Make Your Story Make You Bleed

When you write a story, make it about you. Even if it’s about the shidduch crisis. Even if it’s about the Baal Shem Tov. Start with something that means something to you — a statement, a feeling — and let the story grow from there.

A lot of writing classes will tell you to show, don’t tell. That’s good advice, but it isn’t all true. Telling can be a great tool. But in order to tell the audience what you’re thinking or how you’re feeling, you need to take us through the steps of your experiencing this.

And that’s a lot more easily experienced by telling your reader where you were at one point — not just saying you were, say, a college dropout who refused to eat any food aside from bacon, but describing why bacon was so important to you, telling us in detail how each stick was as long as your hand and had little bumpy ridges and ghostly shivers of white fat, and how the reason you ate so much of it was that your college was Porgsley’s School of Pig-Thumpin’ and they gave it free to all the students, and not only does it conjure memories of happier times, but you sneak onto campus and get free bacon and it’s the only time you ever see all your old friends.

Then — and only then — are we prepared to hear about how you gave it all up to be kosher.

We, as frum writers, as Jewish writers, or just as writers who are somewhat preoccupied with issues of faith and belief, are especially susceptible to epiphany. I saw the light! G-d spoke to me!

It’s such a tempting idea, this sudden mental switch or a realization-from-on-high that affects you in a way that makes you stop in your tracks so fast that dust clouds rise around your ankles, and then — for reasons that are often hard to explain and sometimes so totally otherworldly that you can barely explain them to yourself, let alone write a story about them for other people — you’re a different person than you were before.

That’s the essence of a story. Or, it’s very close to being the essence of a story. What’s missing from your revelation is the story itself.

**

Remember The Matrix? Remember when Keanu said “whoa” a lot, and then Morpheus explained to him for like 20 minutes that all of humanity is living in little electric aquariums and the machines took over and we’ve forgotten what it’s like to rebel….and, my friends, that is a good freaking way to tell.

But The Matrix also made the telling itself into a story. Instead of just saying that there was a war between people and robots and people are sleeping through their lives and they don’t realize it, the filmmakers told it as a process. First the situation was this. Then this happened. Then, here’s another element that complicates it. They explained the situation like building a building, telling one step at a time…and then, before you know it, you’ve got a whole freakin’ skyscraper of a story.

**

Stories don’t have to be about somebody changing. That’s not where the energy of a story comes from — the energy comes from tension, from the moment just before whatever’s going to happen, happens. Sometimes it will happen. Dorothy rescues the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman, Moses tells Pharaoh to Let My People Go.

And sometimes it doesn’t happen. When Joseph’s brothers come to him, they tell him there’s a famine, they need his help — the whole time they’re begging him for food, we aren’t thinking, Is Joseph going to feed them? We’re thinking, Is Joseph going to reveal his true identity? When he sends them away, with the troubling mission of bringing back his brother, the tension mounts. The question is still, is Joseph going to disclose the truth, but now it becomes, Is he going to tell his brothers the truth AND what the hell does he need his baby brother Benjamin for?

Stories within stories.

But if every story were about a character changing, they’d be predictable. They’d be boring. Sometimes stories do get that way. We know this as readers. Instead of thinking, is the main character going to realize he’s wicked and have a change of heart, we’re thinking, when’s he going to get to the change of heart and make everything better already.

Recognize that feeling? That’s called boring.

To keep the reader on her toes — and, even more importantly, to keep ourselves on our toes — nothing can be predictable. We need to keep ourselves guessing.

At this point, you’re probably saying, duh, Matthue, all you do is watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer and read books, your life is more fiction than nonfiction, how do you build character moments in my True Real-Life Personal Essay? Well, it’s true that you’re probably not as exciting as Buffy,* but that doesn’t mean anything. I forget who first said this, but there are some people who can tell a story of walking to the corner store to buy bread and make it more tense and emotional than your mother dying, and there are some people who can talk about their mothers dying and it sounds as boring as going to the corner store.

When you start to write, set your boundaries. Tell your audience what’s at stake. If it’s a blind date, tell us about every date you’ve been on before. Is this your first? That raises the stakes even more. Tell us your dream date as a child, tell us all the ways that this date is nothing like that — for worse or maybe for better. If it’s about your kid waking you up in the middle of the night, tell us how desperately you’re craving sleep, how bad the day has been, or how good, or how you haven’t seen them at all. If it’s a story about being hungry in the middle of the night, tell us about what you ate that day, or didn’t eat that day. Tell us how much you love, say, chocolate-covered Bamba. Tell us how it’s the last packet and you and your parent/child/wife/roommate are fighting over it (or if they’re asleep, tell us how bad they’ll kill you if you eat it). Look for tension. We’re in galus, the world of exile — tension is really not that hard to find. It’s everywhere.

And if there are problems, embrace them. There’s a rule that I’m making up as I write this that says that the sadder or crazier or weirder you look on paper, the more awesome you are in real life. There’s a reason Tom Cruise is okay with getting beat up horribly in his movies, or that Woody Allen always makes himself look pathetic (well, don’t use Woody Allen as a barometer). You’re the hero. Make yourself vulnerable. Make stuff happen to you. As far down as you push yourself as a character, that’s how far you can rise up your story.

Pray Loud

Yankel, who used to be Jack, got kicked out of his last club on a Tuesday night. He wasn’t acting rowdy, not nearly as rowdy as the night when Nail and Anarchia brought the homemade volcano to the Dismemberment Plan concert, not even as crazy as the Godheadsilo show where he’d jumped from the balcony into the audience below. It wasn’t a 21+ show — not that that had mattered for quite a few years now. He even had I.D.

It was the bouncer. He was a big shaved-head guy of indeterminate ethnicity, his face like a Disney gargoyle’s face frozen with a piece of sharp metal hanging out of it. The guy did have the metal, a whole row of hoops erupting out of his lower lip. He looked like every James Bond henchman at once.

He was doing a sweep of the crowd, making sure nobody was up to no good. It’s the hardest part of these shows, Yankel knew from experience. Over the years he’d worked both sides of the table. The guy passed over the guys with piercings sharper than knives, passed over the pot-huddle in the corner. And he stopped in front of Yankel.

Yankel pretended not to notice him. It worked every bit as well as it did when he was 16.

The guy gave him a shrug, crossed his arms. It wasn’t a fierce arm-crossing. It was just to show Yankel that he wasn’t impressed.

“What are you doin’ here, man?”

Yankel leaned forward.

“I’m sorry?” He cocked an ear. Maybe he’d misheard? “What is the problem, sir?”

He’d always been polite, no matter what else he had going on. He respected these guys. It was hard being paid to constantly be about to fight and never fighting.

The guy undid his arms. One of his hands he waved at Yankel. Vaguely at first, fanning the air around him, then zeroing in on his belly — his white shirt, his black vest, the stripes of his over-the-shirt tzitzis that his potbelly poked out like a family camper.

“You, man. It’s no problem, I ain’t kicking you out — but it’s you, man, what’s somebody like you doing here?”

Most nights Yankel didn’t come to these things alone. He brought friends, he found buddies. The few guys still in town from the old days, or someone from the forums. Yankel worked in computers, on the days when business was slow, he still logged onto the chat boards, eavesdropped on what people were saying about the bands he liked, which new bands were like them, lobbing insults at each other for musical taste, avatar use, lyrical quotes in their signatures. Yankel was brief and to the point. He tried never to insult people. His avatar was a gray profile. He didn’t have enemies. No friends, really, but everyone was his ally.

Tonight, though, none of his conspirators could make it. He came alone. Watched the opening band alone. Bought a beer for him and for nobody else. Stood alone in the corner between acts, drinking it as a substitute for between-sets small talk.

“I just come for the music. I like this music.”

The guy wasn’t buying it.

“You people have your own music, man. You ain’t here to dance, you hear to look. Listen. You wanna hook up, there’s a bar across the street, this trance bar, you can rub up against all the girls you want to over there. Girls, boys, whatever you’re after. Maybe take off your little cap next time, dress a little more low key.”

“No, you don’t understand — this band, I got all their albums, I got everything.”

“That’s all I’m saying,” said the guy, hands up, backing away. “That’s all.”

Yankel didn’t have to leave. Yankel left anyway. He listened to the first two songs of the next band’s set, his favorite band from when he’d started coming to these places — but there was no point. It was so long ago. You could hear it in the music, the band’s passion just wasn’t there anymore.

**

He can hear the goings-on inside his house from down the block. The screams get louder as he gets close. They are tiny, breathless, pathetic. The most incredibly syncopated rhythmic cries, like some weird Norwegian or Icelandic art-rock sampling crew.

He climbs the stairs to his apartment, kicks snow off his boots, removes his coat and heads straight for the dark room in the rear.

At once he is confronted.

“Yankie, please, take her.” She thrusts the baby into his hands. The little thing sits there, tiny arms drooping over his huge hands. “She’s been nonstop since dinnertime. I can’t do it anymore, I can’t make her stop.”

For a moment the tiny thing is confused. Then it regains its motivation, starts screaming again, its entire face contorted into the wrinkles around one huge gaping void of a mouth. There aren’t even teeth. No creature in G-d’s great Earth has ever screamed so mightily, so forcefully, and yet still produced such an insignificant squeak.

The door shuts hard. From the other room he can hear a rustle in the closet, a shuffle, a sigh, the welcome sound that the Netflix makes. She is such a special woman, and so selfless. He is unworthy of her.

But what he’s really unworthy of is this baby. This tiny beautiful creature who he has somehow contributed to the existence of. Even as she cries he wants to hug her, to squeeze her tight and protect her from the world, to find anything in the exile of our lives that could possibly be good enough for her.

He rocks her. He jiggles her. He puts a lullaby on the tape player; he tries reciting to her from Psalms, which always seemed like a good idea. He tries everything. From the other room, a fresh theme song. The episode has ended. Another is starting.

“Ba, ba, baba,” he coos softly in her ear. “Ba, ba, baba. I wanna be sedated.”

The tickle of his voice on her earlobe only protracts the worldly anxiety. Her scream becomes an uproar. Her entire body shudders with every blow.

He has no choice but to match it.

“When we have nothing left to give,” he sings, “there’ll be no reason for us to live.” The music screeches with urgency, the backing music in his mind, and he sings, louder now, “We owe you nothing,” again, “We owe you nothing,” and now he’s really screaming out, “We owe you nothing, you have no control,” and “You are not what you own,” and all the lyrics are tumbling out of him now, all the words to all the songs, and he is roaring them at the walls, roaring them against the night, against the world of exile, against his entire life, and remarkably, miraculously, the louder he goes he is like an all-encompassing tsunami, he is nature sounds, he is every white noise at once, and her eyes flutter, maybe taken by surprise or maybe just amused, and her mouth exercises into shapes, an O, an O, a horizontal I, and he is consumed by everything and she snuggles contentedly into the warmth of his exploding chest and settles into a perfect sleep.

Image by Jon Pack, who was very amenable about my waking him up in the middle of the night and asking if I could use it. Find more of his stuff here, or you can acquire some of his work for yourself right here. Lyrics sampled from Fugazi and the Ramones. 

I Am Broken, I'm the Glue

 

I didn’t know what I was going to say to my kids this morning. Each of them is at a different point of comprehension: The election didn’t turn out the way we wanted. That guy who was being mean to girls won the election. 

Women can do anything they want to, but there’s not going to be a woman president quite yet.

I prayed in English this morning. I mostly know what the Hebrew words mean, but my brain needed something simpler, more easily digestible, something I could believe in without asking myself How could this happen? and Do so many people really think this way? and Why is there so much hate in the world? The verses came fast and hard. We are but dust. Not for our sake, but for Your compassion. The rule of man over the animals is nothing, for all is but a fleeting breath.

By the time I finished the sun had risen, it was morning for real. I started with the 6-year-old. She wouldn’t budge, she was dead to the world, and I didn’t have the heart to make her — I’d woken at 5, lay in bed for an hour, unable to summon the courage to move. The Shulchan Aruch says you have to start the day like a lion, ready to pounce on whatever comes, but today I’d felt like prey, not predator. I would let her sleep a little longer, spend another 5 minutes in a place where a woman might still be president and not someone who assaulted them.

The 8-year-old was more responsive. She leaped up, brushed her hair from her eyes, and said, “Today is Vampire Day.”

Oh, good. I didn’t have to tell her, she already knew.

Umm… “What do you mean?”

“My friends and I are dressing up as vampires, so I need a brooch. Can you find me a brooch?”

A, I do not have any brooches lying around.  B, I actually have no idea what a brooch is and, though it might expand my knowledge, I’m not sure a simple Google image search is gonna produce the desired object in a usable form. C, do vampires wear brooches?

D, is this the first morning of a world controlled by an orange sycophant?

We agreed on an ensemble (her uniform, but presented in a slightly vampier way — collar turned up, maybe?). Somewhere along the way, I mentioned to her, Hillary lost the election.

“Oh.” Disappointment and confusion flickered alternately across her face. “So that means Trump is going to be president?”

“Im yirtze Hashem.” If G-d wills it. He could die soon, I thought to myself. He’s old, who knows what he’s been through. Or the revolution could happen. Or he could do something monumentally stupid and the Electoral College could step in, vote in Paul Ryan as an emergency candidate, do something, anything, to save us from ourselves.

“What’s the Electoral College?”

The ditches I dig myself into.

“So when we vote for president, we’re not actually voting for the president.  We’re picking someone else — say, we’re voting for Ani,” I plucked a doll at random, “and in a few weeks Ani is going to go and vote for president for real.”

“Papa, but why?”

“So that if someone really dangerous or evil gets elected, there’s still someone to stop them before they really get elected…but, uh, that doesn’t really ever happen…”

She was looking at me the same way she did when I tried to explain animal reproduction.

A moment of deliberation. Then: “Papa, you’re so silly,” and a grin breaks out.

Not for our righteousness, O L-rd. Not for anything we’ve done, but because of Your generosity and compassion.

So she didn’t completely understand, but that’s about on par with the rest of America. A few minutes later, I go downstairs to wake up the other kids and break it to them. The six-year-old screws up her face, crosses her eyes, sticks out her tongue into a popsicle shake and jams her finger up her nose. “Well, THAT doesn’t make any sense,” she says.

Two minutes later, we are locked in a wrestling match, with her on my stomach and the 2-year-old cheerily perched on my face.

There’s no happy ending to this post. The next four years might suck, and they might suck bad. Or they might not — for all the jejune awareness of how politics really work, you can’t tell another country you’re building a wall and now they have to pay for it; that didn’t even work in kindergarten when Tim Shaw stole my snack and so I figured I would be able to just take his. The president really isn’t that powerful, and in recent history the people who actually hold our nuclear codes have a lot more sense than the people who ostensibly have the power to launch them.

When I broke up with my first girlfriend, I remember how full the world seemed of her. Everywhere I looked and everything I thought about related back to her — the toys in my room we’d played with, the apple juice boxes we’d smuggled to each other. (It was first grade.) (Mostly-true story: She moved away in first grade, but we wrote each other letters for a little bit; to the best of my knowledge, she became a covert operative for the CIA.)

But the more time I spent away from her — the more of my life became filled with not-her things — the easier it was on my tender little heart.

Last night, as the results were pouring in, my wife was out for her first night out since the baby was born. I was left at home with an infant who does not inherit my predilection for bottles — and, for good measure, a beat-up old Saab outside whose alarm went off whenever another car passed by. Yes, bad news was hurling at me like tomatoes toward Fozzie Bear on a good night. But it was all relative. The infant in my arms, who knew nothing of political pain, bellowed at the top of her lungs for milk. And then she had it. And then she was asleep.

Right now we are bellowing. Right now it feels like the whole world — especially if you are at an office job with Internet access, especially if your only way of staying in touch with your friends is them posting memos about the end of the world.

But, as the ancient rabbis said (well, it was on Buffy), we’ve faced the end of the world once or twice before. We’ve pulled through.

It sucks to tell your kids. It sucks to tell yourself. But we’re going to pull through again.

 

photo: “I think I’ll start a new life” by Noukka Signe

What We Prayed For This Rosh Hashanah

 

We prayed for more money. We prayed for a new job, a better job. We prayed not to get fired from this job, because we were sure this was the best job we would ever be offered and things would never be this good again. We prayed to get fired, because we’d been saving up things we hated in a list in our heads, and we wanted so badly to just walk out but we knew we couldn’t, we prayed for G-d to step in, we prayed for someone else to take care of it, because we couldn’t. We prayed for the strength to stick it out at this job, because we hated it but we needed a paycheck or because we didn’t need the paycheck but we needed something to do all day or because we didn’t need either of those things, we just were afraid of the alternative, of endless TV watching and not having an excuse why we didn’t write that novel we’d always dreamed about writing.

We prayed for a new pet. A small one, preferably. A kitten or a fish, maybe a ferret. Something that wouldn’t take up too much space. Something that wouldn’t need too much love. We were busy. We were rarely at home. We were at home too much. We were at home just the right amount of time, and we wanted someone to spend it with, someone to make us not so alone. Maybe a dog. Maybe a big dog. Maybe a dog that would jump on us every time we walked into a room, so warm-blooded that just standing next to him was like hugging him, so big it would jump on us and knock us down. Or maybe something smaller, more manageable, something that wouldn’t demand a whole set of new prayers. Mice were too much like furry insects. Rabbits, maybe, but didn’t they have babies like nobody’s business? We could put it in the hands of G-d. But G-d helps those who help themselves, and one pet sounded like quite enough for us.

We prayed for Trump to lose. We prayed for Trump to win. We prayed for Trump, and his soul. We prayed for someone else to enter the race. We prayed no one worse would enter the race. We prayed the entire race would be forfeit, the entire country would collectively throw our arms in the air and walk away. We prayed that he would work out, that he was the lesser of two evils, that he would fill all of our dreams and not turn out to be what we’d secretly feared all along. We prayed the same thing about us, because, secretly or openly, deep down or on the most shallow and kneejerk of levels, what we thought about him was what we thought about ourselves.

We prayed that G-d would watch over us. We prayed that G-d would notice us. We prayed that we would slip under G-d’s radar and G-d wouldn’t notice any of the bad things we’d done this year, any of the ways we’d screwed up, any of the good things we’d forgotten to do. We prayed we would’t be regarded as bad neighbors, negligent friends or spoiled children, though we knew in our hearts that was exactly what we were. We prayed G-d would remember the good deeds we barely remembered doing, the stray smiles of support across the classroom and workspace and bedroom, the not-speaking-out-but-not-shutting-up, the envelopes of charity we filled out but forgot to mail, the apologies we’d only made in our heads. Keep us alive another year, we prayed, and we will make them, and we will mail them. That was what we were, too.

We prayed for an end to violence. We prayed for violence in our names against those people we hated, those people we thought should not be here. We prayed for violence only in faraway places, only against faraway people, people we couldn’t imagine really existed. We prayed for violence, but only a specific kind of violence. Violence that would defend us. Violence that would keep us safe. We prayed for violence all over the world, a violence that would end in terrible explosions that wiped everyone out, because only then could we stop being afraid.

We prayed for all sorts of things. We knew prayer wasn’t supposed to ask G-d for things. We knew prayer was supposed to thank G-d for the things we already had. And we have so many things already, we know that too. But we couldn’t help asking for just one more.

We prayed for change. We prayed for things to stay the same. We prayed that G-d do whatever G-d wanted to with us, because we couldn’t handle the choices, we couldn’t even handle praying for things to go one way or the other. We are your dice, we whispered, roll us however You want us to turn up. We hoped You would listen. We hoped we wouldn’t be faced with making our own decisions.

We prayed for certainty. We prayed for sureness. We prayed for a lack of certainty, because we knew that once we were absolutely sure about doing something, then we’d have to do it. We slammed our hands into our hearts and hit lightly. We hit hard, deep enough to draw blood, deep enough to bruise, which was like drawing blood but under the skin, without the mess. We kept it to ourselves. We shouted it out to the world. We shared it with the world.

 

This is very loosely based on Julie Otsuka’s tiny novel The Buddha in the Attic, which is totally worth checking out.

Touch Press Games Apparently Just Released 30 of My Video Games, Which Is Cool But Emotionally Confusing

You know those video games I worked on for 4 years? The company, Amplify, was jettisoned by News Corp. Steve Jobs' widow bought it. They turned into a new company called Touch Press, and they are finally releasing the first games today on the App Store.

Via EdSurge:

During its heyday, Amplify touted its orange tablets as the tool that would transform digital learning experiences in school. Yet the company’s most impressive offering may have been its games. The Brooklyn, N.Y.-based company invested more than $25 million to partner with talented developers who built 30 learning games covering math, science and English Language Arts.

Unless you were a reporter or play tester, however, it was hard to get your hands on them. Only one title was available in the consumer market. The rest required a school license sold by Amplify.

The fate of the games seemed in limbo in Sept. 2015 after News Corporation sold Amplify. But now they have found a new home. Today, Amplify announced that it is merging its games division—the team and its assets—with StoryToys, an Irish developer of children’s learning apps, into a new company: Touch Press.

It's weird. I haven't touched them in years, let alone played them or worked on them. I'm not sure what condition they're in or what other games they're going to release, or when -- hey, I didn't even know they were out until someone in the office forwarded me a forward from another forward.

But I'm glad. I'm really glad. Like one of my coworkers said, "This is like seeing your kid graduate high school after his mother took away your visitation rights for the last decade."

But, hey. Now they're on their own. And I can finally stand back and kvell.

[go here to play them - free, I think!]

Orthodox Writers, Meet Your Role Model

 Fifty-two pages in, or a little less than halfway through his newest book, Sailor and Fiddler, which is not an autobiography — or at least, the author concedes, is “the closest to an autobiography I’m ever going to write” — Herman Wouk lets loose a plot twist in a most unexpected way:

[My wife] Sarah and I had encountered suburban Jewish eyebrows raised in amusement at learning we kept kosher. With New York’s Broadway and literary Jewish insiders we had clearly “made it,” but our ways disconcerted them as well. They saw us and socialized with us at Sardi’s, yet we declined their friendly dinner invitations. We were weird mavericks, no question. Christians like [screenwriter] Calder Willingham took us for granted; it was only Jews who found us odd.

Hold on a second.

Let me tell you about Herman Wouk. Once upon a time, he was one of the most famous authors in the world. His book The Caine Mutiny, a military drama that was loosely based on his experience in the Navy during World War II, reigned the bestseller list for over a year.

His work was adapted into plays, films, Broadway musicals, and one of the most-watched TV miniseries ever. He’s been friends with actors, presidents, and even Richard Feynman, the Nobel-winning father of quantum physics, whom he wrote a book about. He was featured on the cover of Time magazine, a magazine not usually known for featuring authors of any sort, at a time when Time was the most influential magazine in the country. The cornerstone of his career — as he calls it in this book, his “main task” — was a two-volume, 2,000-page WWII epic, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, which traced World War II from the earliest stages of European unrest to America’s first jump into full-fledged battle.

You might have seen it in a used bookstore, one of the dustier ones that does more turnover in old paperbacks than the new, chick-lit bestsellers. Your grandparents probably owned a copy of War and Remembrance, at least — the serious-looking heavyweight book with the stark and serious cover whose spine was long enough for the title to be written across, not up and down.

The truth is, I never read any of those books. I first learned about Wouk in college, when I was first becoming Orthodox. He was an older guy who went to the same synagogue as me, the only Orthodox synagogue in Washington DC — I’d just started going there, since I’d just started being Orthodox. One day my friend Aaron said to me, “You see that guy? He writes books just like you, only he’s published,” and then, of course, I felt immediately threatened. A rival! I needed to check out his books. If he was Orthodox, there was no way he could be a good writer.

The shocking part was, I liked him. I liked him a lot. I grabbed the first books I could find, inadvertently bypassing The Caine Mutiny and the War books in favor, first, of a lightly comic farce called Don’t Stop the Carnival. It was about a New York businessman who buys a Caribbean hotel — a simple set-up, followed by hilarity ensuing, and a surprisingly compelling plot about cultural misunderstandings that somehow didn’t come off as racist at all, and a story full of tension and uneasiness where you were in love with every single character. (Little did I know at the time, or else my old-timey teenager self would have been absolutely repulsed, but Carnival was adapted into a big-budget Broadway musical, with accompanying album, by Jimmy Buffett.)

The book wasn’t about Jewish stuff, although the main characters were unquestionably Jewish. It seemed like every place they ate food in a non-kosher restaurant was deliberately choreographed, every time someone went for a swim on Saturday afternoon my alarm bells rang. It was nothing unusual for me and my newly-observant, newly-paranoid brain, but it was like, at the same time, I could feel Wouk’s brain being paranoid too as he choreographed these scenes. He broke the rules — well, his characters did, anyway — but he was being deliberate about it. He was no more violating Shabbos than a chess player loses a game because he offers up a pawn in service of a greater gambit.

Next I read The City Boy, a coming-of-age story about New York before it got cleaned up. There too, I looked for traces of Judaism, and found Herbie eating corned beef from corner delis and sneaking into ten-cent movies on Saturday afternoon. The whole thing — especially for me, a who’d always been either rule-abiding or afraid to be a bad kid, read like an alternate history, a wish fulfillment of the bad kid I’d always wanted to be, running around the neighborhood and ruling it — and maybe, I thought, that was the way Wouk intended it.

I was becoming Orthodox, like I said, but still on very unstable ground. I was living on a couch in a house with two girls and a non-kosher kitchen, eating what I could. One of my roommates, a New England Methodist, came to me one night and confessed that she was dating one of my friends — one of my new friends, my Orthodox friends. “How do I learn about your religion?” she said.

I referred her to Wouk’s book This Is My God. It’s his Jewish anthem, originally an explanation of his beliefs to his non-Orthodox nephew upon his bar mitzvah, but expanded — and honestly, calling it that is belittling it beyond belief (pun intended). It’s a refined, clear, concise explanation of Torah Judaism, written for someone who’s never heard anything about Judaism, but explained so richly that anyone in the lifestyle would have no problem reading it; they might even, dare I suggest, enjoy it — it’s as close to a rational explanation of something fundamentally irrational as can exist, so clear and beautiful that it makes everything make sense. Punch line: the book lasted longer than the boyfriend.

Sailor and Fiddler, that non-autobiography I was telling you about, reads like liner notes, that part of the album that tells you about the inspiration of the songs and funny anecdotes from the recording studio. But honestly, all my favorite parts were the parts that talked about the books of his I hadn’t read. There was The Caine Mutiny, which sprung from his experiences fighting in WWII (linger on that for a moment: he was a Jewish soldier fighting Germany during the Holocaust); the War books; and Marjorie Morningstar, a five-hundred-plus page interior drama about a young woman who runs from New York society life to become a Hollywood actress.

The movie version of Marjorie starred Natalie Wood, fresh off her headlining performance in Rebel Without a Cause (she also played Maria in West Side Story). Marjorie was a cautionary tale in many ways, a girl who shunned her Jewish heritage, dabbled in miscegenation and, uh, immodest activities. Alana Newhouse, the editor of Tablet, makes a convincing argument for Marjorie‘s enduring popularity, despite the pragmatic conservatism of its underlying themes: “Like a literary golem,” she writes, “Marjorie seems to have upstaged her creator, seducing readers in a way Wouk likely never intended.”

But is that really upstaging Wouk? Isn’t the author’s goal to imagine the characters, to set events in motion and nudge the snowball down the hill, then stand back as it builds into an avalanche? In Sailor, Wouk comes off as a consummate entertainer: an artist, for sure, but more than anything a canny showman, someone who knows how to tell a story with just the right amount of adventure, humor and bawdiness to keep us coming back, and keep us wanting more.

I mean, for goodness’ sake, he was asked to write for Lyndon Johnson’s Presidential Inaugural Address. The story, in Sailor, is less than a paragraph long. But it’s crazy. And it’s good. He ate in John Lennon’s dining room after “promises of tuna salad on new plates,”* and then he skips right to moving out of NYC to Washington. This is a guy who’s spent more time writing stories than most of us have living them. He knows how to make each word count.

Perhaps the ingredient he’s most generous with is wisdom: for despite Herbie’s fumbles in The City Boy, and Norman Paperman’s foolish hotel investment in Don’t Stop the Carnival, there’s always a little wink and a nudge to the reader, a shared grin as if he’s saying, I went through this, I made these mistakes, and I might have screwed up but I got a good story out of it.

And he did. Wouk is far too much of a gentleman to address this in his writings, but his own skirting between Jewish law and writing and society life has got to be riveting. Like Norman in Carnival, he bought a lavish house in the Caribbean, and moved there for 5 years with his young sons; and I, with young kids of my own, buried in New York and wishing for a way out, have to ask, how the hell did he pull it off? The food? The schooling? The chutzpah?

And yet it’s awesome how different all these books are. Marjorie is about New York and L.A. society; Youngblood Hawke is a riff on down-home Southern wisdom; Inside, Outside is about a Russian-Jewish family who moves to America, assimilates, and winds up in an influential position in the White House. More than anything else, Wouk just knows a good story.

Wouk published Sailor and Fiddler on the occasion of his 100th birthday, vowing that it would be his final book and that now, ensconced comfortably in the California desert, he will put the pen down and get some rest. That might make life a little less joyous for the rest of us.

But not really. For those of you like me, who are late to the party, there’s an entire career to catch up on. And for those of us who are juggling with the dilemma of our belief and our storytelling ability, how they fit together and whether they fit together at all, well, don’t stop juggling. Here’s a guy who made a whole career out of figuring it out.

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* — That’s a paraphrase; the book’s stuck in a room with my sleeping newborn. Sorry, journalistic integrity.