Jonathan Foer says, Writing is like pulling teeth out of your penis.
Tonight in Allston, Jonathan Safran Foer read a bit from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, accompanied by musicians (rather comically, all would agree), and participated in some Q&A.
It was another example of how folks are figuring out how to take the stuffiness out of readings. It’s so wonderful. Tonight’s event was sponsored by the good people of Boston’s Weekly Dig, which in Dig fashion meant foosball and vouchers for a pint of Moosehead. The crowd was pleasantly small for a writer so popular, but the intimate mood didn’t keep one man from asking, “Jonathan, how’s your daughter doing?” Foer, who’s wife had a son, replied, “Wonderful! She’s changed her sex to a boy. She’s grown a penis and everything.”
Which brings me to my autographed sheet of a Houghton Mifflin (Foer’s publisher) notepad.
With a wonderful accidental lack of humor, I told Jonathan, “This is cheezy, but could you autograph this sheet? It’s what I used to write notes of the stupider things you said tonight.” I meant sillier, as in, these were your laugh lines, good on ya! Anyway, sorry, Jonathan.
“Novel-writing = hating vaginas.” This was my shorthand for Foer’s contention that writing short stories, which he almost never writes, is something he would get sick of. He likes novels because they’re unique and long-lasting. His analogy was, “Imagine you’re a gynecologist and you come home to your wife wearing lingerie. You’d say, ‘Not another one of those!’”
“Took Frosh class with JC Oates, encouraged him.” At Princeton, Foer took a Freshman year writing class with Joyce Carol Oates, who one time before class told him she particularly liked his writing. I had to agree with Jonathan when he said, “As a Freshman, if anyone had told me they liked anything I did, I probably would have persued it.”
“Three years is so long, you can only do what feels right to you.” His response to a question about whether he felt undue pressure in producing his second book.
Foer’s first fan letter ever was hate mail. It was “a crudely made picture of a dog eating a picture of me. The title was ‘Animal Eats Jewish Writer.’ I thought to myself, great, this is the rest of my life.”
