Shepard: Who knows where this fear comes from?  I don’t like to put my analytical mind to it, because to think about why it bothers me so much would involve thinking about the touch itself, and to do that would involve an imaginative journey that I’d prefer not to take.  Instead, I wear many layers of extra long shirts.  My hands hover, the Secret Service agents of my body.  I grab the wrists of my husband or our children, my voice lowering to that tone of warning peculiar to mothers and wives.  “Don’t,” I say.  “I’m serious.” 

Shteyngart: The fear began when I was a small child. I was living in Russia and was given an illustrated children's book in which a young boy and a girl were being unprincipled communists and as punishment they were made really tiny by some party committee. Then they kept being attacked by Gigantic Flying Insects. I remember at one point turning the page of the book and finding that an ACTUAL gigantic flying insect had been squished between two pages, the meat of its body covering an illustration of another such insect. I thought I was, like, going to die, you know?


––How do you manage this fear when it surfaces?

Evenson: If I can, I try to keep it from surfacing.  I avoid raw chicken when I can, though sometimes, in an act of bravado, I’ll actually find myself in a position where I have to roast a chicken.  I arm myself with lots of paper towels and try to touch the chicken as little as possible.  If I’m served undercooked chicken at a dinner party I eat what I can and then try to figure out a way to get the bone off my plate, or position it so as to be exposed to it as little as possible.  Sometimes a certain nausea starts to rise and I leave the room.  At the same time, if the chicken is cooked well, even if it’s on a bone, it doesn’t bother me: I like to eat it.

Grossman: For the first 30 years of my phobic life I deployed a series of escalating procedures to deal with it. When confronted with somebody eating or drinking, my first line of attack would always be to flee the scene—I would cross the street, change seats, hit the bathroom, change subway cars, awkwardly bail out of the conversation, do whatever I had to do. If I was stuck near the person eating––if I was, for example, sitting next to them on a plane, or riding in a taxi driven by them, or in the middle of negotiating a divorce settlement with them––I would engage in various “surreptitious” behaviors to try to distract myself and/or drown out the eating-noise. These would include things like listening to an iPod or sighing heavily or vigorously scratching my head and ears. Though sometimes I would just completely lose it and cringe and cover my ears. If you ever have dinner with me you’ll notice that I tend to eat my food in perfect sync with you—you take a bite, I take a bite. You sip your wine, I sip mine. That’s to minimize the risk of my actually hearing or seeing you eat. Once you notice this it will probably start to annoy you, but I promise you it’s necessary. We're both better off.?  (I should clarify something: not every instance of somebody eating or drinking activates the phobia. There is a set of mysterious, secret (even from me) rules that govern it. I can often get away with eating in restaurants or going to dinner parties, for example; in fact going to restaurants and dinner parties is one of my greatest pleasures in life. I also love to cook. Go figure.)?  Now I’m in treatment for my phobia, so I have a series of mental exercises I’m supposed to do to manage it. One of them involves envisioning the fear as a creature––it’s kind of like the gremlin in The Twilight Zone, which only William Shatner could see. If I can control the creature—force it to obey, mentally order it to back off—the fear subsides. This actually works, sort of. Though I still wish I could just shoot the creature like Shatner shoots the gremlin.