I kicked off this past weekend by attending one of the many cool events hosted by New Yorker magazine as part of their weekend festival. Friday night was Fiction night with an unbelievable line-up of authors. The session I attended was “Where I Come From” - a discussion with Junot Diaz, Shalom Auslander and Sherman Alexie. A Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Foreskin’s Lament and The Absolute Diary of a Part-Time Indian were all amongst my favorite books of the past year so I was pretty psyched.
I had not given much thought to the commonality of these authors since they all come from such different backgrounds - Dominican kid growing up in Jersey, ultra-orthodox kid from a Hasidic community and an Indian kid from the rez. But what made the discussion so interesting was how similar their backgrounds all were. To put it in context - all 3 of these authors are approx our age (this is a generality about the readers of this site but let’s just say that the 80’s were our formative adolescent years) and they were all outsiders growing up. When I say “outsiders” - I can’t stress enough how these 3 guys were completely miserable in high school. Diaz talked about being a Dominican nerd in a black/Puerto Rican school who just wanted to read all the time, whilst Alexie was the token brown kid in all-white right wing school. And even though Auslander was part of the “in” crowd because he wore his “kippah” in the cool way - his inner struggle with God tormented him through his adolescence.
Even more fascinating was that Diaz and Alexie both had the same response to why they wrote the books that they did - “To fill a nothingness and/or silence.” Both of them talked about how there were not any books from their culture about nerds and dorks. Most Latin American and Native American fiction particularly by young male authors were all very macho, aggressive and tough and that books about being a nerd just didn’t exist. They wanted to write a book that appealed to who they were not who they wanted to be. They both seemed surprised at how many people their books touched and spoke to (not to mention the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award that they respectively won).
These authors were as inspiring as readers than as writers. They all spoke extensively about their love of books of all genres. Diaz said that he refers to himself as more of a reader than a writer because he loves to read so much more than write. They were all irreverent, brilliant and open about themselves. I would have loved to just hang out with them at a bar and swap nerdy high-school stories. A classic insight into Alexie was that he described himself in high-school as “all the Breakfast Club characters rolled up into one.”
Shalom Auslander was exactly how I pictured him after reading Foreskin’s Lament. Throughout the book - he describes his torment in growing up in a Hasidic community in which you were controlled fear. He discussed the emphasis placed on the forbiddeness of any type of sexuality particularly masturbation. One of the rabbi’s threats were that if you masturbated you would end up in a giant, boiling pot of sperm for all eternity when you died. Can you imagine???? I digress but I can’t get that story out of my head. This book really haunted me because I couldn’t get over how tormented and angry Auslander was, not to mention that the Judaism he describes is so vastly different from my own. And what struck me after hearing him speak last night is that he is even MORE angry than I thought. This is one angry and bitter dude. Sad.
All in all - a great literary event. And to continue the cultural festivities, Mr. Nitro is attending “Worst Nightmares: Horror Movies with Wes Craven and Hideo Nakata”. If I thought it was a quirky crowd at the author’s discussion, I can’t even imagine the crowd at that event.
