Posted on July 9, 2008 by Steve Pollak
If Rachel Shukert's new book is as good as her recent Salon.com essay about how the video game "Rock Band" saved her marriage then I think we can expect big things from this first-time author.
She's a fun, witty writer who's not afraid to be bawdy. She also pokes fun at herself, at her parents, her husband, her ex-boyfriends, her former classmates ... pretty much anyone.
At the same time, she can be quite poignant, as demonstrated by this excerpt from "How Rock Band Saved My Marriage":
The most depressing thing about getting older isn't really the reminders of inevitable physical decay -- the gray hairs that pop up in unexpected places, the faint lines beginning to etch themselves permanently in the corner of each eye, the mornings when you wake up with a hangover, even though you haven't been drinking -- but the gradual winnowing of options, as your personal limitations become more and more obvious and eventually start beating you about the head and neck with brutal force. The chasm between who you planned to be and who you are grows wider and impossible to traverse.
We try to make ourselves more interesting. We might take up salsa dancing, or become obsessed with cheeses, or begin to wear a fez in public. When this fails, we begin to take out our hostility on the person we feel trapped us in our inescapable little shell of mediocrity. Whether this hostility is expressed by retreat into a fantasy world in which one is a gun-slinging super-fighter saving the world from totalitarian evil (him) or a plunge into unforeseen depths of pathetic, whining neediness (me), the result is the same. You start to fake-hate each other, and if you're not careful, the fake-hate festers into real hate, and suddenly, ladies at synagogue are clucking their tongues at your mother. "It's such a shame! They seemed like such a nice young couple."
In her new book, Have You No Shame? And Other Regrettable Stories, Shukert talks about what it was like to grow up Jewish in "white-bread" Omaha, Nebraska. She says she was one of 37 students in Nebraska's only Jewish elementary school and spent her days dreaming of a "fantasy Aryan boyfriend named Chris McPresbyterian." You get the idea.
In addition to writing books, Shukert has written a fair amount for the theatre. If you live in New York, you can catch her in "WASP Cove," a play she wrote and created along with Julie Klausner.
Just for fun, here's a YouTube video of the "WASP Cove" opening credits:
For more info on Rachel Shukert, you can listen to her being interviewed on the Bat Segundo Show. Also, you can read an excerpt of her new book on Jewcy.com.
Have You No Shame? And Other Regrettable Stories is published by Villard (272 pages).
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