Shalom Auslander's memoir Foreskin's Lament went on sale last week — you may have heard about it already. Auslander, a contributor to public radio's This American Life, was featured in EW's recent Fall Books Preview, and then our critic Jennifer Reese weighed in approvingly, declaring that beneath Auslander's ''extremely funny shtick is one ferociously angry book.''
Why all the fuss? Poised as a potential breakout for the 37-year-old author, Lament describes his long, tortured relationship with God, who started freaking out Auslander — brought up as an Orthodox Jew — at a very young age. Auslander called in from his home in Woodstock, N.Y., to explain just what it is about a religious upbringing that can make a person crazy.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Why risk it? If you think God has it out for you, why write about that and put it on paper?
SHALOM AUSLANDER: I really had a hard time with that question for a long time. I had a hard time in terms of thinking what might happen to me if I wrote it, but I also had a hard time just dealing with the information, trying to cull through a whole life and figure out what it is and why I'm writing this book and why this memoir and not another one. It was hard and there were a lot of times I didn't want to do it. So, privately, my deal with God at the beginning here was to take it easy. [I'd say to God], ''I'm not going to publish it — go start a war somewhere, I'm just going to sit here and type this out, try to make sense of my life a little bit. I'm definitely, definitely not going to publish it.''
Why did you want to write it in the first place?
I didn't want to write it in the first place.
Fair enough.
[Laughs] As part of trying to get the word out about my short story collection, [2005's] Beware of God, I wrote something for This American Life. And they really only do nonfiction. So I wrote one, and it seemed to go over well, and I thought it was fun to do, and after a couple of those, the suggestion came along: Why don't we turn these into a book?
What do your feelings about God go back to? What makes you so afraid of him?
Growing up, I was told lots of scary things about Him! ''Hi, kids, there's a guy, and if you piss Him off, He's gonna flood the world. Now who wants to take a nap?'' That's day one. Later, a lot of kids realize that's not necessarily the real deal, but I didn't go through that. I just believed it, very intently. And in fact, I've often said to people who've e-mailed me, or come to readings with a rabbinical chip on their shoulder of some kind, who are sort of accusing me, in a weird way, of believing everything they told me. I'm always saying to whoever asks, ''Look, what could your beef with me possibly be? That I listened? That I paid attention? If you're saying to me now as an adult, 'Oh yeah, we were just telling you that as a kid — it wasn't meant to be believed,' well, that's what kids do, they believe the adults around them.'' So it never went away.
NEXT PAGE: ''I know full well that with the first fever my son has, or the flat tire I woke to this morning, there's still that thought in my head: He's messing with me.''
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- Book Review Foreskin's Lament | Jennifer Reese
