TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I’m Tonya Mosley. Today, my guest is writer Shalom Auslander. For decades, he’s written with humor about what it was like to grow up in a dysfunctional household within an ultra-orthodox Jewish community near the Catskills in the town of Muncie, N.Y. He describes how it was drilled into him from a very young age that he was born into sin, which meant he was broken, shameful, and in constant need of redemption. Now in his middle age, Shalom Auslander explores the weight of trying to shed those feelings in a new memoir titled “Feh.” Feh is the Yiddish word for yuck, a pervasive feeling of self-contempt Shalom has battled with his entire life. In his attempt to rewrite his story, he faces some of the darkest parts of himself, which include addiction, thoughts of harm, and contending with the loss of his good friend, actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, whom Shalom says also battled with feelings of shame.
His first memoir, “Foreskin’s Lament,” was about his childhood years and his estrangement from his religious community and its traditions. His work has been featured on “This American Life” and in several publications, including the New Yorker, Esquire Magazine, and the New York Times. And Shalom Auslander, welcome back to FRESH AIR.
SHALOM AUSLANDER: Thank you. Glad to be here.
MOSLEY: Can I have you read a passage from “Feh” to get us started?
AUSLANDER: Sure. (Reading) The story of “Feh” is just the first story in a long book of similar stories, the collection of which is a book called “You Suck.” The first part of “You Suck” is known as the Old Testament. Spoiler alert – Moses, the main character, dies before reaching his goal. Why? Because he was feh. The second part of “You Suck” is known as the New Testament. Spoiler alert – it ends with God making a huge wine press, filling it with millions of people, and crushing them to death. Why? Guess. Most people who read the Old Testament don’t read the New. Most people who read the New Testament don’t read the Old. They don’t have to. They’re the same story – feh.
The name of the man who blinded me was Rabbi Hammer. People in Muncie went to him for advice. Tell us how to see, they beseeched him. But Rabbi Hammer was blind too. When he finished telling us “Feh,” he closed the book of “You Suck,” leaned forward, and kissed it. Then he called us up one by one and gave us each a small copy of the book. To keep in your hearts and minds, he said, all the days of your lives. Then he handed us our book and shook our hands. Mazel tov, he said – Hebrew for good luck. He wasn’t kidding. I am 50 years old now, and still I am blind. It is a strange blindness. It is not a darkness, not a blackness, not an absence of light. Rather, I go through life as if beneath a shroud.
I can see the sky, the earth, the trees, the animals, all the flora and fauna, without deviation, without distortion or diversion. But mankind appears to me grotesque, vile, foul, ignominious, none more so than myself. With others, I can occasionally be fair. With others, there is a chance of expiation. With myself, though, I am a hanging judge. To myself, I show no mercy. There’s no criticism I don’t believe, no compliment I accept. I avoid mirrors. Mirrors are bad. Catching a glimpse of my reflection in a store window is enough to ruin my whole day. This is what I think when I do – feh.
MOSLEY: You know, Shalom, when I read that passage, I immediately thought about something my son said when he was about 3 or 4 years old, and it was about the video game Pac-Man. And he said, is Pac-Man the good guy or the bad guy? And, you know…
AUSLANDER: (Laughter) That’s a great question.
MOSLEY: Which made me think about this book, because really, what you’ve been asking yourself all of your life is if God is a good guy or a bad guy.
AUSLANDER: Right. And then, you know, sort of falling out of that, then am I the good guy or the bad guy?
MOSLEY: Exactly.
AUSLANDER: Because the Old Testament and the New Testament, all of this, like, God is the protagonist of that book. He’s the good guy. He’s perfect in every way. And then there’s us (laughter). And we’re a pain in the butt. And we sin from day one, right? So you’re 5 years old, and you’re sitting in yeshiva, and – or madrasa or wherever you are, and they tell you, so this is how humanity began.
God made us out of dirt. And the first thing we did was steal. Then we lied about stealing. So God kicked us out because he couldn’t take one more second of us. Then we had kids and the boys tried to murder each other. Then God said, I’m flooding the world. I’m so sick of you, but I’m going to leave one group behind, one little family. What does that family do? They get drunk and the father has sex with his daughters. You’re like, I don’t know if I want to belong to this family. This is a pretty screwed-up family. And this is me. This is who I am.
MOSLEY: Was there ever part of that story that filled you with hope, that you felt good about when you were a kid, and you were learning about it, and…
AUSLANDER: No (laughter). There was always a piece – the way the narrative of that book works, and all those books work, is just when you think it’s good, it goes bad. Right? So every up is followed by a horrendous down. And it’s usually a down that’s caused because we were feh. In some way or another, we caused this. This was our fault. And I guess in my life, it just got to a point – I’m 54 – in my late 40s, where the shrapnel of that story was threatening…
MOSLEY: Your life.
AUSLANDER: …My life and my new family, which was a beautiful family, and…
MOSLEY: Made up of your wife and your children.
AUSLANDER: Yeah, and that’s it. I don’t have any connection to my family, my birth family, at all, and haven’t for a long time. And it was causing more bleeding when I thought I was over it. When I thought I was over the idea of a foul God, and that was something I could just sort of say, well, that’s probably not true, and I can move on, I realized that there’s this narrative that’s deep within me, and ultimately, I think, deep within mankind, this story we’ve been telling ourselves for so long, that we suck.
MOSLEY: Right? Because you decided to become estranged from your family. You wrote this first memoir, “Foreskin’s Lament,” where you went through your childhood and you really took a hard look at what you had been taught. And you and your wife made this conscious choice – we are no longer going to be in communication. We’re going to start a new life. Take us back, though, to what you were escaping from. So you grew up in this ultra-orthodox community. I think I’ve heard you say it’s like growing up in a town where Tony Soprano runs it. So that’s quite a visual (laughter). What’s an example of what that looked like for you as a boy in the day to day?
AUSLANDER: Oh, it was just terrible fear and shame. I remember going through the town with someone and they were saying, oh, you know, it’s weird. You drive through Muncie, and it’s quite beautiful. It’s, you know, bucolic little – or was – little country town. You know, it’s rural – no sidewalks, no street lights – very pretty. And my feeling was like, yeah, but there’s a monster here that you can’t see. It’s like that “Twilight Zone,” where like, there’s a monster here. And that monster is a God who is furious all the time. For me, personally, the problem that I ran into was that I couldn’t just say, well, that’s just a made-up story because my father in Heaven was crazy, and my father in the living room was also crazy.
MOSLEY: He was abusive. He was an alcoholic.
AUSLANDER: Yeah, he drank a lot. He hit. And so my first reaction was, oh, there’s another one? There’s two fathers? I could do without any at this point. And so there was just a lot of bad feeling and shame involved with it. I never quite fit in. I never felt like I belonged there. And it wasn’t until my teens where I started to move out a little bit, discovering – frankly, discovering literature in used bookstores in Manhattan. But finding other people who were taking this story or this shameful feeling and examining it.
MOSLEY: I was really fascinated in the book when you began to explore those puberty years. Puberty must have been hard because, I mean, it’s a burgeoning sexuality, but you are in a community where rules around pleasure are so strict.
AUSLANDER: Oh, yeah. Yeah. It’s – look, puberty is not – no picnic anyway.
MOSLEY: For anybody, right.
AUSLANDER: But when you’re told that all the things that are happening to you or you’re feeling are evil or wrong, it’s 10 times worse, and you don’t want to see yourself in the mirror. Like, it doesn’t – none of the way I feel about myself to me is a surprise. It all follows from that background. As I say in “Feh,” you’re not born hating yourself. We’re told this story, either through a story-story or through the actions of people around us. But for me, with, you know, growing up – and it wasn’t today, so porn was, like, hid under the blanket.
MOSLEY: Under mattresses, right. And VHS tapes where you had to go to a place to actually get them.
AUSLANDER: Yeah. Yeah. And I would go into these places and feel awful.
MOSLEY: You would feel awful, but you still would go.
AUSLANDER: (Laughter) I don’t know. I feel like there is some element of, am I really that bad, you know? And when you’re told you’re bad, you’re just like, OK, so I’m bad. So I’ll just be bad.
MOSLEY: I heard you tell this story about your grandmother, and I think it was – was it Chiclets? And the reason why I’m bringing this up is because…
AUSLANDER: Yeah.
MOSLEY: …You just mentioned how even though you were told you were bad, there was that small little part of you that was thinking, am I that bad? Can you tell the story of the Chiclets and what that opened up in your mind for you?
AUSLANDER: Yeah, I mean, that was a little tiny moment that in my life was just one of those things you look back and go, oh, thank God, it happened. But it was my mother’s mother, and they were religious, and we used to go over to her house in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. And we’d get there, and she’d call me over and she gave me Chiclets, which – I don’t know if listeners remember this, but there was this awful gum. It came in…
MOSLEY: Yeah.
AUSLANDER: …A – little squares. They came in like a little yellow box. And she would give them to me when I got there every time. And I remember one time my mother saw her giving it to me. And she got upset. She’s like, What are you doing? That’s trafe. It’s nonkosher. And I was ashamed, and I was ashamed for my grandmother ’cause she looked a little chastised. And she just – my mother is like, don’t give him that anymore. You’re not allowed to have it. You shouldn’t have it either and whatever, walked out. And then my grandmother turned to me and she takes out the Chiclets, and takes my hand and pours two of them into it. And she just said, oh, don’t worry about it. It’s just gum.
MOSLEY: What did that signal to you? What did it say?
AUSLANDER: Well, first, I was like, oh, my God. Baba’s a sinner (laughter).
MOSLEY: Yeah.
AUSLANDER: Right on. Let’s go for burgers. But then it was this, oh, maybe there’s a middle ground, right? Maybe there’s sanity in some of this, right? Like, I didn’t question whether she believed in all the rules and God and everything else. She did very much. But it was this moment of moderation, right? Of, yeah, God’ll let some gum slip. Whereas I was told he didn’t. He didn’t let anything slip. The story of, you know, Moses not getting into the promised land is perhaps the purest of the pure one time hit a rock. And so God said, that’s it. You’re not getting in. Your life goal – you’re not getting in. And that’s the lesson you learned as a kid. Like, do not mess up, right? That’s the Tony Soprano thing. You don’t make more than one mistake. ‘Cause he’s coming.
MOSLEY: Let’s take a short break. If you’re just joining us, my guest is Shalom Auslander. He’s written a new book titled “Feh,” which is in Yiddish, yuck. It’s about coming to terms with what he learned about himself growing up in a dysfunctional ultra-orthodox Jewish family and how in adulthood, he’s trying to rewrite his story. We’ll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF ABRAHAM INC’S “TWEET TWEET”)
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. Today, I’m talking with writer and humorist Shalom Auslander. His new memoir “Feh” chronicles the impacts of growing up within a dysfunctional ultra-orthodox Jewish family. And how in middle age, Shalom is trying to overcome what he was taught about himself. Shalom’s other works include “Beware Of God,” a short story collection, and his first memoir, “Foreskin’s Lament.” Auslander is also the creator of Showtime’s “Happyish.”
The way that you express how you felt all of your adult life, this feh that’s on you – and I think you actually said this, that it’s probably what’s on most people – we all, no matter if we’re Jewish or not. But you express what I think a lot of people feel and don’t say, but it’s also what we are told that we shouldn’t feel.
So that is, you wake up every morning and you feel feh, you feel disgusted, you feel bad, and you have to actually walk towards the good. You have to make the conscious choice…
AUSLANDER: Right.
MOSLEY: …Where we’ve been told the narrative that good is the place where we should be sitting in, and the bad is just sprinkled in.
AUSLANDER: Right. I don’t understand that. I think that’s ’cause we know we shouldn’t. But everybody I know, everybody I’ve ever met, has had to deal with these perceptions of themselves that are – that they got from somewhere that are pretty negative. But, yeah, I wake up in the morning. And you know, I remember we rented a new apartment recently, and everything was perfect about it, except the fact that the bedroom had wall to wall mirrors. And I’m like, Oh, God. Are you serious? I have to sleep looking at myself and wake up…
MOSLEY: The moment you wake up.
AUSLANDER: Oh, God. And it like – and it’s bad lighting, it’s sunlight, and you’re like, oh, this is horrible.
MOSLEY: Is it as bad as you thought it would be, though?
AUSLANDER: I try and get up early (laughter) before the sun comes up. But it is. It is. I have to kind of go, ugh. And at this point, I can laugh. Like, laughter is my – is the saving grace for me. So I can laugh at myself for it. But I’m not going to lie. I’m pretty happy when the shirt comes on (laughter).
MOSLEY: Even when you’re alone?
AUSLANDER: Oh, yeah.
MOSLEY: Is that a mark of feh? ‘Cause I would think that, you know, being alone – there’s no judgment of anyone around you.
AUSLANDER: Right. But there is no being alone, right? With feh, there’s no being alone. There’s always someone or something watching.
MOSLEY: God.
AUSLANDER: God or society or – you know, I often wonder, like, if everybody felt really good about themselves, there’d be nobody at the gym.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
(LAUGHTER)
AUSLANDER: You know what I mean? Like, yeah, I know some people go because it feels good. Yeah, OK. But minus those lunatics…
MOSLEY: (Laughter).
AUSLANDER: …If everyone was fine, there’d be no such thing as a health club. Like, what – who needs that?
MOSLEY: We talked a little bit about you being estranged from your family. And the last time you were on the show, you talked about this interaction with – I think it was a midwife. You were having your first son. And she asked you if you were going to have family…
AUSLANDER: Right.
MOSLEY: …In the room, and you said, no, we’re estranged from our family. And she said, well, that is sad. And you said, well, it’s sad for them to be in our lives, and it’s sad for them to be out of our lives.
AUSLANDER: Yeah.
MOSLEY: And that was 17 years ago.
AUSLANDER: Yeah.
MOSLEY: Does it get any less sad?
AUSLANDER: It changes. I don’t have any regret or feel like that was the wrong – the wrong thing to do. And I look at my sons and my wife, and I’m convinced every day that it was the right thing to do. My kids are very free thinking and loving, and they’re artists and musicians, and they would not fit in any better in Monsey than I did – and probably have less (laughter) patience for it.
But the truth is, that’s kind of – you know, that’s kind of the happy ending. I – people hear it and they’re like, oh, that’s awful. But the truth is staying would have been awful because I wouldn’t be who I am. I wouldn’t have the marriage that I have. I wouldn’t be the husband I am. I wouldn’t be the father I am. I probably wouldn’t be here. I probably would have thrown myself off a building sometime in my early 20s – mid-20s, for sure – because that’s what I was considering doing. I couldn’t be in a place where everything pointed to, there’s something wrong with you.
And, you know, that included everything from – I remember when I – my mother found out I was eating nonkosher. She told me I was finishing what Hitler started, (laughter) which is – and I was like, wait. Hitler started a Happy Meal?
MOSLEY: (Laughter).
AUSLANDER: ‘Cause he left over the fries. And it’s just this harsh – right? And you’re like, well, that’s kind of harsh, but I guess. I guess I’m ruining my people. And, you know, I write about this in “Feh” where, like, you know, I so much hated being a male because of everything I was told in yeshiva about it that when I was very young, I was – I – convinced I wanted to be a woman. I’d – I found a Victoria’s Secret catalog in the mail. And I was like, oh, my God. Women are just perfect. And (laughter) look at me. I’m gross. And I was like, oh, so let me put on my mother’s pantyhose. Let me put on some heels. Hey, you know what? Kind of works.
MOSLEY: It kind of feels good.
AUSLANDER: Kind of works. And then, like, very soon after, you know, someone in school – someone in my grade had found a porno mag at the side of the road. And it was a gay porno mag, and they were all laughing at it and being horrified. But the thing that horrified them most was an ad for a film about a transvestite. And I was like, oh, my God. I’m the worst of the worst. And I happened to have been (laughter) wearing pantyhose under my yeshiva clothes at the time and just felt like, they’re going to find me. They’re going to know who I really am.
And I think that’s been the thing my whole life. I feel like that’s – with a lot of people, there’s this impression that who you really are deep down inside is broken, wrong, evil, sinful, not enough in some way. And you have to work your way better than that. But it’s not true. Oftentimes, the thing we’re – we are inside is the best part of us. We’ve just been told it’s awful. So that’s really what the battle against feh is to me.
MOSLEY: Our guest today is Shalom Auslander, author of the new memoir “Feh.” We’ll be right back after a short break. I’m Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF ANDY BISKIN’S “NIGHT SHADE”)
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Tonya Mosley. And today, I’m talking to writer Shalom Auslander. His new memoir “Feh” chronicles his attempt to recover from growing up in Monsey, N.Y., as part of a dysfunctional ultraorthodox family. He describes himself as the son of an alcoholic father, a guilt-wielding mother and a violent, overbearing God. The memoir follows Auslander through midlife as he tries to rewrite the narrative he was taught about himself as part of his religion, that he was broken, shameful and disgusting.
So, Shalom, you were good friends with the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. And about your connection, you write feh knows feh. Feh recognizes feh.
AUSLANDER: Yeah.
MOSLEY: How did you know?
AUSLANDER: Well, I knew Phil for some years right before the end. We met each other through work. And I kind of told the story in the book about meeting him for the first time. And there’s just something about people who are feh that you just know it when you meet them. They just seem to be under a cloud of some kind. It’s a certain posture. It’s a certain way of talking. It’s hard to put your finger on. And it’s not always the same thing. With Phil, he was very kind of – had the weight of the world on his shoulders and was constantly judging himself.
But I think, you know, among other things, Trump is a feh. You know, he was told his whole life by his father he was worthless. And that’s one version of feh, this sort of, well, then I’m going to rule the world kind of thing. But there’s something you just know. And with Phil, it was – I suspected it, and then we got together a few times, and we just, like, had a festival of, you know, feh. We had ridiculously weird amounts in common, the way our mothers were, the way our brothers were, the way our fathers were. Our fathers had porn in the same place in the same room in the house. He was sort of tortured by Irish Catholicism. I was tortured by Orthodox Judaism. And we were both the same age. And it felt like we were both at this age where it was like, ugh, can this still really be going on? Does this ever end and trying to find a way through – with me, writing. With him, acting and directing. Find a way through it.
MOSLEY: He wrote to you or said to you one time – and I want to read this. It’s from the book. He once said to you, you writers are lucky. You get to tell the story you need to tell when you need to tell it. You’re sick, you get medicine. Actors, though, we have to sit around mute, waiting for a script to come along somehow. And if we’re lucky, it tells the story we need to tell. That was really powerful. And I wanted to know, had you considered that when he told you that, in thinking about the ways that your art is a balm, and in particular for him?
AUSLANDER: I hadn’t, to be honest. I didn’t quite know what makes actors tick. And I don’t know that that’s necessarily true for every actor, because I’ve met a few and clearly some just like acting or being the center of attention.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
AUSLANDER: That’s feh medicine, I think.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
AUSLANDER: Yeah, I think it is. I once suggested to him that I thought – because we both had psychiatrists who were pretty much father figures to each of us. But I remember suggesting to him that I think – at that time I was like, I think maybe celebrities and actors get paid so much money because the studios are paying them to stay sick. That if they were healthy, they might not do this job, and they certainly wouldn’t do it as well, I think, and the same way as a writer. If I got all my stuff healed – I don’t know.
MOSLEY: You wouldn’t have anything else to write about?
AUSLANDER: No, I’d go garden. I’d go mow the lawn. I’d do whatever. I’d jog. I’d be fine. Now I can’t jog because I jiggle too much and it’s feh, but I like the idea of it. So there was this notion of, like, how are we getting past this fehness of ours? And Phil just said, for me, like, a laugh is really important. A person’s laugh is like, I don’t care – if Stalin had a good laugh, I’d probably hang out with him. (Laughter) Like, a good laugh changes everything for me. And Phil had this – short of my wife, he had the greatest laugh ever. It was just this massive laugh, and it didn’t come easy. And when it came out, it was like this paroxysm. And it would just – you could hear it around the world. And so it was fun for us to laugh together. And a lot of what we laughed about was how crappy we feel.
MOSLEY: You wrote this screenplay which later turned into “Happyish.” Gosh, I want to say all the words, but it was called “Pigs In S,” initially.
(LAUGHTER)
AUSLANDER: Yes, it was about advertising.
MOSLEY: Yes, it was about this depressed, middle-aged guy who works in advertising. And all of his colleagues are younger than him. And the premise of it really was that, like, “Happyish” is the closest we’re going to get to happy, right? Phillip was going to play this role even though he was a film actor, because this was for streaming.
AUSLANDER: Yeah.
MOSLEY: This was a series.
AUSLANDER: Yeah. It was going to be his first TV role.
MOSLEY: And there was a pilot.
AUSLANDER: And there was a pilot that was shot. And he’d been up and down. We’d been through – I knew what was going on with him. He’d been through some rehab and seemed to be getting better and, you know, same old story. But we shot the pilot. It was challenging just because of what he was going through physically, let alone emotionally, in his sort of rehab-ness. We shot the pilot. We all really liked it. Friday, I remember, I got a call from the head of Showtime at the time, David Nevins, saying we’re going ahead. It’s greenlit. You know, congratulations.
And it was just this, like, incredible – holy cow, this is awesome. And then I go the next day and I start to write Episode 2 and my phone rings, and it’s the executive at Showtime crying, just saying Phil’s dead. And I had no idea what she was talking about. Like, it just didn’t make any sense at all. And I just remember being really furious, first at him, but then at everything that led to that – to the people in his life, mainly his youth, that told him he was this feh person. And it just made me furious. And that’s kind of what started all of this, was that I knew that feh had me close to the edge…
MOSLEY: Yeah.
AUSLANDER: …Many times. But I didn’t realize that it was – ’cause I also thought, oh, it’s just a Jewish thing or – you know…
MOSLEY: Yeah.
AUSLANDER: …Get over the Old Testament, buddy, you know? Read some Richard Dawkins and cheer up.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
AUSLANDER: And I was just – I was shocked at the power that that story had because Phil was this force of nature. I mean, he was just indomitable. I mean, first of all, physically – he had been a wrestler. He was a big guy. You know, if you wanted to bring him down, you’re going to need, like, you know, a football team. And yet, it felt to me that he gave in to that story. And that just made me sad and angry.
MOSLEY: Let’s take a short break. If you’re just joining us, my guest is Shalom Auslander. He’s written a new book titled “Feh,” which is – in Yiddish – yuck. It’s about coming to terms with what he learned about himself growing up in a dysfunctional, ultra-Orthodox Jewish family and how, in adulthood, he’s trying to rewrite his story. We’ll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHARLIE HADEN’S “EL CIEGO (THE BLIND)”)
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. Today, I’m talking with writer and humorist Shalom Auslander. His new memoir, “Feh,” chronicles the impacts of growing up within a dysfunctional, ultra-Orthodox Jewish family and how, in middle age, Shalom is trying to overcome what he was taught about himself. Shalom’s other works include “Beware Of God,” a short story collection, and his first memoir, “Foreskin’s Lament.” Auslander is also the creator of Showtime’s “Happyish.”
You know, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death had such a huge impact on me for someone that I didn’t know but I felt so deeply connected to. I think I was in bed for a few days after he died. I was really upset by it. And you articulating this feh over him – I think I felt, at the time, that someone like him, who – everyone loved him as an actor. He was beloved and had a lot of loved ones who felt a deep love for him, but he couldn’t feel that for himself.
And so that kind of brought me in a spiral of despair and thinking about the people in my family that I also know had that over them, where no matter how much you feel for them, they can’t feel it for themselves, which also in reading about you, it made me think about your wife and how she sees you as perfect.
AUSLANDER: Oh, better than I see myself. That’s for sure (laughter).
MOSLEY: Yeah.
AUSLANDER: Yeah, because feh is a certain blindness. It’s an inability to see things in a certain way. And I kind of learned that in my 20s and 30s, thanks to her and some mental health professionals and – that I couldn’t necessarily trust what I was seeing, right? So something would seem, to me, negative or an attack or going badly. And I would need her or somebody sort of on the outside of my feh to just say, no, no, no, no, no. That’s not what’s happening.
I talk in the book about this very rare brain disorder called Anton syndrome, and it’s people who are blind but think they can see. And it’s not denial. It’s literally – that’s the disorder. They’re convinced. They’ll sit there at a table and say to you, well, there’s a mic over here and a laptop there and speakers over there and then get up and walk into the wall.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
AUSLANDER: But they’re – for them, they’ll just…
MOSLEY: It’s accurate for them.
AUSLANDER: That’s – they…
MOSLEY: They realize that it – yes.
AUSLANDER: Right. The interesting thing about it is, well, first of all, there’s no cure, and second of all, it comes from trauma, right? It’s not a virus. You’re not born that way. Something usually hits you in the head and makes you see things in the wrong way. And that’s what feh, to me, has done to me, and it did to Phil.
And frankly, it feels more and more – you know, you spend five minutes on social media or watching the news, and it feels like it’s hit the whole world that way. And we’re these animals that know ourselves via story – right? – where we teach by story. We learn by story. We communicate by story. Everything’s story. We remember by story. And we’re telling ourselves this story – for thousands of years – of, we’re terrible. We’re sinful. We suck.
MOSLEY: Is feh something we could recover from?
AUSLANDER: I think that we need to find a new story. I think that we have to understand what that story is doing and the prevalence of it. I see it – I mean, here’s the thing that’s interesting. Once I sort of felt that way and identified it, I began to see it everywhere, and that helped – right? – because I would write something, and someone would say – have a bad attitude about it or whatever. And I could see in them that anger, that sort of feh about themselves, and just go, wow, it’s just everywhere.
Or I would see a newscast – CNN – and this one’s hating that one, and the world’s on fire and just go, yeah, but everything they’re saying to each other is feh. They’re pointing their fingers and judging. And I guess I just got really tired of it. And that was the reason for writing the book, was just like, when do we stop sitting in judgment about ourselves and – because we’re not going to stop sitting in judgment about others until we do that. And where does this come from?
And to see it take someone’s life, who was in the prime of his life – and, to your point, we’d go out somewhere in Soho, get a coffee and walk out. I remember this. We walked out of a coffee shop, and a truck – a big truck goes by, and the guys are leaning out the window, shouting, I love you, man. And I’m like, oh, thanks.
(LAUGHTER)
AUSLANDER: But, like you said, it didn’t matter. I think part of what feh does to us is that the love we get from the people that matter we discount.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
AUSLANDER: And so we want love from strangers. But when that love comes, we discount that ’cause we know it’s…
MOSLEY: …Not real.
AUSLANDER: …At best, it’s adulation…
MOSLEY: Yeah.
AUSLANDER: …And that they’re reacting to something they saw on screen or read in a book. So how do you fix all of that? And I feel like, to me, writing the book was helpful because I can see it more.
MOSLEY: But writing on the page, though, you are writing about you.
AUSLANDER: Yeah, but there’s a distance that writing provides, right? It’s at a remove. So it’s sort of analyzing myself, but with a sense of humor, right? So it’s like, it’s bad, but it’s kind of funny that it’s bad. And then it doesn’t seem so bad. And…
MOSLEY: Where did you learn to find humor in…
AUSLANDER: I grew up in a very dysfunctional home. And my earliest memories of it were watching “Saturday Night Live,” and I didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t know why it was funny that this guy with white hair had a fake arrow through his head. But it made everybody laugh. And Friday night would come, and my father would start yelling at my brother and my brother would yell back, and you can sense it coming. And I would just start doing impressions of the things I’d seen. I used to do a Nixon impression. I have no – I had no idea who Nixon was.
MOSLEY: You didn’t realize he was president, but you knew he was…
AUSLANDER: I had no clue. It was like Dan Aykroyd doing it on “Saturday Night Live,” and everyone laughed. And so I just did the same kind of hunching my shoulders over and flipping my wrists over. I had no idea what I was doing, but everyone started to laugh and the fighting stopped. And then it just sort of became oh, this is interesting – like, this thing. And when I found books, which unfortunately get labeled literature because that puts everybody off them. But in my teens, I found an old bookstore, and I started to read Kafka and Beckett and Voltaire and Flannery O’Connor and all these people. No one told me they were serious or literary. I was just reading them because the booksellers, I said, what’s funny? And he gave me these books.
MOSLEY: He gave you those. Yeah.
AUSLANDER: And I thought they were hilarious and dealing with everything that I was dealing with and either laughing at it, laughing at themselves, attacking it, wondering where it came from. And I thought, Oh, this I can do. This seems like a way to get through all this.
MOSLEY: Do you believe in God?
AUSLANDER: Only when bad things happen.
MOSLEY: (Laughter).
AUSLANDER: I mean, I believe – I don’t think there’s a God, right? I think there’s probably not. I kind of like being agnostic about it all. I feel like not knowing is a pretty good place for humans to be, right? I don’t know for sure that there is a God, so I’m not a rabbi, and I’m no atheist saying there is no way there’s a God.
I think a question mark makes for a pretty good tombstone. So I’m OK with not knowing. But what I have gotten to is the idea that there’s a God who hates us or who judges us is entirely ludicrous. And not just ludicrous on the face of it, but if you think that not eating cheeseburgers is going to pacify that God, you’re crazy. ‘Cause Moses couldn’t, and nobody could. Everyone’s sinned. So it seems – when I hear people like that or see people like that – I passed a sign the other day right here, that’s – just a yellow sign on the side of the street saying, beg Jesus for mercy. I was like, why? If you change Jesus to Frank, you’re like, I don’t think I like Frank. What is he up to? Like, why am I so bad? And what makes you want to put a sign up on the 405 that tells me I’m bad? I just don’t get it. And it comes from, I feel like, this story that’s become part of us.
MOSLEY: I’m curious. Raising your children very differently than how you were raised, you’re able to see maybe a version of yourself that didn’t experience the things that you…
AUSLANDER: For sure. For sure.
MOSLEY: How do they interpret this idea, feh?
AUSLANDER: My kids?
MOSLEY: Yeah.
AUSLANDER: They have no connection to it whatsoever. They don’t understand.
MOSLEY: Do you see it in them at all?
AUSLANDER: No. No, I can see – look, they’re not robots, so there are moments where it’s like…
MOSLEY: They’re human (laughter).
AUSLANDER: Sadly. But they are. They’re like they get into their spaces where they don’t feel as good or they’re nervous, or whatever. But it’s at a normal level. I remember reading that that was Freud’s whole – and I know Freud’s, you know…
MOSLEY: Controversial these days (laughter).
AUSLANDER: …Persona non grata anymore. But I do remember reading that he – and I put this in “Happyish,” where he said his whole goal wasn’t to make people happy. It was to bring them to a normal level of misery. And I think that’s a very noble goal, whether he reached it or not.
MOSLEY: Shalom Auslander, thank you so much.
AUSLANDER: Thank you. It’s fun (laughter).
MOSLEY: Writer Shalom Auslander – his new memoir is called “Feh.” Coming up, film critic Justin Chang reviews the new thriller “Longlegs.” This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF BILL FRISELL’S “MESSIN’ WITH THE KID”)
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