There was a blog, then a Twitter feed, then a phenomenally popular book, and then a TV show, which I didn’t see before it was canceled. It sounds too easy—someone just collecting the one-off wisdom of his father—but Justin Halpern’s Shit My Dad Says is, to me, a subtle meditation on Vietnam (Samuel Halpern was a medic during the war), and on the basis of a single, crucial scene, it’s not inconsiderably about Sam still processing that violence, that anger. The book is also very much about being Jewish in America, about the father teaching the son how to be Jewish and male in America, which is a contradictory, complicated thing.
Each entry is 140 characters or fewer—the length of a tweet—and all the subsections and mini-chapters are extremely short; the book is essentially a tape recording of Sam’s best lines, overdubbed with relatively brief monologues by Justin. It’s not great or even good, probably, really, finally, but above all it’s not boring. Which is everything to me. I don’t want to read out of duty. I’m trying to stay awake and not bored and not rote.
What I love about Shit My Dad Says is the absence of space between the articulation and the embodiment of the articulation. The father is trying to teach his son that life is only blood and bones. The son is trying to express to his father his bottomless love and complex admiration. Nothing more; nothing less. There are vast reservoirs of feeling beneath the son’s voice and the father’s aphorisms.
Twenty years ago, David Lipsky spent a week with David Foster Wallace, then fifteen years later Lipsky went back and resurrected the notes. The resulting book, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, pretends to be just a compilation of notes, and maybe that’s all it is, but to me it’s a debate between two sensibilities: desperate art and pure commerce. Lipsky, I hope, knows what he’s doing—evoking himself as the very quintessence of everything Wallace despised.
Tara Ebrahimi, my friend and former student, emailed me, “For years I’ve been taking notes and collecting quotes for a book that I hope will materialize at some point, but every time I attempt to turn the notes into the book, I hate the results. Really, what I’ve built is a database of quotations, riffs, metaphors. I find even my notes on how the book should be structured to be full of energy, because they’re an outline of my massive aspirations, most of which I have no hope of actually pulling off. It feels almost as if my book wants to be about the planning of a book: a hypothetical literature that can’t exist under earth’s current gravity.”
Elif Batuman: “A lot of the writers I know are incredibly good email writers. I often find their emails more compelling than the things they’re writing at the time. Everyone has two lives: One is open and is known to everyone, and one is unknown, running its course in secret. Email is the unknown life, and the published work is the known life.”