Some of you may only know Mara Wilson as Matilda. Or as the youngest child in Mrs. Doubtfire. Or, for a deep cut, as the star of Thomas and the Magic Railroad. For someone who was famous as an actor before the age of ten, releasing a memoir before the age of 30 makes sense. The new book, Where Am I Now?: True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame, is a smart, honest look at Wilson’s childhood and early adulthood, both in the spotlight, and out of it.

For example, she has poignant remembrances of Robin Williams, faces the dread of aging out of her casting niche (the word “cute” is a loaded one for her), and has a disturbing experience where she finds images of herself as a little girl being used pornographically. These are not the coming-of-age experiences of your average girl. But she approaches them with the same weight that she does with other formative experiences, like becoming a big sister or trying to decide if there’s a God. She grew up in a family that worked its hardest to keep her grounded, and it shows.

Wilson has also had really terrible experiences that can happen to anyone. Her fame had nothing to do with the loss of her mother to cancer, or her struggles with mental health, including depression and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

And of course, throughout the book, she returns over and over again to her Jewish identity. Her mother was Jewish, and she is too, but her father and step-mother are Catholic, and she had very few Jewish friends as a child. She brings in her identity, sometimes faltering, when dealing with mortality, neuroses, and moving to New York. Wilson knows only too well how being Jewish makes you a minority. In one great anecdote in the memoir, when cast in a remake of Miracle on 34th Street, Wilson’s mother tells her that the plot is about a little girl who doesn’t believe in Santa Claus.

“Is she Jewish like us?” Mara asks in response.

Fundamentally, Wilson’s memoir works because, from the the funny, to the tragic, to the bizarre, it feels familiar. Looking back, she’s self-deprecating, but never a defeatist, the advantage to being the adult she is today. She could easily be in your group of friends.

But really, all you need to know is that the cover blurb is by Ilana Glazer. QED.

For those of you unfamiliar with her current career, she does enough great work now that you can easily be a fan without ever seeing her act on film. Try listening to her storytelling, or check out her recurring role on Welcome to Night Vale, or read some of her writing, like the hilariously apt McSweeney’s piece, “What a Straight Man’s Favorite Musical Says About Him.” If you want to learn more about her Jewish identity, she wrote an amazing piece for The Toast about a book series written for Orthodox Jewish girls she read.

Or, you could just hang around Brooklyn and Queens. You’ll run into her eventually.

Image via Facebook

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Amy Schumer’s famous and Jewish, but you might be forgiven for not thinking of her as famously Jewish. Outside of a few references, such as her standup story about being called “Amy Jewmer” as a kid, the biggest moments in her career haven’t contained obvious references to being a Member of the Tribe. But if you wondered if Schumer’s Jewishness is important to her identity, fear not: The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, Schumer’s candid new book of essays, is going to give you the answer. Many, many times.

For example, the Jewish roots of her comedy seem to go all the way back — where else? — to her Bat Mitzvah. In an early chapter, Schumer describes how, when she inadvertently made the crowd laugh while flubbing a moment in her Torah portion, she officially became a woman and a comedian in one measure. It’s a sweet take on how the rite of passage affected her in a more personal way, capped off with a page-long rant about her rabbi’s bad breath. But as light as this chapter is, the rest of the book defines her comedy’s relationship to Judaism in much darker terms.

Of course, there are some passing references to her neighborhood’s anti-Semitism (“my town hated Jews” she writes at one point.) Schumer focuses less on that, though, and more about how her own family drama complicated her relationship with religion. In one of the book’s standout chapters, she describes how her mother’s affair with her best friend’s dad ripped apart two families who, in happier times, would go to Shabbat services together. When the affair came out, her experience going to temple and Hebrew School came to an end. It’s a loss she seems to mourn deeply: “My friends and my religion were gone.”

Schumer poignantly marks that point in her life as “ending an important chapter” in her relationship with Judaism. But as the book plays out, it’s clear that’s not the only chapter. When she describes the first time she wrote a joke she was extremely proud to work on, it turns out to be a joke about a subway preacher learning she’s Jewish. While listing surprising tidbits about herself, she confesses to enjoying the “grossest” Jewish food (whitefish salad and gefilte fish, if you were wondering and wanted to argue) and liking the fact that she’s Jewish. And when she delves into her relationship with her dad, she reveals a distinctly Jewish sense of humor that has informed the breakthrough moments in her career.

Fans of Schumer’s are likely familiar with her father’s battle with multiple sclerosis. It’s a fact she discusses openly in interviews and on social media, and she made the disease a central plot point in last year’s Trainwreck, to devastating effect. The book gets even more candid about her complicated relationship with her father, and his disease. While she never seems to deny her dad’s faults, Schumer frames much of her affection for her him around his reaction to his condition. Possibly the book’s best chapter brutally recalls two separate times her father lost control of his bowels in front of her during her teens. It’s a show-stopping moment in the memoir to be sure, but the best part comes at the end of the chapter, when she sums up just what it is she admires about her dad’s reaction to the disease.

“I look at the saddest things in life and laugh at how awful they are, because they are hilarious and it’s all we can do with moments that are painful. My dad’s the same way.”

The ability to look at life’s darkest moments right in the eye and laugh? That’s beautiful and very Jewish  — and it turns out, very Amy.

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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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In today’s installment of “Why We Love Rachel Shukert,” we turn to her interview at The Undomestic Goddess:

What does feminism mean to you?

“For me, feminism, at its essence, is about the acknowledgment that women are as fully human as men. It sounds obvious, but it’s amazing at what a difficult concept that still is for many people, and by people, I mean assholes.”

Wow, that’s so crazy, we hate assholes but we love Rachel.  This all works out perfectly!

And with her next book, Everything is Going to be Great: An Underfunded and Overexposed European Grand Tour (Harper Perennial) out in a week, we are pretty sure that we’ll be posting up a lot of new things that we love about Ms. Shukert.

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