize and went looking for a field that minted a different one.
Her first move was a small act of position-taking, legible only against the hierarchy she was leaving. She chose Brandeis over Yale and Princeton and Harvard, and her milieu treated the choice as the mark of the ne’er-do-well of the century. Bourdieu would note that Brandeis is a consecrated school in its own right, so the gesture inverts distinction only by the lights of the field she was exiting. Read from inside that field, the choice looked like failure. Read forward, it was a first disavowal, the refusal of the surest prestige on offer, and the refusal is the founding gesture of the pole she was heading toward.
After graduate school she worked as a bookseller, a barista, a babysitter, a copywriter, an executive assistant, a Hebrew-school teacher, and a doula. The biographies list the jobs as struggle. The literary field reads them as credit. At its autonomous pole, the end of the field that defines art against the market, the years of ordinary labor and precarity bank a bohemian symbolic capital, proof that the writer came to the work through need and not through ease, and the same years feed the fiction its attention to caregiving and the body and unglamorous work. The disavowal of the economic is the price of entry at that pole, and the doula’s wage and the barista’s apron pay it.
The refusal that organizes her whole career is the refusal to be likable. Her protagonists are angry, selfish, frightened, sarcastic, exposed, and she argues that honesty requires showing them so. She titled an essay collection The Snarling Girl. In adolescence she wrote a school newspaper column she described as her own vitriol turned on everyone, and she copied an Ani DiFranco line about refusing the part of the pretty placid girl across her bedroom wall. The origin field punished those dispositions and called the girl ugly and obnoxious. The literary field rewards them. Its autonomous pole defines value against the pleasing and the popular, and the writer who declines to court her reader claims the purest currency the pole mints, the work that does not sell itself. Her combativeness, mispriced in one market, is consecrated in the other. The disposition did not change. The field changed, and the field sets the price.
Her deepest conversion turns suffering into consecrated goods. Her older brother died of a brain tumor when she was twenty, and she wrote The Book of Dahlia about a young woman dying of brain cancer as she herself approached the age at which he died. Her marriage failed within a year, and she wrote the divorce in The Modern Jewish Girl’s Guide to Guilt. The early motherhood that undid her friends became After Birth. The most private pain, the least marketable material a person owns, yields the most consecrated product, and the consecration arrives on schedule, the Moment award, the Sami Rohr finalist, the Entertainment Weekly and Publishers Weekly lists, the New York Times, the standing comparison to Philip Roth, which is itself a consecration, since to be placed in a lineage is to be granted a seat. The alchemy that changes grief into symbolic capital is the field’s oldest operation, and Albert runs it at full strength.
The conversion depends on a distinction she defends with her whole force, the line between literature and gossip. When the community of her childhood traded news of her divorce across state lines, she called it lashon hara and contempt. When she put the same divorce into print, she called it narrative nonfiction. The difference is not the disclosure. The difference is the field that classifies it. Gossip is the origin field’s debased currency. Literature is the consecrated one. She fights to have her speech filed under the second category and the community’s filed under the first, and the fight is a classification struggle, the contest over who holds the power to name an act art or trash.
The struggle came to a head with a blogger. When a writer reprinted her New York Times wedding announcement beside an interview and treated her autobiographical essays as continuous with it, she objected that her essay was narrative nonfiction and not journalism, that a short story is not an essay and an essay is not journalism, and that a professional writer would understand the difference intimately. She sent the correspondence to her legal counsel. Bourdieu would read the lawyer as a border guard. The blogger stands at the heteronomous pole, the journalistic and the public, and he threatens to collapse the boundary that gives her transmutation its value. If her exposure of her own life is the same act as a wedding notice and a gossip’s phone call, the symbolic capital drains out of it. The field’s autonomy is the writer’s monopoly over the consecrated handling of her own material, and she defends the monopoly the way any field defends its frontier, by naming the intruder unqualified to cross it.
There is a deeper turn, the one the rebellion narrative hides. The origin field demanded continuity, the grandchild, the link in the chain, the replacement for the brother who died. Albert says she married young in part to give her parents that, to have a gillion children to replace him, and she names the demand as the field’s pressure. She refused the biological currency and kept the demand. The book became the heir. I have every intention of having a family, she said, and continuing to write. She answers the field of origin’s central command, produce something that outlasts you, in a currency that field does not accept. The break reproduces the structure it breaks from. She did not stop making continuity. She changed what continuity is made of.
This is where Bourdieu parts from her own account. She tells the story as an escape, the flight from an insular world that suffocated her into the workshop where, by her words, things mattered and she found her people and was valued. Bourdieu hears the story of a woman who left one field for another, each with its stakes, its gatekeepers, and its orthodoxies. The autonomous pole has a creed as fixed as the marriage market’s, the unsentimental, the unlikable, the candid, the disavowal of commerce, and she keeps that creed with the fidelity the camp children gave the JDate corner of the newsletter. Her iconoclasm is the field’s orthodoxy. The belief that the new game is freedom and the old one was conformity is the investment that every field asks of its players, the illusio, the conviction that these stakes are the ones worth wanting. She did not leave the game. She found the game whose prizes she could win.
Three things to watch. The first is her need for the foil. The philistine suburb is the low term that makes her ascent legible as art, and a writer at the autonomous pole requires a bourgeoisie to define herself against, so the place to read her hardest is wherever she invokes the camp and the community, because the contempt is doing the work of marking her own position. The second is what the frame predicts about her fights, and the prediction is that she defends the field’s boundary most fiercely when an outsider dissolves it, when the blogger files literature as gossip or the book festival files literary standing under a political test, both of them breaches of the field’s right to set its own rates, and both drawing her sharpest fire. The third is the cost. Symbolic capital is on loan from the field that grants it, and the field can recall it, as the Albany institutions tried to do, and the autonomous pole pays late and unevenly and in a currency no bank will cash. The disavowal of interest has to hold, which means she can never be seen to want the prestige the suffering has earned, so the more the work pays, the harder she must appear not to be collecting, and the appearance is the last and most exacting labor the field demands of her.
The Voice
Her voice runs on collision. She puts high literary diction against the gutter and the Yiddish in one breath, so “my body my tool for sociopolitical commentary” sits next to “a calculated fuck you to the beauty mafia and the culture that nursed it.” The educated woman and the brawler talk at the same time, and the friction is the effect she wants. The Yiddish does the same work from the other side. Nachas, tsures, lashon hara, heebie jeebies, schadenfreude drop into English sentences as native words, and they let her claim the tribe in the act of attacking it.
Her signature move is the parenthetical self-puncture. She writes “I cultivated a righteous (if somewhat smug) anger” and names her own excess before you can. She admires this in Roth, the willingness to stand back and take aim at your own narrative patterns, and she builds the same trapdoor into her own prose. She raises the figure of eating Roth’s books, then kills it herself: the metaphor breaks down, she says, because then she would have to defecate them. She constructs and detonates in the same gesture. The habit reads as honesty and also works as armor. By calling herself smug first, she leaves the critic nothing to say.
She satirizes by ventriloquism. Her best comic passage writes the New York Times wedding announcement straight, in its own pleased officialese, and lets the genre hang itself: “Nice privileged over-educated girl marries nice privileged over-educated boy. Accelerated offspring, sound real-estate investment, timely death, and flourishing of Judaica on the planet forthcoming.” The bathos of “timely death” tucked into the list of bourgeois goods does the killing. She does not editorialize. She performs the thing and lets the rhythm expose it.
The verbs run to violence. She dynamites, she levels, she excoriates, she skewers, she takes aim. The body is a battlefield and the page is a weapon. Against that aggression she sets a tight control of tempo. She writes a long accumulating run, the phone-sex passage in “Hotline” with its rhythmic exhalations and inexplicable tick tick ticking, breath piling on breath, and then she cuts it dead with a two-word verdict. “Faces fall.” “Crunch, crunch.” The hard stop after the run is where the comedy and the menace live.
She is a sociologist of status detail, in the Wolfe manner she likes. The StairMaster, the salad dressing ordered on the side, JDate, Whole Foods on the Upper West Side, the crown of rubies for the girl who marries well, the alumni newsletter’s corner of mazel tovs. She characterizes a whole class by its consumption and its small rituals, and she trusts the brand name to carry the judgment so she does not have to state it.
Her rhetoric fights on the framing. She refuses the terms of a question and renames the thing inside it. Asked whether her writing is angry, she will not take the word as given: not if anger carries a pejorative edge, and she swaps in “righteous.” Asked to choose between a great book and a great marriage, she calls the premise a false choice and throws it back, daring you to pose it to a male writer. She argues like a debater who wins at the level of definition. The same move powers her communal criticism. She reaches for the tradition’s own law, lashon hara, and turns it against the gossips, indicting the community in its own vocabulary, the insider’s sharpest weapon.
The manner shifts with the medium. In the interview she is fast, candid, self-correcting, crunching raw unsalted almonds while she explains that she honors her feelings. In the emails she writes in lowercase, an intimacy that doubles as a power move, then freezes into legalese: the correspondence has gone to her legal counsel. She corrects Luke’s spelling, reeks not wreaks, mid-dispute, and the pedantry is a status assertion, the professional writer policing the amateur’s prose.
Under the wisecrack sits a tenderness she half disavows. She rejects “angry” and offers “sentimental, and tender and rueful and quizzical,” and the phone-call passage and her account of her brother carry a real ache. The voice oscillates between the armored crack and the sudden soft register, and the oscillation is the range that keeps the comedy from going brittle.
Where it strains: the self-aware parenthetical can become an inoculation, a way to foreclose criticism by performing it first, and the combative pose hardens into a brand that the work then has to keep feeding. The register collision, the profanity-and-Yiddish, the skewering verb, can read as a manner once you have seen it a few times, candor as a style rather than a discovery. Her lineage tells you what she is reaching for. Roth gave her the self-puncturing irony, Bellow gave her the idea that you write in response to everything you have read, the stew, and Ani DiFranco gave her the refusal of the pretty placid girl who makes the room comfortable. The voice is the sound of a woman who decided early that being liked was a trap and that the sentence was where she would get even.
Body Outlaws
I look back now and pat myself on the back for what amounted to years of extended performance art, my body my tool for sociopolitical commentary, my every stomach roll a calculated fuck you to the beauty mafia and the culture that nursed it. I cultivated a righteous (if somewhat smug) anger and unleashed it upon anyone unwise enough to discuss the StairMaster or order salad dressing "on the side" within earshot of me.
A few years down the road, once I'd staged a definitive exit from the ranks of Rhinoplasty High, something strange happened.
Hotline
He is still letting out rhythmic exhalations that echo and imitate the beating of my heart as well as the still present, inexplicable tick tick ticking in my head when I have exhausted myself of Important things I need to tell him. And, like an old lover in sync with me, he comes just when I finish, at the same instant, with a gasp and a pitiful roar. We both sit quietly, spent, entangled in the fiber optics between us.
Simcha Stress and Bridal Blues
By Elisa Albert in the July 11, 2003 Jewish Journal:
Whenever I tell someone about my impending nuptials, the reaction is the same.
First come the whoops of joy and the chorus of "Mazel Tovs!"
Then, invariably, the tone shifts. Faces fall. "How are you?" they ask, in much the same tone one might hear at a shiva call. "How are things going?"
Planning and executing a wedding, the implication suggests, are psychologically only slightly less taxing than death or divorce.
New York Times: WEDDINGS/CELEBRATIONS; Elisa Albert, Joel Farkas
August 17, 2003
Elisa Tamar Albert and Joel Samuel Farkas are to be married today by Rabbi Michael Gotlieb at the Saddlerock Vineyards and Ranch, a winery in Malibu, Calif.
Ms. Albert, 25, is keeping her name. She is a short-story writer and a candidate for a master's degree in creative writing at Columbia. She graduated from Brandeis and received a certificate from the Radcliffe Publishing Course. She is the daughter of Elaine Hearst Albert and Carl A. Albert, both of Los Angeles. Her father retired as the chairman and chief executive of the Fairchild Dornier Corporation, an aircraft manufacturer in San Antonio. Her mother is the director of the children's literacy program for the Los Angeles Jewish Federation.
Mr. Farkas, 34, is to begin his third year at Fordham Law School this month. He graduated from the Los Angeles campus of Antioch College. He is the son of Pamela R. Farkas and Dr. David E. Farkas, both of Los Angeles. His mother is a psychotherapist there, and his father a dentist.
Ms. Albert and Mr. Farkas grew up in the same Los Angeles community, and their families were acquainted — her older brothers were friendly with him — but the difference in their ages left them only vaguely aware of each other. In 2001, when they were both living in New York, their mothers arranged their first meeting as adults, although not for the usual reasons: Mr. Farkas's brother had died by his own hand seven weeks earlier, and Ms. Albert's brother had died in 1998 of cancer, and their mothers thought they might give each other emotional support.
Ms. Albert recalls that she made the first call to Mr. Farkas with trepidation. ''If your mom's just giving out your number,'' she said into his answering machine, ''feel free to ignore this message.''
But Mr. Farkas was glad to have someone from home to talk to. He teased Ms. Albert about her hesitant message, and they arranged to meet in Union Square for coffee.
Both remember their surprise, on that first meeting, that their two-person support group quickly seemed to become something else. ''I was like, 'Oh my God, he's really cute,' '' Ms. Albert said. ''I was chiding myself for being shallow in the face of something much more serious and weighty.'' Mr. Farkas, who also had a crush, worried that the family connection that had brought them together might cause some awkwardness, and that the the age difference could become an obstacle.
A week later, though, he called Ms. Albert and asked her to join him for a band performance at a downtown club. At his apartment afterward, they talked for hours. Just as her patience with his own hesitancy was about to give out, he kissed her.
''Basically, we didn't spend a minute apart for the next six months,'' Ms. Albert said. And in that time, the losses they had each suffered became not just the basis of their introduction but part of their relationship. ''We marvel that something so awful can give way to something so positive,'' she said.
The New York Times Divorce Announcement
Elisa Albert writes in The Modern Jewish Girl's Guide To Guilt:
… My New York Times wedding announcement read, as many do, like a smug sigh of relief: Nice privileged over-educated girl marries nice privileged over-educated boy. Accelerated offspring, sound real-estate investment, timely death, and flourishing of Judaica on the planet forthcoming. Continuity of the Jewish people thusly assured and hopes and dreams of respective families fulfilled, all with a lively hora, some lovely orchids, and top-of-the-line kitchenware to seal the deal.
But less than a year after our triumphant announcement (oh, and the getting married itself), my husband and I separated, and all that pride, joy and hope inscribed in the paper of record quickly gave way to a tailspin of failure, reproach, and profound guilt. It wasn't only my life and heart I'd destroyed: I felt I had dashed the hopes of loved ones, wasted an obscene amount of money, and failed to fulfill the needs of my people by reproducing. I found myself fairly buried under the rubble.
…One day we wer fighting and I felt hopeless and things were going dreadfully, and the next his good friend's wife (a rabbi, no less!) ran into a friend of mine at a mall several states away and breezily offered up the news that we were kaput. Then an in-the-dark relative of mine, still more states removed, got a pseudo-sympathetic phoen call from said rabbi's sister-in-law. And so on. (Um, an aside, if I may? Perhaps we should collectively be focusing a little less on themed bar mitzvah parties and a little more on philosophical illumination of concepts like Lashon Ha Ra. Just a thought.)
Elisa Albert Interview With Publisher's Weekly
I was raised in a very insular and infuriating [Los Angeles] Jewish community, and one that proved endlessly dissatisfying to me as I grew up, but it's impossible for me to shake its influence. There's the desire to reclaim it somehow, make it my own and reinvent it in a way that's meaningful. There's a good deal of sentimentalism inherent in that urge, and one I think I share with the population of my stories.
>Your closing story at once apes and purports to address Philip Roth.
It's designed to pretty much dynamite everything that precedes it. I was aiming to level my own shtick, to poke fun at myself and my own obsessions. I'm most enamored of writers who seem self-aware and are willing to stand back and take aim at their own narrative patterns from time to time, like, say, Mr. Roth. I think I needed to do that in order to put this collection to bed and move on, narratively speaking. That it's fake-autobiographical and mock-revealing made the writing process hugely amusing, if only to me. And a great teacher of mine once said that as long as you're amusing yourself, you're onto something.
Elisa Albert – How This Night Is Different
She calls me from New York Thursday afternoon, July 6, 2006.
Luke: "Could you give me the geography of your life?"
Elisa: "I grew up in Brentwood and then Westwood. I went to Temple Emmanuel for elementary school and Harvard Westlake for [8th – 12th grade, graduating in 1996]. I went to Brandeis, graduating with a major in English with a concentration in Creative Writing and I minored in Women's Studies.
"I worked for a couple of years in New York in publishing. Then I entered Columbia in 2002 and graduated with my MFA (masters of fine arts) in 2004."
Luke: "Where did you go to temple?"
Elisa: "My parents helped found a [Conservative] synagogue in Santa Monica – Kehillat Maarav [Rabbi Michael Gotlieb, who performed Elisa's marriage].
"My parents were incredibly secular. They married. They had my two brothers and me. Around 1980, they went to some kind of weekend at Brandeis Bardin [Institute]."
Luke: "Dennis Prager."
Elisa: "Who posed the 'Do you want your grandchildren to be Jewish?' question. They looked at each other and said yeah.
"My mother had an awakening and instituted Friday night [shabbat] dinners and kept kosher. My father went along with it but never cared that much. They split up in 1986. The split was a long drawn-out process. They divorced in 1995."
Luke: "When did you realize they were going their separate ways?"
Elisa: "I don't know. They didn't really talk to my brothers and I about it. It was one of those strange murky things about my childhood that I can't figure out even now.
"I was a happy kid. At 12, everything started to go insanely downhill. Adolescence was a complete disaster. I was a trainwreck. I was a rebel by default. I didn't have any friends. I didn't do well at school.
"Between 12 and 22, things were pretty rough.
"My older brother was diagnosed with a brain tumor when he was 25. I was 15. I was 20 when he died."
Luke: "When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?"
Elisa: "I wanted to be an actress. I wasn't particularly talented, but I didn't figure that out until later. I was huge reader. I don't know why I didn't think about writing. There's an old family movie my dad shot. My brothers are playing in the foreground. In the background, I'm about two or three, and I'm pushing a doll carriage back and forth in the backyard, but instead of a doll, there's a book in it."
Luke: "You were reading then?"
Elisa: "I was a huge reader. Being the youngest made me precocious. I talked early. I was trying to hold my own with my brothers who were six and nine-and-a-half years older."
Luke: "Do you think that part of the reason you wanted to become an actress was because you didn't want to be yourself? You wanted to play other characters?"
Elisa: "Sure. When I write fiction, that's the best analogy I can think of. I am inhabiting someone else."
Luke: "What group were you in or were you just excluded in elementary and highschool?"
Elisa: "Elementary school was awesome. In highschool, I tried to be a Drama person but I never succeeded. I was on the newspaper and I wrote a column called 'Phat Albert.' It was my own vitriol all the time. I excoriated everybody.
"I don't blame it entirely on L.A., but it is definitely a strange place to come of age. Harvard-Westlake was a stressful private school. I was considered the ne'erdowell of the century for going to Brandeis instead of Yale or Princeton or Harvard."
Luke: "When did you realize you were a writer who deserved to be published in real books by real publishers?"
Elisa: "I lucked out in college and fell into workshops by visiting writers. Jayne Anne Phillips told me I was a writer. Stephen McCauley. Poet Mary Campbell. Marcy Hirshman. Again and again, I got this incredible support from these disparate writers."
Luke: "Tell me about you and your body. It sounds like you hated it for a while."
Elisa: "That essay [in the book Body Outlaws] says it all. I was a trainwreck as an adolescent. I was 50 pounds overweight. I was 5'10. I was a size 12 or 14. It was awful, especially in LA I was at this exclusive private school with all these Stepford people. I was not valued at all for my aesthetic presence. I was embarrassed all the time. I thought I was a blight on the landscape. I had a beautiful mother. That was rough.
"I grew up. I got some self-esteem. I became a vegetarian. I'm pretty normal now. It's definitely a contrast. I hated myself."
Luke: "Did you use make-up? Did you like to dress up?"
Elisa: "No, not at all. I was a combat-boots overalls kind of girl."
Luke: "And now?"
Elisa: "Whatever. Sometimes, for something special, I'll dress up."
Luke: "Jeans?"
Elisa: "Yeah."
Luke: "What were you expected to become?"
Elisa: "I had cool parents. They just wanted us to be happy and so something productive. They're lawyers. My father marveled at my verbal ability and said I'd be a great lawyer."
Luke: "What were the Jewish expectations?"
Elisa: "I definitely heard a lot from my mom about marrying someone Jewish and creating a Jewish family.
"Having lost a brother and watch my parents go through that led me to make a really stupid decision and marry young [at 25]. I'm 28 now but I'm appalled at my 23 year old choice of spouse. It was definitely influenced by my wanting to do the right thing by my family and give my parents nachas (joy) and have a gillion children to replace my brother.
"Luckily, aside from a couple of heinous years of going through a separation and divorce, I'm none the worse for the experience."
Luke: "Would it be fair to describe much of your writing as angry?"
Elisa: "What?"
I repeat the question.
Elisa: "Not if the word 'anger' has a pejorative sense."
Luke: "Forget pejorative."
Elisa: "I'd like to think of it as righteous anger. I was a huge Ani DiFranco [folk-punk singer] fan in highschool. She was this angry chick singer. There was a quote from one of her songs ("I'm not a pretty girl") that I wrote in a black sharpie all over the walls of my room. She had no interest in playing the part of the nice, placid attractive woman who makes everyone feel good about themselves. There's a verse:
I'm not an angry girl
But it seems like I have everyone fooled
Every time I say something they find hard to hear
They chalk it up to my anger and never to their own fear
"I remember relating to that.
"My goal as a writer is to tell it like it is, whether it is in fiction or nonfiction, to tell difficult truths, whether or not it is fun to hear or even feels good to say. I tell my students all the time — you should not bother writing at all if you are not committed to being honest.
"I bristle at that word. I don't think of my stories as angry. As sentimental, and tender and rueful and quizzical, but anger definitely carries that pejorative edge to it."
Luke: "Did you ever get a response from Philip Roth?"
Elisa: "I sent him a little package with the book in it yesterday."
Luke: "Is he your favorite writer?"
Elisa: "He has been. I have a rotating cast of favorite writers. If I'm reading a book I'm really enjoying, that's my favorite writer. He's a pillar. I feel like I've eaten all of his books and they're a part of me. But I guess that metaphor doesn't extend because then I would have to s— them out.
"Saul Bellow said that we write in response to everything we've read.
"When I read something meaningful, it goes into the stew."
Luke: "Tell me about you and God."
Elisa: "I definitely don't believe in some kind of bearded presence in the universe watching us. It's an evolving sense for me that life is precious. That my life is going to come to an end one day and while I'm here, I have many choices. Bound up in that thinking is a sense of 'god.' I'm a big fan of yoga. I consider that my synagogue/church attendance. I go to yoga a couple of times a week and I feel that I can focus and clear away all sorts of mental and emotional clutter and think about what is important and make contact with whatever is in existence. I don't talk about it that much. It's something between me and myself. I feel that whenever I try to articulate it, something crucial is lost.
"I definitely don't feel 'god' when I go to synagogue. I have enjoyed going to synagogue in the past but it's for a sense of community and ritual rather than a true sense of the divine.
"I never thought about it too much, or I didn't have the skills to think about it this way. As I get older, I think about it more.
"When I feel happy, that's the most that I can associate with a belief in god. When I'm surrounded by people I love. When I feel fulfilled. When I feel like I am doing something good in the world, or I feel good.
"I don't think I have too much of a concrete god belief.
"I believe that life is precious. That we are here for a reason. That we should respect nature and the earth."
Luke: "What's been your relationship with Judaism?"
Elisa: "It continues to evolve. The institutional Judaism with which I grew up — the day school, Hebrew High School, Camp Ramah for 11 years (Conservative Judaism) — I loathed all that stuff. I was miserable within that framework of institutional Jewish practice. I have a seething contempt for a lot of the people I grew up with in that milieu. I've tried to leave it far in the past.
"Brandeis was an odd choice for somebody trying to run away from institutional Jews but I had few Jewish friends at Brandeis. I prided myself on having nothing to do with Hillel and anything at all.
"Judaism is something I'm exploring for myself now in ways that make me feel good. I have respect for cultural religious institutions now in a way that I wasn't able to growing up. To this day, I get extreme heebie jeebies when I run into someone from Camp Ramah, which invariably happens whenever I set foot above 69th Street. USY (United Synagogue Youth) is an insular and provincial community. I can't stand it."
The USY website says: "The Department of Youth Activities, of The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, inspires Jewish youth to explore, celebrate and practice ethical values, Zionism and community responsibility based on the ideology of the Conservative Movement."
Luke: "What specifically did you hate about it because every community is insular to varying degrees."
Elisa: "True. With few exceptions, there were a lot of people who seemed to have no ambition or curiosity or intellectual depth beyond getting together, trying to sleep with one another, and planning their big Jewish weddings as soon as they finished college. I felt suffocated and marginalized."
Luke: "How did you feel suffocated?"
Elisa: "I just never related to that. I could never play that game. It just felt empty. It felt divorced from any real religion. Judaism seemed like an excuse to have this little club and be shallow."
Luke: "Can you give me an example of a community where you've experienced the opposite (joy, safety, intellectual stimulation, passion, meaning)?"
Elisa: "Grad school. I felt so at home in graduate school, in workshops with fellow writers who became good friends. Different people from all sorts of backgrounds who all value the same thing — humor, truth-telling, good writing, articulation of things that matter individually and globally. I felt like things mattered. It was a deeper experience. It's definitely an insular world too."
Luke: "The people in graduate school were smarter, more intellectually curious, and had better values?"
Elisa: "Yes. The people at Camp Ramah didn't seem to question anything. What value does anything have if it doesn't withstand questioning? When I grew up, I found people who knew all sorts of things and were adventurous and curious about many different things. Judaism can stand such iconoclasm and questioning.
"There is a great midrash about all the people in a village putting all their tsures (troubles) on the table in front of them and wrapped up in all their tsures were all their triumphs. You can take anyone else's package but you'll always take your own back.
"I don't begrudge anybody else's happiness or success and I don't begrudge it myself either.
"There was a girl a year behind me in grad school who was in the New Yorker's debut fiction issue. Of course I felt like, goddamn it.
"I don't wish the girl any harm. It was a fantastic story and deserved to be recognized."
Luke: "Regarding your essay in The Modern Jewish Girl's Guide to Guilt, how do you wish your friends would've reacted to your dissolving marriage? You write that you wished they'd have studied the laws of Lashon Ha Ra. How should they have reacted when they had a piece of juicy gossip?"
Elisa: "I'm referring obliquely there not to my friends, who are wonderful, but to the Jewish communal yentas (gossips). I read somewhere that when it's someone you know, it's not gossip. It's news.
"It was the element of schadenfreude that I found hard to take. I felt implicated everywhere I went. For a good year, I felt like I wanted to burst into tears every time I left my house. There was almost this glee – 'Oh, guess what happened?'
"I grew up among these people. My older brother works in the Jewish community. He loved Camp Ramah. Those are his people. My mom works in the Jewish community.
"Even the way people tried to console me made it clear that I was the object of a lot of pity.
"How should people have reacted? 'Good for her. She got herself out of a terrible situation quickly without having children or further ruining her life. How difficult. I'll send her a card.' But instead there was a lot of smirking.
"Something hit home for me after my brother died when I'd be out and about and running into people and people wouldn't mention it. It was as though they were afraid of it. It happens to this day. I run into people I haven't seen for ten years. Obviously they know my brother died and they just [say], 'Hi, how are you? Good? Great.' Or, 'That's a bummer. Oh. Have a nice day.'
"I've developed this real anger at that. It doesn't seem right not to acknowledge enormous tragedies in the lives of people around you. It's a lie that really bothers me. I felt the same thing around the marriage. My life is in tatters and people say, 'Oh, great. Everything's sunny. Nice to see you.' When real s— is happening, it's important to [acknowledge it]. It's immoral not to acknowledge. So much of the sorrow we carry around is helped by simply acknowledgment.
"My experience of the Jewish community I grew up in was that a lot of times things did not get acknowledged."
Luke: "At the depths of your pain, you wish that people would observe some of the laws (Lashon Hara) of your religious tradition."
Elisa: "Absolutely. This isn't just about Judaism."
Luke: "But you chose to use the word Lashon Hara."
Elisa: "The point of religion is to make us better human beings. If all Christians were Christlike, this would be a beautiful world to live in."
Luke: "How often do you see religion making people better?"
Elisa: "I see it more often with people who identify idiosyncratically, who intellectualize it, people without blind faith, people who struggle with it."
Luke: "I don't think most people want to be challenged. Only a tiny percentage of people want to struggle with these things. Only intellectuals such as yourself."
Elisa: "I sadly agree but you can surround yourself with such people and you don't have to get frustrated or sad when you have to run into your old Hebrew school classmates at Whole Foods on the Upper West Side."
Luke: "Was your highschool like Lord of the Flies?"
Elisa: "I call Camp Ramah the Jewish Lord of the Flies. There were no adults around. There were adolescents playing adults. There were rampant inappropriate relationships going on between the 'adults' and the teenage campers."
Luke: "Between the counselors and the kids?"
Elisa: "Oh yeah."
Luke: "A lot of predatory?"
Elisa: "Absolutely."
Luke: "What about staff and kids?"
Elisa: "That's what I mean. One person at camp was over 40.
"There's a great story by Ellen Umansky in the Lost Tribe anthology — 'How to Make it to the Promised Land.' It's the definitive Jewish summer camp story. The place is hell on earth.
"My blood pressure goes up just talking about it."
Luke: "Did anyone get busted at Camp Ramah for statutory rape?"
Elisa: "Not that I know of. It was encouraged. Anything that resulted in a Jewish couple was encouraged. That was the goal of Camp Ramah.
"There's a wonderful, famous, respected [Conservative] kindly old rabbi who I like personally, but who is notorious for showing up at Camp Ramah and a few dayschools around town to give a little speech to 14, 15, 16 year old girls about how they need to prioritize getting married and having families as soon as possible. If they are late to do those things, not only will they die barren and alone, but the Jewish people will die out. It will be their fault. You can have a career later.
"It's completely outrageous. It's anachronistic. It's antifeminist and completely misguided and doesn't take individuals into account. I hated it because it encountered virtually no resistance at Camp Ramah. This is a line most people bought into.
"Camp Ramah puts out an alumni newsletter and like JDate, there's a whole corner of mazal tovs. 'We met at Camp Ramah.' This fetishized niche. That's what Camp Ramah is for. If you met your spouse at Camp Ramah, you get a crown of rubies. It's a sick little world."
Luke: "If you were talking to that same group about the same topic, what would you say?"
Elisa: "You have a lot of time. You need to experience the world and figure out who you are in it and take care of yourself and you'll know what you want and who the right partner for you is. You'll be able to create a life that is satisfying to you in the long-term."
Luke: "What should be more important to an 18-year old girl? Get a good education or get a good man?"
Elisa: "Obviously the former, though I don't deny that different people have different capabilities. Some people don't want an education."
Luke: "Would you rather have written a great novel or have a great marriage?"
Elisa: "That's a ridiculous question because one doesn't preclude the other."
Luke: "No, but we can't have everything we want in life. Which is more important to you?"
Elisa: "It's apples and oranges. It's a false choice. Write a great novel or become a great doctor? That you have to choose. I have every intention of having a family, if that is what I want, and continuing to write. I don't see the choice."
Luke: "Which part of your life have you been the happiest?"
Elisa: "Now."
Luke: "The reason is?"
Elisa: "I know who I am and what I want. I know how to honor myself and my feelings."
Luke: "What does it mean to honor yourself and your feelings?"
Elisa: "To know that my feelings are important and that if I feel happy or sad or uncomfortable, it's not me. If I'm sitting across the table from somebody and I want to stab myself in the eye with a fork, it's not because there's something wrong with me, it's that I don't like this person and I don't like the vibe.
"I don't beat myself up for things."
Honoring her feelings, Elisa starts crunching (on what I find out later are) raw, unsalted almonds.
"I live in an insular world of writers and sometimes it slaps me in the face that a lot of people out there don't understand, or willfully ignore, the difference between fiction and nonfiction."
Crunch, crunch, crunch.
I try to bring my questions to a close.
Luke: "What do you love and hate about New York? What do you love and hate about LA?"
Elisa: "I love about LA that my mom and dad are there."
Crunch, crunch.
Elisa: "I can go back now feeling great about life and revisit old places and not feel terrible about the awful years we discussed earlier. I hate about LA that it is a minefield. Without warning, I'll stumble into a weird feeling of being 15 again and not knowing that there's a whole world out there beyond this insular miserable community and just not thinking there's a place for me anywhere in the world. It's a place full of ghosts — my grandparents, my brother, a whole family identity that just doesn't exist anymore. That can be empowering too if I don't let it penetrate and just live with it.
"New York I love because I feel completely at home here. I feel like the person I am is valued here. I feel like I found my place here. I found my people. I am allowed to be who I am and honor myself.
"I hate that it is far away from my parents. I hate that because I didn't grow up here, I don't have all those convenient associations. I don't know who the good waxer is. I don't know where you go to get the best manicure."
Luke: "What did your older brother most want for you?"
Elisa: "To be happy. I don't feel like I got to know him well. He was off to college when I was eight."
Luke: "Was he able to communicate with you when he knew he was dying?"
Elisa: "Not so much. It continues the theme of things not getting discussed or acknowledged in my family. He was really optimistic as was everyone. It wasn't until he'd had a second brain surgery, which diminished his personality, it took away the essence of him, that it was clear he was not going to make it. By that point, he was just a shell. We didn't get to mull it over too much.
"I remember saying at one point — 'He's going to die.' And getting in trouble for that, getting admonished. 'Don't say that! How dare you say that!' As if my saying that is going to make it happen. That's where my penchant for honesty at all cost comes from.
"I'm approaching the age he was when he died (29)."
Luke: "How did your family and friends react to your writing?"
Elisa: "Really well. My dad is plainly thrilled and proud. My mom less so but only because she operates in this insular little lashon hara world. She gets worried about other people thinking X, Y, Z. She moves in this little world and everybody's sniping about everything. The first story [in Elisa's collection] is called, 'The Mother is Always Upset.' She says, 'People are going to look at that title and think it's about me.' I said, 'Mom, if they read the story, then they'll know it's not.' 'But people aren't going to read the story. They're just going to read the title.' 'Mom, if people are that dumb, then who cares?'"
Luke: "Did the people who you described in the Guilt book as gossiping about you, did any of them apologize?"
Elisa: "No. I keep my distance as much as I can from that crew. I can imagine what they think of me. What the camp people I skewer think of me."
I'd like to hear from these people what they think of Elisa Albert and her writing.
Luke: "Is there any pleasure in revenge in your writing?"
Elisa: "I hope not. I'm going to be honest with what I feel, but I think revenge is a bad reason for writing."
Luke: "How did your ex-husband react?"
Elisa: "It was pretty hard but he's a big reader. He understands. He's not thrilled. He wasn't touched by the essay in The Modern Jewish Girl's Guide to Guilt. His happiness that I had gotten published…"
Luke: "So much of Philip Roth's writing is revenge."
Elisa: "You think? Sometimes. I think he's at his weakest when he does that. That stuff reeks from a mile away."
Elisa and I chat for a few minutes after the interview. We lament the quality of Jewish journalism. "Jewish journalism is many things," she says, "but gritty and hard-hitting is not among them."
Luke: "It's just so sanitized."
Elisa: "It's crap."
Luke: "I pick it [the Jewish weeklies] up and I just don't recognize Jewish life."
Elisa: "When you criticize any insular group, that Jews are so beleaguered and have so many enemies in the world, you're not allowed to say anything questioning. The minute you do, you're not a friend of the Jews and the door is shut. We live in the 21st Century. We're clearly not threatened here. We're pretty powerful."
Later, I email Elisa a couple of questions. "How would the people you grew up with at Camp Ramah, Hebrew High, USY, Harvard-Westlake describe you?"
Elisa: "First there'd be an awkward pause. Then? Oh, I don't know. Weird. Loud. Ugly. Obnoxious."
Luke: "How would your closest friends you've made since grad school describe you?"
Elisa: "That's what friendster is for, no? Cool. Attractive. "Cheerfully acerbic," according to one friend. Smart. Funny. Good things."
Great Book Or Great Marriage?
Whenever I ask high-achieving women if they'd rather write a great book (or direct a great movie, etc) or have a great marriage, they usually take offense and maintain they can have both and there is no need to choose, and no, they won't rank which objective is more important to them.
One who did not take offense to my question was married novelist Binnie Kirshenbaum, who emails me that she'd rather write a great book.
Elisa emails me: "That book or marriage/family question is laughable at best. I'd love to see you pose it to a male writer, if only for a true realization of its absurdity."
I ask myself that question and answer that I'd rather have a great marriage.
I email Elisa Albert for the first time July 4, 2006:
Dear Elisa,
I first read you in Jewish Girl's Guide to Guilt and I would love to interview you for my website www.lukeford.net…
After transcribing our interview of July 6, I email Elisa at 11:16 a.m. July 7:
http://www.lukeford.net/profiles/profiles/elisa_albert.htm
Let me know if you have any corrections or additions. I transcribed those parts of the interview of most interest to me. I didn't use most of the modifiers you used, etc.
I am open to your suggested changes and corrections and additions.
Elisa responds Saturday afternoon, July 8:
it's pretty inappropriate to post the text of and link to my actual new york times wedding announcement. i'm not sure what your motive is, there. does it deepen any understanding of my writing?
blurring the line between a writer's personal life and their work does a disservice to all.
thanks.
also, i'm sure you intend to proofread, but there are typos everywhere, including in my quotes. my brother is referred to as "her" at one point.
that book or marriage/family question is laughable at best. i'd love to see you pose it to a male writer, if only for a true realization of its absurdity.
oh, and wreaks, friend, is still spelled "reeks".
best, elisa
I respond Saturday night:
* Wedding Announcement. You made it the whole template of your essay in Guilt so it is an obvious journalistic choice. It is one of the first results of your name in Google.
* Blurring the line. You have written many autobiographical essays. This is a line you blurred long ago.
* Thanks for the corrections.
Elisa responds Sunday morning, July 9:
first of all, my essay in the modern jewish girl's guide to guilt is a piece of narrative non-fiction, not journalism. there is a significant difference, and one i would hope a professional writer would understand intimately. out of respect for him, i changed my ex-husband's name to "jonathan" in that essay. if one wishes to "google" me, of course one quite easily finds that wedding announcement, which contains multiple details about not only my parents and myself, but also my ex-in-laws. but i'm still unclear on what it has to do with your interviewing me on my debut collection of short stories. (surely i don't need to get into the definition of "short story" vs. "essay" vs. "journalism"?)
i spoke to you freely on my dear friend binnie's recommendation. i certainly hope that wasn't an error in judgment. i'm getting a rather unpleasant sense that you might be aiming for some sort of temptest-in-a-teapot, here. i do hope i'm mistaken.
best, elisa
I respond:
I'll be happy to correct any errors in my piece and to add context or additions to your remarks. But I'm not going to withdraw citations and quotes of other pieces on you or by you.
Elisa responds:
once again: my wedding announcement is completely inappropriate "context". it has nothing to do with my writing. if you're in need of context, there have been several pieces written about my collection (you seem familiar with google, so i don't doubt you've seen them), any of which would be more than adequate.
the wedding announcement is not a secret, nor is it private. but it is personal, it has nothing to do with my work, it contains personal details about several people who have nothing to do with my work, and on that principal alone, you may consider our interview officially moot if you insist on abusing it.
our correspondance has been sent to my legal counsel.
thanks and best, elisa
This reminds me of my experience with Benyamin Cohen of Jewsweek.com in 2004.