Life Stories #58: Gary Shteyngart

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photo: Brigitte Lacombe

Welcome to the first Life Stories of 2014! In this episode, I talk to Gary Shteyngart about Little Failure, his memoir of emigrating to the United States from the Soviet Union as a young child, and the ways he screwed up his life until he turned things around in his late 20s. As we discuss, he’s mined his life for his fiction before, from The Russian Debutante’s Handbook to Absurdistan and Super Sad True Love Story, but this time around he’s confronting it head on, and I can tell you the results are entertaining and illuminating—already, the bar for memoir has been set high this year!

You can read excerpts from the interview at Buzzfeed—the first in what I hope will be a series of appearances for this podcast there. That depends to some extent on how popular it proves, so if you enjoy this episode, and want to tell your friends about it, please consider showing them the Buzzfeed link! Thanks.

Listen to Life Stories #58: Gary Shteyngart (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

18 January 2014 | life stories |

Read This: Fosse

When Sam Wasson saw Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz for a film course as an undergrad at Wesleyan in 2001, he “felt something… like depressive exhilaration,” he recalls. “It ate my imagination. I’d had some version of that feeling before, of being consumed by a great work, but it had always registered more like catharsis. It felt good. All That Jazz I loved with an intensity that erased me.”

His reaction isn’t hard to understand. All That Jazz is the type of overwhelming creative vision that can convince even the most hardened materialist to accept the auteur theory—but, more than that, it’s one of a handful of films where the filmmaker’s vision becomes inseparable from his personality to the point that you find yourself on a guided tour of his psyche. In Fosse’s case, despite his superficial attempts to obscure the issue, it was an explicitly autobiographical tour spurred by a series of heart attacks in 1975, when he was simultaneously trying to edit the film Lenny and launch the original Broadway production of Chicago. The film’s climactic number, “Bye Bye Life,” stretches the Everly Brothers classic “Bye Bye Love” so far that it nearly becomes meditative—and would be, if it weren’t for the non-stop choreography and the way Fosse extends the dream-like quality of the Hollywood dance sequence into a provocatively surreal realm… then brutally pulls the rug out from under his fictional stand-in (played by Roy Scheider) and the audience.

That college screening planted a seed in Wasson that has culminated, more than a decade later, in Fosse, a massive biography that builds upon previous accounts of the director-choreographer’s life with extensive original research and interviews. His efforts to explain his subject’s genius are relentlessly psychological, taking its cues from the outline Fosse himself laid out: Scarred by his adolescent experiences working alongside sexually aggressive burlesque dancers, in an environment his parents should have known enough to keep him from, he would grow up to love and hate show business with equal passion, sublimating the moves he learned in those cheap joints for the Broadway stage and the big screen. For Wasson, that process becomes a consistently frustrated attempt to work through his youthful suffering.

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13 January 2014 | read this |