TALK SHOW 8: Family Myth

Guests

Allison Lynn is the author of the novel Now You See It (Touchstone/Simon and Schuster). She lives in New York City, where she writes, edits, teaches fiction, and is at work on her second novel. More on Lynn at allisonlynnbooks.com.

Joshua Neuman is the Publisher of Heeb Magazine. A graduate of Brown University and the Harvard Divinity School, he has taught undergraduate courses in the Philosophy of Religion at New York University, and written for Slate, eMusic and ESPN and appeared on VH1, Food Network, Court TV and National Public Radio. His first book, The Big Book of Jewish Conspiracies, was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2005.

Thisbe Nissen is the author of Osprey Island, The Good People of New York, Out of the Girls’ Room and into the Night, and co-author/illustrator of The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook. A graduate of Oberlin College and of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she’s taught in the MFA programs at Iowa and Columbia, and currently teaches at Brandeis University.

Dan Pope is the author of In the Cherry Tree published by Picador. Dan's stories have been published recently in Crazyhorse, Post Road, Iowa Review, McSweeney's, Shenandoah, Gettysburg Review, Night Train, Witness, and other magazines. Dan is a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where he attended on a Truman Capote Fellowship. He is a winner of the Glenn Schaeffer Award from the International Institute of Modern Letters, and a grant in fiction from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. See danpope.com.

Rachel Sherman is the author of The First Hurt (Open City Books), a book of short stories. The First Hurt was a finalist for The 2006 International Frank O’Connor Short Story Award, short-listed for the 2007 Story Award, and was chosen as one of the 25 Books to Remember of 2006 by the New York Public Library. Her fiction has been published in McSweeney's, Open City, Post Road, Conjunctions, n+1, and Story Quarterly, and in the book Full Frontal Fiction: The Best of Nerve Anthology (Three Rivers Press, 2001), among others. She holds an MFA from Columbia University. More at thefirsthurt.com.


––Describe a family myth that has grown up around you or another family member.

Lynn: My late grandmother, Sophie, claimed that she and my grandfather taught Bette Midler’s parents to have sex. As my grandmother told it, they were all friends back in the 1930s in New Jersey – the kind of friends who would drive around together at night, the guys in the front seat talking shop, the girls in the back singing the latest hits and bopping their heads to the beat. Then, the Midlers got married, came back from the honeymoon and fessed up that they hadn’t consummated their love. Because they didn’t know how. This is where the suspension of disbelief kicks in. According to my grandmother, she took Bette’s mother into one room, while my grandfather took her father into another, and they explained how to do it.

Neuman: There are people who constantly compare life to Seinfeld. Then there is our family who has gone one step further, constantly likening Seinfeld's life to ours. We do not trace our roots to the Mayflower or to European nobility, but we do think of ourselves belonging to Seinfeld stock.

Nissen: The story, as my mother tells, goes like this: when I was little we got a cat. We hadn’t had her too long when my mother came to tuck me in one night and to have a serious talk. My father, it was becoming clear, was allergic to the cat. He was having trouble breathing, sleeping, etc, and we were going to have to do something. It was all very sad, but Daddy and the cat just couldn’t live together in the same house. I looked up at my mother earnestly from bed, eyes wide, and said: “But where will Daddy go?”

Pope: Around the turn of the last century, Colonel Albert Augustus Pope was Hartford's major industrialist. He founded the Columbia Bicycle Company, which manufactured about a quarter million bicycles annually in the mid-1890s, earning himself a fortune. A few years later, Colonel Pope diversified into automobile production with the Pope Motor Carriage. In 1895, he donated Pope Park to the City of Hartford for the use of his employees and city residents, a lovely piece of earth landscaped by the Olmstead Brothers. I grew up in Hartford in the 1970s, when the city still bore the legacy of this industrial giant in communal memory, and the myth in my family is that we are descendants of this Pope.

Sherman: We believed that my family was normal because we were all in therapy. We believed that families that were not in therapy were not normal. We were not in therapy together: we each went individually. But, we believed, each of our “therapies” worked to help the family at large.