Ah, December! Season of rampant consumerism, holiday parties you don’t really want to attend, and endless, endless, ENDLESS end-of-year ‘best of’ lists. Luckily the fatigue hasn’t set in yet, so we’re raaaather excited by the New York Times‘ 100 Notable Books of 2014, just released today, which features a bunch of authors interviewed (or reviewed) by Jewcy.

1. Check out Esther Werdiger on Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Roz Chast’s memoir of parental aging. It’s “an intense, humorous, and frequently painful exercise in catharsis”—well worth the read.

2. Anya Ulinich, author of the deliciously sad, sexy, literary graphic novel Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel, confessed to us that her book was “definitely semi-autobiographical,” and offered male readers some OKCupid profile tips. (Go easy on the Sylvia Plath, fellas.)

3. Boris Fishman, whose superb debut novel A Replacement Life was received to much acclaim, got real with Michael Orbach about Russian hirsuteness, pick-up lines, and the post-Soviet Brooklyn immigrant experience. There’s also a really good (/heartbreaking) anecdote about recycling and perfume, which pretty much encapsulates the tremendous pain of adolescence and immigration.

4. Gary Shteyngart confessed to us that he was “the most Republican kid on the planet”—literally a card-carrying member of the NRA at the age of 11.

5. Yelena Akhtiorskaya, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1992 at the age of 6, told Michael Orbach about the inspiration for her much-praised debut novel, Panic in a Suitcase: “A lot is based on my life… One is being totally fascinated by Brighton Beach—loving it and at the same time realizing that it’s a very absurd and sad place. The second is the dynamics of a claustrophobic, suffocating, chaotic family, which functions as a unified monstrous being.”

Which were your favorite books, Jewish or otherwise, of 2014?

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Michael Orbach caught up with her recently to talk about autobiography in fiction, drawing, Bernard Malamud, and the perverse pleasures of OkCupid.

So your new book begins with your lead character blaming the U.S. State department for her sexual awakening. That’s actually coincidental since I blame the U.S. Department of Agriculture for my own belated sexual awakening…

[Laughs] Actually I would like to stop you right there—it’s a novel, not a memoir, so I don’t want to discuss my own sexual awakening. It’s definitely semi-autobiographical. It’s informed from my own experience, there’s no question about that, but it’s not straight out of it. My life is much more boring.

I think some people are writers who write stuff because they’re very interested in what happens to them; other people aren’t like that. I can think of many writers who write about places they’ve never been to. Some people can’t do that. I need a personal connection to the material.

What was the genesis of this graphic novel?

My first novel [Petropolis] came out in 2007 and I wrote another one, and it was just not good. I didn’t entirely like it; I showed it to my agent and she didn’t exactly love it; my editor didn’t like it. After that, I was in a kind of bad personal state. I couldn’t get myself to start writing another novel but I was doing a lot of drawing and doodles. I haven’t drawn for ten years and then a freelance illustration job fell in my lap. I found that drawing was soothing. I showed those drawings to my agent and she said maybe this was my next project. I have never done any comics before—I didn’t grow up with comics. And I haven’t read that many graphic novels. The graphic novels I did read were basically literary fiction or memoirs: Persepolis [Marjane Satrapi], Fun Home [Alison Bechdel], and stories by Adrian Tomine. I read them the same way I’d read any fiction. I didn’t really know what I was doing at all.

But when I was telling stories with drawing, the space constraints of a comic panel or a speech bubble actually helped me construct a story. When I write fiction it tends to sprawl. With handwritten text, there is the issue of space constraint. It forces you to get the story out. It was an easier process in a way. Do I wrap up a scene or extend it? The choice was obvious; I have to say what I have to say, or draw it all over again. It gave me a kick in the pants as a writer. It made it more vivid. It was a good experience overall.

How long did this take you?

I started it in May 2012 and I finished it last summer—less than a year. I sold it to Penguin on proposal and they gave me a few months. I was really rushing. Drawing takes up a lot of time; the first draft was completed in a few months. I did 16-hour days, it was crazy. I work at home and my kids would be like “There’s no food!” and I’d be like “Here’s twenty bucks, go to the grocery store.” I was disappointed that I didn’t have time to perfect the drawings. Writing is finite, there’s a stopping point when you can’t improve, but with drawing it’s much more ambiguous. I’m much more judgmental of my artwork than of my prose. I would have loved to have more time to make the book more more beautiful. On the other hand, when it was finished, I was happy because the speed gave the book a kind of urgency. The momentum is more intense because the pace is intense and it’s matched by the quality of hand-written text.

I love the dialog. Did some of that come from your own experience on OkCupid?

Yes, I have that in common with my character. I spent my whole adult life in a marriage; I was married at 21, and I had a kid when I was 24 and another one when I was 28. I stayed in this marriage for 15 years. I never dated; you don’t “date” when you’re in college, you “meet people” which is different. I was absolutely fascinated by the whole dating thing; I met people whom I never would have encountered in my normal social circle. All these crazy different stories.

Not every guy I met was somehow interesting or entirely insane, like the guys in the novel. The novel does its fiction thing—even if based on reality, everything is kind of exaggerated and tweaked… But still, it was a really interesting experience for me. Doing online dating as a writer, I couldn’t help deconstructing the way people misrepresented themselves online; even if they are trying to say one thing about themselves, they said another. The way they write about themselves and what they include or choose to exclude, it’s very telling. You learn to read between the lines.

I never looked at OkCupid like that, but I probably should.

I’m almost tempted to do a sociological study of OkCupid profiles and what people do. Our relationship with our photographs for example: we all have something we think is our best feature and our worst feature and we take pictures accordingly. Or something that’s meaningful and sentimental and we put it in our profile, but it’s not necessarily our best picture or looks like that you, or that you’re visible in. Another interesting thing is the language people use and what we chose to include in our reading lists. We don’t put down our favorite guilty pleasure, we put down the kind of stuff that we think will attract the kind of people we want. The men OkCupid matched me with usually “loved” David Sedaris and Charles Bukowski. There’s a list of three writers that the guy who doesn’t actually read books likes to use. No man ever likes any women writers, except for Sylvia Plath.

I’m going to my OkCupid profile to add a female writer now.

Add one who isn’t Sylvia Plath. You can so get the chicks.

Our interview is on hold, while I add Margaret Atwood.

She’s okay. Put Lorrie Moore in there.

Alice Munro?

Yeah, that’ll help.

If I get laid because of this interview…

You can buy me a drink.

I waste a lot of time on OkCupid, but you really made something useful out of it.

To me it was not a waste of time. I waste time professionally, I’m a writer. I gather material. It was fascinating, especially the way people answer some of the questions. Probably 90 percent of men answer the question “Are you smarter than most people?” in the affirmative. I get matched with a certain sub-set of men: basically, educated New Yorkers. And lot of them are white people, and I guess white men think they’re smarter than most people. I wouldn’t date anyone who said that he was smarter than people. What kind of thing is that to say?

I liked how you picked up on the question OkCupid has about whether people with low IQs shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce. They should rename the site OkHitler.

How many over-educated hipsters actually say yes—that the world would be a better place if people with low IQs couldn’t reproduce? It’s really crazy.

In the book, Lena has this moment where she has a nightmare about Philip Roth and picks Bernard Malamud instead. Can you talk a little about that?

Lena has a nightmare about Philip Roth on a Greyhound bus. I had a good dream about Roth on a Greyhound bus, he was really nice to me, but narratively speaking it needed be a nightmare. Malamud is a great artist—his writing is so fine. I like him as an artist better than Roth—but I identity with Roth’s autobiographical characters more. But although I identify with them, I also think if Roth and I met he wouldn’t have given me the time of day. He’d dismiss me. I relate to Alexander Portnoy but I’m not supposed to, because I’m a woman. It’s complicated with Philip Roth… Anyway, sometimes things in novels aren’t put in to be straightforward; it’s not like Lena picking Malamud over Roth. it’s just a sequence.

The story “The Magic Barrel” spoke to me so much because it’s about an existential crisis and desperate scramble for meaning and love. I really related it and I got a kick out of the parallel between the marriage broker’s Magic Barrel full of girls and OkCupid. It’s just a nice framing device for the book. Lena is similar to Leo [the lead character in “The Magic Barrel”], but Leo becomes depressed and is pretty passive. He gives up and mopes around his apartment and finally finds the girl he falls in in love with in an envelope of photos, right in his apartment. But Lena is a woman and women tend to be proactive about fixing their fate. They get off their ass—if things aren’t good, let’s make them better. Especially immigrant women; they’re kinda into survival of all sorts. Lena’s actively searching, rather than throwing up her hands and saying “There is no such thing as love and meaning.” She thinks there might not be, but she doesn’t give up and then she finds it.

Related: Russian as an American Language: A Conversation with Anya Ulinich
Graphic Novelist Liana Finck on Yiddish Letters, Teen Angst, and Becoming a Book Person
Boris Fishman on Grandfathers, Russian Hirsuteness, and the Immigrant Experience

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Death, then deluge: I couldn’t stop thinking about this while reading cartoonist Roz Chast‘s new memoir, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? An intense, humorous, and frequently painful exercise in catharsis, it closely documents the decline and eventual deaths of Chast’s elderly parents—and it’s not pretty. As any dutiful daughter knows, you are definitely not allowed to write about your parents until they are no longer of this world. And if you have siblings, probably not even then. Chast, however, is an only child, and she here she presents a loving but unsparing examination of her parents, and herself.

The story is told through a combination of comics, handwritten pages, photos, and sketches. Chast’s style is harried, and drawings rarely seem drafted, perfectly channeling both the anxiety of living the events described, and the urgency of wanting to record all of it. The photos show up unexpectedly, and to great effect. Pages describing her hoarding parents’ apartment are followed by stark images of rooms filled with piles of browning and greying stuff, the decrepitude highlighted by the flash-photograph.

Visually, comics can get you to a place that feels, somehow, closer to the truth. People who draw their experiences are attempting to document everything as precisely as possible: this is what was said; this is what everyone was wearing; this is what the weather was like on that day. Chast is deeply observant, and a natural storyteller, and the flood of emotion and memory has a remarkable flow. Several comics (and some truly amazing photos of a young, grumpy, cat-eye bespectacled Chast), serve as flashbacks to her childhood, and these stories aren’t merely anecdotal. With the author now caring for her parents, every incident mentioned takes on a new layer of meaning.

Chast has made her name writing jokes on the themes of worry and disappointment, so it’s no surprise that even the funny parts are quite dark. Bizarre Alzheimer’s moments make for amusing stories, as do strange and horrifying incidents at the aged care facility her parents move to. When her mother insists that her (long-deceased) mother-in-law is trying to poison her, or another resident falls off her chair during mealtime, nobody is dismayed. Laughing is coping, because what else can you do? It’s an informative insight into the origin of Chast’s style, and her general philosophy.

Examined more than anything is the author’s relationship with her mother, a stubborn and often unfriendly woman whose New York home ran on fear–of the outside world, money, death, and disease. Mrs. Chast is equally stubborn in dying; she exists suspended between life and death for an extended period of time, and here, more than anywhere else, the trauma of Chast’s unhappy childhood revisits her. She seeks closure and answers, but rarely looks to her mother for comfort; alas, she has never been its source. The painful resolve in wanting to be a better mother than her own is evident here. She worked hard to leave and change, but here she is, back where it all started. These are the things you cannot escape, and this is what they look like.

Waiting with her newly-deceased mother, Chast writes “I didn’t know what do, so I drew her.” A sketch follows. Pages of similar sketches follow; simple pen drawings of her mother’s comatose, slack-jawed face, drawn in the days leading up to her passing. These are not comics. They are dated drawings documenting precisely what the author was looking at: a dying, elderly woman. Death, as usual, demands to be looked at in the eye. Chast tells us that her parents’ “cremains” live in her closet. They are together, they are quiet, and finally, she can contain them. So: death, then deluge, but then maybe peace.

Esther C. Werdiger writes, makes comics, illustrates, podcasts, and lives in New York. You can read her “League of Ordinary Ladies” series here.

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