Virtual Memories Show 597:
Shalom Auslander
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“You are not born hating yourself; someone puts that in there. What would the world be like if they hadn’t?”
With his amazing new book, FEH: A Memoir (Riverside Books), Shalom Auslander explores how the judgmental disgust of FEH infected his life, and what it meant to get sick & tired of the disgust and outrage FEH-stival and look for a way out. We talk about the sense of shame, disgust and self-loathing at the core of our common story, why every bookstore should be called, ‘You Suck’, his friendship with the late Philip Seymour Hoffman and how they bonded over FEH, and how hard he’s worked to find the un-FEH for his kids. We get into how story is our operating system (but what happens when there are bugs in the OS?), how the FEH machine came after his psychiatrist, the notion of misotheism, and his video series UNGODLY where he reads the Bible and asks, ‘What if God is the antagonist?’. We also discuss his ultra-orthodox upbringing, how “Jewish heritage” has been subsumed by Holocaust memorials, his antipathy toward the pop-culture Anne Frank and how he rewrote her for HOPE: A Tragedy, his time in the advertising industry and how it led to his TV show Happyish, his bleak Peanuts parody strip that got Jeannie Schulz’s approval, the neurological condition where blind people believe they can see and how it parallels our existential state of FEH, the realization that cynicism doesn’t mean you’re smart (just lazy), and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read FEH: A Memoir!
“The story at the root of everything is, ‘You suck.’ . . . . Once you start to see the story, it’s a very easy story to see through. . . . And one of the things that needs fixing is the story that tells us there’s no fixing this.”
“It’s not that I’m an optimist; it’s that pessimism has let me down.”
“The more money there is in the creative industry, the shittier the work.’
“Writing this book, I found that I didn’t have to be pro-earnestness; I could just be anti-misery.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
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About our Guest
Shalom Auslander was raised in Monsey, NY. Nominated for the Koret Award for writers under thirty-five, he has published articles in Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Tablet magazine, and The New Yorker, and has had stories aired on NPR’s This American Life. He is the author of the short story collection Beware of God, the memoir Foreskin’s Lament, and the novels HOPE: A Tragedy and Mother for Dinner. He is the creator of Showtime’s Happyish. He lives in Los Angeles. His new book is FEH: A Memoir.
Subscribe to Shalom’s Substack.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at a generic hotel in New York City on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Shalom by Radiance Photography; other photo by me. It’s on my instagram.
, what contemporary books look like they’ll last, and why he eventually came around on Faulkner. 
(Norton), and is a columnist at 
feeding into a 
digital recorder. Intro was recorded on the same setup. Photo of Mr. Mikics by me.
(Grove Press). We discuss the evolution of comedy over the century (from vaudeville to comedy podcasters) and how he got started chronicling it, American comedy’s twin themes of struggle and influence, the connect-the-dots game of comedic lineage, the stories that didn’t make it into the book, comedy’s role in the civil rights struggle, Kliph’s autodidactic background and how it shapes his pursuit of history, the story of how he got kicked out of high school, and more! 
! We explore how her nihilistic, burned-out, drug-addicted post-punk-scene photographer-protagonist has grown over the course of three books of increasing mayhem and murder. (Hint: she doesn’t decide to become a nurturing mom and validate herself with a rich husband.) 
. Processing was done in Audacity and Logic Pro. Photo of Kliph by me.
) and her first two books (
and 
), her house-on-fire list of books to save, her quarrel with Plato, and her adoration of Simeon’s Maigret novels. Bonus: I tell a long, awful and emotional story from last weekend (it starts around the 75:00 mark, so feel free to stop long before that).
– Rick Atkinson
– Rick Atkinson
– Rick Atkinson
– Michael Chabon
– Charles Dickens
– George Eliot
– Ulysses S. Grant
– Vassily Grossman
– Vassily Grossman
– Joseph Heller
– Homer (tr. Fagles)
– Homer (tr. Fagles)
– Henry Marsh
– David Mitchell
– Montaigne
– Plutarch
– Shakespeare
– Shakespeare
– Tolstoy
– Tolstoy
– Tolstoy
– Virgil (tr. Fagles)
– Evelyn Waugh
. Processing was done in Audacity and Logic Pro. Formal photo of Prof. Samet by Bachrach; bookshelf photo of Prof. Samet by me.
in their used section.
– Teju Cole – $7 – Just ‘cuz. If I don’t dig it, I can give it to a book-reading pal.
– Jaime Hernandez – $25 – Because one of my book-reading pals still has my copy of this enormous collection of Love & Rockets comics, and I’m afraid I’ll never get it back.
– Richard Powers – $5.99 – Suggested by upcoming podcast-guest David Rothenberg, partly in hopes of making Richard Powers another upcoming podcast-guest.
– Richard Powers – $5.99 – Ditto.
– Joseph Heller – $4.99 – Recommended by past podcast-guest 
– Nicholson Baker – $2.99 – Ditto, from the part when we talked about shitty novels coming out of the Bush era. He defended this one, so I figure I’ll give it a shot.
– Ada Louise Huxtable – $3.99 – Suggested by upcoming podcast-guest Phillip Lopate (in a list in the back of his collection 
). I loved Ms. Huxtable’s segments in the great 
– Charles Lamb – $2.99 – Another suggestion from Mr. Lopate.
or wait for 
cycle, 
, and more.)
, 
, 
, and 
. You can find out more about the 
, a collection of his zombie fiction, and 
, a collection of his science fiction stories, were both published in 2010. He has been a Stoker Award finalist five times, in the categories of both Short Story and Long Fiction. He is the editor of 
. I recorded the intro and outro on a