When you ask a modern Jew about her relationship to pork the answer is often complicated. With SMITH Magazine’s “Six Words on the Jewish Life” show approaching (September 21, at 92YTribeca in NYC) we thought we’d check in with Jeffrey Yoskowitz, a Jew who’s made pork his passion and profession as founding editor of the storytelling site Pork Memoirs. As with many life callings, Yoskowitz recalls the moment when he made his mind up about pork once and for all.

“What would you do if Cindy Crawford wanted to kiss you?” a fellow camper asked him at Jewish summer camp. “But she had just gone to town on a huge bacon sandwich, and she still had bacon in her mouth?” Would Yoskowitz man up and kiss Crawford or keep kosher like a good Jew?

“Truth is, at that age if Cindy Crawford had wanted to kiss me, I would have done anything, but my answer was no. I wouldn’t kiss her if she had bacon in her mouth,” says Yoskowitz.

Yoskowitz’s yearning to lock lips with Crawford may have waned since his Jewish camp days, but his fascination with bacon has not. While you won’t find Yoskowitz chowing down at a pig roast, don’t be surprised if he personally raised and slaughtered the main course himself.

Yoskowitz has made a career out of his fascination with pork. In addition to founding Pork Memoirs, he has written extensively about pork in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The New Republic. He earned his stripes by working on a pig farm in Israel, where he spent his days covered in pig excrement, tossing out dead pigs, and collecting boar semen. “It’s called ‘milking’ the boars, and it was a promotion from being an all-around cleaner of pig shit,” says Yoskowitz.

“I have a fascination with pork,” he continues, “but it’s not so much a fascination with the meat itself as it is with the idea of pork and what pork represents. To me the pig is so tied to my Jewish identity, whether it’s cultural or religious, and that identity is always in flux and changing.”

Read on for SMITH Magazine’s interview with Jeffrey Yoskowitz on Jewish culture, pork, and his succulent Pork Memoirs.

Pork and memoirs. For most, one doesn’t naturally proceed from the other. Where did you get the idea for pork as a centerpiece of storytelling?
The concept of viewing Jewish life through pork came to me during a class on Jewish memoir at Brown. Memoir is a great medium for understanding larger forces at work—the pains of immigration, poverty, even the Holocaust. Personal narrative allowed me to wrap my head around these grand ideas, and one thing I noticed about all these Jewish memoirs was that there was a first time eating pork story in all of them. My goal with Pork Memoirs is to have it be almost a cultural history, using the pig as a metaphorical anchor.

What’s an example of a powerful memoir about pork?
I received this one story from a woman whose mother, as a child, was hidden with a family during the Holocaust. During that time, her mother basically ate whatever food the family ate in this period of heavy rationing. Her mother remembers eating raw bacon vividly, and after that experience her mother continued to have a strong relationship with pork. Pork connected her mother to this family she was once a part of.

Does pork play prominently in your family’s history?
Definitely. I remember stories my grandmother told about doing slave labor in Siberia. She shows up in Siberia after a long train journey. She hasn’t eaten in days, and there’s a big pork roast that the locals are having when she gets off the train. My grandmother and her family are offered pigs’ blood to drink. My grandmother was adamant about saying no. “We are Jews,” she said. “We will not do that. We will not have that pigs’ blood.”

And yet, you worked on a pig farm in Israel.
The whole experience was awful, but I got commune in a deeper and more intimate way with the pork industry. Every day there was a story. It was amazing, because I was at the pig farm with the explicit goal of learning about the industry.

A pig farm in Israel? How does that work?
Even though the pig farm was Jewish-owned, it was operated under a loophole that allows pigs to be raised for science.

And there’s a market for pork in Israel?
Yeah. It’s a part of Israel’s gastronomic underbelly. I totally understand why so many Jews want to eat pork. Pork is a symbol of defiance. Secular Israelis eat it to make a statement and resist the religious hegemony of the Israeli government.

What would your grandmother have thought?
I would be washing pig crap off my body at the end of the day and asking myself exactly that.

When my grandfather moved to the U.S. after the Holocaust, the only job he could get was as a ham boner in the pork industry, so I’m not the first one in my family to work with pigs. Before he passed away, my grandfather gave me the steel mesh glove and knife he used to bone ham. The glove only covers three fingers, because two of your fingers are considered extraneous for boning ham. If those were lost, it didn’t matter.

I was very much aware that my grandfather worked in a pork factory so that I wouldn’t have to do that sort of work. I was supposed to have transcended that kind of work. But there I was, covered in pig shit.

How could your grandfather work in a pork factory and come home to your grandmother who refused to drink pigs’ blood even as she was starving?
He used to work with pigs every day, but he was adamant that pork would not enter the house. He would get this ham for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and the ham would be given away to their non-Jewish neighbors.

Your story is just crying out for a Six-Word Memoir!
“Inseminated sows, slaughtered pigs. Complicated kibbutz.”

Where do you find your pork memoirists?
The topic of pork comes up all the time. I’ll be encouraging and follow-up with people, and I might work with them on developing a pork memoir. Some people find me, but Pork Memoirs has also been written up on a number of websites. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has written about it, Oprah.com has quoted pork memoirs and linked to it, and MyJewishLearning.com did a whole profile on Pork Memoirs.

But you surely must get a lot of weird looks when you ask for a pork memoir. How do people react when you ask them for one?
Most people I talk to will initially say to me I don’t have a pork memoir. They might say I’m a vegetarian, so I don’t eat pork, or, I’m Jewish or Muslim, I don’t eat pork. My response is: Exactly. You do have a pork memoir. Did you never accidentally eat it? Did you never think about eating it? Do you have fears about eating it? I work with people to isolate those ideas and concepts.

Does your work on the pork industry ever piss off other Jewish people?
Definitely. When I wrote an article for The New Republic about the role pork played in the Israeli election in 2009, I got comments calling me a self-hating Jew. People were saying, “How dare you talk about pigs in Israel?” Like by talking about it, I was defaming the country. Ironically the Chabad rabbi in the town I grew up in loved what I was doing. He was so excited to talk to me about it. He would send me clippings from the Talmud referencing pork. They would call it “the other thing.” It was so vile they wouldn’t even mention it. To this day, no one in Israel calls it pork. There’s all these euphemisms.

What Pork Memoir are you working on now?
Recently I was contacted by a British man with a story about living on a pig farm in Israel that was eventually blown up by terrorists. He was living on the border of Gaza on a pig farm in the 1950s. Since he spoke English, he was in charge of taking around English-speaking inspectors and pretending there weren’t pigs on the premises. One night he was hosting one of these inspectors. After the inspector was satisfied there were no pigs on the premises, he stayed the night with the plan to return home the next morning. Well, that night the terrorists bombed the kibbutz. They thought they were blowing up the dining hall, but it was actually the building where the pigs were hidden. A lot of pigs died. Other pigs escaped and eventually scattered all across Southern Israel. The next morning, when the inspector woke up, he opened the door to a field of pigs running around everywhere.

So if Cindy Crawford wanted to make out with you while she had bacon in her mouth, how would you answer now?
Now my response would be if Cindy Crawford wanted to make out with me, why would she want to do it with bacon in her mouth? Does she want to taunt me? Why would she do that? That’s just cruel. And that’s why my final Six-Word Memoir is: “I won’t kiss Cindy’s bacon mouth.”

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+ Read and contribute to Pork Memoirs.
+ Read Jeffrey Yoskowitz’s stories on pork here.
+ Join SMITH Magazine at 92YTribeca for more Six-Word Stories on the Jewish life this Wednesday.

Before Adam Mansbach wrote the children’s book for grownups, Go the Fuck to Sleep, he was, in his own words, “feverishly working on all kinds of different writing projects, hoping one would hit and keep me from having to move out of my house and into a discarded refrigerator carton.”

It’s an overstatement, perhaps, but effective motivation nonetheless. Working outside the mainstream, Mansbach has, in reality, had previous success most writers would consider a victory. His first novel, Angry Black White Boy, about the assimilation of hip-hop culture by whites, has been taught at more than 60 colleges, universities and high schools, and has been turned into a play that sold out for three straight months in San Francisco. His most recent novel, The End of the Jews, was called “beautifully portrayed” by The New York Times Book Review and “intense, painful and poignant” by the Boston Globe. Recently a visiting professor of fiction at Rutgers University, he’s also written another novel, Shackling Water, a poetry collection, Genius B-boy Cynics Getting Weeded in the Garden of Delights, as well as A Fictional History of the United States With Huge Chunks Missing. And yet within a few days of the incredible viral run of Go The Fuck To Sleep, Mansbach had sold more copies than the sum total of all of his previous books—before it was even released.

A book for adults about the misery that is trying to get small children to sleep, Mansbach and artist Ricardo Cortes have found genius, and gold, in a presentation that’s exactly like a child’s bedtime story. As GTFTS approaches its official release this Father’s Day, its mere fourteen verses of text and accompanying illustrations has a print run of more than 300,000 copies, been optioned as a movie, and completely changed the life of its author, illustrator, and publishing house.

I spoke with the 34-year-old Mansbach by phone while he was gearing up for his book tour with a visit to his hometown of Newton, MA. As we spoke, the cries of my four-month old baby not sleeping provided an apt soundtrack in the background.

The origin story of Go Tte Fuck to Sleep is well known by now, but could you recount it in your own words?
Nothing about this book was planned. Last summer, when my daughter was two, I joked on Facebook: “Look out for my forthcoming children’s book, Go the Fuck to Sleep.” And it wasn’t like there was some overwhelming response, but a few people said, “Go do it motherfucker!” Then I thought about it, found out that a board book [children’s books like the ones we read at bedtime] is fourteen verses, and asked myself: Can I come up with fourteen verses? Can I find that many words that rhyme with sleep? My burst of energy lasted an afternoon and it was honest about the experience and it was done. It was close, but I think I got enough rhymes in just under the wire.

Even though the book is a fluke for you, it doesn’t seem like that radical a departure from your “more serious” books. They’re all quite satirical and obscenely honest.
It’s certainly not a departure; I think there’s a through-line in terms of my other work in the sense that I’ve always written the books I’ve been passionate about writing, without much thought about audience or salability. And in that a lot of my other books use humor as a way to explore serious issues. Also, I’ve always been good at profanity.

The fact that you’re really telling the truth is what people love about GTFTS. The first weeks after my baby was born, all sorts of people asked me if I was spending my days staring blissfully at my son. I was thrilled, sure, but mainly exhausted and terrified. No one mentioned that part to me. Why do people lie?
They lie because there’s a culture of both perfection and dishonesty about things like parenting. Part of the reason this book has been received so well is that it’s been cathartic to have people admit that it’s not good all the time. There’s all this preciousness around kids.

At the same time, remember that the parents in my book aren’t actually cursing at the kids. They’re actually being good parents; they’re not letting on that they’re about to explode.

The book may be the most viral literary sensation to date. What went into the decision to release the entire book via PDF?
We sent the book out as a PDF to handful of booksellers, and one of them leaked it. Once we started getting all this attention, we feared we’d be just a punch line; we’d be done before we got started. So not only did we not release the PDF, we spent a few weeks doing cease and desists, trying to get it off the Internet. We were not only not new media geniuses, we were stupid enough to try to stop it from going viral.

Still, the fact is the book was already charting on Amazon—where all people had were a title, a cover, and one verse—a week or so before the PDF came out. The supply rose to meet the demand.

I knew this book would be huge when people who aren’t part of the literary and/or coastal and/or Gawker crowd started forwarding it to me. Still, from the minute you open the PDF, it’s very much a book you want to physically hold.
It’s short enough to work as a PDF to look at and laugh at quickly, but you still want to buy it—so we had the best of both worlds. I do think that this is a gift book; it’s an art object that fundamentally you buy for a friend or that your mother gives you to remind you what a bad kid you are. Luckily, it’s still bad form to show up at a baby shower with a stapled PDF—even a hi-res one.

There’s a really nice parallel in how a small publishing house like Akashic and you both have room to grow and do what you want next. Can you talk about that for what this breathing room does for you as a writer?
It’s right on time. My job just ended, it’s a tough time to sell a novel, the publishing industry is tanking. So for the last couple of years, I’ve been stressed about the post-job future and feverishly working on all kinds of different writing projects, hoping one would hit and keep me from having to move out of my house and into a discarded refrigerator carton. Now, that’s less of a concern, and I can be selective and deliberate. And this book has helped my publisher stay in business. A small pub like mine can rise or fall by miscalculating a book run of 8,000 books that should have been closer to 2,000.

What are you working on now?
I think I’ll be doing a lot of screenwriting in the next couple of years. I have a graphic novel, Nature Of The Beast, that drops in February. And my next novel is called Rage Is Back. It’s your basic magic realism graffiti revenge novel. I haven’t sold it yet.

I imagine you’re glad it’s still on the market given your new success.
Two months ago I was mortified I hadn’t sold it; now it seems okay. To write a novel takes a lot of endurance and stamina; selling literary fiction is almost fucking impossible now—the challenge for writers is to maintain the energy. I’m fortunate that the success of this book gives me time and security to do other writing projects.

You’ve written a number of serious books—novels, a book of poetry—but clearly this is going to be the book you’ll be known for. Does that make you feel conflicted about this book’s success?
My books have been critically received but haven’t been on any bestseller lists. Even before GTFTS is officially out, I’ve already sold more of this book than everything else I’ve written combined, and I’m not one to complain about success or the potential financial security. I’ve been able to get by with writing and a little teaching. Getting a regular paycheck teaching these last few years was a nice thing. But it just ended and I’ve been worried about getting by. I never would have dreamed that this book would be the big hit. One constant in my career is that I’ve always written the shit I’ve wanted to write.

My friend put it in this way: “What’s so cool about this is that a lot of people sell out to make money, or try to. And this book is you talking the same shit you always say.” But in this case what I said just happened to resonate and hit the vein in the zeitgeist.

Do you worry that when people learn about your earlier work they will change their opinion of this book?
Well, I made my YouTube channel private for a while because there was stuff that was pretty bananas on it. I envisioned an intern at The Today Show finding a lecture on Angry Black White Boy where I’m talking all this shit about structural racism and white privilege—and that would be the end of that. [Editor's note: Mansbach appeared on The Today Show]

What do you read to your daughter?
My daughter is very language focused and story focused—she really cares what she hears. We read Margaret Wise Brown, that sort of thing. A lot of my friends are graffiti writers so we read a lot of books on graffiti art. She took a shine to the twenty-fifth anniversary reissue of Subway Art, the book that started it all in the graffiti world. She says, “Papa, I want look at the train book!”

What book do you remember loving as a kid?
All my memories of books are of ones I was able to read myself. I have a feeling the one thing writers all have in common is that we just love to read—and as kids we always had a book on us. I remember the young adult stuff best. My favorite book is called The Moves Make the Man by Bruce Brooks. It’s set in North Carolina in 1957 and is about this one black kid who integrates this white school, and his white friend. That remains one of the most influential books for me. I reread it every three years.

Are you going to do another book for parents?
I may or may not do another kid’s book, though there’s a lot of pressure on me to do one. Everyone is suggesting sequels and all that. But I won’t do a shittier version of same idea like Eat Your Fucking Vegetables. Everyone on Facebook is saying, “Do a Shut the Fuck Up book!” But I don’t have the urge to tell my kid to shut the fuck up. This isn’t an angry book; I’m not going to be a mouthpiece for everyone’s rage. This book works because there’s an established notion of a bedtime book and I found a way to have fun with it.

One thing that will definitely happen is that we’ll do a G-rated version. My publisher was reading it and realized it’s a pretty funny book to read to a kid without all the cursing. Not a redacted version, but with the same art and tweaked to be a bigger size, more kid friendly.

Are you going to have another kid? Your daughter seems to be good for your creative process.
What are you, my mother?

Finally, Adam Mansbach, what’s your Six-Word Memoir?
Still can’t believe this shit’s happening.

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VISIT Adam Mansbach’s Web site for info and reviews of his many other books.

Diane Ackerman, bestselling author of A Natural History of the Senses, An Alchemy of Mind, and The Zookeeper’s Wife, has built a reputation on her poetic sensibility and uncanny knack for scouting out connections between the heavens, Earth, and everything in between. In her latest memoir, One Hundred Names for Love: a Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing, Ackerman navigates between the science of aphasia, the culture of illness, and her marriage to author Paul West with graceful and surefooted verve.

Diane and Paul had built a marriage on their shared love for an “immense cosmos of words” that thrived on life’s nuances and innuendos. But when Paul suffers from a stroke that leaves him aphasic, it no longer matters how many books Paul has published or that, as he lays in a hospital bed, one of his works is being translated into French. Initially, Paul’s once epic vocabulary is dwindled down to the hateful utterance, “Mem, mem, mem,” and his attempt to write his name ends with the laboriously scrawled: “Poop.”

But all is not lost. Evidence of Paul’s great mind still thrums beneath the surface, and Diane, the ever-resourceful mate, fashions a panoply of exercises to stimulate her husband’s brain.

Indeed, the memoir’s namesake is one such exercise. Paul had once loved bestowing whimsical pet names on Diane such as “Swan,” “Paprika Cheeks,” and “Bush-kitten.” “Used to have … hundreds.” Paul laments after his stroke. “Now can’t think of one.” Undeterred, Diane suggests that, instead of blocking the wrong words that aphasia feeds him, Paul purposefully free-associate for one hundred days to create new pet names to replace the ones he’d lost. The results—“Apostle of Radiant Postage Stamps,” “Divine Hunter of the Cobalt Blue Arena,” “Pong of the Pavilion Where Sweet Peas Go to Spoon”—are a testament to the joyful and creative core of their decades-long marriage. “More than anything else,” says Ackerman, “I think of this book as the crazy love story of two playful, romantic, deeply eccentric, word-obsessed people.”

SMITH recently caught up with Ackerman to discuss her latest memoir, how she managed to write her next book, The Zookeeper’s Wife, while caring for Paul, and, of course, her favorite pet names.

As a writer of creative nonfiction, this isn’t your first memoir, but it is arguably your most personal subject to date.
Yes, it was by far the most personal and it was great fun to write. Books of mine like The Moon by Whale Light and the Rarest of the Rare are just not as revealing or psychological.

I share a lot of intimate things about Paul and me before the stroke. Paul was a true British eccentric who liked to improvise and was afraid to be in the presence of fresh fruit, but he was also the most gifted, romantic person, and our household was always zany in romantic ways. It was great fun to include those elements in the book.

You aren’t a scientist, but you are quite adept at writing about science. I noticed Carl Sagan was on your doctoral committee at Cornell.
When I was at Cornell my doctoral committee included a poet and a scientist. With everyone running interference, I could do an interdisciplinary degree and take courses like Physics for Poets. I didn’t believe nature was knowable from just one perspective. I still think it’s unfortunate that students are obliged to choose between the arts and science.

I don’t want to be a scientist, but I’m fascinated by the revelations of science. Science is just nature. I don’t make a distinction. It’s all part of the spectacle of being life forms on this crazy planet of ours.

You write about slipping into your “naturalist’s way of knowing” as a way of coping with Paul’s brain damage. Did your work on An Alchemy of Mind inform your understanding of Paul’s condition?
Because of my work for An Alchemy of Mind, I knew in chilling detail what had happened to him. Certainly, as a writer telling a story I was fortunate to have this knowledge, but as a spouse, the knowledge brought terror as well as hope. I knew that Paul had permanent damage to his brain and that in the case of stroke, a full cure isn’t possible though improvement is. I also knew the new golden rule of brain research: Contrary to what we were all taught and what a lot of people still think today, the brain isn’t rigid. We know now that brains are what neuroscientists call plastic, and that means don’t lose hope, because some neurons used for other tasks or some unused neurons can take over the functions of those that were damaged by stroke or injury.

When Paul first emerged from his stroke, all he could say was “mem.” Have you two developed an attachment to that sound or do you just absolutely hate it?
We still don’t know what “mem” meant, but it’s common after a stroke for somebody to be left saying just one word. Good thing it wasn’t a curse word. In the case of Charles Baudelaire the only thing he could say was “goddamn,” which was so awkward, because he was being cared for by nuns! We know of a director who can only say “yes”—not very useful for a director—and someone else who could only say “chicken.” No one knows why the brain is left snagging on just one word after a stroke.

Paul doesn’t say “mem” anymore, but he sometimes makes jokes about it. The valentine I received from Paul this year was a handmade collage in multi-colors, and “Mem Mem” was scrawled across the top. That was on the first page, and the second and third pages were filled with sentiments. He always made me valentines, and that didn’t stop after the stroke. They just got a little more chaotic.

As you were dealing with the first months of Paul’s stroke, were you keeping notes with the thought that you would publish on this subject matter?
No. I was writing a little bit in a journal just to help organize my feelings, but I wasn’t thinking at all about publishing anything about it. I’ve always transcended best by pretending that I’m Margaret Mead viewing a scene for the first time or an alien from another planet regarding the spectacle of life on Earth and discovering how spectacular, unexpected, and beautiful it is. Certainly it came in handy when I was in the hospital. I sometimes roamed the hallways looking at it as if it were a separate culture with its own fascinations, habitat, tribes, customs, and protocol. I noticed unusual sounds, smells, textures, sights, and noises that we tend to take for granted, and I thought about how hospitals wreck havoc on the body and the mind. One of the first things that struck me about the hospital is how the florescent lights keep signaling to the brain that it’s always noon. Everything is white, sounds are pinging and clanging; everything is different. Such things do affect patients and their visitors.

While caring for Paul after his stroke, you were also writing The Zookeeper’s Wife. How did you manage to write one of your most widely read books while in crisis mode?
Writing The Zookeeper’s Wife was my salvation for many reasons. It’s important for caregivers to carve out time for themselves in which they can just nourish themselves. Every day, sometimes for just a few minutes or hours, I’d announce I was going to Poland, to the zookeeper’s wife.

The Zookeeper’s Wife recounts the true World War II story of Antonina Zabinski, who hid hundreds of Jews and Polish resisters in the Warsaw Zoo. As a caretaker, were there aspects of Antonina’s character that you particularly connected with?
Antonina had an almost mystical relationship with animals and nature, and I do, too. One way in which I would nourish myself as a caregiver was to go out in nature and find out what everyday miracles had taken place overnight and look at them with curiosity and wonder. That might just mean a walk through the woods or gardening. It could just be a few minutes, but I always found it replenishing. Another thing about Antonina—her husband was a hero in a traditional way—he worked with the underground—but Antonina was heroic because of her radical acts of compassion. She wanted people she was hiding to survive, not just the war, but with their humanity intact. All of these things came into play while I was dealing with the very intense and, in many ways, traumatic events of Paul’s stroke and the difficulty of having Paul at home and looking after him when I couldn’t understand a word he was saying.

You write that “a caregiver is changed by the culture of illness.” Can you elaborate on that?
I think both Paul and I were changed by illness, but not all for the bad. There’s always a piece of my mind that is vigilant—keeping an eye on Paul’s health and looking after his blood thinner and medications. I prefer to have that piece of my mind free as before. But on the other hand, Paul is happier than I’ve ever known him to be. It really brought to him an appreciation for life and living in the moment and a greater appreciation for me. It’s brought us closer than we’ve ever been. We now unwrap each day as it arrives, as the special gift that it is.

I say at the end of the book that a bell that has a crack in it won’t ring as clearly, but it still can ring as sweetly. We’ve made a very good life for ourselves despite this trauma. Over the last six years, through ingenuity and mainly hard work on the part of Paul, Paul has improved beyond anyone’s expectations. I hope that readers take away that it’s important to know what’s possible and not to believe what doctors and textbooks still tell people—that whatever you don’t achieve in the first few months after a stroke you’ll have to learn to live without.

As Paul improved, you encouraged him to write a novel about his experiences, entitled The Shadow Factory. What does the shadow refer to?
I think the shadow is many things. The shadow is the misfortune that can befall a person. The shadow is what appears on x-rays during CT scans of the brain. The shadow could be the memory of a different life, a previous life that is behind you. The shadow is Plato’s shadows on cave walls. The shadow is also what the brain does—it makes allusions, because the brain itself is silent. The brain doesn’t feel anything. It doesn’t taste anything per se. It processes everything the body is experiencing. In the brain there are sleights of mind, there are shadows. But I don’t know which, if any of those, Paul had in mind.

You mention in the epilogue that as you wrote this book, you reviewed your work with Paul. What was that like?
Every evening, Paul would ask me to read him the pages I had written, and then we’d talk. We reminisced, we mourned, we helped each other remember what had happened, and in the process he learned better what had happened to him, and he also learned what I’d been going through. It brought us closer together. It was therapeutic.

How has your marriage changed since Paul’s stroke?
It’s not really one marriage, it’s several. Our household was always very romantic and zany and it still is, and we still play lots of word games and relish language, but Paul is aphasic and he always will be.

Do you have favorites among Paul’s one hundred names for you?
I absolutely love them all. But a few of my favorites are: “Little Moonskipper of the Tumbleweed Factory,” “Spy Elf of the Morning Hallelujahs,” and “My Little Bucket of Hair.” I don’t have a hairdo, I have a weather system of hair!

You continue to devote so much time to caring for Paul, and yet you still manage to write. How do you juggle it all?
Paul and I just agree what time I will be working. I get up early. I love to watch the dawn. I do most of my writing between dawn and noon before Paul gets up. We’ll both stop working at five p.m. and then have dinner and watch a movie.

What’s next?
I am working on something, but I can’t tell you about it yet I’m afraid. No hints! But it will be Ackermanian.

And finally, Diane Ackerman, what’s your Six-Word Memoir?
There was never a dull torment.

Photo: Toshi Otsuki
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READ an excerpt from One Hundred Names for Love.
BUY One Hundred Names for Love.
WATCH a video of Diane Ackerman and Paul West discussing One Hundred Names for Love.
VISIT Diane Ackerman’s website.

Meghan O’Rourke, a much-lauded poet and literary critic, began her career as an editor at The New Yorker. Later, she became the culture editor and literary critic at Slate and a poetry editor at The Paris Review. A sharp observer of sexism in literary fiction and poetry, she has written on the gender gap in literary magazines and the “unconscious gender bias” with regards to women writers.

Now O’Rourke, 35, has produced a very different kind of work, a memoir about her experiences grieving the loss of her mother to cancer. In the vein of Joan Didion, The Long Goodbye chronicles both O’Rourke’s own challenges with grief as well as that of her family. Spliced with detailed childhood memories of Brooklyn summers and the sterility of her mother’s hospital rooms, The Long Goodbye reads as a love letter to O’Rourke’s mother whom she so dearly loved.

O’Rourke, who lives in Brooklyn and Marfa, Texas, spoke to SMITH Magazine from Los Angeles.

The Long Goodbye really struck me as a modern meditation on grieving for single women, particularly without children. At one point in the book you do acknowledge that a lot of your friends are married and have babies and so grieving is a different experience for them. Can you say a little more about that?
Certainly one of the things that I thought a lot about was the particular contours of being, as you say, single and woman and grieving. There is not a lot out there that brings us into the experience of a woman alone grieving who isn’t grieving for a husband who has died. I do think that the book is very much about being a woman in your 30s and 40s, too—that age where you have left the embrace of your childhood home and you may not necessarily have a kind of home that feels secure in a time of great difficulty.

The book is also about becoming a different kind of a grown up and single woman than I was before my mom died. It’s really difficult when you’re at age where you’re thinking about having a family and to lose a mother, which is the focus point for a lot of those feelings, and your model as a woman for what your own life might look like. That was very difficult for me.

You turned to literature a lot to deal with your grief. I really loved the variety in your research—from Shakespeare to Tolstoy. As much as that was apart of your search while you’re grieving, why did you choose to include the voices of other authors when expressing your own grief?
I had been a shy child and always loved books. Books were how I understood my place in the world; and this book was about my grief.

One reason I think lot of grievers turn to books is that we get to pierce the consciousness of another being. In film and in TV, we’re looking at characters from the outside. While film and TV and be very powerful, the experience of grief was such a strange, alien territory that I had no sense of. When you’re reading, you can slip inside the skin of another person. I could slip in C.S. Lewis’s skin or I could slip inside Hamlet’s skin—his cries of feeling estranged. Reading became a way of feeling not alone as I took on the interior world of another.

Your book also struck me as a real writer’s response to grieving as well. There are the included passages but you also relentlessly researched your mother’s diagnosis, which you attributed to being a journalist. Did you intend for this very writerly narrative?
Yes. For me, writing a book became my form of mourning—my mourning ritual. I was able to put my experiences into language, which would sometimes feel beautiful for me. There was an element of transformation and satisfaction that I think I needed. It became this kind of transubstantiation to put down these complicated experiences. In that way, it did feel very writerly from the beginning.

You write that our culture doesn’t have any rituals for properly conveying grief. Even when your friends expect you to move on from your mother’s death, you don’t really blame them because you consider their behavior a cultural by-product.
Part of the difficulty is that we don’t have a shared language and that makes grief awkward for mourners and friends alike. The only language we have resource to is psychological language. So people ask you how you’re doing and you have to answer in this very personal way that may make the person you’re talking to feel very uncomfortable.

Mourning rituals gave you a way to signal grief and to express grief that wasn’t psychological or personal. You could wear black and ritualize your lament; externalizing all these feelings without saying, “I feel sad.”

Isadora Duncan, after she lost both of her children, wrote in letters to her friends that the worst part for her was not right after her children’s deaths or the funeral when everyone came to her side. She said that the worst part came many years later when people approached her and expected her to be completely recovered. Your book really echoed her sentiments for me. Would you agree with her observation?
Yes, I would. Grief certainly becomes less acute. It becomes more real and enduring.

I just gave a reading and a couple of young women who had recently lost parents said that it becomes very difficult to find a language for loss three years later or seven years later. You don’t just heal. It’s much like a tree growing around an obstacle in that something comes into your life and you have to grow around it. That is going to shape the pattern of your growth for the rest of your life, and in not necessarily a negative way.

Koa Beck will be reading from her short story, “Dorian in Germany” in Slice Magazine on May 9th at Housing Works Bookstore Café in NYC at 7 pm.

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MariNaomi, author of the autobiographical graphic novel Kiss & Tell: A Romantic Resume, Ages 0 to 22, anticipated varying sorts of feedback when the book was released last month. However, one adjective that has been buzzing around has taken her by surprise: “Shocking.” MariNaomi, 38, divides her book into chronological vignettes by age and romantic endeavor. While the book takes the reader through truthful stories of her crushes, boyfriends, girlfriends, LSD trips, and orgies, her clean black and white aesthetics carry her message through the raw and real emotions of the situations rather than simply of the deeds themselves.

SMITH spoke to MariNaomi while she was in the maelstrom of a feverish book tour while fighting a cold; however, she was just as effervescent and true as the young adult from her work.

What prompted you to do a romantic resume for a memoir over all the other aspects of your life? Was it more for the reader or yourself?
It was 2003 when I started writing it all–I had just broken up with someone. I was getting involved with someone who wasn’t really that great and I thought to myself, How did I get here again? How did I get broken up with again? I like to write the way I like to read. I wanted to write something I would be interested in. When I meet a new person I start grilling them about their love life and those stories have always been fun for me.

What is your process like? Do you write first or doodle first?
The whole process is basically: I figure out what the plot would be and I sketch it out. Then I meet with my writer friends. Once I know I have a good story, I start breaking it down into each panel and sketch out these little stick figures. I use another piece to pencil and make it a bit more finalized, but I’m still changing things. Every so often I’ll use brushes. It’s great using Japanese brush pens to fill in all of the black spaces. I’ll also use really fine point pens for details.

What do you hope readers get from your memoir?
I really want to connect to people. I don’t want people to read it like the Mackenzie Phillips autobiography. I wasn’t going for shocking by any means. Since people have started seeing the book, people have said the word shocking. I wanted people to identify with it and share their own stories!

Who are your influences in the graphic novel world? What was the graphic autobiography that blew you away?
It’s hard to pin down influences, since it’s rare for me to want to imitate another person. However, over the years I have noticed myself being inspired by Mary Fleener, Scott Russo, Chester Brown, Joe Matt, Roberta Gregory, Rob Kirby, Rita Mae Brown, Kurt Vonnegut, Melissa Bank, Armistead Maupin, David Sedaris… I could go on and on.

As for graphic novels that have blown me away, some of my favorites include everything by Dash Shaw, Maus I and II by Art Spiegelman, Chester Brown’s I Never Liked You, Joe Matt’s Peepshow and Poor Bastard, Drinking at the Movies by Julia Wertz, Make Me a Woman by Vanessa Davis… Gosh, I wish I had my bookshelf in front of me right now, since I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot of books!

You said that you’ve been drawing comics since you were a teenager, how did your style evolve?
Actually, I drew my first comic in my mid-twenties. When I started, my sense of perspective was nonexistent, and I was obsessed with stippling and cross-hatching. Nowadays my artwork is more stark. I think I started going in that direction after a few years of over-detailing everything. Maybe it got exhausting, maybe I just wanted to be able to draw faster. I’m not sure how it happened exactly, but I’m happy with how my art looks now.

Which feedback most affects you about your work? Critiques from your family, readers, or professional critics?
I’ve been reading every review I could find. It’s still pretty new–it’s only been out for a week. Every time I get a review that’s not glowing it gets me a little down. Why would critics like my book if they’re looking for a moral story on how teenagers should act? Also, some complain that they wanted it to be wrapped up tightly, but I don’t know how any good memoir does that. Yes, if it’s a biography the person can die at the end but I don’t get to do that [Laughs].

The scariest part was showing it to my parents. There was a lot they didn’t know, like about the drugs and the orgies. We have a great relationship now and no one yelled at me. But my dad was pretty bummed when he found out through my book that I got an abortion, he sent me a sad emoticon over an email. Last October, I gave the very first copy to my dad because I wanted him to be prepared. I was waiting for all shit to go off. He had only read up to the losing the virginity part and he was having a hard time about it.

What would you differently?
Oh, I can’t think like that. Along with everything in art I do, I can’t look back or else I’ll freak out. There’s one panel in the book that I really don’t like because I changed it at the last moment. I know people wouldn’t dwell on this one panel so I shouldn’t either.

How has touring been?
Touring is so much fun! I am completely in awe of my super-talented, hilarious and brilliant tour mates, and it is such an honor to be a part of Sister Spit! I’m documenting each day with an online comic, which I’m posting on Twitter and my Facebook page. Maybe I’ll make it into a chapbook when this is all over. It has been such a unique experience.

Finally, MariNaomi, what’s your Six-Word Memoir?
Please forgive me mom and dad.

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Gabrielle Hamilton, New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, admits she hit a snag at some point in her writing process. Though she would have liked to have attributed the holdup to the fact that, while writing her memoir, she was also raising two young children and running her East Village restaurant Prune, “The truth is,” Hamilton explained, “I had a paralyzing fear that I’m a piece of shit, this is a piece of shit, I’m boring, and this is boring.” Paradoxically, to overcome that fear, said Hamilton, “I stopped making the memoir about my goddamn self. I brought everything I knew about being a chef, cooking, and the service industry to the project of writing a book.”

So what was the essence of that knowledge? After years of serving hungry patrons, Hamilton understood that “when you’re hungry, there’s nothing better than eating the food you want, to have appetite.” Likewise, to write a bestselling memoir, Hamilton simply had to ask herself what her readers would want.

Blood, Bones, and Butter, the result of Hamilton’s efforts to carry over her talent for satisfying a restaurant full of hungry people, is a memoir that hits the spot. With a flair for describing memories and sentiments through her taste buds (in Hamilton’s world, an emotion is like root beer: “frigid and caught… in the back of my throat”), Hamilton holds her readers’ rapt attention as she leads them, meal by delicious meal, through her childhood, two decades in the catering business, a yearlong backpacking trip (during which Hamilton experiences the particular thrill of being “picked up and fed, often by strangers, when you are in that state of fear and hunger”), and the opening of her popular restaurant, Prune.

SMITH caught up with Hamilton one morning in her New York apartment during a brief break from her book tour. Though she had a million items on her to-do list and had already been up for hours, “right now,” Hamilton reported, “I’m just eating the last bite of toast.” Between bites, Hamilton spoke about writing a bestseller, juggling two careers and motherhood, and, of course, food.

Photo by Melissa Hamilton

How has your life changed since your book came out?
Everyone’s asking me how’s all this fame. I’m like, I’m famous? Wait a minute. I have no sense of what’s going on.

In your memoir, you write that many women have self-selected out of the chef life, but here you are a mother, a chef, and a published author. What drives you?
If you’re referring to the fact that I had a restaurant, kids, and a book to write all at the same time, I’d say I couldn’t have planned it that way. Everything that I wanted in life just happened exactly at the same time. I was not going to say no to any of those things. I just had to cram it all in somehow. I’m generally turned off by the word impossible.

In a previous interview, you say that admitting you wrote a memoir is like admitting you wrote a power love ballad. What’s that comparison about?
I have always understood memoir to be a kind of bastard genre of literature. I’m not ascribing these characteristics to it. This is what the hardcore male literary critics say—that memoir is typically what women do, and by saying that they are demeaning it, because of course whatever women do is obviously less serious than what men do, which we can obviously refute. I just want to embrace this by saying, Yeah, I wrote a memoir. That was my way of de-fanging the critique.

What was your writing routine like? How did you fit it into your busy life?
It was brutal, and it was so far away from that Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own ideal. But the more I have to do, the more shit I accomplish. If I had all day to sit around staring at the book, I wouldn’t have written it. I’m at my best when there’s a lot of constriction and boundaries. If I have only 20 minutes, then I get it done. That’s what I like about magazine and newspaper work. There’s a hard and fast word count and a hard and fast deadline. The limitations work as muse and editor together, because if it has to be done, then you got to get it done.

How would you compare your two crafts—writing and cooking?
They’re incredibly compatible. I’m very grateful to have my day job as a chef and to have the restaurant. It’s so grounding and practical. The restaurant is a place where actual living life happens. It’s sociable and doable, and I cherish being able to walk away from the loneliness and the seemingly unaccomplishable task of writing. I’m a part-time writer, and I’m still learning how to write. Faced with one’s amateurism, it’s nice to go to something you’re pretty accomplished at. Conversely, it’s so nice to come to the page after an 18-hour day of manual labor and quite mundane thoughts like, have I ordered enough parsley today and the espresso machine seems to be leaking. It was an incredible relief to come to the page sometimes and let your mind out for a longer stroll than the average chef life allows.

You write so intensely and lyrically about emotional moments in your life through your descriptions of food. Can you talk about the connection and interplay between food and your memories?
I’ll tell you the truth, I did not deliberately do anything, and I highly recommend it to writers. If you just tell the damn story from the beginning to the middle to the end, and you are authoritative about your subject—you know what it looks like, smells like, you know who, what, when, why–everything else will take care of itself.

Having said that, I knew I had to write about food. Chefs are very popular now, and I happened to be at the right place at the right time. I understood my job in writing this book was to include food. I’m obviously not a food writer, but I was able to write about the experience of food, being a part of a family where food was emphasized. Food is in the book because food is my life.

Hunger is a significant part of your memoir, and you write that your memories of hunger are central to your conception of your restaurant Prune. What does hunger mean to you?
I consider hunger an important part of eating. In terms of Prune, I wasn’t opening a conceptual restaurant. I didn’t want a place that was entertainment or a place where you go to have your mind blown. When I’m having a blood-sugar moment at four in the afternoon, I just want some very delicious thing to eat. I don’t want some conceptual chef to give me a deconstructed hardboiled egg that’s been chemicalized and cheffied up, nor do I want a Snickers at the local deli. When you’re hungry, there’s nothing better than eating the food you want, to have appetite.

You spent two decades in the catering industry, but you don’t really write about how that experience informed your restaurant Prune. Can you tell me a bit about that?
From catering, I learned everything I did not want to do in my restaurant. As a caterer, I spent a long time blow-torching things, wrapping things up in saran wrap, cooking meat hours and hours before it would be eaten, reheating meat in a Sterno cabinet, and preparing food that fifteen people had touched. I wanted nothing to do with that.

On the other hand, I’m a pretty good caterer by now. It’s fun to be able to produce a meal for 350 people in the middle of a field. I’ve actually always loved catering. You see these incredible parties. There’s some formidable stuff that happens in catering. And you can work outside of your idiom. By that I mean, if you have a restaurant, your restaurant has a point of view and you have to stick to that. In catering, you can be in Italy, Morocco, Vietnam. Everything you can pull off is legit.

At the beginning of the book, you write about your French mother with great fondness. She passes on to you her love for food and cooking, but as an adult, you avoid her for 20 years. There isn’t much about the complexities of your relationship with your mother in your memoir. Was that deliberate?
Yes. I had to write about people as they pertained to food, so my mother was obviously a huge influence, and I couldn’t technically write about her without including the fact that we have a strained relationship. But as for the complexities of our relationship, that’s not in the book and it’s not for sale. Understandably, people are having this experience of this book as intimate and very personal, and they feel like they know me so well, but it’s kind of a deceptive intimacy. You don’t really know me as well as you think you do. I’m very much in control of the material in the book.

And what has meeting your readers on your book tour been like?
The book tour has been so surprisingly nice. I didn’t realize that the people who come to see you are on your side. They like the book. I’m always preparing myself for being hated or heckled. I prepare myself for the worst, always, and it hasn’t been that way. I’ve been joking that my book tour is my Facebook Unplugged Tour, because I don’t do Facebook or social media. I’m running into people I haven’t seen in 10 or 20 years. It’s just incredible. Who needs Facebook? You just got to go on book tour. And the conversations have been just how I like them.

What do you mean by that?
I think by writing the book in this straightforward or honest way, it has also encouraged that kind of conversation with others. So far it has not turned into TMI situations where someone is telling you way too much about their life. It’s just been exactly in the same kind of tone that I wrote—honest, straightforward, but not over-exposing, and not over-revealing.

Do you plan on writing another book?
This is just changing in the past couple of days. When this question has come up on book tour, I’ve said, Can we wait just ten minutes? I need to enjoy this book for just a moment. Now that book tour is starting to wind down, I’m a little like, What am I going to do now? I haven’t quite answered the question. I suspect for my sophomore effort, I’m just going to be chickenshit and do a cookbook or something.

What about writing one of those cookbooks that combines recipes and memoir?
I assure you I won’t do that. That’s a kind of cookbook I actually resent. Just give us the recipe. If you want to tell us your life story then just write a memoir.

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For those who have known the particular pain of joblessness in The Great Recession, Caitlin Shetterly’s plainspoken memoir, Made for You and Me: Going West, Going Broke, Finding Home, is a much-needed bear hug. Freelancers Caitlin and her husband Dan never thought the economy would get as bad as it did. Indeed, after marrying, moving across the country from Maine to Los Angeles, and becoming pregnant in quick succession, their future looked bright in spite of the slowing economy. Shetterly’s husband, a photographer, was booking enough jobs to support his growing family. It seemed for a time that they would really make it in L.A. But by early 2008, making ends meet was becoming impossible, especially with a newborn in tow. Dan resorted to looking for work by hitting every store, restaurant, and bar, block by painful block, to no avail.

Stranded in California and drowning in debt, Dan and Caitlin eventually conceded that there was nothing left to do but pack up their baby, dog, and belongings, and move in with Caitlin’s mother in Maine. It was around that time that Caitlin began recording The Recession Diaries for NPR. To their surprise, listeners all across the country responded to Caitlin’s story with their own recession stories and an outpouring of support. “I’d thought that going west was our most American of journeys,” writes Caitlin, “but this journey—the going home—was when I felt America reach out to me and beckon me with its long legacy of triumph over adversity.”

SMITH recently spoke with Caitlin about her All-American story, NPR radio series, and the importance of community and family.

Photo by Daniel E. Davis

One woman who offered to let us stay at her house on our way from California to Maine drove two hours each way to see me at a reading. When she appeared, I just hugged her. The connection was so deep. She had reached out to us in response to the NPR series at a time that was so hard. She saw us for our humanity. Those people who reached out to us will always be saints in my life, and all they did was write to me. I can’t say how much that helped us get across the country.

On the day you received your book advance, you were down to your last $16. What did it feel like to receive that advance?
It felt really weird. We went from having nothing to something, even though we were still living below the poverty level. It was a totally surreal experience. We were so on the edge and so desperate that to have some money felt like a magical thing, a Cinderella story.

So many Americans have experienced unemployment by now, and yet it is a very lonely experience. Why do you think that is?
Why do they feel so alone? Money is so hard to talk about. I’d liken it to when my parents got divorced. When your parents are going through a divorce it feels so specifically ugly, as if what is going on in your family could never be so ugly in someone else’s family. It’s hard to be open about things that feel so personal, so wrenching, and so ugly. You can’t imagine anyone else is going through the same thing.

Sometimes I have these dreams of just handing the book out at job fairs or an unemployment office, just giving it to people who might need it. I wrote the book so that other people would feel less alone when faced with the isolation and pain that comes from economic collapse. The message of the book is that we have to be willing to ask for help, and we have to be willing to help each other.

Was it difficult to write honestly about such a painful experience?
Hemingway said, Write one true sentence. Dan and I have always been committed to telling the truth. I felt my job was to write the truth and be completely honest and open, and I wasn’t scared of telling the truth.

I have a friend who used to say, This is my heart, it’s yours to break. This is my book and it’s yours to break and yours to love. It’s my story. It’s the truth, and I can’t do any better than that.

How did you personally grapple with the ugliness of economic collapse?
Becoming a mother saved me, because I had a more important job than just taking care of myself. My son’s life depended on me. And I had to choose life. I also laughed every day. I went through my whole life for weeks without laughing, and then I had a child and it totally changed me. It changed how I interacted in the world.

How do you hope your son Matty will respond to this book when he is old enough to read it?
Sometimes I worry that all of his life so far has been sort of a struggle. It’s like, we were in that struggle, and then I was writing my book seven days a week, and now I’m on a book tour. I just hope that he understands that the struggle we were going through was always with him in mind.

I hope that he reads my book with mercy. I hope what he reads is about two people who were tenacious and who would do anything for each other, for him, and for our animals, because our animals are our family, too.

How have you changed as a result of the financial struggles you and Dan experienced?
I would say that experience made it scarier to live with a question mark, but I also know now that we’ve got options. I always thought the worst that could happen to us is that we would move home with our mother, and we did that already. Although I wouldn’t like to move home again with my family, it’s not outside the realm of possibility. It no longer feels like this terrifying thing that I have to make never happen.

We’ve brought into our lives some of the communal values from living with our mother. For example, with our landlady, we’ll shovel the driveway and she’ll watch our son. We’ll do part of a holiday together. We really help each other. I never would have existed that way before.

What is the main thing you’d like to say to the many Americans who have had their dreams deferred?
Dreams can get deferred, but that doesn’t mean they’re gone. They can also change, and the things we sometimes think we want are not always what we need. What we need is community, family, and a meaningful life.

As for artists and freelancers who have struggled in this economy, lots of people have worked in jobs that we didn’t expect to be in and we were still able to make art. I’ve worked some bizarre jobs. My parents were artists, but my dad dug clams and my mother worked at a fish factory. Your dreams can still be within reach. You just have to configure your life to make it work.

In your book, you write about how Dan feels emasculated when you move your entire family in with your mother. Has it been difficult for him to have his story told on NPR and in your memoir?
I’d say the audio diaries were more difficult. Some of the tape was so raw and really went through my heart. I don’t think either of us had any idea that the NPR diaries were going to become such a lightning rod. I just never had anything overnight go viral like that. We felt really exposed. There is such a feeling of vulnerability when your voice is out there as well as your words.

The book was a lot less scary. Dan read every draft of it. In the end, I read it out loud to him before my book was transmitted and made into a galley. He was really involved in all that.

How would you compare the work of putting together your NPR audio diaries to writing Made for You and Me?
The audio diaries were hard. However, I felt like the pain of what was happening was happening anyway, and this was a part of it. As far as writing the book went, when I had to write the part about our life falling apart and more specifically about our cat Ellison dying, that was very, very hard for me. Those chapters took a lot out of me, and I approach them with anxiety. When I pick up the book to read it, I just skip the chapter about Ellison dying. I almost don’t even want to touch those pages. I still wear her tags, and I still have my cat’s ashes on my bedside table next to me.

Which authors and books have influenced your writing?
I believe in seeing who has gone before. If you look carefully, you can see that the story was inspired by The Great Gatsby. I learned to write a sentence from Hemingway. There were authors like Pam Houston, Gretel Ehrlich, Jack Kerouac. I read this wonderful book called Went to Kansas. I read a lot of pioneer stories. Those were the real American stories that inform who we are, and the sentences I wrote couldn’t help but be influenced by the pioneers who came before.

How are you and your family doing now?
We’re okay. What’s hard now is that we don’t know really what we’re going to do next financially. The book is out now which means I’ve gotten my final payment. Dan’s about to graduate from school. And we’re about to have two hefty school loans of his. I still have school loans. We are still in a lot of debt. We don’t know what’s going to happen next. This experience got me writing my first book and now I’m trying to promote it, but there’s a question mark in our lives now, too. I’m not back to square one, but I’m back to having to figure out something soon.

What can we expect from you next?
Right now I’m just really focused on getting the message of this book out. I can’t say I’ve really even figured out what I’m doing next. I’d love to say I have a novel in the bag. I have started writing a few pages, but it’s very hard to write when you’re promoting another book.

And finally, Caitlin Shetterly, what’s your Six-Word Memoir?
Went west, went broke, found home.

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Drink Like a F*cking Man, Man!

I used to be a regular at P&J’s Tavern, a hole-in-the-wall in a down-and-out section of Northeast Philly known as Summerdale. P&J’s was the first drinking establishment I’d ever been to, and over the course of a long summer many years ago it’s where I became a pinball wizard, and honed my now-considerable pool, darts and shuffleboard skills. It’s also where I received a crash course in drunkenness, sex, obscene drunkenness, fisticuffs and all manner of other types of unseemly behavior. Not that I engaged in any of it firsthand. At least, not that summer. After all, I was only seven.

It was a different time, and one people seem to now think less enlightened. But I would argue that life was infinitely more interesting for kids in the 70s than it is now. I usually went to P&J’s with my dad. Back then, a heavy drinker bringing a first grader to a bar every day was no more frowned upon than that same guy driving the wee lad home after tying one on, then letting him play with lawn darts or listen to the Carpenters unsupervised. Dangerous, sure. Also really goddamn fun. I think it’s the toys of the era that I miss the most. Like those Click Clack Clackers with the two heavy acrylic balls on a string that when “clacked” together with enough force had a tendency to shatter, sending eye-piercing shards everywhere. Come to think of it, I should have picked some up for Timmy McFadden (more on that guy later).

But irresponsible as it might seem now, spending damn near every day with my pops at P&J’s in the summer of 1976 is one of two truly meaningful father-son bonding experiences I can recall from my childhood. The other happened when I was five and he kidnapped me and fled to Maryland. No shit. I’m going to leave that story be for now, though, except to say that I honestly believe the guy had my best interests at heart. Plus I’ve got to set aside some material for my follow-up to this book, a weepy tell-all companion tentatively titled “A Heartbreaking Work Of Running with a Million Little Pieces of Scissors.” Oprah, I hope you’re ready.

But P&J’s. P&J’s was my indoctrination. That watershed moment that changes everything. No matter who you are and where your own personal relationship with alcohol has taken you, your first encounter with booze is a singular event from which there is no turning back. In that moment you are set upon a journey toward becoming one of four different types of people: 1) a person who drinks; 2) a person who doesn’t drink; 3) a person who wishes he could handle drinking yet cannot; or 4) a person who is dead.

And while I’m sure there are a few teetotalers reading this in the interest of getting a peek behind the curtain, I think it’s a good bet that most of the folks reading this book are, like me, firmly entrenched in the first category. It would be naïve to rule out, however, that any one of us might become a 3 or 4 down the line somewhere. We’re all 4s eventually, after all. And as far as number 3 goes, my extensive field research has revealed a cruel irony: that a given person’s unwillingness to acknowledge their category 3 potential vastly increases the possibilities of it happening. Because alcohol does funny things to your brain. Sometimes it’s the ha-ha kind and sometimes it’s the peculiar kind. And sometimes it’s the “I take my first-grader to the bar then drive him home drunk” kind. Hilarious, right?
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Copyright © 2011 by Dan Dunn
From the book LIVING LOADED by Dan Dunn, published by Three Rivers
Press, a division of Random House, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

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Dan Dunn is the author of the recently released memoir, Living Loaded: Tales of Sex, Salvation, and the Pursuit of the Never-Ending Happy Hour, which chronicles the period of his life he spent as a nightlife columnist for Playboy. During this time he got to live the life many of us dream about (while we secretly hope the guy who actually lives it is not having as much fun as he appears to be). The bad news? Dunn is having a blast. But it’s not all fun and games. While far from a weepy addiction tell-all, Dunn does pack some emotional heft in with his tales of strip-clubs, booze conventions, porn stars, christian rock concerts and Vegas. And to his credit, throughout the book he grapples in a variety of ways with a central (and uniquely American) question: Is there more to life than having a good time?

Full Disclosure: I was Dunn’s editor at Playboy, and Playboy.com, where we developed Dunn’s column, The Playboy Imbiber (on which the book is based).

The book features a character who is a snarky analogue of me, as well as the single most obnoxious song dedication in the history of publishing. I have thus used this forum to exact some small modicum of payback, in part because I didn’t get a penny of the author’s advance. Was this professional? No. Was it satisfying? Yes. I hope that what I lack in objectivity, I have made up for in authenticity. This interview was conducted in a bar, during the afternoon, when most of the respectable world is off being respectable.

What are you drinking, Dan?
I’m drinking a 12-year-old Glenlivet on two ice cubes.

I hear you’ve written a book.
I did. A brilliant, brilliant book.

Your memoir deals extensively with your often-cavalier relationship with alcohol. Meanwhile, your dad is an alcoholic. Was that ever an issue between the two of you?
An issue? No. But we talk about it a fair amount. In fact, I transcribed one of our conversations about booze in the book. I think my dad has a mistaken idea that I can actually handle alcohol a lot better than I can. He hasn’t seen my less shining moments. But he liked the book.

There are aspects of your book that feel like they approach some of the territory explored by J.R. Moehringer in The Tender Bar. What did you think of that book?
When I read The Tender Bar I was disappointed. Mainly because I knew I could never write anything that excellent myself. A lot of people think a drinking memoir has to be drunk or dumb. One of the great things about The Tender Bar is that it’s comfortable with the fact that a corner saloon can be a holy place.

What are your favorite memoirs?
Kitchen Confidential is up there for me. And I was morbidly fascinated by Going Rogue.

What about Tucker Max?
Remember what I said before about drinking memoirs being drunk or dumb? Well they don’t always escape that trap. I’ve been compared to Tucker Max more times than I’m entirely comfortable with, but hey, his book sold really well so maybe I shouldn’t fight it. But for the most part, I prefer to keep my drunk dumbness off the page. This book is about drinking as a vocation, not how awesome being drunk is.

Why should anyone read your memoir?
Because it’s funny and sad and full of deep meaning. You do know I’m a modern Shakespeare, right?

Actually, I think it’s worth the price of admission just for the recipes. Sixteen original cocktails from some of the most accomplished bartenders in the world.

How do you go about getting 16 of the world’s best bartenders to help you write your book for free?
I suppose they might feel like they’ll get something back in return someday. Which reminds me, I probably have to send those guys some books. That’s going to be a pain in the ass collecting those addresses. That’s how much of an asshole I am. These guys go out of their way to create original drinks and write up witty paragraphs to go with them, and I’m pissed I have to email them all.

You poor, poor thing.
Actually, I’m joking about that. I’m not going to send them books.

You being an asshole is something of a theme that runs through the book.
I think that by the end you get the clear understanding that I’m a good guy. But I do have my quirks.

Quirks.
Some might call them shortcomings.

Adorable idiosyncrasies.
Foibles!

One man’s asshole is another man’s iconoclast.
I had a rough upbringing.

Oh, I see. Your bad behavior was thrust upon you. What do you mean exactly by ‘rough upbringing’?
Alcoholic dad. Mentally ill mother. Rough neighborhood.

Philly, right? What part?
The part where you get beat up. Frankford. Northeast Philadelphia. It’s sort of the Philly equivalent of South Boston. We were lower-middle class. Not the poorest, but bad shit seemed to follow us around. My mom’s crazy, my dad lost his arm driving drunk, step-dad died in a fire. You know. Fun stuff.

How does one go about starting a career like yours?
Oh, now it’s a career? Cool. Does that mean I’m going to start getting a living wage? Seriously, though, the perks of this job are great. But there’s a harsh reality right behind them. Sometimes my colleagues and I go on these booze junkets so we don’t have to spend any money that week. You figure if you’re on the road for half a year at least you have half your grocery bill paid. Then again, it’s hard to make free travel, free food and free booze sound like a sob story. A lot of people work real jobs to afford to do what I do for a living. At the same time, I spend a lot of time hustling and trying to figure out ways to make money. When I got into the game, you could be a columnist for a magazine, write a column once a week, and make $75-80,000 a year. That’s over. Doesn’t exist any more. Today you work ten times more for one-tenth the money.

You seem to be managing.
I just had an idea: If I start getting them to fly me first class, maybe I can downgrade to coach and get paid the difference.

Nice move. Is there something in your upbringing that causes this sort of behavior?
I think it’s the Philly in me. Growing up there taught me that you take any edge you can get. What some people call illegal, others call survival.

Is it ever weird having a blue-collar Philly background and going to fancy wine tastings in L.A.?
That’s part of what I wanted to deal with in this book. Because it’s definitely weird sometimes. At the end of the day, though, I actually think it gives me an edge. I can see this world from the outside. And I’m not going to be as swayed by bullshit and schmancy trappings.

Speaking of non-schmancy, in the book you talk about the Dive Bar school of daycare.
Yes. I came close to calling this book: Everything I Needed To Know I Learned In Kindergarten (From A Bartender). The summer when I was seven, I lived with my dad full-time, and this was back when pops was drinking heavily. So we’d spend most of a given day at his favorite bar.

A sort of crash course in bonding…
Not so much. I loved spending time at his bar, P&J’s, but once we hit the door, we didn’t hang together. Having a seven-year-old trailing you will put a serious crimp on your pickup skills. Thankfully, one of the bartenders, Tall Paul, took me under his wing. Taught me how to mix drinks.

At age seven?
Yup. Taught me all kinds of other stuff too. When to cut someone off, who got a buyback and when and how you marked it. It was like this secret language. As a kid, being behind the bar was the best thing ever. It felt so adult.

There was no issue with you being behind the counter?
No. These were less litigious times. Plus, I don’t think Tall Paul had anything to worry about, as far as the cops went. Philly’s still like that. Closing time in Philly is 2 a.m., but a lot of bars just stay open. They don’t even hide it! I was at a friend’s bar–the place has windows looking out on a busy street–it’s 3 a.m. and they’re drinking. Big smiles. Good evening officer! Everyone’s got a brother, uncle, dad or kid that’s a cop. It’s a good system.

A lot of people would look at this book and say: drunk father, mentally ill mother. This guy doesn’t need a job in drinking.
See, I would counter that these people don’t need jobs criticizing poor, defenseless booze journalists.

What was the best thing about writing the book?
It was my job to hang out with remarkable, passionate people. Winemakers, distillers, and brewers are all doing what they love, and that’s an inspiring thing to be around. Today I had lunch with Jim Koch [founder of Sam Adams]. Great guy. Tonight I’ll be hanging out with elite winemakers. Plus, beyond just getting to hang out with them, I get to expose what they do to a wider audience.

Have any public responsibility-type groups come after you for being irresponsible? For promoting reckless drinking?
It’s not like I’m naïve on the topic. My dad’s in AA, my brother’s in AA. And I have nothing but respect and encouragement for people that quit drinking. I respect your reality, just please don’t impose it on me. Especially when I’m trying to get some quality drinking done.

Finally, Dan Dunn, what’s your Six-Word Memoir?
Fine. I got the next round.

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Lately there has been lots of earnest hand-wringing about “cyberbullying.” When Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog, was growing up in Haverhill, Mass., bullying wasn’t anonymous insults over Facebook. It was constant, justified terror of beatdowns—and worse—by poor, drunk, drugged-up kids “who roamed the neighborhood like dogs.”

Skeptical? Intrigued? Read Dubus’s engrossing memoir, Townie, and you’ll get to know and feel this world—and what it took to survive it. At first, on a primal level, it took shame- and rage-fueled hours lifting weights in his basement, plus learning how to fight at a local boxing gym. Later, on the emotional and psychic levels, it took much more.

Dubus describes how fighting gave his teenage self an identity and allowed him to protect his siblings in his father’s absence. (His father, the eminent short-story writer of the same name, lived oceans away across the Merrimack River, writing, teaching then marrying future wives, and largely shirking father duties.) Over time he develops a taste for it, enacting his Dirty Harry fantasies by pummeling boorish drunks and, later, fratboys during college at the University of Texas. The crucial turn, in the book as in life, comes when Dubus bravely confronts not another foe but the secret selfishness of this violence. The epiphany lands after sending a rude punk in the Miami airport to the hospital. As other passengers pat him on the back, he sees himself as “depleted, ugly, and wrong.”

Dubus surprises himself by starting to write, an activity that, in one of the book’s many surprising insights, transforms his fighting prowess and mentality into something redemptive. His ability to break through the “membrane” around him and then the one around his victim—the thing that made him a badass fighter—becomes imaginative empathy, the writer’s lifeblood.

Fans of Dubus’s fiction will thrill to reading his muscular, occasionally lyrical prose rendering his own life. They will also like the passages late in the book that take the reader behind the curtain of the writer’s art as Dubus sees and practices it. Fans of Dubus père will bask in the fresh light cast here by the son, a light warmed by their loving kinship as adults. And everyone will be fascinated by this admirable, strange life and how, slowly and indirectly, it widens out to suggest truths about America, its men, and their peculiar need to “turn a wound into a wounding.”

How did the book come about? Was it your idea to do a memoir?
I had no intention of doing one. I haven’t read many, not even Angela’s Ashes or [Jeannette Walls’s] The Glass Castle. I did read [Tobias Wolff’s] This Boy’s Life.

I was working on a book of personal essays, a form I love. One was about baseball and its mythic place in America. I got baseball from my son, who’s 18. I had to learn how to throw a ball. Of course, it’s usually the other way around. How’d I miss baseball?

I wrote into that question and really got into it. A hundred pages in, I thought, Shit, this isn’t a baseball essay anymore! I felt I was in the same territory as when I’d tried to write fiction out of my childhood experience: a mill town in the 1970s, single mom, rough streets, drugs and sex at a young age, no Dad, Nixon, Vietnam. I tried three times over several years, and it always fell on its face.

So, in writing about baseball I got back into this material. I was surprised it was coming the way it was. I decided to write it straight this time. I still felt reluctant to publish it.

Why?
Part of it was just the usual [ironic tone] “psychic trembling before the public gaze,” but actually I’ve always been an open-book, no-boundaries guy—”How much do you make?…Oh really, I make so and so…”

Mainly, it was not wanting to violate my family’s privacy. Also, I didn’t want people to know how cowardly I was. Twenty years ago, I couldn’t have written it, much less have it published.

What did you discover writing this book?
Writing always teaches me something; it’s a deep mining thing. I’d never known how to write about [my fistfighting days]. The answer that came to me was: through the weak, scared boy I’d been. I thought for years that my rage—which was the reason I won more fights than I lost—was from being bullied. That was 1/20th of it. The real cause was my broken family and home.

In your Acknowledgments you thank your editor for “helping me to find the true book within the one I’d first written.” Was there a scrapped first draft?
I tend to overwrite and shave it down. There was so much I couldn’t put in; it’d be too long. I had a whole section about when I was a bounty hunter in Mexico. Alane [Salierno Mason] got me to write more honestly about the family stuff, to go deeper. She saw that that was the heart of the book.

How was writing this book different from writing fiction?
Of course, you have to be loyal to the facts. The James Frey debacle has made everyone more careful. But it felt more similar to a novel than I thought it would. I saw a Charlie Rose interview with Mike Nichols, who said that reporters ask, What happened? and novelists ask, What’s it like to be inside the thing that happened? With this book I was off the hook for the events, so the creative juice went to capturing more fully what the experience of the events was like.

Do you think there’s a crisis of masculinity in America? A dissatisfaction with the sensitive-guy ideal that was supposed to correct the repressed, macho, and/or remote model?
I wrestle with it. It’s a confusing time for us. I think men are beautiful creatures. The same aggression that goes into breaking a coffee cup over someone’s face can go into putting up an I-beam while building a beautiful house. One of the shadow sides of feminism is the misunderstanding that equality means we’re the same.

At the end of the book you seem to achieve a synthesis of the two extremes. Is that the solution?
I think so. For me the synthesis is between art and athletics. A daily artistic and athletic practice makes me feel vital. I’ve been a gym rat since I started lifting as a kid. And I write every morning because it scares the shit out of me. It’s like fighting: One, you’re opening yourself up to whatever comes, and two, you might fail. It’s hard not to feel totally alive in that moment.

There are lots of economically depressed places where people drink, do drugs, and fight. New England is particularly Hobbesian, more than people might think. You describe a kid throwing a Molotov cocktail in your car, another trying to burn you alive at the stake, another swatting an old lady in the face with a pine branch for no reason. Talk about the role of place in the book.
When I left Massachusetts, I swore I’d never go back. I associated it with ignorant, alcoholic, violent people. But it’s one of the things I’d been wanting to paint for years, the blue-collar life in a New England former mill town. Yeah, it’s kinda brutish, but there are some beautiful women, some great humor…[chuckles].

John Updike called my dad “The Bard of the Merrimack Valley,” because he set his stories here. But, as much as I love his work, his characters have never been recognizable in my experience of the place.

Writing this, place was a palpable other character. If the heart of a book is character, the lungs are place—they allow the character to live and breathe.

I also wanted to capture the early ’70s. Now, there’s a ridiculous nostalgia for that time. It was a bleak decade, the hangover after the sixties. We went from this incredible time to Disco and happy faces.

Do you edit yourself as you write?
I follow whatever intuitive tributaries appear. Then I read it. Often my reaction is, “That’s nice; that’s something you needed to know about this character, but it can be one page, not 60.”

How long did it take to get that?
Ten, fifteen years.

You use similes and metaphors judiciously—there aren’t many, and they all land. Do they come easily to you, or do you have to work for them?
They come more readily than I let them in. When I was young, I used way too many, like all young writers. Now I cut more than the reader will see. They seem to come from this restraint, more so than if I was milking them.

I’m working on some fiction now that’s more impressionistic, but generally I just don’t like showy language.

What surprised you writing this book?
I didn’t think my father would come into it as much. What I was painting was fatherlessness. But he became present as this huge absence.

A novelist couldn’t have come up with a better climax than the scene where you’re burying him and some townies drive by and curse you all out—the family, a priest—for no reason. It allowed you to dramatize transcending your old instinct to get in your car and hunt them down.
I felt the book going toward his death and that scene. This is the only book I’ve written that felt compelled, where the book itself had to be written whether I wanted it to or not. It was a strange experience.

The book shows that you have a well-developed faculty of self-observation, and you seem comfortable with psychological terms. Have you been in therapy?
For one year, after Pop died. Within a six-month period, I turned 40, lost my father, and got rich and famous. I didn’t know how to have money in the bank—it sounds so pathetic. I’m still far more comfortable with my back against the wall, figuratively speaking—and literally!

I drove to Cambridge every week, and my therapist said two things: One, you literally don’t know how to have things go consistently well, and two, you’re hard-wired for bad news. I also learned that the weird physical stuff I had as a kid were anxiety attacks.

Finally, Andre Dubus III, what’s your Six-Word Memoir?
Can do better, will do better.

Edward Lovett is a writer, tutor, and jazz crooner. He lives in Brooklyn.

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