Friday Mar 29

JessicaAnyaBlau Jessica Anya Blau is the author of newly released DRINKING CLOSER TO HOME, which has been called "a raging success" and "unrelentingly sidesplittingly funny." Her first novel, THE SUMMER OF NAKED SWIM PARTIES, was picked as a Best Summer Book by the Today Show, the New York Post and New York Magazine.  The San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers chose it as one of the Best Books of the Year.  Jessica lives in Baltimore and teaches at Goucher College.
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Drinking Closer to Home
by Jessica Anya Blau
Book review, by Meg Tuite
 

From the first paragraph you know you are in the hands of a veteran writer.

“Anna leans her head over Alejandros’s plate, her black hair falling like a screen across her cheek. She sniffs, her head jittering above the gefilte fish that sits there like a rotten, battered sea sponge. Portia watches her and wonders how many chromosomes come between man and dog.”
 
So much is given to the reader in those first three sentences. We already have the introduction of three characters, inimitable visuals, smells and the dynamic humor of the author. The novel envelops us, lets us infiltrate the deepest, hidden recesses of the laugh-till-you-cry, Stein family that has us continually looking back at our own childhood experiences, finding communion with this bewitching household.
 
Drinking Closer to Home is written in alternating chapters of flashbacks from the 70’s and 80’s and the present, 1993, when the three adult siblings all convene at the hospital with their father, Buzzy, after their mother, Louise, has had a heart attack.
 
We have pot-smoking parents growing weed in the backyard, the oldest daughter, Anna, who’s out to shtoop every guy, snort every drug and attempt to control the uncontrollable on the home-front, Portia, the middle child, unhindered by her parents lack of interest in being the so-called authority figures, who wants to raise her younger brother, Emery, who is the over-achiever, the youngest, the one they deem “Noble Citizen,” who makes judgment calls on what is wrong with this whacked-out household full of bird-shit, illegal drugs, cigarette butts, dishes piled high and then the illustrious grandparents, Bubbe and Zeyde, who show up rarely, but pack a punch, spewing out anything that comes into their heads.
 
“Bubbe was holding a pair of Portia’s pink floral underpants, the crotch turned out and pulled taut.”
“She has discharge!” Bubbe said to Zeyde. “Portia’s maturing now, God bless. She’s in puberty!”
Louise laughed so hard she had to lean over the sink and spit out a mouthful of coffee. Portia felt as though she were a tiny, burning fire ant, hanging from the ceiling, watching her mother from afar.”
“Yetta!” Zeyda said, removing his glasses. “You don’t need to look at her underpants to see that she’s in puberty. Look at her breasts!”

You have the sense that it’s survival of the fittest, but when the times get really rough the humor is what brings the Stein family back together. You know they’re having a damn good time in the midst of chronic chaos.
 
The characters in this novel are vivid individuals. Each one has a distinct voice and personality that sets them apart from the rest.

Louise, the mother has a cigarette or a joint dangling from her lips at any time. She is first and foremost a poet and artist, goes to the nude beach every day, spends most of her time at home on the couch reading and decides when the kids are eleven, eight and three that she is giving up as a housewife and the two daughters can take care of the house and their younger brother.

“I quit being a housewife.” Louise shook her hair and smiled.
“Can you do that?” Portia asked...
“Of course I can. I just did. I quit!” Louise took another drag off her cigarette.”

Anna, the oldest daughter is the instigator, the wild card, drug addict, sex addict, adrenaline addict who needs to live on the edge and manage the household. She and her younger sister, Portia, are two opposing forces.

“Anna saw herself and Portia as cartoon characters: Anna spinning up dust like the Road Runner as she whirred around Portia, the slow moving, overly mellow Dumbo.”

Emery, the youngest, is always trying to figure out what’s happening with the rest of the family and why.

“You okay?” Emery asked. Anna looked in the mirror at her brother’s tiny face. With his crinkled brow, she could imagine him a grown man with worries.
“I can’t believe you’re barfing from three drinks! What’s wrong with you?” Anna jerked the car backwards out of the driveway.
“I dunno,” Portia said. “That’s what happens every single time I drink.”
“Then WHY do you drink?!” Emery asked. “If I threw up every time I drank Tang, I would stop drinking Tang!....”
“Watch the road!” Emery shouted.
“Hey, Father Junior,” Anna said, “don’t worry about the road. We’ll be fine!”
Portia took the cigarettes from Anna, pulled out two, and lit them both before handing her sister one.
“This cigarette makes me feel like I have to vomit again,” Portia groaned.
“THEN PUT IT OUT!” Emery said. His eyes were as big and round as his mouth. It was clear he had never before witnessed such imbecilic behavior.”

The structure of the novel is ideal. We begin with the siblings as adults sitting around their mother’s bed in the hospital, and then rotate through the early years, watch each character develop, through family interactions and quarrels, their particular neuroses, intermixing their present circumstances of divorce, affairs and Louise’s illness with the past.
 
The metaphors and similes are flawlessly rendered, noteworthy, and add so much to our understanding of the inner workings of each character.

“Sometimes Anna thought of herself as an appliance. She was never fully operating unless she had the electrical charge of another body plugged into her. When someone was plugged into her, especially when she was high, she found a beautiful, dreamy timelessness where nothing was ahead and nothing was behind. Her life was only in the pulsating here and now: sensation, excitation, elevation.”

The characters see themselves as “others” in a world of “conformers” and they battle between the awkwardness of being different and embracing this part of themselves. This is truly the captivating theme that allows us as readers to get close to this family and identify with their plight. We can vicariously commune with the Steins and all their idiosyncrasies and find comradeship through our own shortcomings and dire, familial humiliations.
 
In the end, it is the candid, fearless language that Blau uses that pulls us into that hospital room or next to Louise on the couch or out with the girls for the night or with Emery as he explores his sexuality. The book is written in third person, which allows each individual to reveal their own story, but there’s never any distance from these characters and we find ourselves lured into the house with them feeling their pain, their vulnerabilities, their frustrations and their unbounded love of the ludicrous that calls to mind some of Sedaris’ stories of his family life.

“Emery rolled his eyes. The only thing worse than his mother’s smoking pot was the fact that she tried to get his sisters to smoke with her…
“So what’d Anna say?” Emery asked…
“Oy, gut,” Louise said in a fake Yiddish accent, and she took another hit off the joint.
“Did she really try to kill herself?” Emery asked.
“No!” Louise said. “She won’t kill herself. She’s too selfish. She’s like your dad.”
“But she’s threatening it?” Portia asked.
“She’s been calling all week, wanking into the phone, waaa waa waa, I’m going to kiiiill myself, I hate myself, I hate my liiiiife!”
Emery was so startled by his mother’s whiny, nasally imitation of his suicidal sister that he started laughing…
Portia imitated her mother imitating her sister: “Tell Portia and Emery I loooooove them!” Emery could feel his eyes squint as he cracked up.”

Drinking Closer to Home
is a blast of hysterical brilliance that will find you running back to read Blau’s first book-sensation, The Summer of Naked Swim Parties, while waiting in line for her next explosive novel.
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Jessica Anya Blau interview with Meg Tuite
 

I couldn’t help but compare the wild Stein family to some of Sedaris’ stories even though “Drinking Closer to Home” is a novel and Sedaris writes non-fiction. I loved that your family was interviewed at the end of this! How do you define the difference, in your two novels, between memoir and fiction?
 
I think that in memoir the author has a certain responsibility to get things right—to be accurate.  And that responsibility is to the people who show up in the book and not necessarily to the readers (although the hordes of people who were pissed off at James Frey after Million Little Pieces would certainly disagree with me!).  I mean, what reader really cares if the sister in a story was a drug addict for two years or for three years? Who cares if she went to rehab in Arizona or rehab in Camarillo?  In fiction you can adjust the truth so that it works better for the story. My work is based on my life, but much of it is made up, or played down, or exaggerated in order to make the novel better.  Telling a great story was my priority when I wrote Drinking Closer to Home. Telling the whole truth wasn’t even on my mind.
 

It seems like your family is very supportive of your writing career. Do you ever have those “oh-no-you-don’t” moments where you censor yourself from writing something because it may be hard for someone else to read?

When I write fiction I never have those moments.  On occasion I write essays and blogs, and I am much more aware of my reader when I write those.  I don’t want to belittle anyone, or mock anyone, or humiliate anyone.  I don’t want to expose people who don’t want to be exposed.  For that reason, I find fiction much more fun to write—you can do and say whatever you want!
 

You’ve written quite a few memorable and hilarious short stories, including the one we’re publishing today.  Do you get your ideas for new novels from stories that you’ve written?
 
Yes, both The Summer of Naked Swim Parties and Drinking Closer to Home had a start in short stories.  Well, Naked Swim, really started with a sentence I had written.  But when I figured out what I wanted to write, I pulled out a short story I had written in graduate school and used that character in that point of her life as the basis for the novel.  Drinking was based on a short story I wrote that was published in The Sun Magazine called, “Home for the Heart Attack.”  The story is essentially the present day chapters of the novel, spread out and lengthened.  The novel I’m working on now is also based on a short story I wrote.


Do you work on more than one project at a time?
 
Yes, definitely. Currently, I’m writing a novel, but within the time that I’ve been writing this novel I’ve stopped and written a screenplay, a short story, and a few essays.  But I think of the novel as what I’m mostly working on.
 

When did you first start writing seriously and publishing your work?
 
I suppose I was writing seriously when I was living in Canada and I wrote a few hours every day.  Almost all of that work was lost when I put it on a disc, gave it to my then-husband to print out for me at his office and he lost the disc.  Nothing was backed up (I use drop box now and I own a printer!).  I didn’t consider myself a serious writer (although I was obviously writing seriously) because I never showed my work to anyone.  It was like my secret, I was almost embarrassed about it—the fact that I sat at a computer and wrote every day seemingly for the simple pleasure of writing.  I didn’t really start thinking of myself as a writer until I was in graduate school.  My first story was published the year before graduate school.  It was a shock to me.  Really.  I was stunned.  But it gave me the courage to keep writing.
 

Are there any specific writers that have influenced your work?
 
I think every writer I’ve ever loved has influenced my work.  And I’ve loved different writers at different times.  When I see a book I’ve read and loved I have this small rush of feeling, like seeing an old friend.  I usually can remember where I read the book and what I was feeling at the time I was reading it.  I just saw Erica Jong’s name on Facebook yesterday and I immediately flashed on reading How to Save Your Own Life on a train in Spain when I was nineteen.  My girlfriend and I read chapters aloud to each other.  And I remember leaning my head out the train window, with that wonderful clackity train noise all around, the wind blowing my hair back and the book in my hand.  I had a thought just then that it would be incredibly cool to write books.  So in a way, you could say Jong was the first person to influence me.
 

What book/books are you reading at this time?
 
I’m in the middle of Caroline Leavitt’s Pictures of You on my Nook.  Since I started that book, I’ve read three other books in order to interview people.  The first was Michael Kimball’s US, the second was Jesus Angel Garcia’s bad bad bad (the book is loaded with sex so I’m doing the Six Question Sex Interview for The Nervous Breakdown with him). And the third is Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (I haven’t written up that interview yet).  The three books I read for interviews before all these were Madison Smartt Bell’s, The Color of Night , Ron Tanner’s Kiss Me, Stranger, and Francine Prose’s My New American Life.  I completely enjoyed, and usually loved, each of the books I read for interviews.  I couldn’t interview someone whose book I didn’t like—that would be an awful feeling.
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