Have Your Say

Ultimately, YOSLY is a novel about rejection. As such, it has universal appeal since we’ve all experienced some kind of rejection: in school, at work, in relationships. The experience is painful and, when internalized, damaging to our sense of self. The resulting bitterness can stimulate fantasies of revenge. We may dream of punishing the “rejector”. Part of maturity is realizing that rejection stems from a complex variety of causes and that bitterness is just self-defeating. It would seem then, sir, that you need to mature.

So you aren’t Jewish. Get over it. You are other things. Negating or disparaging the religion to which you do not belong is racism. I want to be a fashion model. I have the right to be a fashion model. So what if I’m short and overweight? Change the standards. Otherwise, you would be discriminating against me because of an accident of birth. If I were the talented writer that you are, I could choose to write a novel attacking the beauty industry, calling it discriminatory, and demanding that it be replaced with a Harrison Bergeron society.

Imagine a different scenario for your novel. What if the pamphlets Howard brings home are from local gay clubs? What if Howard leaves Anne because he discovers that he is a homosexual and since Anne, by accident of DNA, is a woman, they are incompatible. Would Anne feel any less rejected? More importantly, would you, Mr. Burr, attack the gay community for their exclusionary practices?

Perhaps you should be aware that I, a heterosexual woman, was deeply offended by that bowling ball joke. Was that your intention?

Chani Hadad
Nof Ayalon, Israel

Chandler Burr responds:

Ms. Hadad, awash in your vast, ferocious narcissism you perceive You Or Someone Like You as a personal attack motivated by bitterness.

I understand why my raising this fundamental problem of the separatism and tribalism at Judaism’s core upsets you. The thing is, Israelis have been raising this issue, in Israel, for decades. Ha’aretz journalists and many others have pointed out, well before I did, that Israel’s citizenship laws are analogous to Hitler’s Nuremberg laws. It is Israelis who observe the racialist problem with the Law of Return and the irreconcilable tension between democracy and ethnicity-based citizenship. They are Jewish. I am not. Yet we are making the same point. Since you cannot accuse them of agreeing with me out of petty bitterness at not being Jewish, perhaps — just perhaps — they and I are talking sincerely about a real and complex problem. And if so, mature, intelligent adults would respond to the discussion rather than attacking those who discuss it.

To apply your own advice to you, it’s time to grow up.

In response to your very strange example, I believe that when one person rejects another because of sexual orientation it is idiotic prejudice, but your example supports my views, not yours; it is equally idiotic prejudice for Jews to reject non-Jews because of their race or a putative difference in their inherent moral value. Your point works against you.

As for this, “I was deeply offended by that bowling ball joke. Was that your intention?” Yes, Ms. Hadad. I wrote my entire novel with the single hope and intention of offending you with a joke. You are that important.

I’m the product of a mixed marriage, but only mixed in some ways. My mother is a Jew, my father an Episcopalian, but they were, both of them, liberal, well educated, and proudly American. We didn’t have a Christmas tree or a menorah. I was raised a liberal American Jew, well educated and, to complete the connection to Mr. Burr’s book, gay.

I live with a non-Jewish man. He’s said that Jews believe themselves to be superior and cliquish. I agree. Of course we do. But that’s the nature of groups. Even in Junior High, the losers table thinks it’s better than the Dungeons and Dragons table. And be it Harvey Milk High School or a Brooklyn Yeshiva, every group thinks differences between it and others are important — as long as it’s their own differences you’re talking about.

It’s interesting that Anne calls herself half British. In fact, she is an American with an accent. Just because her father was a diplomat (for a country that epitomized racism, classism, and in general lorded it’s Anglo-superiority complex over the planet) doesn’t mean she can claim more than that. You, Anne, are an American. Why is that not enough? (I do wish that I knew more about Sam. His story was a bit too thin for me, and frankly I thought he was the most interesting character.)

I dislike fundamentalism, and was sorry for Howard’s situation. Be it Orthodox Jews, Christians, gays, blacks, whatever, fundamentalists are to be feared. I also fear that we are facing a future where various radicalized orthodoxies and tribalisms will dictate our future.

We Americans don’t live by any kind of Nuremberg laws. The key to America is being who you want to be. They’re not so lucky in Israel. Europe is using all kinds of racial, ethnic, and aesthetic lines to remind Muslims that they are the other and should assimilate or get out. Even the Swiss, so liberal the cheese avoids color and flavor, has said, “There are to be no minarets here, my friend.” America is the only country where this book could be written and understood. It will be interesting to see what Mr. Burr does next. I do hope that his next book helps me work out Sam’s (and our) next step as a world of “halves.”

Dan Berenson

I can’t claim to be able to judge whether Chandler Burr has interpreted Judaism correctly (a fascinating topic that I know relatively little about), but as a Jesuit-educated, Joyce-ingesting, Rabelais-imbibing and hence complexly lapsed Catholic, I can claim that he sure as hell has a lot of wise things to say about religion. And I don’t mean just fundamentalism but the whole spectrum of belief, from scriptural literalism to ecumenical theism, anguished agnosticism, and devout atheism. Of course, when your favorite novel (Ulysses) has a Jewish protagonist who’s married to a Gentile, both of whom live in a far-from-perfectly-Catholic Ireland, you’re bound to have an affinity for YOSLY and its take on religion. I’m not trying to argue that Burr is theoretically or logically right about any particular religion; it’s that he “gets religion right,” at least in my experience. His nuanced depiction of the myriad ways that religion can shape personality and color perception rings true. Burr captures the essence of that roiling stew of mythology, poetry, guilt, sanctity, fear, sexuality, ethnicity, culture, mysticism, music, money, imagery, altruism, exclusion, and wonder that is the fullest reality of most religions. In this context, Howard Rosenbaum’s spiritual journey is catholic, with a decidedly lowercase “c,” i.e., it’s universal.

In an era when fundamentalism is playing such a large and frequently destructive role in the world, this novelistic contemplation of religion through the experiences of “real” people is refreshing and salubrious because it highlights the often-neglected multifaceted nature of belief. Religion shouldn’t be a yes/no, either/or, saved/damned, us/them proposition. Any thinking person knows why “fundament” is the first word in fundamentalism–and there are elements of fundamentalism in all faiths. At the same time, any thinking and feeling person will see how impoverished our lives and cultures would be if we were simply to dismiss religion (and the question of God). The day we stop thinking, having feelings, and, yes, arguing about religion is the day religion really does die—along with the spiritual, cultural, artistic, and intellectual richness it has offered throughout the history of civilization. (By the way, if you enjoyed YOSLY or just think the issues it addresses are important, I highly recommend Ilana Blumberg’s memoir, Houses of Study: A Jewish Woman Among Books, which deals with many of the same topics in different yet equally insightful and beautiful ways).

Having said all this, I think it does a grave injustice to You or Someone Like You to suggest that it’s just about religion. It’s certainly one of the central themes of the novel, but there are many others, and they’re all interconnected. This book performs a rare feat: it’s an exemplary “novel of ideas,” but at the same time it creates intimate, living portraits of individuals, a family, and a life-long romantic relationship. Burr’s clear-eyed presentation of the psycho-social dynamics of a marriage between two highly talented people, one of whom is forced by a convergence of circumstances and expectations to play the role of the supportive, “following spouse,” is an artfully drawn map of the matrimonial minefield of our time. Likewise, his portrayal of Sam’s sexuality and its effects on his family is profoundly moving and socially significant precisely because it’s direct, honest, and utterly believable. It’s a “coming out” that takes place in the real world, with all its complications, exhilaration, shock, banality, and messiness. In addition to these merits, You or Someone Like You shows with great precision and breadth how language marks us, defines us, limits us, and also how its mutability allows us to inhabit new worlds, new personae, to remake ourselves. And as someone who’s spent the better part of his career in the book business, I can testify that Burr is dead-on accurate in his picture of the literary world. He anatomizes the snobbery, preening careerism, and crippling self-consciousness of the literati, while also revealing their intelligence, idealism, and, I dare say, moments of grace. Furthermore, he weaves together the worlds of literature and film through an ingenious exploration of their overlapping uses of narrative, theme, language, and character. Burr understands the interplay of word and image with a depth that few writers can even approach.

On top of all of this, and perhaps above all, You or Someone Like You made me burst out laughing again and again—the Howard/Sam “Jewish”/“Jew-ish” story (pp 93-94) being just one of many passages that induced a guffaw through a remarkable combination of wit, irony, and compassionately menschlich humor. Leopold Bloom, the non-practicing Jewish/Jew-ish hero/anti-hero of Ulysses, is a great illustration of another famous Bloom’s observation about the importance of the Ur-comic character, Falstaff, an observation that Burr cites at a critical point in the story: “Harold Bloom says that he would locate the key to Shakespeare’s centrality in the canon in one very specific aspect of one single character, Falstaff. ‘It is,’ says Bloom, ‘Falstaff’s capacity to overhear himself. And, thereby, the man’s capacity to change. It is the most remarkable of all literary conventions’” (pg 300). You or Someone Like You is about personal evolution, shades of meaning, the ever-shifting mosaic of our conceptions of art, language, sexuality, marriage, career, money, religion, culture, and nature (Anne’s post-lapsarian literary Garden of Eden being a crucial nexus of many of these). One of the things I like most about this novel is that nobody comes away without an instructive pratfall; all the major characters, including Anne, are shown to have weaknesses, blindspots, and to be particularly prone to that good old-fashioned, eternally returning sin of hubris. Nietzsche (whose favorite writer was the German-Jewish-Christian satirist Heine) says in the epigraph of The Gay Science (a translation of the German title, Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, that creates an unintended but interesting pun, especially in the context of YOSLY and of Burr’s 1996 book, A Separate Creation: The Search for the Biological Origins of Sexual Orientation), “I laugh at every master who does not laugh at himself.” You or Someone Like You shows us that if you can’t stand back from yourself and see how the sublime and ridiculous are constantly at play in all things spiritual, sexual, artistic, cultural, intellectual, and religious, then you need a divine pie in the face even more than the rest of us do. If God really does exist, it’s a good Pascalian wager that She/He/It has the greatest sense of humor in the universe.

John Heon
Philadelphia

While YOSLY was a well written and an interesting read, it ultimately had a hollow ring to it. Instead of an attempt to build bridges between disparate religious communities, or even state a position but show a slightly balanced view of the good Judaism has indeed brought into the world, this work was ultimately filled with hatred. Anne (your alter ego) came off sounding like a spiteful, arrogant, whiny, and hate-filled individual, filled with the exuberance of her own ivory- tower verbosity, compassionately vapid and, seemingly, always in the attack mode.

While I am sorry for the experience that you went through, there have been many others in your position who have chosen a different path. They either went to learn, spoke with Rabbis, or perhaps did turn their backs on Judaism but did not allow hatred to reign supreme.

Mr. Burr, there is enough anti-Semitism and general hatred in the world to go around one hundred fold. Congratulations for contributing to this sad state of affairs. You are a talented individual, misplacing your gifts by perpetuating contempt and ill -will towards Jews and Judaism. Mazel Tov – you have added to all that is toxic in this world. This is not the case of “shooting the messenger” but rather that the messenger himself is the poisoned arrow.

My former community of fellow Jews includes numerous blacks, Chinese and Hispanics. They have converted according to halacha because they strongly identify with Jewish values. My niece and nephew are of mixed race and fully Jewish. I have religious Jewish Hawaiian friends, Indian friends, South American friends and others of mixed backgrounds calling themselves: Religious Jews. Where is the blood component here? Where is the racism?

More than anything, Mr. Burr, I charge you with malicious intent dedicated to fomenting further hatred and fanning the flames of anti-Semitism. You are undoubtedly not blind and realize the role Islam is playing in maligning Jews and Israel. Are you so self-hating (your Jewish underpinnings) that you throw the rest of Jews to the literary wolves? Do you feel no responsibility to improve the world (tikkun olam) through uplifting literature – but only to tear it down with your dime-a-dozen anti-Semetic rhetoric? Members of my book club agree with me in this regard. What a wasted opportunity, a waste of the paper it’s printed on, and a total waste of our money. Here’s hoping you don’t let Sam, Play It Again !

- Tzippi Sha-ked

Chandler Burr responds:

You ask where is the racism. Here it is: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/world/europe/17britain.html?scp=1&sq=British%20Supreme%20Court%20Jewish&st=cse

As for my malicious intent to fan of the flames of anti-Semitism. I understand that since you were born they have fed you a diet of theological and cultural beliefs as parochial and insular as they are deeply rooted and iron-clad. They have dressed you in an intellectual Kevlar that works two ways: It not only prevents anything from getting in, it obstructs at every turn any effort you might make to get out. “You” is in fact a work of tikkun olam (your expression of the responsibility to make the world better) because it raises questions. To name one: The quite obvious contradiction between saying, “I believe in [fill in any traditional religion; all posit people who are important to their god or gods and people who are not]” and, “I believe all human beings are of inherently equal spiritual worth.” You didn’t ignore this question. You simply don’t register it. When a person cannot detect a glitch in a moral or theological system, any discussion of that glitch can only be interpreted as an attack on the system itself. You see malicious intent because you are unable to see anything else.

YOSLY is not courageous at all but instead reveals several large blind spots and lacks in both theoretical coherence and understanding of Judaism (the religion and the culture). The character Anne (and, I believe, Burr the author) is not at all interested in her husband’s heritage— she doesn’t love him for all of who he is but for the fact that he has rejected his background in order to be with her. She has been wounded by the hurtful language and attitudes of her in-laws (fair enough) but rather than acknowledge these wounds and engage at all with Judaism on its own terms, or even on her husband’s, she develops what she believes to be a clear-eyed theory about the “toxicity” of Jewish identity.

This theory is flawed and shaky on many levels: it conflates prejudice with all positive identity and sense of peoplehood; in its self-proclaimed “anti-racialism” it disregards the fact that if Judaism was truly racist then conversion would not be allowed; it blames Jews for anti-Semitism by having a group identity (equivalent to blaming gays for homophobia because they are sexually attracted to the same sex); it confuses all Jews with the very orthodox and/or very prejudiced, which is like confusing all protestants with the radical right-wing; and it behaves as if the goal all of the Jewish religion is to proclaim different-ness, as if it would have no reason for existing otherwise. For example, Burr creates characters who believe that in order to love their daughter’s non-Jewish boyfriend they have to jettison kashrut and their own engagement with Judaism. (He also thinks that they would go to a “temple” which shows his level of ignorance, an annoying detail in a novel that represents itself as trading on insider knowledge.)

Anne is blind to the possibility that Howard might have deep positive feelings towards his Jewishness— in fact she is blind to everything about Jewishness besides the capacity of some Jews to exclude others (her code word for this is tribalism). Incidentally, the fact that the Christian, let alone Muslim, world would also reject and hurt her son is not on her radar, nor is the fact that Israel, despite its problems, is one of the most gay-friendly countries in the world.

Overall, the book is intellectually agile but hollow. Anne talks about people being able to see everything but themselves, but she never once pauses to critique her own motives or underlying assumptions. Moreover, she feigns disgust for organized religion but raises her son with the religion of literature and even temporarily becomes a high priestess herself (and a very organized one at that). Sad to say, I was disappointed that Howard comes back to her at the end— not because she isn’t Jewish, but because she has taken him back purely on her terms. The same theology of separatism that she despises when expressed toward her son is one that she feels free to practice towards her husband and his longing to connect with the Jewish part of himself and his humanity.

Isabelle Headrick
Austin, Texas

Chandler Burr responds:

Isabelle Headrick presents an Anne who “doesn’t love [Howard] for all of who he is but for the fact that he has rejected his background in order to be with her.”There is nothing in the novel that suggests this is why Anne loves her husband and everything to illustrate its opposite. But Headrick’s misreading of “You” is not the problem; it is a symptom of the problem, which is that she is defending Jewish theology, a tribalist, separatist theology dangerously maladapted to the modern world and directly at odds with humanist democratic universalism. Jewish theology classifies human beings according to racial and nationalistic criteria. I imagine (because this is often the case with educated, non-orthodox Jews) that were you to ask Headrick, she would also profess to believe in the infinitely better, more advanced, anti-racist universalist understanding of all human beings as, simply, human beings; I assume she would tell you that people who are Japanese, African, Indian, Hispanic are not less in God’s eyes than she. But these two views are mutually incompatible, and deeply and obviously so. Jews like Headrick compartmentalize. “I’m Jewish. Except that you black people are my moral equals. Except that Jewish theology explicitly says only Jews have a sacred covenant with God. Except that we’re all equal. Except that” etc. etc. It’s irrational, but it’s extremely common.

Hutus and Tutsis slaughtering each other over their identities. Serbians cleansing their identity of Bosnian identity. Aryan identity that undergirded Nazi Germany. The Chinese elites in Indonesia who keep themselves strictly apart from the Indonesians among whom they live and who they consider inferior. These are Headrick’s “identity and sense of peoplehood.” At least the Chinese don’t believe in some God who deems the Indonesians inferior; the Chinese simply make the distinction in terms of wealth and culture. Truly religious Jews on the other hand obligatorily believe that the Creator of the Universe holds non-Jews as strictly secondary. This bothers Headrick not at all, but probably she, like most everyone else, has not thought these things through to their logical ends.

“Identity” is a sickness, and like every addict who has not yet acknowledged her disease, Headrick lays out the standard kit of justifications and engages in the usual hypocrisy. An elegant proof that Judaism is racism is found in this Nov 8, 2009, New York Times article on a ruling from Britain’s Supreme Court: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/world/europe/08britain.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=”Sarah%20Lyall”&st=cse Israel is a racial security state with an apartheidist political system.. As Bill Maher points out, we understand why people make up mythical Beings that favor their groups over other groups— the primitive Japanse made up the goddess Omaterasu Omikami, Zoroastrians made up Ahura Mazda, the Hebrews made up Yahweh, etc.; our species, like other social species, has many dangerous instincts toward tribal identity — but we need to transcend identity and separatist theology and other stupid, dangerous little games.

This is what Anne Rosenbaum is saying.

Moreover I would like to point out that non-religious Jews are world leaders in this extremely important work of shedding antiquated paradigms. Just one example: Former Israeli education minister Shulamit Aloni called the notion of a Jewish state “antidemocratic, if not racist” and worked to reverse the State Education Law that sought to inculcate “the values of Jewish culture” and “loyalty to the Jewish people.” “What’s important,” Aloni explained, “is that they [become] better human beings, not better Jews.”

Aloni’s is the most concise response to Headrick. As for a description of Headrick and those who think like her, here is Anne Rosenbaum: “There are people who tell you that you are a kind of person , I say. Not a person. A kind of person. And that all other people are another kind. Who take your desire for good and your talents and your spirit and twist and twist till you instinctively say, ‘He is one of mine. He is not. She is one of mine. She is not.’ And then convince you that there is a god sick enough to want this. Or, if you’ve no use for the god, that there is reason to perpetuate this culture.”

Headrick has a desire for good, she has talent and intelligence. She uses them to advocate for Jewish theology, which is morally unacceptable, exactly as advocates for Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism advocate for their unacceptable moral systems that divide people into Those God Likes and Those God Doesn’t. Were she to take her talents and use them for a better morality, she could make the world a better place. Here is a better morality, the words Denise gives to Anne when her husband, sickened by an ancient theological poison, leaves the wife he dearly loves: “I will call them my people which were not my people; and her beloved, who was not beloved.”

I was very moved by this book. I am Jewish, Israeli-born, now living in California, and Burr has a lot of courage to put his views out there the way he did in “You Or Someone Like You.”

Intellectually, humanist universalism and groupist traditionalism are not compatible. Human nature being what it is, most of us try to have our toes in both puddles, but this is a compromise that yields an inconsistent way of facing the world.

This inconsistent compromise Chandler Burr labels “hypocrisy.” Fair enough. I wish our species were different in so many ways. I wish we did not derive so much comfort from belonging to groups. But that’s sentimental and idealistic. The fact is that our innate tendency to separate and group ourselves has already lead to the slaughter of many in the name of creating utopias here on earth, of “cleansing” nations, of “purifying” races. The history of the 20th century is the story of slaughter that comes from the innate and dangerous instinct to separate and group ourselves..

Which leads us back to the truth about us: As long as we group ourselves in these various ways, the “tribes” as Burr calls them try to divide themselves from others and to perpetuate themselves.

Jews are but one of these many tribes, but because of his familial background it’s the one whose separatism Burr encountered. I’m sorry nobody told him before he went to Israel that observant Jews define themselves by their birth mother, not by how they feel themselves to be. I’m sorry he had this painful experience. But in the end it made him create an interesting story, and I’m happy he chose to put his story out there. And I’m delighted that he opened and maintains this forum.

Mirka Breen
Oakland, CA

People often ask me if I’m Jewish, if that’s why I study the Holocaust. After I respond that I’m not, their answers usually range from “—” or “hmm” to “awfully depressing, isn’t it?” And while I do concede, yes, it is a depressing topic, I must likewise assert that while six-elevenths of the victims of the Holocaust were indeed Jewish, five-elevenths were not. I study the Holocaust without any ties to Judaism. Notwithstanding that Nazi policy concerning the Jews was that they all needed elimination while partisans, Roma, homosexuals, Free Masons, Catholics, prisoners of war, and political prisoners simply needed concentrating away from the Aryans, the end calculations of deaths during the Holocaust are quite near an even Jew to non-Jew split. Minimizing the deaths of the five million non-Jews during the Hitlerean Reich has been a real travesty of post-Auschwitz studies. That, and it seems that if those whose pedigree doesn’t follow what the Nazis defined as “Jew,” (look again at page 298) that there isn’t much reason to think about the Holocaust. Who are some post-Holocaust thinkers? Goldhagen, Wiesel, Levi, Friedländer, Spiegelman—all of theirs is an interest and attachment to the topic because they are Jewish. What does Burr name his protagonist in You or Someone Like You? Rosenbaum. The choice is clear: to best enable a correct association with the Holocaust, Israel, Jewishness. etc. a Germanic name works the best. But Anne’s not Jewish, and therefore neither is Sam. Reading this book has been ever so encouraging to my interest in the topic because I feel as if Anne gives me a voice as she attacks the latent, or not so latent, hypocrisy of contemporary Jews vis-à-vis the Holocaust. Jewish funding has provided for all of the scholarship around the Holocaust, that thus, the Jews have won it as their topic. Even Anne can’t compete with their talons: she looses her pupils and her forward momentum after being called a Nazi. The Holocaust is sensitive, and it owns such a heavy lexicon. Chandler Burr’s new novel has solidified for me the reason why I should have interest in the Holocaust and the writings which have come afterwards. The goal of reading Holocaust literature is not an attempt to transport oneself to the middle of the twentieth century, to the marshy Upper Silesian barbwired arbeit macht frei Lagers, but to learn, instead, of the stories and of the people who rose out of the ashes after twelve years of the Thousand Year Reich. It seems impossible that central and western Europe in the 1940s allowed the Endlösung, this sordid finality, this end-all-be-all Nazi program, to exist. White men exterminated white men in civilized, modernized countries. Just as the guillotine seems an impossible death sentence in modern times, the gathering and exterminating of eleven million people, six million Jews seems just as archaic, inhuman, and impossible—or is it decidedly modern in comparison? What more important event occurred in the twentieth century to define the progress of human modernity? Doesn’t that history belong to all of us?

Andrew Jones
Bainbridge Island, WA

I had ordered You or Someone Like You it because I’d read a review somewhere and imagined that a book about Hollywood insiders would make a good summer read.
I’m the daughter of a non-practicing Jewish father, and a formerly Southern Baptist mother who sent me to Catholic school (for the scholastic advantages) and to the Episcopal church. My husband (a lapsed Presbyterian) and I were exploring Jerusalem in 1997, entered an open door in an ancient building and encountered the first friendly face I’d found in the city: a man in a kippa, who greeted us warmly and asked if we were from the U.S. We said yes, and he then inquired, “Are you Jewish?” My husband said, no, and simultaneously I answered, “Yes, my father was a Jew.”
“And your mother?” No.
He looked at me with a expression I saw on the faces of Orthodox men when they moved to the other side of narrow streets, perhaps to avoid touching me lest I was menstruating. Without words, he quickly moved us to and out of the door. We stood in the bright sun asking each other, “What was that about?”
Something has been bothering me about Judaism ever since that time in Jerusalem. In this book Burr articulated this “something.”
I’m grateful for it.

Gretchen Newmark
Portland, OR

You or Someone Like You is intellectually satisfying: the plot drives you forward, its ideas reel you in…and the use of literature and literary lions mixed with the writings and writers of today is thrilling. And it’s topical, too, since like Anne, I underwent the sea-change of my husband of 22 years – not a religious upheaval, but just as titanic as Howard’s. Only he did not return, no matter how hard I fought for him. So there I was, beached on the reef of change, the same abyss that Anne feared, and my lovely life wrecked. But you do go on. And one of the things you gain is that when you read a book like this, you read it with more urgency and clarity. Thank you so much, Chandler – and it’s nice to see that Anne does, after all, own her own domain.

Gail O’Donnell
Wilmington, DE

The feeling of coming upon fictional characters whose trials and tribulations closely mirror your own is, to be honest, somewhat creepy. Here I am, a formerly black-velvet-kippa Orthodox boy from New York City, who left the flock and became an unadorned human being, who flew across the continent and there ended up falling for a blonde British expatriate with a Ph.D. in English. In contrast to the fictional Howard, though, the tribalism that reared its ugly head wasn’t my own; it was the prospect of disinheritance and familial excommunication that set the dark clouds in motion over our budding relationship. Better now than later, we said, and that was that, our paths diverged. I should’ve known better, of course, but I convinced myself that these people–”my” people, who quoted Sartre and insisted that their children get a decent higher education–could possibly, possibly be rational through and through. How wrong I was. 

Thank you, Chandler, for exploring that which we’d prefer not to speak about, the uncomfortable truths that have yet to be admitted and dealt with.

Martin Bienenstock

Vancouver, BC