Luke Ford

A manuscript came back to a house in Connecticut with a printed rejection slip. The story carried the title “Friend of the Family.” The writer who had mailed it read the note, set the pages aside, and after a while slid the same pages into a fresh envelope and sent them to the same magazine. She changed not one word. The second time, The New Yorker took it. The story ran in 1993 and became a chapter of her first novel two years later.

That sequence holds much of what a reader needs to understand about Katharine Weber (b. 1955). She held no high school diploma and no college degree. She trusted her work over the verdict on it, and the verdict came around.

The instinct ran in the blood. On her mother’s side stood the world of Broadway and the banking houses. Her maternal grandmother was the composer Kay Swift (1897–1993), the first woman to score a complete Broadway musical, and for a decade the close companion and collaborator of George Gershwin (1898–1937). Her maternal grandfather was the financier and political writer James Warburg (1896–1969), heir to a German Jewish banking dynasty and an adviser to Franklin Roosevelt. On her father’s side stood the garment trade. Her paternal grandmother sewed buttonholes for the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in the months before the fire that killed a hundred and forty-six workers in 1911. One grandmother sat at a Steinway. The other sat at a sewing machine on the ninth floor of the Asch Building.

She grew up in Forest Hills Gardens, the Tudor-styled planned community in Queens that Frederick Law Olmsted‘s firm laid out for a certain kind of striving family. The houses had leaded windows and slate roofs and covenants. A child raised there learned to read the markers of class before she could name them. Music came through the house from the Swift side. So did the long shadow of Gershwin, dead before her mother had finished growing up, present at every holiday as anecdote and grievance and unfinished business.

Weber attended The Kew-Forest School and then Forest Hills High School, and she left in her junior year. In 1972 she entered the first class of the Freshman Year Program at The New School, an experiment built for students who wanted books more than they wanted credentials. She studied later, part time, at Yale. She never collected the diploma. She turned the gap into a thesis, that the work decides the writer and the writer decides nothing by sitting for examinations.

In 1976 she married Nicholas Fox Weber (b. 1947), a cultural historian from Hartford who ran the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. She had been Katharine Swift Kaufman, carrying her grandmother’s name through the middle of her own. The couple settled in Connecticut, and from 1977 they lived in Bethany, beside the foundation grounds, where they raised two daughters, Lucy and Charlotte.

The Albers connection gave Weber a rare apprenticeship. She had already held editorial and research jobs at Harper & Row, at the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and for the architect Richard Meier (b. 1934), whose offices ran on the conviction that white space and proportion carry meaning. Now she worked for the foundation that kept the legacy of Josef Albers (1888–1976) and Anni Albers (1899–1994), the Bauhaus painters who had taught at Black Mountain College. She assisted Anni Albers and did archival work. The Alberses had spent their lives on the proposition that color and thread and the square hold their own logic, that craft is thought. A young writer absorbed the lesson and carried it from the loom to the page.

She built her trade through reviewing. Through the 1980s she wrote newspaper columns and served as books columnist for Connecticut Magazine. She reviewed fiction for Publishers Weekly for several years, the unglamorous bench work of judging other people’s sentences against a deadline. Her own essays and reviews ran in The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Washington Post Book World, Vogue, The Chicago Tribune, and The London Review of Books. A reviewer learns where the joints of a book give way. Weber learned, and then she set out to build books a reviewer could not pull apart.

The first novel, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (1995), took its title from the warning printed on a car’s side glass and made it a study of obsession and the tricks of perception. The book moved through fragments and shifting vantage points. It announced a writer interested less in what happened than in who saw it and what the seeing cost them. The Music Lesson (1999) followed, a taut book about a stolen painting and a woman alone in an Irish cottage, told in the close first person, the reader trapped inside a mind that might not be telling the truth. The Little Women (2003) handed the narration to an unreliable young woman reconstructing the breakup of an affluent Connecticut family, with Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women sounding underneath like a second melody. The New York Times Book Review named all three Notable Books of their years, a run that placed Weber among the careful builders of her generation. In 1996 Granta put her on its list of the Best Young American Novelists.

Then she wrote Triangle (2006), and the apprenticeship and the lineage and the method came together.

Picture the ninth floor of the Asch Building on a Saturday afternoon in March 1911. The cutting tables run the length of the room under hanging shades. Bins of fabric scraps sit beneath them, oil-soaked, packed tight. Hundreds of young women bend over machines, most of them Italian and Jewish immigrants, some of them children. The owners keep the Washington Place door locked against theft and union organizers. A cigarette, a scrap bin, a draft, and the fire goes up the airshaft and across the floor in minutes.

“The pails,” a forewoman shouts, and the women throw the fire pails, and the water does nothing. “Down the stairs,” someone calls, but the stairs fill with smoke and the locked door holds. The single fire escape buckles and drops its load of bodies into the alley. The elevator runs until it cannot run. At the windows the women take each other’s hands and step out into the air above Greene Street, and the crowd below watches them come down, and the firemen’s nets tear like paper.

Weber’s paternal grandmother had stitched buttonholes in a room like that one, in the same trade, for the same company, shortly before. The novelist did not write the fire as a documentary. She wrote it as a problem of memory and evidence. The book turns on Esther Gottesfeld, the last survivor, an old woman whose account of her escape has shifted over ninety years, and on a feminist scholar who suspects the account conceals something, and on a composer who tries to set the disaster to music. Weber built the novel out of testimony, transcripts, a song, a granddaughter’s doubt. She let the record contradict itself, because records do. She trusted the reader to sit with what cannot be settled.

Triangle won the Connecticut Book Award for Fiction and earned a place on the longlist for the International Dublin Literary Award. Critics took it for her finest work, and the judgment has held. The book does what the Albers loom taught and what the reviewing taught: it treats construction as meaning. The form is the argument.

Her later fiction kept the method and moved the subject. True Confections (2010) gives the floor to a woman who married into a family chocolate company and now narrates its history as a legal deposition, a confession, and a sales pitch all at once. The novel takes apart the manufactured story, the founding myth a brand sells about itself and the founding myth a family sells about its own loyalties. Still Life With Monkey (2018) turns to a man left quadriplegic by a car crash, his marriage, his service monkey, and his wish to die. The Washington Post and The New York Times Book Review and Kirkus Reviews praised its restraint, the refusal to sentimentalize a subject built for sentiment. It reached the finals for the Connecticut Book Award and the New England Society Book Award. Jane of Hearts and Other Stories (2022), with the novella The Ring at its center, gathers linked stories around recurring objects and the buried wires that connect lives the characters think are separate.

Between the chocolate and the monkey she went back to the grandmother who sat at the Steinway, and she told the truth about her. The Memory of All That: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Family’s Legacy of Infidelities (2011) is biography, family history, and music criticism braided into a memoir. Kay Swift left her husband, James Warburg, the children’s grandfather, for Gershwin. Gershwin never married her. He died at thirty-eight of a brain tumor, and Swift kept his music and his memory for the rest of her long life. Warburg married and divorced and married again. The infidelities of the title run down the generations like a recessive gene, and Weber traces them without flinching and without revenge.

The book carries a public stake beyond the family. Since Swift’s death in 1993, Weber has served as trustee and administrator of the Kay Swift Memorial Trust, the office that preserves a body of American music a less attentive heir might have let scatter. Under that stewardship came the restoration of Fine and Dandy, the 1930 musical that made Swift the first woman to compose a full Broadway score. A granddaughter who writes about manufactured myths chose to keep a real one in repair.

The teaching ran alongside all of it. Weber taught fiction and nonfiction at Yale, Goucher College, the Columbia University School of the Arts, and the Paris Writers Workshop, among other places. From 2012 through 2019 she held the Visiting Richard L. Thomas Chair in Creative Writing at Kenyon College and served as a senior editor of The Kenyon Review. She sat on the board of Yaddo, the artists’ colony, and judged the PEN/New England Awards and the Connecticut Book Awards. The woman without a degree spent two decades handing degrees’ worth of judgment to people who had them.

A reader who wants a single key to Weber will not find one, and the absence is the point. Her novels use multiple narrators, broken chronology, documents, depositions, songs, and narrators who lie or forget. She resists solving her own mysteries. She wants the reader to feel how memory and language build what we take for fact, and she trusts that feeling more than she trusts a tidy ending.

The recurring subjects stay constant across thirty years: family inheritance, the lives of women, moral doubt, the making of art, historical wounds, and the border between private feeling and public history. The Triangle fire, a chocolate empire, a broken spine, the Gershwin circle. Each one she treats as a made thing to be taken apart and shown working.

The two grandmothers explain her better than any school could have. One built songs that outlived the man she loved. One sewed buttonholes in a room that became a graveyard, and survived it, and passed down a trade and a memory. Weber inherited the loom and the score, the buttonhole and the piano, and she spent a career proving that the made object holds the meaning, that the way a thing is built is the thing it means. She trusted the work over the verdict, the second time she sent the story out, and she has been right ever since.

Katharine Weber: Keeping the Dead in Repair

On a Saturday afternoon in March 1911, on the ninth floor of the Asch Building, the young women at the windows take each other by the hand. The fire is behind them and the Washington Place door is locked and the fire escape has already buckled and dropped its load into the alley. So they step out into the air above Greene Street, two and three at a time, and the crowd below watches them come down, and the firemen’s nets tear like wet paper. A hundred and forty-six die that afternoon. Most are Italian and Jewish immigrant girls. Many have no headstone the family can afford, and some are buried before anyone learns their names.

That is the terror, named in one scene. Ernest Becker (1924–1974) built two books around it, The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil, and he held that every human culture is a defense against this. Not death alone. Two terrors, braided. The first is annihilation, the animal fact that the body rots. The second is worse and harder to say, the dread of insignificance, of having been a speck that left no mark, of going out the window into a crowd that cannot tell you from the girl whose hand you are holding. Becker said the work of every culture is to hand its members a hero system, a scheme by which a man might feel he counts for something that outlasts him. A way to earn what Becker called death-transcendence. A way to matter past the grave.

Katharine Weber’s paternal grandmother sewed buttonholes in a room like that one, for that company, in the months before the fire. Her maternal grandmother, Kay Swift, sat at a Steinway and kept the music of a dead man alive for sixty years. The novelist who descends from both spent a career on a single proposition about the two terrors. You defeat them by making a thing whose construction holds, and by keeping the made things of the dead in repair.

Watch how the hero system reaches her before she chooses it. George Gershwin dies at thirty-eight, and he does not leave the house. He comes to every holiday as anecdote and grievance and unfinished business, present in the scores on the piano, present in the grandmother who loved him and outlived him by more than half a century. A child in Forest Hills Gardens, among the leaded windows and the covenants, learns a lesson before she can name it. The dead stay if their made things stay. The score on the rack is a kind of body that does not rot. This is not yet a theory. It is a household.

So when Kay Swift dies, the granddaughter takes the trust. She becomes administrator of an estate that is music, and she keeps it in repair, restoring the score of Fine and Dandy so the 1930 show can sound again. The verb is the giveaway. You keep a thing in repair the way you tend a grave you refuse to let go green. Becker would call this the immortality project, the labor by which a person ties herself to something that does not die and borrows its permanence. Swift had done it first, for Gershwin. The granddaughter does it for Swift. The hero system reproduces down the line, mother to daughter, each one curating the made thing of the beloved dead.

Here the essay could name a rival and stop. There is no single rival. A sacred value is a word that means one thing inside one hero system and another thing inside the next, and the word that organizes Weber’s life refracts the moment you carry it across the room.

Take the made thing, the object built to outlast the body.

In a back room in Brooklyn a sofer sits over a sheet of klaf with a turkey quill and a pot of ink ground to a recipe a thousand years old. He is writing a Torah scroll. He has been at it for more than a year. When he reaches the Name he rises and goes to the mikveh first. His apprentice asks why he will not let a single letter touch another letter, why a hair of white space ringing each character is law. “If one letter cracks, if one touches its neighbor, the scroll is dead,” the scribe says. “Posul. You bury it. You do not fix it and pretend.” For the sofer the made thing defeats death by erasing the maker. His name appears nowhere. The scroll is not his. He pours a year of his hands into a covenant that was old before him and will outrun his great-grandchildren. The immortality is the community’s, never the craftsman’s. That is one meaning of the made thing.

Carry the value to a forge in Japan, where a swordsmith folds the steel back on itself a dozen times and quenches the blade in water at a heat he reads by the color of the dawn he works in. He signs the tang. His seal goes where the handle will hide it, seen only by the man who someday breaks the sword down to clean it. For the smith the made thing defeats death by transmission, the technique handed from master to pupil across four centuries, the blade a link in a chain of hands. The object is permanence, and it is also a weapon, built to end a life as it preserves a lineage. The made thing here carries no fidelity to any one dead person. It carries the forge.

Now a glass tower south of Market Street, where a founder pitches a room of venture partners. “We’re not building a product,” he says. “We’re building something that outlives all of us.” He means a company. The made thing defeats death by scale, by market share, by the founder’s myth printed in the business press. The object is a vehicle for a single man’s name written large. The permanence he wants is dominance, and he will burn the made thing of ten rivals to get it.

The sofer vanishes into his object. The smith hands his down a chain. The founder rides his to a personal apotheosis. And Katharine Weber does a fourth thing. She signs the book, like the founder, and she pours fidelity into it, like the sofer, and she builds it to last past her, like the smith, but the thing she will not do is let the made object lie. The founder’s myth is a sales pitch. The scroll cannot contain a flaw. The sword serves whoever holds it. Weber’s novel exists to expose the manufacture of the very belief that all three of them depend on.

Take a second sacred value, memory, and watch it refract the same way.

In a VFW hall with folding chairs and bad coffee, the survivors of a rifle company hold their reunion, fewer every year. A man reads the names of the dead from a laminated card, and the room stands. Afterward a younger man, a son, tells the old sergeant that the official history got a detail wrong, that the ridge was taken a day later than the citation says. The sergeant does not thank him. “You don’t get to change it,” he says. “You owe them the version we swore to. You keep it the way we keep it.” For the veteran, memory is loyalty, and to revise the record is to betray the dead. The sacred act is the fixed account, repeated word for word until the last man falls.

Down the hall of a hospice a nurse sits with a dying woman who is not afraid of dying. The nurse has seen this. She tells the daughter so in the corridor. “She’s not scared of going. She’s scared no one will remember she was funny.” For the nurse, memory is release, the story closed gently and let go, the window cracked an inch for whatever leaves. Remembrance is not the labor. Presence is. You do not keep the dying in repair. You keep them company, and then you let them be gone.

For Weber, memory is neither the veteran’s fixed oath nor the nurse’s gentle release. Memory is the unstable thing fiction exists to interrogate. Her novel Triangle turns on Esther Gottesfeld, the last survivor of the fire, whose account of her escape has shifted across ninety years, and on a scholar who suspects the shifting account hides a transaction. Weber does not give the reader the veteran’s sworn version or the nurse’s quiet closure. She gives the reader the survivor whose memory will not hold still, and she trusts the reader to sit inside what cannot be settled. The veteran keeps the dead by freezing them. The nurse keeps them by freeing them. Weber keeps them by refusing to pretend the keeping is ever pure.

This is the artist’s particular bid, and it is the most exposed of all of them. Becker took the point from Otto Rank (1884–1939), who saw that the artist tries to make the immortality project personal. The believer leans on the church, the soldier on the regiment, the founder on the market. Each borrows a permanence the group guarantees. The artist guarantees nothing. She has to justify the made thing out of her own hands, with no covenant behind her and no chain of masters and no quarterly report. When the unchanged story comes back from the magazine with a printed rejection, and she puts the same pages in a fresh envelope and mails them again and they are taken the second time, that is not stubbornness. That is the artist staking everything on the work against the verdict, because the work is the only altar she has built and there is no congregation to catch her if it fails.

Every hero system buries something to keep standing, and Becker called the buried thing the vital lie. Weber’s is hard to say because it wears the face of a virtue.

She spends a life keeping made things in repair, the grandmother’s score, the survivor’s testimony, the catastrophic injury rendered in Still Life With Monkey without a drop of the sentiment the subject begs for. The discipline is real and the restraint is hers. And the discipline might also be a flight. To keep the dead in repair through the object is to prefer the object to the person, the manageable score to the unrepeatable man who wrote it, the testimony to the girl who went out the window and whose name no one wrote down. Curatorship can be a second forgetting performed in the costume of remembrance. The made thing holds because the made thing is what a living person could not be, fixed, revisable, durable, yours. And the cost of building a life around the things that do not rot is the things that do. The unrecorded ordinary day. The presence the nurse practices, given to the living, in the room, before the window is cracked.

Weber is the maker who defeats erasure by construction and by fidelity to the dead, and who refuses to let the made thing lie about the loss it stands in for. The rivals she fights without naming are everywhere, the scribe who would erase the maker, the smith who would serve any hand, the founder who would inflate the myth, the soldier who would freeze the record, the nurse who would let it all go soft and gone. She has answered each of them in a book. The cost the ledger cannot price is the one her own discipline hides. A woman can spend her gift keeping the dead in such good repair that the living slip past.

The Great Delusion

If John J. Mearsheimer is right in his anthropology, the work of novelist and memoirist Katharine Weber undergoes a major shift in meaning. Weber focuses her narratives on family secrets, legacy, art, and the complex internal lives of characters trying to make sense of their personal histories, as seen in The Music Lesson or her memoir The Memory of All That.

A liberal, individualistic reading of Weber’s work treats her characters as autonomous psychological agents. In this view, a character uncovers an inherited secret, wrestles with personal grief or family infidelity, and uses her own insight to heal, break free, and define her own identity. The drama is a purely internal, individual journey toward self-understanding.

Mearsheimer’s realism upends this interpretation. If humans are profoundly social beings whose identities and minds are shaped by their group long before they develop critical faculties, Weber’s novels are not about individual psychological liberation. They are studies in the power of social transmission and institutional continuity.

First, the family secrets and “legacy of infidelities” Weber writes about are not random, isolated personal choices. They are structural codes. The family function is the primary channel for the “intense socialization” Mearsheimer describes. In The Memory of All That, the family environment imposes a value infusion on the child before the child can think for himself. The individual cannot simply choose to leave this legacy behind; it forms the very structure of his mind. The characters do not act as lone wolves. Their choices, even their rebellions, are strictly bounded by the tribal logic of their family history.

Second, Weber’s exploration of art and conservation—such as the repair of broken things in Still Life with Monkey—loses its purely aesthetic, individual meaning. Under a realist framework, art, ritual, and cultural artifacts are instruments of social cohesion. They exist to bind individuals to the collective identity and to pass down tribal values across generations. A character interacting with a piece of art or a family legacy is not engaging in an act of free, creative self-expression. He is responding to an intense cultural imprint that was pre-loaded into his consciousness during a long childhood.

If Mearsheimer is right, Katharine Weber is not a chronicler of autonomous individuals discovering their own truth. She is a chronicler of captivity. Her work shows how deeply the human mind is captured by early socialization, demonstrating that a man can never truly separate his identity from the tribe that raised him.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

If Pinsof is right, the work of novelist and memoirist Katharine Weber looks less like a study of tragic psychological aberrations and more like a report from the Darwinian trenches. In her memoir The Memory of All That: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Family’s Legacy of Infidelities, Weber unpacks decades of family deception, affairs, and social positioning. A conventional literary critic might view these betrayals as failures of communication or psychological wounds that require healing.
Pinsof’s thesis suggests a different conclusion. The infidelities and social maneuvering in Weber’s family history represent rational actors pursuing status, resources, and reproductive advantages. Man does not stumble into affairs or replicate destructive family patterns out of ignorance. He executes strategies that serve his immediate interests. Weber’s narrative avoids the feel-good illusions that mainstream social scientists use to comfort the public. Instead of treating betrayal as a misunderstanding to fix, her writing exposes the raw, self-serving motives that drive human behavior. Her stories do not offer policy implications or therapeutic interventions. They show the human animal operating exactly as natural selection designed him to operate.
Katharine Weber’s catalog of family infidelities through Pinsof’s lens reveals that the writing serves as a tool in an ongoing status game. Documenting the deceptive maneuvers of ancestors is not merely a therapeutic exercise. It is an assertion of ownership over a high-status lineage. It transforms raw, Darwinian competitions over reproductive access and social position into literary capital.

Katharine Weber and the Logic of the Field

A literary career is a position in a field. The term belongs to Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), who spent his working life mapping what he called the field of cultural production, a structured space of positions set against one another, each defined by its distance from the others, each playing for a currency that is not money. The currency is recognition. Bourdieu named it symbolic capital, the credit a producer holds in the eyes of the people who count. A writer who wins it can afford to lose readers. A writer who loses it cannot buy it back with sales. Katharine Weber’s career reads as a controlled experiment in how that currency gets earned, banked, and handed down.

Start with the paradox at the center of her story, the one her admirers tell as triumph. She holds no high school diploma and no college degree. The field she entered rewards the credential. The university certifies talent, ranks it, stamps it. And yet the deepest belief of the literary field disavows the very thing the university sells. The field runs on a charismatic ideology, the conviction that the writer is born and not trained, that the gift precedes the schooling and cannot be conferred by it. Bourdieu called this disavowal dénégation, the field’s refusal to admit its own machinery. Weber’s missing degree, far from disqualifying her, fits the disavowal like a key. The autodidact confirms the field’s flattering story about itself. Her gap is not a handicap she overcame. It is a credential of a higher order, the proof that no credential was needed.

Bourdieu, in the essay “The Forms of Capital,” separates three. There is embodied capital, the dispositions a person absorbs early and carries as second nature, what he calls habitus. There is objectified capital, the books and instruments and art a family owns. There is institutionalized capital, the diploma. Weber inherited the first two in quantity and skipped the third. The habitus formed in Forest Hills Gardens, among leaded windows and covenants, taught her to read the markers of class before she could name them. The objectified capital sat in the house as the Steinway and the Gershwin scores from the Swift side, the banking pedigree from the Warburg side, and later the Albers thread and color she handled at the foundation. A child raised among those objects learns the feel of the game, what Bourdieu called the sens du jeu, the practical sense that lets a player move without consulting the rules. The field let her trade that inheritance for entry and never asked to see a transcript.

Symbolic capital has to be conferred, and the field confers it through a circuit of consecrating bodies, each with the authority to convert raw work into recognized value. Weber moved through the circuit as if she had drawn the map. The New Yorker took “Friend of the Family,” and a New Yorker acceptance is a consecration, a stamp that travels. Granta named her to its list of Best Young American Novelists, a list whose function is to anoint, to tell the field where to look. The New York Times Book Review marked three novels in a row as Notable Books. Yaddo seated her on its board. The Kenyon Review put her name on its masthead as a senior editor, and Kenyon College gave her the Thomas Chair. Each body took her output and returned it as standing.

Then she crossed to the other side of the counter. She judged the PEN/New England Awards and the Connecticut Book Awards. The consecrated became the consecrator. This is how a field reproduces its structure across time. It recruits the writers it has anointed to anoint the next ones, and the circuit closes, and the rules survive the players. A woman without a degree sat on the juries that decide which degreed and degreeless writers receive the field’s blessing. The outsider’s path, walked to its end, deposits her at the center of the apparatus that defines inside and outside.

Her years as a reviewer are the rawest form of field knowledge. Through the 1980s she reviewed fiction for Publishers Weekly and wrote a books column for Connecticut Magazine, and the work put hundreds of books across her desk to be weighed against a deadline. A reviewer learns the space of positions from the inside, where a book sits, what it claims, where the joints give way. Bourdieu would call this the accumulation of a practical mastery of the field, the kind no syllabus delivers.

Bourdieu used the term prise de position, position-taking, for the choices a producer makes that locate him in the field against his rivals. Weber’s choices point one direction. The fragmentation, the unreliable narrators, the documents and depositions and contested testimony, the refusal to resolve the mystery, all of it places her near what Bourdieu called the autonomous pole of the field, the restricted zone of small-circulation production aimed at peers and judges rather than at the mass market. The London Review of Books reader and the Kenyon Review subscriber are her audience, and the match between her position and theirs is what Bourdieu called homology, the alignment between the structure of producers and the structure of consumers. Difficult fiction finds the readers whose own capital lets them prize difficulty.

The Albers apprenticeship and the Kay Swift trust round out the picture as capital management across fields. At the foundation she handled the objectified capital of the Bauhaus, the conviction that thread and color and the square carry thought, and she carried the lesson from the loom to the page. As trustee of the Kay Swift Memorial Trust she took charge of her grandmother’s music, an estate of cultural capital that a careless heir might have let scatter, and she kept it in repair, restoring the score of Fine and Dandy. Bourdieu was interested in how capital converts and reproduces across generations and across fields, how a banking fortune becomes a Broadway score becomes a granddaughter’s literary standing.

Her fiction theorizes the same engine the theory describes. True Confections gives the floor to a woman narrating the history of a family chocolate company, and the novel takes apart the founding myth, the manufactured story a brand and a family sell about their own value. Triangle turns on the testimony of the last survivor of the 1911 fire, an account that has shifted over ninety years, and on a scholar who suspects the account conceals a transaction. Both novels stage the manufacture of value, the moment when a story becomes belief and belief becomes capital. Bourdieu had a word for the shared investment that keeps a field running, illusio, the collective faith that the game matters. A writer who lives by the manufacture of literary belief wrote her best books about the manufacture of belief. The producer and the product describe the same operation.

The field rewarded Weber for a freedom her inheritance underwrote. The no-degree story, told as work beating credential, rests on a habitus and a network and a body of objectified capital that the degree-seekers lacked. Bourdieu called this misrecognition, méconnaissance, the trick by which inherited advantage reads as pure gift, by which the labor and the luck of one’s origins disappear into the appearance of grace. Weber earned her standing, and she also started the race a generation ahead, with the Steinway in the house and the right name in the middle of her own. The field loves the autodidact because the autodidact confirms that talent owes nothing to circumstance. The truth runs the other way. Her position was won, and it was also assigned.

Katharine Weber and the Unexaminable Craft

If a settled standard sat behind The New Yorker, a shared thing the editors held in common, the verdict on a fixed set of words would not flip. It flipped. The judgment did not live in a standard. It lived in two people, and they did not agree.

Stephen Turner (b. 1951) has spent his career worrying that scene, or its like, across every field that claims to run on shared know-how. His book The Social Theory of Practices took aim at a comfortable habit of social thought, the habit of explaining why a group behaves alike by positing a hidden thing the members all carry, a shared practice, a common tacit knowledge, a background everyone absorbed. Turner granted the starting point. Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) had shown that real competence is tacit, that we know more than we can tell, that the skilled hand and the trained eye perform discriminations no rulebook captures. Turner kept the individual half and attacked the collective half. If knowledge cannot be put into words, he asked, then how does it pass from one head to another such that both heads end up holding the same thing? It cannot be poured across. What looks like transmission is each learner building a private capacity of his own from the public performances he watches and the corrections he takes. The capacities resemble each other enough to coordinate. That resemblance is an inference, not a proof of sameness, and certainly not proof of a shared object underneath. Katharine Weber’s career is a long argument for Turner, and against the people who would tidy her up.

Start with her self-account, because she built her public story on a claim about knowledge. She holds no high school diploma and no college degree. She says the work decides the writer and the credential decides nothing. Read through Turner, the claim is that literary competence is tacit. A certificate tests what can be set down and scored, and the thing that makes a sentence land cannot be set down and scored. So the certificate measures the wrong object, or rather it measures an object standing in for the one that counts, and Weber declined to perform the substitution. Few would dispute this much. Polanyi gives you that far. Turner takes you further, to the part that costs something, and the cost arrives later.

The Albers apprenticeship is the case her admirers call pure transmission. At the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation she worked beside Anni Albers, who had woven at the Bauhaus and taught at Black Mountain College, and who held that thread is a form of thought, that the event of a thread carries meaning before a single word attaches to it. Albers taught by doing and by setting the student to do, not by lecture, because the knowledge had no lecture in it. The tempting story says Albers handed her tacit craft to Weber at the loom, that a hidden competence moved from the master’s hands into the apprentice’s. Turner says look again. Nothing moved. Albers could not have articulated what her hands knew, so she could not have handed it over, and Weber could not have received a thing her teacher could not name. What happened is the only thing that ever happens. Weber watched, tried, failed, was corrected, and grew her own capacity, a private one, resembling Albers’s well enough to work. The loom did not teach a doctrine. It set up the feedback under which a second person built a second competence that nobody could read off the first. We call this transmission because we lack a better word and because the result coordinates. The honest description is two people, two sets of trained hands, and a resemblance no one can audit.

The New School ran on the same bet and the same blind spot. In 1972 Weber entered the first class of its Freshman Year Program, built for students who wanted books over credentials. The program guessed that what makes a reader cannot be certified, and so it dropped the certificate. Turner would credit the honesty and press the question the program could not answer. If the competence is tacit and each student reconstructs it alone, how does even a credential-free school know it has produced the thing? It cannot examine the tacit. It can only watch performances and infer that something took. The degree-granting university and the credential-free seminar stand at the same wall. The seminar admits the wall is there. The university paints a door on it and issues passes.

Her years as a reviewer are individual tacit knowledge. Through the 1980s she judged hundreds of novels against deadlines, for Publishers Weekly and for a column at Connecticut Magazine, and she learned where a book gives way. Ask her to reduce that to criteria and she could offer some, and the offered criteria would not be the knowing. The knowing is the trained discrimination that fires before the criteria catch up, the connoisseur’s eye Polanyi described, performed and not stated. Turner accepts all of this at the level of the person. His warning sounds the moment anyone climbs from her trained eye to a shared literary standard her verdicts express. There is no such standard sitting in the field, waiting to be channeled. There are many separately trained eyes whose verdicts converge often enough to keep the appearance of a common measure alive. When they diverge, the appearance drops, and you are back at the envelope, the same pages, two readers, no agreement.

Her fiction stages the same epistemology. Triangle turns on the last survivor of the 1911 fire, whose account of her escape has shifted across ninety years, and on a scholar who suspects the shifting account conceals a transaction. There is no master copy of that afternoon held in common, no shared memory the survivor merely reports. Each rememberer holds a private reconstruction, and what really happened is an inference drawn across divergent performances, never a record pulled from a collective vault. Weber refuses to resolve the divergence, and the refusal is the same refusal Turner makes against the social theorists. Do not posit the hidden shared thing to settle what only individuals hold. Sit inside the divergence. It is all there is.

Turner wrote a second book on the politics of expertise, on the trouble a tacit competence makes for a public that cannot check it. The expert performs a judgment the layman cannot follow and cannot test, and the judgment stands on the expert’s say-so. Weber sat on the juries of the PEN/New England Awards and the Connecticut Book Awards, and edited fiction at the Kenyon Review. There she exercised the trained eye as a gate. A jury cannot show its work, because the work is tacit. It performs discriminations and issues verdicts, and no outsider can audit the verdict against the standard, because the standard, as we have seen, is not a shared object anyone can produce on demand. Here is the part that costs her the comfortable version of herself. The same unexaminability that let the autodidact in is what lets the juror’s taste stand without accounting. The wall that freed her from the diploma is the wall behind which her own verdicts later sit, unchecked. She benefits at both ends. The credential could not capture her gift, which is true, and her gift, raised to a seat on the panel, cannot be captured either, which means the field’s authority over what counts as good rests on judgments that cannot be shown, cannot be tested, and do not have to agree. Weber is proof the certificate measures the wrong thing. She is also proof there is no right thing the public can inspect in its place. The knowledge that could not be examined to keep her out cannot be examined to hold her to account. That is the corner of the conversation nobody likes to stand in, and it is where she stands.

Novelist Katharine Weber – Triangle

From 2006. LF: I've heard you described as a "formalist." How do you feel about that?

Katharine: I'm getting used to the idea. I was surprised when Madison Bell called me a formalist when he was teaching my first novel and I visited his class last Spring, when I was Kratz Writer in Residence at Goucher College. But on reflection it does kind of fit. Okay, I'm a formalist. I do in fact care deeply about structure and form, and it is the way I conceive of my novels and write them. I feel a bit like Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain who, when informed that one can only express oneself in poetry or prose, replies, "By my faith! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing anything about it, and I am much obliged to you for having taught me that."

LF: The character George Botkin almost took over your Triangle book?

KW: Oh, I don't think so.

LF: Do you struggle to keep your characters in their place?

KW: Not really. I don't understand writers who speak as if their characters were little figures perched on their laptops, hopping on the keys while they sit there helplessly. But then, as a formalist, I would say that, wouldn't I? Seriously, I do feel that my fiction emerges from a character in a situation. How I write it is the narrative strategy, but who that character is, why he is there, what he wants, what he does to get what he wants — that's where the fiction begins for me. But my characters serve the stories. I have never felt that they have taken over the stories.

LF: Does the distinction between literary and commercial fiction mean something to you?

KW: Yes.

LF: What?

KW: I think of literary fiction as being character-driven, and I also think of literary fiction as being concerned with the language, with the words on the page. I think of commercial fiction as being about story story story, with quality of language or narrative structure being of little consequence to the writing and of little interest to the reader.

LF: What part of writing is most interesting to you?

KW: I have never thought of writing in parts. I am not sure if you mean process (first drafts, outlines, writing the last pages the first time) or elements of a finished novel (character development, suspense, structure, imagery) or even the business side of it (writing a proposal, submitting a manuscript, getting a contract). ALL OF IT interests me. Which is to say, none of this fails to interest me.

LF: Do you love or hate the process of writing?

KW: Oh, both. Sometimes you write because the only thing — the only, only thing — even worse than writing is NOT writing. It's like chipping away in a mine with a bent teaspoon. But that's what you do.

LF: How has your occupation of writing affected you?

KW: I am sure that my daughters could answer this for you very thoroughly, re their childhoods, since I would be that mother who never made costumes for the school play and rarely volunteered for field trips, and so on. When you write you don't have a 9 to 5 job, you are always writing mentally even if not physically. Having a writer for a monther is having a mother who is not always present, even when she is present.

In other senses, being a writer has affected me in every moment of my waking life. Being that person on whom nothing is lost, taking James's famous advice to the young writer, comes naturally to me in the sense that I can be on a tedious line at Motor Vehicles and overhear something entirely worthwhile. Every random experience is potentially intriguing.

LF: What's the story of you and God?

KW: Not much of a story here. I suppose I would cautiously put up my hand for the agnostic group.

LF: What role has Judaism played in your life? Where does "Jewish" fall in your identity? The primary way you classify yourself or an incidental way?

KW: I come from a mixed background. My mother was a Warburg (my maternal grandfather was James P. Warburg) on one side and the daughter of an Episcopalian of British heritage on the other side (my maternal grandmother was the songwriter Kay Swift). My mother grew up with no awareness of her own Jewish identity whatsoever, despite being a Warburg in New York City, where we call the Jewish Museum The Jew Mu because we feel entitled to do so, since it was Uncle Felix's house.

My father was born in the back of a grocery store in Brooklyn in 1910, and was raised in an Orthodox household. So by some measures I am three-quarters Jewish, and I do feel like a Jew, most of the time, I have to say, except when JEWS TELL ME I AM NOT A JEW. Because of the matrilineal requirement. So here I am, with my Jewish relatives telling me I am Protestant, and my Protestant relatives telling me I am Jewish. This is where a novelist comes from, for sure. None of my Jewish identity is about belief so much as cultural heritage and identity. I certainly take this up in a major way in Triangle, which has now identifed me as a Jewish writer. You, for example, would probably not have come looking for me after reading The Music Lesson, my second novel, which features an Irish American Catholic woman embroiled with an IRA splinter group.

I am married to a Jewish man. One of our daughters identifies herself as Jewish and the other doesn't, though we certainly identified ourselves as Jews in their childhoods. We didn't belong to a temple, but we had an annual tradition of attending services at Yale Hillel, and we would usually storm out in the middle when the rabbi would make a statement about how being a Jew is remembering who your enemies are, and then we would drive home and discuss our outrage — so that is pretty the heritage of our family and how we honored the high holy days.

LF: Do all of your books have equal meaning to you or is one special and why?

KW: They each have certain meaning for me. I can't really pick one out and say this is the best, or this one is different. It really is like having four very different children. My four published novels are each very different, one from the other, which is the only way I know how to work. I cannot imagine tilling the same row finer and finer the way some writers do.

LF: How do you know when you've done good work?

KW: I feel it. I know it. I am a very critical reader. Most of what I read disappoints me, even though I am a very optimistic and generous reader. When I have written something that really succeeds — and I know how grandiose this sounds, but what the hell, I'll say it — it moves me.

LF: What have you sacrificed to be a writer?

KW: A certain amount of socializing, a loss of time spent on other pursuits, from tennis to gardening to travel to developing other sorts of skills….but ultimately, the greatest sacrifice of all, the thing you have to give up if you want to write? That would be not writing. You have to give up the not writing to get to the writing. It's hard to do, and for some people, tragically, it is impossible to do. I got a late start (my first novel was published the same year I turned 40) but I figured it out before it was too late.

LF: What do you do best and worst as a writer?

KW: What I do best as a writer? Oh, find the best reviews and unpolitic blurbs and see what the critics say. What do I do worst? I feel very unproductive and undisciplined. I think I do worst at just engaging with it, getting it done as thoroughly as I know in my heart I should be doing it. .

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

KW: My entire childhood was in effect several lifetimes worth of material for my sensibility as a novelist.

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

KW: An adult. Seriously. I couldn't wait. Now that I have been an adult all these years, I think I have a much clearer sense of the playful little child inside me who in fact helps me do my best work.

LF: Could you have a protagonist you hated?

KW: To a degree, yes, but not entirely. I have certainly featured characters who are not very sympathetic, from Victor the toeless, adulterous Auschwitz survivor in my first novel to the possessed, relentless feminist scholar Ruth Zion in Triangle. But they do have some redeeming features, in the end, and they are not the main characters.

LF: Do you ever have trouble entering and leaving your vivid fantasy world?

KW: Yes, in the sense that it is hard to return to quotidien needs and dinner time and going to the dentist and being with family members at certain moments in the flow of writing. This is why going off to write alone for two or three weeks at certain key moments in the writing of my novels has always been a really productive and sane thing to do.

LF: How has marriage/motherhood affected your writing?

KW: I am married to a writer, which is mostly a good thing for the writing, but sometimes we are both in the same place with our work and it's hard. I think being in the swim of life, being so deeply connected to other human beings in all these profound ways has given me far more insight into how people are than I could have ever imagined it on my own as a solitary disconnected writer in a garrett.

LF: What do you most want from your kids aside from their happiness?

KW: I want them to be people who give more to the world than they take from the world.

LF: You seem so serious in all of your pictures.

KW: I don't think I am so serious, really. I think you would find some sunnier, earlier author photos if you Google images, and on my website — for Triangle it just seemed wrong to be too lighthearted-looking, you know?

LF: Who is your husband?

KW: My husband is Nicholas Fox Weber. He is the author of the controversial biography of the painter Balthus (whose biggest secret was his Jewish background, by the way), Patron Saints, and many other books, mostly about the visual arts. His new book (out next year) is about Le Corbusier. And he runs the Albers Foundation.

The studio audience has come to judge a mother. Ayelet Waldman (b. December 11, 1964) steps onto the set of The Oprah Winfrey Show in the spring of 2005, and before she reaches her chair a woman rises in the seats and calls out, “Let me at her.”

The offense is an essay. Weeks earlier the New York Times had run a piece of hers in its Modern Love column under the headline “Truly, Madly, Guiltily.” In it Waldman wrote that she loved her husband more than she loved their four children. One sentence traveled faster than the argument around it: “I love my husband more than I love my children.” Strangers wrote to call her unfit. A few threatened to report her to child welfare. Now she sits under the lights in Chicago with a representative of the National Fatherhood Initiative across from her and a host who has called her brave, and she does the thing the room cannot forgive. She holds the position. She explains that a marriage outlasts the years of small children, that a mother who pours herself into her children and leaves nothing for her husband mistakes martyrdom for love, that she will not pretend otherwise to soothe an audience. Oprah Winfrey (b. 1954) treats her as courageous. The audience treats her as a confession in need of a verdict.

Waldman takes the private material other writers hide, marriage, maternal ambivalence, mental illness, drug use, political shame, and sets it on the page as the door into a public question. The method earns her readers and enemies in the same motion.

She was born in Jerusalem to North American Jewish parents and spent her early childhood in Israel. After the Six-Day War the family moved to Montreal, then to Rhode Island, and settled in Ridgewood, New Jersey. The household was secular and Labor Zionist. It taught Jewish culture and social justice more than Jewish observance, and both halves of that inheritance surface later, in her fiction and in her politics. She attended Hebrew school and Jewish summer camps and spent a year on a kibbutz in tenth grade.

She took degrees in psychology and government from Wesleyan University in 1986, with a year of study in Israel, and a law degree from Harvard in 1991, where she and Barack Obama (b. 1961) were classmates. She clerked for Judge Albert J. Engel on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, practiced corporate law in New York for a year, and then moved to California and became a federal public defender. For three years she represented poor defendants in federal court. The drug cases marked her. Mandatory minimums sent the people she defended to prison for terms out of all proportion to what they had done, and the arithmetic of that stayed with her. From 1997 to 2003 she taught at the law school at Berkeley, where she built courses on drug policy and criminal justice, and she consulted for the Drug Policy Alliance, a group that argues for drug law grounded in harm reduction.

She left the public defender’s office to stay home with her first child. The suburbs isolated her. A woman who had argued in federal court now spent her days on playgrounds, and she found the scholarly writing open to a law professor dull and the domestic role a poor fit for her temperament. She turned the problem into comedy. The result was the Mommy-Track Mysteries, a series whose heroine, Juliet Applebaum, is a former public defender turned stay-at-home mother who solves murders between school runs. Nursery Crimes (2000) opened the series, and The Big Nap, A Playdate with Death, Death Gets a Time-Out, Murder Plays House, The Cradle Robbers, and Bye-Bye, Black Sheep followed through 2006. The books wear the mystery genre lightly. Underneath they work the same ground as her essays: marriage, female friendship, professional identity, and the gap between what a mother feels and what a mother is permitted to say she feels. Applebaum shares Waldman’s law degree, her Judaism, and her impatience with the rules of suburban motherhood.

Her standalone novels widened the range. Daughter’s Keeper (2003) drew on her years defending drug offenders and followed a young woman caught in the federal narcotics system. Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (2006) told the story of a lawyer undone by the death of her infant daughter and the stepmother she struggles to become; the film adaptation, The Other Woman (2009), starred Natalie Portman (b. 1981). Red Hook Road (2010) traced two families through the years after a wedding-day catastrophe on the coast of Maine. Love and Treasure (2014) braided the history of the Hungarian Gold Train into a contemporary family story and turned her toward inherited memory and the long reach of the Holocaust. In May 2026 she returned to fiction with A Perfect Hand, a Victorian upstairs-downstairs novel. Alice Lockey, a tenant farmer’s daughter who has climbed to the rank of lady’s maid at a great estate, falls for Charlie Wells, a valet in another house. The two can be together only if their employers marry, so they set out to push two people who despise each other into love. The title carries the double sense Waldman intended: a hand offered in marriage, and the Victorian ideal of a lady’s hand, white and soft and innocent of labor. Reviewers read the book as a send-up of the marriage plot with a suffragist turn, a comedy of manners that hides a purpose under its crinolines.

The Modern Love essay began as “Motherlove,” written for an anthology she expected almost no one to read. Reprinted in the Times, it drew vitriol, threats, and the summons to Oprah’s couch. Rather than retreat, Waldman expanded the argument into a memoir, Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (2009), a Times bestseller and a defining book of the mommy wars of the late 2000s. The memoir takes apart maternal guilt, the cult of perfection, miscarriage, sex, work, and the standards women hold against themselves and each other. It made her one of the essayists people argued about at the school gate.

She has also written about her own mind. Diagnosed with bipolar II disorder in 2002, an illness that runs in her family, she has described the work of holding a career and a household together while managing her moods. A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood (2017) records a month she spent taking tiny doses of LSD to treat depression and anxiety. She wove the personal diary together with the science of psychedelics and the legal history that made the drug illegal. She did not present her month as evidence and argued instead for the research that might produce it. The book helped move microdosing from the margins into ordinary conversation and arrived as the broader reassessment of psychedelic medicine was gathering force.

Her work as an editor points in one direction: the people the law forgets. With Robin Levi she edited Inside Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons (2011), an oral history of incarcerated women. With her husband, the novelist Michael Chabon (b. 1963), she edited Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation (2017), an anthology of international writers who toured the West Bank with the Israeli veterans’ group Breaking the Silence. The two went on to edit Fight of the Century (2020). Civil liberties and human rights run through the editing the way harm reduction runs through the early law career.

Television became a second career. She co-developed and produced the Netflix limited series Unbelievable (2019), drawn from the Pulitzer-winning investigation into a serial rapist and the police failures that let him go. The series won a Peabody and gathered Emmy, Golden Globe, and Critics Choice nominations. She and Chabon also worked on the first season of Star Trek: Picard, where she served as a producer and co-wrote an episode. On the strength of that work the couple signed an overall deal with CBS Television Studios in 2019 through their company, Treehouse Pictures, and turned to adapting Chabon’s own novels for the screen.

Jewish identity sits at the center of the writing, approached from the secular and liberal side of the tradition she was raised in. Her protagonists negotiate history, memory, and belonging without the anchor of religious practice. Her relationship to Israel is personal and loud. She was born there, and she has spent years on the dovish edge of the argument about the country, pressing for Palestinian rights and against the occupation.

On a Friday morning during Passover in 2024, that argument put her on a road near the Erez Crossing at the northern edge of Gaza. She wears white. She carries a white flag in one hand and a bag of rice on her shoulder. Around her a group of American and Israeli rabbis sing in Hebrew. They have come with Rabbis for Ceasefire, and they know the crossing is shut to them. They have come to be seen. The banner among them carries a line from the Passover Haggadah, the one that runs let all who are hungry come and eat. A police officer steps into her path and tells her to stop. She moves around him. He blocks her again. She keeps walking. Somewhere with a phone in his hand her husband films and posts the video, and writes that this is what Judaism teaches. By Shabbat the police have released two of the Americans. Waldman is still in a cell in Ashkelon. The state of her birth has arrested her for carrying rice toward a famine while singing its scripture back at it.

The two scenes rhyme. In 2005 she said a thing mothers are not supposed to say and did not take it back. In 2024 she carried rice toward a closed border and did not turn around. The subject changes from a marriage to a war. The posture holds.

She lives in a 1907 Craftsman house in the Elmwood district of Berkeley with Chabon, whom she married in 1993, and they raised four children there. They work from one office in the backyard, edit each other’s pages, and walk the neighborhood to talk through plots. His fiction reaches for myth and genre. Hers stays close to the autobiographical, the legal, the clinical, the political. Together they form one of the more visible literary partnerships in the country. What unites the lawyer, the novelist, the memoirist, and the woman with the bag of rice is a single conviction worked out over thirty years: that the suffering of strangers, the prisoner under a mandatory minimum, the mother no one will let speak, the child in Gaza, is a private person’s business, and that saying so out loud is worth the cost it brings.

The Confessor: Ayelet Waldman and the Many Meanings of Honest

The house is a 1907 Craftsman in the Elmwood district of Berkeley, and in the first years there is a baby in it and a woman who used to argue in federal court. The law degree sits in a box. The diaper bag waits by the door. At the playground the other mothers ask her what she does, and she says she is home with the baby, and she hears the sentence close over her. She is a good mother. By the measure she has lived by, she is also no longer there.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued in The Denial of Death (1973) that a person builds a hero system to stand against two terrors, the terror of death and the terror of counting for nothing. The hero system is the set of beliefs and tasks that lets a person feel he has earned a place in a scheme larger than his own short life, that his days leave a mark the grave does not erase. Most of the time the second terror hides inside the first. We fear death, and under that fear we fear we will have been nothing. For the woman in the Berkeley house the terror comes early and wears a particular face. Not the body’s end. The self’s. The dread of dissolving into the role, of waking one morning to find the person gone and only the mother left, fed and competent and erased.

Her hero system answers that dread with one instrument. Honesty as exposure, the public naming of the true thing the tribe has agreed to leave unsaid. To be seen, in the shameful particular, is to survive the role. The witnessed self does not vanish. This is the engine under everything Ayelet Waldman has written.

She came to it by subtraction. The household she grew up in had already taken God out of Judaism and kept the rest, the peoplehood and the social justice and the holidays drained of the supernatural. Truth in that house was not handed down from Sinai. It was argued toward, secular and moral and human. Waldman took the subtraction further. She removed the maternal ideal, the image of the mother whose love is total and self-erasing, and named it a confinement. She removed the shame around the broken mind and the illegal drug. What she kept was the conviction that a person earns her existence by telling the truth that costs her something.

The founding act came in 2005. She wrote that she loved her husband more than she loved their four children, and that the mother who disappears into her children has mistaken a kind of death for a kind of love. “I love my husband more than I love my children.” The sentence traveled faster than the argument. Strangers called her unfit. A few threatened to report her to the authorities. She did not take it back. She walked onto a talk-show set and held the line while a woman in the audience rose and offered to get at her. Then she did it again, at length, in the memoir Bad Mother (2009), and again with her diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and again in A Really Good Day (2017), the record of a month she spent microdosing LSD against her own depression. Each book is the same act. She takes the private fact the room has agreed to hide, sets it on the table, and takes the blow, and the blow is the proof that she is still there.

So honesty, for Waldman, is heroism. It is how a person refuses the extinction of the role and earns a self that outlives her, in the work and in the widened permission she leaves behind, the next woman who now gets to say the thing.

Here is the trouble. The word she has built her life on is sacred in a hundred other hero systems, and in most of them it means something she would not recognize, and in several it names the opposite of what she does.

Walk onto the oncology ward where a palliative physician keeps her rounds. She knows the chart to the week. In the corridor a daughter takes her sleeve and asks how long, and the physician gives a true range and leaves the worst number in her pocket, because the patient cannot carry it today and tomorrow there will be a better hour to set it down. Her honesty is calibration. She meters the truth to what a dying man can hold, and the withholding is the care, not a lapse in it. Her significance comes from standing steady at the edge and easing the passage. To her, a writer who empties the whole truth onto whoever is in the room has confused honesty with appetite.

Cross the city to a study hall where a rosh yeshiva bends over a page of Gemara with two students, working a line that men have argued for fifteen hundred years. For him truth, emet, is the seal of God, and the honest man is the one who carries what he received without bending it to his own vanity, who adds his small link to a chain that runs back past memory and forward past his death. His immortality is the chain. He beats the grave by faithful carrying. The self is not the subject. The self that pushes forward to be seen is a distraction, at the edge of a sin. To him a woman who sells the inside of her marriage to strangers for the price of a byline has taken something holy and made it cheap, and has called the cheapening honesty. The charge is serious, and it is not stupid, and Waldman’s hero system gives her no good way to hear it.

Sit across from a case officer in a safe house with the blinds drawn. He has lied to his neighbors for thirty years about what he does. He has run sources who could die if he ever said the true thing to the wrong man. His honesty is loyalty, reliability inside the service, the kept secret, the promise to the agent that he will not give him up. In the only court he answers to, he is an honest man, and the confession Waldman treats as courage is to him the one unforgivable act, the leak that gets people killed. He earns his place by guarding what must never be said.

Stand at the back of a morbidity and mortality conference where a trauma surgeon walks his peers through the night he lost a man on the table. The room is merciless. Nobody saves anybody’s face. Show us the decision, they say, and he shows them, every wrong turn, because the honesty owed to the others who hold the knife is total and cold. Two hours later he stands in a waiting room with a different family and a different voice, composed, reassuring, holding back what they cannot use. Two honesties in one man, divided by a door. He earns his significance by mastery and by the judgment of those who can judge the work. The public confession might strike him as spilling the candor of the conference onto people who have no use for it and no way to bear it.

And there is the old judge who keeps the robe and the kept word and the level face, who holds that the honest man is the constant one, whose outside can be relied on and whose inner weather is nobody’s business. To parade the private turmoil is to him a loss of the composure the office demands, a small surrender of dignity. He beats death by leaving a name no one can stain.

Five rooms, five honesties, and the word names a different duty in each. For the physician it is mercy in the dosing of fact. For the scholar it is humility before what was received. For the officer it is the secret kept. For the surgeon it is candor gated to those who can use it. For the judge it is constancy of mask. Waldman’s honesty, exposure as the path to a self that survives, makes sense only inside a hero system where the self is the sacred thing, the role is the enemy, and a person stays alive by being seen. Carry that honesty into the study hall or the safe house and it reads as vanity, or betrayal, or cruelty. Becker’s point was that each hero system looks, from the inside, like plain reality, and the others look like illusion or vice. The sacred word does not settle the argument. It tells you which room you are standing in.

Waldman knows part of this. Her clarity about what her honesty costs her runs high. She named herself the bad mother before anyone else could. She courts the blow and counts it as the price of staying real. What her system hides from her is the honesty of the rooms that hold their tongues. She tends to read the keeper of the necessary silence as a coward or a hypocrite, the mother who will not say the forbidden thing as repressed, the community that will not take the Gaza claim inside itself as morally asleep. The frame that saves her cannot register that a silence might be a discipline, a mercy, a fidelity, its own kind of true. That is the blind spot built into the gift. The instrument that keeps her from vanishing also keeps her from hearing the people for whom vanishing into something larger is the whole point.

The hero is the confessor, the woman who keeps the self from dissolving by saying out loud the thing the room has agreed to bury, and by standing in the blast that follows, because the blast is the proof that she is still here.

The rival she fights without naming is not one person but a crowd of them, the keepers of the necessary silence, every hero system for which honesty means knowing the true thing and holding it: the physician, the scholar, the officer, the surgeon, the judge. She has spent her life arguing against silence, and she has never quite conceded that some of the silences are honest too.

The cost the ledger cannot price is the people she loves did not all agree to be material. She stays a person by making them visible, the husband, the children, the marriage, set on the table so the woman in the Berkeley house will not disappear. The privacy she spends to keep her self is not only hers to spend. She earned her existence by telling the truth. The truth was, in part, theirs.

The Great Delusion

If John J. Mearsheimer is right in his anthropology, the literary and essayistic project of Ayelet Waldman undergoes a major shift from a narrative of progressive individual liberation to a case study in institutional compliance and tribal policing.
Waldman built her public profile as an essayist and novelist by challenging the social boundaries of marriage, mental health, and motherhood. In her essay collection Bad Mother and her memoir A Really Good Day, she relies on a model of radical honesty and individualistic therapeutic exploration. She treats the self as an independent agent that can dismantle artificial social expectations through sheer transparency, public discourse, and personal experimentation.
Mearsheimer’s realism suggests that this framework misses the actual logic governing her work. If humans are social beings shaped entirely by early socialization for the sake of survival, Waldman’s writing does not liberate her from her group’s constraints; it is an artifact of her specific tribe’s internal enforcement mechanism.
First, the “mommy wars” and competitive parenting cultures Waldman critiques in Bad Mother are not random, neurotic choices made by isolated women. They represent the fierce, protective logic of the tribe. Mearsheimer emphasizes that the primary reason for our social nature is survival, and that socialization matters because humans have a long childhood requiring intense protection and value infusion. The rigid social codes governing modern motherhood—and the intense peer pressure Waldman calls the “Bad Mother police”—are simply the mechanisms a group uses to ensure its young are properly socialized into the tribe’s values. When Waldman rebels against these standards in print, she is not operating as a lone wolf; she is playing a predefined role within a highly articulate, self-reflective professional class that uses public confession as a tool to establish its own status.
Second, Waldman’s advocacy and legal writing—informed by her background as a public defender and her critique of the War on Drugs in books like Daughter’s Keeper—assume a liberal universalist framework. Her writing often appeals to individual human rights and systemic reform. Under Mearsheimer’s framework, political liberalism and its obsession with inalienable rights are ideologies that downplay human tribalism. The laws, mandatory minimum sentences, and state policies Waldman fights against are not mere logical errors that can be solved with better arguments. They are the instruments used by dominant social coalitions to maintain order and protect their own group interests. By framing these struggles around individual rights rather than competing group power, her work obscures the raw clash of tribal interests inherent in the justice system.
Third, the therapeutic individualization found in A Really Good Day—where personal mood, marriage, and well-being are managed through precise, self-directed intervention—collapses under a realist lens. If a person’s moral code and identity are pre-loaded during childhood, a man cannot achieve autonomy through a change in internal chemistry or personal perspective. Meaning and stability remain tethered to one’s position within the social group. The relief readers feel when Waldman expresses taboo thoughts is not an act of individual liberation. It is the relief of discovering a sub-tribe of like-minded peers, reinforcing group solidarity rather than achieving individual autonomy.
If Mearsheimer is right, Waldman is not an independent iconoclast breaking free from societal chains. She is an eloquent chronicler of the intense friction that occurs when an individual attempts to negotiate his place within a highly demanding social structure, demonstrating that even our most intimate rebellions are bounded by the logic of the group that produced us.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

If David Pinsof is right, the work of essayist and novelist Ayelet Waldman explores evolutionary strategy masked as honesty. In her essays on marriage and motherhood, such as Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Misdemeanors, and Occasional Moments of Grace, Waldman shocks the public by confessing that she loves her husband more than her children, and by detailing her domestic frustrations. Literary critics view these confessions as an attempt to shatter taboos and relieve mothers of societal expectations.

Pinsof’s thesis suggests that Waldman does not reveal a psychological flaw. She navigates a competitive landscape. In elite circles, public vulnerability and shocking confessions function as a path to status. By subverting the traditional maternal script, Waldman differentiates herself from ordinary mothers. Her self-deprecation serves as a signal of her position. She possesses the social security to flag her deviations from conventional norms without risking social exile.

In her memoir A Really Good Day, Waldman details her use of substances to manage her mood. Under Pinsof’s framework, the focus on fixing internal chemistry to achieve domestic harmony obscures Darwinian logic. The pursuit of a stable mood serves as a tool to maximize fitness and sustain her position within a demanding social marketplace. Her writing converts self-serving domestic negotiations into a project of self-improvement, providing intellectuals with a vocabulary to justify their behavior.

The logic of Pinsof’s essay reconfigures the entire ecosystem of elite literary confession. When writers like Waldman and Weber peel back the curtain on family pathologies, domestic misery, or personal failures, mainstream culture celebrates them for their courage and radical honesty. The assumption is that by exposing these dark corners, they help dismantle oppressive social expectations and heal collective wounds.

If Pinsof is right, this transparency is a competitive maneuver within an elite peer group.

In high-status creative and academic circles, standard moral signaling—pretending to be a perfect parent, a flawless spouse, or a perfectly balanced person—carries little currency because it is common. True elite status requires a more sophisticated play. By publicly declaring her maternal transgressions or marital resentments, Waldman establishes a monopoly on authenticity. She gains status not by being good, but by being the most willing to weaponize her own vulnerability.

This strategy relies on a secure position within the hierarchy. A low-status woman cannot publish an essay confessing she loves her husband more than her children, or detailing her domestic rage, without risking actual social exile, investigation, or community shunning. Waldman can execute this strategy because her Harvard law degree and her marriage to a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist provide immense structural security. Her confessions do not challenge her status; they certify it. The act of self-deprecation becomes an aristocratic luxury, a way of signaling that she is so secure in her social tier that the standard rules of respectable presentation do not apply to her.

The primary misunderstanding of the confessional memoir is that it aims to liberate the reader or heal the writer. Under the evolutionary frame, the confessional memoir is a weapon used to outmaneuver rivals in the attention economy. It converts private domestic transactions into public intellectual authority, proving that in elite hierarchies, even our flaws can be leveraged for dominance.

Sacred Value

David Pinsof writes:

Sacred value. A cover story for status-seeking designed to prevent a status game from collapsing. We deny we’re seeking dominance or superiority and instead pretend that we’re seeking honor, wisdom, beauty, authenticity, self-actualization, equality, morality, or the betterment of humankind.

Waldman builds her most influential work by exposing how intensive parenting functions as a cover story for status competition. Pinsof defines a sacred value as a narrative used to deny that people seek dominance, allowing them to pretend they only seek authenticity, morality, or the betterment of humankind.
This mechanism is the core target of her nonfiction. In her essay collection, Bad Mother, she deconstructs the ideal of the perfect, self-sacrificing mother. She argues that modern parenting standards are not about the welfare of children. Instead, these standards serve as a competitive arena where parents judge each other to secure moral superiority. By admitting public taboos, such as loving her husband more than her children, she forces the hidden status game into the open.
Her fiction operates on a similar logic. In her Mommy-Track mystery series, including Nursery Crimes, the humor and conflict come from the contrast between progressive, elite ideals and the raw anxieties of the characters. The mothers in her stories use hyper-vigilant parenting to signal their class position and intelligence. When a community treats parenting as a sacred duty rather than a practical task, it transforms cooperation into a fierce, unacknowledged hierarchy. Waldman uses her prose to strip away the noble justifications, revealing the status anxiety that drives domestic life.
Waldman relies on the disruption of sacred values to create her best work. In the elite literary and professional circles she inhabits, certain topics are treated as beyond critique. By targeting these areas, she exposes the status games underneath.
Her memoir A Really Good Day applies this method to the War on Drugs. Waldman, a former federal public defender and law professor, uses her experience to examine the legal and social hypocrisy surrounding controlled substances. The legal framework treats drug prohibition as a sacred moral crusade to protect society. Waldman strips away that narrative by detailing her own use of microdosed LSD to treat her mood disorder. She shows how class position protects elite professionals who use illegal substances while the legal system prosecutes poor and minority communities for the same behavior. The book works by showing that the sacred value of drug prohibition is a tool for maintaining social hierarchies.
Her fiction shows this same preoccupation with status anxiety masked as virtue. In her novel Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, she tracks a woman navigating the social landscape of Manhattan stepmothers and ex-wives. The conflict comes from the way the characters use progressive ideals and psychological jargon to justify petty social warfare and secure dominance.
By forcing status games into the open, Waldman often triggers a status game collapse among her readers. When she publicly declared her preferences, she anticipated that people would view her as self-absorbed. Her career demonstrates that exposing a sacred value is an effective way to generate narrative tension, even if it makes the author a target for collective outrage.

Watergate as Democratic Ritual & Cultural Trauma

In the spring of 2005 a woman rises in the audience of a Chicago talk show and calls out that she wants to get at Ayelet Waldman. The cause is a sentence. Waldman had written in the New York Times that she loved her husband more than she loved their four children, and that a mother who pours herself into her children until nothing is left mistakes martyrdom for love. The room has come for a verdict. Oprah Winfrey calls her brave. A representative of the National Fatherhood Initiative sits across from her with the case for the other side. The audience treats the woman under the lights as a confession in need of judgment.

Yale sociologist Jeffrey C. Alexander (b. 1947) gives us the tools to see what the room is doing. In his reading of public life, a society runs on a code, a structured set of oppositions that sorts people, motives, relations, and institutions into the pure and the impure, the sacred and the profane. The pure motive is autonomous, rational, calm, realistic, self-governing. The impure motive is dependent, irrational, hysterical, distorted, mad. Pure relations are open, truthful, deliberative, trusting. Impure relations are secret, calculating, deceitful, conspiratorial. Pure institutions run on law, office, and equality. Impure ones run on arbitrary power, personal loyalty, and faction. The civil sphere is the place where these codes get applied, where solidarity widens to take in a new group or narrows to cast one out. Alexander showed in his study of Watergate that the facts of an event do not announce their own meaning. The break-in sat inert for two years, just politics, until the context shifted and the same facts turned sacred. Watergate had to be told by society before it could pollute a president. Scandal, and standing, come from symbolic work.

This is the engine that runs under Waldman’s career. She specializes in one operation. She takes a person the code has placed on the impure side, the ambivalent mother, the woman with a mood disorder, the drug user, the disbelieved rape victim, the prisoner, the Palestinian under siege, and she does the symbolic work to move that person toward the pure side, to widen the circle of who counts. The method draws the counter-move every time. The side she challenges recodes her as the threat, and the candor that is her instrument reads, to that side, as the impure motive: exhibitionist, selfish, unstable, disloyal. She lives on the boundary she keeps trying to move.

The good mother is a sacred civil category, and Waldman knew it when she profaned it. Her claim was not careless. She offered the all-consuming mother, the woman whose self dissolves into her children, as the distorted figure, the one who has lost her autonomy and calls the loss virtue. She placed her own marriage, her own preserved self, on the side of the realistic and the alive. The backlash answered in the grammar Alexander describes. Strangers coded her as the impure motive, unnatural, mad, a danger to her own children. Some threatened to report her to child welfare, which is the move to bring institutional social control down on a polluted actor. The talk show is the ritual arena where the community examines the deviant in public, and the woman who stands and shouts is the community policing its own sacred edge. Waldman’s counter-coding ran along the relational axis. She cast herself as truthful and straightforward against a culture she charged with performance and pretense, mothers saying the sanctioned thing while feeling the forbidden one. The mommy wars of the late 2000s were a civil-sphere contest over which maternal motive gets to be pure.

She turned the single essay into a campaign. The memoir Bad Mother made her a carrier group of one for a recoding of motherhood, an agent trying to broadcast a claim to a wider public and pull other women inside it, the ones who felt what they had learned not to say. The argument climbed the levels Alexander lays out. It began as a goal, defend the essay. It rose to a norm, mothers should be allowed candor about ambivalence. It reached for a value, the autonomous self stays sacred even inside the mother. That climb, from interest to norm to ultimate commitment, is what Alexander calls generalization, and it is the move that turns a private quarrel into a public morality.

Her own mind became another field for the same work. Waldman has written about her bipolar II disorder, diagnosed in 2002, and in A Really Good Day she recorded a month of taking tiny doses of LSD against depression and anxiety. The code places the mentally ill and the drug user on the impure side, irrational, dependent, out of control. Waldman wrote to move them. She presented herself as the governed and the rational one, a person managing her illness with evidence and care, and she wove the personal diary together with the science and the legal history so that the reader met a competent self where the code expects a damaged one. She did not call her month proof. She argued for the research that might produce it. The book is civil repair of a stigmatized identity, an attempt to bring the medicated and the diagnosed into the circle of the trustworthy.

The thread runs back to the law. For three years she was a federal public defender, and the drug cases marked her. The prisoner under a mandatory minimum is coded a criminal, placed outside, and Waldman spent her early career arguing that the disproportion was the impure thing, that arbitrary power and not the defendant was the offense against civil order. Her work as an editor carries the same intent. With Robin Levi she edited Inside This Place, Not of It (2011), which gives the polluted figure of the female prisoner a voice the code denies her. With her husband, the novelist Michael Chabon, she edited Kingdom of Olives, in which international writers report from the West Bank, and Fight of the Century (2020), essays on the Trump presidency and the rights it tested. Each book is an attempt to make a marginalized group’s injury legible as a civil injury, to widen the boundary of the we.

Unbelievable is her case of civil repair. The Netflix series she co-developed and produced draws on the reported investigation into a young woman whose account of rape the police disbelieved. The first act pollutes the victim. She is coded along the impure motive axis, inconsistent, unreliable, hysterical, a liar, and the institution that doubts her, the police, enacts the pollution by charging her with false reporting. The series reverses the coding. It restores the victim to the pure side, truthful, sane, wronged, and it moves the failure onto the institution, careless and arbitrary where it should have been impartial and competent. The two female detectives who solve the case embody the pure institutional code, office exercised under rule and evidence rather than hunch and prejudice. In Alexander’s terms the series is a trauma claim that lands. The wider audience comes to identify with the woman it had been taught to doubt, and the Peabody and the Emmy nominations are the civil sphere ratifying the repair. The aesthetic arena, the place Alexander says trauma gets channeled into genres that produce identification and catharsis, did the work that the courtroom had refused.

The protest at the Erez Crossing is the hardest case. On a Friday morning during Passover in 2024 Waldman walked toward the crossing on the northern edge of Gaza dressed in white, a white flag in one hand and a bag of rice on her shoulder, while a group of American and Israeli rabbis sang in Hebrew around her. They came with Rabbis for Ceasefire. They knew the border was shut. They came to be seen. The banner carried the line from the Haggadah, let all who are hungry come and eat. An officer stepped into her path and told her to stop. She moved around him and kept walking. The police held her overnight in a cell in Ashkelon and then released her. Chabon posted the video and wrote that this was what Judaism teaches, justice and mercy and liberation.

Read through Alexander, the protest is a trauma claim staged in symbols and addressed to a fragmented public, and it can be tracked through the four representations his account requires. The nature of the pain is the famine pressing on Gaza. The nature of the victim is the Palestinian population the group named in the millions. The attribution of responsibility falls on the Israeli state. The fourth representation, the relation of the victim to the wider audience, is where everything turns, and where the work is hardest. Alexander writes that an audience will only take a distant group’s suffering inside its own identity if the victim is shown in terms the audience already holds sacred. So Waldman and the rabbis reached for the most sacred resources their own community owns. The white, the rice, the Passover text, the vocabulary of liberation. They tried to code the protest with the purest terms in Jewish life and to push the siege onto the impure side, starvation as a weapon, power without restraint. The Israeli state coded back. It placed her on the impure side, the lawbreaker, the naive sympathizer, and it brought institutional social control to bear, the officer, the arrest, the night in Ashkelon, all of it the apparatus a center uses against an actor it has marked as polluting.

Alexander insists that these processes are contingent and never automatic, that ritual and repair succeed only when consensus, carrier groups, and persuasive broadcast align, and that the alignment is rare. The Erez claim ran straight into the most defended boundary in Waldman’s own community, the line that separates the Jewish-Israeli survival group from those it treats as enemies. To widen the circle across that line, she had to ask an audience to take the suffering of the enemy inside its own identity at the moment the audience felt most under threat. Most of that audience refused, and read the recoding as pollution of the self. The same act that Waldman framed as the purest expression of her tradition struck much of her tradition as betrayal. A carrier group cannot broadcast a claim that the audience experiences as an attack on its own existence. The protest reached the smaller public already disposed to hear it and bounced off the larger one. Alexander would not call this a failure of the cause. He would call it the ordinary fate of repair work attempted against a boundary the audience guards with its life.

One operation, then, across thirty years and every arena. The mother, the patient, the addict, the prisoner, the disbelieved woman, the people behind the wall. Waldman finds the figure the code has cast out and performs the symbolic work to bring it back in, and each time the boundary she pushes pushes back and marks her. Her standing in any one of these fights has never come from the brute facts of what she wrote or carried. It came from the contest over how those facts would be told, who would be placed on which side, whose suffering the audience would agree to share. Alexander ended his account of Watergate with a line that fits her life: scandals are not born, they are made. So are reputations, and so is solidarity. Waldman has spent her career trying to make the circle of the we a little larger, and paying, each time, the price the code exacts from anyone who moves its lines.

The Advocate: A Reading of Ayelet Waldman

It looked like a confession. In 2005 Ayelet Waldman told the readers of the New York Times that she loved her husband more than she loved her children, and the country read it as a woman blurting a shameful private fact and then refusing to be sorry. It was an opening statement. Waldman trained as a lawyer, and she has never left the courtroom. She works by the rules of advocacy, and her lifelong subject, under the marriages and the mothers and the murders, is one question. Who gets believed.

Before the books there was the work. For three years Waldman was a federal public defender in California, which made her job to stand next to people the system had already discredited and force a jury to hear them. The drug cases taught the lesson that runs through everything after. The law had decided in advance what her clients were worth and how much of their account it would credit, and the mandatory minimums made the verdict before the trial. She spent her twenties learning that credibility is distributed before the facts arrive, that some witnesses start at zero, and that the work of the advocate is to move a discredited person back toward the benefit of the doubt. She left the office to raise a child and carried the training with her to the page.

Look at what she writes about. The first novels gave her Juliet Applebaum, the discounted suburban mother whom everyone underestimates and who turns out to be right, who sees what the police miss. Daughter’s Keeper (2003) put a young woman inside the drug machine that refuses to hear her. Inside This Place, Not of It (2011), the oral history she edited with Robin Levi, hands the microphone to incarcerated women, the most thoroughly disbelieved witnesses in the country. A Really Good Day (2017) took up two figures whose testimony about their own minds gets thrown out before it is heard, the woman with a mood disorder and the user of an illegal drug, and built a careful evidentiary case that this particular witness should be trusted about her own experience. And the clearest instance is the one she chose rather than wrote. Unbelievable (2019), the series she developed and produced, tells the story of a young woman who reports a rape, is disbelieved by the police, is charged with lying, and is vindicated only when a detective in another state catches the man. The discredited witness, restored. Of all the stories Waldman might have brought to television, she reached for that one. The selection is the tell.

Her own books work the same brief on her own behalf. The 2005 essay and the memoir that grew from it, Bad Mother (2009), put Waldman herself in the dock as a witness whose testimony the culture refuses to admit. The charge is that no real mother feels what she says she feels, that she is therefore either lying or unfit, and the threats to report her to child welfare were an attempt to strip her of standing as a mother in the most literal way the law allows. Her answer is the answer of a defense attorney who has decided the best defense is to take the stand. She insists on the truth of her own interior account against a jury primed to rule it impossible.

The method is courtroom method. A trial lawyer learns to draw the sting, to front the damaging fact before the other side can wield it, to say the worst thing about your client first and in your own framing. Waldman names herself the bad mother before anyone else can pin the label. She concedes the LSD in the title. She states the ranking of husband over children flat, in the first lines, so that the rest of the piece argues the mitigation and the context. The reader is the jury. The shock is the opening move that seizes the frame. What reads as a woman unable to keep a secret is a litigator who has decided which facts to stipulate and which to contest, and who knows that the side that defines the question usually wins it.

Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) drew a line, in Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), between two virtues that look alike. Sincerity is the match between what you say and what you feel, a public good, the avoidance of the lie. Authenticity is the harder thing, fidelity to a self that lies beneath the roles society hands you, the self that the role of mother or wife or patient threatens to bury. Waldman’s whole project is a bid for authenticity, the person held up against the role, and her instrument is radical sincerity, the refusal to soften the avowal. But Trilling saw the trap, and Waldman is caught in it. Authenticity, once it is performed in public and rewarded, becomes a role of its own. The bad mother hardens into a brand, a position she must keep occupying, a persona with a market. The self advertised as unmasked puts on a new mask, the mask of the woman who has no mask. The advocate for her own inner life ends up representing a client who is partly a construction, the public Ayelet Waldman, and the line between the witness and the character she plays on the stand grows hard to find.

This is where the formation that gave her everything also costs her. Three things follow from running your life as a case.

An advocate needs evidence, and the evidence is the people she loves. The husband, the children, the marriage, the miscarriage, the moods, all of it gets entered into the record because the brief requires it. They did not all agree to be exhibits. She stays a visible self by making them visible, and the privacy she spends to win her verdict is not only hers to spend.

The adversarial frame manufactures opponents. A courtroom has two sides, and a writer who casts the reader as a jury casts the culture as opposing counsel. That guarantees the backlash she then treats as proof she struck a nerve. It also tempts her to read every disagreement as the prosecution, to flatten the mother who simply feels differently into a hostile witness, to hear the community that will not accept her claim about Gaza as a jury that has been tampered with rather than one that holds another view in good faith. The lawyer’s gift for building a case can dull the ear for the case on the other side.

And the deepest cost is the hunger for a verdict. A trial ends in a finding. Life mostly does not. Some of the questions Waldman litigates have no judgment to hand down. Whether a mother should rank her husband first, whether the self survives the role, what a Jew owes to the suffering on the far side of a wall, these are conditions to be lived inside, not cases to be won. The training that lets her seize a frame and press it to a conclusion can crowd out the other thing a writer can do, which is to sit in the question without arguing, to be uncertain in public, to let a contradiction stand. Waldman is superb at making the case. She is less practiced at the harder art of having no case to make.

Waldman is an advocate, formed in the years she spent moving discredited people back toward belief, who turned the courtroom into a method and her life into a file. She has spent thirty years asking a single question on behalf of the underestimated mother, the doubted patient, the disbelieved victim, the prisoner, and herself. Who gets believed. The question that remains, the one her training gives her the most trouble with, is what she is like in the rare hour when there is no jury in the room and nothing to win.

Novelist Ayelet Waldman – Daughter's Keeper, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

* Do you ever struggle with the constraints of monogamy? Do your happily married friends? Is monogamy a precondition for a happy marriage? Can one or both parties screw around and the marriage still be good? Even if one is honest, can one, married or single, screw around without wreaking damage? Is there a cosmic significance to intercourse?

No, I don't. I'm in love with my husband, he's in love with me, and neither of us has any interest in a relationship with anyone else. That's what works for us, I imagine any number of different rules might apply to other people's marriages.

* What were your keenest dreams for your life when you were a kid? How many of them have you fulfilled?

I wanted to be an actress. A Broadway star. I would say that that has not worked out at all.

* What crowd did you hang out with in highschool?

Mostly, I had no crowd. I was one of those girls huddled alone in the lunchroom picking spinach out of their braces. Then, once I reached a certain age, I got involved with the theater company, and found a home in that particular group of delightful misfits.

* Do you find your work therapeutic? If so, which part of your work?

When work is going well, it is the most exciting, fun thing in my life. It makes me happy. When it's not going well, but I still manage to get 1000 or 1500 words in a day, I feel a sense of accomplishment that eases my day. When I don't work, I'm a nightmare to be around.

* Do you ever feel keen jealousy of other writers, including your husband? If so, who? Why?

Of other writers, sure. Writers are a squirrely lot who generally endorse the Oscar Wilde prescription for happiness. It is not enough that I succeed, my friends must also fail. So sure, I get jealous when some hot new writer sells a million copies of a book or debuts on the front cover of the book review. I feel absolutely no jealousy toward my husband. It would be ludicrious to. He is one of the finest writers in the English language of the last hundred years. People will be reading Michael long after the rest of his contemporaries have moldered into dust on the shelves of the library of Congress. If I'm jealous of anything, it's only of his genious.

* What's the story of you and God? What role does Judaism play in your life? Do you believe yourself chosen by God for something? If so, what? What do you find inspiring/depressing about Jewish life?

I don't spend much time thinking about God.Judaism permeates my life, but not necessarily religiously, more because of family, tradition, etc. What depresses me? Opening the newspaper. Israel depresses me.

* Which is more important to you? Writing a great novel or having a great marriage? (Many of the single female writers I interviewed got angry at that question.)

Blech.

* 'Literary' often seems to be a code word for the genre of despair. Are there forces that push our best writers to despair as their theme? Is it cool (among literary writers) to be alienated and despairing? If a despairing book contributes to somebody's suicide, is the author partially on the hook? Do you ever view books as moral or immoral (DeSade or Nabokov's Lolita)?

Sure a book can be immoral — certainly not Lolita, and probably not DeSade ( haven't read him) — but if a book, say, contains specific instructions on how to lure small children to their death, then it would be immoral. Despair is just another aspect of the human condition, and more importantly for writers, it's a hell of a lot more interesting than happiness. A book in which someone is perfectly content, there's no conflict, is a dull book indead. The story is always about conflict. Otherwise, what's there to write about?

* How have your social/political views changed since becoming a wife and mother?

Very little. I've always been a liberal with a strong libertarian bent. I feel the same way. I still, despite having children, believe, for example, that the use, possession and sale of drugs — all drugs from marijuana to methamphetamine — should be decriminalized.

* Have your boundaries changed about what you will reveal in an interview or a non-fiction piece since you gave up blogging?

I'm more circumspect since my piece in the New York Times. I'll always be candid about most things — my bipolar disorder, my maternal ambivalence — but there are intimate things I'm not interested in talking about.

Fascinated By Novelist Ayelet Waldman

I just finished her book Daughter's Keeper. It was the most fun I've had reading a novel in two months — since Robert Siegal's All the Money in the World.

I Googled Ayelet and found on Wikipedia:

Waldman's essay "Motherlove" was published in Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race and Themselves (ISBN 0-06-059879-4, edited by Kate Moses and Camille Peri), and reprinted in the New York Times under the headline "Truly, Madly, Guiltily."

The essay explores her conviction that a woman should consider her spousal relationship more important than her relationships with her children. She writes that a clear hierarchy of love is essential to a stable and healthy marriage. Waldman summarizes her ideal family dynamic: "[W]e, [husband Michael Chabon] and I, are the core of what he cherishes… the children are satellites, beloved but tangential."

Waldman posits that children who are made aware of their secondary rank in their parents' affections "are more successful, happier, live longer and have healthier lives" than those who grow up with different expectations.

After Because I Said So was published, The Oprah Winfrey Show invited Waldman to discuss her views on love, marriage, and motherhood.

As a kid, I was taken aback when my mother said she loved my dad more than me. Then she explained that was the nature of the universe. I accepted it.

Then, over the past few weeks, I spoke to novelists who freely admitted that they loved their kids more than their spouse. I found that disconcerting. I want my wife to love me more than she loves the kids.

Jim Jones emails:

As you're discovering in your talks with others, your mother's behavior is not the nature of the universe…

The likely explanation for dear mater's feelings is that she recognized early what a wretched excuse for a human being she had spawned and decided to cut her losses. Who wouldn't? What's hilarious is that her obvious dislike for you compelled her to actually tell you how she felt.

One afternoon in the early 1980s the telephone rings twice for Steve Stern (b. 1947), and between the two calls his life turns over. The first voice tells him the college does not need him next term. Enrollment is down. His section is cut. Stern teaches as an adjunct at nearly every college in Memphis, and the pay comes term to term and never adds up. He sets down the receiver. Three minutes pass. The telephone rings again. This time it is his agent in New York. The two manuscripts she has carried through the publishing houses are coming back cool, she says, and she is not warm on them either. He hangs up the second call and sits in the quiet and decides his life as a writer is finished.

He calls a childhood friend who runs a local folklore center and asks for work. Folklore is at least a poor relation of literature, he figures. She puts him in a back room with a tape recorder and a stack of cassettes and sets him to transcribing oral histories. The job is dull. He types what the old people say into a machine, hour after hour.

The voices on the tapes describe a neighborhood he has never heard of. North Main Street. A run of tenements and shops the speakers call the Pinch. Russian Jews lived there, over their stores, in airless rooms, and kept Yiddish as their common tongue. Down the way ran Beale Street, and the voices remember how the Jewish pawnbrokers and the Black gamblers traded money and idiom, a gambler hocking a toothpick for a stake because the broker knew him good for it, then redeeming the toothpick at a markup once his luck turned. Stern sits in the back room and listens and starts, alone, to celebrate.

The people who run the center hear him through the door. Here is a man delighting by himself over old cassette tape. They take stock of him. He is a native. He works cheap. He is a Jew. That settles it. They hand him the Jewish material and let him run.

Stern grows up far from any of this. His father, Sol Stern, keeps a grocery store. The family belongs to a Reform congregation that has shed most of its tradition. A pipe organ. A choir loft. A rabbi in robes who preaches before the pews. The boy is confirmed rather than called to the Torah as a bar mitzvah. Little Hebrew survives the service. Stern has said the synagogue might as well have been a Methodist church. He learns the Bible stories and not much past them. The East European world of his later books, the Yiddish, the Orthodoxy, the tenement piety, reaches him not at all. It has gone by the time he is born.

He takes a degree at Rhodes College and leaves Memphis without looking back. The next ten years he lives the loose life of his generation. He travels the country and Europe. He lands on a commune in the Ozarks. He squats with others in London. He enters the writing program at the University of Arkansas, where Ellen Gilchrist (b. 1935), Lewis Nordan (1939–2012), Lee K. Abbott (1947–2019), Jack Butler (b. 1944), and the poet C.D. Wright (1949–2016) pass through in the same years. He starts writing fiction in his middle twenties. The characters keep turning up with Jewish names. He does not plan this. It surprises him. Some undigested part of an inheritance he thought he had left behind keeps surfacing in the prose.

The Pinch was real. Irish immigrants settled the ground along North Main Street in the nineteenth century, and the name might come from the pinch-gut hunger of those first poor arrivals. East European Jews followed and made the district their own, with synagogues, kosher butchers, groceries, and small trade. After the Second World War the families moved out into the rest of Memphis and the neighborhood emptied. By the time Stern hears it on tape, the Pinch is vacant lots and a few standing walls east of the river. A steel pyramid now overlooks the spot.

Stern reads his way into the world the tapes describe. He takes up Yiddish. He works through I.L. Peretz (1852–1915), Isaac Babel (1894–1940), the folktales, the mystical books, the Hasidic stories. Then he writes. His first collection, Isaac and the Undertaker’s Daughter appeared in 1983 and draws on the Pinch. Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven followed in 1986. The stories set dybbuks, golems, angels, fools, and wandering rabbis down in the Memphis ghetto and let them stand at the grocery counter beside any other customer. The supernatural carries no special weight. It belongs. In the title story of the second book, the Angel of Death comes for an old man of the Pinch and finds himself wrestled to a draw by a man who declines to die.

Critics file Stern under magical realism. He resists the label and points instead to the Hasidic tale, where the miraculous is an ordinary feature of the road and not a break in it. His stock runs to the old Yiddish types. The schlemiel who fails at everything, even failure. The luftmensch who lives on air and invention. Readers reach at once for Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991), and Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928) names Stern his successor. Stern keeps a softer spot for Bernard Malamud (1914–1986), the one writer of that American Jewish generation who held an Old World tone in his sentences and let his fiction cross into the fabulous. Saul Bellow (1915–2005) and Philip Roth (1933–2018) wrote a more secular Jew. Malamud kept the dark and magical side.

The prose runs on Yiddish cadence, biblical rhythm, pun, and comic stretch. The humor does more than amuse. It carries memory, faces death, and holds back erasure. Stern argues across his work that a lost story stays alive as long as a man keeps telling it.

The praise comes. Susan Sontag (1933–2004) admires the first book’s energy and charm. Ozick calls herself a zealous admirer. Harold Bloom (1930–2019) names him a throwback to the Yiddish sublime. Gordon Lish (b. 1934) ranks him the finest of America’s unrecognized writers. The New York Times calls him a literary darling still hunting for readers, and later the poet laureate of Tennessee’s Jews. The recognition arrives wrapped in its own contradiction. The man the critics crown keeps feeling like an obscurity. After forty years of books he says he still cannot make sense of the trade.

Stern does not pretend the inheritance is his by right. He has said he pirated a tradition that was never his birthright, taking it from books rather than from a life lived inside it. The people he resurrects on the page belong to a world he reached only after it had closed. He builds the Pinch out of other men’s memory and his own reading. He knows the gap and writes anyway, and the writing carries the knowledge of the gap inside it.

The work widens past Memphis without leaving its logic. Harry Kaplan’s Adventures Underground came in 1991, A Plague of Dreamers followed in 1994, and The Wedding Jester appeared in 1999, which takes the National Jewish Book Award. The Angel of Forgetfulness follows in 2005, named among the year’s best by The Washington Post. The Frozen Rabbi appeared in 2010 and carried the conceit furthest. A nineteenth-century Polish mystic freezes in a block of ice, crosses the ocean in the baggage of immigrants, and thaws in a Memphis suburb generations later, where the old mysticism meets the strip mall. In 2015 Stern gave the neighborhood the title role in The Pinch, a novel that is also a history of itself, read by a stoned bookseller on North Main Street in 1968 who finds his own name inside the book.

Then he leaves Memphis on the page. The Village Idiot, in 2022, takes the painter Chaim Soutine (1893–1943) for its subject, and The New York Times calls it a frothy picaresque. Reading a biography of Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) while at work on Soutine, Stern catches a single paragraph about Scholem combing ruined postwar Europe for Jewish books the Nazis had stolen or the Jews had hidden, and cannot let it go. He finishes the painter and goes straight to it. A Fool’s Kabbalah, in 2025, sets Scholem’s salvage mission beside the antics of an invented village jester, Menke Klepfisch, and turns on the grief of rescuing books that outlived the people who owned them. Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), Scholem’s lost friend, stands behind the design.

Stern is in his late seventies now and splits his time between Brooklyn and Ballston Spa, New York. He taught at Skidmore College for thirty years, held the Moss Chair at the University of Memphis, lectured on a Fulbright at Bar-Ilan in Israel, and carries a Guggenheim, an O. Henry, and two Pushcarts. He says his next book concerns a tribe of arboreal Jews and calls the idea foolish, then admits he has begun to scratch the itch. The joke holds his method. He goes back for the people nobody else records, the ones already half gone, and he writes them until they stand up. A neighborhood the wreckers cleared off North Main Street keeps its shops and its gamblers and its angels because a man who never lived there learned the language and wrote it all down.

Steve Stern Against Oblivion

At the end of his last novel Steve Stern sends a scholar into the rubble of Europe to collect books. The war is over. Gershom Scholem, the great cataloguer of Jewish mysticism, walks through cities the Germans emptied of Jews and gathers the volumes that outlived their readers. The books survived the hands that held them. Scholem carries them out of the ash with the grief of a man saving the wrong thing, the text and not the reader. Stern invented that scene. He also wrote, in it, the closest description of his own work he has produced. A Fool’s Kabbalah came out in 2025. For forty years before it Stern had been doing what he gave Scholem to do. He walks into a cleared neighborhood and carries out the books.

Ernest Becker (1924–1974) argued that a man builds a hero system to outlast his own death. The hero system tells him how to count, how to leave a mark the grave cannot erase. Most men borrow theirs from a church, a flag, a firm, a bloodline. Stern builds his out of the dead of other people. His craft is the manufacture of symbolic immortality, and his clients are gone before he reaches them. The rabbi, the peddler, the tightrope walker on North Main Street, the frozen mystic in his block of ice. He grants each a second life by the only means he trusts, the telling.

Two fears run under the work. The first is the obvious one, that a man dies and ends. The second is worse and quieter. A man dies, and the world closes over the place where he stood, and no one recalls that he stood there. The first fear every animal carries. The second belongs to creatures who know they will be talked about or forgotten. Stern writes for the second fear. He grants that the body goes. He refuses to grant that the trace goes with it. A story, told again, holds a dead man past his death.

The fear has an origin you can date. Stern grows up in a Reform congregation in Memphis that has subtracted the tradition down to its furniture. A pipe organ. A choir loft. A rabbi in robes who faces the pews and preaches in English. The boy is confirmed. No one calls him to the Torah as a bar mitzvah, because the congregation has put that away with the Hebrew and the dietary law and the long memory of Europe. His father keeps a grocery. The family has arrived, and arrival in America means the older thing is gone. Stern has said the place might as well have been a Methodist church, and he says it without much heat. He inherits a Judaism with the Judaism taken out.

He leaves Memphis and stays gone a decade. He comes back broke in his thirties and takes a job no one wanted, transcribing oral history tapes in a back room of a folklore center. The tapes hold the voices of old men and women who grew up on North Main Street, in the neighborhood they called the Pinch.

Picture the room. A reel turns. An old woman recorded years earlier, dead by the time Stern hears her, describes a street of kosher butchers and pawnshops and a tightrope walker who once crossed above the crowd. Her voice fills the headphones. She had no idea a stranger would sit in a small room after she was gone and take down every word and build her street again from her sentences. Stern types. The work is dull and then it is not. He starts to talk back to the tape, alone, delighted. The people who run the center hear him through the door and reach their verdict. He is a native. He works cheap. He is a Jew. They hand him the file and let him run. He does not know it yet, but the dead woman in the headphones has just hired him.

What he found there answered a fear of his own. Stern publishes the stories. Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928) names him the successor to Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903–1991). Harold Bloom (1930–2019) calls him a throwback to the Yiddish sublime. The praise comes from the people who decide what counts as literature, and the public never arrives. The New York Times files him as a darling still hunting for readers. After forty years of books he says he still cannot make sense of the trade. He is the rememberer no one quite remembers. The second fear, the one his art fights for the dead, runs in him too. He answers it for himself the way he answers it for them. He makes himself the man without whom the Pinch stays buried, and a man like that does not vanish. Save enough of the dead and you have insured your own name.

His hero system gives certain words a charge they carry nowhere else. Set those words down in front of other men, men building their own systems against their own deaths, and the words break into different things. No single rival sits across the table from Stern. There are many, and each holds his terms by a different handle.

Take memory. For Stern memory is resurrection. To remember a man is to raise him. To forget him is to kill him a second time, the death that takes for good. Memory is a craft he performs, near to a rite, and the dead depend on it.

Carry the word to a young founder in a glass office off Sand Hill Road. Memory is drag. It is the legacy code, the sunk cost, the habit that slows the next release. He keeps a sign telling him the past is the enemy of the build. To honor memory is to lose the quarter.

Carry it to a man back from a war. Memory is the thing that wakes him at three in the morning and walks him back into the worst hour of his life. He pays a doctor to dull it. The cure he wants is the forgetting Stern calls death.

Carry it to a daughter watching her father lose his mind by the spoonful. Memory is matter, a store in a failing organ, leaking out past the labeled cabinets and the photographs he no longer reads. She grieves each piece as it goes. For her, memory is the man, and the man is running out.

Carry it to a son tending the tablets of his ancestors, lighting the incense, setting out the rice. Memory is duty, performed and not narrated. He does not tell his grandfather’s story. He feeds him. The line holds because the rite holds, and a story is beside the point.

Five lives, one word, a different god inside each. Stern’s god of memory raises the dead. The founder’s profanes them.

Take home. Stern’s home is a place he never lived. He built the Pinch from other men’s recollections after the bulldozers had finished. Home for him is built from words, and built after the loss. A man can found a homeland he reached too late to enter.

A developer stands on the same ground in Memphis and reads it another way. The Pinch to him is cleared lots east of the river, square footage, comps, a site. He raised a steel pyramid over part of it. Home is the asset, and the asset improves once the old tenants are gone.

A diplomat’s daughter, raised across six countries, hands her passport over a counter and cannot answer where she is from. Home for her is the airports between the postings. She has no Pinch to lose and none to build. The word names an absence she has learned to carry.

A monk enters his cell and shuts the door on the home his mother kept. Home for him is the room a man goes into to lose the self the world handed him. He renounces the hearth Stern spends his life rebuilding.

Stern’s home shows that a place can stand more solid in the telling than it stood in brick.

Take the fool. This is the value Stern guards hardest and the one the world reads most against him. His pages run with fools. The schlemiel who fails at everything. The luftmensch who lives on air. In his last novel a village jester named Menke Klepfisch plays the clown against the German occupation while Scholem hunts the books. Stern’s fool is the holy one. When power holds every weapon, the fool keeps the single thing power cannot confiscate, the freedom to find it absurd. The laugh is the last human act before the dark, and Stern trusts it past the tragic, because the murdered did not only suffer. They also joked, and the joke survives in the mouth that repeats it. He says his next book concerns a tribe of arboreal Jews. He calls the idea foolish and writes it anyway.

A surgeon hears the word and tightens. The fool is the man who nicks the artery he was told to avoid. Foolishness kills on the table, and nothing about it is holy.

A grandmaster hears it and sees the hung queen, the one move that throws away a winning game. The fool is the lapse a serious man trains for years to drive out of himself.

A quant on a trading desk hears it and thinks of dumb money, the retail crowd on the wrong side of the smart, the fool who buys the top. Foolishness is the tax the disciplined collect.

A Zen teacher hears it and almost agrees with Stern, then turns the other way. The fool is the beginner’s mind, the not-knowing that opens the path. The teacher prizes foolishness because it empties the self. Stern prizes it because it saves the self, carries one human voice intact through a century that set out to erase it. Same word, opposite cargo.

Place Stern, then, by three readings.

He treats death as a thing a story holds off. The body goes. The trace stays as long as a mouth keeps moving, and he means to keep his moving over the names the century buried.

He treats inheritance as a thing a man takes. He did not receive Yiddishkeit. He took it, out of books and tape, and he says so. He once described himself as a man pirating a tradition that was never his birthright. An heir to a faith subtracted before his birth makes himself an heir by theft and pays for it in candor.

He treats the joke as the last weapon. Against an ordinary death the tragic register might serve. Against the death that emptied the streets and the shtetls he reaches past tragedy for the fool, because the fool laughed where the strong gave up, and the laugh is the sign the man was alive. A people survives in its archives. It survives also in its jokes. Stern, alone in the back room with the voices of the gone, decided the jokes were worth saving first.

The Great Delusion

If John J. Mearsheimer is right in his anthropology, the literary project of fiction writer Steve Stern shifts from a whimsical exercise in magical realism to a profound documentation of tribal survival, collective memory, and the inescapable power of childhood socialization.
Stern is celebrated for books like Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven and The Wedding Jester, which are deeply grounded in Yiddish folklore and the historical memory of “The Pinch”—the old Jewish ghetto in Memphis, Tennessee. In a liberal, individualist framework, Stern’s stories might be read as charming local color or as an individual artist choosing to play with myth and folklore to express his personal creative voice.
Mearsheimer’s realism reveals that Stern’s work is driven by a much deeper structural logic.
First, the folklore and communal memory that populate Stern’s fiction are not merely decorative aesthetic choices. If humans are social beings who rely on the group for survival, then a shared mythology, complete with its specific language, taboos, and supernatural logic, is the primary device a tribe uses to maintain its boundaries and internal cohesion. By steeping his narratives in Yiddish folklore, Stern is documenting the exact type of “value infusion” that Mearsheimer describes—the intense, pre-rational socialization that shapes a person’s worldview long before his critical faculties form. The characters in Stern’s world do not act as atomistic, lone-wolf actors; they are deeply embedded in, and haunted by, the collective consciousness of their community.
Second, the structural isolation of a neighborhood like The Pinch reflects the realist premise that groups organize themselves to survive in a world of competing interests. The preservation of identity within the ghetto is not an accidental cultural preference; it is a mechanism for endurance. Stern’s project of mastering the language and collecting the stories of older immigrants before they passed away is, in a realist framework, an act of tribal preservation. He is securing the cultural artifacts and historical memory required to keep the group’s distinct identity alive across generations, countering the atomizing pressure of the broader, individualistic American culture.
Ultimately, if Mearsheimer is right, Steve Stern is not simply an author creating independent works of fiction for the sake of individual self-expression. He is a chronicler of the enduring power of the group, demonstrating through his narratives that a man’s identity, his moral universe, and even his dreams remain profoundly tethered to the social tribe that produced him.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

If Pinsof is right, the work of novelist Steve Stern looks less like a whimsical rescue mission for forgotten folklore and more like an instrument of group identity and status preservation. Stern builds his fiction, such as The Wedding Jester or The Frozen Rabbi, by blending Yiddish folklore with the history of old immigrant neighborhoods like the Pinch in Memphis. Mainstream literary critics view this kind of magical realism as a beautiful attempt to heal cultural amnesia and find transcendent meaning in the past.
Pinsof’s thesis alters this interpretation. Human beings do not pass down folklore and myths because they suffer from a misunderstanding about history or because they seek spiritual enlightenment. They do it because narratives are useful weapons in coalitional competition. Folklore serves as a flag for the tribe. By writing stories that celebrate the eccentricities and history of a specific group, Stern provides his readers with tools to signal their loyalty and elevate their collective status.
The magical elements in books like Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven function as a cover story. Mysticism and folklore allow people to pretend they care about higher, supernatural realities, masking the raw Darwinian business of maintaining a distinct social unit. Under Pinsof’s frame, Stern is not saving old spirits from oblivion. He is creating literary assets that his audience can use to claim moral and intellectual distinctiveness in a competitive social marketplace.

Steve Stern Interview

I call him Monday morning, June 26, 2006.

Steve sounds sleepy.

Luke: "Is this a good time to talk?"

Steve: "I'm just making some coffee."

Luke: "It's 5:50 a.m. my time."

Steve: "Wow. Where do you live?"

Luke: "Los Angeles."

Steve: "Wow. You live there."

Luke: "Yes. Is that incredible?"

Steve: "That place is an abstraction to me."

Luke: "Have you spent time here?"

Steve: "One night. I had a job interview in 1982. I went to some hotel, sat in a room with some academics. They asked me a few questions which were utterly bewildering. I spent the night in a friend's apartment and flew back, not before a drive up Sunset Strip and did a handstand on Cary Grant's handprints, back in the days when I could still do handstands."

Luke: "How do you think of LA?"

Steve: "The whole West Coast. I grew up in Tennessee and developed a phobia of traveling west of the Mississippi."

Luke: "Why the phobia?"

Steve: "I came to the Northeast about twenty years ago. I really like it up here. My girlfriend Sabrina [43 yo] is in Brooklyn. We are back and forth between upstate and down. It's the best of both worlds.

"After growing up in the South with a heat that is so debilitating in the summers, the garbagemen say, 'Throw out your dead!' in the morning, I like the fierce winters."

Luke: "Can you just stay inside or do you have to venture out to teach classes?"

Steve: "I travel between my apartment and the school [Skidmore] and that's about it, though I've become a homeowner recently."

Luke: "I am 40 years old and I have friends who tease me for using the word 'girlfriend.' How do you deal with it?"

Steve laughs. "It's a problem. I've taken to referring to her as my unplatonic sometimes domestic partner, but that's a little clumsy. At 58, it's undignified to say girlfriend. But what are you going to do? We have no plans to marry. We've been together six years now. She's an old Lefty, an underground comic artist. My association with her keeps my hipness quotient up."

Luke: "Have you been married?"

Steve: "I was married when I lived in Memphis. We split up around 1986. We were technically married a couple of years. We were together about seven."

Stern has just the one marriage and no kids.

Luke: "Are you a serial monogamist?"

Steve: "I suppose so."

We laugh.

Steve: "I'm always very faithful to the one I'm with. This last one seems to be terminal."

Luke: "How do you feel about marriage?"

Steve sighs. "It's not something I think about a lot. I married my ex-wife because she said, 'Marry me or leave.' It seemed the path of least resistance. But everything changed once we had done it. I'm not comfortable with the institutionalization of relationships. But if Sabrina wanted to do it, I'd probably do it in a heartbeat.

"She's outdoorsy. I'm not. I'm an old shut-in, an anemic, myopic diaspora type. She's a vital shiksa who drags me up mountains. I've done more globe trotting since we've been together than in all the years previous, which everyone says is good for me."

Luke: "Does she make you feel 15 years younger?"

Steve: "No. She's constantly reminding me of my age and putting me through my paces."

Luke: "Do you wear bow ties a lot?"

Steve: "Not since that [dust jacket] photo was taken. That may have been the one time in my life I put a bow tie on. It was just a clip-on. It was 1986 for Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven. In those days, I was cultivating an image. I've become less of a narcissist in my twilight years."

Luke: "How does your shiksa relate to your Jewish and Yiddish obsessions?"

Steve: "She's tolerant. She's a seeker. She's much more spiritual than I.

"When I was invited to Israel in 2004, I'd never been. It was not high on my list of priorities. Sabrina said, 'You're going. I'm going with you.' When I taught [at Bar Ilan], she came and stayed for a month and dragged me to every manner of a holy place, which I'm better for."

Luke: "Where are you and God?"

Steve laughs. "It's an on-again, off-again relationship. It depends on the time of day and my mood. I've never liked the phrase 'secular Jew' or 'cultural Jew.' I don't think there's any way of taking God out of the equation."

Luke: "Why don't you like the phrase if it is accurate?"

Steve: "I remember doing a reading in Detroit sponsored by the Arbinger Ring [sp?], all these old Jewish lefties who were guardians of Yiddishkeit. I loved being with them because they were old agent provocateurs. They were also fiercely secular and atheistic yet devoted to the culture of Yiddish and kinda Zionists yet devotees of the Yiddish literature I love and read mostly in translation. I remember them asking me, 'How do we teach our children the history and culture and heritage and the tradition exclusive of God?' My answer is, 'You can't.'

"I'm an armchair mystic. My discovery of this mystical component of Judaism I came upon in my mid-thirties. I read everything in translation that I can get my hands on.

"It's a literary endeavor with me but I reserve the right to believe that the myths are real and true even if they never happened."

Luke: "I hate to sound like a Christian, but does God play a role in your life? As a practical matter, do you not do things because you believe God does not want you to?"

Steve: "It's a tough question. It's a tricky business when you feel a strong attachment to the tradition without practicing the rituals. Where's the line between authenticity and hypocrisy? I'll wrestle with that to my grave. There is real mystery to our lives but I'm not someone who pays a lot of attention to the mitzvot. I don't know where ethics come from without some notion of the divine."

Luke: "The New York Times."

Steve laughs. "I do believe in the sacred.

"You're catching me after half a night's sleep. This periodic relationship we have, it takes me a couple of nights to get used to sleeping with somebody else in the bed. So I take heavy doses of barbiturates. I'm inarticulate but probably honest.

"This morning I was reading the Zohar as translated by Danny Matt. I resonate to this stuff in ways I'm not sure I understand. I don't read Hebrew. I don't pretend that one can approach the Jewish mystical discipline without a foundation in Biblical scholarship. I've always loved the idea of the book. The people of the book is a literal concept. The state of Israel begins when the Jews who had taken up residence for some 2,000 years in the book depart. They steal out of pages and back on to the land. It's a reason I've never been able to identify with Israel.

"I'm not sure what the stories of the Zohar mean. There's something of the mysterium tremendum in my reading of the literature. I'm a bookish guy. That's the way I connect. I'm bookish without being particularly scholarly. I have a profound emotional response to the texts. That's about as close to the sacred as I get.

"I distrust myself as I'm telling you this because I don't feel that I'm functioning on all my pistons, so I'll just continue to embarrass myself. How the hell you are going to organize this…"

Luke: "Don't worry about me. This is great. How are your Yiddish skills?"

Steve: "Halting. I have some friends in town who are a husband and wife Reform rabbi team. I used to get together with Rabbi Linda once a week to study Yiddish. She was fluent in Hebrew but it was still the blind leading the blind. It made me feel that I was approaching authenticity. I grew up in the South in a Reform synagogue. My joke is that I thought I was a Methodist until I was 35. It was so completely stripped of the accouterments of the Jewish tradition.

"I came to the Jewish tradition through books. I'd been writing stories, most of which remained unpublished. They had these Jewish elements — characters with Jewish names. That came as a surprise to me. I did not think of myself as particularly Jewish. I had few Jewish friends. My whole frame of reference was the South. I still like to be thought of as a Southern writer though it doesn't happen very often.

"I had courses reading the standard American Jewish writers. I always had a passion for [Bernard] Malamud and Philip Roth but it wasn't like they spoke to me more deeply than the post-moderns such as John Barthe, Thomas Pynchon, or Samuel Beckett.

"There just came a time when the chords began to vibrate stronger. It's still a mystery to me.

"I got a job doing oral history interviews at a folklore center at Memphis [circa 1982] researching an old Jewish ghetto on North Main Street in Memphis. This place began to reassemble itself in my imagination and became the locus for a bunch of stories and about three books.

"This imaginative territory I wanted to live in was a homecoming. It was a completely self-contained East-European ghetto community. When I began to explore that culture, it included stories and folklore and the mystical dimension of Judaism. I had no idea that there such rich Jewish folklore and these wonderful motifs such as dybbuks and golems and lamed vavniks, tzadikim, liliths, Sitra Achra, and a whole magical dimension that informed this gritty and squalid Jewish neighborhood.

"Being seduced into this world wasn't a choice. Sometimes when I look back, I wonder, 'How did I end up in the ghetto?'

"It still seizes my imagination, even if it doesn't delight too many readers.

"I've got to let the cat in."

Luke: "What was your last sentence?"

Steve: "It was a regretful notion that if you write about the ghetto, there's a good chance the books are going to remain there. Often I think that most of my audience is dead and gone and never made it past 1944."

Luke: "Can I challenge you on that as someone who has never published a novel?"

Steve: "Sure."

Luke: "My hunch is that the noncommercial aspect of your work is not the subject you deal in but the fantastical mystical multiple-thread approach rather than having a single protagonist relentlessly going in a direction."

Steve: "That's fair enough. The Jewish content compounds…"

Luke: "It's not commercial."

Steve: "When I began writing about this stuff 25 or more years ago, it seemed fresh and nobody had much heard of the dybbuks and the golem. These things have oddly become common parlance. So many younger writers such as a Michael Shaven, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, are using this material and they are wildly popular. I'm not sure it is the material as how it is used.

"At the risk of sounding sour grapes, I think there's a way of taking the material out of the tradition, detaching it from that exclusive Yiddish world, and bringing it into a popular arena. If it works, more power to them. I feel responsible for keeping those motifs as anchored to as authentic environment as I can. There's a reluctance to go there for readers.

"I don't know. It's something I brood about. It's my fate. I can still wake up in the morning and wonder, 'How the hell did I get into Yiddishkeit?'

"There's a story by Malamud called 'The Man in the Drawer.' The narrator goes to Russia in the late sixties and meets a Jewish communist cabdriver who turns out to be a closet writer and wants the narrator to sneak his stories out of Russia. It turns out that his stories are steeped in Jewish ritual.

"The writer explains, 'When I think Jews, comes stories.'

"I still have friends who ask me, 'When are you going to drop this Jewish masquerade?'

"I've worn the masque so long, it seems to have become a part of my face."

Luke: "Have you had a period of your life where you were observant of Jewish law?"

Steve: "No. Never. When I started getting into Yiddishkeit, my friends worried I'd show up in sidelocks and a caftan. For a while, I thought if I'm going to explore this, why not go the whole hog?"

Luke: "Why not live it?"

Steve: "The observance is not that important. I don't disparage it. I hate fundamentalism in any form but I have a lot of respect for observant Jews. I have good friends who grew up in homes I envy, where they took for granted, not just the observance, but the heritage, in ways that I will never be able to.

"Going to Israel was a reckoning for me. How does one define oneself as a Jew."

Steve laughs. "The cat wants to be on both sides of the door simultaneously."

Luke: "Were you speaking literally or as a metaphor for your life?"

Steve: "Well…"

Luke: "You have a cat there right now?"

Steve: "Yes. Sabrina has shut herself up in her studio so she doesn't have to listen to me blathering.

"For me, the Holocaust is the end of the story."

Luke: "What do you mean?"

Steve: "The Diaspora was the story I was interested in. The Holocaust made a nice operatic climax to the arc of Diaspora Jewish history. I ignored the State of Israel as an afterthought. It was too messy, too complicated. I wondered what the hell Jews were doing in the Middle East. Then I got invited to teach at Bar Ilan [for the fall semester in 2004].

"Most of my friends in Israel were quite Orthodox. There's no question of identity in Israel [even for the secular]. A kind of identity I was not used to. I was used to the definition and baggage of the Diaspora and the suffering and the neuroses and the self-loathing and Kafka as a role model. You take that to Israel and they say, 'Drop it already. It's old. We know who we are here. We're bold. We're courageous. We're warriors. We're builders. We're all the things that you anemic bookish Jews weren't. I was humbled."

Luke: "How did your time in Israel change you?"

Steve: "My experience was stereotypical. Suddenly you're faced with the existence of a place that is an astonishment. It's miraculous. And a kind of Jew that seemed like a whole other species. Men my age who had seen so much more of life, who'd been in wars, and wrestled with all the socio-political-religious aspects of their lives till sundown every day and lived in history in a way that I hadn't, except through books. I found myself humbled and admiring but knowing I am not one of them.

"My glib line is that I went to Israel feeling insecure about my authenticity as a writer and came back insecure about my authenticity as a human being."

Luke: "Martin Buber said certain mysteries are only available to those in the dance. You've never been in the dance of the mitzvot. Yet you write a tremendous amount about that life. I'm wondering how authentic can you be if you've never practiced it?"

Steve: "I wonder about that myself. I went to New York [two weeks ago]. My friend Melvin Bukiet [the novelist] has done an anthology called Scribblers on the Roof. I participated in this reading program on the roof of the Ansche Chesed synagogue. There were the usual suspects of Jewish writers. A bunch of us went out afterwards. I was with younger writers such as Dara Horn, who I admire tremendously. She's exploring and redeeming Yiddishkeit in a way that feels very authentic despite the fact that she's coming at it through books. I feel a sense of attachment to community with her that I never had. I was talking to her about this. I don't know that she is particularly observant."

Luke: "She's moderately observant [and literate in Hebrew and Yiddish]."

Steve: "She was amused by my dilemma of conscience. It didn't seem to be an issue with her, that you enter that world by the imagination and that it is as valid a means of participating in the dance as any. I'm not so sure. I reserve the right to call myself a fraud.

"I remember meeting Chaim Potok and almost asking his permission to poach this material. He didn't know me from Adam and said essentially, 'Go for it.'

"I've had the blessing of writers I regard as super-kosher — Chaim Potok, Cynthia Ozick, Dara Horn… Even at 58, I need the assurance of writers I do regard as authentic that I'm not just an impostor.

"I'm much more a child of Kafka than of Isaac Singer. I love his paradoxes. That he can write about hopelessness in the language of midrash, connecting his godless cosmically-paranoid vision to a sacred dimension. Nobody can do it like him. That elevates him to sainthood, if there's such a thing as a secular saint."

Luke: "What do you have against linear narrative?"

Steve laughs. "Absolutely nothing. I love linear narrative. I encourage my students at every opportunity to write a linear narrative.

"I guess I broke with my own convictions in The Angel of Forgetfulness. Most of my short stories are linear.

"I love the oral tradition and folklore and those are about as conventional as narratives can be. I know I seem to have strayed in recent years from pure cantankerousness. I'm doing it again.

"I like to play with different time frames. The book embodies a kind of timeless place. If you can connect a secular narrative to a mythic timeless element, that dissolves all times into the same.

"The book I love, a revised New Testament, is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude. The message is to give you what appears to be a linear narrative but turns out to be something that was already written and had existed all along. It renders historical time into a universal timelessness."

Luke: "What about the poor reader?"

Steve: "I see myself as reader-friendly. I recently published my only Holocaust story. I generally concede the ground to people who were there, such as Bruno Bettelheim. Cynthia Ozick wrote about the Holocaust. She said, 'The devil made me do it.' The devil made me do it too.

"Most of the story takes place in a boxcar where the character is trying to overcome the horror by telling a story. The narrative moves back and forth between the reality and the tale. And the tale assumes its own reality. There's a deliberate ambiguity between a real horror and an enchantment."

Luke: Some argue that a linear narrative with one protagonist battling the world to achieve something he desperately wants (and in the process having a realization) is the way the human mind best responds to stories.

Steve: "I emphatically agree. It's the thing I try to indoctrinate my students with. That storytelling is a natural function of the human and there are conventions and a design, almost in our DNA. I love that. I believe there should be entertainment and fascination in telling a story. If it doesn't happen in my stories, I regard it as a failure. I don't mean to subvert narrative. Whether what I do works or not, I will leave to my four readers to decide."

Luke: "You get such glowing reviews. How does that feel?"

Steve: "I can assure you that they don't translate into sales. I've always gotten good reviews but it doesn't help. It's pathetic to be on the dinner circuit when you'd like to be on Broadway."

Luke: "May I share my experience of reading you and perhaps eliciting a reaction?"

Steve: "Sure. I'm going to hate this but go ahead."

Luke: "I enjoy the realistic portions of your writing. I feel like I am there in the scene, but when the protagonist changes or it becomes magical, it throws me. Segments of your writing are commercial. I jump into a story and I see everything going on and then suddenly there are rabbis flying in the air and ugly old women with really bad breath."

Steve: "I don't know why I'm constitutionally inclined to fantastic events. It's a matter of taste. The literature of our time that is most honored, appreciated and read is in the realistic naturalistic tradition. That's fine. But it's not where literature began. The great classic American authors were all fabulists — Hawthorn, Poe, Melville. It's not that as a writer you decide to write stark, gritty urban realism or fabulist or magic realist.

"Don't do that! Stop!"

Luke: "The cat?"

Steve: "Yes. He's clawing the sofa.

"I was writing stories with flying human beings before I fell into Yiddish literature, but in that literature, those boundaries are largely ignored."

Luke: "How do you think spending so much time in academia has affected your writing?"

Steve: "It's completely infantilized me, made me out of touch with real world experience, made me this mewling, puking neurotic. Otherwise…

"It's something I don't know how to measure. I've been doing it for so long. I don't love teaching. If I didn't have to do it, I'd leave it in a heartbeat. But when I do it, I work hard. I'm conscientious.

"It takes a toll. The energy you give to it is not recyclable. I hear writers talk about how 'My interaction with my students feeds my work.' It's bulls—. You give them the same energy you give to your work, but it doesn't come back.

"I guess it is a measure of my failure as a writer that I am condemned to teaching until I die."

Luke: "Are your politics left-wing and how important is that to you?"

Steve: "I'm becoming more political as I get older. Part of it has to do with suddenly discovering we are in a fascist administration. Also, I'm less of a narcissist than I used to be. The more you get out of the way, the more room you give history to pour in. Being in Israel woke me up to political realities. I take history more personally. And yeah, I think it is filtering into my writing in a way I hadn't anticipated. There's a lot more bloodshed in my work than there used to be."

Luke: "There are sections of your writing that are erotic, but the eroticism always gets killed by the arrival of some old lady with bad breath."

Steve: "It had to do with that I have never had sex. I've only read about it.

"There is a lot of coitus interruptus in my stories. I haven't examined that. I'm afraid to. There's an impulse to sabotage the experience of my characters. Often they are sabotaging themselves.

"A friend was over last night pawing the paperback of The Angel of Forgetfulness, and he was saying, 'The sex scenes really are quite good.'"

Luke: "Why do you have so many old, ugly and smelly people in your books?"

Steve: "I'm a geriatric-phile. I like old people. I've been practicing to be one for a long time.

"These are interesting questions."

Luke: "I bet you haven't been asked them before."

Steve: "I haven't. And I haven't really thought about them. In folktales, there's always a hag, a witch and a hunchback. I am fond of grotesque characters. It's a way of endowing characters with mythical accessories.

"I'd like to think I'm in line with the Southern writers I admire such as Flannery O'Connor. All of her characters are grotesque. I also think it comes from something very perverse in my own nature, but I can give it a literary rationale."

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

Steve: "An acrobat. I could walk on my hands until my mid-forties when the arthritis set in."

Luke: "What's with the flying rabbis in your work?"

Steve: "It's part of my innate hostility towards gravity. It has to do with that passage between worlds and that one can elevate oneself from the ordinary to the extraordinary. With me, there has to be an element of irony, so if you have a character who does it, it has to be an old moth-eaten rabbi who's an unlikely candidate for that sort of elevation in transcendence."

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

Steve: "I hung out with the popular crowd but I was the courtjester. I was the friendly hunchback. I did not have a great sense of self-esteem in highschool unlike the incredible confidence I radiate today. After highschool, I went from the cool crowd to the wrong crowd. There were a lot of years in the counterculture, which is a dignified way of saying drug-taking hippies. Those were the lost years of Steve Stern."

Luke: "Which years of your life were the happiest and why?"

Steve: "Oh boy. I could be really corny and say now. There's truth in it. This feels like the first truly healthy stable relationship I've been in."

Luke: "You better say that or you're going to get in trouble if she ever reads this."

Steve: "My graduate school days were a lot of fun. It was unexpected. I came off the hippie commune in Northwest Arkansas and I went over to the university in Fayetville. I'd been a hippie for a bunch of years. They were colorful years, but I wasn't doing what I wanted to do. Once I got into graduate school, I became full-throttle a reader and writer. That was euphoric. I didn't realize it at the time, but looking back it seems like an idyllic period. Those were the days when I was pals with the Clintons [from 1974-1976]. They were in the law school when I was in Arkansas. Hillary's best friend was my best friend's roommate.

"I got to know them. I played volleyball with them on Sundays. They were starry-eyed idealists. Uncorrupted."

Luke: "Have you been quoted on the Clintons?"

Steve: "I don't know. Probably not. When he was elected, I wrote a long heartfelt letter, probably the best thing I've ever written. I expected that during the inauguration, he'd take a piece of paper out of his pocket, unfold it, and say, 'As my friend Steve says…' Then I got a form letter back. I'm probably long forgotten."

Luke: "Did anything that happened during the Clinton presidency surprise you?"

Steve: "Hillary was much better in bed than I expected.

"Oh, I was very disappointed. Like everyone, I had high hopes."

Luke: "Were you surprised that Bill was a philanderer?"

Steve: "No, I wasn't surprised.

"I thought he was in love with Hillary. They were the perfect couple.

"I held such high hopes for Hillary, but things like this flag-burning bill she's trying to pass feels like such a betrayal.

"Hillary had a sense of humor. She could be ironic in a way that Bill couldn't. He was always laughing. He could tell a joke.

"I remember my last conversation with Bill. He was always earnest. When you're in his zone, you're his best friend, but as soon as he looks away, you cease to exist. I didn't feel that with Hillary.

"I remember Bill asking me, 'How's the writing going?' I earnestly told him it was going well. 'I'm writing a story about a kid who escapes the Nazis and spends the war in the trees. I'm calling it Tarzanstein.' He's nodding genuinely. Hillary was standing behind him saying, 'Why do you listen to this guy?'"

Luke: "Did you have any inkling that this was the future president of the United States?"

Steve: "There was a sense then that he had a large ambition and that he had the ability to realize his ambition. He was regarded by everybody in Arkansas as someone with a destiny. That's a phenomenon I don't think I'd ever encountered before."

Luke: "Did he feel your pain?"

Steve: "Only on the volleyball court. He was a moral compass on the volleyball court. He played with the law students, all of whom were corrupt. I think he kept them honest. They cheated like crazy."

Luke: "Was he known as a philanderer?"

Steve: "I don't think so. I had a sense that it was a solid marriage. They were newlyweds. They had just bought a house.

"There was clearly a sense that he was marking time."

We've been speaking for 100 minutes.

Luke: "Would you be willing to give Bill Clinton oral sex for keeping abortion legal?"

Steve laughs. "I have some standards. But no. I'd rather let my country die for me.

"Luke, I'm going to have to go. It was fun talking to you. I hope this is something you can use."

Afterwards, I email Steve: "What kind of sexual voltage passes through attractive women when they learn you are Steve Stern, the acclaimed novelist?"

Steve: "I tend to have the same effect on women that Joseph had on Potiphar's wife. This leads to many broken hearts all around, but hey, not my problem."

Luke: "What are your degrees? From where? Years graduated? What is the name and city and year of the highschool you graduated from?"

Steve: "Nothing very distinguished. East High School in Memphis, 1965. Rhodes College, Memphis 1970, Univ of Arkansas, 1976. A lot of dropping in and out and washing up between degrees."

I ask Alana Newhouse, Arts and Literature Editor of the Forward, why Stern has not had more commercial success.

She replies: "Ah, if only someone could figure out that mystery. I presume the decreased readership for literary fiction in general must have something to do with it, but beyond that, I'm mystified. His fiction is gorgeous and funny and smart and dirty — in short, my ideal."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then comes the breakdown.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Great Delusion

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

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

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

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

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

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

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

Leora Skolkin-Smith in the Field

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why This Wall Of Silence About Mother-Daughter Sexuality?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It's a fearful place to go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What about Australian literature?"

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

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

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

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

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

Leora: "Yes."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luke: "Really screwed up."

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

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

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

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

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

Luke: "Was he her favorite?"

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

Luke: "Did your mother help the Haganah?"

Leora: "Oh yes."

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

Leora: "That's a hard question."

In other words, very little.

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

Leora: "Oh yes. She still does.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luke: "Did your mother cling to you?"

Leora: "Oh God. Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luke: "Do you have children?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leora: "Yeah."

Luke: "This is just life."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Great Delusion

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

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

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

December 19, 2008

We did this via email (her website):

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Why did you do a PhD in Creative Writing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* What do you love and hate about teaching?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Have you flirted with blogging?

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

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

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

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

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

I call Margot Friday morning.

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

Luke: "Could you elaborate?"

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

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

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

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

Margot: "No."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Great Delusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

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

Novelist Andrea Seigel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* How did you like Catcher in the Rye?

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

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

a lawyer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* What have you sacrificed to be a writer?

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

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

best: voice. worst: plot.

* Why do you write what you write?

why do you rent the movies you rent?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* How has your writing affected your life?

it's both sustained and wrecked it.

* Do you like your protagonists?

they have their moments.

I Love Novelist Andrea Seigel

Here are some excerpts from her blog:

June 15, 2004

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

More.

September 5, 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider the night the boy went into the water.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Great Delusion

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

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

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

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

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

Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hero System

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The modern systems crowd in too, hungrier and stranger.

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

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

Then the inversion that makes the whole gallery sharp.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few coordinates, then.

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

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

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

Watergate as Democratic Ritual & Cultural Trauma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few coordinates, then.

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

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

Novelist Laurie Gwen Shapiro

9/8/06

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* What have you sacrificed to be a writer?

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

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

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

* Why do you write what you write?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Which contemporary writer is the biggest wanker?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Vital Lie of the Honest Son

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

Two answers to the same fear sit at that table.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The memoir reveals Siegel’s hero system.

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

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

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

The Great Delusion

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

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

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

Confabulation

David Pinsof writes:

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

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

What the Money Became

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watergate as Democratic Ritual & Cultural Trauma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Anthony Siegel's website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert: "Two children in between those."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luke: "Have you read John Grisham?"

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

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

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

"It was my vision of adulthood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luke: "Tell me about your second book."

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

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

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

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

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

12/26/06

All Will Be Revealed by Robert A. Siegel

According to the publisher:

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

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

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

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

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

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